Remembrance Day

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘We believe we have discovered such a linkage in the case of the four deaths. The two women and two men who were killed all had histories of prior catastrophe, or else close psychic linkage with catastrophe.

  ‘In the case of the two women killed. Jennifer Tebbutt (28) was obsessed by the fear of nuclear annihilation. As we know, fear and desire are close. Agnes Silcock (75) had lived through two World Wars, bombed out in each of them.

  ‘In the case of the two men killed. Both had their origins in Europe. Both had suffered from the invasion of their countries by hostile forces. We obtained much of Mayor’s life history from Daphne Mayer; a synopsis is appended. More data is required in the case of the Czech, Vacek, but investigation suggests he was involved with international arms smuggling. (More information is held in official sources, but emergence of Czechoslovakia from Communist domination has not led to easier accessibility of secret material in London, Prague, or Washington.)

  ‘Both Vacek and Jennifer Tebbutt were merely visiting the Dianoya. They had occupied a room – in fact Room Two – for two days previously. They had checked out on the morning (Friday) prior to the explosion to visit Norwich, and were planning to return to London on the Sunday afternoon. Agnes Silcock was staying in the hotel on her granddaughter’s (Tebbutt’s) recommendation. Tebbutt and Vacek had returned briefly to the Dianoya to visit Silcock and Tebbutt’s parents. Their luggage remained outside in their parked car in Dunes Drive.

  ‘We interviewed Mrs Ruby Tebbutt, mother of the deceased girl. She had earlier had a strong premonition concerning “a death at the seaside” (she termed it “a vision”), which she had related to a second party. This is evidence for our hypothesis.

  ‘We are researching the life histories of the surviving hotel occupants (where they can be traced) for the sake of comparison. We expect results to confirm our initial findings, which is of the existence of a transpsychic reality, perhaps already foreshadowed in the popular phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy”, drawing people who have suffered sorrow towards further sorrow.

  ‘Without anticipating final results of our survey, we believe that the four deaths will be seen to represent a kind of unhappy self-fulfilment for the persons involved.’

  Silence fell. The two older men, Embry and Stern, tended to look up at the plaster strap work of the ceiling. Gordon Levine rose unbidden and poured them glasses of white wine.

  Accepting his glass, Embry looked up at the young man and said earnestly, ‘I expect you see all the implications of this research, Gordy. If my thesis proves correct, the world is about to change for the better. We are going to see clearly, and for the first time, what leads mankind into disastrous situations, from solitary suicide to global war. For the first time, psychic factors will take precedence over the economic, political, and nationalistic factors which flow from them.’

  Beyond a curt nod of his head, Levine gave no sign of having heard this speech. Taking his glass with him, he went over to the long windows, to stand looking out at the wintry quadrangle.

  ‘What happened to this Irish chap, Cole?’ Stern asked, peering at his report.

  ‘He got away, Sir Alastair.’

  ‘According to your theory, should he not have perished in the explosion?’

  ‘He may yet meet a bloody end. So one can predict.’

  ‘“Those who live by the sword”…’

  Both men fell silent. Stern put his elbows on his desk, supported his chin, and stared towards the television set across the room. He looked gloomy. Embry shuffled his papers and coughed.

  It was Levine who broke the silence, speaking from his position at the window, arms folded, clutching his half-empty glass.

  ‘Professor Embry, you will no doubt be able to prove your case, to show that misery attracts misery, or whatever it is, because that is what you are setting out to do. Your name will be enhanced as a result. I can see that the idea of transpsychic reality has its attractions. But whatever facts you align to support it – excuse me if I speak bluntly – I shall still regard it as poppycock.’

  Embry’s nostrils elongated. He sat upright in his chair. ‘Facts aren’t important to you. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Not at all. Facts have their place.’ Stern had swivelled in his chair and shook his head at his son-in-law, but Levine continued. ‘Don’t you insult the dead by fitting them neatly into some cock-eyed theory? I don’t know who these four people were who died in the Yarmouth hotel, but they all appear to be very ordinary. You have no proof, have you, that this Czech Vacek was a dealer in arms? As for the others – well, one, Mayor, was the owner of the hotel. One was a young woman in business, with social concerns. One was an old country woman – Silcock, wasn’t it? Ordinary English people. Not especially interesting. Why engineer it to look as if their deaths were in any way sought after?

  ‘No, Professor. They were just on holiday, all except Mayor. Now they’re dead, let’s think of them, and the injured, simply as ordinary people. Like the rest of us, they lived out their lives as best they could. We all have to do it.’

  ‘You’re being sanctimonious, Gordy. I’m trying to be scientific.’

  ‘That’s my complaint. You’re not being scientific. These four people were caught in a dreadful mischance. That’s all. The workings of chance.’

  ‘Hengist’s position, surely,’ interposed Stern, in his dry voice, looking from one to the other, ‘is that there are laws of chance. What he calls a circumstance-chain.’

