Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  Squire nodded sympathetically. “I agree clear guidelines for the regulation of EMV should be formulated.”

  “It should be banned entirely,” the woman said indignantly.

  “If you’d like to give me your name and address, I can perhaps put you in touch with people here who can help you and your son.”

  While the woman was busy with the pen and notebook Squire handed her, Burnell seized the opportunity to turn and speak to a young woman who happened to look in his direction. She was evidently shy, and backed away. Again he found himself facing Squire.

  “Well thanks for speaking to me. It’s good of you to intercede with Karl on my behalf, though I think I can handle my problems. I’m going back to England in any case—a few days’ leave.”

  “Medical advice on abuse of EMV is more authoritative in Germany than England. In Munich there’s an institute—”

  “As I said, I’m going to England. The clues are there, not here. I have to regain my memory. It was ten bloody years, if you wish to know. The last ten years.”

  The woman was still standing with them. She said earnestly, “Sir, if it had been your first ten years that is stolen, then you would be totally incapacitated. That’s been proved.”

  “Oh, piss off, dear, will you? We’re trying to have a private conversation.”

  While looking shocked, the woman stood her ground. “I understand you are disturbed. It is expected. I belong to a group of professional women who could help in your difficulty.”

  Stepping into a tense silence, Squire said smoothly, “I must be off, Roy. Perhaps you’ll see me to the door. Good day, madam. I am happy to have spoken to you.”

  The woman clutched his proffered hand and gave him a sad smile before they broke away. “Don’t forget,” she called.

  Burnell gnawed his lip. “I am a bit demented. I shall find plenty of reminders of the past in my room at home. Letters, videos, suchlike. Perhaps I kept a diary… All sorts of things—they should help fill the void…”

  Giving him an understanding look, Squire said, “Let me utter a warning. I’m sure your Mrs. Rosebottom and many others with professional experience would tell you the same thing. Just suppose you retrieve that missing period of your memory. You would then be bound to scrutinize it.”

  “Of course. That’s why I want it back, for God’s sake.”

  Squire pulled up the collar of his coat. He stood by the glass door, contemplating the drizzle outside. He sighed. “I know of two cases where people have had their memory reinstated. It comes as a shock—one can readily understand this—to have irrefutable evidence of how foolish one was previously. Hindsight is not the easiest lens with which to look back over the past.”

  “I must do it, I must. I don’t want your advice. I want my wife back.”

  “Well, I hope there’s been no harm in speaking to you. Please give my regards to your stepmother when you see her. And your father, of course.” Still he paused, as if hoping the rain would cease, while Burnell shuffled impatiently.

  “Supposing we all had to relive a year of our lives, Roy. Not just remember but relive—relive everything just as it happened previously. That would be hell. Perhaps you’ve come across a novel by Ouspensky, The Secret Life of Ivan Osokin. Something of the kind happens to Osokin. I was scared by that story when I was a boy.”

  As if aware that Burnell was fidgeting, Squire changed tack and said, with rather more vigor, “Well, let’s suppose that actually happened, and we had to relive our past life, unchanged, and unchangeable. How do you think we should fare? Happy moments, yes, of course. Good friends, good lovers, of course… Music, books—worth a rerun. But they would occupy a small proportion of the years, we’d find.

  “Have you ever listened to a few taped hours of your own desultory conversation? It’s startlingly dull… How about knowing that, through your own carelessness, tomorrow would be the day you fell down a flight of steps and broke a leg? Or that the friend you trusted was going to betray you in some way on such and such a date? Would you be willing to survive much of life’s tedium, its second-rateness, a second time around?

  “Possibly you think these are an old man’s questions. I know you’re impatient to get rid of me, Roy. I know you have a kind of hatred for me, possibly based on jealousy…

  “All the same, it is as a benevolent if presumptuous friend of an earlier generation that I assure you hell is not forgetting but remembering. Remembering what asses we were—and therefore still are.”

