Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  As he was finishing his breakfast, Sheila came down to breakfast in a paisley blouse and a long cream linen skirt. Smiling, she waved the mail which Michelin had left for her on the hall stand.

  ‘Another lovely day,’ she said, kissing his forehead. ‘Have you had a swim?’ He was momentarily enveloped in her perfume.

  ‘Couldn’t be bothered. Got to see the Bursar about the heating in my room at ten.’ He put only a minimal grumpiness into his voice.

  She ignored his remark, sat down at her end of the little table, and prepared her bowl of All-Bran and Alpen with milk and sugar, topping it up with a sliced banana and cream. As she ate, she put on her reading glasses and commenced opening her mail.

  Opening mail was a serious business for Sheila. Clement immersed himself in the pages of the Independent.

  Sheila’s post contained bills, which she set carefully aside, several periodicals, and a number of notes and letters from her public, her fans, all excited and begging for autographs, photographs, or locks of hair. All the fan letters were full of praise for the Kerinth romances. Sheila made a pile of them, handing them over without comment for her husband to read. This morning, she received as well a letter from her London publishers, Barrage Sims, containing copies of reviews from English newspapers and magazines of her new novel War Lord of Kerinth, in its English edition. All the reviews were disappointing, as Clement could judge from Sheila’s pained cries as she read: ‘Oh, no!’, ‘That’s wrong, for a start!’, and ‘You bastard!’

  The review from the Guardian was insulting, brief, and righteous.

  ‘They hate me!’ she cried, screwing it up in her fist.

  ‘They don’t understand,’ Clement said.

  ‘They just can’t see …’

  She sipped at her coffee, freshly made and topped with cream.

  Removing her spectacles, she said, without particularly looking anywhere, unless it was at the cornice, ‘Why do I bother to ensure that my English editions come out first? Why struggle, out of some misguided idea of patriotism? What do the bloody British care? Why do I insist that Barrage send out review copies, simply for these bastards to piss on? I’m just not appreciated in this country. The Germans like me, the Americans love me. In future, I shall sell all rights to Swain, and Barrage can jolly well negotiate English rights from them. To hell with them. Bastards.’

  Her lips closed in a firm line, revealing the determination that had made Green Mouth the commercial success she was. Clement had put down his newspaper, so that she was able to look him in the eye.

  ‘It’s not Barrage Sims’s fault,’ he said. ‘They’ve done their best for you. Just the typical English lack of enthusiasm. We still have the genius – as you prove – but the Americans have the enthusiasm.’

  ‘It’s class, that’s what it is. Just because I write genre novels.’

  In alarm only partly assumed, he said, ‘You don’t want to go and live in the States, do you?’

  She laughed. ‘That depends on the tax situation if they make the movie. New York would be fun.’

  He did not reply. Leaning back, she took the telephone off the dresser and dialled Barrage Sims, asking to speak to her editor, Maggie Mower. Clement retreated into his paper while Sheila talked. When she put down the receiver, she said, ‘Whatever the reviews, the sales figures aren’t bad. Their first printing was fifty thousand, and eighty per cent are sold already. That’s not counting book club sales. So someone loves me.’

  ‘According to government claims, the unemployment figures have fallen below the three million mark for the first time in four years.’

  She looked at Clement with scorn, resenting this irrelevance.

  ‘Yes, well, bugger the government and bugger the unemployed.’

  He saw that he was dismissed, wiped his mouth on his napkin, and rose. ‘Me for the Bursar.’

  ‘See you,’ she said, looking up and giving him one of her best smiles.

  Fabian Bush, the Bursar of Carisbrooke, was renowned for his economies. In the long-standing grievance of the chilliness of Clement Winter’s rooms he had so far managed not to budge an inch, while appearing anxious to please. Clement knew before he embarked on the subject this morning that he was going to get nowhere. Even to him, there was something unreal about discussing the sub-zero temperatures of a room at present immoderately hot and stuffy. They stood in the Bursar’s crowded office, pushing back and forth a conversation about the expense of running additional copper piping under twenty feet of parquet flooring, until Clement gave up, knowing full well that if he ventured on the subject during the winter months, when the sub-zero temperatures could actually be sampled, Fabian Bush would claim, with some justice, December to be no time for fetching up floors and draining hot tanks.

