by Brian Aldiss
Dominic clasped his hands behind him. ‘Do you ever see any unhappy men?’
She got into her car. The gates opened for her and she drove away. Dominic walked about the lawn, trying to breathe deeply, while jumbo jets climbed steeply overhead.
Returning to the house, he found Arold lingering in the porch. He proffered a piece of paper on which was a name and address.
‘I just found this blowing about the place, suh, and thought as it might belong to you, suh.’
At three thirty that afternoon, after shedding his car in the carpark, Dominic was sitting in the small office in the West London Hospital which Lucy Traill shared with other physiotherapists. He had been waiting twenty minutes when she arrived, pulling off a wet raincoat and dumping a Samsonite case on the desk on top of a pile of papers.
She looked at Dominic in no particularly friendly way.
He began with apologies. ‘I can see you’re busy but I didn’t know how else to contact you.’
‘Mr Mayor, I don’t think we need have anything else to do with each other. I am, as you say, busy. The administrator showed me the extremely unfair and offensive letter your wife wrote, accusing me of immorality and destroying her marriage. Fortunately, we’re used to neurotic letters. It was ignored, but that doesn’t soothe my feelings.’
She regarded him stonily as he sighed. ‘I looked after your wife for two years and I deserve better treatment than that. I don’t want anything further to do with you or your wife.’
As she stood there, confronting him angrily, her face red, he dropped his gaze. ‘I didn’t do this. I didn’t know this. I knew only she had unfairly sacked you. She told me yesterday. Any rude letter was nothing to do with me. I am innocent of this. It’s terrible, terrible!’ He felt impotently on the verge of tears.
‘It’s not terrible. It’s just disgraceful. What are you doing here? I don’t need your lousy apologies.’
He held out a hand to her, from which she moved away. ‘Lucy – Miss Traill. I didn’t want this to happen, I didn’t know about it. I was away, I talked with your friend Clement Winter. I’m not involved.’
She gave a snort. ‘God, you’re a bit of a worm, aren’t you? And to think I rather fancied you, seeing you in bed in your fancy pyjamas. Please get out of here and let me get on with my work. I have to see another patient in five minutes.’
‘No. Wait. You may insult me, I understand your feelings. I mean to put this right, to show I’m deeply regretful at what has happened. He felt in his inner jacket pocket and produced a cheque book and pen. ‘I’m sure we owe you payment.’
‘Forget it. I don’t want your money.’ The blue eyes were bright with anger. ‘You’ll only add insult to injury.’
He stood with the pen at the ready, as if it were a sword. ‘Perhaps you remember how this all started, Lucy – with you marching uninvited into my bedroom.’ He spoke steadily, looking at her directly. She clutched her case and stared back. ‘You got yourself into this trouble, and you know best what was in your mind at that time. Now, I shall write you a cheque for one thousand pounds in – what’s the word, damn it? – in return for what you have suffered. Then that’s the end.’
‘A thousand pounds! You must be mad.’
As he stooped to the table to write the cheque, he said, ‘No, I am not mad, Miss Traill, just sad. Very sad about this whole misfortune, because I came here hoping we might be friends. You have been unjust in your judgement.’ In a moment of pride and pique, he made out the amount as two thousand pounds.
Accepting the cheque from him, she read it carefully. She blushed furiously. ‘I don’t know what this is all about. I’m ashamed to accept. But I do desperately need the bloody money.’
Hoping the gesture might in some way soften Lucy, he paused; but there was only shame to be read on her face.
‘You might as well have it then. Money means not a thing to me.’
‘Very well. What do I say?’
He pushed past her and closed the office door behind him. Leaving the bustle of the hospital, he walked out to where the car was parked. The rain had stopped, leaving the pavements of Hammersmith Road to glisten with an oily residue.
‘Still for ever protesting your innocence, Dimitri,’ he said.
