by Brian Aldiss
‘We didn’t quarrel.’
‘Oh, er, I don’t imagine you did. Cheri and I think of you as far too gentle – well, too wise, really – too mature – for that. Still, the male psyche’s under threat these days, isn’t it? When the social order is disrupted and the NHS is having to cope with AIDS victims and is breaking down under so many people demanding heart operations.’
‘He’s maddening,’ said Cheri, placidly, interrupting her husband’s demonstration of understanding. ‘He never went on like this till I got pregnant. What about the vulnerability of the modern woman, under threat from all sides, her role questioned? Listen to Arthur or read the papers and you would think the modern woman was off her rocker. There’s passion, you know, and that’s what decides what happens, not just feminism.’
‘You may be right there,’ Clement agreed.
‘It’s generous of you to say so,’ Arthur said, ‘but to my mind, er, financial independence comes into it. That’s what’s caused the breakdown of family life. Women out to jobs, women earning more money than men …’ He paused dramatically, to let the relevance of this remark sink in.
‘Arthur talks like something out of the Old Testament sometimes,’ Cheri said, excusing him. ‘Don’t listen to him, Clem.’
Thinking this was excellent advice, Clement said hastily, ‘There is one thing you might do for me, Arthur. Sheila and I were going to have a party here tomorrow evening. I’ve got a list of the people invited in my study. If you could phone them and say the party is off, owing to unforeseen circumstances, I’d be grateful. Don’t say more than that. Say I’m not too well, or something, if you must.’
‘I’ll do the washing-up,’ Cheri said. ‘There’s a liberated woman for you.’ She struck out in the direction of the kitchen as Clement proceeded upstairs with Arthur.
‘It’s funny how women behave,’ Arthur said, in a low voice, inviting man-to-man confidences.
‘Men have been known to run off from their wives.’
‘Yes, but – er—’ Perhaps Arthur sensed he was treading on delicate ground. ‘You and Sheila seemed so stable. Cheri and I admired you for that.’
‘I’m sorry to let you down.’
‘But what do you make of it?’
‘I don’t make anything of it, Arthur. I simply hope that she will come back.’
Arthur halted in the doorway of Clement’s study, his solid form blocking the entrance. He turned back, the expression on his face obscured by the dimness on the landing. ‘Er – but I mean, you being an analyst, doesn’t this rather upset your ideas, if you didn’t see it coming?’ A hesitation in the way he phrased the question removed some of the impertinence from it.
Clement saw the force of it. If an analyst, whose business it was to understand others, got into such messes, what hope was there for research assistants?
‘I didn’t see it coming.’
‘Does that make you question – well, I’m no judge, but Jung’s ideas always struck me as rather airy-fairy … I thought you perhaps … No, I shouldn’t be saying this. But what price the archetypes now?’
‘Arthur, I don’t really think you want a lecture, but archetypes aren’t just airy-fairy ideas. They’re modes of functioning. The chick pecking its way out of the egg obeys an archetype. A woman loving her newborn child is probably obeying an archetype. Ethology shows us how every species has a whole range of suitable behaviours. Archetypes have evolved through natural selection and are no more airy-fairy than biological entities. Sheila at the moment is trying to escape a wrong archetype, an archetype of dominance, embodied for her in the figure of a threatening step-father. I’m convinced this is more a question of dominance-avoidance than of Eros. If so, she may come to that realization soon, and return. If I’m wrong, I may not see her again.’
‘Gordon Bennett,’ Arthur said. ‘What a mind you have, Clem.’ And he gripped the older man’s arm in a spasm of admiration.
Clement managed to settle Arthur in front of the phone with the invitation list for the party. He went slowly from his study into the bedroom, where he sat on the bed, head bent, reflecting.
It was lax of him to have mentioned Sheila’s overbearing step-father to Arthur. He had an unspoken agreement with Sheila, which had grown up over the years, to edit that man from her life. When talking to others – even when talking to him on occasions – Sheila pretended that she had enjoyed a happy childhood. He always listened with sympathy; the pretence might be regarded as her protective entitlement. He knew all too well the terrors of her early adolescence, and feared only that she might come to take the lie for the truth, unpalatable as the truth might be.
