The Travellers and Other Stories (28 page)

Yesterday at the church in Dives she'd prayed.

After listening to the guide tell them about the blessing of the Norman ships before they set off on their conquering journey across the Channel, she'd walked up to the altar and bowed her head and clasped her hands together and prayed and then immediately felt ridiculous.

It was years since she'd set foot in a church except to look at the things inside, and even if she still said things like ‘Heaven help me' and ‘God forbid' she no longer believed they had any power or meaning.

Perhaps that had been part of the problem, believing that they did. Perhaps her mistake had been to tell herself, as the years slipped by, that what happened or didn't happen in this life was of no importance; that none of it really mattered because if you were patient and did not dwell on things too much, your reward would come later. Well she didn't think that any more, especially since her illness. Her prayer yesterday had been, in every possible way, a nonsense, an aberration, and all the way back to the hotel on the minibus she'd scolded herself for doing something so stupid and pathetic. For an hour and a half after they got back to town she'd walked along the beach, all the way up to the Roches Noires and back, gulping down the air.

Looking now at the umbrella boy, it occurs to her that she could pay him.

There's a piece of orange nylon rope knotted around the handle of the open door to his little wooden hut and it looks to her as if the door could be tied shut.

It would be dark inside which she thinks on balance she'd probably prefer. Even though she would like to see him she is shy about him seeing her.

She closes her hand around the folded notes in the pocket of her quilted jacket and counts them with her fingers; wonders if what she has with her is likely to be enough, or if he might ask for more.

There are other things in her life she always thought would happen that never did, but this is the only one of them, she's discovered lately, that seems important. It is the only one of them, now, she really, really minds about.

In her head, in her best French, she rehearses a form of words that will convey to the boy what it is she wants; what it is she has somehow ended up going her entire life without.

What Wade pictures is him and the Englishwoman hiking up to one of the flat alpine meadows in the mountains above his brown-shingled house in Mason.

The two of them tucking into a picnic of cold grilled chicken sandwiches with mustard mayonnaise on thick slices of fresh rye bread. Some cold beers. A few slices of apricot Danish from the bakery over in Marbleton. Maybe some crumbly Canadian cheddar and a box of hand-made chocolates.

Then both of them shedding all their clothes—his khaki pants and his peppermint shirt, her padded trousers and her sweater and her quilted waterproof jacket—the two of them together out in the open air in Wyoming on top of a mattress of tough flattened grass with the remains of their picnic around them; he, Wade Abello, doing everything perfectly—knowing, somehow, exactly what to do; the Englishwoman called Sibyl Hadley throwing back her head and yodelling with pleasure and delight and a low deep-throated shudder of relief.

With her hand curled around the money in her pocket Sibyl runs through in her head the words of her short but, she hopes, clear speech.

She goes over it several times, making various changes and corrections, hesitating over whether to use ‘je veux' or ‘je voudrais',
I want
or
I would like
, and then she stops.

The boy is in his hut now, leaning against the frame of the open door. He has finished putting up his umbrellas and is smoking a cigarette.

Sibyl looks at him, watches the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the movement of his lips, and slowly her fingers uncurl from around the money in the pocket of her coat. The folded notes slip free of her empty hand, and for the second time today her eyes fill with tears. She knows that it is beyond her to ask him, that she cannot possibly do it, and it comes to her then, to Sibyl, in almost the same moment and with all the clarity of a vision or a prophecy, as she sits alone in her rented deckchair on the beach in Trouville in the last week of an unseasonably cold August in the summer of her sixty-seventh year, that the only event now of any importance she can reasonably expect to experience in what remains of her life is likely to be her own death.

It's a terrible thought—it's a terrible thought and it is, you may remember, a windy day.

