Collected Stories Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Bernard MacLaverty

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  I: Secrets 1977

  The Exercise

  A Rat and Some Renovations

  St Paul Could Hit the Nail on the Head

  A Happy Birthday

  Secrets

  The Miraculous Candidate

  Between Two Shores

  Where the Tides Meet

  Hugo

  A Pornographer Woos

  Anodyne

  The Deep End

  II: A Time to Dance 1982

  Father and Son

  A Time to Dance

  My Dear Palestrina

  Life Drawing

  Phonefun Limited

  The Daily Woman

  The Beginnings of a Sin

  Eels

  Language, Truth and Lockjaw

  III: The Great Profundo 1987

  Words the Happy Say

  The Break

  The Drapery Man

  More than just the Disease

  In the Hills above Lugano

  End of Season

  The Great Profundo

  Remote

  Across the Street

  IV: Walking the Dog 1994

  Walking the Dog

  The Grandmaster

  A Silent Retreat

  At the Beach

  The Wake House

  In Bed

  Compensations

  Just Visiting

  V: Matters of Life & Death 2006

  On the Roundabout

  The Trojan Sofa

  Learning to Dance

  The Clinic

  A Belfast Memory

  The Wedding Ring

  The Assessment

  Up the Coast

  Visiting Takabuti

  Winter Storm

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Since the publication of Secrets and Other Stories in 1977, Bernard MacLaverty has been celebrated as one of the finest living short-story writers. Writing in the New York Times, William Boyd summoned the shades of Yeats, Joyce and Flann O’Brien, insisting that ‘MacLaverty sits perfectly comfortably’ in their company. The Guardian simply said ‘MacLaverty is a master.’

  Melding his native Irish sensibilities to those of his adopted west-coast Scotland, these tales attend to life’s big events: love and loss, separation and violence, death and betrayal. But the stories teem with smaller significant moments too – private epiphanies, chilling exchanges, intimate encounters. A writer of great compassion, insight and humanity, MacLaverty surprises us time and again with the sensitivity of his ear, the accuracy of his eye. Each of these extraordinary stories – with their wry, self-deprecating humour, their elegance and subtle wisdom – gets to the very heart of life.

  The Collected Short Stories includes most of Secrets, A Time to Dance, The Great Profundo, Walking the Dog and Matters of Life & Death.

  About the Author

  Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast in 1942. He worked as a lab technician in the anatomy department at Queen’s University for 10 years before studying English and training as a teacher. In 1975 he went to live in Scotland with his wife, Madeline, and their four children. MacLaverty has published five collections of short stories – Secrets, A Time to Dance, The Great Profundo, Walking the Dog and Matters of Life & Death – and four novels: Lamb, Cal, The Anatomy School and Grace Notes, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. He has written for radio, television and screen. His short film Bye Child won a BAFTA. He lives in Glasgow.

  by the same author

  Novels

  LAMB

  CAL

  GRACE NOTES

  THE ANATOMY SCHOOL

  Short Stories

  SECRETS

  A TIME TO DANCE

  THE GREAT PROFUNDO

  WALKING THE DOG

  MATTERS OF LIFE & DEATH

  Film

  BYE-CHILD

  For Children

  A MAN IN SEARCH OF A PET

  ANDREW McANDREW

  for Madeline

  Collected Stories

  Bernard MacLaverty

  INTRODUCTION

  Writing essays is not what fiction writers are necessarily good at so writing an introduction to this volume of my Collected Stories is not easy. I can’t praise the stories or point out weaknesses. I suppose the easy answer is to ask you to skip this bit and go on and read the stories. The other way is to tell you bits of my life and how I first came to writing.

  I remember my mother, after watching a TV play of mine, saying to me with an incredulous and worried shake of the head, ‘Where did all this come from?’

  She was partly responsible, having married an artist. It was a surprising choice given that she was so full of notions of correctness. She was a good and kind woman, fastidious in the practice of her religion, who was concerned about the properness of how to talk, how to walk, how to eat. In the bus she would say to my five-year-old self, ‘Sit nicely’. Everything had to be done nicely – except that you can’t do creative things nicely. If you do them nicely then they cease to be any good.

  My childhood was spent in a Victorian red-brick terraced house in Atlantic Avenue, Belfast. The rooms had leftover bell handles for my brother and I to summon the staff: my mother, father, grandfather, grandmother and great aunt. Across the street was another grandfather and yet another aunt. I thought that everybody grew up surrounded by old people. When you had a fight in one house you could always run to the other – and make your demands on different servants.

  In our house the elders would sit round the fire making toast on the end of a long custom-made wire fork, clandestinely wrought in the shipyard by an uncle. It went in and out like a telescope. They also used to eat thinly sliced orange sandwiches and wonder aloud if it was the kind of thing the Queen ate and, if so, did she eat them at the same time of day as they did. The air was full, always and everywhere, with the sound of the old ones talking. At one time I was ill and feverish, lying on a sofa in front of the fire happed in blankets. The way the hushed conversational tones faded diminuendo into sleep is one of my best childhood memories.

