Collected Stories

“The locked door of the room,” is what one of them, a daughter, heard.

“The wok cringes in the womb,” is the enigmatic phrase another swears she heard.

The bereaved husband, a blundering old fool in shirt sleeves, heard, incredibly, “The sock is out of tune.”

All three witnesses turn to their listener, as lawyers to a judge. Not one of them is superstitious enough to place great importance on final words. Illness, they know, brings a rainbow of distortion, but they long, nevertheless, for interpretation.

The listening judge is an awkward but compassionate woman who would like nothing better than to bring these three fragments into unity. Inside her head she holds a pencil straight up. Her eyes are fixed on the purpling clouds.

Then it arrives. Through some unsecured back door in her imagination she comes up with “The mock orange is in bloom.”

“Of course, of course,” they chime, nodding and smiling at each other, and at that moment their grief shifts subtly, the first of many such shiftings they are about to undergo.

Pardon

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON MILLY STOPPED at Ernie’s Cards ‘n’ Things to buy a mea culpa card for her father-in-law, whom she had apparently insulted.

“Sorry,” Ernie’s wife said in her testy way. “We’re all out.”

Milly found this hard to believe. The card rack was full. You could buy a happiness-in-your-new-home card or a mind-your-own-beeswax card, even a spectacular three-dollar pop-up card announcing to the world that you were feeling underappreciated. Surely there was such a thing as an I’m-sorry card.

“You can believe what you want,” Ernie’s wife said. “But we’re sold right out. At the start of the week I had at least a dozen sorry cards in stock. We had a real nice selection, all the way from ‘I boobed’ to ‘Forgive me, Dear Heart.’ They went like hotcakes, the whole lot. That’s more than I sell in an average year.”

“How strange,” Milly said. “What on earth’s everyone being sorry about all of a sudden?”

Ernie’s wife made a gesture of impatience. She wasn’t there to stand around jawing with the customers, she snapped. There was the inventory to do and the ordering and so on.

Milly at once apologized for taking up her time; she had only been speaking rhetorically when she asked what everyone was being sorry about.

At this, Ernie’s wife had the grace to blush and make amends. She’d been under strain, she said, what with people in and out of the shop all week grousing about her stock of sorry cards. There was one poor soul who came in weeping her eyes out. She’d had a set-to with her husband and told him he was getting so fat he was no longer attractive to her. It turned out he wasn’t really getting fat at all. She was just in a miffy mood because she didn’t like the new statue of Louis Riel in the park. She didn’t object to Louis in the buff, not that—it was more a question of where her tax dollars were going.

Milly, who was an intimate friend of the sculptor, said, “I’m really sorry to hear this.”

“And then,” Ernie’s wife went on, “a gentleman came in here saying he’d had an out-and-out row with his next-door neighbor who’d been a true-blue friend for twenty years.”

“These things happen,” Milly said. “Just this week my own father-in-law—”

“Seems the man and his neighbor got on to the subject of politics—in my opinion not a subject for friends to be discussing. The neighbor called my customer a stuffed-shirt fascist right to his face.”

“That seems a little extreme,” Milly said. “But why should he be the one to send a sorry card when his friend was the one who—?”

“Exactly!” Ernie’s wife held up a finger, and her eyes filled with fire. “My thoughts exactly. But later that same day who should come in but a sweet old white-haired gent who said his next-door neighbor had called him a pinko bleeding heart and he—”

“Do you mean to tell me he was the very—”

“You’re interrupting,” Ernie’s wife cried.

Milly said she was terribly sorry. She explained that she was feeling unstrung because now she would have to go all the way downtown to buy a card for her father-in-law.

“Well, if you’re going downtown,” Ernie’s wife said, “would you mind returning a pair of pajamas for me? I bought them in the sales last week and, lo and behold, I got them home and found a flaw in the left sleeve.”

Milly disliked going all the way downtown. She disliked waiting for the bus, and when she got on the bus she disliked the way a man sitting next to her let his umbrella drip on her ankle.

