Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘He had to choose between conflicting signals of love and neglect. When his mother did actually desert him – though only for a short while – Joe not unreasonably assumed that she did not love him, and decided in self-defence to cling to that decision. He kept his sanity at the expense of developing a depressive psychopathology.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I wish I had read more … I read a bit of Dickens, following Joe’s example, because he was interested in Dickens’s orphans, feeling himself an orphan of sorts – but Dickens isn’t intellectual, is he? Anyway, he said he was stuck in a kind of limbo, a paralysis, from the time they sent him off to his granny until he met a girl older than him, someone called Irene, during the war, when he was still at school.’

  ‘Yes, Irene Rosenfeld.’

  ‘She gave him love, poor kid, love and a little confidence. Then there was his time in the Far East – his initiation rite, he called it. I hate the mere idea of war. The thought of the bomb petrifies me. That’s why I joined CND – women have to do something if men won’t. But Joe seemed to have enjoyed his war, as you said …’ She looked questioningly at Clement.

  ‘There’s a mythological component to the mind. Being involved in the heroic campaigns in Burma restored Joe to a sense of his own significance he had lost as a child. Being involved in great events is perhaps necessary for psychic health. My wife’s novels sell well because they deal with great, if highly fictitious, events. It may have been good for you to be involved in the great event of Joe’s personality adventure.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ She laughed uncertainly. ‘Then after Irene there was Mandy, the Chinese woman, and his passionate affair with her. That set him on the road to emotional recovery, didn’t it? Was that mythological, too?’

  ‘In both cases, the woman was older and more experienced, and Joe’s role, at least initially, appears to have been rather passive – a token of his depression.’

  ‘He certainly wasn’t passive by the time I met him, on CND marches, let me tell you … So that was where this recurrent dream eventually led him. It was very dramatic. He saw that he had entirely misinterpreted his life – had been forced into a false position by his early bad treatment. And he came to realize that his mother was to be pitied, that in fact she was in the grip of some awful misery that could not find expression except when acted out on him.’

  She turned her head to look out of the window, so that Clement was able to study her wild hair, short and curled at its tips.

  ‘He had to keep on telling me the tale over and over again. When Pat was asleep we used to go down the road to an Indian restaurant to eat. There he’d go over the whole thing in great detail. I think the waiters wondered what on earth we were talking about.’

  Clement laughed. ‘You must have been bored. You didn’t go away again?’

  ‘Joe took me seriously. So I listened. I knew I was being useful.’

  ‘To listen is sometimes the best thing anyone can do. He would have needed your attention. You have no cause to blame yourself. Joe should have made a new will and left you something.’

  Lucy made a gesture and laughed in a displeased manner. ‘Wills? No, we weren’t careful in that way. He’d found new life in himself. He didn’t think of dying. He was full of a kind of glow … I can’t convey it. He said that the whole – the whole emotional coloration of his life was altered, as a result of his forgiveness … Oh, I’m no good at explaining this, Clem – you’ll have to study what Joe set down. You and he have learning. My education was rubbish.’

  ‘You had the great thing, though, a sympathetic understanding of his troubles.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ She lay back against the arm of the sofa, and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Joe became very calm and relaxed, as if a great prison door had been flung open. We had a lovely New Year – he was sure it would be good.’

  ‘And four months later – the heart attack.’

  At that, Lucy got up and walked about, looking at Clement sideways to say, ‘I’m sure all his emotional struggles wore him out. Of course, he smoked too much. You know, he wasn’t resentful or anything about what had happened. Just grateful to be free of it at last. And of course proud of having solved the problem. I don’t know if he was what you’d call happy. Not many people are. I remember he told me that some foreigner – perhaps a Frenchman he’d met – said to him that we are not as happy as we think we are, or as miserable either.’

  When Clement said nothing to that, she asked rather timidly, standing before him, ‘You don’t think Joe was mad, do you, I mean, in any way? Even to the last?’

  ‘I admire Joe. He learnt to cope admirably with a difficult psychopathology.’

  ‘I don’t see exactly what that means. He did really have the vision, didn’t he? If so, there’s hope for all of us!’ She gave a brief laugh.

  ‘Oh, he lived by what he perceived – often a very healthy sign.’

  Dissatisfied with this response, she folded her arms, and then settled again on the sofa, saying, ‘Pity the two of you weren’t closer. I wish I’d had a brother.’

  ‘Joe had almost nothing to do with me when I was a child, and I’m afraid it stayed that way.’

  She appeared restless now that she had told the story. As she set her coffee mug down on the desk, she bit her lip – displeased, Clement thought, with the turn the conversation had taken.

  ‘Well, he’s dead now,’ she said.

  Boisterous cries of ‘Luce!’ came from downstairs.