  Clement worked the rest of the morning and, in his lunch break, phoned his sister Ellen in Salisbury. Perhaps Salisbury had been in her stars at birth. Destiny, Clement felt, had fitted her for the blander parts of fortune. Ellen was now fifty-six, seven years Clement’s senior, and still slightly unapproachable. As a child, she had always been closer to Joseph; he remembered numerous occasions on which they had run off together and left him to play forlornly by himself. ‘Just you behave,’ as a farewell with a wagged finger, had made the partings hard to bear. Now she was a not unprepossessing, rather sharp-tongued woman in the middle age for which nature had fashioned her, living, as far as Clement and Sheila could tell, alone.

  Ellen, somewhat late in her day, had married Alwyn Pickering, a man who had made bank manager before forty. They had immediately had a daughter, Jean, born in 1962, over whom Ellen and Alwyn had made an immense fuss (satirized later in Sheila’s Child of Kerinth), only to see her – as Ellen had once put it in an extra distraught moment – go to the dogs. Perhaps to pacify her parents, Jean, by no means bereft of a sense of humour, had married the chief dog in 1981. The marriage had come apart three years later, and now she worked in Salisbury, supervising social workers. Her mother’s marriage had come apart over the same period. Alwyn had taken to staying away from home for longer and longer periods until finally, Clement had heard, Ellen had requested him not to return. There had been no row, only a financial arrangement to her disadvantage.

  ‘You got the letters safely then,’ she said, when Clement phoned. ‘I never know what the post office is up to these days.’

  ‘Yes, I like those letters very much. It’s really about Joseph’s writings I’m phoning.’

  ‘I suspected you might be.’ She added nothing to the brief sentence. He could visualize her standing watchful by her phone in that room with the patio doors overlooking the garden full of crazy paving and the odd concrete statue.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Not bad. Just been taking the dog for a walk. Is Sheila with you or in Kerinth?’

  ‘We’re both in Rawlinson Road, Ellen. Joseph’s letters to you showed the brighter side of his India-Burma experience. I’m sure that was deliberate. You were quite a little girl at the time.’

  ‘I was fourteen.’

  ‘Yes. Well, I think he naturally wanted to shield you from the harsher experiences. For instance, I know he suffered badly from dysentery, which he doesn’t mention. Later, in Burma proper, he hardly mentions the fighting. I wondered if you thought he was always like that, putting the brighter aspect of things forward.’

  She was silent for a moment, giving the matter consideration. ‘In the social services they encounter a lot of men who went through the war and survived unscathed. Mostly they’re of pensionable age now. Research has shown that many of them found it extremely difficult to adjust to civilian life; some, indeed, claim they never did manage to adjust, becoming alcoholics or chronically unemployable. I would say that some might almost be classified as psychiatric cases – the ones who had a bad war—’

  ‘Ellen, dear, that’s my subject,’ he said patiently.

  ‘War experience certainly caused a great division between generations. Those who returned found that th
ose who had never been away did not understand their problems or want to listen.’

  ‘Do you think he tended to whitewash his Burma experience?’

  ‘He never married, though, did he?’ Perhaps she had not heard his question. ‘Joe needed a decent, understanding English girl.’

  After a pause, Ellen added, ‘Marriage raises more problems than popularly supposed. Or rather, people know marriage is not the solution to everything, but they still prefer to pretend that it is. Men and women.’

  Clement laughed rather forcedly. ‘People don’t want things to be as they are. They dream up idealized situations and try to live by them, but sometimes the bottom falls out of the market.’ He thought of his wife’s fantasies, to which he knew Ellen took exception, and tried to steer the conversation into another course. ‘Do you think there was something of that in Joseph?’

