Selected Stories

A Friend in the Trade

They fell in love when A Whiter Shade of Pale played all summer. They married when Tony Orlando sang Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree. These tunes are faded memories now, hardly there at all, and they’ve forgotten Procol Harum and Suzi Quatro and Brotherhood of Man, having long ago turned to Brahms.

The marriage has managed well, moving with ease through matrimony’s stages, weathering its storms. It seems absurd to Clione when she looks back that she fussed so because at their first dinner party her husband of a month innocently remarked that she hadn’t made the profiteroles herself. It was ridiculous in turn, James has apologized, that he banged out of the house when coffee was spilt over Pedbury’s The Optimistic Gardener, ridiculous that he had not been calm when they missed the night train at the Gare de Lyon, ridiculous that they’d rowed about it when the workmen laid the wrong tiles.

The intensity of passion, and touchiness surfacing quickly, gave way to familial pleasure and familial pressures – three children growing up, their grandparents growing old. Tranquillity came when the children grew up a little more, when a Sunset Home took in a grandfather, a Caring Fold a grandmother. Give and take ruled the middle years; the marriage took on the odds and won. Passed through the battle, surviving dog days’ ennui, love now seems surer than before.

Clione is still as slender as ever she was, with wide blue eyes that still, occasionally, have a startled look. Beauty has not finished with her: her delicately made features – straight classic nose and sculptured lips – are as they always were, and cobweb wrinkles have an attraction of their own. She is glad she did not marry someone else and could not ever have considered being unfaithful. She knows – she doesn’t have to ask – that her husband has not been faithless either.

He deals in first editions and manuscripts. As well, he and Clione run the Asterisk Press together, publishing the verse of poets who are in fashion, novellas, short stories, from time to time a dozen or so pages of reminiscence by a writer whose standing guarantees the interest of collectors. Their business is conducted from home, an old suburban house in south-west London, not far from the river. Provincial auctions are attended in pursuit of forgotten tomes and the letters of the literati, alive or dead. The demands of the Asterisk Press – the choosing of typefaces and bindings, paper of just the right shade and weight, mail-order sales - provide a contrast. A catalogue that combines both sources of livelihood is published every six months or so.

Years ago, the trade in first editions and other rarities threw up Michingthorpe, who specializes mainly in what he calls nineteenth-century jottings. A ‘trade friend’ James calls him, but there is more to it than this designation implies. Since before the children were born, before the funerals of the grandparents, Michingthorpe has been a regular presence in the house near the river. He has brought with him the excitement of jottings that are special; a discovery that defies or contradicts the agreed opinion of academe delights him most of all. But anything will do, for everything is special, or becomes so in Michingthorpe’s possession. Scraps of letters are lovingly laid out; the beginning of a Dickens chapter that was not proceeded with; frustrated Coleridge lines, scratched out, begun again; a note to a tailor; initials on a bill. All have been offered to James and Clione for perusal and admiration.

Michingthorpe talks mostly about himself. In remarking on the particular way a great Victorian author had of looping his I’s or y’s, he manages to make the matter personal to himself, going on to relate that he loops his own letters in that way too, or does not. Responding to a comment or prediction about the weather, he recalls how when he was in Venice once - on the track of a John Cross jotting – rain for six days caused the canals to rise, trapping him in his hotel with nothing better to re-read than Chesterton’s life of Browning, which he had not cared for the first time. If frost is forecast, he recalls that it brings on an ailment. He had an uncle who perished in a storm, struck by the bough of a cherry tree.

Michingthorpe was already running to youthful fat when he first became a trade friend; he is fatter now. The flesh that smudges the contours of his face is pale. Eyes, behind spectacles, are slate-coloured and small. His hair was conventionally short when he was younger; now its grey mat obscures his ears in so distinctive a manner that Clione has heard her waggish son likening Michingthorpe to a New Testament disciple. Had Michingthorpe himself heard that, he would not have minded but possibly would have recalled that as a schoolboy he wrote an essay on the subject of the Last Supper and was awarded a prize for it. He welcomes it when he is spoken of, adverse comments being rarely recognized as such.

