The Collected Stories Read online

  ‘Cow-parsley?’ said Mrs da Tanka. Why did the man say cow-parsley? Why not roses or lilies or something in a pot? There had been cow-parsley in Shropshire; cow-parsley on the verges of dusty lanes; cow-parsley in hot fields buzzing with bees; great white swards rolling down to the river. She had sat among it on a picnic with dolls. She had lain on it, laughing at the beautiful anaemic blue of the sky. She had walked through it by night, loving it.

  ‘Why did you say cow-parsley?’

  He did not know, except that once on a rare family outing to the country he had seen it and remembered it. Yet in his garden he had grown delphiniums and wallflowers and asters and sweet-peas.

  She could smell it again: a smell that was almost nothing: fields and the heat of the sun on her face, laziness and summer. There was a red door somewhere, faded and blistered, and she sat against it, crouched on a warm step, a child dressed in the fashion of the time.

  ‘Why did you say cow-parsley?’

  He remembered, that day, asking the name of the white powdery growth. He had picked some and carried it home; and had often since thought of it, though he had not come across a field of cow-parsley for years.

  She tried to speak again, but after the night there were no words she could find that would fit. The silence stuck between them, and Mr Mileson knew by instinct all that it contained. She saw an image of herself and him, strolling together from the hotel, in this same sunshine, at this very moment, lingering on the pavement to decide their direction and agreeing to walk to the promenade. She mouthed and grimaced and the sweat broke on her body, and she looked at him once and saw words die on his lips, lost in his suspicion of her.

  The train stopped for the last time. Doors banged; the throng of people passed them by on the platform outside. They collected their belongings and left the train together. A porter, interested in her legs, watched them walk down the platform. They passed through the barrier and parted, moving in their particular directions. She to her new flat where milk and mail, she hoped, awaited her. He to his room; to the two unwashed plates on the draining board and the forks with egg on the prongs; and the little fee propped up on the mantelpiece, a pink cheque for five pounds, peeping out from behind a china cat.

  Access to the Children

  Malcolmson, a fair, tallish man in a green tweed suit that required pressing, banged the driver’s door of his ten-year-old Volvo and walked quickly away from the car, jangling the keys. He entered a block of flats that was titled – gold engraved letters on a granite slab – The Quadrant.

  It was a Sunday afternoon in late October. Yellow-brown leaves patterned grass that was not for walking on. Some scurried on the steps that led to the building’s glass entrance doors. Rain was about, Malcolmson considered.

  At three o’clock precisely he rang the bell of his ex-wife’s flat on the third floor. In response he heard at once the voices of his children and the sound of their running in the hall. ‘Hullo,’ he said when one of them, Deirdre, opened the door. ‘Ready?’

  They went with him, two little girls, Deirdre seven and Susie five. In the lift they told him that a foreign person, the day before, had been trapped in the lift from eleven o’clock in the morning until teatime. Food and cups of tea had been poked through a grating to this person, a Japanese businessman who occupied a flat at the top of the block. ‘He didn’t get the hang of an English lift,’ said Deirdre. ‘He could have died there,’ said Susie.

  In the Volvo he asked them if they’d like to go to the Zoo and they shook their heads firmly. On the last two Sundays he’d taken them to the Zoo, Susie reminded him in her specially polite, very quiet voice: you got tired of the Zoo, walking round and round, looking at all the same animals. She smiled at him to show she wasn’t being ungrateful. She suggested that in a little while, after a month or so, they could go to the Zoo again, because there might be some new animals. Deirdre said that there wouldn’t be, not after a month or so: why should there be? ‘Some old animals might have died,’ said Susie.

  Malcolmson drove down the Edgware Road, with Hyde Park in mind.

  ‘What have you done?’ he asked.

  ‘Only school,’ said Susie.

  ‘And the news cinema,’ said Deirdre. ‘Mummy took us to a news cinema. We saw a film about how they make wire.’

  ‘A man kept talking to Mummy. He said she had nice hair.’

  ‘The usherette told him to be quiet. He bought us ice-creams, but Mummy said we couldn’t accept them.’

  ‘He wanted to take Mummy to a dance.’

