The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

by Brian Aldiss

  The chief clerk came out of the side door. I hid round the corner so that I did not have to speak to him. I went back to the side door of the bank, standing there smiling as my father came out.

  ‘Hello, Dad!’

  ‘Hello, Horatio! What are you doing here? Are you waiting for me?’

  With an effort – ‘Yes, Dad, I was, really. I thought perhaps we could – well, you know I’m off on Friday – I thought perhaps we could go and, you know, have a sort of farewell drink!’

  ‘A drink?’ He frowned at me, not at all unkindly. ‘Here, you’d better come home with me. What do you want a drink for? At your age! I don’t want you hanging about the public houses and I hope you won’t when you’re in London.’

  ‘No, I won’t, Dad.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want a son of mine seen in a pub. I know Nelson has been in one a time or two, but we hope he’ll grow out of that. You know your mother’s upset enough at your going to London – I don’t know what she’d do if she thought you were going into public houses. It’s the downward road, my boy, make no mistake of that.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘There’s a good lad! Let’s see if she’s got something nice for my tea.’

  I thought at the time how damned nice he was, and how uncouth and depraved I must have seemed, trying to get him to go for a drink; as far as I knew, he had never seen the inside of a pub. And as a bank manager he had a position to keep up. What made Father seem all the more mild and restrained was that he should make only oblique reference to a squabble of the previous month, when Nelson had actually taken me into a country-type pub just on the outskirts of town; we had each smoked a fag and drunk a half-pint of shandy – and on emerging into the guilty light of day had been spotted by one of the bank’s prosperous customers and reported. Father was extremely angry on that occasion (the customer had been Mr. Tansley-Smith), and Nelson and I had had a lecture about the evils of drink and the sort of company we were likely to meet in such disgraceful haunts as ‘The Three Feathers’.

  So that was it. When it came time for me to get my London train, Father said no more about ‘The Three Feathers’ episode, or about my strange invitation to him, and we parted with a good affectionate handshake; but I could only feel he expected that no good would come of me in London and would hold out no great hopes for my future.

  Mother, at the last moment, appeared more perky.

  ‘It’s a shame you should be leaving me so soon, darling! You’re so young!’

  ‘I’ve been going away to school for years, though, haven’t I?’

  ‘That’s different! Still, I suppose you will be able to look after yourself – if you find a good landlady. Why, she’ll probably love to have a boy of your age to mother! She’ll spoil you! And perhaps she’ll ask your poor old mother down to stay, one day! And you will write every week, won’t you? Nice long letters?’

  It all seemed like an anticlimax. At one time I had imagined that Nelson, Ann and I would stage a sort of absolutely bloody little revolution of our own and march out of the house en masse. But we left one by one, going forth from the paternal roof as much in bewilderment as revolt, reluctantly rather than grandly.

  London was also not as I had imagined it; my arrival was hardly triumphal. But I soon found lodgings in a gaunt little house standing at the extreme north end of Queensway, where I rented a gaunt little room under the roof. The tenants were a Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson – Wilf and Lou, as they soon became. I rarely saw Wilf; he had a night job, maintenance man on the Underground, but his wife was kind to me and fed me well, although she was in other respects a rather mean woman. I did not greatly mind. I had other interests.

  First among these must be counted the thrill of being in London. That great city was then at one of its historical turning points. As I look back to that autumn and winter of 1939 now, I see a city of long ago, ruled by men who were essentially Victorian, inhabited in its less fashionable thoroughfares by people who held many of the beliefs of the Victorian Age, and who lived among the relics of that age. It was a city which, despite the First World War, had peace built into it and so was able to turn only reluctantly and face the angry dawns of war.

