Walcot

by Brian Aldiss

  Wilson paused and took a sip of the cold tea by his right hand, gazing at Martin meanwhile.

  ‘At the next Cabinet meeting, I hope to propose you as Undersecretary of State for Housing. You’ll find yourself under Tony Crosland, unless I give him Education. He can provide the putting up and you can supervise the pulling down. Or something like that.’ He grinned. ‘Do you feel up to the challenge?’

  Hesitating, Martin asked about the nuclear arms race.

  The prime minister inclined his head. ‘We must proceed as if we are not about to annihilate each other. I ask you a second time, do you feel up to the challenge?’

  ‘Well … er, well, I’d … I will certainly do my best, Prime Minister.’

  ‘Good man. Confident but not over-confident, that’s the way. We’ll see how it goes. I know you’ll do your best. Official announcement in two days. Keep mum about it meanwhile.’

  It was over. Wilson rose and offered his hand. Martin rose and shook it.

  ‘Miss Stebbings will show you out, Martin.’ He turned and called to a man nearby to start instructing him about the ordering of the files. Martin turned and went unsteadily down the stairs, past Churchill, past Campbell-Bannerman, past Disraeli …

  He told you later that his heart swelled at the natural kindness of the man, Harold.

  Abby clapped her hands when she heard the news of your father’s promotion. She gave you a kiss, exclaiming, ‘What a clever family I married into!’

  You laughed. You both lit cigarettes and had a drink. You again leafed through your father’s book, now reprinting. One passage in particular teased you. You read aloud to your wife.

  ‘I look at life this way. When you are the batsman, you stand virtually alone. Apart from your fellow batsman at the other wicket, you are surrounded by players who want to get you out. They are all sportsmen, they enjoy the game, but they are there to get you out.

  ‘Does not this situation apply to the rest of life? You may well be part of a team, but the time comes when you have to stand alone and defend your wicket against all comers.

  ‘Your rewards come when you have knocked the ball over the boundary a few times. You then return to the pavilion, or to your marriage, and there you are safe, sheltered, away from the public gaze. How you behave then is a private matter. But I would suggest that the rest of your behaviour is influenced pretty strongly by your performance on the field. You have a “self” which only you know. It differs from your flesh-and-blood self; it is inaccessible to others, and often even to yourself. Others can only sense it, for good or ill.

  ‘It may be necessary to change that inner “self”, perhaps by religious prompting, but certainly to change, as we change at the end of an over. This urge should not be resisted. The bowler’s duty is to bowl, straight to the wicket and no wides!’

  ‘Religion, cricket – spare me! I know nothing about either of them.’ So said Abby.

  ‘That’s nothing to be proud of,’ you told her.

  Then followed your father’s prescription for how to go about changing one’s inner self, complete with cricketing analogies. You found most of this laughable, yet you were uneasy. It was as if your father were addressing you personally. Perhaps he had you in mind when he wrote that passage.

  And … and you ridiculed yourself for finding Martin’s image of himself as standing alone, defending his wicket with opposing players all round him, touching. It might indeed, in his father’s none too subtle mind, be how he felt – isolated, with a son always indifferent, if not actually hostile, to him. But that was absurd, just as Over the Boundary was absurd. Yes, absurd, you affirmed. What Abby thought was neither here nor there. Your father was achieving something: which, you felt, was far from being your own case.

  Your sister Sonia was also achieving something. Even while Loves of Mrs Meredith was still showing in cinemas, she had accepted the role of Medea in the new play by Adam Nightingale, Morning for Medea, at the Haymarket. The papers, the glossies, were full of Sonia, her life story and her face and body in various poses. She was toying with an invitation to Hollywood. She gave her age as twenty-nine.

  ‘Only a few years out,’ said Mary, protectively.

  Sonia threw a party at the Savoy after her triumphant first night. You attended with the pregnant Abby – pregnant again, after many hesitations and prohibitions. Also there were Martin and Mary; Bertie and Violet, with Joyce and Dougie in tow; Terry and his latest conquest, Laura; Joey with his conquest, an underdressed Lily; and various other friends, as well as the director and entire cast of Sonia’s play.

