The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian Aldiss

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      Into my ear she whispered hotly, ‘You told me one of those boys did it to you three times straight off. Now your sexy Esmeralda is going to do it to you three times straight off, and I won’t take no for an answer!’

      She was, I’m happy to say, as good as her word.

      Leaving home was more taxing than I had expected. The truth was, I still loved my mother dearly; her inability to understand anything about the way I thought or felt had caused me to build a layer of indifference over my feelings for her. But when she wept as I went and said she did not know what to do without me now that both her boys had forsaken her, I was deeply mortified and disturbed to think that I had been unfair to her.

      Home was sadly depleted. Ann now had a boy friend of her own, a younger brother of my old enemy Barrett. She clung to me and wept before I left; childhood was ending for her too. We no longer had a maid living in; Beatrice was married and came only in the morning from 8.30 to one. My father was coping with increasing regulations and dwindling staff at the bank.

      Filled with mixed emotion, I went and loitered about by the bank on one of those last evenings, hoping to say something to Father that would enable him to speak to me in the way I always knew he could.

      Although it was daylight yet in the street, a light burned in the bank; above the frosted section of the glass I could occasionally see father’s head and that of the chief cashier. I recalled the times when I had stood here as a small boy, waiting for him to come out, check the door to see that it was securely locked behind him, take my hand, and lead me home. That was no more expected. Now I was grown up, and he might like me better if I behaved like a man.

      The chief clerk came out of the side door. I hid round the corner so that I did not have to speak to him. I went back to the side door of the bank, standing there smiling as my father came out.

      ‘Hello, Dad!’

      ‘Hello, Horatio! What are you doing here? Are you waiting for me?’

      With an effort – ‘Yes, Dad, I was, really. I thought perhaps we could – well, you know I’m off on Friday – I thought perhaps we could go and, you know, have a sort of farewell drink!’

      ‘A drink?’ He frowned at me, not at all unkindly. ‘Here, you’d better come home with me. What do you want a drink for? At your age! I don’t want you hanging about the public houses and I hope you won’t when you’re in London.’

      ‘No, I won’t, Dad.’

      ‘Well, I don’t want a son of mine seen in a pub. I know Nelson has been in one a time or two, but we hope he’ll grow out of that. You know your mother’s upset enough at your going to London – I don’t know what she’d do if she thought you were going into public houses. It’s the downward road, my boy, make no mistake of that.’

      ‘Yes, Father.’

      ‘There’s a good lad! Let’s see if she’s got something nice for my tea.’

      I thought at the time how damned nice he was, and how uncouth and depraved I must have seemed, trying to get him to go for a drink; as far as I knew, he had never seen the inside of a pub. And as a bank manager he had a position to keep up. What made Father seem all the more mild and restrained was that he should make only oblique reference to a squabble of the previous month, when Nelson had actually taken me into a country-type pub just on the outskirts of town; we had each smoked a fag and drunk a half-pint of shandy – and on emerging into the guilty light of day had been spotted by one of the bank’s prosperous customers and reported. Father was extremely angry on that occasion (the customer had been Mr. Tansley-Smith), and Nelson and I had had a lecture about the evils of drink and the sort of company we were likely to meet in such disgraceful haunts as ‘The Three Feathers’.

      So that was it. When it came time for me to get my London train, Father said no more about ‘The Three Feathers’ episode, or about my strange invitation to him, and we parted with a good affectionate handshake; but I could only feel he expected that no good would come of me in London and would hold out no great hopes for my future.

      Mother, at the last moment, appeared more perky.

      ‘It’s a shame you should be leaving me so soon, darling! You’re so young!’

      ‘I’ve been going away to school for years, though, haven’t I?’

      ‘That’s different! Still, I suppose you will be able to look after yourself – if you find a good landlady. Why, she’ll probably love to have a boy of your age to mother! She’ll spoil you! And perhaps she’ll ask your poor old mother down to stay, one day! And you will write every week, won’t you? Nice long letters?’

      It all seemed like an anticlimax. At one time I had imagined that Nelson, Ann and I would stage a sort of absolutely bloody little revolution of our own and march out of the house en masse. But we left one by one, going forth from the paternal roof as much in bewilderment as revolt, reluctantly rather than grandly.

      London was also not as I had imagined it; my arrival was hardly triumphal. But I soon found lodgings in a gaunt little house standing at the extreme north end of Queensway, where I rented a gaunt little room under the roof. The tenants were a Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson – Wilf and Lou, as they soon became. I rarely saw Wilf; he had a night job, maintenance man on the Underground, but his wife was kind to me and fed me well, although she was in other respects a rather mean woman. I did not greatly mind. I had other interests.

      First among these must be counted the thrill of being in London. That great city was then at one of its historical turning points. As I look back to that autumn and winter of 1939 now, I see a city of long ago, ruled by men who were essentially Victorian, inhabited in its less fashionable thoroughfares by people who held many of the beliefs of the Victorian Age, and who lived among the relics of that age. It was a city which, despite the First World War, had peace built into it and so was able to turn only reluctantly and face the angry dawns of war.

      But that very effort had stirred it up. You knew that something was happening in London, a sort of phychic earthquake. Out of the massed villages that together constitute the capital, people were slipping; and, as unobtrusively, new people were slipping in, like rowboats passing unnoticed under Tower Bridge, bringing dynamite. Signs of war were apparent. Barrage balloons hung here and there. Adhesive paper criss-crossed on windows. Sandbags were up. The city was getting secret. It was after dark that the subversive aspects became most apparent. In the blackout, London hummed like the larger version of the dormitories of Branwells that it was. I was too young to realize that yet, for I had still to find my way around; but I certainly picked up the tension on my highly tuned antennae.

      I had no trouble in getting a job in one of the ministerial departments now rapidly springing up everywhere. I chose it not only because it was just round the cornet from Lou Stevenson’s, but because it was housed in a gigantic building and had a STAFF VACANCIES notice on the door as well as an attractive air of mystery in its seedy porch.

      My duties were both light and nebulous, consisting almost entirely of sorting an endless stack of file cards into two packs: those bearing the names of males and those bearing the names of females; and then shuffling the female pack into alphabetical order. Half the women in the British Isles must have slipped through my fingers.

      One morning, as I was leaving Lou’s for the department, a letter arrived for me bearing Virginia’s ‘aristocratic scrawl’ on the СКАЧАТЬ