Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  Clement brought a carton of single cream from the refrigerator and poured some into his coffee. He sat down with the note by his cup. He tried as calmly as possible to put aside guilt feelings, which he perceived to be contradictory: on the one hand, self-reproach because he had once tried to seduce Michelin; on the other, self-reproach because he had not tried often enough. He told himself that in some way he had let her down, searching for a sexual reason for this abrupt departure, since sexual motives lay behind most human activity.

  When he had finished his coffee, he went slowly upstairs, taking the note with him. Sheila was just emerging from the shower, stepping naked and powdered into the bedroom. When Clement entered, she hurriedly covered her nudity with a bath towel – an unexpected gesture which registered on him only later.

  ‘A bit of a shock, love,’ he said, holding out the piece of paper. ‘I’m afraid our Michelin’s left us.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, glancing sharply at him as she snatched the letter. ‘That can’t be.’

  She read it hurriedly, in a flurry of perfume.

  ‘I don’t believe it. How can she leave like this?’ Dropping the note on the floor, she tucked the towel more firmly round herself and went to look out of the window, as if hoping to see Michelin there. ‘The woman doesn’t even mention my name. It’s an insult. I’ve always been so careful of her feelings.’

  ‘She was one of the family.’ He wanted to go on to say, ‘She was like a daughter to us,’ but checked himself, not wishing to cause Sheila unnecessary pain. Like a daughter, he thought, she suddenly decided to up and leave. We mustn’t think of this as final. She may come back. Poor Michelin, something’s troubling her. But what a damned nuisance.

  ‘Fuck her,’ Sheila said. She flung her blue towelling robe over her bare shoulders and rushed from the room. He stood where he was, listening as she ran upstairs and banged open the door of Michelin’s room. After a while, she came downstairs again, frowning, biting a finger.

  ‘Well, this is just too much. She’s done a bunk. What does she mean, “acting as our housekeeper”? She lived here free, didn’t she? We looked after her when she was ill. Bloody bitch. Oh, if she’s pinched something …!’

  ‘I don’t suppose she’s pinched anything.’

  She rounded on him angrily. ‘You’re defending her? What’s the meaning of such a stupid letter, after twelve years? Twelve years! We’ve arranged our lives around her. She’s stayed on in the villa in Marbella – had free holidays at our expense, met our friends … This is a fucking insult. Why didn’t she mention me?’

  ‘We don’t know what’s behind it.’

  ‘Oh, God, you’re always so calm, Clem! How are we to manage now? Have you thought about that? Am I supposed to do the housework, like an ordinary housewife? Is that what you expect, because I’m not!’

  He said helplessly, ‘We’ll just have to get someone else. Probably Arthur will know of someone.’

  ‘Arthur?’ She stared at him blankly, frowning.

  ‘Arthur, yes. Arthur Stranks, or his wife. I think they have someone …’

  She walked about the room, saying to herself, ‘Well, this really mucks things up. How thoughtless can you get? What got into the woman? What’s this grumble about her proper name? I suppose she was jealous of me in some way.’ She sighed deeply. ‘We’ll have the police round here next. They’ll have fished her body out of the Isis.’

  ‘Yes, I’m also slightly concerned for her safety …’

  Again she turned on him with a look of contempt. ‘Are you trying to be funny at my expense? God, you’re irritating. Trust you to be “slightly concerned”! I don’t care what’s happened to her, not after she treats us like this. What kind of creature have we been clutching to our bosoms all these years?’

  ‘You’re being melodramatic. We must look for some explanation. There may be a man involved.’

  ‘What man? You know she isn’t interested in men. Never has been. You found that out for yourself, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, there must be some explanation. I must get to work. I’ll ring St Emma’s and see if they know anything about it.’

  She looked almost pityingly at him. ‘Life has to go on as usual, eh?’

  It was Clement’s turn to sigh. ‘I fear it always does, Sheila.’

  ‘Oh, no, it doesn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Gordon Bennett, that’s awful,’ said Arthur Stranks, briskly. ‘I know how upset Cheri will be when I tell her. Er – she knows how much you and Sheila depended on Michelin.’

