Out of Place No.02: 'The Vagabond' by Colette

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘Nothing keeps me here or elsewhere.’ Freedom and writing in Colette’s The Vagabond

It is true that departures sadden and exhilarate me, and whatever I pass through – new countries, skies pure or cloudy, seas under rain the colour of a grey pearl – something of myself catches on it and clings so passionately that I feel as though I were leaving behind me a thousand little phantoms in my image, rocked on the waves, cradled in the leaves, scattered among the clouds.

In the dressing room of the Empyrée-Clichy, a café-concert in Paris, Renée Néré is preparing for her act. She contemplates the mirror, from behind the mask of her stage make-up: ‘my painted mentor and I gravely take stock of each other like well-matched adversaries.’ It is a cold night, and the dressing rooms are unheated. She can feel the floor vibrate from the chorus and the dancers, listening to the creaking iron staircase and waiting to go on stage as the minutes crawl slowly by. This is ‘the dangerous, lucid hour,’ the time when thoughts and doubts creep in. A restless crowd has gathered in the dark and dusty, smoky auditorium. From the moment the first bars of music strike up, a mysterious discipline takes over and Renée has the sensation that all is well, that she no longer belongs to herself. On the stage she feels ‘protected from the whole world by a barrier of light.’ 

Published in 1910, La Vagabonde, which translates as ‘the wanderer’ was something of a turning point for Colette. This story of life in the music halls of Paris in the early twentieth century was drawn from her personal experience, travelling around France performing as a dancer and mime. As Renée reflects upon solitude and independence, the conflict between a sense of liberation and security, the book mirrors Colette’s own struggles to find artistic freedom. 

The encounter with the mirror image, a self-portrait in disguise, is something that recurs in Colette’s writing and suggests a way of framing her work. As she writes in her 1928 novel, Break of Day: ‘Are you imagining, as you read me, that I'm portraying myself? Have patience: this is merely my model.’

Written in a personal style, The Vagabond is a novel that breaks new ground suggesting that Colette was already beginning to explore the possibilities of a shifting style of writing, moving between fiction and memoir. In her work she mixes genres and different modes of writing in a way that feels distinctive and radical. Colette’s form of writing was based around her own life, but carefully crafted and shaped; constantly reinvented. From the start, we are in the company of a voice that feels fresh and immediate. The Vagabond is written in a first person, present tense that makes it feel ageless and undated. The tone is full of energy and sparkle. She is playful and inventive, witty and disparaging, yet also compassionate and sincere. 

Written in three parts, the novel mirrors aspects of Colette’s life and the events following the end of her first marriage to Willy. Married at the age of twenty, Colette’s life was transformed from the quiet solitude of her upbringing roaming the countryside, to a Parisian woman of society. Willy wrote popular novels, or more accurately employed a production line of young writers to produce the work which was unpublished under his own name. It was during these years that Colette began to write, later she would describe this as her ‘apprenticeship’, and became a ghost writer, publishing the Claudine series of novels under Willy’s name. The Claudine novels were incredibly successful, and the couple became well known within Parisian society. Not only did Willy keep the rights to the books, but he also sold them for an enormous sum of money in 1909. After their marriage and divorce, Colette began to publish under her own name.

Renée too is a writer whose books have had ‘an unexpected and extravagant success.’ The name Renée connotes rebirth, it means to come back to life or re-emerge, to be reborn. In the mirror she sees the image of ‘a woman of letters who has turned out badly’ in the eyes of the world. The book is about finding an identity in writing. As Renée tells us: ‘And that is where my story ends – or begins.’

The Vagabond describes these years of marriage as painful and humiliating - the discovery of her husband as serially unfaithful – and as a time of self-effacement: ‘I was made to understand so well that, without him, I didn’t exist.’ These past experiences haunt Renée when she meets a new admirer and begins to confront the central dilemma of the novel. Torn between finding love and companionship and letting go of her solitary life, and the sense of empowerment and self-sufficiency she has worked so hard to find: ‘On my good days I joyfully say over and over again to myself that I earn my living.’ 

For Renée, the music hall provides a way of securing financial independence, a way for her to survive outside the constraints of marriage, which for Colette represents a form of entrapment for women: ‘He offers me marriage as if he were offering me a sunny enclosure, bounded by solid walls.’ The conflicting needs of independence, work, and love are themes of Colette’s writing, and Renée feels ‘an active passion, a real need to work, a mysterious and undefined need which I could satisfy equally well by dancing, writing, running, acting, or pulling a hand-cart.’ 

The Paris of The Vagabond is Montmartre and its surrounding areas. She writes about the street girls of the quarter: ‘slowly dying of misery and pride, beautiful in their stark poverty … they belong to a breed which never gives in, never admits to cold or hunger or love.’ With Colette as a guide, the Parisian dance halls and café-concerts come alive. The Empyrée-Clichy is a fictional theatre perhaps based on the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Rochechouart. She draws portraits of the music hall artistes. The star of the show is a singer from the streets, raw and untamed: ‘She sings like a sempstress or a street singer, and it never occurs to her that there is any other way of singing […] The public adores her just as she is.’

