Going longer. I found this story when, during the time I wrote under the pen name Jack Robinson, I went looking for my family in fiction. There are male Robinsons in fiction by Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Kafka, Céline, Muriel Spark, Gerald Brenan, Sherwood Anderson, Chris Petit; in films by Patrick Keiller; in poems by Weldon Kees and Simon Armitage; and yes, they share distinctive family traits. ‘Obdurate’ comes to mind. ‘Imperturbable’ is one of the first adjectives applied to Bowen’s Robinson, a factory manager in a small town in Ireland, separated from his wife and children. “When Robinson showed up, late, at the tennis club, his manner with women was easy and teasing, but abstract and perfectly automatic. From this had probably come the legend that he liked women ‘only in one way’.”
A woman drives fast through hilly countryside at sunset to spend the night with Robinson, her lover. Robinson has guests, a deaf woman and her loopy brother, who stay beyond their welcome and are leaving just as the woman arrives. In fact the whole story seems intent on crowding out the lovers – pages are occupied by the woman’s husband, and her two children, and Aunt Fran – and when, finally, the lovers are alone everything is awkward, neither of them knows how to behave. There’s a war on: “You cannot look at the sky without seeing the shadow, the men destroying each other.” The only people who come out of this well are the deaf woman and Vivie, one of the woman’s children: “One arbitrary line only divided this child from the animal: all her senses stood up, wanting to run the night.”
I did think about choosing the scene – around 20 pages – in Bowen’s The House in Parisset in the garden of an emptied-out house in Twickenham on an idle, warm afternoon at the end of April: Karen, Max and Naomi lying under a cherry tree in blossom, silences and drifting talk (“What I say would often be right if I meant something else”), hands touching on the grass. In my mind it’s a scene that swims free of its context, of what comes before and what after, to become a complete short story in itself; many novels contain such episodes.
Published in Look at All the Roses, Jonathan Cape, 1941; collected in The Collected Stories, Vintage, 1999
A Personal Anthology 