by Brian Aldiss
He was lying flat on the couch in his study, thinking of the years that had gone by, so many, so soon, when there was a cautious knock on the door and Cheri Stranks entered.
‘Are you all right, Clement! I wondered if there was something wrong?’
Faintness had overcome him. He smiled, a mockery of a smile, and sat up, planting his feet carefully on the floor.
‘Aren’t you well? You do look a bit sick. Can I get you a gin or something?’ She looked alarmed. She was a well-built girl, today allowing the world a glimpse of her good legs, her jeans having been discarded for once in favour of a tight black skirt. The best feature of her face, a certain pleasing sharpness, was more observable in profile than from the front. Her eyelashes, thick and artificially darkened, framed two lively brown eyes. Her hair was brown and floated freely about her face; there was nothing of the Scrubbing Brush mode which afflicted her husband.
‘Sheila’s left me,’ he said, adding, so that there should be no mistake, ‘for good.’
She came closer. As yet the pregnancy did not show.
‘I can’t credit it. Left you – at her age!’ Immediately realizing her error, she went on, ‘I don’t mean she’s old at all, it’s just that …’ But the damage was done, and in a moment she stopped speaking. ‘It’s a real bummer, and I’m sorry. Arthur and I have always admired you as the sort of couple …’
Again she stopped. Clement saw how ancient he was in her eyes, and that she had come round, perhaps with some urging from Arthur, to see if there was anything to be done for this poor old couple. He stood up and tried to show a little vitality, but reaction to the scene with Sheila had set in, making him tremble and look older than ever.
He cleared his throat. ‘It is a bummer, you’re right. Whatever a bummer is, it’s this. Oh, I’m sure she’ll come back.’
‘But your wife’s so famous. Everyone’s read her books. Has she – I mean, did she say why …’
‘She’s leaving me for another man, Cheri. He’s younger. He’s flying over from the States to meet her. He’s got the same name as your husband, Arthur. He edits books in New York. Well, he’s Sheila’s editor, as a matter of fact. He stands about five feet nothing. And that’s all I know.’ He laughed feebly, holding his forehead.
‘Perhaps you’d rather I went.’
‘I expect you’d rather go.’ He held out a hand to her. ‘It was sweet of you to come round, Cheri.’
She took his hand and almost immediately let it go in embarrassment.
‘I couldn’t have come round at a worse time, could I?’
Recovering from her startlement, she was now beginning to enjoy the situation, as he could see.
‘I’m glad you’re here. Come down and have a drink with me.’
She looked sceptical, but accompanied him as he made a rather shaky way downstairs. They sat in the kitchen; she drank a white wine and Perrier while he sipped a deep brandy. She sat with her legs crossed. She wore patterned net stockings.
‘I suppose in your profession – well, such things are pretty common,’ she said, breaking a silence. ‘Marriage bust-ups and so on.’
‘I had an elder brother. He died earlier this year. He had a fear of desertion. Perhaps that was the biggest fear of his life. His mother – our mother, I should say – deserted him when he was a small child. She came back, but she always held the threat of desertion over him. It is a terrifying thing to do to a sensitive child. By the time I came on the scene I got better treatment; my mother’s neurosis was in remission. But somehow that fear of desertion by the one one most loves has rubbed off on me … I wasn’t at all prepared. Well, one never is …’
‘My parents never got on too well. Always rowing. There were five of us kids.’ They talked for a little while, but, despite her evident intelligence, it was an unequal conversation.
‘I’ll have to get back to Arthur. He needs the car this evening. He’s got to go over to Abingdon, to a meeting. Why don’t you come back and have supper with us?’
