The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ the emptiness, a stabbing knowledge; she’s left school now – the world’s big – you will lose sight of her any day – she’s not so closely tied to you, why should she be? – she could disappear without another word.

      True! Within me, waiting for this opportunity to reveal itself, lay more intuitive understanding of this strange woman I loved. She was elusive to me; and so she was to herself. Infinitely precious, she could so easily be infinitely lost.

      I almost broke out of my room in search of her at that instant. Standing caged, I rested my forehead against my locked bedroom door.

      I resolved to go and see her again next day. I had to make some definite arrangement with her. That was what we had never had. Never had I shown her how deeply I cared; maybe I had been afraid to.

      We had to have a proper relationship. After all, I was no longer a child. Neither of us was going back to Branwells. No longer need our love be clandestine. At last I saw the advantages of growing up!

      That night brought me no sleep. I tried to read, could not; slipped down the drainpipe outside my window, walked to the outskirts of the town, came back, still could not rest. Eventually, tired and disgusted with myself, I took the usual way into oblivion and tossed myself off. Then I slept.

      Next morning, her lovely face, half-mocking, was before me. While Mother told Father across the breakfast table everything Virginia had said at tea the previous day, I resolved that I must speak to Virginia – speak to her seriously.

      Clear on what I had to do, I was muddled on how to do it.

      Virginia’s arrangements were slightly complicated. She had never wanted me to write to her at Traven House because one of the servants there pried into her affairs; I always wrote to an address in Nottingham, where she said she had some rooms. It was to this address that I resolved to go – it was accessible by train, whereas Traven House stood miles off the map, and was too intimidating besides. I slipped away from home after lunch, pretending I was off for a game of cricket.

      Such idiot plans court disaster. It was, really, my first set-back in the Virginia affair, and indirectly it may have helped me to stand apart from her.

      The train chugged into Nottingham Midland Station by 2.30 and I set out on foot for Union Street. The name on paper always sounded so romantic: the union referred to was ours, hers and mine. The reality lay near the lunatic asylum and was extremely drab, a succession of terraced houses punctuated by shops in a semi-industrial area. My step faltered in dismay.

      After much hesitation, hoping to run into her in the street, I went up to the number I had and rang the bell. After a while, a girl of about my age opened the door and peered out. She wore curlers in her hair, a pink apron, and fluffy pink slippers. From behind her came the cabbagey whiff of the house.

      ‘Yes,’ she said.

      I asked politely for Sister Traven, making as if to walk in.

      ‘That slut ain’t in and she owes us rent!’ And with that the bitch slammed the door in my face.

      Shaken, horrified, doubting, I stood back. I was conscious of people looking at me from behind curtains.

      What should I do? Post Virginia a note through the door? Knock again? Wait till someone else arrived at the house? In the end I did nothing. I walked to the end of the street, stood there with my hands in my pockets, and at last went away.

      Everyone must experience such bitter reversals in love. Things happen which seem nothing to do with the quality of the human beings involved, glass-sharp nasty things that come grinding up out of the system in which mankind has to live, reminders of the horrid fact that we as humans must camp out as best we can among complex series of natural laws, which came into being long before man did, and so contain no provision for him or any finer feelings.

      All I could do was return to the railway station. The one distraction was meeting Spaldine, then heading back from Spalding by train. He was as subdued as I was, having come over to Nottingham to volunteer for the R.A.F. We worked our way through a cup of vile coffee and a biscuit together in the station buffet before departing to our separate platforms. Strangely enough, the name of Sister Traven emerged in our conversation, but from a guarded question I put, I gathered that he knew nothing of her whereabouts.

      Back home I went, empty-handed, empty-hearted. A certain ability for self-dramatization may have eased the situation slightly. Nothing else did.

      September wore on. At last my father wrote to the Head and said that he did not think any useful purpose would be served in sending me back to Branwells; I would be doing some war work until I was of age to join the forces. The Head wrote back saying he entirely understood the position, that patriotism must come first, and that he required a term’s fee in lieu of notice.

      I was really alone. No, not really alone; Ann and I took to cycling off into the country with sandwiches for lunch. On one occasion Esmeralda came with us, but Ann and Esmeralda did not like each other – Esmeralda patronized her. We were completely isolated from our parents.

      The old phantom idea of a war between generations is never far away in times when change makes the older generation appear obsolete instead of wise; for all that, it is a silly and distressing idea, in which both sides are losers. In 1939 that sense of division was particularly sharp.

      My father volunteered for the Navy, in which he had served in the Great War (as he called it). He was turned down because he was too old. His generation was suddenly faced with the fact that they were ‘past it’. It was a generation, too, which thought of the new war in terms of the old. To men like my father, the war promised to be merely a stale repetition of the horrors of the previous conflict.

      From ‘Uncle’ Jim Anderson, the war took on a different aspect I have mentioned this occasional visitor to our house. Nelson and I always suspected that there was ‘something going on’ between him and Mother. In the last days of that September everyone was changing, every relationship was changing; and ‘Uncle’ Jim, that uncertain man, was changing with the times.

      He turned up one afternoon when Ann was at school, Father at the bank, and Mother on one of her walks. To my irritation, I had to make conversation to him. He marched about our living-room in the smart walking-out uniform of an infantry regiment; and my irritation was partly with myself for being impressed.

      In a short while, as he talked, it dawned on me that he was not just talking to kill time until my mother returned, but was genuinely trying to communicate with me. I was too sunk into myself to respond; and I can have paid little attention to him, for, even a brief time afterwards I could not recollect what he spoke about, except that it was serious, and that he ended by saying, referring to the war, ‘I’ve wasted away my life so far – perhaps now I shall be able to make something of it!’

      When he said goodbye to my mother she turned pale and ran upstairs.

      Into everyone’s stagnant lives a current was circulating.

      To us who were young, the air was vibrant with hopes and threats. The black on the map, by which Germany was represented, was a thrilling incarnation of evil, to which we were drawn despite ourselves. It represented a sort of liberty.

      I tried to volunteer for service. I was turned down. The British Government had called up the eighteens to the forty-ones, and its hands were full organizing them. Looking back, I see it was typical of the Stubbs family that both Father and I should volunteer within a few days of each other – rather than go together and meet our rebuffs together!

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