The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories Read online

  Translated from the French by the author

  * * *

  ELIZABETH BOWEN

  * * *

  MYSTERIOUS KOR

  Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon’s capital – shallow, cratered, extinct. It was late, but not yet midnight; now the buses had stopped the polished roads and streets in this region sent for minutes together a ghostly unbroken reflection up. The soaring new flats and the crouching old shops and houses looked equally brittle under the moon, which blazed in windows that looked its way. The futility of the black-out became laughable: from the sky, presumably, you could see every slate in the roofs, every whited kerb, every contour of the naked winter flowerbeds in the park; and the lake, with its shining twists and tree-darkened islands would be a landmark for miles, yes, miles, overhead.

  However, the sky, in whose glassiness floated no clouds but only opaque balloons, remained glassy-silent. The Germans no longer came by the full moon. Something more immaterial seemed to threaten, and to be keeping people at home. This day between days, this extra tax, was perhaps more than senses and nerves could bear. People stayed indoors with a fervour that could be felt: the buildings strained with battened-down human life, but not a beam, not a voice, not a note from a radio escaped. Now and then under streets and buildings the earth rumbled: the Underground sounded loudest at this time.

  Outside the now gateless gates of the park, the road coming downhill from the north-west turned south and became a street, down whose perspective the traffic lights went through their unmeaning performance of changing colour. From the promontory of pavement outside the gates you saw at once up the road and down the street: from behind where you stood, between the gate-posts, appeared the lesser strangeness of grass and water and trees. At this point, at this moment, three French soldiers, directed to a hostel they could not find, stopped singing to listen derisively to the waterbirds wakened up by the moon. Next, two wardens coming off duty emerged from their post and crossed the road diagonally, each with an elbow cupped inside a slung-on tin hat. The wardens turned their faces, mauve in the moonlight, towards the Frenchmen with no expression at all. The two sets of steps died in opposite directions, and, the birds subsiding, nothing was heard or seen until, a little way down the street, a trickle of people came out of the Underground, around the anti-panic brick wall. These all disappeared quickly, in an abashed way, or as though dissolved in the street by some white acid, but for a girl and a soldier who, by their way of walking, seemed to have no destination but each other and to be not quite certain even of that. Blotted into one shadow he tall, she little, these two proceeded towards the park. They looked in, but did not go in; they stood there debating without speaking. Then, as though a command from the street behind them had been received by their synchronized bodies, they faced round to look back the way they had come.

  His look up the height of a building made his head drop back, and she saw his eyeballs glitter. She slid her hand from his sleeve, stepped to the edge of the pavement and said: ‘Mysterious Kôr.’

  ‘What is?’ he said, not quite collecting himself.

  ‘This is –

  “Mysterious Kôr thy walls forsaken stand,

  Thy lonely towers beneath a lonely moon –”

  – this is Kôr.’

  ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s years since I’ve thought of that.’

  She said: ‘I think of it all the time –

  “Not in the waste beyond the swamps and sand,

  The fever-haunted forest and lagoon,

  Mysterious Kôr thy walls –”

  – a completely forsaken city, as high as cliffs and as white as bones, with no history –’

  ‘But something must once have happened: why had it been forsaken?’

  ‘How could anyone tell you when there’s nobody there?’

  ‘Nobody there since how long?’

  ‘Thousands of years.’

  ‘In that case, it would have fallen down.’

  ‘No, not Kôr,’ she said with immediate authority. ‘Kôr’s altogether different; it’s very strong; there is not a crack in it anywhere for a weed to grow in; the corners of stones and the monuments might have been cut yesterday, and the stairs and arches are built to support themselves.’

  ‘You know all about it,’ he said, looking at her.

  ‘I know, I know all about it.’

  ‘What, since you read that book?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t get much from that; I just got the name. I knew that must be the right name; it’s like a cry.’

  ‘Most like the cry of a crow to me.’ He reflected, then said: ‘But the poem begins with “Not” – “Not in the waste beyond the swamps and sand –” And it goes on, as I remember, to prove Kôr’s not really anywhere. When even a poem says there’s no such place –’

  ‘What it tries to say doesn’t matter: I see what it makes me see. Anyhow, that was written some time ago, at that time when they thought they had got everything taped, because the whole world had been explored, even the middle of Africa. Every thing and place had been found and marked on some map; so what wasn’t marked on any map couldn’t be there at all. So they thought: that was why he wrote the poem. “The world is disenchanted”, it goes on. That was what set me off hating civilization.’