  ‘We had to move to other seats.’

  ‘What else have you done?’

  ‘Only school,’ said Susie. ‘A boy was sick on Miss Bawden’s desk.’

  ‘After school stew.’

  ‘It’s raining,’ said Susie.

  He turned the windscreen-wipers on. He wondered if he should simply bring the girls to his flat and spend the afternoon watching television. He tried to remember what the Sunday film was. There often was something suitable for children on Sunday afternoons, old films with Deanna Durbin or Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.

  ‘Where’re we going?’ Susie asked.

  ‘Where d’you want to go?’

  ‘A Hundred and One Dalmatians.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Susie.

  ‘But we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it five times.’

  ‘Please, Daddy.’

  He stopped the Volvo and bought a What’s On. While he leafed through it they sat quietly, willing him to discover a cinema, anywhere in London, that was showing the film. He shook his head and started the Volvo again.

  ‘Nothing else?’ Deirdre asked.

  ‘Nothing suitable.’

  At Speakers’ Corner they listened to a Jehovah’s Witness and then to a woman talking about vivisection. ‘How horrid,’ said Deirdre. ‘Is that true, Daddy?’ He made a face. ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

  In the drizzle they played a game among the trees, hiding and chasing one another. Once when they’d been playing this game a woman had brought a policeman up to him. She’d seen him approaching the girls, she said; the girls had been playing alone and he’d joined in. ‘He’s our daddy,’ Susie had said, but the woman had still argued, claiming that he’d given them sweets so that they’d say that. ‘Look at him,’ the woman had insultingly said. ‘He needs a shave.’ Then she’d gone away, and the policeman had apologized.

  ‘The boy who was sick was Nicholas Barnet,’ Susie said. ‘I think he could have died.’

  A year and a half ago Malcolmson’s wife, Elizabeth, had said he must choose between her and Diana. For weeks they had talked about it; she knowing that he was in love with Diana and was having some kind of an affair with her, he caught between the two of them, attempting the impossible in his effort not to hurt anyone. She had given him a chance to get over Diana, as she put it, but she couldn’t go on for ever giving him a chance, no woman could. In the end, after the shock and the tears and the period of reasonableness, she became bitter. He didn’t blame her: they’d been in the middle of a happy marriage, nothing was wrong, nothing was lacking.

  He’d met Diana on a train; he’d sat with her, talking for a long time, and after that his marriage didn’t seem the same. In her bitterness Elizabeth said he was stupidly infatuated: he was behaving like a murderer: there was neither dignity nor humanity left in him. Diana she described as a flat-chested American nymphomaniac and predator, the worst type of woman in the world. She was beautiful herself, more beautiful than Diana, more gracious, warmer, and funnier: there was a sting of truth in what she said; he couldn’t understand himself. In the very end, after they’d been morosely drinking gin and lime-juice, she’d suddenly shouted at him that he’d better pack his bags. He sat unhappily, gazing at the green bottle of Gordon’s gin on the carpet between his chair and hers. She screamed; tears poured in a torrent from her eyes. ‘For God’s sake go away!’ she cried, on her feet, turning away from him. She shook her head in a wild gesture, causing h
er long fair hair to move like a horse’s mane. Her hands, clenched into fists, beat at his cheeks, making bruises that Diana afterwards tended.

  For months-after that he saw neither Elizabeth nor his children. He tried not to think about them. He and Diana took a flat in Barnes, near the river, and in time he became used to the absence of the children’s noise in the mornings, and to Diana’s cooking and her quick efficiency in little things, and the way she always remembered to pass on telephone messages, which was something that Elizabeth had always forgotten to do.

  Then one day, a week or so before the divorce was due, Diana said she didn’t think there was anything left between them. It hadn’t worked, she said; nothing was quite right. Amazed and bewildered, he argued with her. He frowned at her, his eyes screwed up as though he couldn’t properly see her. She was very poised, in a black dress, with a necklace at her throat, her hair pulled smooth and neatly tied. She’d met a man called Abbotforth, she said, and she went on talking about that, still standing.

  ‘We could go to the Natural History Museum,’ Deirdre said.

  ‘Would you like to, Susie?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Susie.