When her middle child was three years old, Clione came into the sitting-room one day to hear Michingthorpe explaining why it was that oysters did not agree with him. He recounted occasions, before he was aware that they did not, when disaster had occurred. Still on the subject of his digestion, he next spoke of a dressmaker who had taken a liking to him in his own childhood, always having rock buns ready when he called in to see her. The rock buns had no ill effects, even though on one occasion he had eaten seven. Changing the subject, though without alteration of expression or tone, he reported that when he first wore spectacles everything tilted – whole rooms, and lamp-posts, the pavement when he walked on it. This led to a memory of someone saying, ‘We see God’s world as God would wish us to.’ Once in a zoo he watched a gorilla escape. He recognized on the street one day the late Boris Karloff. Often he speaks of waiters - how skilled or careless one was last week, what he had eaten on that occasion, whose company he was in. His mealtime companions are always from the trade, business conducted over soup and entrée and pudding.

In the past Michingthorpe appeared to dress more ordinarily: clothes that were hardly noticeable in youth – jeans and T-shirts – are more emphatic with his long grey hair, as if they seek to make a point or perpetuate some illusion. There are chunky jerseys to go with them, horn buttons down the front.

‘I dare say we all are someone else’s unpresentable friend,’ Clione has said, causing her husband and children to laugh, because Clione herself is not in the least unpresentable.

The children, who are adults now – the waggish boy, two younger girls - have ages ago come to regard Michingthorpe as they do the familiar items of furniture in their parents’ house. He is something that has been there for as long as the buttoned sofa in the hall has been, and the ugly picture of mules drawing carts on the stairway wall, the davenport on the first-floor landing. For all the children’s lives he has come and gone, expected or not expected, some detail at once related about the journey he has made. ‘Oh, God, that man!’ the children have cried, when young, when older. Not that Michingthorpe has ever noticed them much, seeming not ever to have established which is which. Among themselves they still wonder, as they always have, how it is that he continues to be a welcome visitor in their parents’ house. The fact bewilders them, but then is packed away as one of the small mysteries that haunt the separation of generations.

The children are visitors themselves now, coming back to the house when they are ill or unhappy in a love affair, though often leaving again without mentioning anything; or coming back because they are, all three, affectionately disposed towards both their mother and their father. Their mother’s fifty-first birthday draws them for Sunday lunch one damp February weekend, the last time it will be celebrated in this house, for after nearly twenty-five years there is to be a move. ‘We rattle about like two ageing peas,’ Clione has said, ‘now that you have left us on our own.’ Two days ago an offer was made for a converted oast-house in Sussex. Tomorrow it will be known if it has been accepted.

Clione has privately resolved that if it isn’t she’ll somehow find the extra and pay the asking price. Her childhood was passed in the country, and already she has wondered about keeping a dog – a spaniel – as once she did. Time has been on her hands since her children’s going; she wants to grow her own vegetables again, to have asparagus beds, to cosset anemones and clematis and hellebores. Some intuition tells her she’ll delight in that.

This prospect cheers Clione after her children have left, all together in the late afternoon, and the house in which all of them were born has gone quiet again. She wears a dress she bought specially for her birthday lunch, two shades of green, a silk scarf with an ivy pattern at her throat. Her presents clutter the sitting-room and there are torn cardboard packages on the floor, four different kinds of shiny coloured paper waiting to be folded: at Christmas it can be used again. Her cards are on the mantelpiece. A Rösel pepper-grinder is on the hearthrug beside her where she kneels, her new yellow coffee-maker on the armchair she usually sits in, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony on disc beside it. The glow of smokeless fuel throws back a little heat at her.

Clione misses her children. It is missing them that drew her to the oast-house, to thoughts of vegetables and plants. And the chances are that her children will be drawn to it too, that they’ll come there more often than to the house in London, that they’ll delight in the summer countryside and weekend walks about the lanes, in winter bleakness, the trees skeletal, brown empty hedges. She longs for her children sometimes, wanting to set the time back to when there were children’s worries, so very easy to comfort, to when her children gave her what a husband can’t, not even the most generous. That a child was stillborn is never spoken of by James or by herself; their living children do not know.

She pushes away a surge of melancholy and thinks again about the changing seasons in a garden that does not yet quite exist, about fitting in all the paraphernalia of the Asterisk Press in the upstairs rooms. No longer kneeling, she leans back against the seat of an armchair, her legs slipped more comfortably to one side. Her eyelids droop.

