Life in the West tsq-1

by Brian W Aldiss

  ‘Old Rowlinson could explain it, I don’t doubt.’

  He could no longer bring himself to look down at his mother’s body. ‘I’ll put the lid on, if you’ve had enough.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I could bear to see you do that. Let me get out of here first.’ But she made no move to leave. She adjusted her hair. ‘Why haven’t you got flowers in here? Why hasn’t Teresa put some flowers in the room?’

  ‘A grey Christmas. Do you remember when we were kids and it snowed heavily just before Christmas, and we got stuck on the bridge at Wisbech? And father just laughed. He was enjoying it.’

  ‘They’ve both gone now. Mother was such a repository of family history — I can feel it already, there’s going to be a huge vacuum all down the left-hand side, here…’ She sketched a large position vaguely in the air.

  ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do. Bow to the Grim Reaper, damn him… Irrational… I keep having an irrational feeling that it’s the cold emanating from her that chills the landscape, that she’s become a dreadful natural force, that…it’s as if the corpse erupted out of the dead landscape, the way she keeps bursting into my thoughts…’

  ‘What’s Adrian said about it?’

  ‘You know Adrian; he never says much about anything.’

  ‘It beats me why you wanted to have the body lying here over Christmas. Bit morbid, isn’t it?’

  He shrugged. ‘It was her home, after all.’

  Deirdre went over to the door with a somewhat slack-shouldered walk he had noted in her lately. She put her hand on the doorknob, then hesitated.

  ‘Are you afraid of being alone in this house, Tom?’

  ‘How do you mean? Ghosts?’

  She nodded. ‘Ghosts and things like that. Father, for instance.’

  ‘That sort of thing doesn’t worry me.’

  She laughed with a partly derisive note. ‘Of course, you’re so tough. You’ve killed chaps in Yugoslavia — I try to forget that rather nasty side to your character. All the same… What about Teresa? Isn’t she scared? How’s she going to be when you’re trooping round the world doing your TV series?’

  ‘Oh, that won’t take many weeks.’

  ‘It’ll alter your lives.’

  ‘Not at all. And I don’t think she’s afraid of ghosts. She’s never said.’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d have asked. It’s an obvious enough question, stuck in a place like this. Really, I don’t think I’ve ever liked Pippet Hall, not even when I was a small child… I wouldn’t care to live here. Won’t Teresa be lonely?’

  ‘She keeps very busy. Her decorative insects are really developing into something tremendously attractive, don’t you think? Aren’t they original?’

  Opening the door, casting a last suspicious glance at the coffin, Deirdre said, ‘You, aren’t you lonely here on your own?’

  Hesitantly. ‘I am afraid of my own loneliness. But that goes wherever I go. If anything, it’s less here, where I belong.’

  ‘I can’t stand it when Marsh is away from Blakeney. I’m worse now I’m getting older. He’s already put in for, and been accepted for, some bloody dig on some bloody Greek island next summer. I may go with him. Though you can’t see me living in a tent exactly, can you?’

  ‘You aren’t quite the pioneering type.’

  ‘Me perched on some bloody outcrop of Hellenic rock, while Marsh grubs up bits of broken urn?’ She laughed at the ridiculous picture she had conjured.

  Squire closed and locked the door behind them.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ his sister asked. ‘Afraid she’ll get loose?’

  They descended together to the lower regions, from which seasonal aromas of roast turkey, sausages, bacon, stuffing, and other fleshly delights arose.

  The meal took its accustomed course. First, champagne all round and a loyal toast to the sovereign; that tradition must have gone back as far as Matthew Squire himself.

  The toast held special meaning, for the Queen was spending Christmas at Sandringham; it was easy to imagine her with her family, sitting down to table only twenty miles away.

  After the toast, Scottish smoked salmon, followed by the main course with all its ramifications — the glistening brown barrel of bird attended by a fleet of small china boats containing gravy, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, and blackcurrant jelly. Then came pudding, flaming luridly, amid cries of delight from the children. Lastly, there was a whole Stilton, wrapped in a napkin, for those to cut at who still had room and courage enough, attended by a good port to wash it down with.

