Three Decades of Stories

by Patrick Gale

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories; LGBT Gay

Synopsis

THREE DECADES OF STORIES is a unique collection of Patrick Gale's two volumes of dark, moving, often witty and eccentric stories, GENTLEMAN'S RELISH and DANGEROUS PLEASURES. It also includes the acclaimed long story, CAESAR'S WIFE. Ranging from a lonely prisoner governor's wife, to a housewife desperate for a makeover; a father's trip to his former school to a long-term mistress offered an unexpected marriage, this is a volume that highlights Patrick Gale's skill of digging beneath the surface of relationships and exposing the often brutal mechanisms that drive them.

Release date: December 13, 2018

Publisher: Tinder Press

Print pages: 434

Sample

Our traditional preference, as a nation, for a three-course fictional meal over a dish of protein-rich canapés is a pity. In America the story has enough high-profile outlets for gifted writers to have based whole careers on producing nothing else. In the UK, it’s different, though I do vividly remember slim collections such as Ian McEwan’s creepy First Love, Last Rites and Helen Simpson’s delicious Four Bare Legs in a Bed being on everyone’s laps or beach towels for a season or more. Happily, the conjunction of new and light reading devices and time-poor readers has led to an increase in shorter publications.

If I think back to being five or six years old and becoming an early devotee of that cunning piece of 1960s reader-recruitment, the Puffin Club, all the earliest books I remember cherishing to the point where their spines crumbled were collections of short stories. My older brother delighted in re-reading Stig of the Dump and Emil and the Detectives but my comfort books were The Little Prince and Other Stories and The Puffin Book of Princesses. From these I succumbed to the group addiction at boarding school and graduated, via a devotion held still for the Moomin novels and The Phantom Tollbooth to the Pan editions of ghost stories and horror stories, many from superb writers. I charted my way through the subversive tales of Saki and the unsettling stories by Daphne du Maurier and John Wyndham and came to realize, as I began to study literature seriously, that the truly great short stories by writers such as Alice Munro, Chekhov, John Cheever and Mavis Gallant, were not simply short but were stories which managed to distil the emotional impact of a novel into a tiny space; like the moment when two minutes of overheard argument in a train carriage or a snippet from a muttered phone call in a crowded bus stop can open out in your head to reveal everything about a marriage gone sour, a life turned awry.

Having written stories throughout my school days and years as a student, it felt entirely natural, in my first year of living as an independent grown-up in Notting Hill in the mid-1980s, to write an entry for the Whitbread Short Story competition. Supported by the publisher Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, and judged by Martin Amis, who was the epitome of literary cool, the shortlisted stories included Borneo, my homage to Saki, and were published in a paperback anthology. The prize vanished the following year, to be reinvented later as the Costa Short Story Prize, but that one little paperback led to my finding a deal for my first two, slender novels.

I’m lucky to have twice persuaded publishers in the UK to publish anthologies of mine. Dangerous Pleasures came out ten years into my writing career, Gentleman’s Relish, a decade afterwards. Thereafter I continued to write stories alongside my novels. Some – Dressing Up in Voices or In the Colony – were intimately linked to novels I had recently finished or was about to write, but most were written as an end in themselves, to exorcise some idea smoking up my brain, and often served, during a period of agonizingly slow novel-writing, to remind myself I was still capable of completing a writing exercise. Many of them, including the shortest here, were born of commissions from the BBC for Radio 4’s precious Afternoon Story slot. These were frequently to be written to a theme – the anniversary of Alice in Wonderland, for instance.

The anomaly, reprinted here for the first time, is Caesar’s Wife. This comic novella, or long short story, is the only excursion I’ve ever made into first person narration. It was written for Secret Lives, a collection of three such stories around a theme created with my late friends Francis King and Tom Wakefield, at a time when I was briefly Tom’s lodger and the three of us were forever meeting for lunch and hatching plans.

My devotion to stories, as writer and reader, is undimmed, not least because the shorter form, where there is less room for the slow revelation of character or gradual extension of sympathies that is so intrinsic to a novel’s pleasure, allows me to give voice to a darker, even brutal side to my nature. There is murder here and violence, and stories of the uncanny, alongside the quieter, funnier exploration of character and family more familiar to readers of my novels.

