The collected stories (14 page)

Mrs Etterick said, 'I'd like to close my eyes and open them and discover it's January.'

Td like to spend the next eight days in bed, watching rubbish on television and eating buttered toast. I mean, really pig it until London's back to normal,' Cox said.

'In Bangkok, you never knew it was Christmas. The heat was dreadful - I loved it. And Gina had an amah then. Amazing, isn't

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it? They were both seventeen, only the amah was about a foot shorter. But she kept Gina well in check. There were parties, but none of this bogus nostalgia. All the Christmas decorations were in the massage parlors and the brothels - well, that's what Richard told me. The Americans carried on, of course. But they would.'

'I had no idea there was another Far East hand at Alliance,' Cox said.

'Another?' said Mrs Etterick.

'I was in Malaya during the war,' Cox said. 'It was long before your time. But I stayed on. I rather enjoyed the Japanese surrender. It was a terrible shambles. They handed Kota Bahru over to me -can you imagine?'

Rudge said, 'There is so much that we have yet to understand about the East. Yes, I suppose one can treat it all as a great joke. Those funny little people. But our destiny lies in the hands of those funny little people.'

'They go out of their way to insult us,' Cox said. 'They make no serious attempt to understand us. Never did. I have always taken the view that we should offer them all the friendly attention they offer us. I mean, if they turf out our people we should immediately turf out one of theirs. Only language they understand.'

'Who are we talking about?' asked Rudge.

'Orientals,' Cox said.

'You lump them all together.'

'My dear boy, they lump us all together. We are westerners, they are orientals.'

Rudge said, 'Did Shiner ever tell you that terrible story about his visit to the Canton Trade Fair? It was when Alliance sent that industrial software delegation over, about three years ago.'

Cox said, 'I never speak to Shiner. I don't like his eyes, or his software, for that matter.'

'His secretary had that nervous breakdown,' said Mrs Etterick. 'That spoke volumes.'

'It makes no difference whether we like Shiner or not,' Rudge said. 'The story still stands.'

Cox said, 'Get on with it, then. I can see there is no way of stopping you.'

'Apparently they went all out to impress our delegation,' Rudge said. 'Took them to spindle factories, steel mills, hydroelectric

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plants. Well, you know. Then they took them to a model commune. The interpreter got hold of the headman and translated what he said. "In five years our cotton acreage has risen fiftyfold," says the headman. "We have increased production of vegetable fiber by two hundred percent." Shiner was terribly impressed. They inspected the schools, the electricity plant, the kitchens. All this time, the headman is raving about the progress they've made and saying how happy everyone is. "Under the wise leadership of Chairman Mao, we have gone from strength to strength." Shiner signed the visitor's book and said he'd have to leave. "No," said the headman, "there is one more thing I must show you." Out of politeness, Shiner agreed. Then there was a bit of by-play between the interpreter and the headman. The headman said that he wanted to take Shiner upstairs, but that the staircase was very narrow and the room was small and so forth. The interpreter relented, and off they went, Shiner and the headman, to inspect this attic'

'Now comes the interesting part,' Cox said.

'There was a cradle in this attic. The headman leaned over to Shiner and said, "That is my daughter." He spoke in English! Shiner was astonished, but before he could recover himself, the headman had picked up the child. He was frantic. He put the child in Shiner's arms and said, "Take her with you! Please, take her away from here! You must do this! She has no future here in China!'"

'Is this an ashtray, too?' said Cox to Mrs Etterick. But she was squinting at Rudge.

'Shiner never said a word,' said Rudge. 'He simply put the child back into the cradle and took himself away. But he told me he was really quite shaken by it.'

'I'd divide anything Shiner says by ten,' said Cox.

'The story is true,' Rudge said. 'There were others present. He had witnesses.'

'But there were only two of them in the attic. You said so.'

k l think it is a heart-rending story, 1 Rudge said. He appealed to Mrs Etterick. 4 I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I'd been in Shiner's position.'

'If you'd had any sense you'd have taken the next rickshaw out of the place,' Cox said.

'I'd like to think I was the sort of man who could get that infant out of the country.'

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'And where would you bring this ashen-faced tot? To England? What future would she have here?'

Mrs Etterick said, 'Gina was very happy in Bangkok. She hasn't been nearly so happy since.'