  Another is of starting a notebook to record some of the things Aunty Betty said – she had such a quirky way with words. I must have been in my mid to late teens and I see this as one of the first stepping stones to being interested in writing. Aunty Betty had four boys and one day she was down on her hands and knees wiping round the floor of the toilet and shouting, ‘All you wains must have crooked flutes.’

  Nowadays people who aspire to write get themselves into their nearest creative-writing class. In my day there was no such thing but I am grateful to the folk who encouraged me: teachers, neighbours, friends. The first one to draw my attention to the importance of written words was my primary-school teacher. He looked like the kind of man who could bend lamp-posts or bite through dictionaries. But he was very gentle. He set a homework to describe ‘A rainy day’. When he returned our corrected jotters he gave me a sweet and a sixpence and read my effort out to the class. I think my mother liked it better than anything I ever wrote after. She kept it in a box with the insurance and other important documents until the day she died. She said to me once, ‘Son, I pray every night you’ll not write anything dirty.’

  My primary-school teacher was an eccentric. He also told us stories that scared the wits out of us. One was his version of the man who sold his soul to the devil so’s he could become the best accordion player in Ireland. But you don’t get irony at that age; all that comes across is s
tomach-churning fear. In his telling of the story he suggested that the would-be accordionist could briefly escape from the fires of hell, and ask you for help. Don’t think of it as a dream or a nightmare because the proof will be there in the scorch-marks in the wood at the foot of your bed.

  In grammar school at senior level I had a great and inspirational teacher – a priest nicknamed ‘the wee Dean’. He taught us about poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Macbeth, D.H. Lawrence and much more. Each class he’d rush in with a stack of freshly Gestetnered sheets in his arms. He’d tell us how late he’d sat up preparing these. Each page was spattered with blackened ‘o’s like it had been hit by buckshot. The plastic centre of each ‘o’ had fallen out, so enthusiastically had he typed it. After I left school I met the wee Dean on the street one day. I had just borrowed a book from the library – a novel of some import. It could have been one of my discoveries of that time – Dostoyevsky or Kafka, Tolstoy or Thomas Mann – and because I might be thought a pseudo-intellectual I carried the book with the title hidden against my chest. However when I saw my former teacher approaching I turned the book face outwards – much to my shame. But he engaged with it, ‘Ah I see your reading such n’ such by so n’ so. Great book; wonderful writer.’

  It must have been around this time – coinciding with the onset of occasional shaving – I started writing: deeply embarrassing poetry, mostly in the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Then, when these so obviously failed, I made attempts at the short story. I wrote these on blank examination booklets stolen from exam rooms policed by careless invigilators. We had a neighbour – a Mrs Theo McCrudden – an English teacher (Theodora was her first name) from a few doors away who read and encouraged my first hesitant efforts. Looking back I’m glad my neighbour was not the wonderful Flannery O’Connor who, when she was asked if she thought universities stifled young writers, said that they didn’t stifle half enough of them.

  Religion both terrified and elevated me. It dominated my childhood. The fact that I don’t believe a word of it now doesn’t diminish the effect it had on me then. It elevated me because of the intimacy I had with the maker of all things – the most important personage in the Universe. We were on the best of terms, able to chat day or night. It was only much later that I realised the workshop was empty. But at that time I believed in the Church’s acres of symbolism, knew without thinking that vestments were colour-coded – red for martyrs, black for death, purple for penance, green for hope, white for grace or purity. Indeed all ceremonies were layered with meaning – at Easter the passing from one person to another of the flame of a candle in a darkened church; the cleansing nature of the waters of Baptism, the secrecy of the Confessional, the reverberations of the altar bell, the scarlet glow of the sanctuary lamp, the gym shoes we wore as altar boys so as not to be too noisy in the presence of God (although why God should want the place quiet I never knew). So I grew up knowing things represented other things. This can only be good for someone who is going to be a writer.

  It is difficult to be precise when an awareness of words first began for me. There was always a time when I repeated a word so frequently that it lost all meaning and the black swamp closed over my head. The meaning of words and the meaning of the universe sat very close.

  Seamus Heaney puts it well – as he puts so many things well – in Preoccupations: ‘Maybe it began with the exotic listing on the wireless dial. Stuttgart, Leipzig, Oslo, Hilversum. Maybe it was stirred by the beautiful sprung rhythms of the old BBC weather forecast: Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre; or with the gorgeous and inane phraseology of the catechism; or with the Litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry of our household: Tower of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star, Health of the Sick, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted.’

  I am able to say ‘snap’ to all of these and add the word-induced nausea of the response to the Litany. After each item the response was ‘Pray for us’ which blurred into ‘prefrus’, ‘prefrus’, ‘prefrus’. And the black swamp closed again.