“I’m most awfully sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize. I didn’t even notice. In a hundred years I would never have let—”

Milly managed a smile and made a gesture with her hand that said: It’s all right, I accept your apology. She was glad the umbrella hadn’t dripped on the pajamas Ernie’s wife had given her to return. Returning merchandise can be tricky, especially when it’s wet and when the receipt’s been mislaid. More often than not you meet with suspicion, scorn, arrogance, rebuff.

But today the gentleman in the complaint department was wearing a yellow rose in his lapel, and his eyes twinkled.

“We take full responsibility for flaws,” he said. “Head office will be sending your friend a letter begging her pardon, and I personally apologize in the name of our branch and in the name of the manufacturer.”

Milly, triumphant, took the bus home. The driver apologized, as well he should, for splashing her as she stood at the bus stop.

“It’s not your fault, it’s all this blessed rain,” Milly said.

The bus driver shook his head. “A regular deluge. But I should have been more careful.”

The instant the words left his mouth, the rain began to fall more heavily. The sky turned an ugly black, and soon rain was pelting down, loud and musical, slamming on the roof of the bus and streaming in thick sheets down its sides. The windshield wipers did their best to beat back the water, but clearly they hadn’t been designed for a storm of this magnitude and, after a few minutes, the driver pulled over to the curb.

“I’m awfully sorry, folks,” he announced, “but we’re going to have to wait this one out.”

Nobody really minded. It was rather pleasant, almost like a party, to be sitting snug inside a parked bus whose windows had turned to silver, swapping stories about storms of other years. Several passengers remembered the flood of 1958 and the famous spring downpour of 1972, but most of them agreed that today’s storm was the most violent they had ever seen. They would be going home to flooded basements and worried spouses, yet they remained cheerful. Some of the younger people at the back of the bus struck up an impromptu singsong, and the older folks traded their newspapers back and forth. The headline on one paper said TRUDEAU APOLOGIZES TO REAGAN, and another said REAGAN APOLOGIZES TO SUMMIT. By the time the sun burst through, many of the passengers had exchanged names and phone numbers and announced to each other how cleansing a good storm can be, how it sweeps away unspoken hostilities and long-held grudges.

Milly, walking home from her bus stop, breathed in the shining air. Her feet were drenched, and she was forced to step over several fallen tree branches, but she noted with pleasure the blue clarity of the sky. It was going to be a splendid evening. A single cloud, a fluffy width of cumulus, floated high in the air over her house. It was shaped like a pair of wings, thought Milly, who was in a fanciful mood. No, not like wings, but like two outstretched hands, wonderfully white and beseeching, which seemed to beckon to her and say: Sorry about all this fuss and bother.

Seeing the great cloudy hands made Milly yearn to absolve all those who had troubled her in her life. She forgave her father for naming her Milly instead of Jo Ann, and her mother for passing on to her genes that made her oversensitive to small hurts and slights. She forgave her brother for reading her diary, and her sister for her pretty legs, and her cat for running in front of a truck and winding up pressed flat as a transfer on the road. She forgave everyone who had ever forgotten her birthday and everyone who looked over her shoulder at parties for someone more attractive to talk to. She forgave her boss for being waspish and her lover for lack of empathy and her husband for making uncalled-for remarks about stale breakfast cereal and burned toast.

All this dispensing of absolution emptied Milly out and made her light as air. She had a sensation of floating, of weightlessness, and it seemed to her that bells were chiming inside her head.

But it was only the telephone ringing—without a doubt her father-in-law phoning to ask forgiveness. She hurried inside so she could sing into his ear, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Words

WHEN THE WORLD FIRST STARTED HEATING UP, an international conference was held in Rome to discuss ways of dealing with the situation.

Ian’s small northern country—small in terms of population, that is, not in size—sent him to the meetings as a junior observer, and it was there he met Isobel, who was representing her country as full-fledged delegate. She wore a terrible green dress the first time he saw her, and rather clumsy shoes, but he could see that her neck was slender, her waist narrow and her legs long and brown. For so young a woman, she was astonishingly articulate; in fact, it was her voice more than anything else that he fell in love with—its hills and valleys and its pliant, easy-sided wit. It was a voice that could be distinguished in any gathering, being both sweet and husky and having an edging of contralto merriment that seemed to Ian as rare and fine as a border of gold leaf.

