The Joy-Ride and After Read online

  The Joy-Ride and After

  A. L. BARKER

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  I The Joy Ride

  II The Narrow Boat

  III A Likely Story

  Copyright

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  Audrey Lillian Barker was born at St Paul’s Cray, Kent in 1918, and published nine novels and eleven collections of short stories between 1947 and her death in 2002. Barker’s fiction was highly regarded in her own lifetime, most memorably by Rebecca West who wrote of Barker’s third novel: ‘You should ask your vet to put you down if you do not admire The Middling.’* Barker won the inaugural Somerset Maugham Award in 1947 with her first collection, Innocents; and her novel John Brown’s Body (1969) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

  Today, Barker is a marginal figure, often remembered as a ‘writers’ writer’. The label suggests that her writing is in some way difficult, inaccessible to the general reader. This could not be further from the truth. Barker’s stories and novels deal with familiar situations and questions, and are set in unremarkable locations: suburban streets, cul-de-sacs, terraces, parks, hotels, chemists. Barker wrote about the places and people she knew and, I think, for the people she knew, literary or otherwise. She avoided overly ‘high-brow’ publications and, from the outset of her writing career (which began proper in the 1930s at the department of juvenile fiction at the Amalgamated Press), she wrote for ordinary readers.

  Many of her short stories started their lives in popular women’s magazines of the 1940s and 1950s; more surprisingly, in the 1970s and 1980s over twenty of her ghost stories were published in bestselling horror anthologies. This involvement in mainstream publishing made her a flexible writer, able to adapt her precise, highly readable prose to the demands of various fictional genres.

  On the other hand, Barker’s best stories tend to thwart both generic conventions and our expectations. Many of them appear on the surface to be about minor concerns but underneath there is a strangeness, a darkness, a sense that she is, after all, concerned with bigger questions. The singularity of Barker’s prose style has a lot to do with this. The precision with which she uses vocabulary has been recognised, but it is worth noting how often in Barker’s writing the meaning is not clear, or the syntax of a sentence trips up the reader. For a writer so interested in the exact meanings of words (she was an avid reader of dictionaries) it is surprising how frequently in her work the meaning of a word or phrase remains elusive. This sense of ambiguity relates to the position of Barker herself. She wrote both literary fiction and genre fiction, short stories and novels; she was at once connected with the London literary scene and distanced from it; and she began writing at mid-century, a ‘critically awkward’ era after modernism but before postmodernism.†

  The ambiguity of Barker’s position sheds light on her preoccupation with the child, a figure at once intensely familiar and strangely enigmatic. Barker’s fiction explores how others have imagined childhood as well as the issues at stake in her own writing of the child. For Barker the modern child is firmly built on Romantic foundations. She is interested in Romantic conceptions of innocence and experience, particularly the dialectical interaction between these two states expressed in the work of William Blake. But her focus on the child is as much a response to the intense interest in childhood in her own lifetime. In mid-twentieth-century Britain children occupied an uncertain position: they were viewed with suspicion and uncertainty; and figured variously in discussions about human aggression and morality, as threats to society, as yardsticks showing the corruptive influence of the war, and as symbols of a future about which many were so unsure. Barker’s fiction resists some of the key narratives being told about children in post-war society and culture, and challenges the tendency in literature and child-study to understand the child in terms of abstraction and opposition. But while she is critical of others’ attempts to pin down the child, Barker’s own preoccupation with this figure is clear. Her oeuvre is a catalogue of variations on the theme of childhood in which she writes and rewrites the child again and again, experimenting with different fictional forms.

  The supernatural was another of Barker’s interests. In a lecture on ghost stories to the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) in 1990, she calls herself ‘a lifelong devotee’ of the genre.‡ Like the child, the ghost story frames Barker’s writing life. In 1942 she read Sacheverell Sitwell’s book on poltergeists which inspired her ghost story, ‘Fetched’. A story from her first collection, ‘Submerged’ was included in the first Pan Book of Horror Stories published in 1959; and her final novel, The Haunt, is in part a ghost story. If Barker could ever be claimed as a popular writer, it would be with reference to her ghost stories. One could also argue that it was by way of the ghost story that Barker achieved a move from the margins to the mainstream of the literary scene in the following decade: in addition to her RSL lecture, she had four stories commissioned by BBC Radio Four in 1992 and the same year published Element of Doubt, a collection of her ghost stories. For Barker, stories of the supernatural had not lost their power in modern times because of the necessity of ambiguity. ‘They endure’, she writes with typical Barkeresque frankness, ‘because we don’t know all the answers and we’re better off not knowing’.§

  A. L. Barker was not fond of novels. In 1983 she wrote: ‘I have not written any novels. Those of my books which have been published under the guise of novels have been short stories stretched, disguised, tarted up and otherwise corrupted to fill the publisher’s bill.’¶ Barker’s description of slipping camouflaged short stories under the nose of her publisher reveals, on the one hand, her ambivalence towards the novel form and, on the other, an awareness of the need to adapt her writing to resemble it. Her solution was the ‘articulated novel’, the name she gave to a book containing several linked short stories or novellas featuring the same characters, themes and events.

