by Brian Aldiss
‘How are you, Joseph?’
Joseph climbed down carefully from his stool. His untidy hair was greyer than when they had last met, and his face more lined. He grinned.
‘Right as a cricket, and no regrets at the prospect of seeing the old girl shovelled under. You’re looking as neat and upright as ever.’
He turned to Sheila and kissed her cheek, standing back to survey her dark dress.
‘Plenty of embonpoint, Sheila, dearest.’
‘I know your preference is for less of that.’
Joseph laughed. ‘Touché. Puissant as always, and selling even better than before, no doubt.’
Clement smiled rather hard at his wife to encourage her to accept this greeting, but she merely said, with a fugitive gleam, ‘I saw a book of yours announced last week in a bookseller’s catalogue.’
‘Oh, that! Let’s have a drink. Same old stuff that no one wants to buy – King Sidabutar of Sumatra, very obscure. Isn’t it amazing that I still keep going over the same old ground? You’d think I’d be discouraged by now, but not a bit of it.’ He laughed heartily, and then changed tack, clutching Clement’s arm in mock earnestness. ‘Well, young ’un, what do you think to this ancient town in which I was born and bred?’
‘Not much. It looks as if it has been ruined since the war.’
‘No, not at all. Improved if anything. When I was a lad, everyone used to go about in creaky boots, with straw in their hair.’
‘I’d grow straws in my hair if I lived here for long.’
‘Where’s Ellen, may I ask? She can’t have thought better of it, can she?’
‘Perhaps she’s staying at home to look after the dog.’
‘She’d better be here, and that pretty daughter with her. Ellie was always mother’s little pet. Can’t plant the old lady without Ellie here to wave her goodbye.’
He’s now fifty-seven, Clement thought, surveying his brother with lively interest. Quite a raffish old man. His skin is rather blotchy, his hair needs a trim and a wash. But cheerful, or at least in his usual sort of bantering, self-deprecating humour. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘Propping up this bar? Not long. I drove over early. Decided to seize on the chance of looking round my birthplace. Don’t ask me why. I don’t suffer from nostalgia. I suppose you take no interest in William Westlake, Clem, renowned author of “The Crippled Goat”? Well, William’s my literary mentor. I had my first orgasm only a semen’s throw from where the old boy lived. He knew the folly of birthplaces.
‘… Pride is in all, e’en in our Birth.
How much we count it where and when on Earth
We happened – though all came by merest Chance …’
He laughed. ‘There was a lot of sense in the eighteenth century, not to mention sententiousness. Yes, I’ve had a prowl around. Went to the cemetery. Revisited some old haunts. Even sought a girl I used to know. Well, two girls in fact. Rosemary and Ruth Tippler. My first loves – or second, or third … They lived over their shop next to our shop. I was twelve when I fell in love with them both. Ever since then, to enjoy two sisters at the same time has been my ideal, but I’ve never come across a pair as lovely as Ruth and Rosemary. ’Course, they’ve been married for years – left bloody Nettlesham, if they had any sense. All very carnal, Sheila, but of course I don’t shock you.’
‘Keep trying,’ she said, and smiled.
‘Worse things happen in Corinth, I bet – or whatever your pet planet is called.’
‘Much worse.’ She was not going to allow Joseph to win a tease. ‘Where’s this drink?’
After a while, Ellen arrived with Jean. Jean was now twenty-two, a pretty girl with dark curly hair and something of the Winter features. Joseph got off his stool, and began to make up to his niece. Clement, while talking to Ellen, observed how much Jean resembled Joseph as he had been when younger, and wondered whether, in her unfortunate love life, she did not also resemble him.
At fifty-three, Ellen looked spry enough in her dark two-piece suit. She dyed her hair. She cradled her handbag in the crook of her left arm and put her right hand daintily on Clement’s shoulder as she kissed his cheek. For Joseph she had a kiss on the lips and a swift hug.
‘Drinking again,’ she said to him. ‘Still, you don’t look in bad shape. You’re a bit thin.’
‘I ran out of money and had to walk all the way back from Bangkok. Those CND marches proved useful at last.’
