Best British Short Stories 2024 E-Book
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- Herausgeber: Salt
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Best British Short Stories
- Sprache: Englisch
The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fourteenth year Inspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes's Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its thirteenth volume. Best British Short Stories 2024 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2023 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online. 'If the latest iteration of Salt's Best British Short Stories collection is anything to go by then the genre remains in safe hands.' —Lawrence Foley, TLS
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Contents
vii
To the memory of Christopher Fowler (1953–2023)
viii
ixNICHOLAS ROYLE
Introduction
POINT OF VIEW
In June 2024, when arguably I should be at my desk working on the final selections for this book, I am out walking. It is not by chance that my route takes me past one of my favourite Little Free Libraries.
A Little Free Library, in case you don’t know, is a neighbourhood book exchange. Not all neighbourhood book exchanges are Little Free Libraries, but all Little Free Libraries are neighbourhood book exchanges. You might find one inside a former telephone kiosk, in a bookcase put out to pasture, or in a purpose-built cabinet outside someone’s house. There’s one in Highbury, north London, that is regularly refreshed with interesting books and, on this occasion, copies dating from 2023 of a popular and highly regarded weekly newsstand magazine that regularly publishes short stories (which is how you know it’s not a British publication). My subscription to this particular title having lapsed, I avidly check the contents pages for the names of British writers. There is one, a notable one. One, in fact, whom I have previously approached for permission to reprint a story of theirs in BestBritishShortStories. (It didn’t happen, since neither the author nor their agent replied to my emails.)
The story starts promisingly. It’s beautifully – meticulously x– written. In the same way that Lionel Messi knows where the goal is, this author knows where the semicolon is – or where it should be, if you’re going to use it – and they use it a lot, to good effect. There’s a simile in the story, for falling in love, that is so good I feel slightly light headed as I read it. The pacing is good; there’s real tension. The characters are believable and therefore I become involved in their fictional lives and care about what happens to them.
The story is approximately 6500 words and for the first 5800 or so, the perspective, or point of view (POV), is third person limited. Then, following a line-break, there’s a switch to the POV of a secondary character, for three paragraphs, about 400 words, and then it switches back to the main character again for the last 300 words or so.
For me, this is a bit of a problem. It’s not a cheat, exactly. The switch and the switch back are marked by line-breaks, but there are similar line-breaks throughout the story. These don’t look any different, but they are doing a different job. There’s no rule saying all your line-breaks have to do the same job. Just as there’s no rule saying you can’t change POV. But in this story, from my point of view, it feels a bit off. Had POV moved around from the start of the story, this switch (and switch back) just before the end wouldn’t have stuck out. But, as it is, it does. Do we learn anything important as a result of the switch? We gain another perspective, quite literally, but it’s a perspective we could have inferred.
In The Art of Fiction (Vintage), David Lodge writes: ‘One of the commonest signs of a lazy or inexperienced writer of fiction is inconsistency in handling point of view.’
In the case of this story, the author is far from inexperienced, and the switch, being a deliberate choice, doesn’t strike xime as evidence of laziness, but it still doesn’t feel quite right.
I cross the story off my mental list. (Would I have kept it on my mental list if I had thought the author or their agent might actually reply to my emails this time? I don’t think so.)
Mine is a subjective response, of course. Another reader would not have minded the late switch of POV. Whoever commissioned and approved publication of the story didn’t mind it either, presumably. In another story, I might not have minded it. But in this story it just didn’t feel right.
Do I get a bit worked up about POV? I think I probably do.
Is it important, however? I think it is.
In TheArtofFiction, again, Lodge writes: ‘The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions.’ (We might substitute ‘short story writer’ for ‘novelist’.)
In BestBritishShortStories2024, there are nine stories written entirely in the first person, one in the second person, seven in third person limited, with one in both first person and third person, and two in third person multiple (actually, one of these might be third person omniscient).
‘Victoria’ writes, on the blog of professional writing, editing and design company ServiceScape: ‘Think of POV like a pair of glasses that you give your audience.’ As a proud and lifelong glasses-wearer, I found myself instantly drawn to this analogy, which she goes on to develop. ‘In order for them to see what you’re seeing clearly, and in the best possible way to experience it, you need to give them the best pair of lenses xiito do that. Those lenses are the different types of narrative voice.’
