Short Story Sunday

Back to Persephone this week, and a sweetly moving tale about enduring love, and faith. The Pain was written by South African born Pauline Smith in 1923, and is set in her native land. Juriaan van Royien and his wife Deltje have been married almost 50 years. They have no children and few possessions, and live frugally in a three-roomed, mud-walled house, scraping a living from the poor soil. But they consider themselves rich, because they have each other – and they are all in all to each other.

When Deltje falls ill and is racked with pain in her side, Juriaan cannot bear to see her suffer, so when he hears of a new hospital where the poor and sick are restored to good health he yokes his oxen to his cart, lays his wife on a nest of the feather bed, pillows and blankets, and sets off. The journey takes them three nights and the better part of three days, but when they arrive the old couple are unprepared for the fact that they must be separated. Apart, they are lonely and afraid. They miss each other and the peace and beauty of their isolated home, and they are bewildered by the interfering nurse, and the routine of hospital life.

So late one night Juriaan, who has been camping on the veld next to the hospital, hitches up his oxen again, breaks into the building, and takes his dying wife back home.

Like Susan Glaspell’s ‘From A to Z’ (the first story in the anthology), this is a simple tale, and it’s simply told, but there’s a very different feel to it, because ‘The Pain’ is about a couple whose love is so strong it has lasted for almost half a century, and everything that has happened over the years – their childlessness, their poverty, their hard life – has only served to deepen the bond between them. Juriaane and Deltje have absolute faith in each other, and in God, and those are the tenets on which their lives are built. They want for nothing: as long as they have each other they are happy, content, and joyful. There is a degree of sentimentality, which may not appeal to all modern readers, but it never seems false, and is never mawkish. I found it a very touching, very tender portrayal of a marriage, and of old age.

Smith’s short story raises questions about where and how we care for the elderly and terminally ill that are still topical and relevant. Are people better off in their own home with those they love? And do we always treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve?  Sadly, you do come across health workers like Nurse Robert, who Jurianne and Deltje fear ‘as they had never before feared any other human being’ because while she is kind, and believes she is acting for their good, she takes control, and doesn’t listen to them, or consider the way they feel, or explain anything – when the doctor makes his rounds she doesn’t allow Deltje to speak, and answers questions for her.

There’s a tremendous sense of place and space in this story, and the descriptions of the old couple’s home are so detailed I felt I could reach out and touch the mud walls, which are smeared with a protective layer of cow-dung and ashes, or the earth floor with its peach stones beaten into the surface.

I had a lump in my throat as I read of their few ‘treasures’, stored on three small shelves in the bedroom, and the account of his preparation for the journey give an indication of just how hard their life was, and how old-fashioned they must have seemed to folk in the new-fangled hospital.

He went back to the house, and stretching an old sailcloth across a bamboo frame fixed this tent to the ox cart. Under the cart he tied the big black kettle and the three-legged pot which were their only cooking utensils. He filled a small water-cask from the stream and tied that also below the cart. He brought out the painted wagon-box and fixed it in front of the cart for a seat. In the cart was their small store of provisions: biltong, a small bag of coffee, a kid-skin full of dried rusks, meal for griddle cakes, and the salted ribs of a goat recently killed. Behind the cart he tied some bundles of forage, and below the forage dangled a folding stool. On the floor of the cart he spread the feather bed, pillows and blankets for Deltje’s nest.

It’s that last sentence which is so revealing, because it tells you so much about the relationship between husband and wife – and that, above all else, is at the heart of this tale. Smith paints a touching picture of Jurianne helping Deltje into the cart and calling her ‘by those tender, beautiful and endearing names which were the natural expression of his love’.

The scene where he creeps into the room where she lies in a narrow bed and tells her he is taking her home is a masterpiece of simple elegance and understated emotion.

He stooped down, opened the locker, and drew out her clothes. With a strange, gentle deliberation he helped her into her petticoats, and tied up her Bible, her mug, and her shell-covered box. The bottle of medicine left standing on the locker he slipped into his pocket. Then he gathered the little old woman up into his arms and carried her out into the moonlit night.

