Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  Generating half-articulated thoughts, Clement stood gazing at the brick. He had another life which had never been lived, a life strangled somewhere in those tangled years of his childhood and adolescence, when he had been possessed by a wish to ‘get on’, and had sacrificed the chance of journeys to foreign lands by sitting for his various degrees. By so doing, he had become successful in a modest way, if being part of the academic environment was success; certainly in Sheila’s Kerinth there were other criteria for success – a strong sword arm, cunning, hatred of scholars, power, magic, virility … The ragged pattern on the kitchen wall seemed to stand momentarily for all the ragged coastlines he had never sailed to as sun was setting across torn sea, mysterious land. He had presided over the rebuilding of other lives; now here was his brother’s, lying in fragments. How could it be meaningfully put together, put together in such a way as to express a certain muted exhilaration, romantic but submerged, which belonged to the Winters?

  Why had Sheila not come back on the five o’clock train as she usually did? What was she up to now? Other houses could be seen from where Clement stood – the backs of houses in Staverton Road; the families there seemed to be working as they should. Old Badger, the Bursar of St Arnold’s, was a funny little ineffectual man, yet his existence, at least from the outside, appeared to run in a perfectly smooth and pleasant way. Of course Badger, looking from one of his upper windows and seeing a fellow of Carisbrooke drinking vodka in his back garden by his swimming pool, might be thinking identical thoughts.

  Sheila did not arrive until eleven-thirty, disgorging from a taxi with some style. She had caught the ten-five from Paddington.

  Dragging a large carrier bag labelled Dickins & Jones, she entered talking and put her free arm round Clement’s neck as she kissed him.

  ‘I caught the train by the skin of my teeth. Jessica Bishop was on it. The taxi was so slow – traffic in the West End was worse than ever this evening. The taxi driver did his best. He told me he was going to retire to Clacton next week. Clacton’s probably full of retired taxi drivers.’

  He recognized her chattery London persona, a mock-up perhaps of a woman Sheila would have liked to be, still not integrated into her personality.

  ‘Have you bought yourself another outfit?’

  She twirled the carrier bag and then dumped it on the sofa. ‘I’ll tell you about that later. Calvin Boas Lee is a bastard. After Tarleton wrote to me, he got a phone call from Calvin in Hollywood to say he would be over in London today. So Tarleton booked us a table for three at Sidebottom’s. You know how these people are – one o’clock came and went and Calvin did not show.’

  He noted the Americanism, as she went into a long description of what they had done and not done, and how stingy Tarleton had been about phoning the Hollywood office for information. As she talked, she went to stand by the fireplace, hands on hips.

  Clement had been playing Wagner; she turned down the volume.

  ‘So eventually Tarleton said that we couldn’t let the Sidebottoms down – he’s friendly with them and takes all his best clients there. So we went down for a bite and it was after two before we arrived. Of course we had to have champagne to soothe ourselves. And you, Clem, why have you not eaten supper? You were being moody, weren’t you? I ought to have phoned you from Sidebottom’s, and this is your way of reminding me.’

  ‘I just didn’t feel hungry.’

  ‘Well, then I’m sorry. Have some toast and pâté now. I’m going to have a cup of tea and then I’m going to stagger to bed. It’s been a hard day and I’m absolutely exhausted, and Calvin’s a bastard of the first water. And the second and third, and however many waters there are.’

  ‘So does this mean the film deal’s fallen through?’

  ‘Who knows what it means?’ she said wearily, turning to march into the kitchen, her figure momentarily framed in the dark doorway and then encompassed by it.

  ‘What else did you do in town?’ he called through.

  ‘Nothing. What do you think I did?’ Her voice came accompanied by the sound of the kettle filling from the cold tap. ‘I’ll show you the new outfit in the morning. I expect you’ll hate it.’

  Clement decided to have a cup of tea with her and forgo his pâté for the pleasure of going to bed at the same time she did. Perhaps she might not want that, although she sounded amenable enough.