'I have nothing so dramatic to offer as Shiner's story,' Cox said. 'I wasn't on a company swan to the Canton Trade Fair. I was in the army, and Kota Bahru was about the grimmest place I'd ever seen. I couldn't imagine why the Japanese had wanted to capture it, or why we were so bloody keen to get it back. But I was an officer and I was put in charge of the reoccupation. What made me think of this? I suppose it was your mention of looters, Diana. After the surrender, Malaya was swarming with looters and Kota Bahru seemed to have more than its fair share. They made me livid. They spent the war hiding behind trees while British soldiers were dying in battle or rotting in prison camps. One day, I was driving along in my jeep. This was just outside of town. I saw a looter running across the road with an enormous great sack. I slammed on the brakes and hopped out of the jeep. And I suppose I yelled at him to stop - I really can't remember. It all happened so fast. I then took out my pistol - the chap was still beetling away with his sack - and fired. One shot. The man fell dead.'

'That's horrible,' Rudge said.

'I was afraid,' Cox said, 'that he might still be alive. He was lying there. I couldn't see any blood. I wasn't even a good shot! I thought he was faking - the way animals pretend they're dead. He had flopped over so quickly, just like a rabbit. I kept my pistol aimed at him as I walked over to him, and then I saw that I had got him right through the heart. The blood had started to clot on his blouse. It was a woman's blouse. I imagine he had stolen that, too.'

'What a thing to have on your conscience,' Rudge said.

'Precisely,' Cox said. 'I thought I'd have a terrible night. But not a bit! I went back to my bungalow and ate a huge meal and then slept like a baby.'

Mrs Etterick said, 'And I'll bet everyone blamed you afterward and said you hadn't any right.'

'Some fools did, but I don't suppose anyone really cared.'

'There's no dessert,' Mrs Etterick said. 'I have some fresh fruit and some cheese, if anyone's interested.'

'I'll help you clear away these things,' said Cox.

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'Leave them, please, Austin,' Mrs Etterick said. 'I rather like sitting in the rubble.'

Rudge said, 'Some years, there's lots of snow in Peebles.' He stood up. 'I ought to be off,' he said. 'Are you going? We're both crossing the river. We could share a taxi.'

'I'm going to linger a bit in the rubble,' Cox said. 'But don't let me hold you up.' Now he looked at Mrs Etterick, 'Or would it be simpler if we both left?'

Though it was almost eight-thirty, it was still dark the following morning as the mother and daughter walked down St John's Hill to Clapham Junction. Mrs Etterick was brisk and silent, keeping four steps ahead of Gina, who was unusually talkative for this early hour. Passing the sweet shops on the hill, Gina remarked that they might buy their chocolate oranges on the way back; at the Granada, Gina said they'd have to see the Disney film - perhaps tomorrow; and there were Christmas trees stacked at the flower shop: Gina fell behind, choosing one. Mrs Etterick had not paused, or replied, and Gina had toiled on clumsy feet to catch up with her. The daughter was big, but had the stumbling round-shouldered gait of a small child. Her eyes were hooded slits in her fat solemn face and her arms swung uselessly in her sleeves.

Gina said, 'After Daddy died and went to Heaven-'

Mrs Etterick quickened her pace.

A crowd of people stood at the ticket window. Mrs Etterick joined them. Now Gina entered the lobby.

'Mum,' she said in a pleading voice. 'After Daddy died-'

'You're talking much too loud,' Mrs Etterick said sharply. 'You'll have to stand in the corner. Over there.'

Gina lugged herself to the corner and waited, murmuring.

It was Mrs Etterick's turn. She put her money down and leaned toward the plastic grille. 'One single and one return to Sunburv, please.'

The Odd-Job Man

Every spring, on the first free day after exams, Lowell Bloodworth and his wife, Shelley, drove to Boston from Amherst and then flew to London. He told people he was seeing his publisher. But he had no publisher. The London visits had begun when, as an associate professor, Bloodworth was working on his edition of The Family Letters of Wilbur Parsons. He had brought a box of the letters, rented a room near Sloane Square, and stuck them into a thick album, working by the window with a brush and a bottle of glue; he added footnotes in ink and gave each personal observation a crimson exclamation mark. English academics mocked his enterprise. He would not be drawn, but Shelley said, 'It's not easy editing the letters of a living poet.' English academics said they had never heard of Parsons. Bloodworth had a reply: 'The only difference between Wallace Stevens and Wilbur Parsons is that Stevens was vice president of an insurance company and Parsons was president - still is.'

