The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

by Brian Aldiss

‘Not much. I mean, I shall be glad of the chance to see you, any old chance. But Mother can be a bit oppressive.’

  ‘She doesn’t think there’s anything … funny going on between us?’

  I frowned at her. ‘Funny? What’s funny between us, Sister Traven? I’m dead serious, I don’t know about you!’

  In the end she agreed to come to tea that Friday. I have already given some account of that farewell feast.

  When it was over, and I had driven with her to the cemetery, and she had gone, and I had dragged slowly back home to make another entry in my secret ‘Virginia Journal’, I lay for a long while on my bed, thinking about my life. Seldom had I so rigorously searched my soul; introspection was rare for me.

  In those days I was incapable of seeing myself as essentially the ordinary fellow I now reluctantly conclude myself to be; I alternated between holding myself a great saint or a great sinner. One thing I did see: that, by what I then reckoned my own fault, I had failed to awake any real loving response in my parents. My brother and sister loved me, and I was lucky in them; but theirs was the slaphappy relationship of fellow nestlings in the brood. I had become a rather isolated and independent character. Sex, I told myself, had taken the place of affection.

  However, there was Virginia. Out of the sordid chaos of school and my life in general, she had provoked, inspired, the best love of which I was capable. I wanted more of her love (even if she didn’t love me very greatly); and I wanted to give her more. What had I ever given her, I, a spotty youth?

  A great emptiness filled me to think how unworthy I was.

  With the emptiness, a stabbing knowledge; she’s left school now – the world’s big – you will lose sight of her any day – she’s not so closely tied to you, why should she be? – she could disappear without another word.

  True! Within me, waiting for this opportunity to reveal itself, lay more intuitive understanding of this strange woman I loved. She was elusive to me; and so she was to herself. Infinitely precious, she could so easily be infinitely lost.

  I almost broke out of my room in search of her at that instant. Standing caged, I rested my forehead against my locked bedroom door.

  I resolved to go and see her again next day. I had to make some definite arrangement with her. That was what we had never had. Never had I shown her how deeply I cared; maybe I had been afraid to.

  We had to have a proper relationship. After all, I was no longer a child. Neither of us was going back to Branwells. No longer need our love be clandestine. At last I saw the advantages of growing up!

  That night brought me no sleep. I tried to read, could not; slipped down the drainpipe outside my window, walked to the outskirts of the town, came back, still could not rest. Eventually, tired and disgusted with myself, I took the usual way into oblivion and tossed myself off. Then I slept.

  Next morning, her lovely face, half-mocking, was before me. While Mother told Father across the breakfast table everything Virginia had said at tea the previous day, I resolved that I must speak to Virginia – speak to her seriously.

  Clear on what I had to do, I was muddled on how to do it.

  Virginia’s arrangements were slightly complicated. She had never wanted me to write to her at Traven House because one of the servants there pried into her affairs; I always wrote to an address in Nottingham, where she said she had some rooms. It was to this address that I resolved to go – it was accessible by train, whereas Traven House stood miles off the map, and was too intimidating besides. I slipped away from home after lunch, pretending I was off for a game of cricket.

  Such idiot plans court disaster. It was, really, my first set-back in the Virginia affair, and indirectly it may have helped me to stand apart from her.

  The train chugged into Nottingham Midland Station by 2.30 and I set out on foot for Union Street. The name on paper always sounded so romantic: the union referred to was ours, hers and mine. The reality lay near the lunatic asylum and was extremely drab, a succession of terraced houses punctuated by shops in a semi-industrial area. My step faltered in dismay.

  After much hesitation, hoping to run into her in the street, I went up to the number I had and rang the bell. After a while, a girl of about my age opened the door and peered out. She wore curlers in her hair, a pink apron, and fluffy pink slippers. From behind her came the cabbagey whiff of the house.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  I asked politely for Sister Traven, making as if to walk in.

  ‘That slut ain’t in and she owes us rent!’ And with that the bitch slammed the door in my face.

