Dr Clock's Last Case

by Ruth Fainlight

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A collection of short stories from the author of "Twenty One Poems" and "Three Poems".

A. S. Byatt's comment that Ruth Fainlight's poems 'combine Alice Munro's virtues with something more archaic and also, in exact clear words, give us a truly new vision of usual and mysterious events' can be applied with equal force to this collection of stories. Acutely precise and elegant, they move from vivid evocations of an American childhood and close studies of amoral expatriate life to erotic humour and black fantasy. The breakdown of a middle-aged man when the ghost of his mother, who perished in the Holocaust, returns to haunt him; the unexplained midnight arrival of three likely terrorists at the comfortable English village house of a university professor; a woman's half-reluctant marriage to her daughter's fiance: all these stories demonstrate Ruth Fainlight's uncompromising subtlety of style, and the range of her sympathies and imagination.

Release date: July 6, 2017

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 177

Sample

The playground was surrounded by tall, stained brick buildings, and the young of the neighbourhood’s nations and races ran and shouted on its concrete. Ellen imagined Martians hovering above, wondering what those darting small creatures in the deep pit below might be. She was the only one to notice them, and her upturned face would be their first sight of a human being. Being almost ten and a half, she felt too grown-up to play with the little ones, but the older children made her painfully aware of her small size and immature appearance.

That summer, Ellen thought about Martians a lot. She would like to see some. One night she dreamed of a pale, white-bearded giant in a tall hat and a wizard’s robe patterned with stars and moons, who floated over the city and loosed a rain of pinky-white stuff like sticky popcorn or small dead shrimps that clung to her clothes and skin. She could remember a hollow reverberating voice, perhaps the wizard’s, louder than any siren, warning to take cover – but not whether she had ignored it out of bravado and curiosity, or had just left it too late. Though she hammered on door after door along the wide empty streets, pleading for shelter, no one would let her in. She screamed as the burning corrosive flakes settled as soft as snow and bit into her bare arms and legs, then woke in a cold sweat, quite different from the usual hot discomfort of New York summer nights. The dream seemed to be connected to those half-comprehended reports of battles and bombing raids she heard on the radio, and the fact that she and her mother and younger brother were here while her father was on the other side of the world.

Recess ended and they went inside. One wall of the classroom was window, banks of glass so dirty it was hard to tell the difference between the frosted lower panes and the higher ones that only gave a view of bricks. A complicated network of manila rope to open and shut them hung like the rigging of a pirate ship. Ellen imagined scrambling to the crow’s nest and scanning the horizon for rescue. She wasn’t making up for work missed last year because she hadn’t been here then, and in any case, always got good grades. The library had been locked for the summer, so she couldn’t borrow a book. It was a relief when one of the young women helpers handed out sheets of cardboard and glass and said they were going to make pretty pictures to take home to their mothers.

The oblongs of glass were crudely stamped with the silhouette of a boat (nothing as grand as her pirate-schooner), with thick black wavy lines for the sea, and a shoreline and clouds. Sheets of shiny metallic paper were passed around, then the teacher showed them how to put it between the painted glass and cardboard backing. Ellen persuaded two of the others at her table to exchange some of their paper for bits of hers, and ended up with a blue sea, silver clouds, and crumpled golden sand. She could imagine her father joking about how awful it looked, but the realisation that her mother would praise the picture with exactly the same uncritical intonation and expression she would use if shown a masterpiece, for a moment made it seem almost as magical and beautiful as the teacher said.

They must have been invited to the party because of some gallant, secret and dangerous exploit of her father’s, she decided, studying the embossed square of thick white card that arrived with the morning’s mail. Her mother laughed when Ellen explained this theory to Hugo, and told them not to be so silly. New York was full of children whose fathers were on war service, and they couldn’t all be heroes. But Ellen and Hugo exchanged looks of faith and resignation, like true believers faced with an apostate.

There was still the fresh damp smell of water sluiced through the gutters by the early morning street cleaners, and the sun had not yet mounted high enough to reach the sidewalk as they hurried between the tall apartment blocks.

‘What can I wear to the party?’ Ellen asked anxiously, running ahead to look into her mother’s face without either of them having to slow down.

‘One of your dresses will do very well.’

