Ruins

by Brian Aldiss

  RUINS

  Brian Aldiss

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  First published in Great Britain in 1987 by Hutchinson, an imprint of Century Hutchinson Ltd

  Copyright © Brian Aldiss 1987

  Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

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

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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.

  Source ISBN: 9780008412562

  Ebook Edition © March 2021 ISBN: 9780008412586

  Version: 2021-02-04

  Dedication

  ‘Our dreams have jurisdiction only over ourselves’

  Bunny Jingadangelow

  for David and Sue, with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Note on the text

  Ruins

  Restorations

  About the Author

  Also by Brian Aldiss and published by HarperCollins

  About the Publisher

  Note on the text

  The text of this edition was generated by scanning an earlier print copy of the story in its first edition. The text is a product of its period and presented here as it was in its first publication.

  Ruins

  That afternoon, they went to the movies to see Ali McGraw in Love Story, Ashley’s movie of the moment, which was showing in Times Square. Afterwards they took tea in the Algonquin lounge since Ashley had an interest in the hotel cat. They happened to meet some old friends there, one of whom had known Hugh Billing in his musical days. They all visited a few bars, ate Mexican in the only Mexican restaurant they knew, took in some jazz on the fringes of Harlem and arrived back late at the apartment.

  A cable announcing the death of Hugh’s mother was awaiting him.

  ‘Do you want me to go to Great Britain with you? I have never been in Britain,’ Ashley said. ‘We could take a look at London and Land’s End.’

  ‘I’d better go alone. They say you travel faster that way.’

  She said nothing for a moment, contemplating him, certain he would not return. ‘That’s just an airline ad, isn’t it? Something eats at you all the time, Hugh Billing. Your brain sure is your erogenous zone.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Hugh said, thinking maybe he should shave off his moustache or trim it just a bit. He tried to recall what London looked like.

  The years had flown since Billing was last in his native country. London, seen from the taxi as he rode in from the airport, frightened him. Dirt, graffiti, crowds, miscellaneous people. Why should someone wish to write UNDERARM ODOUR KILLS on a brick wall under a flyover? He felt himself unchanged, although he was older and his moustache was trimmed. He was thin and neat of figure – an ethos of frugality, learnt from a woman in California, had ensured as much. But he could no longer think in an English way. His clothes were American, he spoke American. The shower in his London hotel wept all the night on to the cracked tiles and was cold towards him in the morning.

  The years had flown. His old friends had gone from their favourite haunts. Most of those who had worked in the music business had retired or died. His sister June was dead, her widowed husband working for a shipping line in the Persian Gulf. Other people he had known had either gone abroad or had been scattered, as if a squall had blown up.

  The years had flown. Only the lawyers who had sent the cable to New York were friendly, in their professional way. They gave him details of his mother’s death, where the funeral was to be held, and the address of Gladys Lee, who was handling the arrangements for a small reception after the burial service. Gladys Lee was no relation of Billing’s: she was his absent brother-in-law’s old mother. Mrs Gladys Lee. He barely remembered her. Everyone at the reception looked strange and short of Vitamin C.

  ‘Your mother and I weren’t on too good terms, to be frank, Hugh. She was … not sincere. Still, live and let live.’ She put a hand up to her mouth. ‘In a manner of speaking, that’s to say.’ He couldn’t get used to the English idioms. Gladys was so ancient; Billing wandered off to talk to someone else.

  ‘I’ve just come back from Spain. It’s a wonderful place, very orderly for a Mediterranean country. I’ll say that for Franco – he does keep everything in order.’ The man who was talking to Billing across their sherry glasses was evidently of the old school, his dark suit and the aroma of moth balls it exuded being ideal for funerals. ‘I hate death, don’t you? Always have done.’

  At the same time, he was looking Billing up and down through his horn-rimmed spectacles. He found Billing odd and Billing knew it. Only women – themselves almost always odd, Billing reflected – found him okay, accepted the fact that he fitted nowhere.

  The front room of Gladys Lee’s small terraced house was crowded with people who seemed puzzled by Billing. They were all old and had perfected ways of talking in patent accents. He remembered none of them. Their hearing aids were aligned against him.

  The man with the horn-rimmed spectacles led Billing over to a man mouldering in an armchair, bald of head and dull of eye, whom he introduced as his elder brother, Arthur. Arthur was scratching at his left cheek as though to check its blood-content.

  ‘He won’t be long for this world, will you, Arthur?’

  ‘Don’t let’s seem to hurry him away,’ Billing said, on the older brother’s behalf. Wasn’t Arthur allowed to make his own decision regarding mortification? Typical English, he thought. What’s wrong with the country?

  ‘Your mother liked Arthur,’ said the horn-rimmed man pointedly, as if pronouncing a curse. ‘Flo liked you, didn’t she, Arthur?’

