The Complete Short Stories (36 page)

My last tea shop was
ominously called The African Palm by virtue of a large tough fern in the window.
I chose a table next to a young couple who were conversing audibly.

‘What was the lavishes
ghast on lavishes ghast like?’ rattled the girl.

‘No, thanks,’ said the
youth, ‘I’ll have a bun.’

The girl looked cross.
He had obviously misunderstood her, had this likable young man. She repeated
her question. Practice had given me a flair for rapid decoding: ‘What was the
Charity Dance on Saturday last like?’

‘Ghast!’ he replied. ‘Lavishes!’

‘I only went to please
my mother,’ he added obligingly, from which I deduced that the dance had been
ghastly and shattering. I now craned eagerly. The girl gave utterance again …
She meant, surely, ‘Harriet’s mannerly ma’s having a bath at last.’ No doubt
Harriet’s ma lived in a boarding-house where there was so little hot water, and
she so mannerly, that she had always sacrificed her bath to the other
residents.

But the young man was
apparently a little deaf. The girl had to repeat her piece of information over
and over. The arrogant heart of the guard carried him far too far … Tragic
that happy young Mark fancies his chance at art … If the tea shop had been an
opium den the nightmare quality of the afternoon could not have been improved
upon. ‘Lavishes lavishes ghast lavishes ghast ghast,’ the girl insisted. I
really believed I had it then: ‘Sad that a man like Papa had to depart fast.’
This was obviously connected with the charity dance. An emerald bracelet had
been missed. Papa, who was present, was also, later, missed. I could see Papa,
small and round, skipping on to the plane — no, the Golden Arrow at Victoria
Station. Papa, feeling for the bulge in his breast pocket, dressed so
businesslike, but emanating such a sublime… Ma was prostrate. His firm were
already going into the accounts. Sad that a man like Papa…

But who was Lavishes
Ghast? Could it be that Papa…

At that moment someone
entered the shop. The girl at the table looked up. Pamela!’ she called out. ‘Halo,
Pamela,’ said the young man, we were just talking about you.’ Well, it had all
been about Pamela and, for all I knew, her angular charms. As it happened I
knew this Pamela. She came and spoke to me, then introduced me to her friends,
and we stuck together for the evening.

We went to a pub and
then to another. Then we went to a pub that served those watery meals
comprising something with two vegetables, and decided we were hungry enough to
take it. Two men sat at the table nearest ours. As the larger man ordered a rum
with his supper, I noticed his voice above the hubbub from the bar, oiled and
purring, like a cat of Rolls Royce make. He wore a broad ring studded with
onyx, and although his clothes were dark, he looked profuse, his face,
fruitlike above the white leaves of his collar, glowing with higher and richer
thoughts. He said nothing to his companion who, poor thing, seemed distressed;
this man, nervous and haggard, made repeated movements with his throat, as
though swallowing down some dreadful sorrow.

The landlord approached
the pair. ‘How’s business?’ he said with a more-than-hearty laugh. The large
man seemed delighted by the question. ‘Lavishes ghast!’ he proclaimed with a
deep ripple of wheel-borne laughter. His friend closed his eyelids and softly
ordered a beer.

The waitress came along
with our plates splashing over each other. She set them down and said, jerking
her head to indicate the two men, ‘Did you hear that? I don’t call that a joke.
Very bad taste.’ She explained that the men worked in the funeral parlour
around the corner, and that it was the landlord’s indelicate habit to inquire how
business was, and the big fellow’s habit to reply, ‘Absolutely marvellous.’

Suddenly I saw the whole
thing quite clearly and the weight lifted for ever: this was Mr Lavishes and
that was the unfortunate Mr Ghast. My friends were smiling at the landlord’s
joke, and I, secure in my private enlightenment, smiled too, and continued to
work out the simple details. The partners had begun as Lavishes, Ghast &
Co., now known generally as Lavishes Ghast, Undertakers. Mr Lavishes preferred
to deal with the bereaved relatives, leaving Mr Ghast to see to the actual
body.

