Red Roses for a Blue Lady Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  About Janet Thomas

  Title Page

  Foreword by Janet Thomas

  Moths Don’t Have Nests

  Coquette au Café

  Come, My Darlings

  La Scala Inflammata

  Red Roses for a Blue Lady

  Enchanter’s Nightshade

  Hyacinth

  The Forest

  Neptune’s Palace

  The Brother

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Christine Harrison was born on the Isle of Wight. She lives and writes on the west coast of Wales, which has been her home for many years. Her award-winning short fiction has brought her national acclaim and recognition. She won the Cosmopolitan Short Story Award with ‘La Scala Inflammata’ which was then published in an anthology, The Best of Cosmopolitan Fiction, and she has been a contributor to many anthologies of women’s writing from Wales.

  Fig and the Flute Player, Christine’s debut novel, was published by Parthian in 2014.

  Janet Thomas is Editor at Firefly Press, a children’s book publisher based in Cardiff and Aberystwyth, which she started with Penny Thomas in 2013. She has worked as a freelance editor for years, including five short-story collections she has edited for Honno Women’s Press, either alone or with novelist Patricia Duncker, where she first worked with Christine. She is also a member of the Honno Women’s Press Management Committee.

  Red Roses for a Blue Lady

  Christine Harrison

  Foreword

  But there were so many little cakes. How to choose just one? The cake tongs in the woman’s hand hovered over the scallop-shelled madeleines, éclairs, cigarette russes with ends dipped in chocolate and chopped pistachios, the pretty tartelettes aux fruits with their glazed black and white grapes, wild strawberries, cherries and loganberries, and all the other sweet little tempting things. All of them waiting to be gobbled up.

  This collection puts us in the position of the characters in ‘Coquette au Café’ looking at the selection of cakes in the pâtisserie window. A remarkable choice of delicious, colourful, sensuous treats, crafted by an expert, all for our delight. And of course, lucky us, we don’t have to pick just one; we can have them all!

  Christine’s stories are ‘delicious’. Sensory enjoyment is a huge part of them — you feel the weight of a coat, the taste of onion breath, the softness of bracken. Her gift for physical detail is central to the success of the stories because when she makes us feel what the character feels so exactly, she binds us to them. We have peeled that nut, tasted the icing, sat through the Greta Garbo film again, searched at the beach for the girl in the tangerine dress. It’s so vivid, we can easily make that jump to believing that we have lived through the character’s choices with them as well — we have made that small but fatal betrayal, we have lost our nerve, missed our moment or made our sudden bid for freedom. I think this is why Christine’s stories are so striking and memorable. We carry the physical memory of them with us afterwards. Things that could have been slight are filled with resonance. There is the sensory pleasure of the moment and, crucially, there is also the sharp mind observing underneath. All the characters are to some extent being watched by ’bright birdlike eyes’. I find that mix of heat and coolness, indulgence and austerity, fascinating. The ‘Coquette au Cafe’ cakes are ‘glamorous but lonely’. As in the title, there is red and blue in each story.

  Under the sensuous, visual details, you can’t miss the author’s ruthless intelligence. I love the sense of rebellion and refusal in these stories, either within the characters or, where the characters can’t or don’t rebel, within the writer’s own rebellion. These are stories about standing on the edge of conforming, looking into a prison, and sometimes falling in and sometimes running free. Those moments of freedom are so exhilarating.

  I have had the pleasure of including Christine’s stories in four anthologies I have edited over the years, three with my friend and colleague Patricia Duncker. Christine always brings that most essential, precious thing to an anthology: a voice unlike any other. There are stories in this collection that I have loved for years and some that I am delighted to read for the first time. Seeing them as a group, I am struck by how much they benefit from being brought together. The stories become richer when you can see themes slip from one to another, like roots or vines. Richer and stranger — I was repeatedly struck by that mix of softness and spikes, the ordinary and the almost fairytale, the way she can move from the recognisable to the magical in a beat, and back again, and somehow always earn that magic. That is much harder than she makes it look here. You return to your own world shaken and with a feeling of something magical still glimpsed in the corner of your eye.

