Walcot

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Welcome to Ashbury, my friend. Though it’s not a great career move, I must admit. I’m Ted Loftus.’ He laughed self-deprecatingly. ‘Known as Lofty. Can’t think why.’

  You shook hands. You discovered soon that students called him, not Lofty, but Neanderthal Loftus.

  As you lugged your suitcases into the mock-baronial main school, it occurred to you that the name Loftus was familiar. You remembered being twelve, when you had climbed a hill in France, with a master whose name was Loftus.

  ‘Good lord!’ you exclaimed, ‘We met long ago, when I was a kid. Do you remember?’

  He looked blank, then covered the expression with a polite smile. He shook his head and the shaggy locks trembled. ‘Sorry. Where was that? I’m afraid I can’t – well, my memory isn’t all it should be …’

  ‘In France.’ A name came floating back. ‘In France. The Roman villa – Beaussais, that was the name. Beaussais.’

  ‘Oh dear … No. Beaussais? Beaussais? Don’t actually recall … What year was that?’

  You told him it was before the war.

  Again the head-shaking, as if the skull were loose on the neck. ‘I was a boy then. Well, I say a boy, just a lad. It must have been my father you met, Archibald Loftus. I could be wrong.’

  You were embarrassed.

  A further embarrassment came later, when you rounded a corner into the main corridor. Two people were talking by the notice board, the red-faced bursar, Jeremy Nash, and Myrtle, the deputy head. Myrtle had her back to you, and was saying, ‘But he means well.’ At a warning sign from Nash, she turned and saw you.

  ‘Oh, Steve, we were discussing the forthcoming tennis match.’ But she spoke in a forced way, which you knew meant she had been talking about you. So they thought you ‘meant well’, what a condemnation. No doubt your prison sentence had earned a mention.

  Any faint intentions you had of forming a liaison with Myrtle died before they were properly formulated.

  Breakfast was served in the staff dining room. Sunlight poured in through a stained glass window, modern and abstract in design. The bare walls were decorated only in one instance, by a stipple engraving of Thomas More, by Bartolozzi. Behind the buffet counter stood the cheerful Mrs Anstruther – Amy Anstruther, wife of the maths tutor. You collected a croissant, a plain yoghurt and a dubious banana, and sat at the common table. Amy brought you over a cup of tea, smiling amiably as she set it down.

  You were sitting next to Ted Loftus on one side and Mrs Verity Nash, who taught English Literature and French, on the other. Mrs Nash was an attractive woman in her mid-forties, as far as you could determine. Her hair was dark and curly, drooping over her brow. Her face was pale and unsmiling. A dark mole rather coyly decorated her right cheek, high, near the eye. As she slowly ate a bowl of muesli, spoonful by spoonful, she peered through a pair of heavy-rimmed spectacles to read a French paperback.

  You cautiously peeped over Mrs Nash’s shoulder to read the title of the book. It was La Tentation de Saint-Antoine. At the same time, you caught a hint of her perfume. She was drably dressed in a fawn two-piece, with a wispy scarf tucked about her neck. She had barely given you a glance and a nod. ‘Not friendly,’ you said to yourself.

  Dr Mathew Matthews entered, wearing black clerical garb, as was his custom. Accompanying him on a lead was his black Labrador, as also was his habit. The dog was almost as dignified as his master. Dr Matthews greeted everyone present, sat down at the head of the table, solemnly drank a cup of tea, ate an unbuttered round of toast, and then departed.

  ‘Just to demonstrate to us he’s an aesthete,’ said Loftus, grinning to show a number of big, heavy teeth. ‘Not that I mean to be unkind …’

  You also departed to your classroom. One consolation was that you would see, among a largely unmotivated group, the cherubic young face of Heather Lambert. This morning, Heather was wearing a tattered pair of blue jeans and a tight blue sweater which showed off her breasts to perfection – or distraction, you told yourself. Although her odious boyfriend, Jasper Deakins (you were sure to remember his name) was sitting close to her, Heather Lambert paid attention to every word you uttered.