‘And you’re wearing a suit – almost a suit!’
‘A last-minute bid for respectability. I should always go about togged up like this. Your daughter gets prettier all the time. How are you?’
While they were uttering phatic expressions of pleasure, in came the rest of the party, a man in front, a man bringing up the rear, with Madge Winter’s two younger sisters, Mary and Doris, and their grown-up offspring, in between.
‘This way. Here we are,’ old Claude Vernon was saying, unnecessarily, proclaiming himself leader of the pack, as they entered.
‘What a tragic occasion, dear,’ said his wife, Doris, opening her arms wide before flinging them round Ellen. Doris Vernon’s past history had given her a taste for the dramatic and a tendency to slope to the right which the years had not quenched.
Mary Overton, her sister, managed to look mournful at the best of times. Ellen’s arms being occupied, she took second choice and headed for Joseph. Evading his aunt adroitly, he left her with no option but to collapse into Sheila’s arms, where she managed a creditable spasm of sobbing.
The younger Overtons and Vernons milled about among themselves. Those with initiative rapidly ordered themselves drinks. Last came heavy-bodied Hugh Overton, Mary’s husband, struggling to escape from the clutches of a heavy overcoat. Clement helped him. ‘Always beastly cold in East Anglia,’ he grumbled to the company in general.
‘How’s the shrink trade going?’ he asked Clement. ‘Still sooth-saying to the sexually repressed?’ In his youth, Hugh had gained a small reputation as a wag.
After a reasonable amount of milling about, and résumés of the journey they had just undergone, they all moved together in a crowd up two steps and into the King’s Arms dining room. As they passed through the glazed double doors, Joseph grabbed Clement by the elbow.
‘I know I’m the senior and all that, but I’m not able to go treat, I’m afraid. I can pay my whack and that’s about all.’
‘Don’t worry, Joseph. This meal was Sheila’s and my idea, so we’ll pay for it.’
‘If father hadn’t been so spineless, we might have owned this town by now. Isn’t life a bummer? Full of “might have beens”, along with all the other nasties.”
‘You’ll probably have the lunch to complain about too. I don’t suppose it’s anything special.’
‘Pity we couldn’t have had a curry.’
‘I don’t eat curry, remember?’
This was said as Clement surveyed the dining room. It was an old room. One might have suspected that, the arts of hospitality having been practised on this site for three or four centuries, tippling, gluttony, gossiping, and other gregarious human failings having filled its spaces to the rafters since the times of Good Queen Bess, something bonhomous might have remained in its atmosphere. But it had been redecorated in the nineteen-sixties, and now was merely an old room.
‘I say, our niece Jean looks good, doesn’t she?’ said Joseph. ‘Divorced so young … Pity she drove her husband away – nice chap, I thought.’
The guests came to the table in clusters, with feigned or real reluctance, and Clement directed where they should sit, making sure that his brother sat next to Jean.
‘I’m glad you’re in command, Clem,’ said Ellen, waspishly.
He grouped the younger people of the Overton and Vernon clans at one end of the table, so that they could make cryptic remarks among themselves. The older members sat at the other end, assembling themselves rather moodily in their unfamiliar clothes as Sheila said, ‘We can be happy together, alth
ough it is a sad occasion. Madge wouldn’t want to see us looking miserable.’
No one answered her, although Joseph glanced across and gave her a nod of approval before plunging back into conversation with Jean.
They kept their voices low. The chilly atmosphere of the dining room got to them. The table had been laid with a white cloth. Withered white carnations drooped in two silver-plated vases. There were white bone china side plates and paper napkins, and white china salt and pepper pots in the shape of imitation igloos. The impression was of a table set more for an ice age than a meal.
Sheila began talking calmly and remorselessly to Doris Vernon and her husband sitting next to her. Launching out on the price of vodka in various Oxford shops as compared with the Duty Free shop in Heathrow, and taking relative proofs into consideration, she moved easily into the psychology of flying long distances, pointing out that motivation as well as the basic technology was needed. With this example to encourage the party, a thin trickle of talk emerged from them; good humour developed as a thin waiter poured a thin red wine.
