The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ sexual dream. I’m almost twice your age. You regard me as an alien or a time-traveller.’

      ‘Why do dreams always break off at the most interesting part?’

      He laughed. ‘Good question. I don’t know if anyone has answered it. Imagination refusing to go any further? Maybe if the good things always happened in dreams there’d be no incentive to make them happen in waking life. They’d sap your determination if you could get to Venus every night.’

      ‘Like you have to work very hard really to get to Ossle Tomski.’

      ‘She was dreadful, wasn’t she? Did she make him the way he is or vice versa?’

      They were speeding among the freighters by then, heading for the dockside.

      After a light lunch, they returned to their hotel. Grahame and the others were nowhere to be seen. With some relief, Squire and Nye took the lift up to their room. It was a beautiful room, cool, well-appointed, smelling of sandalwood, with an ever-interesting view of Orchard Road and the city.

      They showered together and sluiced the sand from their bodies. She let the water course over her upturned face.

      ‘Laura, dearest Laura, I can think and breathe nothing but you.’

      She pressed herself against him. ‘Oh, I do want to be with you. I need you so much, Tom. I can’t leave you.’

      Squeezing her, he stared painfully at her. ‘It’ll be different back in England. I can’t let you louse up your life with Peter. Besides – oh, Christ I keep telling you, I really am old enough to be your father.’

      ‘You told me also that when your boyhood hero Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall, he was old enough to be her father, and that all worked out really happily. Well, we’ll work out something good, too.’

      He turned the water off.

      ‘This is just an idyll, my darling. Unreal. Too good to stay true. Don’t spoil it with hope.’

      She bent down. ‘I’m a sucker for you, Tom Squire,’ she said, and popped his still dripping penis into her mouth.

      They climbed onto the double bed, and began to make love without hurry. Afterwards, they slept.

      ‘Any more dirty dreams?’ he asked her when they woke.

      ‘You don’t love me, Tom. You only fancied me because I was billed as the Sex Symbol in your Instant Culture series. You only love me as a symbol – and don’t start telling me that we all respond to each other as symbols, because I hate that line of chat.’

      ‘You’re doubly dear – as yourself and as a symbol. But I can’t bring all that misery on everyone. On Tess and the kids, and on your Peter.’

      ‘The other day you were saying that she didn’t care for you, only for the house and the possessions.’

      ‘I didn’t mean that exactly. Even so, it would still bring her misery. This must just be a beautiful interlude.’

      She scowled at him, put out her tongue, reached over to a side table. Grasping a bottle of suntan oil, she began to anoint herself, kneeling up on the bed and shutting him off by her concentration on her body.

      ‘If that sight doesn’t give me a hard on, I don’t know what will.’

      ‘Oh, Tom, I wish that bloody UFO I dreamed about had taken me away.’

      He swung over and sat on the side of the bed so that he did not have to watch her oiling her breasts.

      ‘I just remembered when I first thought of the title, “Frankenstein Among the Arts”. Long before I rationalized its use. I thought of all the arts of living, which have perhaps been brought to a higher standard in the West, and to more people, than they have ever been before. And I wondered why the hell we weren’t all happier than mankind has ever been. Not that we deserve to be while parts of the world are starving, as moralists would doubtless remark.’

      ‘As if you weren’t a stinking moralist!’

      ‘Ah, but I’m not the old kind who was shocked when people enjoyed themselves; I’m shocked that people don’t enjoy themselves. And that’s what I saw – behind all the benevolent arts of living, a monster looming, blindly clutching and throttling all that comes within its grasp. What I really wanted to do in the series and the book – what I haven’t done, what I even lost sight of doing – was analyse not the nature of the arts but the nature of the monster. How would you label it: Morality, Immorality, maybe, Communism, Capitalism, History, or some deep-rooted biological flaw in human stock?’

      ‘Things aren’t that bad, darling.’

      ‘You said it yourself earlier today. Why do dreams always stop just as you’re getting to the good part? Ever since we were in Sarawak I’ve been thinking of that cave wall full of phantom hands, palms outstretched in supplication. They may well prove to be the very earliest artwork of mankind that we know – and there we all are, hands lifted, grasping at – something we can’t get, something we can hardly even adumbrate.’

      She put the stopper back on the bottle.

      ‘Or maybe something we’ve lost, like the Australian and his Istosky Lemosky.’

      The sun was glinting through their blinds with slanting rays. He reached over and picked his watch off the bedside table. ‘It’s half-five already. In the Pole’s case it was no doubt the hostile politics of the century that separated him from his place of birth, awful, cold, and unpronounceable as it was, and set him on that long road to Australia and the noonday brandy. But the monster always calls, through one agency or another.’

      She trotted round the room and stroked his hair. He placed a cheek against her glistening flank.

      ‘Stop it. The dice aren’t loaded against us. Don’t pretend they are or they will be. Fatalism is all wrong. Come on, we found each other, didn’t we? That suggests that your monster is on our side, doesn’t it? There’s no monster. You’ve just got one of these intellectual ideas like my father had. I’m going to get you out of it, I’m going to be your Lauren Bacall, Bogie, and I’m going to take care of you and mother you like a daughter, and see that no harm comes to you – ever.’

      He grasped her teasingly by one labium.

      ‘Laura, you’re marvellous. For you I’d swim the Styx, or even the River Bug. Now, drape something over this lascivious little body and let’s see how life is progressing down below.’

      ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’re very happy to have you aboard with us for this tour of Singapore by Night, of which we are all so proud, remembering that it is the third largest port in the world. There are many exotic sights to see, for this really is the most cosmopolitan city on Earth, not excluding Hong Kong and other ports you might name, and thus perhaps a pointer for other cities in the future.

      ‘As to the past which is behind us, many many peoples have formed Singapore and still live here now it is an independent republic. That’s why it is such a melting pot of the Orient, with Chinese, Malays, Indians, Sikhs, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Eurasians, Japanese, Australians, and also the British and other Europeans, with all different religions, in the pot happily together. So it is a hospitable place.

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