Life in the West tsq-1

by Brian W Aldiss

  Squire could not speak.

  ‘I’ve got Zvonko Nedec here. That’s worth something. Who’ve you got up there?’

  Nedec was a well-known pro-Soviet Croat, high on the Belgrade wanted list.

  Squire went into an empty corner of the room and was violently sick. Sweat poured from him. He found himself weeping. The vomit splashed his boots and slacks.

  Confused, he realized after a moment that Slobodan was in the room, driving Nedec before him, the latter with hands tied and face ashen; stains down the front of his trousers showed where he had pissed himself in fright. Only Slobodan was enjoying himself. He clapped Squire on the shoulder.

  ‘Take it easy.’

  Squire sat shaking on the rear window sill, mopping his mouth and face. Chill overcame him. He had shot a man down like a dog. Almost without comprehension, he took in the view from his vantage point.

  Behind the house ran a ruinous stone wall with a steep drop on its far side. Parked under the drop were three old German army lorries with camouflage canopies lashed into place. No doubt that they contained the stolen arms from the arms train. Beyond the lorries, the broken Istran landscape fell away, giving place to a magnificent panorama of the Kvarner Bay. The sun shone dazzling on the blue water. Resting on the breast of the sea were the islands of Cres and Losinj. Squire stared at the sea with longing, until a movement nearer at hand caught his eye.

  Parked under a tree at a distance from the lorries was a white Zastava. A thick-set young man in civilian clothes had broken cover and was running towards it. He climbed in and started up the engine.

  At the sound, Slobodan rushed to the window. He pointed at the car.

  ‘Why don’t you shoot? That’s one of the rats we saw first, maybe!’

  Squire shook his head. Slobodan produced his last grenade, pulled its pin, and hurled it at the car, already moving downhill. The grenade exploded behind it. The car kept on going, bumping across the field, and disappeared behind a fold of hill.

  Losing interest, Slobodan gave Squire a cigarette. Both men lit up. Squire was ashamed of how much his hand shook.

  ‘Come and look see this. It’ll cheer you up. Here’s Milo Strugar’s killer, okay.’

  Slobodan turned and set his foot against the shoulder of the man Squire had shot, so that head and narrow face rolled over in Squire’s direction. A further nudge from Slobodan’s boot brought the head into a beam of sunlight, which blazed in through a gap in the roof. The features of the dead man were unpleasantly illuminated, so that Squire’s stomach lurched again. The features were heavy and sagged in death. On the left cheek was a large mole, its long dark hairs glinting in the sun. It made the man look harmless in death.

  There was no doubting his identity.

  ‘You killed Slatko, my clever young friend!’

  Squire had studied the dead man’s photograph a number of times in Belgrade. Codename Slatko had been active ever since Stalin ceased to be Tito’s patron and master; he was the Russian colonel in charge of softening-up operations in Yugoslavia prior to a Soviet take-over. As head of Department XIII of Soviet Counter-Espionage, he was answerable only to the Soviet Central Committee. Slatko’s presence here in Istra showed how confident the Russians had become of defeating Tito. Perhaps the stolen arms were to reinforce an intended strike presided over by Slatko, and timed to take place while the West had its energies and attention involved with the Berlin air-lift. If so, Slatko had been over-optimistic.

  ‘You killed Slatko,’ Slobodan repeated. He embraced Squire.

  ‘I need a crap,’ Squire said.

  The official break between Stalin and Tito, marked by Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform for hostility to the USSR, came less than two months later. From then on, the Yugoslavs went their own way, negotiating a difficult path between East and West.

  By that time, Thomas Squire had returned to England. He had been too successful — the Yugoslavs feared attempts on his life. They gave him an enormous party in Belgrade and sent him home.

  Squire returned to his own country in a curious mental state.

  What he could confess to no one, and what most deeply disturbed him, was that he had perversely enjoyed killing. It satisfied a black greedy thing in his psyche. For months, he could not rid himself of the vision of Slatko dying, the leg kicking, the Istran sunlight blasting through the broken building.

