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A famous singer arrives at the studio of Lovis Corinth to sit for a portrait in this specially commissioned story

Rain on Klopstockstrasse. Light held in misty nets of water above the grey gleaming pavements. And then later the sound of it steadily falling through the darkness outside.

Max’s cousin comes: Frieda Halbe, the singer. She is large, Brunhilde-like, with a cheerful, practical face. She has brought with her a leather portmanteau containing various props. It is big and heavy but she has carried it with ease up the stairs.

“Herr Corinth,” she says, “I have been taxing myself with the question of how you will represent my particular trade. It seems to me that here we encounter a difficulty. Because there is a sense,” she says, as if slightly surprised to discover that it is true, “a sense in which I have nothing to show for myself.”

The light in the studio is dim from the rain. Water tick-tocks on the roof and down into the gutters. In the street below there are puddles, all broken with raindrops so that silver surges out, as though a surface needed only to be pierced for something more precious – something formless, a life-force – to be released. Increasingly he finds little he can look on without this conflict being enacted, the inner straining to break the bounds of the outer. Yet he loves the surface and wishes for nothing more than to believe in it again.

“In the end, Fräulein,” he says, ‘”none of us really have anything to show for ourselves.”

“But that isn’t true. You paint, and at the end of painting you have a picture. If I was to make a portrait of you it would virtually design itself. You have your studio, your brushes and easels, your canvases hanging on every wall –” she sketches it all with her hands “– these things tell a story. All I do is make a sound, and when I’ve made it, it disappears.” The hands fall apart, empty. “Well, I suppose I might ask you to put on a smock,” she says, cheerful again. “One that was nice and dirty. Most people don’t think of a painter wearing a suit. You look more like –” she thinks “– like a writer.”

“Perhaps that is how I wish to look.”

“But would you write as you paint, Herr Corinth?”

“A painter sees, Fräulein. A writer is one who tells a story.”

“Then the story would be of your own life, would it not?” She looks around the studio, at the walls from which countless versions of his face look back at her. “Max tells me you paint a portrait of yourself each year, on your birthday. Why not a self-portrait in words?”

For a moment they are both silent.

“And what have you brought for me Fräulein?”

He looks with curiosity at the portmanteau.

“Well, first of all, of course, music –” she delves inside and brings out sheaves of pages dense with black notations “– some Wagner, of course, here is Die Meistersinger and also the Wesendonck Lieder which I performed last year at Leipzig, and then a part in a new opera by Strauss –”

She is so practical, so humble in fact, bending over, rummaging in the vast leather case. This awkward business of being herself, of seeming to be herself. One has to deal with it as efficiently as one can. She produces the evidence. Faintly he begins to see her. She has a great rounded woman’s body. She is blonde, flaxen, pink-hued. She puffs a little, the colour rising to her cheeks, as she hefts out a heavy, folded metal contraption.

“– and a stand, of course, to display the music on –”

“Any costumes, Fräulein? Any draperies, perhaps, or head-dresses?”

Yes, she is a heavy pink and white bloom, full, scented, a little waxen. Yet he sees a darkness around her. She is a flower of night, her heavy fragrance perfuming the warm darkness. And there is darkness in her woman’s soul: the night calls her and she answers, not knowing why, for she is so radiant and flaxen, so practical. Surely she should belong to the day, to the sun. During the day she has still to exist – this she knows. But it is at night that her fragrance comes pouring from her, her sound.

“What is that edge of fur I can see?” he says, when she has pulled out a gilded sceptre and orb, a jewel-studded helmet, a tiara of peacock feathers, a velvet cape the colour of wine.

“This? This is a form of pelisse. In fact it is my own – I don’t know why I brought it. I see now the material is completely transparent.”

It is a little cape of opalescent cloth, as fine as a cobweb. She would wear this not for a performance but for a personal occasion, perhaps even when she was alone. He understands why she has brought it. This is the part of herself she wonders about. It is the part she would like him to paint – not the woman who performs but who is capable of the performance, who feels the mystery stirring within her, who seems to be like other women but is not.

“If it would not trouble you just to put it around your shoulders, Fräulein,” he says, gesturing with his hand. “Just for a moment.”

She hesitates. She seems reluctant. She turns away from him, fumbling with the delicate garment. When she faces him again, the pelisse is fastened around her throat, enshrining her form like a web of light. Her expression has changed. Her face is full of a fear and amazement he knows well. He has recognised her.

* * *

A self-portrait with words? Yes, it seems to me that a man ought to be able to tell the story of himself, like Rousseau did. And I have suddenly a desire to search my soul, to search it in holy earnest. I have painted many self-portraits: the strange thing is that they all seem to turn out differently. Still, my guiding principle here will be truth!

I push the curtain aside and see a small East Prussian city that lies where two rivers — the Deime and the Pregel — converge. Barges travel back and forth from the Curionian lagoon, and the boatmen push along the green riverbank with long poles. Little people go about their busy day; they believe that the good God has made the entire universe especially and only for them.

On the day of my birth – 21 July 1858 – everyone in the household rose and prepared to be in the rye fields by dawn. It was beautiful summer weather: everything seemed to point to a good harvest and manpower was summoned from all quarters. For this reason my mother was alone in her difficult hour; the house and courtyard were deserted. My mother had five older children from the tanner Opitz; of her second marriage, at the age of forty-one, to my father, who as well as being her husband was her first cousin by blood and was twelve years younger than she, I was the only product. And as such I became the sunshine of the house, as children sometimes are. The gloomy faces of the workers and day laborers would light up when they saw me around the farm.

“Na Luke, wat deihst du denn da – what are you up to?”

I was often in the courtyard that lay between the back of the house and the farm buildings and which teemed with quacking ducks and cackling chickens and cats balancing carefully over the damp paving stones. Beyond this the farm had five closely adjoining tanning pits, two lime pits and a big bog pit in the middle. The biggest pit of all was filled to the top with tanning bark. I was once lifted into it to look, when it was empty. Usually a journeyman stood one to each pit, fishing out useable leather, for my father was a tanner as well as running the farm, and thus belonged to the “rich”; a fact my school fellows jeered about so that I felt that being rich was something shameful.

The farm was my own world and I observed everything that happened there. I stood at the bog pit while the labourers cut the tails, claws and horns off the raw hides; I watched as they hacked out a piece of raw flesh and threw it to the waiting cats. Bloody puddles formed between the paving stones from which the chickens drank avidly. Once, measuring the depth of the bog pit with a long stick I fell into it and thrashed about in the brown water. Everyone ran out and pulled me from the pit and I was put to bed. I remember looking down at my outstretched body where some pieces of rind still clung …

* * *

In October the city is still green. At this time of year the house on Klopstockstrasse is full of decayed light. The sun is rich on the pocked masonry. There is everywhere a feeling of evening, even in the bright cool mornings. The world is still full of summer, but darkness is coming to meet the light.

Charlotte’s husband is in his studio. He is wearing his overcoat, his hat, a long scarf whose tasseled ends reach down to his massive knees. He sits in a chair in the centre of the lofty room with the blue-covered notebooks in front of him. She can tell instantly by his melancholic demeanour that there is something he wishes to dramatise, a state of mind he requires her participation to enact. She often thinks how terrible it must be to be as poorly integrated as he is, like having to carry one’s organs on the outside of the body. Yet it is precisely this extrusion of interior matter that permits him to create.

“The children were happy to go to school today,” she says, when he does not speak. His yellow eyes are watching her, watching her from their deep wrinkled beds. “It’s a relief when they’re happy. I stood on the doorstep and watched them go. So often when people are happy they go away from you. It’s particularly true when you yourself are not happy. That is one of the cruelest things.”

“Cruel?” he says at last.

“Yes. I think so.”

She crosses to the windows, glancing at the notebooks as she goes by. Increasingly he spends his time writing in these notebooks, but she doesn’t know what they contain. Sometimes, standing in the corridor outside, she hears him in here laughing and talking aloud to himself. She watches the people passing down below, two girls in white nurse’s uniforms with stiff rhomboid veils, a woman in a brown velvet gown, a man as lean and inky as a shadow traversing the road in the sun. He has a spidery walk; he looks fixedly at the brown velvet woman as she passes, and she proudly lifts her pale face a little. Something clenches in Charlotte at the sight, a kind of longing that is also a love of life. She loves and she wants, both equally: in this most delicate and difficult equilibrium she passes her days.

“A child doesn’t recognise cruelty,” he says to her back. “He is shown cruelty and he thinks what he sees is love.”

“That is the most cruel of all,” she says gently.

She has brought flowers to the studio, amarylis and chrysanthemums, and she turns and places them in a jug by the window. The portrait of Frieda Halbe stands there, half finished on its easel. Corinth looks old today. The left side of his face is listing inwards, as though the prop of his cheekbone has given way. There is fear in his eyes, and the childlike confusion she dreads. His right arm hangs by his side while the left is curled around a pen in his lap. Despite the warmth of the day the studio is cold. Corinth needs the cold – he cannot bear to be overheated – but she has wondered whether this need undermines him, as needs so often do. It is those desolate East Prussian flatlands still within him, the comfortlessness of his childhood, so different from her own. That childhood safety had formed her, and would be her whole existence. It was not a prelude, as she had once thought. It was the element from which she had issued and to which she would always be trying to return. She wonders whether it is the coldness of his mother Corinth evokes with his glacial habitat. She redistributes the flowers in their jug, not so that they will look neater but to give the arrangement an appearance of carelessness. The mauve and red blooms are heavy and full. She looks into their lurid hearts: she involves herself with them, with their wildness, with their miniature red worlds of passion.

“You are not cruel,” she says to him. He groans and she rests her hand softly on his heavy shoulder. But he has not asked her why she is unhappy. “The portrait is very brilliant,” she says. “It will be one of your great works when it’s finished. You have painted Frieda’s soul.”

* * *

On the riverbank opposite the farm stood a whitewashed building with a red pointed roof. Here black, white and brown figures came and went, as in a beehive. “East Prussian Reformatory” was written over the gate in golden letters. This institution was once a monastery, built on the swampy ground at the confluence of Deime and Pregel, and the short distance between the two rivers had also been artificially connected by a moat, so that the building was entirely surrounded by water. I was meant to keep an eye on our ducks here, and stop them roaming from the moat into the reformatory’s vegetable garden. And it was while bent on this task that I first saw a landscape painter, sitting in the meadows executing a study of the corner of the reformatory building where tall poplars grew. He was the painter Knorr, who to this day retains some small reputation.

By necessity, since it was facing us, the reformatory had an ongoing relationship with our house. The old wardress – for female persons were also reformed there – lived in our attic. She had a daughter, Emilie, who had only one eye. I liked her very much. When we were together in the attic room, which was filled with ancient furniture and bric-a-brac, Emilie showed me the chest of drawers, which had lion’s paws for feet and wrought gold rings to pull the drawers out. She also showed me a painting that was kept rolled up inside it, showing Friedrich Wilhelm III astride a magnificent horse. I could not look at it often enough, this horse with the protruding veins and sinewy legs. Emilie told me of a statue in Königsberg that showed the same king, again on horseback, and I yearned more than anything to see it.

To return to the farm: the storehouse was a long red half-timbered building, where the hides were hung on rails to dry, their corners pegged out with wooden sticks. Beside the storehouse was the garden. There were no ornamental plants or trees in this garden, for my mother disliked waste. She would not keep a farm dog, saying that one would be better off fattening a pig instead. Instead the garden was taken up by a towering pile of used tanning bark, whose sour, characteristic smell suffused the whole farm. In the autumn the young maidservants, their aprons tied up, would stand with naked calves and feet on a high scaffold laid out with boards. A farm hand dumped the wet tanning bark with a spade on to the boards and the maidservants would jump up and down, stomping it with their feet.

On the first floor of the storehouse was the journeymen’s workroom. There was never any sound here, no laughter or whistling. But from below came the unending thumping and rattling of the bark mill, which stood in the cavernous darkness of the ground floor, where faint blue rays of sun poked through fissures in the nailed-up windows. The mighty horizontal cogwheel had thick wooden spikes which in turn fitted into the crevices of another vertical cog, and these wheels put four heavy beams in motion. The circling horse turned the horizontal wheel and thus lifted the stamping beams alternately, letting them smash down into the bark piled up in a trough until it was pulverised. Then the horse was allowed to stop and rest its crooked legs. The tanning bark was shoveled out of the trough and new bark piled up. Then it started all over again, following the beat around in circles. The horse selected for turning the mill was usually the oldest and most phlegmatic. Eyes tied with a leather mask, it trotted in a monotonous eternity of circles. When it fell asleep a piece of bark was thrown at its head. It would wake up, and surge forward at a faster pace, so that the rhythm of the stamping beams changed with the horse’s pace, as a heartbeat expresses the ebb and flow of the body’s exertions …

* * *

The night he finished the portrait of Frieda, he dreamed of the journeymen of his youth. They were all strung up along Klopstockstrasse. It was a bright, warm day and he remembers most clearly his feeling of self-absorption as he walked along the sunny pavement. The street was full of light, everything so startling and sharp. It was as though the clearer and brighter and sharper it became, the greater grew the fact of his own existence. And it was so silent, the thing that is most unpleasant about dreams. When creatures are born they cannot really hear the world. That sense is muted: they come alive slowly to the sound of life, like flowers opening to the sun. He knows this because he remembers it himself – he has an amazing memory, the thing most valuable to a writer! – and he knows that the silence of dreams is the cousin of this original silence.

