Short Story Sunday - Telling Tales with STW

I'm not sure if  a Gainsborough portrait of Arminella Blount
in the character actually exists, so here's his painting of
his daughters chasing a butterfly.

This week a short story much more to my taste – A View of Exmoor, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, whose work I adore. Here the Finch family, dressed in their best, are off to a wedding in Devon, for Mrs Finch’s niece, Arminella Blount, is getting married. They make, says STW, a very ‘creditable’ contribution. Returning home, they’re still clad in their glad-rags: Mrs Finch in green moiré, Mr Finch is his ‘black-and-grey’,  12-year-old Arden looking pale and ‘owl-eyed’ in his Eton suit (he’s had measles), and Cordelia and Clara in their bridesmaids’ dresses ‘copied from the Gainsborough portrait of an earlier Arminella Blount in the character of Flora’. They also have Arminella’s piping bullfinch and the music box needed to continue its education, as well as the bridesmaids’ bouquets.

It was born in on Mr Finch that other travellers along the main road were noticing his car and its contents more than they needed to, and this impression was confirmed when the passengers in two successive charabancs cheered and waved. Mr Finch, the soul of consideration, turned in to a side road to save his wife and daughter the embarrassment of these public acclamations.

Actually, I suspect it is Mr Finch who is embarrassed by his family, and they’re about to get a whole lot more noticeable. He can’t find the map, and has no idea where he is, but he drives on and on across Exmoor, until they stop to look at the view and have a picnic. At this point Mrs Finch recounts a strange and seemingly pointless tale of Aunt Harriet’s ‘inexplicable’ boots, spotted by Aunt Harriet and her brother when they were children in an empty, open, horse-drawn cab on Exmoor. The duo continued their walk, and saw another pair of boots, on the ground by a sulky-looking man and a crying woman, who snatched up those boots, ran back to the cab, and off it went, leaving the man behind. The people were both wearing boots, and the strangest thing of all, says Mrs Finch, was that the woman had no hat. 

A bullfinch - in case you don't know what they look like!

Explanations for this odd story keep everyone happy and entertained, and things seem more or less normal – but this is STW, and nothing is ever normal! Arden is playing tunes on the bars of the bullfinch’s cage when the door flips open and the bird flies out, and they all rush around trying to catch it. Arden falls out of a tree and makes his nose bleed, and they all get more and more dishevelled. Eventually they heave the music box out of the car, hoping that if the escapee hears the music he will come back.

The music box weighed about fifty pounds. It was contained in an ebony case that looked like a baby’s coffin, and at every movement it emitted reproachful chords. On one side it had a handle; on the other side, the handle had fallen off, and by the time the Finches had got the box out of the car, they were flushed and breathless. His groans mingling with the reproachful chords, Mr Finch, staggered up the lane in pursuit of the bullfinch, with the music box in his arms.

Isn’t that a wonderful image? I just love the description of the music box, which is not one of the flimsy, pretty, little trinkets we know today. No, this is a solid affair (my maths isn’t good, but I reckon it’s roughly as heavy as 25 bags of sugar) and its colour and shape, and the ghostly noises it produces (playing chords of its own accord) make it seem rather sinister. But Mr Finch is ‘devoted’ to music boxes – which makes him sound a lot less conventional than he’d have his believe. I know this is set in 1936 (and written in 1948), but even then I’ll bet there weren’t too many family men with a thing for music boxes!

So, while his wife and children rush off, still searching for the missing bird, takes a moment’s ‘repose’, sits on the ground, plays some music, and lights a cigar. Then, he realises they have company - a young man whose ‘bare ruined legs and rucksack suggested that he was on a walking tour’. And at that moment:

Around the bend of the lane came two replicas, in rather bad condition, of Gainsborough’s well-known portrait of Arminella Blount in the character of Flora, a cadaverous small boy draped in a bloodstained Indian shawl, and a middle-aged lady dressed in the height of fashion who carried a bird cage.

