Learning to Talk: Short stories. Hilary Mantel

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      Learning to Talk

      Short Stories

      Hilary Mantel

      

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thestate.co.uk

      First published by Fourth Estate in 2003

      

      Copyright © Hilary Mantel 2003

      

      ‘King Billy Is a Gentleman’ first appeared in New Writing 1992, Minerva in association with the British Council, 1992; ‘Destroyed’ first appeared in Granta (63), 1998; ‘Curved Is the Line of Beauty’ first appeared in TLS (No. 5157), 2002; ‘Learning to Talk’ first appeared in London Magazine, 1987; ‘Third Floor Rising’ first appeared in The Times Magazine, 2000; ‘The Clean Slate’ first appeared in Woman & Home, 2001

      Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007166442

      Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007354887

      Version: 2015-04-15

      

       Dedication

      Once again with love

      to Anne Terese: and her daughter: and her daughter.

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

       Curved Is the Line of Beauty

       Learning to Talk

       Third Floor Rising

       The Clean Slate

       Giving Up the Ghost

       Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Praise

       Also by the Author

       About the Publisher

       King Billy Is A Gentleman

      I cannot get out of my mind, now, the village where I was born, just out of the curl of the city’s tentacles. We were too close to the city for a life of our own. There was a regular train service – not one of those where you have to lie in wait and study its habits. But we did not like the Mancunians. ‘Urban, squat and packed with guile’ I suppose was our attitude; we sneered at their back-to-back accents and pitied their physiques. My mother, a staunch Lamarckian, is convinced that Mancunians have disproportionately long arms, as a result of generations of labour at the loom. Until (but this was later) a pink housing estate was slammed up, and they were transplanted in their hundreds, like those trees plucked up for Christmas whose roots are dipped in boiling water – well, until then we did not have much to do with people from town. And yet if you ask me if I was a country boy – no, I wasn’t that. Our huddle of stones and slates, scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues, had no claim on rural England, where there is morris dancing and fellowship and olde ale flowing. It was a broken, sterile place, devoid of trees, like a transit camp; and yet with the hopeless permanence that transit camps tend to assume. Snow stood on the hills till April.

      We lived at the top of the village, in a house which I considered to be haunted. My father had disappeared. Perhaps it was his presence, long and pallid, which slid behind the door in sweeps of draught and raised the heckles on the terrier’s neck. He had been a clerk by profession; crosswords were his hobby, and a little angling: simple card games, and a cigarette-card collection. He left at ten o’clock one blustery March morning, taking his albums

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