THE GARDEN PARTY and Other Stories
Short stories can be like photographs, catching people at some moment in their lives and trapping the memory for ever. There they are, smiling or frowning, looking sad, happy, serious, surprised … And behind those smiles and those frowns lie all the experiences of life, the fears and delights, the hopes and the dreams.
These sensitive and delicate stories give us pictures of ordinary people, and of the small, unimportant events that shape their lives. There is a garden party and a death, a desperate search for work, a journey alone across Europe by train, a meeting with a woman who has a dangerous secret. There are children being cruel, the feelings of a young girl at her first dance, the thoughts of a lady’s maid, and of a woman on a lonely farm in New Zealand.
We begin in an artist’s studio in Paris, with a young man who is a mystery to the women around him …
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First published in Oxford Bookworms 1998
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ISBN 978 0 19 479224 0
A complete recording of this Bookworms edition of The Garden Party is available on audio CD ISBN 978 0 19 479205 9
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Illustrated by: Susan Scott
Word count (main text): 22,665 words
e-Book ISBN 978 0 19 478635 5
e-Book first published 2012
He really was an impossible person. Too shy, and he had nothing at all to say. When he came to your studio, he just sat there, silent. When he finally went, blushing red all over his face, you wanted to scream and throw something at him.
The strange thing was that at first sight he looked most interesting. Everybody agreed about that. You saw him in a café one evening, sitting in a corner with a glass of coffee in front of him. He was a thin, dark boy, who always wore a blue shirt and a grey jacket that was a little too small for him. He looked just like a boy who has decided to run away to sea. You expected him to get up at any moment, and walk out into the night and be drowned.
He had short black hair, grey eyes, white skin and a mouth that always looked ready for tears. Oh, just to see him did something to your heart! And he had this habit of blushing. If a waiter spoke to him, he turned red!
‘Who is he, my dear? Do you know?’
‘Yes. His name is Ian French. He paints. They say he’s very clever. Someone I know tried to mother him. She asked him how often he had a letter from home, if he had enough blankets on his bed, how much milk he drank. Then she went to his studio to make sure he had enough clean shirts. She rang and rang the bell, but nobody came to the door, although she was sure he was there … Hopeless!’
Someone else decided he ought to fall in love. She called him to her, took his hand, and told him how wonderful life can be for those who are brave. But when she went to his studio one evening, she rang and rang … Hopeless.
‘What the poor boy really needs is excitement,’ a third woman said. She took him to cafés and night-clubs, dark places where the drinks cost too much and there were always stories of a shooting the night before. Once he got very drunk, but still he said nothing, and when she took him home to his studio, he just said ‘goodnight’ and left her outside in the street … Hopeless.
Other women tried to help him – women can be very kind – but finally they, too, were defeated. We are all busy people, and why should we spend our valuable time on someone who refuses to be helped?
