Ruins

by Brian Aldiss

  When Billing and Rose drove to London again in her old Austin, repaired at great expense, to claim the house in Shepherd’s Bush which was now theirs, he at once took her upstairs to look at the engraving in Gladys’s bedroom. Rose was not greatly impressed.

  ‘Gloomy, isn’t it?’

  She turned and flung open the window, then leaned out and regarded the cat-traversed gardens below.

  ‘Do you think you’d be happy here, Rose?’ Billing asked her broad back.

  ‘You’ve got to be tough. Be thankful for what you can get.’ She straightened and closed the window with a few thumps. ‘Sash cord’s gone. Shepherd’s Bush is a nice area. We’ll have to clear out all Gladys’s junk … Yes, it’s fine. I mean to say, like, beggars can’t be choosers.’

  He liked her grudging ways, knowing the kind heart beneath. True, there were times when, harking back in memory to his days in the USA, he regretted that she had achieved Zero Life Style. Americans of even a non-affluent layer of society always achieved a Plus Life Style in some extraordinary way. Like Italians.

  Rose had a collection of china horses – he had contributed one himself, a shiny coltish thing with brittle legs. But it could not be said that she was into china horses, as an American would have been. It remained simply a collective hazard on the mantlepiece, a somewhat forlorn reminder of a lost Rosey past which had contained fields and pastureage and idle summer afternoons.

  So he put his arms round her, coat and all, and kissed her.

  ‘Don’t really mind where we live,’ she said, kissing him slowly, ‘as long as you keep slipping it up me.’

  ‘Oh, god,’ he groaned. ‘Don’t worry your pretty head about that.’

  Downstairs, in the main room, he contemplated the chaise-longue.

  ‘We’ll have to get rid of that, for a start, Hugh … I like this long mirror, though.’

  ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ He looked in a drawer. Among the clutter of items he saw a birthday card with yachts on. He stared at the bookcase, pulling out the odd book, hoping for something to read.

  ‘We’ll have to get shot of that lot,’ Rose said behind him, indicating the orderly spines.

  ‘Not so fast. It’s nice to have books about.’

  Some were in foreign languages: German, Swedish. There were several books bound in drab green and written by a man named Bengtsholm. Looking at an inscription in ink on the title page of one of them, he realised that Bengtsholm was Gladys’s husband. After his death, she had reverted to the use of her simple maiden name of Lee, Bengtsholm presenting too many obstacles to the insular English. Many of the books in the case had been his, or were actually written by him. Billing felt awed and excited.

  He opened one called ‘Of Analytical Psychology’ and read, ‘Something must be left to your own mental efforts. You might consider what it means to be complete. People should not be deprived of the joy of discovering themselves. To be complete is a great thing. To talk of it is entertaining, but is no substitute for being it. Being complete, however you phrase it, is the main thing in life.’

  He stuffed the book back, recoiling. In his mind was an image of that ladder falling and the body going with it. Complete? Psychology filled him with dread – yet it was a pleasurable dread. There were mysterious doors and possibilities, as he knew.

  The Psyche and Dream Journeyings. Why not just Journeys? The title caught his eye as he was about to turn away. The Psyche and Dream Journeyings … He pulled it out. It was another great long unexplored volume, with clear print, thick paper, heavy binding and plenty of footnotes.

  ‘We’ll have to do something about the kitchen,’ Rose called. ‘I should reckon this here oven sailed with Noah on the Ark.’

  They went out the back into the damp little garden, in which Gladys Lee had not walked for many months before her death. Most of it was down to grass. An old iron bath stood at the far end, under the grey slate-capped wall. Buddleias grew. There was a rockery covered with ferns. On the whole the soil seemed too poor to sustain weeds.

  ‘We could do better with this,’ Billing said, airily indicating the landscape. ‘Conifers at cost. A figure or two. Trellis. Clematis.’

  ‘Get old Frewin down here to help us,’ she said. Frewin was the name of their wine-making neighbours. They had a good laugh about that.

  By the kitchen window was a dilapidated shed containing nothing but a broom and old linoleum. Unwanted things could be stored there and eventually they could have a car-boot sale with them.