The young man on a walking tour continues his journey, skirting nervously round this apparition, and Mr Finch is mortified that his family, away from his ‘supervision’, have once again made themselves conspicuous. He thinks his wife should have explained the situation to the young man. But she says:

He looked so hot and careworn, and I expect he only gets a fortnight’s holiday all the year through. Why should I spoil it for him? Why shouldn’t he have something to look back on in his old age?

That made me smile, and I thought she’s absolutely right. By saying nothing she’s given something to that young man that he’ll remember for ever more, and I could imagine him at some stage in the future telling his children and grandchildren, and everyone sitting around trying to make sense of the mystery, using their imagination to tell stories which create possible explanations… Murder perhaps, madness, ancient rituals being re-enacted. And would anyone have believed the truth if they’d heard it?

And I thought back to Mrs Finch’s story about Aunt Harriet’s boot, where everyone had their own idea about what might have happened, because nothing is ever quite as it seems. So there are issues here about truth and reality, just as there are in many of the other pieces in The Persephone Book of Short Stories, but I also see this as a real celebration of the power of storytelling, linking up with old oral traditions.

I like Jeanne Elizabeth Chaudet's picture Young Girl
with a Birdcage. It was painted in the late 18thC,
and her career overlapped Gainsborough, so the
 cage may  be similar to the one in the story.

Short Story Sunday: Forbidden Love

It’s Sunday, so it’s short story time again, and this week I’ve abandoned Persephone for Virago and I’m dipping into Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Selected Short Stories, which are every bit as wonderful as I hoped they would be. These tales, written between 1932 and 1977, are as sharply subversive as her other work led me to expect, her prose is faultless, and the humour is as dark as ever. She’s the antithesis of Angela Thirkell, and the perfect restorative for those times when you feel you’ve had a tad too much light-hearted sweetness and a surfeit of happy endings – and even I reach that point sometimes. Actually, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Angela Thirkell are so very different that I find it hard to understand how I can like both of them so very much. I guess it just proves that variety is the spice of life.

In the first story, A Love Match, we meet brother and sister Justin and Celia Tizard, both damaged by the horrors of the First World War, who find comfort and healing in an incestuous relationship. They fall into it almost by accident. Left alone when her fiancé is killed, Celia welcomes her brother home on leave, but she cannot bear to listen to his night terrors as revisits the hellish scenes of the conflict. So she goes to him, to quiet him, and comfort him, and things go on from there.

After the war they live abroad for a time, but they return to England, and are accepted by the residents of Hallowby as a ‘disabled major’ and his ‘devoted maiden sister’ who seem middle-aged long before they are. They know their relationship is wrong, but they love each other, and I think they quite enjoy having a secret life, and the thrill of constantly watching what they do and say to ensure they are not discovered.

Returning from their sober junketings, Justin and Celia, safe within their brick wall, cast off their weeds of middle age, laughed, chattered and kissed with an intensified delight in their scandalous immunity from blame. They were a model couple.

Years pass, and life continues: they make friends and involve themselves in the community. Then Celia receives a series of poison pen letters from someone who obviously knows about the couple’s illicit relationship.  The perpetrator turns out to be a young girl, who has made advances to Justin and been rejected (or so he says). He promises to ‘settle’ her, and we never know what happens, but the letters stop, and the girl is left unharmed (but bad tempered).

If anyone else has any suspicions they never mention the matter. It is death which finally exposes the brother and sister. They fall victim to a bomb which hits their house, and are discovered dead, in bed together, amid the wreckage of their home. Even then, their kindly neighbours either cannot, or do not want to, consider the truth of the situation, so they decide Justin must have gone to comfort Celia during the raid.

It’s a sad little tale and, like so many short stories, I feel there is a degree of ambivalence. Was Justin carrying on with pretty little Mary Semple? And do people realise just how close the major and his maiden sister really are, but choose to ignore it? And their death seems almost like some kind of retribution because they have broken a taboo, like something out of an ancient Greek play.

