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  ‘You know,’ he said, stirring sugar into his cappuccino, which to be honest he preferred to the mocha lattes which some of the younger members went for, ‘that 1867 issue with the grille is pretty impressive.’ He didn’t want to seem intimidating so he went on: ‘If you like that kind of thing, I mean.’

  ‘Hm,’ she said. She was drinking a mango frescato with extra cream, which always seemed to him a tad exotic for the kind of person she was, not to mention costing a whopping £3.20. ‘Those Madagascan triangulars aren’t bad, either.’ There was a pause. ‘Not meaning to be funny or anything, Gav, but you really are incredibly tedious.’

  ‘Point taken.’ He was wondering whether he ought to get her a proper pair of tweezers from the shop in the mall. ‘You’re not exactly a sparkling conversationalist yourself, Ange.’

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ she said. He saw that she’d creased the catalogue cover, but reminded himself that he could always iron it. ‘Or yours. That’s what comes of being a character in a Julian Barnes short story.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well, he’s always more interested in the boring stuff that people do rather than the people themselves. Or maybe it’s just that giving them all the boring stuff to do makes them boring. You ought to be grateful your hobby isn’t rambling, or you’d be spouting paragraphs about the Kinder Downfall circuit and Bowden Bridge car-park.’

  ‘Whereas I just drone on about stamps?’

  ‘That’s it exactly. It’s not that I don’t love you, darling; it’s just that we’ve been created by the kind of writer who never lets his characters have lives of their own.’ There was a bit of a pause while he wondered whether the rain would let up and she started scrabbling in her hand-bag.

  ‘What’s that you’re doing, Ange?’

  ‘Come on, Gav! Don’t say you don’t know. It’s the big symbolic moment he sometimes brings in towards the end. In this one I’ve got a penny black I was going to give you, only the grand climax is that I’ve lost it somewhere in the lining.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that makes it all nicely ambiguous,’ he conceded. He was still thinking about the pop-up toaster. ‘Why don’t you tell me about that new range of anoraks you were stocking – you know, the ones with the patent zip-fasteners – last time I was in . . . [continues].

  NOTWITHSTANDING

  LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

  Miss Abigail Tweely and Miss Muriel Arch sat in the drawing-room of Honeysuckle Cottage eating digestive biscuits and drinking cups of strong bohea. They were the village of Whimsy-on-the-Water’s oldest inhabitants. Indeed it was said that Miss Arch’s muslin-flounced wrist had waved from the crowd at King George V’s coronation. Outside the whirr of the developers’ pneumatic drills could be heard tearing up the previously unspoilt meadow.

  ‘I would have offered you cake, Muriel,’ Miss Tweely now said, ‘only Mr Bunn the baker has had to close his shop.’

  ‘Poor Mr Bunn,’ Miss Arch sighed. ‘All to do with the new Waitrose at Nether Gussett, I suppose. Do you know, my dear, I saw a ghost yesterday?’

  ‘Not again! Was it the drowned parlour-maid from Crashing Grange, or the nun who was blown away in a gale – a story, by the way, that I never in the least believed?’

  A low droning noise from across the hill now informed them that work on the new motorway had recommenced.

  ‘Neither. It was the orphan boy who was killed in a shower of hail-stones. However picturesque our lives here, Abigail, it is a great mistake to sentimentalise the countryside.’

  ‘Do I not know it, Muriel? Only the other day, poor Farmer Wazzock was disembowelled by his own gardening fork. But does it not alarm you, our being so figurative?’

  ‘I cannot see,’ Miss Arch remarked, eyeing the tractor that was digging up the road outside, and the copy of the Daily Telegraph whose headline read Thatcher’s Boom: Yuppies buy up old country properties; rural life changing, ‘that I am in the least figurative. What I resent’ – she paused to shake the paw of her pet badger, Boffles, who now stole into the room – ‘is the determinism.’

  ‘Determinism, Muriel?’ A shadow crept across Miss Tweely’s pale, aristocratic face.

  ‘Precisely. The fact, for example, that we all know you are shortly to die a horrible and suitably emblematic death . . . Muriel?’

