Forgotten Life. Brian Aldiss

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was not a habit with him. Yet he pottered about now, the very picture of indecision. He had to admit it: Joseph worried him.

      Joseph had been the adventurous one. Clement had had no adventures in life. His social work, his analysis in West Berlin, his visiting professorships in the States – all had a sheltered quality, compared with Joseph’s way of knocking about the world on next to nothing.

      Clement had gone to university, unlike his brother and sister, or anyone else in the Winter family. His parents would never have aspired so high. Yet the three years in Birmingham – so he felt, looking back – had been largely wasted, as far as living was concerned. He had made few friends, joined few societies, played no games. He had filled up his days with work, poisoning himself with coffee and the cigarettes he now loathed.

      Introspection had led him to become absorbed in the deficiencies of the human character. Within those labyrinths, Clement found himself able to exercise endless patience, like a naturalist in dense jungle, content to wait for hours, and to endure a thousand insect bites and stings, in order to glimpse some rare species. Such a species was now delivered to him in the shape of his elder brother’s papers, and he didn’t know what to do with them, or what pattern to extract from them.

      After graduating, he had done social work in London and Coventry, later specializing in psychiatric work at the Maudsley Hospital, where he came to deal with post-war trauma victims. The war, like a heavy monsoon, had made some people and ruined others, and the losers formed a long queue at Clement’s door, demanding attention.

      That queue had captured his intense compassion. He had gone to study in Berlin, and there underwent a course of analysis with T. F. Schulz, emerging as a qualified analytical psychologist in 1969. It was in Berlin he had met the young Sheila Tomlinson, long before she set foot on Kerinth.

      Back in England, the queue of the maladjusted still awaited him. Marriage to Sheila did not greatly disrupt work on the queue. Only when their one child, Juliet, died, did Clement exert himself and change the course of his career, becoming a professor of sociology in 1973, and publishing his best-received work, Personality and Aggression, in 1974. Later, he worked at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. By then Sheila was enjoying her first literary success, and Clement had to take a certain amount of teasing, much of it only superficially good-natured, from his colleagues. Academics hated fantasy, feeling themselves surrounded by it; nor were they more cordial to success.

      The situation had been better in the States, where success was still regarded as a fun thing, and where he had taken several visiting fellowships in the late seventies. Carisbrooke College, less conventional than older Oxford colleges, had made him a fellow in 1981.

      Joseph had followed a less academic course.

      Clement’s temperate qualities enabled him to enter keenly into the problems of others. But those problems had merely been traffic through the plain of his own life. His one adventure, apart from the determination needed to get to university, had lain in marrying Sheila; she, too, had been part of that traffic, born the month Paris fell to the German invader, seeking a stability she had lost, and willing to find a substitute for it in Clement’s cautious embrace.

      Twelve years Clement’s senior, Joseph had been just old enough to see action in the war, swept overseas in the struggle which had convulsed the world. In Clement’s considered opinion, years of soldiering had awoken something primitive in his brother’s nature, a rebellious and, from some points of view, admirable quality, which had enabled him ever after to live an independent life of struggle, punctuated by periods of insolvency and hazardous travel in the Far East. And of course many affairs with women. Joseph had never settled for anything; nor had he settled down. He had never been able to settle down. That some of his existential problems remained unresolved seemed evident from the muddle of papers in Clement’s room; he had left scattered evidence of his existence, almost as a challenge to his brother, whose duty in life it was to understand.

      Clement’s training, as well as his analytical disposition, enabled him to see how reluctant he was to face his own lack of involvement in Joseph’s affairs. He had been far – often physically far – from the crucial events in Joseph’s career.

      He took from the drawer of his desk an envelope containing a letter and photograph Joseph had sent him in the early eighties. He was sorry to think that they had arrived in response to his duplicated form. When he was embarking on the research required for Adaptability, Clement had sent out the forms to large numbers of people, inviting memories of the beginning of the war in 1939. He had been impersonal; his brother’s response had been personal and immediate.

      Joseph had taken the printed question literally. His reply, in his hasty handwriting, concerned only the declaration of war, when he had just turned thirteen. On that day, 3rd September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, his sister Ellen was almost nine; Clement was little more than a toddler. Their parents, Ernest and Madge Winter, were in their late thirties or early forties.

      Madge Winter had taken the photograph on the family box Brownie. It was in black-and-white, with a white margin. Time had made it crisp and slightly concave. In Joseph’s writing on the back of the snap was the legend, ‘Taken an hour after war was declared.’

      The family was standing by the old square Morris. Ellen, in a check print dress, was holding baby Clement and grinning. Joseph, in holiday shorts, was wearing a large cap and grinning. Father looked sternly out of the car window, elbow and forearm disclosing a rolled-up shirt sleeve. His expression suggested he was mulling over his favourite phrase, ‘That’s what you get …’ Behind the car, part of a ruin could be seen. They had been holidaying on the north coast of Cornwall, by Tintagel, King Arthur’s castle.

      ‘I respond to your form at once, because the more obstinately 1939 gets forgotten by the population at large, the more obstinately I remember it,’ Joseph had written in his reply to the form.

      Even there, Clement reflected, Joseph revealed his character. Good-natured, rather self-mocking, yet in some way challenging, going against the grain.

      ‘There was a car park on the cliff top, large and open, and almost deserted except for our Morris and someone’s caravan. The caravan was drawn up so that it enjoyed views of the Atlantic. Rather a battered old thing, if I remember rightly (does one ever remember rightly?). Father pulled up next to it. We got out and Ellen and I ran to look at the cliffs, followed by cautionary screams from mother.

      ‘A fat man climbed out of the caravan, strolling across to engage my father in conversation. I went over to them after a while, in order to observe the fat man at close quarters. He smoked a pipe and wore a panama hat. Also old grey flannel trousers held up by braces, unless I invent that bit. He seemed a jolly man, although he and father were talking seriously about the international situation. It was a Sunday, and father showed him something in the newspaper.

      ‘The fat man said that his wife had turned him out of the caravan while she prepared lunch – speaking laughingly, he added that there wasn’t room for two large people inside when she was busy. He waved to her, I remember, and the woman looked out and waved back, with an extra wave for me.

      ‘She was cooking sausages and mash, and had their radio tuned to the Home Service. The radio said there was to be a special announcement. “This’ll be it,” said the fat man to father, calling to his wife to turn up the volume.

      ‘Mother and Ellen were walking off towards the ruins with the baby – with you. I stood beside father, staring out to sea. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day and the sausages smelt good.

      ‘I felt anxious. Perhaps I prayed. I was pretty religious at that age. Kids used to be. It seemed СКАЧАТЬ