Poolside stories

This collection promises to “throw new light on a wide range of women’s experiences”, bringing together summery stories by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Townsend Warner, as well as less familiar writers such as Sylvia Lynd, G. B. Stern and Phyllis Bottome.

In Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”, a young couple speak in “monotonous voices” while pressing the end of a parasol “deep down into the soft earth”. The action “expressed their feelings in a strange way, as these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning”. It’s a fitting description of how the stories gathered here work – by suggestion and sideways glances at meanings that loom behind the prose.

A number of the stories focus on children, but there is nothing saccharine about them. Childhood appears as strange, fraught, even ferocious. In the opening story, by Mansfield, a group of schoolgirls struggle to repress their giggles as their teacher recites French poetry on a summer’s afternoon. “On those hot days Eve – curious Eve – always carried a flower”:

She snuffed it and snuffed it, twirled it in her fingers, laid it against her cheek, held it to her lips, tickled Katie’s neck with it, and ended, finally, by pulling it to pieces and eating it, petal by petal.

It’s all “too much” for Katie, who turns away and fantasizes about a man pumping water in the stables. Her fantasy merges together with the teacher’s voice and the scent of Eve’s flower “until they became one great rushing, rising, triumphant thing”. Then the class finishes and Eve pops the flower “down the front of Katie’s blouse”.

In “The Pool”, Daphne du Maurier’s protagonist, Deborah, performs strange rituals in her grandparents’ garden, offering up the stub of a pencil as a “sacrifice” to the pool. At night she finds a woman standing at a gate by the pool, demanding tickets, while faceless shadows and phantoms press to pass through. The woman tells her that she has entered the “secret world”. Deborah feels an indescribable joy, but the following night, as she rushes back to the gate, the phantoms pass through without her and she wakes in “dank, dark, brackish water choked with scum”. At the end of the story Deborah is bedbound. “What had happened to her was personal. They had prepared her for it at school, but nevertheless it was a shock, not to be discussed” with the servant.

In “Requiescat’” by Elizabeth Bowen, a man and a widow struggle to speak about the dead man who haunts them, their minds “full of the essential things impossible to be said”. The writers brought together here press language into new shapes and forms, using it to uncover the intensity of human emotions concealed behind apparently everyday objects and scenarios. These stories are not just for the sunlounger.

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