It's a
very
windy day in fact, and even though the golden-skinned umbrella boy has worked hard to make sure that each one of his big stripy parasols is properly canted into the wind—its heavy cotton-fringed shade angled low to the ground, its sharp metal spike dug deep down into the sand and securely buried—you'll understand how easy it is for an especially violent gust to snatch one of the umbrellas up and send it cartwheeling along the beach like a tomahawk or an accessory in a knife-throwing act or something thrown by a gladiator across the dusty floor of the Coliseum.

You'll understand, also, that there's something about the low-slung design of an old-fashioned deckchair that makes it difficult for someone like Sibyl Hadley, in their mid to late sixties, to get out of one in a hurry. You'll understand that she is indeed about to die; that in these last split-seconds the whole of her solitary and unfulfilled life is about to flash before her in a quick grey kaleidoscope of drab and joyless scenes.

And yet you will know, too, in your heart, that some very big, very fat men are also surprisingly fast runners—you will know that when Wade Abello has finished shaking the flaky crumbs from his croissant out of his napkin and onto his plate in the dining room of the Hôtel Mercure and pushed back his chair and walked outside and begun to make his lumbering slow-footed way along the boardwalk carrying what looks like his lunch in a paper bag—you will know that when he sees what's happening he will break at once into a thunderous sprint of astonishing power and velocity and when his enormous right hand finally hurls away the bag with its dusty cake of hand-made soap inside and his outstretched fingers reach out and grasp instead the spinning cotton fringe of the murderous parasol and he falls to his knees in front of Sibyl in the sand—you will know, then, that Sibyl was wrong about the future, and that this, is just the beginning.

NOTE ON ‘BONNET'

Brontë biographers and scholars have long speculated on what the true nature of the relationship between Charlotte Brontë and her young publisher, George Smith, might have been. We know that Smith was handsome, charming and clever, and that he became Charlotte's good friend, frequent correspondent and attentive host when she visited London; her letters suggest that she may well also have been in love with him and that he knew it. Against the background of Charlotte's tragic family history, her desperate loneliness and sense of personal inadequacy, it is one of the most poignant stories of unrequited love I've ever come across. In my imagination, the encounter depicted in ‘Bonnet' takes place towards the end of 1853, when—and these are the facts—Charlotte is 37 and Smith is 29 and has recently become engaged to Elizabeth Blakeway, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy London wine merchant, but no one, including Smith himself, has told Charlotte yet. The historical truth is that Smith seems to have felt unable to break the news to Charlotte, prevaricating and writing to tell her, eventually, only after she has found it out from his mother. When she does, at last, receive his letter, Charlotte writes back what must be, as Brontë scholar Juliet Barker says, ‘the most extraordinary letter of congratulation ever written'
*
:

My dear Sir

In great happiness, as in great grief—words of sympathy should be few. Accept my meed of congratulation—and believe me

Sincerely yours

C. Brontë

Charlotte married the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, curate at Haworth, in June 1854. She died in March 1855 at the age of 38, probably of tuberculosis aggravated by acute morning sickness.

*
The Brontës: A Life in Letters

NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks to the editors of the publications, anthologies and online magazines where a number of these stories (sometimes in a slightly different form) first appeared:
The 2007 Fish Prize Anthology
;
The 2005 Bridport Prize
;
Don't Know a Good Thing
(the Asham Award short story collection, Bloomsbury);
The London Magazine
;
Kestrel
;
The Dublin Review
;
Granta New Writing
;
The Hippocrates Prize
;
Love Sunday Magazine
;
New Short Stories 3
and
New Short Stories 4
(both Willesden Herald Prize anthologies);
The Manchester Fiction Prize
;
Prospect
;
Red Room New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës
;
The Royal Society of Literature Review
;
Salamander
;
The Ship
;
The Stinging Fly
;
The Story
;
Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories
. Special thanks to Brendan Barrington and Declan Meade, to my agent Rachel Calder, my editor Jen Hamilton-Emery, to Chris Hamilton-Emery and to New Writing North for the financial assistance of a 2013 Northern Writers' Award, supported by Arts Council England.