Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Page 2

  She opens an old story for us, like an egg, and finds the new story, the now-story we want to hear, within.

  No such thing as a perfect writer. Carter’s high-wire act takes place over a swamp of preciousness, over quicksands of the arch and twee; and there’s no denying that she sometimes falls off, no getting away from odd outbreaks of fol-de-rol, and some of her puddings, her most ardent admirers will concede, are excessively egged. Too much use of words like ‘eldritch’, too many men who are rich ‘as Croesus’, too much porphyry and lapis lazuli to please a certain sort of purist. But the miracle is how often she pulls it off; how often she pirouettes without falling, or juggles without dropping a ball.

  Accused by lazy pens of political correctness, she was the most individual, independent and idiosyncratic of writers; dismissed by many in her lifetime as a marginal, cultish figure, an exotic hothouse flower, she has become the contemporary writer most studied at British universities – a victory over the mainstream she would have enjoyed.

  She hadn’t finished. Like Italo Calvino, like Bruce Chatwin, like Raymond Carver, she died at the height of her powers. For writers, these are the cruellest deaths: in mid-sentence, so to speak. The stories in this volume are the measure of our loss. But they are also our treasure, to savour and to hoard.

  Raymond Carver is said to have told his wife before he died (also of lung cancer), ‘We’re out there now. We’re out there in Literature’. Carver was the most modest of men, but this is the remark of a man who knew, and who had often been told, how much his work was worth. Angela received less confirmation, in her lifetime, of the value of her unique oeuvre; but she, too, is out there now, out there in Literature, a Ray of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day.

  Salman Rushdie, May 1995

  EARLY WORK

  The Man Who Loved a Double Bass

  A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home

  A Victorian Fable (with Glossary)

  The Man Who Loved

  a Double Bass

  All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring of those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad.

  That was how Johnny Jameson, the bass player, came to be treated – with respect and admiration; for there could be no doubt that Jameson was as mad as a hatter.

  And the musicians looked after him. He was never without work, or a bed, or a packet of cigarettes, or a beer if he wanted one. There was always someone taking care of the things he could never get around to doing himself. It must also be admitted that he was a very fine bass player.

  In this, in fact, lay the seed of his trouble. For his bass, his great, gleaming, voluptuous bass, was mother, father, wife, child and mistress to him and he loved it with a deep and steadfast passion.

  Jameson was a small, quiet man with rapidly receding hair and a huge pair of heavy spectacles hiding mild, short-sighted eyes. He hardly went anywhere without his bass, which he carried effortlessly, slung on his back, as Red Indian women carry their babies. But it was a big baby for one so frail-looking as he to carry.

  They called the bass Lola. Lola was the most beautiful bass in the whole world. Her shape was that of a full-breasted, full-hipped woman, recalling certain primitive effigies of the Mother Goddess so gloriously, essentially feminine was she, stripped of irrelevancies of head and limbs.

  Jameson spent hours polishing her red wood, already a warm, chestnut colour, to an ever deeper, ever richer glow. On tour, he sat placidly in the bus while the other musicians drank, argued and gambled around him, and he would take Lola from her black case, and unwrap the rags that padded her, with a trembling emotion. Then he would take out a special, soft silk handkerchief and set to work on his polishing, smiling gently at nothing and blinking his short-sighted eyes like a happy cat.

  The bass was always treated like a lady. The band started to buy her coffee and tea in cafés for a joke. Later it ceased to be a joke and became a habit. The extra drink was always ordered and placed before her and they ignored it when they went away and it was still on the table, cold and untouched.

  Jameson always took Lola into cafés but never into public bars because, after all, she was a lady. Whoever drank with Jameson did so in the saloon and bought Lola a pineapple juice, although sometimes she could be prevailed upon to take a glass of sherry at festive occasions like Christmas or a birthday or when someone’s wife had a child.

