Remembrance Day

by Brian Aldiss

  She turned as her mother came up, fell silent, and then went to kiss her. The embrace was followed with anxious enquiries as to health, the running of the Fuarblarghour estate, and other matters. Dominic stood alertly by, accepting a glass of champagne from a passing tray. Dru and Pete faded away rapidly.

  ‘It’s lovely of you to come, Mother,’ said Fenella, wringing her hands. ‘Dominic will get you a drink. Dominic. Isn’t this fun, the party?’

  ‘Och, you’re enjoying it, are you, Fenella? If so, I’m surprised.’

  A moment’s suspense, while Dominic signalled a waitress frantically for a drink.

  ‘Why – why surprised, Mother?’

  ‘Wearing that ridiculous dress. No one gives parties in a dress like that, even a party like this one.’

  The drink arrived, Dominic moved between mother and daughter as the latter fell back, and thrust the champagne at Mrs Cameron, laughing and begging her to drink. When she refused, he pointed out some of the other guests, naming them rapidly as if calling a roll.

  Fenella came forward again. ‘Mother, this is a new dress. I bought it to try and please you. Don’t you remember you once had a dress this colour?’

  ‘I would never wear that colour. It suits me no more than it does you, with your washed-out complexion. Don’t insult me.’

  ‘When I was a little girl, Mother. I came with you to buy it in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Oh, why, here is Colin Cohen, Mother,’ Dominic said. ‘Please don’t upset Fenella. She’s not feeling well. Colin’s in telemarketing and doing fabulously.’

  ‘Going broke, you mean,’ Colin said amiably, clasping Morna’s hand. ‘What can I sell you, Mrs Cameron? It’s my proud boast I can sell anything, even if I lose on the deal.’

  She stared at him in amazement. ‘You’re a salesman, Mr Cohen, do I understand? Perhaps you know something about hearing aids …’

  Taking advantage of the respite, Dominic turned to Fenella. He had witnessed that look of agony before. Gripping her arm, he said, ‘Don’t let the old bag get you down, darling. She loves to stick the knife in, and you’re her favourite target. The more you try to please, the further goes the knife in … The dress looks just smashing, wunderbar.’

  ‘What have I done? What have I done? Oh, Dominic …’ Words failed her. Then she said, ‘I must go upstairs and take this horrible thing off. I knew it didn’t suit me, that’s the trouble. I’m sorry to ruin your party, dear. Stay and enjoy yourself.’

  ‘No,’ he said, pleadingly. ‘Don’t let her win.’ But Fenella had turned away.

  He stood, glass in hand, watching her push through the crowds, watching her climb the stairs, watching her run along the upper landing until she disappeared in the direction of her room. Then he proceeded to drink.

  Friends came along to congratulate him, to pat him on the back, and to be cheerful into the small hours. Many of them had held First Million parties.

  As he moved with friends towards the bar, Dominic was surprised to see a woman he recognized standing alone against a wall holding a glass of fruit juice. It was the physiotherapist who came every day to give Fenella her exercises, by name Lucy Traill. Fenella must have invited her to the party. Leaving his companions, he went over and spoke to her.

  Lucy Traill seemed bored. After a moment’s talk, he said, ‘I know you’re here only as a guest, yah? But make me a favour. Go up and attend to my wife, will you?’

  Lucy smiled pleasantly. ‘Sure, I don’t know anyone here. I’ll be glad to see her.’

  ‘Comfort her.’

  ‘Your wife’s an unhappy woman, Mr Mayor, if I may say so.’

  His anger showed. ‘Mind your own business, Miss Traill. Everyone’s unhappy.’

  As she went upstairs, he rejoined his companions. He had no close friends. These were business acquaintances, mostly of his own age, mostly too busy to establish friendship. They communicated by phone or computer network. But they had much in common, and respected Dominic’s flair for playing the market, based on his understanding of commodities.

  He took two or three people into the library to share some coke. They found a couple making love behind the sofa. No one interfered with them.

  ‘Nice place you have here,’ Colin Cohen said, stretching out on the white rug in front of the fire. ‘I hope it was a bargain, Dom. What did you have to pay?’