  She sat, elbow on desk, pencil poised in the region of her miraculous ear and looked at you, her mouth slightly open. You wondered if that was a sign of admiration or of a tonsil problem.

  In the afternoon, although rain threatened, you took the class out to the dig you had started in the rear of the college grounds. You had managed to persuade Dr Matthews to permit this excavation, saying that a practical exercise was needed for the teaching of geological knowledge to a group not alight with enthusiasm.

  Jasper Deakins and two of his cronies climbed down into the hole. It was square, eight feet at a side, the banks supported by timbers. The spoil had been thrown on two tarpaulins spread nearby.

  ‘We aren’t going to find much here.’ As he spoke, Deakins shaded his eyes with his hand to look up at you. ‘Waste of time, if you ask me.’

  ‘We weren’t,’ you said. ‘Get out now, will you?’

  Partly ignoring Deakins, you addressed the class. ‘We have already learnt something about Britain. We understand that the dry land on which we stand was for a long time under the Tethys Ocean; for hundreds of thousands of years.’

  You scooped up a handful of sand from the nearby pile and let it sift through your fingers. ‘This is Jurassic sand. This part of Oxfordshire lies over vast beds of it. How deep is the sand? Sometimes fifty feet, maybe a hundred. A warm ocean, growing increasingly shallow as the land rose.’

  ‘What made it rise, please?’ That was Heather Lambert, standing with her legs slightly apart.

  ‘The continents were shifting, as they still shift. Laurasia to the North was splitting from Gondwanaland to the South …’ But how could you convey to them the wonder of this ancient planet, the romance of the acquisition and accumulation of this knowledge of it? How force them to wish to know, to actually know, when there was so much you did not know yourself?

  ‘The climate was changing, turning from warmer to cooler. Don’t think of our world as stable. Geologically speaking, stability isn’t on.’

  ‘We’re stable enough,’ someone said. ‘Ashbury House has been here long enough. Too long, if you ask me.’ Several people laughed at this remark.

  ‘You have to learn to think in far grander stretches of time.’

  Deakins sank a small entrenching tool into the sand at his feet. ‘We’re not likely to find any fossils in this stuff.’

  ‘“Stuff”, you call it? This “stuff” is the past life of our Earth.’

  But Deakins had a retort. ‘It’s nothing but sand, Sir. There’s no life here, no skeleton, no bones. We’re wasting our time.’

  You felt compelled to return to the dig that evening. Ted Loftus accompanied you, hands in the pockets of his tight-fitting jeans. The sun shone through a light shower, which tailed off westward towards the White Horse Hills.

  On the other side of the low stone wall marking the boundary of the university grounds was a field fringed by elm trees, which at one end crowded together to make a small copse. This field was owned by a Tony Abelhouse. Crows sat in the crowns of the elms, cawing in chorus.

  Loftus gave a grunt. ‘Dr Matthews is at odds with Abelhouse. He’s suing him for cruelty to animals. I don’t know whether suing is such a good idea, but there, opinions differ. Abelhouse isn’t a very nice man, if I may express an opinion.’

  Abelhouse professed to be a circus man, or at least to provide various animals for local circuses. A small brown bear had been kept cribbed in a narrow cage and had died there, of neglect. Dr Matthews had instigated a furious row which had got first into the local paper and thence into the nationals, and had featured on television. Confined in the field now were five horses of miscellaneous size and colour, but mainly white. The field itself was almost bare of grass, and presented a sorry sight. It had been trampled to death.

  ‘Have a look,’ said Loftus. ‘Poor bloody animals.
Well, mustn’t swear, but just look at their condition.’

  You went to look over the wall at the barren field. The horses came galloping up at a mad pace, eyes rolling, teeth gnashing. You stepped back, alarmed by their ferocity. Their great, sinewy necks stretched towards you. They whinnied savagely.

  Seeing there was to be no help from you, the horses began to race round the field, a small white animal following the immense savage leaders. Their hooves appeared large, out of all proportion to their narrow legs. Their scanty manes flew, their great heads twisted one way and another, accompanied by furious neighing.

