Suffolk charm and j aunty horror
Miranda Seymour
THE STORIES OF RONALD BLYTHE by Ronald Blythe
Chatto & Windus, £9.95
POLARIS AND OTHER STORIES by Fay Weldon
Hodder & Stoughton, £8.95
Reviewers who like short stories look forward to August, the traditional month for publishing them. (The publishers are saving their energies for the great Septem- ber race for the Booker.) It's tough on the short-story writers. August is also tradi- tionally the month when, for all those earnest lists of recommended holiday read- ing, nobody wants to buy books. Not hard-backs, at any rate. Too heavy for holiday luggage and a problem for sun- oiled fingers.
For those who are ready to tote a heavier bag and to wear gloves, there could hardly he a more rewarding purchase than this selection of Ronald Blythe's short stories. Charming is not one of my favourite terms of praise, but here it begs to be used. It is the same charm which made Akenfield such a beguiling book and it lies in the ability to evoke a rural world of the past without ever falling into the trap of roman- ticising it. Lyrical happiness is one of the hardest states to describe, and Blythe can do so, over and over again, with deceptive ease: Then I laughed, not at him, but because I felt so happy, and the day smelt of new winds and new flowers, and because Rose and Gardiner [named for a local murderer and his victim], were making rapturous blowing noises through their soft muzzles, and I had never felt so well in all my life.
This comes from one of the Suffolk stories told by a child, Toby Kettle, of his education in country ways by his uncle Jake. There are no great events, a long day's fishing in icy water for a pike which won't be baited, a visit from the Bagman, a yellow-eyed peddler whose capacity for drinking honey wine makes him a match for Uncle Jake, a meal from the hedgerow of 'the Phasian Bird', a pheasant poached and cooked by Elly Nineteen, the local vagrant who befriends Toby. The last of these stories tells of uncle and nephew going to a cottage wake for Aunt 'Minta and watching the ceremonious squabbling of their relations for her goods. Toby heroically restrains his greed in Aunt 'Min- ta's deserted orchard of pearmains — she had never in her life given him an apple that wasn't a wasp-eaten windfall. Virtue is rewarded. Aunt 'Minta has left Toby everything and, which is where Mr Blythe is so clever in sliding away from the obvious happy ending, Toby is only in- terested in having at last found out her proper name.
We were nearly home and had struggled through five tall cornfields before my uncle bawled, 'Well, boy; what's on your mind?'
I gazed at the elms, now a dull rose-colour against the evening sky. 'Araminta,' I said slowly. 'Funny, I never thought of that . .
Common to all the stories (with the exception of my old favourite, a dragon's consumption of a well-meaning spinster in Bessarabia), is the powerful sense of pos- session. Possession by the past is haunting- ly conveyed in the story of a return to his English home by the boy who has been brought up abroad to idealise it and who finds that the new owner has made it unrecognisably his own. The present takes possession of the past when a convict called Thomas suddenly appears at the lonely house where two middle-aged ladies have invented a friend called Thomas to act as substitute for a dead husband. The past possesses the present in 'The Shadows of the Living', a strange story of the 16th- century villagers who burned their parson and the church-hating squire of the modern village who wishes his parson dead.
Ownership of all kinds are brought together in the last and most subtly dis- quieting of the stories, 'Immediate Posses- sion'. Here, the story is of a child, a house, and two women, the aunt and the gover- ness. The aunt and nephew are sensible. of the pull of the past, are enthralled by the discovery of a rusty old see-saw, hooped for a tribe of departed children. The governess, blind to the past, dreams of taking possession of Miss Trebble and of rising to the superior role of companion. The lonely child, Edmund, finds a ghostly playmate to take possession of him, bring- ing his aunt to recognition of where her duty, and her heart, lie. The child is rescued, the governess forced out, to stare angrily back into her lost Eden: Oh, and there the nursery — so brightly lit by the westering sun. An elderly lady sat in it reading to a small boy, who was nuzzling against her breast. The governess turned wretchedly against the hired car's stern upholstery. 'Fool . . . fool!' she wept.
Fay Weldon's stories don't charm. They aren't meant to. They horrify, not least because it's horribly plain that we are there in her caricature portraits of the housewife whose pride and joy is the boring efficiency of her Christmas lists, the husband who measures the distance between the tents in a camp-site to make sure he has got his legally defined area and who tastes every- thing on offer at the Digustations-libres but never ever buys, the rich common woman who cries by the sea because all that her machinations have brought her to is loneli- ness.
If they were not so fallibly human, Weldon's characters would be hateful. As it is, we are forced into an uneasy sym- pathy with them, pitying them as they scamper away with each other's husbands and wives to a bright new horizon, know- ing, as they don't, that they are only going to find themselves back in the Slough of Despond. The pessimism would be annihi- lating if it was not for Weldon's brisk and almost jaunty style of narration, never letting us stop to ponder the horror of the situation she has just described before we are hustled forward to observe a new dance of love and desperation.
`Well, God,' says the rich lonely woman standing by the night sea, 'you certainly don't give up! You just sing the same old tune, over and over, until we either go deaf or pay attention.' It is the same old tune to which Weldon makes us listen, a very simple one. We all make mistakes, we'll all go on making them, and the only comfort is that it's all experience. Succinct, brutal and sometimes very funny, Weldon's cautionary tales of mod- ern mores are as bracing as a cold bath on a hot day. Essential reading for complacent couples and credulous lovers.
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