She had slowly reconstructed her own biography to suit her needs as a successful writer of romances. He had seen it in print, in articles about her: ‘Green Mouth enjoyed a radiantly happy childhood in Somerset, on her father’s estates.’
Sheila’s father had been killed in the Ardennes, in the closing stages of the war. Her mother had married again, after the war, to one William Harstow, a friend of her late husband’s and a regular soldier. When he was posted to West Berlin, Harstow’s new wife and her daughter went with him. It was an ill-advised match. Harstow was a rigid disciplinarian, and ruled over their uncomfortable home with a heavy military hand. He frequently beat Sheila and her mother, starved them, and humiliated them in front of others. On occasions, when drunk, he sexually assaulted his ten-year-old step-daughter.
One dark night, Harstow came to the bad end his army friends had long been predicting. He was set upon in a dark Berlin alley and battered to death. The incident reached the papers. Had some German vented his anti-British feelings? The matter was never cleared up. No one was charged with the murder. Sheila and her mother returned to England under a mystery, a cloud, and some debts.
But Harstow left behind a sister, Sheila’s adopted Aunt Anna. Anna Harstow had also gone out to Germany, and secured a job in army welfare, which she left after a while in order to work for a German civilian firm. Anna was a different kind from her brother, as gentle as he was rough. Moreover, she took a liking to Sheila, and visited her whenever she was in England.
It was Aunt Anna who brought Sheila to Clement Winter, at the clinic in Berlin where he had just started out as an analytical psychologist, under the aegis of T. F. Schulz.
That was in the autumn of 1969. Sheila was twenty-nine. She was fair and slender, with blonde hair hanging straight to her shoulders. The style of her clothes was dated, but she had an innate elegance. Her manner was polite and reserved. There was little animation about her, a trait that was to persist, as though she had been born to an indoor, sedentary life.
She fixed the impressionable young analyst with a radiant smile, showing irregular teeth – which would be properly fixed in the Kerinth days which lay ahead. The smile was maintained even when the aunt handed her over to Clement’s care and retired to a waiting room – although he observed her increased rigidity and the tighter grip she took of her handbag.
Yes, she told Clement, smiling apologetically, there had been some trouble with her step-father, but the poor man was dead, so it was all over. She had a flat of her own in England. Well, a room, really. She was on fairly good terms with her mother. Well, better terms. And she loved staying with Aunt Anna in West Berlin.
But Clement had been slow to perceive how much the girl suffered. This pretty young woman, with her sweet expression and gentle air, concealed her sorrow well. While she admitted that she had mentioned suicide to her aunt, that of course was all past. Last year, when she was ill. A misunderstanding when she happened to be feeling lonely.
It was the aunt, Anna Harstow, who had understood that her niece’s loneliness went deep, and still continued, to the point of anomia. In some ways, the caring Anna saw Sheila more clearly even than Clement did – for he had fallen in love with her. It took him many months, and another of her suicide attempts, to see how obsessively Sheila tried to conceal the depth of anguish she was experiencing. He had not encoun
tered a smiling depressive type before.
Years later, in the early eighties – he and Sheila had been married for over ten years by then – when he saw photographs of Chinese smiling blankly into the cameras of foreign journalists, shortly after the death of Chairman Mao, he could comprehend something of the tragedy which had overwhelmed China and its population.
The Berlin analysis had proved seminal for Clement as well as Sheila. Week by week, sometimes day by day, he had been in his room with her, gaining her confidence. Once she had begun to talk, it was easier.
At last she had been able to speak of the times when, as a child, alone and frightened in the dark, she had heard her step-father stagger home, the quarrels, the cries of her mother, sometimes the sound of china being broken. She lay upstairs in her bed, ten years old, clutching the friendly little felt lizard her real father had given her before he went off to the war, the lizard she called Green Mouth. Sometimes her step-father would come to her bed. And in her fear, all she could do was to lie there and let him behave as he wished.
