From Under the Overcoat (26 page)

‘They’re too expensive. For now, anyway.’

‘I can show you some others …’

‘No … I’m sorry … I can’t afford any glasses. None of them.’

The optometrist watched as Lotte pulled her purse from her bag. She took all the notes out and put them on the counter. ‘I’ll just pay for the eye test,’ she said. ‘That will do for now. Thanks.’

The optometrist looked at Lotte’s face. It was all he could do, not to drop his gaze. He’d seen earlier. The bruising, around her shoulders, crawling down her back. Like rot.

He opened the drawer below the counter and took out a little red case. His finger flicked it open. Inside was a pair of glasses — exactly the same as the girl had tried on, but with red frames.

‘Would you mind … red, instead of black?’ he asked. He gently opened the arms of the spectacles, leaned across the counter, and placed them on the girl’s nose. She breathed in quickly, just once, as though she’d had a tiny fright. Her eyes were enormous behind the magnified lenses.

‘For you. No charge,’ he said. ‘They’re exactly your prescription. Someone ordered them — ages ago now — they never came and collected them.’

Lotte stood quite still on the other side of the counter. She looked at the glasses and the case. Then she looked at the optometrist. He was smiling at her. At her eyes. Not at any other part of her.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

LOTTE STEPPED OUTSIDE ONTO
the footpath, wearing her new red glasses. The air was cold and still and the strange sea mist sat like a heavy cool cloak around her. Workers bustled by, shivering, rubbing their bare arms with their hands. She looked up and down the street.

It had always felt to Lotte as though the world had been turning its back on her, not quite wanting her to see what was on offer. She had accepted that life would only ever brush up against her, ever so lightly, then be on its way.

Now, in the foggy cool street, everything was different. Life had stopped, turned around, and was inviting Lotte in.

Through the mist, she saw a red neon light, exclaiming
Espresso
, and underneath, the word
Open
. Everywhere, there were signs speaking directly to her.
Enter
, they said.
Welcome
.
This way
.

And the noises! How could it be that a new pair of glasses could turn conversations sharp and clear? Lotte’s bewilderment turned to delight as people passed her by, speaking almost as if they were including her in their discussions. She knew that the glasses weren’t responsible for her heightened perception. But there was no doubt in her
mind that the warmth she was feeling — the euphoria of being
in
the world — was to do with her improved vision.

Next to the red neon light, a cinema advertised the latest blockbuster movie, with a cast of famous actors listed in smaller writing. The list was perfectly clear to Lotte. She smiled as she imagined going to a film, watching every little action, seeing every nuance. She imagined herself exiting the theatre with friends that did not yet exist, exclaiming at the brilliance or otherwise of the film.

Those friends — who would they be? As Lotte waited for the bus back to the café, happiness grew inside her. She checked herself from laughing out loud. Many of the people smiled back.

So taken with the joy of the moment was Lotte that she didn’t notice her bus approaching. She failed to signal for the driver to stop. It sped by, into the fog.

Lotte didn’t mind. She would walk, she decided. She would walk at a brisk pace, making it back to the café before the usual closing time.

The trip took longer than she planned. It was her fault — it seemed that every few steps revealed a marvellous new thing to look at. Lotte stopped outside a dairy and read the headlines on a stack of newspapers. She discovered tiny notes pasted on the glass windows, advertising
Help offered
and
Groups to join
. Lotte stood close to the notes, reading every detail. Each seemed to have been written for her alone.

Some of them were to do with education — they offered night classes in the most amazing array of subjects: history, book-keeping, even literature! She smiled again as she imagined discussing important texts with Jackson, perhaps even helping him with ideas for his Russian story. She opened
her bag, took out a pen and some paper, and wrote down the details of all the courses, all the telephone numbers. As she scribbled, she glanced at her reflection in the windows, and fell in love with the red glasses many times over.

THESE SPECTACLES, READER —
what were they? Plastic frames with two magnifying glasses? But they meant so much more to Lotte Jones. As she walked the streets back towards the café, Lotte felt them settling on her face. It was as if they were attaching themselves to her, to the bridge of her nose. She touched them, as she walked on. It didn’t take long before she was surprised to feel their physical presence. They weren’t hers. They were her.

As for the optometrist, I know nothing about him. I can’t explain to you why he did what he did. I could make enquiries, find out more for you. But sometimes, not knowing is better, don’t you think?