They played truant, missing half the study sessions, the two of them lingering instead over tall, cool drinks in the café they found on the Via Traflori. There, under a cheerful striped canopy, Isobel leaned across a little table and placed long, ribbony Spanish phrases into Ian’s mouth, encouraging and praising him when he got them right. And he, in his somewhat stiff northern voice, gave back the English equivalents: table, chair, glass, cold, hot, money, street, people, mouth. In the evenings, walking in the gardens in front of the institute where the conference was being held, they turned to each other and promised with their eyes, and in two languages as well, to love each other for ever.

The second International Conference was held ten years later. The situation had become grave. One could use the word crisis and not be embarrassed. Ian—by then married to Isobel, who was at home with the children—attended every session, and he listened attentively to the position papers of various physicists, engineers, geographers and linguists from all parts of the world. It was a solemn but distinguished assembly; many eminent men and women took their places at the lectern, including the spidery old Scottish demographer who years earlier had made the first correlation between substrata temperatures and highly verbalized societies. In every case, these speakers presented their concerns with admirable brevity, each word weighted and frugally chosen, and not one of them exceeded the two-minute time limitation. For by now no one really doubted that it was the extravagance and proliferation of language that had caused the temperature of the earth’s crust to rise, and in places-California, Japan, London—to crack open and form long ragged lakes of fire. The evidence was everywhere and it was incontrovertible; thermal maps and measurements, sonar readings, caloric separations, a network of subterranean monitoring systems—all these had reinforced the integrity of the original Scottish theories.

But the delegates, sitting in the plenary session of the second International Conference, were still reluctant to take regulatory action. It was partly a case of heads-in-the-sand; it was—human nature being what it is—partly a matter of political advantage or commercial gain. There lingered, too, a somewhat surprising nostalgia for traditional liberties and for the old verbal order of the world. Discussion at the conference had gone around and around all week, pointless and wasteful, and it looked very much as though the final meeting would end in yet another welter of indecision and deferral. It was at that point that Ian, seated in the front row, rose and requested permission to speak.

He was granted a one-minute slot on the agenda. In fact, he spoke for several minutes, but his eloquence, his sincerity (and no doubt his strong, boyish appearance, his shaggy hair and his blue eyes) seemed to merit an exception. Certainly not one person sitting in that gathering had any wish to stop him.

It was unfortunate, tragic some thought, that a freak failure in the electronic system—only a plug accidentally pulled from its socket—prevented his exact words from being recorded, but those who were present remembered afterward how passionately he pleaded his love for the planet. (In truth—though who could know this?—he was thinking chiefly of his love for Isobel and his two children.)

We are living in a fool’s dream, he told his fellow delegates, and the time has come for us to wake. Voluntary restraints were no longer adequate to preserve the little earth, which was the only home we know. Halfway measures like the old three-hour temps tranquilles were next to useless since they were never, or almost never, enforced. The evening curfew-lingua was ridiculously lenient. Abuses of every sort abounded, particularly the use of highly percussive words or words that were redolent with emotional potency, even though it had been established that these two classes of words were particularly damaging to bedrock and shales. Multilingualism continued to flourish. Wasteful antiphonic structures were actually on the increase in the more heavily populated regions, as was the use of elaborate ceremonial metaphor. It was as though, by refusing to make linguistic sacrifices, the human race had willed its own destruction.

When he finished speaking, the applause was prolonged and powerful. It perhaps held an element of shame, too; this young man had found the courage to say at last what should have been said long before. One after another the delegates rose to their feet, and soon their clapping fell into a steady rhythmic beat that had the effect of holding Ian hostage on the platform. The chairman whispered into his ear, begging him for a few additional words.

He assented. He could not say no. And, in a fever that was remarkably similar to the fever he had suffered as a child during a severe case of measles, or like the fever of love he had succumbed to ten years earlier in Rome, he announced to the audience, holding up a hand for attention, that he would be the first to take a vow of complete silence for the sake of the planet that had fathered him.

