by Brian Aldiss
‘As you yourself remark, Dommy, who can say? It’s immaterial, Mother’s dead, and besides, you are frightening Malcolm.’
Malcolm, in fact, was sitting with a dessert spoon in his mouth, looking pop-eyed from one parent to the other, more full of curiosity than fright.
‘Have I an Uncle Jamie in America, Mummy? Can we go and see him?’
‘Certainly not, Malcolm. He may be a criminal for all we know. Your father is just guessing. Get down and go and play – and take that spoon out of your mouth.’
When the boy had gone, they sat and looked coolly at each other.
‘Have you really no curiosity about that brother of yours?’
‘Things will be very different now,’ Fenella said. She looked out of the long window.
‘But not different enough,’ Dominic said, rushing on to have his say, conscious of plunging into dangerous waters. ‘Despite this house and the estate, Fenny, despite years of knowing your mother as well as you, despite all that, I feel I have no – no contact, yah, with you. You realize you have never said a word to me about your childhood—’
She put her hands on the table; the fingers were long and blunt, without polish. ‘If this is to be another of your criticisms of me, I don’t want to hear it. I shall ring for Trixie to clear away, and go upstairs to sort out my mother’s possessions. There’s much to be done.’
She stood. Dominic stood as well. He spoke in an urgent voice. ‘Fenella, dear, my dear wife, let me get through to you while your mother lies dead upstairs and you are presumably conscious of the frailty of life. I still love you and have no wish to criticize, only to heal. You know all about me. I have told you – I told you when we first were lovers – if you remember such a time – all there was about me, all my tragic past, and the whole business as far as I knew it – as I believe lovers should do. Perfectly frank and open, able to be open.’
‘Oh yes, I had all that Russian business by heart, believe me.’ She folded her arms across her chest, giving him a supercilious smile.
‘Fenella, able to be open. And what did I get back from you? Nothing. Only this defensive silence, as now. Silence. A brick wall. Now your mother is dead, now Morna is dead at last, please renounce her, yah? Throw her out of your mind and be open, happy. Forget! I know she has injured you. Now’s the time to throw her out, now.’
She moved towards the door, looking over her shoulder. ‘The trouble is, you hated Mother, just as you hate me. How you twist things! It was you who were going to throw me out, remember? I don’t want to hear you speaking ill of the dead any more.’
She was about to leave the room. He fell on his knees. ‘Fenella, I beg you, please. Break down now, show emotion, cry, tear your clothes. Now’s your chance. You’re still young and the old hag has gone … You’re free—’
She slammed the door behind her. Slowly, Dominic rose to his feet. Despite the electric fire, the room was as cold as a grouse moor.
Fenella was busy all that weekend, walking about upstairs among the furniture and possessions. She would occasionally summon Trixie MacManus and her surly brother to her side. Some rooms upstairs were empty and uncarpeted, their floors echoing as she prowled them to peer from their deep-set windows or investigate the contents of a fusty cupboard. Other rooms were overfurnished. And there were attics, draughty and dim, full of relics belonging to past Camerons piled up like memories, draped in dustsheets like catafalques, a great family treasure trove with no one to treasure it but Fenella Mayor. Dominic wondered if she was sad or pleased as she found her way among these responsibilities.
Trixie was occasionally despatched downstairs, carrying hat boxes or piles of old picture frames or broken-stringed tennis rackets of Edwardian vintage. These ancestral trophies were stacked outside the back door in the light of day. Dominic and Malcolm, feeling themselves in the way, walked down to the edge of the loch, where they climbed about, in the ruined castle. Not another person did they see there, only an ancient horse which kept its distance.
By night, silence prevailed over Fuarblarghour House. Everything imitated the stillness of the body in the shrouded main bedroom, as if its halitus exuded paralysis. Dominic marvelled that his son was unafraid. When he kissed the boy goodnight on the Saturday, he asked him if he would like a light in his room.
‘I can see to go to sleep in the dark, Daddy,’ Malcolm replied.