And Deltje is ‘filled with that sense of security which his mere presence brought her’ and her heart is ‘overflowing with its quiet content’.

Pauline Smith is writer I’ve not heard of before, and her output does not seem to be great, but I’m curious to read more of her work. Apparently, after leaving South Africa she lived in Dorset with her mother and sister, and was close friends with the novelist Arnold Bennett, who encouraged her to write. According to the ‘Author Biographies’ at the back of The Persephone Book of Short Stories, her short story collection ‘The Little Karoo’ appeared in 1925, and ‘The Beadle’, her only novel, was published a year later.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January. Rain had closed in over London, and her taxi sloshed along the almost deserted Cromwell Road, past one cavernous porch after another, the driver going slowly and poking his head out into the wet, for the hotel was not known to him.

Mrs Palfrey (first name Laura, though no-one, least of all her creator, the novelist Elizabeth Taylor, would dream of calling her this) is the widow of a colonial administrator who, like her new home, has seen better days.

She and her husband spent much of their married life out east before retiring to the south coast, but now she has moved into a room at the Claremont. The taxi-driver's reaction tells you everything you need to know about the establishment, for he does not know it – and there are few places unknown to a London cabbie. Just as Mrs Palfrey never reached the top levels of colonial society, so the Claremont has never become one of the best hotels. And, just like her, the hotel is surviving on an ever-dwindling income.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is set in the 1960s, when many elderly, middle class men and women lived out their final years in the shabby, genteel surroundings of second-rate hotels - think of 'Fawlty Towers' where Basil would never have kept his head above water without payments from the forgetful Major and the two dotty spinster ladies. These were people who once had servants to do their cooking and cleaning, but now found themselves in reduced circumstances. The the prospect of hotel life, where regular meals were provided and there was no housework or gardening to be done, must have seemed alluring. After all, it was cheaper and easier than struggling to cope in one's own home – and far less lonely. What happened to them, I wonder? These days, I suppose, they would buy into care packages enabling them to remain in their own homes, living on microwave meals, or perhaps move into sheltered accommodation, or even a care home.

John Cleese may see the funny side of the 'resident guests', but Elizabeth Taylor's view of their situation is far sadder and more perceptive. There are comic touches here as well, but it's often the kind of dark humour which could almost have come from someone like Beryl Bainbridge. Speaking about the Claremont Mrs Palfrey says 'we aren't allowed to die here' which made me laugh, but it was a very uneasy laugh. 'Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont' may be a social satire on the pretensions of middle class society, and the way we treat our old people, but it also calls into question our own response, as readers, to questions about aging and death. It's easy to laugh at Mrs Palfrey and her fellow residents, and that's just what the hotel's transitory guests do – but as the laugh they shift in their seats and avert their eyes, uncomfortable at this unwanted reminder of what lies ahead.

This year marks the centenary
of the birth of novelist
 Elizabeth Taylor.

As Mrs Palfrey slowly gets to know fellow residents,she strikes up an unlikely friendship with aspiring author Ludo Myers, who tells people he works at Harrods – by which he means he sits and writes his novel in the warmth of the banking hall! In the Claremont visits from relatives (especially personable young men) bestow status and add interest to the dull monotony of the days, so Ludo agrees to impersonate Mrs Palfrey's grandson, who works nearby at the British Museum, but shows little inclination to visit her. When he does finally call on her, he has to be hustled out of the way...

Not a lot happens, so if you like all-action, plot driven adventure stories this is not the novel for you. Like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor makes no direct mention of major political issues of the period, focusing on people and their lives, concentrating on small, everyday things. And she does it brilliantly. She is a genius at portraying characters in very few words, a great exponent of the art of showing, rather than telling, using beautifully nuanced observations on social conventions and interplay between people to make her point.

Despite the fact that the blogosphere has been celebrating her centenary, I seem to have left it until the very end of the year before discovering Elizabeth Taylor, so I can look forward to reading the rest of her novels in the months ahead. Sadly, they don't appear to be available at my library, and I rarely see them in charity shops, but I've got 'The Sleeping Beauty', 'A View of the Harbour' and 'Angel' to be going on with while I search for the others!