A La Carte Read online

  Inspiration update November 2016

  It is hard to ignore, or indeed forget, the late Princess Diana. Her selfless attachment to charitable works defined her as a decent, honourable individual. A self-styled “Queen of Hearts” who touched the lives of millions of people throughout the world.

  When we first published this book in May 1995 our desire just like Diana’s was to help the disadvantaged. Particularly children infected with and affected by HIV/AIDS. Over twenty years on we feel that we can advance our consideration to include the following charities: The National Aids Trust, Great Ormond Street Hospital, NSPCC/Childline, Help for Heroes, and the Samaritans.

  A La Carte (1995) was received well. Its first print run of 350,000 copies made it the third biggest paperback print run of that month in the UK.

  We have chosen two dates to release A La Carte (2017): July the 1st, the late Princess’s birthday, to coincide with the run-up to the 20th memorial of her death (August 31st 2017); the second date is December 1st, World AIDS Day. A La Carte (1995) was a project to raise funds primarily for children. We now feel it appropriate to reach out to a wider need. We hope that the charities we have chosen reflect this.

  Thank you for buying A La Carte. Please share this charitable venture on Twitter, Facebook and other appropriate social media outlets. Our sincere thanks and gratitude.

  Jason Cheriton

  For and on behalf of “In the Company of Authors”.

  © Jason Cheriton 2017

  A La Carte logo © Jason Cheriton 2017

  A LA CARTE

  BY JEFFREY ARCHER

  and 15 other stories by

  famous authors

  Deborah Moggach

  Richard Adams

  Bill James

  Anna Reynolds

  Antonia Fraser

  Doris Lessing

  H. R. F. Keating

  William Trevor

  G. Mackay Brown

  Angela Keys

  Isabel Colegate

  Maeve Binchy

  Julian Symons

  Hilary Norman

  Ruth Rendell

  First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Chancellor Press

  an imprint of Reed Consumer Books Limited

  Michelin House, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 6RB

  and Auckland, Melbourne, Singapore and Toronto

  This collection has been compiled and edited by Jason Cheriton

  Copyright © in this collection

  Betterware Plc 1995

  Copyright in individual stories as follows:

  ‘A La Carte’ © Jeffrey Archer 1988;

  ‘Lucky Dip’ © Deborah Moggach 1989;

  ‘A Dog in the Dark’ © Richard Adams 1995;

  Tail’ © Bill James 1995; ‘A Safe Place’ © Anna Reynolds 1995;

  The Case of the Parr Children’ © Lady Antonia Fraser 1979

  (reproduced by kind permission of Curtis Brown Limited);

  ‘Romance 1988’ © Doris Lessing 1988

  (reproduced by kind permission of Jonathan Clowes Limited);

  The Bunting Affirms’ © H. R. F. Keating 1995;

  “Old Flame’ © William Trevor 1993;

  ‘The Village’ © G. Mackay Brown 1995;

  ‘Sound Proof’ © Angela Keys 1995;

  ‘The Nice Boys’ © Isabel Colegate 1965;

  ‘Recipe for Victory’ © Maeve Binchy 1989;

  ‘The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring’ © Julian Symons 1979

  (reproduced by kind permission of Curtis Brown Limited);

  ‘Vampire’ © Hilary Norman 1983;

  ‘Paperwork’ © Ruth Rendell 1988.

  ISBN 1 85152 891 1

  Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd

  Foreword

  As Patron of the National AIDS Trust, I have often been told by people with HIV and AIDS that one of their worst experiences is the feeling of loneliness – of rejection by society. This anthology of short stories by famous authors who have freely given their talents therefore has a double function. In the first place, it will provide money for the Trust to benefit those affected by the disease, especially the children who may have been born with it. In the second place, it will remind sufferers, as they see the list of familiar names, that they are not alone or rejected and that many of the outstanding people of our time care about them. Finally, as well as providing an opportunity for us to show care, the book will undoubtedly give several days enjoyable reading and re-reading. I am delighted to commend this book.

  March, 1995

  Introduction

  Short stories are a nightmare for the Editor of any magazine which has a reputation for printing them. When I arrived as Editor of the Literary Review in Beak Street, the magazine was receiving about a hundredweight of them every month through the post. If the tiny staff had even started to read them, we would .have had no time to do anything else, and most of them were drivel. It would be easy to conclude that more people wish to write short stories than wish to read them.

  But such a conclusion would be wrong. There is a market for well-written short stories – not a mass market, but a perfectly respectable one, and many people enjoy reading them more than novels. The problem is that the publishing trade nowadays tends to concentrate on trying to produce a few best-sellers. It is not so interested – whether as a result of economic necessity, as it claims, or laziness, as I believe – in earning an honest living from the production of good books which cause much pleasure and selling a couple of thousand copies. The result of this, coupled with magazines’ reluctance to touch a medium which has so much unpublishable rubbish waiting to descend on them, is that excellent stories by famous writers, written in a moment of enthusiasm, tend to be put in the author’s bottom drawer and forgotten.