THE SUN WAS SHINING,
the strange sea fog of the day before gone. Regulars had been coming in for their coffees all morning. They admired Lotte’s new spectacles, with their cheerful red frames. Lotte laughed and looked at her customers closely. ‘Oh, so
that’s
what you look like!’ she giggled.

As she worked, she glanced at her reflection in the mirror behind the counter. She tilted her head this way and that, smiling at the way the glasses caught the light.

You can hardly notice
, she thought. She peered into the mirror at the frames, at the cracks she had carefully repaired,
by touch, with the tiny coffee machine tools and glue.
Even in this silly mirror, you can hardly see the damage at all. You really would need to know what you were looking for
.

It had happened that morning. She was about to leave for the café. The words came from behind her
Whore
…
Money
… but the blow came from the left. It came hard and strong against the side of her head. As the black came down around her, Lotte took off her glasses. They folded neatly in her hands, as though they knew what to do. The last thing she felt was the jagged edge of the broken red frame underneath the left lens.

‘A funny thing happened on my way to the festival lunch,’ Jackson said. He was sitting in his usual place under Che Guevara.

‘What happened?’ asked Lotte.

‘Well,’ said Jackson. ‘A guy dressed in winter clothes comes up to me — right up into my personal space — and waves his fist and says “What do
you
want?”’

‘So?’ said Lotte. ‘What’s so unusual about a guy shouting at people in the street?’

‘Nothing, I suppose.’

‘Hmm,’ said Lotte, wiping grime off the bench, grime that she suspected had been there for a long time. ‘Have you seen him since?’

‘No,’ said Jackson. ‘I woke up thinking about him this morning. I started to wonder who he might be.’

‘Why? Does it matter?’ Honestly, Lotte thought. Writers.

There were just the two of them in the café. Jackson got up and locked the door, turning the
Open
sign inwards.

He didn’t tell Lotte he’d gone to her home that afternoon.
He didn’t mention waiting outside her house to take her to the hospital. He started, instead, with a question.

‘Who hurts you, Lotte?’

Lotte, with her glasses perched on her nose, held her breath. For the second time that morning her head thumped. Then, just as quickly, it cleared. She poured two thick black coffees and took them to Jackson’s table. Without blinking, without crying, she sat down and told him.

LATER, JACKSON PICKED UP
his pen. His hand moved quickly across the page. After just a few minutes, he jumped to his feet and plugged his laptop into the wall. His fingers drummed impatiently on the wobbly table while he waited for the machine to start.

Lotte couldn’t help herself. She blamed the glasses, the excitement of being able to read anything, anytime. She slipped behind Jackson, peeking over his shoulder.

‘What’s with the letters, instead of names?’ she asked.

‘A writing device,’ said Jackson. His fingers danced across the keys. ‘Russians were keen on it. Protected the anonymity of the little man.’

A was making thick black coffee for B C in that café, that funny little place halfway between
…

GUY DE MAUPASSANT WAS
born in 1850 near Dieppe, France, and died of a venereal disease in an asylum in 1893. He was encouraged to write by his godfather, Gustave Flaubert. His stories often portrayed the lives of prostitutes. In 1880 he published ‘Boule de Suif’ (Dumpling Butterball) in Émile Zola’s
Soirées de Médan
, an anthology of short stories about the 1870 Franco–Prussian war.

‘Boule de Suif’ is a tale about a journey, class difference and the perils of flattery and self-deceit. It tells the story of a disparate group of French citizens — among them two nuns, a prostitute, businessmen and their wives, a count and countess — leaving Rouen in a carriage, after Prussian soldiers take control of the city. Only the prostitute — Boule de Suif — has thought to bring provisions for the long trip to Le Havre. The other occupants of the carriage snub her until hunger drives them to court her favour, convincing her to share her food. Boule de Suif is flattered and deceived by the false friendliness, happily sharing her provisions and engaging in political debate.

The travellers spend the night at an inn. It has been taken over by a Prussian officer who refuses to let the group continue its journey until Boule de Suif sleeps with him. At first the intensely patriotic prostitute refuses, but eventually she obliges, convinced by the cajoling of her new ‘friends’ and in particular by the nuns’ claim that the end justifies the means. The next day the group is permitted to carry on to Le Havre but Boule de Suif is devastated to discover that her actions have relegated her status in the carriage back to that of a worthless prostitute. Her weakness for flattery has rendered her unworthy of conversation or of a share of the food that has been brought along for the remainder of the trip.