Behind the perception of the music hall as a place of dubious morality, Renée finds a comradeship among her fellow performers, while acknowledging the precarity of their lives: ‘my silent sympathy goes out to them without any preferences.’ They live an uncertain, wandering life, unrecognized, disparaged, little understood. In her eyes, there is a dignity to the insecurity, the sadness and pride of their lives away from the stage: ‘Who will condescend to wonder what you do […] when darkness has swallowed you up and you are hurrying, towards midnight, along the Boulevard Rochechouart, so thin you are almost transparent.’

Within this life, there is a truth about living. Renée has chosen a life of chance. She is aware that freedom comes also with loss: ‘I attract and keep the friendship of those melancholy, solitary persons who are pledged to loneliness or the wandering life, as I am.’ She tries not to look in the mirror too closely for there she sees the solitary life she has chosen and ‘the realisation that there is no one waiting for me on the road I follow, a road leading neither to glory nor riches nor love.’

On reading The Vagabond, I am struck by Colette’s great love of language and attentiveness in observing the world around her. She is a writer of the senses, concerned with feelings. Her writing is elegantly constructed, absorbing, written with exquisite timing and an extraordinary clarity of expression. The book describes the act of writing, ‘the patient struggling with a phrase until it becomes supple and finally settles down, curled up like a tamed animal, the motionless lying in wait for a word by which in the end one ensnares it.’ Colette’s descriptions are vivid, dreamily poetic, and intense. She writes in a way that seems to map feelings onto the world around her, blurring the boundaries between internal and external experience through memory and reflection.

Colette is a writer of place and landscape, and she has written often of her memories of the countryside where she grew up, Puisaye, an area of northern Burgundy. In The Vagabond, she talks about finding a refuge in the past through writing about memories and places: ‘Every time I touch the fringes of it, my own country casts a spell on me, filling me with sad, transitory rapture; but I would not dare to stop there. Perhaps it is only beautiful because I have lost it.’

Renée’s long self-examination and the central dilemma of the book concerns this sense of being torn between freedom and solitude: ‘I escape from myself, but I am not still free of you, I know it. A vagabond, and free, I shall sometimes long for the shade of your walls.’ These moments of reflection and melancholy contain a realisation that she holds the key to her own destiny, and that sometimes this means ‘the right to be sad’ and to exist in her interior mind, to become ‘neither darker nor lighter than the shadows.’ 

‘Call it obscurity, if you will: the obscurity of a room seen from without. I would rather call it dark, not obscure. Dark but made beautiful by an unwearying sadness: silvery and twilit like the white owl, the silky mouse, the wings of the clothes-moth.’

The Vagabond echoes its title in summoning a writing that is all about movement, and the conjuring power of words. Renée describes herself as an exile, a wanderer, a solitary. She feels a draw towards departures and a yearning for travel: ‘to move from one place to another, to forget who I am and the name of the town which sheltered me the day before, scarcely to think, to receive and retain no impressions but that of the beautiful landscape which unfolds and changes as the train runs past.’

Part three of the novel is the tour itself, written partly in letter form, full of glimpses, details, and images of the places they visit along the way. Colette writes beautifully about the passing landscape, the feel of travel, and of letting go, of seeing the changing scenery unfold. There is real life and feeling to this writing: ‘Half asleep, like the sea, and yielding to the swaying of the train, I thought I was skimming the waves, so close at hand, with a swallow’s cutting flight.’

There is a sense that this freedom is also about writing, and that the book mirrors Colette’s own path towards finding an identity through writing: ‘What are you giving me? Another myself? There is no other myself.’ For Colette, writing The Vagabond could be seen as a turning point, of belief in herself as a writer, and her quest to express what matters most to her in the world. Within the perfect moments of travel, and glimpses from the window of the changing landscape, comes a realisation: ‘as if the one dominating anxiety in my life were to seek for words […] In that same hour an insidious spirit whispered to me: And if indeed that were the only urgent thing? […] If everything, save that, were merely ashes?’

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Book Extract: Twisted Mountains by Tim Woods

We are extremely proud to present this extract from the story ‘Offcomers’ from the new collection Twisted Mountains by our very own Tim Woods. Twisted Mountains is a collection of short stories set among the hills of Scotland, England and Wales, with each story telling the tale of someone who has their own reason for being in the mountains, from a vengeful student to a wannabe biker and Wainwright expert with a secret. ‘Offcomers’ concerns an obsessive hotel owner, what money can buy and who owns the views of high places…

It is the most striking view in the country, of that there is no question. Today, exactly one year on from our grand reopening, it is at its most remarkable – a mountain alive with autumn colour. Its flanks are cloaked with russet bracken, which stops sharply at the dark band of woodland. Beyond, the tetrahedral fells melt into one another, each a little hazier than its predecessor. The lake that separates the mountain from me reflects all of this, doubling the splendour.

The first time I saw it, in February two years ago, I knew I had to have it. Although on that day, I would have happily taken any view on offer – anything to distract me from the interminable board meeting in which I was trapped.

