Mortimer Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-911547-73-0
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

'Family life is Mortimer's subject . . . she picks it apart with precise, swift, sharp strokes.' -- Lucy Scholes, Paris Review First published in 1960, Penelope Mortimer's only collection of short stories lays bare the fury and despair that lurk beneath the surface of everyday domestic life. A mother and her young son arrive at a rental house in rural France only to find themselves locked out; a fractious family of five try and get through a Saturday at home together; a publisher with a penchant for parties reconnects with an old acquaintance who's the life and soul; and a woman in a maternity ward is an unwitting witness to a disturbing drama behind the hospital curtains next to her. Sharp, unsettling, and darkly humorous, Saturday Lunch with the Brownings is fiction drawn from life that unerringly captures the complexities and cruelties of family dynamics. 'No one knows better how to catalogue in easy narrative the minutiae of domestic life or how to undermine domestic life's apparent security.' -- Sunday Times 'I can't think of a writer more attentive to emotional weather.' -- Rachel Cooke, Observer 'Devastating on domestic atrophy, flawed people, feminine rage that can barely find its words but she shows it somehow anyway, warring couples, gloom and glamour. Aggressively perfect.' -- @jessieburton 'Mortimer peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy.' -- Nick Hornby

Penelope Mortimer (1918-1999) was born in Wales. In 1947 her first novel, Johanna, was published and she began writing for The New Yorker. Mortimer wrote nine novels, including Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1958) and two volumes of memoir. Her best-known work, the semi-autobiographical novel The Pumpkin Eater (1962), was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter and made into a film starring Anne Bancroft.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mortimer, Penelope

