Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  Ernest Winter had died at the age of seventy-one, when Clement was thirty-one. Clement tucked the snap back where he had found it.

  Going down to the car with some boxes, he came up again carrying two empty suitcases, into which he started to pile his brother’s clothes. There was nothing he wanted himself. It was cheap stuff, well worn. Michelin could take it to Oxfam. He hesitated once, when he came on Joseph’s bush hat, moth-eaten souvenir of his years in Burma, the Fourteenth Army flash still sewn on its brim. Joseph would like him to keep that.

  The journeys up and down stairs made him feel weak. A certain delicacy prevented him from stretching out on the bed. He sat in the cramped living room, with its curious drugged scent.

  In the ancient, battered roll-top desk, bought doubtless from a local junk dealer, he found various CND leaflets, probably the ones Ron Mallock had been seeking. With them was a bundle of letters, secured by a rubber band. Clement bent over to lift them out into the light. Again that smell came to him, strong as a herb. He found himself incapable of moving from the stooped position. Time passed in dull, thick pulses.

  He saw that it was in fact a long way across the room, a distance hardly to be measured, which wound its way through barricades of books. They were depicted in a vivid purple light which he felt did not deceive him for a minute. Through the open door lay another extravagant vista, seen as if through a weight of water, attended by bar-like wooden banisters and a shabby rug which lay in wait for an unwary footfall. It took time as much as anything to observe these things. At the far end of this distressing view was a strip of wall and another open door, painted dull brown. Through the dull door, a fragment of the kitchen could be seen, and there a man was standing at the sink, washing his hands with slow and portentous industry.

  It was crucial that this man should not turn round and see Clement, who had become small as well as immobile. The likelihood was that the man would turn round, since the fatal scent in the air, which found its way to Clement, emanated from this figure.

  Somehow, Clement found himself able to see the porcelain sink, and the stream of water falling, falling from a thin tap down on a pair of veined white hands, and a bar of soap revolving slowly over and over in the grasp of the hands, foaming terribly as it went, as if it bled. This he was forced to watch, all the while fearing that the man would turn round – he would be bound to turn round slowly, but turn round he would – and look at him. That was to be avoided at all cost. The flies in the room were making a terrible noise.

  The bar of soap went on foaming and revolving, in some way independent of anything else that was happening, for the man was now drying his hands on a towel, his veined white hands now repeating their previous movements under the tap into the folds of towelling. And he was turning round.

  Clement thought that it was time he took another breath, an action that proved laboriously difficult to carry out, stooped as he was. He caught the sounds of his own lungs and imagined them down below somewhere, sponge-like and flapping in a strong wind.

  His brother had now turned completely round. He still held the towel. Now he was advancing on Clement. Considering how far there was to come, he advanced with terrifying rapidity. The towel trailed behind him leading all the way back into the kitchen.

  He entered the living room. Clement remained bent over the open desk.

  Although his brother’s face was pallid, it bore a smile. He was near now. He stood over Clement. With a great effort, Clement rose to his feet and confronted Joseph.

  Joseph said, ‘Everything worked out all right.’

  Then he was gone.

  For a long while, Clement stood where he was, listening to the flies buzzing against the window pane. The strange scent had disappeared. With automatic movements, he went over to close the window he had opened.

  Still clutching the bundle of letters, he moved down the stairs, down the steps covered with their old brown carpeting. Outside, the street looked unnaturally bright, the Mercedes against the curb unnaturally large. Somehow, he locked the tradesmen’s entrance of the flat behind him and crossed the pavement to his car.

  He sat there for several minutes, breathing slowly, before driving away.

  12

  Sheila was sympathetic.

  ‘You poor darling, it’s not like you to see things.’

  ‘There Joseph stood, as close as you are to me. He said “Everything worked out all right” – almost like a voice from the grave. I couldn’t have seen him more clearly. He had been washing his hands.’