  Most of the adults collapsed into chairs after the feast, and somnolence reigned. Marshall joined the children in a new card game. Half an hour later, Teresa and Squire put on their coats and went to see their estate manager. Uncle Willie and Adrian came as well, to walk off the effects of lunch.

  The air was cold and still, with a slightly smokey flavour to it.

  Teresa took her husband’s arm. Uncle Willie grasped hers, leaning rather heavily against her. ‘Very good lunch, my dear. It’s amazing how much nourishment the human frame can withstand.’

  Their footsteps echoed on the frosted ground.

  The manager lived in an eighteenth-century farmhouse at the far end of the estate, on the Walsingham road. As they returned, an hour later, Teresa pointed to the western sky, where a thin red bar showed between strata of heavy cloud. ‘The ghost of the sun!’ she exclaimed. A hemisphere of sun emerged from below the cloud curtain, then the whole ball, less lurid than the pudding had appeared two hours earlier. It hung above a furred outline of slope, apparently emitting little light and less heat.

  ‘Tom, Teresa was telling me about her nightmares,’ Uncle Willie said abruptly. ‘About a dark figure trying to break into the Hall. I suppose I shouldn’t ask you this, but are all your cloak-and-dagger activities with the secret service firmly in the past?’ He drew himself up, trying to straighten his shoulders, peering past Teresa’s furred shoulder at Squire.

  Adrian laughed in a way he had, as if thinking better of the humorous aspect that provoked the sound almost before uttering it. ‘You don’t imagine that KGB agents are tracking Tom down in Darkest Norfolk, do you, Uncle?’

  Tom said placidly, ‘Be sure there are KGB agents in Norfolk, but they have no particular reason to interest themselves in me.’

  To Teresa, Adrian said, ‘KGB, my foot! I’d hazard a guess that that figure in your dream was more likely to be a tax inspector than a KGB man, eh?’

  Snuggling her shoulder under Squire’s arm, Teresa said, ‘Let’s get back to the fire. Mother’s death has made us all morbid. Christmas cake is the perfect antidote.’

  As they headed for the rear of the house, Willie said, ‘I’m the last of my poor old generation left now. It makes for morbidity.’

  She hugged him. ‘You’re the toughest of us all, Uncle, dear,’ she said.

  In the waning afternoon light, the side of the house presented an aspect of greyness, as if a blanket had been draped over it. Lights gleamed in the room downstairs, and children could be seen, running here and there, laughing. Matilda Rowlinson was playing a game with them. The last rays of the sun caught the three lower panes of the window of the room where Patricia Squire’s body lay; they gleamed with dead colour as the four walkers went below them into the shade of the house.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll tell the kiddies a ghost story after tea,’ Adrian said. ‘I always fancied myself as a story teller.’

  Red is the colour of dying light, as incandescence sinks towards invisibility. The bars of the electric fire in my bedroom, dying when switched off, when Rachel lived with us. Long ago now.

  Rachel’s mother, Rebecca Normbaum, had died some years earlier. Squire was sure his mother had told him as much; at the time, busy with other things, he had paid little attention. He remembered a late photograph of Rebecca, taken in America by polaroid camera when such things were rare in England. A tall elegant woman, still with eyes of blue, though her hair was grey. She stood i
n a suburban Detroit garden — or ‘yard’, as she and Rachel would have learnt to call it.

  Karl, the son, the uninteresting boy, kept the Normbaum and Squire families spasmodically in touch. He was Charles nowadays, name Anglicized, manner Americanized. He had married a striking blonde Jewish girl in Detroit, and commuted regularly with her to Israel in his prospering line of business, which involved car exhausts and gas filters.

  At the beginning of the seventies, before the power crisis, Squire had met Charles in London. They had not found much to say to each other, once the reminiscences had been exhausted. Rachel had made a respectable marriage. She lived in a big house. She had two children, both boys, who were doing well. And a dog. She had shares in a downtown restaurant. She and Charles saw each other about once a month.

  So the promise of youth deteriorated into family history.

  After their meeting, afflicted by a mixture of curiosity and nostalgia, Squire wrote to Rachel. He received no reply. The following Christmas, a printed card arrived. Little Rachel Normbaum was now Mrs Gary Baxter.

