Collected Stories Read online

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

  Collected Stories

  Beryl Bainbridge

  For Charlie and Bertie Russell

  CONTENTS

  How I Began

  From Mum and Mr Armitage

  Mum and Mr Armitage

  Beggars Would Ride

  The Longstop

  People for Lunch

  Perhaps You Should Talk to Someone

  Through a Glass Brightly

  Bread and Butter Smith

  Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie

  Somewhere More Central

  The Worst Policy

  The Man Who Blew Away

  Helpful O’Malley

  Uncollected Stories

  Eric on the Agenda

  The Man from Wavertree

  Evensong

  Poles Apart

  The Beast in the Tower

  Kiss Me, Hardy

  Filthy Lucre – a novella

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  A Biography of Dame Beryl Bainbridge

  HOW I BEGAN

  My father and mother bickered a lot, which is why, there being no such thing as television to distract one, or any other room in which to escape from the raised voices, my mother encouraged my natural inclination to scribble in notebooks.

  I began to write stories when I was eight years old – about an old sea-dog called Cherry Blossom Bill who kept his rum supply in his wooden leg. This was not unusual; most of my school-friends kept diaries, wrote poems or composed little playlets, though these had mainly to do with fairies living inside marigolds. Writing was more beneficial an occupation to us than attending a psychiatric clinic, should such a place have existed, and helped to get rid of anxieties nurtured by the particularly restricted sort of upbringing common to lower-class girls in wartime England. It says a lot for my mother that she was always more than ready to clear the table so that I could get down to my next chapter. If I worked for more than two hours she would say, ‘Run out into the garden, pet. All authors must play.’

  I began a novel when I was ten, but circumstances had forced me to destroy it before it was completed. I had bought a book on Livingstone’s travels in Africa, a volume as big as a family bible, its pages tipped with gold leaf. I wrote my epic on pieces of exercise paper and glued them with flour-and-water paste to the existing pages. Apart from the sacrilege of defacing such a beautiful book, this attempt at secrecy was useless. In no time at all the flour swelled and the book refused to close. I was alarmed that my mother would find it and read the contents – it was an in-depth account of what I thought of her life with my father – and I didn’t want to hurt her. I coated the book with dripping, put it in the bin on the path at the side of the house and set light to it. The back door caught fire.

  For three years I contented myself with writing short stories to do with a lonely boy who roamed the seashore talking to seagulls. I repeated sentences in the manner of D. H. Lawrence and grew lyrical about the dark blood of the senses. Then I saw The Thief of Bagdad at the local picture house and launched into more exotic, carpet-flying tales.

  It seemed to me, even then, that a short story was a waste of a good idea, and so I began Filthy Lucre. It owes a lot, undeniably, to Dickens and to Robert Louis Stevenson, two authors I was reading at the time. The character of the legless Robert Straffordson is obviously one up on Long John Silver.

  I was dissatisfied with the result, mainly because it wasn’t ‘real life’ and I had invented the characters and the plot. I don’t think I have ever invented anything since. Reading it now I am of the opinion that writing is very like music, in the sense that if you hear a song often enough it becomes impossible not to go on humming the same tune. I also feel that I must have had a macabre sense of humour, because the best bits – personally speaking – have to do with either death or murder. I don’t remember reading anything about the Chinese Opium War, although my father was always raving about the Yellow Peril, and I can’t think where I got such a puritanical view of drinking. My poor father and mother hardly touched a drop except for a port-and-lemon at Christmas.

  I still think short stories are a waste of a good idea, which is why some of the stories in the collection ended up as television plays or full-length novels.

  B.B.

  FROM

  MUM AND MR ARMITAGE

  MUM AND MR ARMITAGE

  Being elderly, Miss Emmet, the thin lady from the Midlands, expected to be left out of things. And she was. Some of the younger guests – Walter Hood for instance, whose mother had recently died, and the girl who had served in the Land Army during the war and was wearing a halter-top in spite of the weather – took it badly.

  ‘I think it’s downright rude,’ the girl said, when for the third evening on the trot the regular crowd went off into the library to play cards, jamming their chairs so tightly against the door that it was impossible for anyone else to join them.

  ‘I’ve never even set foot in the library,’ complained Walter Hood. ‘They’re in there every blessed minute.’

  Thinking that six shelves stacked with detective novels hardly constituted a library, Miss Emmet said Goodnight and went up to her room. But for the smoke that billowed out from the hearth as she closed the door the young people would scarcely have noticed she was gone.

  ‘Perhaps things will get better when Mum and Mr Armitage arrive,’ the land-girl said. She felt brighter just mentioning their names.