  But Jameson was jealous if she got too much attention and would look daggers at a man who took too many liberties with her, like slapping her case or making facetious remarks.

  Jameson had only ever been known to strike a man once when he had broken the nose of a drunken, insensitive pianist who made a coarse jest about Lola in Jameson’s presence. So nobody ever joked about Lola when Jameson was there.

  But innocent young musicians were hideously embarrassed if ever it fell out that they had to share a room with Jameson while on tour. So Jameson and Lola usually had a room to themselves. Away from Jameson, the trumpeter, Geoff Clarke, would say that Jameson was truly wedded to his art and perhaps they ought to book the bridal suite for the pair at some hotel, sometime.

  But Clarke gave Jameson a good job in his trad group that was called the West End Syncopators. Ignoring the august echoes of the name, they dressed themselves up in grey toppers and tail coats when performing and their souped-up version of ‘West End Blues’ (plus new vocal) had penetrated to the lower reaches of the top twenty.

  They all looked grotesque in grey toppers and none more grotesque than Jameson; but the band still made money.

  Making money, however, meant day after day spent in a converted Green Line bus travelling up and down the country from one one-night-stand to the next. It meant dates at corn exchanges, town halls, grimy back rooms in pubs. It meant constant bone-weariness and constant cash and credit and the band all loved it. They all shared a crazy jubilation.

  ‘The trad boom ain’t going to last for ever, so let’s enjoy it!’ said Len Nelson, the clarinettist.

  He was an incorrigible fornicator, whose idea of profiting from the trad boom was to lure star-struck young girls from the provincial clubs and concerts up into his hotel bedroom and there copulate with them. He loved success. And, to a lesser extent, they all exulted.

  Except, of course, Jameson, who did not even notice that trad was booming. He played just whatever he was told to play. He never really cared what it was as long as the quality of the sound he produced did not offend Lola.

  One night in November, they were engaged to play at a small town in the Fenland wastes of East Anglia. Darkness came with the afternoon, dragging mist with it to fill the dykes and shroud the pollard willows. The band bus followed a straight road with never a turn or dip and when they reached the pub where the jazz club at which they were to perform was held, and climbed from the bus, the darkness fell around their shoulders like a rain-soaked blanket.

  ‘Are they expecting us?’ asked Dave Jennings, the drummer, anxiously. Not a light shone in the pub.

  A frayed poster pinned to the closed main door announced their coming. But the chronic Fenland rain had so softened the paper that the slogan: ‘Friday night is rave night – with the raving, rioting, hit parade happy West End Syncopators’ was almost indecipherable.

  ‘Well, it’s not opening time, yet,’ comforted Len Nelson.

  ‘More’s the pity,’ grunted Jennings.

  ‘Of course they’re expecting us,’ said Geoff firmly. ‘The club booked us up months ago, before the record even. That’s why we accepted a date in this God-forsaken hole, isn’t it, Simeon?’

  The manager was a peripatetic Jew named Simeon Price, a failed tenor sax man who travelled with them out of nostalgia for his swinging days. Simeon was staring at the pub with bright, frightened eyes.

&nb
sp; ‘I don’t like it here,’ he said and shivered. ‘There’s something in the air.’

  ‘Bloody lot of wet in the air,’ grumbled Nelson. ‘Bet the dollies round here all got webbed feet.’

  ‘Don’t come the mysterious East,’ Geoff urged Simeon.

  Simeon shook his head agitatedly and shivered in spite of the great, turned-up collar of his enormous cashmere coat. He always dressed like a stage Jew. His race was his gimmick and he always affected a strong Yiddish accent although his family had been respected members of the Manchester bourgeoisie for nearly 150 years.

  But then the landlord appeared and then the two sixth form grammar school boys who ran the club and there was beer and chat and warmth and laughter. Jameson was very worried in case the damp should hurt Lola, warp her, rot her strings. He allowed one of the grammar school boys, they called him the Boy David at once, to buy her a rum and orange, for her health’s sake. Nelson and Jennings had to take the wondering Boy David off into the Gents and explain about Lola, quietly.