‘You’re enormously kind, Cheri.’ And more than kind, he thought, but of course not always kind. She would have her moods too, docile as she might seem now. She had rested her soft right hand on the table, and he saw there were gilt rings on each of its fingers. It was a beautiful hand, the nails of which were enamelled shell pink. At present that hand slept as far as he was concerned, after its little exercise in being held out to him. And it was accustomed to beckoning husband Arthur towards her. But the day might come – who could tell? – when the hand would be raised with all the force of a policeman’s to halt Arthur’s approach, or to catch another passing man. And then the dainty nails would appear more like claws, and no doubt heart’s blood would flow. But there was no denying it, at this moment she was enormously kind, though the hand could never reach out and touch him with the warmth of Sheila’s.
‘We’ve always admired you, Clement, ever since you came with us to the Tina Turner concert and enjoyed it so much. Generally speaking, your age group doesn’t go a bomb on rock’n’roll. Don’t say no, have supper with us. It’s macaroni cheese.’
‘No, I’ll stay here, thanks. I’d rather. Another time.’
She looked hard at him, then offered a smile. ‘You’ll be okay?’
He laughed. ‘I won’t do anything desperate. Promise.’
When she had gone, he walked about the house, brandy glass in hand. He picked the packet of papadoms off the living room table and threw it in the waste bin.
A plan formed in his mind. He could phone Swain Books in New York and get the number of Arthur Hernandez’s flight. He could check with Heathrow and find what time it landed the next morning. Then he could drive up to Heathrow and shoot both him and her as they came out of Terminal Three.
However, he did nothing. He sat in Sheila’s favourite chair, as unmoving as she generally was, going over the dreadful scene in his mind, trying to analyse it. In retrospect, he was able to appreciate the tension and apprehension in her.
It was his own fault. It was his own fault that Sheila’s hand, the hand that typed all the stories about the fantasy world of Kerinth, had been raised against him. He had never expressed his love enough; oh, he had done all that a husband should or could and possibly more; but Sheila lived by words as well as deeds; her real world, like her fantasy one, must be largely built of words and the need of them. It was a human need. He had never said to her – for instance – for instance, for he was putting himself to an inquisition – he had not talked enough about her novels. He had defended them and her against the prejudiced, had at times been fierce as a tiger. But he had failed to like them, or perhaps just failed to take them seriously enough for her taste. Arthur Hernandez, now – there was a man who took the damned books seriously, who could be said, in his position, to be almost dependent upon them. Creature of Kerinth. The title rose spontaneously to mind. He had emerged, her Latin hero, sparkling from the sugary foam of her fantasy. And there was nothing Clement could do about that.
‘I must not fall into the trap of blaming myself,’ he said aloud. He stood up and sat down again. She was so dependent on her audience. He had seen that in Boston, without realizing all its implications. The novels, which had begun as a substitute for the dead daughter, for little Juliet, had become a substitute for other relationships. She loved Clement, but even more she needed her audience, those warm hearts who found no fault with the Kerinth fantasies and who sent her presents and cards and love. Arturo Hernandez was merely an embodiment of that audience. Rises and falls in sales were received by her as the ardour or coolness of a lover. And here – winging across the Atlantic even now – was the man who had his finger on those sales, the maestro of salesmanship, the astute commercial little man of Swain who had not one word of adverse criticism to offer as long as the product was right.
‘I could have warned her.’
But of course that was impossible. People were not to be warned. He had encouraged her by keeping quiet. He had profited by the enor
mous worldwide sales. After the poverty of his childhood, had they not been ever welcome?
Besides, keeping his trap shut was a habit. Analysis had not changed that. It had appeared that his habit of holding back had been agreeable to her, one of the reasons they had been happy together. Instead of holding back, he should have held her when she tried to go, have been more physical, as Joseph would have been.
And why had Clement held back? What had kept him from ever saying enough to her? Of course it went back to childhood, as everything did eventually. His thoughts returned to that old dull time, as an escaped prisoner’s thoughts must return to his cell. His older brother and sister not wanting him about; then their sudden absence as they got sucked into the global war. His parents, committed to tedious work, rendered more tedious by their religion. Brought up strictly, with everything in short supply. Not like now. The endless preaching that people were wicked and sinful, that happiness was reserved for some vague after-life, and then only for a few, a minority to which he could never persuade himself that he might belong. The conviction that the world was a vale of tears and God had it in for him. The sense that his parents saw it God’s way.
