Ruins

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘It always brought me comfort … That is to say, I mean …’ He tried to live with young people because explanations were always due to the old. ‘Each time the dream comes, it has a new significance. It enfolds my life.’

  The old lady sat where she was, still staring into the fire. The nurse brought her a tray of breakfast, consisting of half a grapefruit, two thin slices of toast, coffee and pills, which Gladys regarded without apparent recognition.

  ‘Go into my bedroom, Hugh. Look at the framed engraving hanging on the wall on the far side of my bed.’

  Billing did as he was told. The nurse had thrown back the covers of Gladys’s bed and opened the windows to air the room. The curtains billowed inwards. He held a curtain back with one hand in order to study the picture Gladys had designated.

  The engraving showed a grand ruin. Ferns and small trees were growing over it, so that it resembled a man-made cliff. The original structure, long in disrepair, had patently been intended for reverential purposes: its proportions, its grand arched windows, indicated as much. Centuries and wars had caused its original function to be lost, and its fabric to be largely destroyed. From the fallen masonry, a modest house had been constructed. It stood within the embrace of the old building. From its windows washing hung and people in the costume of the period stood outside it, idly enjoying the sunshine.

  It was a perfect realisation of his dream. He stood transfixed by it, by its grandeur, which he contrasted with his own crude sketches. With a flash of perception – what was it but a flash that visited him, like lightning in a summer night? – he saw that neither building held much interest alone, the ruin or the house. Only in their juxtaposition was there piquancy, a cause for speculation.

  As he stood in front of the engraving, he had a godlike view of himself from above, standing before the spectacle of the world. His pains, his losses, were encompassed within the greater panorama of his existence. Even the memories of his parents, his dear lost wife, were less than the love they had shared.

  ‘It’s one of Piranesi’s Views of Rome,’ Gladys said, bent double in the doorway. ‘Perhaps you can read the inscription underneath. I was never good at languages. The grand old building was the mausoleum of Helen, mother of Constantine.’

  The names meant nothing to him. He said – without turning round, without removing his eyes from the picture – ‘Death – a mausoleum. Yes. So with me, a walking bit of antiquity. My makeshift life built within that larger shadow. My flimsy walls the debris of past generations.’

  He was aware of the effort she made to speak.

  ‘That applies to biology in general. Not just to you, or to architecture … Our general inheritance …’

  Not seeing exactly what Gladys meant, he said bitterly, ‘Every day of my life would have been different, better, more productive, if my father had lived.’

  Yet while the words were leaving his lips, he perceived that, as he interpreted the engraving, so must he interpret his life. If his interpretation of the engraving was not forged by all he had lived through it would be nothing more than a meaningless pattern. His existence had design, meaning, piquancy, even to himself, because of the relationship between the sorrows which overshadowed the past and the understanding granted in living moments. The glimpse of unity made him whole. He clung to it as he clung to the crutch.

  ‘Hugh.’ She drew near and rested her yellowed paper hand on his sleeve, either for need of balance or affection. ‘I have always valued that print. It was my husband’s. I’ve never been to Rome … No, not Rome. Someone said something. I liked Stockholm … To me it represents the processes of the mind, the inheritance the new draws from the old, through many generations. Imagine how astonished I was when your sketches recreated virtually the same picture …’

  She gasped with pain and turned slowly back to the door while still speaking. Her frame shook. She rattled the doorknob furiously when she held it for support.

  ‘When you wept, I wept too. Something communicated with us … Many people regard this engraving as a gloomy thing. Not I. Far from it. Well, it has shown us its vitality. Through it something communicated with us.’

  For him, the transitory trumpets were playing.

  When he did not respond, the old woman paused on the landing. ‘This is the occasion for a very early application of vodka, my dear. We can celebrate – nurse, nurse! Where is that bloody old woman?’

  Later, when they were in the living room, Billing in the cane-backed chair with his crutch on the floor beside him, Gladys seated on the chaise-longue and the bottle and ice and glasses between them, he stared at the pattern on the carpet and said, ‘Pictures and dreams – how can they make any difference to the facts of life?’