  But Simeon’s slender, delicately pointed nose was almost aquiver with sensibility, smelling something wrong, trouble in the wet air. The East Anglian air was bad for his weak lungs. The Boy David was talking about his club.

  ‘Bit old world, the membership, really, though we get people in for the club from quite a way away – art students, even, and a few sharp youngsters, and leather jackets who come from miles on their motorbikes. But the local teds, well, they still even have sideboards and velvet collars to their jackets!’

  There was a chorus of incredulous mirth and the boy at once became embarrassed and bought more drinks to cover his confusion. The band were to stay the night at the pub, which hid a number of bedrooms behind its unimposing façade. Simeon crept away from the bar to feel the sheets on his bed. They were damp. His throat immediately set up a sympathetic tickling.

  Jameson, humping Lola, also crept away, to the back room where music and dancing were permitted. He unwrapped his instrument and sat huddled over it in the cold, caressing with his silken rag. The room around him waited for the club to open, the shabby lines of quiet chairs waited, the little platform for the musicians waited.

  But there was a potent unease in the night. The musicians sensed it and their laughter became defiant as they tried to frighten the uneasiness away with their merriment. And they failed. Their young hosts caught the silent, depressed infection until they were all just sitting around, drinking for want of something else to do. But Jameson was happy; he was the only one happy, sitting away from them all, with Lola between his knees.

  As the band assembled on the cramped platform, the first customers arrived and stood around with their first half pints of bitter. Music began; the customers waited passively for the first extrovert couple who would start to dance.

  They were an easily recognisable type, these early ones. The boys wore pale, loose sweaters with paisley silk scarves tucked casually into the vee necks and the girls were tricked out in pseudo beat style, black or heavy mesh stockings, loose dresses heavily fringed. They were the children of local doctors, clergymen, teachers, retired soldiers, probably students in their last school year. They wore duffel coats and drove battered old cars and had a tendency to collect those little china ashtrays with veteran cars on them.

  Just before the first break, a black-legged girl in a short little pleated skirt and a youth in cavalry twill trousers ventured, giggling, on to the floor to dance; they did so in a peculiarly self-conscious way that made the musicians wink and grin at one another. Gradually the room began to fill. Art students from a nearby town, sniggering at the bourgeois who aped them; a party of crop-haired modernists, who had also travelled some distance. The modernists had sharp, pointed noses and Italian suits. Their girls dressed with studied formality, faces stylised, pale cheeks and lips, vividly painted eyes, hair immaculate, stiff with lacquer.

  The modernists chaffed Simeon, who lingered by the pay desk because the boys in charge were so young that he worried for them. The modernists joked about the grey top hats and the striped trousers and were patronising about ‘West End Blues’ and, in fact, the whole trad setup altogether; they were here, they implied, just because there happened to be nothing else doing that night. Simeon smiled with professional warmth and wondered whether he dare slip away to spray his throat.

  But his eyes slitted with suspicion when he saw a group of youths were parking motorcycles outside the pub; he could see them through the open door. They took off their crash helmets and left them under their cycles, where they gleamed whitely, like mushrooms or new laid eggs. Then the boys approached, plastic jackets creaking. Simeon personally tore off their jackets for them and watched them anxiously as they fought for brown ales at the bar.

  ‘Now, those chaps are really far less potential trouble than those modernist friends of yours,’ admonished the Boy David. Simeon sighed.

  ‘You wouldn’t have, by any chance, such a thing as an aspirin – and perhaps, might it be possible, could I get a glass of hot milk?’

  Inside the club room, a thick smoke haze dimmed the already low lighting and the room was in semi-darkness. Arms and legs flailed, beer slopped. The music was so loud it seemed almost a tangible, brazen wall. The West End Syncopators were half-way through another successful date.

