Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  The shop flourished in a meagre way throughout most of the fifties. Ernest Winter bought a small bungalow nearby, in which the family could live more comfortably. Anchored in the thirties as it was, the shop and its trade did not survive the sixties. Ernest sold up and retired. His wife, missing the company, got a job in the large newsagent’s shop, one of the chain which had put them out of business. Ernest was furious. The couple lived for some years on bad terms. By that time, Clement was doing psychiatric work in London, and rarely made the journey down to Cornwall to see his parents. His father died in 1969 – ‘in a bit of a huff’, Joseph had said. His widow again managed a new lease of life, and went to live in a flat near her sisters, where she took harmlessly to drink. Latterly she had shown little interest in her sons, though her old affectionate link with Ellen was maintained.

  The sisters, Mary and Doris, wept in chorus as the coffin went into the hole, perhaps foreseeing that their turn was next. Ellen also cried for her mother – the person in the world who had doted on her most – but in silence, as Jean held her hand.

  The parson went through the traditional service, a cleverly compiled series of condolences and veiled threats. Afterwards, Hugh Overton took a photograph of them all, just before they began to straggle towards the distant yews and lych-gate which marked the cemetery entrance.

  Joseph caught up with Clement and Sheila, thrusting his hands deep in his pockets for warmth.

  ‘Well, that’s seen both of them buried,’ he said. ‘Whatever the rights or the wrongs of the case, they’re gone, and now it’s our generation in the firing line.’

  ‘Go easy on the relish,’ said Clement, grumpily. ‘Let’s at least get out of the cemetery before you start sneering.’

  ‘Don’t go pious on me, please.’ After a moment, Joseph said, ‘You notice anyone missing in the roster of the dead, Clem? Perhaps you have no cause to recollect, as I certainly have, that our dear deceased parents spawned four children, not three. There was also the little steel-engraving angel, their first child, who died after six months, remember? Aren’t you a mite astonished to find no stone raised to her, considering the misery her death caused mother at the time?’

  Clement looked curiously at his brother, whose tone contained both jocularity and bitterness. The chilly breeze had blown Joseph’s hair across his eyes, giving him a desperate look.

  ‘I never thought about it.’ Not for the first time, his brother’s intensity made him uneasy.

  ‘Grandfather and grandmother are buried here. Mother and father are buried here. This is some far corner of a foreign Nettlesham that is forever Winter. Where, then, is the little steel-engraving angel buried?’

  ‘Why do you call her that?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘Old associations. She’s the prime cause of this pilgrim’s regress. And because as far as I know the little paragon never had a name. Or mother kept it secret.’

  They dawdled while this conversation was taking place, so that Ellen, dry-eyed now, and Jean, could catch up with them.

  ‘There’s a bird singing,’ Jean said. ‘Isn’t that in rather bad taste?’

  Joseph turned and took Ellen’s arm.

  ‘That little dead sister which had such an effect on our lives when we arrived reluctantly on the scene – what was her name?’

  Ellen looked puzzled. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Joe. Does it matter after all this time? I know you’ve always had this kind of grudge against Mum and Dad, but they did the best for us they could, by and large. It’s an awful subject. I think so. Always blame the mothers … Mothers are only human like the rest. I keep telling Jean. Mothers have their troubles too. You ask too much. We all meet with disappointments. Here we stand … If Mother’s poor dead baby had a name, she never spoke it to us. Perhaps she never spoke it to Dad, either. Perhaps if she spoke it at all she’d have burst into tears.’

  She clutched her coat to her thin frame and looked reprovingly at Joseph.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Jean said, and sighed.

  Joseph brushed his hair back from his eyes and looked at the distant memorial church.

  ‘You’ve given in, Ellie. I haven’t. I have a surprise for you. In fact, I know the answer to the questions I’ve just been asking. I’ve almost laid the ghost of that little steel-engraving fiend. Just this morning I did it, before lunch …’ He struck his chest with an open hand. ‘“Art thou weary, Art thou languid, Art thou sore oppressed? Come to Me, said One, and, coming, be at rest …” That doesn’t mean what you may think,’ he said, with a sly look at Jean, standing next to him. ‘I’ve been busy laying demons to rest which have been torturing me for half a century and more. I’ll tell you all about it if we can go round to your hotel, Clem and Sheila, and get a civilized drink. Failing that, we could have an uncivilized one at my van, where I have a bottle of whisky stashed. How about it?’

