Remembrance Day

by Brian Aldiss

  Of course he had always been unsuitable for her. For whom was he suitable? He had no place. That was the truth. Only in the illusory world of high finance, of the stock exchange, of the IBM VDU, of the BCT did he have any sort of function. How could he possibly live in that remote, stony place, submitting to her rules and the rules of those already dead? Could she not have some sort of empathy for his feelings in the matter? Or in any matter?

  How attracted he had been at first by talk of the Scottish background: by that sense of continuity in her family he so lacked in his own life.

  It was impossible even to consider going to Scotland with Fenella. She wanted him. But more strongly she did not.

  It was the same with him. He wanted her. More strongly, he did not. He wanted to kill her. She was killing him.

  This was how a marriage ended. Misery. Disillusion. Confusion.

  Entering the library, that hollow-shelved place, he stood surveying it. Fenella sat shadowy in the coffin-chair, art nouveau strands of ivy ascending from the floor to climb over her arms, to claim her in the name of all Camerons. It was a trick of his vision. All the structure contained under its wooden wings was shadow. Fenella had fled upstairs.

  A smart double knock like a rat-tat on a drum sounded on the door behind him. He stepped aside as it opened.

  Arold stuck his turnip-shaped head round the door, exhibiting his teeth in an apologetic grin. ‘’Scuse me, Mr Dominic, suh, but I know as things is a bit much for you. Can I bring you summat to eat? Like there’s some nice sirloin of beef, cold, and some smoke salmon, whichever.’

  ‘No. I don’t want a thing. Wait. Arold, have you ever eaten smoked salmon?’

  ‘Well, suh … In my position, you unnerstand … I mean, the likes of Doris and me, we don’t …’ He straightened up. ‘To be frank, Mr Dominic, I’d say that smoke salmon is a rich bloke’s dish.’

  Dominic confronted his servant. ‘But you must have tasted it here, in the kitchen, when there was some left over from a meal?’ Seeing Arold’s silent assent, he said, ‘And you like it?’

  ‘Quite creck. Hambrosia, suh. Even better than the tin stuff.’

  ‘You squeeze lemon on it, Arold. You eat it with brown bread and butter. As you say, it’s a rich bloke’s dish. Only I now realize I hate the taste of the salmon. It’s the lemon I like, and I like the brown bread and butter. The rest’s just snobbery.’

  Vigorous shake of the head. ‘No, no that ain’t so, suh, excuse me. Smoke salmon, blimey! Why, royalty likes it, royalty eats it, gets it down by the ton.’

  ‘Thanks, Arold. I’ll give a call to you if I need you.’

  When the manservant had gone, closing the door behind him, Dominic lapsed back into his anger. What he needed was coke and Shostakovich. The coffee tray lay on the carpet where it had been spilt. He trod over the broken cups, to discover his Walkman smashed in the fireplace.

  The childish spite of it cleared his mind. He hastened from the library and ran upstairs to Fenella’s room, bursting in without knocking.

  Her cluttered chamber was lit only by a standard lamp in one corner. She stood by the mantelpiece, having shed her shawl over the bed, where it sprawled like a lost wing. On the mantelpiece stood an open brown glass bottle of pills and an uncorked bottle of Kir. As Dominic entered, Fenella was in the act of washing pills down her throat, standing nose in air, swallowing. She set the glass down, and leaned against the shelf, elbow supporting head, looking down rather than at her husband.

  ‘I don’t wish to speak to you, Dom,’ she said.

  ‘Still guzzling down those pills? We’ve come to the end of the trail, Fen, haven’t we? You won’t move an inch towards me, will you? Suppose I told you there was another woman, that I was screwing someone else? You’d seize on that, wouldn’t you? That would be the excuse you needed to throw me out of your life. You can’t think how to get rid of me, to take hold of little Malcolm and be off somewhere to live out your sleepwalking fantasy of Scottish baronial life, or whatever it is … But another woman – oh, you’d love that!’

  Still she chose not to look up. Instead, she concentrated on standing as before, trying to dislodge the slipper on her left foot with her right. She spoke without colour or emphasis.