  As you regarded the stampede, a memory of your friend Caleb’s pamphlet, ‘Guernica’, returned to mind. You had regarded his account of Britain as a dark wilderness where persecution and injustice ruled an outdated portrait; but as a metaphor it still lived. These tormented beasts – presumably once placid enough – were the four-legged equivalents of many men you had encountered in prison; forever doomed to tread in the same wearisome circles of deprivation, deprivation of nourishment, mentality, even morality. Why had those unfortunates managed to accumulate the scrapings of the English tongue? Only, as Caliban growls in The Tempest, ‘My profit on’t, Is I know how to curse’, for curse they did, forever in a storm of cursing their rotten luck. These victims of society, and many you met like them beyond the walls of that prison, had minds darkened like the untended regions described in that old book extolled by Caleb.

  Wasn’t England – and by no means England alone – a sham reasonable society where, below the successful and eloquent classes, stormed a sea of the disappointed and lost? Why had you not formed this opinion firmly before now, as you stared over the confining wall? What mattered the great events of the globe when all the while – in the past, now, and inevitably in the future – men, women and children were in the grip of a huge hunger never to be allayed?

  From this horrifying picture of what you saw as a profound, indecent truth you turned away, sickened and saddened by your vision. By the place where the trees stood thickest, the horses paused and, with their huge yellow teeth, savagely gnawed off pieces of bark. Then off again they charged, hooves thudding, wild, savage, starving. You watched them with pity and horror. Round they galloped again and again; unable to cease, in a torment of hunger.

  There seemed nothing you could do. Alarmed, ‘Shuggery-bees!’ was all you could say.

  You directed your attention away from the scene. You climbed down into the excavated hole. Ted Loftus stood staring, hands in ragged pockets, at the horses on their crazed circuit. Shadow lay on the sand that the shower had patterned. You thought that if you were a painter like, say, Tiepolo, you could not paint the light separately; you would have to paint the light on sand.

  The sand had changed since the afternoon. The confused pattern the raindrops had drawn made it look more like the sand you would find on a beach; more alive – sand that still knew the sea and the tides. Yes, it was beautiful. You could not understand why you felt sad, or why you felt so alone. You gave a grunted attempt at amusement to think how lonely it would be to be the one man impossibly stranded in the Jurassic Era.

  A voice coming from behind you said, ‘Hello, Mr Mystery Man.’

  Even before you turned, you knew Heather Lambert was there.

  You looked up at her looking down at you. Her jeans were streaked with a yellow dust, pollen from a flower she had brushed against on her way. From this angle, her neat little chin was in evidence, as were the tilt of her eyelashes and the lids of her eyes over her hazel pupils. And the tilt of her breasts under the sweater.

  ‘No sign of life here,’ you said lightly. ‘Or not until you came along.’

  You watched her behind descend as she climbed into the excavation with you. ‘Are you thinking great thoughts?’ She wore sandals and had painted her toe nails scarlet.

  ‘I’m wondering why you think I’m a mystery. There’s no mystery about me.’

  ‘That’s not what I think,’ she said with a hint of mischief in her voice. She looked up at you, and now the innocence you thought you saw in her face was replaced by something sterner. ‘You do have mystery. It’s not just because you’re older, it intrigues me, I guess. I have a problem. I suffer from anhedonia, so they tell me. You know what that is?’

  You shook your head. ‘Never heard of it. Is it catching?’

  ‘Could be, if you try hard enough. Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure in situations which are normally regarded as pleasant.’

  You regarded her sympathetically, although not without a stirring of lust. ‘How do you contract this condition?’

  She gestured dismissively, as if it was not worth talking about. Her breasts shifted under her sweater. ‘Search me. My ma was German and I hated going out with her, walking with her. Her family was well-connected but she was lame. It always embarrassed me, that lameness of hers; hobble, hobble.’

  ‘Is that enough to bring on – what is it – anhedonia?’

  Bored with the subject, she asked, ‘Have you got religion, Steve?’

  It was the first time she had used your first name. You made a note to use hers at an early opportunity.

  ‘If you can be religious without believing in God.’

  ‘You didn’t come down here to think about that.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I was thinking about my daughter.’