  The regular crowd who frequented the Herbert Arms Hotel Christmas, Easter and summer never stopped talking among themselves about Mum and Mr Armitage. What good sports they were! What fun they were to be with! Life hummed when Mum was in the vicinity. Her real name was Rosemary Mumford, but nobody ever called her that. At least, not after she became a widow. In the middle of the war she had received one of those telegrams regretting that her husband was missing, believed killed. He had last been seen above Düsseldorf, baling out of a blazing Wellington bomber. It was thought that he and Mum had spent their honeymoon at the hotel, in No. 4, the big room at the front with the brass bed by the window and the stuffed stoat on the mantelpiece. They had returned again the following year, in summer. Mum had known the area as a child; her uncle, it was said, had been in charge of the mine over at Marton. When she was little Mum had gone down the mine with a candle attached to her helmet.

  The stoat had been ensconced in the front bedroom for the last ten years, out of consideration for Mum’s feelings. It had previously stood, impaled on a stick on a bed of withered bracke
n and encased in glass, on the window-sill in the library, until, the Christmas after she had received the telegram, Mum had knocked the case to the ground, shattering the glass. It was assumed it was not an accident. Bits of stuffing had come out of the stoat and Mr White had hidden it out of sight in the front bedroom so as not to cause Mum further aggravation. It obviously reminded her of her husband.

  There was even talk that Mum had undergone one of those breakdowns peculiar to arty types, that she had actually been put into hospital; although some argued that it was more physical than mental, or rather that something had happened, while her mind was temporarily distracted with grief, which had resulted in an injury. What sort of injury, no one could say. It was all very much a matter of conjecture, and so long ago.

  That she had loved Mr Mumford, to the extent that life without him had no longer seemed worth living, went without saying. Of course, this was simply the opinion voiced by women members of the regular crowd. Their menfolk, if trapped in the discussion, either looked sheepish or instantly remembered something pressing that had to be done.

  Certain people, Annie Lambert for one, swore she remembered that week in June when Mum had stayed at the hotel with her husband, though for the life of her she couldn’t describe what he had looked like, or how tall he was. Nor was she sure of his name. ‘Bert’, she thought – or perhaps it was ‘Stanley’. It was an ordinary sort of name. And she had an inkling that he may have been an insurance agent before he was drafted into the RAF. Not a door-to-door salesman; something a bit grander than that, as one might expect.

  ‘What sort of fellow?’ people asked.

  ‘Ordinary,’ she said. ‘Definitely ordinary.’

  ‘Was he very demonstrative?’ Molly Berwick had wanted to know.

  ‘It’s a blank,’ Annie confessed. ‘But I think he called her Rosemary.’

  Most people didn’t even know her proper name. She had always been Mum to the crowd at the hotel. Not that she was motherly – far from it. True, she was well built, but they all agreed that the twinkle in her coquettish eyes was neither matronly nor maternal. Her friend Mr Armitage, who had cropped up a year or so after her husband went missing, was the perfect partner for her. Not that they were partners except in the companionable sense. Mum certainly wasn’t his fancy woman; she wasn’t that sort of person, though it was obvious that he thought the world of her. He never addressed her as anything else than Mum, and the others followed suit because Mr Armitage was such a card. They both were. You could bowl people down with a feather, people who weren’t in the know, when they heard him calling her Mum, because he looked old enough to be her father. Really, it was comical.

  Guests often told the proprietor, Austin White, that he ought to give Mum and Mr Armitage a discount, on account of their entertainment value. In theory, he felt they had a point. They were indeed splendid company, and although a fortnight at the hotel, with full board, was very reasonable, the atmosphere was never quite the same without Mum and Mr Armitage. The things they got up to! The tricks they played! The land-girl had been staying at the hotel for a week now and knew most of the stories by heart. There was the Easter when Mr Armitage painted the horns of all the cows with some sort of luminous paint and then let them loose from their stalls after dark just as Captain Lewis from the Pennines, who’d had a harrowing experience at Arnhem, had come cycling back from the pictures in Welshpool. He was so surprised that he rode his bike into the ditch and cricked his neck. And another time, in the summer probably, Mum had organised a midnight bathing party down at the river and no one had worn costumes, not even the retired bank manager from Norfolk who had some sort of disfigurement and wouldn’t have gone naked if Mum hadn’t hidden his bathing trunks. That was the marvellous thing about Mum and Mr Armitage – everyone became part of the fun, no one was allowed to stand on the sidelines. To crown it all, there had been a full moon. The stories were endless.

  Last night, at supper, someone had complimented Mr White on the floral arrangements, and Albert Ward, one of the regular crowd, had picked up a rose and held it between his teeth. He had caused a riot at the table. Apparently it reminded everybody of the year they had gone with Mum to the flower show at Powys Castle, when Mum had dressed up as a Spanish dancer and persuaded that woman from Manchester, the one with the goitre, to climb … but the rest of the story had been lost in uproar, and shortly afterwards the regular crowd had left the table and shut themselves up as usual in the library.

  ‘Did you catch what happened the day of the flower show?’ the land-girl asked Walter Hood.

  ‘Someone fell,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ she asked. But he was looking down at the mourning band on his arm and his eyes were watering.

