Getting a Life: Stories - Hardcover

Simpson, Helen

 
9780375411090: Getting a Life: Stories
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375411097 ISBN 13: 9780375411090
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Set against the backdrop of modern-day London, a collection of nine entertaining short stories captures the joys, tribulations, triumphs, and annoyances of domestic life as it explores the worlds of two female teachers exchanging drunken confidences at a small cafT, a teenage poetry lover who resolves to build a future far different from her career-oriented mother, and others. 12,500 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Helen Simpson grew up in a suburb of London. She is the author of two award-winning collections of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award) and Dear George, as well as one novel, Flesh and Grass. In 1993 she was included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and in 1991 she was the first recipient of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

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GOLDEN APPLES

Jade Beaumont was technically up in her bedroom revising for the exams which were now only weeks away. Her school gave them study days at home, after lectures on trust and idleness. She was supposed to be sorting out the differences between Wordsworth and Coleridge at the moment.

Down along the suburban pleasantness of Miniver Road the pavements were shaded by fruit trees, and the front gardens of the little Edwardian villas smiled back at her with early lilac, bushes of crimson flowering currant and the myopic blue dazzle of forget-me-nots. She felt light on her feet and clever, like a cat, snuffing the air, pinching a pungent currant leaf.

There was a belief held by Jade’s set that the earlier you hardened yourself off and bared your skin, the more lasting the eventual tan; and so she had that morning pulled on a brief white skirt and T-shirt. She was on her way to an interview for a holiday job at the garden center. Summer! She couldn’t wait. The morning was fair but chilly and the white-gold hairs on her arms and legs stood up and curved to form an invisible reticulation, trapping a layer of warm air a good centimeter deep.

I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

That was cool, but Coleridge was a minefield. Just when you thought he’d said something really brilliant, he went raving off full steam ahead into nothingness. He was a nightmare to write about. Anyway, she herself found outward forms utterly absorbing, the color of clothes, the texture of skin, the smell of food and flowers. She couldn’t see the point of extrapolation. Keats was obviously so much better than the others, but you didn’t get the choice of questions with him.

She paused to inhale the sweet air around a philadelphus Belle Etoile, then noticed the host of tired daffodils at its feet.

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy.

She looked back down her years at school, the reined-in feeling, the stupors of boredom, the teachers in the classrooms like tired lion-tamers, and felt quite the opposite. She was about to be let out. And every day when she left the house, there was the excitement of being noticed, the warmth of eye-beams, the unfolding consciousness of her own attractive powers. She was the focus of every film she saw, every novel she read. She was about to start careering round like a lustrous loose cannon.

Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

She was never going to go dead inside or live somewhere boring like this, and she would make sure she was in charge at any work she did and not let it run her. She would never be like her mother, making timetables and lists and endless arrangements, lost forever in a forest of twitching detail with her tense talk of juggling and her self-importance about her precious job and her joyless “running the family.” No, life was not some sort of military campaign; or, at least, hers would not be.

When she thought of her mother, she saw tendons and hawsers, a taut figure at the front door screaming at them all to do their music practice. She was always off out; she made them do what she said by remote control. Her trouble was, she’d forgotten how to relax. It was no wonder Dad was like he was.

And everybody said she was so amazing, what she managed to pack into twenty-four hours. Dad worked hard, they said, but she worked hard too and did the home shift, whatever that was. Not really so very amazing, though; she’d forgotten to get petrol a couple of weeks ago, and the school run had ground to a halt. In fact some people might say downright inefficient.

On the opposite side of the road, a tall girl trailed past with a double buggy of grizzling babies, a Walkman’s shrunken tinkling at her ears. Au pair, remarked Jade expertly to herself, scrutin- izing the girl’s shoes, cerise plastic jellies set with glitter. She wanted some just like that, but without the purple edging.

She herself had been dragged up by a string of au pairs. Her mother hated it when she said that. After all, she was supposed to take delight in us! thought Jade viciously, standing stock-still, outraged; like, be there with us. For us. Fair seed-time had my soul I don’t think.

Above her the cherry trees were fleecy and packed with a foam of white petals. Light warm rays of the sun reached her upturned face like kisses, refracted as a fizzy dazzle through the fringing of her eyelashes. She turned to the garden beside her and stared straight into a magnolia tree, the skin of its flowers’ stiff curves streaked with a sexual crimson. She was transported by the light and the trees, and just as her child self had once played the miniature warrior heroine down green alleys, so she saw her self now floating in this soft sunshine, moving like a panther into the long jeweled narrative which was her future.

Choice landscapes and triumphs and adventures quivered, quaintly framed there in the zigzag light like pendant crystals on a chandelier. There was the asterisk trail of a shooting star, on and on for years until it petered out at about thirty-three or thirty-four, leaving her at some point of self-apotheosis, high and nobly invulnerable, one of Tiepolo’s ceiling princesses looking down in beautiful amusement from a movie-star cloud. This was about as far as any of the novels and films took her too.

A pleasurable sigh escaped her as the vision faded, and she started walking again, on past the tranquil houses, the colored glass in a hall window staining the domestic light, a child’s bicycle propped against the trunk of a standard rose. She sensed babies breathing in cots in upstairs rooms, and solitary women becalmed somewhere downstairs, chopping fruit or on the telephone organizing some toddler tea. It really was suburban purdah round here. They were like battery hens, weren’t they, rows of identical hutches, so neat and tidy and narrow-minded. Imagine staying in all day, stewing in your own juices. Weren’t they bored out of their skulls? It was beyond her comprehension.

And so materialistic, she scoffed, observing the pelmeted strawberry-thief curtains framing a front room window; so bour- geois. Whereas her gap-year cousin had just been all over India for under two hundred pounds.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Although after a good patch of freedom she fully intended to pursue a successful career, the way ahead paved by her future degrees in business studies and marketing. But she would never end up anywhere like here. No! It would be a converted warehouse with semiastral views and no furniture. Except perhaps for the ultimate sofa.

Jade rounded the corner into the next road, and suddenly there on the pavement ahead of her was trouble. A child was lying flat down on its back screaming while a man in coveralls crouched over it, his antidust mask lifted to his forehead like a frogman. Above them both stood a broad fair woman, urgently advising the child to calm down.

“You’ll be better with a child than I am,” said the workman gratefully as Jade approached, and before she could agree—or disagree—he had shot off back to his sandblasting.

“She’s stuck a lentil up her nose,” said the woman crossly, worriedly. “She’s done it before. More than once. I’ve got to get it out.”

She...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375411097
ISBN 13 
9780375411090
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
196
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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