Remembrance Day

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Clacton’s a long way off, Ma.’

  The old girl sighed heavily. ‘What a nuisance. When was that? They’ve probably sold the donkeys, too. I can almost smell the sea air. It would do me good, a day by the sea …’

  ‘I’ve got the saucepan on. You’re not too hot, are you? Can I take this rug off?’

  ‘Why do you and Ray never take me to the seaside?’

  ‘I had lunch with Joyce, Ma,’ Ruby said, moving back to the kitchen and turning up the decibels as she did so. Thank heaven the old dear wasn’t deaf. ‘She’s still having her tooth problems. She’ll be at the dentist right now, poor thing.’

  She didn’t add that Joyce had not asked once about her mother. It was rather a sore point that the old lady lived with her poorer daughter. The temporary arrangement had become permanent, and not solely because the Tebbutts found they derived some benefit from Agnes Silcock’s old-age pension; there was also Ruby’s secret pleasure that she was her mother’s favourite or, conversely, that Joyce was not greatly in favour.

  ‘We could go over to the seaside. What’s-her-name might be there,’ Agnes said in a low shriek. ‘Who turned this wireless off? People are always interfering.’

  Her bad days were becoming more frequent. Soon it would no longer be possible for Ruby to work part-time at the cake shop, and one of their slender sources of income would disappear. The old lady would need someone all day. As it was, Ruby was not happy about leaving her mother alone in the mornings. Perhaps Joyce and Norm would have her in Norwich – though they would be more likely to send the old lady to a home.

  She made herself a cup of tea before taking her mother in a tray with home-made parsnip soup, bread, margarine, and a pat of Tess’s cheese.

  Agnes was not the only problem looming. With dull foreboding, she thought of that three hundred pounds. Although she would not willingly criticize her husband, Ruby could not help feeling it was pusillanimous to have lent Mike Linwood their credit card; he had surrendered too easily to emotional blackmail. He should have thought up a good lie. The surrender opened up a wider question: how much of their present situation was owed to Ray’s general mismanagement of their life together? Although he blamed their misfortunes on a rotten government, there was a point at which everyone had to stand up and admit responsibility for their own lives. He had never been ambitious. He was too easily deceived by Cracknell Summerfield. Did he perhaps enjoy hard rural life too much?

  These cloudy questions had crossed Ruby’s mental skies before. Then she turned on herself, asking, OK, girl, who would you rather be married to? Who do you know’d be cosier in bed? More equable generally? Be thankful he’s not a money-grubber. A faint echo came back, saying: Still, it’s a pity you can’t take the old lady to Clacton for the day; that’s not asking much, is it?

  ‘Do you still believe in God, Ma?’ she asked Agnes as she fed her bread and cheese in small chunks.

  ‘Oh, times are different,’ Agnes said, nodding in agreement with herself. ‘I can remember the time when—’

  ‘But you used to go to church a lot. You used to take Joyce and me, remember?’

  The old lady stopped her munching and wiped her mouth on a tissue. ‘Times are different. No one goes to church now, do they? I never see anyone going to church.’

  ‘God might still be about, for all that.’ She laughed as she formed a mental picture of an old man with a white beard sitting waiting hopefully in a dark empty church for a congregation that never came. Ever.

  ‘Well, God once valued humans. It’s different now. After two World Wars … After that battle … What was it called?’

  ‘Stalingrad?’

  ‘No, no, not Stalingrad … Lord Hay, was that his name? Doesn’t matter … Waste of human life …’

  When she had fed her mother, Ruby went out into the garden. She had changed her dress for a sweater and jeans, and had put on some old gardening shoes. This was a time of day she much enjoyed, spent in the company of Tess.

  Tess lived in an enclosure at the bottom of the garden. Her twelve-foot chain was attached to a wire firmly staked at both ends, so that the white nanny goat had plenty of room to graze, and could retreat into her hut if it rained. Ray had built the hut from old timber, and thatched it with some Norfolk reed stripped off the ruinous outbuilding to the rear of No. 1 Clamp Lane.

  ‘Here we are, darling,’ Ruby called, in her sweetest tones – the tones she had used to Jenny when Jenny was a baby. The goat came slowly towards her mistress, giving a single deep ‘mheeeer’ as she approached. She was milked at the same time every day and regularly yielded about two pints; Ray would milk her when he came home.

