Walcot

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Gordon Bennett, we’ve dug up an ichthyosaurus!’ Deakins exclaimed.

  You corrected him. ‘No, it’s certainly not an ichthyosaur. Ichthyosaurs had elongated jaws, this is a more sophisticated critter. My guess is it’s a Jurassic plesiosaur. It has a long and flexible neck and, if we’re lucky, we may be able to uncover bits of the skeleton. A little more careful digging is required.’

  Young Heather Lambert clapped her hands. She had reverted to Deakins for a lover after her fury at discovering you were married. Age would make her less choosy in that respect.

  But you were right, your students became enthusiasts. As they lengthened, under your supervision, the vital trench, the skeleton of a plesiosaur was slowly revealed. Even Deakins regarded it with awe. Both media and academic worlds were in rapture – you had discovered a skeleton, all but complete, with every vertebra of its beautiful long neck intact and in place. You marvelled, as did everyone, at the delicate architecture of the great fish’s remains, that fish from long ago, beached in Oxfordshire.

  In those exciting days, you bought a VW Golf and drove every day to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford to see Verity Nash, still recovering from her burns. She had undergone a series of skin grafts. When she came out of intensive care, she lay in a small ward with three other women. Soon she was looking up at you with eyes of love. You held her hand. You hoped and expected that she would recover fully.

  Meanwhile, you supervised the extended dig in the Ashbury field so that, with tantalizingly slow care, the mighty neck, the slender body, the large paddles which had once propelled the plesiosaur through the warm, shallow seas – as Bill Heyne on Radio Oxford phrased it, ‘of what in the course of eons was to become Oxfordshire’ – finally, yes, there it was, with only a few fragments missing. The bones of the tail were revealed.

  Dr Mathew Matthews was supportive and generous. He funded a tent to protect the excavation and encouraged the Earth Sciences class to stay on without charge at end of term. He provided them with free meals and refreshments.

  ‘The least I can do,’ he remarked, ‘in view of your generous bequest to the university. You have done us a great service, Steve.’

  There were benefits for Matthews – suddenly, Ashbury was news. The Rector saw to it that you appeared on the television news and on a special BBC 2 programme, always speaking of you as ‘our distinguished geologist, Dr Stephen Fielding’.

  The skeleton held a special attraction which made it newsworthy. Only a few inches beneath the skull and leading vertebrae, a second skeleton was uncovered. It was the skeleton of a small plesiosaur, measuring just over a yard long. Although its delicate bones had snapped, it remained recognizable. MOTHER AND CHILD DOING WELL, declared a tabloid headline, above a photograph of you kneeling by the bones, for all the world as if presiding over a delivery. The image went straight to the sentimental hearts of British tabloid-readers.

  Archaeologists and other experts came to visit the site. A ticket office was hastily installed by the entrance gate and ordinary visitors were charged for entry. Many more students enrolled at Ashbury University. You were the hero of the day.

  When the Smithsonian Institute in the United States mounted a reconstruction of ‘Mother and Baby’, you were invited to lecture at the opening exhibition. Before you flew, you proposed marriage to Verity.

  She had an unexpected fit of modesty. ‘Why should you want to marry me, Steve?’

  ‘I just thought it would look good on my CV.’

  Despite your flippancy, Verity gladly accepted your proposal. As soon as you returned from the States, you and Verity were married at Wolvercote Church.

  You were so busy. You came at last to an agreement with Abby, and were allowed to see Geraldine at weekends. Geraldine was of a placid disposition. She was delighted when Verity gave birth to May, preferring May to any doll. You accepted a good post at Cambridge University, which you held ever since.

  The Iran–Iraq war filled the nineteen-eighties. You and Verity scarcely noticed, although half a million people died in the war and twice that number were wounded. Even the coming to power in the USSR of Mr Gorbachev, and his subsequently being supplanted by Yeltsin, and the fading away of the Cold War, meant no more to you than did the pressure of everyday things, and the passage of weeks and months. On Christmas Day of 1991, you saw on television the resignation of President Gorbachev and, before the year was over, the Soviet Union was dissolving into its component parts.

