by Brian Aldiss
Josie had her problems. Her husband was working for the Saudi-Arabians, while she was left in Nettlesham with two young teenage children to look after. She lived in a semi-detached, and the people in the other half of the semi, the Dowkers, were making her life a misery. Mr Dowker had three strong teenage lads, about whom Josie had been to the police several times. She had proof they had killed her cat and hung it from her clothes line. They drilled holes through the bedroom wall in order to spy on her daughter.
Joe had his arm round Iris and was telling her of ways to be happy. ‘I don’t want to be happy,’ she said, protestingly. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I just want to enjoy life. I’m still young, but this bloke Eddie won’t let me alone. He keeps popping up. I told him, I said, I am not interested any longer, and I hate the smell of kebabs, but he said to me, Where I come from it’s never a case of not being interested, you can’t be not interested once you’ve started. So I told him, I said, Well, this is England, and in England it’s quite usual for people not to be interested any old day of the week they please, but then you see he says—’
‘Why don’t you look at it this way, Iris? I’ve had a lucky life, really, done a lot of things I wanted to do, though sometimes I think it has been a pretty miserable one, until I see how other people are getting on. And I believe that you have to fill your life with something. The truth is that in evolutionary terms, the human race was not properly created. We’re neither animal nor angel, and we just don’t know what to do with our lives. I’ll get you another gin in a minute.
‘Your generation wasn’t brought up on the Bible, but I was, and I think that human life’s like the Third Day. You know God is supposed to have created the world in seven days. On the Third Day, he created the sea in one place and the dry land in another, and he caused grass to grow everywhere. It was a terribly boring dump, and evidently the Almighty had to have a bloody good think before he decided what to do next. The human mind’s like that. Just grass and dry land and the odd patch of ocean to begin with. We each of us have to think what else should go there. And we actually have the option. We stock it with obsessions, assumptions. I won’t go into mine, but basically I was rejected at birth and from that rejection I’ve managed to fill my mind. The point I’m trying to make is that we’re actually in charge from the Third Day on – we can choose what to put in all that space. We have to choose unless we’re to become basket cases. We have to choose whether to be educated, to accept education, we have to choose whether to be good or bad, we have to choose whether to be happy or miserable. As a French philosopher once said, we are neither as happy nor as miserable as we think. We really do make choices in all the vital areas DNA doesn’t predetermine. The difficulty is, that the choices we make are based emotionally on all the chance things that happened to us on Day One and Day Two, which we don’t remember because we were too young and unformed. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘Sort of. You mean the Bible’s true, after all?’
‘No, I bloody don’t. Look, I’ll explain. You’re so involved with this Eddie because whether you realize it or not you need to be. Something in his foreignness attracts you, but you could chuck it all if you really wanted. Throw it off like a coat. Be someone different tomorrow. Character isn’t permanent, choice is. I nearly married a Chinese girl once, just because she was so unlike my mother I thought she wouldn’t skip out and leave me.’ He roared with laughter.
‘What do you do?’ Iris asked. ‘What’s your job?’
‘I’m a historian of the Far East.’
‘I think maybe Josie and me had better be going. It’s getting late.’
When the pub closed, and Clement and Joseph were ushered out into the cold, they proceeded up the dark street arm in arm, Joseph at least in the best of spirits.
‘I don’t know what Sheila will say,’ Clement remarked.
‘She was nice, wasn’t she? Iris. Sweet little person, easy-going at heart, I’d say, but pretty stupid.’
‘What on earth were you telling her?’
‘What she needs is a good man. No, maybe not – who knows what people need? She wouldn’t come with me. What was I saying? Just trying to cheer her up. She’s got problems.’
‘You should hear Josie’s problems. One feels so compassionate. You were giving Iris some nonsense about choosing the way you live. It was nonsense, utter nonsense – well, I thought it was nonsense, although I didn’t catch exactly what you were saying. Anyhow, you were very optimistic.’
‘I’m always optimistic. This parental stuff – it isn’t going to bite so hard from now on. I’m determined.’