I suspect that readers follow publishers and publishers follow prizes, so that what is needed is something with the heft of the Costa Book Award or Man Booker Prize to be devoted to a complete volume of short stories. Were that to happen, I’d cheerfully sacrifice a long summer to sitting reading in the garden as a judge; I know I’d not be the only reader to be delighted.

for Rupert Tyler

Wanda would never have thought of buying such a thing, never have planned to do so. In this case, however, her thoughts and plans were immaterial. She was put upon, the object, quite literally, thrust upon her. The salesman pounced as she was waiting for a friend and as soon as she had felt the thing’s slippery heaviness between her fingers, her fate was sealed.

Wanda had never mastered the art of evading the attentions of department store demonstrators and had gone through life being squirted with unwanted scents. Where other women could stride purposefully by, freezing all overtures with a glare or a scornful laugh, she would feel coerced into buying small gadgets for slicing eggs into perfect sections or recycling old bits of soap into garishly striped blocks. On the rare occasions when she heard him speak of her to his friends, she gathered that her husband’s image of her was coloured by this weakness.

‘She loves gadgets,’ he would say. ‘If she thinks it saves her time, she’ll buy it. When they invent a gadget to live your life for you, she’ll be first in the queue and let herself be talked into buying six.’

In her youth she had become a not terribly fervent Christian in the same way – sold the idea by a catchy sermon involving some crafty use of props – until her faith went the way of the spring-loaded cucumber dicer and the Bye-Bye Blemish foundation cream, gathering to it a kind of dusty griminess that dulled her guilt at its under-use.

‘Excuse me, Madam.’ It was a less vigorous approach than usual, tired and mechanical. He was evidently too drained by a long day of false charm to be mindful of his commission. ‘Would you like to try a wig?’

A chip slicer she might have resisted. She had one of those already. And a hoover attachment for grooming the cat (not a great success) but the very strangeness of that little monosyllable seemed to pluck at her elbow. She paused and half-turned.

‘I beg your pardon?’

He was a nondescript, sandy man; the kind of man one looked straight through. She did not imagine he could draw in much business and yet, now that he had caught her eye, she perceived something confidential in his very nothingness. She felt an immediate sense that, in talking to him, she became invisible too, temporarily shielded from critical view.

‘A wig, Madam,’ he repeated. ‘Would you like to try one?’ He did not smile. His manner was earnest, even urgent.

‘Should I be insulted?’ she asked, touching her own hair instinctively. ‘Why me? Why didn’t you ask someone else?’

‘I did,’ he said, with a ghost of a smile. ‘I’ve sold several.’ He considered the small rack of the things ranged on polystyrene heads on the trolley at his side like the grim evidence of an executioner’s zeal, and stretched one over the backs of his simian fingers. ‘I think this one for you,’ he said. ‘Not our most popular model, because it’s rather expensive. To be quite frank with you, designs from the cheaper range tend to go to people looking for fancy dress or hoping to cover the short term effects of medical therapy. Try it on. I know you’ll be surprised.’

She took it gingerly, expecting the cheap sweatiness of nylon but it was pleasantly cool, sending a kind of shock through her fingertips. It put her in mind of being allowed to hold a school friend’s angora rabbit for the first time; now, as then, she was seized with an immoderate temptation to hold it to her cheek. It was blonde, of course. To that extent he was like any salesman. He had assumed, quite erroneously, that being a quiet-looking brunette with a sensible cut she could brush behind her ears or tame with an Alice band, she harboured a secret desire for Nordic bubble curls. Obedient, resigned to humiliation, she pulled out her hair slides then slid the wig over her tingling scalp. Feeling slightly dizzy, she bent her head forward – she was slightly taller than the salesman – and allowed him to tuck in any locks of her hair still showing.

For all its mass, it felt no heavier than a straw hat. She could not restrain a soft laugh; she knew she would not buy but this was amusement as harmless as raiding the dressing-up box and, smiling at her, he seemed to enter into her childish pleasure.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good.’

‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Let me see.’