  ‘I would never have believed it!’ Verity cried. ‘Thank God, oh thank God! It’s the death of that hideous ideology.’

  ‘Some would claim that it really marks the final end of World War Two.’

  ‘Some would claim anything, dearest.’

  As you embraced her, you said, ‘But someone has to pick up the pieces.’

  ‘That’s up to the Russians,’ she replied. It proved a realistic remark. The following summer, you made a tour of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, all now free of the Russian yoke. By that time, not only you two, but England at large was becoming more prosperous.

  Sometimes professional demands took you abroad, most notably to the Yucatán peninsula, where you worked with American colleagues near the site of the Chicxulub crater. Your equable disposition made you popular. While you were in the field in Mexico, your Aunt Belle phoned to tell you that your grandmother, Elizabeth Fielding, had died in Venice. This was in 1995. You felt truly miserable; for a while you sank into gloom.

  Verity kissed you. ‘Many causes for grief,’ she murmured. ‘A good woman can rarely be replaced.’

  ‘Yes, and not only grief for her and the past she represented, her dignity, her generosity, but for us too, and for the triviality of my life, which has been so self-indulgent. She perceived that Abby and I were “not spiritual”, as she put it.’

  Verity shook her head and smiled.

  ‘At least we have some time to reform, my love, if we only knew how.’

  Elizabeth’s body was flown from Venice back to England. You also flew back to England, from Yucatán, to attend the funeral. Most of the family, young and old, gathered in the cemetery.

  Giving a short oration, you spoke in affectionate terms of your grandmother. ‘Elizabeth was approaching her one hundredth birthday, and was certainly very frail. We understand that human beings are living longer; in that respect, my dear grandmother was a trailblazer. Towards the last years of her life, she became unable to speak. On occasions, she would scribble a few words on a piece of the paper she kept by her side. I have here the last such scrap on which she wrote, when I visited her at her home in the Calle Galina in Venice, the year before last.’

  You produced and unfolded the paper to show it to the mourners standing by the graveside. On it, in a shaky hand, Elizabeth had written in pencil, ‘No longer in human race’.

  You continued, ‘Grandma had for many years struggled with language. Towards the end, she could no longer speak, and so she considered herself ruled out of the human race. Perhaps she merely meant “human society”. Even though it was untrue, we all understand how she felt. We believe that it is the gift of language which makes us human, and which forges our societies.

  ‘Yet recent exhumations of a cousin of early homo sapiens, whom we call homo heidelbergensis, reveal that even those primitive beings probably had a form of speech. In the ear are curiously named bones: the hammer, the anvil, the stirrup. We have them; heidelbergensis also had them. The inference is that these bones of the ear equipped them to hear at frequencies of from two to four kilohertz. It’s the range that covers normal human speech.

  ‘We cannot but wonder at the life of this long-extinct tribe, which existed perhaps four hundred thousand years ago. What did they say to one another? What dreams and affections could they convey? Elizabeth Fielding had a speech impediment of long standing. Nevertheless, she conveyed her meaning perfectly well; a meaning always full of love and good intentions. She was my benefactor.

  ‘Now, alas, her voice has died
forever from the stirrups of our ears. We can only wonder at her life, and at her determination – her determination for instance to live in Venice, a city she adored. But at this solemn time, when we commit her remains to the earth, we must wonder at all intelligent life.

  ‘Those long extinct people, the heidelbergensians, we cannot know what they said to each other, what their fears and hopes were. But we can suppose that they lived then as we do now, half-aware, hoping and fearing, captives of the enchainment of day following day following day, until our night falls, as Elizabeth’s has done.’

  Your Aunt Ada and her second husband – nowadays he had a little white beard – threw a posy onto her mother’s coffin as it was lowered into the ground. She clutched Beavis Gray’s arm, perhaps afraid he might fall into the forbidding hole. Tears blurred her vision, as yours too was blurred.