Ailsa Cox mentions lenses in relation to point of view when she writes, in WritingShortStories(Routledge), about Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’: ‘In all storytelling, it is vital to establish a clear point of view. In this story, Kafka filters most of the narrative through his protagonist so that, even though the author is writing in the third person, we endure with Gregor all the excruciating physical adjustments he is forced to make. The term “focalisation”, taken from the French critic Genette, helps clarify this idea of viewpoint or perspective … Another example of an author depicting the scene through the lensof a character is [Katherine] Mansfield’s focalisation through Bertha in “Bliss”.’
Do readers care about point of view? On the whole, I suspect not. I care about it, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you, without checking first, that, say, M John Harrison’s ‘Egnaro’ and ‘Running Down’, two of my favourite stories from his 1983 collection The IceMonkey, are both first-person narratives. Nor would I have put money on ‘Creases’ and ‘Mystery Story’, two outstanding stories in MJ Fitzgerald’s 1985 collection Ropedancer, both being told in the third person. It may be the case that Harrison and Fitzgerald made the ‘correct’ POV choices in those stories and that those choices are partly responsible for those stories being as effective and powerful as they doubtlessly are, but they’re not memorable details, or, I should say, I hadn’t remembered them. I don’t know what that means, in terms of how we engage with literature, but I know from experience that one of the ways in which a writer knows that a story is not working is when it grinds to a halt after a couple of pages and the author finds xiiithat they have gone back to the beginning and started changing ‘I’ to ‘he’ or ‘she’, or ‘they’ to ‘you’, or whatever.
Looking for an appropriate short story to be dragged kicking and screaming into a discussion of point of view, I turn to my copy of Anti-Story:An Anthology of Experimental Fiction (Free Press) edited by Philip Stevick and published in 1971. What should I find in there, among lots of other great stories (it’s an excellent anthology), but Julio Cortázar’s ‘Blow-up’, source material for Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film starring David Hemmings and 1960s London, with Charlton’s Maryon Park a strong contender for best location in a supporting role.
Cortázar’s story is set in Paris, mostly on the Ile St Louis, where Roberto Michel, a French-Chilean translator and amateur photographer, pursues his hobby of street photography. In a tiny park at the tip of the island he spots a couple, or is it a boy and his mother, and who is the man in the grey hat? And who, for that matter, is telling the story? ‘It’s going to be difficult because nobody really knows who it is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I’m seeing … or if, simply, I’m telling a truth which is only my truth …’ The narrative voice actually switches from first to third person and back again several times throughout the story, not with any intention to confuse, it would seem; instead, the effect is exhilarating.
Michel takes a picture and the woman protests, demanding the film from the camera and insisting that no one has the right to take a picture (of another person) without permission. Michel counters that this is not the case, in a public place (he is right, incidentally, although publishing such a picture xivwould be a different matter), and while their exchange plays out, the boy runs off, ‘disappearing like a gossamer filament of angel-spit in the morning air’.
A few days later, Michel develops and prints his pictures, creating an enlargement of the one taken at the tip of the Ile St Louis and tacking it up on the wall of his apartment. Over the coming days, he finds himself breaking off from his translation work to study the photograph.
The texts reprinted in Anti-Storyare organised into sections described as being ‘against’ something: ‘Against Mimesis: fiction about fiction’, ‘Against “Reality”: the uses of fantasy’, ‘Against Meaning: forms of the absurd’ etc. ‘Blow-up’, which appears under the heading ‘Against Subject: fiction in search of something to be about’, is fourteen pages long, and it’s not until page ten that we read: ‘I looked at the photo ten feet away, and then it occurred to me that I had hung it exactly at the point of view of the lens. It looked very good that way; no doubt, it was the best way to appreciate a photo, though the angle from the diagonal doubtless has its pleasures and might even divulge different aspects.’ It’s a story about point of view, then, about perspective. While ‘Blow-up’ is a perfect title for the film, in which it’s only through enlarging his photos of Maryon Park that David Hemmings discovers evidence of a possible murder, it’s perhaps not such a great title for the story, as translated by Paul Blackburn. Indeed, the original Spanish title of the story is ‘Las babas del diablo’, or ‘The Devil’s Drool’, a term for early-morning fog, the symbol invoked to describe the boy’s flight from the tip of the island.
