The collected stories Read online

'That means you have to be very careful. You have to make sure that Mummy's all right.'

  'Why won't Mummy be all right?'

  Robarge said, i think her friend is a thief.'

  'No - he's not!'

  WORLD S END

  'Don't be upset,' said Robarge. That's what we're going to find out. I want you to watch him if he comes over again.'

  'But why? Don't you like him?'

  'I don't know him very well - not as well as Mummy does. Will you watch him for me, like a daddy?'

  'Yes.'

  'If you do, I'll bring you a nice present.'

  'Mummy's friend gave me a present.'

  Robarge was so startled he could not speak; and he wanted to shout. The child peered at him, and Robarge saw curiosity and pity mingled in the child's squint.

  'It was a little car.'

  'I'll give you a big car,' Robarge managed.

  'What's he stealing from you, Daddy?'

  Robarge thought a moment, then said, 'Something very precious-' and his voice broke. If he forced it he would sob. He left the child's room. He had never felt sadder.

  Downstairs, Kathy kissed him on his ear. The smack of it caused a ringing in a horn in his head.

  He had invented the trip to Aberdeen; he invented work to justify it, and for three days he knew what madness was - a sickening and a sorrow. He was deaf, his feet and hands were stupid, and his tongue at times seemed to swell and choke him when he tried to speak. He wanted to tell his area supervisor that he was suffering, that he knew how odd he must appear. But he did not know how to begin. And strangely, though his behavior was clumsily childlike, he felt elderly, as if he were dying inside, all his organs working feebly. He returned to London feeling that a burned hole was blackened on his heart.

  The house at World's End was so still that in the doorway he considered that she was gone, that she had taken Richard and deserted him with her lover. This was Sunday evening, part of his plan - a surprise: he usually returned on Monday. He was not reassured to see the kitchen light on - there was a telephone in the kitchen. But Kathy's face, when she answered the door, was blank.

  She said, 'I thought you might call from the station.'

  He tried to kiss her - she pulled away.

  'My hands are wet.'

  'Glad to see me?'

  WORLD S END

  'I'm doing the dishes.' She lost her look of boredom and said, 'You're so pale.'

  'I haven't slept.' He could not gather the phrases of the question in his mind because he dreaded the simple answer he saw whole: yes. He felt afraid of her, and more deaf and clumsy than ever, like a helpless orphan snatched into the dark. He wanted her to say that he had imagined the lover, but he knew he would not believe words he craved so much to hear. He no longer trusted her and would not trust her until he had the child's word. He longed to see his son. He started up the stairs.

  Kathy said, 'He's watching television.'

  On entering the television room, Robarge saw his son stand up and take a step backward. Richard's face in the darkened room was the yellow-green hue of the television screen; his hands sprang to his ears; the blue fibers of his pajamas glowed as if sprinkled with salt. When Robarge switched on the light the child ran to him and held him - so tightly that Robarge could not hug him.

  'Here it is.' Robarge disengaged himself from the child and crossed the room, turning off the television as he went. The toy was gift wrapped in bright paper and tied with a ribbon. He handed it to Richard. Richard put his face against his father's neck. 'Aren't you going to open it?'

  Robarge felt the child nodding against his shoulder.

  'Time for bed,' said Robarge.

  The child said, 'I put myself to bed now.'

  'All by yourself?' said Robarge. 'Okay, off you go then.'

  Richard went to the door.

  'Don't forget your present!'

  Richard hesitated. Robarge brought it to him and tucked it under the child's arm. Then, pretending it was an afterthought, he said softly, 'Tell me what happened while I was away - did you see anything? 1

  Richard shook his head and let his mouth gape.

  'What about Mummy's friend?' Robarge was standing; the question dropped to the child like a spider lowering on its own filament

  of spittle.

  i didn't see him.'

  The child looked so small; Robarge towered over him. He knelt and asked, 'Are vou telling the truth?'

  And it occurred to Robarge that he had never asked the child

  WORLD S END

  that question before - had never used that intimidating tone or looked so hard into the child's eyes. Richard backed away, the gift-wrapped parcel under his arm.

