by Brian Aldiss
The words sank deep into my heart. Although I continued to munch gloomily at the cake, I ached inside. She couldn’t leave! I needed her. I loved her. She could not realize what she was doing to me or she would never go.
There were four females in the room with me. Excluding my mother, I had had sexual relations with all the others. But the need was now for Sister, entirely for Sister, only for Sister, among all the women in the world.
Should I stand up and declare my feelings? Would they laugh? What would Mother say? But Mother at this point, having poured herself a last cup of tea, was doing her party stunt and declaiming some poetry learnt as a girl:
‘Old Holyrood rang merrily
That night, with wassail, and glee.
King James within his princely bower
Fêted the chiefs of Scotland’s power,
Summoned to spend a passing hour.
For he had vowed that his array
Should southwards march by break of day.
Well loved that daring monarch aye
A banquet and a song.
By day a banquet and at night
A merry dance, made fast and light,
With dancers fair and costumes bright,
And something loud and long
This feast outshone his revels past.
It was his biggest and his last.
‘And so it goes on – I forget what comes next. It’s the court bit from Sir Walter Scott’s “Marmion”. I learnt it at school. Oh, I could spout it for hours! I tell Ann and Horatio they ought to read more poetry. Are you a great poetry-reader, Sister?’
Sister made some suitable reply.
After tea Ann slipped away to play in her bedroom. I hung around while Mother entertained my guest.
‘Well, darling,’ she said at last, turning to me. ‘Fetch Sister Traven your latest paintings. He really does show promise.’
‘I haven’t done any more since I saw her last.’
Smiling, shaking of head. ‘He’s done several, Sister. He’s far too modest about them. I’m a great admirer of the British artists, Gainsborough and Hogarth, and others.’ For some reason she pronounced Hogarth as if it had two “g”s: Hoggarth.
‘It’s “Hogarth”, Mother. One “g”.’
‘I can spell Hogarth, darling. And pronounce it. A fine artist. We used to have a butcher called Hogarth at home, in the old days. Anyhow, Sister, it’s been very good of you to take such an interest in Horatio, and to take him out as you have done. …’
Truer than she thought, I said to myself. I watched Sister as she rose to leave; not, if you were strictly honest, a great deal of figure. But I could discern her breasts under the jumper, and I knew how sweet they were, how pink the nipples, when you disengaged them gently from the brassière … Steady, you sod, or you’ll be getting a hard on …
We all stood up. Mother lightly patted down a curl of hair on the back of my head, and then squeezed me affectionately.
‘I tell him, if he were a girl, I’d get a slide to that piece of hair. How it infuriates me! But he’s a good boy. I sometimes reproach myself that I neglect him, bless him. Yes, I’ve been very lucky with my children.’
‘Oh, not that again, Mother! She says that to everyone, Sister. She forgets what little horrors we were.’
‘I’m sure you were,’ Sister said, smiling. It amazed me at the time that she was not at all put off after seeing me treated as such a kid.
‘When this one cried as a child, his father got so mad at him, he used to take him to the window and threaten to throw him out! But he was a good boy, on the whole. Well, Sister, it’s been so pleasant … Horatio, go and get Sister Traven’s coat, where are your manners? Yes, I do hope we’ll see you again soon …’
As they moved to the door, I got there first, opened it, and edged myself half out before saying, ‘Mother, I’ll just drive down the road with Sister. There’s something I want to tell her.’
‘Tell her now – you’ve been quiet enough up to now!’
‘No, it’s all right. I’ll tell her on the way, Mum. Then I can drop off to see William. I shan’t be long.’
‘Yes, all right, dear. Don’t be long. Your father will be home soon.’
As Sister and I made our way down our five whitened steps and along the front path, I took her arm and led her to the car. Mother stood waving as we drove away; I hoped she had noticed my gesture.
‘Let’s go up by the cemetery.’
‘You mustn’t be long!’
It was generally quiet in the lane that ran by the side of the cemetery. She stopped in a suitable place without any mucking about. We turned and looked at each other. There was no sign on her that she had been through the ordeal I had. We kissed each other. Not exactly a passionate kiss – I knew I would not get that kind from her at this hour of the day; the passionate ones, and even the ones before the passionate ones, which were her way of testing her own mood, only materialized after dark. But certainly a loving kiss. Again I was amazed that she was not put off by Mother’s attempted demonstration that I was just a kid.
‘You were very nice to Mother,’ I said presently.
‘She was nice to me.’
Better not explore that subject! I asked her if we could drive about until it got dark. She knew what I meant.
‘I must get back to Traven House, love. The family solicitor is coming over specially this evening, to sort out some of my papers. I have various bonds and other possessions, and a little not-very-valuable jewellery, that I am going to leave in his safe-keeping until the war is over.’
‘God, how I wish you weren’t going, Virginia!’ I ran my hands over her body, but she would only stand a certain amount of that in a semi-public place. In a safe room it was another matter. Once, after dark, in the dark, she had let me undress her and I had run my hands all over her body, and then slipped a finger into her fanny and began to frig her gently. That little secret organ of hers! But there could be nothing like that on this occasion.