There is something about Michingthorpe’s way of ringing a doorbell that indicates, in this house at least, who it is: a single short ring, shorter than most people’s and never repeated. Michingthorpe knows the sound can be heard in all the rooms, that if the summons is not answered no one is in, even though some lights are on.

Her doze disturbed, Clione imagines him already in the room and bearing, as her children have, a brightly wrapped gift. The unlikely, sleepy fantasy goes on a little longer. She sees herself in gratitude embracing Michingthorpe – which she has never done – and hears her voice exclaiming over what their visitor has brought.

Dusk is giving way to darkness. She shovels more coal on to the fire, then pulls the curtains over all three windows. The hall door bangs downstairs. Minutes later, in his long black overcoat, Michingthorpe is giftless in the sitting-room doorway.

‘I knew of course that it was there.’ He speaks to the air, as he always does, addressing no one. ‘The funeral two months ago, disposal of the library on the eighth. They’d no idea. All that stuff and they’d no idea. I had the pickings to myself.’

He doesn’t take his overcoat off. He has a way of sometimes not doing that. He sits down, still talking, saying he spent the night before in the temperance hotel of the town he visited, the only hotel there was. He and a local bookseller were the only dealers, and all the bookseller wanted was the Hardy. Sluggish on the sofa, Michingthorpe polishes his glasses and carefully replaces them as he speaks.

‘Frightful journey. Change twice and a tree down on the line at Immington. Of course I had the Grossmith stuff to annotate.’

Pouring drinks, James nods. His fair hair has gone non-descript and is receding; in fawn corduroy trousers, checked winter shirt, fawn pullover, he is a little stooped.

‘Clione’s birthday,’ he says, offering Michingthorpe a Kir.

But nothing that is outside himself, or part of other people, ever influences Michingthorpe. His surface runs deep, for greater knowledge of him offers nothing more than what initially it presents. Roaming the Internet is his hobby, he sometimes says.

Still feeling a little woozy from the wine at lunchtime, Clione shakes her head at the offer of a drink and tidies the room instead. Michingthorpe says he has formed the opinion that Conrad conducted a correspondence with a woman called Rosa Hoogwerf.

‘Then residing in Argentina, though why remains a mystery. I’ve floated the name on the Net.’

Clione wonders if he noticed that she has carried a yellow coffee-maker across the room, or registers that she is now gathering up the remains of cardboard packages from the floor. She clears away the birthday cards from the mantelpiece.

‘Some woman in Hungary,’ Michingthorpe is saying. ‘By the sound of her, Rosa Hoogwerf’s granddaughter.’

He has accepted the drink that has been poured for him, and Clione wonders why he is here, then realizes it is to tell about the journey he has made and the prize that has come his way. Someone who once visited his flat saw the refrigerator open, with only a single bottle of milk in it, and uncooked sausages on a plate and butter still in its foil. Michingthorpe is unmarried, has apparently never had with anyone – man or woman – what could be called a relationship. That is generally assumed, but assumed with confidence, and is not contradicted by the known facts.

Clione sits down again. The conversation dims to a grey murmur she doesn’t listen to. She doesn’t dislike Michingthorpe, she never has; he isn’t an enemy of any kind. Sometimes she considers he isn’t even a bore, simply a presence with small slate eyes and teenager’s hair that has a biblical look. She isn’t aware of how she knows he loves her.

‘Not that I feel my age,’ she suddenly hears now, and wonders if he has finally acknowledged that there has been a birthday in the house and has said when his is, in August, as he has said before. ‘Miskolc is where that woman is. She has a little English.’

He has never, that Clione can remember, met her eye, for he doesn’t go in for that with anyone; yet still she knows. For several years – and before, for she senses that it has been longer – there has been something that even now seems extraordinary: it is incredible that Michingthorpe can love anyone; incredible too that he can be mysterious. Burning the cardboard she has collected, continuing not to listen to what is said, she wonders yet again if he is aware that she senses his attachment.

‘We can sell the house at last.’

She hears James passing this information on and looks to see the vagueness it inspires in Michingthorpe’s plump features, as happens when something utterly without interest requires his attention.

‘We’ve found an oast-house,’ she says herself.

There is a different reaction now. For the first time in Clione’s entire acquaintance with him, Michingthorpe allows his mouth to open in what appears to be shock. Nor does it close. His small eyes stare harshly at the air. He sits completely still, one hand grasping the other, both pressed into his chest.

‘This is the country?’