The purpose was to agree exactly how many redundancies the company would need to make that year, and our declining prospects were evident in the choice of venue: a run-down hotel set two hundred metres back from the lake. The kind of place that tries to add a touch of glamour by providing cheap sparkling wine with lunch, no doubt trusting its regular clientele won’t realise it is nowhere even close to champagne. The whole charade was utterly tiresome and I resented being part of it, especially as I had already informed my fellow executives of my decision to retire. None of the redundancies would be my responsibility, so there was no need for me to be involved. Yet there I was, trapped in an increasingly aggravated discussion about unions, corporate responsibility and two-yearly forecasts. 

***

I passed the time staring out of the window and across the water. The small thicket of trees on the near shoreline prevented a clear view, yet I was still able to observe how the mood of the mountain opposite changed with each passing hour. Its still-snowy summit accentuated the cold grey-green of its flanks, while the strip of white cloud ravelling down its face accentuated its nuance and depth. Birds glided effortlessly on the hyaline water between us, leaving dissipating arrowheads behind them. As argument and counterargument raged around me, I knew that I had to have this view. To own it. To decide who got to share it and who didn’t. I blocked out all else and began to formulate my retirement plan.

At sunrise next morning, I walked down to the lake. I needed to see it again, at its earliest hour, just to be certain. Passing flower beds showing the first shoots of daffodils – such an uninspiring choice – I headed for the bench a little further up the shore. Unobscured by the trees in front of the hotel, the view from here was even finer and the mountain somehow even more spectacular. The sun crept up behind me, illuminating the eastern face inch by inch and painting it with a fresh palette, one of brown and purple and orange, scorched through with thick black shadows cast by its ridges and folds, a shifting show of shadow puppets. The singularity of this view was confirmed by the photographers jockeying for position on the grass around me, some even waiting in line for their turn in the prime spot. Even the joggers paused to take their own mental snapshots.

It is possible to have everything in life and still want more. Once back in London, I could not stop obsessing about the view imprinted so vividly on my mind. During those long final weeks before retirement, I set out the details of my new project: a fully refurbished hotel, five stars and fine dining in place of the shabby old relic where I’d been forced to stay. Something exceptional for those who not only deserve it, but can also afford it. It was just what the region needed: a taste of the top-end, an overdue injection of style and refinement. An alternative to the washed-out places that still, even now, proliferate around here, somehow surviving on two-for-one weekend deals and ten-pound lunches. By contrast, my hotel would be perfect. And the perfect hotel demands the perfect view.

***

Too many people dismiss us wealthy as being materialistic. It is a lazy insult, painting us as fools who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is also incorrect: we can appreciate the beauty of the natural world as readily as anyone else. The lower classes have long thought they had an exclusive moral right to enjoy the countryside, ever since they set off on their trespass over Kinder Scout. Yet the key word there is trespass: they were not supposed to be there. Would we have defended it so fiercely if we had not also valued it? No, the wealthy have the right to enjoy England’s beauty too. Anyone with money has worked to earn it, or toiled still harder to keep it. We deserve the chance to enjoy what it can buy, and exclusivity is part of enjoyment.

***

The complaints began even before our first month was through. The dining hall had no privacy, said the guests, as the huge windows meant that people passing by could watch them eat. Others said it was too cold in there. Which was nonsense, of course, and I even installed an antique thermometer to assuage their doubts. But a landscape of frost-capped fells can, it seems, make people feel cold, even in the confines of a fully insulated and expensively heated building. And people are so very eager to share imagined discomforts in lieu of any actual ones. Even those who didn’t complain failed to appreciate what they were experiencing, with eyes more commonly fixed on their phones, their food, or occasionally their companions. Anywhere other than my mountain. 

They also failed to appreciate the master suite. Complaints ranged from the noise of the diners below to the smells from the kitchen, and again the imagined cold. Yet as autumn changed to winter, by far the commonest cause for complaint on those insufferable online review websites was the dining hall windows, my Italian-made, nine-foot-high windows. There’s too much sunlight; the rain is too loud; why are there no blinds to stop people looking in… The unique opportunity to admire the finest view in the land was never remarked upon. Not once.

The final straw came during that first winter. Bookings were below half-occupancy and I had already been forced to lower prices after less than four months of operating. As I passed through the reception on my way to meet, and possibly sack, my manager, I heard someone complaining at reception. He was rich, arrogant and trying to impress a woman who was clearly only with him for weekends away in expensive country hotels. But the nature of his grievance hit me like a fist: he didn’t like the view. For three hundred and fifty pounds, he expected more than just a lake and a mountain. The girl on reception tried to placate him, but I cut her off before she had even completed her sentence. Give them a full refund as long as they leave immediately. I won’t let anyone talk about my mountain like that, especially not in my own hotel. 

It was clear to me by then that somehow, somewhere along the way, I had got it wrong. My vision was wasted on other people, whether rich or poor. I summoned my team of architects once more and explained what needed to be done.

