Ruins

by Brian Aldiss

  Gladys Lee had one of the small terraced houses off Redan Wood Road, where a monastery had once stood. The area had been heavily bombed during the war; it was now rebuilt on a more modest scale. An old retired nurse with a glass eye came to wash Gladys and clean her house every morning.

  Gladys Lee was eighty-eight. Her white hair was neatly set and she wore a string of pearls outside a well-cut green suit. She was frail, her flesh like an ancient beach.

  ‘Come in, Hugh.’ She made the effort of standing to greet him. She walked with a stick, bent double, and looked pained. Her pearls chattered among themselves. When seated in the tall cane-backed chair she seemed more in command and surveyed Billing with some authority.

  On an impulse, he gave her his digital watch as a present. She was amazed by it.

  ‘It was very cheap,’ he said in apology.

  ‘They saved money by leaving off the winder,’ she explained.

  Her living room looked out over a small damp garden, given up to ferns and green slime, to a narrow area of the street. He reconnoitred the contents of the room as if seeking out snipers; certainly, loaded as it was with unfashionable furniture and vases of dried foliage, it could provide cover for an enemy. The overall shape was indeterminate, rendered more so by the tarnished mirror over the fireplace. On the mantelpiece was lodged the postcard of the Empire State Building he had sent to Gladys over a year ago. Clearing his throat, he sat on the edge of a chaise-longue, hands clasped between his knees, and answered her questions.

  He was amazed at how much the old lady found out about him within the first twenty minutes.

  After that time, as though she had now heard enough, she said, ‘Well, it’s tea-time. Shall we have tea, or would you prefer vodka?’

  ‘As you like, Gladys.’

  ‘It’s not as I like, Hugh. You are the guest. However, as you are kind enough to pass the decision to me, I vote we have both the tea and the vodka. Lapsang Souchong and Cossack, I’m afraid.’

  Two days later, hardly knowing why, he went back to see Gladys Lee again. He chose the morning, just before eleven o’clock, when the old nurse was still fussing over her charge. Of Alice there was no sign; doubtless she was in a mental home by now. Gladys was feeling unwell; although her hands shook badly, she greeted Billing amiably enough, though with a warning: ‘I’m not at my best this early in the day.’

  She reclined on the chaise-longue with a rug over her legs while Billing took the cane-backed chair. The nurse served them tea and it was then, in the middle of their conversation, that Billing first heard the meretricious trumpets.

  He was familiar with most bugle calls. This one he could not recognise. It sounded rather jazzy; perhaps it was of a non-military nature. Confused as to whether it was a bugle or a trumpet, he missed something the old lady said. Her skin, like the mirror above her, was speckled with brown, providing perfect camouflage.

  The thin mendacious notes alarmed him, bringing to mind, for some reason, a scene in a forest clearing, where a monstrous something was being buried. He stood up in alarm. Muttering excuses, he went to the window to peer into the lachrymose street. Nothing was to be seen but pavement and brick and a selection of yesterday’s cars.

  ‘Music?’ Gladys repeated. ‘I hear nothing. You make me nervous, I’m afraid. Come and sit down. Why are you nervous?’

  ‘Perhaps it comes from next door.’

  ‘The Armstrongs do not play music at this hour of day. They’re very quiet. He used to be with the Admiralty.’

  After a while the music faded, was gone, was forgotten.

  Billing rented a room near Covent Garden, above a veterinarian and pet shop infested with budgerigars, another English obsession. It was 1982 and already the unemployment queues were growing, but he found himself a job as porter in a supermarket. He had seen supermarkets from the administrative side in the days when his father had opened one in their home town. It soon became apparent to him that better ways of laying out the store existed, so that facilities for both staff and customers could be improved at little expense.

  The manageress of the supermarket, Mrs Dwyer, was a pleasant woman of about Billing’s age. She dressed brightly, was efficient, and did not bully the girls who worked at her cash-desks. Billing spent several evenings in his room, drawing and colouring plans. When they were complete, he presented them humbly to Mrs Dwyer for her consideration.

