by Brian Aldiss
‘Nothing very new there.’
‘OK. That’s no objection, is it? But Embry states that our early experiences can cause us to fix on a mental model of the world which we may need to junk. Like some disaster early in life can set us on disaster courses later. “Circumstance-chain” is his phrase. Pass along the pitcher, “old chap”.’ He put his mode of addressing Levine in humorous quotes, as if recalling a phase of life he had jettisoned.
Marsh’s friend, Polly Ester, sitting on his far side, had hitherto contented herself with reading the legend on Marsh’s T-shirt over and over. She bestirred herself to lean forward and say smiling to Levine, ‘Dale’s forgotten the part of the argument I like best. It’s not just individuals whose memories of disaster can lead them to further disaster later in life. There’s a brilliant chapter on how the individual is a microcosm of the nation. Hen shows how certain countries are ruled by – ruined by – memories of disaster.’
Several places away, engaged in argument, Hengist Embry nevertheless caught the mention of his own name and roared down the table, ‘Alpha for you, Polly. Examples include Georgia, Serbia, many Latin American countries, maybe China, and, of course, Ireland.’
Marsh formed a circle of thumb and forefinger and made Embry a cheerful ‘spot-on’ sign as the latter plunged back into his own noisy conversation.
‘Whether all that’s true or not …’ Deciding against completing the sentence, Levine returned to his platter of crab.
Rather to Levine’s surprise, Embry paid him renewed attention as the group left the restaurant. In the carpark, he took Levine’s arm in a friendly way and led him apart from the crowd, his mind evidently still full of his dinner conversation.
‘Remember that lovely “Veni, Redemptor”? Well, man has to be his own Redemptor, to my way of thinking – but fast.’
‘Most human plans for improvement come to grief.’
‘There opinions differ. Look what the US has become. This was all wilderness two centuries ago.’
While Levine was feeling ashamed of his English remark, Embry deftly changed the subject. ‘As a successful man, I have my enemies here, Gordy,’ he said. ‘Some are not above spreading lies about me. You find the same kind of thing in every community. Now, let’s get to the crunch. I’m a visionary but I’m also a practical man. I was hoping you could maybe give me a few introductions back in England, to ease my path in the new post.’
Levine said he did not entirely understand what line of work Embry was planning for the AUN.
‘Gordy, I will be more than happy to inform you. What I mainly require from you is a warm personal intro to Sir Alastair Stern, principal of AUN. He’s your uncle, right?’
‘Father-in-law, actually.’
‘How I relish that British “actually”. I didn’t know you were still using it.’
‘I’ve heard the word on American lips.’
‘Now, in a few sentences, I’ll explain the project I have up my sleeve. It’s a real beaut. I am eager to be working in Norwich. It’s the capital of the County of Norfolk, right? See, I have some Norfolk blood in my veins. My great-grandfather sailed over to New England from Norfolk, back in the 1830s. That was a terrible time for the poor. The legend in the family is that the last great-grandfather saw of England was a line of hayricks burning on the horizon.
‘My proposed project involves the analysis of an incident which occurred in the Norfolk port of Great Yarmouth. Do you know Great Yarmouth, Gordy?’
‘Yarmouth. Yes, I’ve been there more than once. It’s a seaside resort.’
‘It so happens that there are Embrys buried in Great Yarmouth cemetery.’
‘Quite a coincidence.’
Embry stopped his strolling and looked hard at Levine. ‘A coincidence – or something more? Is it not what I term a circumstance chain? Is the universe of human affairs random – stochastic – or pre-ordained, or ruled by God? Or what? That is precisely the question I mean to research. It’s a big question, with large implications.’
Looking as if for inspiration towards the distant neon sign proclaiming JUMBO STONE CRABS, Embry began to recite. ‘“What of the Immanent Will and its designs? It weaves unconsciously as heretofore Eternal artistries of circumstance, Whose visions – wrought in wrapt aesthetic rote – Seem in themselves its single listless aim, And not their consequence.” Thus the poet … Well, we are going to diagnose those artistries of circumstance for the first time. Ingenuity lavished on space technology will now confront Fate. Pardon the expression.’