  Heaney goes on to observe, ‘None of these things was consciously savoured at the time but I think the fact that I can still recall them with ease, and can delight in them as verbal music means that they were bedding the ear with a kind of linguistic hard core that could be built on someday.’

  In the same vein there was the Latin we parroted as altar boys. Not having a clue what it meant we were in love with the sound of it – and the grandeur it lent to our Belfast accents.

  In the missal, kneeling beside my mother at mass, I came across the word ‘concupiscence’. At eight or nine I hadn’t realised that the young James Joyce had a similar problem with the word ‘simony’. I rolled the word ‘concupiscence’ round my mouth like a gobstopper and asked my poor mother what it meant but she shook her head from side to side. What did she know about the yearnings of lust and the desires of the flesh?

  In an essay, early in secondary school, shortly after reading a passage of D.H. Lawrence I used the phrase ‘the fecund darkness’. My Great Aunt Mary, looking over my shoulder, gave a little sniff and said there was something ‘not quite right’ about that word. She had been a school teacher herself but she mustn’t have read much Lawrence because she nearly collapsed when she caught me reading the school set text of Thomas Hardy’s adult tale The Woodlanders.

  This fascination with words became worrying when I found myself enjoying Roget’s Thesaurus. It was like opening a gold mine.

  Another thing which might have been part of my ‘linguistic hard core’ was – I hate to admit it in public – being sent to elocution. It was just another bullet in my mother’s bandoleer of ‘doing things nicely.’ Maybe that was because the other cultural nightmare was not an option – the piano. In our house there was one which had not been tuned for years and half of the notes, when pressed down, played silent. ‘A dust-gatherer’, my mother called it. So it was my job to stand up straight and try to speak like a BBC child. The only advantage was an early contact with poetry – particularly that of James Stephens – its sounds and rhythms. I can’t remember what age I was but I was young enough to be unskilled about blowing my nose. Before going on to do my recitation at a competition my mother would give me a clean, freshly ironed hanky and tell me to get somebody backstage, preferably a woman, to do the needful before I went on.

  One of the best learning experiences was long after leaving school when Philip Hobsbaum, an English lecturer at Queen’s University, after reading a short story of mine in a medical magazine, invited me to come along to the ‘Group’. I was an employee of the university at the time – a medical laboratory technician in the Anatomy Department. There were an amazing number of talented people in the Group, none of whom had published anything. It included the poets Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Frank Ormsby, Paul Muldoon, Jimmy Simmons, Joan Newman and Ciarán Carson, the playwright Stewart Parker and many others. Hobsbaum chaired the meetings and always took the part of the writer against those who were being critical, waggling his pencil as he did so.

  What happened was that you submitted a story or a sheet of poems or whatever, and they would be typed up and copies would be run off and posted out to members. On Monday night the author would read his contribution aloud to the other writers, all slumped in armchairs in Philip’s flat. Then people would either make helpful suggestions or, if they were feeling aggressive, unhelpful ones. The only formality was that there was no alcohol – coffee was the drink – writers, alcohol and criticism do not go together.

  But the thing which amazed me about the Group was that my attempts at writing were being taken seriously. And this seriousness encouraged me to send stories to more permanent publications like The Honest Ulsterman and David Marcus’s ‘New Irish Writing’ page in the Irish Press. The latter paid a small fee. The first money I earned as a writer was from the BBC’s ‘Morning Story’. I was very excited when invited into the BBC to discuss the piece I had submitted. I wa
s told ‘Morning Story’ was two thousand eight hundred words and that my story was too long. At first I was indignant. Then, back at home, I discovered that the more words you took out the better the story became. Up to a point. If you went too far down that road you’d end up writing nothing.

  Much later I was frightened by Wittgenstein’s ‘In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing.’

  Ours was not a great reading family. Like most things, the activity was subjugated to religion. The only reason you would read a book was if it kept you out of hell or made your entry into heaven easier. Books of this nature were kept in a glass-fronted bureau bookcase. I know the names of the authors and can recall the colours of the spines – D.K. Broster, H.V. Morton, A.J. Cronin – the initials making me think of a literary cricket team. I once talked to a man in a pub about books and he told me that I should read those Reader’s Digest Classics. ‘They cut out all the rubbish and you’re left with pure classic.’ The only reason a book was owned, rather than borrowed from the library, was because it had been a present bought for Christmas. Then it ended up in the glass-fronted bureau bookcase. I only read one of them, it was the first grown-up book I’d ever read – essays by the humorous Irish writer John D. Sheridan. I was about ten years of age and was returning the book to where I’d found it. Whether it was ‘The Right Time’ or ‘My Hat Blew Off’ I can’t remember. What I do recall was my father’s interest: that I was leaving behind the Just William and Biggles books. He must have asked me why I liked the John D. Sheridan and I told him that it made me laugh – those people on the street who always asked the author for the right time – nothing else was any good to them. We were alone in the room standing by the window and when the issue of books was raised he sat down on the arm of a sofa to carry on the conversation. I remember that with clarity – because conversations with adults never happened.