Forgotten Life (33 page)
Authors: Brian Aldiss
âThe dream was all part of Joe's mythology. I can't help thinking of him â even now he's dead â as a kind of mythological character, though you'd probably know a better word. The prodigal son who refused to go home. It was November of last year that he got a cheque from some learned society or other and decided we should go off to the south coast for a break. I parked Pat on Ron and Ron's mum â her and my mum used to be neighbours a long time back. We ended up in Dorset and put up at a little pub smack on the coast. It was cold but we went for walks on the cliffs. I love Dorset.
âIt was there Joe suddenly hit on a new interpretation of his old dream. You know the circular gate with the white screen behind it? At the top of the steps?' She spoke as if she and Clement had personally visited the site. âHe suddenly thought that he had got the idea the wrong way round, and that it wasn't a circle or white screen. It was the moon. The gate led direct to the moon. The circle of perfection, he called it. The dream had always made him happy because it represented an escape to another world, to a higher sphere. That was what he said.'
âThe moon can also represent a great many other things. As you know, in classical mythologyâ'
âYes, Joe knew all that stuff. He used to quote “Diana, huntress, chaste and fair ⦔ However it went. Joe was fond of poetry. But what he said was that the moon represented his anima. I still don't quite grasp what an anima is, but it's the female component of a man's mind, is that it?'
âIn the female mind it's the animus. Animus and anima are contra-sexual archetypes. When a man falls passionately in love, it is because the woman embodies the qualities of his anima, or appears to do so. The anima acts as mediator between conscious and unconscious, which was also the function of Joe's recurrent dream. Go on.'
Lucy said, folding her arms, âThese things frighten me. I can't see how such ideas got into our heads in the first place ⦠Anyhow, Joe interpreted his dream as meaning he had to make an approach to his anima. The message, he said, had finally got through to him. Throughout all the years previously, he said, he had been mad.'
â“His soul had been in China ⦔ Sorry, that's another quotation. Go on, Lucy, I'm extremely interested.'
âWell, that's what he said. He'd gone â I forget what word he used â bonkers â the day his mother ran off and left him. Yet always at the back of his mind had been this dream, a communication from the anima, the sane bit of his brain, trying to get through to him. Is that possible?'
âYes, though the words may not be exactly right; he suffered from an anxiety state rather than insanity.'
Lucy hardly seemed to be listening as she concentrated on the next stage of her story.
âThat night, it happened there was a full moon. Joe said it was no coincidence, but that was the way he thought. Crazy in a way, but it related to his view of the natural world, and if it got somewhere it couldn't be crazy ⦠So he was all kind of elevated. Our little pub was on the coast road, and our bedroom looked out over the cliffs to sea. We knocked back a drink or two after supper but then he was eager to get to bed. He didn't want sex that night.
âWhen we put the light out, there was the full moon, shining
over the water. Really beautiful. He made me keep quiet. What he did was quite sort of daft, or so I thought at the time. He got down on his knees and prostrated himself â like a Muslim or something, and asked his anima to visit him.' She laughed at the memory of it, a short laugh, rather rueful, without looking directly at Clement.
âI couldn't sleep that night. The bed was lumpy. Joe slept like the dead. He never moved. When he woke up in the morning, his face was youthful and full of â I don't know, joy, certainly, and he said, “Luce, the anima visited me. Jesus, I never expected her to, but she really and truly visited me.”
âHe wouldn't or couldn't say anything else then. He was like a man stunned. I didn't press him. I was â oh, it sounds corny now, but I was sort of excited and frightened, all at once. There was a feeling, you know, that something really strange had taken place. Certainly there was a difference in him. Only when we got outside after breakfast and were up on the cliffs â no, we climbed down to the beach that morning â did he say to me â I warn you, you may not think this sounds like much. He told me at the time it wouldn't sound like much.'
âGo ahead, Lucy. What did Joe say?'
She took a sip of her coffee. âHe explained that he had seen nothing in his dream, so it hadn't been a dream. Or if it was, it was strictly non-visual. But he had heard the anima's voice as clear as he heard mine, and what she said was simple and unmistakable. His anima said to him, “Your mother did love you.” That was what the anima said. “Your mother did love you.”'
