Royle Best British Short Stories 2024

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78463-310-3
Verlag: Salt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 224 Seiten

Reihe: Best British Short Stories

The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fourteenth year Inspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes's Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its thirteenth volume. Best British Short Stories 2024 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2023 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online. 'If the latest iteration of Salt's Best British Short Stories collection is anything to go by then the genre remains in safe hands.' -Lawrence Foley, TLS

Autoren/Hrsg.

Royle, Nicholas

Leseproben

JONATHAN COE

Summer of Light

It is not a small thing to fall into a Venetian canal. The consequences can be serious.

In the film Summertime, Katharine Hepburn falls into the canal which runs alongside the Campo San Barnaba. The director of the film, David Lean – a notorious perfectionist – made her perform the stunt four times, and as a result the actress developed an unpleasant eye infection which bedevilled her for the rest of her life. The canals in Venice are not clean. They contain a number of ingredients besides water, including human sewage. Summertime was filmed in the summer of 1954. Neither David Lean nor Katharine Hepburn knew it, but thirty years earlier, an Italian painter had fallen into the same canal at the very same spot. Fortunately, in his case, the experience did not induce a lifelong ailment. However, it was undignified, and brought to a messy end an evening which ought to have consisted of pure triumph. The circumstances of his fall have remained unclear, until now.

The accident in question took place in 1924. Two years before that, Livia had learned that she would soon be leaving Onè di Fonte, the village which had been her home for the first seventeen years of her life. Her father had decided that there was no future for himself or his family in this tiny backwater, and announced that they were moving to Bassano del Grappa where there was surely more work to be found.

Later, after they had moved to Bassano and she had made friends with Serafina, she would tell her about that last summer in the village, the summer of 1922, revisiting it again and again in her memory and always referring to it as the ‘summer of light’. The two girls would sit on the low wall which ran along the pathway above the river Brenta, and Livia would tell her friend the story of the painter who lived in the little house on the edge of the village and how he had seen her sitting by the fountain one day and how he had asked if he could paint her portrait, and everything that followed.

Since Livia and her family had arrived in Bassano, she and Serafina had become firm but unlikely friends. Serafina was a classical Northern beauty, with long dark hair, flawless tawny skin and an immaculate figure: already boys were swarming around her, but on the whole she did not take them seriously and made it her practice to flick them away like so many flies. She was a smart and quick-witted girl with a burgeoning contempt for the male sex. Livia, on the other hand, was taciturn and inward-looking, with her granite face and habitual silence masking a dry sense of humour which was known only to those who were closest to her. For some reason she had reddish hair and she had no idea what to do with it. After years of failed experiments with buns, plaits and pigtails she had simply cut most of it off and now wore it in a mannish short-back-and-sides. She was aware that she was not pretty, and was beginning to understand – although the full truth of it had not broken on her yet – that this was going to disadvantage her for much of her life. But she did not resent Serafina for her beauty. She valued her, instead, for the friendship she had extended to her from the day they met.

‘The sun showed no mercy that day,’ she told her friend, as they looked down towards the foaming currents of the river. ‘I was sweating waterfalls. The whole summer had been the same but that day was especially bad. I was sitting in the shade by the fountain, resting on my way back from the shop, when the painter came by. We all knew him, by sight at least. He had a little house on the edge of the village and he’d been living there since the end of the war, with his wife and his son. You sometimes saw him sitting in the fields, painting a tree or a horse and cart or some such. I must say there was something a little intriguing about him. They said that he’d spent some time studying abroad, in Germany I think, and in my eyes – perhaps foolishly – that made him a sort of romantic figure. Of course I’d never spoken to him before and didn’t mean to speak to him now but I could hardly fail to notice that he had sat down on the bench opposite the fountain and was staring at me. Not just staring but looking at me in different ways.’

‘Different ways?’ said Serafina.

‘Yes, he kept leaning this way and that, so that he could view me from different angles. He was making no secret of it.’

‘But you have to get used to the way that men look at you,’ Serafina said. ‘They do it all the time.’

‘Not to me,’ said Livia. ‘Only the night before there had been a party in the village. A couple had been celebrating their anniversary and everyone was there, dancing all night. There was a boy called Flavio – a beautiful boy, I had such a crush on him – and however much I tried I couldn’t get him to look at me once. It was as if I was invisible.’ She stared across the river and repeated the word: ‘Yes, invisible …’

Serafina said nothing, but put her hand on Livia’s forearm and gave it a squeeze. It was meant to be a comforting gesture, but Livia did not acknowledge it. She continued:

‘That was why I was so amazed when this man said that he wanted to paint me. Me! Out of all the girls in the village. He said that he wanted to start as soon as possible and asked me to come to his studio on Monday morning. He had a studio attached to his house.’

‘Didn’t you ask him,’ Serafina said, trying to find a way to phrase the question tactfully, ‘what … sort of painting it was going to be?’

‘Oh, I know what these painters are like,’ said Livia, who was not altogether unworldly. ‘They can’t wait for their models to take their clothes off. All those pious, religious paintings from centuries ago, all those Ascensions and Annunciations. It’s amazing how often the women in those paintings are falling out of their dresses and have their bottoms hanging out of their gowns. But my instinct was that he wasn’t interested in anything like that, and I was right. When I turned up on Monday morning I was wearing my ordinary clothes and he was perfectly happy about it.’

‘And what was his studio like?’ Serafina asked.

‘It was so beautiful,’ said Livia, sighing at the memory. ‘I think originally it was just an old barn, but Signor Rollo – a very clever builder, our next-door neighbour – had changed it for him. There were these three huge skylights in the ceiling and they let in all this wonderful light, this wonderful summer light, and everywhere you looked there were canvases and sketches in lovely bright colours and at once you could see that he was a very good painter. A serious painter. These were not the sort of paintings you see them selling to tourists on the Ponte Vecchio. And there was a smell in there, I don’t know what it was – oil paint or turpentine – one of those things that painters use. Such a lovely smell, I remember it all so perfectly. I was there the whole week …’

‘The whole week?’ Serafina was incredulous.

‘Yes, that’s how serious he was. Every inch of the canvas took him hours. And there were sketches, first, pencil on paper, before he even took out a brush.’

‘What on earth did you talk about, all that time?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘He never said a word to me. Nor I to him. For the first few minutes, on the first morning, I tried to make some conversation, and talked to him about the weather, and asked about his family, but he didn’t reply. After that, there was nothing but silence between us. Every day. And yet it wasn’t awkward at all. He was absorbed in his work, and I was happy just to sit there, enjoying the stillness, enjoying the light. Enjoying the …’ She was too embarrassed to say the word at first. ‘The attention. Nobody had ever looked at me like that before. Or since. Looked at me so intently. As I say, I don’t know why it was me that he chose, but I was so happy that he did. It was the best experience of my life.’

She stared ahead of her, lost in sightless reminiscence.

‘And then,’ Serafina asked, ‘what did you think of the painting, when you saw it?’

‘It was very fine,’ said Livia, coming back to earth and choosing her words carefully. ‘Very faithful. He caught me – almost to perfection, you might say. It wasn’t a flattering portrait, by any means, but it was … honest. I liked his honesty, very much. But, to tell you the truth, I only saw it very briefly, when it was finished. Soon afterwards we moved here to Bassano, and I never saw the painter again, and I don’t know what happened to the picture. Perhaps he sold it to a private collector, and it will be hanging in the dining room of some dingy villa for the next fifty years. Isn’t that what happens?’ Livia sighed. ‘I would give anything to see it again, you know. Even a glimpse. Anything at...