Life in the West

by Brian Aldiss

  Squire reflected that he probably spent more time thinking about the long-defunct Matthew than about his still-living brother. Although Adrian was rather a dull stick, that was a mistake; blood was thicker than marble.

  Adrian was the only member of the family to subside into the civil service. He had been doing worthy and inscrutable things in Whitehall for a quarter of a century and, for most of that time, had owned a flat near the Fulham Road. Whatever his private delights and excitements, the only episode in Adrian’s life to stir the family had been when he went on a delegation to Bombay and returned with an Indian film actress on his arm, a lady by the name of Sushila.

  That had been almost fifteen years ago. Well did Squire remember how he and Teresa had gone up to London to meet Sushila on Adrian’s invitation. In theory, Squire thoroughly approved of the match. He too had a taste for the exotic, but had never expected the same to manifest itself in his sober brother; perhaps Adrian’s infant imagining also had been stirred by the dark beauty of Rachel Normbaum.

  Sushila was beautiful beyond imagining. Squire and Teresa both found themselves silenced before her elegance. ‘I wear saris here in London because it is expected of me,’ she said. ‘At my home, I am more comfortable in jeans.’

  ‘Have you visited London before?’ asked Teresa.

  Her answer was a silvery laugh. ‘My family is pretty cosmopolitan, I’m glad to say.’

  Squire had hardly been able to keep his eyes or hands off her, and had deeply envied his brother — an envy that Teresa had infallibly sensed. He remembered the terrible row after Adrian and Sushila were married, when he had acted as his brother’s best man. But the marriage was not to last. Perhaps Adrian was too set in his ways. A son was born to them but, within two years, the cosmopolitan Sushila was on a plane back to Bombay, with the child. Adrian had never spoken of her or the boy since in his brother’s hearing.

  Since those exciting times, the profile had grown sharper, thinner, had acquired a moustache and spectacles with which to regard the changing world. Yet unhappily it seemed no more inclined to exchange confidences than the marble bust behind it.

  The Rev. Rowlinson’s sermon came to an end, the congregation rose on frigid feet to unite in ‘Hark, the herald angels sing’.

  After the service, all were cheerful. Everyone shook hands with Edward Rowlinson as he stood in his surplice, a tall and not undignified figure despite the loose false teeth, wishing everyone a Happy Christmas as they filed past him at the entrance. Purple-visaged Ray Bond — an Australian gentleman, some parishioners said — shouted out a ‘Merry Christmas’ before jumping into his yellow Porsche and belting off in the direction of the nearest whisky.

  When the church was empty, the Rev. Rowlinson put on his blue raincoat and gloves. He and his wife and their grown-up daughter Matilda walked downhill with the Squire party to Pippet Hall. It was customary for them to eat their Christmas lunch at the Hall. The children, Ann, Jane, Grace, Douglas, and Tom, led the way, running and calling, keen to get back to their new toys and games, now that duty was done.

  The hospitality offered the Rowlinsons was the last drip of a stream of Pippet Hall hospitality which had flowed over the centuries. The sheltering of the Normbaum family, though an act not without self-interest, had been in that good tradition; but taxes direct and indirect, and the winds of change, had dried it. All that was left was an impoverished squire offering a meal to an impoverished vicar. A turkey bone, a game of Consequences, and duty was fulfilled for another year.

  The little Normbaums had soon shown themselves marvellous at games round the house. In no time, Rachel was talking a pretty variety of English, and Karl was hardly slower. Rachel was slender and had blue eyes and dark hair, a dashing, brilliant, affectionate child who became Tom’s first and unconsummated love. Oh, the delight of having her there, of coming back from school in the holidays and finding her awaiting him, long-legged, at Hartisham station (for in those days the old Great Eastern trains still ran). Those were the happy years, the years of sheltered childhood while the war played itself out below the horizon. And the end of the war — unwelcome in many ways, not least because suddenly the Normbaums were gone to Detroit in a new world, and Pippet Hall became empty and full of shadows, debt, dry rot, servants not returning, old order disappearing in shabbiness, damp, and tarnished silver. Then he had learnt — at the time of the Belsen revelations — that mother had taken in the refugees only to save the Hall being commandeered by the RAF for the duration.

