Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  There’s one curious feature about the dream, apart from its persistence over nearly half a century (how’s that for permanent transience?) – the way in which I have never woken immediately afterwards saying, ‘There was that dream again.’ One or two days have always had to pass before I could say ‘I dreamed it again.’ In other words, the dream came, in some way I do not understand, slowly through consciousness, instead of direct from the subconscious, like an ordinary dream.

  It first appeared to me, so I believe, when I was enjoying the enforced stay with my grandmother in Lavenham, as a vulnerable child of four. It has returned ever since, at intervals – perhaps once every five years – developing as I have developed. On paper, there is little startling about it; yet it has always given me comfort and hope. I told Lucy about it when we were quarrelling, and the quarrel ceased.

  In essence, all the dream contains is a garden and a gateway. I am wandering in a vast, disconsolate garden. I am small, perhaps still in short trousers. I do not know where to go. There is a threat in the garden which I cannot understand. Looking about, I see no one.

  After a while, I come to some steps. The steps are wide and paved, with ornate balustrades. The balustrades are all of a certain number, I know not what. I ascend the steps. The flights are punctuated by terraces, with nine steps between terraces (yes, that number I do remember, I believe, even from the earliest dream). I feel safer.

  At the top of the steps stands a perfect wall. In the wall is a perfectly circular hole or entrance, its diameter taking up nearly the whole height of the wall, its circumference ornamented with stonework. A yard behind this entrance is another wall, a screen blocking the view beyond.

  Perhaps someone speaks to me at this point. In any case, I am delighted and full of expectation as I approach the gateway.

  There the dream ends.

  I am sure of the details of this first dream, as far as they go, because I was so taken with it that I got out my water colours, with which I used to play, and painted the scene. My grandmother declared that the result was a masterpiece.

  Aren’t dreams amazing? I was a kid, an infant. I knew nothing about anything. Yet this archetypal dream came to me and prepared me for much of my life, all the emotional part of my life.

  About this time I was learning to read swiftly and easily. That was how I filled the time spent by myself. Newspapers in those days – the early nineteen-thirties – devoted a lot of space to children. There I read a long tale about a little boy who lost his shadow. He made a walking pattern with his shadow on a sunny wall, and the shadow simply ran away from him and was lost. The boy was inconsolable, and sought it high and low. He travelled to the far ends of the earth after it, and eventually found it, I forget how, in China, in a palace.

  Although I was already familiar with Grimms’ fairy stories, this was the first story I ever read that seemed to say to me direct, pointing a finger, ‘This is about you – the real you – the secret you!’

  Perhaps the story influenced the dream. Where else did I get it from? All its furnishings were Chinese. When first I saw one of those circular Chinese entrances, in Medan, I was overwhelmed by a sense of recognition.

  As I grew older, the dream altered according to circumstance. On one occasion, for instance, the steps had flattened into a paved path. The path led through a dreary pine wood. On another occasion, I was in danger from floods. But always at the end of the track stood this confining wall, with the circular entrance and, beyond the entrance, a white screen.

  I interpreted the entrance as symbolizing the female sexual organ.

  Sometimes I met someone along the way. In my adolescence, the dream once took on the aspect of nightmare, for a maiden met me near the wall, a slender maiden, pale as paper. I drew near her and looked into her eyes. She was death. Shortly after that, I went into the army. More often, when the female appeared, she was a tutelary spirit, guiding me to safety.

  The richness of that dream can’t be conveyed, any more than words can convey the richness of life. The dream enriched my life. Gradually I came to understand how Chinese the dream was. Desultory reading revealed to me that the multiples of nine, into which the dream steps were divided, represented the celestial number which divides the Chinese heaven. The square wall, the circular entranceway, conform to the ancient belief that Earth is square and the heavens round. I understood that the entrance was the entrance to heaven, or at least to happiness.

  Also, the entrance, with the white blocking screen behind it, was built according to the Chinese belief that devils and evil spirits were notoriously unable to turn corners, and so would crash into the screen and be unable to enter beyond it.