  ‘Facts are open to interpretation, just as the picture is. It’s not the picture that’s important but its interpretation … Pictures and dreams. No, you removed the chest when we went to live in Malmö. My silk stockings were in that chest. It’s pure carelessness … What was that? No. What was I saying?’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t know. About interpretation. I’m out of a job, I know that. Nowhere to go, life in ruins.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Everything with any meaning has many meanings. The picture preserves a meaning for us jointly. You see, I am the old ruin, Hugh, and you are the new building. You must come and live … within my walls. Before I fade out … There are two rooms upstairs never used. You can throw out a lot of the rubbish. All rubbish. You can be at home here. I shall try not to be a burden to you. I know I’m a burden. You need not see me every day, even. We could make it a rule of the house. Only every other day and then only for so long. An hour, two …’

  He regarded her old and lined face, her trembling white hair, the hands that rested, one in her lap, one on the curved back of the chaise-longue.

  ‘I’d have to be free to come and go, Gladys.’

  She sighed deeply and coughed. Pursing her mouth until the lower part of her face was a maze of wrinkles, she asked, ‘Is that your only response, to evade responsibility?’

  ‘I don’t want mothering.’

  She gave a dry laugh. ‘That kind of untruth is another evasion, dear. What’s certain is that in my last years I do not require a baby son to look after. Perhaps my offer was a mistake, too generous. I’m weak in the head, that I know, I’m afraid.’

  Billing went down on his good knee beside her and clutched the skeletal hand in her lap.

  ‘Take me in,’ he said. ‘Please take me in. I’ll just have to be free to come and go, that’s all. There’s a woman I must see again.’

  The lane was long. In his dream he seemed to have been walking for ever. He did not recognise the curiously distorted trees that grew on either side of the way.

  Yet the ruin ahead was familiar. It had been an ecclesiastical building in time gone by and now bore a crown of grass and ferns growing from the remains of the roof and the broken window-sockets. The evening sunlight bathed it in a ruddy glow.

  Two people stood in the middle of the road, waiting for him. He felt hostility in the air, before realising that it was his hostility towards them.

  The strangers escorted him round to the back of the ruin. There, in contrast to the general decay, stood a modest dwelling built from fallen masonry. He recognised that he was in exotic country; yet the occasion held a haunting sense of home-coming.

  Washing hung in a small courtyard, strung between old and new walls. They walked under its damp folds in order to enter by the front door, which stood invitingly open. The elderly couple moved aside to allow him to go in first, their hands extended in a gesture of welcome.

  He hesitated for a moment, looking round uncertainly, seeing for the first time how wild the country was all about. The setting sun filled it with mist and shadows. He turned. This time he entered the dwelling.

  Restorations

  ‘I shall never be able to look back on the funeral with any pleasure,’ Rose said, gloomily. ‘This just about ruins the day.’

&n
bsp; She had been standing beside the car, the poor defunct car, with her arms akimbo; now she climbed into the back seat and closed the door firmly, not slamming it but shutting it loudly enough to express a finite but not negligible amount of disgust.

  Billing made no answer. He stood where he was, hands in pockets in front of the car, regarding the scenery.

  The stretch of road was deserted, apart from an occasional lorry growling by. They were stuck somewhere north of London. No building was in sight. Trees lined the road, with fields beyond. They were waiting on the northbound side of the road, in a lay-by into which they had pushed the Austin. Tall trees, firs and ruinous pines a century old, formed themselves up into untidy woodland beside them. It was almost dark. Minute by minute the air thickened.

  The breakdown people should arrive at any time. Hugh did not permit himself to say the words, knowing that he had spoken the sentence aloud before. It would only annoy further the woman he wanted to console. But the garage was being a long while coming. He had had to walk three miles to a phone box to summon them.

  He made an effort now to stay in touch with Rose, strolling over to her window and saying, in firmly cheerful tones, ‘I’m sorry, I’m no good at dealing with car engines. I expect it’s the armature again.’