  ‘Sonia’s just terribly, terribly good,’ the director told you. He grabbed hold of Sonia and pulled her to his side. ‘She really becomes Medea.’

  ‘Luckily, it’s all pretence,’ said Sonia brightly. To you she said, ‘You’re doing well, Pop’s doing well, Abby is expecting and looks well, the family is doing fine. How did that miracle happen?’

  ‘Britain is entering a new epoch under Wilson. Thank God he refused to let us be drawn into the Vietnam war. We’re modernizing. The times are better.’

  She flashed you a contradictory look. ‘What you mean is how lousy the times were.’

  ‘Pop’s knocking down slums like billy-o!’ you said. But you were uneasy. You believed that Sonia, despite her success, was unhappy. Taking her to one side, you asked her if all was well. She said she would write to you, so you knew something was wrong.

  You caught a breath of her perfume – Blue Grass – Abby used it too.

  Then other people swept her along on a tide of bonhomie. And there was scandal to talk about among the members of the family. Claude Hillman, once married to Martin’s sister Ada, had gone off with a woman who ran a beauty salon in Carnaby Street. Joey and Terry made jokes about their father’s disappearance from the family home, waggling their hands in mock desperation.

  ‘He was always a bit of a blighter,’ said Terry.

  ‘He’s having a last fling,’ said Joey.

  ‘We don’t know it’s his last,’ said Terry, and everyone laughed.

  The champagne corks continued to pop.

  ‘How does Ada feel about it?’ asked Lily, with a dash of acid in her tone. It was not a popular question.

  Sonia addressed her captive audience briefly. ‘My mother used to pretend she had a phantom daughter, by name Valerie. Valerie made my early life misery. Now I can be miserable in my own right – not that I am exactly miserable at the moment, with all you dear friends and all these expensive drinks around! Funny thing is, I have become a Valerie. I am now a phantom daughter – not a daughter at all, to be honest, but an actress instead. That strangest thing, an actress, where one week you are sitting on a sofa, pretending to knit socks, stage left, and the next you are busy murdering the rest of the family, stage centre …’

  Everyone listened to her, nodding in agreement or laughing nervously.

  ‘So I ask you to toast my mother, who taught me the fine art of dissembling!’

  You drank your champagne with the rest, not daring to look at Mary.

  There was dancing that evening; Abby said she felt too pregnant to dance. You danced with your sister and with the actress who played Clytemnestra, and with your Aunt Violet. She had shed her blue-rimmed glasses for the evening.

  ‘I suppose you remember?’ she said, gently.

  ‘Of course, my darling aunt!’

  She smiled and looked charming as you floated round the dance floor. ‘There’s a lot to be said for incest,’ she murmured.

  ‘Yes, it keeps it in the family.’ You added, ‘Don’t cling so close or they’ll begin to be suspicious.’

  17

  In the Alley

  Dear Steve,10th October

  I never seem to get the chance to talk to you alone, but now I must write to you in my anguish. I don’t really regard love as a defining centre of life; our parents maimed me by overdevotion. But at the moment love, desire, is destroying me. Shuggerybees, as we used to say, long ago in our
foolish youth.

  Did I ever mention the name of Adrian Hyasent to you? He’s a very famous stage-designer. Also costumes, more and more. We met and fell instantly in love. Adrian was married. They have a child. I know it was wrong but I begged him to leave his wife and live with me. After all, it is the 1960’s.

  Eventually, Adrian did come to me. He spent the whole of that weekend crying. Crying, crying. About his bloody wife, about his bloody kid. In the end I got furious. He said it was his sensibility. And when Monday came, he went crawling back to them.

  Can you imagine how I felt!!!

  That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. I am obsessed by that beautiful man. He is superior to every other man I have met – and I have met a few. And slept with many. I am a bit of a whore, it must be admitted. It’s easier for blokes.