  Dominic said he had bought it reasonably off a man who was going broke. ‘He had several other big houses round the country. A private yacht and so on. He had debts totalling £24 million.’ He laughed. ‘Of course he was soon in business again. People respect big debts. His name was Cracknell Summerfield, and his taste in interior decoration was real bad.’

  ‘That’s old Charlie Summerfield,’ Colin said. ‘He still owes money, believe me. But he’s into double-glazing and décor now, and mixes with Kuwaitis. I heard he was thinking of standing as Tory MP for somewhere up North. Carlisle, could be.’

  ‘Carlisle deserves him,’ Colin Cohen’s girlfriend said, and they laughed.

  Later, Dominic was summoned by one of the guests to look after his mother-in-law, who wished to leave. She stood in the entrance hall, her coat about her shoulders, with her look of unpreparedness to be pleased.

  ‘Sorry you’re going, Mother,’ Dominic said. ‘Allow me to escort you to your car.’

  ‘I appreciate it, Dominic. You are always polite, that I must say. I should not have hoped that Fenella would come to see her mother off. She’s never behaved like a daughter of mine. I don’t know why I bother.’

  ‘That’s what mother-love is all about, Mother, yah?’

  As they walked over to where the Rover was parked, rather jammed in by other cars, Dominic looked about for Arold, but the man was nowhere to be seen. He said in a low urgent voice, ‘Mother, dear, if you don’t mind my saying this, Fenella loves you very much. You’d get on so much better if you made allowance for her shortcomings. It would make her happy.’

  She gave him a look that perhaps attempted humour. ‘That’s aye rich! It’s your job now to make her happy, not mine, thank God. I could never please her. She never loved me, whatever you say.’

  They had reached the car. He took the keys from her and began to ease into the driver’s seat. ‘She does love you in her way, as I suppose you love her in yours. If you could let it show it should be a great help.’

  She was on him immediately for that impertinence. ‘That from you! I never heard such a thing. Haven’t you had a row with Fenella too? Haven’t you threatened to desert her? I suppose it’s all about this sex business. Well, you’ve had a bairn between you, poor wee boy, and you should be satisfied. It never appealed to me, but I suppose sex is all people think about today. I didn’t bring Fenella up to be like that. I think it’s disgraceful.’

  She pulled at her hearing aid, as if it too offended her, saying ‘You’re to blame it’s come to this, Dominic, though I know she’s difficult. You’re making too much money, that’s the trouble … A rotten situation. It makes me feel ill.’ She put a hand to her chest. ‘Not that you’d care about that.’

  He squinted up at her from the driver’s seat. ‘You find life very bitter, don’t you, Mother?’

  The headlights glinted in her spectacles. She hesitated momentarily, before saying, ‘I manage my life better than some people I could mention.’ As he started the engine, she stood back out of the way.

  Once the car was outside the gates, he let her take his place at the wheel.

  ‘Go carefully, Mother,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you feel as you do.’

  She looked up at him, gave him a smile from the desert, and drove off without another word.

  Dominic walked slowly back to his party.

  The great crush of people began to thin rapidly after two in the morning. Although it was a Sunday, many of these yuppies would put in several hours of work today, or perhaps pay some attention to any children they might have acquired. An intense shunting of automobiles took place.

 
The security men came to Dominic, leading in their patrol dogs. He paid them off from a roll of banknotes in his back pocket, tipping them generously.

  By two forty-five he was alone. A little green Morris stood solitarily in the carpark. He assumed someone had been too drunk to drive and had accepted a lift.

  He went back into the house, where Doris Betts was endeavouring to clear up some of the mess. ‘Terrible, in’t it, Mr Dominic?’ she said. ‘Some people don’t half make a muck.’

  ‘Leave all that, Doris, and tell your husband to get the Porsche out.’

  Straightening up, she said indignantly, ‘Why, it’s near three in the morning. Time we was all in our beds.’

  ‘I can’t help that, woman. I want to go for a drive. Get Arold, if he’s not blind drunk.’

  ‘Drunk?’ she muttered, hurrying towards the servants’ quarters. ‘Never touched a drop. What do you take us for?’

