Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  It was Clementine’s move. She decided to compound interest her score, kept her velvet streamer in port, and obtained a Docket. Burnell moved next, sailing his shoe diagonally across the board toward London from his home port of Ullapool (the initial letters of the ports spelled out the name of the long-dead nautical Gabriel, known as “Gabs” Burnell).

  “What would you consider a tidy life?” Burnell asked Binns.

  His Aunt Sheila answered him. “Oh, come now, Roy. We’re too modem to expect tidy lives. Monastic life in the Middle Ages was probably tidy. Compartmentalized, regulated, ordered by the hour, the calendar. However, I see the challenge in your eyes, so I may say that since I became an independent lady, rather late in life, and followed my own desires, my life has been much neater, much more pared down.”

  Seeing she patted Jenny Binn’s arm, Burnell asked, “Do you spell that ‘p-a-i-r-e-d’?”

  “Spell it how you like, and it’s Jack’s turn.”

  “I know it, I know it,” Jack said, with only partly simulated gloom.

  “Well, buck up, then,” urged Tarquin.

  “… And I’m not leaving port. I’m buying five ELCs in the hope they’ll increase in value next round.” He looked at the Winifred clock to estimate his chances before producing his money. “There, that’s my go. Violet, your turn!”

  Violet made no answer, merely leaning forward heavily in her chair and dropping one apple into her galosh. She fixed a calculating eye on the chest which represented Newcastle. A church had been painted on its side. Players could trade for rings in Newcastle, and marry there, forming transitory alliances with other players which enabled them to avoid some of the more crippling turns of fate the game regularly threw up. Violet, as mariner, was a renowned marrier.

  “It’s three years since I won this game,” Tarquin said. “When it’s a man’s birthday, he ought to be allowed to win.”

  Sheila said, “We’re talking about art, not about me. Just for once. The story of Smoke in the Streets is deliberately confused. Nothing is resolved—who did what et cetera. It’s terribly clever. So I’ve designed the sets with a deliberate simplicity. Lots and lots of Tarkovsky muslin curtains blow about at long windows in long bare rooms.”

  “You’ll have to remind me of the absurd rules,” Violet said in her deep voice, looking about at everyone except her husband for assistance. “I never liked Esbjerg as a port. It’s so far from Newcastle. Am I allowed to carry three apples in my hold after my maiden voyage? How many apples does a wedding ring cost?” She looked round the company with her dark sunken eyes. “Who wants to marry me? Could we have some coffee? We always have coffee when we play.”

  The first hurricane came, and only Ben capsized. The symbolism of the game was impressive.

  “Sounds like early Rouben Mamoulian—Garbo and all that, Sheila,” mocked Krawstadt, in tone indicating he was not to be taken seriously.

  “Never mind Garbo, let’s go on with the game,” barked Tarquin. He abused them for land lubbers, and they played in silence for several turns. Ben sailed into his wife’s port and deposited an ELC. The housekeeper brought in coffee on a tray.

  “What I had in mind,” said Sheila, “was an approach to abstraction. The results are mystical and really quite—”

  “Come on, old girl,” said Tarquin impatiently. “Concentrate, will you? It’s your bloody go. No wonder women don’t make good sailors!”

  Sheila stared at the board through her glasses. “Well, I’m coming out of Bilbao and I’m going to block the sea lane, because I can see Clem is heading straight for Newcastle with her stones.” She pushed her old cracked sandal forward, square by square.

  “Every life is ‘mystical and really quite—’, Auntie,” Burnell told her. “When seen in the right perspective, that is. It’s a question of interpretation.” Restless, he rose from his chair and went to stare out of the window at the side terrace. It was definitely colder today. Something in the chill oppressed him; God was on his trail, stealthily, like the approach of winter, and would get him one day. The autumn was here already, the autumn which eluded Ashkhabad: the garden was wearing no hyacinths: soon he would have to accept another commission from the WACH. The passport, the suitcase, the real travels across the real seas… When this game was over, he would phone Blanche again. He suffered from an impression that none of these people, even his father, really remembered who he was, or cared; though he sought to ascribe this feeling to his own introspection.