  The department de-activated him, and Squire returned to private life. Following family tradition, he went up to Cambridge, and spent three years there reading Medieval History, without great distinction. Among his friends were James Rotheray and Ronald Broadwell, later to become Squire’s publisher.

  He invested the money paid by the BIA, and a legacy that accrued to him on his twenty-first birthday, in a directorship in a city insurance firm. Then he settled down to pretending that he took himself for an ordinary man. Several years passed before he could realize that he was an ordinary man.

  ‘By the way,’ d’Exiteuil said, turning an unfriendly face to Squire as they were leaving the conference hall. ‘You said yesterday in your opening speech that we had to forge a methodology for the future. Well, we have one, despite anything you or Fittich may say to the contrary. It’s Marxism. Academic Marxism. And it’s already started to run future culture. Popular arts, after all, can never belong to reactionaries like you. We have to shape them to the needs of society. You will be out of it from now on, as I expect you will discover after the conference.’

  11. ‘The Strong Act as They Have Power to Act’

  Blakeney, Norfolk, July 1978

  Two women stood at a window looking out, one intently, one restlessly.

  The house was low-built of red brick, with seven bays and two stories. It dated from the Regency period. Even in the sunny days of this fitful Norfolk July, its rooms remained shady.

  Pink flowers of tamarisk pressed against the window, growing in sandy soil. The house stood on a spit of land at one end of Blakeney quay, with long perspectives of sea and marshes to both the back and front. The rear of the house was sheltered against winter winds by trees and a high wall.

  In the front of the house, the windows were square casements, low to the ground, with white-painted shutters on the inside. The two women stood together at the living-room window, Deirdre Kaye with her arms folded, Teresa Squire with binoculars to her eyes, searching the distance.

  The linked circles of Teresa’s vision passed over the lively scene of the harbour, with its porcupine-quill quota of masts of dingeys, with near-naked children fishing for gillies at the harbour-edge. They lifted slightly and passed beyond the main channel to the distant sea, the glittering mud of low tide where terns fed, the bars of sand, the marshes and dykes, to a pale stretch of beach backed by the blue North Sea. On the stretch of beach four ponies moved.

  Even from this distance, the glasses enabled Teresa to distinguish the copper heads of Deirdre’s two boys, Douglas and Tom, Deirdre’s husband, Marshall, and her own estranged husband, Tom, riding in a line by the water’s edge. She stared for a long while at Tom’s image, wavering in the heat rising from the land. He resembled a phantom progressing underwater. He had drowned in heat and absence.

  ‘Well, I’ll go and knit a doormat or something,’ Deirdre said.

  ‘They’re out on the point — coming back here, I expect,’ Teresa said, lowering the glasses and turning to her sister-in- law. ‘The boys look terribly brown. So do you, Deirdre. How long have you and Marshall been back from Greece?’

  Deirdre went over to a low table and lit a cigarette from the lighter standing there. ‘A week. Sorry I didn’t send any cards. The house still smells shut up, doesn’t it? It’s almost as hot in Norfolk as it was on Milos. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘There was nothing but rain and cloud here all June.’

  Deirdre swung round to confront Teresa.

  ‘Look, let’s not beat about the bush, Tess. How much longer are you going to keep the children over at Grantham with your moth
er? It’s bad for them and for everyone. You know Tom’s still willing to have you back. I think you should stop acting up and return to Pippet Hall at once.’

  ‘That’s really our private business and nobody else’s.’ The words were said defensively. Teresa clutched the binoculars and looked anxiously at Deirdre, who was a head taller than she. Deirdre promptly wreathed herself in smoke.’ It’s not simply a question of his “having me back”, as you put it. I just can’t take his unfaithfulness any longer. Sorry, but I just can’t.’

  Grace came into the room, carrying a large cat.

  ‘Get out, will you?’ Deirdre told her oldest child. ‘I’m having a row with your aunt.’

  As Grace faded from the scene, pulling a face, Deirdre said, ‘I wanted to say this to you before they return and Tom finds you’ve arrived. I personally am baffled, completely baffled, by how you are behaving. This talk about Tom being unfaithful — I mean, you realize that’s old-fashioned for a start?’

  ‘You’d probably call it by a nastier name. It hurts me, as it does most women. Men think they can get away with too much.’