  Shaken, horrified, doubting, I stood back. I was conscious of people looking at me from behind curtains.

  What should I do? Post Virginia a note through the door? Knock again? Wait till someone else arrived at the house? In the end I did nothing. I walked to the end of the street, stood there with my hands in my pockets, and at last went away.

  Everyone must experience such bitter reversals in love. Things happen which seem nothing to do with the quality of the human beings involved, glass-sharp nasty things that come grinding up out of the system in which mankind has to live, reminders of the horrid fact that we as humans must camp out as best we can among complex series of natural laws, which came into being long before man did, and so contain no provision for him or any finer feelings.

  All I could do was return to the railway station. The one distraction was meeting Spaldine, then heading back from Spalding by train. He was as subdued as I was, having come over to Nottingham to volunteer for the R.A.F. We worked our way through a cup of vile coffee and a biscuit together in the station buffet before departing to our separate platforms. Strangely enough, the name of Sister Traven emerged in our conversation, but from a guarded question I put, I gathered that he knew nothing of her whereabouts.

  Back home I went, empty-handed, empty-hearted. A certain ability for self-dramatization may have eased the situation slightly. Nothing else did.

  September wore on. At last my father wrote to the Head and said that he did not think any useful purpose would be served in sending me back to Branwells; I would be doing some war work until I was of age to join the forces. The Head wrote back saying he entirely understood the position, that patriotism must come first, and that he required a term’s fee in lieu of notice.

  I was really alone. No, not really alone; Ann and I took to cycling off into the country with sandwiches for lunch. On one occasion Esmeralda came with us, but Ann and Esmeralda did not like each other – Esmeralda patronized her. We were completely isolated from our parents.

  The old phantom idea of a war between generations is never far away in times when change makes the older generation appear obsolete instead of wise; for all that, it is a silly and distressing idea, in which both sides are losers. In 1939 that sense of division was particularly sharp.

  My father volunteered for the Navy, in which he had served in the Great War (as he called it). He was turned down because he was too old. His generation was suddenly faced with the fact that they were ‘past it’. It was a generation, too, which thought of the new war in terms of the old. To men like my father, the war promised to be merely a stale repetition of the horrors of the previous conflict.

  From ‘Uncle’ Jim Anderson, the war took on a different aspect I have mentioned this occasional visitor to our house. Nelson and I always suspected that there was ‘something going on’ between him and Mother. In the last days of that September everyone was changing, every relationship was changing; and ‘Uncle’ Jim, that uncertain man, was changing with the times.

  He turned up one afternoon when Ann was at school, Father at the bank, and Mother on one of her walks. To my irritation, I had to make conversation to him. He marched about our living-room in the smart walking-out uniform of an infantry regiment; and my irritation was partly with myself for being impressed.

  In a short while, as he talked, it dawned on me that he was not just talking to kill time until my mother returned, but was genuinely tryi
ng to communicate with me. I was too sunk into myself to respond; and I can have paid little attention to him, for, even a brief time afterwards I could not recollect what he spoke about, except that it was serious, and that he ended by saying, referring to the war, ‘I’ve wasted away my life so far – perhaps now I shall be able to make something of it!’

  When he said goodbye to my mother she turned pale and ran upstairs.

  Into everyone’s stagnant lives a current was circulating.

  To us who were young, the air was vibrant with hopes and threats. The black on the map, by which Germany was represented, was a thrilling incarnation of evil, to which we were drawn despite ourselves. It represented a sort of liberty.

  I tried to volunteer for service. I was turned down. The British Government had called up the eighteens to the forty-ones, and its hands were full organizing them. Looking back, I see it was typical of the Stubbs family that both Father and I should volunteer within a few days of each other – rather than go together and meet our rebuffs together!

  Then came word from Virginia.

  Sick and unsettled, I was desperately glad to hear anything. Her letter was written in her untidy scribble (‘that upper-class scrawl’, as I admiringly thought of it) on violet notepaper.