  The Joy-Ride and After (1963) is Barker’s first articulated novel. It combines the portrayal of extraordinary or epiphanic moments in people’s lives, a technique commonly found in short fiction, with a novelistic exploration of cause and effect. In the first novella, garage assistant Joe Munn’s decision to go for a drive in a car belonging to his employer’s sinister friend Brind has terrible consequences. The repercussions of Joe’s actions are felt in the second section, in which Alice Oram leaves the family home one evening after discovering that her husband Frank is having an affair. The final part of Barker’s novel, set five years later, returns to an earlier character, Esther Munn, now married to Arthur Bulow, a canteen manager.

  The novel is concerned with the accounts people give of and to each other. It deals with problematic relationships underpinned by habit, convention, loneliness or obsession; conversations in which characters misunderstand one another accidentally or deliberately, or in which neither party says what they really mean; relationships in which information is told, or held back, to secure or undermine power. The physical and social isolation of the minor characters in the novel like Mrs Martineau and Garnett shows how societal relationships have broken down. Discrepancies between the accounts of events given by different characters, and incidents in which opportunities for experience and communication are missed, are replicated on a formal level by the articulated structure of the novel. The Joy-Ride and After conceives articulation to be as much about holding apart as linking together, as much about separation and disunity as it is about connection, and as much about misunderstanding and inability to articulate as it is about communication.

  Kate Jones

  Kate Jones is shortly to complete her doctoral thesis on A. L. Barker at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.
The project, which examines representations of the figure of the child in Barker’s fiction, will provide the first full-length introduction to her work and life. In 2011 Kate was awarded a dissertation fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas in Austin; the award enabled an invaluable research visit to the HRC’s A. L. Barker archive.

  * Rebecca West, ‘The Novelist’s Voice’. Typescript housed at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.

  † Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘Introduction’, British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 1.

  ‡ A. L. Barker, ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies: A Loving Look at Some Tales of the Supernatural’, lecture for the Royal Society of Literature, 18 October 1990, p. 1. Box 2, Folder 3, A. L. Barker Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  § Ibid., p. 3.

  ¶ A. L. Barker, draft response to Jean Chaudhuri’s letter dated 22 June 1983. Box 9, Folder 3, A. L. Barker Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  THE JOY-RIDE AND AFTER

  I

  THE JOY-RIDE

  RUMBOLD had taken to sitting in the office all day. It was in a corner of the pump bay, a two-by-four place with glass-topped walls like the wheelhouse of a ship. The wind had a straight run up Recovery Road and every scrap of paper, every billhead wagged in the draught. Rumbold felt the cold. Sometimes it was the only thing he felt. It got into his armpits and under the soles of his feet, it was in his pockets, down among the tobacco dust and small change.

  He could remember being hot, splendidly hot. In Burma. His memory sorted out from all that gargantuan stew of green a few wild banana trees and frangipani and honeyed sweat welling from every pore. That was happiness, that’s how it came, a grain at a time. Ten years after, he picked it out, pure and still luminous, and rolled it between his fingers. One grain out of a whole war, but it was the purity that surprised him. For a split second he fooled himself back under the tigrish sky, the blade of the sun cut him down, his bones melted and the dust drank them up.

  On the concrete apron the boy, Joe, rambled about serving petrol. Now and then when there was nothing else to do he used his fist to split the ice in the water-cans. The wind whipped across the marshalling yards and Joe’s body stood out as if it had been shucked. His overalls peeled back over his bones, big bungling bones that sprouted anyhow, like scrub timber. He stood sorting over lumps of ice in his palm.

  Rumbold kicked open the door. “Joe!”

  He, Rumbold, had burnt those scabs down the jamb, snubbing his cigarettes out, thinking of something. Of what? That scar high under the lintel, what had he thought of when he reached up to make that? Maybe it marked one of his decisions, he was liable to them when he finished a cigarette, the feeling would endure for a moment of having come to a corner and got round it.

  “Joe!”

  The boy opened his fist and let fall the lump of yellow ice that dribbled in his palm. The fragments skidded wide and he cracked them under his boot as he crossed the yard.

  “Stop fooling with that ice, will you? I’m sensitive, I’ve got nerves.” Joe waited, his was not so much a stare as a kind of trenchant blankness. “Oh, you’re all right, you wouldn’t know a nerve from a pipeline.” Rumbold turned up his coat collar. “I’m going across to Evie’s. You’d better shift the Vauxhall, there’s no room for the tanker to set up.”

  First flakes of snow came blundering in on the wind as he crossed the street.

  *

  It was warm in the café. Evie’s, they called it, though Evie didn’t own a stick of the place. She stood behind the counter and the café crouched round her, the chairs and tables like a lot of stiff-legged old creatures waiting to jump through a hoop. She filled the room with her climate, a soft bloomy air, alive and stirring—part of her breath. Then the bare walls and the webby floor had a saloon-bar plush.

  Rumbold used to shut the door and stand waiting for the cold gust that had come in with him to be stifled. When he moved he went gingerly, opening his knees, straightening his back, letting the warmth into every crease.

