Helen Simpson is not a prolific writer; six slim collections of short stories in 25 years, each timed quinquennially with what seems, at least retrospectively, like impeccable forward planning. In fact, time, we shall see, is what her career so far has been about. She has also heroically resisted the pressure —and there must have been a significant one, at least towards the beginning — to move on from the short form and deliver a novel, as if the short story were not an entirely different genre but just a warming-up exercise before the heavyweight training session of the novel.
Cockfosters is a slender volume, all of 140 pages, each of its nine stories named after a place (‘Kentish Town’, ‘Kythera’, ‘Arizona’, ‘Moscow’ etc.), which can be both real and metaphorical. In one of the key stories, ‘Arizona’, which depicts an hour’s acupuncture session administered by Mae to an academic, Liz, who is just entering the menopause, the acupuncturist says that she envisages the ‘new state’, the post-menopausal self, ‘as being like Arizona… arriving in another state, brilliantly lit and level and filled with dependable sunshine’.
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