Girl, Balancing & Other Stories Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Helen Dunmore

  Title Page

  Foreword

  THE NINA STORIES

  Cradling

  The Towel

  The White Horse

  Girl, Balancing

  THE PRESENT

  Taken in Shadows

  Esther to Fanny

  Where I Keep My Faith

  A Thousand Roses

  Hamid in the Playhouse

  Whales and Seals

  All Those Personal Survival Medals

  A Night Out

  Portrait of Auntie Binbag, with Ribbons

  About the First World War

  A View from the Observatory

  Count from the Splash

  In China This Would Not Happen

  A Very Fine House

  Duty-Free

  Chocolate for Later

  The Medina

  Wolves of Memory

  The Musicians of Ingo

  Frost at Midnight

  THE PAST

  Rose, 1944

  Protection

  A Silver Cigar in the Sky

  Dancers’ Feet

  With Shackleton

  At the Institute with KM

  Grace Poole Her Testimony

  The Landlubbers Lying Down Below

  Writ in Water

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Haunting, uplifting, beautiful: the final work from Helen Dunmore

  Helen Dunmore passed away in June 2017, leaving behind this remarkable collection of short stories. With her trademark imagination and gift for making history human, she explores the fragile ties between passion, love, family, friendship and grief, often through people facing turning points in their lives:

  A girl alone, stretching her meagre budget to feed herself, becomes aware that the young man who has come to see her may not be as friendly as he seems.

  Two women from very different backgrounds enjoy an unusual night out, finding solace in laughter and an unexpected friendship.

  A young man picks up his infant son and goes outside into a starlit night as he makes a decision that will inform the rest of his life.

  A woman imprisoned for her religion examines her faith in a seemingly literal and quietly original way.

  This brilliant collection of Helen Dunmore’s short fiction, replete with her penetrating insight into the human condition, is certain to delight and move all her readers.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction. Rich and intricate, yet narrated with a deceptive simplicity that made all of her work accessible and heartfelt, her writing stood out for the fluidity and lyricism of her prose, and her extraordinary ability to capture the presence of the past.

  Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led D. H. Lawrence to be expelled from Cornwall on suspicion of spying, and won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller with The Siege, which was described by Antony Beevor as a ‘world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize. Published in 2010, her eleventh novel, The Betrayal, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Lie in 2014 was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2015 RSL Ondaatje Prize.

  Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, deals with legacy and recognition – what writers, especially women writers, can expect to leave behind them – and was described by the Observer as ‘the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written’. She died in June 2017, and in January 2018, she was posthumously awarded the Costa Prize for her volume of poetry, Inside the Wave.

  ALSO BY HELEN DUNMORE

  Zennor in Darkness

  Burning Bright

  A Spell of Winter

  Talking to the Dead

  Your Blue-Eyed Boy

  With Your Crooked Heart

  The Siege

  Mourning Ruby

  House of Orphans

  Counting the Stars

  The Betrayal

  The Greatcoat

  The Lie

  Exposure

  Birdcage Walk

  FOREWORD

  ON THE EVENING of 11th November 2016, when my mother was already very unwell, she asked me to sit with her to discuss the management of her literary estate after her death. Although she lived until June the next year, the unpredictable path of her illness meant we did not know how many more weeks or months she had left, and for her this was the time to get things in order.

  We sat on her bed and I noted down what she told me: the processes she followed in doing her accounts, her instructions on what to do with the papers that were stashed away in many boxes in her office, passwords for her email, phone, Spotify account, Facebook, and that we might, perhaps, publish a collection of short stories after she died.

  That next year, 2017, would see the publication of her final novel, Birdcage Walk, her poetry collection Inside the Wave and an illustrated children’s book The Little Sea Dragon’s Wild Adventure. Amongst the complex and interlinked feelings of impending loss, a less visceral yet still potent sense of waste was that the flow of Mum’s writing was being cut off long before its time. Mum, though, was more philosophical about this. As always, ideas for the next novel were developing in her mind, but she felt satisfied with where she had got to with her work; there wasn’t something particular that she wanted to achieve which she would not now be able to do.

  ‘A collection of short stories at some point might be nice, though,’ she said to me that evening.

  It is almost twenty years since my mother published a full volume of short stories, but she did not stop writing them. She told me about a file on the floor by the narrow bookcase in her studio, a bird’s nest overlooking Bristol on the eighth storey of a block of flats, and also gave me the passwords for her laptop and iPad. Some of the stories had been printed ad hoc in newspapers or magazines, or had been broadcast, and others had not been published at all. Those could be included, she said, but ‘it depends how good they are’.