Though in fact there was a sound, and it was this that caused him to look up. It was a light insistent clinking of chains, like the fretting sound the wind makes in a boat’s rigging, and it summoned his eyes from the pavement. And to his surprise he saw a line of limp feet dangling in mid-air. The men were chained to a horizontal system of wires by metal collars and cuffs, their bodies turning a little to left and right and their clothes ruffled by a strong breeze. He recognised Szelig and Kraft and Kronig the shoemaker, that wizened long-dead man, a scrap of rough humanity barely more than an animal. At the sight of them he felt an unbearable shame. He imagined showing them his self-portraits: suddenly this “self” was no place where he could live. He could hear the murmur of their voices: they were speaking the low German of his childhood, muttering to themselves, while the bright sun cruelly clarified their workmen’s clothes and their shrunken bodies with the over-large lolling heads and hands of marionettes. These heads turned automatically on their narrow necks; their black eyes moved with awful bewilderment in their sockets. Guiltily he walked on, for Charlotte and the children had gone ahead and he feared being left behind.

He hurried along the main street towards the park, where Charlotte and the others stood distantly on the green sward-like figurines. He hastened towards them, wanting to speak of this outrage, the working men exhibited outside their very own house. But they did not notice him: they were half turned away, as though deep in conversation. Freida Halbe was there too: he saw her profile, the detailed iridescent shape of her pelisse. There were ravens hopping on the stretch of grass that lay between himself and them and he stopped, unable to go forward. His irrational terror of birds, of all birds but particularly these black messengers … well, he’s felt that all his life, and dreamed of them often enough, but here, in this dream, there seemed to be the possibility of more than just fear and repetition – yes, there on the grass in the bright day there seemed suddenly to be the possibility of an irrevocable event. For the first time he asked himself what the true meaning of the bird might be. The journeymen with their swivelling eyes had readied him for some form of judgement on himself. The bird as symbol, even as representation, he wanted no more of. And the biggest raven came towards him, hopping grotesquely, closer and closer until it mounted his chest, for with its approach he had found himself lying down on the grass as though to meet it. It came up on his chest and it spread itself there, black and hot and heavy, and it pressed its coal-black head and beak against his mouth and cheek, so hard that he couldn’t raise his head from the ground. What a predicament! The thing pressed and pressed, the flesh and the skeleton hot and palpable within the fanned black feathers. His heart was thrashing in his chest but he was unable to move at all and so he lay there partaking, partaking intimately of his deepest dreads. It was so very personal and so very horrible, like eating the flesh of his own children. He shouted for Charlotte out of the corner of his mouth, where the raven’s beak had left a portion of his lips free. She was not attending to him; she was at a distance, half turned away, conversing with the children. Then he saw two people passing close by, a friendly-looking man and wife, and they stopped and peered down at him, smiling, where he lay on the ground.

“Please,” he whispered, “you must help me. You must get this thing off my chest, just lift it off. Please can you help me.”

“I’ll go and get your wife,” the man said, so friendly and reasonable.

And he watched them walk away across the grass. They joined Charlotte and her group and soon were part of the conversation, all of them half turned away from him. He saw they had forgotten him. He could feel the bird’s heart beating against his own. He could feel the little movements of its sleek black head against his cheek. Out of the corner of his mouth he shouted again and again, Charlotte’s name, and woke to discover he had shouted so loudly the whole household was awake, and were standing in consternation around his bed.

* * *

At lunchtime work was laid down in the storehouse and the farm and silence reigned. Sometimes I was given the job of calling the journeymen to the table. One day I chose to summon them by singing out loudly an insulting verse that they themselves, out of schadenfreude, had taught me and that fell in nicely with the chiming of the estate bells: “Come here, come here, you lazy Beeskreete!” Out of the house tore my mother, a leather strap in her hand, and she proceeded to bring it down again and again across my back. In this way I learned that what I had done was incorrect. I was often given this kind of lesson – beating – by my mother, who was the highest authority in the house. But today I understand that it must have hurt my mother very much to hit me. It is a horrible feeling, to wound what you wish to love, and to be loved by, for all of us felt a terrible desire to be loved. It laid a fetter on our souls, the need for love and yet the difficulty of its expression. There amid the hard, busy life of the tannery and the farm we hid our love, hid it for fear of being undone by it or of undoing one another. And besides, a person cannot disavow their character: such things appear to be immutable, particularly where that character is a necessary form of adaptation to the circumstances at hand. My mother’s character was one of hard work and thrift and domination. When she was not toiling in the house or the vegetable garden or the farm she sat at her loom, a medieval-looking contraption that stood in the parlour window, spinning incessantly. Often I stood beside her, looking through the glass at the scenes outside while her fingers noisily worked the rattling frames, in which she seemed to be withheld or encased. But it was usually when I was elsewhere, on the far side of the room cutting the shapes of horses and men out of paper or through the doorway entirely, that for no reason I could discern she would stop the loom and call me to her, and with her customary expectation of unconditional obedience, would require me to embrace her …

* * *

Charlotte finds the blue notebooks locked in the drawer of his desk. For weeks she has been cataloguing her dead husband’s effects, from the big canvases to the smallest sketches on scrap paper, but the desk she has left untouched. Corinth’s last self-portrait still stands on the easel in the studio: she can’t bring herself to move it. At first she doesn’t recognise the notebooks but then she remembers them, remembers the difficult period in which he was preoccupied by writing in them and seemed to have gone away from her. She remembers how he talked about Rousseau and about his desire to write the story of his life, as though that might legitimise the pain life had caused him. And indeed, when she opens the first notebook and starts to read, what she sees is that the pain has been hidden beneath a surface of words. To begin with the surface is coherent – now and again she smiles sadly at the charm he manages to bestow on that foul-smelling tannery – but as she turns the pages she sees it start to break down. Her husband’s handwriting deteriorates; the entries become non-sequential and confusing. Drawings start to appear, savage little sketches of himself, grotesque and misshapen.

It was, she remembers, at around that time that Corinth painted his famous portrait of Frieda Halbe. The painting was the talk of the Berlin Secession all winter; Frieda’s fame was enhanced quite as much as Corinth’s. Not long ago Charlotte heard her sing at the Staatsoper, and sitting there listening to Frieda’s voice in the darkness she thought of how strange and wonderful it was that her husband should have had this ability, the ability to make the invisible visible.

Along with the notebooks she finds a letter from her husband, in which he requests that a publisher be found for them after his death. She sits for a long time with the letter in her hand, staring out of the windows on to Klopstockstrasse. Her husband looks down at her almost apologetically from his last self-portrait; a searing and important painting, and one she feels certain will secure Corinth’s reputation far into the future. It is not clear to her why, with his gift for painting, it meant so much to him to be a writer: to put the notebooks in order will require weeks of work. On the endeavor to conserve her husband’s greatness she will spend the last of her own energy and youth, as she spent its substance on the endeavor to love him. She sits with the notebooks in her lap. Through the windows she watches the darkness come.

• Rachel Cusk is the author of six novels and the celebrated memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001). She won the Whitbread first novel award for Saving Agnes in 1993 and was on the Granta “best of young British novelists” list in 2003. The Bradshaw Variations (2009) is her most recent work.

• Certain passages in this story have been loosely adapted from Selbstbiographie by the painter Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), translated by Chiara Francesca Alfano

The figure who makes a great impact on others’ lives without ever coming into view themselves is a potent device. Who is the best example in the novel?

A conversation about non-speaking parts in The Archers this weekend led to a far longer, more involved discussion of fiction’s great unseen characters: literary creations who never make an appearance on the main stage, but whose presence nevertheless hovers over the text, influencing thoughts and actions.

A childhood immersion in Middle Earth meant that, for me, the high-watermark for maximum influence/minimal screen-time was set early, by JRR Tolkien’s baleful antagonist, Sauron. In fact, I can recall conversations with my father, who read the books to me, on this very subject. Why didn’t we get to see Sauron at the end? I asked. Well, he said, isn’t it much more frightening not to see him at all? If he turned up you might find out he was quite ordinary. At the time, I was agnostic, but the merit of his argument is now clear: just as Jaws is terrifying up to the moment he lurches out the water and the Close Encounters aliens are awesome until they waddle out of the spaceship, so, if you want to create a truly menacing evil-doer, you’d do better to keep him under wraps. Your own imagination is far better placed to scare you sideways than anyone else’s.

On the surface the device would appear to offer authors just as great an advantage when applied to everyday folk as to wicked ones. By withholding characters from our scrutiny, their creators theoretically allow them to achieve far greater resonance than if they were delineated on the page: all amorphous potential rather than reductive detail, they loom large in the minds of the other characters, as well as our own. You’d think, therefore, that examples would be 10 a penny – but in fact, after setting down the rule that characters who are simply deceased didn’t count, given their excellent justification for failing to make an appearance, we struggled to come up with more than a handful. There’s a rash of absentee fathers in 19th-century children’s literature (Mr March in Little Women and Mr Waterbury in The Railway Children, although both of these do finally hove into view in the closing pages), but beyond that we foundered, finally coming up with Varguennes, the eponymous lieutenant of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, who abandons the novel’s heroine before the opening pages, Leo Duffy, Sy Levin’s incorrigible predecessor at Cascadia College in Bernard Malamud’s A New Life, and the redoubtable Mrs Churchill, who exerts her influence over her adopted son Frank from a distance, before finally succumbing to one of her many ailments in Chapter 45 of Emma. And, of course, the greatest ghost-hero of them all: Godot.

We figured there must dozens of examples in Dickens, (and indeed in Victorian literature in general, where the exigencies of travel provided the perfect excuse for keeping characters at arm’s length) but in the event we couldn’t call any to mind. So please: help us. Can you think of any more? And how do you rate their effectiveness as literary tools?

As this week’s books podcast falls on the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year, we decided to devote it to the literature of war and remembrance. We talk to Michael Morpurgo, bestselling author of War Horse and Private Peaceful, about what the first first world war means to the great-great-grandchildren of the people who fought in it, and why it is so important to continue reminding them about it.

We discuss the new war poets with former poet laureate Andrew Motion, and Louisa Young joins us to talk about her award-winning novel, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, which deals - among other things - with the birth of facial surgery, as doctors fought to repair the terrible injuries to survivors of the trenches.

Reading list

War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo (Egmont)
Private Peaceful, by Michael Morpurgo (HarperCollins)
Enduring Freedom: An Afghan Anthology (Firestep)
Laurels and Donkeys, by Andrew Motion
My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by by Louisa Young (HarperCollins)

A poem for Armistice Day

Christmas Eve in the trenches of France,
the guns were quiet.
The dead lay still in No Man’s Land –
Freddie, Franz, Friedrich, Frank . . .
The moon, like a medal, hung in the clear, cold sky.

Silver frost on barbed wire, strange tinsel,
sparkled and winked.
A boy from Stroud stared at a star
to meet his mother’s eyesight there.
An owl swooped on a rat on the glove of a corpse.

In a copse of trees behind the lines,
a lone bird sang.
A soldier-poet noted it down – a robin
holding his winter ground –
then silence spread and touched each man like a hand.

Somebody kissed the gold of his ring;
a few lit pipes;
most, in their greatcoats, huddled,
waiting for sleep.
The liquid mud had hardened at last in the freeze.

But it was Christmas Eve; believe; belief
thrilled the night air,
where glittering rime on unburied sons
treasured their stiff hair.
The sharp, clean, midwinter smell held memory.

On watch, a rifleman scoured the terrain –
no sign of life,
no shadows, shots from snipers,
nowt to note or report.
The frozen, foreign fields were acres of pain.

Then flickering flames from the other side
danced in his eyes,
as Christmas Trees in their dozens shone,
candlelit on the parapets,
and they started to sing, all down the German lines.

Men who would drown in mud, be gassed, or shot,
or vaporised
by falling shells, or live to tell,
heard for the first time then –
Stille Nacht. Heilige Nacht. Alles schläft, einsam wacht …

Cariad, the song was a sudden bridge
from man to man;
a gift to the heart from home,
or childhood, some place shared …
When it was done, the British soldiers cheered.

A Scotsman started to bawl The First Noel
and all joined in,
till the Germans stood, seeing
across the divide,
the sprawled, mute shapes of those who had died.

All night, along the Western Front, they sang,
the enemies –
carols, hymns, folk songs, anthems,
in German, English, French;
each battalion choired in its grim trench.

So Christmas dawned, wrapped in mist,
to open itself
and offer the day like a gift
for Harry, Hugo, Hermann, Henry, Heinz …
with whistles, waves, cheers, shouts, laughs.

Frohe Weinachten, Tommy! Merry Christmas, Fritz!
A young Berliner,
brandishing schnapps,
was the first from his ditch to climb.
A Shropshire lad ran at him like a rhyme.

Then it was up and over, every man,
to shake the hand
of a foe as a friend,
or slap his back like a brother would;
exchanging gifts of biscuits, tea, Maconochie’s stew,

Tickler’s jam … for cognac, sausages, cigars,
beer, sauerkraut;
or chase six hares, who jumped
from a cabbage-patch, or find a ball
and make of a battleground a football pitch.

I showed him a picture of my wife.
Ich zeigte ihm
ein Foto meiner Frau.
Sie sei schön, sagte er.
He thought her beautiful, he said.

They buried the dead then, hacked spades
into hard earth
again and again, till a score of men
were at rest, identified, blessed.
Der Herr ist mein Hirt … my shepherd, I shall not want.

And all that marvellous, festive day and night,
they came and went,
the officers, the rank and file,
their fallen comrades side by side
beneath the makeshift crosses of midwinter graves …

… beneath the shivering, shy stars
and the pinned moon
and the yawn of History;
the high, bright bullets
which each man later only aimed at the sky.

The Christmas Truce, by Carol Ann Duffy, illustrated by David Roberts, is published by Picador (£5.99). To order a copy for £4.79 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

As part of our series of specially commissioned short stories, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells of a girl growing up amid the corruption of contemporary Lagos

Ifemelu grew up in the shadow of her mother’s hair, the thick, long black-black hair that drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, took hours under the dryer and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. “Is it your hair?” strangers would ask, and then reach out to touch it reverently. Others would say, “Are you from Jamaica?” as though only foreign blood could explain such bounteous hair that did not thin at the temples. Through the years of childhood, Ifemelu would often look in the mirror and pull her own hair, separate the coils, will it to become like her mother’s, but it remained bristly, growing reluctantly; braiders said it cut them like a knife.