  Both your parents were dead. You had never brought yourself to ask them if there had been a period of their lives – for this was the way you tactfully phrased it to yourself, in silent rehearsal – in which they would have liked to be entirely rid of you. The question had never been asked, certainly never answered; so that the problem of your days alone on the sands of Walcot could never be resolved.

  Your mother in her coffin looked so small and frail as you stood there, bidding her a sorrowful last farewell. The lines of discontent about her mouth had faded away. In death she appeared young again. You wished then … but wishing was useless.

  A year later, standing at your father’s graveside, head bowed, you thought with some affection of old Martin Fielding. ‘At least he tried to do something for his country. That counts,’ you told yourself. ‘He knocked up a century at the game he loved, he wrote a book, he served in the Labour government, and perhaps it was a good thing, after all, that he had the old Blackall Square slum pulled down.’

  Moreover, you were consoled to know that the multi-storey car park which had succeeded the square had recently been pulled down in its turn.

  You were gloomy at that time.

  Sonia did not attend father’s funeral. I felt she should have been there. Even if your family’s not all it might have been, there is something precious about it.

  You speak in retrospect.

  I saw Sonia once during this period. She did attend the reception after Elizabeth’s funeral. It was all a matter of timing, she said. She flew over by Concorde, on her way to make a movie in … I think it was Hungary. It was hard to hold a conversation with her, she was with what Dad used to call ‘a fast set’.

  She had no time for you?

  Let’s not get into Time.

  Anyhow, towards the end of your father’s life, when he became more dependent than ever on the NHS, Martin had acquired some religious belief. He defended what he saw at first as a weakness, by claiming that no individual intellect was capable of grasping the truth of Christ; that truth came to a body of people as a whole, just as football fans forfeit their identities to merge within a greater mass of support; that the truth of Christ’s Resurrection could be known, not through logic, but through revelation; and that this revelation had been preserved through the faith and medium of the Church; and that the Church was one of the most stable factors in Britain, more stable than government or politics.

  He saw no hypocrisy in this line of unreason. As his hold on religion, or religion’s hold on him, strengthened, his interest in politics weakened. He had never supported Tony Blair and New Labour.

  You thought solemnly of how you and he had stood side by side watching his tiny fire in the garden, the fire he strove to keep alive day after day, and of the intent way Martin had watched the trail of smoke rise into the clear sky and disperse. That had been a moment of companionship and reconciliation between you.

  Towards the end, Martin had become a milder man, but it was too late for Mary to assert a more dominant role. She remained until the last the nonentity she had always been.

  These thoughts, compassionate and puzzled – for what was meant by human character? – ran through your mind as you watched the clods of earth land with a decided thump on your grandmother’s coffin.

  A light rain began to fall. The mourners hurried into their cars for shelter. The drivers drove them to ‘Bacton’, yours and Verity’s house, for some refreshments.

  ‘A touching and academic oration you gave, darling,’ said Verity, in the car. ‘If a touch pedantic. You’ll miss your dear Gran, I know. Elizabeth was a remarkable woman.’

  You simply nodded. You held her hand, the hand of a woman you loved more deeply than you had any other. As the car was pulling into the drive, Verity, her thoughts still occupied with your family, asked you what you most regretted about your marriage to Abby.

  ‘We virtually threw away our dream chateau at Tremblay.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s only property. Nothing else?’

  ‘Not knowing Geraldine, but fortunately I haven’t entirely lost her. And I’ve got you.’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t make it sound like a deal!’

  ‘You mean a good deal to me, sweetheart.’

  ‘Bacton’ began to fill with cheerful mourners. A younger generation now predominated. Ted, Verity’s older son, was acting as host and seeing to it that everyone was looked after. You had more or less patched up the divide between Abby and yourself; once free, Abby had gone social climbing and was now Lady Abigail Wade-Warren, her husband currently being British Ambassador to Ecuador. Rumour had it she had learnt to speak fluent Spanish. However, your daughter, the placid young Geraldine, was present, and making eyes at Ted Nash. Ted was ostensibly keeping his eyes on your daughter May. Various Frosts and Hillmans, together with Joyce and Dougie Wilberforce, were there with their friends.

