Taylor Poppyland

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78463-347-9
Verlag: Salt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 15, 208 Seiten

Reihe: Salt Modern Stories

On Stewkey Blues: 'In his solid, grounded, entertaining collection of stories, DJ Taylor draws out the mythical qualities of East Anglia's terrain, urban or rural or somewhere marginal in between.' -Hilary Mantel Most of the people in Poppyland are watching their lives begin to blur at the margins. From small-hours taxi offices, out-of-season holiday estates and flyblown market stalls, they sit observing an environment that seems to be moving steadily out of kilter, struggling to find agency, making compromises with a world that threatens to undermine them, and sometimes - but only sometimes - taking a decisive step that will change their destinies.

D. J. Taylor has written thirteen novels, including Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and three volumes of short stories, most recently Stewkey Blues (2022) which won the Fiction Award in the 2022 East Anglian Book Awards. His non-fiction includes Orwell: The Life, which won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography, and its successor, Orwell: The New Life (2023). He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Taylor, D. J.

Leseproben

Poppyland

They came down the winding asphalt path from the cliff-top in their usual holiday phalanx: Danny in front, guiding the buggy; Marigold a step or two behind him; Mr and Mrs Callingham vigilant on the flanks. At the bottom of the slope there were a couple of herring gulls tearing open an abandoned fish-and-chip packet, but the sight of Mrs Callingham in her saffron summer frock was too much for them and they flapped noisily away. Bird, Archie chirruped from the buggy – it was one of the five words he knew, along with ‘bean,’ ‘bath-time,’ ‘banana,’ and ‘Ummagumma,’ his pet monkey – bird, bird, bird, bird, and Danny leant forward and patted him fondly on the head. The herring gulls were gone now, heading out over the pier into the duck-egg-blue sky, bound for the Hook of Holland for all anyone knew. Bird Archie said one last time and then went silent. Down at the foot of the cliffs it was unexpectedly cold and the shadow cast by the hand-rails fell dramatically across the pavement. Danny, bringing the buggy to a halt, glanced surreptitiously at the figures assembled around it: Marigold, dutifully attentive to whatever her mother was saying; Mrs Callingham, blithe, stork-like and terrifying; Mr Callingham a more solid presence, but, Danny knew, liable to cause trouble if not closely watched.

‘Well, this is all very picturesque,’ Mrs Callingham said, propping one of her huge bony knees upon the bottom-most rail. Unlike many of Mrs Callingham’s opinions this one, Danny acknowledged, had something to be said for it. The steps running up to the pier entrance had panels sunk into them which recorded the exploits of the Cromer Lifeboat. On the wall beyond hung posters of Freddie Starr, the Nolan Sisters and other veteran acts who were appearing in Summer Season. It was about ten o’clock in the morning, still early for the holiday crowds, and not bad for mid-July. ‘I used to come here as a boy,’ he began to explain, feeling unexpectedly proprietorial about the row of beach huts and the criss-cross of anglers’ lines, but Mrs Callingham was not in the mood for childhood reminiscences. ‘I had a long conversation with Fenny,’ she said, addressing herself to Marigold, ‘and she had some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that Angelica has failed her driving test, but the good news is that Mark’s psoriasis is improving.’ Defying the urge to add ‘as if anyone cared,’ Danny looked to see how his father-in-law was taking this update on his wife’s sister’s family, but Mr Callingham, who had not yet found a newsagent able to sell him a copy of The Times, was still sunk in gloom.

‘That’s a shame about Angelica,’ Marigold said absently. She was still exhausted from the previous afternoon’s three-hour drive and the sleepless night with Archie. Another day or so and she would be able to give these Clan Callingham gossip-fests all the punctilious gusto they deserved. The Callinghams, who answered to ‘Billa’ and ‘Geoffrey’, were reaching the end of their stratospherically distinguished careers. Billa taught medieval history at one of the smaller Cambridge colleges and had written a ‘seminal’ book about Angevin Shropshire, while Geoffrey did something so mercurially abstruse at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that Danny had never actually managed to work out what it was. Four years on, he was still amazed that they had allowed him to marry their daughter. ‘Of course,’ Mrs Callingham was saying, with a certain amount of bitterness and in a blizzard of phantom italics, ‘it’ll be a great advantage when she does pass her test because I dare say she’ll be able to drive down and visit you.’ And Danny knew that they were back to the conversation that had enlivened, or strictly speaking undermined yesterday’s trip along the A12. ‘Oh, Mum,’ Marigold said, ‘it’s only something we’re talking about. Something to discuss.’ There were times when he thought the Callinghams were a well-meaning but censorious and interfering old couple and other times when he thought the four of them were engaged in a no-holds-barred power-struggle that made the Wars of the Roses – about which Mrs Callingham had written illuminatingly – look tame by comparison. Desperate for a diversionary tactic, he tapped Archie on the shoulder with sufficient heft to make him swivel slightly in his seat and then said with apparent surprise: ‘You know, I think Arch has another tooth coming through.’ This did the trick. Mrs Callingham, whose attitude to children was that of Grace Darling towards water-boatmen, went down on one knee and grabbed at Archie’s face between her coal-heaver’s fingers. ‘Poor ickle babbity,’ she pronounced, with no self-consciousness whatever. ‘Is oo’s toofy-pegs hurting um?’ Naughty toofy-pegs.’ Amid the clamour of the gulls and the roar of the water crashing against the sea-defences, tiny, insignificant figures dwarfed by the wide horizon, they made their way down to the beach.