  ‘You poor darling,’ she said again. ‘It’s the heat. Temperatures were over ninety in Somerville when they took the noon reading. Why don’t you go up and get into bed and I’ll have Michelin bring you up a nice light supper.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll do that,’ Clement said. ‘It sounds a bit feeble.’

  ‘You’re allowed to be feeble once in a while.’

  ‘“Everything worked out all right …” I can still hear his voice. It was amazing.’

  ‘Would you like me to get Dr Lloyd?’

  ‘No, I’ll go and have a bath as you suggest.’

  ‘Have a nice cool bath. Not too cool. Perhaps I’ll take your temperature.’

  When he lowered his flabby bulk into the bath, Clement lay there half-submerged. He was unable to wash himself. Staring at the tablet of bath soap, his mind returned to that other bar of soap in Chesterfield Street, slowly revolving, foaming its substance away in Joseph’s hands. What had it signified? He tried to answer the question clinically, imagining it posed by Mrs Emerova. Answer would not come: only the vision of the soap rotating, its colour now forgotten, and the minute linked bubbles of foam falling away from it, regularly.

  After the bath, he slid into bed between the sheets, to find himself shivering. He could not get to grips with himself or with his recent experience. The functioning of his brain seemed oddly affected, although he could not explain how. Nor was it possible for him to decide whether he had actually received a visitation from his brother, or whether he had had some sort of illness, say a minor stroke, which had caused a vivid hallucination. The latter possibility left him unmoved; strokes were part of the rational world. Far more alarming was the prospect that his brother might actually have come back from the dead to speak to him; the rational world had no place for such events.

  Suppose, against all belief, Joseph had returned. The meaning of ‘Everything worked out all right’ was still obscure. Probably Joseph was referring to his own life. Or was he referring to Clement’s problem with the book, or with Sheila? Perhaps he meant that the whole confused world worked out all right, on evidence from some superior time-annihilating position of vantage granted those who had died …

  It was more comfortable to suppose that the whole episode had been a delusion. Heat may have played a part. Clement remembered the smell of the flat; it might also have had a disturbing effect on the mind.

  He dozed lightly, hearing traffic go by in Rawlinson Road. When he roused, his head felt better and he noted that he was less uneasy, at least until the thought of Mrs Emerova came into his mind. It would be difficult communicating this new episode in his life to her.

  ‘It was a vision of some kind. One hates using the word because of its Biblical connotations, but a vision is what it was: something between reality and unreality.’

  ‘Do you mean between objective and subjective? Is there such a state?’

  ‘Why do you look at me like that? I suppose you think the whole thing was just an outcrop of disturbed sexuality?’

  ‘Is that what you feel it was?’

  ‘It was just a joke. Maybe I was just having a kind of brain storm. I was rather upset by the friend of Joseph’s I met there, Ron Mallock.’

  ‘Why did he upset you?’

  ‘Oh, he was just talking about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament …’

  Suddenly, Clement remembered that a psychotherapist of his acquaintance at Carisbrooke had told him over drinks that two of his
patients were high-ranking members of the CND who had come for treatment, in conditions of utmost confidentiality, because they found that competing with their wish to ban the bomb was a strong desire to see it dropped. Wish and fear were close neighbours; opposites attracted.

  In a similar way, his vision in the Acton flat seemed to incorporate opposites, fear and reassurance, or his love of his brother and his hatred of him. Joseph had excluded him from his life.

  Feeling slightly perked up, Clement sat up in bed and adjusted his pillows. The untidy bundle of letters he had brought from Acton lay on his bedside table. Taking them up rather feebly, Clement began to shuffle through them.

  With one exception, the letters were from Lucy Traill, the last of Joseph’s long succession of girl friends. He knew Lucy was a physiotherapist, from the disastrous occasion when she had tried to practise her art on Sheila. He also remembered, as soon as he started to read the letters, that she was an ardent supporter of CND, and that Joseph had met her on some demonstration or march. She worked in a hospital in Richmond, and lived with Joseph only at weekends, which explained both the letters and their highly-charged sexual content.