He was stooping below his little trolley for the mirror when she saw her friend – one used the term loosely – returning from the haberdashery department with the shoulder pads and French chalk she had been seeking when they parted company. The friend was a conventional woman with a tendency to spiteful tale bearing when she caught any of her acquaintance doing anything eccentric or irrational. Wanda froze as the friend approached, suddenly aware that the salesman had frozen too, in suggestive complicity. It was too late to pull the wig off without hopelessly disordering her hair yet she could think of no plausible explanation as to why she was standing there trying it on. The friend’s worst done, she would find herself receiving pitying looks as one bravely keeping a struggle with cancer or alopecia to herself or she would be scorned as the frivolous vulgarian they had long suspected her of being. The latter would be almost welcome. Her friends were merely neighbourhood women who had taken her under their wings; ambiguous controllers she would happily avoid. She could easily hide solitary days from her husband.

The friend passed her by however, without the slightest betrayal of recognition, continuing to look querulously about for her missing companion. Wanda looked after her retreating form in amazement. Had she a bolder appearance, she might have thought it miraculous. The salesman had found the mirror and was holding it out.

‘See for yourself,’ he said. ‘Of course, it is beautifully styled, but the reason it’s so much more expensive is that, apart from the basic skull cap, every fibre in it is human.’

She did not look directly in the mirror but, in the second before she tugged the thing free of her head in a spasm of revulsion, she seemed to catch a reflected glimpse of an angry stranger.

‘Horrible,’ she stammered. ‘I’m so sorry. My friend’s waiting for me.’ And she hurried off for a reprimand from the friend and a dour, unfattening lunch.

When he first singled her out for his special attentions – fumbling trips to the cinema, long, circular drives in his car, hectoring sessions of golf tuition – her husband had praised her normality. ‘The thing I really like about you,’ he would say, ‘is you’re so normal.’

Delivered in lieu of anything more romantic, the praise warmed her heart and briefly convinced her that normality was indeed her special feature. Pressing through on his advantage, he wooed, wed and twice impregnated her. By some sleight of hand, he managed to do all four without once mentioning love. She did not love him – this had been one of the certainties that lent her courage in accepting his proposal – but she nonetheless hoped that he might love her and be holding something back out of manly reserve. This fond delusion evaporated shortly after the birth of their second child, when he passed on an infestation of pubic lice and blamed it, with neither apology nor embarrassment, on insufficient aeroplane hygiene. She had learned to live with the delusion’s residue. She had a nice house, two clean, healthy children and a generous housekeeping allowance from which she could grant herself occasional treats without detection. Although she had only ever experienced orgasm by accident, her husband continued to grant her perfunctory sexual intercourse at least once a fortnight.

For most wives, that evening might have been a memorably bad one; for her it was much like any other. Their daughter, Jennifer, refused to eat supper, pleading incipient vegetarianism, and was sent to bed with no alternative. At several points during the meal, Mark, their son, imitated Wanda’s way of talking, most unpleasantly, only to be rewarded with her husband’s indulgent laughter. When she had seen the children off to bed, smuggling in an apple and some cheese to Jennifer, he pointedly admired a Swedish actress’s breasts throughout the thriller she had not wanted to watch. After that, when she was ready to drop with exhaustion, he made her sit up and play Scrabble. Scrabble, like her normality, had been one of the things originally to bring them together. He had made her play it the first time he took her to Godalming to meet his mother.

An inveterate snob, he had learnt from his mother that most card games apart from bridge were somehow common and bridge, he swiftly gathered, lay beyond his impatient understanding. Scrabble, however, appealed to him. He assured her it was a game ‘smart’ people played. When challenged he would never say why and she suspected he was influenced by the game’s appearance in a hackneyed advertisement for chocolate mint creams. His mother claimed it was sophisticated because it came in a dark green box and anyone knew that all the best things came in dark green – waxed jackets, cars, Wellington boots, folding TV dinner tables and so forth. The problem was that Scrabble was one of the few pastimes at which her husband seemed dim beside her. In front of his friends he pretended to boast of her cleverness, her facility for scoring forty-five with a four letter word placed slyly across the ends of two others, but in private she knew it maddened him. She learned early on in their relationship to temper her glee at triumphing over him. She avoided forming words like gnomon or philtrum which she knew he would vainly insist on challenging and she tortured herself by passing up frequent opportunities to score Scrabbles. Try as she might, however, she could not let him win. It was a game at which he could never excel. She hoped he would abandon the challenge, dismiss the skill he lacked as being feminine and therefore pointless but it was as if he wished to bludgeon the game into submission the way he did the television, or the dog. He knew he could beat her effortlessly at golf, drive faster and mow the lawn better than she ever would but he would not accept that in this one, insignificant area of their life, he had no mastery and was her inferior.

