The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian Aldiss

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      Average age of party – fifty? Ninety? Who cared? I crouched on my perch trying to work out when the visitors had last – if ever – had it in. It was hard to imagine that the females were penetrable or, if penetrable, that the males were capable of penetrating them. Did Mr. Mole occasionally manage a subterranean passage up Mrs. Mole, over a sack of demerara, under a flag-draped photo of Winnie with his two fingers in the air?

      From my disadvantage point, I could watch my reflection in the mirror of the wardrobe, which stood near the door and opposite the chest-of-drawers. Now there was a born shagger, if ever I saw one, given the chance. I stuck my feet in the top (sock and handkerchief) drawer and spread my arms out along the ceiling. The sight reminded me of something. Pulling the hair down over my eyes, I pantomimed a corny crucifixion scene, with plenty of bleary and reproachful dekkos up at the plaster. ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ I looked more like Hitler throwing one of his fits than Christ in final aggs.

      Why this obsession with Christ, for God’s sake? Perhaps I’d been Christ in a previous existence – during my mid-teens, I had nursed a sneaking belief in the theory of reincarnation. Oh Christ, don’t let me have been Christ! I dropped the crucifixion act and made monkey faces at myself.

      You could rule out all the women at the party straight away, except for Valerie, Henrietta Crane, and Sylvia. Valerie was Nelson’s bit of crumpet, so that left Henrietta Crane and Sylvia. That’ll show you how desperate I was, not to rule out Henrietta Crane straight away! The Enigma was in her mid-twenties – perhaps five years older than I. A heavily-powdered girl or was it just that she had never been dusted?, who looked as if her clothes, flesh, eyes, hair, everything, were made out of a single ambiguous material – stale sponge cake, say. Even I, despite frequent practice shots, could not imagine her undressed, or even with her hair down. Did she ever run for a bus, or fart, or burst out laughing? Henrietta Crane was the sort of girl you didn’t have to go near to know that her breath would smell of Kensitas cigarettes and Milk of Magnesia. You never find girls like that any more, thank God. They were all scrapped at the end of the war.

      Which left our Syl. As the party warmed up – i.e., came to something approaching room-temperature – Ann was working our gramophone, then giving out with a Carroll Gibbons recording of That Old Black Magic, and Sylvia was standing beside her, jiffling to the tunes. It was a wind-up gramophone, brought out of the air-raid shelter now that we were not having air raids any more, so that it needed the two of them to keep it cranked and loaded. I prowled round the perimeter of the little conversations, attracted by Sylvia’s jiffle.

      Her bum moved round to about ten o’clock and then worked anticlockwise to about two-thirty, after which it repeated the gambit. Since she was putting more weight on one leg than on the other, her buttocks were not quite in synch: the left was with Carroll Gibbons, while the right worked on a wilder melody of its own. What a sight! I could feel my pulses getting sludgey. Sod it, I had to have it in tonight – tomorrow, fuck knows what would happen tomorrow! My stomach gave a thin whine at the mere thought of tomorrow … At least Syl could move, unlike Henrietta Crane. Syl was small and rather shifty-looking, but by no means as ancient as The Enigma. Lumps of breast could be seen under a blue dress, although they were unable to coincide entirely with the tit-positions sewn into the dress. Of course, it would be an old dress of her mother’s cut down. I’d met Our Syl’s mother, but did not let that put me off. I smiled, she smiled, still working the buttocks in friendly fashion. Or perhaps they worked by themselves.

      ‘So you’re off then, Horatio?’

      ‘The war’s been taking too long. The War Office has sent for me at last.’

      ‘… “I hear your name, and I’m aflame …” Lushy song! What do you look like in your uniform? Smashing, I bet! All dressed for action!’

      ‘How’d you like to see me in nothing at all?’

      ‘Horatio, what do you mean?’

      ‘Stripped for action!’

      ‘Ooh, we’ve got a right one here!’ she told Ann.

      Father was not about, so Mother was being officious for two. She willowed over with a glass in her hand. ‘Now, my big soldier boy, you mustn’t let Sylvia monopolize you all evening!’

      ‘I only just came over—’

      ‘Circulate, dear – And brush your hair back properly, you look silly with it hanging over your eyes like that!’ These family pleasantries all sotto voce.

      If she overcame my natural instinct to look like Robert Preston in Wake Island, which I had seen five times in the camp cinema, so she had also overcome my father’s instinct to have no booze during the evening. ‘It only spoils the party.’ No, come on, he didn’t really say that; I must have imagined it! But poor old Dad was the sort you could imagine saying it. Fortunately, Mother’s sense of occasion had won; she had sucked up to the chap in the post office, who could get you anything, and secured two bottles of pre-war sherry, which she was now doling out gaily, with many a quip about tipsiness, into little bile-green glasses. Mr. Jeremy Church, anxious to establish what a merry old turd he was, had brought along a bottle of puce burgundy.

      ‘See you later,’ I said over my shoulder to Sylvia, loading the words with all the disgusting sexual innuendo they would take.

      I skirted the talk of scarcities and heroism, striving to look by other means than dishevelled hair as if I had just arrived from Wake Island. Collecting a burgundy from Church with a minimum of conversational involvement, I went over to peer down at Henrietta Crane.

      The Enigma was offering several items of clothing between blouse and sponge cake – vests, spencers, brassieres, who knows what; wartime conditions gave this sort of girl a magnificent chance to put on every variety of fusty garment her mother had put off fifty years earlier. The sponge cake, notoriously undusted, moved slowly up and down, as if there was someone in it. Yes, I could force myself to get excited. I flung my sexual emotions into gear by imagining sponge-cakey vulvas. The prick gave a faint lethargic twitch in its sleep, like an ancient dog offered an ancient bone.

      Henrietta was sipping the puce burgundy with her mother. They were making faces and whispering together. I perched on an arm of the sofa beside her – more for the sake of ‘A’ Company than anything personal. She moved her elbow away surreptitiously, so that it could not by any chance come into contact with my arse.

      ‘So glad you could make it this evening, Henrietta – and your mother. Didn’t have any trouble getting here in the blackout?’

      ‘So you’ve just got this forty-eight-hour leave, Horatio, have you?’ That was her mother, not her, looking up brightly and showing her dentures.

      ‘That’s right. Forty-eight hours. The usual.’

      ‘Just two days, in fact.’

      I appeared to make quick calculations under my breath … ‘Thirty, thirty-three, forty, forty-eight …’ ‘Yes, that’s right, just two days, in fact!’ said with as much feigned astonishment as I dared show.

      ‘And where are you going when you get back to the Army? It is the Army?’

      ‘First battalion, the Second Royal Mendip Borderers.’

      ‘Well, that is the Army, isn’t it? Where are you going to go?’

      ‘That’s a military СКАЧАТЬ