The Complete Short Stories

I nodded. ‘I hope she isn’t too disappointed when she finds poetry is still being written in the bad old way. That reminds me, I’ve got twenty-five pages to fill. How’s your VT set running?’

‘No longer have one. Wrecked it the morning you phoned up. Haven’t used the thing for years.’

I sat up. ‘Do you mean that those sonnets you’ve been sending in are all hand-written?’

‘Absolutely, old boy. Every single one a soul-grafted gem.’

I lay back groaning. ‘God, I was relying on your set to save me. What the hell am I going to do?’

Tristram grinned. ‘Start writing it yourself. Remember the prophecy. Perhaps it will come true. After all, Aurora thinks I’m dead.’

I cursed him roundly. ‘If it’s any help, I wish you were. Do you know what this is going to cost me?’

After he had gone I went into the study and added up what copy I had left, found that there were exactly twenty-three pages to fill. Oddly enough that represented one page for each of the registered poets at Vermilion Sands. Except that none of them, apart from Tristram, was capable of producing a single line.

It was midnight, but the problems facing the magazine would take every minute of the next twenty-four hours, when the final deadline expired. I had almost decided to write something myself when the telephone rang. At first I thought it was Aurora Day — the voice was high and feminine — but it was only Fairchild de Mille.

‘What are you doing up so late?’ I growled at him. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting your beauty sleep?’

‘Well, I suppose I should, Paul, but do you know a rather incredible thing happened to me this evening. Tell me, are you still looking for original hand-written verse? I started writing something a couple of hours ago, it’s not bad really. About Aurora Day, as a matter of fact. I think you’ll like it.’

Sitting up, I congratulated him fulsomely, noting down the linage.

Five minutes later the telephone rang again. This time it was Angel Petit. He too had a few hand-written verses I might be interested in. Again, dedicated to Aurora Day.

Within the next half hour the telephone rang a score of times. Every poet in Vermilion Sands seemed to be awake. I heard from Macmillan Freebody, Robin Saunders and the rest of them. All, mysteriously that evening, had suddenly felt the urge to write something original, and in a few minutes had tossed off a couple of stanzas to the memory of Aurora Day.

I was musing over it when I stood up after the last call. It was 12.45, and I should have been tired out, but my brain felt keen and alive, a thousand ideas running through it. A phrase formed itself in my mind. I picked up my pad and wrote it down.

Time seemed to dissolve. Within five minutes I had produced the first piece of verse I had written for over ten years. Behind it a dozen more poems lay just below the surface of my mind, waiting like gold in a loaded vein to be brought out into daylight.

Sleep would wait. I reached for another sheet of paper and then noticed a letter on the desk to the IBM agency in Red Beach, enclosing an order for three new VT sets.

Smiling to myself, I tore it into a dozen pieces.

1961

Deep End

They always slept during the day. By dawn the last of the townsfolk had gone indoors and the houses would be silent, heat curtains locked across the windows, as the sun rose over the deliquescing salt banks. Most of them were elderly and fell asleep quickly in their darkened chalets, but Granger, with his restless mind and his one lung, often lay awake through the afternoons, while the metal outer walls of the cabin creaked and hummed, trying pointlessly to read through the old log books Holliday had salvaged for him from the crashed space platforms.

By six o’clock the thermal fronts would begin to recede southwards across the kelp flats, and one by one the airconditioners in the bedrooms switched themselves off., While the town slowly came to life, its windows opening to the cool dusk air, Granger strode down to breakfast at the Neptune Bar, gallantly doffing his sunglasses to left and right at the old couples settling themselves out on their porches, staring at each other across the shadow-filled streets.

Five miles to the north, in the empty hotel at Idle End, Holliday usually rested quietly for another hour, and listened to the coral towers, gleaming in the distance like white pagodas, sing and whistle as the temperature gradients cut through them. Twenty miles away he could see the symmetrical peak of Hamilton, nearest of the Bermuda islands, rising off the dry ocean floor like a flat-topped mountain, the narrow ring of white beach still visible in the sunset, a scum-line left by the sinking ocean.