Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘No, I didn’t, I admired many of them, though I felt he held some of them for the wrong reasons. If you’d been nicer to him, he would have come over to see us more often.’

  ‘I was nice to him, most of the time. He was jolly, but whenever he came over for the weekend, he used to booze and get argumentative. At your mother’s funeral in Nettlesham – well, you both went out and got thoroughly plastered, didn’t you? Like a couple of overgrown boys.’

  He remembered the occasion, and frowned. ‘I certainly don’t forget how you attacked Joe that evening. I’m amazed you choose to mention it. No wonder we didn’t see much of him after that.’

  Sheila remained unperturbed, smiling conspiratorially at Michelin. ‘It’s true I told him a few home truths that evening. Also, I didn’t care much for some of the women he brought over here. You remember that Filipino girl – Carmilla, was it? I swear she stole that pair of gold earrings off my dressing-table.’ She laughed at the memory.

  Clement laughed. ‘And she was sick in the lavatory. Carmilla was a disaster, admittedly.’ He helped himself to more white wine.

  ‘Then there was that physiotherapist of his. You remember her, Michelin? Lucy Traill. The unmarried mother, right?’

  As it happened, Clement had taken a fancy to Lucy Traill, liking her spirit. He knew, too, that she had a more permanent place in Joseph’s later years than any other woman. So he said, ‘Not an unmarried mother, Sheila, please. Lucy was a one-parent family. Keep your terms up to date.’

  Ignoring this, Sheila continued, ‘Joseph brought her over a couple of times, the first time with that awful child of hers. The second time, she’d only been in the house for half-an-hour when she started manipulating my shoulders! It was like being seized by a mad wrestler.’

  They all laughed. Clement said, ‘You thought she had gay aspirations towards you.’

  ‘She said I was suffering from something or other and needed Alexander technique. I thought it was something to do with sex.’

  Amid laughter, Clement said, ‘She was quite sexy. She used the word “posture” rather adroitly, I recall.’

  ‘Oh, and we heard them arguing in the bedroom at night. That was because Lucy wanted to go off on some CND march, wasn’t it?’

  ‘She tried to speak to me in French, and wasn’t at all good at it,’ Michelin said. ‘After family deaths in Languedoc, there often follows increased drinking and risks of suicide. It is related to a tendency to stay indoors more, so as not to meet other people who will fail to comprehend your grief. Then the lack of blue sky overhead tends to promote mental illness, and pretty soon the house of grief is again a house of illness. What’s the word? Terminal illness.’

  ‘In England, too, one marriage partner tends to follow the other to an early grave,’ Sheila said. ‘The bereaved often suffers a heart attack. It must be the same in France, and elsewhere.’

  ‘There’s more drinking in France than here.’ Thus reminding herself, Michelin gave them all a refill of wine.

  ‘Those drinking statistics are highly suspect. I’ve always thought so. French drinking is mainly wine and aperitifs. Over here the stuff is harder. The further north you go, the more fiery the liquors consumed.’

  ‘I’m not exactly suffering from grief,’ said Clement, ‘and can manage without fiery liquor, thanks. I would just like to be able to put my brother’s life in order, that’s all.’

  ‘You mean put his papers in order, Clem. Putting your brother’s life in order is a big commitment.’

  Clement nodded at Michelin to show that she had made her point, and said to Sheila, ‘I think I will take your suggestion and drive up to Acton to the flat. Will you come too?’

  She spread her hands. ‘Oh, I have so much to catch up with here. No, no, I’m just so busy. I’d only be in your way. Acton depresses me. There are so many letters to answer and I’m still feeling the effects of jet-lag. Besides, you like to be there alone – you can be as melancholy as you wish. One thing I have against Joseph was his attitude towards his parents. I suppose you might say I am no judge because my childhood was so idyllic. But he was very vengeful towards them, blaming them for all sorts of things that were his own fault. That’s a token of weakness of character. From what I saw of your parents, they were perfectly nice ordinary people. You thought so, Clem, you know you did.’

