Twenty-One Stories Read online

  ‘It was me,’ Carter said, ‘thirty years ago.’ The girl was climbing back on to the bed.

  ‘It’s revolting,’ Mrs Carter replied.

  ‘I don’t remember it as revolting,’ Carter replied.

  ‘I suppose you went and gloated, both of you.’

  ‘No, I never saw it.’

  ‘Why did you do it? I can’t look at you. It’s shameful.’

  ‘I asked you to come away.’

  ‘Did they pay you?’

  ‘They paid her. Fifty pounds. She needed the money badly.’

  ‘And you had your fun for nothing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d never have married you if I’d known. Never.’

  ‘That was a long time afterwards.’

  ‘You still haven’t said why. Haven’t you any excuse?’ She stopped. He knew she was watching, leaning forward, caught up herself in the heat of that climax more than a quarter of a century old.

  Carter said, ‘It was the only way I could help her. She’d never acted in one before. She wanted a friend.’

  ‘A friend,’ Mrs Carter said.

  ‘I loved her.’

  ‘You couldn’t love a tart.’

  ‘Oh yes, you can. Make no mistake about that.’

  ‘You queued for her, I suppose.’

  ‘You put it too crudely,’ Carter said.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She disappeared. They always disappear.’

  The girl leant over the young man’s body and put out the light. It was the end of the film. ‘I have new ones coming next week,’ the Siamese said, bowing deeply. They followed their guide back down the dark lane to the taxi.

  In the taxi Mrs Carter said, ‘What was her name?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’ A lie was easiest.

  As they turned into the New Road she broke her bitter silence again. ‘How could you have brought yourself . . .? It’s so degrading. Suppose someone you knew – in business – recognized you.’

  ‘People don’t talk about seeing things like that. Anyway, I wasn’t in business in those days.’

  ‘Did it never worry you?’

  ‘I don’t believe I have thought of it once in thirty years.’

  ‘How long did you know her?’

  ‘Twelve months perhaps.’

  ‘She must look pretty awful by now if she’s alive. After all she was common even then.’

  ‘I thought she looked lovely,’ Carter said.

  They went upstairs in silence. He went straight to the bathroom and locked the door. The mosquitoes gathered around the lamp and the great jar of water. As he undressed he caught glimpses of himself in the small mirror: thirty years had not been kind: he felt his thickness and his middle age. He thought: I hope to God she’s dead. Please, God, he said, let her be dead. When I go back in there, the insults will start again.

  But when he returned Mrs Carter was standing by the mirror. She had partly undressed. Her thin bare legs reminded him of a heron waiting for fish. She came and put her arms round him: a slave bangle joggled against his shoulder. She said, ‘I’d forgotten how nice you looked.’

  ‘I’m sorry. One changes.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I like you as you are.’

  She was dry and hot and implacable in her desire. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘go on,’ and then she screamed like an angry and hurt bird. Afterwards she said, ‘It’s years since that happened,’ and continued to talk for what seemed a long half hour excitedly at his side. Carter lay in the dark silent, with a feeling of loneliness and guilt. It seemed to him that he had betrayed that night the only woman he loved.

  1954

  THE HINT OF AN EXPLANATION

  A LONG train journey on a late December evening, in this new version of peace, is a dreary experience. I suppose that my fellow traveller and I could consider ourselves lucky to have a compartment to ourselves, even though the heating apparatus was not working, even though the lights went out entirely in the frequent Pennine tunnels and were too dim anyway for us to read our books without straining the eyes, and though there was no restaurant car to give at least a change of scene. It was when we were trying simultaneously to chew the same kind of dry bun bought at the same station buffet that my companion and I came together. Before that we had sat at opposite ends of the carriage, both muffled to the chin in overcoats, both bent low over type we could barely make out, but as I threw the remains of my cake under the seat our eyes met, and he laid his book down.