  ‘They were caught in a dreadful mischance,’ Levine repeated. ‘A mischance which those who survive will remember for the rest of their lives. Let’s hope the dead were at least as happy as it’s possible to be in a troubled world.’

  At that, Embry rose to his feet, pulling off his half-frames to wag them at Levine. ‘You’ll forgive me if I say that those are the words of a wimp. God, man, can’t we do any better than a few pieties? Something happened. I want to find out why. Can’t we academics look around us and invest good hard cash in finding a way to beat killing? This wasn’t old age or cancer or a fall from a cliff. This was a bomb going off, killing innocent people. Ordinary English people, like you say. But why them exactly? I want hard understanding, not conventional condolences.’

  As Embry sighed deeply, Levine started to speak, but Embry brushed his words aside. ‘I need the backing of this university. It is not impossible that we can penetrate the enigma of what makes us as a species seek disaster, opt for it. I say we don’t have to lie down and take what is coming to us.’

  He turned to Stern, who had remained in his chair, listening gravely to the argument. ‘I’m not here to be put on trial, Sir Alastair. I’m merely here to make my case – to you.’

  ‘Quite, quite.’

  ‘Excuse my anger, but I can’t help feeling your son-in-law’s attitude is all too defeatist, too European – too British.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ Levine said, setting down his glass and coming forward. He had turned pale, and spoke quietly and swiftly. ‘I am European, Professor. I am British. I’m also a Jew. So far, I’ve stayed clear of catastrophe in my life. Nevertheless, always in my conscious thought – or on the edge of it at least – is the knowledge of that appalling catastrophe, Hitler’s destruction of six million Jews and other races. Many members of my family perished in those dreadful years, those dreadful events.

  ‘If your crackpot theory holds water in any way, then those six million victims wished their deaths. Right? That’s absurd and disgusting. Disgusting. I will not accept such a cruelly deceitful proposition.’

  ‘Nevertheless—’ Embry began, but Levine was in full spate.

  ‘And I too, with that catastrophe in my bones, built into my whole world picture, should be predestined for catastrophe, if we believed your proposition. I find that idea disgusting too.

  ‘To be honest, I prefer the old Talmudic concept of the Hand of God. God at least moves in a mysterious way. Whatever miseries He inflicts on His people, at least we are no
t lemmings.’

  Embry thumped his fist on the principal’s desk. ‘I’ve listened to such rubbish before. “God” is simply an invention of the human mind – an invention, Levine, designed to smother the question of why we suffer. Forget it! Forget God! Think present day.

  ‘You say we’re not lemmings. We are lemmings. We go on believing the old shibboleths, or even sillier new ones. I want to cure that. We’re always running to disaster, just like lemmings. Not “wished” disasters, as you keep saying. Merely avoidable. Avoidable in the same way so-called automobile “accidents” are ninety-nine per cent avoidable if you cut out social factors like drink, tiredness, inattention, recklessness, and so on.

  ‘No, let me finish! Just when things internationally seem to be looking up, wham, along comes another war or invasion or revolution. That’s careless existence-driving. We can’t go on that way. It’s time for new understanding. I have taken a substantial first step along the way. I hope you see that, Principal, even if your son-in-law doesn’t?’

  Embry stared at Stern. Stern stared down at his desk. Then he rose.

  ‘Professor, I need to think this matter over. I have listened to you both, and I apologize if Gordon spoke out of turn. I respect your concern, while being unable as yet to endorse your thesis. Perhaps you would both be kind enough to leave me now, and I will study your summary.’

  He rose, came round his desk, shook Embry’s hand and ventured to put his other hand, frail and white, on Embry’s sturdy shoulder. Embry left the room, taking care to see that Levine preceded him. The door closed behind them.

  Once he was alone, Sir Alastair walked slowly up and down the old room. He had to decide whether to request the university to fund a second year of Embry’s research. Deciding was one of the most difficult aspects of his position. He found it easy to set Embry’s blustering but engaging personality aside and consider the possibilities of his work.

  During the meeting, no stormier than many held in this room, he had left the television set switched on with its volume right down. The set stood in its mahogany case in one corner, pouring forth its images of the world. Stern crossed to his desk, picked up the zapper, and increased volume.

  The day was Remembrance Sunday, Sunday 10 November. The BBC were covering the memorial ceremony at the Cenotaph. A commentator was speaking in a hushed voice as Whitehall filled with people and the service of remembrance began. Strawy yellow sunshine lit the solemn faces of the crowd.

  For Sir Alastair Stern, this gathering in the heart of London was always an emotional event. His wish was that he could have been at home with his wife. Both he and Martha had lost close relations in the Second World War. Their children hated the whole idea of Remembrance Day, finding it merely ghoulish. That, he thought, was their entitlement. He had fought the Nazis in order that his children should be easy in their minds.

