Twenty-One Stories

Graham Greene

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781504054065
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Classici

These wide-ranging tales of menace, tragedy, and comedy offer ample proof that "in the short story, as well as the novel, Graham Greene is the master" ( The New York Times ). Written between 1929 and 1954, here are twenty-one stories by a "master storyteller" ( Newsweek ). Whatever the crime, whatever the pursuit, whatever the mood—from the tragic and horrifying to the ribald and bittersweet, Graham Greene is "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety" (William Golding). In "The End of the Party, " a game of hide-and-seek takes a terrifying turn in the dark. In "The Innocent, " a romantic gets a rude awakening when he finds a hidden keepsake from a childhood crush. A husband's sexual indiscretion is revealed in a most public and embarrassing way in "The Blue Film." A rebellious teen's flight from her petit bourgeois life includes a bad boy, a gun, and a plan in "A Drive in the Country." In "A Little Place off the Edgware Road, " a suicidal man's encounter with a stranger in a grubby cinema seals his fate. A young boy is ushered into a dark world when he discovers the secrets adults hide in "The Basement Room." And in "When Greek Meets Greek, " a clever con between two scoundrels carries an unexpected sting. In these and more than a dozen other stories, Greene confronts his usual themes of betrayal and vengeance, love and hate, faith and doubt, guilt and grief, and pity and pursuit.

THE BASEMENT ROOM

1

When the front door had shut the two of them out and the butler Baines had turned back into the dark and heavy hall, Philip began to live. He stood in front of the nursery door, listening until he heard the engine of the taxi die out along the street. His parents were safely gone for a fortnight’s holiday; he was ‘between nurses’, one dismissed and the other not arrived; he was alone in the great Belgravia house with Baines and Mrs Baines.

He could go anywhere, even through the green baize door to the pantry or down the stairs to the basement living-room. He felt a happy stranger in his home because he could go into any room and all the rooms were empty.

You could only guess who had once occupied them: the rack of pipes in the smoking-room beside the elephant tusks, the carved wood tobacco jar; in the bedroom the pink hangings and the pale perfumes and three-quarter finished jars of cream which Mrs Baines had not yet cleared away for her own use; the high glaze on the never-opened piano in the drawing-room, the china clock, the silly little tables and the silver. But here Mrs Baines was already busy, pulling down the curtains, covering the chairs in dust-sheets.

‘Be off out of here, Master Philip,’ and she looked at him with her peevish eyes, while she moved round, getting everything in order, meticulous and loveless and doing her duty.

Philip Lane went downstairs and pushed at the baize door; he looked into the pantry, but Baines was not there, then he set foot for the first time on the stairs to the basement. Again he had the sense: this is life. All his seven nursery years vibrated with the strange, the new experience. His crowded brain was like a city which feels the earth tremble at a distant earthquake shock. He was apprehensive, but he was happier than he had ever been. Everything was more important than before.

Baines was reading a newspaper in his shirt-sleeves. He said, ‘Come in, Phil, and make yourself at home. Wait a moment and I’ll do the honours,’ and going to a white cleaned cupboard he brought out a bottle of ginger-beer and half a Dundee cake. ‘Half past eleven in the morning,’ Baines said. ‘It’s opening time, my boy,’ and he cut the cake and poured out the ginger-beer. He was more genial than Philip had ever known him, more at his ease, a man in his own home.

‘Shall I call Mrs Baines?’ Philip asked, and he was glad when Baines said no. She was busy. She liked to be busy, so why interfere with her pleasure?

‘A spot of drink at half past eleven,’ Baines said, pouring himself out a glass of ginger-beer, ‘gives an appetite for chop and does no man any harm.’

‘A chop?’ Philip asked.

‘Old Coasters,’ Baines said, ‘they call all food chop.’

‘But it’s not a chop?’

‘Well, it might be, you know, if cooked with palm oil. And then some paw-paw to follow.’

Philip looked out of the basement window at the dry stone yard, the ash-can and the legs going up and down beyond the railings.

‘Was it hot there?’

‘Ah, you never felt such heat. Not a nice heat, mind, like you get in the park on a day like this. Wet,’ Baines said, ‘corruption.’ He cut himself a slice of cake. ‘Smelling of rot,’ Baines said, rolling his eyes round the small basement room, from clean cupboard to clean cupboard, the sense of bareness, of nowhere to hide a man’s secrets. With an air of regret for something lost he took a long draught of ginger-beer.

‘Why did father live out there?’

‘It was his job,’ Baines said, ‘same as this is mine now. And it was mine then too. It was a man’s job. You wouldn’t believe it now, but I’ve had forty niggers under me, doing what I told them to.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘I married Mrs Baines.’

Philip took the slice of Dundee cake in his hand and munched it round the room. He felt very old, independent and judicial; he was aware that Baines was talking to him as man to man. He never called him Master Philip as Mrs Baines did, who was servile when she was not authoritative.

