Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  But how desirably naughty they were. Since they took an interest in me, I blossomed in their sight. A detestable failing. Ever since, I have blossomed when a pretty woman showed interest in me, and after blossom comes the fruit, which has often been bitter.

  When Mrs Tippler worked at her hats in the little room over her shop, or went out to see her ladies (those fortunates who had married Gentlemen), Rosemary and Ruth kept shop. I cannot remember them ever going to school. Perhaps they didn’t.

  Rosemary loved to tease and kiss me. She had rich brown hair which she, like a smart young thing, had had shingled, whereas her younger sister had a crop of straight dark hair, kept in place by a big blue slide. Rosemary would say silly things to make me laugh and then laugh at me for laughing, and ask me if I was ‘all there’. When she had made me smart enough, she would kiss me. Real kisses. Marvellous kisses, mouth to mouth. Sometimes she would crush me to her tender bosom, when I could sniff how sweet she smelt. She would even permit me, momentarily, to feel her breasts when, excited beyond measure, I put my hand there.

  It is really terrible to be twelve years old and not know what it is you wish so frantically to do. Terrible and delectable.

  A green curtain was hung to cut off the rear of the shop. We felt ourselves safe behind it. They had few customers, and those often short-sighted.

  Rosemary had a way of daring me to do something and being disapproving as I did it, while at the same time seeming to urge me on. Easy enough to say now that she was uncertain of her own sexuality and felt safe only when she could control the situation with a much younger boy. All that’s over the young boy’s head. He is in love and longing to experiment with all the dangerous forces whirling about him.

  She wore a black velour dress on the day I was challenged to undo its little fiddly black buttons if I just dare. Every button undone was an absolute affront, an outrage.

  ‘Do you see this, Ruth? Look just at what he is doing now. Oh, you little devil, there goes another button. I’m going to go right out and tell your mum. What does he hope to find in there, I’d like to know. Eh, Joseph? What do you think is in there?’

  It was warm in there. Perhaps from design, she wore no brassiere. Next moment a lovely soft breast was resting in the palm of my triumphant hand. It was a bit like finding an egg when you reach up into a bird’s still warm nest in the spring. Almost as exciting.

  ‘There, Ruth, what do you think he’s got hold of now? The cheek of it! I bet you didn’t expect to find that, did you, sonny? Why, you’re looking quite excited, and what exactly do you imagine you’re going to do with it now? You mustn’t be clumsy with it – it’s delicate enough to be set before the king …’

  I drew it out into the curtained daylight of their room. Rosemary screamed with affront and caused the breast to pop in again like a startled rabbit. For years after that – all through my adolescence – I had visions of getting that breast out again and kissing it, and much else besides.

  Ruth I also loved. Her part in all this sexy teasing was also important. She was the onlooker. She watched, giggled, and commented.

  Out at the back of their shop was a small yard, wedged between high walls. It was there she showed herself no mere onlooker.

  I had noted how she jumped up and down with excitement when her sister kissed me. Ruth was darker, her lips redder, than her elder sister. And evidently more emotional.

  Excited by a tease I had just enjoyed with Rosemary, Ruth and I fell to kissing. Kisses are marvellous when you know of nothing better. Strawberries out of season. Unlike her sister, Ruth was interested in my body. That is how she soon came to be clutching a sausage shape in her hand, and how I came to have my hand in her knickers and to be fingering a little crescent moon of a fishpool, with bewilderment and joy.

  Gasping, I let my head roll back – and saw that Rosemary was watching us out of the rear window.

  The delight of those two girls, and the harmless play with them, made a return to Tremblingham doubly awful, but warmed many a cold night in my bed when I got there.

  I was playing with some friends in Nettlesham Square one day when out came my mother to the edge of the pavement and called me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, fearfully drawing near and feeling guilty as ever.

  ‘Your grandfather’s seriously ill, that’s what’s wrong. I don’t think you’d better play out there.’

