Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘He hates Sheila and me simply because we are happier than he is, and much richer. He hates us because we’ve got a villa outside Marbella. He hates us because we have the house repainted every four years. He hates us because we’ve installed Victorian fireplaces. He hates us because we have parties. What if a guest once slung a bottle over the wall and smashed one of his cloches? Didn’t we go round next day with a bottle of wine to apologize? When’s he ever come round here with anything? He hates Sheila because she’s bigger than his little mouse of a wife and wears fashionable clothes. He hates her because she gets her photo in Blackwell’s shop window. He hates her no doubt because he secretly desires her. Some hope!

  ‘He hates other people’s success. He hates me. I don’t have a thing against him. He’s just a little shit who ought to be squashed.’

  ‘And do you see yourself doing that?’

  ‘Often.’

  The interior dialogue went some way towards cooling Clement’s temper. Draining his coffee, he looked at his watch. He might as well go along to his room in college and work on Adaptability; he liked the silences Sunday brought, with Arthur presumably off taking his nubile little wife out in their Zastava Caribbean to have lunch in Burford or Henley. He felt perfectly well this morning, although the traumatic visitation from his brother remained vivid in his mind. The bar of soap still revolved. He made a resolve not to go over to Acton alone next time.

  Before leaving the house, he went upstairs to say hello to Sheila.

  Sheila, in her role as Green Mouth, had taken over all the first floor of the house. Of the two front rooms, bedrooms under a previous ownership, one served as a sort of library-lounge-art gallery, while the other was her study – her Room, more simply. It was the powerhouse of Kerinth.

  A secretary, who had a small room of her own at the rear of the house, also worked in Sheila’s study. The study was dressed in cream. Being in it was rather like being in a huge meringue. The walls were cream, the long heavy curtains were cream. Even the Chinese carpet on the floor was cream, with brilliant green edges. Her desk was also cream. The chairs in the room were upholstered in cream, as was the large Victorian sofa, on which green cushions were piled.

  The secretary, Mrs Florence Flowerbury, also sat at a cream desk, half-concealed behind a four-panel cream screen.

  Seeing Clement enter, Mrs Flowerbury half-rose and gave him a gracious smile. ‘Here we are, you see, Dr Winter. How are you?’

  It was her little joke that she stuck to Sheila – in a phrase she had once used – ‘through thick and thin’, though very little thin had affected the Green Mouth career.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you here on a Sunday, Mrs Flowerbury.’

  ‘A lot of work to catch up with, Dr Winter. I wouldn’t do it for everyone’ – said with a sweet smile towards Sheila.

  The general effect of being in a clotted cream factory was mitigated by a brilliantly painted panel on the rear wall of the room, executed somewhat in the manner of Douanier Rousseau. Amid riotous foliage, lifesize mazooms and crichts, the owl-like inhabitants of Vinto, Kerinth’s moon, gazed down with huge cat eyes on their creator.

  Their creator, evidently not yet entirely back to Earth after the adulation heaped on her in Boston, wore one of her striking green embroidered robes. She was working at her word-processor. On a corner of the sofa lay Green Mouth, the lizard-like doll and companion of Sheila’s childhood, much worn by years of infantile caresses, from which Sheila had taken her trade name. The doll was her secret talisman, without which she could not write. It was clear she meant business now. Her somewhat heavy face was set in lines of concentration as she sat, elbow on desk, considerable cheek resting on fist, peering into the screen of her purring word-processor for inspiration.

  ‘I must get out into the garden,’ she said, absent-mindedly.