  The next day, shortly before teatime, Miss Emmet was sitting in her mackintosh in the little garden at the side of the hotel, pressing wild flowers between the pages of her nature book, when she was startled to see a procession of guests trooping through the French windows on to the lawn; some of them had obviously just risen from an afternoon nap, because they were still in dressing-gowns and slippers. The man they called Albert Ward was wearing a tea-cosy on his head. From within the hotel came the boom of the dinner gong, struck with frenzy and accompanied by laughter.

  ‘Is it a fire?’ asked Miss Emmet, alarmed.

  Outside the hotel a dozen people had assembled on the road. Mr and Mrs Hardwick were attempting to keep their children under control, lining them up according to height beneath the library window. One of their daughters, the tomboy child with the plaits, was stabbing a fork into the wistaria which, only yesterday, the proprietor had so carefully and protectively tethered behind a complicated cat’s cradle of string. Molly Berwick, the schoolteacher from Huddersfield, and her friend Annie Lambert were standing to attention against the church wall; they had been over at the bowling green and Mrs Lambert still held the jack. As usual, her friend had a cigarette stuck to her lip.

  ‘Eyes front, girls,’ shouted Albert Ward, and he ran into the yard at the back of the hotel and returned with the mucking-out brush, carrying it over his shoulder as though it was a rifle. He began to parade backwards and forwards in front of the porch, barking out military commands like a madman. The diversion this caused gave Mr Hardwick, smiling broadly, the opportunity to snatch the fork from his daughter’s hand and smack her quite brutally over the head.

  ‘Whatever is going on?’ demanded Miss Emmet, perplexed. She couldn’t understand why the child with the plaits wasn’t howling.

  Then suddenly the two middle-aged men from Wigan – they were always referred to as ‘the lads’ – who habitually wore shorts, even at supper, and who had been hogging the most comfortable seats in the lounge ever since lunch, snoring, and dangling their speckled legs over the arms of the chintz sofa, rode out of the yard on their tandem bicycle. Wobbling somewhat before gathering speed, they pedalled off down the road towards the hump-backed bridge. The Hardwick children ran in pursuit, whooping like Indians. From the churchyard came a tremendous clatter as rooks lifted from the tops of the elm trees and swooped across the sky.

  ‘Is it a race?’ persisted Miss Emmet, not expecting an answer. A few moments later a faint cheer rose from beyond the bridge, and then Mr White’s black car, horn tooting like the devil, appeared round the bend of the lane, flanked by the tandem and the screaming children.

  ‘They’re here,’ shouted Mollie Berwick, stamping her muddy plimsolls up and down on the puddled road. It was hard to believe that she was a teacher.

  ‘They’re here,’ echoed Annie Lambert, and she sent the jack hurtling like a cannonball into the hedge.

  The regular crowd surged forwards. Without a second’s hesitation the land-girl ran behind, clapping her hands.

  Miss Emmet went back into the garden. Collecting her nature book from the bench, she let herself out by the wicket gate and set off in the direction of the village. She could hear the telegraph wires humming, high and quivering above her head. Unaccountably, after days
of rain the sun came out.

  When Miss Emmet returned some hours later, the gong had already sounded for supper. The din from the dining-room could be heard outside on the road. As a general rule she would have gone without food rather than sit down at the table in her walking clothes, but there was a delicious smell of casseroled rabbit above the scent of roses in the garden and her long tramp in the sunshine had increased her appetite. She didn’t think she would look out of place in her tweed skirt; the majority of the guests seemed to favour casual attire of one sort or another. On the night of her arrival, when she had come downstairs in one of her two silk frocks, Albert Ward had remarked that they didn’t stand on ceremony at the Herbert Arms Hotel. ‘So I gather,’ Miss Emmet had replied, for she had found herself seated next to the stouter of the two ‘lads’, and when she bent to pick up her napkin which had fallen to the floor, she inadvertently brushed his hairy leg with her arm. He had made some innuendo, and one or two people had sniggered. She had pretended to be amused.

  Miss Emmet went round the front of the hotel into the yard and through the scullery door. Fortunately she had left her court shoes in the cellar when changing into her brogues that morning. The spaniel dog was nosing its tin bowl across the flagstones, ferociously lapping water. Miss Emmet kept her distance. It was not that she was afraid of dogs, simply that she disliked not being able to tell at a glance whether they be friend or foe. It was difficult, she felt, to trust anyone, man or beast, whose eyes gave nothing away. Washing the blackberry stains from her hands at the scullery sink, she went down the passage to change her shoes.

  She was just stooping to undo her laces when she realised that she was not alone. There was a man in the cellar, standing on a three-legged stool among the barrels of beer, doing something to the trap door in the ceiling. She was flustered, and stared at him quite rudely.

  ‘Sssh,’ the man warned, and he tapped the side of his nose meaningfully with his little finger. Miss Emmet was taken aback. All the same, she found herself going on tiptoe out of the cellar. She was leaning awkwardly against the larder door, one shoe off and one on, when he came after her. ‘Joke time,’ he whispered. ‘It will be our little secret.’ And he bounded off down the passage in his striped blazer.