***

The trees I felled and promised to replace have finally taken root, although rather than doing so in a nearby field, they now form a neat row between the old hotel buildings and the sparkling new construction near the water. The latter is now my residence, and quite possibly the most expensive private home in the country. The master suite is my bedroom, and the dining hall – my brilliant, beautiful dining hall – is the office from which I now manage the hotel myself, ensuring it matches the tastes of the lower classes. Once grown, those trees will become a barrier, affording me a little privacy from the riff-raff who now comprise my clientele. More importantly, they will block off all views across the water for anyone except me. Never again will my guests be confronted by a mountain too grand for them to behold, or be disturbed by a majesty they cannot appreciate. That burden is now mine, and one I bear alone. 

***

You can order your copy of Twisted Mountains via Little Peak Press. 

At Ocean's Mercy

A short story by Audrey T. Carroll:

The hazy ash gray, like a sick snow, blended line of ocean with line of sky. Willow hugged her thigh-grazing cardigan around herself to guard against the pitiful sighs of the water’s surface. Her hair whipped her cheeks, alternating with the salt to batter her skin with pinprick stings like the jellyfish kisses when she was a girl collecting what she mistook for sea quartz washed ashore. Those years, losing herself in the collecting, that’s what she hoped to recite now in every rhythm of her body, to focus so intensely on the task that the context fell away, only leaving in its wake the digging and eroded minerals and the child-sized achievements of discovery.

The few other people walking the shoreline wore shades of slate and khaki, blending in nearly seamlessly with their surroundings, a chameleon smoothness. They seemed cold and distant, the grayscale and sepia tones of a long-worn photograph with facial features faded away. The albums in the basement that her mother had so carefully curated from a hundred year’s artifacts, dated, arranged, book after book until it seemed there was no end... Willow could not prod at her most tender places right now thinking of that word, end. Instead, she thought of the surface. In royal violet and denim, contrasting the others, she was practically a tropic fish out of place in Rhode Island’s Atlantic waters. No one noticed her. In summers so many would walk the shore and set up towels and garish rainbow umbrellas along the way. But the winter solstice was two days’ past, and it had been months since unfamiliar feet had trespassed here.

As Willow glided forward, her ballet flats cracked the packed wet sand, the fractures spider-webbing along the surface. It left behind clumps like in the boxes of light brown sugar that her mother used to bake with every autumn. The air hung heavy with brine, and Willow swore that she could smell the quahogs beneath the waves. The tourists were always trying to block that scent out, grilling animal flesh and smoothing on sun lotion like mortar over bricks; they never wanted the actual experiences beyond the sand and the sun and the view, something inoffensive and interchangeable that they could’ve experienced anywhere along the east coast. 

The sand here, closer to the water, was more densely pocked with bits of quartz and amethyst. Willow bent over, her cardigan greeting the sand. She clawed with an infant’s grasping fingers, piercing the wave-crashed sand in what would look to an outsider to be a mindless frenzy. Willow, however, was very mindful—she knew exactly the kinds of pieces she was looking for. Finally, she came across the pink underbelly of a ribbed half-shell, its jagged umbo evidence of the trauma of its split. When she excavated it from its dreary beige tomb, she found that it had been cracked not only at the joint but also vertically, as though the absent shell half had taken with it half of this piece as well.

An imperfect half-shell was of no use to Willow. She tossed it, underhand, back to the water. The water was more than water. Her waves curled toward the sky in an openhearted gesture, then reached down toward the shore with an eager curiosity. The ocean was filled up with life—sea stars and octopi and invasive green crabs. Her mother had been an ocean, once, in a way that had somehow through the generations been proclaimed unremarkable on account of its seemingly natural inevitability, but it remained mystifying to Willow. 

The waves, famished, gnawed at her ankles, disturbing her thoughts. It wasn’t until the water drained back to the ocean that Willow simultaneously remembered she was wearing cloth shoes and realized that they were ruined beyond repair. Willow hopped, her feet heavy with oversaturated sand clinging in its attempts to cement her to the ground. And so she hopped again, this time feet slipping from shoes. Her leap brought her forward the equivalent of two steps. The shoes were behind her.

It was behind her.

She was behind her.

And maybe, Willow dared in the deepest chambers of herself still nursing irrational hope, if she didn’t turn around then the pillar of salt would not be waiting for her.

We’re all pillars of salt she had told Willow as a child. Her mother had lost count of how many times she’d read Slaughterhouse Five long before Willow was born. The copy in her study, torn on almost every edge and kissed with coffee stains, folded on almost every corner and scribbled in like a love letter, was never to be touched. She quoted it constantly, so much so that by age five Willow had felt as though she had read it herself. That copy now sat in the two-bedroom beach home that Willow rented year-round, tucked away behind an antique doll with red ringlets of synthetic hair so that Willow could only barely be reminded of its love-roughed edges.

Willow coiled around and found her flats, abandoned, under threat of further attack from the encroaching waves. She scooped up the shoes. They smelled so harshly of salt—pillars of salt, pillars of salt, mocking her like a cruel and demented bird out of a Poe story. They smelled so harshly of the salt that she almost pitched them as far into the sea as she could manage. One shoe happened to tilt to its side in Willow’s hand. She glared at its rebellion. Inside, she realized, a hermit crab, deep red exoskeleton and iridescent pearl of a shell to call home, had taken shelter. Heartbroken at what she had almost done, Willow plucked the crab from the toe of her shoe. She nested the flats under her arm as the crab pinched at her cuticles. Willow forgave each sting instantly; she knew what it was to be hurting, to be afraid, and reach for any sense of command over what happened next—that resistance to being pushed and pulled as though by the unknowable will of the waves.