  We had then started work on Medea, beyond the read-through stage. For a week, we never touched each other, hardly even spoke. I hated Adrian, but I needed him. And my pride was hurt; I would go home late at night and dust and scrub and wash like an old mad woman. I was an old mad woman! Me, a star!

  Then he rang me. He needed me in his life, he said. So we went out for a drink and – oh, Steve, I can’t tell you. We just talked and talked – talked our souls out. It was my turn to cry. But we were sort of together again. Nothing else mattered.

  Yet I can’t bear living like this. I shall never stop. I never pass a day without anguish, never lie in my bed at night without longing for him. Will I ever be able to take him to Spain, a country I adore? To swim naked with him in the Med?

  Life has cheated me. Just when I feel so low, along comes the offer of my life – another flick! This time a serious story. Nothing less than the title role in a class British movie called Jocasta, from the classical novel. Screenplay, Robert Bolt. It’s the Oedipus story and they say it’s going to be big. I must accept – my agent’s fighting for more money up front. At least if it’s shot in England I’ll be able to see Adrian occasionally. I turned down a Hollywood offer because of him, the bastard!

  Still we manage weekends together, now and again. What rapport, what tenderness then! The sense that everything is shared, that we accept everything about each other. Steve, I love Adrian so much I cannot tell you. His love for me must cause him pain too.

  I feel I can never be free. Always I must live this half-life. Sometimes the bitterness of it makes me feel old and ugly. When I was a child, we used to pretend I was a hunchback. Now I really have that hunched back. Only when I am in the glamour of the stage or before the movie cameras – when I am being someone else – does that hump disappear.

  Of course I know you can’t help. No one could. But any comment on your foolish and perverse sister’s predicament would be welcome.

  I know you have your problems too.

  With my love,

  Sonia

  You read your sister’s letter with deep sympathy. The anger came later, anger against this fellow Hyasent, who was making two women’s lives miserable and, as far as you could see, taking advantage of them both. You saw him as weak, as a parasite. You felt that when he had actually left his wife, only to spend the weekend crying, Sonia should have kicked him out of her life and had no more to do with the man.

  After thinking hard in this vein, you wrote to Sonia expressing your fears for her, your worry about her situation. Underlying the sympathy flowed a deeper tide – the knowledge that your sister was now in her mid-thirties, and that the biological clock was ticking against her. Growing older was easier for a man than a woman, although how anyone coped with the attrition of the years was always a personal and secret process.

  You sealed your letter in an envelope and went out to post it in the pillar box along the street. It was that mild October day in 1965, when there was a demonstration against the war in Vietnam – a war into which Harold Wilson had sensibly declined to send British troops. People were running down the street as you left the apartment block. You felt it was nothing to do with you. You and Abby were arranging to go on holiday to France; Abby had pressed you to buy a house there, where prices were so cheap.

  It was a Hindu in the sixth century after the birth of Christ, whose name has not come down to the West, who discovered something missing from the abacus, that calculating machine used for centuries all over the world. After the figure nine came nothing, or ‘zero’, an Indian invention. Ever since that time, people in the civilized West have been slightly superstitious about zero, or anything with a zero in it. Such as fortieth birthdays.

  It was on your fortieth birthday that your wife gave birth to a baby girl, whom you or she would later decide to christen Geraldine Augusta Fielding.

  Abby was in the maternity hospital. There was no thought of your throwing a party, although you had taken a bottle of champagne to the hospital to share a glass with Abby – in the main to celebrate the birth of the baby, rather than your own.

  Your parents came to Leinster Gardens one afternoon, once Abby had returned there, to visit you and the babe. They were going to Medea that evening to see Sonia on stage for a third time. Once more, you concealed your feelings. On sorting out some of Abby’s clothes to take to the hospital, you had found two love notes in the pocket of her dove grey coat. Both were handwritten and from Joey, plainly indicating that he and Abby had been lovers and were talking about a secret love nest in Bordeaux.

  Hatred against Joey boiled within you, that particularly toxic variant of the emotion which includes hatred of oneself and of one’s folly – not to mention one’s lusting after other women. Joey had always been a curse. It was part of his and Terry’s so-called system, to take advantage of anything that was offered.