As usual, tonight, she trounced him despite her best efforts to help him win. She murmured soothingly that he had wretched luck with the letters he picked up but she knew he was seething from the way he splashed his whisky when he poured his nightcap and the entirely unnecessary fuss he made over some small item of household expense for which she had failed to obtain a receipt during that day’s shopping excursion. She was weary to her very soul and knew she would have to make an early start the next morning because it was her day to drive the school run so she pointedly popped a sleeping tablet before pecking him a placid goodnight.

He ignored the hint, however. The cheap posturing of the film had left him restless and aroused and his humiliation at the Scrabble board had stirred in him a need for vengeance. She knew the warning signs of old. An unpleasant memory from when she was once laid low with gastric flu told her he would not be denied.

‘You only have to lie there,’ he said when she demurred and, tugging aside the pyjama bottoms she suddenly remembered she had forgotten to include in that morning’s wash, he thrust his erection into her face. It bumped her nose once then she obediently took it in her mouth, remembering to keep her teeth out of the way. She had once been ambushed by an article on oral sex while waiting in the dentist’s waiting room for her son to receive some fillings. It had changed her life – at least, it had changed a small part of her life – with the advice to make a yawning motion so as to widen the entry to the throat and avoid telltale, not to say unflattering, gagging. Tonight she found it difficult not to choke. As he pumped back and forth, his thighs weighty on her breasts, his grasp causing the headboard to bang against the wall, she fought back spasm upon nauseated spasm, diverting her thoughts onto undone tasks, recipe cards, the alpine perennials she had yet to plant on her rockery.

‘I bet she never has to take this,’ he said, mentioning the actress. ‘I bet no one ever does this to her. She’d be on top. She’d call all the shots.’

He spoke in so matter of fact a manner that she feared his mind was on rockeries too and the ordeal might be prolonged much further but suddenly her cheeks were filling with his vile, familiar jelly. Never one for delicate gestures, he heaped insult on assault with a comment about helping to wash down her sleeping tablets. As he rolled off her and walked to the bathroom, she took a certain pleasure in spitting out his juices into the back pages of some golfing memoirs he had been reading.

Her children were enrolled in consecutive years of the same school and she shared the school run with mothers of three of their friends. School runs were a far cry from the easy suburban slovenliness of dropping one’s husband off at the station with an overcoat flung over one’s nightdress. Other children were all too often hostile emissaries of their parents, spitefully observant as only children could be. Normally she presented them with as clean and careful a version of herself as she would offer her husband’s colleagues at the Christmas party. This morning, however, she had dressed in a hurry, thrown into confusion by a bad night’s sleep and the discovery that her son had unplugged the tumble drier so as to recharge some batteries, and so left in a sodden heap that day’s blouse which she had planned to iron before breakfast.

‘You were wearing that dress yesterday,’ said her daughter’s best friend in a tone of friendly astonishment.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Hurry up and belt up or we’ll be late.’

‘Yes you were,’ said the child. ‘I’m belted now so you can drive on. Yes you were. I saw you when Mummy came to pick up Mark and Jennifer.’

‘Really?’ Wanda replied, pretending to frown at some road works. ‘I really don’t remember. Maybe I was. How funny. Now. What have you all got on your timetables today? Is it horrid maths?’ Incredulously she felt herself break out in a nervous sweat. The girl had turned away, oblivious to the bright conversational gambit. ‘Mummy changes at least twice a day,’ she told the others. ‘Three times if she’s gardening or something. She says Daddy likes it.’

