Cold Hand in Mine - Robert Aickman

The second of my Aickman Faber Finds but I suspect originally published before Wine Dark Sea.  Again, we have eight short stories.  The settings are as varied as ever, with many of the same tropes.  Again, the tales work best when they are truly strange.  I absolutely love it when something extremely strange happens - and that's it: no explanation, no consequences.

Take for example the opening story, 'The Swords'.  A young travelling salesman has his first sexual experience with a woman off the fair, a woman who can be pierced with swords without lasting injury or apparent pain.  The fact that the setting is somewhere in the West Midlands at the height of its grime and squalor only enhances the overall seediness.  Then something happens - I won't say what, save that it's strange, and disturbing and ever so slightly revolting.  Our hero pays off her pimp - somewhere else in the lodging house someone screams - and that's it.  Brilliant.

Something similar happens in 'The Hospice'.  Another commercial traveller, this time seemingly in the 1960s, runs out of petrol and spends the night at the titular establishment.  The meals are absolutely enormous.  They offer him a bed.  He has to share - everyone shares at the Hospice, by choice apparently.  In the night his room mate disappears and locks our protagonist in.  He returns later.  In the morning they carry out a body,  We don't know whose.  And they generously offer our hero a lift to the nearest petrol station ... in the hearse.

These and 'The Same Dog' were my favourites.  'Meeting Mr Millar' was enjoyable, and 'Neimandswasser' reminded me of D H Lawrence's 'The Prussian Officer'.  Some stories are better than others but there are no duds.  I'm really enjoying the range Aickman manages to achieve within quite a limited genre, and the depth of characterisation.  These are what make him a master.

The Prussian Officer - D H Lawrence

Poor old Lawrence never had any luck.  In July 1914 he marries a von Richtofen, in November he published a volume of short stories the first two of which are sympathetic portrayals of German soldiers.  A hundred years on, however, they are great stories.  The titular tail is really a collision of the castes: the officer is aristocratic, aloof from normal human emotion; his orderly is the common man, in love with a common woman.  'Thorn in the Flesh' is about new recruit Bachmann of whom too much is expected.

My favourites, though, are 'Daughters of the Vicar' and 'Odour of Chrysanthemums'.  'Daughters' is essentially about the class system in the same way as 'The Prussian Officer' - the good looking sister feels obliged to uphold the family status and thus submits to a loveless marriage with a strange vicar who comes from money.  The plain sister, meanwhile, falls passionately in love with a collier.  'Chrysanthemums', which I remember being forced to read at school when I was thirteen or so and had thus completely forgotten, is about the wife of a collier who has taken to drink.  She's stuck in the cottage with their two young children, waiting for him to come home, cursing him when he doesn't.  He's gone to the pub again, she assumes.  She won't lower herself to go and get him but she is willing to ask her neighbour to do so.  Eventually they bring Walter home.  He's been trapped in the mine for hours after everyone else went topside.  He suffocated.  His wife and his mother lay him out in the parlour.  For his mother he's a saint, for the wife he's dead meat.  She cannot comprehend that they were once one flesh.  She cannot mourn.

It is years and years since I read any Lawrence.  I had forgotten how ahead of his time he was, how preoccupied with sex and sensuality.   In many ways the short story form suits him best.  For me, the ones set in Nottinghamshire with an industrial background always hit the spot.  They don't necessarily have to be about mining - take for example 'Goose Fair' in this collection.