Dominic himself was installed in a long narrow room to the rear of the house, the walls of which were hung with photographs for whose frames a whole oak forest had gone down. Between two long narrow windows stood a grandfather clock. From above the face of the clock protruded the carved head of a Highland stag. He stood looking at it, touched it, for a moment almost believing he had seen it before. The clock was unwound. When he tapped its case, the chime struck one with a parliamentarian voice, as if declaring that the Noes had it.
He quizzed in the drawers of a high chiffonier. They were choked by carefully folded sheets with lace edges, shawls, blankets, all smelling of mothballs. The drawers were lined with issues of the Scotsman dating from early in the century. In one drawer he discovered a photograph, mounted on brown card and tucked under a stack of lace napkins. It showed a pair of children, elaborately dressed, sitting on a rug. Behind them was a painted Japanese screen. The children were boy and girl. The boy, with as many curly locks as the girl, was the older of the two. Both had the long Cameron face. It could be Fenella and Jamie. He did not know. He sighed and closed the drawer. It was no business of his. Had Morna hidden it there? Poor comfortless Morna.
The past lay suffocating as camphor in the room. Other people’s pasts … as if one’s own was not bad enough. A large study of Malcolm Cameron, Fenella’s father, all drooping moustaches, wearing a deerstalker hat, dominated the wall above the brass bedstead, entombed in another oak. Dominic had discovered of this man only that he had died of drink, although cancer was generally given out as the cause of death.
‘The Laird of Blarghour!’ exclaimed Dominic, addressing the portrait in a sportive way. ‘What sort of a life, yah? Maybe you caused all the grief. Bet you were made to sleep alone … In this very room. Why was that? Were you bully or victim? What did you do to your wife? Your children?’ The portrait remained silent. ‘Pity research can’t be done into such matters, everything computerized and analysed. Sorted out. Filed. Happiness programmed. Break up the solid blocks of misery, the chains of circumstance.’
He lay uncomfortably between cold sheets, staring out into the room, his thoughts turning to Lucy Traill. She could warm his bed, make it a paradise. The endearingly cheeky way she had come in and perched on the end of his bed at home. Must have been after something …
No future in thinking like that! He pressed the switch dangling over the head of the bed and put out the light. Lying flat on his back, he tried to calm himself with thoughts of work, the refuge in figures he so often sought. Before leaving Shreding Green, he had inspected his offices on the first floor of the manor. His assistants were keeping everything under control while he was absent. At present, Dominic was particularly interested in the price of copper on the commodities market. Copper had been expensive and in short supply a few years back, when he entered the game; with new glass fibres coming into use in place of copper, demand had slackened. He bought and sold profitably on a falling market. Dominic was a master of price movements. His assistants were trained to commit huge sums of money in one market and sell within minutes in another; no Mayor money ever left Schatzman’s or his other banks. It was Colin Cohen’s BCT.
He was dozing. A noise somewhere in the house roused him. He sat up, thinking of his son. Silence. Then the noise again, a brisk noise, very small, muffled by thick walls, and the massive furniture of the house. Silence again.
He lay back, still tense. As for his investments, this refrigerator of a house represented another sort of investment, an investment in bricks and mortar and land of which the British were traditionally so fond. No ten-minute switches here from
market to market. Inheritance, with its unseen powers, took years, decades, generations. It was a stone-age way of getting rich. Though no one here knew it, the microchip had rendered Fuarblarghour House obsolete. Fenella didn’t know it; certainly her family solicitors, Stirrup & Dower, were not going to break the news to her.
The noise roused him again. Without switching on the light, he climbed out of the high bed, slipping on his jacket against the chill. On the corridor walls beyond his room hung threatening things, huge oils of Highland scenes, framed documents, the odd shield and sword. He went quietly round the right-angle of the corridor.
Turning the corner, he saw that a door on the landing above was open. Light fanned from it on to the patterned carpet. Fenella was moving about in the room. He could now identify the noise as the snapping closed of trunks.
Dominic went forward silently, barefoot on the carpet, until he could see what she was doing.