  ‘Well, cheer up,’ he said; ‘there isn’t much of it left.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I cheered up some time ago. This war shows we’ve by no means come to the end. If you can blow whole places out of existence, you can blow whole places into it. I don’t see why not. They say we can’t say what’s come out since the bombing started. By the time we’ve come to the end, Kôr may be the one city left: the abiding city. I should laugh.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ he said sharply. ‘You wouldn’t – at least, I hope not. I hope you don’t know what you’re saying – does the moon make you funny?’

  ‘Don’t be cross about Kôr; please don’t, Arthur,’ she said.

  ‘I thought girls thought about people.’

  ‘What, these days?’ she said. ‘Think about people? How can anyone think about people if they’ve got any heart? I don’t know how other girls manage: I always think about Kôr.’

  ‘Not about me?’ he said. When she did not at once answer, he turned her hand over, in anguish, inside his grasp. ‘Because I’m not there when you want me – is that my fault?’

  ‘But to think about Kôr is to think about you and me.’

  ‘In that dead place?’

  ‘No, ours – we’d be alone here.’

  Tightening his thumb on her palm while he thought this over, he looked behind them, around them, above them – even up at the sky. He said finally: ‘But we’re alone here.’

  ‘That was why I said “Mysterious Kôr”.’

  ‘What, you mean we’re there now, that here’s there, that now’s then?… I don’t mind,’ he added, letting out as a laugh the sigh he had been holding in for some time. ‘You ought to know the place, and for all I could tell you we might be anywhere: I often do have it, this funny feeling, the first minute or two when I’ve come up out of the Underground. Well, well: join the Army and see the world.’ He nodded towards the perspective of traffic lights and said, a shade craftily: ‘What are those, then?’

  Having caught the quickest possible breath, she replied: ‘Inexhaustible gases; they bored through to them and lit them as they came up; by changing colour they show the changing of minutes; in Kôr there is no sort of other time.’

  ‘You’ve got the moon, though: that can’t help making months.’

  ‘Oh, and the sun, of course; but those two could do what they liked; we should not have to calculate when they’d come or go.’

  ‘We might not have to,’ he said, ‘but I bet I should.’

  ‘I should not mind what you did, so long as you never said, “What next?” ’

  ‘I don’t know about “next
”, but I do know what we’d do first.’

  ‘What, Arthur?’

  ‘Populate Kôr.’

  She said: ‘I suppose it would be all right if our children were to marry each other?’

  But her voice faded out; she had been reminded that they were homeless on this his first night of leave. They were, that was to say, in London without any hope of any place of their own. Pepita shared a two-roomed flatlet with a girl friend, in a by-street off the Regent’s Park Road, and towards this they must make their half-hearted way. Arthur was to have the sitting-room divan, usually occupied by Pepita, while she herself had half of her girl friend’s bed. There was really no room for a third, and least of all for a man, in those small rooms packed with furniture and the two girls’ belongings: Pepita tried to be grateful for her friend Callie’s forbearance – but how could she be, when it had not occurred to Callie that she would do better to be away tonight? She was more slow-witted than narrow-minded – but Pepita felt she owed a kind of ruin to her. Callie, not yet known to be home later than ten, would be now waiting up, in her house-coat, to welcome Arthur. That would mean three-sided chat, drinking cocoa, then turning in: that would be that, and that would be all. That was London, this war – they were lucky to have a roof – London, full enough before the Americans came. Not a place: they would even grudge you sharing a grave – that was what even married couples complained. Whereas in Kôr…

  In Kôr… Like glass, the illusion shattered: a car hummed like a hornet towards them, veered, showed its scarlet tail-light, streaked away up the road. A woman edged round a front door and along the area railings timidly called her cat; meanwhile a clock near, then another set further back in the dazzling distance, set about striking midnight. Pepita, feeling Arthur release her arm with an abruptness that was the inverse of passion, shivered; whereat he asked brusquely: ‘Cold? Well, Which way? – we’d better be getting on.’