  ‘Well, Tom doesn’t think that because Tom isn’t that kind, though he may have had a bit on the side occasionally. I want to say two things to you. First of all, you ought to try and realize that he’s experienced difficulties in life — well, so have we all; but last year and this are in a way his great years. As I see it. They’ve come a bit late, but they’re wonderful for him. Last year, the excitement of conceiving the “Frankenstein” series and getting it filmed and the book written; then, this year, the tremendous success of the book and the series. The book’s reprinting and they’re now re-running the series, in case you haven’t bothered to watch the box, with all your other enterprises. It’s a triumph for Tom and for the family. You realize that he thinks he’s doing something for England, for the West — silly though you probably find that. And in the middle of it all, you — you have to muck everything up, so that he’s left Pippet Hall in despair and gone to live in his club in London. How do you think he feels? You’re his wife — haven’t you more sense of him as a person than to let him drift like that?’

  ‘I didn’t make him leave Pippet Hall, did I? Nor did I make him go with that woman.’

  ‘Laura Nye, do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I expect he’s brought her here often. You probably know her well, which is why you take her side.’

  ‘Don’t be cheap. That’s my role. I met Laura twice last year. But that’s all past — you’ve been told it’s finished, over and over again. That was your excuse to muck about yourself, wasn’t it? My God, how you grabbed it with both hands! So what if Tom did have it off with Laura Nye? She was one of the actresses in his drama. She was literally a passing fancy. He’s got to do something while he’s travelling to all these fancy locations, Hollywood, Malaysia, and so on. If I were in Singapore now, I’d be having it off with the nearest Chinaman, I can tell you!’

  Teresa put the binoculars down on the window sill, carefully, to conceal her trembling. ‘I don’t want to have this discussion, Deirdre, sorry. I came over here to see Tom, not you. How you would behave in Singapore is nothing to do with it. Tom obviously preferred the girl to me. He’s old enough to be her father. You speak as if the tragedy’s all his, but believe me it’s mine too — ’

  Coughing angrily into her fist, Deirdre said, ‘What thought processes do you use? Your mind is stuck on clichés. “He’s old enough to be her father”, indeed! Just try and understand what that may mean in real terms. Tom’ll be fifty next year. That’s not a very comfortable age for men. He probably saw this fling as his last chance, as something to bolster his flagging libido. I don’t know, he doesn’t confide, but I can make intelligent guesses about the situation, and you should do the same. You should ask yourself why he needed that reassurance in the first place.’

  ‘Oh, stop it, Deirdre! Talk about clichés, you sound like an Agony Column yourself. A successful man like Tom needing reassurance from me…’

  ‘Of course he does! You’re his wife. Don’t be so blind. He kicked Laura out and returned to you, didn’t he? You turned your back. Agony! — You think he’s not lacerated by your unhappiness? Why aren’t you lacerated by his? And he bailed your business out earlier this year — to the tune of several thousand pounds, I heard.’

  ‘He was obliged to, Deirdre…’ She put her chin up. ‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but Tom was legally bound to sort that out. If I hadn’t been so upset, my business would have flourished. You think I don’t suffer? I just don’t make a fuss about it. After all, I was the one left at home alone. It’s humiliating to have your husband chasing some bit of goods, humiliating, and then you watch them laughing together on TV, and know everyone else is watching, admiring, too. And you expect me to catch the repeats… Do you think I can get over that? I’m disgraced.’

  Deirdre stubbed her cigarette out in a shell ashtray. ‘Of course you were hurt. Okay, then you had your consolation and got back at him. Put your claws away, stop erecting all these items into an ideology of grievance, and be a proper wife.’

  ‘There’s just one difficulty you prefer to ignore…’

  Teresa paused. Deirdre looked at her suspiciously. ‘What’s that? You’ve got another bloke?’

  ‘I don’t love Tom any more.’

  Deirdre sat down. ‘Don’t say that to Tom.’ She got up again. She moved over to one of the windows and opened it a trifle wider.