‘Can I make myself one? You won’t need to buy anything for it. I’ve got it all worked out.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Her mother’s voice was distracted and irritable. They had reached the entrance to the school. ‘Now don’t forget to find Hugo and give him his sandwiches. And the two of you go straight to Aunt Lena’s this afternoon. No hanging around on the street, understand?’ A neighbour had agreed, for a price, to supervise the children during those difficult hours between the end of school and her return from the mid-town office where she worked. With so many women in a similar position – rusty from years of being housewives, and not able to manage on what the authorities regarded as an adequate allowance – she had been lucky to find a job.

A jumble of images from the movies was all that Ellen had to draw on, when she tried to imagine the elegant hall where the party was being held. A movie star was guest of honour, the invitation revealed, so she knew there would be lots of photographers. If only she could get her picture in the papers . . . Then it wouldn’t be merely a matter of Hollywood directors fighting each other for a chance to work with her. The whole family would be able to move from their one-and-a-half-room apartment into a mansion, and her mother have nothing else to do except advise and admire her triumphant daughter. And that was just the start. The President would certainly want to have a private fireside chat with such an extraordinary girl, and doubtless arrange for Ellen’s father to fly back from wherever he was to deliver a front-line report. Whether she would actually be able to stop the war . . . Here, the unreeling film must have snapped. There were no images at all for a moment.

Everything depended on the marvellous garment she was going to make from the large ecru-coloured lace curtain which Lena had given to her after noticing how much Ellen admired its deep fringed border of birds and flowers, when they had been straightening her closet one afternoon. ‘You take the old thing if you like it so much,’ she said, putting it into a brown paper bag. ‘It’s the only one left out of six I got when I was married. I haven’t used it for years.’

Her mother’s attempts to dissuade her from wearing a curtain to the party were unsuccessful. Ellen pondered every detail, lying awake in the stuffy room where the three of them lived and slept. It would be a shame to cut the piece of fabric – better to let it to hang from her shoulders like one of the Greek or Roman togas in her history book. She’d always made clothes for her dolls, and a few weeks before a dirndl skirt for herself had turned out all right. Imagining the grand transformation, she eased as far away as possible from the body of her mother, who moaned now and then in her sleep and became hotter and hotter as the night progressed.

It didn’t matter that none of the neatly suited men and smiling women in the reception line paid any attention to her. There was so much to notice that it was better not to be distracted. Ellen stared at the shining parquet floor, elaborate chandeliers and gilt pilasters with tall mirrors between, the waiters and waitresses in sober uniforms and the tables covered with plates and glasses ranged along one side of the vast room. The ceiling was so high that voices sounded lost and faint across the empty central space into which no one had yet ventured.

The noise level rose as speakers of different languages among the families of Allied servicemen competed for audibility. Then, by some mysterious process of communication, they all became aware that the guest of honour had arrived. Children quietened and moved closer to their mothers, and those who had been circulating with trays of food and drink stopped and stared in the same direction towards a small dark-haired woman with a pretty, heavily painted and bad-complexioned face, who slowly turned her head in a wide arc and made each person feel that she had looked directly at him or her alone. Ellen understood at once that this was the essential quality of stardom. A touch on the elbow brought her back to the present. A man standing in front of her said, ‘Come over here, into the picture.’ It was all beginning to happen, she thought.

Like representative beneficiaries of a charity, a group of guests was being formed to commemorate the occasion. ‘Stand here,’ he directed. Ellen heard a woman mutter, ‘Don’t you think she looks a bit odd?’ but no one objected when she pulled from her mother’s grasp and squeezed into the front row. There was a fusillade of flashbulbs, then it was all finished. The actress and her entourage moved briskly away, and the rest of the group drifted off like parts of an organism that no longer have any function. One of the men nearby called, ‘Milly, for heaven’s sake!’ in a delighted tone of voice, and clasped her mother’s hands. ‘I didn’t know you were in New York.’

Ellen hadn’t seen her mother smile like that for ages. ‘Yes, these are my two babies.’ She gestured them closer. ‘You wouldn’t recognise her after so much time,’ she laughed, and added, ‘She loves to dress up.’

