The Collected Short Fiction Read online

  The Inner Room (1966)

  It was never less than half an hour after the engine stopped running that my father deigned to signal for succour. If in the process of breaking down, we had climbed, or descended, a bank, then first we must all exhaust ourselves pushing. If we had collided, there was, of course, a row. If, as had happened that day, it was simply that, while we coasted along, the machinery had ceased to churn and rattle, then my father tried his hand as a mechanic. That was the worst contingency of all; at least it was the worst one connected with motoring.

  I had learned by experience that neither rain nor snow made much difference, and certainly not fog; but that afternoon it was hotter than any day I could remember. I realised later that it was the famous Long Summer of 1921, when the water at the bottom of cottage wells turned salt, and when eels were found baked and edible in their mud. But to know this at the time, I should have had to read the papers, and though, through my mother's devotion, I had the trick of reading before my third birthday, I mostly left the practice to my younger brother, Constantin. He was reading now from a pudgy volume, as thick as it was broad, and resembling his own head in size and proportion. As always, he had resumed his studies immediately the bumping of our almost springless car permitted, and even before motion had ceased. My mother sat in the front seat inevitably correcting pupils' exercises. By teaching her native German in five schools at once, three of them distant, one of them fashionable, she surprisingly managed to maintain the four of us, and even our car. The front offside door of the car leaned dangerously open into the seething highway.

  'I say,' cried my father.

  The young man in the big yellow racer shook his head as he tore by. My father had addressed the least appropriate car on the road.

  'I say.'

  I cannot recall what the next car looked like, but it did not stop.

  My father was facing the direction from which we had come, and sawing the air with his left arm, like a very inexperienced policeman. Perhaps no one stopped because all thought him eccentric. Then a car going in the opposite direction came to a standstill behind my father's back. My father perceived nothing. The motorist sounded his horn. In those days, horns squealed, and I covered my ears with my hands. Between my hands and my head my long fair hair was like brittle flax in the sun.

  My father darted through the traffic. I think it was the Portsmouth Road. The man in the other car got out and came to us. I noticed his companion, much younger and in a cherry-coloured cloche, begin to deal with her nails.

  'Broken down?' asked the man. To me it seemed obvious, as the road was strewn with bits of the engine and oozy blobs of oil. Moreover, surely my father had explained?

  'I can't quite locate the seat of the trouble,' said my father.

  The man took off one of his driving gauntlets, big and dirty.

  'Catch hold for a moment.' My father caught hold.

  The man put his hand into the engine and made a casual movement. Something snapped loudly.

  'Done right in. If you ask me, I'm not sure she'll ever go again.'

  'Then I don't think I'll ask you,' said my father affably. 'Hot, isn't it?' My father began to mop his tall corrugated brow, and front-to-back ridges of grey hair.

  'Want a tow?'

  'Just to the nearest garage.' My father always spoke the word in perfect French.

  'Where to?'

  'To the nearest car repair workshop. If it would not be troubling you too much.'

  'Can't help myself now, can I?'

  *

  From under the backseat in the other car, the owner got out a thick, frayed rope, black and greasy as the hangman's. The owner's friend simply said, 'Pleased to meet you,' and began to replace her scalpels and enamels in their cabinet. We jolted towards the town we had traversed an hour or two before; and were then untied outside a garage on the outskirts.

  'Surely it is closed for the holiday?' said my mother. Hers is a voice I can always recall upon an instant: guttural, of course, but beautiful, truly golden.

  ''Spect he'll be back,' said our benefactor, drawing in his rope like a fisherman. 'Give him a bang.' He kicked three times very loudly upon the dropped iron shutter. Then without another word he drove away.

  It was my birthday, I had been promised the sea, and I began to weep. Constantin, with a fretful little wriggle, closed further into himself and his book; but my mother leaned over the front seat of the car and opened her arms to me. I went to her and sobbed on the shoulder of her bright red dress.

  'Kleine Lene, wir stecken schön in der Tinte.'