  They were sitting on a bench, watching a bird that Susie said was a yellow-hammer. Deirdre disagreed: at this time of year, she said, there were no yellow-hammers in England, she’d read it in a book. ‘It’s a little baby yellow-hammer,’ said Susie. ‘Miss Bawden said you see lots of them.’

  The bird flew away. A man in a raincoat was approaching them, singing quietly. They began to giggle. ‘Sure, maybe some day I’ll go back to Ireland,’ sang the man, ‘if it’s only at the closing of my day.’ He stopped, noticing that they were watching him.

  ‘Were you ever in Ireland?’ he asked. The girls, still giggling, shook their heads. ‘It’s a great place,’ said the man. He took a bottle of VP wine from his raincoat pocket and drank from it.

  ‘Would you care for a swig, sir?’ he said to Malcolmson, and Malcolmson thanked him and said he wouldn’t. ‘It would do the little misses no harm,’ suggested the man. ‘It’s good, pure stuff.’ Malcolmson shook his head. ‘I was born in County Clare,’ said the man, ‘in 1928, the year of the Big Strike.’ The girls, red in the face from containing their laughter, poked at one another with their elbows. ‘Aren’t they the great little misses?’ said the man. ‘Aren’t they the fine credit to you, sir?’

  In the Volvo on the way to Barnes they kept repeating that he was the funniest man they’d ever met. He was nicer than the man in the news cinema, Susie said. He was quite like him, though, Deirdre maintained: he was looking for company in just the same way, you could see it in his eyes. ‘He was staggering,’ Susie said. ‘I thought he was going to die.’

  Before the divorce he had telephoned Elizabeth, telling her that Diana had gone. She hadn’t said anything, and she’d put the receiver down before he could say anything else. Then the divorce came through and the arrangement was that the children should remain with Elizabeth and that he should have reasonable access to them. It was an extraordinary expression, he considered: reasonable access.

  The Sunday afternoons had begun then, the ringing of a doorbell that had once been his own doorbell, the children in the hall, the lift, the Volvo, tea in the flat where he and Diana had lived and where now he lived on his own. Sometimes, when he was collecting them, Elizabeth spoke to him, saying in a matter-of-fact way that Susie had a cold and should not be outside too much, or that Deirdre was being bad about practising her clarinet and would he please speak to her. He loved Elizabeth again; he said to himself that he had never not loved her; he wanted to say to her that she’d been right about Diana. But he didn’t say anything, knowing that wounds had to heal.

  Every week he longed more for Sunday to arrive. Occasionally he invented reasons for talking to her at the door of the flat, after the children had gone in. He asked questions about their progress at school, he wondered if there were ways in which he could help. It seemed unfair, he said, that she should have to bring them up single-handed like this; he made her promise to telephone him if a difficulty arose; and if ever she wanted to go out in the evenings and couldn’t find a babysitter, he’d willingly drive over. He always hoped that if he talked for long enough the girls would become so noisy in their room that she’d be forced to ask him in so that she could quieten them, but the ploy never worked.

  In the lift on the Way down every Sunday evening he thought she was more beautiful than any woman he’d ever seen, and he thought it was amazing that once she should have been his wife and should have borne him children, that once they had lain together and loved, and that he had let her go. Three weeks ago she had smiled at him in a way that was like the old way. He’d been sure of it, positive, in the lift on the way down.

  He drove over Hammersmith Bridge, along Castelnau and into Barnes High Street. No one was about on the pavements; buses crept sluggishly through the damp afternoon.

  ‘Miss Bawden’s got a black boyfriend,’ Susie said, ‘called Eric Mantilla.’

  ‘You should see Miss Bawden,’ murmured Deirdre. ‘She hasn’t any breasts.’

  ‘She has lovely breasts,’ shouted Susie, ‘and lovely jumpers and lovely skirts. She has a pair of earrings that once belonged to an Egyptian empress.’

  ‘Flat as a pancake,’ said Deirdre.