  They looked up at the slate roof, the peeling windows (bathroom window frosted half-way up), rusty gutters, wrinkled brickwork.

  ‘It’s ours!’ they said proudly, and hugged each other. ‘All ours! Wonderful!’

  ‘If we sell everything, it’ll bring us in enough cash to completely redecorate inside,’ she said. ‘George taught me how to hang wallpaper. I’m a dab hand at it. We’ll make it look all lovely and light and modern inside and banish Gladys’s ghost. Oh, it will be grand! Better than Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘I’ll paint the outside. We’ll need to get a long ladder.’ Inwardly, he was a bit sorry about banishing Gladys’s ghost. In some odd way, he longed to preserve everything as it was, in all the seedy pomp of yesterday; but he said nothing, recognising that ultimately Rose’s practicality would triumph over his nostalgia. Probably quite right, too, he said to himself.

  Staring at the rockery, he ceased to listen to what she was saying concerning the hanging of wallpaper. A woodlouse was climbing up the slope between two shoulders of stone. A miniature avalanche of soil sent it slipping to the bottom of the slope but, undeterred, it tried again and eventually disappeared behind a brown frond of fern. One snowdrop was flowering in a hollow beside a boulder of clinker.

  Weeks passed. Billing and his lady hugged themselves frequently as the realisation of their fortune sank in. It seemed as if they could never discuss it enough. To have a house of their own gave them security and, more than security, dreams.

  Rose rearranged her week so that she could take Saturdays off as he did. On Friday nights, they’d drive away to London in the Austin, taking with them such food as jam tarts, pork pies, cakes, and taramasalata, to spend all weekend in Shepherd’s Bush, refurbishing the house, picnicking, chatting, calling to one another.

  At the far end of the garden, by the old bath, Billing made a bonfire of various tatty pieces of carpeting while Rose scrubbed the floors of the house with disinfectant. Billing turned off the water supply at the mains and extracted an ancient cast-iron hot water tank from the cupboard next to the kitchen, replacing it with a more effective copper cylinder plumbed into what had been the kitchen broom-cupboard. The cupboard that was now empty he painted with emulsion paint and filled with shelves; so they acquired a pantry. A good secondhand refrigerator fitted neatly into it. Another hug was required when that was in place, and much self-congratulation.

  Asleep in the double bed with Rose that night, Billing had a bad dream.

  He and Rose lived in a great house which seemed to fill a whole countryside. The corridors went up hill and down dale like mountain paths. They were happy until a stern personage in grey and white uniform came to separate him from her. Doors slammed, mysterious winds blew.

  He was taken to a confusing garden, flowerless and a muddle of small constructions. At the far end of it stood a little rundown building, guarded by wooden fences and gates. The personage led him into the building, saying that henceforth Billing had to live here.

  It seemed that the building had once been a poultry-house. Although Billing did not wish to enter, the personage would brook no protests. It was a low one-storey place. The doors were stuck and opened only with difficulty, creaking as they did so.

  The interior was worse than could be imagined. All was in tones of grey. The frosted windows were clouded with cobwebs. Mould and dust covered everything. The atmosphere was dense and fusty, while the floor appeared to be paved with decaying cheese. Billing found he could scarcely walk.


  The personage (now very faint) said, ‘It will not be too bad.’ It then faded away and Billing was alone, shut in.

  His feeling was one of intense grief. He wandered about without any fixed intention or plan of escape. Worse was to come. He found himself in an interior room, more distressing than the others, more suffocating.

  The room was ill-lit. Amid dark shadows, propped in one corner, sat Gladys Lee. She was shrouded in dust sheets and sunk in her final demented stage, her eyes red-rimmed. She beckoned Billing forward. Her mouth fell open with a terrible crack, revealing broken sticks of teeth.

  Billing woke feeling sick and sat up in bed. The crack still rang in his head. He was convinced it was real.

  Leaving Rose to sleep, he made his way barefoot downstairs. The staircase was presently uncarpeted. By the light from a streetlamp he saw that the glass in the front door had been shattered. Retreating, he went back to the top of the stairs and switched on the hall light.