  Although Blakeney was so near, Deirdre, Marshall, and their children always slept at the Hall on Christmas night. It was part of the tradition. When they were younger, this had been a time for drinking too much brandy and port and playing childish games after the children had gone up to bed. Now they were more staid, and Uncle Willie drove himself off to Norwich at nine-thirty in order, as he explained, to look after his flat and his cat.

  Squire and Mrs Davies went to see him off at the front door.

  ‘You’d better look after your grand-daughter, Madge,’ Uncle Willie warned Mrs Davies, as he wound a woolly scarf round his neck. ‘Do you know what Grace said to me?’

  ‘I’m sure it was something very precocious, Will. Young girls reach the age of — become young ladies very much earlier than they did in my day. I can’t understand it. It must have been something lacking in the diet when we were young.’ She smiled at him teasingly.

  ‘Come, my dear, you are still a beautiful lady, and Ernest is a very lucky man. Blossoms that flower late go on flowering into the winter.’

  Squire, slightly surprised at this flight of fancy from his uncle, asked, ‘What did Grace say to you, Uncle?’

  The old man hesitated, then chuckled. ‘Why, she told me that she’d had a dream in which she had gone down to the beach, and there she had seen a fully grown male seal sporting in the waves. Although it was a bit rough, she took off her clothes and joined him, and put her arms round him and held him tight. She said it felt lovely. Those were her words: “It felt lovely.” ’

  ‘She is getting to that age…’

  ‘It was her comment afterwards that shocked me. She said, “I expect it’s a premonitory dream about enjoying sexual intercourse, don’t you, Uncle?” ’

  While Squire and Uncle Willie laughed, Mrs Davies pretended to look affronted. After Willie had gone, she said as she retreated with Squire from the chilly regions of the front door, ‘Willie Squire is such a nice man. Ernest and I have always admired him. A pity he doesn’t marry again. I suppose even marriage is unpopular or something these days — so many people seem to be getting divorced.’

  ‘Most of them tend to remarry. It’s what Dr Johnson calls the triumph of hope over experience.’

  ‘I’m so glad that you and Teresa are happily married, and have this lovely house, full of such exquisite workmanship.’

  ‘Sometimes I am afraid she feels imprisoned here.’

  ‘Oh, no, not Teresa.’

  He took her arm and led her into the warm living room, where her husband was already setting out a Scrabble board.

  Later in the evening, the children submitted to Adrian’s ghost story and then climbed upstairs to bed. Madge and Ernest followed them, and the Rowlinsons left.

  Marshall Kaye threw an additional log on the fire and stretched out before it on the sofa, next to Adrian. Deirdre smiled at her husband and returned to the novel she was reading. Teresa trimmed the candles, which were now the room’s sole illumination, while Squire poured everyone a malt whisky.

  ‘Not for me,’ Adrian said, waving a hand. ‘I’m fighting against middle-aged fat.’

  ‘You’re very thin, Adrian,’ Teresa said. ‘A whisky would do you good.’

  ‘It’s refusing all the whiskies that would do me good which keeps me thin.’

  ‘Middle age should not be devoted to abstinence,’ Kaye said, raising his glass and sipping.

  ‘What is middle age for, Marsh?’ Teresa asked her brother- in-law. ‘I’ve yet to find out.’

  ‘Well…it’s a sort of reprieve-period, in my book. You’ve finished mating and the furtherance of the species. Your waistline becomes more important than the rat-race…I guess it’s a time when you’re supposed to become wise and good.’

  Laughing, Squire brought his glass over and sat down by the fire with them. ‘Most people get more awful in middle age, not more good, and take to drink or politics. Although revolutionaries start young, other shades of politician get involved only when they’re past the optimal breeding age.’

  ‘Must be a correlation there,’ Kaye said, laughing.

  ‘When I was a child,’ Adrian confessed, ‘I thought that acquiring knowledge would infallibly make one good. Now I suspect it warps the soul.’

  ‘That’s a useful bit of knowledge to have.’

  Squire said, ‘We can recognize distinct stages in a man’s life. Puberty. Mating. Family-rearing. After that, with the initial biological directives losing their force, he turns to complaining about the state of the country.’