  They stood in a rather English way, indecisively on the gravel, discussing what the chances were that the Gryphon would provide drink at three in the afternoon. They said goodbye to Mary Overton and Doris and Claude Vernon and their relations in a way indicating warmth of heart without enthusiastic liking.

  ‘We want to get away from Nettlesham just as soon as we can,’ said Doris, as if condemning those who stood chatting at the entrances of graveyards. ‘This is a chilly part of the world.’ She gave them a farewell wave. Hugh straggled after her, still trying to deal with his ill-fitting coat.

  ‘See you next funeral,’ he said, as he passed Clement.

  ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ asked Jean, with a touch of impatience. ‘I support Uncle Joseph. I vote we go to the Gryphon and see how we get on. The least they can do is give us a cup of tea.’

  Agreeing that funerals made them thirsty, they moved on, and drove in their three vehicles to the hotel.

  There, because the manager was agreeable and Sheila was carrying the Good Hotel Guide, they were served a round of drinks in a snug back parlour, the manager himself presiding.

  He was a small rotund man, built round a tomato nose cleverly underlined by an upwardly mobile moustache. His blue eyes, also round, peered out on his little world with nervous intensity. He had evidently decided that, despite his build, he was the stuff the military are made of, since he sported commando-style boots, cavalry twill trousers, and a club tie on a white shirt under what appeared to be an old deflated life-jacket. He spoke a strangulated English pepped up with the odd French word, to indicate the tone of his establishment.

  ‘I’m without auxiliary assistance this p.m., malheureusement, life being what it is. But don’t let the thought decommode you. Think of me as entirely à votre service, n’est-ce pas? Enjoy yourselves, drink away.’ Snatching a covert glance at Sheila’s Good Hotel Guide, he addressed her more particularly. ‘Your wish is my command. Give me a bell and I shall appear toute suite from the nether regions.’

  He disappeared. They heard him scuffling behind a curtain. Next moment, muzak filled the room.

  They looked at each other round the table, said ‘Cheers’, and drank.

  ‘I didn’t think Claude looked at all well,’ said Ellen, stealing a glance at her watch. ‘We mustn’t be long before we start back, Jean. I’m worried about the dog. He hardly said a word over dinner.’

  ‘Is it true he once ran off with an Argentinian woman?’ Jean asked. The company understood that Claude Vernon was under discussion, rather than Ellen’s dog.

  ‘Brazilian, and only as far as the Channel Islands,’ Sheila said, and all but Ellen laughed.

  ‘Well, Joe, are you going to tell us about this ghost you’ve laid?’ Sheila enquired, putting her head on one side and managing to frown and smile at him at the same time. ‘I’d like to hear a good story.’

  ‘Yes, what’s the mystery, uncle?’ asked Jean. ‘What have you been up to?’

  Joseph hung over his drink. He shook his head slowly. ‘This won’t mean as much to Clem and Sheila, or you, Jean, my girl, as it will to Ellie and me. Every family has layers of history –
little dark corners where others can’t penetrate. I’ve had to hug some bits of my early life to me in secret for years, and I’m glad enough to get rid of them. You might think they’d be buried, but no, they go on and on. Every so often, one surfaces, as today.’

  He looked rather challengingly at them. The only one to speak was Jean, who showed lively interest.

  ‘I’m longing to hear what you’re going to tell us. Surely it’s true that every time someone dies some awful secrets spring out? I’d hate to think I died with a totally unblemished record, as if I’d been a nun. Wasn’t granny married, or something dramatic like that?’

  Joseph turned smiling to her. ‘Madge got married right enough, and to Ernest, your grandfather. They were spliced, as the expression used to have it, just after the end of World War I. Nine months later, they had a baby – a girl.

  ‘It still pains me to talk about that child. It received the affection I never got, like a sponge that sucked up all the nourishment available before I appeared on the scene.’