  Having fondled the animal, Ruby fetched a steel comb from the shelf inside the hut and sat down by the goat to comb her. Tess stood still for this procedure, occasionally shaking her head, as if not in entire accord with the endearments Ruby was whispering.

  God took up some of Ruby’s thought. Before going to work that morning, she had provided a galvanized bucket full of water for the goat; the bucket was wedged between three stones brought from the beach so that Tess would not accidentally kick it over. Ruby looked at the water, at the face of the goat, she inhaled its sweet breath and its pleasant scent. She regarded the grass, clipped short by grazing, with its maze of detail, the moss, the tiny twigs, the worm casts, the filaments of buttercup, daisy, clover, and thought to herself, ‘I don’t know about the grand effects God’s supposed to bring off, though I know they exist. I’ve seen them on television. But someone is awfully good on minute detail.’

  She was conscious of the smallness of her own life. She liked it that way. If only they had a bit more fucking cash.

  The mange on the goat’s flank was no better. She rubbed Intensive Care into the patch while the goat tried to eat the plastic bottle.

  Unhitching Tess from the run-wire, she led her round the house and out by the front gate, taking care to avert her eyes from No. 1 Clamp Lane on the other side of the road. Its derelict state constituted a threat to orderly existence. Broken, dismal, its garden overgrown, it stood as a reminder of how the rural poor of an earlier generation had fared. The previous summer, vagrants, two men and a woman, had arrived one night and taken over the vacant premises. They moved on after a few days, to the relief of the Tebbutts. Ruby and Ray had gone over to inspect, and found that the vagrants had painted swastikas and crude cruel drawings over the faded wallpaper, as well as using the small front parlour as their toilet. Ray had brought in disinfectant and soil to cover the mess; the feeling that the cottage was defiled was more difficult to bury.

  Turning right, Ruby took Tess for an amble down Clamp Lane in the direction of Binham. The sun shone warm upon them, woman and goat, as they sauntered. Birds sang, the goat’s chain rattled as she foraged contentedly in the hedgerow, nibbling at this and that. Later, Ruby would work along here with a pair of shears and a sack, cutting grass to dry for winter fodder.

  Pulling Tess out of the hedge, she made her walk a short way on the paved road; the hard surface was good for her hooves. No traffic passed that way. The afternoon dreamed. She and the animal moved amid the deserted farmland. To her right, over the shoulder of the field, she could see a distant line of trees and the rooftops of Field Dalling Manor farmhouse.

  Where the road reached its lowest point, thistles grew thickly by a ditch on one side. Tess enjoyed thistles, ignoring the clumps of poppies flowering nearby. Vetch with its modest purple flower entangled itself among the grass and dock, ground ivy and dead nettle, which sheltered under a hawthorn hedge. The attention to detail was pretty good here, Ruby thought. Beneath the leaf cover, the soil was crumbled and dry.

  She dragged Tess away from a laurel bush which would have poisoned her. Would God do as much for her? She recalled her mother’s words, ‘Once God valued humans …’ What had He thought about the vagrants? Had He valued them? Had they done something to deserve their horrible way of life, shitting on all they came across? What was He planning for
her and Ray? To her mind came a dreadful picture of being turned out of No. 2, to wander the countryside, pushing Agnes in a wheelchair; her deepest fears painted such a scenario.

  ‘You’d come with us, Tess,’ she said aloud. ‘You could help pull the wheelchair.’ She climbed up on the bank at the roadside in order to let the goat forage more deeply into the hedge.

  Her anxieties were not allayed next morning, when she went in to Agnes first thing and found her in a lethargic and confused state. Ray was sympathetic, but drove off to work as usual. After dithering a while, Ruby rang the doctor, who told her to give Agnes an extra pill. Ruby went upstairs and drank a strong mug of tea by the bedside, before hurrying downstairs again to ring Bridget Bligh at the cake shop, to announce that she would be late.