  By the time we were half-way to Bedwell Junction we had found an enormous range of subjects for discussion; starting with buns and the weather, we had gone on to politics, the Government, foreign affairs, the atom bomb, and by an inevitable progression, God. We had not, however, become either shrill or acid. My companion, who now sat opposite me, leaning a little forward, so that our knees nearly touched, gave such an impression of serenity that it would have been impossible to quarrel with him, however much our views differed, and differ they did profoundly.

  I had soon realized I was speaking to a Roman Catholic – to someone who believed – how do they put it? – in an omnipotent and omniscient Deity, while I am what is loosely called an agnostic. I have a certain intuition (which I do not trust, founded as it may well be on childish experiences and needs) that a God exists, and I am surprised occasionally into belief by the extraordinary coincidences that beset our path like the traps set for leopards in the jungle, but intellectually I am revolted at the whole notion of such a God who can so abandon his creatures to the enormities of Free Will. I found myself expressing this view to my companion who listened quietly and with respect. He made no attempt to interrupt – he showed none of the impatience or the intellectual arrogance I have grown to expect from Catholics; when the lights of a wayside station flashed across his face which had escaped hitherto the rays of the one globe working in the compartment, I caught a glimpse suddenly of – what? I stopped speaking, so strong was the impression. I was carried back ten years, to the other side of the great useless conflict, to a small town, Gisors in Normandy. I was again, for a moment, walking on the ancient battlements and looking down across the grey roofs, until my eyes for some reason lit on one stony ‘back’ out of the many, where the face of a middle-aged man was pressed against a window pane (I suppose that face has ceased to exist now, just as perhaps the whole town with its medieval memories has been reduced to rubble). I remembered saying to myself with astonishment, ‘that man is happy – completely happy.’ I looked across the compartment at my fellow traveller, but his face was already again in shadow. I said weakly, ‘When you think what God – if there is a God – allows. It’s not merely the physical agonies, but think of the corruption, even of children . . .’

  He said, ‘Our view is so limited,’ and I was disappointed at the conventionality of his reply. He must have been aware of my disappointment (it was as though our thoughts were huddled as closely as ourselves for warmth), for he went on, ‘Of course there is no answer here. We catch hints . . .’ and then the train roared into another tunnel and the lights again went out. It was the longest tunnel yet; we went rocking down it and the cold seemed to become more intense with the darkness, like an icy fog (when one sense – of sight – is robbed, the others grow more acute). When we emerged into the mere grey of night and the globe lit up once more, I could see that my companion was leaning back on his seat.

  I repeated his last word as a question, ‘Hints?’

  ‘Oh, they mean very little in cold print – or cold speech,’ he said, shivering in his overcoat. ‘And they mean nothing at all to another human being than the man who catches them. They are not scientific evidence – or evidence at all for that matter. Events that don’t, somehow, turn out as they were intended – by the human actors, I mean, or by the thing behind the human actors.’

  ‘The thing?’

  ‘The word Satan is so anthropomorphic.’ I had to lean forward now: I wanted to hear what he had to say. I am – I
really am, God knows – open to conviction. He said, ‘One’s words are so crude, but I sometimes feel pity for that thing. It is so continually finding the right weapon to use against its Enemy and the weapon breaks in its own breast. It sometimes seems to me so – powerless. You said something just now about the corruption of children. It reminded me of something in my own childhood. You are the first person – except for one – that I have thought of telling it to, perhaps because you are anonymous. It’s not a very long story, and in a way it’s relevant.’

  I said, ‘I’d like to hear it.’

  ‘You mustn’t expect too much meaning. But to me there seems to be a hint. That’s all. A hint.’