She positioned the crab with care in a safe spot in the sand; in turn, he gave her a gesture of his claw that, had he fingers, would have been profane. She stood upright again, careful to walk in the direction opposite the hermit crab so as not to cause him harm. Staring at her own two feet as she moved, the sand consumed and then regurgitated them, again and again. A cycle. Like the waves. Like the moons. Like the rest.

With a sudden change in direction, Willow sprinted toward the ocean, to feel closer to it, even if it felt nothing in return. But then Willow found that it needed to feel something in return, that if it didn’t she might suddenly transform into a starburst with no one to witness. She knelt in the sand, knees of her jeans be damned. She couldn’t think about such frivolous, shallow things. Not now. Not when she felt so close to a breakthrough. A breakthrough to what, she did not know. But it was there, just under the surface. If she could only tease it out…

Digging. Her nails became claws, built for nothing but digging in the sand. She was pushed forward by a compulsion not quite her own. Digging. Digging. Cracking sand and piling sand. She found one empty half-shell, two. Each was unceremoniously lobbed into one of her shoes for future use; she was not gentle. After five, six, seven shells found themselves torn from Earth where it invited ocean, Willow felt the compulsion lift and air reenter her lungs, expand them, the pungent water stinging her eyes, bringing warmth to their corners.

Her lungs found rhythm again. Suddenly her toes felt pained from cold—and, in another instant, they went numb and she was forced to remember that she was in the heart of a New England winter. Willow flexed and wiggled her toes in attempt of shocking feeling back to skin and muscle and bone. She took the shell-filled shoes, cradling them to her chest as their contents clinked together like the dainty porcelain hands of China dolls. Her heart seemed to swell against her lungs and ribcage as she heard the music of the shells, the promise of the prayers that Willow would speak later lost against the steady lament of the waves that suddenly seemed so far away, nothing more than an echo.

***

Audrey T. Carroll is the author of Queen of Pentacles (Choose the Sword Press, 2016) and editor of Musing the Margins: Essays on Craft (Human/Kind Press, forthcoming). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Prismatica Magazine, peculiar, Glass Poetry, Vagabond City, So to Speak, and others. She is a bisexual and disabled/chronically ill writer who serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. 
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Unreal estate No.01: Shruff End

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the first of a new series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Shruff End from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea. Each essay will be about a different house, illustrated by the artist Katrina Gelze. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. 

“What madman built it?”
– Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea, 1978

“My imagination lives near the sea and under the sea,” Iris Murdoch said in 1978. She had never lived by the sea herself, but water played a big role in her books and her life.

A passionate swimmer and with characters who are thrown into water by her pen, Iris Murdoch was fascinated by the sea. Shruff End is one of the seaside houses of her mind, enlivened in her book The Sea, The Sea. 

“Water had a quickening effect on Iris Murdoch’s imagination,” writes Olivia Laing in her book To the River, “for her novels brim over with rivers and pools and chilly grey seas.”

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1919, as the only child of a singer and a civil servant. When Iris was a few weeks old the family moved to London. She would go on to study philosophy and wrote 26 novels, before being diagnosed with Alzheimers disease in 1997. Iris Murdoch died in 1999 aged 79, her brilliant mind relentlessly erased by dementia during the last two years of her life.

Iris Murdoch’s book The Sea, The Sea was published in 1978 when she was 59, was her nineteenth novel and the one which brought her the Booker Prize. The story is about a retired middle-aged actor, playwright and director Charles Arrowby, who leaves glittering London and moves to a house by the sea to write his memoirs. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.  

“Strange novel”, writes Philip Hoare in RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. “Faintly ridiculous” admits Olivia Laing, but this tragi-comic drama sinks in, and you become soaked in its story just as Shruff End remains forever dampened by the mysterious sea.

The House

Shruff End is a fictional house on an unidentified English coast. Charles Arrowby buys it in a fever of haste, selling his big apartment in Barnes, London, by the Thames. The sea-house takes most of his savings, but Arrowby imagines living simple, hermit days here, far away from his previous life on the London stage. But this dream that has come true soon turns into a strange nightmare, and Shruff End has its own role in the gripping story.

Shruff End is perched upon a small promontory, not exactly a peninsula, and stands on the very rocks themselves. “What madman built it?” Arrowby wonders. The facade, looking out onto the road, is “not in itself remarkable”, but in its lonely situation is strangely incongruous. The house would scarcely attract notice in a Birmingham suburb but all alone upon that wild coast it certainly looks odd. “Exposed and isolated,” writes Arrowby about his first impression. He falls in love with it.

The house is a brick, ‘double-fronted’ villa, with bay windows on the ground floor and two peaks to the roof. From the upper seaward windows the view is almost entirely of water, unless one peers down to glimpse the rocks below. From the lower windows the sea is invisible and one sees only the coastal rocks that surround the house, elephantine in size and shape. “How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life,” Charles Arrowby writes of the view. 