‘Why don’t you go and see someone?’
Joseph did not answer. He gave his brother’s shoulders an affectionate squeeze. They turned a corner and the Gryphon lay ahead.
‘Glad I left this fucking town.’ He sketched with a free hand what passed in the gloom for an airy eighteenth-century gesture. ‘Remember Westlake – “I was a crippled goat that lost its way. But took delight in being all astray.”’
Sheila was sitting in the cosy bar of the Gryphon, saying farewells to a young couple who were about to leave. Joseph went up to her and became heavily gallant in a drunken way, clutching her about the waist, while Clement looked on, laughing.
‘Get off me, Joe! You’d better not drive back to Acton in that state.’
He persisted. ‘We’ve just been celebrating the great event, Sheila, dear Sheila – burying the old girl, you know. She’ll be with the angels this evening!’ He put his hands together in mock-piety and rolled his eyes upwards, allowing Sheila to stand back and confront him. Something changed in the generous planes of her face. Suddenly, she was Green Mouth, standing no nonsense from anyone.
‘Joe, I’ll tell you something. You are just a baby, and a rather noxious one at that. Why can’t you show some love, or at least respect, for your mother? Have you ever had a moment’s pity for her, poor woman? You’re a self-dramatizing bastard, entirely self-centred—’
‘I know all this,’ he broke in. ‘Known it ages … Not again, old girl. Virtue makes me want to throw up.’
She pushed Clement away as he moved to her side.
‘Throw up if you like, but first listen to me. The way you go on and on about that dead sister of yours! The first Clem ever told me about you was that you had this hang-up. It’s become your signature tune, your cue for sympathy, your cue to grab centre stage. Can’t you think of something better? Do you like going about acting the cripple? Do you do it so that women can mother you? God, you must be a real mess in bed! You never spare one single thought for how your mother might have felt when her first little baby died, do you? Do you know that the death of a baby is about the worst thing a mother can ever suffer, worse than losing a partner, worse even than rape? Feelings of guilt, inadequacy, failure, utter loneliness—’
‘Sheila!’ Clement took her arm. He could see that she also had been drinking. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she was winding herself up to say more. The young couple stood by the door, ready to leave but longing to hear.
‘Keep out of this, Clem. You only encourage Joe. He has never made any attempt to understand how callously his mother might have been treated by everyone, back whenever it was. It was regarded as a disgrace to give birth to a dead baby. A disgrace. Ernest’s attitude was all important, and he may have blamed her, who knows? Instead of consoling her. The doctor certainly didn’t even let her see or hold the little baby – it would be taken away and shovelled under, and she’d be left to grieve with no memory of it. And then the agony for her, a religious woman, of having the burial in unconsecrated ground …’ She turned on Joseph. ‘When I saw you, when I watched you today, telling your pathetic tale with such relish, such venom – oh, such delicious excitement, I realized your true character—’
‘Stow it, you pompous, preaching woman,’ said Joseph, clenching his fists. ‘You love a scene, don’t you? You’re jealous because I took your precious husband off for a couple of hou
rs. Get back to your best-sellers and leave the legions of the lost to look after themselves.’
Making a disgusted face at Clement, he turned, barged past him, and staggered out into the darkness of the Nettlesham night.
15
An old moon was waning above the roof-tops of North Oxford. The sky over Linton Road was of a purplish blue special to the hour between summer day and night. Even the noise of Sunday traffic on the main road seemed to attune itself to the sensuous pleasure of the moment, as the Winters came away from Carisbrooke. A thorny hedgehog could be heard snuffling in the gutter, hoping for grubs and starlight. The gardens of houses on either side of the street, masked by dusk, so that their general air of neglect did not show, were voluptuously clad in green. Nature was not incompatible with old brick. This suburb had been established long enough for saplings, staked out by Victorian hands, to have developed hearty trunks, and branches which looked in at upper casement windows. They had been generous, those early botanizers, planting out not merely flimsy trees and ornamental cherries but what were now, in effect, grand forest giants, their roots, burrowing through clay under old walls, eventually defining metaphorical ways across ceilings in the form of hairline cracks seeking exploratory courses over coving and plaster. At this silvery hour, appearances suggested that North Oxford had been built in a wood. Oberon and Titania might have emerged from the leafy grounds of Carisbrooke, clad in their academic gowns, without untoward effect.