The wine had somewhat clouded Levine’s perceptions. He felt they should drive back to the Hilton, where he could lie down, or perhaps have another drink.
‘I don’t follow. A diagram of circumstance? I mean, couldn’t you pursue such research more effectively in the US? Why Yarmouth, for heaven’s sake?’
‘It so happens that Great Yarmouth presents us with precisely the contained situation required, the kind of laboratory test case.’ He smiled benignly. ‘I’m an optimist, Gordy, and, what’s more, I have the future good of humanity in mind. I see – I do believe I see – a way in which poor suffering mankind might be made happier, safer. And I’m not talking about SDI or anything like that.
‘Ask yourself why we are always running towards disaster. Just when you might think affairs were straightening out, along comes a fresh crisis. It happens in individual life, it happens in international affairs. I can remember back to the aftermath of World War II. Just when we were sorting out the peace and trying to put everything together, along came the threat from the Soviet Union, and the Cold War descended upon us, warping millions of lives for decades.’
‘That may be so, but it doesn’t have much to do with Yarmouth.’ He should have known that such a remark would not have ended the discussion.
A sagacious finger was wagged at him. ‘I hope it has everything to do with Yarmouth,’ Embry said. ‘There I shall test out my hypothesis of transpsychic reality …’ He repeated the phrase thoughtfully, as if more for his benefit than his listener’s. ‘Transpsychic reality … If I’m right, then a new epoch in human relationships will dawn. I shall father a revolution in how we view the physical world around us …’ He took a deep breath and then said, suddenly, ‘I should have gone to the john before we left the restaurant.’
‘We’d better get back to the hotel.’
The bladder problem evidently wasn’t too serious. Embry dismissed it with a grand gesture. The physical world was going to have to wait.
They had come to the end of the carpark. Beyond some smart new plastic warehousing, masts of dinghies could be seen. Music of the swing era could be heard.
‘I may as well admit it, Gordy. It’s an ambitious plan, and it will need a whole heap of moral support from Sir Alastair Stern, not least because of the depressed state of the British economy in 1990. I want your father-in-law on my side.’
He outlined the circumstances of the case as clearly as if he was lecturing a class.
One of the depressants afflicting British life was the situation in Northern Ireland, which cost the British taxpayer many millions of pounds sterling a year. The Irish Republican Army, the IRA, although not politically effective, existed as a disruptive force in social life. In the mid-eighties, it had attempted a major coup when it planned a series of bomb outrages in English seaside towns during the holiday season.
Scotland Yard had got wind of the plan. Bombs of Czech-made Semtex were detected and defused in six towns along the South Coast. Three men had been arrested, including a high-ranking IRA officer. Unfortunately, one bomb had escaped detection. It exploded in a small hotel in Yarmouth.
‘Four people were killed in the Great Yarmouth explosion,’ Embry said as they climbed into his car. ‘I am not concerned with the IRA. Though I may say parenthetically I do not approve of American support for the IRA. They can be described only as terrorists, killing and maiming innocent people. My AUN unit will investigate the lives lost.
‘Who were those
four persons killed that day? What were their lives like? What brought them to that hotel on that date? Was their presence merely stochastic, or had it to do with, say, economic conditions?’
‘Or the hand of God?’ hinted Levine, smiling.
‘We are open-minded. We rule nothing out. Not even the Immanent Will. “Veni, Redemptor”. I do not go into this project with preconceived ideas, Gordy. I want to establish whether the random was at work, or were those deaths circumstance-chain deaths – with submerged social causation of the same kind that draws me back to ancestral ground?
‘It’s going to be an original and epoch-making sociological field exercise. Who exactly were the four who died that day in the Hotel Dianoya in Great Yarmouth?’