She had made me grow up, made me see that there were other things than immediate satisfactions – I would not have dared ask her to toss me off, as I might have done with another girl; for Virginia was teaching me immense ideas about sexual organs – ideas that I learned only reluctantly, ideas that went against all my early training: showing me that love had to be there somewhere, and that against the recurrent isolation of life the hastily snatched orgasm was not the only antidote.
Firmly, she held my hands.
‘There’s a war … People get separated. I learnt that in the last war, when I was younger than you.’
‘I can’t bear to be separated from you, Virginia, darling! We’ve only just got to know each other.’
She looked very searchingly at me, then said, so quietly that I could hardly hear, ‘You can always write to me at my Nottingham address. I shan’t be off to London yet … And, Horatio – I must tell you … You really don’t know me at all.’
I rested my head on her shoulder.
‘Oh, Virginia, I want to, I want to know you better. You’re so wonderful for me, and I love you so much.’
She never said she loved me. But she stroked my cheeks and looked at me in what for her was a wild sort of way.
‘Virginia, I want to know you …’ The eternal cry of lovers. It was eventually by getting to know her that I lost her.
‘Sweetheart, you are a child!’
‘You never said that to me before. Why say it now? I know you don’t mean it as an affront – as Mother does when she calls me a child. But I’m sick of childhood. I’m finished with it, I hate it! It’s so sordid – you’ve showed me – Christ, you’re the one who has brought me out of it!’
I choked on the words. We just sat there in the uncomfortable car, touching and looking at each other. She never even said that she needed me, but I had always been secure in that. I knew she needed me; it was one of the things I understood about her without the necessity for words.
We parted there by
the bloody old cemetery, in which my grandfather had been only recently buried. I walked back, hands in pockets, saying to myself over and over, ‘Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck it all, fuck the whole shitting issue!’
And as I went along, I resolved that my childhood could be closed, after all, if I really wished for it. Did I really wish for it? What would being an adult entail? That was unknown. What had being a child entailed?
All very mysterious. It had not meant a lack of sex. I was introduced to the delights of masturbation early, and had never looked back since then. You might say I was a hand-reared boy. Perhaps I should have been ashamed of all that; I was not. People pretend to be so enlightened about sex these days; they talk happily about copulation and such subjects, about adultery and homosexuality and lesbianism and abortions. Never about masturbation, though. And yet masturbation is the commonest form of sex, and tossing off the cheapest and most harmless pleasure.
Of course, as I grew older I graduated to more fashionable delights.
Shortly before I was born, my father was promoted manager of a branch of Barclays Bank Ltd. in the East Midlands. It was a small dull town then, in the early twenties, and is a large dull town now. For a reason I forget, we did not go to live in the accommodation the bank offered, but instead took over a large house on the edge of the town which had been an inn in the prosperous days, a century earlier, when the stage-coaches flourished.
One of my first memories is of the smell of beer which the floor of our living-room released whenever the sun shone on it or the room was warm – ancient beer, which had soaked into the wood for decades, and could never be eradicated, however my mother set her series of maids to polishing. Could I somehow have become intoxicated by those benevolent fumes as I sprawled on the floor? Did they have some loosening effect on my infantile moral sense? Sophisticated fellows might answer yes. But I believe the maids themselves were more to blame for my failings!
Of those maids, and in particular of Beatrice, we will speak later. First I must describe the family.
My father was a small and aloof man. He could be cold and sarcastic, to his wife as well as his children. He feared his father, my grandfather, until the day the old man died, and I believe this relationship did much to blight his pleasure in life. When my grandfather and grandmother came to stay with us, as they did all too often, my parents suffered a good deal.
My mother, on the other hand, was thin and clinging. Although far from passionate, she demanded love from her family and returned it by spasms. Terribly moody herself, the highest praise she reserved for other people was to say, ‘So-and-so is always the same!’ She cosseted me often, devoting much attention to me where my father devoted almost none. Yet I never doubted that he loved me deeply, just as, from a remarkably early age I doubted whether she loved me at all.
My elder brother, Nelson, was born in 1920. He grew tall and thin and dark where I was chubby and fair. I always admired him and he tolerated me with what I regarded as marvellous good nature. He hit me a good deal, as I suppose bigger brothers do. He loved animals and once tried to stuff a dead cat with wood shavings – his only venture into taxidermy. Nelson was a fairly clever boy, clever enough to be always slightly rebellious; he was secretly planning to become an architect, and drawing fantastic buildings, at an age when I was tamely following Father’s suggestion that I should go into banking and ‘work your way up’.
I was born three years after my brother, with my fists – so claimed the midwife – clenched in my eyes. 1923 was not a good year to be born. There were dock strikes in England and coal strikes in America. The French were occupying the Ruhr, Hitler was tunnelling away in Munich, like a mole under Germany’s troubles. A mighty scene was already being set for my late and trivial adolescence. On the day I arrived in the world there was a severe earthquake in Japan.