There were two aspects of this story that captivated me — the isolation of being on a journey (and the associated loss of free will for the duration of the journey) and the human failing of conceit. In the case of Boule de Suif, the conceit results in her ostracism, once she has served her purpose.

KATHERINE MANSFIELD WAS BORN
in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, and died in Fontainebleu, France, in 1923. She wrote ‘The Doll’s House’ in October 1921 and it was included in
The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories
(1923). In his introductory note to that collection, John Middleton Murry says Mansfield’s journal records the original title of the story as ‘At Karori’.
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‘The Doll’s House’ has class consciousness as its major theme. The story begins with the arrival of a beautiful doll’s house, painted spinach green and yellow, at the home of the well-off Burnell children, Isabel, Lottie and Kezia. The moment at which the hook is prised open and the front of the doll’s house swings open is one of delight —

THE THREE GIRLS TAKE
great care in deciding who, among their school friends, will be allowed to come and see the doll’s house. At the end of the queue are Lil and Else Kelvey — the daughters of a husbandless washerwoman — forbidden to visit by the class-conscious Mrs Burnell.

The idea of a house being physically prised open — and its interior life publicly exposed — found its echo in the modern real estate practice of open homes.

HENRY JAMES WAS BORN
in New York in 1843 to Scottish and Irish parents. He spent most of his writing years in England, and was naturalised a British subject in 1915, a year before he died. Some of his works have been classified as ghost stories, but their potency emerges from the possibility of realistic unspoken evil rather than the overtly violent outcomes of traditional ghost tales. ‘The Turn of the Screw’ was described by one reviewer at the time as ‘the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read, in any literature, ancient or modern’.
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The story tells of a governess arriving in a rural English home to care for two very young orphaned children. Both children seem delightful, although the boy has been expelled from a boarding school for an unknown reason and the
governess is unable, or unwilling, to insist on finding out why. After some time, the governess sees two ghostly figures — a man and a woman — in the grounds of the home and becomes convinced the children are aware of them. The woman is the children’s former governess, and the man her illicit lover, with whom the children spent a lot of time before their deaths.

The new governess believes the children have been, or are being, corrupted by the ghostly figures in some unspecified way. She eventually drives the situation to a head, with the removal from the home of the little girl and the death of the little boy.

Yet one can read the story from a different point of view — as did the critic Edmund Wilson in his 1934 essay ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’ — and believe that the children are innocent, the new governess is hallucinating, that she kills the young boy and that
she
is ‘a neurotic case of sex repression’ whose reading is not to be trusted.
4

The narrative energy of ‘A Turn of the Screw’ has two sources. The first is the introduction, with its traditional storytelling-around-a-fire setting and the narrator’s reluctance to share the tale for fear of its impact on the listeners. He withholds the story for several nights, building tension for both the other characters and the reader.

The second source of narrative energy — located in the tale itself — is the potency of unverifiable rumour: what is not, and cannot ever be, definitively known.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON WAS BORN
in Clyde, Ohio in 1876 and died in Panama in 1941. Frank O’Connor, in his introduction to
The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
, suggests that the modern American short story developed from Anderson’s ‘remarkable little book’
Winesburg, Ohio
. O’Connor believes that short stories are primarily concerned with ‘submerged populations’ and in the case of
Winesburg, Ohio
that population is the lonely and alone American midwesterner.

Winesburg, Ohio
, published in 1919, comprised stories about the residents of the small fictitious town Winesburg. In his introduction to the 2005 edition of the book, Jeffrey Meyers says Anderson wrote the stories after making ‘intensive studies’ of people in his own home town.
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These connected stories explore isolation, displacement and loneliness within communities, families and marriages following World War One. Read together, they form the world of a novel, in a way similar to James Joyce’s
Dubliners
, E. Annie Proulx’s story collections and, most recently, Elizabeth Strout’s awardwinning
Olive Kitteridge
.

In ‘Death’, Elizabeth Willard, against her father’s will, marries a hotel clerk ‘because he was at hand and at a time when determination to marry came to her’.
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Her angry father offers her a large sum of money to guarantee her
independence — Elizabeth accepts it but never uses it, despite her desperate marital unhappiness. She hides the money from her husband in a wall in her bedroom.