  After the usual ritual of turning out the lights and chaining the front door, they took their tea upstairs. All was peaceful in the street. She talked intermittently about her agent, Tarleton, and his marital problems, as they washed and undressed. After they had scrambled into bed, under the king-size duvet, Clement clasped her to him, feeling her considerable bulk roll readily towards him. He kissed her and murmured in her ear.

  ‘Oh, that’s how it is,’ she exclaimed, putting on a light girlish intonation. ‘I thought you were just a little bit huffy with me downstairs. A general huffiness ever since I came in. Favourite pupil had misbehaved.’

  ‘Is that really how you see yourself?’

  ‘I couldn’t help being late. I didn’t do it to annoy. Or did you think I was hanging about on Paddington station on purpose?’

  He preferred not to pursue that line of thought, and said so, slipping his hand down under the duvet instead. Yet he heard the edginess in his own voice.

  ‘I can’t think what it is you see in me,’ Sheila said, in a mock-naive chirping voice.

  He growled. ‘This neat little box of tricks so cunningly hidden where none but I may find it.’

  ‘Oh, that’s what it’s all about, is it? Is that all I mean to you? Is that what you were waiting for?’

  ‘You ask as many questions as Mrs E. Had you forgotten I still fancy you?’

  Despite the dark, she moved her head back as if to get a better look at him.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘You seem to have forgotten what happened in Boston with that Spanish gigolo!’ He had not meant to say it.

  She lay back with her head on the pillow. He could feel the emotion warm in her, without being able to read its content. Anger welled up in him. Unsatisfied, they fell apart. Her refusal to speak seemed to smother them. But, as he was about to withdraw his hand from her thighs, pity for her and all her difficulties overcame his anger.

  With compassion in him, he felt able to make love to her. She did not resist.

  Afterwards, when he heard Sheila sail on relaxed breathing into the caverns of sleep, he thought to himself, soothingly, ‘It’ll be all right. She never admits when she’s in the wrong. I’ll just have to forget about it. Bury it. That’s best. She will never refer to it again if I don’t; I know that. It means much less to her than it does to me. We’re different people.

  ‘What a mess. Half the time, she’s Green Mouth, leading that other life in that dream world of hers. I must take it easy. There’s no need for it to infect me. It’s such a misery … Why can’t people just screw and be done, for the simple pleasure of it?… But I suppose that’s what she did with the little Hispanic sod. Don’t go over it all again. Think of something else. Remember how she was in Berlin.’

  There was always another circle to descend, down to the smallest circle that could never be reached – his self. Before that was the newly activated circle of his lost brother. He found himself lying there addressing Mrs Emerova; and he and she were back in their familiar chairs, in the darkness.

  ‘I wonder why it is I find myself upset about Joseph? After all, his wasn’t an easy or a very successful life. Perhaps I envy him because he’s out of it all. Or perhaps I’m jealous of the way he’s got out of it and left all this stuff – his problems – for me to resolve. What do you think?’

  ‘If you find yourself offering so many alternatives, could it be something more important to you than any of them?’

  ‘It’s as if I’ve had no life – no, as if I’ve only lived through other people, and now he’s offering me another substitute life, his secret life, well …’r />
  ‘And do you want the life he’s offering you?’

  ‘I partly admire, partly despise the all-consuming love he had for a Chinese woman. It seems to have haunted him.’

  ‘Is that what you want in the way of love? Do you feel Sheila gives you a lesser kind of love than the Chinese woman gave Joseph?’

  ‘Yes – I mean no. I don’t really believe in all-consuming love. It’s a Romantic myth. Perhaps I envy him the myth. He was very much a man who lived with myths. My life seems devoid of myths. It’s stuffed with contemporary history instead. For two brothers we were very separate …’

  ‘But now he’s trying to come closer and you don’t want it?’