  “You’re stuck, aren’t you?” Jenny Binns said, turning round in her chair toward him. “Why not marry me and we’ll block Newcastle?”

  Jack Gibson had said something to Sheila and was laughing at his own remark. She asked him, tartly, “Don’t you experience anything mystical, ever? Isn’t mysticism—being aware of otherness—really the best thing in life?”

  “The best thing,” Jack said, “is getting your hand up a girl’s skirt.” The others laughed. Except Sheila, who gave a scream.

  “Oh, look at that! Clem, you wretch, you’ve done a Lutine on me!”

  At this moment of crisis—for Lutines could change everyone’s fortunes—Laura walked into the room. Laura looked at her icy best, in a long puff-skirted dress of deep blue, her hair elaborately curled about her face, minute pearls studding the lobes of her ears. The players in the Dairy fell silent. Laura spoke in an undertone to Tarquin, who snorted and puffed; whereupon, she placed a calming hand on his shoulder. Burnell saw the flawless hand with its red fingernails sink into his father’s shoulder. It was quite a firm grip. He was a horse soothed by its rider.

  Looking across the shoe-studded floor, head raised, she beckoned Burnell over.

  “There’s someone called to see you, Roy, dearest.”

  He let his sister take over his port. In the front hall, Stephanie was awaiting him.

  “She wants you back, Roy, dear,” Laura whispered, giving Burnell a slight push by way of encouragement.

  He could see Stephanie was nervous. She hesitated to come forward. Her tall figure was framed in the rectangle of the front door, the two side windows with their stained glass contributing to a triptych effect. Stephanie wore a light fawn coat draped over her shoulders, underneath which was a brown jersey suit. As he approached, she put a hand up to pat her fair hair, smiling uncertainly in greeting.

  Laura said, “I’ll get you some coffee, dear Stephanie and Roy. There’s a fire in the blue room—you can sit in there and talk and be absolutely private.”

  But directly Laura was gone, retiring in the direction of the kitchen, Stephanie said in a low voice, “Roy, can we go outside? I don’t really wish to remain in this house. We need to talk without interruption.”

  Burnell was not certain that was the case.

  To be with her again, taking in that almost pretty face, was disconcerting. It was with startlement he saw she had aged; in his self-absorbed state in hospital, he had not noticed the wrinkles under her eyes. To take in her presence at all was one thing; to have evidence that she was growing old quite another. Burnell felt his words to be slow and heavy as he said, “It would be warmer in the blue room.”

  She gestured as if to dismiss his objection, turned, and made for the front door. She opened it, fumbling with the latch. In a low voice, as if she had answered him, he said, “You’re right. Laura was manipulating us, as always.”

  Walking down the shallow steps beside her, he saw a black limousine drawn up in the drive a short distance from the house. A small hand waved from the car’s rear window.

  “Your son?” Burnell asked.

  “I didn’t exactly aim for you to see him.”

  “Oh no. I wouldn’t have seen him if we had gone in the blue room… I suppose Laura arranged this meeting, did she? How else would you know I was here? I sensed there was something in the air.”

  “You remember Laura and I always were close… or perhaps you can’t.” He noticed her faint American accent.

  He forced himself to ask, “So that’
s your boyfriend in the car with your son? You’ve brought all the family along for the outing?”

  She sighed as they began to crunch their way over the gravel. “Humbert’s in Europe on a business trip. Rather an important one, he says.” Her voice expressed either over-emphasized patience or weariness. “He’s often in the UK. He travels a lot. The Far East, Hong Kong, everywhere… But that’s not what I want to talk about.”

  “Thank God for that! What do you want, Steff? Why exactly are you here?”

  Then she gave him her first faint smile, as if life had become less unpleasant. “Gosh, it’s great to hear you call me Steff again, after all this while.”

  “Habits are hard to break. Last time we met, you told me to call you Stephanie. You couldn’t stand ‘Steff’.”

  Her response puzzled him. If she had come here merely to annoy him, the presence near the house of the man Humbert, sitting in his black Mercedes with the child, Steff’s child, was provocation enough. Her small approach to familiarity seemed to him merely contradictory; he failed to understand it.