Baines had seen the world; he had seen beyond the railings. He sat there over his ginger pop with the resigned dignity of an exile; Baines didn’t complain; he had chosen his fate, and if his fate was Mrs Baines he had only himself to blame.

But today—the house was almost empty and Mrs Baines was upstairs and there was nothing to do—he allowed himself a little acidity.

‘I’d go back tomorrow if I had the chance.’

‘Did you ever shoot a nigger?’

‘I never had any call to shoot,’ Baines said. ‘Of course I carried a gun. But you didn’t need to treat them bad. That just made them stupid. Why,’ Baines said, bowing his thin grey hair with embarrassment over the ginger pop, ‘I loved some of those damned niggers. I couldn’t help loving them. There they’d be laughing, holding hands; they liked to touch each other; it made them feel fine to know the other fellow was around. It didn’t mean anything we could understand; two of them would go about all day without loosing hold, grown men; but it wasn’t love; it didn’t mean anything we could understand.’

‘Eating between meals,’ Mrs Baines said. ‘What would your mother say, Master Philip?’

She came down the steep stairs to the basement, her hands full of pots of cream and salve, tubes of grease and paste. ‘You oughtn’t to encourage him, Baines,’ she said, sitting down in a wicker armchair and screwing up her small ill-humoured eyes at the Coty lipstick, Pond’s cream, the Leichner rouge and Cyclax powder and Elizabeth Arden astringent.

She threw them one by one into the wastepaper basket. She saved only the cold cream. ‘Tell the boy stories,’ she said. ‘Go along to the nursery, Master Philip, while I get lunch.’

Philip climbed the stairs to the baize door. He heard Mrs Baines’s voice like the voice in a nightmare when the small Price light has guttered in the saucer and the curtains move; it was sharp and shrill and full of malice, louder than people ought to speak, exposed.

‘Sick to death of your ways, Baines, spoiling the boy. Time you did some work about the house,’ but he couldn’t hear what Baines said in reply. He pushed open the baize door, came up like a small earth animal in his grey flannel shorts into a wash of sunlight on a parquet floor, the gleam of mirrors dusted and polished and beautified by Mrs Baines.

Something broke downstairs, and Philip sadly mounted the stairs to the nursery. He pitied Baines; it occurred to him how happily they could live together in the empty house if Mrs Baines were called away. He didn’t want to play with his Meccano sets; he wouldn’t take out his train or his soldiers; he sat at the table with his chin on his hands: this is life; and suddenly he felt responsible for Baines, as if he were the master of the house and Baines an ageing servant who deserved to be cared for. There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good.

He was not surprised when Mrs Baines was agreeable at lunch; he was used to her changes. Now it was ‘another helping of meat, Master Philip’, or ‘Master Philip, a little more of this nice pudding’. It was a pudding he liked, Queen’s pudding with a perfect meringue, but he wouldn’t eat a second helping lest she might count that a victory. She was the kind of woman who thought that any injustice could be counterbalanced by something good to eat.

She was sour, but she liked making sweet things; one never had to complain of a lack of jam or plums; she ate well herself and added soft sugar to the meringue and the strawberry jam. The half-light through the basement window set the motes moving above her pale hair like dust as she sifted the sugar, and Baines crouched over his plate saying nothing.

Again Philip felt responsibility. Baines had looked forward to this, and Baines was disappointed: everything was being spoilt. The sensation of disappointment was one which Philip could share; he could understand better than anyone this grief, something hoped for not happening, something promised not fulfilled, something exciting which turned dull. ‘Baines,’ he said, ‘will you take me for a walk this afternoon?’

‘No,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘no. That he won’t. Not with all the silver to clean.’

‘There’s a fortnight to do it in’, Baines said.

‘Work first, pleasure afterwards.’

Mrs Baines helped herself to some more meringue.

Baines put down his spoon and fork and pushed his plate away. ‘Blast,’ he said.

‘Temper,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘temper. Don’t you go breaking any more things, Baines, and I won’t have you swearing in front of the boy. Master Philip, if you’ve finished you can get down.’

She skinned the rest of the meringue off the pudding.

‘I want to go for a walk,’ Philip said.

‘You’ll go and have a rest.’

‘I want to go for a walk.’

‘Master Philip,’ Mrs Baines said. She got up from the table, leaving her meringue unfinished, and came towards him, thin, menacing, dusty in the basement room. ‘Master Philip, you just do as you’re told.’ She took him by the arm and squeezed it; she watched him with a joyless passionate glitter and above her head the feet of typists trudged back to the Victoria offices after the lunch interval.

‘Why shouldn’t I go for a walk?’

But he weakened; he was scared and ashamed of being scared. This was life; a strange passion he couldn’t understand moving in the basement room. He saw a small pile of broken glass swept into a corner by the wastepaper basket. He looked at Baines for help and only intercepted hate; the sad hopeless hate of something behind bars.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he repeated.