  But Miss Tweely had already slipped upon the letter from Messrs Shark & Vulture offering to buy Honeysuckle Cottage, fallen full-length into the fire, and been burnt alive. Miss Arch shook her head. In her innermost heart she felt like dressing up as a man and going out to kill some squirrels. There was nothing like getting closer to nature.

  A SON OF WAR

  MELVYN BRAGG

  Skipping over the open sewer that ran down the middle of the street, palm clenched hotly around the silver threepenny bit he’d found in his aunt Sylvia’s Christmas pudding, young Melvyn rounded the corner to the family house. The lit windows of 14 The Hovels, Wigton, shone invitingly at him. ‘Ee lad, there’s nowt to warm tha like a champion fire to thee grate,’ his father had often said. Pausing only to wave to old Silas McTavish, who stood at his gate cheerfully exposing himself to the small children who played in the yard, he darted through the front door. It was grand up here, up north, with these warm-hearted Cumbrian folk, he thought.

  In the front room his mother was doing the ironing. From the tearful look on her face he knew that she’d found another dead rat in the overflow pipe while cleaning the outside privy. But northern people got stuck in. That was what they did. They might become peers of the realm or well-loved media personalities, but they got stuck in. His father sat reading the News Chronicle, listening to Family Favourites, smoking Players’ Weights and doing all the other things that people did in the late 1940s.

  Sam looked up. ‘Where have you been, our Melvyn?’ he asked accusingly.

  His mother moved swiftly in to support him. ‘Now then, Sam. He’s been to his piano lesson with Miss Fotherington-Posh. Like we agreed.’

  ‘You’ll be turning him into a lass if you go on like this.’ He turned to his son. ‘And what’s thee been doing to tha hair?’

  ‘Honestly, daddy. It just grows this way.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with his hair.’ Ellen was defiant now. That was what northern people did. They got defiant about their children’s hair. It was a wonderful feeling, this defiance. ‘Besides, I want him to make something of his life.’

  ‘Make summat of his life? There’s a job waiting for him at Carlisle sewage works any time he likes.’

  ‘No. Something proper. Like, well, a highly respected TV arts presenter, or a best-selling novelist.’

  Melvyn could see his father staring at him intently. ‘Well, just you promise me one thing, young Melvyn. Wherever you go and whatever you do, always remember where you come from.’

  In his mind’s eye he could see the white surface of the ermine stretching out towards him. Soft. Yielding. ‘I’ll remember, daddy.’

  Outside the warm reek of excrement rose into the night sky. Above, the cheery northern stars looked on.

  STRANGERS

  ANITA BROOKNER

  She had always known that it was her destiny to write novels. For a time the substantial presence of art had threatened to interpose itself, but ultimately even this impediment had faded away and the true summit of her ambition lay unignorably before her: tantalising, vertiginous, exact. And so the novels had been written, a shelf of them at least, with a regularity that to her public denoted merely a mastery of her material, but which to certain of her critics hinted only at a uniformity of subject matter. She was not distressed by these insinuations, for she belonged to a generation that considered intimations of both praise and blame unworthy of one’s notice.

  They were very grave and elegant books, stately in their phraseology, civil in their intimations, well-nigh Jamesian in their syntactical arrangement, decorous in their converse and quite devoid of that insensate relish for physical relations in which the modern novelist delight
s. In their form, so in their content, for they concerned a class of person perennially overlooked by her contemporaries: modest, genteel people, quiet in their habits, sober in their amusements, timorous even in their vexations. Their subject was loneliness, their theme endurance, their vice similarity.

  Occasionally her publisher would venture the mildest of remonstrances.

  ‘Miss Brookner,’ he would say (she liked the habitual deference of his address), ‘has it never occurred to you to put in a little, let us say, demotic into your books, you know, the kind of conversations that people actually have?’

  She considered this request carefully. It was to her like the sound of rain falling far off, upon distant thoroughfares, but capable of intruding upon her own vicinity.

  ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘It has not.’

  ‘I see. And don’t you think – forgive me my impertinence, Miss Brookner – that your readers might sometimes like you to address one or two of the issues of the day instead of all this stuff about sad old people in Kensington?’