One day, the year Ifemelu turned ten, her mother came home wearing a beatific expression, a wide-eyed unfocused stare. She took the large pair of scissors in the drawer and, handful by handful, chopped off all her hair, her long and lavish hair. Ifemelu stared, stunned by confusion. The hair lay on the bedroom floor like dead grass. Then her mother began collecting all the Catholic objects in their flat, the crucifixes hung on walls, the rosaries nested in drawers, the missals propped on shelves, and put them all in a large waterproof bag, which she carried to the backyard, her steps zealously determined, her faraway look unwavering. She made a fire near the rubbish dump, at the same spot where she burned her used sanitary pads, and first she threw in her hair, wrapped in old newspaper, and then, one after the other, the objects of faith. Dark-grey smoke curled up into the air. From the balcony, Ifemelu began to cry because she sensed that something had happened, and the woman standing by the fire, splashing in more kerosene as it dimmed and stepping back as it flared, the woman who was newly bald and eternally calm, was not her mother, could not be her mother.

When her mother came inside, Ifemelu backed away, but her mother hugged her close.

“I am saved,” she said. She spoke with a dramatic tone, a demeanor that belonged to someone else; her essence had clearly taken flight. “Mrs Ojo ministered to me this afternoon during the children’s break and I received Christ. Old things have passed away and all things have become new. Praise God. On Sunday we will start going to Revival Saints, it is a Bible-believing church, a living church, not like St Dominics.” Her mother sounded as though she was announcing a special treat that Ifemelu may not yet fully appreciate, and if she noticed the tears on Ifemelu’s face, she did not show it.

Her mother’s God had always been a distant and amiable man; she sang to Him in Latin that her Father said was unforgivably mispronounced, wore mournful images of saints around her neck, and carefully crossed herself before she ate or drank. But, after that afternoon, her God became exacting and humourless. Relaxed hair offended Him. Dancing offended Him. She bartered with Him, offering starvation in exchange for prosperity, for a job promotion, for good health, and fasting herself bone-thin: dry fasts on weekends, on weekdays, only water until evening. Ifemelu worried that she would, one day, simply snap into two and die. Then her mother told her of a vision she had had in their kitchen on a Saturday evening just before Easter, a blazing appearance, near the gas cooker, of an angel holding a book trimmed in red thread, telling her to leave Revival Saints because the pastor was a wizard who attended nightly demonic meetings under the sea. And so her mother left the church and began to let her hair grow again, but stopped wearing necklaces and earrings because jewelry, according to her new pastor at Miracle Spring, was ungodly, unbefitting of a woman of virtue. Months later, on the same day as the failed coup, while the traders who lived downstairs were crying because the coup would have saved Nigeria and market women would have been given cabinet positions, Ifemelu’s mother saw another vision. This time, the angel appeared in her bedroom, above the wardrobe, and told her to leave Miracle Spring and join Guiding Assembly. Half-way through the first service Ifemelu attended with her mother, in a marble-floored convention hall, surrounded by perfumed people and the ricochet of rich voices, Ifemelu looked at her mother and saw that she was crying and laughing at the same time. In this church of surging hope, of thumping and clapping, where Ifemelu imagined a swirl of affluent angels above, her mother’s spirit had found a home.

Her mother began to wear jewelry again, to drink her favourite Guinness stout; she fasted only once a week and often said, “My God tells me,” and “My Bible says,” as though other people’s were not just different but misguided. Her response to a “Good morning” or a “Good afternoon” was a cheerful “God bless you!” Her God became genial, and did not mind being commanded. Every morning, when she woke the household for prayers, before the singing and clapping and covering the day ahead with the blood of Jesus, she would say, “God, my heavenly father, I command you to fill this day with blessings and prove to me that you are God.” On Sundays, she was first to hurry to the altar to offer a testimony. “I had catarrh this morning,” she would start. “But as Pastor Gideon started to pray, it cleared. Now it is gone. Praise God!”

The congregation would shout “Alleluia!” and other testimonies would follow. I did not study because I was sick and yet I passed my exams with flying colors! I had malaria and prayed over it and was cured! My cough disappeared as Pastor started praying! But always her mother went first, always Pastor Gideon smiled brightest at her as she glided, smiling, to the altar, enclosed in salvation’s glow. Later in the service, when Pastor Gideon would leap out in his sharp-shouldered suit and pointy shoes, and say, “Our God is not a poor God, amen? It is our portion to prosper, amen?” Ifemelu’s mother would shake her head and raise her arm as she said, “Amen, Father Lord, amen.”

Ifemelu did not think that God had given Pastor Gideon the mansion in GRA and all those cars, it was obvious he bought them from the three collections at each service, and she did not think that God would do for all as He had done for Pastor Gideon, because it was mathematically impossible, but she liked how the new church swallowed her mother, absorbed her, made her predictable and easy to lie to. “I am going to Bible study” or “I am going to fellowship” were the easiest ways for Ifemelu to leave the house unquestioned during her teenage years. Ifemelu was uninterested in God, indifferent about making any religious effort perhaps because her mother already made so much, and yet her mother’s faith comforted her; it was, in her mind, a white cloud that moved benignly as she moved. Until the General came into their lives.

During morning prayers, Ifemelu’s mother commanded God to bless the General, “Father Lord, bless Uju’s mentor,” she would say, the word “mentor” pushed out of her mouth like a challenge. “May no weapon fashioned against him prosper! May his enemies never triumph over him! Lord, we cover him with the precious blood of Jesus!” her mother would conclude, in that sing-song manner she had whenever she prayed and Ifemelu, sleepy-eyed and kneeling on the scratchy carpet of the living room, would mumble something nonsensical instead of saying “Amen”. The story Ifemelu’s mother told the neighbors was that the General had helped Aunty Uju find a job because, having once wanted to be a doctor himself, he was committed to helping young doctors. A story whose inanity glared like a blood stain on a white napkin. Blind desperation thickened her mother’s voice whenever she told it, as though the force of her words would not only erase the neighbors’ knowing smirks, but would also remake the world into a place where young doctors could afford Aunty Uju’s new Mazda, the intimidating, streamlined latest model.

When Aunty Uju first announced that she had a job – “The hospital has no vacancy but the General made them create one for me,” were her wry words – Ifemelu’s mother promptly said, “This is a miracle!”

The high-pitched cries of a hawker selling beans on the street floated in through the window, further away, cars were nosing against one another in long, exhausted petrol lines, lecturers were gathering to announce another strike, pensioners were raising wilting placards demanding their pensions, and Aunty Uju, freshly graduated from Ibadan, had a job at the military hospital in Victoria Island.

“A miracle,” Ifemelu’s mother repeated.

Aunty Uju nodded, and Ifemelu wondered why she did not say, in her lightly amused way, that of course it was no miracle, that she had expected to tumble, like other recent graduates, into a parched wasteland of joblessness until she went to a friend’s wedding and the General sent his ADC to call her and when she came to him and said, “Good afternoon, sir,” he looked at her and said, “I like you. I want to take care of you,” and she agreed to be taken care of. But perhaps she said nothing because there was something of a miracle in those words “I like you, I want to take care of you”, and in her new car, and in her move to Dolphin Estate, the cluster of duplexes that wore a fresh foreignness, some painted pink, others the blue of a warm sky, hemmed by a park full of bright green plants and grass lush as a new rug and benches where people could sit – a rarity even on the island.

“You have to study medicine, Ifem, look at how well your aunty is doing,” Ifemelu’s mother said, while unpacking the new television Aunty Uju had brought them. Ifemelu looked at her mother and wondered how people could tell themselves stories about their reality that did not even resemble their reality.

“Mummy, doctors just started another strike because they have not been paid,” she said. But her mother, as though she had not heard, went on gently stripping away the last bits of styrofoam packaging from the television, humming a song – the Lord has given me victory, I will lift him higher – which was often sung at collection time in church.

Ifemelu’s father sat in his well-worn sofa, silently reading his well-worn book. He had been jobless for months, fired from the federal agency for refusing to call his new boss mummy. “If you have to call somebody mummy to get your salary then you do so!” Ifemelu’s mother had said when he, wracked with bitterness, came home with his termination letter, complaining about the absurdity of a grown man calling a grown woman mummy because she had decided it was the best way to show her respect. He went out every morning for weeks afterward, teeth clenched and tie firmly knotted, patiently circling job advertisements in newspapers although most of them said “Applicant must not be more than thirty-five years,” but soon he began to stay at home in a wrapper and singlet, to lounge on the shabby sofa near the radio, to nod mutely each time Ifemelu’s mother reminded him that she was struggling to support the family on a teacher’s salary.

He spoke the formal, stiff English of an old-fashioned civil servant, and Ifemelu often imagined him in his colonial classroom in the fifties, wearing an ill-fitting school uniform made of cheap cotton, eager to impress his missionary teachers. His handwriting had a terrifying elegance, all the curves perfect, the flourishes unforgiving, and he used an elevated language for everyone, even their househelps who hardly understood English. As a child, he had scolded Ifemelu for being recalcitrant, mutinous, intransigent, words that made her little actions seem epic and almost pride-worthy. But, in the months of his joblessness, he no longer muttered “nation of intractable sycophancy” when the nightly news started on NTA, no longer held long monologues about how Babangida’s government had reduced Nigerians to imprudent idiots. And, most of all, he began to join in the morning prayers. He had never joined before; her mother had once insisted that he do so, before leaving to visit their hometown. “You cannot travel to the east unless we pray first, we have to cover the roads with the blood of Jesus,” she had said and he replied that the roads would be safer, less slippery, if not covered with blood. Ifemelu missed the man he used to be. She would come home from school and greet him and fight the urge to shout at him because she knew that he, if given another chance, would call his boss mummy.

By the time Aunty Uju moved to Dolphin Estate, Ifemelu had stopped saying “Amen” to her mother’s prayers.

“God is faithful. Look at Uju, renting a house on the island!” her mother said.

“It is the General’s house, Mummy, Aunty Uju is not paying one kobo to live there,” Ifemelu said, knowing that her mother would ignore her.

That Sunday, after a Young Christian Girls meeting, where Sister Ibinabo gave a talk about the sinfulness of tight trousers – “Any girl that wears tight trousers wants to commit the sin of temptation,” she said – Ifemelu refused to join in the Sunday Work. They were in the church backroom, cutting and curling pieces of tissue to form flower-shapes that, strung into fluffy garlands, would hang around the thick neck of Chief Omenka and the smaller necks of his family members. He had donated two new vans to the church.

“Where does the man’s money come from? Why should I make garlands in church for a thief? The man is a 419,” Ifemelu said to the astonished Sister Ibinabo before walking away.

Of course she had joined in making garlands for other 419 men in the past, many of them worshipped at Guiding Spirit after all, men who donated cars with the ease of people giving away chewing gum.

But it was a particularly hot day, period cramps were chewing at her lower belly, and she had looked at Sister Ibinabo – her dried-up face that hoarded years of personal frustrations and made it difficult to tell her age, looking at young girls with a poisonous spite that she pretended was religious guidance – and suddenly saw something of her own mother. Sister Ibinabo was a person who denied that things were as they were. A person who had to place the crown of religion on her own petty desires. It had all seemed benign before, her mother’s faith, all drenched in grace, and suddenly it no longer was. Why could her mother not simply like the things Aunty Uju brought as the General’s mistress without pretending that they were from God?

At home, her mother slapped her, finger-shaped welts rising on her cheek, and said, “The devil is using you.” Later Ifemelu would notice her mother watching her at the dining table, eyes hooded with worry, as though she knew that she was losing her daughter.

“You need somebody to talk sense into your head,” her mother said. She would ask Aunty Uju, as she had always done in the past. “Go and give that girl Ifemelu a talking-to,” her mother had told Aunty Uju often during the teenage years. “You are the only person she will listen to.”

Aunty Uju got along with Ifemelu’s mother, the easy relationship between two people who carefully avoided conversations of any depth.

Perhaps Aunty Uju felt gratitude to Ifemelu’s mother for not questioning her presence, her status as the special resident relative. Ifemelu had never felt like an only child because of the cousin after cousin, aunt after aunt, uncle after uncle, who lived with them for months, or for years.

Most of them were her father’s relatives, brought to Lagos to learn a trade or go to school or look for a job, so that the people back in the village would not mutter about their brother with only one child who did not want to help raise others. Her father tolerated them, with a disciplined obligation, always insisting that everyone be home before 8pm, and locking his bedroom door even when he went to the bathroom.

But Aunty Uju was different. Her father called her his youngest sister although she was the child of his father’s brother, and he had always been more protective, less distant, with her. “Uju was too clever to waste away in that backwater,” he often said, especially when Aunty Uju brought home yet another school result littered with As. Ifemelu was a surly three-year old who screamed if a stranger came close, but, according to the family legend, the first time she saw Aunty Uju, thirteen and pimply-faced, Ifemelu walked over and climbed into her lap and stayed there. She did not know if this had happened, or had merely become true from being told over and over again, a charmed tale of the beginning of their closeness. It was Aunty Uju who brought her James Hadley Chase novels wrapped in newspaper to hide the near-naked women on the cover, who hot-stretched her hair when she got lice from the neighbours downstairs, who talked her through her first menstrual period, supplementing her mother’s lecture that was full of Biblical quotes about a woman’s virtue but lacked useful details about cramps and pads. And it was Aunty Uju who, after Ifemelu met Obinze in class four in secondary school and announced that he was the love of her life, told her to let him kiss and touch but not to let him put it inside.

