Forgotten Life. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ and Sheila thought of it. As if to assert a wildness of character acquaintances would not otherwise have suspected him of possessing, Arthur had a small tattoo on his left wrist, a bird of prey with something resembling a rat in its beak, probably holding some arcane sexual significance, thought Clement. He knew his assistant for one of Mrs Thatcher’s conformists, tethered to his job and monetarist respectability, but there was another side to Stranks, a side represented in part by Mrs Stranks, Cheri, a rather silent lady of sidelong glances, sighs, and a self-evident bosom, who was always to be seen – at least by Clement – in very tight stone-washed jeans. Regarding Stranks, Clement found himself thinking of the bird with the rat and of Cheri.

      Stranks had made it clear from the first that he considered it a privilege to work for Dr Clement Winter. In an early attempt to be friendly, Sheila and Clement had taken the Strankses to Covent Garden to Janaček’s opera Jen

fa. A few months later the Strankses had invited the Winters to what was at first described simply as ‘a concert’. After accepting, Clement discovered that it was a rock concert.

      When the day came, Sheila was too busy finishing a novel to go out. She had excused herself, and Clement had gone on his own with Arthur and Cheri to the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre to see Tina Turner live.

      He was the only person in the audience in a suit.

      The show, the noise, the audience, the enthusiasm, had overwhelmed him. Until that evening, he had never heard of Tina Turner. She was a light coffee-coloured lady wearing a tight-fitting white two-piece which laced up over her exuberant breast, and, even more effectively, a huge wig like a lion’s mane. As she screamed her songs at the audience, the mane shook with fervour. The stage could barely contain Tina Turner. She prowled and stamped about it, shrieking her strange love laments, as if seeking a way of getting at the audience and devouring it.

      She was a marvellous and, to Clement, a terrifying spectacle. His ideal of feminine beauty had been formed at about the age of ten, when he distinctly recalled rubbing a pubescent penis against a photograph of Miss Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr had been presented as static, even icy, with the best bits (as he had put it to himself) always chastely concealed. This secretiveness, this pretended show of privacy, had enhanced Hedy Lamarr’s stunning beauty. All such artifices were flung out to allow Tina Turner’s beauty full play. He was looking at a new age, heralded triumphantly by the singing, the stamping, the tossing mane.

      And, like the other males in the audience, Clement was filled with lust. That was what he found terrifying. Savage though Tina might appear, barbaric though the noise was, he saw or imagined a delicacy to her limbs, her hands with their long red claws. In particular, there was a sunny good humour about the whole performance from which it took him days to recover.

      The audience, clapping and shouting, was another matter. Art and Cheri beside him were suddenly half-naked, which was to say in T-shirts; paying him no attention, they became part of the mass-mind. Clement, too, dropping his jacket on the floor, also gave in. The whole great cavern became a pool of amplified noise and heat and emotion. And Tina Turner, her carnivorous teeth gleaming at the fun of it all.

      The next morning found Clement out of sorts with himself. He sent his suit to the cleaners in Summertown. There were worlds which were not his.

      Since then, Clement had kept a mental distance from his assistant. He feared that Stranks and his wife, who had really looked astonishing in that T-shirt, might invite him again into those lower depths. And was affronted that they never did.

      Now he averted his eyes from the sinister tattoo, and called his attention back to the reason that had brought them to this untidy room.

      ‘Better pick up the threads again,’ said Clement, after they had talked for some while. He rubbed his hands together, staging enthusiasm, but doing no more than frown at his chair.

      ‘How’s Sheila?’ Arthur needed more conversation before starting work. ‘Er – her side of things go okay?’ He had the habit of beginning most sentences with ‘Er’, often accompanied by a quick and useless adjustment of the spectacles.

      ‘Oh, her tour went like a bomb. She’s good on television, and they’re respectful to the English accent, you know. Especially in the south. She’s a bit exhausted – no wonder.’

      ‘Should think so. She likes America?’

      ‘Very much so. Whiskey sours. And of course she is so popular there. The Americans have an enthusiasm we lack.’

      ‘They’re not so critical, are they?’

      Clement found this rather an unfortunate remark, but all he said, as he sat down, was, ‘You and Cheri must come round again soon. Sheila will tell you all about it.’

      The last time Arthur and Cheri had come round to Rawlinson Road had been quite a success. He had read a couple of Green Mouth novels; no doubt the essentially conservative nature of epic fantasy had its appeal. Clement had spent much of the evening talking to Cheri. It had not been unpleasant. He remembered now that at sight of the tiny swimming pool she had said brightly, ‘I must bring my costume next time.’

      Arthur was still postponing a move towards the table.

      ‘Er, I was reading about Zola in one of the weeklies.’

      ‘Oh yes?’

      ‘Emile Zola … Seems as if when he was writing his novels he was transported into a sort of totally different thingey – state of being. Rather like being possessed – a state of possession. Terrible visions, intense nightmares, dreams of er, sexual ecstasy, intimations of murder. Quite different from his normal life. A different plane of being … I wondered if – excluding the murder business, of course – if other writers also experienced that kind of transformation … A different frame of mind entirely.’

      Clement laughed briefly. ‘You’d have to ask my wife that question.’

      Something in Clement’s tone caused Arthur to fall silent. He retreated to his own desk. His trainers made squeegee noises on the parquet flooring.

      This was a signal for Clement to resign himself to work. He pulled various items from his briefcase, arranging them on the table before him.

      The main bulk of work on Adaptability was already finished, although some chapters required last-minute revision. There were appendices to be drawn up – mainly Arthur’s task – the vexatious notes to be gone over, and various references to be checked. He would be only a few months over his publisher’s deadline. Yet, he realized, the trip to the States, the appearance at the symposium – where American full professors seemed to lead such affluent lives – and the outing to see his wife in action at Fantacon XIX, had unsettled him. He regarded the cordilleras of paper before him without appetite. They certainly would not be printed up in an edition of 1.5 million.

      He found himself thinking again of his dead brother. He owed Joseph something. Consanguinity could not be denied.

      Sighing, he began to sort through some newspaper cuttings which Arthur had amassed while he was away. One of them caught his attention. It was a brief account, cut from the Independent, of a massacre which had occurred in the Lisenitsky Forest, on the outskirts of Lvov, in the Ukraine, in September 1943.

      The details were brief but clear. Following the fall of Mussolini, Italy surrendered unconditionally early that September. Italian forces were still fighting alongside the Nazis. Many of them were left politically and physically stranded by the armistice. 229,000 СКАЧАТЬ