"The Silver Age" by James Lasdun (Penguin, 1986)

Stories from Cosmopolitan, Encounter, Fiction Magazine, Literary Review, etc.

• Property - a grandson's staying with a rich grandmother (The blotches on her skin were big and far apart, like the first raindrops on a pavement). She gets a parcel - a silver candle-snuffer returned after decades by a maid who'd stolen it. Next day £2500 appears. Then flowers. The 2 of them watch TV in the afternoon, and bet. On the flower day they win at high odds. The grandmother dies (I think), holding her winnings.
• The Bugle - A son returns after 3 years to his aging parents. Their carer is the woman who looked after him when he was little. She keeps feeding things into the garden incinerator, including his old bugle. He keeps getting job rejections. His parents project an old home movie. He recalls those days when a girl he had a crush on stayed the night and he blew the bugle with joy until the woman has confiscated it.
• Dead Labour - The narrator visits his prof on his deathbed, promising to complete his final work for him. However, he's just started a job reviewing restaurants and social events, plus he's met a girl - "when she came she did so in one silent, extended, blissful, private shimmer. Traffic sounded in the distance. A clock ticked in the bedroom". Drunk, he watched a stage magician doing tricks with scraps of paper. He lets the old man down.
• England's Finest - A working class couple do well for themselves, move to a village and adopt a baby boy. The boy doesn't turn out well at first. The ending was telegraphed, the build up to it too linear.
• Escapes - Steven plans to commit adultery while at a conference in Paris. To him it's like losing your virginity again. A mutual friend, Delmore, sets him up with Lena. "now he must begin steering the conversation from the impersonal towards the intimate. Perhaps he could begin by conveying to her, suitably modified, what Delmore had said about her and how true it was. But no, there was something dangerously coarse and mercantile there, and he absolutely forbade himself to explore that avenue". He walks her home. They have a gun pointed at them. They escape. At her door she says goodbye, which surprises him. He catches the metro, getting out at a deserted station with long passages and locked exits. He begins to panic then finds a way to the surface.
• Heart's Desire - A pretentious 19 year old at a village fete sees 3 more interesting people. He follows them to their enclosed garden and big house. He passes a lake. "The perfect reflection of a fallen silver birch twins its branches into the double hemisphere of a brain, to which the wood with its quiet creatures and watery light might be no more than a figment of imagination". He watches them through the French windows. He sees them in a restaurant and overhears their lewd ancedotes. He later saves (without being seen) one of them being raped. At the end I think he's happy to marry a local.
• Snow - The narrator retrospectively realises that her great aunt had an affair. He comes to understand the significance of footprints in the snow.
• The Spoiling - Ronald, recently divorced, has 2 children. He hosts a party with the aim of talking to Hilary, a friend of his ex. She's a widower with a son, Marty. The children are left together. Marty's aware that he might have to integrate. Marty's world is described to us in an adult way - "But Marty needs to hear no words to know that he has transgressed in some small, but fatal way; that any foothold he had made in the entrance to the private world of these children has been abruptly lost. And with an only child's hypersensitivity to the intricacies of other children's affections, he senses a feeling, long familiar to him, of being gently, but irredeemably, cast out". He sabotages the party. Once he'd swigged the alcohol I guessed how the story would end, right down to the final smile.
• The Siege - Marietta, a young female foreigner, rents the London basement of Mr Kinsky in return for cleaning. They barely see each other let alone talk. He practises the piano hours a day. Things begin to appear in the dumb waiter - a card, an orchid, then a ring. He proposes to her.
  When he asks her what he could do to make her love him, she blurts out "Get my husband out of jail". We and Mr Kinsky were unaware that she has a husband, let alone that he was in a foreign military prison. Over the months items disappear from the house. She sees letters suggesting that Kinsky is in touch with her country. He learns a new piano piece, starting simple then adding complexity, filling the house for hours. It affects her. She sees one the day the piano being removed from the house. She receives a letter from her husband saying he's soon coming to London. She's apprehensive. Kinsky says he can stay in her basement. In the night, on the eve of her husband's arrival she goes to Kinsky's bed. He's plump and greying, the first person he's slept with for 4 years. She has satisfying sex without talking.
  There's a long, rather atypical, explanation of her reaction - "Love desire, fear, revulsion ... Feelings are like a physicist's massless particles; the hypothetical agencies by which the universe coheres and makes itself visible. These miraculous phenomena combine all-pervasiveness with absolute elusiveness, ceasing to exist when not in motion. Devoid of any intrinsic qualities, their secondary effects are none the less momentous and ineluctable. A particle of desire is as improbable as a photon or a graviton; its effects are as undeniable as light, or gravity"
• Delirium Eclipse - Lewis Jackson, charity project manager, meets unemployed Clare at a party just days before he's going to India. He asks her to come as well. At Varanasi he receives a telegram saying that his charity has gone bust. They swim in the Ganges. He gets feverish, imagining that Clare is having sex with the hotelier. One evening he walks through the hectic streets (A skew-horned cow patrolling one of the alleys dragged, like a prisoner's ball, a giant watermelon she had stamped on) to the river to check if she's there - she is, dealing with lepers thoughtfully. He's impressed. But returning to the hotel he has doubts again. He still hasn't told Clare about the telegram.

Often the main character is shaken by news or an event, and wanders/follows in a confused state, leading to an inconclusive ending. I liked the stories which adopted that broad template.