Fenella was in stockinged feet, wearing only a vest and a slip. She was bending over a large black cabin trunk, lifting from it items of clothing. Tissue paper rustled. She spread out a woman’s two-piece suit of heavy tweed. After feeling in the pockets of the jacket, she started to try the garments on, watching herself in a cheval glass.
Soon she was fully dressed in her mother’s clothes.
The mortal remains of Morna Agatha Cameron were laid to rest in the Blarghour graveyard, the service being conducted by the Rev. Anstruther Nickerman, black of habit, white of whisker and face, red of nose, and dark brown as regards voice.
It appeared from all the Rev. Nickerman said that he had every hope that the recently departed would even now be on her way to, or had actually arrived at, a state of eternal bliss. To Dominic, holding Malcolm’s hand, this statement seemed countered by the ugliness of the narrow slot freshly dug in the soil. Nor did the Chapel of Remembrance allow bliss great priority. It was of the meanest possible dimension inside; outside it sprouted numerous pinnacles and minispires in advanced stages of nigrescence, like a mass of stalactites turned upside-down. Of all the buildings he had ever encountered, it was the one least to be associated with a state of eternal, or even fleeting, bliss.
After the ceremony, hastened by a light, pleasant rain, Fenella grasped Dominic’s arm and turned away from the grave with the same abruptness with which the Rev. Nickerman closed his Book of Common Prayer and made off towards his small black vehicle.
Dominic remembered, was encouraged, by that firm grip on his arm when they were back home again in Shreding Green. He regarded himself as a vacillator. She showed no weakness: he admired most the characteristic he feared most.
With settled determination, Fenella drove over to Kensington every day, to clear up in her mother’s flat. Dominic drove over there too one evening, and offered to take her to dine in a restaurant he knew before going home.
‘Splendid,’ she said. ‘In that case, I shall try out a coat of Mother’s, which has hardly been worn.’
October had turned to November. There was the excuse to wear a coat. Even Dominic could see that this heavy mannish coat was out of date and ill-suited his wife; having no wish to upset her, he said nothing. Perhaps it was an endearing feature that she was blind to the trivialities of fashion.
They went together in the newly repaired Porsche. The restaurant was already bustling when they arrived. Dominic had reserved a corner table.
Fenella swallowed pills with her wine.
‘I shall put Mother’s flat on the market in a few weeks,’ she said, as they drank coffee at the end of the meal. ‘The possessions I wish to keep can be temporarily stored at the manor.’
‘We might get a better price for the flat in the spring. Why not hang on till then? Perhaps you could let the apartment for the next quarter, yah?’
‘The trouble is I’ve decided to sell at once.’
‘That’s it, is it?’ He smiled. ‘Why not wait a bit? You know there’s a recession at present. House prices may improve next year.’
She returned his smile. ‘I want to get it off my mind. The flat was only Mother’s pied-à-terre. It wasn’t the family home.’
He felt she was holding something back. She would say what she wished to say in her own time. He changed the subject.
‘How’s the physiotherapy? Do you feel it does your back good?’
She lifted the coffee cup to her mouth – ‘I sacked Miss Traill on Tuesday’ – and drank.
Dominic took a deep breath, and smoothed his beard. ‘Really? You sacked her? I thought Lucy was rather a friend of yours. You asked her to the party. She was always very concerned about you. Why on earth have you sacked her?’
Fenella gave him the frosted look, her eyes blank as she looked through him. She set down her cup precisely in its saucer before replying, ‘I believe you know why.’
‘I most certainly don’t.’ Yet he felt within himself that familiar uncoiling of guilt, like a snake awakening.
‘How stupidly innocent you look, Dom. You most certainly do. Didn’t Miss Traill, Lucy as you call her, enter your bedroom after the party?’
He threw back his head and gasped. ‘Jesus, Fenella, what new thing have you thought up against me? This is too much. I can’t take it. I can’t take any more. It’s impossible. Let’s pay the bill and go, get out of here. Whatever’s in your mind, forget it – it didn’t happen.’