Wanda amused herself briefly with the image of the woman in question actually effecting regular bodily changes – new hair, new teeth, new leg lengths – with the restlessness of a dissatisfied flower arranger. Then the unnervingly self-possessed Morag, the next child they picked up, physically recoiled as Wanda laughed her hello in her face, and she realized she had forgotten, in the rush, to brush her teeth. She was caught out in her hasty rootle through the glove compartment for a packet of peppermints and, forced therefore to pass them round, had to admit to her lapse if she was to justify taking the last mint and thereby depriving Jennifer of one. Any ground gained by doling out sweets was doubly lost by this tasteless revelation. The girls shifted slightly on their seats and giggled except for poor Jennifer, who pressed her nose to the window and stared with forlorn fury at the passing houses, condemned now for a mother not only slatternly but unhygienic.

After seeing the children safely into the playground, Wanda drove directly into town, while she was still fired with humiliation and rage. Only half aware of why she was there at all, she found a parking space then half-strode, half-ran back to the department store. For a moment she froze as it seemed that the salesman and his trolley had vanished but then she saw with a start that he was only feet away, helping a woman peel a long, red creation off her own head of nondescript grey.

Instinct and a kind of warning glance from him told her to stand back until the woman had made her purchase then, as she stepped forward he greeted her with a blandly surprised, ‘Ah, Madam,’ and asked if she wished to try on the same model again.

‘No,’ she told him. ‘It’s perfect. I know it is. I was just being silly before. About the hair being human I mean. I don’t know why. Perhaps it made me think of nuns. But now I . . .’ She faltered, her mouth suddenly dry with nerves. His face briefly clouded by concern, he asked if she would like to wear it immediately.

‘Oh no,’ she said, scandalized. ‘Wrap it up, please I . . . I’ll try it on again once I get it home.’

He wrapped it in tissue then shut it into a bag so discreet it might have contained a roll of curtain-heading tape or a box of talcum powder.

Meeting the extravagant price with a handful of notes from the horde she had pared from her housekeeping budget, she experienced a dizziness that verged on the erotic and she had to hurry to the coffee bar to eat two slices of cake to recover her equilibrium. It was only as she sat there, terrible booty on the chair beside her, softly munching, reduced like the immobilized shoppers around her to a contented sugar-trance, that she noticed the bag was not one of the store’s own but of a different provenance entirely. It was black with small gold lettering which boasted outlets in France, Luxemburg and Florida. Silence, the company appeared to be called, which put her in mind of libraries. Perhaps it was meant to be pronounced in a French accent to sound less an imperative, more a bewitching promise. In small curly letters beneath the title the bag whispered, Your secret is our pride. She wondered if the store’s management knew the salesman was there at all or whether he slyly played on the employees’ ignorance of one another’s purpose and throve in their scented midst like a parasite on a sleek but cumbersome host. As if to confirm her suspicion, he had moved his trolley again when she glanced around her from the downward escalator. He had shifted his favours from foundation garments and hosiery to between costume jewellery and winter hats.

At first she only wore the wig at home, when she was safely alone, honouring it with all the ritual befitting a complex pornographic pursuit. She would lock doors and draw curtains. She took off all her too familiar clothes, the better to focus on the wig’s effects, and wrapped her body Grecian-style in a sheet or bath towel, much as she had done as a slyly preening child. Every time she stretched it anew across her knuckles and tucked it around her scalp she felt afresh the near-electric sensations that had first surprised her in the store. She was fascinated by what she saw, transfixed before the unfamiliar woman she conjured up in the mirrored doors of the bedroom cupboards. If the doorbell or the telephone rang during the hours of her observances, she ignored them, although, lent courage by curls, she made a few anonymous calls to people she disliked, words slipping from her lips which the unwigged her could never have uttered. Had her husband come home unexpectedly, he would have caught her in as much guilty confusion as if he had surprised her in some rank adulterous act.

And yet with each resumption of blondeship she grew less timid. The woman in the looking glass would not be ignored, it seemed, and her influence proved cumulative. Wanda grew bolder. She began to make short daytime excursions in the wig and did things she imagined a woman with such hair would do. She drove to smarter districts than her husband’s where she sat in pavement cafés and ordered a glass of red wine that brought a flush to her cheeks or a searingly bitter double espresso whose grounds she savoured on her tongue. She bought expensive magazines, flicked through them with a knowing smile as though she recognized the people within, then, casually profligate, left them behind on restaurant tables without even bothering to retrieve the small sachets of free samples glued to certain advertisements.