By emphasising the ambiguity of the dynamics between the boy and the woman – and the man in the grey hat – is the author further fogging the plates or is he seeking to dispel xvthe idea that of any real-life encounter between two or more individuals there could only ever be a single truthful account?
‘Blow-up’ lets us know, in its opening lines, exactly what we are in for: ‘It’ll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing.’
Nicholas Royle
Manchester
July 2024xvi
BEST BRITISH SHORT STORIES 2024
1BHANU KAPIL
Stories I Can’t Tell Anyone I Know
A new father, a youth of about twenty-two, can’t pay for nappies. His wife has a broken tooth. The baby is crying. He leaves, and within an hour returns with £100. What did he do? What you’re imagining is what he did.
A young woman lives alone on an island. It’s not exactly an island, connected to the mainland by a strip of earth that’s submerged at high tide. There’s a reason she chose to live this way. One night, a man enters the woman’s home while she’s sleeping. In the morning, the woman has a shower as hot as she can stand it. Indifferent, she cuts the sharp, yeasty bread in half. A cup of lemon beer. The dog loops the brine.
A man approaches a girl of about twelve as she’s waiting for the school bus. Can I give you a ride? No, I’m waiting for a bus. A few weeks later, the same man, dressed in a houndstooth suit in pale yellow tones, pulls over as she leaves the station. Would you like a ride? No, I’m walking home. I could make you famous. A few months pass. An orange VW bug idles on the kerb. Is this you? The man, this time in jeans and 2T-shirt, wire-rimmed glasses and sideburns down to his beard, proffers a photograph. An Asian woman is standing in front of a wooden fence in autumn, squinting at the camera. No, it’s not me. Oh, I thought you were her. We were engaged to be married.
At the age of nineteen, I joined a matrimonial website for Asian singles. Cajoled, I switched my video on. No, I’m not remembering that correctly. I took a photograph of myself, naked from the neck down, for him to masturbate to. The part of me that’s survived everything that ever happened to me did not, at the last moment, include my face.
A father escorts his fourteen-year-old daughter to the car after a group recital at her high school. Ensemble pieces, monologues. You’re so fat. Why are you so fat compared to the other girls? The girl, whose body has developed fast, does not think of herself as overweight. What worsens her mood are not her father’s thoughtless words, but rather the embarrassment she felt when the cast assembled for their last bow. In those moments, her cheap black leotard and tights, laddered now in places, were conspicuous in contrast to the emerald-green catsuit of the girl on her left, and the mauve catsuit of the girl on her right, a raven-haired beauty who was given the role of Secretary Bird.
At the age of twenty-six, the outer limit of youth, my mother stood before a glass case containing a jewel looted from her birthplace. She screamed: ‘You took it from us, now give it back.’ The guard on duty escorted her to the exit, pitchfork alert. Afterwards, mum and I ate cheese and pickle sandwiches 3on a crumbling wall above the Thames, which shone and spat below our feet.
A boy walks away from the girl he loves, pauses at the gate, then turns to apologise. At that exact moment, an older man sits down next to the girl, right there on the bleached grass of Hyde Park. The girl responds politely when the man, a stranger, asks her a question. No, I don’t want an ice cream. To the boy, this scene is one of betrayal, evidence of the girl’s lack of presence or intensity in their nascent relationship. Revengeisadishbestservedcold, the boy writes on an anonymous postcard, in his signature loopy handwriting, before posting it with a flourish the next day. What kinds of relationship did he have as a grown man? Perhaps good, perhaps bad.
A nineteen-year-old man falls in love with a man who lives as a woman. Every morning, this woman wraps her bright sari anti-clockwise around her waist and tucks it in with precision. Stylish, kind, beautiful, the woman is well-liked in the community. That the man and the woman are together is an open secret. One day, the man tells his mother he wants to marry her. Only then does conflict arise. Only then is the man forced to leave his community.
I lack the courage to write fiction.
