The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionately circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

      ‘I believe we have to live with that slavery, at least for a while. But SF, I know from experience, is one way of making it tolerable.

      ‘Thank you for listening to me.’

      As Frenza asked for questions or additional statements to be limited to a duration of five minutes, Rugorsky wrote a note and pushed it over to Squire, making it slide across the green baize, one fat finger simultaneously propelling and holding it captive.

      The note consisted of four words. ‘But Shelley is dead.’

      It was difficult to decide on Rugorsky’s meaning. An idle joke. Or perhaps a positivist Soviet rejection of the poet’s negative remarks. Possibly even a threat of some kind. People did die, and that wasn’t pleasant. As Selina’s Serbian father had died …

      Inner vision could fly northwards, away from the Mediterranean, over the Alps and France, across the Channel, across England, to Pippet Hall in the heart of the Norfolk countryside, could enter there undetected and find its way up to the children’s playroom, the old wooden room now painted white which – in the days when it was stained with brown varnish – had been home for Tom, Adrian, and Deirdre.

      Striking in through the windows in the room’s brown varnish days, the sun had lit it till it glowed like the interior of a honeypot. Each worn yellow floorboard had an individual character and an individual role. In winter, a coal fire burned in the grate. Next to the grate was a cupboard with a lock mechanism which worked only with difficulty. Inside the cupboard was a secret compartment where Tom stored a few personal possessions. At the back of the compartment was a large tin box with its own lock. The box contained, along with precious things like cigarette cards and postcards and a penknife with bone sides, a fat red notebook on which was printed the one grave word, ‘MEMORANDA’.

      To the playroom one day, inpelled by grief, together with a certain sense of dramatic intensity, Tom had gone, removing his red notebook from the recesses of the cupboard, and writing in it in black crayon, ‘March 12th, 1937. Daddy Died.’ From then on, the words being so desperately final, he wrote nothing more in the notebook.

      The notebook still existed. So did that entry. So did the death.

      John Matthew Squire had bestowed on his eldest son a love of arts and shooting and the countryside which lasted all his life. John Matthew Squire’s death had bestowed on the son who found his body a sense of violence and frustration which equally had never worked itself out of his system.

      The arrival of the refugee Normbaums, like crows gathering at a battlefield, had proved the herald of a great violence, the war. The war. Growing up, going to school, knowing always that tremendous actions involving courage and hardihood were taking place not a hundred miles away. Hearing the planes roar over the rooftops at night – all of Norfolk was an aerodrome. The intense love for Rachel Normbaum. Puberty. Fondling her in a quiet room, an erection flaming against her thigh and the intense astonishment, mingled with pride and annoyance, when, at the touch of her fingers, semen spurted over his grey trousers. Something to do with being a soldier. Preparing to join the struggle, to leave school, to get into Europe, to taste that traditional harsh life of war – waiting, fighting, killing, marching, winning, going hungry, enjoying the fruits of conquest – women, booze, good companionship, self-glorification. Then Berlin was taken and the war collapsed.

      Tom Squire was just too young to fight. He had missed the biggest initiation rite of the century. The allied armies were being disbanded. Detumescence had set in.

      On the surface, he was relieved. Below, frustrated, disappointed. Oh, to have liberated Paris!

      Only to his Uncle Willie did he make his real feelings known. Uncle Willie had friends in London, connected with the county. Young Tom Squire was on National Service, and completing his preliminary square-bashing at Aldershot, when he was posted for special training at a camp near Devizes. After some tests, he was transferred to MI6 to a department specializing in overseas operations. The Cold War was tightening its grip on the world. Men like Squire were needed.

      He was given leave. A friendly man drove up to Pippet Hall; later, Squire met the friendly man in Whitehall. Following a hot tip, Squire applied for a job with a consortium of manufacturers who were interested in new export markets. He got the appointment and went to night school to learn Serbo-Croat.

      War-battered Europe was putting itself together again. The Americans, with a gesture of unique generosity, launched the Marshall Plan. Britain, its overseas investments exhausted after paying for the war, set to work cheerfully on an export drive. The war had been won; now they were to win the peace.

      The frontiers of the peace were already established. The Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, and the luckless nations of the Continent found themselves either on one side or the other; with one exception. The nation of Yugoslavia.

      Although Yugoslavia was communist, there were remarkable differences between it and the other communist countries. Their leader, Tito, was a national hero and had conducted a formidably courageous war against the Nazis; he became a popular peacetime leader, and was not imposed on the country by the Soviet Union. Britain had supported Tito during the war; Churchill had made wise decisions there; so a friendship of sorts remained possible across barriers of ideology.

      The BIA (British Industries Abroad) opened an office in Belgrade and attempted to develop trade with the Yugoslavs only a comparatively few months after the official cessation of hostilities. On their staff was a young secretary, Thomas Squire, with a briefing to travel to all regions of Yugoslavia looking for trade. He had the perfect job for undercover work.

      ‘You may not like Yugoslavia very much until you settle in,’ Squire’s head of department said. ‘After that, you’ll hate it.’

      Squire loved it. There was something in this mountainous country – particularly in Serbia – in its songs, in its turbulent history, which corresponded to the violence trapped in his own nature. Moreover, a war was still going on, a war of minds. As an impoverished and broken economy picked itself up, the nation fended off its enemies. The Yugoslavs were intensely nationalistic, intensely suspicious. Foreigners were constantly watched.

      Belgrade, the Serbian and national capital, was at that time a city in ruins. Of the housing that remained, much was old and substandard; the energetic rebuilding was new and substandard. Greyness and cold prevailed. Filth, disease, misery, mud, flowed like blood through the ruptured veins of the capital. Food was short. It was all that Squire desired; here was the harshness and challenge of the world war he had missed.

      A Serbian girl called Roša came his way. He knew she was an agent. He embraced her as eagerly as he did his new life. In her pallor, her treachery, her nakedness, she was a paradigm of her country.

      ‘Obey your operating orders, whatever they are,’ he said – he rapidly became fluent in Serbo-Croat, ‘but make me part of you. Let’s do everything. Be extreme. Involve me, involve me!’

      He thought she loved him in a way. She tried to dye her hair blonde, with disastrous results. They both laughed; then she fought with him and wept. Her parents had been shot by Nazis for some petty offence. The country was an armed camp. The army built roads, bridges, bicycle factories. Ferocious drink-parties took place in which people fell out of windows and died. Roša got drunk and sang folk songs about the centuries of Turkish tyranny, the beauty of Serbian hills, and red wine spilt on white tablecloths. Her voice was like zeppelins crashing. It made him weep.

      Squire СКАЧАТЬ