  After Diana had gone he’d found it hard to concentrate. The managing director of the firm where he worked, a man with a stout red face called Sir Gerald Travers, had been sympathetic. He’d told him not to worry. Personal troubles, Sir Gerald had said, must naturally affect professional life; no one would be human if that didn’t happen. But six months later, to Malcolmson’s surprise, Sir Gerald had suddenly suggested to him that perhaps it would be better if he made a move. ‘It’s often so,’ Sir Gerald had said, a soft smile gleaming between chubby cheeks. ‘Professional life can be affected by the private side of things. You understand me, Malcolmson?’ They valued him immensely, Sir Gerald said, and they’d be generous when the moment of departure came. A change was a tonic; Sir Gerald advised a little jaunt somewhere.

  In reply to all that Malcolmson said that the upset in his private life was now over; nor did he feel, he added, in need of recuperation. ‘You’ll easily find another berth,’ Sir Gerald Travers replied, with a wide, confident smile. ‘I think it would be better.’

  Malcolmson had sought about for another job, but had not been immediately successful: there was a recession, people said. Soon it would be better, they added, and because of Sir Gerald’s promised generosity Malcolmson found himself in a position to wait until things seemed brighter. It was always better, in any case, not to seem in a hurry.

  He spent the mornings in the Red Lion, in Barnes, playing dominoes with an old-age pensioner, and when the pensioner didn’t turn up owing to bronchial trouble Malcolmson would borrow a newspaper from the landlord. He slept in the afternoons and returned to the Red Lion later. Occasionally when he’d had a few drinks he’d find himself thinking about his children and their mother. He always found it pleasant then, thinking of them with a couple of drinks inside him.

  ‘It’s The Last of the Mohicans,’ said Deirdre in the flat, and he guessed that she must have looked at the Radio Times earlier in the day. She’d known they’d end up like that, watching television. Were they bored on Sundays? he often wondered.

  ‘Can’t we have The Golden Shot?’ demanded Susie, and Deirdre pointed out that it wasn’t on yet. He left them watching Randolph Scott and Binnie Barnes, and went to prepare their tea in the kitchen.

  On Saturdays he bought meringues and brandy-snaps in Frith’s Patisserie. The elderly assistant smiled at him in a way that made him wonder if she knew what he wanted them for; it occurred to him once that she felt sorry for him. On Sunday mornings, listening to the omnibus edition of The Archers, he made Marmite sandwiches with brown bread and tomato sandwiches with white. They loved sandwiches, which was something he remembered from the past. He remembered part
ies, Deirdre’s friends sitting around a table, small and silent, eating crisps and cheese puffs and leaving all the cake.

  When The Last of the Mohicans came to an end they watched Going for a Song for five minutes before changing the channel for The Golden Shot. Then Deirdre turned the television off and they went to the kitchen to have tea. ‘Wash your hands,’ said Susie, and he heard her add that if a germ got into your food you could easily die. ‘She kept referring to death,’ he would say to Elizabeth when he left them back. ‘D’you think she’s worried about anything?’ He imagined Elizabeth giving the smile she had given three weeks ago and then saying he’d better come in to discuss the matter.

  ‘Goody,’ said Susie, sitting down.

  ‘I’d like to marry a man like that man in the park,’ said Deirdre. ‘It’d be much more interesting, married to a bloke like that.’

  ‘He’d be always drunk.’

  ‘He wasn’t drunk, Susie. That’s not being drunk.’

  ‘He was drinking out of a bottle –’

  ‘He was putting on a bit of flash, drinking out of a bottle and singing his little song. No harm in that, Susie.’

  ‘I’d like to be married to Daddy.’

  ‘You couldn’t be married to Daddy.’

  ‘Well, Richard then.’

  ‘Ribena, Daddy. Please.’

  He poured drops of Ribena into two mugs and filled them up with warm water. He had a definite feeling that today she’d ask him in, both of them pretending a worry over Susie’s obsession with death. They’d sit together while the children splashed about in the bathroom; she’d offer him gin and lime-juice, their favourite drink, a drink known as a Gimlet, as once he’d told her. They’d drink it out of the green glasses they’d bought, years ago, in Italy. The girls would dry themselves and come to say good-night. They’d go to bed. He might tell them a story, or she would. ‘Stay to supper,’ she would say, and while she made risotto he would go to her and kiss her hair.