The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian Aldiss

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ yesterday?’ She gave a painful smile.

      We crossed the road and walked familiarly together, relieved for the moment not to have to talk.

      When we were in the park she said, ‘Darling, I should not have come. But I am frightened. To tell you the truth, I am getting a bit frightened to remain in the house. There is a man in the street watching me – it’s not who you said it was, it’s another man. I’m sure he has a big gun in his pocket. I’m afraid they are going to kill me.’

      I just did not understand that she believed what she was saying. Trying to laugh it off, I said, ‘You’re making it all up, darling!’

      Perhaps she also had thought about the whole situation over-night. Perhaps she saw, through the veil of all that obsessed her, that I was no part of the conspiracy against her. Perhaps she had struggled against herself, and won, and come to me to give me another chance. I don’t know. But I should not have told her she was making it all up! By her expression, I knew I had committed a bad tactical blunder.

      ‘You don’t know my father! He’s a dangerous man! He would quite easily have my sister and me shot to inherit my grandfather’s money.’

      I blurted out, ‘You haven’t got a sister, Virginia!’ Maybe I hoped shock therapy would work.

      She began to walk on, talking rapidly, telling me I was getting involved in something I did not understand. Her gas-mask case rolled against her hip. Tagging by her side, I had to admit to myself that she was, after all, right; yesterday I had been innocent; today I was involved and no longer innocent. Perhaps she was correct to fear me because I was a part of her world, just as Britain had finally become involved in the far more squalid delusions of the man over in Berlin.

      So I broke into what she was saying, and asked, ‘Tell me just one thing – tell me if you said you were married simply to save me further hurt. You aren’t really married, are you? I can’t believe it!’

      We stopped under a tree and looked at each other. Her grey uncertain eyes were searching my face. I believe she was not married; that would have been too binding a contract for her elusive nature; and possibly what she said next was the nearest she could come to an admission it was so. Lowering her head, she said five heavy words:

      ‘He left me long ago.’

      The words must have contained an inner truth – perhaps part of that secret truth of hers of which I had always been aware.

      From a great distance I heard myself saying faintly, ‘If you are free, Virginia, I will marry you.’

      And from a great distance she replied, ‘I shall never be free of him.’

      They were words of farewell. I stood there, looking as she receded from me. I called to her, broke into a run, thrust my little silver token into her gloved hand. She walked on with it.

      Circumnavigating bushes, dodging behind the park railings, I kept her in sight until her slight figure was obscured behind a building.

      She walked off into the streets of London, those quiet grey Sunday streets, with her gas-mask swinging on her hip, and I never encountered her again. For a long while, when I had other girls, far more orthodox girls, when I was in uniform and they came and gaily went, I would recall Virginia – recall her dear lack of vividness with such vividness! – and fear for her in the double jungle: the real jungle of London and the equally real one that she had built in her own mind. For I understood by then how beyond help she was.

      BRIAN ALDISS

      A Soldier Erect

      or Further Adventures

      of the Hand-Reared Boy

       Epigraph

      As she turned around, I saw part of her backside, leaned over and laid my face on it, crying about my broken drum; the evening sunshine made it all bright – how strange I should recollect that so clearly, but I have always recollected sunshine.

      My Secret Life, by ‘Walter’

      ‘Cavaliers, and strong men, this cavalier is the friend of a friend of mine. Es mucho hombre. There is none like him in Spain. He speaks the crabbed Gitano though he is an Inglesite.

      ‘We do not believe it,’ replied several grave voices. ‘It is not possible.’

      The Bible in Spain, by George Borrow

      Table of Contents

       Epigraph

       Introduction

Book One

The Lair of the Monkey God

       Book Two

       The Old Five-fingered Widow

       Book Three

       God’s Own Country

       Introduction

      Whilst writing The Hand-Reared Boy, I began to consider a further book, where we might meet with my Stubbs when adult. Taking the time scale into consideration, it seemed likely that young Stubbs would join the army. A Soldier Erect is wholehearted in its awfulness. Here is Horatio Stubbs again, fresh from his adventures in the first novel of the trilogy.

      We find him now complaining about a party, which was planned to celebrate his departure overseas with the Mendip Regiment to fight the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma. (Burma until this date had been part of the British Empire.) Stubbs begins his account in the grumbling mode – a mode which endures, with the volume being turned up throughout the book. Complaint about war is hardly surprising, but the entire novel has implications beyond this, confronting us with passages full of filth, fear and frustrated fornications; passages engendered in large part by the horrors and hungers of global disruption.

      Stubbs and his young mates, ill-informed as they are, have a hatred for the lower orders of Indian society with which they are forced to mingle. One might wonder what the Indians of today would make of these violent episodes and impressions, launched upon us with demonic energy.

      A short extract might tell us what we are in for. Here are the words written on a card СКАЧАТЬ