  But the leatherjackets kept apart from the main, happy crowd. They had taken over one particular corner for themselves and were not dancing but standing up to their beer, laughing and grinning.

  The boys in the band played and sweated and gulped restorative bitter between choruses. They undid their silk waistcoats and their black ties and mopped the red indentations made on their foreheads by their top hats. It was just like any other date.

  Just like any other date until one of the leatherjackets spilled his beer all over the olive green buttocks of a thin girl in a sheath dress who jived backwards into him. She turned, angry. He apologised with profuse irony and that made her more angry still. The girl complained to her sharp, short-jacketed escort and the leatherjackets stood all round and leered.

  ‘And aren’t you going to say sorry to this young lady, then, mate?’ the girl’s dancing partner shouted above the music.

  The leatherjackets closed ranks like a snapped clasp-knife. Their indistinguishable, pallid, slack-jawed faces all grinned at once.

  ‘And what if I ain’t particularly sorry? Wasted all my beer, I have.’

  A group of Italian youths deserted their girls to gather behind the olive-sheathed girl’s defender. And that was how it started. The quarrel boiled up into a fine ragout of cries, shouts, blows and the dim interior whirled with thrusting limbs and crashing bottles as the eager youths met in fight. A bottle smashed the single, red-painted electric bulb and there was a horror of darkness. In the chaos, a pair of leatherjackets launched an attack on the musicians who were moaning and terrified and striking little matches to see something of the battle.

  ‘That such a thing should happen when we’re in the top twenty!’ gasped Simeon.

  The Young Conservatives came scurrying past shepherding frightened Susans, Brendas, and Jennifers. But the art students clustered safely at the door to giggle. The tight-skirted teddy girls dropped their impassivity; like valkyries they rode the battle, cheering the fighters on. Their exalted faces flickered in and out of the light that trickled through from the public bar.

  Now the musicians cast aside their top hats, their instruments and their neutrality. Simeon saw Len Nelson – as jerky and uncertain in the intermittent light as a man in an early film – leap from the dais and seize an Italian youth by his narrow and immaculate lapels and shake, shake, shake him until the boy’s mouth gaped open, howling.

  ‘Nothing like it ever happened before!’ the Boy David kept exclaiming in an apologetic frenzy. There were crashes and splinterings and the landlord appeared, trembling. Simeon took him into the private bar to soothe him with his own Scotch.

  ‘Quite like the old days, before we got famous,’ p
anted Nelson, defending the microphone.

  But it was all over very quickly, when someone shouted something about the police and the room emptied like a bath when the plug is pulled out. The musicians’ heavy breathing and little exclamations of triumph and sighs were the only sounds in the room.

  ‘Would I be such a fool as to call the police?’ demanded Simeon rhetorically. So they all laughed and went for a drink.

  ‘Here,’ said someone later, ‘has anyone seen Jameson?’

  ‘Not since the lights went out.’

  ‘Well, what does it matter? I’m going to bed,’ said Simeon. ‘I’ve a dreadful cold coming, I feel it. Not that going to bed will do me much good; wringing wet, the sheets are . . .’

  Then they all of them forgot about Jameson until very much later, when all but Geoff and Nelson had finally followed Simeon up the stairs to bed. Geoff and Nelson, decently happy, decided to go and have a look at the damage in the club room. They took a light bulb from the bar and plugged it into the socket where the red light had once been. And into focus leapt all the shattered glass and broken chairs and brown beer puddles soaking into the floor.

  Sobered at once, Geoff climbed on to the stage and poked anxiously among the instruments remaining. Miraculously, the drum and its accessories had survived and – he sighed – there seemed not a casualty on the dais. Then he found a terrible thing. Where Jameson had sat with Lola, there remained nothing on the floor but a heap of chestnut-coloured firewood.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. Nelson looked up, startled at the tone of the other’s voice. ‘Jameson, how are we going to tell Jameson, Len? His bass . . .’