After Aunty Uju moved into her house in Dolphin Estate, Ifemelu would watch her giving instructions to her househelp, Ekaete, and wonder how deeply she had submerged the village girl brought to Lagos, whom Ifemelu’s mother mildly complained was so parochial she kept touching the walls, and what was it with all those village people who could not stand on their feet without reaching out to smear their palm on a wall? Now she was twenty-five years old, with two househelps, a driver, and a gardener called Baba Flower. During the week, she hurried home to shower and wait for the General and, on weekends, she lounged in her nightdress, reading or cooking or watching television, because the General was in Abuja with his wife and children. She avoided the sun and used creams in elegant bottles, so that her complexion, already naturally light, became lighter, brighter, and took on a waxy sheen; and at the hair salon, where different shades of female power were most understood, she had all the hairdressers hovering around her, over-praising her handbag and shoes, curtseying deeply as they greeted her.

“Those girls, I was waiting for them to bring out their hands and beg you to shit so they could worship that too,” Ifemelu said when she went with Aunty Uju to the salon, and watched the dramatic fawning.

Aunty Uju laughed and patted the silky hair extensions that fell to her shoulders: Chinese weave-on, the latest version, shiny and straight as straight could be; it never tangled. “But you know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they don’t know which ass to lick or they don’t even know how to lick an ass. I’m lucky to be licking the right ass.” She smiled. “It’s just luck. He said I was well-brought up, that I was not like all the Lagos girls who sleep with him on the first night and the next morning give him a list of what they want him to buy. I slept with him on the first night but I did not ask for anything, which was stupid of me now that I think of it but I did not sleep with him because I wanted something. Ah, this thing called power. I was attracted to him even with his teeth like Dracula. I was attracted to his power.”

Ifemelu said nothing. Aunty Uju had told her different versions of this story, as though by doing so she, too, would make sense of her attraction to the General.

They were in the cold interior of the Mazda and as the driver backed out of the gates of the salon compound, Aunty Uju gestured to the gate man, rolled down her window and gave him some money.

“Thank you madam!” he said and saluted.

She had slipped naira notes to all the salon workers, to the security men outside, to the policemen at the road junction. “Do you know they aren’t paid enough to pay school fees for two children?”

“That small money you gave him will not help him pay any school fees,” Ifemelu said.

“But he can buy a little extra something and he will be in a better mood and he will not beat his wife this night,” Aunty Uju said. She looked out of the window and said, “Slow down, Baba Sola,” so that she could get a good look at an accident on Osborne Road; a bus had hit a car, the front of the bus and the back of the car were now mangled metal, and both drivers were shouting in each other’s faces, buffered by a gathering crowd of people. “Where do all these people come from? These people that appear once there is an accident?” Aunty Uju leaned back on her seat. “Do you know I have forgotten what it feels like to be in a bus? It is so easy to get used to all this.”

“You can just go to Falomo now and get on a bus.” Ifemelu said.

“But it won’t be the same. It’s never the same when you have other choices.” Aunty Uju looked at her. “Ifem, stop worrying about me.”

“I’m not worrying.” “You are worrying because you think that one day Oga will get tired of me and all of this will disappear and then what will I do? Well, when it disappears, it disappears.” Aunty Uju turned back to the window. “You’ve been worrying since I told you about my account.”

It was true. Ifemelu had assumed that Aunty Uju, living in her big pink house with the wide satellite dish blooming from its roof, her generator brimming with diesel, and her freezer stocked with meat, would have a bank account full of money from the General. Even if only to keep her life oiled and running. And so Ifemelu had asked if Aunty Uju could “give something” to her father for their late rent, telling her how the landlord banged on their flat door, a loud unnecessary banging for the benefit of the neighbors, and how he had rushed to the electric meter and yanked off the fuse, while hurling insults at her father. “Are you not a real man? Pay me my money. I will throw you out of this flat if I don’t get that rent by next week!”

As Ifemelu mimicked the landlord’s voice, a wistful sadness crossed Aunty Uju’s face.

“I’ll ask Oga. I have nothing in my account. He never gives me big money. He wants me to ask for everything I need. And do you know I have not been paid a salary since I started work? Every day a new story from the accounts people. The trouble started with my position which does not officially exist, but they still send patients to me.”

Her tone was flat. She looked suddenly small and bewildered among the detritus of her new life, the fawn-colored jewel case on the dressing table, the silk robe thrown across the bed, and Ifemelu felt frightened for her.

A few days later, Aunty Uju visited Ifemelu’s parents and handed her father a plastic bag swollen with cash, “It’s rent for two years, Brother,” she said, with an embarrassed casualness, and then made a joke about the hole in his singlet. She did not look him in the face as she spoke and he did not look her in the face as he thanked her; it was the easiest way to navigate their new discomfort, by evading each other’s eyes.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer, based in Nigeria and the US. She won the Commonwealth writers’ prize for best first book with Purple Hibiscus (2003) and the Orange prize for fiction in 2007 for Half of a Yellow Sun. The Thing Around Your Neck, an anthology of short stories, was published in 2009

Don DeLillo’s richly compressed short stories are the work of a true master

Don DeLillo makes some people’s brains ache. They hurry to consign his novels – from Americana and Ratner’s Star to the great Underworld – to curiously inappropriate categories, whether readymade (”postmodernism”) or jerry-rigged for the purpose (”hysterical realism”). Minds skid on the glacial beauty of his fictive thought. Perhaps a slower pace, encouraged by the short-story form, will facilitate a better grip.

In these stories, previously published between 1979 and 2011, DeLillo’s prose punctuates the exactly casual with a rich compression of imagery or argument. A narrator in the tropics is driven through “the total rain” with “the actual jungle pressing in”, the tourist’s inarticulate thrill at unmediated reality economically evoked by that “total” and “actual”. A man in an orbiting spacecraft thinks of “California, where women wear their hair this year in aromatic bales”, his nostalgia for sex and smell balled up in that savouring “aromatic”. During an earthquake, a woman “crouched in the open doorway like an atomic child”, the “atomic” recalling nuclear-age government-information campaigns as well as picturing the character’s loneliness and feeling-small. DeLillo knows what he is doing with adjectives.

His characters are often frozen momentarily in attitudes of looking, at whatever might be total or actual. It is not in a burned-out Bronx that one expects to find such a visual glorying as this: “The projects appeared at the rim of the sky, upper windows white with sunplay against the broad dark face of beaten stone.” In a small college town, another character sees “a face in the window of a passing car, runny with reflected light”. The DeLilloan consciousness is routinely pummelled by photons.

Nearly all these stories, indeed, are in one way or another about looking. The most recent, “The Starveling”, begins by describing the protagonist having once sat “staring into space”; now he is “watching another woman”. What? Where and who was the first woman? This strategy of almost subliminal suspense primes the reader to be on the lookout for what people are looking at. It might mean something, in retrospect.

In “The Runner”, a jogger circling a park sees a fragment of a crime, buried in a list of heterogeneous sense-impressions; only afterwards do we understand what he witnessed. In “Baader-Meinhof”, a woman comes to an art gallery to look, day after day, at a series of paintings about the gang, searching for consolation in a half-seen or wished-for cruciform tree in a gloomy canvas. In the title story, a crowd gathers every evening to witness the appearance of the face of a recently murdered child on a billboard. The “staring” protagonist of “The Starveling” takes this theme to its logical extremity: he has dedicated his whole life to looking, going to the cinema three or four times a day for decades. (”Days were all the same,” the narrative voice deadpans. “Movies were not.”)

All this gaze-tracing does not render DeLillo’s stories silent dioramas; they are noisy with thought and talk. The dialogue, as in his novels, is act-it-out-in-your-head good: jagged, glancing, witty, always avoiding the clichéd stylisations of ordinarily “naturalistic” literary speech. The title story gives a loving aural portrait of the kingpin of a scrap-metal gang: “One of my best [graffiti] writers, he does wildstyle, he’s exactly twelve more or less […] Hey, don’t be surprise my scrap ends up in North, you know, Korea.” In the same story, a worried urban nun is reassured by a wisecracking monk: “‘Who knows you? The dogs know you? There are rabid dogs, Mike.’ ‘I’m a Franciscan, okay? Birds light on my index finger.’” DeLillo’s third-person narrative voice occasionally speaks in its own personality of dreadful calm irony, like a jaded but sympathetic extraterrestrial: “A boy was dragged a hundred yards, it is always a hundred yards, by a car that kept on going.”

It would be condescending to say that, over the three-decade span of this collection (and the 15 novels since 1971), DeLillo has kept up with modern culture; more accurate to say that culture keeps catching up with him. (White Noise, his 1985 satire of media, the academy and disaster, remains hilariously topical, while 2003’s underrated Cosmopolis now seems a prescient microcosmic allegory of the financial crisis.) Two of the most recent stories here touch on modern techno-anxiety: a prisoner misses all the gadgets housing “the memory that needs recharging”; and a university student relates how his fellows in a logic class eschew their computing paraphernalia, making old technology strange again: “Our notebooks had pages made of flexible sheets of paper.”

The latter story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky”, also smuggles in what it is tempting to read as an artistic manifesto. The logic teacher, a wonderfully dishevelled character named Ilgauskas, emits among his gnomic pronouncements the following: “‘If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,’ he said, ‘the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.’” In these stories or lucid dreams – sometimes drily shocking or mournfully funny, always masterfully designed – DeLillo himself isolates that stray thought, and makes of it great art.

As part of our specially commissioned series of short stories, Atwood tells the comic tale of a dog’s very unexpected discovery

Molly

Light returns, oh how simple faith is justified! I do count on it and anyway there is always hunger, even if it stayed as dark as holes, as coals, as under the sofa, hunger would come back regardless and tell me what to do. Up, up, one foot and then the other. Mouth wide in a yawn, teeth bared to the air, tongue curled out and downwards, rump on high, stretch of the forearms forward; then a subsidence, a wriggle of the spine, a realignment. Bailey is still asleep, dreaming, legs twitching, uttering small yelps. I nip him and he groans. Even in sleep he knows who is top dog.

Up the stairs, clickety click, scratch and whine at the closed door. No response. Hark! Hark! Hark! Hark! A twist of the shoulder, a push, the door flies open, the pillow hurtles out; I dodge it, rush inside, leap onto the bed and apply the wet and delicate and appreciative tongue lavishly to the face of She-who-ought-to-be-a-dog. Jesus Cripes Molly get the hell off me, you really stink!

It’s nice to be noticed.

She-who-ought-to-be-a-dog doesn’t taste the way a dog should; she tastes sweetish and greasy. But I’m used to that. I do some tugging and some hard slobbering and panting, because there’s no free lunch and if you want the brass ring you have to put in the work, and it’s first thing the walk and then She regurgitates the food, pre-chewed, and coughs up the bones, though not in the usual way, and no walk, no breakfast; so the main thing is to get her onto her feet. At last She rises up, pale and mostly hairless – she must have a bad case of the mange – and does the usual morning stumbling around.

Eyes aglow, tongue at the loll, I note her every movement: She likes a display of interest. It’s a wonder we ever make it out the door at all, the way She fumbles and fiddles and mumbles and piddles, but we do. The leash is a bore but that’s the price you have to pay. Sniff sniff sniff sniff, there’s been a lot of activity along here since last we passed this way! Cat piss everywhere, dog piss ditto, and Bailey of course has to add his two cents’ worth to every conversation; he’s not speaking with the cats of course, as they are not worth talking to.

Come on Bailey, come on Molly, you can go faster than this, it isn’t a funeral for heaven’s sakes!

Oh little does she know. This and that and he and she and it have died during the night; I smell a rat. Down the slippery musty fungusy steps into the ravine, with its rivulet of running sewage; along the gravel path; old paper bag, cheese in it once, old beer bottle, a skunk, a woodchuck, enough to make you sneeze. Along comes a man in shorts, running, lightly pelted legs up down, up down; waves of sweat roll off him, damaging the air. He does not merit a growl. Dog poop everywhere, over among the leaves, and several items on the main path, already stepped in and moistly squashed. Some people never look where they’re going. Bailey and I are happy to contribute; we squat and roll our eyes and grin. Scratch scratch scratch, snuffle snuffle. One likes to leave one’s autograph, make one’s little scented mark, however evanescent. For heavens’ sakes don’t be so disgusting Molly, that is not Play-Doh and this is not kindergarten, and don’t take all day about it!

Jauntily along, ears forward, end of spine in the air, gracefully back and forth; on the lookout. No one alert but me, because She-who-ought-to-be-a-dog has no more sense of smell than a pigeon, what would She do without me? To serve and protect. Useless relying on Bailey, who’d be more functional as a lawn ornament.

Wuff wuff! What’s this? It’s a something, no, a somebody. In the shrubs, leg sticking out! Smells all wrong, a wrong smell – not like old bottles, worse. Hackles up! Hark hark hark!

Molly, you bad dog, get out of that! Now what have you found? Leave him alone, Molly, good girl. Leave the nice man alone.

What is it, what’s wrong? Oh no! There’s blood!

Hark hark hark hark hark!

Carol Plumridge Dodd

Too light too soon. Might as well be noon. Turn face to the wall, better this way. Darker and more oblivious. Back to the dream, daydream because it’s day, because it’s May, wonderful May, I planned it for then. Sewed the dress myself, peau de soie and a fingertip veil, walking down the aisle with the bouquet, three calla lilies because it would be different, and some roses and baby’s breath and his aunt from England said Where I come from we only use those for funerals. All the same I was happy then, an end to anxiety or so I thought. Where came next? The honeymoon. What a name for it, I never did know what it meant. Moonlight all sticky and golden on the skin.

Damn dog scratching, no need for an alarm clock, she always gets the door open sooner or later, Jesus Christ Molly get the hell off me, you really stink! That’s the thing about dogs, you can say anything you like to them and they still love you. Wish I’d been able to say that to Bert, at the end when he’d taken up with that bitch Wynette and thought I didn’t know; but no, I couldn’t, too polite. Molly, I love you really.

Still, I could do without the slobber.

Same with Bert.

All right, all right, I’ll get up. No help for it, damn dogs run my life, they’ve got their own time clock, it’s worse than at work. What have you done with Bailey? Where’s Bailey, eh? Have you finally murdered him? Wag wag wag, playing dumb, Who me? Innocent as a newborn babe. Less work though.