  Sometimes, it appeared that I was dressed in ceremonial vestments when I approached the entrance. Sometimes I was merely a lonely wanderer, my one ambition to get into whatever lay beyond the entrance. I had the impression that the hour was always the same, possibly at the first glimmer of dawn.

  I cannot say how much this dream interested me, and how I longed for each successive visitation. It was as if I in some way partook of an ancient ritual, in which the ceremony was invariable. There was a negative aspect to the dream, in that if I could never get through the round entrance, then I must myself be an evil spirit, but this interpretation felt weak and did not appal me, as perhaps it should have done. For the dream came from my very being, that healthful biological centre within even the most desperate of us – the psyche, as the Greeks used that word, to mean the consciousness of all living things, and not only of human beings. This primitive, faraway aspect of the dream was not its least attractive feature.

  The last time I dreamed that dream, it remained in its essentials the same, although I approached the wall across a desert, riding on horseback. I think it was a horse. I could see that beyond the wall lay a great complex of buildings and trees. Before the gate stood two tutelary spirits, as I have called them, both beautiful pale women, who came towards me with graceful gestures. They were the most lovely women I had ever seen, waking or sleeping. They spoke sweetly to me, beckoning me to enter the gate. I awoke, trying desperately to recapture what they had said, but without success.

  This dream prepared me for a wandering life. Indeed, it may have set the pattern for a wandering life. It also prepared me to love a Chinese woman.

  Clement grunted as he put the book aside. His brother was not so different from him as he sometimes imagined; both of them, having discarded their father’s religion, had become preoccupied with the inner life, bestowing on it a kind of sanctity. The times were uncertain; who could say if the sanctity was justified? Like God, the mind was easy enough to make use of, but almost impossible to understand.

  Clement regretted the gulf that lay between him and his poor wandering brother, a gulf which had widened after their mother’s funeral in Nettlesham, when Sheila, normally so placid, had berated Joseph for his self-indulgence. They had not seen him for some while after that – not until they were next in Marbella, spending the Christmas holiday in Sheila’s villa. Michelin accompanied them. And Michelin it was who had announced Joseph’s unexpected arrival, after lunch on Boxing Day.

  ‘No room at the inn, Sheila dear,’ Joseph had said. ‘Have you a place to lay my head? A stable would be ideal.’

  He looked at his worst. His clothes were filthy and worn. A small pack was slung over one shoulder. He had a long, incoherent tale to tell them of his wanderings. As they might have expected, a girl had been involved. He had been returning home from the East. The girl had stolen his wallet in Cairo. Joseph had managed to get a ship to Gibraltar, working as crew, and had hitched by road from Gibraltar to Marbella, hoping to find his brother at the villa. They had a spare room for him, but that night Joseph had been at his worst, getting hopelessly drunk ‘for Christmas’, as he put it, and cursing them all three for bloated capitalists.

  ‘Why don’t you throw me out, Clem?’ he asked next morning, when he finally made an appearance, his face pallid, his hair still la
nk from the shower. ‘I’m useless. I should’ve finished myself off long ago. Not that I haven’t tried. If I ever get in Who’s Who, like your lovely Sheila, I shall list “failing suicide” as my hobby. I just haven’t enough courage. Or else I can’t believe that the world wouldn’t wink out if I ceased to exist. There’s egotism …’

  ‘Your trouble’s not egotism, Joe,’ Clement said. ‘It’s a certain lack of self-esteem – something with which women can’t supply you, apparently.’

  Joseph gave him a dark look. ‘Typical clever shrink-talk. Stealing my wallet was a symbolic castration, was it? But you’re right. Clever boy! I’m easy to see through. I certainly lack self-esteem. Those bastards of parents, they robbed me of that one natural biological quality which even a tadpole enjoys – self-esteem. But I mustn’t start on that tack or Sheila will be at my throat again. Lend me some money and I’ll be off – I can get to Madrid, and there’s a friend there who will look after me.’

  Clement had given his brother a wad of pesetas and Joseph had disappeared, as so often he had done before.