  Lucy was good at describing in detail what she and Joseph had done the previous weekend, and what she wanted them to do when next they met. The uninhibited nature of the correspondence caused Clement to stir uneasily in the bed.

  He and Sheila rarely talked much about sex. Nor was there much in the way of description of sexual activity in Sheila’s Kerinth novels. Yet vivid and happy memories came back to him of their early years of marriage, when they had both discovered in themselves a desire for sexual intercourse out of doors. They had done it wherever and whenever they could, sometimes tumbling out of cars to perform in a lane or a field, quickly before anyone saw them – Sheila had always been fast off the button. They had done it in parks, in woods, by roaring motorways, on beaches. They had done it lying down, or had enjoyed knee-tremblers against trees in the rain.

  Thought of those happy years brought a gush of pleasure to him. How close they had been! – And still were, perhaps because of that carefree, randy time. It had ceased with the birth of their daughter, Juliet, in 1970.

  He sighed, still not willing to think of Juliet, and opened another of Lucy’s letters.

  After a long description of their next encounter in bed, she wrote, ‘But all these joys may never be. You have been increasingly strange lately, not even coming on the last demonstration. We put on a great show outside the base at Lakenheath, yet you weren’t there. And that remark of yours about the Pershings – that they weren’t pointing at us. Okay, I know you were drunk. It was in The Queen’s Arms, remember. There was a sudden hush. Everyone suddenly shut up and stared at you. I felt such a fool. We have to be united, firm in our beliefs. Every missile in the world points at us. If you’re going to give up now, just when we seem to be succeeding, don’t count on me to be around.’

  Her next letter showed that Joseph had given a reply she found unsatisfactory. Her tone was abusive.

  Joseph had made a pained and elaborate response. That it had been important to him was indicated by the fact that he had typed it out on an old manual typewriter and kept a carbon copy. It was dated January 1987.

  My darling Lucy,

  We’ve always been honest with each other. I know the taste of your mind as well as I do the taste of your fanny. You’re a zealot -as I am, but it appears our zealotry sometimes goes in different directions. I just hope we don’t. I love you madly and would even overcome my rooted objection to marriage if it suited you, and adopt your kid, I suppose.

  I’m older than you by quite a bit. You’re a child of the Cold War, born early fifties, whereas I did such growing up as I was ever going to manage in the World War. So I’m going to bore and irritate you (in a good cause) with MY story of the BOMB. I want to try and set it all down. You clearly confuse sex and CND, like many of our comrades. I confuse the Bomb and Life. Like this. Darling, I dig your deepest depths, please read this. Don’t be impatient. Assume a Zen posture.

  You know Japan only as a distant country which showers down upon us all the electronic gadgets we now take for granted. You can’t imagine what a different face Japan showed to those who fell within her power. I fought against them in Burma, when our commander-in-chief referred to the Japs as ‘fighting insects’. They were rightly feared as pitiless – to themselves and others. They struck the first blow. They were an enemy who had to be fought and conquered.

  After the Burma campaign, while the war was still on, my division, part of the Forgotten Army, was sent back to India and there disbanded. I was posted to a camp near Bangalore, and from there to Madras where, in hot and primitive conditions, we were set to practising amphibious landings.

  We used landing craft which had been returned from operations in the Middle East. Old boats, good enough for South East Asia Command. These were the craft we were to employ in an assault on the Japanese armies ensconced in Singapore and Malaya.

  This assault had a code name. Operation Zipper. The rumour was that we were to attack Singapore from the sea – this vauntedly impregnable fortress – and to invade the complex western coast of Malaya. Much later, it was discovered that some of the designated beaches in the Port Swettenham area were impossible places in which to land, with dangerous currents sweeping the beaches and mangrove swamps behind the beaches. Training for Zipper caused severe low morale, particularly for those of us who had served in Burma.