4JONATHAN COE
Summer of Light
It is not a small thing to fall into a Venetian canal. The consequences can be serious.
In the film Summertime, Katharine Hepburn falls into the canal which runs alongside the Campo San Barnaba. The director of the film, David Lean – a notorious perfectionist – made her perform the stunt four times, and as a result the actress developed an unpleasant eye infection which bedevilled her for the rest of her life. The canals in Venice are not clean. They contain a number of ingredients besides water, including human sewage. Summertimewas filmed in the summer of 1954. Neither David Lean nor Katharine Hepburn knew it, but thirty years earlier, an Italian painter had fallen into the same canal at the very same spot. Fortunately, in his case, the experience did not induce a lifelong ailment. However, it was undignified, and brought to a messy end an evening which ought to have consisted of pure triumph. The circumstances of his fall have remained unclear, until now.
The accident in question took place in 1924. Two years before that, Livia had learned that she would soon be leaving Onè di Fonte, the village which had been her home for the first seventeen years of her life. Her father had decided that there 5was no future for himself or his family in this tiny backwater, and announced that they were moving to Bassano del Grappa where there was surely more work to be found.
Later, after they had moved to Bassano and she had made friends with Serafina, she would tell her about that last summer in the village, the summer of 1922, revisiting it again and again in her memory and always referring to it as the ‘summer of light’. The two girls would sit on the low wall which ran along the pathway above the river Brenta, and Livia would tell her friend the story of the painter who lived in the little house on the edge of the village and how he had seen her sitting by the fountain one day and how he had asked if he could paint her portrait, and everything that followed.
Since Livia and her family had arrived in Bassano, she and Serafina had become firm but unlikely friends. Serafina was a classical Northern beauty, with long dark hair, flawless tawny skin and an immaculate figure: already boys were swarming around her, but on the whole she did not take them seriously and made it her practice to flick them away like so many flies. She was a smart and quick-witted girl with a burgeoning contempt for the male sex. Livia, on the other hand, was taciturn and inward-looking, with her granite face and habitual silence masking a dry sense of humour which was known only to those who were closest to her. For some reason she had reddish hair and she had no idea what to do with it. After years of failed experiments with buns, plaits and pigtails she had simply cut most of it off and now wore it in a mannish short-back-and-sides. She was aware that she was not pretty, and was beginning to understand – although the full truth of it had not broken on her yet – that this was going to disadvantage her for much of her life. But she did 6not resent Serafina for her beauty. She valued her, instead, for the friendship she had extended to her from the day they met.
‘The sun showed no mercy that day,’ she told her friend, as they looked down towards the foaming currents of the river. ‘I was sweating waterfalls. The whole summer had been the same but that day was especially bad. I was sitting in the shade by the fountain, resting on my way back from the shop, when the painter came by. We all knew him, by sight at least. He had a little house on the edge of the village and he’d been living there since the end of the war, with his wife and his son. You sometimes saw him sitting in the fields, painting a tree or a horse and cart or some such. I must say there was something a little intriguing about him. They said that he’d spent some time studying abroad, in Germany I think, and in my eyes – perhaps foolishly – that made him a sort of romantic figure. Of course I’d never spoken to him before and didn’t mean to speak to him now but I could hardly fail to notice that he had sat down on the bench opposite the fountain and was staring at me. Not just staring but looking at me in different ways.’
‘Different ways?’ said Serafina.
‘Yes, he kept leaning this way and that, so that he could view me from different angles. He was making no secret of it.’
‘But you have to get used to the way that men look at you,’ Serafina said. ‘They do it all the time.’
‘Not to me,’ said Livia. ‘Only the night before there had been a party in the village. A couple had been celebrating their anniversary and everyone was there, dancing all night. There was a boy called Flavio – a beautiful boy, I had such a crush on him – and however much I tried I couldn’t get him to look 7at me once. It was as if I was invisible.’ She stared across the river and repeated the word: ‘Yes, invisible …’
Serafina said nothing, but put her hand on Livia’s forearm and gave it a squeeze. It was meant to be a comforting gesture, but Livia did not acknowledge it. She continued:
‘That was why I was so amazed when this man said that he wanted to paint me. Me! Out of all the girls in the village. He said that he wanted to start as soon as possible and asked me to come to his studio on Monday morning. He had a studio attached to his house.’