Only a week earlier, one of the Squire family had been in the same West London Hospital. Jane Squire worked in a small business in a mews off Thurloe Place. The property had been a carriage-house in Edwardian days. Together with three men and another woman, she was part of a company called Astro Nought One, which devised software for CD-ROMs. The company had begun by devising shoot-’em-ups for arcade games. Now, with Jane’s inspired input, they were moving up-market.
While wondering how to devise a sequence whereby a wizard turned into a dragon and then a butterfly, Jane was walking to work one morning from her two-room flat. As she crossed from the South Kensington tube station, a car hit her.
After several spells of drug-induced sleep, she woke to find her parents at her bedside in a one-bed ward. Her face was bandaged; she peered at her mother through one blackened eye.
‘Nothing more serious than a broken leg, my sweetie,’ Teresa assured her. ‘That will heal and you’ll be fine.’
‘All your bruises will be gone in a few days,’ Squire said.
She turned her face from him, sinking further down the bed. ‘Let me alone.’
‘We’ve brought you some flowers and grapes, darling,’ said her mother.
‘Go away. I know you’re only pretending to care.’
She would not speak again. Outside the ward, a young Portuguese-American consultant, Don Barrieros, took Squire and his wife to one side, assuring them that their daughter was mildly in shock, nothing more. He patted Teresa’s arm. ‘She is my best patient, Lady Teresa.’
Teresa was shopping next morning. Her husband went to the hospital to sit for the best part of an hour by his daughter’s bed. The flowers Teresa had brought the previous day stood in a vase on the window ledge. On his entry, Jane had turned her back, huddling up in the bed. While he made no attempt to disturb her, he hoped that his silent presence might provide some solace; faint was that hope, for the relationship with his younger daughter had never been an easy one.
She had left home early, dropping out of university, rarely returning to Pippet Hall, rarely communicating, except with her mother. Anxious for her well-being, Squire had made periodic checks through friends, and knew that Jane was making a name for herself in the shifting world of computer animation.
Thomas Squire had reason to feel melancholy, that cool London morning. A friend in the Foreign Office had phoned to say that an old friend, Vasili Rugorsky, had died in Moscow. Only three years earlier, Squire and Rugorsky had been together in Sicily. The Russian, Squire recalled, had looked unwell even then.
His thoughts were drifting when suddenly Jane turned in the bed, wide awake, wide of eye, angry, and said, with her distinct elocution, ‘Why bother to sit there? You’ve never shown the slightest interest in me before.’
‘I’m showing some now, Jane. The bruises on your face are healing, I see.’
‘You see nothing.’ She slammed her head down on the pillow again, while continuing to glare at him.
‘What can we bring you? Books? Magazines?’
‘My friends bring me all I need.’
After a short while, she said, almost as if communing with something inside herself, that he was sitting there enjoying acting the role of a fond father.
‘I really am a fond father.’
‘Baaa.’ She made an angry sheep noise. He remembered her angry sheep noise. He sighed and sat tight, knowing more was to come. It would do her no harm to let it emerge.
‘Oh, you doted on my sister but not on me. You were only interested in your career.’ As she spoke, she gripped her sheet tightly, perhaps in some fear of his response to this challenge. ‘I’ve had to lie here for hours and think it over, think it all over.’ Then she came out with it, raising herself t
o say that he showed no interest in anything but his career, as if she had not uttered almost identical words the moment before.
Squire considered before replying. ‘I enjoyed fame when it came my way, yes. For a while I felt that I was needed, was necessary. That I could somehow make the world just a trifle happier, make individuals happier. Maybe change the way people thought. Folly, I suppose. Hubris. But retribution came. Retribution is a dependable quality, with a reliable timetable.’
There was a silence.
‘We girls were not such fools as you might think. We were only kids then, but we knew all about your bloody Laura. That surprises you, doesn’t it, Daddy?’
He was rubbing his hands together. ‘Of course I knew you knew about her. It was a tragic episode and I really cannot discuss it with you.’
‘You had the affair but she really meant nothing to you.’ Her tone was suddenly supplicatory, as if she was near tears.
