The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian Aldiss

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      When I got back to the table Spaldine had craftily lit a fresh cigarette, thus saving himself the necessity of offering me one. He blew smoke out across the table and said, ‘You never went to Traven House, did you?’

      ‘I was going, but we changed our plans.’

      ‘Like that was it? Give over, Stubbs. I know who changed the plans! She did – she had to! She doesn’t live at Traven House any more than I do.’

      ‘You’re lying, Spaldine!’

      ‘Look, I turned up there about twelve o’clock. Great big house all going to pot, it is! An old man answered the door, some sort of a butler, I suppose. I asked for Sister and the old boy said there was nobody of that name there, very poker-faced. Of course, I said I knew better. They’d got birds nesting under the porch affair. I kicked up a bit of a fuss. The old bloke started shouting. Eventually a chap calling himself Captain Traven turned up. He could have been sixty or seventy, I suppose. Anyhow, he sent the aged retainer away and tried to sort things out a bit. I told him why I was there, and he asked me in for a beer. He was civil enough – he’d been in the Army, he said. Walked with a limp. It was a funny house, a lot of sporting what’s-its on the walls. As I say, he gave me a beer. I needed it. And we had a chat. They’d got a kind of a billiard room there.’

      ‘What relation was this captain to Virginia?’

      From what Spaldine said, I gathered that the captain squeezed more information out of Spaldine than Spaldine squeezed out of him. The captain sounded a shady character, the way Spaldine told it, but a few words from Spaldine could have made the Archbishop of Canterbury sound like a cheap crook.

      The captain had evaded Spaldine’s question about Virginia, much as Spaldine evaded mine about her. He had talked about the failure of business interests. A hag-like woman with dyed red hair had appeared, lit a cigarette, and inspected Spaldine; she asked him if he was staying for lunch (to which the captain had sharply said ‘No’), and then drifted off without another word; Spaldine said he was willing to bet that the hag was not the captain’s wife.

      ‘What did he say about Virginia?’

      Spaldine had led the conversation round to Virginia, and the captain told him that she was his daughter – his only daughter; after his second marriage she had become very difficult; eventually she had left under a cloud – this many moons ago, Spaldine gathered – with mutual vows that she would never return. She had tried to set the house on fire.

      The repulsiveness of this story owed much to the obnoxious character of the man who was telling it, but it had certain features in its own right that exercised very little appeal on me. Even supposing Spaldine had inserted no lies of his own into the account, there was no telling how much of the story was a fabrication of the captain’s. Spaldine had said of him, by way of description, that he wore ‘a sort of military dressing-gown’; and somehow this detail alone was enough to conjure up in my eyes a whole career of unscrupulousness. I felt myself close to the dusty source of that terrible ill which I always knew had been done Virginia at some period in the past.

      No such reflections detained Spaldine. He was pressing on with his tale of disenchantment.

      Still on the trail of Sister – and now more savagely than ever, I gathered – he had cycled in to Nottingham and hammered on the door in Union Street. The slut (described by Spaldine as ‘a little honey in sexy pink slippers’) had opened up to him and shown him Virginia’s room upstairs. Virginia was in, and alarmed to see him. He was furious and created a big scene, during which she wept. Later she soothed him and said that even if her situation was not quite as she had represented it, it was certainly not as her father had represented it. He was a cruel man who had turned out her and her mother, so that he might live in sin with the red-haired woman. He was currently trying to disinherit her from the money due to her in her grandfather’s will.

      All the time Spaldine raved on about the lies Sister had told him and the damage she had done him, I was aware how my hatred of him was growing. He referred to her as a snake-in-the-grass, using the expression several times, but he was my snake-in-the-grass; plainly, he had bullied Virginia, and had still been screwing her in Union Street, even when he had begun, by his own admission, to hate her. To think I’d met him in Nottingham, that very day, shortly after he had been seeing her, had bought him a cup of coffee, had never suspected a thing!

      How I felt about Virginia was another matter. I was then unsure how I felt; an immense lake of sorrow was growing inside me, but partly it was because I regretted she had become involved with Spaldine.

      However, it was clear that many of Spaldine’s charges against her were correct in essence. Virginia had deceived everyone. The wealthy upper-class background she had sketched was a myth – as I should have seen, had I had more experience, from her worn clothes and the shabby rooms in which she had to live.

      ‘You realize that the bitch is even now having it off with somebody else?’ Spaldine said. ‘She came down here because she couldn’t get enough round Nottingham.’

      ‘She’s allowed to choose, isn’t she?’

      ‘Don’t give me that stuff! She’s got an obligation to me – to us, let’s say, hasn’t she? To me, anyhow. Just because she was sacked from school …’

      ‘What? She was sacked? Are you sure? She never told me she was sacked!’

      ‘She never told you a bloody thing, Stubbs!’

      ‘She told me she wanted to join the Nursing Service.’

      ‘Oh did she! She told me she had to come to London to act as principal witness in some involved divorce case concerning a friend.’

      ‘Well, she mentioned that to me too – perhaps both are true.’

      ‘Look, they’re neither true, you silly clot! I reckon she got bunked!’

      ‘You’ve no proof.’

      ‘I reckon the Head found out what she was up to. Christ, man, she must have had half the Upper School across her at one time or another. Someone on the staff would have been bound to find out!’

      ‘You’re just guessing, and you’ve no right to say that. I don’t see you’ve got any right to watch her house, either – much less clobber anyone who comes out.’

      He shambled up to the bar and bought two more half-pints of beer and a packet of Woodbines. I watched him and saw what a radically unattractive fellow he was, his fair hair standing up in spikes, his nose pudgy and dismal and his trousers filthy from our scramble. No doubt I looked as bad myself. The knuckles of my left hand were bleeding badly, and I had wrapped them in a dirty handkerchief. Two sordid young men of seventeen, Virginia’s lovers! Poor dear Virginia!

      Spaldine put the beer down and lit a fag. I cadged one off him. A couple of old women were watching us covertly, attracted by Spaldine’s vehement manner, doubtless. I gave them a good hard stare, mean-mouthed, and they looked away.

      ‘See, something fishy’s going on round at hers,’ Spaldine said. ‘I bloody know there’s some other bloke having it off with her. She put me off meeting her tonight, you know. She doesn’t want me any more, that’s for sure!’

      ‘Wouldn’t it be better to resign yourself to the worst? You can’t make her’ (I gulped) ‘love you.’

      ‘Are СКАЧАТЬ