Clement walked back from College with Sheila beside him. He found that the pain in his left leg was eased if he progressed more slowly than usual. Perhaps in sympathy, she clung to his arm. He was glad of the solid feel of her against him and, enjoying her companionship and the warmth of the evening, felt disinclined to talk. Sheila was conversational; parties always energized her.
‘Nansey Fender-Lieversohn has had such an interesting life,’ Sheila said, and proceeded to regale Clement with some of the details. He half-listened, observing the dying light in the trees while trying to gauge how much pleasure he derived from it. He thought he remembered a performance of Tristan und Isolde in Salzburg, some years ago, where the advent of evening in Act II had been achieved more poignantly. With the recollection came the distant sound of hunting horns.
He and Sheila were returning home from a small party given by Aaron Fender-Lieversohn and his wife Nansey in Fender-Lieversohn’s rooms, before his return to Israel. Fender-Lieversohn had spent a year at Carisbrooke, working on a study of Husserl and phenomenology. Over the year, he and Clement had enjoyed several pleasant conversations. Fender-Lieversohn was a frail man in his late seventies; Clement wondered if they would ever see each other again, and if Fender-Lieversohn would finish his work on Husserl – or even if he wished to finish, while continuance implied creativity, that hallmark of life.
Whilst trapped tête-à-tête with one of the Fender-Lieversohns’ more tedious guests, Clement had been able to overhear part of a nearby conversation between Sheila and Nansey Fender-Lieversohn. Nansey was some years younger than her husband. He already knew – as did most of Carisbrooke – of her involvement with Jean-Paul Sartre, when Aaron’s interests had taken him to Paris, and of how the bright-painted creature had been kidnapped by Sicilian gangsters, had corresponded with Chou En-lai, and enjoyed other enlarging episodes. Her adventures had, in fact, become a topic to be avoided around the College. Her sensationally awful girlhood in Poland was also common knowledge. An anti-reminiscence mafia had sprung up to evade her anecdotes. In Sheila, Nansey had found a new listener, and out came the terrors once again, delivered with glittering eye, while Sheila responded with chirpy cries of, ‘Oh, and to think how happy my childhood was!’ As she retold Nansey’s tales, Clement listened with patience, checking on how accurate Sheila’s short term memory was. It seemed in good fettle this evening, despite a considerable amount of the Fender-Lieversohns’ white wine.
Once they were home, Clement and Sheila went through into the kitchen to make themselves cups of tea. Michelin appeared to be out, which was nothing surprising. They refrained from switching lights on, preferring to be together in the half-dark, enjoying the voluptuousness of dusk, the softening into ambiguity of day’s outlines.
‘You all right? You were walking a bit slowly. Still worrying about what happened to you yesterday in your brother’s flat?’
‘I certainly wonder how exactly to categorize that experience, yes.’
‘Does that affect your leg?’
‘Old Aaron’s interested in phenomenology and how Husserl’s trail led to existentialism, but he doesn’t seem to have investigated the psychology of perception very thoroughly.’
‘Nansey hinted that she had once been the mistress of Martin Heidegger. Was he a phenomenologist?’
‘I don’t think she could have been. She likes to embroider her tales, you know.’
‘You didn’t tell Aaron about your experience yesterday, did you? Wouldn’t that come under the heading of phenomenology?’
‘That’s private. Don’t go spreading it around, will you, or people will think I’m cracking at last. I could have touched Joseph. He was so real.’
‘But you didn’t touch him. So he remains an unclassified phenomenon. Sit down and rest. I’m a bit worried about you, seeing ghosts.’