  ‘I suppose you have some prostitute or other. Sex is all you think about, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why don’t you look at me? You’re about to change into that other person, are you, that phantom kid, whoever she is?’ From his inner breast pocket he pulled a micro-cassette recorder and waved it. ‘I recorded every batty word you said when Dower was here. Would you like to hear yourself, eh? Would you like to hear what I’ve had to put up with for so long?’

  Fenella flung herself on him. The cassette recorder went flying and smashed against a wall.

  ‘I’ll give you sex! You want sex? I’ll show you what a prostitute can do!’

  Afterwards, he never understood their frenzy. He was cursing her, tearing his clothes off. Just as savagely, she was tearing hers from her. They snarled at each other, face to face, lips drawn back in similar snarls. He ripped himself out of his trousers and fell on her. Amid screams and shrieks, they collapsed on the floor, rolling on her white reindeer rug.

  Fenella was slapping him wildly on the side of his head. Biting at her neck, he prodded at her stomach with his erection until she grasped it as if it were a dagger and thrust it up into her body. She writhed on it as he drove it in with the force of his lower body behind it. Still they cursed and damned each other, legs entangled, one flesh.

  Her fingernails were tearing into his back, ploughing the skin. Roaring with something beyond pain, he managed to get his arms about her, to pin down her flailing arms, to lock her against him. As he forced one of her breasts into his mouth, she bit his ear. So they stayed locked, fucking and kicking, until the cataclysm of sensation rocked them.

  They fell apart, gasping and angry. She crawled on hands and knees over to the bed to grasp one corner of her shawl and drag it down to cover her nakedness. ‘That’ll show you I can be a prostitute too,’ she said in a low voice, burying her face in the duvet.

  ‘You want me to pay you?’

  He pulled his trousers about his buttocks and slunk from the room. His ripped shirt and blood he left behind on her rug.

  That night, he went to Malcolm’s bedroom and kissed the boy goodbye before packing a suitcase and driving away from the manor. He never went back. His adopted mother, Daphne Mayer, put him up that night and for many nights to come.

  He received notification from Stirrup and Dower that his wife had taken up her inheritance and was now living in Scotland at Fuarblarghour House with her son. She was suing for divorce on grounds of desertion.

  Dominic lost touch with all his old friends. He gave up his work. After a blank spell which Daphne’s doctor pronounced to be a nervous breakdown, he set about improving the quality of Daphne’s life. They decided to escape from London, which was becoming dirtier and more sinister.

  Something of both their wishes was fulfilled when he bought a small hotel, the Dianoya, in Great Yarmouth. The Dianoya stood on the front at Yarmouth, overlooking promenade and beach.

  Dominic took a large attic room for himself. From its east-facing windows he swore he could see across the North Sea to the Continent.

  The hotel was under Daphne’s management. She was assisted by her new boyfriend. Dominic’s task was to keep the accounts, to be civil to guests, and to do odd jobs. The first members of staff they engaged were Arold and Doris Betts. Under the previous management, the hotel had become run down. Dominic had it redecorated from top to bottom, and a conservatory added at the back, where guests breakfasted and dined. For a few years, the hotel was a modest success.

  Dominic took up oil painting, and soon married a second time, a local artist by the name of Caroline Lambert. They produced two children, a boy and a girl.

  While these children were still infants, the Dianoya took in an Irish guest calling himself Jim Donnell.

/>   5

  Accepted

  Midsummer 1986

  The castle was built of yellowing bone. A solemn parade of guards moved along its ramparts. Prompt on the first stroke of twelve, the main gates opened wide, to reveal a grim scene in the courtyard beyond. There the condemned prisoner stood, a thread of rope about his neck. The executioner, albeit a trifle creakily, pulled a lever. Down went the trap door, down went the prisoner with it, to hang limply by his neck. The main gates closed.

  A white card propped against the castle walls read: ‘Constructed by prisoners in Norman Cross during the Napoleonic Wars. Repaired, with new mechanism.’ And a price was quoted, far above Ruby Tebbutt’s purse.

  Even after the mechanism had stopped, Ruby stood gazing in the window of the antique shop, one hand delicately up against the glass by her face, to shield the reflection of Fakenham market place. The macabre souvenir of past miseries fascinated her. She would have liked to buy it for her mother. Ray would be amused too. Still, it was something just to see it, all built from bones, and she could tell Agnes about it in the evening. How clever those French prisoners must have been.