  ‘I like a man with a few brains in his head,’ Mrs Dwyer said, approvingly, crossing her legs and adjusting her skirt.

  The next time one of the directors of the chain was visiting, Mrs Dwyer summoned Billing into the office. As a result of their discussion, Billing was offered an office job with the parent firm. He travelled from shop to shop as an unofficial time-and-motion study man, creating new space from old. Once his work took him as far afield as Slough. He still visited Gladys Lee.

  Gladys often surprised him, upsetting many of his preconceptions about the elderly. In Billing’s limited experience, old people complained about the present day and told interminable stories about silly things they had done in their youth, whilst sneering about any silly things one did in one’s own youth. Gladys was not at all like that.

  She had done a lot of silly things, like being ship-wrecked off Madeira, getting lost in a storm in Marseilles, spending a night locked in a church in Cortina and marrying a crazy Swede. These matters she related almost incidentally; they were always subject to her clear perspective on the nature of human life, which was not so much a Christian one – Billing was surprised to find her quietly pagan – as one filled with many of the traditional Christian virtues.

  She said as she poured Billing a cup of tea, ‘I often dream of him,’ meaning the Swede she had married. ‘Though it’s difficult to see people’s faces in dreams, don’t you find? … I told him when we were first married that I did not wish to live in a world in which he had no existence, yet here I still am.’

  ‘And pretty permanent, by the looks of things,’ Billing said, heartily.

  ‘You think so?’

  To break a difficult silence, he said, ‘I have a dream which keeps returning over the years.’

  She vaguely indicated the bookcase behind her. ‘In one of those books … I don’t look at them as often as I used to … in one of them, it says that recurrent dreams are the consolation of those who have failed to reach adulthood. Is that the case with you, do you suppose?’

  Suddenly he thought of Cathy, with her childlike dream of becoming a Hollywood star. Her waif-like body, the casual way he had lost her on the way to the baseball game, rose again to reproach him. Surprising himself, he said, ‘I don’t seem to be any good at keeping hold of love when I have it. Is that … that’s not a failure to reach adulthood, is it?’

  She never gave him any answer he might expect.

  ‘I’m afraid your mother was a very charming woman,’ she said. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Hugh. I liked Florence … I just was not sure whether she liked me. She made people unsure. Perhaps she made you unsure.’

  Billing laughed. ‘I know she did swank a bit. Tell me what you remember about her.’

  He heard nothing to upset him. Gladys was too wise for that. He soon found that he benefited in a mysterious way from her company.

  Despite this, Billing experienced guilt. He could not understand why he now shunned other company. ‘Company’ had once been so dear to him that he had surrendered his identity to it. Nor could he understand why he so enjoyed being with Gladys. As he sat in his room wondering, he heard again the call of the meretricious trumpets and jumped to his feet.

  His left knee gave him trouble. A twinge of rheumatism, no doubt. England was so damp. Nevertheless, the tinny sound drove him into the street.

  The noise vanished. Perversely, he now longed to hear it again.

  It was a mild day in early autumn. The season made him think with sudden longing of his little Jewish ex-wife in Denver, so long ago. He wandered through the night. Occasionally he rested,
dozing fitfully against the flanks of buildings. As it grew light, he strolled in the Notting Hill area, not far from Gladys’ house, watching street markets open. He felt becalmed. He was waiting for something, something like a tune.

  Wandering soon became a habit with him. Night after night, he wandered across London, listening for trumpets. Once or twice, almost daring himself to do it, he went to the terraced house where Gladys lived, sat himself down on the doorstep and dozed. Church clocks chimed, strange dreams visited him, scavenging dogs sniffed him.

  He became known around the early markets. The men there called him ‘Jimmy’. He often helped them to put up a stall or unload a lorry. He was invariably polite and good-natured in a mild way, as if professing scarcely to know himself. He began to neglect his daytime job.

  Gladys’s eighty-ninth birthday approached. He bought her a little silver box with an embossed cherub from a stall in the Portobello Road, a huge bunch of dahlias from Kensington Park Road and a card with yachts on it from a W H Smith branch.