  He walked about in his white suit, glancing at his watch as if the time would not register on his consciousness. Going over to the drinks cabinet, he poured himself a liberal tot of Armagnac and rolled it about in the glass. After taking a sip, he set the glass down. Staring at himself in a mirror proved no more satisfactory. He smoothed his little beard and tried to adjust his expression so that it looked less hang-dog.

  ‘What am I to do?’ he asked himself aloud.

  He had resumed his pacing up and down among the debris of the party when there came the roar of a car engine outside, a terrible grinding sound, and then a protracted noise of disaster, followed by the barking of the mastiffs at the rear of the house.

  Dominic went outside, not exactly at a run.

  Beyond the clump of pampas, his Porsche lay nose down in the ornamental goldfish pond. Its side was scarred and buckled. As he approached, the rear lights glowed and died.

  ‘Shit,’ Dominic said.

  Arold Betts was climbing from the driver’s seat. He fell into the pond, cursed, and crawled out on hands and knees to sprawl at Dominic’s feet, groaning.

  ‘Oh my gawd – I swear as I never saw that particular bit of wall before. The car lights couldna bin working. Then I had to swerve to miss that pampas … Oh, whatever have I done?’

  ‘What you have done is you’re drunk, man, and you have completely buggered up my car.’

  ‘Creck. Creck in every point, my gawd. Oh, bloody hell …’ He drew himself up on to his knees, covering his face with his hands, so that his words were barely distinguishable. ‘And ain’t that just what happened to our lad Haubrey when he come back from the war where he covered himself with onner, and lost a finger, and the night he come back I says to him, “Aubrey, if onner ’as a name it’s Haubrey” – right proud of ’im, we was, and the ’ole street turned out, and then he goes and runs his car right into the canal.’

  ‘Never mind that. Get up, Arold.’

  But Arold stayed kneeling, feeling safer in his puddle. Clutching his face, he looked pitifully up at Dominic. ‘You was the best boss I ever ’ad, Mr Dominic. I know how you values this car, and what an expense it was, and I’m right sorry for what I done, honest. I’m a bastard, a real bastard, don’t know my own best interests. Now I’ve gone and very like broke your heart and proba’ly got me and Doris sacked into the bargain.’

  ‘Get up, Arold,’ Dominic said again, taking the man’s damp elbow to encourage him. ‘It’s OK, yah, really OK. Worse things happen.’

  ‘I’m ever so sorry, Mr Dominic,’ Arold said, standing and sober now. ‘I wouldn’t have ’ad this ’appen for the world. It was just that wall come at me …’

  ‘I understand,’ Dominic said gently. ‘I don’t mind. Now we should better all get to bed. Worse things happen.’

  He walked off. But Arold stood where he was, still voicing his regrets by the ruined car. ‘You bloody well should mind,’ he said, squeezing water from his trousers.

  A cup of tea stood by the bedside. He looked at it for a minute, seeking a meaning to it, before bringing a hand from under the duvet and reaching out to feel it. The cup was cold.

  The bedside clock told him it was almost nine.

  Dominic groaned. His head throbbed, his nose was blocked. He felt generally second-rate. At this time most days, he would be along in his work suite, the ten IBM monitors switched on, and he would be taking the pulse of stock exchanges all round the world: not only New York, London and Japan, but the Paris Bourse, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other centres.

  Doris Betts had come in and left the tea without waking him. As a general rule he slept lightly. Now he lay on his back, breathing through his mouth, sniffing, his thoughts dull.

  The fool party. Sheer ostentation. He wished he had not done it. Heavy-eyed, he looked at a watercolour, mounted and framed, hanging on a wall where sun could not reach it. Marshes and a broken fence stood in the foreground; behind was an old barn, outside which stood a tractor, and the remains of a windmill, with blue distance beyond. Dominic had painted it when fourteen or fifteen, picnicking with his adopted mother, Daphne; Daphne! who treated him to a holiday in Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. Happy bygone days. Perhaps he should have been an artist. But it was years since he had held a brush. Despite the regret (regret was the permanent backcloth of his mind) he always gained pleasure from looking at the picture; amateurish though it was, it represented a real act, a true event, to set against the world of deception in which he had become an actor.