  “Look, Tom—”

  But a hand was raised against him. Sir Tom Squire was unused to having his speeches interrupted. “The trouble with what we call life—unlike “life” on stage or in a novel—is that we are forced continually to ad lib. And to gain the facility to see clearly what kind of performance we have put on is to be, for the most part, shamed out of our socks.”

  It was Burnell’s turn to sigh. “Sorry, Tom. I hear you but I want my Stephanie back if possible. There may be some truth in what you say about making mistakes. I want to see my mistakes and put them right. I grant my personal past may prove awful, but that’s a journey I intend to take.”

  He glared at Squire’s retreating back, as the old man made his way slowly through the light rain, shoulders hunched, in the direction of the WACH offices. In the foyer of the block, ten little girls dressed in white, imported from a local school, were reciting poems by Amanda Schäfer.

  Up in his apartment, Burnell burst into fury, taking a running kick at his luggage. Why had Squire appeared? What the hell did the old bugger mean by saying that Burnell had “a kind of hatred” for him, possibly based on jealousy? Why should Burnell be jealous of the old fool? Why had he presumed to give advice?

  Part of his anger was directed against his own inability to recollect what role—if any—Squire had played in his previous life. He concealed that piece of self-knowledge in an outburst against the interfering older man, and kicked his suitcase again.

  Next day, he arrived at the international airport in good time for the twice-weekly direct flight from Frankfurt to Norwich. His plane was delayed. A vague explanation was given: catering facilities had been disrupted. The Euro-Berlin Flight 02 would depart an hour later than schedule. Euro-Berlin wished to apologize for any inconvenience caused.

  In a penitent mood—and partly to kill time—Burnell decided to apologize to Squire for his impolite behavior. He had made an ass of himself the previous day. A secretary in the WACH offices announced that Squire had already left by rail for Munich. She gave him the phone number of Squire’s hotel in Munich. Burnell called the number and was fortunate enough to catch Squire as the old man was going out to an appointment.

  After Squire had accepted the apology with good grace, Burnell asked, unpremeditatedly, “Do you have friends in Munich? Are you ever lonely?”

  It was the second question to which Burnell hoped to have an answer, but Squire merely replied that some old friends of his were taking him to Götterdämmerung that evening. Burnell said he had no fondness for opera.

  “Oh, such things improve on acquaintance and become addictive. The more you see The Ring, the more you see in it. As in life, really. In Wagner, proceedings are so long-drawn-out that one has time to wonder if, for instance, Brünnhilde’s destruction of the gods is such a good idea after all.” He chuckled, distant, voice remote and dry, hardly audible above the clatter of the airport lounge where Burnell stood. “But much of the Götterdämmerung music is lovely, even if the plot creaks a bit. It’s always a touching moment when Siegfried swallows the love potion and forgets Brünnhilde in a false passion for Gutrune. One fears for Siegfried, even while envying him that wholehearted passion.”

  As he went aboard his delayed flight, Burnell wondered whether Squire had been in fact answering his second question or uttering a veiled warning.

  28

  Open to the Public

  The seasons were in retreat. From the snows of Turkmenistan and the chilly showers of Germany, Roy B
urnell emerged into the mild warmth of a Norfolk October. The Burnell home, Diddisham Abbey, lay sixteen miles from Norwich airport in flat bland agricultural country. The sunshine was hazy, non-committal.

  The gates of Diddisham, which had stood open throughout Burnell’s boyhood, were reinforced, and now operated electronically. As his stepmother’s car swept up the drive, along the avenue of lime trees planted in his grandfather’s time, Burnell saw Tarquin Burnell at the far end of the avenue, escorted by Burnell’s sister, Clementine.

  Tarquin waylaid his son before Burnell could enter the house. What he wanted to talk about was the drought, the rotten state of the nation, the riots, the difficulty of obtaining reliable help in the garden and, by a circuitous route, the drought again.

  Despite what Tarquin described as the appalling state of the garden, the grounds of the abbey were open to the public this Saturday. He described this as the only way to make ends meet.

