Learning to Talk: Short stories. Hilary Mantel

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СКАЧАТЬ was in the kitchen, talking to my stepfather, who I was told to call Dad these days. I heard the boy say it was a right shame, but I didn’t listen to find out what the shame was. The boy went out, my stepfather with him. They were chatting as if they were familiar.

      I didn’t understand in those days how people knew each other. They’d say, you know her, her who married him. Constant was her name before she married him, or, her name was Reilly. There was a time when I didn’t understand how names got changed, or how anything happened, really. When somebody went out of the door I always wondered who or what they’d come back as, and whether they’d come back at all. I don’t mean to make me sound simple, my infant self. I could pick out reasons for everything I did. I thought it was other people who were the sport of fortune, and the children of whim. I was the sole heir to the logic in my head: sole heir and beneficiary.

      When my stepfather had gone out, I found myself alone in our front room, before the slumbering and low-burning fire; and so I started talking to the puppy Victor. I had read manuals of dog training in preparation for his arrival. They said that dogs liked a low, calm, soothing tone, but they didn’t suggest what to say in it. He didn’t look as if he had many interests yet, so I told him about the things that interested me. I squatted on the floor next to him, so my great size wouldn’t intimidate him. I looked into his face. Know my face, I prayed. After a certain amount of boredom from me, Victor fell to the floor as if his legs had been snapped, and slept like the dead. I sat down beside him to watch him. I had a book open on my knees but I didn’t read it. I watched him, and I had never been so still. I knew that fidgeting was a vice, and I had tried to combat it, but I did now know stillness like that was in me, or calm like in the half-hour I first watched Victor.

      When my stepfather came back, he had a worried frown on his face, and something under his overcoat. A foxy muzzle poked out, noisily snuffling the air. ‘This is Mike,’ my stepfather said. ‘He was going to be destroyed.’ He put the new puppy on the ground. It was a bouncing skewbald made of rubber. It ran to the fire. It ran to Victor and sniffed him. It raced in a circle and bit chunks out of the air. Its tongue panted. It jumped on Victor and began to pulverise him.

      Mike – let it be understood – was not an extra present for me. Victor was my dog and my responsibility. Mike was the other dog: he was everyone’s, and no one’s, responsibility. Victor, as it proved, was of sedate, genteel character. When he was first put on his lead, he walked daintily, at heel, as if he had been trained in a former life.

      But when the lead was first clipped on to Mike’s collar, he panicked. He ran to the end of it and yelped and spun into the air, and hurtled out into space, and turned head over heels. Then he flopped down on his side, and thrashed around as if he were in danger of a heart attack. I fumbled at his collar, desperate to set him free; his eye rolled, the fur of his throat was damp.

      Try him again, when he’s a bit older, my mother suggested.

      Everybody said that it was nice that Victor had got his brother with him, that they would be faithful to each other, etc. I didn’t think so, but what I didn’t think I kept to myself.

      The puppies had a pretty good life, except at night when the ghosts that lived in our house came out of the stone-floored pantry, and down from the big cupboard to the left of the chimney breast. Depend upon it, they were not dripping or ladies or genteel; they were nothing like the ghost of drowned Clara, her sodden blouse frilled to the neck. These were ghosts with filed teeth. You couldn’t see them, but you could sense their presence when you saw the dogs’ bristling necks, and saw the shudders run down their backbones. The ruff on Victor’s neck was growing long now. Despite everything my mother had vowed, the dogs did not get food out of tins. They got scraps of anything that was going. Substitutions were constantly made, in our house. Though it was said that no one thing was like any other.

      ‘Try the dog on his lead again,’ my mother said. If a person said, ‘the dog,’ you knew Mike was the dog meant. Victor sat in the corner. He did not impose his presence. His brown eyes blinked.

      I tried the dog on his lead again. He bolted across the room, taking me with him. I borrowed a book from the public library, 101 Hints on Dog Care. Mike took it in the night and chewed it up, all but the last four hints. Mike would pull you in a hedge, he would pull you in a canal, he would pull you in a boating lake so you drowned like cousin Clara, when her careless beau tipped her out of the rowing boat. When I was nine I used to think quite a lot about Clara, her straw hat skimming among the lily pads.

      It was when my brother P.G. Pig was born that my mother broke her own rule. I heard the cousins and aunts talking in lowered voices about the choice of name. They didn’t take my views into account – no doubt they thought I’d recommend, Oh, call him Victor. Robert was mooted but my mother said Bob she could not abide. All those names were at first to be ruled out, that people naturally make into something else. But this left too few to draw on. At last my mother made up her mind on Peter, both syllables to be rigidly enforced. How did she think she would enforce them when he was a schoolboy, when he went to the football field, when he grew to be a weaver or a soldier in a khaki blouson? I asked myself these things. And, mentally, I shrugged. I saw myself in my mind. ‘Just asking!’ I said. My fingers were spread and my eyes were round.

      But there was something else about the baby’s name, something that was going to be hidden. By listening at doors, by pasting myself against the wall and listening at doors, I found it was this; that the baby was to be given a second name, and it was to be George, which was the name of my aunt Connie’s dead husband. Oh, had Connie a husband, I said to myself. I still thought that widow, like mongrel, was a category of its own.

      Peter George, I said to myself, PG, Peegee, P.G. Pig. He would have a name, and it would not be Peter, nor would it be Pete. But why so hushed? Why the averted shoulders and the voices dropped? Because Connie was not to be told. It was going to be too much for her altogether, it would send her into a fit of the hysterics if she found out. It was my own mother’s personal tribute to the long-destroyed George, who to my knowledge she had not mentioned before: a tribute which, to pay, she was prepared to throw over one of her most characteristic notions. So strong, she said, were her feelings on the matter.

      But wait. Wait a minute. Let logic peep in at the window here. This was Connie, was it not? Aunt Connie who lived next door? It was Connie, who in three weeks’ time would attend the christening? As Catholics we christen early, being very aware of the devil. I pictured the awful word ‘George’ weighting the priest’s tongue, making him clutch his upper chest, reducing him to groans until it rolled out, crashing on the flags and processing down the aisle; and Connie’s arm flung up, the word ‘Aa…gh!’ flashing from her gaping mouth as she was mown down. What an awful death, I said to myself. Smirking, I said, what a destruction.

      In the event, Connie found out about the naming in good time. My mother said – and thunder was on her brow – ‘They told her in the butcher’s. And she’d only gone in, bless her, for her little bit of a slice of –’

      I left her presence. In the kitchen, Victor was sitting in the corner, curling up an edge of liver-coloured lip. I wondered if something had provoked him. A ghost come out early? Perhaps, I thought, it’s George.

      Connie was next door as usual, going about her tasks in her own kitchen. You could hear her through the thin wall; the metal colander knocking against the enamel sink, the squeak of chair legs across the linoleum. In the days following she showed no sign of hysterical grief, or even nostalgia. My mother watched her closely. ‘They never should have told her,’ my mother said. ‘A shock such as that could do lasting harm.’ For some reason, she looked disappointed.

      I didn’t know what it was about, and I don’t now, and I doubt if I want to: it was just some tactic one person was trying on another person and it was the reason I didn’t like СКАЧАТЬ