  So I didn’t, but it served little to improve the old man’s health. He was seventy-five and had suffered a stroke just before he left home for work that morning. His sons took him to hospital (in Hereward’s car), and father stayed by his bedside overnight. When the old man appeared to be sinking next morning, my father said to him – as mother faithfully reported to us later – ‘I hope you’ve divided the business up fairly between Hereward and me in your Will. Otherwise we’ll only quarrel over it.’

  To which grandfather said, or rather husked, these drear words: ‘You’ll have to fight your own battles from now on, Ernest.’ An hour later, he died, right hand still clutching a book about Scott’s Expedition to the South Pole.

  After the funeral, attended by all the other acceptable ironmongers for miles around, I returned to Tremblingham. Term was almost over when I received a letter from my mother saying that they were moving to a small house in Lowestoft. Lowestoft was to be home from now on. Hereward and father had quarrelled bitterly and Hereward had bought father out of the business.

  Father had fought his own battle. And lost.

  It was goodbye to galvanized pails at one shilling and one penny ha’penny, goodbye to red-faced Seneca, Setebos, and Cecil – already away learning to be Gentlemen at a much smarter school than mine – and goodbye, alas, alas, to Rosemary and Ruth, my two loves. Nettlesham was now behind me for ever, and I returned at term end to a saturnine house on three floors, with two small rooms on every floor and a smell of fish emanating from the basement, standing at the fishier end of Lowestoft.

  My parents, who so often had no idea, had no idea that I might miss my various friends and enemies in Nettlesham. I was simply left to adjust to the new circumstances on my own. Defeated, I retired to the top floor of the house and played under the sloping roof with my Hornby trains. Ellen by now was old enough to serve as a competent guard or ticket collector. Come summer, we found our way to Oulton Broad, and there we swam together, the best of companions.

  That side of life was enjoyable. In the house, gloom reigned. My father felt himself a displaced person. He did not acquire another business for himself, nor would he work for others. Instead, he invested his little nest egg in large decayed houses, in which we would live while he redecorated and repaired them, and strove mightily to get the garden into order again. Then he would sell at a profit, and start the process over again in another old house. So our homes became impermanent.

  Father had little to do with us. He became a man of deep silences. We saw him as someone on the top of ladders, painting ceilings, or at the bottom of gardens, laying crazy paving. He was another crippled goat that lost its way.

  These cottagers, in kinship close, yet share

  No words, no joys; before their cheerless grate

  They live apart, though bound by kindred fate.

  Father came into his own when buying property. While the owner was extolling the merits of his house, father would stand creaking a board beneath his foot – he unerringly found out creaking boards – and interrupt suddenly, saying, ‘Is this floor rotten, do you know?’ Or he would tap at a wall and ask, wistfully, ‘Any death watch beetle recently?’ His way of looking at guttering or sash windows could reduce a proud owner to silence.

  At selling houses, father was equally adroit. He never used an estate agent. So for a while his business flourished. He made money. But the war was approaching fast, and property on the East Coast became very slow. Finally, nothing was selling, and father was left with a monstrous house on his hands. He closed it down in a fit of desperation, and took us off to Cornwall to
live – a great swerve in his life, as if to avoid demons. The Lowestoft house was commandeered by the military during the war, and sold off later to the council for a song. It is now demolished. Twenty town houses stand where it once stood.

  At this point came a break in the narrative. Using a different pen, Joseph resumed further down the page.

  It is impossible to continue as I began. The protective tone of levity has failed, after taking me through the years of early childhood. Long after that, until I was grown up, until after I left the army, I could never communicate to anyone the shame I felt at my mother’s desertion of me and my banishment to my grandmother’s house in Lavenham.

  Much of the pain came from a source quite beyond my control, years before my birth. I have said that I was my parents’ elder son but not their first-born. Here’s the awful secret. They had another child, born six years before me, which died.