  She said she had joined the Q.A.I.M.N.S. (or Q.A.R.A.N.C, as it now is) She was staying in London, in the Queensway district, with an old friend who was currently making a name for herself in a West End stage play; life was quite pleasant despite the war. She hoped I would come and see her some day before I went back to school.

  Everything in that note made me at once happy and miserable. The greatest vexation was that its tone was only lightly affectionate – oh, Virginia’s tone to the life, as I realized, but what I wanted was meaty, heart-baring declarations of love!

  And that bit about ‘hoping you’ll come and see me’ … She knew I had been to London only three or four times in my life, when Mother took Nelson and me down for a treat. Of course, I was gratified that Virginia asked me at all … but then there was the jibe, as I saw it, about being a schoolboy, which I no longer was.

  Nor did she mention the three letters I had written to her c/o Union Street. Had she never received them? Had the young harridan grabbed them first, or had Virginia not bothered to read them? Or preferred to ignore them?

  All of a sudden, my blood growing decidedly chilly, I decided that I would go down to London and see her. I would get a job near her. I could see her every day then. I would leave home. Nobody would care.

  My mind was made up: I carried my resolution through. Although I have called myself timid, I have portrayed myself as acting boldly on several occasions. The two are not incompatible.

  One of the mainsprings of my nature – which I was then trying ineffectually to understand – was a deep inferiority complex caused, as an anxious reading of the psycho-analytical shelf at the public library informed me, by my apparent rejection by my parents. When I once decided to do a thing I could only go through with it with the doggedness of a weak man – often to arrive at accomplishment without the wind in my sails to go further and press home the advantage I had gained. Until I grew beyond this stage I let myself in for many disappointments which cumulatively allowed me no chance to think well of my management of my own insignificant life.

  Before I left home I went to say goodbye to Esmeralda. She and her mother were now alone in the big house. Esmeralda’s father had paraded through the town in dashing infantry dress uniform and then driven off to join his regiment. Esmeralda’s mother might have been alone, but she was not lonely; she made it clear that officers were welcome at her house provided they came in small parties and left in the same way. I heard Mother telling Father that she was no better than she should be; they were not keen that I should see Esmeralda, but by now I was somewhat independent and they did not like to issue direct orders in case they were disobeyed directly.

  When I arrived at Esmeralda’s house a gramophone was playing. This was the fag-end of September. By now Brown would be up to his spunk-producing tricks in the dormitory, and the British Expeditionary Force was almost ready to move into France. Perhaps some of the officers present that night were due to go. Their presence only helped my schemes, because Esmeralda was sitting upstairs in her bedroom, rather sulky. Her mother did not want her downstairs – though she was all dressed up to go in and kill, given half a chance. She told me she liked kissing officers.

  Dramatically, I told her that she could kiss all the officers she liked. I could no longer allow myself to feel jealous of what she did: I was off to London, and was going to join the war as soon as I could.

  She had the grace to be prettily sad about this. We started kissing. Down below, the gramophone was playing ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk!’ and ‘Where’s That Tiger?’ We were all absolutely vulnerable to the passage of time.

  Was it the music or the occasion? Suddenly I had a wild impulse. She had her little warm hand in my flies, but I broke away.

  I began to confess to Esmeralda all the sexual stunts at school – not a word about Virginia, of course, but everything about the boys, and how Branwells was really nothing but a huge brothel. She sat there, staring at me. Once I started, I could not stop.

  To this day, I do not know what provoked the confession. But the very word confession suggests that I laboured under a feeling of guilt for what had gone on. If so, this was not conscious. Nelson and I were lucky in that Father never lectured us on the perils of masturbation; he was far too reserved to do so. As I have said, I never suffered from the fears of blindness or backache or stunted growth with which some Branwells boys were afflicted. Partington – he who took so long to reach orgasm – told me once that his father lectured to him for an hour about it, made him uncover his cock, told him to read the Bible when he felt lust coming on; and Partington took the advice to heart so literally that on one occasion he had enclosed his rampant, sin-bound organ within the delicious India-paper pages of the Holy Book and frigged himself with it until he shot his roe in the middle of the Prophet Isaiah. He suffered miseries for that blasphemous act. Whereas I – who never looked on any sexual exercise as other than the use of organs there for the purpose – I never suffered mental or physical trouble on any occasion.