She looked challengingly at Clement.
Arthur entered the kitchen, with Cheri close behind him. He adjusted his glasses as he spoke.
âMost of your guests are not at home and haven't got answer-phones. Er, I'll come round this evening and have another go. I take it you won't be at College today? You don't want me to phone the police?'
âCertainly not.'
âWe'll see you later, then,' Cheri called. âCome on, Arthur! I've got to go round to the clinic.'
Clement saw them out to their waiting vehicle. Then he and Lucy were alone in the house.
Inset in the front door of the house in Rawlinson Road was a stained glass panel. In the middle of an abstract lozenge arrangement was a circular design consisting of three elements: a small boat with a white sail skimming over a blue sea towards an imagined haven ensconced between two thickly wooded green hills. Clement had called the picture âThe Soul Returning to its Home'; Sheila had a more boisterous title for it.
The sun, shining through thinning cloud, cast the white, the blue, the green, on to Lucy's face and shoulders as she and Clement stood looking at each other in the hall. He recalled the sunny sexuality of her letters to Joseph.
âThere's been nothing but interruptions this morning,' he said. âLet's go up to my study.'
She gave him a sly glance. âDo I get to lie on your couch?'
âThat depends on how you behave.'
He perceived that she was the sort who could not resist flirting with men.
âI can see how good you are at handling people, Clem. I'm good at handling their bodies, and that's all. If you knew the mess â¦'
Since she left the sentence trailing, as part of the hesitancy that was ingrained in her manner. He said, taking her hand, âLet's get
some more coffee and go up. Ron and Pat will be quite happy in the pool for a while.'
The hand was small and its skin tough. He felt a quickening of his pulse. âEverything worked out all right â¦' Perhaps it would do.
In the kitchen, she picked up the woven bag with which she had come and slung it over her shoulder. They refilled their mugs. Politely indicating that she should go ahead, he followed her up the stairs, conscious of the movement of her thighs and buttocks encased in her old patched jeans. She stopped several times on the way to look at Sheila's pictures, with a particularly long pause before âFaithful Unto Death', though she made no comment.
In Clement's study, she would not settle at first, but prowled about, looking at this and that, regarding the Kandinsky, fingering the spines of some of his textbooks, as if identifying their titles by touch, poking at Joseph's papers on the window sill. Then she sighed deeply and sat down, folding her legs, on the seat Clement had indicated.
âYou live a learned sort of life.'
He smiled. âI was never much good at games.'
âMy life's such a mess.'
âMost people feel the same way, Lucy.'
As if with a sudden intuition, Lucy asked, âWhere's your wife gone?'
âShe's in London.'
âI see ⦠Just as well, perhaps. She didn't like me. She's a famous writer, right?'
âYes.'
She fumbled in her bag, looking down into it. âYou're so different from your brother. Joe was very emotional. Sometimes he'd fly into rages, you know.'
âThat was fortunate for him, if not perhaps for you. He must have induced himself to fly into rages; expression of anger is important â women in particular, I find, tend to repress anger, and there are clear indications in his writings that there was a time when Joseph could not release his anger, or could release it only masked as humour. Anyhow, I want to hear more about Joseph's visitation by his anima. It said, “Your mother loved you.” Is that correct?'
â“Your mother did love you.” He told me about it down on the beach and he suddenly roared with laughter. Oh, he ran about like a child, and he caught me up and kissed me. He was so funny. I said to him, “You're like a great dog.” Then he was very serious and said, “It means I have got to rethink my whole life. I shall begin today.”'
Lucy pulled from her bag an A4 notebook bound in a William Morris floral pattern cloth. She held it out to Clement.
âYou'd better read what he says about the whole business. Joe was great at telling these things. It's my recipe book, which he lifted. Trust him!'
He looked at her, then accepted the book. It opened to a series of recipes, some hand-written, others cut from columns of newspapers and magazines. True to form, Joseph had turned the volume over and started to write from the other end.
His account took the form of a letter â presumably a draft for a letter never sent â to Ellen, and began in characteristic style.