  ‘You’re no chicken yourself, Teresa. You’re four years older than me. “You don’t love him…” That’s a bit more ideology of grievance, if you ask me. I mean, at your age, you and Tom should steadfastly continue to love each other. By rote, as it were. You’re not in your twenties. When a man goes a bit haywire at the male menopause, okay, his wife stays by him, supporting him through a year or two of rough water, and after that they become closer than ever; his gratitude will ensure that. But if you lose that chance — which you’ve already bungled… You’ve got the wrong idea about love, deserting him when he probably needs you more than ever.’

  ‘Deserting… Oh, Christ, it’s like being in a trap of words…,’ said Teresa, moving unhappily round the room.

  ‘Don’t rush about. We’ve only got words since you’ve turned down actions.’

  ‘Tom’s fine, just fine. It’s only his pride that’s hurt — he’s mad because I actually dared to go away with another man to Malta for Christmas, because I pleased myself for once. He’s off to Sicily in September. He’ll probably find a woman for himself there.’

  ‘God, you bitch, what a mad round of pleasure you make it all sound!’

  ‘Look, Deirdre, maybe you hate me. He doesn’t need me. He needs me at home. That’s different. He just needs me at home, keeping Pippet Hall in order. The wife in her place. You know he is proposing to open the place to visitors, now he’s such a big success?’

  ‘Well, the bloody estate is broke. Be reasonable. You’re so vituperative: why should he want to forgive you?’

  ‘You can’t see that aspect of things as clearly as I can. After all, you’re a Squire too. Tom just wants me at Pippet Hall. That satisfies his love of order. He’ll forgive anything, anything, to get me back, because the Hall is the most important thing in his life. Any messy divorce, or anything like that, and he could lose the Hall. I’ve got him by the short hairs and he knows it. I’m being kinder than you think, driving over here today to see what he has to say, especially with my health delicate.’

  She stopped before the anger in Deirdre’s face.

  ‘Don’t dare think that way. You’d even use his love of the Hall against him? Just watch it. Marsh and I may have been away, but we also have an interest in the Hall. I have witnesses to prove that you have been back there on several occasions, and have taken that little rotter Jarvis with you. And you had him over when Tom was away filming, before you found out about Laura.’

  As they stood there confronting each other, they heard footsteps a
nd voices outside in the back yard.

  ‘Don’t bring Vernon Jarvis into this,’ Teresa said. Her face and lips were pale.’ He’s not around now. He had nothing to do with this quarrel — ’

  ‘He has fleeced you and hopped it?’

  ‘I said, he is not around. Tom started the quarrel and Tom has to mend it. Money doesn’t mend quarrels, if you think it does. Tom’s the one in the wrong.’

  ‘Well, get him out of the wrong, then. You certainly owe him that.’

  The ponies were hired from Old Man Hill, who had run a stable in conjunction with his fishing boat for longer than anyone in Blakeney could remember.

  After walking along in the shallows of the sleeping sea, the animals were reluctant to be turned towards the land. Douglas and young Tom rode ahead, wearing only swimming trunks and trying to steer the animals with their knees. Tom Squire and Marshall Kaye followed behind.

  For two summers in succession, Kaye had been digging in Greece. He was tanned a deep brown behind his spectacles, and presented a striking appearance. His drooping moustache was yellow, his eyebrows dark brown, his hair brown fading to blond on top, where the Aegean sun had bleached it. So the years had baked him, Squire reflected, from a brash young Yale graduate to a seasoned and renowned archaeologist. His eyes, fringed by dark lashes, were light blue. Above his shorts was a worn windcheater of a similar faded hue.

  He was giving Squire an account of his and Deirdre’s stay on Milos, making both it and the excavations sound rewarding. Squire envied the stability of the younger man’s life.

  ‘Despite everything, despite that amazing sense of being surrounded by the history of your own culture, I find Greece and the islands depressing,’ Kaye said.

  ‘How’s that? I thought the Greeks were getting into their stride again, now that the colonels have departed.’

  Their mounts negotiated low swelling dunes through which some first spears of grass appeared.

  ‘They are, kind of. I suppose I mean that the denudation problem is depressing, and the way nothing’s being done about it, or is ever going to be done, as far as I can see. Not more than two per cent of the entire country retains its original top-soil…’