  My father, who could pronounce six languages perfectly but speak only one of them, never liked my mother to use her native tongue within the family. He rapped more sharply on the shutter. My mother knew his ways, but, where our welfare was at stake, ignored them.

  'Edgar,' said my mother, 'let us give the children presents. Especially my little Lene.' My tears, though childish, and less viscous than those shed in later life, had turned the scarlet shoulder of her dress to purple. She squinted smilingly sideways at the damage.

  My father was delighted to defer the decision about what next to do with the car. But, as pillage was possible, my mother took with her the exercises, and Constantin his fat little book.

  We straggled along the main road, torrid, raucous, adequate only for a gentler period of history. The grit and dust stung my face and arms and knees, like granulated glass. My mother and I went first, she holding my hand. My father struggled to walk at her other side, but for most of the way, the path was too narrow. Constantin mused along in the rear, abstracted as usual.

  'It is true what the papers say,' exclaimed my rather. 'British roads were never built for motor traffic. Beyond the odd car, of course.'

  My mother nodded and slightly smiled. Even in the lineless hopsacks of the twenties, she could not ever but look magnificent, with her rolling, turbulent, honey hair, and Hellenic proportions. Ultimately we reached the High Street. The very first shop had one of its windows stuffed with toys; the other being stacked with groceries and draperies and coal-hods, all dingy. The namePOPULAR BAZAAR, in wooden relief as if glued on in building blocks, stretched across the whole front, not quite centre.

  It was not merely an out-of-fashion shop, but a shop that at the best sold too much of what no one wanted. My father comprehended the contents of the Toy Department window with a single, anxious glance, and said, 'Choose whatever you like. Both of you. But look very carefully first. Don't hurry.' Then he turned away and began to hum a fragment from 'The Lady of the Rose'.

  But Constantin spoke at once. 'I choose those telegraph wires.' They ranged beside a line of tin railway that stretched right across the window, long undusted and tending to buckle. There were seven or eight posts, with six wires on each side of the post. Though I could not think why Constantin wanted them, and though in the event he did not get them, the appearance of them, and of the rusty track beneath them, is all that remains clear in my memory of that window.

  'I doubt whether they're for sale,' said my father. 'Look again. There's a good boy. No hurry.'

  'They're all I want,' said Constantin, and turned his back on the uninspiring display.

  'Well, we'll see,' said my father. 'I'll make a special point of it with the man....' He turned to me. 'And what about you? Very few dolls, I'm afraid.'

  'I don't like dolls any more.' As a matter of fact, I had never owned a proper one, although I suffered from this fact when competing with other girls, which meant very seldom, for our friends were few and occasional. The dolls in the window were flyblown and detestable.

  'I think we could find a better shop from which to give Lene a birthday present,' said my mother, in her correct, dignified English.

  'We must not be unjust,' said my father, 'when we have not even looked inside.'

  The inferiority of the goods implied cheapness, which unfortunately always mattered; although, as it happened, none of the articles seemed actually to be priced.


  'I do not like this shop,' said my mother. 'It is a shop that has died.'

  Her regal manner when she said such things was, I think, too Germanic for my father's Englishness. That, and the prospect of unexpected economy, perhaps led him to be firm.

  'We have Constantin's present to consider as well as Lene's. Let us go in.'

  By contrast with the blazing highway, the main impression of the interior was darkness. After a few moments, I also became aware of a smell. Everything in the shop smelt of that smell, and, one felt, always would do so, the mixed odour of any general store, but at once enhanced and passé. I can smell it now.

  'We do not necessarily want to buy anything,' said my father, 'but, if we may, should like to look round?'

  Since the days of Mr. Selfridge the proposition is supposed to be taken for granted, but at that time the message had yet to spread. The bazaar keeper seemed hardly to welcome it. He was younger than I had expected (an unusual thing for a child, but I had probably been awaiting a white-bearded gnome); though pale, nearly bald, and perceptibly grimy. He wore an untidy grey suit and bedroom slippers.

  'Look about you, children,' said my father. 'Take your time. We can't buy presents every day.'

  I noticed that my mother still stood in the doorway.

