Short Stories: Have you ever experienced that unsettling suspicion that suggests everyone else has been enjoying something that you somehow missed out on?
Reading Constitutional, the fourth collection of short stories from British writer Helen Simpson, will leave you with that feeling - if, like me, you have not read her previous three books. Admittedly they had off-putting titles - Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories (1990), Dear George (1995) and Hey Yeah Right Get A Life (2000). None of those titles exactly seduce by subtle persuasion. There is an "in your face" quality which could deter even the most adventurous reader. With head held low, I now confess - each of those three volumes passed unread through my hands, and out of my life. Now I want them back.
Constitutional consists of nine stories, eight of which are so good, to read anyone of them should be sufficient to make a reader intent on reading them all. Seldom have plain-speaking, non-literary and impressively unselfconscious narratives proved so convincing. Simpson plays no tricks.
There is nothing sentimental, no cheap laughs. Instead she operates through candour; she writes with the bewilderment, sorrow, wonder, irony and exasperation that all of us recognise as familiar territory.
Her narrators are ordinary and the dialogue is sharp, funny and always believable. This is Everyman's fiction, scenes of everyday life crafted with relaxed precision, a likeable but never knowing tone, and a firm grasp of how lives are lived, and how they end.
Loss of memory, regret, death and particularly the fear of death dominate these darkly cheerful mid-life bulletins from the quotidian. "It happened very fast, without warning," states the opening sentence of Every Third Thought, "one day everybody starting dying." The narrator is a wife and mother of three girls who suddenly becomes aware that all around her, friends and acquaintances are becoming ill before being despatched to the next world. For her, death has become the new plague. The more frightened and obsessive she becomes, the more casual are the attitudes of those around her.
As each new piece of bad news sends her deeper into panic, she withdraws into a state of terror. Her middle daughter, Anna, asks cheerfully over supper: "How old do you want to be when you die?" "A hundred and I want it to happen when I'm asleep," the eldest girl replies. The best answer comes from the Narnia-loving seven-year-old: "A hundred and ten. But I want to be awake to see what it's like. As long as it doesn't hurt."
In If I'm Spared a bored, hyperactively unfaithful journalist husband receives a much-needed health shock which sends him running back to his unloved, martyred wife. "The trouble with Barbara," he decided, "was that she made such a production out of being a misery. She huffed, she sighed, her face drooped with reproach whenever she saw him."
Simpson demonstrates her mastery of the first-person narrative in The Tree, a very funny and tragic account of a middle-aged, exasperated but caring son's vigil over his mother's dying memory. As he battles the London traffic, she phones him about a dead tree.
"I'm really worried about it. It's a danger to life and limb." Over and over again, she refers to the threat posed by the tree. "Listen Mum," says the narrator. "You keep saying the same thing. I heard you the first time, you know. You're repeating yourself, over and over again, did you know that?" His mother is surprised but doesn't dispute it. "I suppose it's true. You've said so before and you wouldn't make it up." Of course her reasonable tone makes him regret his sharpness, so he soothingly counters: "It's not the end of the world. Me, I'm forgetting names all the time now that I've reached fifty." The next line comes quick as a flash and is typical of Simpson's perfect timing, "Are you fifty?" asks the mother and the narrator reports, "she sounded quite shocked". The chaos mounts, culminating in his attacking tree surgeons over cheating his elderly mother. After fury and threats, "she told me she was very sorry but she'd given me the wrong number. She hoped she hadn't caused any trouble." From this point on, the son knows his mother is helpless.
"Organising a new back door after the break-in was more complicated than you might imagine. Even sourcing a ready-made door to fit the existing frame took some doing," begins The Door, which gradually reveals itself as an account of a woman recovering from a failed relationship, retreating into the ordinary and beginning to see all she has missed.
Last but far from least is the brilliant title story in which a science teacher, unexpectedly pregnant by a younger - and only recently discovered to be married - boyfriend, sets off on her ritual lunchtime constitutional on the nearby heath. "The walk is always the same but different, thanks to the light, the time of year, the temperature and so on . . ." The deceptive simplicity of Simpson's lucid, unaffected prose enters the mind and soul of a clever, philosophical science teacher analysing her life and that of others.
This may look like a slight volume, but it is actually very big. Not since V S Pritchett mastered the form has an English writer appeared as comfortable with the short story as Helen Simpson. Forget about covers, never judge a book by its title. Now where are those three earlier books?
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Constitutional By Helen Simpson Cape, 133pp. £14.99