My dearest Ellie,
There you sit, or maybe stand, down in Salisbury, with that faithful hound of yours by your side. Here stand I, or maybe sit, with a far rarer animal in my grasp. A visionary animal, a metaphorical hound which, by my following, will lead ⦠God knows where.
We've suffered hard knocks in our time, Ellie, as have most people, but now a bit of luck has come my way, and I must tell you about it. I must tell you about it in a way that will not too far strain your credulity. You try so hard to live on the textbook level, but that's never been my way. And you go to church services â and are a Friend of the Cathedral, aren't you? â just as our dear parents brought you up to do. You know I'm the rebel, the defaulter, and you forgive me, don't you? Because I once used to love and cuddle you when you were a tiny person in soggy nappies. In my heart I love and cuddle you still, so you will have to accept that I have had what in Christian terms would be a miracle. I've had a Visitation.
St Paul on his way to Damascus couldn't have been more knocked out than I've been.
This was last November, and I am still trying to reorient myself.
Oh, Ellie dear, life's so strange ⦠Why don't people just throw up their hands and admit it?
That day, I had to go and see a solicitor. He's a rogue who knows how to deal with rogues. I'm trying to sue a publisher, to get a miserable sum of money he owes me. My solicitor has moved from Harrow to Oxford. I was in Oxford and I did not go to see Clem and Sheila. Would Clem forgive me if he knew? He's such a dry old stick â my guess is that the voluptuous Sheila does his living for him. But I don't know what goes on in any marriage, do I? Having had that one failed marriage under my nose all my childhood â and it's still a mystery to me â I'm not likely to set another up for myself.
Anyhow, Oxford. Home of the young. I like it. It's like the East in that respect â everyone is young and hopeful. Tranny-culture, maybe, but the new generation has style: they swear and screw without being self-conscious about it. Frankly, I envy them. I sat in a coffee shop and watched them, setting up their plans and pretences so whole-heartedly. Girls very pretty, swearing like chaps.
Then I took refuge in one of the College chapels. It was more my age. Clem took me there once. New College â built in Plantagenet times, I believe. The carved misericords under the seats are my delight: little bursts of brutal peasant life as counterpoints to all that solemn upraising of eyes to God and the roof beams. Acrobats, people dancing, men gambling, a chap fucking a sow. That brute life of the centuries, not much tainted by mind; and allowed there in the church. That's where I belong, in the gutter life, being sat on. But I too have had a vision of lovelier things, and not in a church either.
There must have been a time â perhaps in Plantagenet centuries, who knows? â when gutter and heaven were close. Our old Nettlesham poet Westlake, in âThe Conversation', has something of the same thought (you see I still read him):
However dark the gulfs that ope, the days
That 'whelm me, still I feel the Maker's gaze.
From chapel to solicitor. He seemed to think we might extract some money from my back-street publisher. You see, back-street authors have back-street publishers. The thought of solvency went to my head. I buzzed straight back to Acton, collected Lucy from her hospital, and drove off to the south coast.
We found a little place in Dorset, near Lulworth Cove. It's years since I was at the English seaside. I like palm trees and mangusteens and warm water. But the Dorset coast looked superb, like a film set; November had washed it clean of tourists, and the great chalk cliffs stood out into the waves as if creation had made chalk, rather than Homo sapiens, the highest form of intelligent life. The air turned me very spiritual. We got a neat little room under the eaves of a quiet pub, with a sea view out of the foot-square window. We took a long walk, arm-in-arm, along the cliff paths.
Everything was simple â none of your middle-classization in that pub â to match the great gentle forms of the cliff. Lucy and I felt so good, and were in harmony (English for not rowing for once). The meal that evening was okay and, after a drink and a chat with the landlord, we went out to look at the night before going to bed. The moon was up, sailing in a clear sky like a sparrow's egg in a fit of hubris. Another simple form in the immense beauty of the universe.
On the beach were pebbles as smooth as the far-shining moon. As I chucked one of them into the foam dashing up to meet our feet, as I had the feel of it between my fingers, it occurred to me naturally that a recurring dream I had was about the moon, and that the moon was a female entity with which I was in communication. About the night was a unity that made this leap of thought entirely natural, as if something from a much more primitive way of life, long forgotten, had slipped through a panel in the universe and presented me with its visiting card.
This thought â it was something much more basic than thought
â this illumination filled my mind like sunshine (it's generally very dark in the brain, you know). We shook the sand from our shoes and went inside, up the wooden stairs to bed.
That nut Jung said that the crux of today's spiritual problems lay in the fascination which psychic life holds for modern man. Or, alternatively, he might have said does not hold for modern man ⦠But suddenly I was filled with a radiant psychic hope â I can't tell you â quite unlike me. You're religious and you'll interpret it your way, but I felt it as a great pagan force, almost
geometrically
plain and pure, like cliffs, sea, moon, beyond our window sill.
Lucy was marvellous. She must have thought I was mad. We sleep naked. There she was in the nude, in the dim white light of the room, before creeping into bed. I didn't touch her. She was a catalyst that night, a numinosity rather than the flesh. I was in a trance. There has never been a night like it in my life.
I recalled Muslims in Sumatra, prostrating themselves during Ramadan. The urge came on me to do the same. I flung myself to the floor. The light of the moon poured in on me like a white syrup. Without words, I addressed the anima, my female tutelary spirit â wayward priestess â beseeching her to speak to me, to emerge from behind the veil. I was complete, on the spiral, beyond myself, a creature, a flung pebble.
How I slept. Like a dropped pebble. Ellie, something wonderful happened to me. My anima did indeed visit me. Perhaps her face had always been turned elsewhere. Okay, it wasn't like that, but it felt like that. I tell you some inarguable persona of female gender came unto me during that night while I slept and said â
Can you think of the most momentous thing she might have said? The most unlikely, the most tiny, the most illogical, the most inescapable? You can? Okay, well that's what she said. I awoke with these words in my head: âYour mother did love you.'
You see, she was putting me right, putting everything right.
Your mother did love you. So I was worth something, after all.
It's possible to be full of faith and joy and yet almost fainting. I
told Lucy about it when she woke. And again she was great. She seemed extremely moved. At least, she didn't laugh, and was strong enough to stand back and give me air. Somehow I managed to eat an enormous breakfast downstairs in a little back parlour, and then we went out into the morning air. There I tried to explain everything.
She listened and kissed me and did not run from me screaming.
Ever since that clear November day, I have been trying to rearrange my life according to the truth as delivered by that wondrous voice. Well â rebuilding rather than rearranging. It's like arriving from Mars to try and live on Earth. Long, long ago, before geology happened, while you were still running about with a rusk in your mouth barking like a little dog, I came to the conclusion that the parents, sweet folk that they were, did not love their only little son. I had to come to that conclusion. It protected me from the uncertainty that was destroying me.
You won't remember how you were kidnapped into persuading me how hateful I was. But mother grabbed you and strapped you into your pushchair and rammed on your bonnet and rammed on her bonnet and rushed off in the direction of eternity up Ipswich Street â simply in order to persuade me that I was such a little shit she had run away from me for good. Maybe that was the actual moment you got religion. You know â Teach Love Through Fear and all that. It was the moment when I got mad. I could not bear the nervous strain and found it as a matter of survival necessary to remain forever sullen, unmoved by kisses or threats, sheltered behind the doleful fortification of her assumed unlovingness. I mean, part of me knew even then that she did in a way love me, but was too much up the pole to admit it.
And ever since I have had to live my life behind that barricade. It has twisted everything out of true. All those whores in the East, all my attempts to cut my life short, all those fears of the permanent bond of marriage, all those delusions, all those broken hopes ⦠all have sprung from that fragile defence erected at the age of four or five. Of course she was off her rocker, and she threw me off
mine. I think she buggered up your life just as much, but I know you won't have that.
Anyhow, somehow, I have survived sixty years of torture to be â it's your word â Redeemed. I am a different chap. Lucy sees it. She knows there's a touch of magic about me. Understanding follows forgiveness, blossoms follow drought.
As to what it has cost. The universe itself
There the letter broke off.
Clement closed the recipe book and laid it down on the desk, scarcely able to look at Lucy, who had sat by on the sofa, covertly studying his face as he read and crossing and re-crossing her jean-clad legs.