April rain came scudding down outside, an element twinned with the clear soup served inside. Jean laughed at Joseph’s jokes. Someone in the kitchen was having a violent fit of coughing.
Both Mary Overton and Doris Vernon resembled their dead sister. They had been tall, although now they were beginning to crumble, gazing out on what was left of their world through thick spectacles. In repose, Mary’s face had a mournful expression of surprise, as if she was saying, inwardly, ‘Oh dear, that’s what’s happened, is it?’ The younger of the two, Doris, looked rather more formidable, although still mournful when not imbibing the soup; her expression inclined more towards, ‘Well, don’t let this happen again.’
These two slightly differing expressions, etched on their respective faces with increasing emphasis over the years, owed much to the influence of their spouses. Hugh Overton, Mary’s husband, was known as a moody man who had long outgrown any notoriety as a card; with the years, his jests had turned to jibes and his jibes had turned against his wife, perhaps because she excelled him in an area where he had expected little competition, intelligence. He had conducted a furniture business in North London; now, in the years of his retirement, he haunted secondhand shops and auctions, making occasional purchases which Mary neglected to polish.
Doris’s fate had been more dramatic than her sister’s. Her husband, Claude Vernon, had been a young lawyer in Bury St Edmunds. After she had borne him three children, he had run off with one of his clients, a South American lady called Dolores Beltrao do Soares. They had fled to a small island in the English Channel, Elbit, the property of Dolores’s uncle, to escape the lady’s husband. There it had been love among the sheep, until the husband arrived by motor launch with a rifle, in a well-sustained jealous rage.
The intruder had threatened to shoot both his wife and Claude, but they had somehow fallen to talking, possibly about sheep-breeding, with such intensity that Dolores, whose interest in sheep was at a low ebb, had snatched the rifle and shot her husband. He had been taken to a hospital in Weymouth, where he died; Dolores was arrested for murder. The trial, with its romantic ingredients – lust, weaponry, small island, adultery, and sheep – had received wide and sensational coverage. Claude Vernon had been expelled from the Bar. Dolores got a two-year sentence for manslaughter.
Claude went back to Doris and the three children. Far from being apologetic, his attitude was that of a man who had instigated high and desperate adventure. He persuaded Doris, at least temporarily, to take the same point of view. She accepted him back into the family home.
But the high and desperate adventure, coupled with difficulty in finding a suitable job, had unsettled Claude’s disposition. Doris’s mood of acceptance slowly changed to one of resentment, coupled with some envy. She gradually withdrew herself from her husband and children; rheumatism had taken her like a rusted weathervane and frozen her in that attitude. She walked and now sat at the table with a perceptible tilt to starboard, leaning away from what she loved and hated.
Although this adventure had taken place in the late thirties, when such affrays were as common as record-breaking flights across the Atlantic, and when Doris and Claude were in their early thirties, the mark of it was still on them, half a century later – and upon the relationship between the sisters; for Mary’s life, despite the jibes and the furniture, had been very dull. She still showed some envy of her sister, whose photograph had appeared in the Daily Graphic and other newspapers, as if Doris had been the one run away with rather than from. Doris, too, was able to luxuriate in her brief fame, when not punishing her husband for it; so that the pleasant sibling friendship they had enjoyed as children had long drained away. In Mary’s presence, Doris came more than usually to resemble the celebrated Tower of Pisa.
Stepping up the ‘Well, don’t let this happen again’ expression, Doris now addressed the company in general, saying, as pallid translucent strips of fish were brought in on cold plates, ‘Madge’s was a long widowhood. She was a gentle creature who deserved better of life, in my opinion.’
‘I wonder what God’s opinion was,’ said Jean, and then looked horrified at what she had said. ‘I mean, granny wasn’t at all what you would call religious. She never went to church.’
‘She went to church a lot when she was young,’ replied Doris.
‘We all had to go to church then, Doris,’ said her sister, speaking in a reproving tone as if for the entire C. of E. ‘If you can remember those days.’
‘And she went to church a lot after she married Ernest,’ said Doris, in a conclusive way, ignoring Mary’s remark.