  Joyce had decided three months previously to live with Paul Patel, and was already expecting his baby, as she proudly announced. She had had an earlier pregnancy, but had miscarried. Despite the solemnity of the occasion, Joyce put on a CD of The Cure. She and Patel were dancing together in a corner of the room. Patel was now a wealthy man. He had bought a declining brewery in the Midlands, where his own light beer, ‘Shabash’, was brewed and canned. ‘Shabash’ had spread from Indian restaurants to bars throughout the land.

  Paul Patel spoke teasingly about his success. ‘To think I studied erotic Eastern art as a youth! Now in middle age I’m a bloody old plutocrat and philistine.’

  You teased him. ‘That’s so English. Really, Paul, you’re so English! Do you feel English inside?’

  ‘No, no, it’s all a pose.’ He wagged his head, smiling. ‘You mean under my brown skin? Equally, when I ask myself if I feel Hindu inside, I find that is equally a pose. What’s a poor chap to do?’

  Looking cheerful, he accepted another glass of Australian Shiraz.

  ‘Why, he brews a wonderful beer that all races can drink,’ said Joyce, clinging to his free arm and looking admiringly into his face.

  Your sister Sonia was now a grand dame of the international stage and screen. She had changed her name by deed poll to Sonia Gleesorro. She had finally disposed of Adrian Hyasent and was now escorted by a gay young man called Wayne Ellison. She sat at a side table on a hard-backed chair with a drink at her elbow, receiving homage from many in the room. She had played a cameo role in a Hollywood sci-fi comedy called The Dark Light Years, as a result of which she was dependably rich.

  And an old friend of yours was also present on that occasion, Gerard Geldstein. Gerard had come with his son, Pief, a handsome and exotic man escorting his wife, Veronica Vera Goldstone, CEO of a mobile phone company. Pief had still not read any Tolstoy.

  As you and Gerard embraced each other, Gerard said, ‘You’ll think I’m an old fool, but I am standing as candidate for Mayor of London. England is quite kind to its Jews and, if I am elected, I shall try to repay that kindness.’

  ‘What’s your main concern? Inner-city poverty, traffic, the state of the Underground? All that stuff?’

  Gerard chuckled. ‘Well, all of those, of course. I wo
uld like to bring a little order to the general untidiness. I once ran a museum, in another lifetime, if you can remember. But in particular, cars are my passion, my aversion. You remember what Aristotle said, that the virtue of a thing is related to its proper function? The proper function of a car is to be moving. That’s why it has wheels, eh? But stationary, not moving, it’s a curse.’

  You agreed, smiling. You reminded him of the way in which Blackall Square had been demolished to make way for an ugly multi-storey car park.

  ‘Exactly and precisely,’ Gerard said. ‘It was that act of vandalism which set me on my political career. Though to speak truth – as if one should ever speak otherwise – I would rather be back lingering and lazing on that beach at Assos Island. You remember how we swam in the waters where Aristotle had swam? Swum? Oh, these highly irregular verbs! When we were young and able? Surely we gained a little sagacity there, didn’t we?’

  You shook your head, not quite knowing whether to smile or grieve.

  ‘Gerard, my dear friend, I was never there on the beach at Assos – not with you, not without you.’

  He looked confused. ‘What tricks the mind plays on one when one grows old. Of course. It was never a beach but a forest where we first met and encountered one another.’

  ‘Yes, and you pulled a gun on me. That I remember clearly!’

  And you both laughed, rather ruefully.

  After your grandmother’s funeral reception, you and the helper stacked all the glasses in the dishwasher. You went and sat down with Verity, who had kicked off her shoes and put her stockinged feet up on a pouffe.

  ‘How about a Metaxa to wind down with?’ you enquired.

  Verity gave a thumbs up. You settled on the sofa with her, cuddling against her. When she asked about Gerard, you told her how supportive he and Helge had been after you were discharged from prison.

  ‘He seems a cheerful and good man,’ she said.

  ‘I believe he is, when he might well have been broken and wicked.’