The kettle was coming to the boil and making a song and dance of it. He sat down, surreptitiously rubbing his calf. He said rather loudly, ‘Significance doesn’t lie in the object itself, but in the object as perceived, however erroneously or distortedly. Husserl appreciated that. And that seems to be as true in science as in analysis.’
‘And that applies to Nansey’s early life?’
‘To everything. To a cup of tea. We regard tea as benevolent. The tannin is actually a deadly drug.’
Sheila laughed, pouring boiling water on to two tea bags, watching the clear water colour as steam rose to her eyes. She said, not looking at him, ‘You don’t really believe that. You’re just saying it for effect. Why do you always try to impress me?’
Despite the wine he had drunk, he was taken aback by the unexpected challenge.
‘That’s the Oxford manner. Everything’s effect, effect is everything. I’m surprised you haven’t contracted it yourself, living in this house in your fantasy world, immune from outside influence. Even at the party, you weren’t talking to any of my colleagues, only to outsiders like Nansey Fender-Lieversohn, who will be leaving Oxford in a week or two anyway. I’ve had to adjust to the environment. Even if it’s only protective camouflage, some of it gets through. Doesn’t matter how foolishly you behave, as long as what you say is either frivolously intellectual or intellectually frivolous.’
She stood immobile in the middle of the kitchen, milk jug in hand, half-raised in the air, as if about to pour a libation.
‘Your colleagues don’t like me. Timid rats! That’s why I talk to outsiders. They’re all male chauvinists and they absolutely hate what I write. Even Maureen criticizes my novels, and says they are not politically aware enough, although my central characters are women. As if Queen Gyronee wasn’t a real independent—’
‘You pay too much attention to Maureen. Ever since she’s made feminism pay.’
‘Oh, shut up. Don’t think I don’t know what people say about my …’
Feeling slightly dizzy, Clement rose from the chair and said, ‘I have to live with these people. If I may quote, we all have our crosses to bear. We all have our John Farrers living next to us. It’s a conformist place, the University, by its nature. No wonder there’s so much mental illness.’
‘Even in Carisbrooke, they only read spy stories. And you love it, Clem, don’t deny it. Oxford was made for you and you for it.’
He fell silent, not happy with the tone in which Sheila delivered this remark. So preoccupied were they with each other that in the dusk they missed the letter awaiting them on top of the refrigerator.
Carrying their cups of tea, they made their way slowly upstairs to bed. The street light o
utside meant that the front of the house was never dark at night. An antiseptic imitation of moonlight seeped round the curtains on to the landing, throwing shadows of pictures and their frames slantwise over the walls.
They sat down on the side of the double bed in near-dark, not bothering to draw the curtains.
‘Did you have lunch with Maureen, or did you work as planned?’
‘Inspiration ran out early. We went to the Perch for lunch. It was crowded.’
‘So you’ve been boozing all day. What a good preparation for Nansey Fender-Lieversohn. And how’s feminism these days?’
He could see in the dimness that she lowered her eyes, looking away from him as if moved by instinct to protect her thoughts.
‘Oh, we had a long talk.’ Said with studied carelessness.
‘Oh? What about? Love? Fecundation?’
‘Maureen was in fine form. Lots of ghoulish sexual anthropology stories as usual. She has nearly finished her latest book on women.’ Sheila folded her hands and looked across them sideways at her husband. ‘It’s to be called People with Breasts.’
‘People with Breasts…’ A sudden gust of laughter took him. Sheila joined in. He sank back on the bed, laughing and protesting that he was sloshed. She lay back with him, giggling and cuddling him.
It was while he was brewing himself a cup of coffee on the following morning that Clement observed the white envelope on the top of the refrigerator. As he took it up, he saw that it bore his name, written in Michelin’s neat handwriting. At once a premonition of dread filled his mind. He tore the envelope open.
The message inside was brief.
Dear Clement,
This is to tell you I shall leave now. I have enough of acting as your housekeeper. You have taken me for granted too much. It is final.
Not all of my things are with me. One will come later to take away more of my possessions. Good-bye to you both.
Michelle
P.S. You can see I sign with my proper name.