‘Well, yes. Sussex.’

There is a pause, and then recovery. Michingthorpe stands up. ‘Originally my family came from Sussex. But a long time ago. Michingthorpe Ales.’

‘We shall miss you.’ Clione notices herself sounding as mischievous as one of her children. There is no protestation that they’ll be missed themselves. For a long moment their empty-handed visitor is silent. But before he goes there’s more about the Internet.

Pouring coffee at breakfast five days later, Clione waits to hear the content of an early-morning telephone call: only Michingthorpe gets in touch at five to eight. It has occasionally been earlier.

‘He has been to see it.’

‘What? Seen what?’

‘The oast-house. He’s been down there. Well, he was near, I think. Anyway, he has looked it over.’

‘But why on earth?’

‘It’s decidedly unlike him, but even so he has. I think I told him where it was. Not that he asked.’

‘You mean, he went along and bothered those people for no reason?’

‘He just said he’d looked it over.’

A flicker of unease disturbs Clione. It might have amused her if ever she had confessed that Michingthorpe has feelings for her; but to have confessed as well that he has never displayed them, that her woman’s intuition comes in here, would have led too easily on to a territory of embarrassment. Could it all not be imagination on her part? Or put more cruelly, a fading beauty’s yearning for attention? ‘Oh, but surely,’ Clione has heard James’s objection, the amusement all his now. Better just to leave it, she has always considered.

‘He knows our offer has been accepted?’

‘Oh, yes, he knows.’

Two days later, in the early afternoon, they visit again the house they have bought, received there by an elderly man – a Mr Witheridge whom they have not met before, whose daughter and son-in-law showed them around. They are permitted to take measurements, and in whispers speak of structural changes they hope to make.

‘Nice that your friend liked it too,’ the old man says, waiting downstairs with teacups on a tray when they have finished.

Profuse apologies are offered, and explanations that sound lame. Some silly muddle, James vaguely mutters.

‘Oh, good heavens, no! Oast-houses are in Mr Michingthorpe’s family, it seems. Michingthorpe Ales, he mentioned.’

The garden is little more than a field with a few shrubs in it. The present occupants came in 1961; Mr Witheridge moved in when his wife died. All this is talked about over cups of tea, and how mahonias do well, and winter heathers. But there are no heathers, of any season, that Clione and James can see, and herbs have failed in brick-edged beds in the cobbled yard.

‘Martins nest every year but they aren’t a nuisance,’ the old man assures them. ‘I’d stay here for ever, actually.’ He nods, then shrugs away his wish. ‘But we need to be nearer to things. Not that we’re entirely cut off. No, I don’t want to go at all.’

‘We’re sorry to take it from you.’ James smiles, again apologetic.

‘Oh, good heavens, no! It’s just that it’s a happy place and we want you to be happy here, too. There’s a bus that goes by regularly at the bottom of the lane. I explained that to your friend when he said he didn’t drive.’

‘Yes, I dare say he’ll visit us.’ Clione laughs, but doubts – and notices James doubting it too – that Michingthorpe often will, not being the country kind. The long acquaintanceship seems already over, the geography of their lives no longer able to contain it.

‘Your friend was interested in the outhouses.’

‘You’re intending to live with us?’ Clione stares into the puffy features, but the slaty eyes are blank, as everything else is. His voice is no more lifeless than it usually is when he explains that he happened to be in the neighbourhood of the oast-house, a library he had to look over at Nettleton Court.

‘Not fifteen minutes away. Nothing of interest. A wasted journey, I said to myself, and that I hate.’

‘You mentioned converting the outhouses to that old man.’

‘I have a minikin’s lifestyle. I like a certain smallness, I like things tidy around me. I throw things out, I do not keep possessions by me. That’s always been my way, I’ve been quite noted for it.’

‘We’ve no intention of converting the outhouses.’

Michingthorpe does not respond. He takes his spectacles off and looks at them, holding them far away. He puts them on again and says:

‘What d’you think I got for the Madox Ford? Remember the Madox Ford?’

‘We’ve never talked about your living with us.’

It is impossible to know if this is acknowledged, if there is a slight gesture of the head. Michingthorpe Ales were brewed at Maresfield, Clione learns, but that was long ago. In the 1730s, then for a generation or two.

‘I never took much interest. Just chance that I stumbled across the family name. In Locke’s Provincial Byeways, I believe it was.’