Gradually, she talked the terror and shame away. Life again became possible for her.
After she ceased to attend the clinic, Clement sought her out and proposed to her. And was accepted.
He felt, he hoped, that Sheila and he had forged such a bond between them that they could not be happy with other partners. But of course financial independence had come her way. She might want to exercise it. She had exercised it.
Feeling a headache coming on, he took an aspirin. He was going slowly downstairs when the front door bell rang.
‘She’s back,’ he thought, and a shaft of daylight seemed to play through his being.
Outside, however, stood three figures, none of them remotely resembling his wife. All belonged to the armies of the jean-clad. A heavily built man with his shirt open to his navel and his sleeves rolled up to reveal tattoos on his arms was trying to anchor a struggling child whom he held by one hand. Smiling at Clement, he gave a mock salute with his free hand. The child, running fast backwards without moving, trying to drag its anchor, was red in the face and resembled a small version of the man as to rig-out, except for the tattoos. In front of these heroic figures was a woman of decided features, sharp looks, and blue eyes. Her hair was in interesting disarray, while something in her alert stance suggested that she was equally prepared for flight or attack, as the occasion might require.
‘Here I am, bang on time. You’ll have to excuse me bringing along Ron and the bairn, but we fancied a look round the colleges while we were this way, didn’t we, Ron? Okay if we come in? Stop that, Pat.’
A few seconds late, Clement recognized Lucy Traill. It had been some while since he last saw her when, as far as he could recollect, she had been wearing the same clothes as now, and sporting the same CND badge on her faded jacket.
‘Come in, all of you,’ he said. He could not for a moment think of anything else to say. He had phoned Lucy only yesterday, before Sheila had taken it into her head to disappear, since when the appointment had gone completely out of his mind. ‘Sheila’s not here at present,’ he added.
He thought that Lucy gave a slight sniff. She and Sheila had not become friends.
The man addressed as Ron made a great show of dragging the child into the hall, while the child made a great show of going insane as it entered. Getting a closer look at the creature as it swung in an orbit about Ron’s body, Clement saw that it was female, though its hair was cut as short as a boy’s. It was protesting its lot in a high, unmusical monotone.
Apparently unaware that his arm was being torn off, Ron said, grinning, ‘You sorted your brother’s gear out yet?’
‘Not quite.’ Belatedly, Clement realized that this was the man claiming to be Joseph’s friend, whom he had found inside the Acton flat, on his visit at the weekend. Ron Mallock.
‘I expect you’d like some coffee.’
‘Yes, coffee’d be okay, great, cheers,’ Ron said. ‘Give over, Pat, will you, for crying out loud?’
‘I don’t want to be here I told you I keep telling you I’m not meant to be here why did you drag me here why did you make me come why can’t you let me go why can’t you lay off I’m not meant to be here I’m meant to be somewhere else I don’t want to be here I’m going to spew up if you don’t look out I’m supposed to play with Daphne why don’t you leave me alone why did you make me come,’ said the child, in a kind of unpunctuated shriek, evidently feeling that at least she could kill off grammar while biding her time on Ron.
‘She wanted to stay home,’ Lucy said, by way of elucidation. She was not tall, and stood looking up into Clement’s face as if watching for his next move.
He was in the presence of the woman who had found Joseph dead. The vitality in her, in the way of walking and in her stance, seemed to negate death. The movement of her clearly defined lips and the positioning of her head when she spoke, as if a question lurked behind her every statement, was immediately familiar to him, as if it had not been a couple of years since they had last met – apart from Joe’s cremation, when she had come and gone without speaking to anyone, standing alone at the rear of the crematorium, wrapped in a black plastic raincoat.
Sheila and Clement had just returned from a dinner in Thame when the phone had rung. Lucy was on the line. He knew immediately that something was wrong.
‘I’m ringing from a call box,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s going to be rotten news. Are you ready? Joe’s dead. I’ve just found him up in his kitchen. I mean, he’s still up there, just lying by the sink. I can’t go back, sorry. I blame myself for not being with him. I can’t say how long he’s been there. He’s quite cold.’