  ‘Sorry to hear your directives are losing their force, Tom,’ Adrian said.

  Kaye took the remark more seriously. ‘I’m all for complaining about the state of the country. I know it’s rather an obsessive British occupation, but in the States it’s regarded as unpatriotic, which it shouldn’t be. Why, we’ve had to import Solzenhitsyn to do the complaining for us. That’s bad.’

  Deirdre looked up from her book. ‘Stop grumbling about America, Marsh. Just because they have their own way of doing things.’

  ‘Good old America,’ he said. ‘So close to God, so far from everyone else.’

  ‘It is disconcerting the way Russian thinking of various types has so greatly influenced the West, on both the Left and the Right,’ Squire said, reaching for the decanter. Adrian jumped to his feet.

  ‘I’m going to bed. Politics is something I gave up, along with whiskies that do me good. Thank God that Britain, for all its faults, is not a political nation. To hear you talk, Tom, with your knowing insinuations that there are KGB agents snooping round the grounds, you’d think the poor old country was a dead duck.’

  ‘As to that,’ said Squire, leaning back and pointing a hand at his brother, ‘as to that, Adrian, old sport, will you dream more sweetly in your whisky-free sleep if I tell you categorically that there is a dedicated band of Soviets and their Warsaw Pact hyenas, all with the most unfriendly intentions towards this sceptred isle, within six or seven miles of this comfortable fire?’

  Adrian did his sawn-off laugh. ‘My dear Tom, you are getting to be, you know, a bit of a bore with this Lord Chalfontism of yours. Perhaps it really is compensatory fantasy for lack of the old biological drive.’

  Squire stood up, set his whisky glass on the table, and raised his right hand, arm extended, to shoulder level. He swung the arm until it pointed almost due north.

  ‘That way’s the coast, right? You wouldn’t disagree there. Not more than five miles away as the crow flies or the shell whizzes, right? All round our shores, hugging the two-mile limit, are Soviet spy-vessels, monitoring everything that goes on ashore. Five and two make seven.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Adrian. ‘We’d never let them.’

  ‘We can’t stop them.’ Squire lowered his arm. ‘They’re seven miles away, sitting in a well-armed ship of modern design. They monitor everything, local radio, police reports, the lot. Plus anything their numerous secret a
gents ashore like to beam out to them. How come you don’t know this, Adrian? It’s no secret. Is it that you don’t want to know it?’

  ‘It can’t be true. What could they learn? Anyhow, we probably do just the same to them.’

  ‘We haven’t got the vessels. You know how the defence budget has been pared away by successive governments year after year for thirty years. That’s right, isn’t it, Marsh?’

  Kaye drained his glass. ‘We’re even closer to the bastards at Blakeney. You can see them through the binoculars. Let’s get to bed, Tom. This is no talk for Christmas Day. Maybe, as Solzenhitsyn says, the Third World War is already lost. Just don’t quote me.’

  ‘I think you’re both being defeatist,’ Adrian said, stoutly.’ In any case, even if it were true, they’d never dare attack us.’

  ‘Your trouble, Adrian,’ said Kaye, lifting his glass,’ is that you’ve given up your sense of history along with your taste for whisky. Think they care about Christmas, six miles from here? They’re for abolishing it for good and ever…’

  8. Sublimated Coin Warfare

  Ermalpa, September 1978

  The side street appeared unusually busy. Cream Fiats poured down it like salmon in broken water, bravely plunging into the stream of traffic choking the harbour road. Tyres squealed, brakes whined, a thin blue haze rose from the sun-battered street.

  As Herman Fittich, Carlo Morabito, and Thomas Squire emerged from the bar into daylight, they paused to adjust to the noise and glare.

  ‘It’s the hour for lunch,’ Morabito said. ‘What you are viewing are not automobiles but foil-wrapped empty stomachs.’

  There was a lot of shouting in the streets. A fat woman was calling from an upper window. Squire was mildly surprised at the activity; the northern myth that people in hot countries were lazy died hard, though it should have given its death rattle, as far as he was concerned, on his visit to Sao Paulo, the busiest city in the world, where the blazing temperatures, far from acting as a soporific, accelerated the pace of life, as a burning building accelerates the movements of those leaving it.