Life in the West. Brian Aldiss

thought back to an evening only three nights ago, before Grahame Ash, Laura Nye, and the crew had come down to Hartisham to film – only three nights ago, but now, separated from the present by the quarrel, a long way in the past. It had been so peaceful, so domestic: Tess and he, and the two girls, and Tess’s reliable friend, Matilda Rowlinson, sitting drinking coffee in his study after supper. Yet even then he had been dreaming of someone else …

      Teresa was painting, copying a large butterfly. She used acrylics on a large pad, and worked deftly, occasionally looking up and smiling at Ann and Jane, who lolled by the fire with Nellie, the Dalmatian. Ann was just thirteen, her sister eleven; the sandy gene had run out with their elder brother; they had inherited their mother’s mouse, and their father’s enquiring nature.

      ‘You girls ought to be going to bed,’ Teresa said, as the grandfather clock in the hall struck ten.

      ‘We’re watching you,’ Ann said. ‘We’re fascinated, aren’t we, Nellie?’

      ‘You’re not.’

      ‘What sort of butterfly is it, anyway?’

      Teresa appealed to Squire. He had bought the spectacular insect in its frame in a Singapore shop as a homecoming present for her.

      ‘It’s called a Bhutan Glory.’

      ‘You’re ruining the ecology of Singapore by buying that poor butterfly, Dad,’ Jane said. ‘There soon won’t be any left. How’d you like it if they came over here and bought all our butterflies?’

      ‘We’d have to exercise some controls.’

      Teresa said in his defence, ‘Daddy helps to preserve the ecology of the Norfolk Broads, because they are our local responsibility, but you can’t expect him to butt in on Singapore’s affairs.’

      ‘It’s a pity we didn’t manage to stop the council pulling down the old almshouses,’ Matilda said. She was the vicar’s daughter, a tall pale woman in her early thirties and, with her plain looks and self-effacing manner, an embodiment of the traditional vicar’s daughter, until one became aware of her lucid way of thought.

      ‘They were tumbledown,’ Teresa said, ‘but the semi-detacheds that Ray Bond is building in their place are quite out of keeping with the rest of the village.’

      ‘I know, why don’t they build houses with green bricks instead of red ones?’ Jane said. ‘Then they’d merge with the landscape.’

      ‘Who’s ever heard of green bricks, Stupid?’ said her sister.

      ‘Well, they could invent them … Only I daresay they’d fade after a year and turn the colour of dog shit.’

      ‘I heard that Ray Bond was having an affair with two women at once,’ Ann said. ‘Both of them married. Isn’t that beastly, Dad?’

      ‘Beastly complicated.’

      ‘It’s disgusting. You girls shouldn’t listen to village gossip,’ Teresa told them.

      Ann rolled onto her back, and pulled Nellie on top of her. With evening, a chilly wind was blowing in from the coast, and the big old electric fire was burning. She rested a slippered foot on top of it and announced, ‘I think I shall have affairs when I grow up. I’d like to have people gossiping about me.’

      ‘What, affairs with people like Ray Bond? You are nauseating,’ Jane said. ‘That’s just about your style.’

      ‘Oh, you can stick to your boring old ecology. You think caterpillars are more important than love, but I don’t. Grownups think love is important, don’t you, Mummy?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Teresa, and nothing more; so that Matilda, who sat quietly on a large Moroccan pouffe just beyond the compass of the light falling on Teresa’s paper, added, ‘Love can be a way of perception, like science or art, Ann, provided you don’t use it for power over people.’

      ‘To think I once used to be in love with that odious Robert Mais! I was only six then. I’ve got better taste now …’ Ann thought a while and then asked Squire, ‘Were you in love when you were very young, Dad?’

      ‘I don’t remember being in love at six. But I was at nine.’

      Ann sat up. ‘Go on, don’t just stop there! True confessions … Who was she? Do we know her? I suppose she must be pretty ancient now.’

      He laughed. ‘That’s true. Her name was Rachel. She lived here during the war. I loved her dearly.’

      ‘She lived here!’ Ann laughed. ‘I smell a rat! Did you have an affair with her, Dad? I mean, you know, a real flaming affair?’

      ‘Oh, shut up, Ann!’ Jane exclaimed. ‘You’re embarrassing poor Daddy, can’t you see? Nellie, eat her, go on, eat her! This conversation is getting too carnal entirely.’

      They rolled together, shrieking. Teresa called to them ineffectually to stop.

      ‘Was it carnal, Dad? Tell us, we won’t tell anyone!’

      He broke into laughter. ‘I just loved her, that’s all.’

      Matilda, smiling, said, ‘Even carnal love can be a sign of someone’s yearning for Unity, though one can only really achieve unity with God.’

      ‘You’re bound to say that because you’re the Reverend Rowlinson’s daughter,’ said Ann, derisively. ‘I bet you’ve never had carnal knowledge – not even with Ray Bond, have you?’

      ‘That’s very rude, Ann. Apologize and go up to bed at once.’ Squire joined his wife with a shout of ‘Apologize!’

      ‘We’re only talking, Mummy,’ Jane said, soothingly.

      But Ann had already shifted back to her original target. Jumping up, laughing, she demanded again, ‘Were you carnal, Pop – even when you were only nine?’

      The noise of a woodcock roused Squire. For a moment he had a vision of happier things, imagining that his father was alive and moving about in his room; then his waking senses returned. His bladder was full. His body felt cold. Sighing, he sat up.

      Light of another day filtered through the long windows. His carriage clock pronounced the time to be five-twenty. He was lying cramped on the chesterfield in his study, with a quarter-full glass of whisky standing on the carpet beside him. His head ached. His mouth was dry.

      The pallid light seemed to cast a veil between Squire and a painting on the wall on which his sickened gaze rested. The painting dated from 1821, and had been executed by a nineteenth-century artist whom Squire had collected consistently over the past quarter century, Edward Calvert. Entitled ‘The Primaeval City’, it showed a scene which charmingly mingled the rural with the urban. A bullock cart trundled among trees into a city of thatch and domes and ruin, where figures could be seen in cameo, a bucolic pressing wine, a nun entering the church, a woman hanging out washing, a man pulling a donkey. In the background, garlanded with leaves, a gibbous moon rose like a planet above the crumbling rooftops, and a shepherd tended his sheep. In the foreground, dominating everything, stood a nude maiden in a leafy bower of pomegranate trees, having climbed from a brook. She looked over one shoulder without coquetry at the viewer, a bewitching mixture of flesh and spirit.

      Recalling the previous evening, Squire turned his regard from these symbols and yawned.

      Painfully, he got to his feet and staggered across to the french windows. When he twisted the latch, they opened with a squeal. He walked stealthily across the terrace, arms enfolding his chest to ward off the chill. He went on tiptoe down a gravel path and made his way barefoot over damp grass to the nearest clump of rhododendrons.

      Down by the Guymell, faintly, he could see cattle standing without movement. Steam attended their flanks. All was still, artificial. The nearby cedars stood in a mist which rendered them as outlines. As a painter reduces a tree to a symbol which will function within his composition as a real tree does in a real landscape, so these outlines rendered the awakening