  Callie was no longer waiting up. Hours ago she had set out the three cups and saucers, the tins of cocoa and household milk and, on the gas-ring, brought the kettle to just short of the boil. She had turned open Arthur’s bed, the living-room divan, in the neat inviting way she had learnt at home – then, with a modest impulse, replaced the cover. She had, as Pepita foresaw, been wearing her cretonne house-coat, the nearest thing to a hostess gown that she had; she had already brushed her hair for the night, rebraided it, bound the braids in a coronet round her head. Both lights and the wireless had been on, to make the room both look and sound gay: all alone, she had come to that peak moment at which company should arrive – but so seldom does. From then on she felt welcome beginning to wither in her, a flower of the heart that had bloomed too early. There she had sat like an image, facing the three cold cups, on the edge of the bed to be occupied by an unknown man.

  Callie’s innocence and her still unsought-out state had brought her to take a proprietary pride in Arthur; this was all the stronger, perhaps, because they had not yet met. Sharing the flat with Pepita, this last year, she had been content with reflecting the heat of love. It was not, surprisingly, that Pepita seemed very happy – there were times when she was palpably on the rack, and this was not what Callie could understand. ‘Surely you owe it to Arthur,’ she would then say, ‘to keep cheerful? So long as you love each other –’ Callie’s calm brow glowed – one might say that it glowed in place of her friend’s; she became the guardian of that ideality which for Pepita was constantly lost to view. It was true, with the sudden prospect of Arthur’s leave, things had come nearer to earth: he became a proposition, and she would have been as glad if he could have slept somewhere else. Physically shy, a brotherless virgin, Callie shrank from sharing this flat with a young man. In this flat you could hear everything: what was once a three-windowed Victorian drawing-room had been partitioned, by very thin walls, into kitchenette, living-room, Callie’s bedroom. The living-room was in the centre; the two others open off it. What was once the conservatory, half a flight down, was now converted into a draughty bathroom, shared with somebody else on the girls’ floor. The flat, for these days, was cheap – even so, it was Callie, earning more than Pepita, who paid the greater part of the rent: it thus became up to her, more or less, to express good will as to Arthur’s making a third. ‘Why, it will be lovely to have him here,’ Callie said. Pepita accepted the good will without much grace – but then, had she ever much grace to spare? – she was as restlessly secretive, as self-centred, as a little half-grown black cat. Next came a puzzling moment: Pepita seemed to be hinting that Callie should fix herself up somewhere else. ‘But where would I go?’ Callie marvelled when this was at last borne in on her. ‘You know what London’s like now. And, anyway’ – here she laughed, but hers was a forehead that coloured as easily as it glowed – ‘it wouldn’t be proper, would it, me going off and leaving just you and Arthur; I don’t know what your mother would say to me. No, we may be a little squashed, but we’ll make things ever so homey. I shall not mind playing gooseberry, really, dear.’

  But the hominess by now was evaporating, as Pepita and Arthur still and still did not come. At half-past ten, in obedience to the rule of the house, Callie was obliged to turn off the wireless, whereupon silence out of the stepless street began seeping into the slighted room. Callie recollected the fuel target and turned off her dear little table lamp, gaily painted with spots to make it look like a toadstool, thereby leaving only the hanging light. She laid her hand on the kettle, to find it gone cold again and sigh for the wasted gas if not for her wasted thought. Where are they? Cold crept up her out of the kettle; she went to bed.

  Callie’s bed lay along the wall under the window: she did not like sleeping so close up under glass, but the clearance that must be left for the opening of door and cupboards made this the only possible place. Now she got in and lay rigidly on the bed’s inner side, under the hanging hems of the window curtains, training her limbs not to stray to what would be Pepita’s half. This sharing of her bed with another body would not be the least of her sacrifice to the lovers’ love; tonight would be the first night – or at least, since she was an infant – that Callie had slept with anyone. Child of a sheltered middle-class household, she had kept physical distances all her life. Already repugnance and shyness ran through her limbs; she was preyed upon by some more obscure trouble than the expectation that she might not sleep. As to that, Pepita was restless; her tossings on the divan, her broken-off exclamations and blurred pleas had been to be heard, most nights, through the dividing wall.

  Callie knew, as though from a vision, that Arthur would sleep soundly, with assurance and majesty. Did they not all say, too, that a soldier sleeps like a log? With awe she pictured, asleep, the face that she had not yet, awake, seen – Arthur’s man’s eyelids, cheek-bones and set mouth turned up to the darkened ceiling. Wanting to savour darkness herself, Callie reached out and put off her bedside lamp.