Best British Short Stories 2020

^{DAVID CONSTANTINE} THE PHONE CALL

The phone rang. I’ll go, he said. Normally he left the phone to her but they were cross so perhaps he wanted to put himself even more in the right. She remained at the table. This keeps happening lately, she thought. Oh well, what if it does? He came back: It’s for you. – Who is it? – He shrugged: Some man. By the time she came back he had cleared the table, washed the dishes and was watering the beans – his beans – at the far end of the garden. She stood in the conservatory, observing him and trying to make sense of the phone call. A long summer evening, birdsong, everything in the garden doing nicely. But she could tell, or thought she could, that he was watering the beans much as she supposed he had washed the dishes: to be indisputably in the right. She could almost hear the voice in his head, the aggrieved tone. Not really pitying him, nor herself either for that matter, but because she did not want it to go on till bedtime, she walked down the garden and stood by the beans that had grown high and were crimsonly in flower. She smelled the wet earth. He turned and came back from the water butt with another full can. That’s good, she said. He said nothing, but he did nod his head, and she saw that the job, which he loved, was softening him. When he had emptied the can, he said, One more.

She waited, watching him, thinking about the phone call. Over his shoulder, as he finished the row, he asked, Who was it then? Some man, she answered. He said he’d met me twenty years ago, on that course I went on. The husband put down the empty can and looked at her, mildly enough. What course would that be? – The course you gave me for my birthday, the poetry course in the Lake District. You said I’d been rather down in the dumps and a course writing poetry in the Lake District might buck me up. All my friends said what a nice present it was. – Oh, that course, the husband said. And the man who just phoned was on it with you, was he? – Well he says he was, but I can’t for the life of me remember him. I said I could, but that was a fib. – But he remembered you all right, enough to phone you up after twenty years. – To be absolutely honest, I’m not even sure he did remember me, not me myself, if you know what I mean. He said he did, but I’m not so sure.

The husband turned away to put the can back by the water butt where it belonged. She watched, wondering more about the man who had phoned than about her husband and his questions. Did he have a name, this man? he asked, returning. Yes, he did, she answered. He said he was called Alan Egglestone. But I honestly don’t remember anyone of that name on the course. I remember who the tutors were, and two or three of the other students, but I don’t remember an Alan Egglestone. Then the husband said, Well it was a long phone call with a man you can’t remember. You must have discovered you had something in common, to go on so long. Yes, she answered, I’m very sorry I left you with the washing-up. I couldn’t see a way of ending it any sooner. I didn’t have the heart to interrupt him. Now the husband looked at her as though, for some while, he had not been seeing her for what she really was. Don’t look at me like that, Jack, she said. I’m not looking at you like that, he replied. I just don’t know what you could find to talk about with a complete stranger for so long. Perhaps you’ve been on his mind for twenty years. Perhaps he’s been writing you poems for twenty years. I very much doubt it, she answered, beginning to feel tired, and not just of the conversation about a phone call, but, as happened now and then, of everything. Jack must have seen this. It was pretty obvious. Nobody else of his aquaintance lost heart quite so suddenly, quite so visibly, as his wife. I’m not getting at you, Chris, he said. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. I was only wondering what this Mr Egglestone had to say to you that took so long.

With the index finger of her left hand Christine pulled down and let go, again and again, her lower lip. She did this when she was nervous or puzzled or both together. It was a bad habit, annoying to other people, and she had often been scolded for it by her mother as a little girl. He told me he’s got leukaemia, she said. He said he’s probably only got three weeks to live. And she looked at Jack as though he might know what to make of it. But Jack shook his head: Don’t give me that. You don’t phone a complete stranger to tell her you’ll be dead in three weeks. I never said he was a complete stranger, she answered. I said I couldn’t remember him. And if he’s a stranger to me, he says I’m not to him. He says we were on that poetry course together in the Lake District. And I’m in his address book. – You’re in his address book? – Well there’s nothing very odd about that. Why shouldn’t people on a course swap addresses at the end of it if they feel it has been a special time? The fact that I can’t remember him is neither here nor there really. And, let’s be clear about this, it’s not just me he’s phoning, he’s phoning everyone in his address book, he told me that at once. So he’s into the w’s, said Jack. Not far to go. No, he’s nowhere near the w’s, Christine answered. He’s only in the b’s. – So why, may I ask, did he phone you? – Because on the course I used my maiden name. I don’t mean I told people I wasn’t married. I used my maiden name because I thought that’s the name I’ll use if I ever get anything published. You never told me that, said Jack. Didn’t I? she answered. I’m sure I did. But it’s no odds whether I did or I didn’t. You didn’t, said Jack. And he gave her another look and went very deliberately back into the house.