  He tried to recall more of what had happened on that occasion. Memory was, as usual, selective. He could not remember what Sheila had said. He could not remember how Joseph had intended to get to Madrid. He could remember a cat that Michelin had befriended. And he could remember his selfish relief when Joseph left.

  ‘I shouldn’t have let him go,’ Clement said now, savouring the taste of fruitless regret. ‘He was my brother and I wasn’t even his friend.

  ‘The time will come when I shall be Joe’s age when he died. One advantage of growing older is that one gets to appreciate more the living minute. Small pains creep up on one, pains in the joints and so on, but it is amazing how little they detract from happiness. Happiness can be such a good solid quality, although it wasn’t for Joseph, with his indwelling insecurity. He acted like a fool, yet at heart he was wise. Perhaps it’s the reverse with me; I did tell Sheila that it did not matter how stupidly you behaved as long as you said sensible things. I was a bit tiddly; nevertheless, I may have meant it, and it may have been the truth … Memory is so uncertain: not at all the mind’s equivalent of a filing cabinet, more like a compost heap from which unexpected plants grow. Take this old photo of the Winters, snapped by mother in the very hour war broke out. Even that is not reliable. It has usurped real memory and become memory. It has stopped past time. Because of photography, we have made our memories come to resemble family snapshots, static and posed. Yet the unique ingredient of the living moment is its malleable, transient quality, the fish swimming downstream, a glint of sunlight on its twisting body. No one has ever caught that evanescent moment, that dear thing, that solemnity in sunsets. All the world’s diarists are hotfoot in quest of it, yet it remains its own tricksy self, there and gone. Gone. Gone, only to be immediately replaced by another tricksy moment. I wish Sheila would come back. I love having her near. Why, I can’t even recall to the inner ear the timbre of her voice. Yet how often have I recorded it in mind – often listened to its music rather than to what it was trying to tell me. She’s so ordinary, my dear Sheila, so extraordinary. Perhaps I missed something in life by being so unadventurous, yet I found her. That was a bit of luck. She doesn’t seem to fret about the passing moment as women are supposed to – and perhaps it’s worse for them. How many images of her could I honestly conjure up from all the years we have been together? Out of the millions, precious few.

  ‘These minutes that go by now, where do they vanish to? It’s somehow against nature to think they’re lost for ever. Yet they’ve gone beyond recall and I’ll never remember them from this moment on. What was my train of thought just a moment ago? I suppose Joe wished he could forget his early years. For some people it is an absolute curse how those memories linger. Perhaps memory is the seat of all psychological disease. But that’s a thought I’ve had before. No thought is entirely new. That one’s staler than most – except for the one that wonders how Joe’s state of mind was when he knew he was dying. He surely didn’t really want to die … Perhaps the hour will dawn when I shall wish I could forget Joe. But that’s a base thing to say.’

  He was sitting idly, spinning out his drink, with Joseph’s dream book by his elbow, when he heard a car draw up outside and Sheila’s key in the door below. He went downstairs.

  She appeared flustered. He had the impression that she was trying to avoid looking directly at him.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine, absolutely fine.’

  ‘It’s quite late. Did someone drive you home?’

  ‘Maureen drove me back. I went round to see her.’

  ‘It was only yesterday you had lunch with her.’

  ‘I’m sorry Clem, she’s a friend of mine, as you know. I really don’t want to talk. I’m tired, I have a headache, and I want to go to bed.’

  She stood impatiently before him, formidable, and yet as if in some way awaiting a signal from him. Clement was the first to change stance.

  ‘Well, let me get you something. Have you had supper?’

  ‘Oh, don’t fuss. Please leave me alone. I’m fine, absolutely fine.’

  She looked angrily at him. ‘Please, Clem, I just want to be quiet. What is all this anyway? What have you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve been up in the study. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’

  She brushed past him and rushed to the rear of the hall, fair hair aflutter, crying that she couldn’t stand any more interrogation.

  Clement did not follow. As he stood at the foot of the stairs, he found himself listening to an unusual noise outside, like a long-protracted sigh, gentle, yet regretful. Oxford was being visited by a shower of rain.