  Rose remained looking down. ‘I know, Hugh. You’re the dreamer.’ She had flattened all nuances from the remark, so that only the words remained, spiritless between them.

  Billing turned his back, resuming a contemplation of the roadside copse. It was a chilly February day and the sun had already set behind the trees. While the man and woman waited by the car, the hectic colours of day’s end had died from the sky. Now only muted tones remained: shades of oyster, lemon, pearl and then, nearer the horizon, a series of greys and tones neither grey nor blue. The rough trunks of the trees presented themselves in silhouette against this backdrop, providing an avenue towards the distance.

  It seemed to Billing that from this arrangement of colours and space something spoke to him, addressed him gravely yet comfortingly. He felt an answer arising in himself. Outwardly he was mute, his usual unkempt self contained within the dark suit he had bought especially for Gladys Lee’s funeral.

  He thought, I’m a funny fellow. I wonder if Rose feels all the sensations I do? He was too shy to ask her directly, suspecting that the answer could be deduced – the answer he had found throughout life, that no one felt things as he did. Of course, old Gladys had done, no denying that. But she had become quite gaga towards the end.

  It grew darker yet. He watched the great drama through the trees as if it would never happen again. Rose climbed out of the car and begged him to get in, in tones the over-strained patience of which suggested a mother’s tact with a wayward child.

  ‘I bet it’s the armature. And the fan belt,’ he said.

  They sat in the back seat, holding hands.

  Darkness had closed in definitively when headlights appeared and a vehicle pulled into the lay-by. Billing jumped out and went over to the cab.

  ‘Watson’s garage?’

  ‘I’m Watson.’ The driver was a nondescript man in overalls with a mass of uncombed hair, his plain face made more shapeless by the cigar wedged into one corner of his mouth.

  ‘That smells like a good cigar,’ said Billing.

  ‘It’s a Fischer Florett, mate. You can’t buy them in this country. I buy a supply of them when I go on holidays in Switzerland.’

  ‘It makes a change to see a man smoking a good cigar nowadays.’

  ‘What’s the problem with your vehicle?’ As Watson spoke, he emerged from his cab. He was a disappointingly small person, his round head hardly coming up to Billing’s chest. Without waiting for an answer to his question, he stomped off to look at the car for himself.

  Rose had emerged from the rear of the Austin and said hello to Watson.

  ‘You two been to a funeral, then?’ he asked, opening up the bonnet, again without waiting for an answer. Rose went over to Billing and took his arm. They stood helplessly while Watson shone his torch and peered about in the engine, muttering as he did so.

  ‘It’s the armature, I think,’ Billing told him.

  Watson eventually slammed down the bonnet and went back to his truck. ‘Major trouble, mate. Didn’t you never have that thing serviced? It’s leaking oil from every joint and your cylinders have seized.’

  He operated a series of levers on the side of his truck. A hook descended, which he secured under the Austin. He then hitched the car up until only its back wheels remained on the ground.

  ‘Better climb in the cab with me,’ he said. ‘’Less you want to stay here all night.’

  They squeezed in the front beside him and had the benefit of the Fischer Florett all the way back to the garage, which stood on a bleak crossroads at the edge of a village.

  It was late when they reached home in a hired car.

  ‘What a way to finish up a funeral!’ Rose exclaimed, as she made them some tea.

  ‘It turned out better for us than for Gladys,’ Billing said, grinning.

  Prodding the teabags, Rose said, ‘Fancy the car breaking down. And two hundred pounds’ worth of repairs. I hope that man Watkins is honest.’

  ‘At least we didn’t come to any harm. Watson.’

  ‘Watson or whatever. Hugh, I think you enjoy breakdowns, I think your whole life is broken down.’

  He was humble with her because she had really remade his life; but then he was humble with everyone.

  ‘I’ve never achieved smartness, like you. My physique wasn’t made for it. I admire the way you dress, Rose. Don’t let me drag you down to my standards.’