  ‘That’s Ron,’ she said, getting to her feet again. ‘Listen, Clem, I’m having problems with little Pat, always have done. Can I come and see you some time – about Pat, I mean? Would you charge me the earth?’

  He got up. ‘Come to my consulting room in the centre of Oxford. I’ll give you my card. I’ll fit you in and I won’t charge you.’

  ‘Oh, bless you for that.’ They moved together and kissed each other, touching only for a moment, as shrill cries from below redoubled.

  ‘I’m grateful to you for coming over, Lucy.’

  ‘It was my day off. I couldn’t have poured it all out over the phone, could I? I miss Joe so much.’

  ‘So do I, believe it or not.’

  They went downstairs together. Ron Mallock and Pat stood together in the hall, hair spiky from the water. He was not holding the child, who swung energetically from his tattooed arm.

  ‘We had a lovely swim, Mum,’ Pat said. ‘Next time, you’ve got to come in with us.’

  ‘There may not be a next time, love,’ Lucy said, taking hold of her daughter’s hand.

  It was almost twelve noon when the trio left Rawlinson Road. Clement Winter went indoors, locked the front door, and returned to his study. His coffee mug and Lucy’s stood together on his desk. Her presence seemed to hover in the air.

  She had engaged his sympathies. Sheila’s and his earlier perceptions of her had been mistaken, he considered; her clumsy attempt to knead Sheila’s shoulders had been compounded of social awkwardness and a genuine desire to help. She was a woman, no longer young, struggling to survive in a harsh society, a one-parent family. She needed help and advice. Her attitude to Ron Mallock suggested that she regarded him as only a temporary prop in her life … He reined his thoughts abruptly. He was also sexually attracted to her. In their farewell kiss, she had darted a thin tongue into his mouth.

  He relished the memory of it. Yet their meeting had not ended in too satisfactory a way. He had withheld something, in characteristic fashion. What she had wanted, perhaps the covert reason for her visit, was to hear praise for her unusual lover. A requiem of sorts. She had needed that beacon in her difficult life, and he, the weak brother being weak again, had not provided. Her magical tale – important to her – had not been adequately rewarded.

  Clement walked about unhappily. Holding people at arm’s length presented a difficulty; the length of arms required varied. He could still make amends by writing his brother’s biography. And Lucy would hav
e to be a star witness. Sheila, if she came back, would have to put up with that arrangement.

  In any case, he would see Lucy again. For the moment, staring out of the window at the horse chestnut, he allowed his fantasies free play. There were other things he had inherited from his brother – why not his bedmate? The incestuous nature of the idea was not unpleasant, spice to the dish. It would be a way of getting his own back on Joseph.

  ‘Oh, God!’ He held the heels of both hands to his head. So that was the reason for all the indecisiveness …

  He saw again the bar of soap turning, endlessly turning, the suds dripping like saliva into the basin. Had he all along wanted to wash his hands of Joseph, and of everything that was Joseph? What mysteries we were – especially to ourselves.

  This was something to discuss with Mrs Emerova on his next visit. Not that answers could be expected, but new, interesting questions would be raised.

  Poor homeless Lucy. Perhaps he should sell her the Acton flat cheaply – even give it to her? That would make her grateful. His reveries flowed, thick and rich, into the new channel. If Sheila had left him for good, then he was free to do as he pleased.

  He hummed a tune to himself and recognized it as a snatch from Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel. The two children had been left to perish in the forest; a Hansel without any Gretel, Joseph had been left in the same way. The problem of parental cruelty was one which, for Clement, far outweighed in importance any political questions. The matter of the oppression of the powerless by the powerful in fact had strong bearing on world politics.

  Impatience seized him. How typical of him it was to be pondering a general question, when he was a man newly deserted by his wife. Here he remained in the house alone, while she had gone off to play the femme fatale with a New York publisher. Bloody Sheila! Money and success had gone to her head. But if that was all there was to it, then why hadn’t she run off with someone glamorous, someone powerful? Not with little Hernandez, a jumped-up copy-editor … Green Mouth should have had more ambition. Her fans would be disappointed.

  He began pacing about the study, going over the long history of his marriage. Of course he’d taken Sheila for granted. After seventeen happy years, that was part of the deal.

  But it wasn’t. Not these days. Marriages were breaking down everywhere. There were more homosexuals, more lesbians, more confused, more homeless, more suicides. The nuclear family – which he and Sheila had failed to establish – was breaking up. Society was in trouble. He was victim of a trend, and rebelled against the role; it was an indignity as well as a misery.

  Bloody Sheila! Why am I so slow to find my proper anger against her?