  As to how you felt about Abby, all those feelings of anger and betrayal had to be sublimated. She lay in bed nursing your baby; it was your duty to love her.

  So you tried to continue life as usual. You fostered your image of the man about town, and consorted with your friends. To those friends you said no word of what Joey had done; you feared it would make you a laughing-stock in their eyes.

  For six days you kept a lid on your feelings. You struggled in a whirlpool of emotions, among which was a contempt for yourself for doing nothing. And the disease of blind hatred for Joey; a hatred that killed off all other questions, all reasoning. Only an insane cunning remained.

  You bought a small hunting knife. You drove to Muswell Hill, where Joey had an apartment. You knew the place; you had been there many times, sharing a false friendship with the fellow. You parked the car some distance away. You stuck a false moustache on your upper lip. You walked, one hand in your pocket, clutching the knife.

  The apartment block was bland and anonymous, built since the war. Its windows looked out onto a small square, Eden Square, surrounded by railings. Only residents in the square could enter the uninspiring little garden.

  To one side of the block was a narrow alleyway leading to a back street. You went to the alley and stood watch, your mind black with murder. It was 10.07. You would wait. When Joey emerged, you would go up to him – walk? rush? – and stab him in the chest. Hold the little cur. Get an arm round his neck. Drag him towards the blade. He would struggle, you could choke him, jab the blade into his guts. Once. Again. Again. In his chest, a second time. See the blood pour out. Tell the bastard, ‘You are going to die, you little scumbag!’ ‘Die!’ ‘Die!’

  You would then throw him down. On the pavement. Maybe he would writhe – yes, yes, writhe in agony – before dying. Kick him. Kick him hard. Break his backbone. His skull …

  What if there were passers-by? They would run off in terror. No one would interfere. You would have your revenge, then fling the knife into the railed garden. Run back to – No, walk back to the car.

  What if Terry had also been fucking your wife?

  You lusted for the attack. You were swollen with a terrible fury.

  Someone was coming along the pavement, walking slowly. You hid the knife. He approached. You struggled to take cont
rol of yourself. It was Claude Hillman, in a shabby old check suit.

  ‘Hello, Steve, what are you up to?’ He showed no particular surprise.

  ‘Oh, I was caught short, Uncle. Had to have a quick pee.’

  ‘You don’t look well. Are you okay? I suppose you are here to see Joey, but he’s up in Middlesbrough today. I said I’d look in and feed his ruddy cockatoo.’

  ‘Yes, Middlesbrough. Of course. I’ll be off then.’

  ‘Grown a moustache I see. Look, Steve, old boy, seeing as you’re here … I’ve got a new project on –’

  ‘Sorry, Uncle, I must go. Not feeling too well.’

  ‘It’s a false moustache, isn’t it?’ He was peering at you more closely. ‘What have you been up to?’ He suddenly changed tack. ‘I just want a bit of help to get on my feet again.’

  ‘Oh? So what happened to Torrid Tours?’ You were shaking your head and blinking in a kind of fever.

  He shrugged his shoulders and gave a false laugh. ‘That one didn’t really take off. You know what Spaniards are like. But if you could let me have two thousand quid – just for a month or two – I’d –’

  ‘Uncle, I really couldn’t. Sorry. I’m a father now, you know.’

  ‘What, you’re taking up burglary or something? It’s nothing to you, two grand! Don’t worry, you’d get it back. Trust your old uncle.’

  You were looking about you, shaking your head, as if seeking a way of escape.

  ‘Uncle, sorry, I must run.’

  ‘Two hundred quid, then.’

  You did run. Claude called angrily after you, ‘Wait till you’re up shit creek! See if I’ll help you then!’

  You were fortunate that circumstances prevented you from committing murder. Once I calmed down, I was ashamed of myself. I had taken no thought of the consequences.

  No need for shame. It was a design fault. We never properly adjusted the endocrine system.

  18