  Ellen said, ‘Joe, I wish you wouldn’t talk in this way.’ She tapped the table, as if in a feeble attempt to bring her brother to order. ‘I know you suffered a hurt, but – well, it doesn’t do any good to go on like this.’

  ‘Oh yes, it does. It’s a relief just to talk about it. For too many years I kept silent. I never said anything to you when we were kids, close though we were. I was too ashamed. Why did I suffer guilt for their negligence?’

  As he was taking a drink, Jean patted his hand.

  ‘What about this child, then?’

  Joseph turned back to his sister. ‘You remember how that child was held up to us as a paragon, one that could never be excelled? How good it was, how it never cried? Remember all that crap?’

  ‘No, I can’t say I do exactly.’

  ‘I had four years more of it than you did … Anyhow, Ellie, you surely remember that we lived with the legend of the good darling daughter who died tragically at the age of six months?’

  ‘Oh, I remember that. Of course mother was sad about it.’

  ‘Six months, right? How the creature died we were never told – how she went to join the angels, in mother’s immortal phrase. Somehow, I used to imagine her carried off by autumn winds, turning blue and blowing away …’

  Sheila said, as Joseph paused, ‘What year did this unhappy child die? You have no need to grieve about it any longer, surely, Joseph? Can’t you put it behind you?’

  ‘I hate the child, Sheila. I always did. It stole my happiness. My parents didn’t want me, because they yearned for it.’ He covered his face briefly, and then said with forced cheer, ‘Can’t we get monsieur to drag up some more drink? A bottle. Une bouteille, nicht war? You see – I don’t know how I can explain this. Well, old Westlake, that great neglected bard of Nettlesham, had the right idea. His mother died young – i.e., she forsook him, just as mine did. William went mad in the end, but not before knocking out the immortal couplet

  Grief unlike Joy ignores the tick of clock

  ’Til later generations feel its shock.

  ‘If this cherished little wretch lived for six months, then it must have been christened and given a burial in Nettlesham churchyard. Presumably a stone was raised to it by its inconsolable parents. When I turned up here early this morning, I had a snoop round the churchyard. What we military types term a recce … No sign of any stone. Not a marble angel in sight. Ah, monsieur, another round, and turn off the muzak, if you please.’

  The manager of the Gryphon did a slow scuttle to the table and bobbed his head. ‘Enchanté, of course. Just as you wish. And may I say that cakes and tea will be available from my good wife within the next few minutes, for those desirous …’

  ‘That is odd,’ agreed Clement, diving back into the conversation as soon as the manager had rolled away. ‘The child must have had a stone. Would it – she – have been buried anywhere else?’

  ‘Where else?’ asked Joseph.

  ‘Oh, she would have been buried here,’ Ellen said. ‘Where our parents worshipped. They were devout churchgoers at the time, as most of the middle classes were until the war.’

  They looked at Joseph.

  ‘Yes, I solved the mystery,’ he said. He lit a cigarette and sat back, tilting his chair back with him. ‘Since I drew blank at the churchyard, I went to the Town Hall and asked to check in the parish records. I enlisted the aid of a helpful lady clerk who dusted off the register of burials for the year 1920. We know our little angel was born in March of that year, so it should have died six months later, in September. But no entry in the records. Not a sausage. I began to wonder if the little horror had existed at all, if she wasn’t just some ghastly hoax that the parents had decided to play on me, to rob me of the dubious honour of being their first-born.

  ‘The clerk lady was resourceful. She thought to look in an old ledger they had preserved in which were logged payments to gravediggers. The Burial Fees book. This will all sound like Victorian England to you, Jean. To be honest, it does to me too. The book was quite a Victorian relic. Entries in ink, in copperplate … Well, it was sixty-seven years ago. Another age.’ He sighed, then turned the sigh into a laugh.

  ‘So what did it say in the book?’ Jean asked.

  ‘I found it: “Stillborn female child of Mrs Madge Winter, 6 The Square, Nettlesham. Entry No. 5115. Fees taken: Board Fee, 1 shilling, Grave Digger, 1 shilling.’”