'Why is it,' an Englishman once said to him, 'American academics are forever putting their fingers down their throats and bringing up books like these?' Bloodworth had thought of asking that man to help him find an English publisher. It struck Bloodworth as odd that the mere mention of his book caused shouts of laughter in London. Especially odd since this book, brought out in America after several delays by a university press, got Lowell Bloodworth the tenure he wanted, and now he was earning thirty thousand dollars a year. But it was the salary that embarrassed him, not the book. There was an additional bonus: The Times Literary Supplement gave him one of Parson's collections to review, and years afterward Bloodworth said, 'I do a little writing for the TLS,' often claiming credit for anonymous reviews he admired.

He liked London, but his links with the life of the city tended to be imaginary. There was that huge party at William Empson's. Bloodworth had gone with one of Mr Empson's former students (who, as it turned out, had not been invited either). Bloodworth

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talked the whole evening to an elderly man who told malicious stories against Edith Sitwell. The stories became Bloodworth's own, and later, describing that summer to his Amherst colleagues, he said, 'We spent quite a bit of time with the Empsons . . .' He appropriated gossip and gave it the length of anecdote. One summer he saw Frank Kermode across a room. In the autumn, for a colleague, he turned this glimpse into a meeting.

Nine summers, nine autumns had been spent this way; and always Bloodworth regretted that he had so little to show after such long flights. He craved something substantial: a literary find, an eminent friend, a famous enemy. Inevitably his rivalries were departmental; the department had grown, and for the past few years Bloodworth's younger colleagues, all of whom flew to England in June, had come back with similar stories. In the warm, early-autumn afternoons they would meet at Bloodworth's 'Little Britain' on the Shutesbury Road; the wives in Liberty prints swapping play titles, the children jerking at Hamleys' toys, and the men discussing London as if it were no larger or more complicated than Amherst itself: 'Leavis is looking a lot older . . . ,' 'We saw Iris Murdoch in Selfridge's . . . ,' 'Cal's divorce is coming through . . .' This last remark from Siggins, whose preposterous anecdotes Bloodworth suspected were nimble parodies of his own: lately, Bloodworth had felt (the word was Parsons's) outgunned.

This was the first year the Bloodworths had spent their English vacation outside London. They were flushed from Sloane Square by the department. On their second day in London they met Cliff Margoulies on Pont Street. He had a story about Angus Wilson. That afternoon, they bumped into Siggins at the Byron exhibition. Bloodworth said he was just leaving. The next day he had gone back to the Byron exhibition and seen Arvin Prizeman: there was just no escaping them. He ran into Milburn at the Stoppard play, and Shelley had seen the Hoffenbergs at Biba's. Each encounter was alarming, producing a keen embarrassment Bloodworth disguised unwillingly in heartiness. The prospect of a summer of these chance meetings made Bloodworth cringe, and so, at the end of their first week, the Bloodworths took a train to the village of Hooke, in Kent, where they rented a small cottage ('Batcombe') for the remainder of their vacation.

It was not a coincidence that a mile from this village was the house of the American poet Walter Van Bellamy, who had been

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living in England since the war. Bellamy was an irascible man of about seventy who had known both Pound and Eliot - and been praised by them - and who (though the airfare to New York was less than his well-publicized phone bill) described himself as an exile. Bloodworth was not the first American to get the idea of going to Hooke with the intention of making Walter Van Bellamy's acquaintance; there had been others - poets, Ph.D. candidates, anthologists - but invariably they were turned away. Out of spite they reported how they had found Bellamy drunk. The more Bellamy protected his privacy, the more scandalous the stories became. Bloodworth, who gave a Bellamy seminar, was anxious to verify the stories. He had often talked to Wilbur Parsons about Bellamy's influence: Parsons acknowledged the fact that Bellamy was the greater poet, but they had, Parsons said, been good friends and had once dated the same Radcliffe girl. Now, Bloodworth's ambition went beyond verifying the scandalous stories or even meeting the man. He had in mind an edition of poems that would be different from anything scholarship had so far produced. This book, 'Presented by Lowell Bloodworth,' would consist of poems in Bellamy's hand, photographs of work sheets and fair copies, discovered drafts, inky lyrics, all of them nobly scrawled instead of diminished by the regularity of typefaces. It would be a collector's item: Introduction by Bloodworth, Notes by Bloodworth -the sort of book got up to honor a dead poet's memory, an exhibit showing crossed-out lines, second thoughts, hasty errors in the poet's own handwriting. Bloodworth's sections, of course, would be printed in Times Roman. In his mind the book became such a finished thing that when he remembered he had not yet met the man he grew restless to see samples of his handwriting.