  So it happened that she was at home when the post van roared along the lane and the postlady flipped a letter through their front door. Letters arrived rarely at the Tebbutt household. Ruby picked this one up from the mat, perched her glasses on her nose, and studied the blue envelope cautiously. The postmark was one which covered the whole county, ‘Norwich, Norfolk’, and so gave her few clues. The typewritten envelope was addressed to her. It felt too fat to be a tradesman’s bill.

  Taking the letter through into the kitchen, she got a knife and opened it. Inside was a brief handwritten note on the same hard blue paper as the envelope; it enclosed three hundred pounds in six fifty-pound notes. The note was signed Joyce, with love and kisses.

  Ruby took the note to the wooden milking stool by the back door, removed her glasses and cried quietly.

  When she had regained her composure, she folded the money and Joyce’s note back into their envelope and hid it in a Toby jug on the dresser. She went outside. She walked about slowly on the paved way which led up the garden, gaze lowered.

  The money changed everything. A grave joy filled her to feel how hard it made her, how it fortified her. Unexpected though the gift was, she felt small gratitude towards her sister; Joyce owed her this at least for the way she alone cared for their mother; it was Joyce’s conscience money – though Ruby acknowledged to herself that it was something to have a conscience nowadays.

  The same pleasure in being hard made her secretive. She would not allow this unexpected gift to become an easy way to let either Mike or Ray off the hook. Ray had particularly annoyed her when he had suggested allowing the Linwoods to keep the money; she had interpreted his suggestion as weakness, not generosity. Once she showed the fifty-pound notes to Ray, he might give up the pursuit of what she saw as justice. She wanted him to force the Linwoods to honour their debt. Accordingly, she resolved to hide this morning’s unexpected windfall. It would be her secret, and the Toby jug her secret bank.

  How thrilling! It was like plotting an adultery. The power of money …! Even in this modest sum.

  Like a vision – was this God taking care of detail again? – she saw that now she could afford to take her mother to the seaside.

  She smiled as she thought of trying to heave Agnes up on the back of a donkey. In any case, they’d better avoid Clacton. She had heard that Clacton was completely spoilt. There was always Yarmouth. Yarmouth was nearer, and probably cheaper than Clacton.

  A spasm of anger against Ray overcame her. He would be furious if he discovered she had told their troubles to Joyce. It wasn’t that he did not get on well with Joyce and Norm, but he had his pride. Of course he had his pride. But the silly ass would probably order her to send the money back, and that she certainly was not going to do. Considering that Joyce never contributed anything in support of her mother, she could bloody well afford to let go of three hundred pounds. Why hadn’t she sent more? If she knew they were in difficulties, she could easily have sent five hundred pounds. Five hundred pounds was nothing to that little bum-licker Norman Lowe.

  What a lousy unjust world it was. Scowling, she marched back into the house to see how Agnes was. It was high time she went to work.

  The cake shop was not the smartest place in town. It had been a greengrocer’s until a nearby supermarket, selling more expensive vegetables, had put it out of business. Bridget Bligh had bought the premises at an advantageous price. She lived with a cat in the two cramped rooms upstairs.

  When Ruby entered the shop, red in the face and out of breath, Bridget gave her a smile which lacked her usual warmth.

  ‘Look what the cat’s dragged in,’ she called to her son.

  Teddy Bligh, aged twenty, had occasionally been known to do odd jobs about town. As far as Ruby knew, Bridget had never married. It was hard to imagine that Teddy had been conceived in anything other than a fit of generosity between two other engagements.

  Teddy was helping out in the shop this morning, wearing a blue baseball cap which said ‘Kansas’ on it.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Ruby said. ‘Have you been busy? It’s quite extraordinary, I had a – well, a vision, I suppose it was, on my way here.’

  Bridget gave a toss of her head. ‘The meringues have had a vision and all. Summat must account for them collapsing. They’re about as crisp as a baby’s wet nappy. Get that batch of filled rolls in the window, will you? We can natter later on.’

  ‘I had a vision, Bridget, a real vision, cycling to get the bus. I must tell you.’

  Bridget made a sort of ‘tsk’, half-scowling, half-laughing, as she bustled about. ‘It’s a weird bloody place, is Norfolk. People seeing visions cycling to work … Woman told me the other day she’d seen a ghost in her bathroom, of all places.’