‘You’re wrong there.’ He shook his head, baffled by the way in which communication – of which an influential critic had called him a master – was so poor a medium for conveying any depth of meaning, particularly when that meaning involved gentleness, love, concern.
‘My dear daughter, never think that anything that happens means nothing. If you have not yet experienced it, the time may come when you will love someone dearly yet find that love to be impossible. We are granted only so much.’
Jane’s voice was gruff. ‘You trying to make me sorry for you?’
He rose, took a pace or two, reconsidered, and sat down again.
At that moment, Barrieros put his head round the door and asked if everything was all right. Squire waved him away. The head disappeared.
‘We both must feel this is a ghastly conversation, Jane. Under emotional stress, we might say things we could regret later. Or we might say things the other would misinterpret. Be sure I do love you greatly. You’re my dear daughter – it cannot be otherwise … I may have been lousy at showing it. You have a good creative job, and that makes for happiness. Let me tell you that being a public figure, that holding forth on every possible subject, does not create happiness, only self-delusion.’
She levered herself up in bed as if coming more alive. ‘Ann always said you had another occupation, a secret one.’
‘Well, if it was secret, that is because it cannot be discussed.’
After she thought about that and decided not to pursue her accusation, she said, ‘So what’s so wrong with self-delusion? What I really hate is self-knowledge. It makes you see what a little worm you are.’
‘Nonsense. That’s just self-pity, which you must not encourage in yourself. It’s bindweed in the garden of the psyche – as any gardener would tell you.’
His metaphor had made her smile, at least with one side of her face. ‘Talking of bindweed … Why isn’t Mummy here?’
He did not say what he suspected Teresa meant when she said she was ‘going shopping’. He only knew she was quieter than usual after such expeditions.
‘She’s gone shopping. She’ll be along soon. Then she and I will lunch at the Travellers’ Club with some old friends. And we shall raise a glass to an old friend who just died in Moscow.’
‘Did I know him?’
‘No. Listen, Jane, if you can live without delusions, you’ll be doing well. I popularize modern art, I promote all kinds of art, because I believe people secretly thirst for it, especially in a secular age. It took me some while to realize that I have no art in myself, none. Pontificating is a lesser thing, a substitute for art. Your mother’s grotesque winged insects she makes are a better thing than anything I can do. I cannot paint, compose music, write.’
‘Come off it, Dad. You’ve written several books.’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing creative. Merely digestive.’
She gave him a sideways glance. The scorn had gone from her face. Only the bruises remained.
They held hands in silence.
Although Dominic had switched on the engine of the car, he did nothing more than sit in the driver’s seat, letting half-thoughts and semi-feelings whirl like snow in his brain. The puddles in the carpark were filled with dead-fish colours of oil, blurring before his unfocused sight. The colours changed as rain fell again and turned to snow. Dominic closed his eyes against an immense roar filling the space, as of aero engines passing overhead or a train hurtling onward.
Frightened at last, he roused and stuck his head out of the window, ignoring the wind and speed. As he had anticipated, the woman stood rigid in the field, dwindling fast, her small boy beside her. Grief at a terrible lost chance took Dominic, distorting his vision. He waved frantically. ‘Mother!’ he called, but the small figure, black against the snow, made no response. ‘Mother!’ – again – but no sound uttered by human lungs could compete with the defeating definite onward machine progress.
The train ran on a curve, and the woman in the snow was lost from view behind the clattering carriages.
Rubbing his eyes, Dominic brought his head in and closed the train window.
Various stenches surrounding him reminded him of that cattle boat, Noah’s Ark. Where had it been? Notions of space and time were hazy. When Lena and her Communist husband had taken him away from Dresden, they had made him leave behind all his toys, everything – including that precious little carved wooden Noah’s Ark. He could have clung on to the Ark, or at least to the painting he was in the middle of – his little box of paints! – to leave that behind! – but this was the terrible lesson of life, that everything had to be left behind, paints, mothers, father, money – his Ark, with its little red roof and the giraffe looking perkily out of the top window, and that delightful curve of the bow rising from the spume, to curl back on itself in an ornamental yet practical way, like the unfolding of a fern leaf. Gone. Gone. The leaf would never properly unfurl.