  I wish I lived in Christine’s world, but the coward in me is glad I don’t. Under the ordinary, there is magic and beauty. There is so much beauty, pleasure and passion here in these stories. But underneath that there is nowhere to hide.

  I think if I were going to sum this book up in one image it would be:

  Neptune’s Palace will come alive

  at the railway station at 7pm

  The circus will come — and it will leave.

  It is wonderful to see Christine’s remarkable stories being collected together, celebrated and shared by Parthian. Dive in!

  JANET THOMAS

  Moths Don’t Have Nests

  ‘Try it on,’ he said in an offhand way.

  A moth flew out as he shook it. He held it out, opening up the pale heavy satin lining to view.

  At this my heart beat a little faster.

  ‘Has the moth got it?’ I sounded as if it didn’t matter one way or the other. ‘There was a moth. Did you see it fly out?’

  ‘Only one,’ he said, then, ‘try it on.’ He held it out now as if offering an embrace. I slipped myself inside it – it felt different from any coat I had ever worn. Putting on this coat, I was wrapped at once in all the queer bitterness of the past.

  ‘I wonder if there’s a moth’s nest,’ he said, putting his head inside the wardrobe’s cavernous space. He folded back the wardrobe door so that I could see myself in its long looking-glass. I fastened the single button of the coat. This fantastically elegant woman in the mirror looked at me.

  ‘Moth’s don’t have nests,’ I said rather absently.

  The coat was circa 1920 but in perfect nick. Fur trimmed at neck, cuffs and hem. Voluptuous but not vulgar… I felt unusually lady-like in it.

  ‘Smells sort of spicy in there,’ he said. ‘Nutmeggy. Not moth balls anyway.’

  ‘Mmm.’ I pressed the fur cuff to my nose. ‘I really like that smell.’ The cloth was the colour of a cut-open nutmeg and with a grain like that too.

  ‘It suits you,’ he said. ‘You look very posh.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Will you wear it?’ His voice trailed off inside the wardrobe again. ‘Books, books, books,’ he was saying in a muffled voice. When we bought the house this huge old wardrobe had understandably been left. It wasn’t empty.

  ‘Calf bound,’ he said smugly. ‘Smollet. Gold leaf. Most of the pages still uncut by the look of it. Blast. One volume missing. Blast.’ He sat back on his heels, looking at his find.

  ‘Possibly. Probably,’ I said. ‘Yes, of course I’ll wear it.’ But perhaps I shouldn’t wear it that afternoon to visit my friend with her new baby in hospital. If I picked the baby up it might be sick on it.

  I would look all right bringing the flowers though. Lilies perhaps would go. Red carnations would look very nice.

  ‘Does Helen like carnations?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ He had found something else. ‘Anot
her book. Russian. Handmade. Just after the revolution I’d say. There was this state-run craft movement. Look at those dyes.’

  I looked over his shoulder. It was a fairy story book: ‘Baba Yaga and the Fence made of Human Bones’; ‘The Frog Prince’. He turned the pages with careful fingers.

  ‘I wonder who she is,’ he said. We were looking at this beautiful hero girl, fur-hatted and with a coat not unlike the one I was wearing. Underneath it she had on a dress of deepest blood-red. There was a certain look about her of confident savagery, of perhaps ambivalent sexuality, of being part of the natural world and yet having a sophistication that was strange and attractive.

  ‘I don’t know who she is,’ I said.

  We stared at the Russian text which held the answer to the mystery. I felt that I had met her somewhere before. This was no doubt because of the coat I was wearing, in which messages were stitched with invisible stitches. These messages have changed my thoughts.

  ‘Stephen, I must go to the florist,’ I said. ‘It’s nearly visiting time. Will you come?’ He was looking through all the little drawers inside the wardrobe and did not answer. ‘I’ll be off then,’ I said as I swept out.