  At this little distance, the child seemed calmer. He shook his head as he had before, but this time his confidence was pronounced, as if in the minute that had elapsed he had learned the trick of it. With the faintest trace of a stutter - when had he ever stuttered? - he said, 'It's the truth, Daddy. I didn't.'

  Robarge said, 'It's a tank. The batteries are already inside. It shoots sparks.' Then he shuffled forward on his knees and took the child's arm. 'You'll tell me if you see that man again, won't you?'

  Richard stared.

  'I mean, if he steals anything?'

  Robarge saw corruption in the unblinking eyes.

  'You'll tell me, won't you?'

  When Robarge repeated the question, Richard said, 'Mummy doesn't have a friend,' and Robarge knew he had lost the child.

  He said, 'Show me how you put yourself to bed.'

  Robarge was unconsoled. He found Kathy had already gone to bed, and though the light was on she lay on her side, facing the dark wall, as if sleeping.

  Robarge said, 'We never make love.'

  'We did - on Wednesday.'

  She was right; he had forgotten.

  She said, 'I've locked the doors. Will you make sure the lights are out?'

  So he went from room to room turning out the lights, and in the television room Robarge sat down in the darkness. There, in the house which now seemed to be made of iron, he remembered again that he was in London, in World's End; that he had taken his family there. He was saddened by the thought that he was so far from home. The darkness hid him and hid the country; he knew that if he appeared calm it was only because the darkness concealed his loss. He wished he had never come here, and worrying this way he craved his child and had a hideous reverie, of wishing to eat the child and eat his wife and keep them in that cannibal way. Burdened by this guilty thought, he went upstairs to make sure his son was safe.

  Richard was in darkness, too. Robarge kissed the child's hot

  WORLD S END

  cheek. There was a bright cube on the floor, the present from Aberdeen. He picked it up and saw that it had not been opened.

  He put it beside Richard on the bed and leaning for balance he pressed something in the bedclothes. It was long and flat and the hardness stung his hand. It was the breadknife with the serrated blade from the kitchen, tucked beneath these sheets, close to the child's body. Breathless from the shock of it Robarge took it away.

  And then he went to bed. He was shaking so badly he did not think he would ever sleep. He wanted to smash his face against the wall and hit it until it was bloody and he had torn his nose away. He dropped violently to sleep. When he woke in the dark he recalled the sound that had wakened him - it was still vibrant in the air, the click of the front gate: a thief was entering his house. Robarge waited for more, and perspired. His fear left him and he was penetrated by the fake vitality of insomnia. After an hour he decided that what he had heard, if anything, was a thief leaving the house, not breaking in. Too late, too far, too dark, he thought; and he knew now they were all lost.

  '4

  Zombies

  Miss Bristow was certain she had dreamed of a skull because on waking - gasping to the parlor and throwing open the curtains -the first face she had seen was skull-like, a man or woman looking directly in at her from the 49 bu
s. It verified her dream but was simpler and so more horrible, with staring eyes and bony cheeks and sharp teeth and the long strings of dirty hair they called dreadlocks. She went to the small cabinet and plucked at the doors with clumsy fingers before she remembered that Alison had the key. And then she felt abandoned in dismal terror, between the bedroom where she had dreamed the skull and the window where she had seen the face moving down Sloane Street.

  She was still in her slippers and robe when Alison arrived at ten. Alison was an efficient girl with powerful shoulders, a nurse's sliding tread and humor in her whole body; the distress was confined to her eyes. She said, 'Have we had a good night?'

  Miss Bristow did not reply to the question. She was tremulous with thought. Her arthritis gave her the look of someone cowering.

  'You took the key.'

  Alison appeared not to hear her. 'I hope you haven't forgotten that you have a lunch date today.'

  She had forgotten. She saw the skull, the teeth, the cowl of hair grinning from the far side of a table in a restaurant where she was trapped. She said, 'Who is it?'

  'Philippa - that nice girl from Howletts. She left a message last week.'

