Best British Short Stories 2020 by Nicholas Royle (reading books for 5 year olds txt) 📗

are in ours, you must admit, there’d be nobody alive in ours if I waited for contributions from you. But how should I know? I’ve never met the man or if I have I can’t remember what he looks like or anything about him. He told me he’d just been told he’d got three weeks to live and he was going through his address book in alphabetical order and he’d reached the b’s and come to me. Now can we leave it at that?

In bed Christine reflected that you shouldn’t let the sun go down on your wrath because one of you might be taken by death in the night and forgiveness be prevented. But it wasn’t wrath, she decided, and really they had nothing to forgive. Anyway, Jack was already asleep. Christine lay awake trying hard to remember anything whatsoever about Alan Egglestone but nothing came back to her. Instead, with sudden emotion, she remembered somebody else on that poetry course in the Lake District, Steve somebody-or-other, quite a young man, a good deal younger than her at least, which he hadn’t seemed to mind but had suggested they bunk off for a walk together one afternoon when there were no workshops and everyone was supposed to be getting on with their own poems quietly. He knew the way up from the old coffin road to Alcock Tarn and beyond into the dale that was known as Michael’s Dale after Wordsworth’s poem about an old man who was building a sheepfold up there but his son had gone to the bad and broken his old father’s heart so some days he climbed into the dale and just sat still by the work in progress ‘and never lifted up a single stone’. Tears came into Christine’s eyes on that line of the famous poem, the poor father, the poor disappointing son, and the young man called Steve who had obviously found her attractive enough to suggest a walk with him to places she would never have gone to on her own.

Next morning Jack got the breakfast as he always did. Nothing much wrong then, Christine thought, and quickly googled Alan Egglestone, to see whether he had become known in the passing years, but nothing came up that could possibly have anything whatsoever to do with him.

After breakfast, in fact just as she was leaving home to do her morning in Oxfam, she told Jack that Google know nothing at all about Alan Egglestone. So it was a waste of money on him as well, said Jack. Christine saw that Jack knew at once that he should not have said such a thing. But she left the house with only a curt goodbye before he could apologise. On the street, walking quickly, she reflected that you should no more leave the house wrathful than you should turn aside to sleep wrathful because you might go under a bus and the wrong that needed righting would remain a wrong for ever. Then quite deliberately in the back of the shop with the other Tuesday Ladies sorting out the tons of stuff families send to Oxfam or Help the Aged when a loved one dies, she thought about Steve and Alcock Tarn and the steep climb beyond into Michael’s Dale. It was early June and the shallows all around the banks of the tarn were entirely black and seething with quite big tadpoles and the word ‘selvaged’ had come back to her out of one of the poems Hardy wrote for his wife when she died and his dead love for her revived, the white-selvaged sea, the black-selvaged tarn. Steve said that in their density but every single one of them distinct, every one of them in the mass a separate possibility of further life, each driven separately into the next stage of its life, they resembled sperm, the selvage of the tarn was spermy. And she had thought that not in the least indecent or embarrassing. Her word and his were such as might occur to you if you suddenly saw something in a new light. And when they began the climb into Michael’s Dale, out of the rock face there a rowan jutted, jutted out and at once rose up, out of rock, out of very little sustenance, out and at once upwards, as it desired to, and flowered densely, creamily, in its own peculiar scent, upwards into the air, out and up over nothing, over thin air, over a sheer fall, upwards. Steve insisted that before they began the climb itself, into the dale, they should get as close as possible to where the tree started horizontally out of the ferny rock and as soon as it could aimed for the sky. He took her hand and helped her, it was almost like rock-climbing, and when they got to the place itself, the very place of the tree’s emergence out of the hill, he concentrated so hard on the sight, on the thing, on the exact nature of the phenomenon, she felt, in a nice way, quite forgotten, nice because she had the double pleasure of contemplating him, his self-and-her forgetting intense attention, and the rowan tree itself by which he was so rapt.

Back home, Jack had laid the table for lunch, which he never did. He looked very hang-dog and said at once, I’m sorry, Chris, I shouldn’t have said what I said. I know very well your course wasn’t a waste of money, you enjoyed it, didn’t you, and that’s all that matters. Yes, I did enjoy it, she replied, and it did me good. All my women friends noticed the change in me. I was well for nearly two years afterwards, if you remember. Jack cheered up. Now what are we going to do about this poor bugger Egglestone? he asked. Anything or nothing? Nothing, said Christine. What can we do? Nothing. – I mean, he didn’t say he’d phone you again, to let you know how