The pale buff-coloured blinds, which hang in almost every room, are “in excellent condition”, with glossy wooden toggles on strings, silk tassels, and lace fringe at the bottom. When these blinds are drawn down, Shruff End, as seen from the road, has a weird air of complacent mystery.

The bricks are dark red. The back of the house has been horribly “pebble-dashed” against the weather. “Little do they realise how ardently I look forward to those storms, when the wild waves will beat at my very door!” Charles Arrowby is rather exalted in the first pages of his memoirs: “What a paradise, I shall never tire of this sea and this sky.”

Mr Arrowby lives entirely on the seaward side of the house, upstairs in his bedroom and what he calls his drawing room, and downstairs is the kitchen and a small den next to it known as “the little red room”, where there is a fireplace. On the other side of the house are the the book room, where he has put the crates of his still unpacked books, and the dining room, where he stores his wine. 

The chief peculiarity of the house, and one for which Charles Arrowby can find no rational explanation, is an inner room found on both floors.They are rooms with no external window, but lit by internal window giving onto the seaward rooms. These two “funny” inner rooms on two floors are extremely dark. Throughout the book they seem to be a rib-cage containing the soul of the house. 

The house is “mysteriously damp”, its floor is “curiously damp”. The large – and damp – larder is full of woodlice. “Is it conceivable that the sea could be rising up through a hidden channel under the house?” Charles Arrowby prises up some linoleum in the hall, and replaces it with a shudder. There is a salty smell, he observes. At the end of the book he tries to get rid of the house, and admits that no one seems to want to buy the place, “perhaps because of the dampness, perhaps for other reasons”.

The sea becomes a canvas for Mr Arrowby’s own inner demons. “It is after tea and I am sitting at the drawing-room window watching the rain falling steadily into the sea. There is a terrible grim simplicity about this grey scene. Apart from an iron-dark line at the horizon the sea and the sky are much the same colour, a muted faintly radiant grey, and expectant as if waiting for something to happen. As it might be flashes of lightning or monsters rising from the waves.” 

One morning he does see a monster rising from the waves, while the sea also mysteriously and repeatedly unties the rope that he ties to the shore to help himself get out of the water after his daily swims. It provides one of the most quoted lines from the book: “Time, like the sea, unties all knots.”

The house starts to play tricks on his mind. Is the house haunted? He asks about a poltergeist in a nearby bar. “Any house might be haunted,” someone answers. At first it is a vase that falls down and is smashed to pieces. Then – a mirror. And then there’s a face he sees in the window at night. Or was it moon?

Shruff End seems to have not only its own ghost, but also its own climate, independent from the weather outside. It feels cold even on warm days. One day Arrowby comes in from the brilliant light outside and the air in the house seems grey and thick. The house is gloomy, and there are strange sounds too, or perhaps it is just the bead curtain clicking in the draught from the open door...

“The house was still acting up, but I felt by now that I was getting to know its oddities and I was more friendly towards it,” writes Arrowby. “It was not exactly a sinister or menacing effect, but as if the house were a sensitized plate which intermittently registered things which had happened in the past – or, it now occurred to me for the first time, were going to happen in the future. A premonition?”

When Mr Arrowby puts Shruff End up for sale and runs back to London, he moves to “a peculiar miserable derelict” new flat. If he ever wanted to live as a hermit, retired from the world, then this – he concludes – would be a far better habitat. “It is oddly enough easier to write here, amid all this cramped chaos, than in the open spaces at Shruff End.” 

In the end, he hadn’t been able to concentrate in a house by the sea. 

“Throughout the book water runs like a spell or a curse. The sea of the title is not just a background or vista, it is a character,” writes Daisy Johnson in the introduction of a special edition of The Sea, The Sea. It was published by Vintage Books in the summer of 2019 to celebrate the 100th birthday of Iris Murdoch. 

***
About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

Beautiful Place: A novel by Amanthi Harris

We are extremely pleased to present an extract from the new novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE by Amanthi Harris. Set in Sri Lanka, this is a novel about leaving and losing home and making family, about being oppressed and angry and wanting a better life. 

‘In quiet distilled prose, Amanthi Harris takes a moment of change we all experience and brings it into poignant, evocative focus. Her story resonates like a personal and deeply felt memory.’ —Preti Taneja

***

The van followed the bay, passing through villages of houses with dark empty porches. Light shone deep inside in rooms where families had gathered to gossip and tease and worry and scold away the last hours of the night. Soon the van left the villages behind and the sea came nearer, blackly glistening past coconut groves of slanting trees silvery in moonlight. The van stopped at the edge of a grove and they stepped out to the roar of sea and cold rushing winds. Ria put on her jumper. High above her, the coconut trees swayed and bowed against a blue-black sky, the stars a dusty spray of sparkling white. 

“I’ll come back in two hours,” the driver said and gave Louis his card. “Hope you see some turtles.” 

“But where are you going?” 

“I’ll just be nearby – call me if you want to stay longer.” 

“You never said you’d be leaving us,” Louis protested, but the driver was already in the van. “Hey!” Louis cried, but it was too late, the van drove away. 