  As his thoughts wandered, they lighted on Suzy Rund, his one consolation in the disaster of the previous night, remembering her flushed cheeks, her hot breasts, her sneeze. Had he caught a cold from Suzy? Even for that moment of pleasure, there had to be punishment.

  Oh, Jesus, I suppose I deserve all the blows you rain on me, yah? he said to himself, and staggered out of bed to find a box of tissues, treading as he did so on the white Italian suit which had been cast on the floor.

  A tap on his door. At his command, in came a woman with another cup of tea. Not Doris, as he expected.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, surprised, standing at bay by his chest-of-drawers, checking instinctively to see his pyjama trousers did not gape.

  ‘I’ve brought you another cup of tea, sir,’ said Lucy Traill, moving confidently, and setting the new cup by the cold one. ‘I wanted to see if you were all right before I left. Mrs Betts is collecting your son from next door.’

  He liked the aura of calm surrounding her. He had seen her only rarely on her regular visits to give Fenella the physiotherapy a doctor had recommended. Lucy Traill made a neat figure in her stone-washed jeans. Her sharp features, clear-cut lips, and inquisitive blue eyes were sheltered under a mop of interestingly disarrayed golden hair. Something in her smile told him she enjoyed seeing him at a disadvantage, and he climbed back into bed.

  ‘You’ve been here all night?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Did my wife ask you to stay?’

  She put her hands on her hips and showed white teeth as she bit her lower lip. ‘Your wife was in rather a bad way, Mr Mayor. I must tell you. She threatened to commit suicide. Since there was no one else, I thought I should stay with her. Entirely my own decision.’

  ‘How long have you been coming here, Miss Traill?’

  ‘I’m Lucy. Eighteen months. No, more. I drive over from Acton.’

  ‘My wife infrequently speaks of suicide. It’s not too serious.’

  ‘Do you take no notice? Perhaps it is serious.’

  He was annoyed that she challenged him in this way. ‘Look …’ He paused, uncertain that what he was about to say was for the best. ‘I regard her threats as part of her emotional blackmail of me.’ He blew his nose on a tissue.

  She sat down on the end of his bed, tucking her jean-clad left leg under her.

  ‘I have to go. I’ve got to get back to my kid. But I should perhaps say to you, Mr Mayor, that your wife is in a very bad way emotionally in my estimation. Perhaps you know, or perhaps you don’t, that Mrs Mayor has been prescribed a lot o
f drugs – far too many, to my way of thinking. I’m attached to a hospital and I see a lot of what goes on. Doctors love ladling out pills indiscriminately. Saves them having to get to know their patients. Your wife – Fenella – has accumulated a cupboard full of pills.’

  Dominic felt uneasy. He picked up the cup from the bedside and then set it down again without drinking. ‘I do find – the situation is difficult. I can say that much.’

  With a flash of humour, she said, ‘You can say that little … She is upset because you said you wanted to leave her. Is that right?’ Then, reading the expression of pain on his face, she added, ‘Sorry, I know this is none of my business, but she talked to me for a long time last night, wouldn’t let me go … Huh, well, she spoke continuously for two hours before falling asleep.’

  He leaned forward in sudden interest. ‘She did? What did she talk about in that two hours?’

  Lucy looked confused. She cast her gaze downwards, for the first time less than certain in her manner. ‘Um … well … it was a sort of – I can’t really remember. A sort of general complaint against life.’

  ‘I understand. Miss Traill, I also have had to listen to those monologues. Two hours. Once three. Very terrible. You can only listen, but once launched, she needs no listener, yah? The monologue is followed by sleep. Very terrifying. The sick monologue. Is there such a thing in medical science? And, even worse, the listener cannot remember. Not a word. Somehow, the memory rejects it, throws it out. Like a dream.’

  He shook his head, clutched the cup of tea again, looking pained. The physiotherapist was about to reply when he cut into her words.

  ‘Let me tell you – I’ve confided this to no one else – that sick monologue, even Fenella does not remember it after. It’s like another person who speaks with her mouth. I was so frightened. It’s true I did say her “I want no more of it, I want to leave”, but it was only in a moment of anger. I was frightened. You cannot always keep the temper with Fenella. You know how it is to talk with her, do you? Like a maze … You think I’m trying to – how do you say? – win you over, get round you? No. Not that.’