  Arthur smiled, sighed, and returned to his cheek.

  The funeral service, too, had been a disaster. The preacher had been late and either coldly inebriated or just over the safety limit of a nervous breakdown. Clasping the prayer book upside down, he had muttered furtively over grave and coffin, casting his words to the disinterested wind.

  Straining his ears, Billing caught the words ‘… whom God hath joined … cast asunder.’ The wedding service having been intoned, the mourners made their way back to Gladys Lee’s place, to seek in her sherry a refuge from mortality.

  ‘You weren’t at the service?’ Billing now enquired of Arthur, not long for this world.

  The bald man looked up and smiled in the general direction of Billing. He raised a glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and, drinking, spilled some of the liquid down his chin. His furry white tongue failed to reach the elusive drops where they clung to the wrinkles of his face.

  ‘I’m excused funerals,’ he said. ‘Being blind, I don’t see the point any more.’

  Could he actually be making a
joke? Billing was uncertain. He had lost his ear for English irony.

  ‘You’ve got your sense of humour still. That’s the main thing.’ He recalled that one spoke in such a way at family funerals.

  Arthur nodded thoughtfully and fumbled with his chin as if it were newly discovered territory. ‘I don’t get as much fun out of visual gags as I used to,’ he said with regret.

  Seeking relief, Billing looked about for a gleam of happiness, for the sight of a pretty woman. But pretty women had been debarred from this shabby-genteel part of London. There was only old Gladys Lee in her pearls, fragile but grand, playing queen in her generally unvisited rooms.

  They’re so isolated, these people, Billing told himself. As I was. The Americans are much more ingenious at coping with their loneliness. Patriotism is another form of psychotherapy over there. He thought of the mountains of Utah, where he had once skied. Those wild mountains, the way American skiers dressed in bright garments to flash down their slopes like Martians, the sudden fogs which embraced the Snowcat. Loneliness there had been grand opera, solitude a momentary thing with commercial value.

  It was not only the English people. Gladys Lee’s room and everything in it were old. No disgrace in that, or commercial value either. It was just that he had become used to new things: not so much in New York, which was to him curiously ancient, filled with old Jewish and African habits, but the great stretches of Middle America, blue-grass country, where all the furniture in all the houses had been manufactured only the year previously from extruded creamy plastic.

  He excused himself from the company of the blind man and his brother and went in search of a lavatory. The toilet still had an overhead cistern and a chain with a china handle that said Pull. Back in time, he said to himself, as the water gurgled and frothed; I’ve travelled back in time. The 1973 calendar showed a picture of an old horse and cart.

  Lights were on in Gladys Lee’s kitchen, which was next to the john. A sturdy woman of middle age dressed in something that might have been a caftan was bustling about among piles of china.

  ‘Were you after the coffee, dear?’ she called, as Billing’s head appeared round the door. ‘Won’t be long. You can lend a hand if you like. I can’t find where she’s put the bloody tray. There must be one somewhere.’

  He wandered into the kitchen and, in studying the arrangements, took a look at his companion. She was amply designed; brightly painted, florally scented, with a florid way of smoking, as if believing the sleeves of her dress needed to be shaken every time she removed her cigarette from her mouth. Her short hair curled into horns which lay against either cheek. Billing was pleased to see her smoke. All the career women he knew in the States did so.

  ‘I’m Hugh Billing,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, so you’re Hugh Billing.’ She came forward loiteringly, having another puff and a shake. Her eyes were a dark blue and surrounded by freckles which made her, in Billing’s eyes, appear intelligent. ‘I’m Alice. I was looking after your mother, this last year or two. Now I’m helping Gladys out, just for today. It seems to be my role in life, so help me.’

  They shook hands. As he exchanged a few words with her, Billing listened to her North Country accent, remembering it as if rediscovering a forgotten countryside. Complete with old horses and carts.

  ‘Your mother thought the world of you,’ said Alice, without a hint of reproof. ‘Have you written any more of them songs of yours lately?’

  ‘Not lately, no.’

  ‘I liked that “Side Show”. I’ve got a record of it at home, you know. You’re younger than I thought you were, just judging by your mother’s photos.’

  A familiar sensation overcame Billing; like cramp, it made its presence known only when it had set in. She liked him. Fancied him. She wanted a little part of him. Even as he responded by making himself agreeable, he said to himself, ‘This is not for me and I am not interested. From now onwards, I want my life free of involvement.’

  Hugh Billing roused the next morning to feel Alice’s heavy body against his. He lay there with his eyes shut, smelling her floral perfume. Wallflower, possibly. It was a movement of hers which had wakened him.

  Evidently aware that he was awake, Alice turned and put an arm round him. But it was not sex that interested her this morning. She had a number of complaints to deliver, many of them centring on her landlady, Mrs Chivers, who was making her life unnecessarily difficult.