“How come there’s no one else here?” Ria said. 

“Maybe we’re too early.” 

“Or too late,” she replied. 

There was a glow through the trees from a thatch hut. They walked towards it. Over the door was a sign: ‘The Turtle Watch Museum’. An electric bulb swung from the rafters in the wind, dancing its glowering light over framed photographs of turtles lumbering onto night time beaches, digging in sand, or straining, legs splayed, squeezing out eggs. Louis read every sign, every caption, excited again. 

“This place is great – they’re a charity employing ex-convicts. They teach them about conservation.” 

“Ex-convicts?” 

“Good evening, sir-madam!” A short stocky man bounded into the hut and grinned at them. His eyes lingered on Ria. The man’s face was pockmarked and puffy, the skin yellowed and tough, the nose broken; eyebrows interrupted by the scars of old stitches. His smile though was joyful, unconnected seeming to the damaged features. 

“In our turtle watch we don’t steal turtles’ eggs – we’re not like the people down the road,” he told them. “Those people steal the eggs and grow turtles in tanks. Sometimes they eat the eggs. They’re very bad people, don’t ever go to their turtle watch, sir and madam.” 

“Where can we buy tickets?” Louis asked. 

“No need of tickets, sir – it’s all free at our turtle watch. You only pay if you see the turtles.” “Wow! That’s great!” Louis approved. 

“So let’s go and see if they come! This way, sir-madam!” 

The ex-convict came up beside Ria as they left the hut. 

“Sinhalese?” he murmured, his voice turned low and adult, a secret voice, brought out for the real conversation. She pretended not to hear. He pretended not to have spoken. 

“This way sir, follow me!” He darted away, become the happy child again. 

The ex-convict shone a torch ahead and they followed him, winding past coconut trees, their great hooves of trunks stamped in the ground. Ria took off her shoes and the sand was silky-cold and dry, slinking around her feet with every step. A half-moon cast its pale gleam over a wide empty beach. 

“No turtles yet, sir-madam,” the ex-convict declared, scanning the sea with binoculars. 

“When do the turtles come?” Louis asked. 

“It can be anytime, sir – soon, hopefully, soon! Dear God, please let there be turtles for sir and madam! Just keep watching the ocean. I will go closer and look for you.” 

He ran down to the water’s edge and strolled through the waves swirling idly in. He walked around a rocky outcrop and disappeared. 

Ria sat down on the beach, a sandy bank firm at her back. Louis sighed and sat down beside her. 

“Do you know anything about this place?” he asked. 

“No.” 

“Does your family ever come here?” 

“I’m not sure.” 

“You don’t know where your family goes?” 

“I know very little about them, it turns out.” 

There was no way on earth her family would have come to such a place – in the middle of the night, to look at turtles. 

“You should have asked Padma about this place,” he accused. 

“You arranged it!” she retorted. 

The ex-convict appeared on top of the rocks, walking a little unsteadily. He stood looking out to sea. The pale beam of his torch reached over the waves. 

“Something’s weird about this,” Louis said. 

Across the water, at the other end of the bay, lights shone in the town where life went on unknowing of them. It was the first time Ria had been anywhere so deserted in Sri Lanka, so far away from the places she knew, and everyone. The trees leaned over velvet rocks and the pale soft sand of a primal Sri Lanka, a pre-world of hushed dark beaches and a muted rocking sea sweeping the shore all through the night – long still nights, full of unknowable secrets. These were the beaches where war bodies would wash up, maimed and distorted after night-time abductions – even now, in peace-time, the abductions went on for different, more secret reasons. It seemed impossible to end the savagery; it seemed a part of the unreal beauty of the island, so spoiled and churning under the surface. 

But here was its raw splendour, its secret night-time source, potent and untainted before it was lost in the world of people. 

“Why aren’t there any other tourists here?” Louis demanded. 

“Maybe they didn’t want to see turtles.” 

He made an exasperated noise and glanced at her impatiently. 

“It’s better like this, don’t you think?” Ria said. 

“It feels like a scam.” 

“I don’t see how. We haven’t given the guy any money.” 

“Everything in this country is a scam – that’s why my friends left, they’d had enough. It was always the same: hire cars, safaris, Buddhist temples – you name it, there was always a way they could con you.” 

“But we don’t have to pay unless we see turtles.” 

Louis jumped up, full of a new restlessness, a fierceness in him. “Hey!” he shouted to the ex-convict. 

The ex-convict spun round. 

“Where are your turtles?” Louis yelled. “Are they coming any time soon? I’m getting tired, I want to go home!” 

The ex-convict tensed, his round belly turned solid, thin legs locked. Like a fat sparrow, Ria thought. But dangerous. 

“I think I might just call the driver!” Louis taunted, waving his phone. 

The ex-convict scrambled down from the rocks and came running. 

“The turtles will come, sir! Just wait and see – just a few more hours. Madam – you tell sir, to wait a little!” he panted. 

“What’s it to you if we leave?” 