Lavishes Ghast. I like
to think of Mr Lavishes and Mr Ghast performing, each in his own way, their selfless
functions, so necessary to all. I feel it is rather touching, and only right,
that when we gather together at parties we should pass those hours, as we do,
in fervent acclamation of the Lavishes Ghast combine. In their way they are as
much the backbone of the country as is the Housewife or the Coldstream Guard.
And it is a memory to be cherished, that evening at the pub, when they settled
to their late-snatched supper, in a silence of mutual understanding,
interrupted only when shrunken Mr Ghast looked up from his plate, and having
brokenly uttered the national phrase to which he had contributed his name,
swallowed a mouthful of cabbage, alas.

The Young Man Who
Discovered the Secret of Life

The main fact was, he was haunted by a
ghost about five feet high when unfurled and standing upright. For the ghost
unfurled itself from the top drawer of a piece of furniture that stood in the
young man’s bed-sitting room every night, or failing that, every morning. The
young man was a plasterer’s apprentice, or so he claimed.

But I have been told on
good authority that this is absolutely absurd. There is no such thing:
plasterers do not have apprentices. Ben, as the young man was called, was very
concerned when I wrote to point this out. He decidedly preferred to change his
status to that of ‘bricklayer’s’ or, better still, ‘kerblayer’s apprentice’,
even though this meant putting himself in an unemployed category while doing a
bit of plastering on the side to make a weekly wage of sorts.

I myself had only heard
of Ben through correspondence, for he had written to me a most unusual letter,
care of my publisher. In it, the then ‘plasterer’s apprentice’ told about the
visitations of the ghost. Normally, I would have torn up the letter; I only
replied to him because one of his statements contained the challenging one that
through his ghost Ben had discovered, or was by way of discovering ‘the secret
of life’. In my reply I was cautious about the ‘apparition’, as I called his
ghost, but I more definitely pointed out that ‘the secret of life’ was most
likely to mean the secret of his own personal life, not life in general. The
lives of people hold many secrets, I emphasized. There was possibly no one ‘secret’
applying to us all. So, anyway, I wished him luck, and mailed off the letter.
Goodbye.

But no, it wasn’t
goodbye, as I might have foreseen. It was true that I didn’t write to him for
some time, but he continued to write letters to me in some inexplicable need
that he felt to express his odd experiences, real or imagined as the case might
be.

According to Ben’s
letters to me, his greatest problem with the ghost was now blackmail and
jealousy, for the ghost was truly jealous of Ben’s girlfriend.

‘I can haunt whoever and
wherever I wish,’ the ghost told Ben. ‘It is easy for me to inform the whole of
your acquaintance that you are only a plasterer looking for a steady job, and
as for being a kerblayer or even a bricklayer, that is far from the truth.’

‘Please yourself who you
haunt,’ said Ben. ‘I am totally indifferent. The fact remains that I am a
kerblayer at heart, whatever the nature of the temporary job as plasterer,
etc., etc., that I am economically forced to accept from time to time.

‘And what is “etc., etc.”?’
said the ghost nastily. ‘Do you mind explaining?’

‘Curl up and return to
your drawer,’ Ben bade him. ‘And mind you don’t crush my pyjamas.’

‘Your pyjamas,’ said the
ghost, ‘have no place in the top drawer where I come from. They are not pure
silk, they are Marks & Spencer’s.’

Ben was secretly very
anxious lest it should be known he was not a kerblayer after all. But he was a
brave fellow. ‘Get back to your place or else,’ he said.

The ghost curled up
again, murmuring, ‘At least you admit that I have a right to be here. As it
happens I know what is going to win the three-thirty tomorrow. It is Bartender’s
Best.’

True enough that horse
won the race and Ben was furious with himself for failing to take the tip, for
he liked to play the horses when he had some money.

‘Any more tips?’ he
asked the ghost that night.

‘I thought you would ask
that question,’ said the ghost. ‘But as you know, your girlfriend doesn’t like
betting. If you give her up I’ll tell no one your secret and I’ll give you good
racing tips.

‘Do you know what?’ said
Ben. ‘You are getting on my nerves. You are the result of stale air, neither
more nor less. Stale air becomes radioactive. It becomes luminous. If I open
the window you will gradually disappear.

‘Not me,’ said the
ghost. ‘Not me, I won’t.’

‘I can’t think of any
more mindless occupation than to be a ghost in that post-mortem way you have in
coming and going. So very unnecessary. I could have you psychoanalysed away.’

