The Travellers and Other Stories Read online

  It’s a terrible thought—it’s a terrible thought and it is, you may remember, a windy day.

  It’s a very windy day in fact, and even though the golden-skinned umbrella boy has worked hard to make sure that each one of his big stripy parasols is properly canted into the wind—its heavy cotton-fringed shade angled low to the ground, its sharp metal spike dug deep down into the sand and securely buried—you’ll understand how easy it is for an especially violent gust to snatch one of the umbrellas up and send it cartwheeling along the beach like a tomahawk or an accessory in a knife-throwing act or something thrown by a gladiator across the dusty floor of the Coliseum.

  You’ll understand, also, that there’s something about the low-slung design of an old-fashioned deckchair that makes it difficult for someone like Sibyl Hadley, in their mid to late sixties, to get out of one in a hurry. You’ll understand that she is indeed about to die; that in these last split-seconds the whole of her solitary and unfulfilled life is about to flash before her in a quick grey kaleidoscope of drab and joyless scenes.

  And yet you will know, too, in your heart, that some very big, very fat men are also surprisingly fast runners—you will know that when Wade Abello has finished shaking the flaky crumbs from his croissant out of his napkin and onto his plate in the dining room of the Hôtel Mercure and pushed back his chair and walked outside and begun to make his lumbering slow-footed way along the boardwalk carrying what looks like his lunch in a paper bag—you will know that when he sees what’s happening he will break at once into a thunderous sprint of astonishing power and velocity and when his enormous right hand finally hurls away the bag with its dusty cake of hand-made soap inside and his outstretched fingers reach out and grasp instead the spinning cotton fringe of the murderous parasol and he falls to his knees in front of Sibyl in the sand—you will know, then, that Sibyl was wrong about the future, and that this, is just the beginning.

  NOTE ON ‘BONNET’

  Brontë biographers and scholars have long speculated on what the true nature of the relationship between Charlotte Brontë and her young publisher, George Smith, might have been. We know that Smith was handsome, charming and clever, and that he became Charlotte’s good friend, frequent correspondent and attentive host when she visited London; her letters suggest that she may well also have been in love with him and that he knew it. Against the background of Charlotte’s tragic family history, her desperate loneliness and sense of personal inadequacy, it is one of the most poignant stories of unrequited love I’ve ever come across. In my imagination, the encounter depicted in ‘Bonnet’ takes place towards the end of 1853, when—and these are the facts—Charlotte is 37 and Smith is 29 and has recently become engaged to Elizabeth Blakeway, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy London wine merchant, but no one, including Smith himself, has told Charlotte yet. The historical truth is that Smith seems to have felt unable to break the news to Charlotte, prevaricating and writing to tell her, eventually, only after she has found it out from his mother. When she does, at last, receive his letter, Charlotte writes back what must be, as Brontë scholar Juliet Barker says, ‘the most extraordinary letter of congratulation ever written’*:

  My dear Sir

  In great happiness, as in great grief—words of sympathy should be few. Accept my meed of congratulation—and believe me

  Sincerely yours

  C. Brontë

  Charlotte married the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, curate at Haworth, in June 1854. She died in March 1855 at the age of 38, probably of tuberculosis aggravated by acute morning sickness.

  *The Brontës: A Life in Letters

  NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to the editors of the publications, anthologies and online magazines where a number of these stories (sometimes in a slightly different form) first appeared: The 2007 Fish Prize Anthology; The 2005 Bridport Prize; Don’t Know a Good Thing (the Asham Award short story collection, Bloomsbury); The London Magazine; Kestrel; The Dublin Review; Granta New Writing; The Hippocrates Prize; Love Sunday Magazine; New Short Stories 3 and New Short Stories 4 (both Willesden Herald Prize anthologies); The Manchester Fiction Prize; Prospect; Red Room New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës; The Royal Society of Literature Review; Salamander; The Ship; The Stinging Fly; The Story; Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories. Special thanks to Brendan Barrington and Declan Meade, to my agent Rachel Calder, my editor Jen Hamilton-Emery, to Chris Hamilton-Emery and to New Writing North for the financial assistance of a 2013 Northern Writers’ Award, supported by Arts Council England.