  For a moment they were silent, and then all started talking at once. ‘Stillborn!’ exclaimed Ellen. At which point, the manager rolled back with the tray of drinks and an enquiry as to whether they required la musique to be switched on again.

  ‘Stillborn,’ repeated Joseph, when he had left them. ‘And the date of the entry – 20th March 1920. And attached to the entry was a certificate signed by a doctor to show that the delivery of the child had taken place on 18th March, 1920, at 6 The Square …’

  ‘So it didn’t live six months,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Mother always claimed it lived for six months,’ said Ellen. ‘I remember she had preserved a little pink nightdress it was supposed to have worn. You’re sure you’ve got this right, Joseph?’

  ‘At that time, it appears that stillborn infants were buried without a funeral. Because they had not been christened. Great, eh? They could be buried in the cemetery, but only in unconsecrated ground.’ He shook his head in disbelief at some profound wickedness. ‘Do you wonder she haunts me? Unconsecrated ground! And the graves were unmarked. I suppose they just shovelled the little corpse in under the chestnut trees … In a box, I suppose …’

  ‘Oh, uncle, I’m so sorry …’

  ‘No, Jean, I feel all the better for knowing. To know is like laying a ghost.’

  Ellen said, ‘So they lied to us about the child …’

  ‘They? Father never lied. Father never said anything at all about the child. It didn’t exist as far as he was concerned. It was mother who kept on about her.’

  ‘But why lie?’

  ‘It doesn’t require much psychological penetration to see why she lied. What do you think, Clement? You were too young. By the time you were born, long after Ellie had come along to console everyone, that storm was all over.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it a lie,’ Clement said thoughtfully, looking at Sheila. ‘I’d say it was a fantasy. A protective fantasy. Mother was editing her past in order to make it bearable.’

  He caught something in Sheila’s expression, and stopped speaking. They looked into each other’s eyes. Sheila said, ‘Yes. Not a lie. A kindness. Her child was born dead, but in retrospect she could give it six months of life and a Christian burial. That would mean that at least she had held it alive and kicking in her arms, and sucking milk …’

  Joseph rose from the table. He went to the window and stood with his back to it, drawing on his cigarette. ‘Sorry, I realize this is a tender subject for you, Sheila. I’d forgotten for a moment how you lost Juliet. But I’d say you’ve hit the nail on the head. Tha
t six months we always heard about, in which little Blank was such a paragon, was an invention, a protective device. Pathetic, really, wouldn’t you say?’ He looked round challengingly.

  ‘Touching would be my word,’ Sheila said. ‘Tragic.’

  ‘Oh, well, you’re a popular novelist. So that was my discovery today. I discovered that my little steel-engraving angel was truly dead and gone. The knowledge slightly abates some of the torture they put me through …’

  ‘Joe, you are a bit unfair to them,’ Ellen said. ‘They weren’t that bad, were they, Clem?’

  ‘Oh, to you they were great,’ Joseph said. ‘You were the little spoilt apple of mother’s eye. Couldn’t do a thing wrong, got everything you wanted—’

  ‘You’re jealous! You’re still jealous!’

  ‘Not a bit. Ellie, honestly, I pity you. It’s almost worse to be spoilt than neglected. Look how you grew up. Nothing ever satisfied you. Then you married Alwyn, who treated you as if you were his baby rather than his wife. And poor Jean here – haven’t you spoilt her rotten, so that her marriage collapsed after a couple of years? Jean, that bloke of yours was okay. You ought to go back to him and leave your mother to sort out her own problems.’

  ‘You bastard!’ Jean exclaimed. ‘It’s none of your bloody business why I ditched Bob. He was no good, wasn’t he?’

  ‘I daresay if you told him he was no good often enough, he came to believe it.’

  Ellen stood up, steadying herself with one hand on the table. ‘If that’s really the time, then Jean and I must be on our way. Joe, I’m sorry you see fit to spoil a pleasant occasion …’

  He laughed. ‘Mother’s funeral – a pleasant occasion! You said it, I didn’t. Sorry, Ellie, you know me, can’t keep my mouth shut.’

  ‘You should learn to. Silence is golden, especially in families. How else can they stick together? I’ve certainly had my troubles and I’ve learned not to complain.’