  'I want those wires,' said Constantin.

  'Make quite sure by looking at the other things first.'

  Constantin turned aside bored, his book held behind his back. He began to scrape his feet. It was up to me to uphold my father's position. Rather timidly, I began to peer about, not going far from him. The bazaar keeper silently watched me with eyes colourless in the twilight.

  'Those toy telegraph poles in your window,' said my father after a pause, fraught for me with anxiety and responsibility. 'How much would you take for them?'

  'They are not for sale,' said the bazaar keeper, and said no more.

  'Then why do you display them in the window?'

  'They are a kind of decoration, I suppose.' Did he not know? I wondered.

  'Even if they're not normally for sale, perhaps you'll sell them to me,' said my vagabond father, smiling like Rothschild. 'My son, you see, has taken a special fancy to them.'

  'Sorry,' said the man in the shop.

  'Are you the principal here?'

  'I am.'

  'Then surely as a reasonable man,' said my father, switching from superiority to ingratiation.

  'They are to dress the window,' said the bazaar man. 'They are not for sale.'

  This dialogue entered through the back of my head as, diligently and unobtrudingly, I conned the musty stock. At the back of the shop was a window, curtained all over in grey lace: to judge by the weak light it offered, it gave on to the living quarters. Through this much filtered illumination glimmered the façade of an enormous dolls' house. I wanted it at once. Dolls had never been central to my happiness, but this abode of their was the most grown-up thing in the shop.

  It had battlements, and long straight walls, and a variety of pointed windows. A gothic revival house, no doubt; or even mansion. It was painted the colour of stone; a grey stone darker than the grey light, which flickered round it. There was a two-leaved front door, with a small classical portico. It was impossible to see the whole house at once, as it stood grimed and neglected on the corner of the wide trestle-shelf. Very slowly I walked along two of the sides; the other two being dark against the walls of the shop. From the first-floor window in the side not immediately visible as one approached, leaned a doll, droopy and unkempt. It was unlike any real house I had seen, and, as for dolls' houses, they were always after the style of the villa near Gerrard's Cross belonging to my father's successful brother. My uncle's house itself looked much more like a toy than this austere structure before me.

  'Wake up,' said my mother's voice. She was standing just behind me.

  'What about some light on the subject?' enquired my father.

  A switch clicked.

  The house really was magnificent. Obviously, beyond all financial reach.

  'Looks like a model for Pentonville Gaol,' observed my father.

  'It is beautiful,' I said. 'It's what I want.'

  'It's the most depressing-looking plaything I ever saw.'

  'I want to pretend I live in it,' I said, 'and give masked balls.' My social history was eager but indiscriminate.

  'How much is it?' asked my mother. The bazaar keeper stood resentfully in the background, sliding each hand between the thumb and fingers of the other.

  'It's only second-hand,' he said. 'Tenth-hand, more like. A lady brought it in and said she needed to get rid of it. I don't want to sell you something you don't want.'

  'But suppose we do want it?' said my father truculently. 'Is nothing in this shop for sale?'

  'You can take it away for a quid,' said the bazaar keeper. 'And glad to have the space.'

  'There's someone looking out,' said Constantin. He seemed to be assessing the house, like a surveyor or valuer.

  'It's full of dolls,' said the bazaar keeper. 'They're thrown in. Sure you can transport it?'

  'Not at the moment,' said my father, 'but I'll send someone down.' This, I knew, would be Moon the seedman, who owned a large canvas-topped lorry, and with whom my father used to fraternise on the putting green.

  'Are you quite sure?' my mother asked me.

  'Will it take up too much room?'

  My mother shook her head. Indeed, our home, though out of date and out at elbows, was considerably too large for us.

  'Then, please.'

  Poor Constantin got nothing.

  *

  Mercifully, all our rooms had wide doors, so that Moon's driver, assisted by the youth out of the shop, lent specially for the purpose, could ease my birthday present to its new resting place without tilting it or inflicting a wound upon my mother's new and self-applied paint. I noticed that the doll at the first-floor side window had prudently withdrawn.