Elizabeth makes regular visits to her doctor to reminisce about their younger days. During these visits the doctor comes to love her — the discussions transform her dowdiness into the youthful beauty of her past — but this possibility of happiness between them is never fulfilled. Elizabeth falls ill in the bed next to the walled-up fortune. She strives, in her final words to her son George, to tell him about the money — to offer him a chance to avoid the melancholic isolation and loneliness of life in Winesburg — but fails to speak the words before she dies.

This poignant story concerns itself with free will, stubbornness, utter isolation, paralysing loneliness and, above all, self-denial. In ‘Scratchy’ the same forces rob Edna Carson of her chance at happiness.

JAMES JOYCE WAS BORN
in Dublin in 1882 and died in Zurich in 1941. ‘The Dead’ was written in 1907 and is the final story in James Joyce’s 1914 collection,
Dubliners
. Although each of the fifteen stories in the collection stands alone, together they build a picture of a downtrodden lower-middle-class Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century. The presence of death — literal and symbolic — pervades the final story, reaching a climatic moment in Gretta Conroy’s disclosure
to her husband Gabriel about her childhood sweetheart Michael Furey: ‘I think he died for me’.
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Dubliners
, and ‘The Dead’ in particular, sparked intense literary discussion about the presence of epiphanies in Joyce’s writing. In his introduction to
Dubliners
, Terence Brown wrote that Joyce believed it the artist’s duty to expedite forth the manifestations of epiphanic moments in a context allowing the reader to discern their possible significance.
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However, critics have debated whether all or any of the
Dubliners
‘moments’ constituted true epiphanies.

THE MAORI CREATION STORY
is an oral tradition but it is recorded in many books of Māori legends. The story reflects on the beginning of life and existence from a natural perspective. There are different versions but most describe the creation of the world as the separation of the earth and the sky.

In the beginning, there was nothing — Te Kore. From this Rangi-nui (the sky father) and Papa-Tū-ā-nuku (the earth mother) emerged. They were physically connected, and their children were born between them in darkness — Te Pō. Various versions name different children, but most include Tāne Mahuta (god of the forests), Tangaroa (god of
the sea), Tūmatauenga (god of war and humans), Rongo-mā-Tāne (god of cultivated plants), Haumiatiketike (god of wild plants) and Tāwhirimatea (god of the weather).

The children decided to separate their mother and father, to allow light into the world. The effort was led by Tāne, who forced his parents apart. The only child to object to the separation was Tāwhiri. While the other children stayed with their mother, he ascended to be with his father. From there, he attacked his brothers, using storms, high winds and seasonal changes.

ARTHUR SCHNITZLER WAS BORN
in Austria in 1862 and died there in 1931. In 1900 he published one of the first tales written purely in interior monologue in European literature — a short story entitled ‘Lieutenant Gustl’.
9

The Austrian officer Gustl attends an opera and believes himself to be insulted there. The story — which takes place almost exclusively in Gustl’s mind — tells of the consequences of the perceived insult, the claustrophobic interior monologue a perfect vehicle for Gustl’s rising paranoia.

The story’s negative portrayal of the officer cost Schnitzler his medical officer’s rank in the Austrian army.
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The interior monologue form was later made famous by James Joyce in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.

George Clarke Junior
is inspired by a passage from a book published in 1859,
The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present — Savage and Civilized.
The excerpt dealt with the first official execution in New Zealand in 1842 and conflicting cultural — Māori versus British — perceptions of justice.

RUSSIAN WRITER ANTON PAVLOVICH
Chekhov was born in 1860, the son of a former serf. He trained as a medical doctor and practised medicine throughout his writing life. His most famous stories were written between 1890 and 1904. He died of consumption in 1904 at Badenweiler, Germany.

Chekhov’s stories are drawn from everyday life, and focus on both the political and social conditions of the day and the emotional world of his characters. In his introduction to ‘The Party’, David Richards says the ‘poetic poignancy of [Chekhov’s] best work stems from the author’s unvoiced awareness of the ironic gap between our modest hopes and the banal realities of life’.
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‘The Party’ tells the story of a large, all-day party hosted by Peter Mikhaylovna, a circuit court president, and his wife Olga. Olga, who is pregnant,
drifts through the party in an uninvolved way, upset with her husband’s inability to communicate with her and bored with the pretences required by the occasion’s etiquette. She becomes increasingly disillusioned with her marriage as the night progresses, convincing herself that she really does not know her husband at all. By the end of the evening she is uncontrollably enraged and accuses him of marrying her for money. The story ends with her losing their baby.