The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ the masts of a sailing ship could be discerned. Beyond the masts was the sea, the Mediterranean.

      Squire stood with his hands in his pockets, looking across the wall. He let the memory of other seas refresh his mind, but thoughts of the difficulties he faced, here and at home, stayed with him.

      Pedestrians brushed past as they hurried home. He glanced at his watch. It was almost time for the last session of the day, at which his friend Herman Fittich would speak; for Fittich’s sake, he would submit to being incarcerated again in the mirrored conference hall. As he turned to make his way back to the Grand Hotel Marittimo, he caught sight of Selina Ajdini walking towards him; accompanying her was one of the more cut-glass young Italians, Enrico Pelli, who had earlier delivered a prolix paper on ‘Psychiatry and the Popular Understanding of Prehistory’. Ajdini saluted Squire with some eagerness in her gesture, and the customary mocking note in her voice.

      ‘Are you looking for more flying saucers, I suppose?’

      ‘In search of the miraculous? Waiting for a sign?’

      She laughed. ‘I’ve seen too many signs in my life. They all point different ways.’

      ‘Ha! “What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws? Passion and reason, self division cause.”’

      If she recognized a couplet from one of Aldous Huxley’s favourite poems, she gave no sign, saying cheerfully, ‘If you are about to turn back to the hotel, Signor Pelli and I will walk along with you.’

      He smiled warmly at her, suddenly full of affection, loving that naked face, and reflected again on the beautiful curvature of her lips, only made possible by the topography of her lower jaw. How long would you have to live with Selina before you failed to notice those affecting proportions? Enrico was no doubt under the spell of them. He had given Squire no greeting. His face was clouded, his heavy brows drawn together, his back rigid. As he moved reluctantly to walk beside Ajdini and Squire, the latter thought, ‘So he’s been propositioning her hard, and had no luck.’

      And, as his gaze rested on her, ‘I wonder what luck I’d have?’

      ‘There’s a sailing boat moored by the harbour,’ he said, walking on the other side of Ajdini from Pelli, and addressing her left profile. ‘How pleasant to sail away now, before the moon is up, to forget all your responsibilities … To discover a little sunlit island no one had ever happened across, with a golden beach and no footballers …’

      ‘Footballers! How did they get there?’

      ‘They didn’t.’

      ‘And on the island …?’

      ‘Coconut palms …’

      ‘Your dreams are so standard. Better natural products are oil, wheat and whisky …’

      ‘I wasn’t planning to work or get rich.’

      ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘I’m not a bad sailor.’

      Outside a bar in a side alley, a broken sign burned, advertising a Belgian lager with the words ‘STELLA ART’ in blurred mauve neon. He took it as a good omen: there were islands somewhere, even if not readily accessible.

      ‘“All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by …”’

      ‘It would be a good alternative to listening to Herman Fittich, I’m sure.’

      ‘I like the man. I’m confident he will have something interesting to say.’

      She gestured. ‘His perpetual irony I cannot stand. A defeated man. But I don’t like the Germans in any case.’

      ‘They did make themselves a bit unpopular a few years ago.’

      She flashed him a reproving expression. ‘Don’t you start on the irony. You were safe in Britain when the Germans were killing off Europe. Me, I am Yugoslav by birth, or half Serbian and half Turkish, plus a dash of Persian.’

      ‘So you have reason to hate the Germans.’

      She gave a curt nod, and tossed her head.

      ‘I was a tiny girl when the damned Nazis invaded my homeland. Everyone fought them, young and old. No country was more brave, more determined, than Serbia. My father was killed by the Bosch, then my elder brother. So I can’t help hating them. An uncle and I escaped to the United States after the war, but one does not forget those times. They leave a mark.’

      Pelli said something to her angrily in Italian, but she silenced him with one of her quelling glances.

      ‘The Americans understand little of the rest of the world,’ she said. ‘But you see I am not like that, although I have American citizenship.’

      ‘Yugoslavia’s a magnificent country. If you’re so left wing, and you dislike the States as much as it seems you do, why don’t you return to Yugoslavia?’

      She appeared to undergo a sudden change of mood. As if dismissing the subject, she slipped a slender arm on which bracelets clattered through his arm, and made him look with her in a small lighted shop window. Pelli stood awkwardly by, hands impatiently on hips.

      ‘That handbag’s not bad, eh? I bet it was made in Milano. You know Yugoslavia, don’t you? You have lived there?’

      ‘Yes, I have.’

      ‘There are more job opportunities for me in the States.’

      ‘Thank democracy for that, Selina. Be grateful for what you’ve got.’

      She sighed and they walked up the street in silence.

      ‘Well, dear, dear. You see, Tom, I do really quite fancy you – much more than I fancy this sulky young man who wants only to go to bed with me and fortunately does not talk English. Well, I go to bed with whom I feel like and maybe tonight I feel like you if you are so inclined. So I don’t want to offend you. But you are – oh, so simple. The British are like Americans, they do not know the real world. Okay, there are more job opportunities in the States, but that’s only your debating point to be scored. You don’t see why there are all those jobs more.

      ‘Jobs are what capitalism’s all about – getting people to work for the bosses. That’s really why I hate capitalism, because it is just a huge business and industrial machine gone mad, with all the stupid “free citizens”, as they call themselves, really mere consumers, chained for life to support the machine, proud of their sharing.’

      He seized her wrist and shook it till the bracelets jangled, laughing in irritation. ‘At the risk of being left off your visiting list tonight, let me tell you that you are the victim of propaganda – outdated propaganda at that. If the world was as you say, it wouldn’t be worth living in! You’ve got a silly argument, like Krawstadt with his pinball machines. Work’s okay, work gives us identity. And do people cease to consume, to need goods, under other systems than capitalism? It’s just that other systems are less efficient at producing the goods.’

      ‘That may be, and the other systems may have their faults, but it is the efficiency of the capitalist system I also dislike. It exploits the world for the privileges of a few. Who needs an electric carving knife? That efficiency is itself a crime; I’ll give you an example.’

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