Elizabeth Bowen Stories (14)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE THIRTEENTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE:https://horroranthology.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-13/
My reviews of EB stories so far, in alphabetical order: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
My previous reviews of general older, classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/ — particularly the multi-reviews of William Trevor, Robert Aickman, Katherine Mansfield and Vladimir Nabokov.
“She never had had illusions: the illusion was all.” — EB in Green Holly
SEE BELOW FOR MY ONGOING REVIEWS OF BOWEN’S STORIES
LOOK AT ALL THOSE ROSES
“…they felt bound up in the tired impotence of a dream.”
A couple have been touring in a car and heading for London in a roundabout Suffolk way, even though they had a deadline to get back to London, a Suffolk with flat horizons…. “…they passed dropping gates, rusty cattle-troughs and the thistly, tussocky, stale grass of neglected farms. There was nobody on the roads; perhaps there was nobody anywhere … In the heart of all this, the roses looked all the odder.” A couple not married to each other, because the man is already married, but dissatisfied enough with each other to have been as good as married to each other themselves, with talk of telephones and ear-wigs, and a deadline of return but with endless comings and goings, but never doing either, as the car breaks down in this wonderfully Proustianised Aickman type story and they have to walk back from the car to the house that they had passed, the remarkable roses…. “Each side of the path, hundreds of standard roses bloomed, over-charged with colour, as though this were their one hour.” As if that one hour became an eternity of Bowen’s one cruelly inherited minute.
A story of Null Immortalis and of a girl in an invalid chair now taken into the rose garden, and of her mother Mrs Mather, and a missing Mr Mather.
“There stood the house, waiting. Why should a house wait? Most pretty scenes have something passive about them, but this looked like a trap baited with beauty, set ready to spring.”
A house with its door lodged open with quartz as a symbol of crystallised time. And the man Edward leaves the other, Lou, the woman of adhesiveness, to stay there while he walks to the village Three Miles Up the road, to telephone for help. The house had no telephone and the servant had taken the only bike.
“Men cannot live with sorrow, with women who embrace it. Men will suffer a certain look in animals’ eyes, but not in women’s eyes.”
And all comes to some fruition of nothing, with Edward’s taxi ride back that destroys even this great story in one fell swoop of a trite ending of what or whom is buried under the roses. I had wanted, instead, to stare at the dreaded space of this story’s sky forever. Through that invalid girl’s eyes. Her shabby mother’s damson jam available or not. And the canary in the cage that Lou became? … that ‘trap baited with beauty’ prefigured earlier? But, of course, readers and especially reviewers should never tell lies about the stories they read. Better to be confused than duplicitous in the re-telling, never going anywhere, so that they never come back from where they go and thus they stay not knowing whether they are coming and going.
“But extinct paper and phantom cretonnes gave this a gutted air. Rooms can be whitened and gutted by too-intensive living, as they are by a fire. It was the garden, out there, that focused the senses.”
THE WORKING PARTY
“Under the cloth the table, polished this morning, had been awaiting its moment; now it reflected the hands and faces moving above it, the square of the window, the wicker sides of the work-baskets.”
A darkly engaging, perfectly prose-pitched, hilariously characterised story of a young newly married Mrs Fisk at last nervously holding, at her husband’s farmhouse, the next meeting of the Women’s Working Party, a prestigious sewing group in the area, and despite claims she is too secluded to reach and her needing to live up to the standards of her late mother-in law, this starts off proudly, with her having made meticulous preparations alongside her well-tutored servant Phyllis, … until an incident transpires that it would be a spoiler to divulge here. A spoiler for the whole event in itself! To such an extent that the whole Working Party was airbrushed from Mrs Fisk’s memory by the End. A specific Null Immortalis type of ‘End’ – “The End had been in young Mrs Fisk’s bed and she didn’t care to dwell on it.” Not forgetting the Sunk Kitchen where, suddenly, there was ‘Somebody’… a somebody other than her or Phyllis.
***
Meanwhile, a few pleasing or significant moments for me…
Her dizzily preparing the high curtain loops, making sure her cosy cat is well positioned, looking apprehensively at the crowd of her guests in the room as ‘a wood of women’, and, as with the Cows of Bashan in one or two Bowen stories I earlier reviewed, some of the women are scared by cows in coming to this farmhouse!
Mauve gateaux, a silver strainer for scryable tea-leaves, yellow plum jam, and the lovely tablecloth left on the table for show, only for it to be removed to enable sewing, details of which activity with needles etc. pixelate this text like piques.
One woman, “one hand on the small of her back where the pain was, the other pulling her scissors open and shut, open and shut, like a hungry beak.”
And there are other birds in this so story, like a crowd of starlings … and a kinder woman ironically called Mrs Hawke.
***
But above all, for me, there are the abounding Bowens of Time and a Half in this Zeno Zone…
“Mrs Fisk, face to face with the clock, watched the hands jealously lest time should escape her.”
