The last set of short stories for the year! I am hoping to get through these three collections of stories in the coming weeks, though I am not sure I will get to write about each one. I've already told you about most of the stories in the Andrea Barrett collection, Ship Fever. I only have the novella left at the end of the book. I was so taken with the story I read by Elizabeth Parsons earlier this past summer that I ordered her one collection which is sadly out of print. I have since dipped into it, but I have never gotten around to writing about the stories, but hopefully I can pick out a few of my favorites to share later. And why read just one story by Elizabeth Jane Howard, especially when I liked it so much. It seems a perfect collection to return to, and going by the two stories I read this weekend, I think it does indeed very much suit my mood at the moment!
I read "Mr. Wrong" for one of my RIP stories and it was nicely atmospheric. "Summer Picnic" is a very short story, but a perfect morsel of a story, which I thoroughly enjoyed. So much so that I went on and read the next one as well. If you have read Howard's Cazalet Chronicles (I liked the story so much it made me go and pull the second volume, Marking Time, from my shelves--I had started to reread the quartet in anticipation of the last last volume--number five actually--time to get back to the story I think) you'll know the sort of story she writes so well--a family drama with interesting characters and great insight into the minds of women in particular. The story is both a reminiscence of one woman and the coming of age of another--one old and one young. It's a story about young love and loves past-over but not forgotten. It is a lovely story both hopeful and elegiac.
"The illusion that eating in the open air constitutes at least one aspect of the simple life is ancient and enduring, but now, if the contents of all three cars were unloaded on to the lawn and somebody who didn't know about the picnic was asked what it was all for, they might equally have thought it was the blitz, or a bazaar, or the result of some mysterious crisis like the Mary Celeste."
The family is obviously of a certain class--the class that has nannies that look after children and knit while supervising their young charges on a family picnic. The sort of family that might at one time planned a picnic to rival all others with cold-roast birds and claret and an entire Stilton cheese. The sort of family that wants their daughter to marry well but will allow inclusion into the family of a commoner.
Well, that is what a family with several generations looks like. It is the grandmother who once dined so well, so much so that the grandchildren could never imagine such a spread:
" . . . with quantities of fruit the perfection of which seemed mysteriously to have vanished today--with the handsome man and good dinner-table conversation. It was better now to be very old, or the age of that granddaughter escaping into the woods to discover whether she liked being kissed."
The grandmother remembers just such an event in her own life. This is such a lovely slice of life, a reminiscence of a time past but well imagined and an event enviably wished for now but never to happen at this point in life. But then this is why there are such short stories and why they are so well appreciated by this reader! I always find it a mark of a really good writer to be able to tell such a story, that feels so complete where you feel like you have learned something or been somewhere, and it is done in such an economy of words and style.