The Persimmon Tree and other stories by Marjorie Barnard (1943)

I am already a fan of Barnard, so reading this was well anticipated. I read the Virago 1985 reprint which includes three extra stories at the end, selected I'm thinking by Barnard herself. The remainder of her solo stories were collected together a couple of years later in another volume called But Not For Love. These twenty are typical of her, in that they cover the smaller themes in life, as they represent the larger. Thus a woman having a hairdo becomes a meditation on loss in relationships, whereby depression reigns until the 'armour for living' is back up to full strength; a redesign of the cafe of a department store which includes canaries in cages high above the eaters reveals out-of-place passion in the hearts of the little birds who sing intensely once the orchestra begins to play, striking the entire chattering cafe dumb for a few precious moments; the ribbing and jealous sidelong glances of a group of ferry-travellers on Sydney Harbour toward a fellow who is a regular belies the fact that the winner of a lottery is in fact his wife who can't cope with his rigidity and controlling behaviour, and who has packed ready to leave him when he gets home; a family goes ahead with holding a Christmas party and dressing a huge tree despite the loss of the youngest child very recently - the jollity is finally too much for the mother who, at the end of the night, goes upstairs and empties too many sleeping pills into her hand; in Vienna, during the 1934 uprising, a woman goes out for seed for her little bird who is still singing madly despite starving - caught in the ongoing melee, she is struck and slowly dies on the pavement, while her little bird slowly goes silent in her now deserted apartment. A couple of these stories deal with returns to family locations where a person has moved on while other family members haven't, or a new import causes ructions. All bar two are set in Australia. The other thing they do superbly in their love of simple detail is give a strong mental picture of the 1930s, when most, if not all, are set. The one detraction is minor: I think Barnard is at her best when she can cumulate power, meaning that her novels written with Flora Eldershaw are more regal and mythically flowing. But these are far from miserly in their impact as they detail the sadness and vulnerability of those who hope, the bitterness of those who've lost too much to, and the puzzlement of believers in the face of pitiless fate.