Louis stood taller than the ex-convict. He looked down with a cold angry smile at the ex-convict’s pitted fleshy face. Louis’ hair shone in the moonlight, swept back from his fine-boned face, the perfect lines of jaw and chin and lips. Ria looked away from that perfection, winning so easily above the beaten face below. Louis was so much stronger, so much luckier than the fat-sparrow ex-convict. Louis started to type a number on his phone. 

“No sir! Please sir, stay!” the ex-convict cried. “The turtles will come! You just have to wait – how can I know what time they will want to lay eggs?” 

Louis went on typing then put the phone to his ear. The ex-convict grew still, watching in silence – no more pleading, no more explaining about the turtles. The torchlight made his cheeks seem waxy and hard. ‘Tourists missing from Turtle Watch Beach’ – Ria could already see the headline. A small square of text with their names, ages and occupations and an inaccurate account of what had happened. 

“The driver will be back in an hour, let’s just wait till then,” Ria insisted. 

“Yes, wait!” the ex-convict agreed. 

“Maybe the turtles will come later,” Ria added. 

“Yes, later! The turtles will come later!” 

“Yeah, right.” Louis ended the call and sat down again, looking away. 

The ex-convict jogged away to a distant spot at the water’s edge. Ria sat down beside Louis. He didn’t look at her. She watched the sea alone, feeling his silence for the first time and him closed to her. He checked his watch. His arm touched hers and she felt the muscle hardness of him under the softness of cashmere, and he felt apart and other. He would always be other, separate from her; she would never truly know what he was thinking – why he had smiled at her that first afternoon on the veranda, why he had asked to join her for dinner. How did you ever know when you knew someone, when it was safe to allow that last private door inside you to open? She understood now why people had horoscopes read before marriages – even the arrangements of stars in their constellations were a comfort faced with the unknown of another’s mind. She watched the night-time sea surging in surly bursts onto the beach.

“The sea looks so different at night,” she said. 

The waves slicked back in an oily sweep, receding into themselves – another sea altogether from its joyful, spraying, sparkling, sunlit self, dazzling all day. 

“It looks so pure in the mornings,” she reflected. 

“You shouldn’t have undermined me in front of that guy,” Louis said. 

“What are you talking about?” 

“You should be on my side, not his.” 

“I didn’t want to antagonise him.” 

“It was up to us when we left. What could he have done about it anyway?” 

“I don’t know . . . He might have friends nearby. Or he might have a knife or a gun – who knows? I didn’t want to risk it.” 

“That’s crazy! You’re always so afraid of everything!” His eyes were a scornful pale glare in the tan of his face. 

She glared back at him. He turned away.

***

PHOTO: Maxi Kohan

Amanthi Harris was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and has degrees in Law and Chemistry from Bristol University. As well as her novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE, her novella LANTERN EVENING won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 and was published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published by Serpent’s Tail and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Beautiful Place - Salt Publishing (UK)
Beautiful Place - Pan Macmillan India
Amanthi Harris’ website

The Housewife of New Friends Colony

A story by Rita Malik

Her husband Ravi had eaten a strange leaf in the first strange country he had visited long ago, under the pretense of his business affairs, no doubt. But his gastronomic tendencies were awakened to the new possibilities. Possibilities that did not include in any way shape or form, yellow or red ground spices, mixed all spice, cinnamon, nor betel nut, no hing, no lentils, and no unnecessary red or green chilies. The peptic ulcer his personal physician had for so long profited over, that helped house him in a perfect Mercedes Benz, was no longer going to provide the funds. The salt had lost its savor. He was a connoisseur of all things non-Indian. He could even gallivant and float and beam over the most delectable and bland fish, boiled potatoes, as long as they were associated with a culinary culture and a national pride of some independent nature, such as Irish dishes. Yes, Ravi had developed a taste for Irish food.

Meanwhile, his friend Vijay had hatcheries all over China. Seema had wondered during many pillow talk parlances with Ravi about the state of affairs if one has only to rely on the revenues from various chicken hatcheries to make a living.

“But he’s doing very well,” Ravi had told her. “How else could he live in that beautiful farmhouse and all that acreage in the middle of Delhi?”

“Inheritance,” she’d replied, flipping a magazine page without looking up. “He’s his father’s son.” Vijay’s grandfather had been the Mayor of Delhi once upon a time. The family had depths of connections, especially in political circles. His wife, a pretty woman, who went by the name of Penny, outright non-Indian, even though she was a Kashmiri, had the gift of youthful looks and a fine figure, Seema reflected ruefully.

Seema herself was darker skinned, but by no means of the blackish sort, seen in the people of Dravidian descent. Her family was from U.P. Bihari’s. Wheat skinned. And there was no noble lineage. She had been able to hide this from her friends. In fact she had led them on to believe she was descended from a long line of Rajputs, before the drastic changes took place, industrialization, globalization. She made self-deprecating remarks and joked about the Rajputs along the way, endearing herself with the Dolly’s, the Sweety’s, and the ruffians of Punjab, as she would call them, in her parlances with Ravi after their partying.

Still, Ravi never understood. He did patiently hear her out, as she ranted about the housewives of New Friends and South Extension.

“Shopping and kitty parties and showing off, that’s all that these women find time to do.” Why she had done this, the deliberate misleading as regards her lineage, she did herself not know.