  ‘This was no ghost, Bridget. I was coming through Field Dalling and suddenly I was in Germany. Somehow I knew it was Germany. Well, it was on the Continent. There was an ornate stone bridge over a wide river. People were walking on the bridge – no traffic. It was definitely foreign. I wasn’t frightened a bit, not at that moment. I just stood looking at the river.’

  ‘Did you see any meringues floating by?’ She was disinclined to take in what Ruby was saying, although Teddy lounged across the counter, mouth open.

  ‘Listen, a woman approached me, taking a long time about it. She was old, bent double, dressed in black. I saw her as clear as I see you. She had a scarf over her head. And she was leading some kind of animal, I don’t know what.’

  ‘That would be Swaffham market, not Germany, love.’

  ‘Shut up, Ma,’ Teddy said.

  ‘For some reason, I was frightened of her. I couldn’t see her face. And she pointed at the water. She took hold of me by the arm and she pointed at the water and she said – I’m scared to tell you, Bridget! I’d better not tell you, in case it comes true.’

  ‘Tell me. Whisper it.’

  ‘Well, you see …’ Ruby paused anxiously. Two customers had entered the shop. Teddy turned reluctantly to serve them. ‘I can’t quite explain how, Bridget, but you see we were standing under the bridge. There was this massive stone arch over us, as if we were in a cellar. It was very dark. I felt – well, as if I was already dead. And this voice came from a long way distant, saying … Well, it said, “People saw you die by the seaside.”’

  Bridget stared hard at her. ‘You’ve gone as pale as a sheet, Ruby. You’d better come in the back and sit down. I’ve got a nip of brandy. “People saw you die by the seaside”? What does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, it probably doesn’t mean a thing. Load of rubbish. First sign of madness. Have you been sleeping all right? What happened after that?’

  Ruby revealed her muddy shoes. ‘When I came to, I found I’d got off my bike and was standing in a ditch, by the old Grendon place. I’ve never had anything like that happen to me before.’

  ‘Didn’t something dreadful happen on the Grendon farm once, so I was told? A murder or something? Get some more carrier bags out, will you, love?’

  ‘What do you think it all means, Bridget?’

  As she asked this, she was moving into the little crowded rear room to sit down as advised. Bridget, however, was emerging from her brief sym
pathetic mode and thinking of her meringues.

  ‘Means you’re going daft, if you ask me. Germany, my foot! In Field Dalling! Now let’s get busy.’

  Although Ruby had her nip of brandy and got busy as instructed, she remained preoccupied. Normally she did not worry; she had cultivated forgetfulness. Behind the ominous vision which had visited her, unpleasant enough in itself, lay an anxiety that in some peculiar way she might have invented it all herself: that it had been a product of will rather than accident, just as, she had once seen on TV, there was a debate going on among people to whom such things mattered as to whether the universe itself was a product of will or accident.

  Nor had it escaped her troubled mind that the old crone in her vision might well have been her mother. Perhaps at this moment her mother was lying on the floor of No. 2 Clamp Lane dying of a heart attack. The vision had been a psychic projection, whatever that was. The strange message, ‘People saw you die by the seaside’, must connect with her mother’s desire to revisit Clacton.

  Yet, Clacton … With its bright banal sands, its coarse amusements, its stinking food shops … How different it was from the melancholy cellar-encased atmosphere in which the voice in the vision had pronounced, as if it were a note of doom, the picture-postcard word ‘seaside’…

  She could not wait to get home and see that all was well. Yet she feared to go. The vision undermined her simple courage in existence.

  That day, Ray Tebbutt was far from his wife’s thoughts. It was also true that she was far from his. As he worked in the garden centre, he worried about his three hundred pounds. The morrow would be the last day of the month when – so he believed – the credit company would start to charge him interest on the unsettled account.

  He had to get the money back from Mike Linwood; yet he would humiliate himself in so doing. Mike’s dreadful decision to enter the Church … well, it put Jean and the boys at risk. Perhaps the Linwood family could afford that piddling sum even less than the Tebbutts. He was furious with himself for the way in which the loan had come to dominate his thinking. It was untrue, as he had once supposed, that only the rich were obsessed with money; the poor thought about it all the time.