by Brian Aldiss
It happened that Britain and other countries in the West were entering a period when the lives of women were much discussed, and new interest and knowledge were applied; when womanhood was scrutinized afresh and freshly valued. Not only woman’s beauty and grace, but also her capabilities, her powers. Her vital function in the state. Too bad that womanhood was not also confined in your prison, you thought.
The contraceptive pill was changing society, leading perhaps to a period when the uses and employments of men were underestimated. Your wandering thoughts strayed to the lives of men, as you reflected on the peculiarities of your own life. You longed to read a learned book on the various struggles and existences of contemporary men. You would have preferred it to have had an informal title, and to have been informal, perhaps ‘The Lives of Blokes’ – indicative of the gender which still scratched its armpits. What did men do to establish themselves before their own eyes? How did they do it? The difficulties besetting those who knew no father as model, or had rejected the father as model: ‘Fatherlike he spends and tears us. Well our feeble frame he knows …’
You thought how once, men – almost every man jack of them – had been serfs, peasants, or had fought. In those dark centuries of the past … But now! If you were skilled at kicking a football, or if you were moderately capable of singing, then your path was reasonably clear, at least for the years when you were in fashion, while you collected Rolls Royces, or mansions, or younger women.
But alternatively, there was the hard route of learning. Or the way you had chosen, the primrose path of making money; although, to be frank, it had hardly been a matter of choice, rather just a matter of things happening. You had no firm hand on the tiller of your own destiny; you were afloat on a tide of lust and greed, those pleasant vices you concealed even from yourself.
And so the idea of change, the longing for a change, seeped like a rising tide into your mind. You resisted the prospect, being slow to realize it was already fermenting within you. By reading, you diluted your hours of solitary introspection between those grey walls. In one of the books from the prison library, donated by the League for Penal Reform, you came across some old Jacobean plays. In one play, an illustrious duchess asks: ‘What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut / With diamonds? Or to be smothered / With cassia? Or to be shot to death with pearls?’ An unlikely and philosophical enquiry for a woman about to be strangled, perhaps: yet it seemed a relevant question to ask of your past life, where to be a rich bloke with a wealthy and haughty wife appeared a satisfactory way of being, indeed, a bloke of stature.
Doors slammed, keys jangled, raised voices sounded. Somewhere, a prisoner yelled continually.
You thought over again what you had already thought.
The Duchess of Malfi’s question, What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut / With diamonds? seemed immensely apt, immensely moving. You had cut the throat of any body of spiritual life you had once enjoyed. Yes, it was more difficult ‘to be a bloke’ when the war was over, and with it all the fear and courage and deprivation of that time of hostilities, yet who in their right mind would wish for wartime back? There had to be a new way; perhaps the budding European Community was a new way, or part of it. But what of the individual, the bloke on the Clapham omnibus? You recalled the saying that fine feathers made fine birds; but not, presumably, if the feathers were stolen. Somehow, you had fallen into a habit of stealing, although you were aware that to steal was wrong; prison drew your attention to the fact. You were, ultimately, glad to be imprisoned. Glad, even with the two tasteless, half-cold meals per day. The authorities did not let you starve exactly, though your meditations rolled like a sea without a shore.
Many of those imprisoned with you, being reckless, had performed heroic deeds during the war. They had failed to adjust to the demands of peace; lawlessness had entered their blood. When they had done their bird, they would break the law again.
One night, you dreamed you were walking in a garden with Abby. High clipped hedges arose on either side. You asked her if she was well and happy.
‘Yes,’ she said, but her face indicated a negative. Her expression was ghastly; the look was that of a dead woman, so that she turned her head away to hide it.
Startled, you awoke. You believed that the dream signified the realization that your marriage was dead. You stood with your face against the cell wall and wept.
Your marriage was finished and your whole life had reached a dead end.
A psychotherapist visited you. You enjoyed looking at her, with her clear skin and clear eyes. You were willing enough to talk to her; you told her your spirit had withered and died, the rigours of war had killed it. She suggested you were feeling guilt because you had survived. You said that if your spirit died, then you did not survive.
She said, ‘Since you dare to breathe those words, then your spirit is not dead, and you should encourage yourself to see that it lives more fully.’
‘I’m thinking,’ you said, by way of a joke, ‘of writing a “Life of Blokes”.’
She suggested that flippancy would not help; it was, generally speaking, a defence mechanism. Deep retrospection might prove more helpful to you, while you should remember that Buddhists regarded guilt as self-indulgent.
Probation officers visited your cell in order to help you think over your situation. One of them, a Jamaican woman named Beryl, suggested various Open University courses you might take. You chose to study Earth Sciences, and so your thoughts were slowly drawn away from yourself to greater things, to a study of the processes of the planet itself, and the vastly complex interlocking mechanisms of the biomass, working upon the Earth.
You studied. Something in you quickened. You read various books.
The prison library was full of trash. Among its children’s books and crime novels you dug out a large novel entitled The Man without Qualities. The very title attracted you. It proved to be a translation from the German, and was recommended by an illustrious person. You could see it was full of fine writing, but could not grasp its overall meaning. In that respect it resembled life.