  Being annoyed too at her insistence that they walk outside on a rather chilly morning, he hunched his shoulders and looked glum.

  The gravel crunched under their feet. Her reply was delayed, but she put on a bright tone to say, “Can we go round by the ruin? That little objection of mine was a while ago. A lot has happened since then. Does Tarquin still keep peacocks? I just hate the way those things shriek.”

  He sighed. They turned the corner of the house. Passing the summerhouse, they walked along a curving path under a pergola of entwined clematis. Twice on the way Stephanie glanced back at the waiting car, until they came to a holly hedge. Filing separately through a narrow kissing gate, they entered the precincts of the old abbey. The abbey’s remains were partly concealed behind a crumbling stone wall, built in the Norfolk fashion of knapped cobbles. The sky overhead had become as gray as the wall, and as unyielding in appearance. The growl of a lawnmower grew louder as they approached through an ivy covered archway.

  “I suppose you got my card from Ashkhabad?”

  More annoyance for him when he felt her answer was deliberately casual. “Ashkhabad? Is that in India?”

  “It was a view of the railway station. They have a great railway station in Ashkhabad.” He tried a laugh which sounded false even to himself.

  “I mustn’t keep Humbert waiting too long. He’s not at his best with children, not really… Roy, I have to ask you—I don’t know how to put this. I guess you feel pretty grumpy about me, right?”

  The grass was brown among thick low lines of stone, which were all that remained of walls once dividing the rooms of the old religious edifice. For the convenience of visitors, these phantom rooms had metal notices attached: Church, Lay Brothers’ Room, Buttery, Cloister Garth, Sacristy, and so on. As they walked along a passage labeled Passage, Tarquin’s gardener rode his ride-on mower up and down among the grass banks, turning amid the flinty skeleton of the abbey. This would be the last cut of the season, and a sparse one at that.

  Burnell asked himself if his wanting her had not been a mere fossil habit. Glancing at her set expression, he felt he detested her. Certainly their old way of life, whatever it had been, was as dead and gone as the order of men who had once lived and worshiped on this spot.

  “Ask what you like.” Burnell was unable to keep a note of bitterness from his voice. “You’re a Hillington again now, aren’t you, not a Burnell? Or so you told me, I seem to remember—when you said you didn’t wish to know about me any more.”

  She turned to face him, looking earnestly into his eyes as if seeking a way to proceed. Under the inhospitable sky, wrinkles were more evident. “Let me tell you this. I didn’t know how to behave when I was younger. Perhaps I still don’t. I don’t know what you’re—what anyone’s—supposed to do. With themselves.”

  “You didn’t come here to discuss your behavioral problems, did you?”

  His remark silenced her for a few seconds. Feeling sorry for what he had said, he prompted her to go on.

  “On a day-to-day basis, I mean. I used to be so fussy and precise.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Your neat airing cupboard! I admired it.”

  “You don’t remember,” she said, dismissively, needing to make her confession. “Everything had to be just so with me in those days. It was the way I was brought up. You were irritated. I didn’t realize how or why I irritated you. I didn’t know it was me all the time…”

  He did not respond, seeing that more was to come. They paraded among the ancient slabs, plunging hands in coat or trouser pockets against the cold. Apart from occasional glances at each other, to judge the level of hostility between them, they kept their gaze on the ground, to see where they walked. Stone steps had to be negotiated here and there. The flinty ground plan of the ancient buildings formed a labyrinth to amuse child visitors, freed of its religious significance. The mower’s roar faded, growing again as the machine turned and charged in their direction.

  Stephanie tugged her coat more tightly round herself. Her voice came suddenly, as internal argument broke to the surface. “But at least ours was a passionate marriage. Do you remember that? I never knew until recently how passionately you felt about me, under that cool surface of yours. How, I mean, you desired me… No one else ever…well…”

  “It would have been quieter in the blue room. I can hardly hear what you say for this chap on his bloody tractor.”

  “Oh, shut up about the blue room. Buddies Laura and I may be still, but I wasn’t having her listening in to what I had to say.” Her voice rose to a shout. “I was saying it was all my fucking fault!”

