Walcot. Brian Aldiss

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       7

       The New Widow

      It was on the first day of April, 1939, that the Spanish Civil War ended. General Franco’s forces had triumphed. ‘Fascists!’ your father had been shouting for some time. But not on that particular day. For on that particular day, he was standing with his mother, Elizabeth Fielding, by the bedside of his father, Sidney Vawes Fielding, in the Southampton hospital.

      Old Sidney had been lying in a white-tiled cell, on a raised bed. He had been enjoying a last puff of a cigarette, clutching the cylinder in shaky purple hands. His countenance was the colour of the hospital pillow supporting his head. He suddenly raised that head from the pillow with a startled look, eyes bulging. ‘I mean to say –’, he began, only to fall back again, dead.

      He had suffered from gastritis and lung cancer. He was sixty-nine years old.

      Elizabeth clutched his cold, gnarled hand with both of her delicate ones. ‘Good-bye, my dear … my faithful husband,’ she said, in her clear, but hesitant tones. This was after she had suffered her stroke.

      Elizabeth Fielding had a more distinguished look about her than the majority of her clan. It could not be said that this was because of any particular facial feature, although her high forehead and delicate nostrils and lips were attractive. Her pile of white hair, secured by a small black velvet bow, gave her an impressive air. But her distinction lay more in the way she held herself stiffly erect. She had always been a silent sort of person, which had made you, when you were a small boy, fearful of her. The impediment in her speech, a result of the stroke, had hardly made her more garrulous. The family had not been accustomed to taking much notice of Elizabeth. If she resented this attitude, she wisely did not show it. She had, however, begun to show some partiality towards you, as if recognizing in your small person someone whose potentials were also overlooked.

      In need of a degree of security, Elizabeth had married Sidney Fielding knowing him to be intellectually her inferior, as well as some years older than she. She tried to conceal this knowledge from Sidney, but such knowledge leaks out in many ways.

      Sidney was never entirely satisfied with his wife, finding her often critical. He failed to relish her criticism as a way of advancing his own appreciation of the finer points of life. And so to their children, Martin and his brothers and sisters, that hidden dissatisfaction had a way of working through and shadowing their lives also. As to Martin and Mary’s children, you often held beliefs that cast a shadow over what should have been your contentment, and their acceptance of you.

      Various members of the family were summoned for Sidney Fielding’s funeral. So the funeral took place a week after his death, on the day when Mussolini, having annexed Abyssinia, invaded Albania. This fresh sign of the rottenness of Europe was scarcely noticed by the Fielding and Wilberforce families. Or by you, for at fifteen you were enmeshed in the agonies and joys of your first love affair. You were pursuing Gale Roberts, who was proving by turns joky and elusive, affectionate and indifferent. This female behaviour was totally inscrutable to you. What Gale desired from day to day remained baffling; whereas all you desired was to get a hand up her skirt.

      This problem had to be shelved on the seventh of April, when you and your sister stood by your parents’ side at your grandfather’s grave. Your heads were bowed. You wished to be sad, but Sonia kept nudging and winking at you, and exclaiming ‘Shuggerybees!’ After the ceremony, the two families, together with friends and spouses, gathered in your father’s house for drinks and refreshments. They were greeted on the doorstep as they arrived by joyous barking from Gyp. Joy Frost, terrified of dogs, ran back to the car for refuge, and took some coaxing before she reappeared on the scene. ‘Shut the confounded dog in the greenhouse,’ demanded Mary. Although you loved Gyp greatly, you did as she ordered, smoothing his noble head before shutting him in.

      Emma, the maid, served tea as soon as the guests came in. All were dressed in black, making family likenesses more apparent, the Wilberforces with their sallow complexions, the Fieldings with their aquiline noses, the Frosts with their tendency to be undershot, the Hillmans – or Claude at least – with their flushed faces and broken-veined cheeks.

      Your parents’ house gave off a slight greenish tinge. There were thick old green velvet curtains СКАЧАТЬ