Patrick’s second collection of short stories appears thirteen years after his first, Dangerous Pleasures and, like that volume, shows how the shorter form seems to draw out a darker side to his imagination. The benevolent, forgiving narrative voice familiar from his novels is still there occasionally, but so too is another voice, darkly mischievous, even malevolent. 

 

Typical of the first would be the opening story, The Lesson (memorably read by Lindsay Duncan when it was broadcast on BBC Radio 4), in which a prison governor’s wife receives discreet lessons in sea angling and self-determination from a prisoner ordered to build her bookshelves. Hushed Casket, in which two gay “church crawlers” on their honeymoon introduce something extremely nasty into their relationship when they give houseroom to a temptingly elegant Georgian tea caddy which isn’t rightfully theirs typifies the second. As do The Dark Cutter and Obedience, two sinister glimpses of life on a Cornish farm which are anything but idyllic and where the reader is left comfortless. 

Here are stories commissioned by Radio 4 for the anniversaries of the publication of Alice in Wonderland or the founding of the Caravan Club, but also stories written specifically for readers in Asia or in Cornwall. There’s a neat example, too, of a practice Patrick has demonstrated in the past, of revisiting a character about whom he feels an abiding curiosity. In The Camp will delight readers of his novel, The Whole Day Through with a Lord of the Flies-style glimpse into its heroine’s bizarre naturist childhood. 

There are ghost stories here too – a tale of a lady novelist whose loneliness at a Balinese book festival is lessened by the wan presence of a poet nobody else seems to see and a portrayal of a harried widower finding ghostly communion with a parish spinster at a succession of Cornish concerts – and an altogether less benign one in a which a small boy increasingly unnerves his babysitter by insisting a sinister creature, half-woman, half-moth, is preying on him in his moonlit room… 

Patrick is passionate about the short story form, possibly because it was his first love, both as reader and writer. “As a boy, my favourite books were all of short stories,” he says. “An odd assortment of the Puffin Book of Princesses, my parents’ editions of Wilde and Saki and some other books I used to buy rather guiltily with my pocket money and hide from their disapproving gaze: the horrifically jacketed but, in literary terms, surprisingly distinguished compilations of ghost and horror stories produced in the Sixties and Seventies by Pan.” He despairs of the few outlets given short story writers in England, compared to America, and the corresponding reluctance of publishers and readers to commit to them. “They do require a slightly different approach from the reader. Perhaps you can’t lose yourself in a story collection the way you can in a novel or read it with quite the same rapacity – which frustrates readers whose principal aim in reading is escapism – but they’re enormously stimulating and if one story doesn’t work for you, you can skip without guilt to the next. They’re the perfect bedside book, too. When I stumble on an especially good collection, I ration myself to just one story a night.” 

Has his taste in stories changed much since boyhood? “I can’t take horror fiction any more -  I think that’s easier to enjoy when you’re young and have less knowledge of pain and fragility but I still regularly re-read Saki’s best ones and I still love ghost stories. But as an adult I think I’ve come to realise how well suited the story is to analysis – the swift, devastating dissection of a marriage or a relationship or simply a misdirected life. Alice Munro is marvellous at this, as are William Trevor, Colm Toibin and Mavis Gallant. But I think if I had to pick a single story it would, indeed, be one of those boyhood favourites – probably one of Saki’s wickedly suggestive tales of suggestive encounters with something not quite civilised, like his story of the handsome young werewolf, Gabriel Earnest, or the tormented, lonely little boy in Sredni Vashta who founds a bloodthirsty religion on his pet polecat-ferret…”