Best British Short Stories 2020 by Nicholas Royle (best novels to read for students txt) 📕

– The quilted fields of England. I love this countryside. Even the names resonate. Chiddingfold. Could be Old English for ‘cemetery’, conjures up the cosiness of village graveyards. All safely gathered in. Hambledon, Bramley. English as autumn mists. Pictures of this sort of landscape – maybe a shire horse in the middle distance, church spire far distance – still work their magic, guarantee the sales. Anything rural or ecclesiastical or both. Even quite modern buildings can do it. Know Guildford Cathedral? Only finished in 1961. Still a popular card. That’s how I met my wife. She was sketching it. Naturally I took a professional interest. Suggested she did a watercolour, maybe soften the cathedral, age it a little, submit it to my art director for a greetings card. She did, he went for the idea, I went for her.

It was love at first sight. He had leaned over her shoulder, watched the pastel smudge the deep-grained paper. Her long hair matched the quaking grass, ruffled by the same breeze. Her chin set in concentration, a soft furrow echoing a distant field. He retreated until she was packing up, handed her his card.

They drove into town, had coffee and scones with a view of the Guildhall, then drove through darkening Surrey lanes.

This was the pattern of their Sundays for a month.

On the Sunday of Michaelmas, after their coffee, he parked in sight of the cathedral, wound down the window. ‘You’d make a perfect Mrs Wilson Thomas. You might even enjoy it.’ ‘Will I, Wilson Thomas? Yes.’

– She became very interested in colour-washed pen and ink. We both love the work of Thomas Rowlandson, his chromatic delicacy against the robust penwork, the feathery foliage. I got her to do a series of views in that style, tried to get the firm to accept them as a set of upmarket postcards. Came to nothing. I had a few printed up, send them to her when I’m on the road, with a little poem on the back, something out of Clare or Herrick or William Blake. Blake is her idol. The watercolours, the woodcuts – she loves them. Did you know he lived near Bognor? Felpham, few miles along the coast. She wanted to visit it, soak up the atmosphere. Tricky. Had to head her off on that. Suggested a little project of my own – trace the locales of Wilson Steer’s works. Personal interest – he was a distant relative on my grandmother’s side. I’m named after him, in fact. So whenever I have a few days’ leave, we’ve been trundling round the country, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Stroud Valley, tracking down the footprints of his easel, so to speak. She copies the paintings, I photograph the scene. ‘Then and now’ sort of thing. Surprising how much of the country is still unspoiled. Turn down a lane, find a stile, follow a path between furrowed fields. Smell of wet earth. Leafmould in the hedgerows. Like generations of wisdom, sifting into the soil. She’ll put her arm through mine, say, Breathe it in. I know just what she means. You’d like my wife. See that programme on cancer on the box?

Wilson is much possessed by death, and sees the skull beneath the skin. For if one of them should die? Or leave? Easier to face the knock upon the door.

Wilson is not, has never been, a political man, but he has watched, appalled, the bi-polarity of the world crumble. He is unnerved. The world now reminds him of a pre-Columbus globe in reverse. He sometimes feels the axis tilt, feels the slide and scramble. Each stop at Ball’s Cross becomes a little longer.

Wilson has read somewhere of a scientist who requested his ashes be made into a firework, who ended his earthly intactness in the starshower of a score of rockets.

He thinks of him now, thinks of himself, sees his wives and assembled guests, with their sausages on sticks, gazing at the flare and burst, thinks of his soul ricocheting off the stars.

NJ STALLARDTHE WHITE CAT

Linda had spent most of June trying to kill the white cat. For her first attempt, she used a simple method: three tablespoons of rat poison in a saucer of milk. She left the saucer next to the sliding doors of the villa. A few days later, she found two dead birds in the garden and one in the swimming pool, the grey feathers mangled in the gutter. Linda collected the birds in a shoebox and buried them beneath the bougainvillaea.

After that, she bought a BB gun from the hunting store in the mall. But when she tried to practise she couldn’t pull the trigger. She said it brought back memories of her grandpa’s suicide.

‘Would you believe me if I told you I’m an animal person?’ Linda said, leaning against the kitchen island where I was eating my cereal. She wore denim cut-offs, a faded pink T-shirt and a plastic golf visor. Her skin was aged from too much sun and the split ends of her blonde ponytail fluttered in the breeze of the AC.

‘You are?’

‘Of course I am, honey. I’ve had plenty of pets. I ride horses. I would never kill an animal except in self-defence.’

Linda didn’t want to kill the white cat, she explained. The cat had terrorised her. It left decapitated lizards on the doorstep. It stared at her while she swam. Plus it was ugly. A tiny head and a long thin body covered in pink sores and clumps of white fur. A missing eye.

‘Have you ever seen a cat with one eye? It’s gross. The skin on the socket is all pink and clenched, like an asshole,’ she said, and puckered her lips and laughed.

I assumed Linda was exaggerating about the white cat. Since I’d moved into the villa, she’d sent constant emails about the black bugs taking over the kitchen, advising me to scrub down the kitchen counters with rubbing alcohol and a paper towel, even though I’d never seen a black bug.