  ‘Well.’ He laughed. ‘It’s a bit late to try and come closer now, eh? He should have tried that when he was alive.’

  ‘That sounds rather like your father, doesn’t it?’

  Clement was silent a long time. Bloody Mrs Emerova, with her irrelevancies, disrupting his line of thought. There was so much hatred and disappointment in various relationships that it was difficult sometimes to see your way.

  ‘Anyhow, this great love of his. It failed, didn’t it? He couldn’t see it through. He wasn’t quite determined enough.’

  ‘Is that how you see it?’

  ‘How do you see it?’

  ‘I want to see it through your eyes. I think that for some reason it is important for you to believe that neither he nor your father loved you enough, or was capable of loving enough …’

  ‘You confuse me. There are so many points on which we disagree. Sometimes I can’t help wishing I was anywhere but here.’

  ‘Far away from me, eh? Like Joseph in Sumatra …’

  5

  The past immediately becomes history. Even yesterday has undergone a magical transformation; it may still exist in memory, in stone, in documents, in old newspapers waiting to be disposed of. But it lacks breath. It has become part of death’s kingdom.

  The Sumatra I remember does not exist any more. As far as I am aware, no novelist or poet celebrated the Sumatra I knew. It remains alive only in my memory. And alas, my memory is faulty.

  Long after I had returned to England from Sumatra, many years after, the chance arose to return there. I had in mind what Marcel Proust said in the circumstances, that it was impossible ever to return to a well-loved place, for what we sought was a time as well as a place. I knew it, yet, when the opportunity arose, I gladly took it, marvelling that it was possible for me to return at all.

  From Singapore I flew to Medan, the capital city of Sumatra. Polonia airport was little different. Except that it had previously – thirty years earlier – lain outside town. Now it was in the suburbs. Medan had grown.

  Much had changed. I had known Medan as a sleepy town, a town of shadows and silences. The population had expanded enormously since then, and had taken on some of the trappings of modernity. No longer did bullock carts lumber along the Kesawan. The population now relied on two-or three-wheeled vehicles for its daily errands. Exhaust fumes poisoned the air. Hooting and tooting, motor-cycles wove their way along the crowded streets.

  As I walked through the town, a fever gripped me to revisit the parts of the town I had once known and in particular to set foot again in those places sacred to the love that had existed between Mandy and me. I remembered a short story of Thomas Hardy’s in that melancholy vein in which I once delighted, with a title such as ‘Interlopers at the Knap’ or ‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’, in which a man goes back to his hometown in Wessex and finds it much changed, although he himself feels youthful as ever.

  In Wessex, the stones had become worn, the shops had lost their paint, the old coaching inn was ruinous and unwelcoming. In Medan, a similar erosion seemed to have taken place under the burden of population; though I felt myself to be as lusty as ever, thirty years had weighed heavily on the city. Unlike any town in Hardy’s Wessex, it bore an additional burden: it had changed hands.

  When, on the 5th October, 1945, 26 Ind Div Signals landed at the port of Emmahaaven, we imagined we were visiting a Dutch possession, an island one thousand miles long which was part of the N.E.I., the Netherlands East Indies. In fact, the island never returned to Dutch hands. The world had changed, independence movements had started up everywhere. Thirty years later, a great many evidences of Dutch rule had disappeared under Indonesian nationalism, as tropical temples disappear under encroaching jungle.

  The map I bought had not one familiar name on it. Indonesian names had taken over from Dutch. The outlines of the town were blurred. The centre had been disfigured by extra roads and one-way streets. Even the atmosphere had been rerouted, renamed, and reconstituted.

  The compulsions of pilgrimage overcame me. Three places I badly needed to visit were the grocery store where Mandy and I had first met, my apartment where we had first kissed, and the bungalow where our love had been consummated. Clutching my map, I set out on foot through a bewildering maze of streets, the lives of whose inhabitants spilled untidily on to the thoroughfare. Pigs, derelict automobiles, laundry, were the ordinary furniture of any ordinary road, round which the inhabitants made their way. I was dazed by it all. Nothing was the same. This was the measure of thirty years of freedom and progress, that a stranger should choke and weep from the foulness of the atmosphere. Most of the men I passed smoked cigarettes in self-defence.