  He stood in the middle of the room, head lowered, during the two minutes’ silence. But his thoughts turned again to Embry. Gordon disliked Embry and considered him no scientist, a buffoon rather. But perhaps new lines of thought, new theories, sprang from just such minds as Embry’s. The greatest of all experimental investigators into physical nature was Michael Faraday, yet Faraday was a black-smith’s son who taught himself science – and went on to make discoveries which changed the world. Something in the set of Embry’s face reminded Stern of the expression on Faraday’s face in a photograph he knew well. Was it not possible that his present unlicked and cranky theory might develop into something of value? Might it not be that he was on the way to discovering a kind of yardstick by which a propensity for disaster could be measured? Wasn’t that an eccentricity worth pursuing?

  Stern could not believe for a moment that the four people killed in the Yarmouth outrage were particularly susceptible to that fate. Yet he admired the attempt at measurement, at quantification. It was something – however superficially laughable – to set against the ever-present spectre of war and killings on an unremitting scale. In the human universe, almost everything remained to be done.

  Try as he might, Sir Alastair did not understand transpsychic reality. Embry had written a book on the subject – it lay on his desk at present. He could not believe a word of it. Indeed, he thought it bunkum. However, there was something in the whole farrago to like: the connection between individual and state. It was, as Embry pointed out, too common for individuals to blame their governments for error, where governments always represented something vital in the temperaments of those governed.

  Any system that aided the individual promised ultimately to improve governance. If governance improved, reciprocally ameliorating individual lives, there was a chance that war and killing might slowly atrophy. That part of Embry’s argument had Stern’s full support.

  The two minutes’ silence was over. The world came back to life. The silent masses in Whitehall began to move, sporting their scarlet poppies.

  Cranky. Utopian. Absurd.

  For all that, Stern wanted to give his mad American professor his head, to devise something to stand against the bloodbaths disfiguring the twentieth century. He sat down at his desk and began to think of ways in which he might approach his finance committee.

  In No. 2 Clamp Lane, Ray and Ruby Tebbutt were also watching the proceedings on TV. Ruby had come in from the garden when Ray called, and was still wearing her boots.

  ‘I’ll bring us a cup of coffee,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s just see this first,’ Ray said, without removing his gaze from the screen.

  They sat together on the sofa, watching as the Queen laid a wreath at the base of the Cenotaph, commemorating the dead of two World Wars and the wars succeeding them. Following her came the commanders of the armed services, and the heads of what remained of the British Commonwealth. Laurence Binyon’s epitaph to the fallen was spoken:

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

  We will remember them.

  A military band struck up with cheerful old tunes – ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Goodbye Dolly Grey’ – as ex-servicemen and women began the march past along Whitehall, swinging their arms as of old. The frail grey remnants of the Old Contemptibles, now few in number, came by, earning a special cheer. Everyone earned special cheers on this solemn day: the men of the Eighth Army, the Burma Star veterans, those who had fought in the Falklands and the Gulf Wars, and many more.

  ‘Jenny hated this,’ Ruby said. ‘She said it was all bullshit and militarism.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ray. It was all he could manage to say through the lump in his throat. But his thoughts ran on. Of course you were right, Jenny, my love, of course. The poppies are laid for you too. You also died by an enemy bomb. But all your fierce opposition to militarism – it did no good. Perhaps it was just a premonition of how you were going to die. Perhaps your hatred of that militaristic side of England showed itself by your going off with that Czech.

  No, that can’t be true. My thoughts are tired of thinking about you, Jenny. What is true? Heaven help us if that bugger Mike Linwood has the truth … The side of England you hated was not necessarily the side I hate. But the love of country goes much deeper – and isn’t so easy to express. Except in war, of course, when you can die for your country. Perhaps that’s why wars are popular, fought not for hate as generally assumed, but for love …

  When Ruby rose to go and make the coffee, Ray also stood, using his stick. He still had trouble with his injured legs; age did not improve them. He stared out across the lane at the derelict No. 1 cottage, while listening to the silver band in London playing ‘Colonel Bogey’.

  The poppies are for you, Jenny, my love. And for Mum and Dad, killed in the last war. The Tebbutts are a funny old lot, when you think. Death runs in the family … We’ll never forget you, Jenny. Where you’re concerned it’s always Remembrance Day.

  Hobbling, he followed Ruby into the kitchen.

  A further change in Czechoslovakia’s arms industry is signalled by the makers of Semtex – t
he plastic explosive – seeking Western partners. (Guardian, 1.2.91.) British company ICI visited the chemical works where Semtex is made at some point during 1989, ‘with an eye to forming a joint venture’ stated Jane’s Defence Weekly, 16.2.91

  Campaign Against the Arms Trade

  April 1991 Newsletter, 50p.

  Those who constantly recall their history are doomed to repeat it.

  HENGIST M. EMBRY

  THE SQUIRE QUARTET

  Life in the West

  Forgotten Life

  Remembrance Day

  Somewhere East of Life

  Copyright

  The Friday Project

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  First published in Great Britain in 1993 by HarperCollins

  This edition published by The Friday Project in 2012

  REMEMBRANCE DAY. Text copyright © Brian Aldiss 1993. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work.

  ISBN 978-0-00-746118-9

  EPub Edition © APRIL 2012 ISBN: 978-0-00-746117-2

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