2
Displaced
Midsummer 1986
The car was an orange Hillman which had seen better days. Ray Tebbutt drove it with the kind of care he devoted to most matters, slowing to corner, braking gently to stop, signalling whenever humanly possible. He left the main Fakenham–Cromer road and turned north in third gear. Although the side road was empty of traffic this summer evening, he handled the wheel as cautiously as if in one of the city traffic jams to which he had previously been accustomed.
Clamp Lane was a narrow strip between high banks. History had split it open to the sun like a walnut. Within living memory, the lane had been shaded by elms, their woody topknots havens for birds. The trees were all that remained of extensive forest which had once choked this region of Norfolk before the Enclosures Acts of the previous century had begun a process of denudation. Then Dutch Elm Disease, spread through the importation of cheap foreign timber, had wiped out the last grand sentinels. Three summers and they were gone, and the birds they sheltered gone with them. Clamp Lane was now bathed in impartial summer sun, banal, no longer secret, me-andering between unfrequented wheat fields, easy going for orange Hillmans.
Tebbutt slowed still further where the road sloped into a depression which provided some shelter from the wind for two cottages, solitary in the landscape. Like the landscape, these two Victorian cottages, close yet apart, built for farm labourers, were dominated by the socio-economics of their time. Machinery had superseded the labourers; they and their families were gone long ago, as the birds had gone.
The cottages contemplated each other across the roadway. The building on the left, No. 1, never distinguished for its beauty, was tumbledown, many of its windows broken; it had remained empty for some years, a little too distant from the coast to attract speculative builders. The garden had run riot in a tangle of weeds, while clawed arms of bramble reached up to the bedroom windowsills. Ivy had gained the chimney pot. On the front bank, a wattle fence had collapsed, but marigolds still flowered there, year after year.
The opposite cottage, No. 2, to the right of the lane as Tebbutt approached, presented a more cheerful aspect. Though its original denizens had been packed off, and it had endured years of emptiness, it was now occupied and maintained. Its windows, which were open, shone brightly; all paintwork and guttering were spick and span. Its rather poky aspect had been improved by a small front porch. Its neat little garden, with stone garden seat, was planted out with flowering annuals, while the gravel drive leading to a lean-to garage was weeded and lined with box.
A small black and white cat sat alertly on the sill of one of the upper windows, as if anticipating its master’s arrival.
Turning in at the white gate, Tebbutt brought the car to a gingerly halt in order not to disturb the gravel, and tooted the horn.
A comfortable-looking woman came bustling immediately round the side of the house. Her hair was dyed brown. Over her thin form she wore a handwoven red blouse, jeans, and a pair of sandals, country garb which did not entirely disguise her look of being a displaced townee.
Removing her spectacles from her nose, she kissed Tebbutt on the lips as he emerged from the car.
‘Hello, Ruby love, how’s the day been?’ he asked, squeezing her narrow bottom as he embraced her.
‘Naughty Bolivar caught another bird this morning,’ she said, glancing up accusingly at the cat on the sill. ‘A poor little corpse was waiting for me on the back doorstep when I got home.’
‘Little devil,’ said Tebbutt indulgently. ‘Not another thrush? Bolivar must have killed every thrush in Norfolk by now.’
‘A robin this time,’ replied his wife, linking her arm in his. ‘I warned him that one day a dirty great eagle would fly down and carry him off to be fed to baby eagles.’
‘That should have a tonic effect on his morals.’
Laughing, they went together by the narrow way between fence and garage, and turned in at the back porch.
The porch was built of breezeblock topped by insecure rustic work. It had been added to the main structure by previous occupants of No. 2 Clamp Lane. The Tebbutts had camouflaged the crude wall by nailing a trellis to it and growing a Russian vine up the trellis. The vine had threatened to cover the entire cottage until Ruby took shears to it; now it was regularly clipped.
The kitchen which they entered stretched across the rear of the building, and overlooked farmland. The view from Ruby’s sink was pleasant, but curtailed by rising ground, above which could be seen a line of treetops and one chimney, belonging to the Manor Farm in Field Dalling. The ground floor of the dwelling consisted of kitchen, toilet, a passage doubling as hall, and a front room. This living-room had once been two rooms, a tiny parlour and a smaller dining-room. When newly installed in the cottage, soon after Ray had lost his Birmingham job and they were still optimistic, the Tebbutts had removed a rusty solid-fuel stove and knocked the two rooms into one. The stove they sold for five pounds to a scrap dealer from Swaffham.