  Nothing was the same. I soon became lost. The map, turn it about as I might, was no help. And then I found myself by a landmark I knew. Presenting a clean wall to the broken street and pavements was the Deli Cinema.

  The cinema, built in the streamlined style of the thirties, with curves for corners, had just had a new coat of paint. It glowed with prosperity. The reason was clear. It was showing such masterpieces of the cinema as Shark Invaders Destruction and Ghost Devils of the Pacific. Just as when I knew the cinema in the forties – when I had taken Mandy there – its speciality was fantasy, generally horror fantasy. Whatever else had changed with independence, with freedom, with the population explosion, an appetite for ephemeral sensation had remained constant.

  With this landmark, I was able to find my way to the first of my three objectives, the grocery store. It was, in fact, just round the corner. This was the first hint I had that my memory too was feeling the effect of thirty years, for I had imagined the store to be at some distance from the cinema. Did I not recall shadowy silent streets, walked with her arm on my sleeve at night? Yet here I was, standing in front of the store. It was now shuttered and closed. Next door, a butcher’s thrived. An old cart was parked outside its door. Useless to ask passers-by where the people had gone who once lived here; they knew nothing.

  Just to have seen the store gave me some satisfaction, although I was burdened with the passage of thirty years, the length of a generation. The years had been longer than I imagined. The Sumatrans thronging past me were young. One and all, they looked too busy, too hard pressed, to wish to speak to a foreigner with very few words of Besar Malay at his command.

  Now I could get to one of the two remaining objectives, for the bungalow where we made love in those indolent afternoons was only a few streets away. It was baffling enough, though. One street had been blocked off. New streets had been pushed through, and buildings reorientated to face another way. A low wooden building in which I had worked with Intelligence had disappeared, to be replaced by a shoddy office block.

  I walked for a long while, hot and bewildered. I had forgotten the name of the street with the bungalow; it had certainly not been called Jl Irian Barat, as the map seemed to indicate. All was confusion. I nearly got run over by a three-wheeled van. I found myself walking round the outside of a large bustling enclosed market, negotiating refuse, broken boxes, parked lorries, and knots of people. Nowhere was that certain bungalow with a palm (possibly two?) and a flowering – tree? – shrub of some sort? – at its gate.

  Time had to pass and weariness set in before I accepted the idea that the line of little bungalows had go
ne, probably to make way for the market. There remained only my apartment to visit, where Mandy and I had first kissed. That, being further from the centre of town, was less likely to have suffered change.

  Clutching the address carefully written on a card, I tried to get a taxi. Six taxis stood outside the Pardede Hotel, their drivers playing cards and smoking in the shade of a palm.

  They were used to foreigners and their whims. One of them, who spoke a good smattering of English, agreed to take me on my quest.

  Directing him to the right area was complicated. We drove about fast one-way systems while I looked out for landmarks. The house in which I had my apartment had stood on the edge of a wide open space with jungle at the far side of it and a distant view of the railway line. It had been built in a distinctive Dutch style.

  There were no open spaces. I could not understand the way the railways ran, or the meandering River Deli, now used for a refuse dump. Replica Dutch houses stretched for street after street.

  Finally, I asked the driver to pull into a side road. Something here seemed familiar in the general layout. Close behind the house had been a sleepy kampong. Of course it would be gone now; one might expect that. Modern housing would take its place. If we had come from that direction, then this would be the road behind my house and – why, this would be the very house, this one on the corner. Some of the grounds must have gone, shaved off to widen the road. I hesitated at the gate. Had it really looked like that? Search my memory as I would, I did not recall exactly the features of the house.