  The thing is you can’t do that – sweep out – in a modern coat. It would be too lightweight for one thing. A lovely wool and cashmere coat is warm, light as a feather, but has an ephemeral, minimalist feel. This coat had an erotic weight to it and wearing it I was a different woman.

  It wasn’t a restrictive eroticism, like a corset for example. The coat was loose and easy to wear; I could take long strides in it. I could have done cartwheels in it were I capable of doing cartwheels. At the same time it was heavy and nun-like and hid my body. I loved that.

  I picked up the skirt with one hand as I ran down the front steps. Off to the florist to see what red carnations would look like with my coat.

  There was a chilly wind. I could have done with gloves as the coat had no pockets. I comforted my cold hands with little strokes of the fur cuffs.

  After all I took chrysanthemums to the hospital because of their wintry smell.

  ‘Helen thinks the coat is ravishing,’ I told Stephen. ‘She wanted it off my back, she said why don’t I give it to Christie’s to auction.’

  ‘Is that what she said?’ His voice was interested but sarcastic as he helped me out of it.

  ‘Or donate it to the costume museum,’ I muttered.

  I knew I would take no notice of either suggestion. And yet, oh dear, the weight of the past hung on me, it made my shoulders ache. I rubbed them. Please let me have transitory things. China I can smash; things that won’t last. Paperback books I can lend to people who won’t return them. Actually, I’ve always wanted to live in a tent. And here was Stephen finding more treasures: old cruets and things.

  ‘I shall wear the coat to the concert tonight,’ I said. After its years in the dark wardrobe I would take it on an outing that was befitting. In the abbey, listening to Monteverdi, everything would feel perfectly right.

  And so it did. Walking up the nave in the interval, I put my arm through Stephen’s and he patted my hand. We stopped and spoke to friends. Mary smoothed my fur collar. ‘Mink?’ she asked in a soft voice.

  ‘She says they’ve been dead for ages,’ said Stephen. ‘Anyway, I rather like my wife wearing fur.’

  I took the coat off.

  ‘Are you too warm, darling? Shall we take a turn outside before the Finzi?’

  I put the coat around my shoulders like a cloak. Cloaks are different. Quite different. Actually, it was a cloak the girl in the Russian book had. That was how you could see her blood-red dress. I was that girl – though my frock was not red but green. Not blood-red but forest-green.

  I put the coat on properly though, to settle into our uncomfortable wooden pew. As the orchestra tuned up I thought I could catch the faint rustle of those stitched-in messages… I couldn’t make out what they were about. Perhaps they were in a foreign language. It was a relief to listen to the Finzi. I withdrew both hands into the furry cuffs and clasped them together. It was like having a mink muff.

  I sighed and Stephen put his foot against mine. He gets quite bored in concerts if they’re playing anything later than eighteenth century.

  Anyway, I managed to give my attention to the music for a while. But occasionally other thoughts drifted across. It would be best to wear my coat only when going to certain places. Cathedrals. Especially nice tea shops. That sort of thing.

  After the concert it was lovely going out of the abbey into the cold starry night and feeling warm, rich, and civilised.

  But when the cold February weather became even colder and tempted me into wearing the coat to the supermarket my latent snobbery surfaced, making me despise the plastic-wrapped cheese and the mixed bunches of frightful flowers, and, well, practically everything.

  ‘I must buy myself a practical coat,’ I told Stephen. ‘I haven’t got a really warm winter coat – only this one.’

  I was unpacking my purchases onto the kitchen table, which was littered with ornaments, books, and pictures – more of Stephen’s wardrobe finds.

  ‘If you want to help,’ he said, ‘put the cat food and the baked beans down that end, don’t mix it all up. I’m trying to sort out what to keep. What about this thing?’

  It was a sampler. They always made my heart sink. I wondered if it had been worked by the owner of the coat when she was a child. ‘Susan Butler, aged twelve. 1889. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt.’