  Few people write enough short stories to make a book of their own. The result is an anthologist’s dream. Jason Cheriton has cracked the system brilliantly. By asking famous writers to offer their work to charity, he successfully bypasses the vanity of so many authors who feel they should be paid enormous sums for their work.

  He appeals to them in the most honest and admirable way, to their sense of decency. Finally, by intelligent selection, he has assembled an admirable collection of stories by interesting and important writers. I hope the book raises as much money as possible for the AIDS charity he has in mind and points the way to a successful career for him in the future.

  Auberon Waugh

  Contents

  The Inspiration

  A La Carte

  Lucky Dip

  A Dog in The Dark

  Tail

  A Safe Place

  The Case of The Parr Children

  Romance 1988

  The Bunting Affirms

  Old Flame

  The Village

  Sound Proof

  The Nice Boys

  Recipe for Victory

  The Flowers that Bloom In The Spring

  Vampire

  Paperwork

  The Inspiration

  In September 1989 I met an extraordinarily brave lady whom I shall call Tanya. She looked like an ‘ordinary’ woman. Although shy at first, Tanya revealed a warm and sensitive disposition. She had, however, been recently widowed. Her husband had died from AIDS at the age of 32 and had left her, then 28 years old, HTV seropositive.

  The remarkable thing about Tanya was her vitality and unending desire to help others understand the dire consequences of contracting the HIV infection. The national media gave her plight full attention and I’m sure many people have been encouraged by her stoic bravery. This anthology has been inspired partly as a result of the brief friendship that Tanya and I shared.

  I then worked for twelve months on a project which resulted in a charity auction of donated g
ifts from well-known people for a ‘local’ AIDS group. To say I was disappointed at the interest shown by the minimal attendance is an understatement – I was angry and vowed to work on another project which would be a success.

  You have in your hand the result of that promise and I thank you for buying it.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks go to Sir John Gielgud, whose generous cheques supplied the means to start this project. Thanks also to Richard Adams, whose story was the first to arrive in late January 1991. This gave me a fine start and the strong incentive needed to see this project through.

  Thanks to Ruth Rendell, Deborah Moggach and Lord Jeffrey Archer for taking my phone calls, answering my letters and giving me advice and encouragement, and, of course, thanks to all those authors who said ‘yes’. Last, but by no means least, a warm thank you to David and Jane Cornwell for their very generous cheque.

  Jason Cheriton

  A LA CARTE

  Jeffrey Archer

  Arthur Hapgood was demobbed on November 3rd, 1946. Within a month he was back at his old workplace on the shop-floor of the Triumph factory on the outskirts of Coventry.

  The five years spent in the Sherwood Foresters, four of them as a quartermaster seconded to a tank regiment, only underlined Arthur’s likely post-war fate, despite having hoped to find more rewarding work once the war was over. However, on returning to England he quickly discovered that in a ‘land fit for heroes’ jobs were not that easy to come by, and although he did not want to go back to the work he had done for five years before war had been declared, that of fitting wheels on cars, he reluctantly, after four weeks on the dole, went to see his former works’ manager at Triumph.

  ‘The job’s yours if you want it, Arthur,’ the works’ manager assured him.

  ‘And the future?’

  ‘The car’s no longer a toy for the eccentric rich or even just a necessity for the businessman,’ the works’ manager replied. ‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘management are preparing for the “two-car family”.’

  ‘So they’ll need even more wheels to be put on cars,’ said Arthur forlornly.

  ‘That’s the ticket.’

  Arthur signed on within the hour and it was only a matter of days before he was back into his old routine.

  After all, he reminded his wife, it didn’t take a degree in engineering to screw four knobs on to a wheel a hundred times a shift.

  Arthur soon accepted the fact that he would have to settle for second best. However, second best was not what he planned for his son.

  Mark had celebrated his fifth birthday before his father had even set eyes on him, but from the moment Arthur returned home he lavished everything he could on the boy.

  Arthur was determined that Mark was not going to end up working on the shop-floor of a car factory for the rest of his life. He put in hours of overtime to earn enough money to ensure that the boy could have extra tuition in maths, general science and English. He felt well rewarded when the boy passed his eleven-plus and won a place at King Henry VIII Grammar School, and that pride did not falter when Mark went on to pass five O-levels and two years later added two A-levels.

  Arthur tried not to show his disappointment when, on Mark’s eighteenth birthday, the boy informed him that he did not want to go to university.

  ‘What kind of career are you hoping to take up then, lad?’ Arthur enquired.

  ‘I’ve filled in an application form to join you on the shop- floor just as soon as I leave school.’

  ‘But why would you —’

  ‘Why not? Most of my friends who’re leaving this term have already been accepted by Triumph, and they can’t wait to get started.’

  ‘You must be out of your mind.’

  ‘Come off it, Dad. The pay’s good and you’ve shown that there’s always plenty of extra money to be picked up with overtime. And I don’t mind hard work.’

  ‘Do you think I spent all those years making sure you got a first-class education just to let you end up like me, putting wheels on cars for the rest of your life?’ Arthur shouted.

  ‘That’s not the whole job and you know it, Dad.’