Almost at once he regretted his words, but hubris kept him from recanting for the first twenty-four hours and, after that, a kind of stubbornness took over. Isobel met him at the airport with the words, “You went too far.” Later, after a miserable, silent attempt at lovemaking, she said, “I’ll never forgive you.” His children, clamoring to hear about his moment of heroism, poked at him, at his face and chest and arms, as though he were inert. He tried to tell them with his eyes that he was still their father, that he still loved them.

“Leave him alone,” Isobel said sharply. “He might as well be a stranger now. He’s no different than anyone else.”

She became loud and shrewish. When his silent followers arrived at their door—and in time there were thousands of them, each with the same blank face and gold armband—she admitted them with bad grace. She grew garrulous. She rambled on and on, bitter and blaming, sometimes incoherent, sometimes obscene, sometimes reverting to a coarse, primitive schoolyard Spanish, sometimes shouting to herself or cursing into the mirror or chanting oaths—anything to furnish the emptiness of the house with words. She became disoriented. The solid plaster of the walls fell away from her, melting into a drift of vapor. There seemed to be no shadows, no sense of dimension, no delicate separation between one object and another. Privately, she pleaded with her husband for an act of apostasy. Later she taunted him. “Show me you’re still human,” she would say. “Give me just one word.” The word betrayal came frequently out of her wide mobile mouth, and so did the scornful epithet martyr.

But time passes and people forget. She forgot, finally, what it was that had betrayed her. Next she forgot her husband’s name. Sometimes she forgot that she had a husband at all, for how could anything be said to exist, she asked herself loudly, hoarsely—even a husband, even one’s self—if it didn’t also exist in the shape of a word.

He worried that she might be arrested, but for some reason—his position probably—she was always let off with a warning. In their own house she ignored him, passing him on the stairs without a look, or crossing in front of him as though he were a stuffed chair. Often she disappeared for hours, venturing out alone into the heat of the night, and he began to suspect she had taken a lover.

The thought preyed on him, though in fact he had long since forgotten the word for wife and also the word for fidelity. One night, when she left the house, he attempted to follow her, but clearly she was suspicious because she walked very quickly, looking back over her shoulder, making a series of unnecessary turns and choosing narrow old streets whose curbs were blackened by fire. Within minutes he lost sight of her; soon after that he was driven back by the heat.

The next night he tried again, and this time he saw her disappear into an ancient, dilapidated building, the sort of enclosure, he remembered, where children had once gone to learn to read and write. Unexpectedly, he felt a flash of pity; what a sad place for a tryst. He waited briefly, then entered the building and went up a flight of smoldering stairs that seemed on the point of collapse. There he found a dim corridor, thick with smoke, and a single room at one end.

Through the door he heard a waterfall of voices. There must have been a dozen people inside, all of them talking. The talk seemed to be about poetry. Someone—a woman—was giving a lecture. There were interruptions, a discussion, some laughter. He heard his wife’s voice, her old gilt-edged contralto, asking a question, and the sound of it made him draw in his breath so sharply that something hard, like a cinder or a particle of gravel, formed in his throat.

It stayed stubbornly lodged there all night. He found it painful to breath, and even Isobel noticed how he thrashed about in bed, gasping wildly for air. In the morning she called a doctor, who could find nothing wrong, but she remained uneasy, and that evening she stayed home and made him cups of iced honey-and-lemon tea to ease his throat. He took her hand at one point and held it to his lips as though it might be possible to find the air he needed inside the crevices of her skin. By now the scraping in his throat had become terrible, a raw agonizing rasp like a dull knife sawing through limestone. She looked at his face, from which the healthy, blood-filled elasticity had gone and felt herself brushed by a current of air, or what might have been the memory of a name.

He began to choke violently, and she heard something grotesque come out of his mouth, a sound that was only half-human, but that rode on a curious rhythmic wave that for some reason stirred her deeply. She imagined it to be the word Isobel. “Isobel?” she asked, trying to remember its meaning. He said it a second time, and this time the syllables were more clearly formed.