  “Come to that, Steff, I might also have something to say… God knows what quarrels we’ve had in the past—they’re stolen from me, the bad things along with the good. I feel wretched about this whole thing, this whole situation—and particularly about your leaving me. I’ve wanted you… I’ve traveled here, there, everywhere, wanting you. But just recently—”

  The mower came roaring by again, drowning their voices. There was nothing for it but to retreat. They moved into the shelter of what had been the church, one end of which still remained standing, together with some evidence of the chapel at its east end. Above them an empty window frame gaped to the sky. Not a peacock was to be seen.

  Looking at Stephanie, realizing that this meeting entailed as much pain for her as for him, Burnell found himself—it was hardly a conscious decision—relenting, telling her that if they were going to be penitent, then it was all as much his fault as hers. “I know my attitude to life is to blame. I’ve always been like it, since I was a schoolboy. I think you know what’s behind it, behind my chilliness. My sense of having been cheated. But not by you, no, I don’t mean by you…” He jerked his head upward, with a half-sneer at the clouds grinding along above them.

  Stephanie looked at Burnell, at the wall behind him, and back at him, as if perplexed, as if thrown from the line of argument by his admission.

  “Why did I leave you?” she asked, without particularly directing the question at him. “Why did everything have to happen as it did?”

  She tensed her hands at her side, bursting out with sudden venom, “Jesus, here we are talking so quietly and half our life’s already over! Why? Why are you being so bloody English and decent to me? You make me come over all English too. Why don’t you shout and rave? Why don’t you hit me about, for God’s sake, the way Humbert does—show me you’re angry and hurt?”

  He leaped into her words before they had died on her lips.

  “Because Humbert’s a shit and a phoney and a creep and a mean little asshole who probably loves any excuse to knock a woman about. I hate him, I hate to know you’ve had a son by him, I hate the way you connive with Laura to drive up and park that scumbag in the family’s drive, sitting there like a gangster, waiting impatiently for you to shut up and hop back in the car with him. And a whole lot more things I hate, if you want to hear the
m. I have a little self-control. That doesn’t mean to say my life isn’t fucked up. All the while I was away, I was thinking of you with longing. Now I have you here, and a boyfriend waiting for you, and your kid, I’m just not so sure how I feel. And I’m cold.”

  Despite her recent protest, she disliked this outburst. Saying nothing, she thrust her hands deep into her pockets and went to stare down the nearby well, the circular mouth of which was protected by a heavy iron grating.

  “This isn’t going to work,” she said aloud, addessing herself. Despite the drought, the well retained its water. She looked down at her dark reflection, while Burnell stood apart, watching.

  “When we were first married, I felt inadequate, a child still. I used to think about drowning myself. I could see quite clearly the fish devouring my body. I could almost watch myself disintegrating. You made me feel so—oh, insignificant.”

  She dropped a piece of mortar down the well, waiting for the delayed splash, watching her reflection disintegrate.

  Looking across the stony distance between them, she spoke quietly but intensely, as if from a witness box.

  “You’ve forgotten when we were staying in Holland that time and what you did to me. It’s very nice for you not to remember, but don’t think I forget. The WACH conference in The Hague and I was made to feel like nothing, nothing, in public, while you went off with that dreadful French creature Blanche who—”

  “Wait. Hang on a minute.” He raised a hand, scowling as he did so. “Maybe you really don’t know how to behave! If you persuaded this boyfriend of yours to drive you up here—with Laura’s connivance—so that you could pitch into me, I’m not taking that. If I hurt you in the past, I’m really sorry, but I’m not going to hang around out here in the permafrost and listen to a diatribe about something I don’t—”

  “You used to listen! You used to listen!” Stephanie turned from him and clasped her hands up to her face. “Listen now, will you, to what I’m trying to say. I’m not trying to quarrel—I’m trying to make it up. I’m not blaming you because you had an affair, Roy, I’m just telling you. Believe me, Humbert goes with other women all the time, everywhere. Humbert the Mad Humper… I hate it and I’ve put up with it for long enough. I’ve had affairs too. Maybe it’s important, maybe not—that’s the sort of thing everyone has to make up their minds about.