  But that very effort had stirred it up. You knew that something was happening in London, a sort of phychic earthquake. Out of the massed villages that together constitute the capital, people were slipping; and, as unobtrusively, new people were slipping in, like rowboats passing unnoticed under Tower Bridge, bringing dynamite. Signs of war were apparent. Barrage balloons hung here and there. Adhesive paper criss-crossed on windows. Sandbags were up. The city was getting secret. It was after dark that the subversive aspects became most apparent. In the blackout, London hummed like the larger version of the dormitories of Branwells that it was. I was too young to realize that yet, for I had still to find my way around; but I certainly picked up the tension on my highly tuned antennae.

  I had no trouble in getting a job in one of the ministerial departments now rapidly springing up everywhere. I chose it not only because it was just round the cornet from Lou Stevenson’s, but because it was housed in a gigantic building and had a STAFF VACANCIES notice on the door as well as an attractive air of mystery in its seedy porch.

  My duties were both light and nebulous, consisting almost entirely of sorting an endless stack of file cards into two packs: those bearing the names of males and those bearing the names of females; and then shuffling the female pack into alphabetical order. Half the women in the British Isles must have slipped through my fingers.

  One morning, as I was leaving Lou’s for the department, a letter arrived for me bearing Virginia’s ‘aristocratic scrawl’ on the envelope. I opened it and read it – a glance sufficed to do that – as I emerged among the pedestrians in the grey and sooty Bishop’s Bridge Road.

  The thought of Virginia had never been far from me. On my first day in London, as soon as I had found a room and taken my few possessions from my papier-maché suitcase, I sat on the bed and wrote to her, giving her my address, announcing dramatically my arrival in the metropolis. I could not resist telling her that I had come especially to find her; although I declared that I loved her, I was careful to add that I would not make myself a nuisance to her; I longed only to see her as soon as possible.

  It was eleven long days later that her answer arrived, to be ripped open in the Bishop’s Bridge Road. With what I told myself was facile despair, I had begun to assure myself that she would never reply: she had done just as I feared and vanished into the great hazy quicksands of the world.

  Virginia’s tone in her note lay somewhere between guarded and chilly. She simply invited me to come and see her at 8.10 on the following night. Her letter offered at least an implied explanation for her delay in answering; her address was now in Lansdowne Lane.

  At seventeen, all love’s weather is heavy. As I sorted my filing cards, I thought I would say to her bravely, before she could speak, ‘I know you have ceased to care about me; I am too proud to bother you further’; and I would turn and lose my way for ever in the dark streets of the capital. Or at another moment, I thought – well, it is immaterial now what I thought, all those years ago. All day I worked away at my trestle table, wondering at how a letter like mine could be answered by a letter like hers; for I had yet to grasp the simple principle that adults finally and sadly have to grasp, that people follow their own behaviour which they are not necessarily able to alter for anyone else. Only the immature can throw up everything and begin anew.

  I had to question several people in the department before I discovered how to find her address. ‘It’s somewhere off Holland Park Avenue,’ I was told.

  Those were hungry days; I was always short of cash. On the next evening I left work, went back to my room to wash and spruce myself up, watering down my hair and all that, and then returned to the streets, passing the department again to get to a little pie-and-peas shop I had found. The pies were cheap and good. With luck, with will-power, I could make
that meal my tea and supper; on a bad day, and they came fairly frequently, I would be I forced by the thought of closing time to burst out of my room again later in the evening, to seek another bite to eat.

  Full of pie, I headed towards Notting Hill and Virginia. Now I worried chiefly over the precision of Virginia’s timing, as implied in her letter. She wished me to appear at 8.10. Exactly what was the nicety of her arrangements that eight should be too early for her and 8.15 presumably too late?

  My morale – a word we were then beginning to hear frequently – had sunk still lower by the time I reached Virginia’s address; the several wrong turnings I had taken, my base hesitancy in approaching strangers to ask the correct way, had convinced me that I was destined always to take life’s wrong turnings. Now, there I was, forty-three minutes early, if my watch was correct – and even that could not be relied upon. Rain was falling. I wore my mac, since that happened to be the only outside garment I possessed.