‘Didn’t you ask him,’ Serafina said, trying to find a way to phrase the question tactfully, ‘what … sort of painting it was going to be?’
‘Oh, I know what these painters are like,’ said Livia, who was not altogether unworldly. ‘They can’t wait for their models to take their clothes off. All those pious, religious paintings from centuries ago, all those Ascensions and Annunciations. It’s amazing how often the women in those paintings are falling out of their dresses and have their bottoms hanging out of their gowns. But my instinct was that he wasn’t interested in anything like that, and I was right. When I turned up on Monday morning I was wearing my ordinary clothes and he was perfectly happy about it.’
‘And what was his studio like?’ Serafina asked.
‘It was so beautiful,’ said Livia, sighing at the memory. ‘I think originally it was just an old barn, but Signor Rollo – a very clever builder, our next-door neighbour – had changed it for him. There were these three huge skylights in the ceiling and they let in all this wonderful light, this wonderful summer light, and everywhere you looked there were canvases and sketches in lovely bright colours and at once you could see that 8he was a very good painter. A serious painter. These were not the sort of paintings you see them selling to tourists on the Ponte Vecchio. And there was a smell in there, I don’t know what it was – oil paint or turpentine – one of those things that painters use. Such a lovely smell, I remember it all so perfectly. I was there the whole week …’
‘The whole week?’ Serafina was incredulous.
‘Yes, that’s how serious he was. Every inch of the canvas took him hours. And there were sketches, first, pencil on paper, before he even took out a brush.’
‘What on earth did you talk about, all that time?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘He never said a word to me. Nor I to him. For the first few minutes, on the first morning, I tried to make some conversation, and talked to him about the weather, and asked about his family, but he didn’t reply. After that, there was nothing but silence between us. Every day. And yet it wasn’t awkward at all. He was absorbed in his work, and I was happy just to sit there, enjoying the stillness, enjoying the light. Enjoying the …’ She was too embarrassed to say the word at first. ‘The attention. Nobody had ever looked at me like that before. Or since. Looked at me so intently. As I say, I don’t know why it was me that he chose, but I was so happy that he did. It was the best experience of my life.’
She stared ahead of her, lost in sightless reminiscence.
‘And then,’ Serafina asked, ‘what did you think of the painting, when you saw it?’
‘It was very fine,’ said Livia, coming back to earth and choosing her words carefully. ‘Very faithful. He caught me – almost to perfection, you might say. It wasn’t a flattering 9portrait, by any means, but it was … honest. I liked his honesty, very much. But, to tell you the truth, I only saw it very briefly, when it was finished. Soon afterwards we moved here to Bassano, and I never saw the painter again, and I don’t know what happened to the picture. Perhaps he sold it to a private collector, and it will be hanging in the dining room of some dingy villa for the next fifty years. Isn’t that what happens?’ Livia sighed. ‘I would give anything to see it again, you know. Even a glimpse. Anything at all.’
A few months went by. Livia found work at a dressmaker’s in the Via Brocchi, while Serafina continued to wait tables at a restaurant, the Gallo d’Oro. She began to attract the attentions of one customer in particular, a handsome youth called Andrea who had just returned from law school and was now assisting the local magistrate. He dined at the restaurant every evening and soon began taking Serafina out and before long everyone was talking about them as if they were a couple.
Andrea had a friend, Riccardo, the son of a wealthy factory owner. He didn’t seem to work for a living, and kept telling people that he was going to join the army although there was little sign of it happening. Instead he just seemed to follow Andrea around everywhere, and was generally considered to be rather stupid and a bit of a pain. Livia in particular disliked him. But because he spent so much time with Andrea, and Andrea spent so much time with Serafina, she always seemed to end up in his company.
One day after work she went to the Gallo d’Oro and found, inevitably, that Andrea and Riccardo were already there, dining together. While they were waiting for their pasta to be served, Andrea was reading the newspaper and Riccardo was cleaning 10his fingernails with his teeth. As usual he ignored Livia when she arrived: he did not consider her pretty enough to talk to, even though he was no great looker himself. Anyway, this evening Livia had something else to distract her. She gasped when she saw the photograph in Andrea’s newspaper, and snatched it off him.