  She kissed him as she handed over his mug of tea. ‘Must Do Better. Where are we going to find a spare couple of hundred pounds? We’ve still got to pay for this carpet.’

  ‘Something will turn up.’

  ‘I could cheerfully kill you, sometimes.’

  He was already on his way next morning to the garden centre where he worked when the post arrived. It consisted in one letter only. Rose opened it. The letter came from a solicitor in Islington, announcing that the late Mrs Gladys Lee had left all her estate to Hugh Frederick Billing.

  It was five years since Hugh Billing had first met Rose in the London supermarket where she worked. She left her husband when she discovered through a friend that he was having an affair with a woman in the next street.

  ‘The very next street!’ she kept exclaiming. Billing wondered if she would have forgiven George Dwyer had the other woman lived three streets away; but he held his peace and discovered to his delight that she was prepared to live with him. Which she did without fuss.

  ‘I’m a decent working-class woman and I don’t expect a fat lot, Hugh,’ she told him. ‘A bit of courtesy and kindness and I’m yours.’

  He remembered how courteous she always was with the girls in the supermarket. Together they looked for somewhere to live. Rose wanted to escape from London and George and eventually they found a rented flat in a side street in St Albans. He was perfectly happy in an expanding garden centre just outside town, while she worked as supervisor in a supermarket in Watford. Every Saturday he caught a bus in to London to go and see Gladys and spend the afternoon with her.

  In that way he had witnessed the old lady’s gradual physical deterioration. Her nature remained much as ever, calm and slightly inclined to give orders; she was always pleased to see him, and Rose too, when Rose appeared. Rose, at first inclined to resent this usurper of Hugh’s free afternoons, also grew fond of the old lady and took her boxes of Rose’s Chocolates from the supermarket.

  ‘Without doing much, I am good for her,’ Billing used to say. ‘As her doctor heals her, so do I. It’s the company, the attention. We all need it.’

  ‘So you keep telling me,’ Rose said. She had been born in Manchester, but her parents had come to London when she was eleven.

  ‘But you see it’s been good for me, Rose, being good for someone else. We
’ve each got benefit from the friendship.’ It had crossed his mind once or twice that there might be more rewards for him when she was gone; he dismissed the thought as avaricious and distasteful.

  Gladys’s mental deterioration, when it came, was sudden and unremitting. She saw her room filling up with snow. Soon there were men of snow closing in on her armchair, men who would not or could not speak to her. Gladys whispered about these things from a stricken face which looked as if it was even then isolated in the middle of a terminal blizzard. After she was discovered wandering in the streets in her nightdress they took her to hospital. There most things were white and she died of it, after a screaming fit.

  ‘Wandering, just as I’ve spent my life wandering,’ Billing said with a shiver. But he was anchored at last, anchored by Rose, by the flat, by the fact that he now wore clothes she chose for him, by the fact that they were saving up for a bungalow of their own, that they had rented a TV set, that she cared for him enough to seek out a suitable diet so that the bugles no longer shrilled in his head, calling him away.

  It was part of his new rootedness that he took to reading while Rose was sitting in front of the TV watching quiz games. From a second-hand bookseller in town he bought the longest and heaviest novels he could find: The Apes of God, Confessions of Felix Krull, The Good Companions, Anthony Adverse, Don Quixote – Billing read them indiscriminately, knowing nothing of their standing in the world. Later he graduated to non-fiction, reading with the same lack of discrimination he had once shown in other fields of endeavour.

  Both he and Rose felt they were educating themselves. The neighbours were nice people but talked only about the garden and home wine-making.

  Their wine itself was passable. Rose particularly liked the turnip and tea wine. Billing stuck to the potato, which he christened ‘Spirits of Spud’.

  His wandering had ceased. The phantom bugles were silenced. His dream of that long journey down the lane had not recurred for – Billing could not recall how long. He ascribed its absence to the way in which the Piranesi engraving had brought both dream and contents to the light of consciousness.