Helen Dunmore has appeared in this newsletter before. I wrote about her second novel, Burning Bright about three months ago.
Love of Fat Men (1997) is the first of Dunmore’s three collections of short stories, containing 19 stories, 11 of which had previously appeared in various magazines and periodicals from 1990 onwards. Just over half of the stories, including the title story, feature a young Finnish woman named Ulli. When reading the collection for the third time to prepare this post I noticed something I’d missed before: the Ulli stories alternate with stories about other characters. There are 10 Ulli stories in all, including the first and final ones. It hadn’t been my impression that the Ulli stories dominated the collection in this way: some of the others, like “Annina” and “The Thief”, make more of an immediate impression. The stories are all short: the nineteen stories take up 180 pages. Because each new story begins on a recto, some of the stories are followed by a blank verso page. By my count there are seven such pages, so the average story length is just over 9 pages.
My initial failure to notice that every second story features Ulli arises in part from the fact that the third one, “Short Days, Long Nights” doesn’t mention her by name. Its protagonist is simply “she”. She is woken by the radio, which she must have left on all night. Its batteries need to be replaced. She sits up to write “BATTERIES” on the to-do list pinned above the bed, and she sees something unexpected.
Someone else in the bed. Well. She’ll just let her thoughts take a walk, she thinks. Grey light drips round the blinds, not getting far. But it was worth spending so much money on this hand-made, low, slatted pine bed with its thick mattress which is so well sprung that you can’t tell by the give in it that there is anybody else in the bed. In her old bed they’d have bumped into one another long before morning.
— A man, she supposes cautiously. (pp. 21–2)
The man has not woken up by the time the story ends and we readers learn nothing of substance about him. I was reminded of the reference to the well sprung mattress by the following passage in another story in the book, “Ullikins”:
Fat men asleep give out heat like furnaces all night. And often they wheeze a little, so that whatever time you wake, however sick and singing your head feels, you know you have company. All night the mattress gives way under their weight and you roll against the elastic warmth of their sides. You know you cannot roll off and away into space. Whatever the bed advertisements say, Ulli knows there is nothing as sleep-giving as the shoulder and breast of a fat man. (p. 107)
It was this echo that alerted me to the possibility (quickly confirmed) that the unnamed “she” of “Short Days, Long Nights” might actually be Ulli. But that raised another question: is “Ullikins” set before Ulli bought her expensive bed with its thick mattress or later, when the mattress has started to sag. How are the stories temporally related to each other? “Ullikins” is as close to the centre of the volume as any of the Ulli stories can be: it’s the eleventh of the nineteen. Not much happens in it. Ulli is doing her Christmas shopping, having first bought, but not collected, a plain white quilt for herself. The story begins “She hasn’t found anything for her fat man” (p. 97). She remembers having bought a present for her father, “Driving gloves with skinny leather palms” (p. 105), the first Christmas after she left home.
Then she’d posted the gloves to a friend in Tampere, to send them on from there, so that nobody at home would be able to tell where she was from the postmark. (p. 106)
A few pages earlier, after a reminiscence about her childhood, we’ve been told flatly, “She’ll never go back” (p. 101). Even now, when her brothers have families and careers and have made their own homes elsewhere (one in Berlin, one in Karelia), she doesn’t let them know where she is living when she phones them. This is the clearest hint we’ve had so far that the undisturbed surface of the stories’ mundane events is covering something more momentous. The next of the Ulli stories is “Family Meetings”, which juxtaposes two encounters between Ulli and her mother.
Eight-year-old Ulli arranges a family meeting at which the members are to write down and discuss what they like and don’t like about the family and how they can “improve” (p. 118) it. Ulli’s brothers are out playing ice hockey, so the only participants are her father, her mother and herself. Her father treats it humourously, her mother is irritated and suspects that this idea originated with Ulli’s teacher, Miss Ilmanen, whom she characterizes as “a very ordinary young woman” (p. 123), but Ulli insists that she thought of it on her own. Her mother takes part reluctantly at first.
There is a conversation between Silja and Ulli some years later, when Ulli is a student, home on a break from university. Silja tells her daughter that she “wanted to die” (p. 116) for many years, including the previous night.