  ‘No,’ she said, somewhat perplexed, ‘I do not believe that they do.’

  ‘And there’s nothing I can do to convince you not to keep on writing what is effectively the same book but just changing the details a bit?’

  ‘There is nothing,’ she said, a trifle sadly, ‘nothing at all.’

  ‘Well then,’ he said. ‘We shall just have to carry on as we are.’

  Curiously he found himself consoled by this display of adamantine resolve. Everything was cyclical. Reading this in Proust he had not quite believed it. Now he knew it to be true.

  THE CHILDREN’S BOOK

  A. S. BYATT

  As the train bored on through soft, Kentish night, Elfrida Snitkin devised a story for her children. It was about a little tribe of trolls, fierce and black, perhaps an inch or two high, or sometimes three, who emerged from the wainscoting of the nursery in the silence of the night and wove the discarded strands of tobacco from their father Inverarity Snitkin’s pipe into gold yarn. Some of the trolls were invisible, others not. Some were well-intentioned, a few fit only to menace. The gold was taken away and sold to an enterprising dragon, Ancaligon, who resided in the well.

  The children listened thoughtfully with pale, stricken faces. Ptolemy, troubled and serious, wondered if the trolls were interested in bi-metallism, of which his father sometimes spoke. Hecuba felt freedom in this beautiful and terrible imagined world. Araminta thought of the trolls’ sharp, clever fingers tugging at the hem of her poplin dress. Philip, the boy they had discovered in the basement of the South Kensington museum and brought home with them, sat mute and quiescent in the darkling shade.

  ‘Where be you a-taking me, mum?’ he demanded finally.

  ‘Where are we taking you?’ Mrs Snitkin, like many English things, and many English novels, appeared at first to be an instance of pure whimsy, but was in fact more complicated. ‘Why, it is the happiest chance. Really it is. Why, Philip, we are taking you away to be a character in Mrs Byatt’s wonderful new historical panorama.’

  He thought of hard, adamantine rock, caverns far underground, white, nacreous jewels in clustered profusion. ‘But what do that mean, mum?’

  ‘It is the greatest opportunity. Why, you will be taken to my house and introduced to a number of persons even more implausibly named than those you have already met: Gentian, for example, and Mauve, and possibly even Floribunda, if she has come back from her eurhythmy class. You will be compelled to watch a great many puppet shows derived from the fascinating books of German fairy tales with which Mrs Byatt has filled her house over the past few years, and learn about the history of early Fabianism which she has been researching in the London Library. You will have to listen to a torrent of immensely stylised conversation of a kind that no human being ever spoke, where quite ordinary words are arbitrarily italicised – there! What did I tell you? Like that – as in the novels of Iris Murdoch, of which Mrs Byatt is such a devotee. And, of course, you will be acclaimed by the critics. What better future could there be for a slum-lad from Burslem with no seat to his trousers?’

  The train was slowing to a halt, amid overhanging woods of beech, and birch and yew. ‘Please mum’ he begged. ‘I wants to get out.’

  ‘That, alas, I cannot allow.’ Elfrida’s face shone arrestingly through the murk. ‘We are in a novel by A. S. Byatt, you see, and there are another 600 pages to go.’

  RAGNAROK: THE END OF THE GODS

  A. S. BYATT

  There was a thin child, who was three years old when the world war began. Her name may well have been Antonia, although this would be telling. But this thin child was not as other children are, being sapient, thoughtful and precocious, eager to walk to school across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, thistles, speedwell, foxgloves [continues] and given to reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, and her mother, seeing this, put into her pale, thin hand a solid volume called Asgard and the Gods.