  The house in which Virginia lived was one of a long terrace of a kind prevalent in that area of London: three storeys high plus basement, with would-be-grand steps leading up to the front door under pretentious porches. Once these had been the residences of prosperous middle-class families; by the war they were already subdivided and mysterious people came and went by private doors. Nowadays they are still further divided, and the roof which once sheltered my frail Virginia now keeps the rain off a large family of solid and stern-faced blacks.

  I stood under a porch from which I might survey Virginia’s porch and detested my hopes and fears.

  At 8.08 I shovelled my thoughts back into place and went over and rang at Virginia’s bell.

  A man, smiling and suave and of call-up age, confronted me, nodding and grinning even more widely as I declared whom I was after, but without actually speaking, which transformed his smiles into gems of hostility. He waved me into the hall, put his hands abruptly in his pockets, and led me upstairs, leaving me outside a door on the first floor. I tapped and went in, hating every moment.

  Virginia was sitting on the sofa, smoking, wearing her customary clothes and a wry expression. Sitting in an armchair was another girl of about the same age, also smoking. The room was drab; a black paper blackout dominated the room. In the hearth a small electric fire burned; over the mantelpiece was a coloured print of a man sitting on a horse in a condition print dealers refer to as ‘somewhat foxed’. The only thing that heartened me was the sight of one of Virginia’s dabby landscape sketches on a side wall.

  ‘Hello, Horatio! What fun seeing you down in the wicked city! Rather different from the wilds of Derbyshire! Say hello to my friend Josie. She lives here.’

  I said hello to Josie, and went and sat by Virginia. I got up and took my mac off without being asked. I sat down again by Virginia; she smiled quickly and looked away from me. Her face was thin and rather lined; for the first time I realized she was really pretty old, older than she claimed to be. She offered me a cigarette from the open packet on the sofa arm.

  ‘How’s life in the Nursing Service?’ I asked diffidently.

  ‘I haven’t joined yet. A friend of mine is trying to get me a good position.’ Or perhaps she said commission.

  ‘I thought you said you had joined.’

  ‘I’m hoping to join next week.’

  Conversation died. I waited for Josie to go. She lit another cigarette, examining it with intense curiosity between puffs.

  ‘Look, Virginia, I’d naturally like to talk to you privately, if I could.’

  It turned out this was Josie’s flat. Virginia was just looking round for a flat of her own. She had left her last one because the landlady was so horrid. Desperately, I asked her to come round to my place; it wasn’t far; we could walk. She said she did not want to go out; she was expecting someone to come and see her in a little while. I pressed her harder. She and Josie looked at each other, she nodded and led me into the adjoining bedroom.

  The room was only dimly lit, but I observed that it was small and extremely untidy. Clothes hung everywhere. I clutched her and told her I loved her, needed her desperately, had come to London just to be near her. She put her arms round my neck and looked up at me, half-smiling, still taking nothing seriously. She started talking about Josie, who was in love with a captain in artillery, but I cut her off. I asked if she was in some sort of trouble.

  ‘There is some trouble, Horatio, darling, but I would advise you to keep out of it. It’s grown-ups’ trouble, not for boys.’

  ‘Thanks, Virginia, but I am grown up or I wouldn’t be here.’

  She frowned as if I had said something incomprehensible and continued, ‘The trouble is my cousin, a very bad cousin – I forget if I told you about him. You know my mother was an invalid for years. She died recently and there is some terrible trouble about the will – a lot of money is involved. My cousin is trying to get hold of it. I have to be very careful.’

  ‘Was that your cousin who showed me up here? The smarmy chap?’

  ‘That’s a cousin of Josie’s, and he’s really awfully jolly.’