‘Look at this!’ she said.
‘What about it?’ asked Serafina, coming over.
‘Here – this is him! The painter from Onè di Fonte, my home town!’
Sure enough, there was a small article about the painter, under the headline ‘Local artist will be showing his work at the Biennale this year.’
‘This year?’ said Serafina. ‘In Venice? That settles it. We’re going!’
On the opening night of that year’s Biennale, 31st March 1924, the Italian pavilion was of course crowded. Livia, Serafina, Andrea and Riccardo had arrived by train and vaporetto. Livia was wearing her very best clothes but even so she felt conspicuous and shabby beside the hordes of elegant women in their beaded evening dresses and long strings of pearls. There seemed to be hundreds of men in dark suits, standing around in groups of four or five, chatting, smoking – doing everything, in fact, apart from looking at the paintings on the walls, which in any case were difficult even to glimpse through the densely packed throng of visitors.
An officious man in full dinner suit approached them and said ‘Can I help you?’ in a menacing way. He had been watching them for some time and had decided that they either needed assistance or – more likely – had come to the 11wrong place and should be quietly escorted from the premises.
‘We’re looking for a painting called …’ Livia turned to Serafina with a helpless look and admitted: ‘I don’t know what it’s called.’
‘PortraitofLivia, I expect,’ said her friend. But at that moment Livia noticed someone a few metres away on the other side of the salon. It was the painter himself, standing at the centre of an adoring circle of admirers – five men and three women – and holding forth on some subject or other with great authority while his audience hung on every word. Remembering the week they had spent together during that long summer almost two years ago – the strange, silent intimacy they had forged in his light-filled studio – Livia felt an overwhelming urge to talk to him now. She caught his eye and he briefly returned her gaze but didn’t seem to recognise her, and so she was obliged to loiter on the edge of the circle for what seemed like aeons, unable to step forward, unwilling to step back. How much time passed in this excruciating manner she could not have said, but she remained fixed to the spot until she suddenly felt Serafina grab her by the arm and try to propel her away. She turned to ask her friend what she was doing and was astonished to see her face: livid with fury and contorted into the fiercest scowl.
‘Come on,’ Serafina said. ‘We’re leaving.’
‘What about the portrait? Did you find it?’
‘Forget it. Let’s go.’
But then, above the hum of conversation, Livia heard laughter. She heard the voices of Andrea and Riccardo as they cackled and guffawed together. Breaking free of Serafina, she pushed forward through the crowd and found them standing in front of her portrait.12
On seeing the painting again, she stood back to contemplate it for a moment. It was just as she remembered. Livia’s eye was untrained but her instinct was good, and she could see that in its detail, in its brushwork, in its patterning of light and shade, this was a masterful composition.
‘It’s a wonderful picture,’ she said to them, annoyed. ‘What are you laughing at?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Andrea said. ‘Quite wonderful.’ He turned to Riccardo and spluttered with mirth. ‘An exquisite study in the absence of beauty.’
‘A paean to plainness,’ Riccardo said, with a horrible chuckle. ‘A triumphant hommageto the hideous.’
Livia did not know what they were talking about. Then she looked down to the bottom of the frame, at the little golden plate where the title of the painting was engraved, and her heart stopped beating.
He had called it TheUglyGirl.
Eventually Serafina found her friend sitting on a bench in the Giardini della Biennale. She had her head in her hands, her fingers hiding her face. It took half an hour to persuade her to say anything, and another half an hour to get her to move. Then for the next two hours they walked through the streets of Venice: past the Arsenale, through San Marco and across the Accademia bridge until they reached the Dorsoduro.
Serafina did most of the talking. She railed against men and told Livia that they were all idiots and she was going to split up with Andrea because he was an idiot too. She did everything she could to make Livia laugh, and when they finally sat down to eat in a little osteria in the Campo San Barnaba she told her that anyway in her eyes she was beautiful, the most 13beautiful girl in the whole of Bassano del Grappa, and by the time they had finished their second bottle of wine Livia was starting to feel better and starting to believe her. Her eyes shone with tears but they were different tears now, tears of gratitude.