Ulli does not say anything. She sits frozen. She does not want to ask any of the questions which her mother has just invited. For years she has wished that she and Silja were the sort of mother and daughter who would sit in the kitchen over coffee, talking about their lives. Now that it has come, she is terrified. (p. 127)
Ulli doesn’t think that this conversation occurred on her very last trip home, but on one shortly before that. However it’s probable that it was a major factor in keeping her away. She hasn’t been able to deal with her mother’s distress and persistent unhappiness. There are other stories which appear largely uneventful yet hint at things the reader is not being told about. One of these stories is “Spring Wedding”. in which sixteen-year-old Ulli is staying with her boyfriend, Jorma, while his parents are away at a wedding.
It’s mid-April. Two weeks now since she stopped being a virgin. (p. 39)
Then it’s summer. Jorma is working as a counsellor in a summer camp. Ulli is at a loose end. Nothing very much happens. Ulli isn’t able to sleep. Her breasts and stomach “seem to be tender and aching all over” (p. 44). She sees that her breasts are bigger than they were before. There’s no direct reference to pregnancy, to a baby or a miscarriage in this story, and nothing (that I can see) in any of the other stories to suggest that Ulli has had any of these. So what was happening? Had it anything to do with her later reluctance to go home again? Perhaps it was just a false alarm. Whatever it was, it seems to have fallen into one of the gaps between these stories.
In the rest of the stories which concern her, pregnancy (actual or potential) doesn’t seem to be a concern for Ulli. In “Païvi”, Ulli helps the title character who has suddenly become ill and upset while they are out for a meal with a group of friends. Ulli seems to be the only woman in the group, apart from Païvi.
She wasn’t really a friend of Païvi’s herself. Certainly not a close friend. She had no useful ideas of what you did to help someone who was due to have her first child next week, and had suddenly dropped her knife in the middle of her creamed potatoes and heaved herself up from the table … (p. 81)
Ulli is sympathetic to Ulli’s predicament but is really more a friend of the woman’s partner, Matti. “Ulli couldn’t think how Païvi had stuck him for three months, let alone three years” (p. 83). When Païvi recently told her that she has “always” wanted children, Ulli seemed not to understand. “When she’d thought of the future, she’d always seen herself with a baby. Always, thought Ulli” (p. 82).
Once Païvi has recovered, she gets her coat and goes home. Ulli rejoins Matti and his friends at their table. They’re thinking of going on to the Blue Vine, where there’s a good band playing. Ulli will go with them.
Who wants to be the one who hangs back, who has to go home, who is giving up smoking and only drinks a careful glass and a quarter and won’t touch spirits? Because it’s night and the night goes on so long. (p. 87)
The final story in the collection, “Girls on Ice”, is another which presents a calm, placid surface. Again, very little happens. Ulli and one of her friends, Edith, are walking on the frozen surface of the Baltic, discussing Edith’s relationship with Jussi. (In “Spring Wedding”, Jorma has a brother of that name, but this may not be the same person.) They walk much further out than they have before, and it seems unlikely that they can get back to land before it gets too dark for them to find their way, or the temperature rises and it starts to snow.
In a photograph of the scene, Edith and Ulli would appear as little black dots on the white expanse. The story concludes:
Enlarged, Edith and Ulli would be cell-like clumps of dots, like embryos held together in the loose grip of one particular moment before the wind changed, before the snow covered them or stopped falling, before they reached or failed to reach the shore. (p. 180)
The young women’s situation has something in common with that of the protagonist of the second story in the book, the first that isn’t about Ulli, “Batteries”. Paula escapes from the house on the evening of Christmas Day to go skating on the frozen lake opposite. Her husband and son are busy with the son’s new Gameboy but her younger child, Maudie, is not so easily shaken off. The child follows as Paula skates over the lake, much further than they’ve ever gone before. Maudie likes it but inevitably gets tired and when Paula says they have to go back, she at first insists on being carried. She’s used to her father giving in when she goes limp and pretends to be asleep. But they’re too far out for Paula to carry her now.
“No,” says Paula quietly, “this is real, Maudie. You have to skate.”