  For my house, my parents had allotted me the principal spare room, because in the centre of it stood a very large dinner table, once to be found in the servants' hall of my father's childhood home in Lincolnshire, but now the sole furniture our principal spare room contained. (The two lesser spare rooms were filled with cardboard boxes, which every now and then toppled in heart-arresting avalanches on still summer nights.) On the big table the driver and the shop boy set my house. It reached almost to the sides, so that those passing along the narrow walks would be in peril of tumbling into a gulf; but, the table being much longer than it was wide, the house was provided at front and back with splendid parterres of deal, embrocated with caustic until they glinted like fluorspar.

  When I had settled upon the exact site for the house, so that the garden front would receive the sun from the two windows, and a longer parterre stretched at the front than at the back, where the columned entry faced the door of the room, I withdrew to a distant corner while the two males eased the edifice into exact alignment.

  'Snug as a bug in a rug,' said Moon's driver when the perilous walks at the sides of the house had been made straight and equal.

  'Snugger,' said Moon's boy.

  *

  I waited for their boots, mailed with crescent silvers of steel, to reach the bottom of our creaking, coconut-matted stair, then I tiptoed to the landing, looked, and listened. The sun had gone in just before the lorry arrived, and down the passage the motes had ceased to dance. It was three o'clock, my mother was still at one of her schools, my father was at the rifle range. I heard the men shut the back door. The principal spare room had never before been occupied, so that the key was outside. In a second, I transferred it to the inside, and shut and locked myself in.

  As before in the shop, I walked slowly round my house, but this time round all four sides of it. Then, with the knuckles of my thin white forefinger, I tapped gently at the front door. It seemed not to have been secured, because it opened, both leaves of it, as I touched it. I pried in, first with one eye, then with the othe
r. The lights from various of the pointed windows blotched the walls and floor of the miniature Entrance Hall. None of the dolls was visible.

  It was not one of those dolls' houses of commerce from which sides can be lifted in their entirety. To learn about my house, it would be necessary, albeit impolite, to stare through the windows, one at a time. I decided first to take the ground floor. I started in a clockwise direction from the front portico. The front door was still open, but I could not see how to shut it from the outside.

  There was a room to the right of the hall, leading into two other rooms along the right side of the house, of which, again, one led into the other. All the rooms were decorated and furnished in a Mrs. Fitzherbert-ish style; with handsomely striped wallpapers, botanical carpets, and chairs with legs like sticks of brittle golden sweetmeat. There were a number of pictures. I knew just what they were: family portraits. I named the room next the Hall, the Occasional Room, and the room beyond it, the Morning Room. The third room was very small: striking out confidently, I named it the Canton Cabinet, although it contained neither porcelain nor fans. I knew what the rooms in a great house should be called, because my mother used to show me the pictures in large, once-fashionable volumes on the subject which my father had bought for their bulk at junk shops.

  Then came the Long Drawing Room, which stretched across the entire garden front of the house, and contained the principal concourse of dolls. It had four pointed French windows, all made to open, though now sealed with dust and rust; above which were bulbous triangles of coloured glass, in tiny snowflake panes. The apartment itself played at being a cloister in a Horace Walpole convent; lierne vaulting ramified across the arched ceiling, and the spidery gothic pilasters were tricked out in mediaeval patchwork, as in a Puseyite church. On the stout golden wallpaper were decent Swiss pastels of indeterminate subjects. There was a grand piano, very black, scrolly, and, no doubt, resounding; four shapely chandeliers; a baronial fireplace with a mythical blazon above the mantel; and eight dolls, all of them female, dotted about on chairs and ottomans with their backs to me. I hardly dared to breathe as I regarded their woolly heads, and noted the colours of their hair: two black, two nondescript, one grey, one a discoloured silver beneath the dust, one blonde, and one a dyed-looking red. They wore woollen Victorian clothes, of a period later, I should say, than that when the house was built, and certainly too warm for the present season; in varied colours, all of them dull. Happy people, I felt even then, would not wear these variants of rust, indigo, and greenwood.