  As I think is common for many people, the months after Mum’s death were a frenetic period for me, probably trying to counter or mask the loss of our mother with action. Yet I did not think about the short-story collection until visiting Keats House in London one weekend with my father, standing in Keats’s bedroom there and suddenly remembering with vivid recall Mum’s short story ‘Writ in Water’, about Keats’s death in Rome. From that moment, putting together a collection of short stories ‘at some point’ became urgent, a project to focus on.

  Not remembering at the time about the file by the narrow bookcase, I started a search of Mum’s laptop, trawling through her many thousands of emails and document files. I was tentative at first, knowing that a person’s privacy does not die with them, and that there would be many emails that Mum would not have wanted me to read. I glanced sideways at emails, skimming for signs that they might be relevant, before seeing that Mum’s careful categorising of her emails made the task much easier. Those labelled ‘personal’ were out of bounds, those labelled ‘work’ I knew she would not mind me reading.

  It was some time before I felt certain I had found everything. A number of the stories were already gathered into a collection that Mum had compiled in 2010, but not pursued any further. That was the year of the publication of her novel The Betrayal, of her illustrated children’s book The Fer
ry Birds, and a year when she was working on the poems that would later be published in The Malarkey. The 2010 collection had sat there, waiting for its time, and clearly this was the starting point of what Mum had in mind when suggesting a collection. The decision on which stories would be included was made by my father, my sister and me, Mum’s publisher and her agent, all of us satisfied the stories certainly met Mum’s criterion of being good enough.

  The prospect of editing this collection was daunting, although made much easier by the guidance of Mum’s friend and publisher, Selina Walker, who published Mum’s last three novels. Ordinarily the publisher makes suggestions to the author who then finalises the work. Here, I had to make judgements not about what I thought should or should not be edited, but about what Mum herself would have done. I felt neither qualified nor entitled to do anything to her work, yet once I had started my concerns dissipated. Probably this was because I have followed Mum’s work so closely from the days as a child when she would read draft manuscripts of her children’s books to me. Not that the stories required a great deal of work, almost none for some, and for others merely the lightest polish before publication.

  There was also something special about reading work that I had not read before. Throughout my mother’s writing life, I always anticipated the next work, which she would give to me as a finished manuscript or proof copy, or simply as an emailed poem or short story. When I read her final novel in manuscript, I thought as I finished the last page that I would never get to read new work from my mother again. Then, as I read these stories, here was that feeling; the pleasure of discovering something new. This is one of our reasons for publishing the collection, to share this work with Mum’s readers, many of whom, too, must feel that their enjoyment of Mum’s writing has been cut short.

  My mother kept her own story to herself, feeling strongly that once she handed her work over to the public, it would take on myriad meanings that had nothing to do with the author. Yet it is inevitable that her writing holds something of her in it. The humour in this collection is very much of my mother. Always kind, she nonetheless had a keen eye for other people’s less than benevolent behaviour, not least when they themselves were unable or unwilling to see it. In the sad, but comical story ‘With Shackleton’, the narrator’s mother-in-law is skewered for her hurtful conduct towards her daughter-in-law. For my mother humour was one of the sides of a good life, especially in difficult times. This is shown beautifully in ‘A Night Out’, a story of two widows whose warmth towards one another and shared laughter give a shimmer of hope in amongst their grief.

  The collection itself is Dunmore work through and through. Mum’s writing has always been characterised by a preoccupying interest in the individuals who otherwise may not be noted by the hands that write our shared history. Many of her novels focus on the impact of historical events from the bottom up, but her interest in the individual was not limited to times of great upheaval. She recognised the work it can take simply to exist, for a person to make their way through their own life and the interactions that come together to shape a human experience.

  Each of the stories focuses sharply on the individual, perhaps most movingly in the Nina Stories, in which a young woman has to take responsibility for her own protection, her knowledge of how to stretch her small budget to feed herself almost as vital as her instinct for danger. She is a girl, just about balancing. Or in ‘Esther to Fanny’, in which Fanny Burney’s astonishing bravery in undergoing violent nineteenth-century surgery for breast cancer extends her life for twenty-nine more years. The story is Fanny’s, not that of the pioneering surgeons.

  Most important, though, is the writing. The poetry of my mother’s observations is as present here as in any of her work, the sometimes ethereal quality of a world seen through a lens that catches minutely the harsh realities of our existence, but also the endless beauty of the world and the people in it. In the wonderfully titled ‘Portrait of Auntie Binbag, with Ribbons’, you sense the hidden riches of life, which perhaps is how you might describe my mother’s philosophy. As she wrote in one of her final poems, ‘The Shaft’:

  Who would have thought that pain

  And weakness had such gifts

  Hidden in their rough hearts?

  If you stop to look, as my mother always did with intense curiosity, you will see beauty. We are glad to be able to share these stories and we hope that Mum’s readers, whom she valued greatly, will take as much pleasure from them as we have.