  Miss Bristow was relieved. She said, 'The Italian.'

  'Philippa is not Italian,' said Alison in the singsong she used when she repeated herself. 'Now you must put some clothes on. You haven't had your bath.' She opened the blue diary and said, 'She's coming here at twelve. She'll have news of your book.'

  'In a moment you're going to say you've lost the key.'

  Alison said, 'We promised we weren't going to be naughty, didn't we?'

  WORLD S END

  The Italian, she thought in her bath. At the party, months ago, the girl Philippa had sat at her feet and a sentence was fully framed in Miss Bristow's mind. 'I can remember,' she said, rapping the words on the arm of her chair, struggling to say them, 'I can remember when we were Romans.'

  'And now we're Italians,' the girl had said quickly.

  Miss Bristow peered at the girl's blank face. The girl scarcely knew how witty she had been, and so Miss Bristow felt better about appropriating the remark and making it her own: We are Romans turning into Italians.

  The girl had been attentive, with a hearty dedication, saying, 'Your glass is empty again!' But the criticism in the words was not in her tone. Miss Bristow felt the need to sip; she panicked and became breathless when there was nothing to sip. But the girl had made sure there was something in the glass all evening. Miss Bristow sensed the girl's watchfulness as she sipped. How could she explain the paradox she herself did not understand? The contents of this glass worsened her fears, but made her better able to bear them.

  'I take no pleasure in this,' said Miss Bristow. 'It is a necessity, like a splint on a fracture.'

  Or, she thought, embalming fluid. At eighty-two, Miss Bristow felt like a corpse. A celebrated writer in the thirties, she had, after a period of obscurity, lived on to see her work rediscovered and treated - those angry and unhappy books - with a serene reverence. The critical essays about her had the slightly fraudulent forgiving tone of obituaries, publication days the solemnity of exhumations. She knew the talk, that people believed she had been dead for years. When it was learned (and this was news in London) that she was not dead, but had only fallen silent, living on gin in solitude in a tiny Welsh village, she was invited to parties. The books that were republished sold well. She was regarded as a survivor, a voice from the past. And part of her past, the earliest, was a small island in the Caribbean. For the first time in her life, she could afford to live in London. She could not remember when people had listened to her so keenly. She began to write again.

  Philippa had asked all the predictable questions, and then they had started to discuss the country. Strangers meeting in London these days spoke of the condition of England as they had once spoken of the weather - cherishing the subject, as people did a

  ZOMBIES

  harmless illness or a plucky defeat. England was in a pickle: they made it comedy, without consequences, as the girl had done: 'And now we're Italians.'

  All evening Miss Bristow had been in the chair. Philippa had carried drinks to her, and a heaped plate of food from the buffet downstairs. Miss Bristow had eaten a pinch of watercress and some of the swollen raisins from the risotto. The ease made her reflective, and the girl relaxed, too.

  'I love it here,' said Philippa. 'So many literary people!'

  'Do you think so?' Miss Bristow liked the girl's dullness. Lively people required listeners and close attention.

  'Sarah's fantastic'

  'That woman,' said Miss Bristow, indicating Sarah, the hostess, who was a poet's widow. 'She is to her late husband's work what Anne Hathaway's cottage is to Hamlet.'

  Philippa moved her lips and laughed.

  Miss Bristow said, 'And I am a zombie.'

  Miss Bristow was aware that her fame made bright people shy. But the girl was dull and bold. She was attentive without fawning. She was carelessly pretty, like a beauty in an old snapshot. Miss Bristow wanted to know the girl better, not so much to make a friend as to reacquaint herself with the person she had once been. Already she had seen the re-enactment of some of her own traits - going downstairs for the food the girl had flirted with a black man; she had a slyness in her stare; she knelt on the floor unselfconsciously; she had a frank laugh and a nervous cough - the sounds were harshly similar and seemed to give no relief.