  He went slowly on turning his face to the pane, though he could have seen nothing in the whirling world outside except an occasional signal lamp, a light in a window, a small country station torn backwards by our rush, picking his words with precision. He said, ‘When I was a child they taught me to serve at Mass. The church was a small one, for there were very few Catholics where I lived. It was a market town in East Anglia, surrounded by flat chalky fields and ditches – so many ditches. I don’t suppose there were fifty Catholics all told, and for some reason there was a tradition of hostility to us. Perhaps it went back to the burning of a Protestant martyr in the sixteenth century – there was a stone marking the place near where the meat stalls stood on Wednesdays. I was only half aware of the enmity, though I knew that my school nickname of Popey Martin had something to do with my religion and I had heard that my father was very nearly excluded from the Constitutional Club when he first came to the town.

  ‘Every Sunday I had to dress up in my surplice and serve Mass. I hated it – I have always hated dressing up in any way (which is funny when you come to think of it), and I never ceased to be afraid of losing my place in the service and doing something which would put me to ridicule. Our services were at a different hour from the Anglican, and as our small, far-from-select band trudged out of the hideous chapel the whole of the townsfolk seemed to be on the way past to the proper church – I always thought of it as the proper church. We had to pass the parade of their eyes, indifferent, supercilious, mocking; you can’t imagine how seriously religion can be taken in a small town – if only for social reasons.

  ‘There was one man in particular; he was one of the two bakers in the town, the one my family did not patronize. I don’t think any of the Catholics patronized him because he was called a free-thinker – an odd title, for, poor man, no one’s thoughts were less free than his. He was hemmed in by his hatred – his hatred of us. He was very ugly to look at, with one wall-eye and a head the shape of a turnip, with the hair gone on the crown, and he was unmarried. He had no interests, apparently, but his baking and his hatred, though now that I am older I begin to see other sides of his nature – it did contain, perhaps, a certain furtive love. One would come across him suddenly, sometimes, on a country walk, especially if one was alone and it was Sunday. It was as though he rose from the ditches and the chalk smear on his clothes reminded one of the flour on his working overalls. He would have a stick in his hand and stab at the hedges, and if his mood were very black he would call out after you strange abrupt words that were like a foreign tongue – I know the meaning of those words, of course, now. Once the police went to his house because of what a boy said he had seen, but nothing came of it except that the hate shackled him closer. His name was Blacker, and he terrified me.

  ‘I think he had a particular hatred of my father – I don’t know why. My father was manager of the Midland Bank, and it’s possible that at some time Blacker may have had unsatisfactory dealings with the bank – my father was a very cautious man who suffered all his life from anxiety about money – his own and other people’s. If I try to picture Blacker now I see him walking along a narrowing path between high windowless walls, and at the end of the path stands a small boy of ten – me. I don’t know whether it’s a symbolic picture or the memory of one of our encounters – our encounters somehow got more and more frequent. You talked just now about the corruption of children. That poor man was preparing to revenge himself on everything he hated – my father, the Catholics, the God whom people persisted in crediting – by corrupting me. He had evolved a horrible and ingenious plan.

  ‘I remember the first time I had a friendly word from him. I was passing his shop as rapidly as I could when I heard his voice call out with a kind of sly subservience as though he were an under-servant. “Master David,” he called, “Master David,” and I hurried on. But the next time I passed that way he was at his door (he must have seen me coming) with one of those curly cakes in his hand that we called Chelsea buns. I didn’t want to take it, but he made me, and then I couldn’t be other than polite when he asked me to come into his parlour behind the shop and see something very special.

  ‘It was a small electric railway – a rare sight in those days, and he insisted on showing me how it worked. He made me turn the switches and stop and start it, and he told me that I could come in any morning and have a game with it. He used the word “game” as though it were something secret, and it’s true that I never told my family of this invitation and of how, perhaps twice a week those holidays, the desire to control that little railway became overpowering, and looking up and down the street to see if I were observed, I would dive into the shop.’

  Our larger, dirtier, adult train drove into a tunnel and the light went out. We sat in darkness and silence, with the noise of the train blocking our ears like wax. When we were through we didn’t speak at once and I had to prick him into continuing.