  Patrick Charnley, 2018

  THE NINA STORIES

  CRADLING

  NINA DIDN’T KNOW that she had earache. She’d woken up in the bottom of her bed, trapped in folds of blanket, on fire. They heard her crying and came in smelling of the time that happened after she went to bed. Their mouths breathed out smoke and cider when they said she must hush now because her sister was still asleep.

  Nina batted her hands at her hair because the pain was somewhere inside her head. They pushed back the hair that was stuck to her face with crying, and knew straight away what was wrong.

  ‘It’s those blessed ears again.’

  Her mother was already in the kitchen, lighting the gas, fetching out the little bottle of olive oil she’d bought from the chemist last time Nina’s ear hurt. There was a special spoon with a groove where the oil could drip out. Nina kept her eyes shut and listened. Her father carried her into the sitting room and sat back in his armchair, pulling her against him. She cried on but not panicky now, just letting him know how hard it was hurting her.

  ‘It’s the same ear,’ said her father. She heard his voice through his chest, not through the air. ‘The right one.’

  She could sense her mother above her, with the spoon, hovering.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said her father.

  She felt him free his hands, but she stayed as still against him as if he were still holding her. He was testing a drop of the oil on his hand to see how hot it was. She’d seen him do it before.

  ‘Keep still, Nina.’

  The back of the spoon was hot as it went into the cup of her ear. She moaned although it didn’t hurt. In a moment a warm wriggle of oil went deep inside her. It nearly touched the back of her throat even though it was going into her ear. Her father was holding her arms to his body, not hard but firm enough that she knew she didn’t have to battle. She could let it happen without fear. The warm oil spread inside her. The bolt of pain weakened a little.

  ‘I’ve put a cloth in the oven,’ said her mother.

  Her father held Nina, rocking her so that the oil would find its way deep into her bad ear. She heard the thick, warm sound of his heart inside his body. She curled herself right up so that she was as close to him as possible, like a snail inside its shell. She heard the little pock sound of someone lighting a cigarette. Her mother lit cigarettes for her father when they were in the car, and then passed them to him. She was doing it now, in the house.

  Her father smoked steadily, blowing the smoke away from Nina, over her head. The wireless was on in the corner, playing band music. Once she had seen her mother and father practising the cha-cha with the rug rolled back.

  She heard her mother dig the shovel into the coal-bucket. She would be getting the right mix of large pieces and small. Coal rattled as it fell back into the bucket, and then there was the sound of it going on to the fire and the smell of coal-dust. Before they went to bed her father would put the slack on the fire and beneath its crust the fire would sleep all night, ready to wake in the morning. The stove in the kitchen had to be fed too or there’d be no hot water. Sometimes Nina heard the noise of riddling and stoking through the floor when she was in her dreams.

  ‘Hell’s bells, I’ve forgotten that cloth,’ said her mother.

  She had to wave it about in the air to cool it. There was a singed smell, but not as bad as burning. Nina had one eye open now, her right eye. The other stayed shut, pressed into her father’s pullover. Her mother did a little dance with the cloth to cool it f
aster. There was a glass with cider in it on the table and her mother picked it up and drank some. Nina thought: This is what they do at night when we’re not here. They make a big fire and then they dance.

  ‘Keep still, Nina,’ said her mother. Nina closed her eyes meekly and the warm cloth came all over the side of her face. Ease spread through her.

  ‘That’s better,’ said her father, as if he knew.

  ‘It’s such a nuisance, this ear,’ said her mother.

  Nina was never ill. She had slept through the night almost from the day she was born. She ate everything. She was a Trojan. But the coils of her ears were too narrow, that was what the doctor said. Sometimes, without knowing it, Nina heard almost nothing at all. She sat behind the bathroom door, looking at her pop-up book, while they shouted for her. In a minute or a minute more, the people in the pop-up book would come alive.

  ‘It’s hardly surprising this child can hear nothing. Her ears are completely blocked.’ The doctor had pumped warm water into Nina’s ear until it felt as if he was holding her down to drown her. Clots of wax had poured out in a swill of clouded water. Since then Nina had had ear infections, one after the other.

  Her father began to sing a little song:

  ‘Chin Chan Chinaman

  Bought a penny doll,

  Washed it, dressed it,

  Called it Pretty Poll,

  Sent for the doctor,

  The doctor wouldn’t come,

  Because he had a pimple

  On his thumb thumb thumb.’

  A giggle stole into Nina’s throat. She knew that the last word didn’t have to be thumb. It could be bum.

  ‘She’s feeling better,’ said her mother.

  But her father stayed where he was. He wasn’t rocking her any more, although the noise of his heart made it feel as if he was. It was slow and steady, much slower than her own. That was because he was twenty-eight. Next birthday he would be twenty-nine, and after that, thirty. She had counted all the way up from nought for him, but he hadn’t been pleased.