Christine stayed in the garden. It was pleasant out there, quite like the country really, for a suburban place. Foxes came with their cubs in the summer early mornings and you heard them, the dog and the vixen, barking and screaming in the winter nights. And owls too sometimes, in the hospital’s big trees. She stayed out, fingering her lip. She stayed until around her shoulders she felt chilly.

Indoors, Jack was watching the news. There had been another massacre. I think I’ll go to bed, Christine said. He switched the television off. I’m sorry for this Mr Egglestone, he said, of course I am. But I don’t see why he has to tell everyone in his address book that he’s going to die. Aren’t his family and a few close friends enough? And how many strangers does he have to phone a day, I wonder. He’ll hardly get through them, will he, if he’s only got three weeks. In the Wakelin household, Christine had become the authority on the dying Egglestone. He does have a family, she said. Three girls, to be exact. But his wife left him and took them with her when they were still at school. She said he was selfish, apparently. So he hardly ever sees his family, and he hasn’t told them what his condition is. And perhaps there aren’t all that many people in his address book, perhaps half of them are crossed out dead, they are in ours, and perhaps it’s the old address book that his wife left behind when she cleared out and she started another for her new life and most of the addresses in the old one, the one he’s working his way through now, were her side of the family and her friends anyway, they 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 he was getting on? And you didn’t say you’d phone him? No, said Christine. No he didn’t and no I didn’t.

So Jack and Christine Wakelin continued their own slower courses towards their separate ends. And the phone call meanwhile continued to work in them, separately. Christine had heard Alan Egglestone’s voice and could not get it out of her head. Indeed, day by day it became more present there, more insistent. Helplessly she listened to its aftertones of terror and desperation. She recalled how little she had spoken, how he had scarcely given her chance to speak, and what could she have said anyway of any use or comfort? What did he want, except not to die? Did phoning alphabetically through the address book help him in the least? All she heard now was a man talking on his own to a person who did not remember him. She pitied him, but the dominant feeling in her on his account was horror. And she saw Jack watching her. She understood, and it sickened her, that they had Alan Egglestone in common. In bed or at meals or standing side by side doing the washing-up, one or other of them without preamble, as though it were the only possible subject of reflection or conversation, might wonder aloud about him, posing a question, rhetorically, not really expecting an answer. Or from Jack or from Christine came a speculation. Perhaps, said Jack, he was hoping for a miracle. That would be quite understandable. Say there are fifty people in his address book, well perhaps one of them had heard of somebody who stopped a leukaemia dead in its tracks, halted it, by some miraculous means, or held it up for a while at least and won the dying person an extra five years, or a year, even six months? You may be right, said Christine. Though he didn’t ask me did I know any such person. She saw this made Jack wonder again why Alan Egglestone had phoned her at all. Then a day or two later, quite suddenly, she said, It struck me he was maybe going through in that methodical fashion to check there was nobody in the book he owed an apology to or who owed him an apology and he phoned to say there wasn’t much time left for making amends. At that, visibly, Jack’s suspicions really did return: Did he ask you that? – No, he didn’t. But it has occurred to me. And later that same day, actually interrupting Jack who was talking about something else, she said, It’s very wrong of him not to tell his wife and children about his condition. He must want them to feel bad when they find out he’s dead. But nobody should be vindictive when they’re near the end. Phone him and tell him, said Jack rather crossly. – I don’t know his number. – There’s ways of finding out. – I don’t want to find out. I don’t want to speak to him again. I don’t want to hear his voice. I hear it anyway, Jack, all the time. I don’t want him adding to it in the flesh.

Once or twice Jack said outright that her Mr Egglestone was a bloody nuisance. He’d no business phoning people up like that and spoiling their lives just because he was nearing the end of his. Everybody has to die, said Jack. Why is he so special? And he looked with even greater suspicion at Christine, so that she knew he believed there were things she hadn’t told him about the damned poetry course. And in town one day, trailing along with her while she did the shopping, he asked in a false-casual sort of way whether she still had anything from that course, any old letters, poems, photographs, any souvenirs at all that might help her, and him too for that matter, understand why Mr Egglestone had phoned her to tell her he was dying. No, she replied, putting the liver and bacon in her bag, if you really want to know, I threw everything in the bin one morning about two years after it when I started to feel bad again. Everything I owned about that week – it was all in a folder with a ribbon round it – I threw the whole lot in the bin, I watched through the window till the bin men had reached next-door-but-three, then I went out and threw my folder in the bin so they would certainly take it and I couldn’t change my mind. That’s what I did with my souvenirs of the poetry course. You never told me that, said Jack. No, I never told you that, said Christine.

Day by day Christine saw Jack looking more worriedly at her. I know what he’s thinking, she said to herself. Then three weeks after the phone call, to the day, another beautiful evening, down by the beans, he was watering them and she was standing oddly to one side, half watching, half not, and fingering her lower lip in the way he didn’t like but had got used to over the years, he set down the empty can and said, Chris, you’re not going funny on me again, are you?