‘Master Philip,’ Mrs Baines said, ‘you’ve got to do as you’re told. You mustn’t think just because your father’s away there’s nobody here to—’

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Philip cried, and was startled by Baines’s low interjection:

‘There’s nothing she wouldn’t dare.’

‘I hate you,’ Philip said to Mrs Baines. He pulled away from her and ran to the door, but she was there before him; she was old, but she was quick.

‘Master Philip,’ she said, ‘you’ll say you’re sorry.’ She stood in front of the door quivering with excitement. ‘What would your father do if he heard you say that?’

She put a hand out to seize him, dry and white with constant soda, the nails cut to the quick, but he backed away and put the table between them, and suddenly to his surprise she smiled; she became again as servile as she had been arrogant. ‘Get along with you, Master Philip,’ she said with glee, ‘I see I’m going to have my hands full till your father and mother come back.’

She left the door unguarded and when he passed her she slapped him playfully. ‘I’ve got too much to do today to trouble about you. I haven’t covered half the chairs,’ and suddenly even the upper part of the house became unbearable to him as he thought of Mrs Baines moving around shrouding the sofas, laying out the dust-sheets.

So he wouldn’t go upstairs to get his cap but walked straight out across the shining hall into the street, and again, as he looked this way and looked that way, it was life he was in the middle of.

2

The pink sugar cakes in the window on a paper doily, the ham, the slab of mauve sausage, the wasps driving like small torpedoes across the pane caught Philip’s attention. His feet were tired by pavements; he had been afraid to cross the road, had simply walked first in one direction, then in the other. He was nearly home now; the square was at the end of the street; this was a shabby outpost of Pimlico, and he smudged the pane with his nose looking for sweets, and saw between the cake and ham a different Baines. He hardly recognized the bulbous eyes, the bald forehead. This was a happy, bold and buccaneering Baines, even though it was, when you looked closer, a desperate Baines.

Philip had never seen the girl, but he remembered Baines had a niece. She was thin and drawn, and she wore a white mackintosh; she meant nothing to Philip; she belonged to a world about which he knew nothing at all. He couldn’t make up stories about her, as he could make them up about withered Sir Hubert Reed, the Permanent Secretary, about Mrs Wince-Dudley who came up once a year from Penstanley in Suffolk with a green umbrella and an enormous black handbag, as he could make them up about the upper servants in all the houses where he went to tea and games. She just didn’t belong. He thought of mermaids and Undine, but she didn’t belong there either, nor to the adventures of Emil, nor to the Bastables. She sat there looking at an iced pink cake in the detachment and mystery of the completely disinherited, looking at the half-used pots of powder which Baines had set out on the marble-topped table between them.

Baines was urging, hoping, entreating, commanding, and the girl looked at the tea and the china pots and cried. Baines passed his handkerchief across the table, but she wouldn’t wipe her eyes; she screwed it in her palm and let the tears run down, wouldn’t do anything, wouldn’t speak, would only put up a silent resistance to what she dreaded and wanted and refused to listen to at any price. The two brains battled over the tea-cups loving each other, and there came to Philip outside, beyond the ham and wasps and dusty Pimlico pane, a confused indication of the struggle.

He was inquisitive and he didn’t understand and he wanted to know. He went and stood in the doorway to see better, he was less sheltered than he had ever been; other people’s lives for the first time touched and pressed and moulded. He would never escape that scene. In a week he had forgotten it, but it conditioned his career, the long austerity of his life; when he was dying, rich and alone, it was said that he asked: ‘Who is she?’

Baines had won; he was cocky and the girl was happy. She wiped her face, she opened a pot of powder, and their fingers touched across the table. It occurred to Philip that it might be amusing to imitate Mrs Baines’s voice and to call ‘Baines’ to him from the door.

His voice shrivelled them; you couldn’t describe it in any other way, it made them smaller, they weren’t together any more. Baines was the first to recover and trace the voice, but that didn’t make things as they were. The sawdust was spilled out of the afternoon; nothing you did could mend it, and Philip was scared. ‘I didn’t mean …’ He wanted to say that he loved Baines, that he had only wanted to laugh at Mrs Baines. But he had discovered you couldn’t laugh at Mrs Baines. She wasn’t Sir Hubert Reed, who used steel nibs and carried a pen-wiper in his pocket; she wasn’t Mrs Wince-Dudley; she was darkness when the night-light went out in a draught; she was the frozen blocks of earth he had seen one winter in a graveyard when someone said, ‘They need an electric drill’; she was the flowers gone bad and smelling in the little closet room at Penstanley. There was nothing to laugh about. You had to endure her when she was there and forget about her quickly when she was away, suppress the thought of her, ram it down deep.

Baines said, ‘It’s o...