  That was a mistake, and Evie let him see it by the way she picked him up and put him down in a glance. As if there was nothing to know about him, nothing to want. She was right, he had no surprises left. He went to the counter and put his hands on the urn, holding them there until it was bliss to rub and chase the burn down into his finger tips. What was left was too subtle for Evie. She was uncomplicated. He’d watched her when the truckers came in, the big men with faces wine-dark from the wind. They’d slam the door, shaking the cold off their coats like dogs in from a swim. Evie would be there behind the urn, smiling a smile that began in her body.

  “That’s the way to get chilblains.”

  “On these?” Rumbold held out square calloused fingers, kneading one fist into the other until the dry skin squawked.

  There was one other customer, an old cabby sitting over against the wall. He sucked once or twice at his brimming mug of tea before he took off his cap, felt inside and brought out a flat newspaper package. He opened it on the table, took out a decker of bread and ham, re-wrapped the parcel—mitring off the corners—put it back in his cap and settled the cap on his ears.

  “Gets a bit draughty after supper, eh, Charley?” called Rumbold.

  The bright blue veins in the old man’s cheeks knotted and twinkled. “I keep a crust up for breakfast.”

  Evie laughed. She opened her throat and the laughter came quaking up out of her breasts, swelling the thick cords in her neck, quivering along the soft floury flesh of her arms and down into her thighs. Both men watched her, old Charley’s gums grinning and crumbling his sandwich, Rumbold smiling tightly, waiting for her to finish. Evie put her hands up to her hair, still laughing, pinned a loop of it in place. She had beautiful hair, bold as brass, and she wore it roped round her head in a yellow plait as solid as her own wrist.

  “Jessamy, I’m warm. Laughing always makes me warm.”

  Rumbold leaned across the counter. “Have you thought about tomorrow?”

  “Not till it comes.”

  “I’ll take the Buick and we’ll go up West. You like riding in the Buick—”

  “Gone pink as a lobster, I have.” Smilingly, Evie pinched up a fold of flesh on her forearm, gently rolled it between finger and thumb.

  “Anywhere you like—the Strand Palace or Mario’s.” Rumbold could hear the pleading in his voice. “Anything you say.”

  He didn’t like the way she looked at him, knowing him, knowing everything about him, half smiling at what she knew.

  “If you’ve got another date—” But she’d no right to another date, he’d asked days ago. ‘Just once, Evie, just for old times’ sake—’ Begging, it had come to. “We’ll make it Friday, or Saturday—any night.”

  The urn suddenly tried to blow its top. It gathered itself for the effort, sweating steam and scolding like a cat. Rumbold stepped back, snatching his hands from the counter.

  “You’re nervy.” Evie pressed the valve, a jet of steam shot out with a snarl. In the sharp hush that followed old Charley sucked up his tea. “It’s snowing, funny how quiet it goes when it starts to snow.” She looked where the big flakes sailed down the window and the small grains whipped to and fro in a solid gas. Out of a soupy sky the snow came down a bad yellow, folding into the black grease of the road. “It’s pretty, there’s nothing so pretty as snow.”

  *

  The snow was bothering Joe Munn. He was flat on his back beside an old box-car and the flakes lit on his eyes and mouth like soggy moths. They tasted of sulphur where the wind had brought them across the marshalling yards. He couldn’t see what he was doing or what he ought to be doing. At the moment he was considering a problem.

  The jack had jammed on the axle and the problem was to free it without bringing half a ton of near scrap iron down in a hurry. Joe eased himself under the chassis until his face was free of snow. He l
ay looking up at the dirty underguts of the car. The axles, shafts, rods and bolts under the curded grease and the webs of mud—they had properness and purpose. All machines had that. So had maps, country looked best on a map.

  The jack was tight as a rock when he grasped it, had probably overrun its thread. If Rumbold was right and the axle was cracked, they had a major job. Rumbold hadn’t bargained for a major job.

  “Buy cheap and sell dear, that’s business.”

  Joe wasn’t going into business. Business meant books, and books gave him goose-pimples. He tapped the axle with a spanner. It sounded dead, there was no ring to it. He wished he knew enough to know if there had to be a ring. He hit it again, harder. This time there was a strong true chime from the jack. It gave, gracefully, and the chassis flopped, ancient joints yawning, into a half-cock on its off-side rear wheel, missing his head by a split inch. He squirmed out feet first into the ribbons of snow.

  The car looked comic from behind, like an old dog trying to get its leg up. You’d never think it was a fly particular thing, all those rods and cylinders, valves and pistons, picking the gas out of a tank of petrol, firing a whiff at a time and belting along all that cold iron with each explosion. That was mystery. But one day he was going to know it, down to the last washer, the last pin, he was going to know an engine. Rumbold knew and sometimes he would tell, sometimes not. He liked to pretend it was too deep, or too easy, or something you had to be born with.

  A few turns of the jack handle and the car was down on an even keel and the snow was dribbling in the ribs of its wooden coachwork. Joe pushed it away into the shop. He switched on the pump lights and the flicker sign over the drive-in. Traffic greased by, people trotted past rounded like beetles, and the hard blue blink of the flicker-sign pricked out the last of the daylight.