  Mother had friends in the county, in some cases traditional old friends of Squire’s father and grandfather. They helped her. Thomas Squire had neglected them in their old age, preferring more sophisticated friends in Cambridge and London.

  At the Hall gates, Squire paused to let Madge and Ernest, his parents-in-law, catch up with him. Matilda, the pale Rowlinson daughter, went on ahead with Teresa and Deirdre to see how the Christmas lunch, the turkey with all its gallant accessories, was faring. As the party progressed past the artificial lake — frozen but not frozen enough to bear skaters — it could hear Nellie barking from the house, and see Uncle Willie’s Austin Maxi standing by the front porch. Like Deirdre and Marshall, Willie always drove over for Christmas Day; unlike them, he would be driving home in the evening, claiming that his cat could not survive overnight without him. He had protested also that Pippet Hall beds were too hard for his old bones.

  Despite Patricia’s terminal illness, Squire had insisted on the Hall’s being decorated for Christmas. The party trooped through the front door, exclaiming at the cold now they were safely out of it, and gathered to admire the Christmas tree, which stood in the hall as usual on such occasions. Its lights seemed to emphasize a dreary negation of light which hung this year at the top of the stairs to the upper regions, where the body lay.

  But the tree was grand and glittering, swathed in a glass-fibre called Angel’s Breath, which was carefully saved in a hatbox from one year to another. The tree had been dug from the grounds and stood in a tub specially constructed for the purpose. At the top of the tree, spreading brilliant plastic wings, was the fairy which Teresa had made; despite its wand, there was about it something of the insect reminiscent of Teresa’s more usual creations. A paraffin stove radiated warmth beside the tree, compensating for the uncertainties of the central heating in this area of the house. From a radio in the sitting room came the sound of Bethlehem bells. The thing lying upstairs would not hear those bells this year as, when living, it had done every Christmas since the invention of the wireless. Soon, there would be no one left who remembered cat’s whiskers and crystal sets; to Squire himself, they were only stories.

  As Uncle Willie came into the hall, smiling, to wish them all a Happy Christmas, the children disappeared into the morning room to play with Tom Kaye’s new Scalextric motor race track. The adults, after removing their coats and scarves, went through into the living room, Squire ushering the Rowlinsons hospitably before him.

  ‘Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the bells,’ Madge Davies said. ‘Do you remember how funny it was in the wartime, when the churches were not allowed to ring their bells? I expect you remember that, Mr Rowlinson? I feel so sorry that poor Patricia isn’t with us this year — she was quite a campanologist. One can’t help wondering who will be taken from us by next Christmas.’

  ‘Don’t say that, dear,’ Ernest said. ‘It’s morbid. Besides, we are all in the pink.’

  ‘What about your back? And Teresa says…’ But she decided not to complete the sentence.

  Although the living room struck rather cold, all agreed that it would soon warm up. The room was decorated with boughs of pine tucked behind the pictures on the wall, and with red candles, half-used, which would be lighted again at dusk. To make the fire in the wide hearth burn up, Squire threw onto it elm logs which he had sawn himself. They all stood round the hearth, exchanging idle conversation, except for Adrian Squire, who was silent as usual. He smoked a cigarette unobtrusively, and cou
ghed a little.

  ‘That is one blessing of the Dutch Elm Disease,’ said the Rev. Rowlinson. ‘It has provided everyone with more wood fuel than they have ever known before. In these days of spiralling prices, it is very welcome.’ He shook his head, as if contradicting his own words.

  ‘Wood-burning stoves are very fashionable again. Ray Bond told me so,’ said his wife. Dorothy Rowlinson was a large but timid woman with a sharp nose and a memorable amount of grey hair which, though apparently natural, brought to these remote reaches of Norfolk a reminder of the Afro hair-styles affected in Notting Hill Gate. Dorothy Rowlinson’s parishioners claimed that spirits could frequently be smelt on her breath; some said brandy or, the more charitable, sherry; otherwise, none had any complaint about this shy and dedicated woman.