‘Cup of tea, love?’ Ruby asked, continuing without awaiting an answer, since she knew what it would be. ‘You look a bit tired.’
Ray sank down on one of the two chairs they had managed to cram in the kitchen beside the small table where most of their meals were eaten. He was a small wiry man in his early fifties. What remained of his hair was dyed black. His bullet-head gave him an aggressive aspect, though the expression on his red-tanned face was amiable. His large feet were crammed into boots which he now proceeded to remove, sighing heavily as he did so. He dropped them on the matting on the floor, paused, then arranged them under the table.
‘That bugger Greg made me dig the upper field all afternoon,’ he said. ‘He’ll never grow anything on it when it’s dug. It’s far too dry under the shade of that line of poplars.’
‘He should get a thingy on it.’ She was four years younger than her husband, but occasionally forgot the names of objects. ‘A mechanical digger.’
‘It’s full of couch-grass. You can’t make any progress.’
Tut-tutting in agreement, she passed him his mug of tea. As he thanked her, she nodded and pointed with elaborate pantomime in the direction of the front room, while silently mouthing the word ‘Mother’.
Tebbutt nodded and smiled and mouthed the words ‘I’m going’ in return. After a noisy sip at his tea, the mug of which carried a picture of a sheep wearing spectacles and the legend ‘I’ve been fleeced’, he rose to his stockinged feet and padded dutifully into the front room.
His mother-in-law sat in a big wicker chair, her chin resting on her chest. A wisp of scanty white hair had fallen over her face. She was a small frail woman in her seventy-fifth year, retaining her position in the chair only by dint of four large colourful cushions which, like sandbags round a beleaguered building, served to bolster her morale.
Although Agnes Silcock gave every appearance of being asleep, she spoke distinctly as Tebbutt approached. ‘Early tonight then, are we?’
‘Excuse my stinking feet, Ma. It’s gone seven. Usual time, thereabouts.’
‘So it is. I must have been wool-gathering.’ She raised her head to observe the clock with the loud tick, an old wind-up relic from better days standing on the mantelpiece, and then let it fall again.
He
told her the events of his day, while Ruby stood behind him, listening, in the doorway.
Tebbutt knew that both Agnes and her daughter had a passion for small detail; Agnes had been a jigsaw addict before her eyes had failed her: the accretion of the small pieces, each to be accommodated in one place only in the whole picture, had greatly satisfied her. Ruby had shared this hobby.
But for Tebbutt it was precisely the small accretion of incident which pained him. His day, like all days now, had been passed in manual labour at Yarker’s garden centre. Though he liked to please his mother-in-law, it was with no great pleasure that he recalled its details for her. But to see her listening thirstily to the details of the outer world was rewarding. And it pleased Ruby.
His boss, Greg Yarker, had driven to Hunstanton to collect a consignment of plants, leaving Ray in charge of the centre until noon. Yes, he’d been quite busy. Despite the hot weather and the recession, people were still buying plants. He had sold four nice tamarisks to a woman who said she was from South Creake. Never seen her before. Some people still had money to spend.
‘Don’t know where it comes from,’ Agnes said, with a cackle.
Pauline Yarker had issued forth from her caravan and brought him a coffee at about noon. He had chatted with her for a while.
‘Awful woman,’ Ruby said.
Then he’d shifted bags of peat. Yarker had returned with the plants. He had done a deal over some furniture with some people in Hunstanton who were having to sell up. Yarker was more interested in furniture than plants; he would sell up the centre if anyone would buy. He had brought Tebbutt a pasty for lunch from a new bakery in Hunstanton. So Tebbutt had saved Ruby’s sandwiches and brought them home again. She could fry them up for his supper and that would save the rest of the ham for tomorrow.