  ‘Well, we gave each other mutual support,’ said Clement. On arrival at Carisbrooke, he had not been able to keep the impact of Michelin’s dismal note to himself and, rather to his surprise, had told everything to his research assistant.

  Arthur now stood in the bay window, scratching the Scrubbing Brush cut and trying to look for all the world as if something awful had happened to him.

  ‘You hadn’t had any kind of row?’

  ‘Certainly not. We never had rows.’

  ‘Let me drive you round to St Emma’s. I’ve got the car. We can find out straight away what they know about her. I’ll just ring Cheri and let her know what’s happened.’

  ‘Oh, no, Arthur, really, that isn’t necessary, is it?’ He was disturbed by the way his assistant seemed to be taking over Michelin’s disappearance, and waved his hands to reinforce the seriousness of his protest.

  ‘Perhaps there’s something Cheri could do to help. She could go round and see Sheila, perhaps. She’s free this morning because, as I think I mentioned, the library’s putting her on part-time. They’re having to make some cuts.’

  ‘Another of the government’s blows against culture?’

  Even that remark failed to stop Arthur. Bouncing in his trainers, he led the way across the quad to the car park, where his new blue Zastava Caribbean waited. Clement found himself cramped into the front passenger seat, remembering his last lift, when Arthur and Cheri had taken him to see Tina Turner, in the days of the Mini with the printed jokes in the rear window.

  ‘She wasn’t – well, funny, or anything? Michelin?’

  ‘She told me once that her soul was in China.’

  ‘Soul in China? What does that mean?’

  ‘Arthur, sometimes I wish I had taken up a different career and was even now digging up dinosaur bones in Wyoming. I’m no good at dealing with people.’

  ‘That’s cool, coming from you!’ As he spoke, Arthur shot a quick smiling glance at Clement. To Clement, it came as a shock. Good God, he thought, he actually admires me. Or makes a good pretence of it.

  They negotiated the Banbury Road traffic to the sound of Radio One.

  The single window in St Emma’s secretary’s office looked out through leaded panes to an enclosed stretch of lawn, where a bust of someone once illustrious took shelter under a laburnum tree. The diamond pane motif was carried over in the embroidery on the secretary’s cotton shirt, while the glazing was continued by the spectacles she wore on a gold chain about her neck. Two small breasts lay concealed beneath the shirt. She was a birdlike creature of no particular age, with quick movements, glimpses of spiky teeth, and bony little hands which seemed poised as if about to attack an invisible piano. They ceased their foray on a typewriter as she darted a look at the two men. The spiky teeth were revealed in a momentary smile as she said, unhelpfully, ‘Yes?’

  Arthur stated their business in an efficient way.

  The secretary sat down on her hands, as a preliminary to not being helpful, and shook her head, as if she had practised these difficult movements many times. Forestalling her, Arthur, who had Clement firmly in tow, introduced him with full titles.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Dr Winterman, yes, I’m afraid to say that Michelle Bouyat has left St Emma’s,’ the secretary said, retrieving her hands from her sparrowy buttocks.

  ‘When did she leave?’

  Feeling called upon to answer this question standing up, the secretary rose to her sandalled
feet, saying, ‘It wasn’t very convenient for us, really, her leaving before the end of term. So inconsiderate. She went last Friday. Would you like to see the Warden? I think she’s available.’

  ‘Three days ago …’ While Clement and Arthur exchanged thoughtful glances at this evidence of iniquity, the secretary resumed her chair, perhaps as an indication that her duty was done. ‘Just tell me, miss, have you a forwarding address?’

  She rifled through an antiquated card filing system. Arthur, computer born and bred, rolled up his eyes in horror. Peering shortsightedly at a large pink card, the secretary said, ‘We’ve got an address in a place called Saint Enemy.’

  ‘Sainte Enémie,’ Clement corrected her, without thinking. ‘That’s on the Tarn. It’s an old address – her aunt’s, I believe. Did she tell you why she was leaving?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She was going to get married.’

  ‘Married? To whom?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’ The hands were firm about that, and alighted on the typewriter.