  ‘It’s fortunate for the look of the countryside that there’s more oak than elm in the region,’ Marshall said, his sharp Bostonian voice in contrast to the rather woolly tones of both Rowlinsons. ‘Northampton and Bedfordshire have been practically denuded of trees. Entire landscapes have changed character in just these last two years.’

  Looking mysterious, Uncle Willie took himself off to the morning room, bearing envelopes. He was going to make his annual rather cheese-paring distribution of record tokens to the Squire and Kaye children, and to receive in return their well-simulated cries of grateful surprise.

  ‘People make a lot of fuss about the elms,’ said Adrian. ‘They’ll grow back again.’

  ‘I’m damned sure they won’t,’ Marshall retorted. ‘People don’t have time for trees any more.’

  ‘Oh, surely that’s not so,’ Rev. Rowlinson protested. ‘Dorothy and I are very fond of trees.’

  Teresa and Matilda entered, bearing trays of glasses and hot negus. Deirdre followed with crisps in bowls. Grace, now thirteen, slipped into the room to try her aunt’s drink, and tasted it appreciatively. ‘It’s lovely, Aunt Teresa, and not at all alcoholic.’

  ‘You just take care,’ Deirdre warned her. ‘One alcoholic in the family’s enough.’

  When all present were clutching a glass, Squire went and stood at the far end of the room away from the fire, unconsciously framing himself against a window where a landscape in white and blue-grey led towards distant Walsingham. He took a slim book from a shelf and read Journey of the Magi aloud.

  ‘A cold coming we had of it,

  Just the worst time of the year…’

  His voice faltered only once. He kept his thoughts away from the figure of greys and browns lying under the roof with its eyes now always closed, concentrating instead on the magi’s account, and on his discomfort at finding — as many men had done — that after returning from a long journey, one’s native land was also full of strange gods.

  He had read this poem every Christmas morning since returning from Yugoslavia in the late forties, before he married Teresa. His mother would have liked him to continue what had become a tradition. He realized how deeply the words still cut, words of an Anglican poet so much crisper, more uncompromising, than the sentimental consolations Rowlinson ladled out. The real Christian message — which went beyond Christianity — was here, that birth and death were hard, conditions between always unsatisfactory, vision intermittent. Christianity must have been a great religion when it belonged to the underdog.

  ‘Why would you be glad of another death, Uncle Tom?’ asked Grace, when he had closed the book and set it back in its place in the bookcase. ‘Isn’t one enough at present?’

  Grace was his favourite niece. She had her mother’s fair hair but was going to be taller and slimmer. He smiled at her and said, ‘That line isn’t a reference to your grandmother. It’s spoken by one of the magi, as I suppose you realize.’

  ‘But why did he want another death?’

  ‘I’ve always supposed he referred to his own death.’

  She said lightly, ‘I think about God a lot, these days, but I don’t know many people who believe in him.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Of course, the Rev. Rowlinson and Mrs Rowlinson and Matilda all believe in him, but that’s their job, isn’t it? Of course, I suppose it’s easier to believe at Christmas. Do you believe, Uncle Tom, or do you mind saying?’

  He hesitated, and immediately felt her interest slip away, saw it in her eyes as they switched their gaze to something happening at the other end of the room. He was tempted to lie to shield her, to say that he did believe. He was tempted to fudge the question, to say that it was a question of perspective. He found himself inarticulate, unable to reply. A thousand answers rose to his mind.

  Still with her attention on the other end of the room, where mince pies were appearing, closely followed by the other children, Grace said, ‘Someone at school told me that God existed, but he left Earth at the end of the Stone Age because he could see that mankind was getting on pretty well without his help. But I guess that doesn’t explain Jesus, does it?’

  With a polite smile, she made for the mince pies.

  How were Jews treated in the Stone Age? He sipped at his negus.

  The question of God was a matter of perspective. It was easier to believe as a child, just as it was easier to believe in Santa Claus. The mere fact of having parents to care for you made a parental God plausible. Then one acquired knowledge, and worse succeeded.

