Comfort Zone. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ a stout stick of a type known to the Irish as a shillelagh from its hiding place beneath a rug and laid it under the sofa on which she slept, so that she could more easily grab it if she was attacked.

      A coloured curtain hung over the rear wall of the bungalow, concealing a wooden door. She checked that the bolt was secure. Going about these protective measures, Om Haldar sang to herself in a low voice.

      Grasses glitter with the dews of morning

      For the little birds to suck.

      Where I come from no birds or dews

      Came to greet the dusty pinks

      That herald one more starving dawning

      Where the wild dog comes and drinks –

      The Great alone feed, while for us to pluck

      No mangoes, schooling, justice, luck

      I drown in all my thoughts, my sorrows.

      How can my pa be so unkind

      Who once held me on his knee?

      How can I ever purge from mind

      The death, the dagger? I can see

      But pa is blind. From vengeance, death, I flee.

      My yesterdays and worse tomorrows

      Surely are not writ and signed?

      Here amid this land of strangers

      Much I see is clean and neat

      Much I see is calm and sweet

      And yet they have no god to praise

      And those I know breed dangers, dangers.

      Allah, let me see your face –

      I must be ever on my ways

      Or I will die for my disgrace –

      My little fault, my love, my days –

      To some other foreign place …

      She took her duster to clean the windows and to watch, singing to herself, hoping Allah would understand her plight and be merciful.

      Justin’s house, Clemenceau, was solid. He had grown fond of it. Clemenceau aspired to none of the grandeur of Righteous House. It stood with its sturdy façade towards the street; it was the house in which Janet Haddock had died. It marked the end of the street, beyond Ivy Lane. The street was one-sided. On the other side of the road opposite Clemenceau was a wilderness of trees and bushes, behind which lurked a small special school. Sometimes, standing on his front doorstep, Justin could hear the cries and calls of a different species of being: schoolchildren. Since his wife’s death, or – as he sometimes liked to describe it – the divorce, this old grey house of his had become the necessary shell of the crustacean within. Clemenceau was one of the old modest stone-built houses standing not exactly close, not exactly apart. It had originally consisted of two rooms at ground level and two upper rooms. Later, two more rooms, an upper and a lower, had been tacked on. Then a room serving now as a living room had been built to the rear. When Justin bought the house, he had greatly extended it, lengthening it with a generous hall and study, above which was a room Janet had liked to call her own, together with a spare bedroom and toilet en suite. This simulation of organic growth in the building presumably marked an increase in British fortunes across the years. When he lay in bed of a night, he listened to the many noises the house made to itself, a succession of creaks, bumps and groans, as if the old place were talking to itself, muttering about its early past before central heating was invented. In the back garden, Justin had turned up the remains of a well, with an old mattress stuffed down it. Also, as he dug himself a vegetable bed, the yellowed bones of an aged dray horse had been uncovered. These were further indications of an earlier, less comfortable, age. Justin crept about his familiar rooms. A certain dread lurked that he might, through infirmity or impoverishment, have to forsake the house in exchange for a single room. He had a relationship with the house. Not quite a love affair, more a kinship: a place where he might cling to his humanity as long as possible. He had filled the place with etchings and paintings and some of his own abstract oils. The walls of several rooms were choked by books; books on or epistles by Byron or Mary Shelley and her group, histories of World War Two, catalogues of Kandinsky exhibitions, learned works on G.B. Tiepolo’s etchings, biographies of John Osborne and the letters of Kingsley Amis, works on Sumatra and other countries, and of the solar system. It was not so much that he feared death: he hated to think of his library being broken up. That was the final dissolution of personality, of his personality and of Janet’s. Sometimes he chose to forget Janet was dead and imagined her living in Carlisle. Surely she would return, wanting to see their son again?

      He heard Maude enter the house, but did not go to greet her. She went quietly to her part of the ground floor they shared. He had recently redecorated the downstairs lavatory with a soothing green emulsion paint. A pretty green summer dress of Janet’s hung on the back of the door. He had yet to make up his mind to part with it. Like the rest of the house, this lavatory was fairly shipshape. It was only the outside drains and gutters that still required the attention of the elusive builders.

      He was comfortable enough in his house, even sharing it with Maude. No one had ever broken into it. Nevertheless he was uneasy, not understanding what trouble Maude seemed to be involved in. He had spoken to Guy Fitzgerald, with whom he was on fairly formal terms. Guy owned Righteous House; he was an anaesthetist at the JR, the local hospital, the John Radcliffe. He had shed no light on the matter of Maude’s conversion, or of who was living in his summerhouse, beyond the fact that he thought their lodger held no immigration papers.

      Justin’s living room was unremarkable, somewhat dated. Janet had furnished it; he had never changed it, except to add a large TV screen to one corner. The windows looked out on the garden and his courtyard. Morning sun flooded into this room. The sun tried to tempt a big unkempt succulent standing on the window sill to flower. This tousled plant had not flowered for three years. He forgave it, liking its grand disorder. When and if it ever flowered again, it would give forth the most brilliant blossoms, opening mouths of unimaginable colour.

      At the front of the house was a smaller and smarter room. He had taken some trouble with its furnishings. The basic colour was a sober deep blue, markedly enlivened by a large rug fashioned from many multi-coloured squares and rectangles of a durable wool. He had installed a small settee of a plump nature, on which he often sprawled to read the TLS. There had been a time when the afternoon sun had filtered into this room, making it glow with an amiable beauty. Over the years, trees such as leylandii and a magnificent horse chestnut had grown up on the perimeters of the school on the opposite side of the road, absorbing the sun’s rays; so that only little trembling points of gold now broke through into this evening room. Justin’s kitchen was old-fashioned, his pantry sparse. He rarely went into the dining room. Only when Kate came to spend the night with him did they have breakfast there. Eggs and bacon always featured on those happy occasions. In these various rooms he maintained himself and Maude. He had even learnt to tolerate the incantations Maude was learning from Om Haldar.

       2

       A Note from the Summerhouse

      Marie Milsome СКАЧАТЬ