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Sunday 7 September 2008

Christmas short story

Humiliation

The Spectator's short story for the holidays

I winced and tut-tutted as I looked at Parker’s strong and elegant features as she related, with great expression, the various diagnoses and prognoses the doctors had given her and I wondered if it were pos-

sible to have an affair with a beautiful woman who shared a first name with the pen I wrote with every day. I decided, on balance, that it was. We agreed to meet for dinner at the Courderc later, after her trip to Brive to see poor Raleigh. Do give him my very best, I said.

We did not eat oysters that night, needless to say. We talked about books, plays, films, cities we knew. She was a young widow, intelligent and cultured (Raleigh had known her late husband, a composer), rediscovering her place in the world. I felt that honour — or professional standards, professional courtesies — obliged me to tell her about Mrs Raleigh Maltravers and the Maltravers brood and she disguised her evident shock with admirable indifference, though I saw a tear well momentarily in her eye. After our supper we walked down to the quai by the old bridge and stood under the elms and watched the black oily river slide by, limned by the lights of the town behind us. I knew I could have kissed her if I had wanted to and thought that she would have let me, but I decided to wait until tomorrow (we had made plans to go to Périgueux — shame to waste the hired car). As we stood there I conjured up the image of a pale and voided Raleigh Maltravers, groaning quietly in the hospital at Brive as his body tried to subdue or expel the remaining toxins lingering inside him. Was it my sun-stewed oyster that had done for Raleigh, I wondered? Or was it that bitter drop of my humiliated blood? No matter: perhaps he would prudently chew his oysters in future — if he ever dared let another one down his throat — the only certain way to tell if an oyster is bad. Parker and I walked slowly back to the Hôtel de la Gare. I kissed her hand in the lobby and climbed the stairs briskly, like a boy, two at a time, to my attic room.

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