  A half-brick lay on the mat inside the door, with fragments of glass all round.

  He went and woke Rose. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s only half-past twelve. Who’d do such a thing, do you think?’

  She pulled a face. ‘Bloody Dwyer, who else? My husband – George Dwyer, the drunken cretin. Him and that bird of his from the next street. He must have seen us coming and going round here. I wouldn’t put anything past him.’

  They went down and stared at the damage. Hugh found a piece of cardboard with which to block up the hole, while Rose swept up the fragments of glass and had another swear.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been your George,’ he said, squatting down beside her. ‘No man would do a thing like that deliberately. It must have been a passing yob, hitting our door by accident.’

  ‘You don’t know George. Friday and Saturday nights especially, when he’s had a few.’

  ‘But how would he know where you were?’

  ‘Oh, he’d find out. Don’t forget he’s a taxi driver. He’s got friends crawling all round town, he has. One of them must have seen us in the street, unloading the car or sommink.’

  When they had cleared away all the glass, they had a cup of tea before returning to bed. Going up the stairs, feet cautious of splinters on the rough treads, he suddenly said, ‘Friday and Saturday nights … You mean he might come back tomorrow night?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose he might. He can be a vindictive little bugger, can George.’

  ‘I must say you take this pretty calmly.’

  ‘Hasn’t nothing of the sort never happened to you when you were in the United States? Are the Yanks all that different? You picked up enough women there, by all accounts.’

  The double negative irritated him. ‘Is that how the working class goes on? Bashing up property?’

  ‘We certainly don’t make a little tin god of it, like you posh fellers.’

  He burst out laughing, partly in annoyance. ‘Oh, forget it. Let’s get to bloody sleep.’

  Saturday evening saw Hugh Billing in a nervous state. It was dusk when he finished giving the side door and window an undercoat and swept the side passage with the worm-eaten old broom from Gladys’s shed.

  ‘We’ll have to do something about Dwyer,’ he called in to Rose, who was working in the bathroom. ‘Otherwise, we’ll always be worrying.’

  He kept his real worry to himself. Dwyer had become a vast figure of evil in his mind. Not knowing what the man looked like, he was free to imagine an ogre, bent on the destruction of their happiness. Dwyer was a nightmare, linked to the nightmare from which the smashing of the glass had roused Billing. He was a spectre beyond reason, which had to be laid. The thought of him brought Billing to a state close to paralysis. But he fought against his nerves and, with Rose’s none too reluctant help, developed a plan, based on the premise that Dwyer, to have thrown a brick with any accuracy through the front door, would have had to stop his cab temporarily opposite the house.

  On Saturday nights, they generally went down to the local pub for a drink and a bite to eat. On this evening, they had supper ‘at home’, as they already began to think of it. By ten o’clock, the remains of cold smoked herring, salad, and Jacob’s Club biscuits were cleared away and they sat staring at each other.

  ‘He may not show up, of course.’

  ‘Seems a bit unlikely.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still, he might.’

  ‘I know. Be prepared, eh?’

  ‘It’s always best. Teach him a lesson.’

  ‘A bloody good lesson.’

  ‘Else we’d never feel safe.’

  ‘I’ll go outside.’

  ‘It’s far too early.’

  ‘Better be ready, just in case.’

  ‘You’re right there.’

  By ten-thirty, he was in position in the front garden, concealed from the road by a wispy privet bush. The nearby street-lamp lit the front of the house. Billing and Rose had planned everything carefully. They had pinned a sheet of cardboard over the unbroken pane of the door and left the door standing open. Billing had even gone to the trouble of crumpling up a few pages of the Daily Mirror, placing them where they could be seen, on the upper step and in front of the open door. In the darkness, the house thus presented a derelict air, attractive to the vandalous-minded. Rose waited inside while Billing crouched uncomfortably by his bush. He felt the gravel under his thin shoes. A twig scratched persistently at his right cheek. One buttock nudged the railings which marked the extent of his property. His right hand was cold where he clutched a poker, his offensive weapon, too tightly.