  ‘Poor Joseph’s dead, Clem.’ Again a long silence, as if she mulled over the implications of what she was saying. ‘Why don’t you simply keep all his letters and so on, if you want them, and forget about making them into a book? Let him rest. Live your own life.’

  ‘I am trying to live my own life. I feel my brother is part of my life.’

  ‘You weren’t close. He and I were close. When are you going to sell the Acton flat?’

  ‘A bit more cleaning up to be done first, Ellen.’

  He exchanged a few more desultory remarks with the distant voice in Salisbury and then hung up.

  The baffling quality of his relationship with his sister did not diminish with time or distance. Since they saw so little of each other these days, the matter was no longer of importance: yet it worried him. The will to be friendly, even close, should have had greater effect. He ascribed the problem to the way in which his parents had remained so distant. The failure of their relationship, that abiding mystery, had been central to the emotional development of their three offspring, Joseph, Ellen, and Clement.

  Perhaps because of that central loss, Clement felt almost a mystical identification with the institutes round him: his College, the University, Oxford, or more particularly North Oxford – the Puginesque, Betjemanesque half-mile which contained so much diversity and snobbery – and, beyond that (‘mistier and mistier’) England, the European idea, and the planet Earth itself as a complex ecological unit. He was in some respects a feeble man, yet not an ignorant one, and some of his intuitions, he recognized, had been gained from his wife’s half-instinctive, slapdash writings, which he constantly defended, whatever his own private reservations, against the unthinking contempt of the Oxford crowd.

  This tendency towards loyalty now attracted him to the preservation of what would otherwise be the forgotten life of his dead brother, and not least to concealed aspects of that life.

  Evidence for the concealed aspects of Joseph’s life was contained in a binder which the historian had covered with a piece of green wallpaper, possibly to denote a special affection for the book.

  It was this book which Clement read through again when he returned to Rawlinson Road at six o’clock in the evening. Sheila and Michelin sat companionably together in the kitchen, drinking white wine with their feet up on the kitchen table. They were watching the news on television.

  ‘How was the Bursar?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘Did I tell you he had turned back into a hunchbacked toad?’

  He took a glass of wine with him and went up to his study. The book Joseph had labelled LIFE HISTORY was a plastic binder containing badly typed pages of a student’s loose-leaf block. Stuck to the inside of the binder was a photograph of the Market Square in Nettlesham, Suffolk.

  Joseph’s account began abruptly.

  This is my life history, which I set down this 8th day of January 1987, being of sound mind more or less. I write it for my own sake, but also in the hopes that perhaps others may gain some advantage from its strange lesson.

  It is a history which serves to illustrate two principles: that one may be in grave error for many years without knowing it, and eventually recover; and that, as La Rochefoucauld says, we are none of us as miserable or as happy as we think we are.

  Part I really begins before I was born, but we will leave that till later. I first saw light of day, with a thunderous noise, like harsh bells jangled out of tune, in the market town of Nettlesham, in Suffolk. While my arrival was a cause of astonishment to me, I have to report straight away that it was a grave disappointment to my mother, and that from this disappointment much grief sprang.

  Part II may serve as a warning to other historians. It tells the story as I fully believed it to be until a short while ago. That story, however, was a curious misreading. I had misunderstood my own life’s story. How, in that case, are we to know that we can ever read other people truly?

  With such a question mark, I begin.

  Nettlesham in the mid-nineteen-twenties, when I was born, was a sleepy little hole. There was not much to distinguish it from a thousand other small English towns, except this: that a minor eighteenth-century poet, William Westlake, famous in his day, came down from London to live with his female cousin in a house on the town square, wrote a few poems sitting at his window, went off his head, and died there. So I claim kinship: I lived there and went off my head.

  Not many may boast, as I justifiably can, of having emerged amid the grandiose rattling of galvanized pails at one shilling and one penny ha’penny. It was the first noise to greet my ears on this earth, an unmistakable noise, not harmonious and, as it was to prove, hardly auspicious. As distinguished in its way as the ringing of church bells. And you’d go a long way these days to find as many galvanized pails as we had.