  ‘Someone must have asked her that all-too-obvious question. When a lady in her mid-forties gets married, it’s quite an event. Who would know?’

  But the secretary could help them no further. Her manner indicated that she was offended by the assumption that there was something going on to which others were privy and she not. Further questions were met with helpless shrugs and one further glimpse of the front teeth. In the end, Clement and Arthur left, and walked back to the Zastava.

  ‘I’ll ring the Warden later,’ Clement said. ‘I have some slight acquaintance with her. We’ve met once or twice at dinner.’

  When they got back to the College, he phoned Sheila, but their number was engaged. Sighing, he turned to work, and was soon engrossed in the early weeks of 1940.

  Arthur presented him with three new letters, one from a correspondent in New Zealand who had been a child in Coventry when that city was bombed by the Luftwaffe and remembered the cathedral burning. The other two were from correspondents who had written before, answering Clement’s forms, and had essentially nothing fresh to add. They wrote for the pleasure of talking about what one correspondent referred to, without apparent cynicism, as ‘the good old days’. It was a matter of conjecture as to how much these correspondents could be said to have adapted, not to the war and its upheavals, but to the peace which followed.

  On his way home that evening, he visited the post office in North Parade to buy Sheila a box of her favourite Belgian chocolates. Directly he let himself in the front door, the emptiness of the house struck him. Closing the front door softly, he stood for a full minute in the hall, listening to the silent signals emanating from various rooms.

  He directed his gaze up the stairs. Here were ranged some of the Victorian and Edwardian oils which Sheila collected: a Leighton, a Peacock, and a Stone, leading towards her two favourite John Collier puzzle paintings which hung in her sitting room upstairs. At the top of the flight of stairs, he could just see from where he stood an etching of Poynter’s sinister ‘Faithful Unto Death’. He looked, however, not at the framed pictures but at the shadowy vacancy before them – expecting, for a superstitious moment, that his brother might appear again.

  Clement felt tired and dispirited, and went through to the drinks fridge in the kitchen to pour himself a Cinzano on the rocks laced with vodka. He observed that the bottle of Smirnoff he and Sheila had brought Michelin from New York had gone. Walking into the conservatory, he dropped the chocolates in a wicker armchair. He picked up the Independent, but dropped that too after a minute’s desultory scanning of the headlines.

  Gyronee, Queen of Kerinth, was still staring into the future from her alcove. The doglike thing by her feet appeared to be looking direct at Clement. He had never trusted it.

  If only Juliet had lived, she might have been here to greet me.

  Making an effort, he forced himself to go and inspect Michelin’s room. She had folded her duvet neatly and piled her used towels, also folded, on top. A calendar of France for 1987 hung open at June on one wall. All her personal effects had been removed, except for two large suitcases standing by the door. A faint scent of perfume was traceable in the air. He reflected on the nature of the person who had shared his and Sheila’s lives for so long. She had entered their existence casually, one day on a mountain road, and had as casually left it. Was she happy about the prospect of marriage, or did the abruptness of her farewell note indicate otherwise?

  Not to have her help during the party on Thursday was going to be difficult. Perhaps they should cancel the party. No, that would be to give away their precious privacy, to start rumours. Perhaps Cheri Stranks would come and assist.

  He thought of Sheila. ‘I’m enjoying it too much to stop …’ Well, she had stopped, and no doubt Arthur Hernandez was as absent from her mind as he was from Clement’s. The upset of Michelin’s disappearance would drive him even further. Right now, she was most likely at a SOW meeting. SOW was the Society of Oxford Writers she had helped found. Even distinguished writers like A. N. Wilson had joined, to her delight. They would simply have to grow accustomed to Michelin’s absence.

  In his study, he rifled through Joseph’s papers rather aimlessly, then lay on his couch and dozed for ten minutes, the Cinzano beside him.

  In contrast with his wife’s Colliers, all that Clement’s study had to offer in the way of the pictorial was a severe 1927 Kandinsky, which Sheila had bought him at a New York auction.

  The silence of the house weighed on him. Joseph seemed to be in a dream he had, but when he woke the contents of the dream eluded him – as perhaps after death, he thought, the contents of life might elude one.