Enter the story
Genevieve, young and fair, a designer of scarecrows, Ben’s girlfriend: Ben was
convinced that her occupational status, the only type of status that apparently
he knew, was beneath his, particularly now that he had become ‘Profession:
kerblayer’s apprentice’. The passion with which the ghost despised Genevieve
could only be matched by Ben’s genuine and desperate love for her. In the
meantime the ghost continued to unfurl its five feet and to give Ben advice
like ‘psychoanalyse your crazy pavements.

‘The ghost is a terrible
snob,’ Ben wrote. ‘He makes me feel great and terrible —’

In fact, Ben changed his
patronizing attitude towards the girl only after Genevieve borrowed his
sun-hat, his jeans and one of his shirts to make up one of her scarecrows. She
painted a turnip in the likeness of Ben’s face. When she had set up this
scarecrow in a field everyone knew that it was modelled on Ben. Everyone
smiled. The terrible snob ghost came to report this to Ben, adding that a cow’s
milk had already been turned by the scarecrow.

On the previous day Ben
had won twenty-four pounds on a horse, quite on his own hunch. So he skipped
his usual visit to the job centre and took a bus out of town to the field where
Genevieve’s handiwork was flapping. Two cars had drawn up by the side of the
road, and the occupants were admiring the work of art, as one of them called
it. ‘It’s the image of a young builder’s mate who once worked on my property,’
she said.

So instead of taking the
effigy amiss Ben was full of admiration for Genevieve. He rang her up and made
her fix a date for their marriage, never mind that he was at present out of
work.

The ghost unfurled
himself again that night, but when he heard of Ben’s proposal to Genevieve, he
returned to the top drawer from whence he came, curled up and disappeared. ‘This
quenching of the ghost,’ Ben wrote, ‘is to me the secret of life.’ He said ‘quenching’
for he felt the ghost had been thirsty for his soul, and had in fact drunk his
fill.

Ben never again won on
the horses, although he became a master-bricklayer, a prosperous man,
specializing in crazy-paving.

Daisy Overend

It is hardly ever that I think of her, but
sometimes, if I happen to pass Clarges Street or Albemarle Street on a sunny
afternoon, she comes to mind. Or if, in a little crowd waiting to cross the
road, I hear behind me two women meet, and the one exclaim:

‘Darling!’ (or ‘Bobbie!’
or ‘Goo!’) and the other answer: ‘Goo!’ (or ‘Billie!’ or ‘Bobbie!’ or ‘Darling!’)
— if I hear these words, spoken in a certain trill which betokens the period 1920—29,
I know that I have by chance entered the world of Daisy Overend, Bruton Street,
W1.

Ideally, these Bobbies
and Darlings are sheathed in short frocks, the hems of which dangle about their
knees like seaweed, the waistlines of which encircle their hips, loose and
effortless, following the droop of shoulder and mouth. Ideally, the whole is
upheld by a pair of shiny silk stockings of a bright hue known as, but not
resembling, a peach.

But in reality it is
only by the voice you can tell them. The voice harks back to days bright and
young and unredeemable whence the involuntary echoes arise —
Billie!…
Goo!… heavenly!… divine!
like the motto and crest which adorn the
letter paper of a family whose silver is pawned and forgotten.

Daisy Overend, small,
imperious, smart, was to my mind the flower and consummation of her kind, and
this is not to discount the male of the species
Daisy Overend,
with his
wee face, blue eyes, bad teeth and nerves. But if you have met Mrs Overend, you
have as good as met him too, he is so unlike her, and yet so much her kind.

I met her, myself, in
the prodigious and lovely summer of 1947. Very charming she was. A tubular
skirt clung to her hips, a tiny cap to her hair, and her hair clung, bronzed
and shingled, to her head, like the cup of a toy egg of which her face was the
other half. Her face was a mere lobe. Her eyes were considered to be expressive
and they expressed avarice in various forms; the pupils were round and
watchful. Mrs Overend engaged me for three weeks to help her with some
committee work. As you will see, we parted in three days.

I found that literature
and politics took up most of Daisy’s days and many of her nights. She wrote a
regular column in a small political paper and she belonged to all the literary
societies. Thus, it was the literature of politics and the politics of
literature which occupied Daisy, and thus she bamboozled many politicians who
thought she was a writer, and writers who believed her to be a political
theorist. But these activities failed to satisfy, that is to say, intoxicate
her.