Why had he gone in for analysis, if not to banish that diseased vision of life? How delighted he had been when, in his teens, he had come on one of Freud’s works dismissing religion as neurosis. It had led him on like a torch to new thoughts, new ways of life, better ways.
But, despite his analysis in Berlin, despite the easy adult life he had lived, so full of surface pleasure, that infernal picture set up in childhood had evidently persisted. He had known secretly that life was grim, and had its revenge on those who smiled and drank wine and made love, and that one day … one day, unsuspecting, a man would discover that the whole easy fabric would be torn from the place where he lived, to reveal the bare stones of misery. And those who had lived the easy bourgeois life would feel it worst, and be flung down hardest.
What was he going to do now? What was left for him? His father would have said, glowing with schadenfreude, as his way was, ‘That’s what you get …’
That’s what you get … As if the phrase contained a profound truth, beyond which nothing could fruitfully be said.
He wished he had told all that to pretty Cheri, a little earlier, to warn her. There must be some way of warning people what to expect.
That’s what you get … He found he was standing looking at his widespread hands, as if to convince himself that what he got was nothing. He ran upstairs, ignoring the pain in his leg, and stared into Sheila’s study, assuring himself she was not there. Everything in the clotted cream factory was as usual, except that the room did not live without Sheila’s presence. It had become a photograph of itself. On the rear wall, the large painted mazooms and crichts, inhabitants of Kerinth’s moon, stared at Clement with their large cat eyes. That’s what you get, they said.
He went listlessly downstairs again, wandering about, wondering what could possibly be done. It came to his memory that he had arranged a party for Thursday evening. Friends would be arriving at six o’clock to celebrate Sheila’s return from the States and to drink to her new novel. He dismissed the thought irritably. He would worry about that in the morning. There were more important issues to worry about. Of course he would be disgraced; he took that for granted. Going to the patio windows in the rear of the house, he looked at the dull evening trapped between the walls of the garden. The sun, striking through a band of cloud over Walton Street, lit the maple in the Phillips’ garden nearby so that all its wet leaves gleamed. Its shadow fell on the Winters’ garden. The swimming pool lay motionless, its surface blank as a sleeping face.
He felt a sudden unity with Joseph, who had been pursued by a fear of desertion for ever after his mother’s betrayal, and had fought the fear, leading as vivid an existence as possible – preferably in the Far East, as distant from the scene of the crime as could be.
He saw more clearly than ever that it was not only the desertion and that expulsion from the family home on the day – the very hour – of Ellen’s birth which had so scarred Joseph, but the way in which those heedless acts had come as confirmation of a whole prior history of maternal deprivation, dating from his birth, that birth over which the steel-engraving angel had presided so decisively.
The dreadful thoughts would not allow him peace. He could no longer bear to stay in the house alone. Bursting through the silent rooms as if pursued, he ran out of the front door, slamming it behind him – to the evident satisfaction of both Farrers, alert in their front garden – and walked with uncharacteristic rapidity in the direction of the Woodstock Road and Wolvercote, as if all the steel-engraving angels in the world were pursuing him.
17
Clement’s night was a restless one. Often he imagined Sheila, lying somewhere in a hotel bed in London, must also be restless. He slept in fits and starts, waking late after a vivid dream.
After showering, he dressed and went down to eat a piece of toast in the kitchen. Memory of the dream returned. He had been in Australia, an hour before dawn, waiting for the sun to rise. Already it was hot. Other people jostled by him. He could not see their faces. In the tall, dead, brittle, elephant grass, a creature like a dog roamed. He had looked towards the west, where a great black rock loomed between him and the sky. The dawn, because this was Australia, was postponed several times, but he knew it would come, and this knowledge filled him with happiness.
The question he asked himself was, why did this fragment make him happy, and how did he connect it with Sheila?
