The People on Privilege Hill

Jane Gardam

• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781609450359
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"Engrossing stories of hilarity and heartbreak" from the Whitbread Award–winning author of the Old Filth trilogy ( The Seattle Times ). A collection of stories from a writer at the height of her powers—a celebrated stylist admired for her caustic humor, freewheeling imagination, love of humanity, and wicked powers of observation. This is a delightful grouping of stories, witty and wise, that includes the return of Sir Edward Feathers, "Old Filth" himself. "[Gardam's] stories, like delicate tapestries, are alight with colors." — The Times (London) "When Gardam hits her mark, like other exemplary short-story writers such as William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Taylor, she can be dazzling." — The Guardian "Gardam's brisk narration and fearless temperament make for serious fun." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Wry, economical and perpetually surprising, these 14 stories from English novelist Gardam follow the last of the intrepid, stiff upper lip WWII generation of British ladies and gentlemen.... Gardam vividly evokes an age of iron wills." — Publishers Weekly "Gardam displays the consummate skill of the short-story-teller, which is that of the caricaturist, the ability to capture a personality in a few brief strokes.... Privilege Hill is a collection of gentle stories that you could read to your grandmother, with the kind of sharp wit that would no doubt give her a secret smile. But they're deeper than they look... so don't read them all at once." — The Bookbag

THE HAIR OF THE DOG

The Airedale’s head fitted snugly into the palm of her hand. The walking stick had been her husband’s favourite, a present from their daughter Rosie, a very expensive present from the Burlington Arcade, bought over thirty years ago. Eleanor held the knob tight as she felt about with the ferrule of the stick on the station platform to step off the train. She took her time.

Then she thought, I must watch out. I’m behaving like an old woman on a stick. I could easily do without one.

But the dog’s tiny ivory head was a comfort: a reminder of poor George’s firm hand.

Victoria Station. She hadn’t seen it in years. It was scarcely recognisable as the placid airy forecourt to the line of trains where, when she was young, she had waited for friends. (“I’ll be under the clock. Don’t hurry. I’ll have a book.”) There had been two trains an hour from Brighton, then, and in the nicest of them, the Brighton Belle, the rose-coloured lamps on the tablecloths in the buffet car had always been lit.

Eleanor was not what you’d call old, but she could remember steam. Perhaps even Rosie could remember steam, for Eleanor had taken her when she was small to see the last steam train out of Victoria. They had stood on the bridge at South Wimbledon to watch it vanish beneath them in its cloud of thin air.

Leaning on the stick, Eleanor watched the station now. The clock, hanging like a white full moon, was not there. There were no unhurried girls reading books. Everything was movement. Strings and streams of alien life all looking angry, resentful or sad. Or driven. People moved at a trot, never touching, never colliding. Sometimes they swept along in groups across invisible currents, confident, unstoppable: like bats from caves at sunset. She stood for a moment gripping the stick, closed her eyes, opened them and stepped into the mêlée.

She was on her way to lunch at the Goring Hotel, which she remembered as being just round the corner from the station, but now that she had reached the Victoria Street entrance, which was just the same (she remembered all at once that she had once stood here asking people to sign a petition against the execution of Ruth Ellis, the last—please God—hanging in England in 1955), now that she was here on the corner the Goring was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it was to the right, on Buckingham Palace Road. Somewhere around Grosvenor Gardens? This part of London had been her home once and she remembered its street names better than those in Wimbledon where they had moved next, and where Rosie had grown up and been married, and certainly better than the streets in Brighton where she lived alone now. In her mind she could see the white steps and polished brass of the Goring. She knew it still existed because a table had been booked there for this lunch.

So she would have to get a taxi. And the cab driver would say, “It’s not worth the fare, love, it’s just round the corner.” Then she would have to flourish the Airedale stick and look lame.

She stood for a long time in the taxi queue (thank goodness she’d come on the earlier train) and eventually it was her turn and the cab driver said, “It’s not worth the fare, love. Just over the road at the lights. Up left and turn right.”

So she walked to the corner and watched the skeins of traffic run by, and looked across to the memorial to Marshal Foch on his horse with the elegant tail. She had pushed Rosie in her pram to see him every afternoon. Now, the traffic screamed and streamed.

And there fell one of the mysterious silences that occasionally drop over London: the lull, the pause that happens in no other capital city (George had always said it was to do with the alignment of traffic lights) and that she had forgotten. Tears filled her eyes with the beauty of the silence, its promise. London froze.

But no, it did not freeze. It warmed. The poisonous air around Eleanor warmed and a cleansing waft drifted towards her, from the park and the wide streets of Belgravia to the north, caressing her hair.

Then it passed and the clamour returned, the crowds were all at it again, the police sirens and the ambulances. She took a hold on her mind and on the Airedale’s head, turned from the traffic that pawed the ground behind the red lights and instead of right crossed left into Ebury Street where she had come as a bride.

For two pounds a week they had lived in a couple of rooms above a maker of sculptured memorials and an angel, six foot high, had stared from his window each evening as she came home from the office. Its stone gaze knew when she was first home, which was almost always. It knew that she would have to go out again to buy the supper and that she had less than five shillings. “And after that,” it said, “when you are back with the sausages the phone will ring and you must be prepared for him to say, ‘I’m afraid I’ll be late. Don’t wait for me.’”

The delicate eighteenth-century house, the whole of the long, eighteenth-century street, had disappeared with the angel long ago to be replaced by this blood-red stretch of four-storey mansions where a one-room apartment cost a quarter of a million pounds.

But north of it—away she went now, up Eccleston Street and into Belgrave Place and beyond—there were still the magnificent crescents and mansions that her daughter Rosie had beheld for her first two years, enthroned in her Silver Cross perambulator. Eleanor walked towards Grosvenor Crescent and here was a mews, each garage and pastel-painted little house breathing money. Burglar alarms decorated every one of the garrets of the nineteenth-century stable boys, and a chauffeur was grooming a thoroughbred Porsche.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

She said, “I knew it here once. There was a little hairdresser,” and he turned away and went on polishing.

“Oh, but there’s the flower stall,” she said aloud on the corner of Belgrave Square. “Still blazing away.” And with suddenly young feet and the memory of her first high-heeled London boots, her Mary Quant minidress and a particular hat—a silky sou’wester patterned like a Dalmatian—she plunged out in elderly brogues into the almost certain death of the traffic spinning up to Hyde Park Corner, flourishing the Airedale stick on high.

She reached the farther shore and paused on her stick beside the Artillery Memorial’s bronze figures: private soldiers deep in thought, heads gravely bowed, a fourth lying dead, his tin hat on his chest. Survivors of 1914–18. Eleanor knew them well. She had over the years, when you still drove into London by car, stopped beside them stuck in traffic for ten minutes at a time. She was a pacifist and had regularly marched to Aldermaston but these four had always...

Table of contents

• THE PEOPLE ON PRIVILEGE HILL
• PANGBOURNE
• BABETTE
• THE LATTER DAYS OF MR. JONES
• THE FLIGHT PATH
• THE MILLY MING
• THE HAIR OF THE DOG
• DANGERS
• WAITING FOR A STRANGER
• LEARNING TO FLY
• THE VIRGINS OF BRUGES
• THE FLEDGLING
• SNAP
• THE LAST REUNION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR