The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ in a minute, silver bursts forth on the right-hand side of the black disc. The sun is winning its struggle. Birds begin to sing again. Normality, swiftly returning, seems a disappointment. We walk back to Grandma Wilson, who has remained in the car, snug under her rug.

      Eclipse or no eclipse, Grandma’s life is governed by pleasant routine. She walks down to the shops once a week, to Ross the Grocer and elsewhere, where she is received by men in clean white aprons, who listen reverently to her order as if to the Nunc Dimittis, and despatch her wants by errand boy that very afternoon.

      Bill returns from South Africa with photographs of Table Mountain and is in better health.

      Bill and Dot resume their life above the shop. Business occupies his mind. He must make it up to The Guv’ner for having been away. In the evenings, he and his wife sit by the coal fire talking business. Their faces are grave. They talk in the code of the shop.

       Suppose we buy double K yards of it at U cis DX. With a mark up of B plus we can reckon on A cis BA, maybe, let’s see, A dat double C …

      I hate this whispering, hate this code. It excludes me. Later, I take to Kafka like a duck to water. For the time being, I play with my Lotts’ Bricks and first Meccano set. I build a house for Uncle Bert to live in.

      Bill has a repertoire of tricks with which to amuse me at table. He sticks his napkin ring into his eye socket for a monocle and adopts a highfalutin’ voice. When he jokes, I am happy and think how wonderful he is.

      Shortly after Bill’s return, in the spring of 1930, I am standing in our living room in the sunshine. The door is open on to the flat roof, built over Father’s offices in the shop. It is announced on the wireless that a new planet has been discovered. The name of the astronomer involved is Clyde Tombaugh. The planet is to be called Pluto. It is the outermost planet of the solar system, and conditions there are bound to be pretty cold and dark.

      I am thrilled. Though I would not have put it in such terms at the time, it is an extension of our imaginations. A whole extra new world that no one knew about. And how long had it been there …?

      Not so very much later, I am reading books by. Sir James Jeans. Who, in 1931, could resist a book with the title The Stars in their Courses? Jeans speaks of Pluto as being ‘so far out in space that its journey round the sun takes about 250 years to complete, and so far removed from the sun’s light and heat that in all probability not only all its water but also its atmosphere, if it has one, must be frozen solid.’

      Frozen solid. Its atmosphere …

      Gosh, I’d love to go there!

      Like all good astronomers, Jeans deals with time as well as space. Near the end of his book is another reflection that extends the imagination: ‘We realise that we are, in all probability, at the very beginning of the life of our race; we are still only at the dawn of a day of almost unthinkable length.’

      I told an interviewer recently how greatly the discovery of Pluto excited me. She said, ‘But you were not five years old …’

      But before schools and jobs are inflicted upon us, the universe is ours.

      As related in Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s, I was early subject to strange ontological dreams. More than once, I dreamed I had been a great wizard in a previous existence, perhaps in France. I had been burnt at the stake for my beliefs. Sometimes the stake with me lashed to it would crash into the blaze. I would awaken screaming. Mother would bound across the passage from her room to comfort me.

      There are other dreams of falling, to be accounted for only years later.

      We are now coming towards the September of 1930, when I am given a new pullover and sent to my first school. The Five Year Abyss lies over the horizon, rumbling closer.

      For school I am well prepared. I can read and write. The two abilities are almost synonymous. They are greatly encouraged by Dot, who assists my reading by the making of little books. My first stumbling adventures in the alphabet are taken up with my crude drawings and bound together. The books are covered with pieces of wallpaper, cut to size, remnants from the furnishing shop.

      At the age of four or five, I am on good terms with the tracklements of the main meat dish of writing: the pens, scissors, pictures, rulers, bindings, and above all the white paper.

      How I love these little books! Dot is in a good mood and does not sigh too much when we sit together at this occupation at the dining-room table. She finds me a ready pupil. The books get bigger and more eloquent. Crayons are used. I win another prize.

      So school comes round.

      It’s not too far. I walk from the flat through the market place, past a haunted house, which stands empty at the top of Swaffham Hill, and up Quebec Street to Miss Mason’s Kindergarten. On the way, we play conkers or marbles or tag or anything. Someone has a slowworm in his pocket. He scares the girls with it.

      Miss Mason is tall and severe, with red cheeks on which capillaries map the delta of the Nile. She is assisted by two other teachers. One is a fat panting lady, who comes to school with an ugly little pug dog, and has to have an inflatable cushion on which to sit in class. Her name, suitably enough, is Miss Payne. The other teacher is a trim and elegant lady who wears tweeds and has pearls in her earlobes to denote her superiority. Her name is Miss Ida Precious. I would learn Higher Calculus for Miss Precious. She never takes the remotest notice of me. I think to myself, Better that way.

      We have French lessons almost at once. C H A T. CAT. With a picture of a cat, just to make sure. The two words are similar. No problems so far. We’re in deeper water when they try to tell us that C H I E N means DOG. On the face of it, the idea seems unreasonable. Education entails learning a number of unreasonable things.

      We chant our multiplication tables as if they were psalms. Twice two are four, twice three are six. Only when you get to the seven times table do you start to wonder if teachers really know what they’re about.

      It is in one of the breaks that Margaret Trout is dramatically sick, thus shattering our engagement. The promise to love someone for ever rests on the understanding that they will remain forever loveable.

      There are other attractions in the playground. It is easy to tell girls from boys; they are the ones who tend to kick you less. Some are also beautiful. I am fond of one whose name has disappeared down the rabbit hole of time; she has short dark hair and wears a mustard-coloured cord dress. She is quiet and has a half-smile. She lives in the country, Toftwood probably. Jammed with me behind a sheltering water butt, she lets me look up that mustard-coloured skirt. Oh, the days when we ask – and receive!

      As it must have done to a greater degree to parents born in Victorian days, it seems extraordinary now to recall how much sex goes on in Miss Mason’s playground. It was purely pleasurable, without guilt, the sort of playfulness one imagines Gauguin hoped to find when he arrived in the favoured isles of Melanesia.

      One game is called Cows and Milkmaids. The boys are cows. They line up and the milkmaids come along and ‘milk’ them. It’s a colossal hit! Everyone loves it, except for little Clara Cream, who is regarded as too objectionable to be permitted to play. The cows moo with delight, the milkmaids work away. Scrunch scrunch scrunch in the trousers.

      So enraptured am I with Cows and Milkmaids that, eager to share, I tell Dot about it. Dot flies into a morality fit. Horror is not the word. Sex is a bit of a sore point with her. She bids me sit perfectly still and not move. She phones СКАЧАТЬ