‘Charming.’ His glance passed rapidly over Ellen and then back to her mother’s face. ‘Come over and meet the others.’ Ellen turned to where Hugo had stood a moment before, but she was surrounded by strangers, all of whom seemed to have a great deal to say, though not to her. She might as well have been on another planet.

‘Have you had anything to eat yet, dear?’ an elderly English woman in a fussy brown hat enquired. ‘I expect you must be feeling a bit lost.’ Ellen followed towards the refreshment tables, and munched her way through several slices of cake, darting hostile stares at anyone who looked as if they might begin a conversation.

She was released by Hugo’s voice in her ear. ‘We’re going home,’ he said, grinning happily. ‘Terrific ice-cream. Come on, Mum’s by the door.’

‘Who was that?’ Ellen demanded.

Her mother responded with a shrewd and critical look. ‘An old friend of your father’s. He’s over here doing some war work.’

‘I’m glad my Dad’s a soldier, anyway,’ Hugo commented as they waited for the elevator.

Next day at school Ellen insisted that she didn’t want to take the glass and silver-paper picture home but refused to say why. Later when the teacher told the class how Uncle Sam was helping all the people in Europe and described the falling houses and storms of flame menacing London children at that very moment, then played the record of a fulsome contralto singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, Ellen couldn’t hold back any longer. As they all watched the tears run down her face and heard her sob, ‘Daddy, Daddy’, that little demon, chin on fist and faunish legs crossed, who always perched somewhere up in the top corner of the scene observing her performance, chuckled with admiration. Even though she moaned louder and squeezed her eyes tight shut to wipe out sight and sound of him, she knew he was there in his robe of moons and stars, her most reliable ally and familiar.



In the empty lot opposite, the goldenrod. I walked down the porch steps and crossed the narrow road. Blossoming spikes reached as high as my shoulders, and as I pushed through them the loosened pollen made me sneeze.

Blue sky and gold flowers and pale dusty earth. Green leaves beginning to dry at the edges and curl inwards, rust-blotched by the end of summer. A space that seemed vast enough to hide from everything, among the densest clumps of bushes at the centre, to read and dream or watch how ants veered around the shiny pebbles, how beetles crawled up jointed grass stems and the mantis moved its legs. I had learned not to go barefoot because of the red chiggers that burrowed under the skin between your toes and had to be dug out. When I took my sandals off at night, the top of each foot was stained by the sun into an elaborate pattern of white and brown.

Now it was September, and I watched the goldenrod harden and darken. School had started a week ago and I was still in love with the same arrogant, spectacled boy I had not seen since June. After class, we took up all our old arguments about God, Marx, and the meaning of life, just where we had left them, as if there had been no break. I had arrived home so charged with refutations and unpresented evidence that I immediately sat down to write him a letter. I sealed the envelope and cut across the lot to the next street and the nearest mailbox. As soon as it had fallen through the slot I knew I had made a fool of myself.

The afternoon seemed even hotter than August, but maybe that was because I was wearing my new sloppy-joe sweater and a pleated skirt instead of T-shirt and shorts. There must be some way to get the letter back.

If any neighbours passed they would be sure to ask why I was standing there. I retreated into the vegetation keeping the box in my line of sight. The mailman was due about now. As I moved restlessly through them, drifts of disturbed pollen rose from the tall plants. But even after I explained why it was so important, he refused to let me search for my letter among the others. Nothing I said would sway him. He grinned and walked away muttering, ‘Crazy kid!’

The dull yellow expanse of the field hummed and vibrated. In spite of the new school clothes I threw myself down on the hot ground between the bushes, and later blamed my swollen eyes and tear-streaked face on the powdery torment of the goldenrod.



The two houses stood stranded between the last street where whites lived and the beginning of the black district – a no man’s zone of empty lots and decrepit farmsteads whose fields had been sold off decades before. The small Virginian town was already jammed with army people and war-workers when my uncle was sent there to supervise a new factory. Suddenly, for the duration of the war, he had become head of a family consisting not only of himself and his wife but also his wife’s sister and her two children. Finding anywhere at all to live was a stroke of luck, so he had bought one of the badly built pair. The other was occupied by Walter and Dolly, their baby boy and daughter Diana, and Rover, the red setter dog. Not yet thirty years old, the couple already looked slack and middle-aged. . . .