The light of terror came into his eyes, or perhaps the beginning of a new fever; she managed to calm him by stroking his arm. Then she called the children inside the house, locked the doors and windows against the unbearable heat, and they began, slowly, patiently, hands linked, at the beginning where they had begun before—with table, chair, bed, cool, else, other, sleep, face, mouth, breath, tongue.

Poaching

ON OUR WAY TO CATCH the Portsmouth ferry, Dobey and I stayed overnight at a country hotel in the village of Kingsclere. The floors sloped, the walls tipped, the tap leaked rusty water and the bedclothes gave out an old, bitter odor.

At breakfast we were told by the innkeeper that King John had once stayed in this hotel and, moreover, had slept in the very room where we had spent the night.

“Wasn’t he the Magna Carta king?” Dobey said, showing off. “That would make it early thirteenth century.”

“Incredible,” I said, worrying whether I should conceal my fried bread beneath the underdone bacon or the bacon beneath the bread. “Extraordinary.”

The innkeeper had more to tell us. “And when His Royal Highness stopped here, he was bit by a bedbug. Of course, there’s none of that nowadays.” Here he chuckled a hearty chuckle and sucked in his red cheeks.

I crushed my napkin—Dobey would call it a serviette—on top of my bacon and fried bread and egg yolk and said to myself: next he’ll be rattling on about a ghost.

“And I didn’t like to tell you people last night when you arrived,” the innkeeper continued, “but the room where the two of you was—it’s haunted.”

“King John?” I asked.

“One of the guards, it’s thought. My wife’s seen ‘im many the time. And our Barbara. And I’ve heard ‘im clomping about in his great boots in the dark of the night and making a right awful noise.”

Dobey and I went back to our room to brush our teeth and close our haversacks, and then we lay flat on our backs for a minute on the musty bed and stared at the crooked beams.

“Are you thinking kingly thoughts?” I said after a while.

“I’m thinking about those poor bloody Aussies,” said Dobey.

“Oh, them,” I said. “They’ll make out all right.”

Only the day before we’d picked up the two Australians on the road. Not that they were by any stretch your average hitchhikers—two women, a mother, middle-aged, and a grown daughter, both smartly dressed. Their rented Morris Minor had started to smoke between Farrington and Kingsclere, and we gave them a lift into the village.

They’d looked us over carefully, especially the mother, before climbing into the back seat. We try to keep the back seat clean and free of luggage for our hitchhikers. The trick is to put them at their ease so they’ll talk. Some we wring dry just by keeping quiet. For others we have to prime the pump. It’s like stealing, Dobey says, only no one’s thought to make a law against it.

Within minutes we knew all about the Australians. They were from Melbourne. The mother had recently been widowed, and her deceased husband, before the onset of Addison’s disease, had worked as an investment analyst. Something coppery about the way she said “my late husband” suggested marital dullness, but Dobey and I never venture into interpretation. The daughter taught in a junior school. She was engaged to be married, a chap in the military. The wedding was six months away, and the two of them, mother and daughter, were shoring themselves up by spending eight weeks touring Britain, a last fling before buckling down to wedding arrangements. It was to be a church ceremony, followed by a lobster lunch in the ballroom of a large hotel.

The two of them made the wedding plans sound grudging and complex and tiresome, like putting on a war. The daughter emitted a sigh; nothing ever went right. And now they’d only been in England a week, had hardly made a dent, and already the hired car had let them down. It looked serious too, maybe the clutch.

Everything the mother said seemed electrically amplified by her bright, forthcoming Australia-lacquered voice. She had an optimistic nature, quickly putting the car out of mind and chirping away from the back seat about the relations in Exeter they planned to visit, elderly aunts, crippled uncles, a nephew who’d joined a rock band and traveled to America, was signed up by a movie studio but never was paid a penny—all this we learned in the ten minutes it took us to drive them into Kingsclere and drop them at the phone box. The daughter, a pretty girl with straight blond hair tied back in a ribbon, hardly said a word.