  And this book, girt in green with its cover image of Odin’s Hunt in wild halloo, was a source of fascination to her, for it told of the world’s beginning, and its sacred trees, Yggdrasil, the mighty ash, whose roots ran down beneath the mountain-core, and Llados, with its submerged foliage, deep in the enchanted lake of Llareggub, through which foraged a variety of horn-coated and crepuscular creatures, shrimp and shiny lobster, brittle-star and urchin-ball, all roaming and chewing, silently ascending and quietly descending, and a multitude of crabs: porcelain crabs, masked crabs, circular crabs, angular crabs, Uncle Tom Cobley crab and all. This Sea-tree stood in a world of other sea-growth, and the shoals of fish went swarming by: herring and mackerel, porpoise and porbeagle, dolphin and hammerhead, tunny on their long journey to the tin, cod, plaice, rock-salmon and scampi . . . [continues for several pages].

  As I have remarked, this thin child in wartime was not as other children are, and while they were listening to the radio, playing hide-and-seek or contemplating their grim and workaday destinies, she was considering the question of how something came out of nothing. The mind–body problem would, of course, come later. In a copy of the Bible, which a kindly clergyman had also put into her hand, a nice old grandfather with a white beard spent six tantalising days making things, ending this prodigious if somewhat implausible feat with a warning to the man and woman he had created not to consume the knowledge of good and evil.

  The thin child considered this prohibition faintly presumptuous, and there was no one in the story with whom she could sympathise. Except perhaps the snake, who was agreeably scaly, if not logical, could not be blamed for the role which its divine creator had arbitrarily apportioned it – could not it have been consulted in some way? – and which, if allowed, she would quite liked to have kept in a cage and fed on dead mice. But the vicar was jolly keen on all this, and it would have been impolite not to believe him.

  Meanwhile, in Asgard the other gods were getting up to the naughtiest larks. There was great Odin, one-eyed, mail-girt and raven-haired, at the thought of whom the thin girl shivered with terror and excitement, Thor with his pulverising hammer, and Loki – sly, witty, darkly malign yet abundantly enticing – on whom, to be perfectly honest, she had a bit of a crush. The gods in Asgard drank mead, plundered magic rings from the dark smithies of the dwarfs and confronted giants, and the thin child arrived at the suspiciously mature judgment that eternity is likely to be horribly tedious. Anyway, it turned out that immortality was an illusion, for the Wolf Time was upon them, the ash tree withered and died, and everything came to an end. For ever. The black tide of water, rising over the surface of the world, was to the thin child, in another of her suspiciously mature judgments, a form of knowledge.

  All this made her want to write.

  Back in the real world, the thin girl’s father came home from the war, busied himself about the garden and cut down the ash tree whose branches went tippety-tap on her bedroom window and inspired all sorts of fey girlish imaginings, which gives this story a nice circul
arity. And the thin girl, marshalling her resources, went on to become one of the most eminent lady novelists the world has ever known, eternally beguiled by the idea of myth and determined to bring it into everything she wrote.

  But perhaps, looking down from some celestial promontory, her mother wondered whether the putting of Asgard and the Gods into her daughter’s hand might not have been a dreadful mistake.

  Author’s note: If my sister Margaret writes about this sort of thing in her next book I shall be furious.

  TO HEAVEN BY WATER

  JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT

  The truth is, David thinks, that being alive is probably better than being dead. The Kalahari bushmen – he has read about this in a book – believe that the human soul is an entombed spirit, that only death sets it free to wander the world at will. Perhaps there is something in this. On the other hand, David thinks, Kalahari bushmen are not compelled to live in central London, with all the fret and fracture that implies. Soon, he imagines, he will go back to Jo’burg. Like the Lorelei it will not stop calling him. Cyril Connolly once said that everyone repeats himself in the end. Maybe South Africa is the repetitive act that distinguishes him. Who knows?

  Brian is ordering from the waitress at the bar. She has very thin legs, which are at odds with her plump, décolleté frontage, like a sparrow, permanently tottering forward by virtue of its embonpoint. Despite his hearing aid he can hear her trumping Brian’s banter, banter, he thinks, being about the only thing Brian has in his chirpy sixty-something’s repertoire. Yerse, we gossome luvverly pig’s fry and bacon ’ere me old china. Can you Adam and Eve it? Cockneys, he thinks, have the vanity of the artist’s model. There is an early evening TV show – he cannot remember its name – in which these jellied grotesques snarl and whinny at each other in their urban patois. Maybe they enjoy colluding in their own patronage. Who can tell?