  On Tuesday, the weather was considerably cooler. The sky was cloudy but the threat of rain seemed to have passed. Clement decided to walk into town to his clinic. He wore a light suit and carried a raincoat over one arm. He adopted a slow pace, conscious of the pain in his left leg which he was unable to diagnose, although a list of more or less unpleasant possibilities ran through his head.

  His walk took him down the Banbury Road, past the old cumbersome Victorian houses still disregarding the traffic as if their lives depended on it, through St Giles on the St John’s side, and along Cornmarket, making his way with difficulty among the crowds of people there. The people all seemed to him young, and dressed in tawdry fashion, although he realized that this was a subjective view which owed much to his age. If he stopped to think, he could remember how dingily and with what lack of variety his generation dressed in the early sixties, before Style had visited the multitude, and how they had probably smelt badly in the days before roll-on deodorant. By this intellectual effort, he could think well of those about him. But he could not like their habit of pushing by on their own rude course, without regard for others; he had been brought up to step aside for his elders, and such old training did not easily die – rather, became stronger with the years, like bands of ivy round a decaying tree. He found himself breathing heavily. Couldn’t these young barbarians see he was almost fifty, and slightly distinguished? What were they doing? The answer seemed to be, Nothing. Cornmarket had become a precinct of loafers.

  One token of the loafing was the rubbish and filth which lay on the pavements. Young girls were smoking and eating in the open air, throwing down their litter, using the world as their ashtray. He sighed at his own disapproval. Of course, even the fourteen-year-olds would be having sexual intercourse every day. He overheard their use of swear words – forbidden when he was a boy – as he went by. Once he had hoped such freedoms would come about. They had arrived, and they did not please him.

  Sheila was never far from his thoughts. She had made every effort to appear as normal at breakfast, so that he had not dared to bring up the incident of the evening before. So rare was it for them to have a difference, that he was disturbed by it; but he would not permit himself idle speculation on a subject he could not resolve. The cause of her unhappiness wo
uld no doubt emerge in time. Meanwhile, he turned his contemplation to the sessions which lay ahead of him, as far as that was possible among the jostling crowd.

  It was hard to understand the state of Britain, he thought. Either it prospered or it was going downhill. But nobody could look on the Cornmarket with much favour, certainly not Britain’s European partners, the Germans, the Dutch, the French, whose own city centres were clean and decorous.

  Turning into Boots, a garish shop containing all pre-requisites for brothel life, he purchased a packet of his favourite blackcurrant throat pastilles and proceeded down The High, congested with groups of tourists all looking for somewhere to sit and rest, or for even older colleges than those already visited. From The High, after lingering for a moment before the windows of the Oxford University Press, he turned right into King Edward Street. This grandly named street, which in Clement’s early days in Oxford had appeared friendly, containing lodgings and old professors versed in the Napoleonic Wars, was now coldly schizophrenic, with health shops on one side and on the other, the east side, grim offices of lawyers, solicitors and accountants, thus catering, in Clement’s eyes at least, to some of the less appealing features of the English character, crankiness and litigiousness.

  On the east side of the street, however, Clement had his room, which he shared with two other analysts. Tuesday was his day of occupancy. This room, situated on the first floor, and overlooking from its windows the health shop opposite, had, by a legal trick, been saved from the encroaching lawyers; it catered to the minds and souls, rather than the pockets, of the locals. On every side, one had only to drill through a wall to overhear discussions of tax matters, dividends, and disputed wills: but in this room, dreams, fantasies, and selected snatches of the past were allowed.

  Despite his worry regarding Sheila, he looked about the neutral room with some satisfaction. He might have been dominated by his brother, but here at least he was in control and could help people. The light in the room pleased him; the cloud having dispersed, sunlight slanted in with a rather artificial aspect, reflected from the windows on the opposite side of the street. With its hint of warmth, it recalled to his mind a hired room in which Sheila and he had once stayed, in a town in France, on their way to the Mediterranean. He remembered that they had been in high good humour, having just eaten a meal that began with a plate of delicious haricots verts. The old bed had creaked when they made love.