Leseproben

THE SKYLIGHT
The heat, as the taxi spiralled the narrow hill bends, became more violent. The road thundered between patches of shade thrown by overhanging rock. Behind the considerable noise of the car, the petulant hooting at each corner, the steady tick-tick of the cicadas spread through the woods and olive groves as though to announce their coming. The woman sat so still in the back of the taxi that at corners her whole body swayed, rigid as a bottle in a jolting bucket, and sometimes fell against the five-year-old boy who curled, thumb plugged in his mouth, on the seat beside her. The woman felt herself disintegrate from heat. Her hair, tallow blonde, crept on her wet scalp. Her face ran off the bone like water off a rock – the bridges of nose, jaw and cheekbones must be drained of flesh by now. Her body poured away inside the too-tight cotton suit and only her bloodshot feet, almost purple in the torturing sandals, had any kind of substance. ‘When are we there?’ the boy asked. ‘Soon.’ ‘In a minute will we be there?’ ‘Yes.’ A long pause. What shall we find, the mother asked herself. She wished, almost at the point of tears, that there were someone else to ask, and answer, this question. ‘Are we at France now?’ For the sixth time since the plane had landed she answered, ‘Yes, Johnny.’ The child’s eyes, heavy-lidded, long-lashed, closed; the thumb stoppered his drooping mouth. Oh, no, she thought, don’t let him, he mustn’t go to sleep. ‘Look. Look at the …’ Invention failed her. They passed a shack in a stony clearing. ‘Look at the chickens,’ she said, pulling at the clamped stuff of her jacket. ‘French chickens,’ she added, long after they had gone by. She stared dully at the taxi driver’s back, the dark stain of sweat between his shoulder blades. He was not the French taxi driver she had expected. He was old and quiet and burly, driving his cab with care. The price he had quoted for his forty kilometre drive from the airport had horrified her. She had to translate all distances into miles and then apply them, a lumbering calculation, to England. How much, she had wanted to ask, would an English taxi driver charge to take us from London Airport to …? It was absurd. There was no one to tell her anything. Only the child asking his interminable questions, with faith. ‘Where?’ he demanded suddenly, sitting up. She felt herself becoming desperate. It’s too much for me, she thought. I can’t face it. ‘What do you mean – where?’ ‘The chickens.’ ‘Oh. They’ve gone. Perhaps there’ll be some more, later on.’ ‘But when are we there?’ ‘Oh, Jonathan …’ In her exasperation, she used his full name. He turned his head away, devouring his thumb, looking closely at the dusty rexine. When her hot, stiff body fell against him, he did not move. She tried to compose herself, to resume command. It had seemed so sensible, so economical, to take this house for the summer. We all know, she had said (although she herself did not), what the French are – cheat you at every turn. And then, the horror of those Riviera beaches. We’ve found this charming little farmhouse up in the mountains – well, they say you can nip down to Golfe-Juan in ten minutes. In the car, of course. Philip will be driving the girls, but I shall take Johnny by air. I couldn’t face those dreadful hotels with him. Expensive? But, my dear, you don’t know what it cost us in Bournemouth last year, and I feel one owes them the sun. And then there’s this dear old couple, the Gachets, thrown in so to speak. They’ll have it all ready for us, otherwise of course I couldn’t face arriving there alone with Johnny. As it is, we shall be nicely settled when Philip and the girls arrive. I envy us too. I couldn’t face the prospect of those awful public meals with Johnny – no, I just couldn’t face it. And so on. It was a story she had made up in the cold, well-ordered English spring. She could hear herself telling it. Now it was real. She was inadequate. She was in pain from the heat, and not a little afraid. The child depended on her. I can’t face it, she thought, anticipating the arrival at the strange house, the couple, the necessity of speaking French, the task of getting the child bathed and fed and asleep. Will there be hot water, mosquitoes, do they know how to boil an egg? Her head beat with worry. She looked wildly from side to side of the taxi, searching for some sign of life. The woods had ended, and there was now no relief from the sun. An ugly pink house with green shutters stood away from the road; it looked solid, like an enormous brick, in its plot of small vines. Can that be it? But the taxi drove on. ‘I suppose he knows where he’s going,’ she said. The child turned on his back, as though in bed, straddling his thin legs. Over the bunched hand his eyes regarded her darkly, unblinking. ‘Do sit up,’ she said. His eyelids drooped again. His legs, his feet in their white socks and disproportionately large brown sandals, hung limp. His head fell to one side. ‘Poor baby,’ she said softly. ‘Tired baby.’ She managed to put an arm round him. They sat close, in extreme discomfort. Suddenly, without warning, the driver swung the taxi off the road. The woman fell on top of the child, who struggled for a moment before managing to free himself. He sat up, alert, while his mother pulled and pushed, trying to regain her balance. A narrow, stony track climbed up into a bunch of olive trees. The driver played his horn round each bend. Then, on a perilous slope, the car stopped. The driver turned in his seat, searching back over his great soaked shoulder as though prepared, even expecting, to find his passengers gone. ‘La Caporale,’ he said. The woman bent, peering out of the car windows. She could see nothing but stones and grass. The heat seized the stationary taxi, turning it into a furnace. ‘But – where?’ He indicated something which she could not see, then hauled himself out of the driving seat, lumbered round and opened the door. ‘Ici?’ she asked, absolutely disbelieving. He nodded, spoke, again waved an arm, pointing. ‘Mais …’ It was no good. ‘He says we’re here,’ she told the child. ‘We’d better get out.’ They stood on the stony ground, looking about them. There was a black barn, its doors closed. There was a wall of loose rocks piled together. The cicadas screeched. There was nothing. ‘But where’s the house?’ she demanded. ‘Where is the house? Où est la maison?’ The driver picked up their suitcases and walked away. She took the child’s hand, pulling him after her. The high heels of her sandals twisted on the hard rubble; she hurried, bent from the waist, as though on bound feet. Then, suddenly remembering, she stopped and pulled out of her large new handbag a linen hat. She fitted this, hardly glancing at him, on the child’s head. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I can’t think where he’s taking us.’ Round the end of the wall, over dead grass; and above them, standing on a terrace, was the square grey house, its shuttered windows set anyhow into its walls like holes in a warren. A small skylight, catching the sun, flashed from the mean slate roof. They followed the driver up the steps on to the terrace. A few pots and urns stood about, suggesting that somebody had once tried to make a garden. A withered hosepipe lay on the ground as though it had died trying to reach the sparse geraniums. A chipped, white-painted table and a couple of wrought-iron chairs were stacked under a palm tree. A lizard skittered down the front of the house. The shutters and the doors were of heavy black timber with iron bars and hinges. They were all closed. The heat sang with the resonant hum of failing consciousness. The driver put the suitcases down outside the closed door and wiped his face and the back of his neck with a handkerchief. ‘Vous avez la clef, madame?’ ‘La clay? La clay?’ He pursed and twisted his hand over the lock. ‘Oh, the key. No. Non. Monsieur and Madame Gachet … the people who live in the house … Ce n’est pas,’ she tried desperately, ‘ferme.’ The driver tried the door. It was firm. She knocked. There was no answer. ‘Vous n’avez la clef?’ He was beginning to sound petulant. ‘Non. Non. Parce que … Oh dear.’ She looked up at the blind face of the house. ‘They must be out. Perhaps they didn’t get my wire. Perhaps …’ She looked at the man, who did not understand what she was saying; at...