‘That would be when her first child died, wouldn’t it?’ asked Joseph. ‘I mean, that poor little thing, which would have been my elder sister …’ He looked poker-faced at Jean as he spoke. ‘Mater remained heart-broken about that until Ellie was born. The Almighty is a bad listener and made the mistake of sending her a boy – me – as replacement first time round.’
‘That’s no way to speak, Joe, really,’ said Doris. ‘Madge cried her eyes out for that poor little darling.’
‘Prayer should be an end in itself,’ said Joseph. ‘It’s an end, not a means. The Buddha knew that. If you get an answer, it comes from yourself, and it’s a miracle.’
‘Well, it would be a miracle if you got an answer from yourself, wouldn’t it?’ said Hugh Overton, with a laugh. He was not attending much. Senility was setting in and he was assisting it with an overdose of the thin wine. Clement summoned the waiter for another bottle.
‘We haven’t any more,’ said the waiter.
‘What do you mean, you haven’t any more?’
‘What I say. That was our last bottle.’ The waiter spoke as from a deep sense of injury, and sucked his mouth in, as though he would say much more, were he so minded, and were it not so chilly.
‘Bring us something like it, then.’
‘Well done, Clem, but don’t over-tax the local resources,’ Joseph said, nodding across the table. ‘Remember, this country lapsed into barbarism when the Romans left and has yet to recover.’
‘Of course, you’re a socialist, aren’t you?’ said Claude, scowling. A cheer came from someone at the other end of the table.
Silence descended. In due course, the beef was got through, and they were served something called ‘gateau’. This was the first time they had warm plates. The gateau was white in some parts and brownish in others, rather like decomposing flesh, with a grey imitation marble topping which broke into gravestone-shaped segments when tackled, thus preparing the diners for the ceremony which was to follow after the meal.
‘Nice wine,’ said Hugh. ‘Some brandy would help fend off the cold.’
‘Brandy at the bar,’ said the waiter, over the guests’ heads, rattling the dirty plates as he started to clear away.
The Nettlesham cemetery, like the King’s Arms dining room, held little comfort for the living. Nor did it reflect much credit on the
dead, who might be reckoned indifferent to ecological niceties. Unlike the great mortuary enclosures of France and Italy, little grandeur flourished here, and no sense of occasion. The monuments raised were mainly skimpy and conventional, pocket having triumphed over piety in the minds of the recently bereaved. Neither flowers nor stones were deployed with imagination. Instead, the defunct had been interred within little oblong prisons like disused men’s toilets, outlined by curbs the colour of frozen pig’s liver. The memorial stones carried only names and dates – rather less information than an identity card. It was hard, looking about Nettlesham’s windy cemetery, to imagine that anyone buried there had been much loved, or that anyone attending their burial had been much moved. The more recent the stone, the more this seemed to be the case.
Madge Winter’s coffin went down into the gravelly ground close to where her husband lay. Clement stood clutching Sheila’s hand. She gave a great sob.
He also felt close to tears which the bitter Nettlesham wind encouraged. His parents’ history was now closed. His father had decided to stay in Cornwall when war broke out, for safety’s sake, fearing that in Suffolk they would all be bombed. Such property as he held in Lowestoft had to be sold for a song. Such money as he had had been invested in a small newsagent’s and tobacconist’s business in Bude. The family lived in cramped conditions over the shop, putting up the blackouts every night.
Ernest Winter worked and scrimped throughout the war, growing more taciturn as time went by. The lady now being lowered into the gravel, however, had flourished. In the shop she was always able to find someone to talk to. She began to organize things about the town. She became, in a small, parsimonious way suited to the times, a social success. Clement remembered her from that period, when he was still in short trousers, as delightful company, full of jokes and stories. His mother had also been a good cook. The war served as a challenge to her culinary expertise. By using the barter power of the shop’s stock, some of which was on ration, she could procure for her family prime hams, salmon, turkey at Christmas, and a regular stream of eggs. Barter was a joke to her. Everything that happened in Bude could be turned into a joke in Madge Winter’s reckoning. This was her manic phase. After the war, she ran out of steam.