‘We’ll move down there in May.’

Quite badly foxed, the Ford, the frontispiece gone. ‘Well, you saw yourself. Six five, would you have thought it?’

Later, Clione passes all that on. The faint unease she experienced when she heard that Michingthorpe had been to Sussex is greater now. For more than twenty years he has had the freedom of a household, been given the hospitality a cat which does not belong to it is given, or birds that come to a window-sill. Has he seen all this as something else? It seems to Clione that it must be so, that what appears to her children and her husband to have come out of the blue is a projection of what was there already. Michingthorpe’s clumsy presumption is the presumption of an innocent, which is what his unawareness makes him. She should say that, but finds she cannot.

She listens to family laughter and when the children are no longer there says she is to blame, that she should have anticipated that something like this would one day happen.

‘Of course you’re not to blame.’

‘It was my fault that he presumed so.’

‘I don’t see how.’

She tells because at last she has to, because what didn’t matter matters now. A misunderstanding, she calls it. She knew and she just left it there, permitting it.

‘Oh, but surely this can’t be so? Surely not?’

‘I’ve always thought of it as harmless.’

‘You couldn’t have imagined it?’

She does not let a stab of anger show. Her husband is smiling at her, standing by the windows of the sitting-room they soon will leave for ever. His smile is kind. He is not mocking or being a tease.

‘No, I haven’t imagined it.’

‘Poor bloody fool!’

‘Yes.’

She does not confess that after her recent conversation with Michingthorpe she felt sorry she’d been cold, that bewilderingly she dreamed these last few nights of his shadow thrown on snow that had fallen in the oast-house garden, his shadow on sunlit grass, an imprecise reflection in a pool on the cobbles where the outhouses were. His fleshy palms were warmed by a coffee mug while his talk went on, while she beat up a soufflé, while again he recalled the dressmaker who had made him rock buns.

‘It’s horrid,’ she says. ‘Dropping someone.’

‘I know.’

James does know; she is aware of that, drawn into his thoughts, as their closeness so often allows. Dropping someone is not in James’s nature, yet why should they pander to the awkward selfishness of an oddity? There are the memories that go back to A Whiter Shade of Pale, the settlements and compromises of the marriage they were determined to make work. Her friends have not always been her husband’s kind, nor his hers, and there were other differences that, with time, didn’t matter either. The intimacy they have come to know is like a growth of roots, spreading and entangling, making them almost one. Why should there be embarrassment now?

‘For it would be like that,’ she hears James say. ‘Day after day.’

‘He has a nothing life.’

She pleads before she knows she’s doing so, and realizes then that she has done so before. In the car when they drove away after the revelation in the oast-house she suggested that the old man might have misheard, that it was probably gratuitous information on his part about the buses passing near, not the answer to a question. You can pity a child, Clione finds herself thinking, no matter what a child is like.

‘It’s a different kind of love,’ she murmurs, hesitating over every word.

‘It’s fairly preposterous, whatever it is.’

‘For all the time we’ve known him we have looked after him. You as much as I.’

‘My dear, we can’t play fantasies with a fully grown man.’

She sees again the shadow from her dream, distorted when it crosses the cobbles from the outhouses, cast bulkily on the kitchen floor, taking sunlight from the table spread with her cooking things. Being a shadow suits him, as being a joke once did.

‘It was just a thought he had,’ she says.

On a cool May morning, piece by piece, the furniture is carried across the pavement to the removal vans. The men are given cups of tea, the doors of the vans are closed. Clione passes from one room to the next through the emptiness of the house where her three children were born, the house in which they grew up and then left, leaving her too. Who will listen to him now? Who’ll watch him talking to the air? Who’ll not want to know what a splendid find he has come across at another auction? Who’ll not want to know that oysters don’t agree with him?

He is there when they drive off but does not wave, as if already he does not know them, as if he never did. ‘Oh, he’ll latch on to someone else,’ the children have said, each of them putting it in that same way. ‘He won’t mind your going much.’ She cannot guess how he’ll mind, what form his minding will take, where or how the pain will be. But the pain is there, for she can feel it.

Their unpresentable friend won’t come, not even once. Because he does not drive, because there is no point in it, because the pain would be too much. She does not know why he will not come, only that he won’t. She does not know why the pity she feels is so intensely there, only that it is and that his empty love is not absurd.