The Complete Short Stories

I smiled at him. Like most other writers and poets, he had spent so long sitting in front of his VT set that he had forgotten the period when poetry was actually handspun.

‘They’re poems, of a sort, obviously.’

‘Do you mean she wrote these herself?’

I nodded. ‘It has been done that way. In fact the method enjoyed quite a vogue for twenty or thirty centuries. Shakespeare tried it, Milton, Keats and Shelley — it worked reasonably well then.’

‘But not now,’ Tony said. ‘Not since the VT set. How can you compete with an IBM heavy-duty logomatic analogue? Look at this one, for heaven’s sake. It sounds like T. S. Eliot. She can’t be serious.’

‘You may be right. Perhaps the girl’s pulling my leg.’

‘Girl. She’s probably sixty and tipples her eau de cologne. Sad. In some insane way they may mean something.’

‘Hold on,’ I told him. I was pasting down one of the Xero’s satirical pastiches of Rupert Brooke and was six lines short. I handed Tony the master tape and he played it into the IBM, set the metre, rhyme scheme, verbal pairs, and then switched on, waited for the tape to chunter out of the delivery head, tore off six lines and passed them back to me. I didn’t even need to read them.

For the next two hours we worked hard. At dusk we had completed over one thousand lines and broke off for a wellearned drink. We moved on to the terrace and sat, in the cool evening light, watching the colours melting across the desert, listening to the sand-rays cry in the darkness by Aurora’s villa.

‘What are all these streamers lying around under here?’ Tony asked. He pulled one towards him, caught the strands as they broke in his hand and steered them on to the glass-topped table.

"-nor canticles, nor hollow register — " He read the line out, then released the tissue and let it blow away on the wind.

He peered across the shadow-covered dunes at Studio 5. As usual a single light was burning in one of the upper rooms, illuminating the threads unravelling in the sand as they moved towards us.

Tony nodded. ‘So that’s where she lives.’ He picked up another of the streamers that had coiled itself through the railing and was fluttering instantly at his elbow.

‘You know, old sport, you’re quite literally under siege.’

I was. During the next days a ceaseless bombardment of ever more obscure and bizarre poems reached me, always in two instalments, the first brought by the chauffeur promptly at nine o’clock each morning, the second that evening when the streamers began to blow across the dusk to me. The fragments of Shakespeare and Pound had gone now, and the streamers carried fragmented versions of the poems delivered earlier in the day, almost as if they represented her working drafts. Examining the tapes carefully I realized that, as Aurora Day had said, they were not produced by a VT set. The strands were too delicate to have passed through the spools and high-speed cams of a computer mechanism, and the lettering along them had not been printed but embossed by some process I was unable to identify.

Each day I read the latest offerings, carefully filed them away in the centre drawer of my desk. Finally, when I had a week’s production stacked together, I placed them in a return envelope, addressed it ‘Aurora Day, Studio 5, The Stars, Vermilion Sands’, and penned a tactful rejection note, suggesting that she would feel ultimately more satisfied if her work appeared in another of the wide range of poetry reviews.

That night I had the first of what was to be a series of highly unpleasant dreams.

Making myself some strong coffee the next morning, I waited blearily for my mind to clear. I went on to the terrace, wondering what had prompted the savage nightmare that had plagued me through the night. The dream had been the first of any kind I had had for several years — one of the pleasant features of beach fatigue is a heavy dreamless sleep, and the sudden irruption of a dream-filled night made me wonder whether Aurora Day, and more particularly her insane poems, were beginning to prey on my mind more than I realized.

My headache took a long time to dissipate. I lay back, watching the Day villa, its windows closed and shuttered, awnings retracted, like a sealed crown. Who was she anyway, I asked myself, and what did she really want?

Five minutes later, I saw the Cadillac swing out of the drive and coast down the Stars towards me.

Not another delivery! The woman was tireless. I waited by the front door, met the driver halfway down the steps and took from him a wax-sealed envelope.

‘Look,’ I said to him confidentially. ‘I’d hate to discourage an emerging talent, but I think you might well use any influence you have on your mistress and, you know, generally…’ I let the idea hang in front of him, and added: ‘By the way, all these streamers that keep blowing across here are getting to be a damn nuisance.’

The chauffeur regarded me out of his red-rimmed foxy eyes, his beaked face contorted in a monstrous grin. Shaking his head sadly, he hobbled back to the car.