  ‘We’ll sell it,’ I said. ‘And I’ll take that cruet. And that vase thing.’

  ‘We’ll keep the books,’ said Stephen.

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to read Smollet.’

  ‘They’ll look good on the shelves. What about the Russian book? We should have it valued.’

  ‘Keep,’ I said. I turned the pages to find the girl in the cloak and the red dress. She looked alive, as if about to speak.

  ‘We could learn Russian,’ I said.

  ‘You can if you like.’

  I put the Russian book in the Keep pile.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m going into Bath and I’ll take the things we don’t want.’

  ‘What about the coat?’

  ‘I’m wearing it.’

  ‘It seems to make you cross.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Help me out to the car, will you, I can’t live with this clutter another minute.’

  I took the country road.

  Halfway there, after I had driven about five miles, I came to a place that always held a frisson for me. I didn’t know why. It was moorland fringed with hazel coppice and reeds. It always looked different. In spring there were king cups. Now, on this cold, still winter’s afternoon, the sky was richly coloured as if painted with deep dyes: ochre, cobalt blue and indigo.

  I switched on the car headlights which picked up the eyes of sheep standing by the crossroads sign nearby. I saw a van disappearing in a cloud of smoke down the Bath road.

  Then, standing there against the coloured sky, I saw a girl. I changed gear and slowed down.

  She was just standing there in that desolate landscape. She didn’t look lost. She looked as if she owned the place. Owned the world, in fact.

  She was tall and had masses of hair, some of it in a wonderful frizz and some of it plaited into very thin plaits and twisted round her head like a crown or tiara. I slowed right down.

  On the ground beside her was a cat in a cage. That settled it: I stopped.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ She picked up the cat in the cage.

  ‘Going far?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Nice cat. Is it for sale?’

  She didn’t answer but started lacing up her long boots with the string that kept them together, sorting herself out to trek to wherever she thought she was going. I reckoned the driver of the van had left her there suddenly, or she had jumped out, half-d
ressed, in some sort of rage.

  I started the car up.

  ‘Hang on,’ she said. I waited while she finished lacing her boots and wound a scarf round her waist. She got in and put the caged kitten on her lap.

  ‘I’m going into Bath,’ I said. ‘Any good?’

  ‘That’s where that sod is going.’ She had some sort of accent. Scottish, Glaswegian perhaps. ‘He’ll be round about the abbey square. I’ll catch up with him.’

  Her anger and the cold air had flushed her cheeks. She had a faint exotic smell – it wasn’t patchouli. I was glad as patchouli gives me a headache. The little cat had set up a persistent meowing, showing tiny sharp teeth like little fish bones. She poked her finger in the cage and it chewed her already bitten-raw skin. The backs of her hands were scratched to pieces.

  We travelled in silence. She did not seem to want to talk, sitting there eaten up with her thoughts. I felt the satin lining of my coat against my ankles as I changed gear, and the soft fur on my wrists. I felt more relaxed in my coat beside this ragged muddy woman than at any time I had worn it. She made me feel properly dressed. Was it because she just didn’t care or notice, in her outlaw sort of way?

  After a while she calmed down a bit.

  ‘I’ve never seen a cat in a cage before,’ I told her.

  ‘Haven’t you?’ she said, as if there were probably a lot of things I hadn’t seen. I could feel her, from time to time, giving little glances at my coat.

  ‘Nice coat,’ she said at last.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure about it,’ I said.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Feels too much like… I don’t know.’ How could I explain my ambivalent relationship with a coat?

  ‘I had this great hat once,’ she said. ‘I lost it at Glastonbury. It had magpie feathers in it.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. We were coming down into Bath. It looked like a city that had been sacked, smoke rising straight up in the still air to the darkening sky streaked with thin lines of colour.

  ‘I’ll see if there’s room in the car park.’ Unusually, there was plenty of room. It was so cold and there was such a feeling of bad weather to come, everyone must have been at home by their fires. Or perhaps the place had been sacked.