After that things improved slightly. Mr Callingham found a kiosk on the front that sold newspapers and settled down to read about the war in Iraq. Mrs Callingham ate an ice-cream in a mincing, girlish way and gave exaggerated little shrieks of disquiet as fragments of the chocolate flake tumbled down the front of her dress. Marigold unfurled a towel on the sand, lay down on it and fell instantly asleep. Archie, unleashed from his buggy, tottered a few steps here and there, collapsed in a tumble of misplaced limbs, tried to eat a worm-cast and said a sixth word, which might have been ‘Diogenes.’ Still, though, danger lurked in all this seemly repose. Mrs Callingham relayed some more urgent family news about someone called Francesca, who might or might not have been sent to Indonesia by whoever it was that employed her, before offering some startlingly unoriginal remarks about the Government’s education policy. Mr Callingham, benign and rubicund in open-toed sandals and rolled-up flannel trousers, got as far as the Arts pages of The Times and then gave an ominous snuffle. ‘There’s a man here really doesn’t like your book,’ he declared.

This kind of thing had happened before. With infinite weariness – not because he feared the reviewer’s strictures, but because he feared the conversation that would follow his reading of them – Danny lent forward, discovered that for some reason Mr Callingham was not prepared to relax his grip on the paper, but eventually gathered from glancing over his shoulder that Daniel Foxley’s third novel was an undistinguished performance that harboured few of the qualities intermittently on display in its predecessors. ‘Friend of yours, is he, this I. B. Littlejohn?’ Mr Callingham wondered in a half-way jovial tone, and Danny smiled back. ‘We were at college together,’ he riposted, and then, for good measure, ‘He taught me all I know.’ Mrs Callingham was having one of her vague moments, when the warp and weft of the world escaped her usually circumspect eye, but in the end Mr Callingham managed to explain to her what had happened, and she, too, was allowed a grudging glance at The Times. ‘You really are not to worry about this,’ she instructed him. Mrs Callingham’s attitude to Danny oscillated wildly. Early on in their relationship she had told Marigold, not wholly approvingly, that he was ‘rather a high-flier.’ Just lately she had been heard to say that these provincial universities were making great strides. ‘When we get home,’ she said fiercely, as if someone were purposely delaying her journey there, ‘I’ll make us all lunch. That is, if one can find a serviceable saucepan.’ After that they sat there in silence under the wide sky, while children shrieked and cantered around them, until such time as Marigold woke up and they could collect their things, find the car and drive off through the Norfolk back-lanes, the head-high clumps of cow parsley and the shimmering fields of poppies.

?

The holiday let was three miles out of Cromer at the end of a lane of beech trees: elegant, spacious, cool even in summer. Mrs Callingham’s way of finding fault with it was to go fossicking around the kitchen drawers lamenting the absence of items no ordinary person could ever want: an egg-whisk and a cake-knife were high on this list of desiderata. Danny knew already that the visitor’s book, which lay on the hall table next to a Bakelite telephone and a gazetteer called What to do on the Norfolk Coast, would not be safe from her. For lunch Mrs Callingham cooked an Irish Stew, heavy on the onions and with additional clumps of pearl barley lurking in its lower depths. In the intervals of eating it, and trying to interest Archie in a warmed-up jar of savoury rice, and watching the Callinghams absently-mindedly clash water-glasses together and knock over salt-cellars, Danny found himself wondering, as he quite often did, what kind of people they were. When first ushered into their presence in the big, cacophonous house at Harrow-on-the-Hill, he had assumed that they were old-fashioned, high-minded liberals of the sort...