  What a mass of contradictions you are, he told himself. You’re in acute fear of this Dwyer, you see him as an ultimate brute. At the same time you long to get at him, to kill him, even. Rose is to blame for all this. How did I get into such a mess?

  More deeply, he thought, Father didn’t care one bit for me or he would never have allowed himself to fall off that ladder. Such things are never really accidental. If he were still alive, he’d give me some guidance and protection in life and not let me drift. Now I’m going to get beaten up, all because of him.

  He clutched the poker tighter.

  By eleven, he had stopped thinking.

  Some people went past in the street, most of them quietly. Cars roared by, including the odd taxi. A dog came and barked tentatively before moving on. The air grew colder.

  By eleven-thirty, Billing had had enough. He whistled to Rose and went inside.

  ‘We mustn’t give up,’ Rose told him, giving him a hug. ‘This is about George’s time. Have a snort of gin and then let’s get back on watch again.’

  ‘I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Just till quarter past twelve. We must nail the old bugger if we can.’

  Back by the privet, Billing immured himself to hardship by recalling scenes from his American past. Taking over a new apartment in Riverside, hearing a phone ring as he entered and running from room to room trying to locate it. Being in a woman’s house when the mosquito door banged and in came a businesslike dog with a cigar in its mouth. The woman – her name had gone – taught rehabilitative drama at the Alabama State Penitentiary, Children’s Division. Waking in Greenwich Village and finding that someone had built a punk tree outside his window, made entirely of copies of the St Petersburg Times. A sign on a road outside Atlanta, Georgia, erected in sorrow or pride, saying ‘One driver in every ten on this road is drunk’. America was much more surreal than England. It was a pity.

  His wandering thoughts were recalled by the sound of a car stopping on the far side of the street. He crouched lower, glancing at his watch. It was ten minutes past midnight. A man was getting out of the driving seat of a cab. It was Dwyer! This was it!

  Everything was still. The orange London smog sulked overhead. The man walked slowly across the deserted street, hands in pockets.

  Billing gripped the poker, fear gripped Billing.

  The man came slowly to the iron gate. He stood there on the pavement,
scrutinising the front of the house, with its half-open door, its lightless windows. He was a small, thick-set man, rather less terrifying than Billing’s imaginings. He wore a bomber jacket and cord trousers.

  Suddenly he moved, looking to left and right and then, finding the street empty, running forward, covering the front path in two strides and reaching the steps that led up to the open door.

  Billing jumped from concealment without thought, brandishing the poker. At almost the same time, Rose emerged from the shadows with a bucket of cold water, which she flung at Dwyer. Unfortunately, Billing, in his excitement, had given a shout of challenge as he emerged. Dwyer turned, fists ready.

  Some of the water hit its target. Quite as much soaked Billing.

  He struck out boldly, blindly, and the poker caught Dwyer across one shoulder, thwacking into the bomber jacket.

  Cursing, Dwyer started to feel in one of his pockets, kicking out at Billing at the same time with a toecap to his right calf. Billing dropped the poker and punched Dwyer on the jaw. Dwyer responded with a left-handed punch which struck Billing full face. Blood immediately poured from his nose. His sight became foggy.

  Another man jumped from the taxi and came across the street, shouting, intent on supporting Dwyer.

  Still swearing, Dwyer managed to pull a knuckleduster out of his dripping pocket.

  This was too much for Billing. He ran round the side of the house to the back garden, Dwyer in pursuit. Both men were shouting.

  Rose hurled her bucket at the second invader. She ran down, seized the fallen poker and brandished it. The second man retreated respectfully and went to stand on the far side of the taxi, evidently deciding not to face an armed woman.

  Billing almost fell over the broom he had been using earlier. Dashing blood from his face, he grasped it, swung it, and caught Dwyer amidships. With a grunt, Dwyer seized the free end of the broom. Then commenced a kind of folk-dance across the back lawn, each combatant fighting for possession of the weapon. Dwyer did a good deal of cursing. Billing gritted his teeth and hung on. He had an idea.