I bet he’s downstairs humping his favourite chair. Sex, sex, sex, that’s all they think of. And food, of course. Doesn’t even have to be another dog. Could be just a piece of furniture. Like Bert; I mean you wouldn’t think of that slut Wynette as a human being. More like a sofa. Overstuffed. What a name anyway, Wynette. Like one of those crocheted toilet roll covers.

Oh well. Anyone who’d prefer that bimbo to me is a jerk anyway. Better off without him.

Must get some exercise. Do more walking. I say that every day. Two more pounds; it can’t be the food, I eat like a bird, it must be just fluid retention. I should drink more coffee, they say it’s a diuretic. Oh for a coffee and the morning paper on the back deck, such as it is, but no, they’d never let me get away with that, not before the walk. Try it once and they’d both crap on the carpet, such as it is. They take an unholy interest in functions anyway. That’s what my mother used to call it: functions. She used the same word for church teas.

Molly, you do not have to come into the bathroom with me, can’t I even pee in private? No! Get your nose out of there! Down! Bad girl! Overexcitable. Like the time she bit Wynette. Only time she ever saw her; got it right first crack. For that alone I will love her forever. Bert of course wanted Molly put down. Told him, If anyone should be put down it should be you and your hot patootie, that dog is not rabid she only has good taste, you touch one hair of her head and this will not be an amicable separation! I’ll go after you for every stick and stone, in every way, shape or form, in this life and the next, so back off buster! I’m poor maybe, but Molly is alive.

Now where did I leave those runners? Need a new pair; down at heels. Can’t afford them. Down at heels, what my mother used to say. Down at heels, seen better days, something wrong with my plumbing. Plumbing! Couldn’t admit anything was made of flesh and blood. Not her, anyway. Not me.

Here’s one of them, at least. Molly? Molly! What did you do with the other shoe? Oh, thanks a bundle. They’re so much nicer with drool on them.

One leash, two leashes. Here, Bailey! Good dog. Don’t forget to bolt-lock the door; too many addicts and perverts around here, it’s practically a slum, used needles and condoms on the lawn every morning; not that you’d call that thing a lawn. Well, it’s what I can afford right now. The kids have to sleep on the sofa when they come to visit; at least they’re through school now, at least they’ve got jobs. Jobs of a sort. Thank God they were old enough to cope when that Wynette thing happened. I wasn’t old enough to cope, myself, but that’s another story. What my mother used to say: That’s another story. Which she then wouldn’t tell.

Packing up to move out on him, I remember I filled up a green garbage bag with clothes to give to the poor. Didn’t know I was going to be the poor. What a joke.

Get out of that, Molly, that’s a garden! Only one on the street. A few moth-eaten pansies. Maybe I should start a garden again. Had one once; I was good at it. Good at that, at the cooking, at the cleaning. Then I lost interest and things died.

Bailey! Put that down! Too disgusting! Whoever said a dog’s mouth is clean has never watched what they put into them.

Maybe I should place an ad in the Personals. What to write? Gay divorcee – no, not gay, that means something else now – sprightly divorcee, blonde, petite, likes outdoor sports and cozy fireside evenings with a glass of scotch. Or else the truth: Sorry but zero interest in another man, they are too much work and too self-centered and they think you exist for nothing but their own personal convenience, and they can’t tell a woman from a rubber blimp or their dick from a posthole digger and they guzzle up the scotch like there’s no tomorrow, and they never clean out the ashes after the cozy fireside evenings. So piss off.

Nevertheless I get lonely. Sometimes. At night. I talk to myself too much. Or else to the dogs. Well, they never argue.

Down the steps, watch it, they’re damp, you could slip and break your neck and then what? Along the path, smell the spring air, assorted florals and eau de sewer, give thanks for small mercies, at least it isn’t raining. Molly, not on the path! I suppose I should pick it up, but this is practically a forest and nobody picks up after the foxes and wolves and what-not; anyway nobody’s looking. Hurry up, doggies! That’s the way! Give it the old heave-ho! Good doggies!

I bet this place seethes with the homeless, at night. Eating whatever they eat, drinking whatever they drink, under a bush or bridge. The homeless, the feckless, the gormless, the witless. I shouldn’t be so condescending, one slip at work and I’m out of a job and then I’ll have to join them. Hi fellows, I’m your homeless person for today. I could sit on the street with a tin cup and a sign: Respectable mother of two. Wonder how long I’d be respectable. Wonder how long I’d last. No dental plans for the homeless, I’d lose my teeth in a shot and then I’d have to live on dog food, everything pre-chewed. I wonder if I got really hungry, whether I’d eat Molly and Bailey. Or whether if they got really hungry Molly and Bailey would eat me. I bet the homeless would get all of us first, though. Tramps, my mother would have called them. That means something else these days. Wynette, now there’s a tramp for you. I seriously thought of killing her, once. Pulling her plug, letting out her air, then he’d've had to send away for another blow-up rubber dolly.

But why kill her – why not kill him, for heaven’s sakes? She couldn’t have taken the initiative, a piece of furniture does not take the initiative; he must have taken it himself. May I put my hand on your cushion? No answer means yes to Bert, it always did. At least he had the grace to tell me it wasn’t serious, though that didn’t make it any better. So, you threw away our twenty-one years of marriage for something that wasn’t serious? Way to go, Bert, you creep.

Oh well, it’s always the woman you want to kill, that’s how it is. Unless you’re a man of course; then you want to kill the man. Or both of them; might as well do her too for good measure. Amazing I let myself get so worked up over a shit like Bert, but twenty-one years of a happy marriage and garden included will do that to you. Or everyone else thought it was happy. Fun once, though. The honeymoon.

Molly, you bad dog, get out of that! Now what have you found? Legs. Some guy under a bush. A homeless person. A tramp. Probably into the aftershave last night and sleeping it off. Shouldn’t be disturbed; he might leap up in the grip of a violent hallucination and run me through with a paring knife. They’ve let them all out of the loony bins to save money and that certainly accounts for a lot. Provincial politics for instance. Leave him alone, Molly, good girl. Leave the nice man alone. Damn nosy-parker dog. I’ll just take a peek …

What is it, what’s wrong? Oh no! There’s blood!

Jesus Cripes.

Miriam Rosenberg-Lee

Miriam sits in her favourite spot, the breakfast nook overlooking the ravine. Her dad’s birdwatching binoculars are nearby in case anything interesting happens, but so far today it’s only the usual. Joggers go past; there’s an old man asleep under a bush. Dogs scrabble in the leaves.

Miriam likes to get up before everyone else and have her breakfast early, so she can think in peace. So she doesn’t have to listen to her parents dumping on her with their version of how she should spend her day. Is your math done yet? What about your French? Isn’t that the third movie you’ve been to this week? Why can’t Marjilane come over here to do her homework, why does it have to be the Kaffay Nwar at two-fifty for a lousy cappucino? Well, if that’s how you want to waste your allowance I suppose it’s your own business.

Each one of them has a long list of the chores their own parents made them do when they were her age. Not that she believes they ever were her age. They were born exactly the way they are now, Dad bald at the top and Mom into the hide-your-grey rinses, and both of them with bad feet. At your age I used to dust the whole house, top to bottom. And I mowed the lawn. But Mom, Bettina does the dusting and Green Pastures mows the lawn, so what do you want from me? Maybe I could scrub the sidewalk? Hey, I know, give me some matches and I can be the Little Match Girl and be really virtuous and freeze to death!

That’s enough out of you, young lady, at your age I would have been sent to my room for talking back in that snippy way.

Oh cool, snippy! Oh, I am devastated! I am bouleversée, I am ecrasée! Call me a geek, call me a turkey, but don’t call me snippy! How about calling me louche? At least it has a certain je ne sais quoi, n’est-ce pas, mon petit crapaud?

Fred, what’s she saying?

Serves us right for sending her to that snotty school. An arm and a leg and what do you get? A kid you can’t understand!

These conversations don’t usually take place out loud. Miriam can just hear them going on and on, inside everybody’s head. Sometimes she thinks her parents aren’t her real parents at all. Sometimes she thinks her mother was impregnated by aliens but can’t remember anything about it because she was unconscious at the time. Miriam saw a movie like that once.

She’s eating her favourite breakfast, a big piece of the apple pie she made last night. She likes making pies; it’s kind of a creative process. She taught herself to do it out of her grandmother’s old cookbook, because the only recipe her mother knows is Let’s go out for Italian. That’s one thing her mother approves of anyway – Miriam’s pies. Or she sort of approves of them. Look at the mess in this kitchen, who’s going to clean it up, and let me tell you in advance that Bettina is not the answer. Though she doesn’t approve of Miriam eating the pies for breakfast. When I was your age I had to eat a proper breakfast. Oatmeal porridge, every day. Even in summer. Miriam happens to believe that this is a lie; even in the past, nobody could be that gross.

She thinks maybe she’ll get a tattoo, like her friend Marjilane. A tattoo, or else a belly-button ring. She’s saving up.

Down in the ravine the joggers go past; pathetic, most of them. Middle-aged guys with earbuds stuck in their ears, they think they’re so cool. Trying to work off the flab. At least her dad doesn’t do that. Make a spectacle of himself in those lime-green spandex bicycle shorts, it’s almost the same as walking around naked, all the bulgy parts showing. She’d die of embarrassment.

Here comes the blonde woman with the two dogs, the little yappy one and the other one, bigger and shaggier; they pass by at this time every day. The dogs always shit on the path, the woman always looks around to make sure nobody sees them doing it. Dogs are revolting. Dog owners are revolting. They have absolutely no shame.

Now the little dog is sniffing around the clump of bushes where the old guy is sleeping. Now it’s barking. Bark bark bark, they can take out the smell glands on skunks so why can’t they take out the barking glands on dogs? When Miriam rules the world she intends to make it a law.

Now – oh, this is getting good! The dog has just bitten the sleeping man on the leg, and now the old guy has jumped up and is hopping around with the dog still attached, and the woman is screaming her head off because the man’s face is all covered with blood, or that’s what it looks like through the binoculars; and now another man has jumped out of another bush and a third man out of a third bush, and the dog has come loose but is still barking, and now the woman has fainted. Or at least she’s lying on the ground. Maybe one of the three guys knifed her.

Miriam watches with lively interest. Maybe it’s a mugging! Maybe it’s a gang rape! Now she’s getting alarmed. Should she call the police? Maybe it’s a major crime and she will have to appear in court as a witness. On the other hand, maybe it’s a major motion picture. It’s hard to tell.

John A Schweitzer

Up until this morning everything was going fine. They’d done two previous shoots this week, one in the Mount Pleasant cemetery, with the legs coming out from behind an ornamental shrub and a tombstone visible in the background – a subtle touch – and the other in a larger ravine, the one over by Summerhill.

The plan is to catch the early joggers and the people walking their dogs, and to that end John has been getting up every morning at five. He doesn’t have to worry about waking anybody else up: Serafina took off a month ago after throwing all the glassware at him and denouncing him as a megalomaniac sado-masochist who was insanely jealous of her own art; she does oversized renditions of catalogue-advertised sex aids, in macramé, epoxy, and woven panty hose. He’d laughed scornfully – him, jealous of that feeble, derivative crap? – and she’d burst into tears and claimed he secretly wanted to kill her. Then she’d stolen his bicycle. He hasn’t had the heart to try again on another relationship. Perhaps he’s doomed to be alone. Some days it feels like doom, and other days it doesn’t: taking other people into consideration is always a strain. His apartment is a wreck, of course. Serafina wasn’t the housewife type, and he himself hasn’t had the energy to clean up. Perhaps it’s time to move again.

One good thing about doing this piece is that he doesn’t have to shave; over the week he’s sprouted an impressive growth of stubble. He puts on the dirty rumpled suit and the falling-apart shoes, without socks, and checks the briefcase in which he keeps his makeup. Then he heads off for the rendezvous with Alf and Bruno, stopping for a coffee and a doughnut on the way. He likes to test the general effect: even without his makeup, he looks dingy enough so that the serving folk are markedly cool to him.

Once at the site, he parks his car and climbs into the back of Bruno’s van. There he applies the fake blood, the bruise paint and the scar. The idea is to make himself look either seriously wounded or dead. While he fools with the finishing touches, Alf and Bruno set up, behind some bushes adjacent to the one John himself intends to use. Alf is the sound man, a Cockney who’s been over here for ten years. Bruno is from Romania, and runs the camera; he likes to be called “the cinematographer.” John doesn’t much care what he’s called as long as he gets the pictures.

John messes up his hair, checks the effect in the mirror, climbs out of the van, locks it up – you can never tell when a real derelict will emerge from the shrubbery and there’s no point leaving temptation in their way – and joins the other two. Then he crawls under his bush, and the others coach him until he’s in the right position – mostly concealed, but with enough leg sticking out so that a curious or concerned person might be tempted to take another look. Then Alf and Bruno hide themselves, and then they wait for the joggers and dog-walkers. It’s strangely exciting, the waiting. Almost like hunting.

Alf records the sounds, which so far have been mostly feet crunching and people talking to their dogs, and a bit of whistling. Bruno films everyone – those who don’t notice John’s legs at all, those who notice and pretend not to, those who stop and frankly stare. In the two mornings so far, only one has actually come closer and made as if to take a real look; but she’d thought better of it and continued on. It’s amazing to John how many people genuinely don’t see him: they aren’t concentrating on where they are at the moment, only on where they’re headed.

When he’s got three mornings’ worth of video tape – which is all he can afford on this mingy little grant – John will be able to start on the really creative part of the project. He’ll cut and splice and re-film, and digitally alter the heads of the joggers so they won’t be able to sue him for invasion of privacy. Maybe he’ll colour them – purple or green – and add a few extras, like flames shooting out of their ears, or big round bug-eyes. Then he’ll put himself at the beginning, in his serious-wounds makeup, and explain that this is a visual rendering of indifference – the indifference of a society made callous by repeated exposure to degradation and suffering. The tape will run in a continuous loop as part of an installation he’s doing: white plastic panels covered with found objects from the sous-sol of society, such as used junkie needles and discarded condoms and hamburger wrappers and crushed soft-drink cartons and shattered beer bottles. That sort of thing.