  He had a disturbing memory of his mother, throwing a cup down on the flagstones in the kitchen, angry because she was having to do her own washing up. Time, one of those grey years in the late forties when, the tide of war having withdrawn, people were still coping with the effects of the flood. People like Patricia Squire expected the servants to come back after the war, expected that life would return to what it was in the thirties. But the young people of Hartisham did not intend to work at menial jobs any more. They saw their chance: they left Norfolk and went to earn good wages in the car factories of the Midlands. The thirties had been reviled in their time; money was short and nothing was as it had been in grandfather’s time, before the Great War. Now, after another war, the thirties were suddenly seen as halcyon. Time gilded them.

  The seventies. Everyone complained, comparing them unfavourably with previous decades. Even the forties were now looked back upon with a certain nostalgia. Yet the time would inevitably come when the seventies would themselves be remembered as a time of peace and plenty. So they were, for all their alarms.

  He pictured Grace, now munching a mince pie, as a grown woman, saying, ‘Christmases are not what they were when old Granny Squire was alive.’ And later, to her children, ‘Christmases are much more commercial than they were when my old Uncle Tom was alive…’

  Plain Matilda Rowlinson brought him a mince pie. As he talked to her, his wife filled his glass with more negus. They smiled happily at each other, not needing to speak. The wine, flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg, ran across his palate, mingling with the rich taste of the mincemeat.

  ‘Do you think God approves of mince pies, Matilda?’ Squire asked in sudden mischief. ‘Or does he think they’re ungodly?’

  She laughed. ‘I think He leaves it to each of us to decide for ourselves.’

  A good answer on the spur of the moment, he thought. All the best gods should leave it to the customer to decide.

  It was a question of perspective. Periods of time seemed better or worse according to what followed. When you were young and had seen nothing follow, then time was special. So with God; he was special until you had seen certain things happen, Belsen, authorized murder in Yugoslavia, or your father’s face eaten by dogs.

  He strolled over to his sister and slid his arm through hers.

  ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Oh, extremely cheerful, all things considered. And you? I was just thinking that with a few of these neguses under my belt I could perhaps face looking at mother. Would you come up with me?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Do you remember, people used to say “Bearing up”, if you asked them how they were.’

  Deirdre filled her glass and the
y went upstairs. Her boys, Douglas and Tom, were playing with a Slinky on the stairs. ‘I’ll be down soon,’ Deirdre told them, ‘I’m just going to inspect your grandmother.’

  Her defensive facetiousness fell away from her once they were in the small room on the attic floor. Squire stood by the window, gazing out at the iron landscape, listening to his sister’s choked sobs.

  He forced himself to speak. ‘She went so suddenly when she went. A week and she was gone. Ten days ago, she was joking, and quizzing me about “Frankenstein”… Teresa had been having bad dreams. She dreamed that a black figure was trying to get into the house. I told her that we would get a better burglar alarm, but now I wonder… Well, it’s easy to believe in portents at such a time — death makes everything irrational.’

  Deidre said, with a forced distinctness, ‘I blame myself that I never came over to see the old girl when I phoned and you said she was unwell. You know what it is, just before Christmas one’s always busy. It was end of term and we had to go over and see Grace in her school play, and Douglas had a cold and Tom had carol-singing and a party… Still, I should have bloody well come over. I can see that now. Poor old thing. I don’t fancy being a corpse, do you?’

  Making the effort, he went over to her and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘There’s always guilt at these times. Filthy death, filthy guilt. Let it wash round you, don’t let it stay. We could all do better by everyone; it must be a cosmic law or something.’

  ‘Old Rowlinson could explain it, I don’t doubt.’

  He could no longer bring himself to look down at his mother’s body. ‘I’ll put the lid on, if you’ve had enough.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I could bear to see you do that. Let me get out of here first.’ But she made no move to leave. She adjusted her hair. ‘Why haven’t you got flowers in here? Why hasn’t Teresa put some flowers in the room?’

  ‘A grey Christmas. Do you remember when we were kids and it snowed heavily just before Christmas, and we got stuck on the bridge at Wisbech? And father just laughed. He was enjoying it.’