  On her desk she had gathered, conventionally enough, a series of objects of problematic relationship. They lay strewn beside a photograph, framed in silver, of the Winters’ dead child, who, staring as if deep in thought at a toy ambulance from which protruded the legs and feet of a doll, formed a striking little figure in a short-skirted dress and picture hat. The surrounding objects included a small bell from a Mexican church; a matchbox advertising a restaurant in Bath; a postcard view of the Potala Palace in Lhasa; a block of Duplo Lego; an Italian miniature scent bottle without stopper; a netsuke of a man and woman copulating, gift of an admirer in New York; and a smooth stone, streaked with wafer-thin evidence of bygone geological events, which had been picked up on a distant seashore. It might have appeared – say to an interviewer who came to talk to Sheila Winter in her home – that these items presented some kind of methodical reminder to the author of the so-called real world, necessary while she ventured into the realms of her imagination; but from their casual disposition, and the way in which most of them were half-buried in paper or scribbled notes, or other vital adjuncts of her profession, it seemed they had accumulated merely through an idle acquisitive instinct. Sheila was a conventional woman.

  As her husband came closer, she glanced up and smiled.

  ‘How are you feeling, darling? I was up early this morning. I had an idea.’

  ‘You must have thought me out of my mind yesterday. It’s ridiculous to say that Joseph’s flat is haunted, but there he was.’ He went to her side, and she took hold of his hand. ‘There he was. It was a real shock. He was washing his hands in the kitchen. I can’t tell you the effect of it all. The hand-washing seemed to be going on for ever … You aren’t about to tell me I imagined it all, are you?’

  Sheila half-smiled. She stood up and held his face between her hands. ‘You old silly! “There’s nothing but thinking makes it so.” Isn’t that what you’ve often told me? It’s real to you, so it’s real to me.’

  ‘Well, it was most extraordinary. Joseph definitely spoke to me. “Everything worked out all right.” It’s a genuine message from the Beyond, isn’t it? How are you feeling? Are you entirely over your jet-lag yet?’

  Even as he asked the question, he wondered if Joseph’s supposed appearance had not been a product of his own jet-lag.

  ‘That reminds me. Mrs Flowerbury, we must ring the Boston committee and thank them for their hospitality.’ She seated herself again on her cream chair, her mind slipping back to her work. ‘I suddenly had a marvellous idea as I was in the shower. An image. It must have been something to do with the milkman. He was delivering yesterday with a new van. When I was a child in the country, the milkman used to go on his rounds with a horse and cart.’

  ‘Good, yes, well, I’m just off. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Don’t forget it’s drinks with the Fender-Lieversohns this evening.’

  ‘Good. I had the image of three hooded men galloping at full stretch along a shore. The tide had retreated, leaving miles of sodden sand reflecting the blue sky. Some way out to sea was a small island, volcanic, with smoke rising in a plume from it. A wonderful opening. A wonderful cover. I felt I had to write it down. We’ll see where it takes me. Keep your fingers crossed.’

  ‘That’s fine. Remember, you don’t need to work on a Sunday, nor do I. I must get the booze for the party from Bottoms Up tomorrow. Well, they’ll deliver as usual, of course.’

  ‘Don’t forget to order plenty of glasses. I thought this time I’d make more of the Rajjimi, give them a bigger role in events.’

  ‘I like your Rajjimi. Don’t overwork.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be Sunday-lunching with Maureen. I might just put her off. She’ll understand.’

  He kissed her and they stroked each other’s faces.

  He did like the Rajjimi, he reflected as he went downstairs past Sheila’s pictures, among the soothing shadows, hearing the keyboard of the word-processor already beginning to click. The Golden Age of Kerinth lay far behind it. The planet had once been ruled by a noble and powerful race, the Rajjimi. It had disappeared. A quarter of a million years (and not a million years, as the man had said in his Guard
ian review) of barbarism had elapsed before Kerinth became – at least in part – civilized again. The ruling Rajjimi materialized to the new rulers of the planet, appearing like apparitions from the dead, to advise, to counsel, to warn. Some of the new rulers heeded them, others deliberately flouted the ghostly advice.

  At first, the Rajjimi made few appearances but, when their popularity was certain, Sheila began writing them into every book.

  Well, it was not such a preposterous idea, Clement thought. Just a post-Freudian idea … We were all ruled by the dead whispering to us. The Rajjimi functioned rather like archetypes.

  Juliet’s death came back to him. He closed the front door carefully on the house and its contents.