He used to do sculptures, but no one’s buying those any more. At his age – not old, but no longer the wave of the future – he can’t afford to seem passé. It’s a cut-throat world out there; maybe that’s why he’s chosen to depict a cut on his throat. He’ll get a few closeup stills of that and add them to the installation. He’s calling the whole thing Underbrush Man, in a glancing reference to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground; also as a take on the Fuller Brush Man, to represent the hucksterism and crass commercialism of the present age. That’s the way art is these days: intertextual. Not that anyone can be expected to get it. Like a lot of the other intertextualism floating around these days, it will have to be carefully explained.

Thus John muses, lying beneath his bush, feeling the cool damp seep up through the back of his tattered suit, listening distantly to the passing feet. No one will stop and look; like the genuine homeless, he’s invisible. It’s a shame, really – just as he’s finally got the hang of the scar, and is looking less like a Hallowe’en mask and more like a man who’s been truly injured. Or perhaps murdered.

It’s odd, lying here pretending to be dead. He wonders what his shrink – not the one he has now, the one of two years back – would make of this latest charade of his, this latest impersonation. This is a substitute for your suicide of yourself, no? You have killed yourself in your art so you do not have to do it in the real life, so much is evident. You see yourself as wounded. In the heart, no? You long for the departed Serafina, yes? You wish her to return. You wish to be a small sick boy, with some kind woman taking care of you.

Rocket scientist, thinks John. Don’t we all? And besides, I am wounded.

All at once a new and different thing happens. He’s being barked at by a dog; that’s happened before, but this is serious barking. He opens his eyes and looks up to see a woman’s hand parting the branches. Then a sudden pain shoots through his leg. The goddamn dog has bitten him! He leaps to his feet – What the fuck! – and explodes out of the bush. The dog-owner is a blonde, and his effect on her is more than he ever could have hoped for. She screams like a maniac when she sees the blood, and the next moment she has keeled over and is lying on her back in the path.

John hops up and down, holding his bitten leg. Alf and Bruno charge out from behind their own bushes. Did you get it? says John. Did you get all of it? Bruno reassures him. Alf says maybe the woman has had a heart attack. No, says John, looking down at her. She’s just sensitive. She’s fainted. He’s intrigued by the idea of a woman who can still faint. Possibly she is the only caring woman in the entire city, because isn’t she the only one who stopped?

Maybe he should pick her up in his arms and carry her to the van. He thinks he could manage it without giving himself a hernia, she doesn’t seem too heavy. She looks like the kind of woman who could use a man in her life. A little worn around the edges maybe, but that kind are more appreciative. There are however the dogs to contend with; the little one is still growling at him. The woman could sue him for scaring the piss out of her under false pretenses, but then, he could countersue for grievous bodily dog bites.

You wanted to be wounded, says the voice of his former shrink. And now you are. It is dangerous sometimes to act out our fantasies, no?

John kneels beside the woman; she opens her eyes. Jesus Cripes, she says, I thought you were dead.

I’m not, says John. Are you all right?

Jesus Cripes is promising; this woman is of the earth, earthy – not some neurotic female artist. He’s had it with neurotic female artists. This woman looks as if she knows which end of the vacuum cleaner the dirt goes into. Already he can see the two of them together, her pottering in the garden – he hopes she has a garden – or cooking dinner in the kitchen, while he explains to her the theory behind his latest project, or two, or three. She’ll rearrange the closets; he’ll run his tongue up her neck. Then they’ll end up in the bedroom. It will be perfect.

She’ll be there when he wants her, and not when he doesn’t. She will have tact; she’ll know about artistic freedom and the personal space he needs. She’ll rub his back when it’s sore, and won’t insist on regular mealtimes, and if he requires an interlude with some other woman, to increase his spiritual range, she will be indulgent.

Perhaps she too is wounded. He will have to teach her how to trust again. They will teach each other.

Oh yes, there are the dogs. They will have to be tied up outside, in the yard. He hopes she has a yard. Or else they can be locked in the cellar. Or something.

You look like bloody hell, says the woman.

I’m supposed to, says John. It comes with the territory. He smiles. She smiles back. It’s a beginning.

• Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist and essayist. Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize five times, she won in 2000 with The Blind Assassin. Other awards include the Giller prize and the Arthur C Clarke award, for The Handmaid’s Tale. Her latest book is In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011).

You won’t get away with tinkering with his plays for an adult audience – but some bracing liberties are being taken for kids

The treatment of Shakespeare in Roland Emmerrich’s current flick, Anonymous, has had many a critic reaching for his poniards. Some think the film cocks an audacious snook at the sacred cow of Avon, showing off “balls the size of the Globe Theatre” in the process – others think its irreverence is unjustified by any pretensions to artistic merit and that WS should be left, baldly untroubled, on his playwright’s pedestal. Either way, envisaging Shakespeare as lecher, fraud, and murderer, has made a lot of people hot under the ruff.

Fictional or speculative takes on Shakespeare’s character are not new in the world of YA fiction, although they don’t usually make such resounding waves. Susan Cooper notably set him centre stage in her time-slip fantasy King of Shadows, in which Nat Field, an orphaned American boy actor mysteriously stricken with a case of bubonic plague, is transported from the newly restored Globe of 1999 back to the time of its first building.  Braving the rigours and ripeness of Elizabethan life, Nat plays Puck to Shakespeare’s Oberon, and finds, in the sympathetic playwright, a temporary replacement for his lost father. More recently, Celia Rees gave us The Fool’s Girl, foregrounding the playwright against a backdrop of courtly corruption and what might have happened if Twelfth Night’s Illyria were a real country, riven with internecine politics in the wake of the play’s neat and tidy ending. Cooper’s Shakespeare is a tender, charismatic poet, while Rees’s is somewhat cowardly, hard-headedly resigned to realpolitik, but sentimental underneath. Neither author portrays him as a villain (or, indeed, as a fraud) but both use his fictionalised character to bring his context, and his work, vividly and accessibly to life.

Animating and enlivening Shakespeare for young readers is uniquely challenging – the plays are dense and allusive, frequently featuring X-rated storylines of violence and sexual desire, but they also represent a treasure chest most teachers would like their students to begin plundering at as early an age as possible. So sugaring the pill by taking liberties, whether in retellings, through imaginative departures or by dramatising Shakespeare’s own temptingly undocumented life, are rather encouraged than frowned upon.

Straightforwardly retelling Shakespeare for children, however, does present authors with the dismaying prospect of bowdlerising or Tateification, especially if they feel the need to apply tactful fig-leaves according to the envisaged age of their readership. Recently rereading Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare , I was amused by the injunction to the better-lettered boys of the 19th century to select “what is proper for a young sister’s ear” if they start reading chunks of the originals to their adoring siblings. Although the Lambs do a splendid job of potting Shakespeare’s plots (I wish I’d remembered them when doing undergraduate revision), there’s no room in their orderly, highly moral universe for ambiguity, or for the “problematic” – Isabella, for instance, is delighted to marry the Duke at the end of Measure for Measure, accepting him “with grateful joy” rather than silence and setting such an “excellent example” as a virtuous Duchess thereafter that sex before marriage, the sin that drives the play, becomes all but unknown. Unfortunately, too, the language of the Lambs’ own time now presents almost as many barriers to the young 21st-century reader as Shakespeare’s does.

A happier series of retellings for contemporary children (of both sexes) is Leon Garfield’s inspired partnership with Michael Foreman, Shakespeare Stories. In two volumes, with the help of Foreman’s unsettling, delicate watercolours, Garfield’s own understated and assured poetic power triumphs in rendering the eerie, the hilarious, the monstrous and the moving, and in inspiring young readers with the wish to explore the original treasure chest. Like the Lambs, Garfield preserves much of Shakespeare’s spoken language, but the assurance with which he creates a background to the stories (the thatched cottages of Illyria are “neat as well-combed children”) brings them brightly into the eye of the mind, there to be fixed by Foreman’s astonishing paintings. I am still haunted by the pale, skull-like face of Julius Caesar mid-assassination, bleeding from myriad wounds, with his mouth fixed in a Munch-like scream.

For teenagers, Mal Peet’s Exposure is a magnificent modernisation of Othello, which won the Guardian children’s fiction prize in 2009. Before reading it, I snobbishly turned up my nose at the idea of a star footballer Otello and a pop star Desmeralda, but afterwards I was a repentant and enthusiastic convert. It’s phenomenally powerful, not least for the parts which owe least to the parent work – the depiction of street children in an imagined South American country, and the passionate beauty Peet imparts to football commentary, which makes the book more likely than most to appeal to teenaged males otherwise averse to high-falutin’ drama.

Enjoying such a wealth of “takes” on Shakespeare in the context of children’s literature, it seems strange to me that while in the world of grown-up cinema his person has become untouchably sacred – in bringing the Bard to babes and sucklings, one can get away with murder.

In the first of a series of exclusive short stories, William Trevor tells of a tutor and his young pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet up again years later

Mary Bella didn’t remember when she woke up and then she did: he hadn’t come. The train was late and Woods had telephoned from the station. It was nearly ten by then and she must have fallen asleep waiting on the sofa. She didn’t remember going up to bed.

It was very early now, she could tell by the light. The air coming in at the half-open window was cold and she pulled the bedclothes up. If he had come he would be in the room she had helped to get ready for him, the primroses she’d picked in the vase on the dressing-table. She wondered if he had.

When she slept again she dreamed he hadn’t, that it was wrong about the train being late, that Woods came back alone and said a stranger hadn’t got off that train. But when she went down to the breakfast-room and listened at the door there was a voice she didn’t know. “Now why can I guess who this is!” he said when she went in, and held his hand out for her to shake. They had all summer, he said in the schoolroom afterwards. They had a lot to do.

It was she who called the nursery the schoolroom when she first had lessons there. Woods found a slate that might do for a blackboard, but it wasn’t necessary since everything could be written in her different exercise-books. Mary Bella was twelve that summer, thirteen when September came.

He wore blue jerseys, and blue shirts which her mother called Aertex, and tweed ties and whipcord trousers. Her mother said he reminded her of Leslie Howard in Gone With the Wind, her father that he was confident this chap would get her into Evelynscourt, which was the purpose of his being here. “Enough for one morning,” he said himself every day when it was twelve o’clock and they went about the farm then to see how things were getting on. Later in the afternoon they would ride to Worley Edge and sometimes on to Still Fell, or walk to Grattan’s Tomb.

“Very Heathcliffian,” he said when there were riders racing one another on the moors one day and she didn’t understand what he meant. He read to her on their walks, or she to him, depending on what book it was. It made her sad that the summer had to end. He said it never would, because remembering wouldn’t let it.

❦

Anthony was twenty-two then and, not knowing what to do with himself after an undistinguished university career, he considered that a few months adding what he could to the education of a child in a country house would be better than doing nothing. The letter he received in reply to his answer to the advertisement was in an educated hand, and honestly laid out the disadvantages he would encounter if he took the post. We are close to moorland, and remote. You may find the sense of solitude oppressive. But the location turned out to be less intimidating than this suggested, the house – called Old Grange – grander than he had imagined, the farm prosperous. Anthony delighted in the place as soon as he became familiar with it, and in Mary Bella too. Small for her age, sharp-witted and volatile, she smiled a lot and laughed a lot, the beginning of beauty already in her features, her manner touched with a child’s unspoilt charm. In the schoolroom she disliked the dreariness of geography, and geometry’s uninteresting straight lines and the silly shape of trapeziums. History caught her imagination, she learned poetry easily, had a way with spelling and with words. And that summer, which was warm, with hardly any rain, she developed a fondness for Anthony that he could not dismiss or pretend he didn’t notice and which, when September came, caused him more unease than he admitted to himself. He left Old Grange the day after Mary Bella’s thirteenth birthday, leaving behind far more than their excursions on the moors, their conversations, or the birds Mary Bella identified for him, far more than the hay-making he had helped with, or a family’s friendliness. He left what he thought would be impossible to forget – the sadness Mary Bella had spoken of, and something like desperation in her eyes when the last day came and they said good-bye to one another. But Anthony did forget. He made himself, considering it better that he should.

❦

Mary Bella passed, quite comfortably, the entrance examination for Evelynscourt, where her mother had been happy in her time but where Mary Bella wasn’t. Too often and too easily she remembered the summer of the schoolroom and nothing at Evelynscourt was like that. She didn’t talk about the summer to anyone, not wanting to; and in the holidays she concealed her feelings every time she returned from riding to the places they had ridden to or when she sat alone in the schoolroom, the books of some holiday task or other spread out on the ink-stained table unheeded. She was reconciled to never seeing Anthony again, but his voice was there, as if it always would be, telling her about Jeanne d’Arc, and Elizabeth Tudor, whom he had called the Lonely Queen, and Charlemagne and Marie Antoinette. It drew her into the world of the Marshalsea, brought her to Dorcote Mill and Wildfell Hall, made Haworth Rectory as real as it had been.