  Ruby’s shift in the cake shop was finished. After a visit to the supermarket, she went with her purchases to the weekly lunch with her sister. Thank goodness, this week it was Joyce’s turn to pay.

  She was first in the Crown as usual. She entered the building, saying a word to one or two of the occupants of the public bar she recognized as she headed for the lounge, with its prints of long-dead racehorses. Dumping her carrier bag at her regular table, she bustled into the toilet and applied some lipstick, staring into the misty mirror at what she called her pasty old face. ‘You never were pretty, you bitch,’ she said to her reflection. She thought about having a wee and decided not to bother.

  As she returned to the table, Joyce Lowe appeared, chirping her greetings. The two women trotted towards each other, uttering friendly squeals of recognition.

  Although Ruby had put on a dress for this occasion, it was an old one her sister had seen many times. Even as she moved towards Joyce, she took in her sister’s floral-patterned dress with white collar and its cry, ‘New, new!’

  ‘His hygienist gave me a perfect bill of health, was terribly complimentary, in fact,’ Joyce said, without preliminary, in continuation of a phone conversation held two days earlier, hugging her sister and exploding a kiss two inches from her right ear without interrupting herself. ‘But no, still I’ve got to go back to Denys this afternoon, so I mustn’t linger too long. I know he’s good but he is really being officious this time. Anyhow, how are you, Ruby? OK? Come back to Norwich with me and do some shopping.’

  The saga of Joyce’s wisdom teeth, and her love-hate relationship with Denys, her Norwich dentist, had been a long one, and no less long in the telling. Ruby was not at all discomposed by the flurry of information, while reflecting on how much of life was spent listening to the troubles of others. She knew her younger sister well. Before the wisdom tooth an ingrowing toenail had dominated conversation for some weeks. Both tooth and toenail had been exhibited to her more than once, though not in the Crown.

  In the present impoverished state of the Tebbutt household, she was not about to go shopping in Norwich; the thought of shopping anywhere alarmed her.

  ‘I’ve got something I want to do this afternoon,’ she said, aware the answer sounded feeble.

  Joyce got out a compact and proceeded to apply lipstick. ‘A change would do you good. What are you doing? Where’s the waitress? I need a G & T.’

  Ruby was never sure whether to be pleased or annoyed her sister refused to acknowledge the fact that the Tebbutts were markedly less wealthy than the Lowes. ‘Tess has got mange. On her left flank.’ She indicated her own left flank in order to make matters clear.

  Her sister laughed with affection. ‘That bloody goat of yours!’

  ‘Just a touch of mange. We aren’t sure if it will affect the milk. I’m giving her vitamin pills.’

  ‘Get the vet in if you’re worried,’ Joyce said.

  ‘It’s not that bad.’ She did not say that a visit from the vet would set them back fifty pounds they could not afford.

  As Ruby was about to impress her sister with the news of Jennifer’s new Czech boyfriend, the waitress brought the menu and exchanged a few pleasantries with them. She told them about her son, who was doing so well at Creative Modelling. They ordered drinks, which arrived promptly, Joyce’s G & T and Ruby’s half-pint of bitter. Although the pub had been serving lunches for some years, it retained its traditional drive to get drink into its customers in preference to lasagne.

  They talked about an old British film they had both seen recently on TV. It starred Stewart Granger, an actor both women had fancied in their youth. From there they moved on to other themes of childhood days, talking comfortably together while eating steak pie, chips and peas. They smiled at each other as they conversed, forgetting their small rivalries.

  But Ruby found it hard to forget completely her sister’s husband, Norm. She had never confided in anyone, not her sister, not her closest friend, about her intense early sex life with Ray; it was too precious, too private; to have spoken of it to a third party would have been to rob it of something of its magic. But soon after her sister had married the Norwich builder, Norman Lowe, she had become the unwilling recipient of Joyce’s confidences.

  And Joyce, in a first flush of matrimonial concupiscence, had told Ruby – they had been sitting together in Jarrold’s cafeteria in Norwich – Ruby remembered it well – that Norman enjoyed rimming her.