  The car crash had happened in the summer of 1974, thirteen years ago. Juliet would have been sixteen by now, in the fifth at Oxford High School. Instead, she remained forever in his mind – and Sheila’s – at the age of three and a half, delicate, dependent, dear. He had been driving. That was what made it so awful. And the country had been so green and heavy with leaf. The details had always been vague, except that he did not see the other car as it pulled out of a side lane in front of them.

  Then he had found himself being carried, and had no idea where he was. He shouted for Sheila. Shouted in a whisper. Things faded. He was in a moving vehicle, prostrate, and Sheila’s face was near his, deathly white. His thought was, ‘I’ve killed her.’ That terrible moment still resurfaced at intervals in his mind. He had not immediately thought of Juliet then. At the Radcliffe Infirmary he had learned that both Sheila and he were relatively whole, but their child was dying. She had been sitting on Sheila’s knee, and had gone through the windscreen during the collision.

  They had been sedated and patched up before they returned to the house. They lived in Chalfont Road, then, in a roomy upstairs flat. They had avoided friends for a long while. How many times had he poured out his guilt to Sheila. How many times had she forgiven. How many times had they both wept. That beastly summer, full of irremediable pain.

  Ice-cream. That was all they seemed to want to eat. Endless maple and walnut ice-cream from the new delicatessen in Summertown. And both being all in all to each other. They had endured each other’s silences, each other’s fits of wailing. Somehow they had clung to the idea that they still loved each other, despite a tendency to fly apart, to flee to the other ends of the world to escape from the one person who most reminded them of the dead.

  They sated themselves with music as if it were a kind of drug, in particular playing records of Bach chorales over and over. Clement never heard ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’, in the sombre key of F minor, without recalling that desolate time. Slowly the mania left them, along with the need for ice-cream, as the winter’s rains came down.

  Then one day she had started typing on the manual Hermes they shared. ‘I’m going to write a fantasy novel,’ she said.

  There had been no dead child in that first Kerinth novel. All had been excitement and sunlight and it had ended happily. But the mysterious Rajjimi had made their first appearance, coming back from death, trailing clouds of a vanished glory. ‘Arrant impossibilities’ indeed …

  Clement tried to dismiss the past as he came to the Banbury Road and the challenge of its traffic, dense even today. In a city of obfuscations, the Banbury Road was one of Oxford’s more definite statements, blunt rather than equivocal. For most of its length, say from St Giles to Summertown, it had been built before the age of the motor car, or at least during the mere dawn of that terrifying age. The great houses which flanked it, angular mansions of brick, had been designed for ample families; provision had been made in basement and attic for plural servants. Carriages had conveyed the families into town, to shop at Elliston & Cavell’s emporium. Young rustic men in waistcoats served as gardeners, in response to the Edwardian penchant for rus in urbe.

  But the Kaiser had proved too much for stability. Young England had gone first to the war and then to the dogs. Now these Oxford gardens were under-tended and over-grown; models of Darwinism, they had become places where only the fittest plants survived. The houses themselves had been given over to trumpery schools of English or divided into flats where untenanted milk bottles congregated on crumbling doorsteps. The carriages had gone, swept aside by automobiles. Arthur Stranks lived in one of the little flats into which No. 82 Banbury Road had been sliced, and would drive his Zastava Caribbean regularly into the streams of traffic which ran north and south through all daylight hours and long after. This was where Clement and Sheila had once walked in agony, mutely clutching each other’s hands, as far up as Squitchey Lane, after their Juliet was killed. The great houses, behind their great trees, lay back from the thronging cars, blind, wounded, extinct – yet living on, their carcasses turned over to contemporary fashion and lusting estate agents.

  Catching a period without traffic, Clement hastened across the road and soon took a side street to College, but his trail of memory persisted.

  How vulnerably young they had been then!