  ‘You go there over my dead body,’ said his father. ‘I don’t care what your friends end up doing, I only care about you. You could be a solicitor, an accountant, an army officer, even a schoolmaster. Why should you want to end up at a car factory?’

  ‘It’s better paid than schoolmastering for a start,’ said Mark. ‘My French master once told me that he wasn’t as well off as you.’

  ‘That’s not the point, lad —’

  ‘The point is, Dad, I can’t be expected to spend the rest of my life doing a job I don’t enjoy just to satisfy one of your fantasies.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to allow you to waste the rest of your life,’ said Arthur, getting up from the breakfast table. ‘The first thing I’m going to do when I get in to work this morning is see that your application is turned down.’

  ‘That isn’t fair, Dad. I have the right to —’

  But his father had already left the room, and did not utter another word to the boy before leaving for the factory.

  For over a week father and son didn’t speak to each other. It was Mark’s mother who was left to come up with the compromise. Mark could apply for any job that met with his father’s approval and as long as he completed a year at that job he could, if he still wanted to, reapply to work at the factory. His father for his part would not then put any obstacle in his son’s way.

  Arthur nodded. Mark also reluctantly agreed to the solution.

  ‘But only if you complete the full year,’ Arthur warned solemnly.

  During those last days of the summer holiday Arthur came up with several suggestions for Mark to consider, but the boy showed no enthusiasm for any of them. Mark’s mother became quite anxious that her son would end up with no job at all until, while helping her slice potatoes for dinner one night, Mark confided that he thought hotel management seemed the least unattractive proposition he had considered so far.

  ‘At least you’d have a roof over your head and be regularly fed,’ his mother said.

  ‘Bet they don’t cook as well as you, Mum,’ said Mark as he placed the sliced potatoes on the top of the Lancashire hot-pot. ‘Still, it’s only a year.’

  During the next month Mark attended several interviews at hotels around the country without success. It was then that his father discovered that his old company sergeant was head porter at the Savoy: immediately Arthur started to pull a few strings.

  ‘If the boy’s any good,’ Arthur’s old comrade-in-arms assured him over a pint, ‘he could end up as a head porter, even a hotel manager.’ Arthur seemed well satisfied, even though Mark was still assuring his friends that he would be joining them a year to the day.

  On September 1st, 1959, Arthur and Mark Hapgood travelled together by bus to Coventry station. Arthur shook hands with the boy and promised him, ‘Your mother and I will make sure it’s a special Christmas this year when they give you your first leave. And don’t worry – you’ll be in good hands with “Sarge’’. He’ll teach you a thing or two. Just remember to keep your nose clean.’

  Mark said nothing and returned a thin smile as he boarded the train. ‘You’ll never regret it …’ were the last words Mark heard his father say as the train pulled out of the station.

  Mark regretted it from the moment he set foot in the hotel.

  As a junior porter he started his day at six in the morning and ended at six in the evening. He was entitled to a fifteen-minute mid-morning break, a forty-five-minute lunch break and another fifteen-minute break around mid-afternoon. After the first month had passed he could not recall when he had been granted all three breaks on the same day, and he quickly learned that there was no one to whom he could protest. His duties consisted of carrying guests’ cases up to their rooms, then lugging them back down again the moment they wanted to leave. With an average of three hundred people staying in the hotel each night
the process was endless. The pay turned out to be half what his friends were getting back home and as he had to hand over all his tips to the head porter, however much overtime Mark put in, he never saw an extra penny. On the only occasion he dared to mention it to the head porter he was met with the words, ‘Your time will come, lad.’

  It did not worry Mark that his uniform didn’t fit or that his room was six foot by six foot and overlooked Charing Cross Station, or even that he didn’t get a share of the tips; but it did worry him that there was nothing he could do to please the head porter – however clean he kept his nose.

  Sergeant Crann, who considered the Savoy nothing more than an extension of his old platoon, didn’t have a lot of time for young men under his command who hadn’t done their national service.

  ‘But I wasn’t eligible to do national service,’ insisted Mark. ‘No one born after 1939 was called up.’

  ‘Don’t make excuses, lad.’

  ‘It’s not an excuse, Sarge. It’s the truth.’

  ‘And don’t call me “Sarge”. I’m “Sergeant Crann” to you, and don’t you forget it.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant Crann.’

  At the end of each day Mark would return to his little box-room with its small bed, small chair and tiny chest of drawers, and collapse exhausted. The only picture in the room – of the Laughing Cavalier – was on the calendar that hung above Mark’s bed. The date of September 1st, 1960, was circled in red to remind him when he would be allowed to re-join his friends at the factory back home. Each night before falling asleep he would cross out the offending day like a prisoner making scratch marks on a wall.

  At Christmas Mark returned home for a four-day break, and when his mother saw the general state of the boy she tried to talk his father into allowing Mark to give up the job early, but Arthur remained implacable.

  ‘We made an agreement. I can’t be expected to get him a job at the factory if he isn’t responsible enough to keep to his part of a bargain.’

  During the holiday Mark waited for his friends outside the factory gate until their shift had ended and listened to their stories of weekends spent watching football, drinking at the pub and dancing to the Everly Brothers.