Collected Stories by Beryl Bainbridge

Author:Beryl Bainbridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

POLES APART

Mrs Evans had just got back from the library with her friend Miriam Fortesque when Avril Scott telephoned to ask her for Christmas.

‘How very kind,’ murmured Mrs Evans. ‘But I really think that this year the journey might be a little too much for me.’

‘Nonsense,’ Avril said. ‘It’s Sussex, not the Outer Hebrides. You can take a taxi to the station and either Jim or I will meet you this end. It will be lovely. I’ll give you a tinkle nearer the time to arrange things.’

‘Oh hell,’ Mrs Evans said, replacing the phone.

‘Another invitation?’ asked Miriam Fortesque, knowing it was a foregone conclusion. Her friend was always in demand at Christmas, was never short of invitations to parties during the run-up to the big day, to lunches the week before, to mulled wine dos on Christmas Eve, to festive dinners with all the trimmings, to elegant suppers on Boxing Night. Nor was she stuck in a corner with some child who had been bribed to keep her company. On the contrary, she was always in the forefront, on the captain’s table, so to speak, and people vied to sit next to her.

‘How can I get out of it?’ demanded Mrs Evans, prowling irritably round the sitting-room and kicking Miriam Fortesque’s stick to the carpet. ‘I shall freeze to death in Sussex. They only turn the central heating on after the Six O’Clock News.’ In her spring-chicken fifties and her autumnal broiler sixties she had appreciated the attention paid to her. Now, five years short of her eightieth birthday, she was less enthusiastic. Really, all she craved was to be left alone by her own fireside, a bottle of gin at her elbow and The Towering Inferno on the television.

‘You’re a fool to yourself,’ certain friends said to her – certain geriatric acquaintances, who, though deaf, half-blind and often incontinent, sensed perfectly well the difference between sufferance and welcome – when Mrs Evans complained that this person or that had only a moment ago telephoned to ask her here, there and everywhere; to Sussex, Majorca, or worse, Edinburgh. ‘If you can’t do what you want at your age,’ they told her bitterly, ‘when will you?’ ‘Don’t rub it in,’ she would reply. ‘I know I’m an egotist. I can’t help feeling a refusal would offend. All my life I have walked backward into the limelight.’

Mrs Evans wasn’t a distinguished woman. She had never done anything special; she hadn’t discovered something, or written anything, or excelled in any given field. She had never been notorious in her own right. All the same, throughout her life – her early days, that is – she had managed to be connected with someone who had. For instance, she had just happened to be in Italian East Africa, in the station square at Diredaua in 1937 when the Duce had been present at the unveiling of some monument or other. She had caught his eye – God knows what she had been doing – and she had been asked to join his party for drinks afterwards.

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