  Thus my beginning, and the announcement to Nettlesham, or to anyone who happened to be nearby in the square, that I had butted in on the scene and effected that awful transition out of the nowhere into the everywhere with some success.

  See where these simple country swains appear –

  Well known to Heav’n, tho’ little noted here

  in the immortal words of William Westlake, in his poem on his mother’s portrait. Other remembered gems of his include ‘The Conversation’, ‘A Summer Stroll Through Parts of Suffolk’, the renowned ‘The Crippled Goat’ (‘I was a crippled goat that lost its way …’) and many other affecting pieces.

  Westlake’s name was commemorated by the Westlake Memorial Hall and Westlake Street. There was even a Conversation Arms in Commercial Street, although its literary associations began and ended with the name. Westlake wasn’t a drinking man – no wonder he went mad.

  It’s clear that Westlake was a polite and conventional chap. My father had the same qualities, clinging to spats and the Sunday sermon with the same fervour that Westlake showed towards the heroic couplet. Also affected by Westlakeitis, he composed a history of World War I – in which he had flown biplanes and ridden mules and various other characteristic vehicles of the time – entirely in verse: it was the last appearance of the alexandrine and the heroic couplet. Unfortunately, this literary relic has not survived. He read parts of it to me when I was young and defenceless. I remember only this couplet:

  ‘Go forward then,’ said Kitchener, ‘ye Grenadiers,’

  And off they marched by way of Armentiers.

  I mention Westlake because there was a time when I too longed to be just as dead and as deadly respectable as he. Being spurned by my mother, I had only the death wish to court. The death wish proving as adamant as my mother, I suppose I must own that such writing as I have done probably owes something to the author of ‘The Crippled Goat’. Had it been Constable instead of Westlake who went mad in Nettlesham, I should no doubt be turning out watercolours by now; these childhood influences can be extremely powerful.

  But how did I come to misunderstand my own life story? Can there be anything so idiotic? What streak of the perverse entered into me? There must have been some influence more powerful than old Westlake’s crippled goat to make me so obdurately lose my way for so long.

 
There certainly were factors to make even the least shrewd of infants suspect that he was less than popular in the maternal bosom. Take the case when Mater was swelling and I shrinking; she swelling with another infant and I at four years shrinking under the weight of what was to come. So she wanted a girl with an urgency bordering on the dotty: she did not have to bring me into it. I could have been left in blissful ignorance of the whole reproduction thing, among my farm animals and Bonzo the dog.

  Instead, I was made to get down on my knees with her every evening before beddy-byes (bloody beddy-byes being about six) and pray with her, earnestly and too long, that this time – this time, pray God, nice God – this time it would be a little girl with a little cunt and cute little skirts and pigtails. Pretty humiliating for a chap, boding no good.

  Why didn’t God intervene? Lean down and prod her on the shoulder? ‘Sorry Mum, but I shouldn’t go into all that in his presence or he’ll start thinking of himself as a failure. Read Freud if you don’t believe Me.’

  People, and this includes deities, intervene only when they are not wanted. Nature rolled inevitably on, mother found it more and more difficult to sink to her swollen knees. I caught – and how was that for timing? – how, why, did they let it happen? – I caught whooping cough. What’s embarrassing is that it sounds such an old-fashioned disease to catch, like curvature of the spine, or ophthalmic spermatorea. Why could I not have caught curvature of the spine? ‘Oh, the poor little lad has curled into a hoop, let’s cancel the pregnancy.’

  They must have warned me that whooping cough was fatal to babies but, not being up in medical science, I suppose I went right back to studying Chick’s Own and forgot all about it.

  Next thing is, the much-prayed-for infant arrives, proves the existence of God by coming complete with little cunt, little skirts, and pigtails, and I’m flung out of the house. Flung out on the very hour the infant surfaces. Go and live with granny, you little bastard.