The collected stories (3 page)

'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

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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

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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 returning. 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.

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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.

'Terrible,' said Miss Bristow. 'An American asked me just the other day, "How can you live here?" I said, "I can live here because I once lived on an island that was overrun by savages."'

'Actually,' said Philippa, 'I'd like to be in publishing. But there aren't any jobs going just at the moment.'

'They are the enemy,' said Miss Bristow. 'But if you are

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absolutely determined I might be able to help you. My publisher is looking for someone. Do you know Howletts?'

'They're awfully grand.'

Miss Bristow laughed. 'I used to think that!'

'But their list is-'

'It is all trade,' said Miss Bristow. 'They are in business to make money, like everyone else. In Isabella, before the Great War, there were icehouses in the capital. Yes, water was a commodity! They sold it by the cake to planters who carried it upcountry, so they could have cool drinks. The ice merchants were on to a good thing - isn't that the phrase? They might have been selling anything -cloth by the yard, soap, matches, motor cars.' Miss Bristow pursed her lips and added, 'Or books.'

'You're being a bit unfair.'

'Am I? I mean it as praise. What a very great pity it would be if they were not interested in profit,' said Miss Bristow. 'But they are, which is why I have no friends there.'

'Drink,' said Philippa briskly. And before Miss Bristow could react, her empty glass was lifted from her hand.

'You are very kind,' said Miss Bristow.

The girl was immediately hired at Howletts on Miss Bristow's recommendation. And Miss Bristow knew she had assigned the girl to the firm to approve her new book, to eliminate the ritual. Miss Bristow wanted an ally. Dull people mattered more than the spirited ones who mystified her with praise that sounded like mockery.

And now, rising carefully from the bath so she would not break her bones, and hating the feeble image that made the full-length glass seem a ridiculous distorting mirror, she thought how, in the months Philippa had been at Howletts, she had been able to work. She had her ally; and she wasn't fooled: the girl knew very little of her, but how could she? The girl was as she had once been — bold and untruthful, undemanding, generous, and a little foolish. But the girl believed, and the girl did not judge her - that was worth anything. Miss Bristow remembered that she had liked the girl for a phrase, a single observation - Romans, Italians. She had put this into a story and afterward had felt grateful and a bit guilty using words that were not wholly hers. The indebtedness was nothing compared to the fears she remembered and the faces she saw, sleeping, waking, so often now as she tunneled in the

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past, living in it more intensely now and blinking the zombies away to write about it.

The door chimes rang. Miss Bristow became eager.

'Won't you have something to drink?' said Miss Bristow, entering the parlor, taking the girl's hand. She kept her back to the window so as not to see any skulls. This fear made her seem prim, and even somewhat stately.

Alison said, 'I have already asked her. She doesn't want anything.'

'Go on, my dear. A gin and tonic perhaps?'

'Oh, all right,' said Philippa.

'You see?' said Miss Bristow.

Alison reached through the neck of her jumper and brought out a blunt key on a thong. She went to the cabinet, removed the gin bottle, and made Philippa's drink.

'I will join you,' said Miss Bristow. She smiled at Alison. 'The usual.'

Alison mixed the gin and vermouth for Miss Bristow with a kind of defeated disregard.

'I am feeling a bit shaky today,' said Miss Bristow, slowly fitting herself into the chair and reaching for her drink. She sipped, gulped, sipped again, and said, 'It was that film on the television about the mummy. They unwrapped it and I thought, "Oh, my, I must turn this off." But I couldn't. I just sat there while they unwrapped it. I thought, "I know I'm going to have a bad night if I watch this" but I kept watching and they kept unwrapping. Finally, I couldn't stand it any more. I switched it off and went to bed. And I had a bad night.'

'I didn't see it,' said Philippa. 'I was at a party. A publisher's thrash.'

'It reminded me of something.'

'The mummy?'

'Something else. A face I knew, a face from the catacombs - a long time ago.'

'I didn't know you'd been in Rome.'

'I have never been to Rome,' said Miss Bristow.

Philippa looked at her watch. 'I booked the table for one o'clock and the traffic's pretty bad. We ought to make a move.'

'I'll just fetch my hat,' said Miss Bristow. From the bedroom

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she heard Alison speaking to Philippa in a harsh accusing whisper.

'We've got lots to talk about,' said Philippa in the restaurant. 'And I have two ideas for you.'

'Before you say another word,' said Miss Bristow, pushing down her hat, 'I want you to get that young man's attention and ask him for two drinks. There's a dear.'

Philippa ordered the drinks and even began talking, but it was not until the gin and French was set before her that Miss Bristow's eyes lost their vacancy and took on a glaze of attention.

'I've been thinking,' Philippa was saying, 'that it's about time you wrote your autobiography. I don't know why you haven't done it before! What an absolutely marvelous book it would be. Of course, I haven't mentioned it to Roger' - 'Roger' to Philippa had been Mister Howlett to Miss Bristow for ten years - 'but I know he'll be fantastically sweet about it.'

'My autobiography?'

'Yes! It just occurred to me the other day,' said Philippa. 'I don't know how I thought of it! What do you say?'

Not one day of my life has gone by, Miss Bristow thought, without that book appearing to me. The book was constant, not as a mass of papers, but finished, a hefty lettered spine, occupying a thick space in a shelf in her mind.

She said, 'It is a nice idea. But who would want to read it?'

'I certainly would!' said Philippa.

The girl was being unhelpful. Miss Bristow wanted more than this.

Philippa said, 'London in the First World War, Paris in the twenties, London again-'

'My island,' said Miss Bristow.

'Of course,' said Philippa, but seemed disappointed.

'I haven't been back to Paris since 1938. It's such a long time ago. I wouldn't go back, not now. People say it's changed so much. I'd go back if I could do it - somehow - like being a fly on the wall, just watching and listening. But that's impossible. How can one be a fly on the wall? And my island. It wasn't what you might think. Some people think it was paradise - "That beautiful life you must have had there," they say. I say, "What beautiful life?'"