She had a pedicure at an elegant chiropodist’s, which left her feet dangerously soft in the new black shoes she had bought herself. Then, inspired by the pleasure of watching a woman crouch below her working at her feet with little blades and chafing devices, she paid to have her toe and fingernails painted traffic light red. This last impulsive indulgence seemed a miscalculation at first since it could not be shut away in her wardrobe like the wig and the shoes or easily washed off like the new, distinguished scent, but her husband seemed to like her with claws. Or at least he did not seem actively to dislike her with them. A few weeks ago she would have thought them entirely out of keeping with her rather homely character and what she thought of as her ‘look’ but now they seemed no more than a newly exposed facet of her personality. Her fingers seemed longer and more tapering than they had before, her clothes less a necessity and more of a statement.

It was only a matter of time – two weeks, in fact, before she dared to leave the wig on when she picked the children up from school. As she waited by the gates, other mothers complimented her on her bold new style. She did not duck her head or offer bashful thanks and explanation as she might have done before but merely smiled and said, ‘You think so?’ for their opinions were now entirely unimportant to her wellbeing. The children, especially the other girls on the school run, usually so slack in their compliments, touched her with their enthusiasm.

‘It’s amazing!’ they cried ingenuously. ‘You look like a film star!’

She knew that children’s ideas of glamour were hopelessly tawdry and overblown, that, in the undereducated estimation of little girls, anything forbidden them – lipstick, bosoms, cigarettes, false eyelashes – was of its very nature beautiful so that mere prostitutes acquired a near-royal loveliness for them. She knew she should not take their effusions as a compliment. She knew she should play along for a moment or two then expose the wig for the fraud it was. After all, she would still have shown herself to be that rare thing among mothers – a good sport with a potential for sexiness. But then she saw how her daughter was sitting, squeezed into her usual corner of the back seat, mutely glowing at the praise her mother was receiving from these all-important peers. She even received a rare gesture of affection from her son; a warm, dry hand placed on her shoulder as he boasted of the points he had received for a geography test. She imagined the disappointment, disgust even, on their faces if she suddenly tugged the wig off. They might not praise her as a good sport; they might simply declare her mad. She was not yet so far from her own childhood as to have forgotten that madness in mothers was even less forgivable than bad hats.

So she drove on. Wigged. A game, laughing lie made flesh. She laid rapid plans. If she could make it through the night undetected, she would cash in the rest of her rainy day fund, call at her usual salon the next day, throw caution to the winds and have her own hair dyed and styled to match the wig. At the thought that she would thereby become the woman in her looking glass, the stylish, effortless woman of her daylight excursions, she felt herself suffused with a warm glow that began in her scalp and ran down her neck and across her breasts and belly. She gazed at the suburban roads unfolding ahead of her and smiled in a way that might have scared the children had they been less absorbed in their own chatter by now. She dreaded her husband’s return however. She dreaded his mockery or anger. Once supper was safely in the oven and the children were bathed, she locked herself in the bathroom to check with a mirror that no tell tale label or lock of her own hair were showing. The look was perfect however. She reapplied her new carmine lipstick, gave the back of her neck a squirt of scent then stood back to admire her full length reflection, stepping this way and that. He had a treat in store. He had a whole new wife.

Which were his own words exactly. At first he was perturbed. He wanted to know what had suddenly made her do it.

‘You,’ she said lightly. ‘You said you wished I was blonde like that actress. So I am. I can always change back if you don’t like it.’

‘No’, he said, looking at her in an uncertain, sideways fashion as he mixed his gin and tonic and poured her a sweet sherry. ‘No. Don’t do that. Was it very expensive?’

‘Not very.’

He had no idea how much women’s hair cost to fix. He naïvely thought it was maybe twice what he was charged by the barber in the station car park.

‘Supper’ll be about five minutes,’ she said. ‘I’m running a bit late. And I don’t want a sherry. I want a gin.’

‘