❦

Anthony became a cartographer, astonishing himself that he had not sooner been attracted by a profession that at once interested and absorbed him and in which, he discovered, he was both skilled and gifted. A few years after his months at Old Grange he had met at a party a slim, fair-haired girl called Nicola who, when they knew one another better, accompanied him on his commissions abroad. She took photographs for him in the uncharted region of the Abruzzi and in the new, mapless towns of Africa, in rebuilt Germany and where motorways now changed for ever the old roads of England. In time, they married. Two children – both girls – were born, a house acquired in the leafy London suburb of Barnes and, flourishing in contented motherhood and Anthony’s devotion, Nicole’s prettiness acquired a quiet confidence that had not been there before. Anthony went alone on his commissions and liked returning more than going away. Each time he came back, his children seemed a little different and another aspect of his small family was more than it had been before. His absences kept love alive, and interest in his children’s pursuits did not wane as otherwise it might have. On Saturdays, if the week had been free of disobedience, there was the visit to Richmond Park, tea afterwards in the Maids of Honour. On Sundays Nicola’s mother took the girls away for their day with her, returning them undamaged by excessive affection, for she was careful about that. How fortunate they all four were! Anthony often said, or Nicola did. Neither wondered how married life might have been if they had married other people, how different their children would be. It was enough to know that being married to one another was what they wanted, that neither wanted more. “Tell them about Old Grange,” Nicola often urged, and Anthony would recall for the girls what he remembered of it. They always listened, as Nicola did too. Because it sounded so lovely, she said, and the girls agreed.

❦

On the morning of her sixtieth birthday Mary Bella’s mother died suddenly, without an illness’s warning. Mary Bella was twenty-four then, had been at Old Grange since she left Evelynscourt, and was content to be there. She took her mother’s place quite naturally, but in spite of the comfort and convenience of her presence, her father was unable to come to terms with the tragedy that had so unexpectedly occurred. He did not ever recover his good humour or his affection for the house and the farm. In the darkness of his mood he took to drink a little and to riding recklessly over the moors as if in search of the happiness that had been taken from him. One day he did not come back and was later found after his horse returned alone. The fall was a bad one, but perhaps achieved for him what he wanted. He did not regain consciousness.

Mary Bella might have sold Old Grange, passed on to its new owner the horses and her small band of farm workers, the Charollais herd and several thousand sheep. Instead, she remained, and often during the lonely months that followed her father’s death she sat in the schoolroom as she had as a child, her sole companion a spaniel who, with age, had become blind. She knew she was living in the past, that it would always be here, around her, that she was part of it herself.

❦

It was not sentiment that brought Anthony back to the Yorkshire moors. By chance, his profession did, and when he found himself one morning not far from Worley Edge it was an impulse, stirred by curiosity, that caused him to park his car less than a mile from Old Grange. He walked then, skirting the walled garden and the farm buildings when he came to them. There was a silence about the place, a tranquillity quite at odds with the clatter of the yard, the hurrying and the bustle that had lived on in his recollections. Not knowing why he passed the house by, he followed a right of way he remembered.

The morning, in early April, was fine. Except for sheep, the moors were empty. No horses raced there, no solitary figure – a movement in the distance – climbed to Grattan’s Tomb: going on, Anthony realised he had been expecting to see that. He remembered the places where they had rested on their walks, where he had read from Wuthering Heights or listened to another page of The Chimes, or where he had insisted that only French should he spoken.

He turned before he reached Still Fell. Carelessly selective, his memory had misled him. Only once had there been horses racing on the moors; it was unlikely that they would have been there today at this time, and long ago the child he had taught would surely have left so remote a house. He turned and walked back the way he had come, for a moment hesitated, and then passed between the avenue’s two grey pillars.

The big, wide front door was as it always had been, sunburnt pale, in need again of paint. He went to the side entrance, a door without a knocker or a bell, bolted only at night. When he pushed it open the same picture – trapeze performers above a circus ring – still decorated one wall of the long, cold corridor that led to the kitchen and the sculleries. There was a murmur of voices, the rattle occasionally of a knife or fork put down. “Hello,” Anthony called out, and his voice silenced everything.

In the kitchen the faces around the table were not at first familiar. Six or seven men, a slight dark-haired woman in a blue dress, looked back at him.

“Hello,” he said again and the woman stood up and he knew at once that she was Mary Bella.

“Good heavens!” she greeted him, and two of the older men stood up, too, and he knew then who they were. They nodded at him and he shook hands with them.

“You’ve come to lunch!” Mary Bella was amused in a way he had not forgotten, her sudden laughter seeming to brim over as it enlivened her features. Once long, sometimes plaited, her hair was tidily drawn back.

“How are you, sir?” One of the men who’d stood up pulled out a chair for him.

“It’s a shank of lamb,” Mary Bella said, spooning some on to a plate.

The men finished their food. There was more talk from the older two, reminiscing about the past they associated with him. Then they shook hands again and all the men went off together.

“Gosh,” Mary Bella murmured, gazing at Anthony in a way he remembered also.

❦

Driving back to London, Anthony didn’t wonder why he’d stayed so long. “Walk with me a little,” Mary Bella had begged, and it felt natural that he should, that they should walk where they had before, that she should take him to the schoolroom, that he should stay for hours when he hadn’t intended to.

He had heard about her mother’s death, her father’s so soon afterwards. It was the fate of an only child, Mary Bella said, to inherit what couldn’t be refused. She wasn’t complaining. There was nothing of that in her voice, and she smiled when she said it, as if it was a comedy that she should own everything because there was no one else. Her smile came often, as it used to. Her laughter too.

“I wondered,” she had said, “if ever you would come back.”

She made tea for them and the flowery china was the same, the cake the one her mother most often made. He said he had become a cartographer.

A man who hadn’t been in the kitchen earlier came in and Anthony had recognised the lean, baffled features of the man waiting on the ill-lit station platform the night the train was so very late.

“I saw the car,” Woods remarked in bewildered tones that hadn’t changed. “I said to myself who’s was it?”

Tired of the motorway he was on, Anthony drove off it. Near Melton Mowbray he stopped in a village and had a drink in the bar of a hotel. After another he didn’t want to drive on and spent the night there. He dreamed of the schoolroom as it was, its windows wedged to keep them from rattling, specks of soot on the unlit kindling in the grate. Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Mary Bella recited for him, Little breezes dusk and shiver … Once he had been woken in the night by her father, who needed help delivering a calf, and afterwards they sat drinking whisky until dawn. Unopened letters were always scattered on the table in the hall. Inaccurate clocks were everywhere.

In the morning Anthony knew he shouldn’t have gone back. A letter came, his handwriting on the envelope. She propped it up on the dresser, to be read when she was alone. “I never thought of you as patient,” she had confessed the day he came back. “But of course you must have been.”

She remembered his saying once that patience was worthwhile, and while she waited until the evening, his letter still where she had left it, she thought that that was probably true. How very strange, seeing you again, she read at last. I passed the house by, thinking that time should perhaps be left where it had settled. But I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I hadn’t changed my mind.

She had been kind, the letter said. Your family’s hospitality is all it ever was. She wondered where he lived. He hadn’t told her, and the letter had only London as an address. He’d married someone. She could tell, although he hadn’t said that either. She wondered if there were children.

The letter was precious and she folded it into the folds he’d made and put it away. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t reply. He had come back.

❦

Anthony hadn’t made it happen. It had happened because it was part of something else, of what had been impossible and now was not. He told himself that, but it made no difference. He tried to push it all away, to deny that time, only by passing, could contradict so easily and so naturally, but he found he couldn’t. Too much was there already, too much had coloured too many moments since they had walked again on the moors, since in the kitchen afterwards she had made tea, since in their schoolroom he had wanted her.

The moors were vast, he reminded himself. He could go back and walk alone there, seeing from afar the house, the farm, and now and again a lonely rider. There could be that.

But when Anthony returned he went at once to the house, and after that he always did.

❦

Nicola lived with her bewilderment, aware that it wasn’t much to have to live with. Yet each morning, when she woke, she felt uneasy, and didn’t want to think. And in the daytime on her own – cleaning, cooking, in a shop – she searched for the calm that had always been hers to call upon, but could not find it. She tried to believe that what she dreaded was only in what she wondered, but could not. Disquiet did not recede, and still the dread was there.

❦

A long flat stone marked Grattan’s grave. Half fallen, crooked on what was once a hillock and now hardly higher than the surrounding turf, it bore no inscription. Myth claimed this grave, made of its unknown dead an ill-met presence, fearsome on the moors, lone and mad, a chieftain of his ancient time.

“How the past holds on!” Anthony remarked, and Mary Bella knew he was not referring to what an unlettered stone had inspired, but to the past that was theirs. Often their thoughts touched before words expressed them. When Mary Bella felt sometimes that the hiatus that separated, for them, one time from another she knew he felt it too. Someone else, not he, had lived his other life: that fantasy, in silence, was shared.

The August sky was pale, without a cloud, the day as lovely as any Mary Bella had known. The grass around the grave was grazed to a springy shortness, a single clump of cranesbill grown up again from what the sheep had left behind. “How good this summer is too!” Mary Bella murmured. “How good that you have come again today!”

Idyll he had written for her once and she had loved the word, and more than ever loved it now. A happiness, he had written too. Since he’d come back they had not said, and did not say it now, that they would be together in the house. They knew they would be. Because the house, the moors, were where together they belonged.

❦

In the dead time of a Sunday afternoon Anthony told the wife he had once loved that their marriage, unchanged for her, had become for him a mistake. He told her gently, in the garden, choosing this time to do so, since their children were with their grandmother and would not be back for more than another hour. The deckchairs they were sitting in were close together because the garden’s paved area was restricted.

“It is a shock,” he said. “I know it is.” He held a hand out and she took it, seeming not quite to realise what she was doing.

Autumn had come, its sunshine a compensation after a disappointing summer. The leaves of shrubs were not yet withering, were only lank, less green. Quite soon the dusk of evening would be there in the afternoon, Nicola had earlier that day remarked.

Her book was open on her knees and she searched for the bookmark she had dropped, then slipped it into place. She had said nothing in response to Anthony’s revelation and she didn’t now. He watched her walking among their small flowerbeds, picking here and there a weed, gazing down at Michaelmas daises that yesterday hadn’t been in bloom. When she returned to the deckchairs she said that she had known. Her hope that she was wrong was a pretence: she’d known she should not hope.

“Don’t say more now,” she begged. “Please. Not yet.”

She wound around a finger a blade of couch grass she’d picked.

He’d left it too long, Anthony thought. All of it was worse because he’d left it so long.

The couch crass cut her when she was careless with it and she threw it away. She put her finger to her lips and he offered to get something for it. She shock her head.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She tried to read. “Don’t go,” he had thought she would plead, but she hadn’t. She didn’t plead in any way at all, nor allow her tears to come. “I’m sorry, Nicola,” he said again.

She shook her head, not looking up from the page that hadn’t been turned, and still wasn’t in the silence she had asked for. A car door banged and then their children were there, calling out as they ran into the garden, Amelia nine, Susie five.

❦

Autumn brought with it the bitter wind that, every autumn, blew across the moors. Sheep huddled close, rivulets and bogland froze. Snow came.

But the idyll that had begun in sunshine was still there, its unhurried days, though briefer now, as much a pleasure. Anthony no longer drove away from Old Grange to begin a journey that familiarity had made uninteresting. His books were packed into half-empty bookcases, his coloured inks and pens arranged to his liking on the schoolroom table. A map of the old town of Kishinev – his first commission – was framed and on a wall, his clothes hung beside Mary Bella’s in the wardrobe that had been hers and now was theirs.

Her life had changed less than his. The wages of the men still had to be paid every week, their midday meal cooked, her mother’s shortcuts with roasts and stews remembered. She kept the farm accounts as she had before. She was responsible and in charge, continuing to make her own contribution to how things should be, what differences were necessary in a different time. A dish-washer for the lunchtime dishes because there were so many made for a less busy day, as other contemporary devices did. The Aga was electric now, and it was warm in the house, as it never was before. The dog who had been Mary Bella’s companion during her time of solitude was suspicious of another presence, but it didn’t matter. Nothing did, and the days that so smoothly became weeks, then months, were unlike any that Anthony or Mary Bella had experienced before, and both believed that nothing could disturb the contentment of being together. But as November ended, Mary Bella one morning at breakfast handed across the table a letter addressed in blue, clear handwriting. She knew at once, although she hadn’t seen the writing before, that it was his wife’s. She watched Anthony reading a single, tidily filled page. He read it twice before he gave it to her. “Nothing can be done about this,” his only comment was.

The older of his two children was starving herself. No reason for her doing so was given, but Mary Bella could guess and knew that Anthony could too.

They did not talk about the letter that morning, or all day. Anthony took it away and Mary Bella imagined he burnt it when he was lighting the drawing-room fire. She never saw it again.

But its contents could not so easily be eluded. They both knew that, and when the post came the following morning the blue handwriting was there again.

“They have taken her into hospital,” Anthony said when he read it. “For observation, so they say.”

Mary Bella took the letter from him. It said more than he had quoted, but not much. She gathered up the breakfast dishes. He poured more coffee. He said:

“There’s nothing to be observed. Nothing mysterious to be discovered. Nothing that isn’t known.”

A child had found the pain of her father’s absence too much to bear. Silent at first, she cried all day for several days and then began to starve herself. They ask that you should be told at once, the clear round writing recorded.

The day he left his family, Susie had helped him to carry his books to the car, following him every few moments with another from the pile in the hall. Amelia didn’t speak. She didn’t come out of her room. But that would pass, he had told himself.

❦

At the hospital they declared that there was nothing particularly unusual about this variation of a child’s reaction to extreme distress. They were optimistic and reassuring, and Anthony’s presence brought about a recovery that was maintained, as other recoveries had not been. Eventually it was he who drove Amelia home again, and he stayed for longer than he’d meant to, sleeping on a downstairs sofa and often in the night going to gaze at the somnolent features of his affectionate daughter. They looked as tired as an old woman’s, but whenever he touched her forehead with his lips she opened her eyes and sometimes even smiled. Amelia had been born with difficulty but had never before been difficult herself. He remained for more than a week, during which she made amends for the trouble she had caused. She said she wanted to be a cartographer and Anthony was pleased. He understood and was forgiving. He wasn’t angry when he was with her.

But three days after he drove into the yard at Old Grange he learned that she’d again begun to starve herself.