  On the day itself, Gladys Lee wore a new costume, green tweed with a green velvet collar. The pearls were in evidence, also the digital watch. When he called at three o’clock she was feeling well, she told him, and sat with a large-print book beside her on the chaise-longue.

  ‘We’ll have a small Cossack immediately, without fooling about with the preliminaries,’ she said. ‘And by the way, I observe that you are neglecting yourself these days, Hugh. Your suit is very crumpled. Your shoes need a polish.’

  He had not noticed. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘There are some awful people about nowadays. You should not be one of them. You are not like that. Regular haircuts are as important as regular baths.’

  As he was shuffling the dahlias into vases under her instruction and manoeuvring round the obstacles in her room, he realised that her furniture had been allowed to accumulate without thought. There was a way to arrange everything which would improve her life. The chaise-longue on which Gladys habitually sat could be moved to the other side of the long window, so that she would see more sunlight outside, as well as a wider and more lively prospect.

  For a moment Billing stood with the flowers in his hand. He surveyed the dresser, the many shelves, the chairs, the side tables with their freight of vases and wood carvings, the dim Impressionist paintings on the walls. He saw how it could all remain the same, while allowing the old lady easier access to the door and – if the ornate electric fire were shifted slightly – freedom from the draught of which she complained. That night, instead of roving, he worked with his pens and coloured felt tips, replanning her room.

  Gladys Lee regarded Billing over her spectacles. ‘I don’t particularly wish to move a thing. It is preferable that time should not pass in this room. I have become set in my ways. For that reason, if no other, we had better execute your plan. I might even approve the result, I suppose.’

  Billing gently insisted on her retiring to her bedroom whilst he carried out the rearrangements. His master touch was to bring in secretly from outside a full-length mirror which he had bought on the cheap from a dealer. He screwed the mirror to the wall just inside her living room door. As she sat gazing out of the window, Gladys would need only to turn her head to see most of her treasures, either directly or by reflection. Smiling, he went to fetch her.

  Gladys professed herself delighted with everything.

  ‘You are a wonderful and imaginative man, Hugh,’ she said, touching his arm fondly.

  He repeated the words to himself that night. A moon sailed overhead, flooding the streets of London with its silver dust. Just to see it in its course inexplicably lifted his spirits. He roamed as far as the Tower of London, repeating, ‘Jimmy, you’re a wonderful and imaginative man.’ The words were like a song. Once, far in the distance, somewhere up the river, he heard the haunting bugle call, counterpointing his song.

  Next evening, as he sat down facing her, Gladys said, ‘You’ve transformed my room, Hugh, dear. I have always preserved a view of life which I cannot express in words, I’m afraid. It concerns a connection between all things in our lives. You understand my meaning?’

  ‘My life has been very disconnected, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I believe that the spiritual is a metaphor for the physical and, equally, that the physical is a metaphor for the spiritual. You felt compelled to transform my room and I had to accept it – as I would have done from nobody else, Hugh – because of the way you have transformed my life. Can you stay a little longer than usual this evening?’

  The question alarmed him. He glanced at her brass clock and said, ‘I’m a bit short of time.’

  ‘Not so short as I.’

  They regarded each other.

  ‘There is no reason to look startled. I shall never impose on you. Even if I were tempted to do so, I should not, for fear you would disappear for ever – though in my case, for ever is not a particularly long time. What was I going to say?’

  Sometimes her conversation ran off the tracks. On this occasion, with an effort, she brought it back.

  ‘Yes, you always say your life is very disconnected. I listen to what you tell me, Hugh, dear, though you may not think so. Your life is much more connected than you know and you would be more content if you perceived its connections. Perhaps it is my duty to reveal those connections to you.’

  Billing blinked a bit. ‘I’m not complaining about my life, Gladys, dear.’

  ‘Ah, well, you should, I’m afraid. You should shape your life as you shape my room. It’s the only life you’ll get. You don’t believe in that nonsense about reincarnation, I hope, do you? In a civilised community like ours, life should be shaped, much as a work of art. One’s hope of remaining intact lies in preserving a continuity. An artistic continuity, since you and I are not religious.’