Short Story Sunday: Infinite Riches

My 1993 edition of Infinite Riches,
is edited by Lynn Knight.

A slight change from ‘The Persephone Book of Short Stories’ this week, because I found a copy of Infinite Riches, a Virago Modern Classics short story collection, and once I looked at it and saw the first offering was by Sylvia Townsend Warner how could I possibly resist? And I’m so glad I bought the book, because An Act of Reparation is a little gem. It opens with a shopping list – are there any other stories, short or long, which do that I wonder?

Lapsang sooshang – must smell like tar.

Liver salts in blue bottle.

Strumpshaw’s bill – why 6d?

Crumpets.

Waistcoat buttons.

Something for weekend – not a chicken.

I realise that not everyone likes lists, but I do: lists for shopping, lists of things to be done, lists of books I want to read, lists of things I must ask my mother.... I may not stick to them (in fact I rarely do) but they lend a sense of purpose to my daily routine, and make me feel a warm sense of satisfaction when I manage to tick anything off.  Occasionally I stumble across an old list, tucked inside a book, marking a long-forgotten day in my life, and I marvel at the eclectic nature of the things scrawled on scrap paper.

This list, which is a wonderful mish-mash of disparate items, belongs to Valerie Hardcastle, who has been married for five months (and cooked a chicken every weekend) when she bumps into her husband’s first wife while waiting in the bank. You might think the stage is set for a scene of bitter recriminations. Even Valerie, who knows as little about human nature as she does about housework and cooking, is a trifle concerned. But she might be surprised at her predecessor’s thoughts.

...she, Lois Hardcastle, writhing in the boredom of being married to Fenton, had snatched at snatched at Miss Valerie Fry, who had done her no harm whatever, and got away at her expense. And this, this careworn, deflated little chit staring blankly at a shopping list, was what Fenton had made her in six months’ matrimony.

The two women go to a cafe, where Lois reflects on the nature of guilt and compassion as she surveys Valerie’s shopping bags.

They were her bags, her burden: and she had cast them onto the shoulders of this hapless child and gone flourishing off, a free woman. It might be said, too, though she made less of it, that she had cast the child on Fenton’s ageing shoulders and hung twenty-one consecutive frozen chickens round his neck ... a clammy garland. Apparently it was impossible to commit the simplest act of selfishness, of self-defence even, without paining and inconveniencing others.

She whisks the younger woman off to buy the ingredients for an oxtail stew and returns to her former home to cook the dish, and there’s a hilarious passage where she hunts for her old cooking utensils, including the large stewpan, which is hidden in the cupboard under the stairs and now holds jam pots and spiders!

The story is very humorous, with a slightly witchy feel – I could imagine Lolly Willowes applauding the first wife’s actions, especially as Lois, like Lolly, seems to have finally made her own decisions about the life she wants to lead. But there’s an unsettling edge. Valerie seems spellbound by Lois, who gathers her ingredients and prepares her stew as if it were a magical potion, and whose motives may not be as unselfish as they appear. At one point Warner tells us:

No act of reparation, thought Lois, sitting in the taxi, can be an exact fit. Circumstances are like seaweed: a moment’s exposure to the air, an hour’s relegation to the past tense, stiffens, warps, shrivels the one and the other.

I think there’s an undertone of menace there that hints at decay and rottenness. And when Lois embarks on her cooking she certainly doesn’t seem to feel compassion: indeed, at this point I started thinking of Valerie and Fenton as her victims, although there is nothing explicit, and you must decide for yourself whether this an act of reparation, or a subtle form of revenge – or perhaps, in some strange way, they could even be two sides of he same coin.

Without a flutter of pity, of compunction, of remorse, of any of the feelings that should accompany an act of reparation as parsley and lemon accompany fried plaice or redcurrant jelly jugged hare, Lois searched, and cleaned, and sharpened, and by quarter to three the oxtail was in the large stewpan, together with the garlic, carrots, bay leaves, peppercorns and celery.