  He went over to the boxes containing Joseph’s literary remains, conscious of a slight resentment of his brother. Michelin’s unexplained disappearance gave him a feeling of being incapable of managing his life; the present had to be negotiated, without these encumbrances from the past.

  He sat down on the edge of his couch with a hardbound notebook labelled ‘Book of Dreams’, to which Joseph had stuck a Chinese gift tag. The tag showed an undulant Chinese lady carrying a fan and trailing long flimsy silk scarves from her wrists. She appeared to be beckoning.

  His intention was to study again one of Joseph’s dreams to which the latter had attached special significance. But, flipping through the unlined pages, he discovered writing at the back of the book. Turning it upside down, he began to read. Here were more of Joseph’s Eastern jottings. He opened with fragmentary accounts of what he called Three Great Disasters, the killing of perhaps ten million Chinese by Soekarno’s and Suharto’s governments in Indonesia, the Rape of Cambodia, and the Chinese Catastrophe under Mao Tse-tung. These appeared to be preliminary notes for a longer treatment, which Clement had in his possession.

  The notes ended. Next, the pages were filled with a small script where Joseph had written accounts of his visits to brothels and his affairs with women. Each entry was dated. The years covered were the early seventies, when Joseph had been abroad preparing contributions to a guide to the East. Some entries were several pages long. Joseph had noted down things of interest the women said, together with details of their anatomies and descriptions of their breasts and sexual organs.

  The entries were interspersed with aphoristic cries like, ‘Predatory man always turns victim’, ‘In every love affair there is one who pursues and one who falls flat on his face: both are I’, and, in imitation of de la Rochefoucauld, ‘We are neither as whored nor as abhorred as we think.’

  Although he had settled himself to read, Clement soon grew impatient. Box File No. 3 on his window sill contained similar accounts of sexual adventure in a variety of cities, from Rangoon, Saigon, Penang, and Phnom Penh to Palembang, Djakarta, Hanoi, and Hong Kong. Box File No. 3 also revealed that Joseph had put some of his reminiscences together and sold them to the Luxury Life Limited Edition Club of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, under the pen name of Michael Meatyard, Duke of Suffolk, England. The resultant book b
ore the title, Eastern Arousals: Memoirs of a Dissolute Duke.

  Joseph had travelled farther than his brother from the stifled respectabilities of Nettlesham and Bude. While Joseph, unlike some Casanovas, appeared genuinely to like women and enjoy their personalities, it was open to doubt whether he knew any of them as intimately as Clement thought he knew Sheila. Pondering this contrast, his thoughts went to his old father, forever at work in his shop and rising at five each morning to collect the day’s newspapers from Bude railway station. What would Ernest Winter have made of the careers of his two sons, had he known of them? What would he have made of Kandinsky, come to that? Both he and Joseph had escaped from their father’s narrow way of life.

  And yet. Ernest Winter had had little to say in those long years of his working life. He had never complained. He had spoken of nothing that Clement could remember beyond the immediate affairs of the newsagent’s shop. As far as his family could tell, he had no imaginative life. He had remained closed. The rest of the family had pursued their own emotional concerns, virtually ignoring Ernest. He had died of lung cancer in the end: or rather, Clement thought, cancer, work, disillusion. Joseph had hated his father. Yet Clement had found something to admire in that long-sustained silence; and something in it he had unwittingly imitated and incorporated into his own character.

  He turned to the series of dreams in Joseph’s book, leafing to the final entry. This he now re-read, concentrating with effort and having occasional recourse to his Cinzano.

  There is a flaw in the universe (Joseph had written in his neat longhand). The Greek dramatists knew it. The good and the innocent suffer along with the rest. I have suffered so much that I am now neither good nor innocent. But being moderns means this: we understand that the flaw in the universe is inside us. What Aeschylus could have done, had someone explained to him about genetic inheritance and the eternal artistries of the DNA spiral!

  Yet a flaw is not a fatal wound. However much I have suffered, I have not been utterly destitute of hope. I am visited by a cheering recurrent dream. This I set down now in some doubt, fearing that to drag that precious dream into the open may drive it away for good.