  By this time, she would have met her lover off the plane. They would have had time to get from Heathrow to central London. They could have checked into a hotel by now. She liked to stay at Brown’s: perhaps they were in Brown’s. In bed. Little Hernandez would probably be underneath, as in Boston … ‘I’m enjoying it too much to stop …’

  Well, never mind Joseph and his forgiveness. He was not going to forgive Sheila. She had thrown too much away, had thrown real things away for a dream, a fantasy. The nature of the real world was such that it required forgiveness; but the hard fact, against which so many of his clients wrecked themselves, was that imaginary worlds were so much more delusive, ultimately so much nastier.

  He would ask Lucy back. He could find plenty of pretexts. They would have an affair. She seemed willing enough, and he could help her. Her and that slender little tongue …

  He went slowly downstairs. The ache in his left leg was back. He had resented the invasion by the Strankses; now he missed them. The house was eerily silent. Still, he would not let Sheila in when she came back. If she came back. Even Mrs Flowerbury did not have a key to the door; only Sheila and he had keys. He would get on to those people in Walton Street and have the lock changed.

  Thought of action cheered him. He went outside, locking the door behind him, and got the car out. Happily, he saw no sign of Alice Farrer next door. Making a conscious effort to drive slowly, he took the Mercedes down Walton Street and arranged for a locksmith to come in the morning and change the front door lock.

  And if she never returned …

  In his estimation, the chances were that she would return. She was basically a sensible woman, who would soon realize that she had fallen victim to her own fantasies. Facing reality would be painful, but she could do it – as she had in Berlin, long ago.

  He could not bear to go home. He was too sick at heart to feel hungry. Driving up the Woodstock Road, he took the ring road round Oxford and headed for Swindon. In a short while, he turned off the main road and drove up the winding way on to the White Horse Hills.

  Only a half dozen cars stood in the car park. Nobody was about: an ancient pre-English silence brooded over the scene. Clement went to look at the view towards Swindon. It was unexpectedly hazy, and little could be seen. He was isolated on a bleak grassy island. He walked about, but the chill wind usually haunting this part of the world chased him back into the car. He sat there, drumming with his fingers on the steering wheel, staring out at the immense supine mound before him. The thought occurred to him that he might drive over a steep edge with some convenience to himself and everyone else involved, but he found he was not desperate enough to do it.

  Blank misery settled over him like the haze in the valley. He thought of everything and nothing. Nothing coherent came through. He wanted to leave this isolated place but could not find the motivation. His misery drove him from the car again, and he trudged up to the site of the old Roman fortress, over the close-cropped grass. A man and a boy, well wrapped up, were flying a two-string kite. When they called to him, Clement did not answer. He came back down to the Mercedes, chilled to the bone.

  Goaded by cold, he drove down the hill, past sheep nibbling in the hedgerows. The time was gone four-thirty. He drank a cup of tea at a thatched tea place in Uffington. Then he walked, wandering along the network of small roads lying at the foot of the downs.

  When he returned to his car, it was almost nine in the evening, and the light was going. He had no idea, no memory, of where he had been; all he knew was that he was tired and sick at heart.

  ‘Sheila,’ he said brokenly, but could formulate no sentence to go with her name.

  By the time he tucked the car into the garage in Rawlinson Road, it was all but dark. He entered the silence of the house and locked himself in.

  In the kitchen, he poured himself a glass of Mouton Cadet, more from force of habit than from desire. He found he had no taste for it. Out in the garden, two sopping brown towels lay by the side of the pool. He kicked them into the water, where they floated like drowned bodies.

  Taking a book, he settled with it in a chair, only to throw it down after a few minutes, unaware of a word he had read. There seemed nothing for it but to get to bed and take a sleeping pill.

  As he was approaching the stairs, he heard Sheila’s key in the front door.

  The wind tugged at his locks. A lone

  Rose tore from off the tower wall.

  He saw that in FORGIVENESS all

  Redemption lay. His Parents’ stone

  Their carved Names bore where ivy gnawed.

  Then cried he, ‘Just to be forgiven

  Or to forgive: both are to HEAVEN

  The Key. I do forgive them, LORD’ –

  His words shook like the riven tree –

  ‘Who never have forgiven me.’

  ‘The Storm’ from

  A Summer Stroll Through Parts of Suffolk

  William Westlake, 1801

  THE SQUIRE QUARTET

  Life in the West

  Forgotten Life

  Remembrance Day

  Somewhere East of Life

  Copyright

  The Friday Project

  An imprint of HarperCollins

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project.co.uk

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  First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Victor Gollancz Ltd

  This edition published by The Friday Project in 2012

  Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work.

  ISBN 978-0-00-746116-5

  FORGOTTEN LIFE. Text copyright © Brian Aldiss 1988. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Epub Edition © APRIL 2012 ISBN: 978-0-00-746115-8

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