  She started telling me about him and what he was doing, and what other people who lived in the house were doing. By refraining from interrupting, I gained time with her, and time to try to adjust to the sensation I had that she was at once as she had always been and yet also entirely changed – a dual feeling that radiated from my mysterious intuitive source. Too restless to listen properly to what she was saying, I prowled about the encumbered room, dragging at my cigarette. There were several ashtrays in the room, most of them full of ash and stubs. By the side of one of the two single beds, a book lay open, face down; that was a habit of Virginia’s. It was a novel of Ethel Mannin’s, Venetian Blinds; by chance, I had recently read it myself and thought it rather daring. I stared down at it, trying to make it provide me with a clue to Virginia’s mood, and over my head flew details of strange lives, people getting exotic war jobs, mysterious and handsome refugees from Hungary, husbands and wives changing into uniform. In between all this, Virginia dropped only the most stray word about herself.

  It was an infuriating meeting. I could not piece together what was happening. She seemed unable to explain properly, or to make up her mind. It even appeared to me that she was lying about intending to join the Q.A.I.M.S. I begged her to meet me at the British Museum, so that we could spend some time together and go somewhere where we could walk and talk. Eventually she gave me a kiss and said she would drop me a note. I had to insist that she wrote down my address and did not just rely on her memory; doing that entailed going back into the other room and borrowing a little diary pencil from Josie. Josie was still smoking in her armchair.

  Virginia came out on to the landing, still smiling rather anxiously, glancing at her watch. We kissed goodbye, and I went down the dim stairs in a muddle of emotion.

  I let myself out into the street. By now it was absolutely dark and raining slightly; my sense of time and place was disoriented. I stood for a moment and then started off along the pavement. Such was my misery that when I heard someone walking close behind I did not bother to look round. I turned a corner and as I did so my shoulder was grabbed. Turning, I was hit inaccurately in the chest.

  The blow caught me off balance and I fell over. My attacker began kicking me. I grasped his legs, dragged him down, and reached out for his throat. He was about my size, by the feel of things. He was hitting me in the face, and we rolled into the gutter. Terror and anger seized me. He wore a slippery mac, buttoned up round the throat, so that I could not hold him properly. I banged his head on the road. He struggled away but I had hold of him.

  A car passed down the road. By the dimmed light of its headlamps, I saw the man I was fighting with.

  ‘Spaldine!’ I exclaimed. I let go of him and he began running. But I ran after him and called his name again. He stopped and we confronted one another, fists clenched, in the middle of the roadway.

  ‘Oh, my Christ! Stubbs!’ he gasped.

  We went
into a little pub, mopped ourselves up in the Gents’, and then sat at a table and talked over half-pints of bitter and cigarettes.

  Spaldine was full of jealousy and bile. Once he started the tale of his grievances, he could not stop. And the target of his love and hatred was Sister Traven – as he called her thoughout his account.

  He had first made love to Sister at Branwells about three weeks before I did. He had been entirely more precipitate than I. He had gone up to her room sometimes in the early hours of the morning and had stayed till dawn. He was crazy about her.

  No coherent feelings, apart perhaps from amazement at my own pain, came to me as he talked. Although I interjected remarks, and they came from numbed lips, they were innocuous remarks that apparently rendered him quite insensible to any effect he was having on me.

  ‘What about Pepper? He was the prefect in your dormitory. Didn’t he ever find you were missing?’

  ‘I always went up to Sister Traven’s room in my pyjamas and dressing-gown. Then if I met anyone I could say I was feeling sick, see? Pepper, he used to sleep till the Five-to Bell! From Sister’s room you can hear old Scrimbleshanks going across the quad to ring the Rising Bell. That was the signal for me to leave her. She never wanted me to leave her.’

  ‘Nobody ever caught you getting back to dorm?’

  ‘You can always make excuses, can’t you, Stubbs? Been for a shit, or something.’

  That he could equate that with lying with Virginia!

  Forgetting his anger, Spaldine began telling me some of the stories of her earlier life which I had heard. But there were alarming little differences between his accounts and the ones I had received, the only one of which I remember was that she told Spaldine (later in their relationship, this was) that when her family was living in Tanganyika she and her sister had been pursued by hornets and had had to jump into a lake with all their clothes on to avoid the insects. It was a distorted echo from my own life, coming back to me disturbingly now.