He could smell the giraffe now, he thought, as he stood there in his little-boy breeches, disconsolate. The corridor of the express was choked with livestock: cockerel, pullets, an angular goat chewing a haversack, little black pigs of hirsute disposition, all guarded or not, as the case might be, by Vasili’s cohorts, lounging, smoking, laughing, caring little for the ordure underfoot. Evidently a successful raid behind enemy lines had recently taken place. These boys knew that war was fun – better a soldier than a peasant. In the near compartment, so crammed was it with inebriated infantry that they had been forced to nurse an old tan cow across their corporate knees, and to swig their home-made vodka over the cordillera of her backbone; fun was in escalation mode.
The master of the revels stood nearby, conducting a long monologue through a fog of cigarette smoke. His cigarette blazed at the tip like a damp firework. Still struggling with grief and loss, Dominic, from the position of the man’s knees, fur-booted, filth-caked, made bold to interrupt the disquisition.
‘Why did you do that to her?’ he asked Vasili. ‘She’ll die in the snow.’
His mother’s first husband, unshaven rogue, it could be discerned through the smoke screen, was a tall gaunt man with a dark moustache and eyebrows curling sadly towards his dark, deep-set eyes. His square jaw bore a ragged scar. He wore a dirty white sweater under his Soviet greys. A hard man, but not a brutal one: indeed, he looked, at this moment, merely sorrowful, and slightly bizarre with a black-faced lamb draped over his right shoulder.
‘Why did you turn her away?’
‘An ancient Kirghiz saying puts it far better than I could, boy. “Good riddance to bad rubbish” – a piece of folk wisdom you might well bear in mind in your present circumstances. I did what I did because I love Ursula more than Lena. Ursula is more to me than all the stars in the heavens.’ He delivered this inarguable statement in a deep voice, lending emphasis to each word in the sentence. Ursula, the German woman he had made captive, sat beside him, a magnificent example of Prussian femininity, if slightly beady-eyed, arms folded in her fur coat, contemplating little unborn Dominic with detached interest. Beside her, p
ropped up with a lot of other baggage, was a Nazi flag with a swastika at its centre, evidently one of the spoils of war, like Ursula herself. Although she wore a thick cloth skirt – perhaps part of a nursing uniform, he imagined – it had ridden up to reveal her plump, appetizing calves and thighs. To be taken into Ursula’s orbit of ministration would be, he felt acutely, no small thing.
‘You may understand some day,’ said Vasili – not unkindly but implacably, as if reading from some sacred script – setting the lamb down gently on the floor of the compartment, as if for emphasis.
‘You’re a victim of circumstance. I’m not. There are certain key times in life when God Above gives a man a rare chance to decide his own fate. There are seven such times, one for each decade of your life. In all other whiles, we are in the hands of God Above, and he has charge over us, as I have charge of this lamb whose throat we shall be slitting tonight, and also this venerable clock here, worth millions, and appropriated from a certain Scottish manse of which you know, or will know after you are born.’
Vasili smote the clock to which he referred, which gave out a hollow bleat of protest. A carved stag’s head protruded above its enamel face. The compartment was so loaded with loot, with oil paintings, carpets, water-closet pedestals, fire tongs, vacuum cleaners, chests-of-drawers, armchairs, and other prerequisites of civilization, including the grandfather clock the commander of the supply train had just struck, such as simple clean-living Cossacks had never encountered in their born days, that there was barely room to move. This congestion confused Dominic almost as much as the temporal convolutions contained in Vasili’s statement. He shook himself, for a moment almost crediting himself with sitting in a white car in a carpark in Hammersmith; although this improbability was washed away in a flood of lamb urine over his right foot, as he attempted once more to grapple with Vasili in conversation.
‘Excuse me, but I was told you were a Communist and believed in Lenin. I mention this because I am surprised at your reference to God.’