  ‘We may have been brothers but we were born in rather different circumstances. In this notebook’ – he indicated the green-covered book – ‘Joseph makes the case against our parents very clearly. I consider he was treated with monstrous insensitivity as a child. When I came along, family circumstances were different, and they behaved rather better towards me.’

  ‘I can believe that,’ agreed Michelin. ‘Very often in a family there is one child on whom all the family anger is visited. It may be a boy or a girl. The other children are treated kindly, even spoilt, yet the one unfortunate child is given a very bad time, is not loved, is starved, or whatever the special beastliness of the house may be. We have a lot of that in France, too. Nothing seems to explain why one particular child should be treated so.’

  ‘My brother has an explanation,’ said Clement.

  ‘You admire him, don’t you?’

  ‘I admire him because, despite the way he was treated, he never exhibited the slightest jealousy towards Ellen or me. She and I failed to realize how he suffered, how desperate he was, but he never showed us other than his gentlest side.’

  ‘He probably thought it was his destiny to suffer,’ said Sheila.

  ‘Destiny is rather an old-fashioned word these days. We talk about genetic inheritance instead.’

  The heatwave persisted over the south of England. After only a week of dry weather, there were already warnings of drought and water shortage. Householders were urged not to use their hoses. Standpipes were installed in the West Country. There was a plague of ladybirds in Kent. Inspired by the heat, British holiday-makers went abroad in their thousands, in quest of even higher temperatures. A bomb exploded in a tourist hotel in Tunisia, injuring ten British tourists.

  Acton looked cheerful in the sunshine. When Clement Winter arrived towards noon the next day, men and women were already standing on the pavement outside pubs, drinking and taking in the sun, enjoying the start of the weekend. He parked the Mercedes in Chesterfield Street. His dead brother’s flat occupied the upper floor of No. 22, a house which had been built in some indeterminate period either before or after World War I, when people had said that house-building had reached its nadir, simply because they had not the gift to see into the future. The street had been designed to provide cheap housing for an upwardly mobile lower middle class. Although the houses almost touched each other, they were detached within the strict meaning of the term. They had bay windows and a small porch with a half-hearted Gothic decoration. The front door of No. 22 contained stained glass offering a vague memory of some mullioned pile from which it was remotely descended. The front garden, although no larger than a senior executive’s desk, boasted a holly tree.

  The ingenuity of the builder had been taxed when it came to the matter of class distinction. Yet, even with the limited space at his command, he had solved it, as far as anyone could tell, to the satisfaction of many generations of denizens of Chesterfield Street. The narrow brick facade of each house was crammed with a porch and front door, a bay window, and a second door, designed solely for the use of tradesmen, maids, bootboys, or similar inferior species. There being no access to the rear of the house, the builder had inserted the back door at the front, making it lower than the front door, to which one step led up, by three steps which led down, thus plainly denoting its reduced status.

  This inferior door still bore on it a legend saying TRADESMEN ONLY, despite the fact that many of the houses in Chesterfield Street were now occupied by the tradesmen themselves. Beside the legend on the inferior door of No. 22 was a note on card in waterproof ink, but smudged nevertheless, saying J. WINTER. Clement had no doubt that Joseph
had enjoyed this wry joke.

  He went to unlock the door but found it ajar. Proceeding inside cautiously, he ascended the narrowest of stairways, carpeted with worn stair-carpet, and became conscious of the smell of the place. It comprised a mixture of dirt, nutmeg, and imprisoned heat. It halted him for a moment on the stair, as if he were trying to remember something. Then he heard a noise above, and went slowly forward.

  He reached a narrow upper hall from which four doors led. One door was open. A burly man poked his head out and asked of Clement in a suspicious voice, ‘Who may you be when you’re at home?’

  ‘I should be asking you that. And how did you get in?’

  For answer, the burly man fished in his pocket and triumphantly produced a key, which he held upwards, rather as if it had been a small sword.

  ‘You’ll be the posh brother from Oxford,’ he said. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘I’ll have that key, thanks, and I’d still like to know who you are.’