  ‘Ah, that’s more like it. So there is a mystery, I guess.’

  ‘What do you want, Heather?’

  An impatient gesture. ‘I don’t know what I want. You tell me what I want.’ And she looked smilingly up at you mouth open, waiting, inviting.

  And so you were lying together on the damp sand, kissing each other, her mouth soft and moist.

  ‘Ooh, you’re not that old,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not that young.’ Lucky some girls have a father fixation, you thought.

  She began kissing you again with her tender mouth, as you stroked her hair. In that eternal moment, the hooves of the starving horses could still be heard, drumming on the earth of the bare field, like a detached heart. You had forgotten about Ted Loftus. Tactfully, seeing the arrival of Heather, he had lumbered off, hands still in pockets.

  Finally, your lips disengaged and you were laughing. ‘You weren’t enjoying that?’

  She was laughing. ‘Anhedonia comes and it goes. Just now, it went. Cool.’

  You were feeling under her sweater and she was lying back, letting you, when the rain came on again. You had a hand on her left breast and her nipple between your finger and thumb.

  ‘Fuck!’ she said.

  ‘Come into my room,’ you said. And you both made a dash for cover.

  ‘We can have a serious talk,’ she said, panting.

  So you did, among other things. The perfume when she was aroused enveloped you, becoming the very atmosphere of your desire. Heather, gasping, finally said she thought she enjoyed everything you did, but there was always something in her mind that stood apart, not happy when she was happy, not miserable when she was sad.

  She propped herself up on an elbow and stared at you with large, dark eyes. She thought all this meant she was intended to be religious. She had been thinking of leaving Ashford at the end of the present term, but now … ‘Things are a bit different, I guess.’

  You were not too sure about that. You could foresee trouble ahead if Dr Matthews discovered you were having a love affair with a student. It would mean dismissal and another blot on your CV.

  You turned up at the tennis courts on the following day to watch Heather play in the finals of the so-called Ashford Cup. Although she was not a brilliant player, her athleticism on the court was attractive. She won the first set with ease, but was in difficulties in the second set, up against an opponent who was beginning to warm to the game. You found yourself sitting on one of the uncomfortable metal seats next to the self-contained Verity Nash, ensconced as usual behind her ebony-rimmed glasses. Her husband, the bursar, was nowhere to be seen
. The only other member of staff watching the match was Myrtle.

  You felt you had to say something to Verity Nash. Heather was flashing her neatly filled panties at deuce when you said, without taking your eyes from that glimpse, or the possibility of another, ‘Tennis provides a good opportunity for the celebration of human consciousness.’ Something intellectual, if asinine, seemed to be demanded. ‘It combines rapid movement and balance, with coordinated judgement of spatial dimension. I don’t imagine australopithecus played tennis, do you?’

  You had not exactly expected a response from this remote-seeming lady, but she said, flicking a half-smile at you, ‘That’s the physical aspect. The psychological aspect is that you need to make rapid guesswork about the enemy’s responses.’

  ‘That’s so,’ you said, rather surprised.

  ‘That’s where I went wrong,’ Mrs Nash said in lowered tones. ‘In tennis as in life.’ She then stared rigidly ahead at the play on court, her body language saying, ‘No more talk, I have already overstepped the mark.’

  You too concentrated on the game, and the panties, while thinking that there was more to Verity Nash than one would have at first imagined.

  Kissing the succulent Heather had been the impulse of a moment, prompted by both hunger and curiosity. Had the wish come initially from her? Were you simply lonely? It was a long while since you had lain with a woman. Supposing it had been one of the other girls in the class …

  Had it been her breasts or her mind that attracted you? Once you were alone, you thought hard about these matters. ‘Anhedonia.’ It sounded like an arid country in North Africa.

  You came to no precise conclusion. There seemed to be no word for what you felt.

  Here, you need no language. Everything you have done or even thought is recorded and is transparent.

  I am supposed to be comforted by that?

  You will become comforted in a while.

  But why not comforted then – that vital then, when I was alive? It seemed to me there was no one course of conduct, no single response to be offered, or indeed, no set of definite rules to be followed.