If you could not understand this book, why keep on reading?
I felt I too was a man without qualities. No, a better answer is that such is – was – my nature, that I preferred something I could not fully comprehend to something I could easily comprehend.
Good. That’s a sensible answer.
You began to take more interest in other prisoners. For the first time, you attended ‘Association’, or free time. You tended to divide your fellow prisoners into the intelligent and the near-imbecile, although the borderline between the two groups was indistinct. One man in the intelligent group attracted your attention; you were convinced you had met him before, in the great outer world of illusory freedoms, but could not remember where, or who he was. You had not known each other well … Or for long.
One day in the gym, you spoke to him.
‘No, I don’t know you. We never have met, I am certain,’ he said, bowing his head to one side in a rather sad way.
It was that slightly unidiomatic turn of phrase, ‘we never have met’, instead of the customary ‘we have never met’, which unlocked your memory.
‘You’re Joe! Joe Rich!’ you exclaimed. ‘You are – or were – the caretaker of that War Department store, wherever it was – off the A5 … Aren’t you?’
He held out his hand. Now he was not sad, but smiling sadly. A warden watched you shake hands.
You both asked simultaneously what the other was doing in prison.
You said that you had led a useless kind of life; self-indulgent. That you were frankly not sorry to have a time in your life when you could think things over and review your mistakes. Even as you made the admission you were proud to do so, believing such an admission to be unusual – perhaps something that other blokes would not have thought of saying.
Joe Rich said that he now remembered your visit. ‘You would save my stay in this place if you had buyed all the fu
rniture Rhona and I guarded. Winters in Grimscote are cold. I burn a wooden table or a wooden desk in the grate to keep us warmed. I thought no harm in it.’
‘Why not? No one else wanted the damned things.’
Joe nodded. ‘As you say. As I also said. No one wanted that obsolete furniture. But yet, they were not my things to burn. Once came officials for inspection from the Department of War. They carried what do you call it – yes, an inventory! An inventory of all that should be in the store. Much of the wood things were missing; chairs, tables … I confessed I had used them on my fire, to keep my woman and me warmed in the winter. So I was arrested. And here I am, my friend.’
‘You mended my trousers – did a splendid job!’
He gave a laugh. The warden eyed him.
You swung on the parallel bars and asked, ‘What happened to the furniture – the stuff that was left in the store?’
‘Military lorries came and took away everything. It was all to be destroyed.’
‘Yet still they sentenced you to prison!’
‘Three months only.’
‘But how grossly unfair!’
‘No, my friend. Not unfair. Just! I took things and used them that were not mine. Therefore I was a thief. It is only justice that I am in this horrid place.’
‘Joe, I’d call that unjust. There is such a thing as necessity … I think I believe in necessity more than I do justice. Justice is man-made.’
‘So was the wartime furniture …’
You hoped to see Joe again the next day. He was not there, nor on the day following. He had served his three months, was discharged and had returned to Rhona.
All the same, that conversation with him had started a new line of thought. You had claimed to yourself that you had made a confession other men would not have done – that you were glad of the respite in prison to think over your sins. That claim was untrue. Doubtless, many others had admitted, while being locked up, the error of their ways.
You thought for a while about furniture. The furniture business had made you and others a lot of money – bought you that chateau in France, for instance. Whereas, furniture had merely kept Joe and his wife warm on winter nights. There was an enormous difference when you considered the matter; Joe’s was the more unusual case.
Let me ask you how you see yourself at that period.
Confused. All the parts of the body change in seven years. The psyche probably undergoes a similar change. It’s only things like passports and dental records that identify myself as I was before I was sent to prison.
That imagined, or perceived, lack of continuity is a weakness with which we shall have to deal.
You followed up the perception that you were not unique – that you were just a bloke. Your silly notion about blokes had been subconscious preparation for admitting to yourself that you were nothing out of the ordinary; indeed you were just a cheat, an agent of fraud. Why had you become that cheat? Because you had considered yourself as somehow different from others.
Which had permitted you to be ‘above the law’.
You stood facing the cell wall, legs slightly apart for balance, resting your forehead against the clammy tiles, breathing deep, lost in a maze of thought.
You thought back to a poem about a beach, part of which Joe had once quoted to you:
… the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain …
A deep bitterness flooded over you as once again you thought of all those vulnerable childhood days spent on the beaches of Walcot. All the while unknowingly under a prevailing indifference, cruelty; as in that poem. And as in that poem of Matthew Arnold’s, you had soldiered too long on that darkling plain.
The argument in your mind was then carried a step further. You considered yourself unique, different from others because of what you had been told happened – or rather, had failed to happen – long ago on the Walcot beaches. You were a child whom some higher power, unspecified, had spared.
Whom the gods love they first make arrogant.
This uncomfortable trail of reasoning, through a forest of hesitations and denials, finally reached a conclusion: you had lived under an illusion – much as your mother had, to take a parallel case – and now you were free of it.