  Burnell walked along beside his father’s wheelchair, murmuring occasionally in agreement, casting curious looks at his sister, who was saying even less than he. No doubt she had heard the tirade many times before. What memories had she worth mourning? Burnell wondered.

  Finally Tarquin asked what Burnell had been doing. When Burnell replied that he had merely been working here and there at his profession, his father interjected, “I was told you’d been killing off heads of state.”

  “Only one, Father.”

  “Wasn’t that rather against the law of the bloody country?”

  “There was no law in that bloody country.”

  “Oh well, England’s getting almost as bad.” Tarquin pursued this theme for some while, punctuating bad news with barks of something like laughter, before changing the subject. “We’re open to the public for one more weekend. Since we have this freak mild autumn—not a drop of rain for months—we must take advantage of it. Of course there’s a hosepipe ban. But we’ll collect a few more pennies from the peasantry. Though by the time you’ve paid off the tea ladies and the security staff there’s little enough in it. Come on, I’ll give you a look round. You’ll have to forgive the electric chair.”

  Although Burnell suggested he might dispose of his luggage and have a wash first, his father would hear nothing of it, warning his son that the abbey was full of weekend guests.

  “Get some English air in your lungs. You see I’m still going strong, despite your absence,” said Tarquin, darting up one of his hard glances. His face could be summed up, Burnell thought, in the word “wasted.” Tarquin’s skull was part-visible beneath the fleshless skin, part-concealed by tufts and shadows of hair growing about cheeks, lips and other unexpected places, and by the flakiness of his skin, lichened over with moles and rusty blotches and broken veins. Tarquin Burnell’s face resembled an old wall from which creeper had been brutally stripped.

  The old wall was held together by the mortar of a fierce spirit. Tarquin had been confined to his chair for almost fifteen years. As ever, his autocratic manner, which his son had learned to see behind, presented a challenge to those who, loving him, might be tempted to show pity.

  Before them lay the major target of his attentions, the grounds of the abbey. Tarquin patrolled the grounds every day, snatching as he passed at weeds and plants which offended him, shouting orders to his two gardeners, cursing his trees into leaf, defying his grass to grow.

  “It’s at its worst, nothing flowering, everything rotting,” he said, speeding up, so that his offspring had to walk faster. The chair made a quiet whine, like the sound of repressed gases in a stomach.

  A few visitors, probably members of the National Trust, moved out of the chair’s way with various degrees of sympathy, respect, or protest.

  Walking behind Tarquin’s chair with a hand on the rear rail, as if she longed to push the vehicle, was a woman of thirty. Burnell’s younger sister, Clementine, did not speak unless spoken to. The padded shoulders of her mauve dress gave her a hunched determined aspect which the tight set of her mouth reinforced. She used no make-up on her puffy face. When she responded to one of her brother’s remarks, it was with a reserved air, and the detached look of one reading the headlines of a morning newspaper. In many respects, Clementine was Burnell’s temperamental opposite.

  “Don’t you do visitors’ teas any more, Clem?” Burnell asked, as they bowled along a gravel path.

  “Min does them in the stables.” Min was a local village girl, a long-standing friend of Clementine’s. It was pleasant to hear that Min remained; the horses had long since gone from the stables.

  “What are you charging nowadays?”

  “It’s two pounds a cup. That includes a biscuit.” She spoke without irony—trying not to be amusing, Burnell thought.

  “No cream teas any more? Has Mrs. Parslow retired?”

  “They’re five pounds a head.”

  “Will you be sorry when the visiting-season closes?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Lonely, I mean?” It was the question he had asked Tom Squire in Frankfurt two days earlier.