  ‘Life is continuous. Even my life.’ He was pleasantly mystified.

  Her book slipped to the floor. She motioned him to leave it there, lest his movement distract her.

  ‘By continuity, I mean that we remain in touch with all the vitalising moments of various periods, dear, right back to childhood.’

  He sighed. ‘My childhood was rather short of vitalising moments. I prefer not to think of it.’

  She raised her feet slowly, bending forward in pain, and brought them slowly to rest on the damask of the chaise-longue.

  ‘I climbed out of bed in the night, do you know. There was a beautiful moon, but I heard a fearful crash somewhere. Fearful. It sounded nearby and it continued for a long while. Like a Zeppelin crashing.

  ‘I went out on the landing, yes, yes, the curtains really need to be dry-cleaned, and I think I went out into the street. Did I? I can’t recall now, it’s all so long ago, but there she was. She was smiling. It’s no good arguing, I said. I saw her so clearly …’

  Gladys lapsed into abstraction, but after a few seconds resumed.

  ‘There was nobody about at all. Just the moon. I wondered that everyone wasn’t out in the street, just as in Stockholm, because it was such a noise. I don’t mean Stockholm, I mean Madrid. What did I say Stockholm for? One of the big airliners from Heathrow had crashed on Shepherd’s Bush. I could hear it – appalling.

  ‘It caught fire and kept on and on ploughing through row after row of houses, burning like a torch. You could watch all the people jumping clear and skyscrapers falling. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I rang your phone number and eventually a very grumpy man answered, but he said you weren’t in. He said it was four in the morning and I should go back to bed, although it was as light as day. It was a wonder the plane didn’t strike this house. They come over so low, you know. Perhaps they are German. Where are they all going?’

  ‘I hope you weren’t frightened, Gladys. It was just something you imagined.’ He regarded her anxiously, picturing her frail figure alone in the moonlit street, trying to place in the sky the rending noises she heard in her head. Possibly the crashing airliner was a herald of one of her ‘attacks’ of
which she had once guardedly spoken. When the cells of the brain stem collapsed from lack of oxygen, perhaps they both sounded like, and actually were, an air disaster, exemplifying what she had said about the spiritual and physical being metaphors for one another.

  ‘What was I talking about?’ she asked, looking fixedly at him. Her face took on a mask-like quality. ‘What did you say about Stockholm?’ With no marked transition from her state of confusion and without changing her tone of voice, she went on. ‘As I told you, my first husband was Swedish. He was a psychoanalyst, although he came to reject much of Freud’s teaching in view of his own experiences with his patients. I have his books over there; you must read them some time.’ She waved her stick in the direction of her bookcase. ‘I’m afraid I don’t look at them as often as I used to …

  ‘I helped him a great deal. He valued my feminine insight. Oh yes, there is such a thing as female insight, although people make themselves sick nowadays trying to deny it. Wearing tights, too, is bad for female hygiene …’

  She looked for a long while at a picture of a horse and a peasant beneath a tree. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather tired, Alice … I wanted to ask you this: have you had any recurring dreams throughout your life? Perhaps you would bring me a glass of water.’

  Distressed, Billing hurried to the kitchen to fetch her a drink. The kitchen was the room in which he had first met the Alice whom Gladys’s words accidentally conjured up.

  He held the glass to Gladys’s lips. Her livid hooks of hands closed over his, shaking the glass until the water splashed her dress.

  ‘What can I do? Call the doctor?’

  ‘That man will do me no good. No, leave, Hugh, leave. I hate being ill. Even more, I hate you to see me ill. Leave. Come tomorrow, come tomorrow and I’ll be better. Come tomorrow and we’ll talk about dreams. You will come?’

  He kissed her cheek. ‘Bless you, Gladys, dear. Of course I’ll come.’

  Billing took a bus back to his digs. Mrs Dwyer was waiting for him, standing about the hall in her fawn coat, clutching a fawn handbag under one arm. His heart jumped.