  The story of my generation, now getting a little long in the tooth, is set about with war. We were a parenthesis between wars. My parents-to-be, young Ernest Winter and Madge Scoones, met during World War I, when he was on leave and she was acting as temporary nurse in a hospital in London. He was so eager to meet her again after the war that, when the home-coming troopship on which he was sailing was delayed outside Southampton harbour, he dived overboard and swam ashore. This exploit became a family story. It was hard to equate the aloof father I knew with that eager young man.

  They were married in Nettlesham, Ernest’s home town, in June of 1919, after a brief engagement. In March of 1920, a child was born to them.

  How can I best relate this dark story? I never remember a time when my mother was not telling me about that dead child. Father never spoke of it. It was a girl. Mater told me piously, ‘Your poor little sister is with the angels now.’

  It happened that an old book I often looked through contained steel engravings of religious subjects. Perhaps it was an illustrated edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – a book which even as late as my childhood could still be found in every self-respecting religious home. One picture showed a small boy climbing a hill. Over his head – rather uncomfortably close, to my infant mind – floated a small girl angel, with only a shred of cloud to conceal her nudity. This menacing little phenomenon became my dead sister, hanging over me like the Sword of Damocles. The Angel of Damocles.

  Nothing I did was ever as good as what my steel-engraving angel would have done. Nor could I in any fashion prove an adequate substitute for her. Mater would in no way allow my coming into the world to appease her grief for the child that had left it. It was her tragedy and she needed to hold it to her.

  Her story was that the little creature had lived only six months before fading out. ‘We just have to believe,’ she told me, ‘that she was too good for this world.’ Six years of mourning had gone by, and then I turned up. She felt herself insulted. ‘We just have to pray that next time it’s a little girl,’ she told me.

  Next time, it was a little girl. It was Ellen. Ellen assuaged Mater’s wretchedness as I could never do. Gradually, she became more cheerful, more human, and, by the time World War II broke out, she was able to confront its vicissitudes with amiable courage.

  But that wretched little steel-engraving angel took far longer to fade from its position a foot above my head.

  My despair at school became worse when father again moved house to buy a small business in Bude, in Cornwall. On that occasion, my parents removed my sister Ellen from her school and took her down with them to a local school. I, however, was left at Tremblingham, despite my pleas to be moved too. Clem was just an infant then.

  I took this rejection as a further desertion. Coming at puberty, it went very hard with me, and I suffered a nervous breakdown. The school doctor was a sympathetic man, and sent me nearer home. For some weeks, I was housed in a small private nursing home on the north Cornish coast, and allowed to recover gradually. In the evenings, in a season of calm weather, we were able to watch from the upper windows the first wartime convoys moving out of the Bristol Channel into the Atlantic, the ships outlined against a setting sun.

  There I experienced again a recurrent dream which had first come to comfort me at my grandmother’s, at the age of five. But my recovery was due as much as anything to a woman called Irene Rosenfeld, who lived only a few minutes away from the nursing home.

  Irene was in her mid-twenties. Of course I thought of her as much older than I. In the October of 1941, when we set eyes on each other, I was fifteen, and in many respects still a hag-ridden little boy. We met on my daily walks along the cliffs and at first we only talked together. Then Irene invited me to her house for tea.

  She was completely alone. She had a big complicated family, but they lived elsewhere. She was married to a man now serving in the Air Force, who came home on leave only occasionally. She was lonely but did not actually want the burden of a love affair. I was her substitute – her victim, I suppose, in some ways. So I can see the situation, years later. At the time, however, I fell into her embrace and her tuition with gratitude.

  They best can learn, who court the Muse

  When learning doth with gentle joy infuse

  as old Westlake remarked of more academic matters.

  The days at the nursing home became transformed. I lived in a golden daze, to think that I would be with her all afternoon and evening, that we would be naked to each other and in bed together. I could not believe my luck. Here was someone who really did love me, and showed it abundantly. Later, it became possible for me to see that, in her kind way, Irene was merely enjoying sex with me, and passing empty hours in a manner she thought safest; but for me it was a full-blown love affair, tinged with some pathos to think that my poor darling was so old.