  He listened without comment. He had enjoyed being in bed with this strange and affectionate woman. Sexual excitement had made her cheerful. This morning she needed to offload her woes, her afflictions, which she did in a businesslike way. Despite her conviction to the contrary, little in what she said marked her out as special; neither in her difficulties nor her response to them was there anything that revealed in her a unique essence. Nor did she treat him as in any way individual. He was simply there to be copulated and conversed with.

  Gradually he ceased to listen, trying to wonder instead about the role of fornication in modern life, as he often did. Sometimes it led to revelation, to the discovery of a unique human being. That was always a miracle. More often, it was a cover for a rejection of more complex relationships. The number of women who enjoyed sex for its own sake, as men did, seemed on the increase, he thought; they were smoking more too. It was the Pill.

  There he paused. He did not want Alice. She was possessing him beyond the call of duty: Mrs Chivers was no concern of his. He thought of all the women who had poured out their secrets to him over the years while he lay there, fondling them, having no secrets of his own he was prepared to offer in return.

  Why was he so negative? Why had he not even a Mrs Chivers with her mean peeping-tom habits with which to respond? He was a blank sheet on which women scribbled their inner graffiti. Billing was not displeased with this striking image of himself.

  He recalled his dead mother with sorrow. He had neglected her.

  ‘Did you get on well with my mother, Alice?’

  A pause.

  ‘She liked to swank a bit, did your mother.’

  Something in her voice chilled Billing.

  ‘I must get up. I’ve got a lot to do,’ he said, trying to think of something.

  ‘There’s a spare towel in the bathroom,’ Alice said, stoical before his abruptness.

  Her washing facilities were barely adequate. He recalled with regret Ashley’s cosy little shower-room in her apartment in the Village. Not that he intended to go back to Ashley. He felt a kind of indifference rising in him and feared it. And he was tired of seeing Love Story.

  As he washed, familiar music drifted to his ears. Alice was playing his old hit record ‘Side Show’ as she dressed.

  Rinsing his face, he glanced up and saw in the mirror that she was looking round the door at him. Only her head and one shoulder appeared. In her eyes was a fixed stare. The stare did not alter when she saw Billing had noticed her. This failure of a human signal unnerved him. He stood motionless, glaring back at her in the mirror. Alice still gave no sign and simply withdrew her head after a while when the record stopped.

  Billing buried his face in the towel. More than anything, he dreaded insanity. Insanity. The very word exercised a hypnotic effect on his faculties. He contrasted Alice’s cheerfulness of the night before with her dark mood, her suspicion of her landlady this morning. She had seemed normal enough, but … that stare … perhaps she was schizophrenic.

  He had always feared that insanity might be catching. It was definitely time to move on.

  Forty-four was an uncertain age for Billing. He recognised it as the age when men take to drink, divorce or homeopathy; but for Billing life had always contained the uncertain. His father, whom he had idolised, had died young, falling from a ladder while painting the guttering of their house. He remembered clutching his sister at the time and weeping – weeping a little more than he need have done, in order to try and impress upon her the solemnity of the event. He had wanted June to care more than she had se
emed to do.

  He had pursued music vigorously. In music he could drown out the tragedy. As an adolescent in the fifties he got work with small bands; jazz and dance. What he liked best was trad, although, in the early sixties, a lot of other things were happening which threatened trad. Billing wrote a number of compositions of his own and managed to get solo work in various clubs. He played piano. The manager of one club advised him that he should sing, to hold the audience’s attention. In something less than two hours, he wrote words to ‘Side Show’ – loose words, he felt, mocking, yet somehow affectionate about the world.

  An agent who heard him sing and play brought Billing into a recording studio. Early in 1962, ‘Side Show’ became Number 1 on what was then still called the Hit Parade. Later in the year ‘Count to Zero’ rose to Number 2. A few months later ‘Crisis’ fared almost as well. Hugh Billing became part of the sixties.

  ‘Side Show’ remained in common memory and became a standard. He enjoyed no more successes, but the realisation slowly dawned that ‘Side Show’ was likely to pay his way through life. Provided he lived modestly, he need never work again. His manager had arranged an American Tour. He played in fifteen cities then headed for Denver where he had met a girl he liked. He never returned to England.

  Or not for some years.

  He married the Denver girl (she was Jewish, from Calgary in Canada) but the marriage did not last. She left Billing and was last seen heading in the direction of California with a bespectacled tax accountant. Billing returned to England for a short while and tried to write more music. But the gift, such as it was, had gone.

  One miserable night, when he was without inspiration or wife, he had his recurrent dream. As usual, mysteriously, it was a week or so before he even recalled he had had it. With ordinary dreams, such things never happened.

  He had been travelling endlessly down a road when two people had come to greet him and take him to their modest home. A log fire awaited him. Although the dream never allowed him to enter the house, he understood that its purpose was to comfort him.