  Perhaps my confession had a simpler prompting. Perhaps I just wished to be free of the shadow of public-school life for ever.

  And perhaps I also hoped to make Esmeralda sexier than usual by telling her a spicy tale.

  She was certainly interested. Trying to get similar confessions from her, I asked her if she had not done similar things and had similar things done to her.

  ‘Not by other girls! Girls don’t do such things!’

  ‘They do! They are called lesbians, after a famous Greek woman who used to do it.’

  ‘Greek women, perhaps! But not English girls!’

  ‘But you sometimes do it to yourself, Esmeralda, don’t you?’

  ‘Well … that would be telling, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Don’t ask rude questions! How often do you do it?’

  ‘About once a week.’ I daren’t tell her the truth.

  ‘Let me see you do it!’

  We had an argument about that. I was willing but shy, and needed to be talked into it. Eventually, I brought out my penis, which was well inflated by all the discussion, and began to rub it, on the understanding that she would finish for me. There was a perverse and unexpected delight in doing it boldly in front of her, and thus perhaps breaking down a barrier in her mind as well as my own. So I did it slowly and lasciviously, pulling down my pants at the same time, so that she could see me naked, and my balls and everything.

  Esmeralda began to tremble. Her eyes gleamed, her lips parted. Her hand stole up her skirt as if without her knowledge, and at the sight of it, I came in a swoon, sending the semen scattering over her carpet. She was annoyed and excited. I was still excited myself. We began kissing violently. With her help, I
eased down her knickers and commenced to frig her wet and slopping little organ. Insensibly, it changed to fucking, and she was oh-ing and ah-ing feverishly. This was the first time I had gone into her. It was the greatest delight to thrust into her just as far as I could get. Downstairs, the gramophone was pounding, and she flopped back gasping under me. The movement dislodged me – just as well, because as I came out, all red and be-juiced, the orgasm was on me and I pumped my roe against her chubby thighs.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and we just lay there. ‘Oh God!’

  After a bit she took hold of my little organ and kissed me on the lips. She slid her tongue into my mouth, starting very slowly to massage life back into the sausage in her clutch.

  Into my ear she whispered hotly, ‘You told me one of those boys did it to you three times straight off. Now your sexy Esmeralda is going to do it to you three times straight off, and I won’t take no for an answer!’

  She was, I’m happy to say, as good as her word.

  Leaving home was more taxing than I had expected. The truth was, I still loved my mother dearly; her inability to understand anything about the way I thought or felt had caused me to build a layer of indifference over my feelings for her. But when she wept as I went and said she did not know what to do without me now that both her boys had forsaken her, I was deeply mortified and disturbed to think that I had been unfair to her.

  Home was sadly depleted. Ann now had a boy friend of her own, a younger brother of my old enemy Barrett. She clung to me and wept before I left; childhood was ending for her too. We no longer had a maid living in; Beatrice was married and came only in the morning from 8.30 to one. My father was coping with increasing regulations and dwindling staff at the bank.

  Filled with mixed emotion, I went and loitered about by the bank on one of those last evenings, hoping to say something to Father that would enable him to speak to me in the way I always knew he could.

  Although it was daylight yet in the street, a light burned in the bank; above the frosted section of the glass I could occasionally see father’s head and that of the chief cashier. I recalled the times when I had stood here as a small boy, waiting for him to come out, check the door to see that it was securely locked behind him, take my hand, and lead me home. That was no more expected. Now I was grown up, and he might like me better if I behaved like a man.