  The threatened return of Irene’s husband on leave happened to coincide with the nursing home’s declared intention of returning me to school. I bought her flowers, I made her speeches, I felt my heart breaking, I suppose I was as absurd as a fifteen-year-old can be. Irene took it all seriously and sweetly, and kissed me over and over, even weeping prettily as we finally parted.

  Somehow, the remaining school years passed. In fact, I was happy at school for the first time. I had something positive to set against all the previous negativity. I talked smut like the rest of the boys – but that pure affair (as I regarded it) with Irene remained my precious secret, to be shared with no one.

  In the autumn of 1943, I was conscripted into the army, and went straight from school into a barracks at Prestatyn. The days of my childhood were finished. Within a year, I found myself in Burma.

  Joseph’s ‘Life History’ ended there. Part II, mentioned in the opening paragraphs, was missing. There, Joseph had promised to show how he had misunderstood his own story.

  The meaning of that curious remark as yet remained obscure to Clement.

  BOOK TWO

  Anima

  11

  ‘You have been a bit absent-minded since we got home, darling,’ said Sheila, with a calculated amount of indulgence in her voice.

  Clement was on his hands and knees, picking up the pieces of a cup and saucer he had knocked on to the kitchen floor.

  ‘It’s partly because I’ve so much to cope with at present,’ said Clement, realizing how sorry for himself he sounded. He kneeled up and looked at his wife over the top of the table. ‘Joseph.’

  It was a code name.

  Sheila settled herself comfortably beside Michelin and continued to arrange flowers in a glass vase. ‘But you weren’t all that close, were you? He was too much your senior. The war came between your childhoods.’

  ‘Still there was a brotherhood,’ said Michelin. ‘Sorrow has to come out.’

  ‘Mourning is often a matter of guilt as well as sorrow,’ said Sheila, in one of her writer’s intonations. ‘He probably feels guilty because he was not as close to Joseph as his sister was.’

  Clement did not relish hearing himself explained. ‘I’ve no reason to feel guilt,’ he s
aid. He put a hand to his left knee to help him rise, clutching the shards of cup and saucer in his other hand.

  ‘It’s essential to be practical after a funeral,’ said Michelin, addressing him rather than Sheila, as if now taking his side. ‘One has to do something after a funeral.’ She was drinking a spritzer, as was her evening habit. The kitchen television set was tuned to Channel Four. A domestic drama was on. They had taken up an incident in the play for discussion and, as so often, sharing little of the public humility before the medium, they found their own opinions more interesting than Channel Four’s offering.

  ‘I am doing something,’ Clement said. ‘And more than just breaking tea cups. I’m always doing things. The puzzle is the small effect they seem to have.’ He piled the broken pieces of china, with their crisp edges and interesting shapes, on the draining board.

  ‘After a funeral,’ Michelin continued, ‘one holds a memorial service – at least we do in France. Or orders a stone angel, or polishes up the photo frames. And of course goes round talking endlessly regarding the dead – favourably at first and then, as the flowers on the grave wither, more freely and scandalously …’

  ‘I did think of a memorial service,’ said Clement, ‘but I couldn’t be quite sure who would come. Do you think that universities in Singapore, Medan and Bangkok would have sent representatives, because I don’t.’

  ‘You’re fortunate, Clem. You have plenty to do. You don’t have to polish up photo frames,’ said Sheila. ‘You have all Joseph’s junk to look into, all his secrets to nose out. You can find out if you will all his scandalous relationships with women. That Lucy Traill woman, for instance. It’s of moment to you if no one else. As you say, people in Singapore are hardly interested, but now that your brother is dead, you can turn his life into your hobby.’

  ‘You’re being unpleasant.’

  ‘No, it’s a perfectly legitimate hobby. Why don’t you go over to that flat of his in Acton again and sort out the rest of his things? The sooner you sell that place, the better, after all. Just don’t be made miserable. Why should his death upset you? You saw little enough of each other. You disliked his political views.’