Maudie doesn’t understand, she knows. She is a city child, not like Paula, who grew up here and always knew that winter was hungry, just waiting for you to make a mistake. It got someone every year … Maudie doesn’t know about any of that. Why should she? They’re summer and Christmas visitors with a car full of things from the city.
But Maudie understands a certain tone in her mother’s voice. (p. 17)
They get back to shore safely, but with Maudie too stiff to sit down and have her skates removed.
Two of the stories without Ulli are particularly impressive. “Annina” is narrated by a woman who has two children. The first, Blaise, is a boy who grew to be “tall for his age” (p. 49), but the second, the Annina of the title, is tiny when born, almost overlooked, and reaches five inches tall by the age of 10. Her birth looks like a miscarriage, and maybe that’s exactly what it is. Only the narrator knows of Annina’s existence. She carries her tiny daughter in a sling under her clothes and doesn’t know whether her husband ever becomes aware that the child is there. Annina is more than an ordinary child.
Annina is my little girl. Annina is my language. I speak Annina. Even in quite ordinary conversations, I pick up scraps of Annina. Out of the fuzz of static which is what ordinary English has become for me, I catch a phrase. Annina. (p. 47)
Is Annina then just a consolation, an expression of the grief and loss felt by the narrator at her miscarriage? Perhaps, but there is more loss to come. Annina is convinced that there are others like her and eventually she sets off to find them.
I’ve learned your language, Annina, and now I’ve no one to speak it with. So I’m still talking to you, wherever you are. It’s all right to listen, Annina, for I’m not saying any words that might weaken you. I’m willing you on, Annina, morning and evening. I’ll never so much as whisper “Come home.” (p. 57)
So, this remarkable story manages to combine, in a single relationship, the pain of miscarrying with that of the eventual separation from a grown child.
“The Bridge Painter” is the first-person narrative of a man who paints bridges. He’s on the ferry between the Danish islands of Sjaelland (Zealand) and Fyn (Funen) making sketches of the long suspension bridge that was then being built between them. (The bridge was completed the year after the collection was published in hardback.) The painter has a rather disturbing attitude to the subjects of his paintings.
They’ve found watchmen, lodged in some of these old bridges. Little curled-up skeletons. Cats, or children. Wall them in and they become watchmen. They keep the bridge safe, keep it standing. For it’s hard to keep a bridge standing above the swirl of water, what with the weight and the wind and weather. So they set a watchman. It’s what they thought a bridge needed, then. Or wanted, perhaps. (p. 30)
He seems to regard almost as a deity the structures he’s sketching. Addressing the incomplete Danish bridge, he says:
You monster, you beautiful monster. If you put your foot down on this ferry you’d send us straight to the bottom. All those little lives working on you, serving you. You deserve it. You’ve going to be so beautiful. They can’t stop you now, not the environmental campaigners, not the economists, not the local politicians nor the big guns in government. They’ve got more than they bargained for, building you. (p. 31)
He recalls that, fifteen years earlier, having met a young woman carrying her baby in a sling (which “weren’t so common then”, p. 31) he got the idea of setting his own watchmen in bridges that were being built or rebuilt. He quickly dispels the reader’s concern that he might be sacrificing children or cats. His watchmen are realistic-looking, crying dolls, which he buys on the pretence that they’re gifts for his imaginary granddaughter. But he’s barely soothed that anxiety when another lesser one replaces it. He’s going to set a watchman for this bridge. But the foundations of its pillars are in the sea and he’s on the ferry.
And it’s no good unless you hide away your watchman in the dark with your own hands. My hands are ready. I watch them grip the rails where it’s cold and slippery. I notice, as if they’re someone else’s hands how rough they are, how chapped from years of working in the open air. Then they tense, taking my weight, ready to climb. I shall set my watchman. The sea’s so smooth, so flat you could almost believe you could walk on it. (p. 33)
It seems that the enormous bridge will have its human sacrifice after all.
Many of these stories, including most of the Ulli ones, are a bit like Finnish lakes: with flat, unperturbed, unmoving (sometimes frozen) surfaces over unexplored, dark and presumably dangerous depths below.
Edition: Penguin paperback, 1998.