  I tell you this for background to what follows.

  Some luck came my way. I was unexpectedly posted from Madras to Bombay, to act as Out Clerk in a signals office there.

  For the first time, I had some idea of what it would be like to be detached from the army, which by this time I hated. Instead of sleeping in a mildewed Great War tent on a strip of Madrassi desert, I found myself in a private house standing in a private road near Breach Candy, the luxurious bathing pool by the sea. I enjoyed that blessed luxury, a room to myself, and a bearer to look after me. I also enjoyed an unconsummated love affair – you don’t even know what the words mean, but life was different then – with a WAC(I) called Mary. The initials stand for Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India). I can’t tell you the racist and sexist insults poor Mary put up with in our signal office, where I was her defender, and fought a dispatch rider who insulted her vilely. This little affair went some way to satisfying the hungers of the soul. Oh, the hungers of my bloody soul. But on, on to the Bomb …

  Despite all my manoeuvres, I found it impossible to anchor myself to Bombay. After a month, I came under orders to return to Madras, as if the dread Operation Zipper couldn’t start without me. I went back to my division (now the 26th Indian Div). It was early August, 1945.

  We woke one morning to find that the atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.

  Ever since then – since that merciful time when Operation Zipper was cancelled – I have been a student of what manoeuvres went on on the international scene. It was a crucial period in the history of the war.

  So much savagery was unleashed on the world. That savagery is always there, in war or peace – something has to contain it. All we know to contain it so far is the threat of retribution. The way Mater contained me.

  Japan in 1945 was a country slowly succumbing to starvation. American B-29 fire raids on Tokyo were killing 80,000 civilians and injuring over half that number in one night. Yet there were high officers in the Japanese military who believed that the war must continue at all costs, for honour’s sake, if necessary to the last man, woman, and child. They thought like that.

  However, Japan’s foreign minister, Togo, was suing for peace. He sued in the wrong place. He directed his efforts at Moscow, capital of what he took to be a neutral country as far as Japan was concerned. But devious plans were in the making. Stalin was secretly preparing to attack the Japanese in Manchuria and then to press on to the home islands. He wanted a presence in Tokyo itself. So his foreign minister, Molotov, fou
nd it convenient not to see Togo’s ambassador.

  On the 2nd August, Togo cabled that ambassador, ordering him to speak to Molotov. A note of desperation breaks through the stiff diplomatic politeness. Togo said, ‘Since the loss of one day relative to this present matter may result in a thousand years of regret, it is requested that you immediately have a talk with Molotov.’

  It was not to be. The nearer the weir, the faster the water. The slow and secret preparations to manufacture an atomic bomb – the Manhattan Project – to be dropped on Germany were complete. The bomb was ready, but Nazi Germany was already out of the war.

  You’re supposed to know all this, but you refuse to bloody think about the past.

  On the 5th August, the crew of a B-29 christened the Enola Gay ate a midnight breakfast of eggs, sausage, toast and coffee, and then attended a church service. In the early hours of the 6th August, the Enola Gay took off. This was from a small airstrip on Tinian, an island near Guam. They had the bomb aboard, and were accompanied by a weather plane.

  Their target was Hiroshima, an army centre and military supply port. The flight was without event. The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 31,600 feet on a city just going about its morning business. A peaceful city, an enemy city. 71,379 people were killed or just went missing, 68, 023 were injured.

  The world changed, Lucy. Never has there been such a clear-cut division between one age and the next as that marked by the mushroom cloud boiling up over Hiroshima. All that savagery and hate had found technological embodiment.

  This first bomb, code name Little Boy, was a uranium bomb. On the 9th of August, a plutonium bomb was dropped on the seaport of Nagasaki. In the time between these two bombs, on the 8th of August, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. (Did you know that? What an hour to strike!) Japan surrendered unconditionally on the 14th of August.