He stood up, signalling angrily to their waiter. Fenella sat where she was, looking up fixedly at him. ‘The trouble is, she did enter your room, didn’t she?’
‘No, she bloody didn’t. Not in the way you think.’
‘She waited till Doris was out of the way and Arold was in the garden and then she came into your bedroom. Do you dare deny that?’
‘Wait till we’re outside.’ As the waiter came over with the bill in leather folder, Dominic produced his American Express gold card, saying to the man, ‘We’re in rather a hurry, if you don’t mind. Thanks.’
She stood up. ‘Very well, you refuse to admit it. But Malcolm came in and saw you and Miss Traill cuddling – if that’s all it was – on your bed. Of course I sacked her. What else could I do?’
This was said in a loud conversational tone, rather as if she were addressing a slightly deaf mother. Conversation died at tables nearby, heads turned a polite few degrees.
‘Shit,’ Dominic said, standing there, feeling embarrassed. It did not help matters that she was taller than he was. He glanced quickly at his watch, anxious to escape.
Holding his head downwards and towards her, he said in low tones, ‘You could have asked her what really happened, that’s what you could have done. Or you could have asked me. Come to that you could have trusted me. If you think we were screwing, then you are mistaken. Unfortunately.’
‘Oh, what were you doing then? Talking about me, I suppose.’
He hurried away across the restaurant, waiting impatiently at the cashier’s desk, drumming his fingers on it, until he had his card back. The waiter, returning it, gave him an oily smile, half-way between conspiratorial and gleeful, as male chauvinism vied with the pleasure of seeing a customer discomfited. Dominic left the restaurant without looking back, leaving his wife to retrieve her hideous coat.
‘What a weakling I am,’ he said, pacing on the pavement outside. ‘Why didn’t I hit her? Why don’t I drive off now? Because I’m scared to. I’m forever putting myself in her hands. Of course she has a contempt for me.’
When Fenella appeared, she was in her usual state of calm; a calm that had intensified since her mother’s death.
‘That was a fine performance you gave in front of everyone,’ she said.
‘Let’s get in the car and get home.’
At the wheel of the Porsche, he was able to control himself. He chose to take the Old Bath Road home, driving slowly, mollified to see other people about, squeezing a little pleasure from the evening. After all, there had been a time when he and Fenella had delighted in each other’s company. Before he made a million. And, after all, h
e would have liked to have screwed Lucy Traill when she had sat down so freely on his bed; the impulse had not been absent from his mind. Or from hers? Since he had not told his wife of that incident, or of his visits to Winter when he was away – she had asked nothing about his absence – she could not be blamed for her suspicion. It was silly of him to lose his temper in the restaurant.
He pulled the car into the forecourt of a silencer centre which was closed, and cut off the engine.
‘Are you going to make me get out and walk from here?’ she asked, with a small attempt at humour.
‘Fenny, Lucy and I did nothing sexual. OK? Please believe me. I’m sorry I lost my rags.’
‘Rag.’
‘Rag, yah. There was a time between you and me when everything was so happy. I still remember the evening of the blackout when I walked you a little way back to Kensington, and felt immense joy. You were so cool, so gracious.’ He was looking at her, turned as far as the seating would allow, while drumming with his right hand on the steering wheel. Fenella stared ahead into the shadowy recesses of the station, as though listening intently.
‘You too perhaps remember the promise of those days. I can say only that for me it was then like spring. Spring and a new life. But now after only a few years, where has the summer sunshine gone? I feel we live together, but without – oh, my dear Fenny, without the warmth that grows between a man and woman, without the summer sunshine, the natural confidences, the … the flowers of …’ He hesitated over the dangerous word. ‘… Of love.’ And went on hastily, ‘I do not speak in reproach at all. It’s just that between us – really ever since the birth of little Malcolm, yah? – there is a terrible … you know what I’m saying?… a cold state of something like – well, not at all like the gentle summer sun we could enjoy together. The sun, the music. You see what I mean.’