The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ burning, firelight reflecting on all the shining brown surfaces of the room. The child at the window, face half-turned to the outdoors, realizing the lure – the wilderness – of the world, as dusk filtered in. Realizing the unknown was limitless. It had been the first of his escapes beyond time, and in a way the most vivid. He had felt his own containedness and greatness. He had reached to an oceanic content within his own being.

      There had been other similar moments before his father died; they continued after the watershed of that event.

      The death had killed his tentative reaching towards the orthodoxies of the Christian religion, though not towards an unspoken mysticism. He saw only now that the unspokenness had preserved its freshness. He hated the very word ‘mysticism’; but of its flesh he was not in doubt, for he felt it inside him.

      Even these reflections visited his mind without a cloud of words, as he slowed his breathing and set aside the hotel room.

      With placid amusement, he detached himself from his body, rising above it to see a man, recently embraced by a woman, standing in still posture, mind clear of logical thought. That stillness, that balance, was a triumph, achieved within – the image always charged him with excitement – within the violent explosion that was the universe. He visualized the curdling galaxies, the stellar bodies, whirling away from each other, still fleeing from that primal explosion, that ejaculation of matter which began everything. The cosmos was still inexpressibly new.

      All human experience was a brief dawn affair; more comprehensive experiences would be possible later in the cosmic day. Meanwhile, it was possible to develop towards greater understanding.

      The sparks flew forever up the chimney. Turmoil was all that could be expected. There was evil in man, in men and women; only a fool would doubt it when he had the privilege of living in the twentieth century – as a being confined to a lunatic asylum would be the maddest of all inmates if he refused to believe in lunacy – but that evil was a flaw wrought by the holocaust of the physical world. That was where religion falsified the situation. Flames had no morality. If evil was a human creation, so was the concept of perfection. Wasn’t perfection always visualized as somehow static? And stasis was an impossibility in the exploding universe. It was a good idea to recognize the instability of all things, and to breathe deep and slow.

      He threw off his clothes, brushed his teeth, and climbed between the sheets.

      His mind would not let him sleep. He lay there for some while before realizing that sleep was not going to visit him yet. Some factor just beyond his grasp was worrying him.

      He sat up with sudden impatience, saying into the wall of dark before his face, ‘But anyone who could speak so ill of Huxley cannot be a good person.’

      Impatiently, he let his head thump back on the pillow.

      Again, he tried to make himself sleep, concentrating on slow breathing. But the moment of rapture had curdled into a mood of self-distrust, sucking him back into the past with its regrets.

      Images of disquiet flooded him. His father’s savage death. His mother’s dead countenance, patched with hitherto unknown browns and greys. The long estrangement from Teresa. Even the savagery with which the English critics, unlike those abroad, had attacked ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’.

      From serenity, he fell into despair.

      Near at hand lay his doubts about the conference in Ermalpa, and his quarrel with d’Exiteuil. One of his beliefs was that, as the nineteenth century cultivated optimism, often of a rootless kind, so that century’s impoverished heirs and assigns of the twentieth cultivated a pessimism possibly as rootless. The art of enjoyment was lacking. He had always hoped to contribute to the general enjoyment; not as an entertainer – he had no gift for that – but as an appreciater, one who could enhance other people’s lives, as his father had enhanced his. That had been the driving force behind his great television series and the book related to it.

      (‘Tottering between playing the common man and the intellectual, hopelessly fumbling both roles, Thomas Squire – even now no doubt expecting a knighthood for his services to a TV-zapped nation – tries to camouflage a lack of content beneath a middlebrow concern with the surface of trivia; his compulsive dashes about the globe, which reduce all space and time to a corner of the studio, are physical analogues of his efforts to cover dozens of subjects in order to conceal the fact that he has no subject. As he points in astonishment at things with which we are all too familiar, it is impossible not to feel that the new Renaissance on which he lavishes his laboured epigrams is our Untergang in thirteen episodes.’ Leslie Lippard-Milne, ‘Frankensquire Among the Parts’, New Statesman)

      There were no Lippard-Milnes in Ermalpa. The conference paid him homage – although one accepted that homage never meant what it professed. But the delegates were also busy destroying the things he held dear, the things they held dear. Could poor Krawstadt ever enjoy a game of pinball now he had written so villainously on the subject? Well, perhaps one hoped not.

      These unembarrassed arts, why should they wilt so easily beneath scrutiny? Another law was emerging. Pick a flower and it dies.

      What was he going to do next? How was the rest of his life to be lived? He thought of the sailing ship moored at the harbour, ready to slip away to sea. There was no escape, only the appearance of escape. That depended who else was in the boat with him. The opportunity to begin again often presented itself, no doubt of that. But the blowfly in the human heart ensured that one went on making the old mistakes.

      He had no complaints. Things were as they were. If the conference was a failure, he was not responsible; he would never be one to admit it failed. If ideology killed it, there again he had no complaint. In his time – it was curious to look back on it now – he had killed for the sake of ideology. He could remember the savage triumph he felt when, in a farmhouse in Istra, he looked down at the broken body of Slatko, the Russian colonel. That had been no timeless moment of vision; whenever the episode rose to mind, he pushed it from him, not wishing to recognize any more that part of himself.

      Now Slatko’s brutal face pursued him. Squire sat up and put the light on, feeling ill.

      He padded over to the bathroom to get himself a sip of water – he had been warned that Ermalpa water was contaminated, but he had heard similar tales wherever he went. He caught sight of the unopened envelope lying on the table. After drinking, he took the envelope back to bed and ripped it open.

      Inside was one sheet of paper with the hotel’s crest. The letter read,

      Dear Tom,

      For reasons you know well, I can bear no more of the talk round the conference table. Let me get away just in the morning. You must come with me and pay. We can take a No 9 bus to the little town called Nontreale. It is a cheap fare but you know our government keeps us poor as saints – which we otherwise are not – when we are out of our country. Besides, you are rich.

      Tell nobody our plan. I must not tell my ‘comrade’ Kchevov. We will play truant, and talk like men, and view Nontreale cathedral to educate you and make me thirsty.

      The bus leaves at 9.05 in the morning. Meet me just outside the hotel at ten minutes to nine tomorrow and I will take you to the bus stop. Nobody shall know where we go, so please be safe and flush this sheet in your toilet bowl (we Russians have a passionate admiration for secrets, you know that). I trust you.

      Yours

       Vasili Rugorsky

      Squire laughed. He laid the letter by his bed, switched off the light, СКАЧАТЬ