  ‘What’s rimming?’ Ruby had asked and, even while asking, had regretted her question. She knew the answer would be something awful. She felt herself blushing before Joyce replied, ‘Surely you know what rimming is. Don’t you and Ray do it? Norm likes to lick my bum, my arsehole. After a shower, of course.’

  On the bus back home afterwards, Ruby could hardly stop laughing; but, out of the same instinct for privacy with which she kept quiet about her own activities, she never mentioned Norman’s predilection to her husband. All she said to herself was, ‘Lowe by name, low by nature.’

  Joyce had never again offered such confidences, perhaps seeing that her sister was offended. After fifteen years of marriage, Joyce, like her husband, had grown somewhat on the portly side. Try as she might, Ruby could not banish from her mind a prurient curiosity: was Norm still able or inclined to indulge in that bedroom sport? And exactly what positions did they take up for its accomplishment?

  She felt a similar sense of shame now, as she leaned over the little round table in the Crown and broke one of her own rules by blurting out, ‘We’ve got trouble at present, Joyce.’ And she found herself telling her sister how Ray had lent Mike Linwood three hundred pounds for the repair of his car. She became flushed as she spoke. Joyce lit a cigarette.

  Her fear was, as she spilled out details of the scene at Stanton’s garage, and the week which had passed since then, the money still not repaid, that Joyce would merely laugh and tell her not to be so silly. She thought the dress with the flower pattern and the white collar probably cost more than half the sum which so distressed her. But when she shed a tear or two, Joyce put down her cigarette and took her hand, uttering comforting nothings, much as their mother had once soothed them in their infant sorrows.

  ‘I know the amount doesn’t mean a thing to you, Joyce,’ Ruby said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. ‘But it means a lot to us, and there will be interest to pay on the credit card, and poor Ray blames himself, and it has buggered up our friendship with the Linwoods … Oh, I shouldn’t say anything to you about it …’

  ‘You were always the one who bottled up your feelings,’ Joyce said, sympathetically. ‘Cheer up and I’ll get the waitress to bring you a brandy. You do drag out that half of beer, I must say. Gloria!’ This last cry was to the waitress. ‘It was generous of Ray to do what he did. Serve Linwood right if he’d had to leave his car with Stanton and walk home.’ />
  ‘Oh, Ray wouldn’t let him do that.’

  She accepted the brandy and sipped it noisily. She hated balloon glasses, which made it difficult to get at the liquid.

  After the meal, she retired to the toilet to touch up her face. Joyce came with her, all motherly. ‘Look, darling, don’t be upset. I must head for Norwich in a mo’, but I’m sure everything will be fine. The blighter is bound to pay up – especially if he’s got religion.’

  ‘That doesn’t follow,’ Ruby said, regretfully.

  After her sister had left, she had a wee and went home to see how Tess was.

  When the Fakenham bus had deposited her, Ruby retrieved her old bicycle from the hedge and pedalled slowly along, down Clamp Lane to No. 2. She went in the back door, calling to her mother, dumping her shopping bag on the draining board.

  Agnes was sitting in the wicker chair in the front room, sleeping, propped erect by cushions, with the radio talking by her side.

  ‘Are you all right, Ma? I’ll get you some dinner.’ She switched off the radio to save the battery.

  The old lady raised her head and looked round woozily. Having been dozing with her mouth open, she began to munch, as if dinner had already been delivered, in order to induce a little moisture back into her mouth.

  ‘Is that you, Doris? The brown paper’s in the cupboard. Don’t forget the dustcart comes today. If it wasn’t for this wind …’ Her mumblings became more obscure.

  Her daughter knelt by her, smoothing her brow, thinking compassionately of the ageing mind lost somewhere in the mazes of the past. With a paper tissue from the box by the radio she mopped a trickle of saliva from Agnes’s chin.

  The action roused Agnes. Her eyes opened, and she said with perfect clarity, ‘What was that they were saying about the Germans on the wireless? Did I hear someone’s voice? What’s his name?’

  ‘I’ve only just come in, Ma. Would you like some parsnip soup? Bread, cheese, OK?’

  ‘I used to love it when we went to Clacton as kids,’ Agnes replied. ‘I had a donkey ride once. Lovely beaches when the tide was out. We could go back there, Ruby, couldn’t we? Have a paddle, just the two of us?’