“There was (as she felt in that half moment that she should have expected) Somebody there.”
“As the clock’s hands crept down to half-past four the Working Party began to relax. The needles dawdled; many were unthreaded frankly and stuck into bosoms or work-basket lids.”
“She shook back her frilly cuff to glance at her wristwatch: half-past four to the minute.”
“The hall clock, ‘Mother’s clock’ – ‘Mrs Fisk’ senior’s – tick-tocked above her head, nagging at time.”
Till the ‘End’.
***
Poor airbrushing Mrs Fisk…
“Do remember the ladies!’ She splashed another handful of water in Phyllis’s face. ‘Stay quiet, will you!’ she thundered.”
“Stumbling, tottering on her high heels she fled up the valley; the cows looked after her placidly;…”
This story will eventually be the End of my Bowen story reviews as it has the title at the end of the alphabetical list of them!
FIRELIGHT IN THE FLAT
“– the flats had no lift –“
“Now the walls jumped in and out of shadow: a five-shilling clock struck a half-hour long ago past.”
A tranche of life, a city flat (probably near the Serpentine) with the fire having been left burning in the grate, and if you listen alongside the characters, you will hear it ‘snap’. Meanwhile, war-forgetful Robertson (aka Bobbet) thinks gratuitously of ‘gooseberry pie’ in a dream chicken farm that he and his wife Betty (currently out at the flicks watching Dietrich, it turns out) might one day take on. While attacking some pork pie that Constance later calls ‘pig pie’. Betty had lent her latchkey to this Constance, 17, who had been waiting in the empty flat that had run out of shillings for the electricity, with inconstant Constance wanting fifty pounds from him (when he turns up) but only a bob (shilling) from Betty (Bob-bet?) when the latter later returns, and my mind teems with implications that are thankfully never settled. All I know is that Betty had been to a continuous programme at the flicks where you used to need to see the images on the screen sort of loop back to where you started seeing them whenever you went into the cinema, and that seems to bring my own loop back to the above ‘a half-hour long ago past.’
But which one of these characters was the Shadowy Third? All of them seem pretty shadowy in the dying firelight. (Seems appropriate to loop back to the Gatward story that I read and reviewed earlier today (here) before reading this Bowen.)
“‘Well, what of it? But she won’t; not till eight. She and Diane went in about half-past five; they’ll be seeing the programme round.’”
My review of THE LOST HOPE here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/16/the-unwilling-draft/
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This near lost story may, ironically, be Bowen’s greatest story?..
REQUIESCAT
“A third is never really wanted.”
…but I am never sure who is wanted by whom and for which triangulating need. It is thought or said by Stuart, a man somehow called David by the newish widow. She knows him as someone who comes as a previous part of that triangle with her late husband, to see her at the house on the Italian lakes where ….
“The loggia had an air of occupation; it was probable that on any of those tables, or among the cushions, he might see her book, half open, or the long-handled lorgnettes that Majendie had given her in France.”
“…her big pupils seemed to see too much at once and nothing very plainly.”
He thought she had always thought of him as an appendage to that marriage, here now brought back as a pet dog (he wrongly assumed?) to help with the death’s legal papers otherwise threatening tantamount to be taken over by a version of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I guess! Stuart had abruptly diverted there, when summoned, on his way to Ireland from India where he usually worked. The reasons he had earlier left the triangle for so long is adumbrated in various ever-increasingly subtle ways.
“Now they looked bewildered, helpless hands.”
As she asks for forgiveness, but for what? I shall never know. Unless my younger, less subtle, self in 2014 knew better when I originally read it. I shall later look up my then review and append it as a comment below, once I have completed this my review today.
“A steamer, still gold in the sun, cleft a long bright furrow in the shadowy water. The scene had all the passionless clarity of a Victorian water-colour.”
Today’s obsession with Null Immortalis, Zeno’s Paradox, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, after all, I guess! —
“The leaves rustled, he listened again; somebody was trying to detain him. As the slope grew steeper he quickened his steps to a run, and, skirting the terrace, took a short cut on to the avenue. Soon the lake glittered through the iron gates. She leant back against the pillar, gripping in handfuls the branches of the climbing rose. She heard his descending footsteps hesitate for a long second, gather speed, grow fainter, die away. The thorns ran deep into her hands and she was dimly conscious of the pain. Far below the gate clanged, down among the trees. The branches of the roses shook a little, and more white petals came fluttering down.”
That perfect, intransigent story.
2014
Requiescat
“Afterwards will come of itself.”
There is a theme in later Bowen fiction of the ‘shadowy third’, a sort of semi-detached and timeless troilism without any explicit consummation. This book’s ‘early stories’ include the beginning of that theme, and we follow an extrapolated audit trail from this bereaved meeting of two out of three on the Italian Lakes as a sort of retrocausal rhapsody.
“‘A third is never really wanted. […] his harshness no longer cast a shadow in her world,…”
This review continues here: https://weirdtongue.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-15/