Peter Robinson: The Price of Love and Other Stories

For someone who considers himself primarily a novelist, I seem to have written rather a lot of short stories. I have also been very fortunate in that my publishers want to publish them in collection form, which induces a retrospective frame of mind in me as I gather these tales together and prepare them for publication.

Most of the stories in this collection were written at the request of one editor or another. I know that sounds rather mercenary, and that, in the Romantic view of art, the writer is supposed to work from pure inspiration. But I think of the stories as challenges, and sometimes a challenge can bring out the best in a person, or at least it can bring to the surface something he didn’t know he had, something he hadn’t explored before. And that is very much the case in this collection.

I’m not going to go into details here about the content or origins of any of these stories. I’m saving that for the afternotes because I don’t want to spoil anything for those readers who, like me, want to know as little as possible about a story or novel they are about to read. I will say, though, that some of these requests for stories opened up new directions for me, took me places I would not normally have gone, and forced me to dig deep into areas where I might never have ventured left to my own devices.

In some cases, I simply set off into the dark without even a light to guide my way, moving from one word to the next and letting the story find itself. In others, I thought and fretted about the story for months, shaped it in my mind, despaired over it, scrapped it, started again, and when I was finally driven by the demands of a deadline to put fingers to keyboard, it came out as something different, often something better than I could ever have hoped for.

I have said before that I find short stories difficult to write, and that is still the case. The discipline is exacting and the amount of space in which I sometimes feel I have to maneuver feels quite claustrophobic. The bits I have to leave out would probably make a novel. But the satisfaction level is high. I remember when I used to write mostly poetry, I would sometimes work for weeks trying to get a poem right, especially when I began to value form and structure as much as, if not more than, Romantic self-expression or postmodernist confessional. Everyone who has ever written a poem knows that to make it work you sometimes have to sacrifice your best line or image, and working on a short story is far more akin to that process than is writing a novel, which in some ways is a constant search for more things to put in.

So here are the stories. I hope you enjoy them. People often ask me whether they should start with the first Inspector Banks novel or with one of the later ones, and I usually answer that it doesn’t matter unless you are the kind of person who has to start at the beginning. The stories are not presented chronologically, and nor did I agonize over their order according to some secret code or system of symbolism known only to me. Please feel free to jump in wherever you wish.

PETER ROBINSON

Toronto, January 2009

Banks pulled up outside his parents’ council house and parked his Renault by the side of the road. He wondered if it would be safe left out overnight. The estate had a bad reputation, even when he grew up there in the sixties, and it had only gotten worse over recent years. Not that there was any alternative, he realized, as he made sure it was locked and the security system was working; his parents didn’t own a garage.

He couldn’t very well remove the CD player for the weekend, but to be on the safe side, he stuffed the CDs themselves into his overnight bag. He didn’t think any young joyriders would want to steal Thelonious Monk, Cecilia Bartoli or the Grateful Dead, but you couldn’t be too careful. Besides, he had a portable disc player now, and he liked to listen to music in bed as he drifted off to sleep.

Banks’s parents’ house stood near the western edge of the estate, close to the arterial road, across from an abandoned factory and a row of shops. Banks paused for a moment and took in the redbrick terrace houses — rows of five, each with a little garden, low wall and privet hedge. His family had moved here from the tiny, grim back-to-back when he was twelve, when the houses were new.

It was a Friday afternoon near the end of October, and Banks was home for the weekend for his parents’ golden wedding anniversary that Sunday, only his second overnight stay since he had left home at the age of eighteen to study business at London Polytechnic. When that didn’t work out, and when the sixties lost their allure in the early seventies, he joined the police. Since then long hours, hard work, and his parents’ overt disapproval of his career choice had kept him away. Visiting home was always a bit of a trial, but they were his mother and father, Banks reminded himself; he owed them more than he could ever repay, he had certainly neglected them over the years and he knew they loved him in their way. They weren’t getting any younger, either.

He took a deep breath, opened the gate, walked up the path and knocked at the scratched red door, a little surprised by the loud music coming from the next house. He saw his mother approach through the frosted glass pane. She opened the door, rubbed her hands together as if drying them and said, “Alan, lovely to see you. Come on in, love, come in.”

Banks dropped his overnight bag in the hall and followed his mother through to the living room. It stretched from the front of the house to the back, and the back area, next to the kitchen, was permanently laid out as a dining room. The wallpaper was a wispy brown autumn-leaves pattern, the three-piece suite a matching brown velveteen and a sentimental autumn landscape hung over the electric fire.

His father was sitting in his usual armchair, the one with the best straight-on view of the television. He didn’t get up, just grunted, “Son, nice of you to come.”

“Hello, Dad. How are you doing?”

“Mustn’t complain.” Arthur Banks had been suffering from mild angina for years, ever since he’d been made redundant from the sheet-metal factory, and it seemed to get neither better nor worse as the years went on. He took pills for the pain and didn’t even need an inhaler. Other than that, and the damage booze and fags had wreaked on his liver and lungs over the years, he had always been fit as a fiddle. Hollow chested and skinny, he still sported a head of thick dark hair with hardly a trace of gray. He wore it slicked back with lashings of Brylcreem.

Banks’s mother, Ida, plump and nervy, fussed a little more about how thin Banks was looking, then the kitchen door opened and a stranger walked into the room.

“Kettle’s on, Mrs. B. Now, who have we got here? Let me guess.”

“This is our son, Geoff. We told you he was coming. For the party, like.”

“So this is the lad who’s done so well for himself, is it? The Porsche and the mews house in South Kensington?”

“No, that’s the other one, Roy. He’s not coming till Sunday afternoon. He’s got important business. No, this is our eldest: Alan. I’m sure I told you about him. The one in that picture.”

The photograph she pointed to, half-hidden by a pile of women’s magazines on one of the cabinet shelves, showed Banks at age sixteen, when he captained the school rugby team for a season. There he stood in his purple and yellow strip, holding the ball, looking proud. It was the only photograph of him they had ever put on display.