He set the question aside for a time, while he sorted out the mail. Most of it was for Sheila, as usual, many letters in familiar American air mail envelopes. There was a bill for him and a letter addressed in writing he recognized as Michelin’s. He slit it open with a buttery knife.
Dear Clement and Sheila,
It is necessary that you think badly of me to leave in my hurry without informing you both. I deeply beg forgiveness. But I cannot bear your questions.
You know my age. Time goes by. I have fallen in love with a man of a year less than me. He is rich, in fact a lawyer, and from my region of France. We know each other only since a week, but it is the REAL THING! This I need so desperately. But I could not stand your eyes upon me when I tell these things.
We will fly to Nice in only a few hours. Then I will write to you again. Now, my thoughts are in a tempest!
Sincerely,
Michelin
‘Poor dear Michelin!’ he said aloud. ‘There seems to have been an outbreak of love here. Perhaps I should have the house fumigated before I catch it …’
He stood there, thinking, absently making himself a cup of coffee as he worried about this uncharacteristic impulse of Michelin’s. If only she had confided in Sheila earlier in the week, perhaps after comparing notes neither of them would have left, and he would not now be alone …
The doorbell rang. As he went to answer it, he thought, ‘She’s back.’ But on the doorstep stood Mrs Flowerbury, neat, ample, smiling her rather fixed smile and clutching the handbag she always carried.
‘You look startled, Dr Winter. It’s Wednesday and it’s ten o’clock, or am I a bit early?’ She smiled with her head on one side, as if this was her patent way of smiling, to which she stuck through thick and thin.
‘Oh, Mrs Flowerbury, I’m afraid Sheila isn’t here this morning. She has had to go up to London.’
‘It would be about the film business, I expect. Never mind, I can get on with my work.’ She made to enter.
‘Well, I’d rather you didn’t, Mrs Flowerbury. I’m going to have her study cleaned professionally while she’s away. See you next week.’
‘Oooh, everything will be turned upside-down.’ She backed away, as though an offer had been made to clean her professionally, and turn her upside-down into the bargain. She retained enough self-possession to wave to Clement as he shut the door.
‘Of course,’ he thought. ‘Sheila is also down-under
slang for “woman”. That’s why the dream was set in Australia. It was all about her, and she is the sun about to return to my life.’
Perhaps the doglike thing in the dry undergrowth had been a vague memory of the pet Sheila had owned in Berlin. He went back to his coffee, thinking of an occasion when they had encountered each other in a park in West Berlin. It was spring. Sheila wore a neat fawn coat and a hat. She was slender in those days, even thin. She had been walking her little dog on a lead.
She was reserved; he was shy. But he had induced her to sit on a bench with him. She had nursed the dog while they talked, running her long fingers through his fur, and once or twice kissing him on the head, with a gesture of unconscious coquetry.
The doorbell rang again. He thought, ‘She’s back’ but, when he opened the door, Arthur and Cheri Stranks stood there, Arthur looking business-like and standing on his toes. Cheri back in her stone-washed jeans and clutching her husband’s arm proprietorially, as if to demonstrate who had brought whom. Behind them in the road the Zastava Caribbean was parked.
‘Er – I just had to come round and say how sorry I am,’ Arthur said, stealing a march on his wife – stealing such a march that he had moved forward and was entering the house before either Cheri or Clement could forestall him. ‘Cheri and I have been talking about it all night. If there’s anything we can do – for instance, if you want to go somewhere and don’t want to drive yourself …’
He was inside now, adjusting his spectacles and nodding, with Cheri following nimbly behind.
‘Please don’t mind us intruding,’ Cheri said, ‘but we had the notion that we might just nip in and be of use. That’s what friends are for. You have only to say the word.’
‘Creative people are known to be sensitive,’ Arthur said, looking as if impressed by his own insight. ‘Er – creative people in particular. They’re more dependent on the old bio-clock. More dependent than is comfortable, sometimes. It would be a hell of a world if men menstruated as well, wouldn’t it? No, no, it’s easy to quarrel at such times.’