  Miss Bristow had been like this - hard and pretty and reckless in ways that had later, as memories, lessened her loneliness. She had emerged from her twenty years' solitude whole, impatient, her imagination undiminished and with an added strength, a directness. She hated discussion, talk of terms, Howletts' ritual respect whenever she turned in a new book. And memory: years of her life which she had thought irretrievable, when she had been as young as that girl, she recovered and wrote about. It startled her to remember these years — other lives in another world. She was glad that she had that girl to talk to. She was, she felt, speaking to her younger self.

  'I hope it's not too strong,' said Philippa returning again, the glass between two fingers. Miss Bristow noticed the physical difference

  world's end

  in their hands. Her own, twisted with arthritis, was so shaped by habit that it snugly fitted the glass.

  'You are so right,' said Miss Bristow. 'Romans turning into Italians.'

  Philippa looked baffled. Miss Bristow remembered: the girl had not said precisely that.

  'Oh, yes,' Philippa finally said. 'But no one has described it better than you.'

  Had she? Perhaps - in a book or story long ago which had not enjoyed the revival. There had been so many books, too great a number for any disinterment to be complete. And now, like everyone else, she knew only the work that had been revived, that was spoken about. The rest was lost to her.

  The girl said, 'I admire your work enormously.'

  It was not exactly what Miss Bristow wished to hear. She felt sisterly, but her affection was being returned to her more formally, as to a grandmother or great-aunt, and it obliged her with the impulse to do something for this girl - to help her in some way, if only to prevent her from squandering her attention on worthless people like Sarah.

  'Do you write?' said Miss Bristow, dreading the girl's reply.

  'I tried,' said Philippa. 'I spent a summer in the Caribbean. I wrote poems, part of a play. I started a novel. Then I came home and burned the lot.'

  'Ah,' sighed Miss Bristow, seeing the flames - swift and yellow, they consumed the luxury of error and wasted time. It matched a memory of hers and was too much for her. She said, 'And did you visit Isabella?'

  Isabella had been Miss Bristow's island.

  'Only for a holiday.'

  'A holiday?' It dignified the place absurdly. A holiday therel

  The girl coughed her nervous cough. She said, 'More of a pilgrimage, actually. But I had been there so often already in your books it was as if I were simply r
eturning. It is such a lovely island.'

  'It was lovely once.' Miss Bristow thought a moment, and sipped, and said, 'In Roman times.'

  'Changeless, like so many of those islands.'

  Miss Bristow said, 'The Romans became Italians. It has altered beyond recognition.'

  'You reckon?' said Philippa.

  ZOMBIES

  Miss Bristow smiled at the expression.

  'You really ought to go back.'

  'I did. I couldn't bear it. Everything has changed. I was lost - I went to the beach, for a stroll, for my sanity. It was ghastly.'

  'The hotels,' said Philippa.

  'I like hotels,' said Miss Bristow. 'We built our share of hotels. No, it was the tidewrack, the detritus on the sand. Once, it was all driftwood and torn nets, barrel staves, rope - beautiful things. You expected to find pirate treasure, messages in bottles. Now it is all plastic beakers, tins and tubs, broken glass, bits of rubber. Junk. And oil. And worse.'

  'Pollution,' said Philippa.

  Miss Bristow glanced at the girl, wondering if with this idiot word she was satirizing her.

  'I must write about it.'

  'You will.'

  'Yes, encourage me,' said Miss Bristow. She looked at her crooked fingers and she whispered, 'I write so slowly now.'

  'No one writes about the really important things.'

  'Exactly,' said Miss Bristow. 'And what are you writing, my dear?'

  Philippa said, 'I think it is ever so important to realize that if one has no talent one ought not to waste one's time in self-deception. I would rather help others, who really have a gift.'

  'You are so right.'

  Philippa winced. 'I am on the dole.'

  Miss Bristow could not hide her shock. This pretty girl, this drawing-room, the talk of her holiday. For a moment, Miss Bristow thought this girl was speaking figuratively: rich parents, idleness.

  'I've as much right to it as anyone else,' said the girl, and as she spoke of having lost her job selling antiques, of the Employment Exchange, Miss Bristow looked at the girl's hands - the ring, the silver bracelet: the girl collected her money with these perfect hands.