My mother was always secretly frightened of men. I say ‘secretly’, but a mother has fewer secrets than she imagines from the young innocent tagging boredly and apparently unobservantly at her skirts. The way in which she was all friendly condescension to the tradesmen, the way she skirted the dole queues which afflicted the Midlands – and perhaps much more subtly the way all her appeals and coquetry towards Father were framed – spoke of her terror of the male. Although both her parents were dead long before I arrived howling on the scene, they had been a formidable couple by all accounts; her father; whose old farm we sometimes drove past in our tiny black car, had been a tyrant of the Victorian school. No doubt he, and the stern nonsenses with which he could fill a small girl’s head, were sufficient to give her a scare for life.
Marriages (I was told as a kid) are made in heaven. In fact, they seem to be made in a tiny, dim, shuttered, undiscovered room in the brain, where some fiendishly clever little hunchback of a genius sees to it that we get the marriage partner we really want, whatever we think we want, and however we rail against his choice later.
I believe that, much though my mother suffered from my father’s coldness and his sarcastic tongue, she chose him because he was aloof and did not ‘trouble her too much’.
Since I do not go far with the psycho-analysis, I’d better drop that line of reasoning. It makes sense to try to make sense of our parents; it is part of the process of understanding ourselves. As far as Freud helps common sense, he is welcome. I suppose he might have agreed that, for whatsoever reason, my mother was happier in the company of her own sex.
For that reason she badly wanted a little girl. If Nelson was a disappointment, Horatio was a greater. Not being a maths wizard, she must have felt that the chances of the second baby being a girl were twice as great as the first time. My father, who, as a banker, could no doubt have enlightened her on that simple excursion into the realm of probability theory, characteristically did not. Mother went into what was euphemistically termed ‘a nervous breakdown’ and took several months to recover. Perhaps it was in some sort of revenge for that that they called me by the unfortunate Christian name I bear; or perhaps, had I been a girl, they had been intending to christen me Emma; when my father read a book it was about British heroes – preferably Nelson.
Anyhow, the mother would not look at the new baby, or was advised by the family medico not to look at the new baby. A wet nurse was found for the new baby, and he went to stay in her house for the first two months of his existence.
Was it that early exile that tipped the sexual scales? I ask myself … but no longer very fervently!
Legend has it that my father came every evening after the bank closed to inspect his second son and to see that the wet nurse was looking after him. The action sounds hardly characteristic of Father, although the story sounds characteristic of Mother’s tales.
What she suffered then goes unrecorded – like most suffering. She could never afterwards entirely decide on her behaviour towards me. Should she blame me because she ‘nearly died’ on my arrival? Or should she make it up to me because I had been sent away at once? She never solved the problem.
A partial solution arrived four years after I was born. In the summer months of 1927 she achieved her long-awaited daughter. Caroline Adelaide Ann Stubbs opened her eyes upon the world, and found it good. She also found it good that a devoted mother awaited her every behest.
The birth of Ann, as the baby was called in the family, brought a measure of happiness to us. We were glad that Mother was glad. Nor was this particularly unselfish; it gave Father more peace, and it gave Nelson and me the chance to play with less supervision. I believe we really loved Ann, almost as much as Mother demanded we should. True, my brother did drop her once while carrying her round the garden, but I recall the sincerity of his penitence after, which had nothing to do with Mother’s tears or Father’s chastisement!
Mother’s success with Ann went to her head – or womb, rather. Two years later she bore another little girl, but this baby was still-born.
I recall poignantly the news of its arrival. One of the maids was keeping Nelson and me amused; she kept runnin
g out of the room and coming back, telling us, ‘You’ll hear it cry presently! It’s coming now!’ I remember leaving our toys and going to kneel on the wooden window seat; I stared through the panels of yellow semi-frosted glass that flanked our windows and wondered what it felt like to be a child that as yet was nowhere – listening eagerly for its cry and hearing instead a cuckoo, asking myself if there was a connection between mysterious bird and mysterious baby. Then Father came and told us – he took our hands – that the baby was dead and Mummy was very sad.
‘It would have been a little sister for you,’ he said. ‘But God took her away again at the last moment.’
After that we were more devoted than ever to Ann. Neither Nelson nor I would have put it past God to take her too.
Our little town boasted one superior kindergarten, run by a Miss Matilda Unwin, and to this I was sent at the age of five. Nelson was almost ready to leave and go on to grammer school.
Kindergarten was satisfactory enough. We bullied and were bullied, but nothing very terrible. I was immediately attracted to several of the girls and, although most of this attraction was entirely undeclared, it was generally reciprocated in some degree, which contributed considerably to the pleasures of school, since seats were scarce in the youngest form and we had to sit two at a desk. So I was able to cuddle against Sheila, in her lovely golden-brown cord dress, which reminded me of wallflowers. It had a white lace collar, and white socks went with it. Her legs were pretty, but I believe I loved her only on the days when she wore that fetching little dress.
I was continuously fond of Sonia, who had attractively short-cropped fair hair. She was a tough and adventurous little girl and we used to play together out of school. At one time we planned to marry, but then she was sick in class, right – splash! – into her desk, and I turned my affections elsewhere.
Even in those days, just like adults, we thought of little but sex, although it took diffuse and childish forms. We invented a lovely game to play in the playground: Farmers and Cows, it was called.