I love Warner’s writing, especially the way she juxtaposes small, domestic details alongside bigger issues, using unexpected turns of phrase and comparisons which give a sudden, perceptive insights into a character’s thoughts and feelings. I have no idea if this particular short story is available in any currently published collection, but if it isn’t it should be. If you haven’t come across it I would urge you to track down this book immediately, forthwith, and even sooner than that, because whatever the price it’s worth it for this story alone.

Lolly Willowes

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel, is a quite extraordinary story of a woman who sells her soul to the Devil and finds her true self by becoming a witch. Let me start by saying that Laura Willowes – the Lolly of the title – may confound your expectations of witchery. She wouldn't dream of riding a broomstick, and she has no intention of casting spells, for good or for bad. Laura doesn't want to help, or to be helped. She just wants to be herself, to think her own thoughts, make her own decisions, and live her own life.

When her father dies Laura moves in with passionless, duty-bound Henry (the younger of her two brothers), his wife Caroline and their two daughters. Laura has some reservations about her future: “But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in their paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray.”

However, she remains passive about the move, with no will of her own. “And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best,” Townsend Warner tells us. Over the next 20 years Laura loses her name and her identity. She becomes Aunt Lolly, a dull, sensible, conventional woman, always ready to help when needed. But there are inklings that all is not quite as it seems, for each autumn she feels oddly uneasy and sometimes, while visiting old, forgotten corners of London she feels she is missing something important, and a secret is about to be revealed.

Then she walks into a small greengrocery shop and everything changes. “As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like a load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her gingers seeking the rounded ovals of fruit among the rounded ovals of leaves.”

The chrysanthemums she buys smell of the dark, rustling woods, like the wood which haunts her imagination each autumn, and on discovering they come from the Chilterns she buys a map and guide book and informs her horrified family that she is moving to the village of Great Mop.

Once there she feels at one with the landscape, with nature and the passing seasons. But she senses a hidden secret just beyond her grasp. However, her new-found freedom and her joy in life are threatened by the arrival of Titus (the son of her other brother). She wants rid of him at any cost, and her anguished plea for help is answered – by Satan.

The novel starts as something of a social satire, a comedy of manners. “The Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways,” writes Townsend Warner, adding: “Finding that well-chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed the same law applied to well-chosen ways.”

But beneath that humorous veneer lies something much sharper and darker. I found it utterly un-put-downable, but I wouldn't describe it as charming, delightful, or whimsical. There's a kind of wildness here, something untamed and uncontrollable, and it must have seemed very subversive when it was published in 1926, demanding a life of their own for women, and portraying the Devil almost as a force for good.

When he appears, Townsend Warner's Satan may look like a dishevelled gamekeeper, but he seems to have more in common with ancient pagan gods than he does with the conventional Christian view of the Devil. He is a hunter who collects souls not because he's evil, malicious, or even mischievous, , but because he can. He doesn't want to control people, or lead them into bad ways. Once he knows he has their soul he is happy to leave them alone, to let them do, say and think what they want. He confers a glorious kind of freedom on people, which enables Laura to finally be completely true to herself, and do exactly as she pleases.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

And when she meets Satan she is confident enough to launch into the most amazing, impassioned speech, in which she rails against the way women are treated. There is nothing for women, she says, except 'subjugation and plaiting their hair'. Men talk, while women listen and become dull. Women do. “If they could be passive and unnoticed it wouldn't matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed,” she explains. “And think, Satan, what a compliment you pay her, pursuing her soul, lying in wait for it, following it through all its windings, crafty and patient and secret like a gentleman out killing tigers. Her soul – when no one else would give a look at her body even.”

And, she says, a woman will take that chance to stretch her wings and be herself in a dangerous black night because 'it's to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others'. There are no theological arguments here, no thoughts about the nature of good and evil, or life and death, or considerations about the future. What matters is the here and now, and a woman's right to be independent.