  The burly man came out on the landing. He wore trainers, jeans, and a blue shirt open almost to his navel. There was a casual, open-air look to him. He bore a tattoo and a gilt bracelet on his left arm. He held out the key to Clement, grinning as he did so.

  ‘Possession being nine points of the law and the law being nine points about possession,’ he said. ‘I’m Ron Mallock, good friend of your late brother’s, known him many years.’

  ‘You weren’t at the funeral.’

  ‘I’m an atheist, same as what Joe was. He’d have laughed if he saw you giving him a Christian burial. I come here to pick up some disarmament pamphlets I should have got hold of before.’

  He retreated into the rear room. Clement followed, feeling slightly at a loss, still conscious of the heat and scent of the flat.

  ‘None of this stuff is your property, you know,’ he ventured.

  Ron Mallock flashed a smile. ‘Funerals, property … What next? I’m not trying to rob you, chum, I’m just looking for a few pamphlets. I don’t imagine you’re a member of CND, are you? – so I can’t think it would hurt you if I collected them. Your brother and I ran the local branch, you know.’

  ‘We’re still waiting for probate,’ Clement said, becoming conscious at once of the inadequacy of his reply.

  Ron Mallock gave a half-grin but made no answer. Instead, he got on his knees and crawled under the gateleg table which occupied the centre of the room, where stacks of Marxism Today and other periodicals had found a resting place.

  There was little furniture in the room. In one corner lay a pile of grey blankets. Papers were everywhere. Conspicuous among the books were many volumes of B. Traven who, Clement knew, was a favourite of Joseph’s. Where not occupied by bookshelves, the walls were covered with threatening-looking posters in various languages; the Polish Solidarity sign was among them. In contrast was a delicate Korean Buddha, standing on a window sill. A desk by the window and a side-table were covered with more pamphlets and papers, some in Eastern alphabets. Half-empty bottles of wine and stronger liquor stood on the mantelpiece, together with a mug lacking a handle.

  Everything was as Clement had last seen it. It was a comfortably squalid room. He had visited many like it in Oxford, rotting here and there in old mansions which had once been family houses. It was a place where bookwork was done. Its stuffy yet curiously inviting smell made Clement think of drugs. As if to emphasize the heat, flies buzzed about the room or darted their little dynamic bodies against the windows.

  Seeing Ron Mallock sink back on his heels and begin to read through a book on the Vietnam War, Clement made impatient noises.

  ‘Sorry, don’t mind me. I’m having the day off. I’ll be sad when this lot goes. This place has been a home-from-home for me. I’ve got a place over in Brentford. You don’t mind me being here?’

  ‘Well, not a lot, I suppose,’ said Clement, seating himself in an old wicker chair with rather more force than necessary.

  ‘Here’s the morning paper.’ Ron took a folded copy of the Daily Mirror out of his rear pocket and threw it across to Clement. ‘You might like a read. Take it easy – you look pale.’

  Clement accepted the newspaper rather shame-facedly, thinking that after all this man had probably been a better friend to Joseph than he had.

  The front page of the paper carried a huge headline, TUNIS TRAGEDY, and an account in various weights of type of how bombs had exploded in four luxury hotels in Monastir, on the Tunisian coast. Six English people, all women and children, had been injured. Despite reassurances from the Tunisian government, British tourists were now flocking home by the hundred, cutting short their holidays and heading for safety.

  ‘Terrible, i’n’t it?’ said Ron, catching Clement’s eye.

  ‘Yes, it is. Innocent holiday-makers.’

  ‘Terrible the way they panic and all start rushing home at one little spot of bother.’

  ‘The Arab world is rather in ferment at present. What reassurances can a government possibly give that more bombs won’t be planted? Agreed, Tunis is pretty peaceful, but you can’t take chances. If I were there with my family, I’d bring them back home pretty promptly. It would not be a case of panic, rather of simple caution, surely.’

  ‘These people don’t know anything. Rich tourists. They’re selfish.’ Ron spoke as if he had not heard Clement’s reply. ‘They just panic and rush home with never a thought that they might be ruining the tourist trade on which the Tunisians depend. So the Third World gets poorer and poorer and suffers a further decline. More victimization by the Developed Countries.’