He interrupted her flow. ‘Stay there. I’ll be right over.’
‘The point is – well, I’ve got to get back to my kid. You know how it is. It’s a bit of a journey by tube … Should I ring for a doctor?’
‘Leave it to me. How did you get in the flat?’
‘Oh, Joe often didn’t lock the door. If only someone had been with him, someone to comfort him. Me.’
‘Don’t fret. It’s a shock, of course. Go home, have a drink of tea – maybe something stronger. I’ll take care of everything. Thanks – thanks for phoning.’
‘I didn’t realize he was that bad. He was okay last week when I was with him … Poor Joe.’ And then she had allowed herself a few sobs.
Now she looked fine. He took it she had been sunbathing, making the best of the good weather. He did not believe that weeping formed part of her ordinary repertoire. Although the child was still howling, Lucy appeared calm and alert, her clear gaze fixed on Clement as if she was coming to some decision about him, a decision which might or might not be favourable. The thought made him nervous.
He led the way through the rear hall into the kitchen. Although the child fought Ron every inch of the way, he still found the chance to observe his surroundings, saying, in the genial voice which seemed to be habitual to him, ‘You done better in life than your brother by the looks of things.’
Such remarks embarrassed Clement but, before he could express that embarrassment, the child began to kick Ron and anything else within reach, including the table.
‘You’ll break a leg, Pat,’ Lucy said, without making it clear whose leg she was referring to. At which point, Cheri emerged from the walk-in larder and was introduced in a sort of way, the proceedings drowned out by the child’s rapid stream of protests.
‘Do you think Pat would like a swim?’ Cheri asked Clement. This was such a sensible suggestion that even the child could not resist it, and took up a great cry of, ‘Wannerswim, wannerswim.’
‘It’s in the back garden. Cheri will show you,’ Clement said curtly, dividing the remark equally between Lucy and Ron, since he was not yet certain to whom the child belonged. ‘There are towels in the changing hut.’
‘I’ll take care of her,’ Ron said, with a nod at Lucy. The child was now dragging him after Cheri, who smiled and made playful scurries at her, pe
rhaps getting into practice for when her own child was born. ‘I’ll have that coffee in a bit, cheers.’
As he switched the kettle on, Clement asked Lucy, ‘Is Pat your child? I mean, not Ron’s?’
‘Yes, I’m living with Ron now, since your brother died.’
He recalled that a silent and sulky Pat had been with Lucy on her first visit to the house with Joseph. It was difficult to concentrate on anything but Sheila’s absence.
He was silent. Perhaps sensing unspoken criticism, she said, ‘Ron’s a caring guy.’ After another silence, she added, ‘He’s good with Patricia. She’s been quite upset since her dad left us. She didn’t get on with Joe.’
Clement did not intend to show approval or disapproval of this revelation. Instead, he passed her over a mug of instant coffee. He pushed the demerara sugar towards her but she shook her head. He put more coffee and boiling water in the mug he had used earlier and sipped at it appreciatively.
‘I thought a lot of your brother,’ Lucy said. ‘But Ron’s been good to me, there’s no denying. Things aren’t easy for those who don’t fit in with Mrs T’s notions of progress.’
He construed these remarks as mainly defensive, and grunted sympathetically. He assumed she was still doing physiotherapy, but did not enquire.
‘Anyhow, it was good of you to come over.’
‘I told you on the phone I would. I’ve brought along the notebook you might like to see. You’ve been talking to that Captain Parr.’ Lucy perched close to him on the edge of the kitchen table.
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a bit of a lad. How ever old is he?’ She laughed with amused pleasure, and for a moment he saw something open and delightful in her rather anxious face.
‘Lucy, Captain Parr was telling me that Joseph had a revelation of some sort. A spiritual revelation. I’m afraid I saw very little of Joseph after our mother died, which I regret. I’ve been trying to finish a book, and goodness knows why we should set books above people—’