  Clem made no reply. Perhaps she regarded the question as an intrusion into her privacy. It was impossible to know what lay concealed in that personal territory; she never told; she never mentioned their dead mother; perhaps she dreamed of her in the secrecy of her nights. Burnell’s discretion, for which he cursed himself, did not permit him to probe. The three children of Vanessa and Tarquin Burnell had reponded in markedly different ways to the family situation. Burnell and Clem’s brother Adrian had become schizophrenic in his teens, and was now leading a quasi-independent drugged life in a hostel in Leeds. His siblings had soon learned not to speak of Adrian in front of their father; Adrian in consequence had faded from their lives.

  Doubtless it was thoughts of this kind, prompted by the return of his older son, which moved Tarquin to ask Burnell if he was glad to be home—only to withdraw the question for fear of receiving an unpalatable answer by hurrying on, saying, “You have to face facts, Roy, life’s not as much fun as it was. We’ll play ‘Newcastle’ tomorrow—we’ll enjoy that. Do you two remember that jolly holiday we had in Iceland, many a moon ago, eh?”

  “I remember it,” said Burnell.

  “You do remember something, then!”

  Clementine said, in unemotional tones, “I’ve never been to Iceland, Father. You told me I was too young. You left me behind at home.”

  “You missed a damned good holiday, girl.”

  All three fell silent. They were approaching the Brook Garden, marked off by trelliswork constructed by a gardener long ago. Grass banks stretched where, in Vanessa’s time, there had been extensive herbaceous borders. A solitary lady visitor sat on a bench, legs crossed, eating a sandwich from a little plastic box. She waved shyly to Tarquin, who waved back.

  “Season ticket,” Tarquin told his son, lowering his voice. “Here every Saturday, poor woman.”

  “Who is she?”

  “No idea.” The subject was dropped. Accelerating, he shouted, “Charge!” and steered his chair on to the bridge leading to the rose garden. Saying nothing, he pointed with his stick, swinging it slowly through an arc of forty-five degrees and back.

  “What do you make of that, Roy?”

  Burnell was already making something of the fact that the bridge had shrunk considerably since the days when he first ran across it: which was reasonable, since it now spanned a shallow declivity instead of the chasm he remembered. He leaned thoughtfully over the parapet of the bridge. A group of three visitors was strolling about in the rose garden, where an old gray gardener plied a hoe among the flower beds. He saw that the stream had died which once flowed through the grounds of Diddisham and under the stone bridge. Not even the glisten of mud shone up from its shallow bed. Rank grasses grew, black at their base, sere and yellowed at their tips.

  There as a boy he had paddled, barefoot with his friends, building little bays and lets under the bridge, while reflected sunlight rippled on the arch above the
ir heads, while the stream served as their wide Atlantic.

  “The Bittering Brook. Completely died up. Nothing. Ducks gone, of course, geese gone. Bulrushes all dead. Fish, sticklebacks… And the water lilies down in the pool. I blame Hitchens, mucking about with dams for his blessed cattle on his stretch of river. I’m suing him. Of course I’m suing.”

  Herby Hitchens farmed the adjacent land—land which had once, in palmier days, belonged to the abbey. An amiable, lazy man was Hitchens; Burnell recalled him from childhood. He had often eaten at Mrs. Hitchens’s board, and played with the Hitchens sons in their sties and stables.

  “Could it be global warming to blame, Father?”

  “There! That’s exactly what the local council claim. Idiots. Even they’re against me.” Tarquin struck the parapet of the bridge with his stick, indicating the way he would deal with the world of idiots. Clementine turned and offered her brother a smile which got about halfway to him before fading out. It was an inducement to him to humor their father. Burnell recognized the signal of old.

  They crossed the bridge into the rose garden. A breeze strewed brown petals in their path. The rose garden was partially surrounded by a fine old brick wall, much of which was still standing. Stone busts looked unsympathetically out from arbors along an arcaded walk. The gardner straightened up and nodded politely to his boss.

  “My son’s back, Ray,” Tarquin called to this withered figure. “Been God knows where.”

  “So I see,” said the gardener, grinning but not shifting his ground. He gave Burnell a combination of nod and wink. “So I see,” he repeated, in case the message had not got through the first time.