The Pick-up or L’Ercole D’Oro

The manners of the pretty young woman couldn’t be worse. They’re revolting. She’s dressed as if she’s just got up; a lilac robe with the hood thrown back. It’s fastened deep down in the bosom, like a seductive dressing-gown, has trumpet sleeves and an embroidery of lilac beading on the shoulders. The colour suits her perfectly.

Rosemary Tonks’s 1973 short story The Pick-up or L’Ercole D’Oro, later re-published in the posthumous 2014 collection Bedouin of the London Evening, is an atmospheric piece told from the point of view of an old woman, Signora Danielli, in Venice. To summarise a story as opaque as this would be a challenge, even after reading it a few times, so I apologise in advance for anything I’ve misunderstood.

Sat outside a cafe, ‘the burnished man’ and ‘the lilac girl’ are being watched by Signora Danielli, Tonks’s self-insert character. She scrutinises their behaviour in a typically and gloriously spiteful way, with the lilac girl receiving the worst of her scorn. When a storm interrupts this activity, we flee to her home and meet the old woman’s husband, and it’s fair to say that they aren’t in love any more.

As with her two volumes of poetry, which make up the bulk of the collection, Tonks’s prose is psychedelic in its contempt, an allegory of bile defying the reader. Before this reissue, not a lot was known about Tonks’s life after she stopped writing – she had cut ties with her family, and there was a rumour that she had become a nun.

A wealth of biographical detail is to be found in Neil Astley’s introduction, revealing, among other things, that Tonks had converted to a fundamentalist form of Christianity after her divorce, borrowing her own books from libraries to burn them, on the basis that all books other than the Bible were the work of Satan.

The power of ideas and literature are a recurring theme in Tonks’s writing, amoral forces with an impressionable readership, and her later reclusivity and religious conversion offer a tempting point of comparison here. In her previous life as a poet and novelist, by contrast, Tonks made visits to palm readers in between adding to her collection of various spiritual artefacts from around the world.

I feel like there is a bit of a folk horror vibe with this story, it reminds me a bit of The Owl Service. Like Alan Garner’s work there’s a dissonance at play – the structure, the ritual of the story, is overwhelming, even if you’re not sure what exactly is happening. The nicknames given to the characters here add to the effect that you’re reading some kind of parable. The story ends with the old woman reflecting on her life as she watches an old rich man going off somewhere in the car with “a happy schoolgirl” – the aforementioned and previously derided lilac girl.

Bath Time

“You can’t live like this,” he said, and concentrated hard on the specification she’d handed him. “You know, you could do this much more cheaply and there’d be enough left to get the basics done on the rest of the flat. You’ve got to have a kitchen, and the bedroom and living room aren’t habitable.”

Jenny Diski’s 1995 short story ‘Bath Time’, from the collection The Vanishing Princess, is about a woman – Meg – who sets out to have a bath that lasts all day. We are introduced to her through the prism of the bathrooms she’s had, from childhood to the present day. The perfect bath is an ambition which was been undermined until now by the right conditions – enough hot water, and the guarantee of privacy – never coalescing.

What stands out about Bath Time is its stillness. The prose is understated, lending credibility to a conceptual premise that in turn provides a warmth it might otherwise lack. There’s a self-awareness about the neuroticism of Meg’s wishes even as we’re enveloped by her internal monologue. The reader is left feeling claustrophobic, perhaps appropriately.

Her daughter having moved out, Meg moves into a “near-derelict” flat “in a dingy road of dreary terraced houses” to spend all the money she has on creating her dream bathroom. She wants a boiler, she explains to the builder, rather than central heating, as she has no need for radiators – there’s only one room she cares about.

In Diski’s novelistic memoir Skating To Antarctica, published two years later, this same combination of sensory evocation and self-introspection is used as we are presented with a picture of nothingness. Diski is content with doing nothing, and the South Pole offers a purer distillation of nothing.

Both deal in a curious form of escapism. The author’s voice – introverted, agoraphobic – is juxtaposed with a search for an aestheticised idyll of comfort. The story comes to a close on the 24th of December, when, with the requirements finally met, Meg looks forward to tomorrow’s perfect bath.