At eleven o’clock they realised it was time to go home. But as they left the little restaurant and hurried across the square towards the Ponte dei Pugni, they saw him again.
At a more expensive restaurant on the same square, the Quattro Venti – one of the best in Venice – the painter and his companions were coming to the end of an excellent meal. The guest of honour had been the Baron Dieudonné Sylvestre de Montmorency-Noailles, a famously wealthy and discerning collector from Paris, who had been deeply impressed by the works he had seen on display in the Italian pavilion. Sales were promised. Further exhibitions were mooted. Everyone was in a thoroughly good mood. As the meal concluded with cigars and grappa(the best that Bassano could supply), the air was thick not just with smoke but with the oaky scents of money, success and entitlement.
A few minutes later, the dinner party emerged from the restaurant and wandered over towards the canal, still chatting and laughing. The artist never moved far from the collector’s side. Together, they stood at the very edge of the water, which lay green and opaque in the lamplight, too thick and too dull to offer anything but the faintest reflection of the crescent moon. The two men conversed murmurously beneath the immensity of the Venetian sky. The collector proffered a witticism and the painter was heard to give an obsequious laugh.
At that moment, from the shadows within the doorway 14of the Chiesa di San Barnaba, two women ran towards them. One of them had long dark hair and the other had short reddish hair. The dark-haired woman ran directly up to the painter and looked him straight in the eye and said to him, with great emphasis:
‘You stupid prick!’
Some say that she ran towards him so quickly that he stepped backwards in surprise and simply lost his balance. Others say that, on pronouncing the third word, the dark-haired woman reached out towards the painter’s chest and gave him a violent push. Whatever the truth of the matter, these things are certain: he fell, his body flipped back into a perfect forty-five degree angle, his feet left the ground, he described a brief, graceful arc and two seconds later, following an almighty splash, he was thrashing and floundering in the filthy water and screaming for help.
Help came swiftly. The Baron himself did not intervene, but two of the other diners wasted no time in reaching their arms out towards the unfortunate artist and pulling him onto dry land where for the next few minutes he sat looking around him in a state of absolute stupefaction. The taste of brackish canal water was rancid in his throat, his wet clothes stuck to his body like an icy flannel, and his mouth kept opening and closing like the mouth of a goldfish.
The others looked on, having no idea what had just happened or what they should say about it. The square was otherwise empty, and a curious silence hung over the whole scene. It was a silence broken only by one, receding sound: in the distance could be heard the footsteps of two young women, running to catch the last train to Bassano del Grappa, their progress through the narrow streets impeded only by the fact 15that they were attempting to run arm-in-arm, and kept collapsing into fits of shrieking laughter.
NinoSpringolo’spaintingRagazza Brutta (1922)currentlyhangsintheCa’PesarogalleryinVenice.
16PAUL BROWNSEY
Manoeuvres
He had stayed overnight at his mother’s to make sure she got her morning train down to England and the relative safety of his sister’s house near Crewe while the war scare lasted, and after that he was getting milk and bread for us plus the courgettes I needed for the courgette bake I was going to cook that evening. Even so he was a lot later coming home than I’d expected.
‘Where’ve you been?’ But the canary-yellow armband of yellow electrical tape on his jerkin told me.
‘Maryhill Burgh Hall.’ He spoke as though something totally ordinary were involved, like going to the dentist. ‘Where’s my framed rucksack?’
‘You’re not really…’ I couldn’t finish it. In any case, it was best to appear to play along with him, so I said, ‘It’s in the basement. I know where it is. I’ll get it.’ Drummond and I have – no, had – one floor of a large old house in Glasgow’s West End that had been converted into flats. The basement was too small and low to be converted into a garden flat so it became a sort of lumber room for the owners of the flats above.
But instead of going to fetch it, I said in what could have passed for an admiring voice, ‘So what decided you?’17
‘Didn’t you listen to the news?’ Having carefully put the shopping away in the fridge and breadbin, he was now rooting around in the under-sink cupboard.
‘I haven’t. It just leaves me so—’ I couldn’t finish that in a way he wouldn’t despise, and already I knew, like a cloud of filthy grease engulfing me, that he regarded his husband as a selfish coward.