❦

Mary Bella tried not to dwell on what was happening. It wasn’t her place to make suggestions and anyway she could think of none. She felt uncomfortable and lost, belonging in what had come about and yet outside it. Anthony had spoken hardly at all about the family he had deserted, his tone when he did so now impersonal, as if he considered that in the circumstances it should be. Of the wife he was still married to, Mary Bella knew little more than her name and that she wrote letters in blue ink, with a fountain pen, not a ballpoint. There were no photographs of her at Old Grange, none that Mary Bella had seen of the two children who had been born. A house had a few times been mentioned, no more than where it was.

Yet out of so little, images came, and voices spoke. As in the schoolroom once Jeanne d’Arc had ridden into battle, as precious stones had glittered on the great high collar of Elizabeth Tudor, so shadows now were more than shadows. The knife that so cruelly and so often fell, the heads that rolled into a mire of blood, the treachery of plots, through their own drama became reality.

A loss that is unbearable does now, the bitterness of a quiet wife. The room that has been his is no one’s. Its shelves are empty, its drawers are light, his chair is in a corner. The household is bereft, but the pictures on its walls, the patterns on its carpets, are as they always were, and things on tables are. They take away the child again.

❦

Wind whined and whistled, gusts spluttered. On the moors conversation was lost, began again, was lost again. For warmth Mary Bella wore clothes that were rough and of the farm, the coarseness of tweed, and shabby corduroy, making more of the delicacy in features that Anthony still often saw as a child’s. Knowing Mary Bella twice – her mind, her nature, her laughter, her sadness too – he had twice considered her unique, the second time as lovers do about each other.

But in all this Anthony’s instinct was as it always was: not ever to allow in himself the kind of tribulation that haunted Mary Bella. His way was to suppress, to conceal, to be protected. The cartographer’s world he had been drawn to was rational and understandable, beyond imagination’s interference. He delighted in its accuracy and precision, and made of it what wanted him to make, discarding what had no purpose.

“We are here, we are together,” he said while the raw cold nagged. “We live with consequences. We have to, and we can.”

❦

Mary Bella wondered if they could. Perfection began when he came back, when he called out and she was there as she had always been, all other love rejected. And yet that memory brought disquiet now that felt like fear.

The snow that earlier had flecked the landscape fell heavily. In the distance, Worley Edge was obscured and they went no further.

“How well you taught me to imagine,” Mary Bella murmured, the softness of her tone not quite conveying the irony of her observation. But what she said was taken by the wind and she did no repeat it. That something demanded more of her was a silent echo on the long walk back, an intimation that would not declare itself yet still was there.

The yard was quiet when they reached it, the men already gone home. The empty house was warm, the blind dog waiting.

❦

The snow fell for days, was blown into drifts, accumulated on the roofs of sheds, on windowsills and frozen panes, changed the shape of water-butts and mounting-blocks. It was confining too.

On the schoolroom table Anthony had spread out an unfinished map of street alterations in Dijon, four paperweights holding it in place, his inks and pens in orderly rows beside it. The table had been put to other uses since he and Mary Bella had shared it in the past – seed potatoes had sprouted on it, apples kept from touching one another, brass and silver polished, china and porcelain repaired. This morning it was shared again, Mary Bella going through the farm accounts at the other end of it.

She would make curtains for the curtainless windows, she had a moment ago decided. And the daisy wallpaper, badly sunburnt, stained and faded, could be renewed. The white paint of the skirting-board and the picture-rail could be, and the paintwork of the door and the window-frames. Their room they called it, and always would.

“All right?” she heard Anthony ask. Then he looked up and smiled at her before he returned to what he’d been doing.

Often she dreamed of the household she could not prevent herself from imagining. And often she lay awake, telling herself that he was right, that people lived with what happened to them, that people had to. Marriage fell apart, he said; it was not unusual. His child was a sensible child, he said; she would be again. One day they would be glad they had held on.

But at night, while Anthony slept, confusion crept into the empty dark, bewilderment became a tiredness, and Mary Bella heard her own slight whisper speaking of a child who had been damaged, a damaged woman too. She remembered pity from long ago when in an accident one of the workmen lost an arm. She had pitied her mother in pain, and a girl at Evelynscourt who was despised, and the blind spaniel who followed her about the house. Challenging the love that kept her silent, her pity now seemed presumptuous when it came in the night, not belonging in an expected way as it had before. Yet still she pitied.

“Yes, I’m all right,” she said, and smiled a little too.

In a dream, occurring often, his child was dead and he stood by the grave, alone, flowers spread on the clay. And she watched, hidden by trees, not wanting to be parted from him.

❦

“You are unhappy,” Anthony said one evening in the kitchen when they had finished supper.

Carrying plates and dishes to the sink Mary Bella shook her head but did not answer. Not turning round, she scoured a saucepan she had left on the draining-board to steep.

Anthony waited, then dried the dishes he was handed one by one warm from the steaming water. At peace, the old dog slept in his corner.

“Amelia is herself again,” Anthony said. “You do know that?”

“Yes, I do know.”

“What is it, Mary Bella?”

“A silliness.”

She had told herself this moment would come, yet had believed that it might not, that the invasion of her thoughts, no matter how persistent, would slip away, each day, each night becoming less troubled than the one before.

“It’s over now,” Anthony said. “The awfulness of that time.”

It wasn’t over. Since memory would not allow it to be over, it never would be. The damaged do not politely go away, instead release their demons. That must be so, she could not think that it was different.

Soothing and patient, his voice went on. His smile was tender. She loved his pale blue eyes, his hands, his lips, the way he stood, and moved, his quiet laughter. But still his words were nothing. He did not understand.

She tried to say that what had been a wisp of doubt flourished now as premonition, but thought became confusion, did not connect, would not communicate. They could not change themselves, could only simulate what was not so.

With that simplicity a loneliness began for Mary Bella that was more than loneliness had ever been before. Belittling the solitude she had so often known, it was mysterious too, coming as it did while she still had the companionship she valued more than any other. “It’s foolishness, all this,” Anthony said.

There was no anger in his tone, no edge of irritation. But both would come when patience had worn itself out. There’d be indifference then, disdain, contempt. Why did she know? Why did he not? He’d been the teacher once.

❦

The night was slow. Its slowness was their hope, the dawdling hands of the clock on the windowsill their chance to settle what had been disturbed. Time was their genius, Anthony had said: emptily passing, it had held their love before it made of it a high romance.

“We’re happy surely?” He pressed his presumption just a little. “Shouldn’t we be sensible too?”

But the disturbance that had come did not give up its ground.

❦

The men called out to one another in the yard, early-morning energy in their voices. The herd was driven from the fields for milking. Buckets rattled. Softly a transistor played. In the kitchen, through ragged tiredness, conversation stumbled on.

“How slightly we know ourselves until something happens.” Mary Bella broke a silence that had lasted. “How blurred the edges are: what we can do, what in the end we can’t. What nags, what doesn’t.”

Anthony stroked her hair and held her, wanting to for ever. “Your courage is extraordinary,” he said.

❦

One of the men came in with the morning milk and eggs. Anthony took the milk can from him and filled two blue-and-white kitchen jugs, pouring what remained into a saucepan for their coffee. “A better day?” he asked and the man said it was brighter than recent days had been. Mary Bella cut bread for toast.

❦

When spring was about to come and then did not, one morning Anthony wasn’t there. Waking early, Mary Bella heard the car.

The men knew more. They’d seen his belongings carried from the house. He’d said good-bye, had shaken their hands. They waved when he drove off, then watched the car becoming nothing on the distant moors.

His clothes, his inks, his pens, unfinished Dijon, his books: all these were gone. Only the old town of Kishinev remained, as he intended it should, a part of him still there.

❦

She knows his journey, where he will stop, where once he spent a night but has not since and will not now. It will be dusk when he arrives.

She slices gammon, two slices for each plate, the men in turn come for their food. The sun has reached the kitchen, as at this time in spring and summer it always does. Sometimes in the schoolroom he pulled the curtains over. It will be dusk when he arrives.

She takes her own plate to the table and is deferred to there. In kindness, because kindness is his way, he’ll call upon prevarication and deceit, his lies of mercy all he can offer the wife he now returns to. He’ll make of love a wild infatuation that did not last and now is over.

The talk at the table is as it always is, about the morning’s work, some of it finished, some not yet, about the weather, the forecast for tomorrow. Mary Bella plays a part, for she is used to that. He will be tired, but even so he’ll manage for that too is his way. His grateful wife will not reject him, the broken pieces of what is shattered will be gathered.

The altered fencing of a field is now complete, new gates put in, so she is told, a stile that wasn’t there before. He will not come back, not once, not ever. There’ll be no tawdry attempt at a revival, no searching in the falsity for something that might be better than nothing.

The men push back their chairs, the shuffling of their boots noisy on the red-tiled floor. Mary Bella senses an anxiety, and pity perhaps. She doesn’t try to smile any of that away, only wishes the men could know that love, unchanged, is as it was, is there for him among her shadows, for her in rooms and places as familiar to him as they are to her. She wishes they could know it will not wither, that there’ll be no long slow dying, or love made ordinary.

• William Trevor is an Irish short-story writer and novelist, who has lived in England since the 1950s. He has won the Whitbread prize three times and has been nominated five times for the Booker prize, most recently for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin literary award in 2011

Nearly 70 years after it ended, the second world war is still throwing up books inspired by the conflict

This week’s Remembrance Day is almost superfluous. British writers and readers just can’t stop fighting the second world war. It ended nearly 70 years ago, but it’s as though the guns have just fallen silent.

There are several strands to the British book trade’s preoccupation with this war. First, there’s the appalling fascination of the Nazis, who remain a literary and artistic obsession. This was satirised by the late Alan Coren in Golfing for Cats, a slim volume of comic pieces adorned with a lurid swastika. After golf and cats, said Coren, the Third Reich was one subject that never failed to exhilarate the British book buyer.

There’s also a treasure trove of incredible stories, narrative bullion, locked up in the years 1939-45. As the Great War fades from living memory and becomes part of history, its successor takes its place. The conflicts of 1914-18 were largely European. A genuinely global struggle, the second world war satisfies an international appetite for war stories, some of them now coming to light for the first time.

Finally, where the “war to end all wars” was a traditional great power slugfest, the contemplation of the second world war allows the British reader to occupy the moral high ground. Churchill’s instinct to fight Hitler to the death was belligerent, but morally right. Britain’s sacrifice was indeed our “finest hour”. Internationally, we have traded on it ever since.

In the aftermath of 1945, there have been at least three phases of literary response and each one of them has been pure box office. At first, the celebration of the stiff upper lip insisted that the war should be remembered for its Boy’s Own adventures in books such as Ill Met By Moonlight, The Man Who Never Was and Appointment with Venus. These postwar bestsellers were interspersed with grittier exploits such as The Dam Busters and The Wooden Horse.

When the appetite for these entertainments ran out, there were two decades of memoirs and biographies recycling the myth of the conflict. Now, for the first time, the true story of the camps began to be told, though the full horror of the Holocaust was not popularised in book form until the late 60s.

The end of the cold war inspired a new surge of second world war historiography, the discovery by English and American readers of the Eastern Front, based on Soviet archives hitherto inaccessible to scholars. Stalingrad by Antony Beevor is the emblematic bestseller from this third phase. Nonetheless, the latest generation of second world war historians is finding that, despite these myriad volumes, in many languages, there is still more to say or another thrilling episode to investigate. This season has seen the publication of The End by Ian Kershaw (the death throes of the Third Reich), All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings (the horrors of total war, described by ordinary people), D-Day by Antony Beevor (once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more) and, perhaps most harrowing of all, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege 1941-44 by Anna Reid.

Rather more interesting, to me, are two books that open up the secret side of the second world war. Spies in the Sky by Taylor Downing tells the story of the reconnaissance pilots who photographed occupied Europe and interpreted these images in a country house at Medmenham in the Thames Valley. This work, says Downing, was arguably more important to the outcome of the war than the more famous Bletchley Park code-breakers. Spies in the Sky gives a new perspective to some of the most famous moments of the conflict, from the sinking of the Bismarck to the landings in Normandy.

If there was one man who knew the secrets of this secret war, it was probably Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming. The tale of Fleming’s posse of authorised looters and thrill-seekers, 30 Assault Unit, is told in Ian Fleming’s Commandos by Nicholas Rankin.

This absorbing yarn has the added literary virtue of identifying the inspiration for James Bond, licensed to kill. Casino Royale, 007’s debut, was not published until 1953, but the seeds of the character, and some of his exploits, had been sown in the Admiralty’s Room 39, Whitehall, during the darkest days of the war, under the watchful eye of that supreme national storyteller, Winston Churchill.

Where there’s a Will, there’s a way to flog a dodgy book

Anonymous is a very silly film about William Shakespeare or should I say Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford? Worse, it gives publicity to an international fraternity of Shakespeare denialists. So Californian writer Dan Walker has denounced Roland Emmerich’s “fairytale” while simultaneously claiming that Shakespeare “did not write the literary works commonly attributed to him”. Walker – surprise, surprise – has a self-promotional interest in joining this ludicrous controversy. His novel, My Dark Lady, which explores the authorship question from the perspective of the “dark lady” of the sonnets, has just been published by Amazon. Walker claims special insight into Shakespeare because, he says, he was educated “at a grammar school in Warwickshire”. Oh, really? As the old aphorism has it, being born in a stable doesn’t make you a horse.

So that’s bah humbug to online publishing

In February this year, I wrote that writers in search of readers should consider “experimenting with social media” and explore the possibilities of giving new titles a dedicated website. Tom Garbutt, a former primary school teacher, has taken me at my word, developed the concept of “reader participation” and launched a new platform that’s “lighthearted, expansive and universal”. Garbutt has plans to develop a partnership with Waterstone’s. However, when I attended Waterstone’s pre-Christmas celebration of new management at its flagship store in London’s Piccadilly, no one seemed terribly interested in social media or online publishing. “Right now,” said one senior executive, “what we are worrying about is Christmas.”