  It remained a source of pride to him that he and Sheila had seen each other through that period of mourning, although at times her grief had been nearly impossible to bear. The very smell of her had changed for a while. Had anyone ever done a medical paper on that? Changes in Olfactory Signals During Periods of Grief. He had made love several times to her friend Maureen Bowler – looking back, he appreciated Maureen’s immense understanding: she had agreed, he could perceive, not for his sake but for her friend’s. This was in Maureen’s pre-feminist days. The affair, lasting hardly a month, had put him back on the road in running order. He had been more able to look after Sheila. Ever since, they had remained close, devoted, although Sheila would never start another child. They had been examples of the adaptability round which Clement was compiling his record.

  Kerinth was Sheila’s child. She had her escape routes. No one could bear too much reality. Even at this moment, she was writing about three hooded men galloping along a deserted seashore on an imaginary planet. He smiled to himself. Good for her.

  By an inevitable and painful association, Clement’s thoughts ran to another dead child, his mother’s first-born, born long before he himself saw the light of day. That ill-fated little creature, that ‘steel-engraving angel’, had had a malign effect on Joseph’s childhood, haunting his early years. He recalled Joseph’s strenuous attempts to lay that ghost on the occasion of their mother’s funeral in Nettlesham, three years previously.

  It was a suitably bleak occasion. Madge Constance Winter, widow of Ernest Winter, had died one cold April day in 1984. She left behind a wish to be buried beside her husband in the town cemetery of Nettlesham, Suffolk. Her two sons carried out her wishes.

  Nettlesham lay in the midst of flat uninteresting country, a market town which had lost touch with its countryside. It stood cold and grey within a ring of treeless new estates. An east wind moved through its streets. Clement, accustomed to the legend of Nettlesham as the old family home, took a dislike to it all over again. Although he and Sheila arrived at lunchtime, the town gave an appearance of obstinate stagnation, like something washed up on an elderly beach. On the outskirts, they had driven through some light industry, kitchen designers, agricultural machinery hirers, bamboo furniture importers, and such. The centre, despite the injection of a hideous shopping centre, had fossilized in a dull bygone time, cramped and crotchety. Young people with red hands ate their lunches from paper bags in the street.

  Nettlesham’s one claim to fame remained the poet William Westlake, the minor eighteenth-century figure who had gone mad and died there. In the market place was a Westlake Tea Rooms, which sold postcards and scarves, as well as dusty buns.

  Sheila and Clement drove up from Oxford in the Mercedes. Ellen drove up in her Mini with her daughter Jean, even then undergoing a divorce. Joseph drove up in his van. Sheila and Clement had booked to stay overnight at the Gryphon, the only hotel for miles recommended in the Good Hotel Guide, thinking to
have a look at the coast the next morning. The others planned to drive home that evening.

  Despite the solemnity of the occasion, Sheila and Clement arrived in Nettlesham in good humour, amused at the prospect of seeing some of the family again. Clement had driven; Sheila did not drive. He sometimes wondered about that. She had refused to learn. In many things, she had come to be the dominant partner in their marriage. Above all, fame and the earning-capacity had become hers. Most of the time, he was content enough that this should be so; it was a state of affairs compatible with the times, when women played an increasingly confident role in life. But in the car and in bed with Clement she was content to play a passive role.

  They all met by arrangement in the King’s Arms, near where the old Winter ironmongery shop had once stood – new developments had swept the shop away with a lot of the other junk of the past. It now had a fragile existence only in the memory of Joseph Winter and possibly one or two others.

  Joining the two brothers later would be Ellen and Jean, and Madge Winter’s two younger sisters, Mary and Doris, together with their husbands and assorted offspring. They had all agreed to meet in the bar for a drink before visiting the dining room for a meal.

  Directly Clement and Sheila entered the bar, all yellow pine and plastic avocado upholstery, they saw his elder brother there alone, drinking. Joseph sat hunched on a swivel stool, elbow on bar and glass of beer in his hand. He was neatly dressed in a dark grey jacket and black trousers. As Clement advanced, he saw that Joseph’s tie was slightly awry and the top button of his shirt undone. He wore a CND badge in his lapel. Clement smiled and extended his hand.