  ‘If I were in one of those hotels, I would think of my family before the local tourist trade, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘There you go, the extortion of the Third World. This will scare off the American tourists, you’ll see, and they will all stay at home. It’s the Americans’ fault in the first place, all this.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’

  ‘Obvious, isn’t it? Start a lot of oppression, gang up with Israel, this is what you get.’

  ‘I feel I mustn’t take up any more of your time. If you can find those pamphlets, well and good. I must have the flat to myself, since I hope to tidy everything up. Besides, I’m hoping to write a book on my brother …’

  Ron stood up. ‘And what sort of a book will it be, may I ask?’

  ‘That’s what I haven’t quite decided. I’m keeping an open mind until all the evidence is in.’

  ‘An open mind, eh?’ Ron appeared to think about it. ‘Yet I gather from what you say that you’re a Tory?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, no, I’m not. I’m a socialist – a socialist with rather a small “s” these days, I’m afraid, but still a socialist.’

  Ron laughed, showing a lot of white teeth and looking amazingly well. ‘You’re kidding. Listen, Mr Winter, your brother was a really good man. There was a side to him you maybe never saw. He worried greatly about the rotten social system in this country, and all the misery it brings. And he cared about the Third World – especially the nations of South East Asia, which he often visited. Such as Kampuchea, ruined by American Imperialism. You’d better put all that in your book.’

  ‘I intend to.’

  ‘And put in that he was a sensitive man who cared for the spiritual side of life. Not a man of action, you wouldn’t say, more your dreamer, but none the worse for that. A scholar and a gentleman.’

  ‘I thought he didn’t have much time for gentlemen.’

  ‘It’s just a saying, isn’t it? He had revelations, your brother. Which is more than what I have. Or you, I daresay.’

  Feeling his temper rise, Clement said nothing.

  Ron hefted the volume he had been looking at. ‘I’d better be off if my presence offends you. Let’s have my paper. I don’t see the CND pamphlets anywhere, but I’ll just borrow this book, if you’ve no objections.’

  Clement made a gesture and opened his mouth to speak.

  Ron said quickly, ‘Oh, I know, don’t tell me. Probate. Keep the book, a
nd good luck to you. I’m not a thief, you know.’

  As he left the room, Clement shouted, ‘Take the bloody book if you want it.’ He felt rather feverish.

  Clumping down the stairs, Ron Mallock shouted a response which Clement did not hear. As he left by the tradesmen’s entrance, he slammed the door shut behind him.

  Clement wandered round the room, vaguely vexed. He opened a window where a fly buzzed and stared out over the unappetizing prospect of back yards and broken roofs. He could hear his heart beating and wondered why he was so upset.

  Perhaps he was not the sort of man to write his brother’s biography.

  It was true he did not have revelations. Life had to be lived on a low plane, without sudden glimpses of the numinous. The survivors of the war, chief witnesses in his work on adaptability, testified to finding God in merciful escapes from death among ruins. There had been no similar challenges for Clement, barely seven when the war ended; he remembered nothing of it, only the return of bananas when it was all over. His was a peaceful peacetime existence, without especial exhilarations.

  Of course there was Sheila, the great consolation. Her pleasantness, day by day and year by year, was a form of revelation for which he was grateful.

  At last he turned away from the window, conscious of the stuffy silence of the flat surrounding him. Death – the ultimate in probate – had immobilized it. He walked uncertainly through the other rooms, the poky bathroom/toilet, the kitchen/diner where Joseph’s body had been found, the bedroom with its unmade bed. Each room had an individual silence and individual smell.

  On a shelf in the bedroom stood a large framed photograph of Lucy Traill, Joseph’s last girl friend, standing her ground while a small child tried to wrench her arm off. Tucked into the frame of this photograph was an old snapshot – rather surprisingly – of Ernest Winter, Joseph and Clement’s father. In his early fifties, he was standing by a privet hedge, holding a large pair of shears and smiling uncertainly into the camera. His appeared an intelligent face, although Clement never ceased to be astonished at how little of their owners faces gave away. Even hands were more revealing.