  ‘An elaborate seduction,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t think his plans were as simple as that,’ my companion said, ‘or as crude. There was much more hate than love, poor man, in his make-up. Can you hate something you don’t believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed. Day by day all through those holidays his obsession must have grown, but he kept a grip; he bided his time. Perhaps that thing I spoke of gave him the strength and the wisdom. It was only a week from the end of the holidays that he spoke to me of what concerned him so deeply.

  ‘I heard him behind me as I knelt on the floor, coupling two coaches. He said, “You won’t be able to do this, Master David, when school starts.” It wasn’t a sentence that needed any comment from me any more than the one that followed, “You ought to have it for your own, you ought,” but how skilfully and unemphatically he had sowed the longing, the idea of a possibility . . . I was coming to his parlour every day now; you see I had to cram every opportunity in before the hated term started again, and I suppose I was becoming accustomed to Blacker, to that wall eye, that turnip head, that nauseating subservience. The Pope, you know, describes himself as “The servant of the servants of God”, and Blacker – I sometimes think, that Blacker was “the servant of the servants of . . .” well, let it be.

  ‘The very next day, standing in the doorway watching me play, he began to talk to me about religion. He said, with what untruth even I recognized, how much he admired the Catholics; he wished he could believe like that, but how could a baker believe? He accented “a baker” as one might say a biologist, and the tiny train spun round the gauge O track. He said, “I can bake the things you eat just as well as any Catholic can,” and disappeared into his shop. I hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant. Presently he emerged again, holding in his hand a little wafer. “Here,” he said, “eat that and tell me . . .” When I put it in my mouth I could tell that it was made in the same way as our wafers for communion – he had got the shape a little wrong, that was all, and I felt guilty and irrationally scared, “Tell me,” he said, “what’s the difference?”

  ‘“Difference?” I asked.

  ‘“Isn’t that just the same as you eat in church?”

  ‘I said smugly, “It hasn’t been consecrated.”

  ‘He said, “Do you think if I put the two of them under a microscope, you could tell t
he difference?” But even at ten I had the answer to that question. “No,” I said, “the – accidents don’t change,” stumbling a little on the word “accidents” which had suddenly conveyed to me the idea of death and wounds.

  ‘Blacker said with sudden intensity, “How I’d like to get one of yours in my mouth – just to see . . .”

  ‘It may seem odd to you, but this was the first time that the idea of transubstantiation really lodged in my mind. I had learnt it all by rote; I had grown up with the idea. The Mass was as lifeless to me as the sentences in De Bello Gallico, communion a routine like drill in the school-yard, but here suddenly I was in the presence of a man who took it seriously, as seriously as the priest whom naturally one didn’t count – it was his job. I felt more scared than ever.

  ‘He said, “It’s all nonsense, but I’d just like to have it in my mouth.”

  ‘“You could if you were a Catholic,” I said naïvely. He gazed at me with his one good eye like a Cyclops. He said, “You serve at Mass, don’t you? It would be easy for you to get at one of those things. I tell you what I’d do – I’d swap this electric train set for one of your wafers – consecrated, mind. It’s got to be consecrated.”

  ‘“I could get you one out of the box,” I said. I think I still imagined that his interest was a baker’s interest – to see how they were made.

  ‘“Oh, no,” he said. “I want to see what your God tastes like.”

  ‘“I couldn’t do that.”

  ‘“Not for a whole electric train, just for yourself? You wouldn’t have any trouble at home. I’d pack it up and put a label inside that your Dad could see – ‘For my bank manager’s little boy from a grateful client.’ He’d be pleased as Punch with that.”

  ‘Now that we are grown men it seems a trivial temptation, doesn’t it? But try to think back to your own childhood. There was a whole circuit of rails on the floor at our feet, straight rails and curved rails, and a little station with porters and passengers, a tunnel, a foot-bridge, a level crossing, two signals, buffers, of course – and above all, a turntable. The tears of longing came into my eyes when I looked at the turntable. It was my favourite piece – it looked so ugly and practical and true. I said weakly, “I wouldn’t know how.”