Free! That wonderful word, tasting good in the mind even in captivity!
Yes, we admired the struggle in your limited mind to uncover the truth about yourself. You did find it and that made you jubilant –
Oh yes, you dear accursed alien thing! Happy indeed! Happy even in that Aristotelian sense of deserving to be happy! Maybe for the first time, truly happy, happy –
Now you exaggerate. Remember you – or the French – have a saying that nothing is ever as good or as bad as we imagine.
But the funny thing is, I was happy just to see myself as an ordinary fellow – the very thing I would once have hated.
That is certainly no ordinary matter.
And for the first time you felt a closeness to that monstrous thing telling you your story. Oh, that prison cell, that solitude, that revelatory disquisition with yourself … all in shades of grey.
Martin and Mary came visiting. Mary was complaining that the prison was over a hundred miles from home; you explained to her, as to a child, that you had no choice regarding into which prison you were cast. Martin was at his most jovial, Mary at her most shrinking. Martin had brought a film crew along. He had special dispensation to film your meeting.
‘Some of the fellers in the department rib me,’ Martin told you. ‘They say I’ve got a wrong ’un for a son, but I take no notice of them.’
‘I’m a bit “beyond the boundary”, am I, Father?’
‘You shouldn’t talk to the boy like that,’ Mary told her husband. ‘He’s still my precious son, whatever he’s done. Aren’t you, dear?’
‘There are seventy-five thousand inmates of British prisons,’ Martin told you. ‘We are building more prisons. The system is under strain; you are fortunate to have a cell to yourself. Are you lonely?’
‘A bit.’
‘“A bit,” he says!’ Mary exclaimed. ‘Of course he’s lonely. Misses his wife, I’m sure.’
‘What’s the news of Abby? She never visits me.’
Your mother put on a mean face. ‘She’s gone to live on her family’s estate in Gloucestershire. She’s seeking a divorce from you. How can you blame her, after all?’
Martin was annoyed, although he controlled his face for the cameras. He told Mary she should not have told you about the divorce; they had agreed beforehand not to tell you about it.
‘He’s brought disgrace on the lot of us,’ she said. She began to sniff, mustering up a tear. ‘I hope you pray to God for forgiveness, Stephen, dear.’
Your frustration showed. ‘Mother, don’t you remember how you used to pretend you had a daughter called Valerie, who did not exist?’
‘No, I never did!’
‘Yes, you did. You had a firm belief in Valerie, it caused me endless misery. Do you now have a firm belief in God, who equally does not exist?’
Mary turned away, muttering about your blasphemy.
Martin’s visit was shown on the Midlands TV News that evening. ‘A minister takes an interest in the prisoners behind bars in one of our new prisons,’ said the commentator. You had become ‘the prisoners’. Your name was not mentioned, nor your relationship with ‘the minister’.
Sonia visited you on another day. ‘I can’t stay long, love,’ she told you. ‘Adrian’s outside in the car, waiting for me. I hate this dreadful prison smell; I suppose you’re used to it.’
‘I suppose I am.’
‘What are the loos like? No, don’t tell me, let me guess. Are you surviving okay? I’ve brought you a cake. No file in it.’
‘I guess it passes the time.’
‘Yes, and more than that. You’re still with this chap Adrian, then.’
Sonia spread her hands. ‘You could say …’
‘How’s the career going?’
‘Smile when you say that! Day after tomorrow I’m off to the States. Hollywood calls! That’s why I came to see you today.’
‘I’m glad you came, darling. Enjoy Hollywood!’
‘Whatever, I shall enjoy it as much as I enjoy anything. All pretence, of course …’
‘How’s Aunt Violet?’
‘She hasn’t been well this winter. She sends you love – I nearly forgot. She’s getting on a bit. God, I’m going to hate old age …’
Alone again, you meditated on what people endured. Sonia seemed never to be happy. Curious how Joe Rich was perfectly content to serve his sentence, believing it to be just. Aristotle had had a great deal to say about justice, ‘When he wasn’t swimming with a woman off the shores of the Isle of Assos,’ you said to yourself. Some of the basic principles of Western democracy had been formulated by Greeks in their mild Thracian climate, where the living was fairly easy. Those principles had taken root in Northern Europe, where life was harsher than in Greece. You speculated on the hardships survived in the winters of past centuries in the North. The artist Brueghel had painted the onslaught of the first great European winter descending on Christendom in his superb canvas, The Hunters in the Snow. Winters had always been dreaded.
It was a time for cogitation. You thought of that ferocious wartime winter in the Ardennes, when Hilary Montagu had been killed, along with thousands of other men. Winters were times of cold, hunger and darkness, illness and death. For almost two thousand years, methods of lighting and heating had not improved. It was believed that devils walked in the night; certainly something carried the old and the very young away in the small hours of February months. Central heating had banished such devils. Life had become remarkably easier since the Second World War. Had people become softer since then? If they had become softer, what then of their moral values? Improved? Deteriorated? Much the same?