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Thursday 4 December 2008

Christmas short story

Humiliation

The Spectator's short story for the holidays

‘Really? I don’t take Illuminations. I hope you were kind.’

‘I was very severe.’

I shrugged, as if I had been told my train was five minutes late. This is what you must do: utter indifference is your best weapon. I thought my throat would close but I managed to say, ‘Oh, well, c’est la vie.’

‘That’s very white of you,’ he said, and offered his hand. ‘Professional standards, professional courtesies.’

‘What?’ I said, shaking his proffered hand, limply.

‘Men of letters. English men of letters. So I know I can ask you this particular favour.’

I was wordless. Maltravers leant forward and thrust his face at me. I saw he had a pliant, mobile upper lip, covering an overbite. I realised the half-goatee was an attempt at hirsute facial ballast to hide his weak chin.

‘The thing is, Hill,’ he said in a deep, confiding voice, ‘I’m not here. You’ve never seen me. We have not spoken. I am, so to speak, invisible.’

Oxen are still in general use in the fields and farms of the Dordogne, and many a shock awaits the daydreaming motorist as he rounds a corner and comes upon an ox-cart with its pair of oxen, apparently immobile, in the middle of the roadway. The ox-cart moves more slowly than a walking man but a good pair can plough as well as horses.

‘Oblong is an expense of spirit in a waste of shamefully useless reading time.... Mr Hill’s laboured symbolism, his banal profundities, engender a fatigue the like of which... toiling efforts at attaining a European philosophical dimension provoked hoots of incredulous laughter in this reader....’ Raleigh Maltravers’s long two-page review of my novel in Illuminations came to me, as I lay sleepless in the hot furrow of my bed, almost as if dictated. How could I recall every word? I listened to the doves shifting outside my window as the first lemony dawn light penetrated my thin, too-narrow curtains and I felt a form of pure sensation shiver through me — one that I had not experienced since early childhood. It was hate. I recognised it: unadulterated, grade ‘A’ hate. I hated Raleigh Maltravers, and I wanted to kill him, slowly and with agonising pain.

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