Brian Aldiss - Ruins

Rose had a collection of china horses – he had contributed one himself, a shiny coltish thing with brittle legs. But it could not be said that she was into china horses, as an American would have been. It remained simply a collective hazard on the mantlepiece, a somewhat forlorn reminder of a lost Rosey past which had contained fields and pastureage and idle summer afternoons.

So he put his arms round her, coat and all, and kissed her.

‘Don’t really mind where we live,’ she said, kissing him slowly, ‘as long as you keep slipping it up me.’

‘Oh, god,’ he groaned. ‘Don’t worry your pretty head about that.’

Downstairs, in the main room, he contemplated the chaise-longue.

‘We’ll have to get rid of that, for a start, Hugh … I like this long mirror, though.’

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ He looked in a drawer. Among the clutter of items he saw a birthday card with yachts on. He stared at the bookcase, pulling out the odd book, hoping for something to read.

‘We’ll have to get shot of that lot,’ Rose said behind him, indicating the orderly spines.

‘Not so fast. It’s nice to have books about.’

Some were in foreign languages: German, Swedish. There were several books bound in drab green and written by a man named Bengtsholm. Looking at an inscription in ink on the title page of one of them, he realised that Bengtsholm was Gladys’s husband. After his death, she had reverted to the use of her simple maiden name of Lee, Bengtsholm presenting too many obstacles to the insular English. Many of the books in the case had been his, or were actually written by him. Billing felt awed and excited.

He opened one called ‘Of Analytical Psychology’ and read, ‘Something must be left to your own mental efforts. You might consider what it means to be complete. People should not be deprived of the joy of discovering themselves. To be complete is a great thing. To talk of it is entertaining, but is no substitute for being it. Being complete, however you phrase it, is the main thing in life.’

He stuffed the book back, recoiling. In his mind was an image of that ladder falling and the body going with it. Complete? Psychology filled him with dread – yet it was a pleasurable dread. There were mysterious doors and possibilities, as he knew.

The Psyche and Dream Journeyings . Why not just Journeys ? The title caught his eye as he was about to turn away. The Psyche and Dream Journeyings … He pulled it out. It was another great long unexplored volume, with clear print, thick paper, heavy binding and plenty of footnotes.

‘We’ll have to do something about the kitchen,’ Rose called. ‘I should reckon this here oven sailed with Noah on the Ark.’

They went out the back into the damp little garden, in which Gladys Lee had not walked for many months before her death. Most of it was down to grass. An old iron bath stood at the far end, under the grey slate-capped wall. Buddleias grew. There was a rockery covered with ferns. On the whole the soil seemed too poor to sustain weeds.

‘We could do better with this,’ Billing said, airily indicating the landscape. ‘Conifers at cost. A figure or two. Trellis. Clematis.’

‘Get old Frewin down here to help us,’ she said. Frewin was the name of their wine-making neighbours. They had a good laugh about that.

By the kitchen window was a dilapidated shed containing nothing but a broom and old linoleum. Unwanted things could be stored there and eventually they could have a car-boot sale with them.

They looked up at the slate roof, the peeling windows (bathroom window frosted half-way up), rusty gutters, wrinkled brickwork.

‘It’s ours!’ they said proudly, and hugged each other. ‘All ours! Wonderful!’

‘If we sell everything, it’ll bring us in enough cash to completely redecorate inside,’ she said. ‘George taught me how to hang wallpaper. I’m a dab hand at it. We’ll make it look all lovely and light and modern inside and banish Gladys’s ghost. Oh, it will be grand! Better than Buckingham Palace.’

‘I’ll paint the outside. We’ll need to get a long ladder.’ Inwardly, he was a bit sorry about banishing Gladys’s ghost. In some odd way, he longed to preserve everything as it was, in all the seedy pomp of yesterday; but he said nothing, recognising that ultimately Rose’s practicality would triumph over his nostalgia. Probably quite right, too, he said to himself.

Staring at the rockery, he ceased to listen to what she was saying concerning the hanging of wallpaper. A woodlouse was climbing up the slope between two shoulders of stone. A miniature avalanche of soil sent it slipping to the bottom of the slope but, undeterred, it tried again and eventually disappeared behind a brown frond of fern. One snowdrop was flowering in a hollow beside a boulder of clinker.

Weeks passed. Billing and his lady hugged themselves frequently as the realisation of their fortune sank in. It seemed as if they could never discuss it enough. To have a house of their own gave them security and, more than security, dreams.

Rose rearranged her week so that she could take Saturdays off as he did. On Friday nights, they’d drive away to London in the Austin, taking with them such food as jam tarts, pork pies, cakes, and taramasalata, to spend all weekend in Shepherd’s Bush, refurbishing the house, picnicking, chatting, calling to one another.

At the far end of the garden, by the old bath, Billing made a bonfire of various tatty pieces of carpeting while Rose scrubbed the floors of the house with disinfectant. Billing turned off the water supply at the mains and extracted an ancient cast-iron hot water tank from the cupboard next to the kitchen, replacing it with a more effective copper cylinder plumbed into what had been the kitchen broom-cupboard. The cupboard that was now empty he painted with emulsion paint and filled with shelves; so they acquired a pantry. A good secondhand refrigerator fitted neatly into it. Another hug was required when that was in place, and much self-congratulation.

Asleep in the double bed with Rose that night, Billing had a bad dream.

He and Rose lived in a great house which seemed to fill a whole countryside. The corridors went up hill and down dale like mountain paths. They were happy until a stern personage in grey and white uniform came to separate him from her. Doors slammed, mysterious winds blew.

He was taken to a confusing garden, flowerless and a muddle of small constructions. At the far end of it stood a little rundown building, guarded by wooden fences and gates. The personage led him into the building, saying that henceforth Billing had to live here.

It seemed that the building had once been a poultry-house. Although Billing did not wish to enter, the personage would brook no protests. It was a low one-storey place. The doors were stuck and opened only with difficulty, creaking as they did so.

The interior was worse than could be imagined. All was in tones of grey. The frosted windows were clouded with cobwebs. Mould and dust covered everything. The atmosphere was dense and fusty, while the floor appeared to be paved with decaying cheese. Billing found he could scarcely walk.

The personage (now very faint) said, ‘It will not be too bad.’ It then faded away and Billing was alone, shut in.

His feeling was one of intense grief. He wandered about without any fixed intention or plan of escape. Worse was to come. He found himself in an interior room, more distressing than the others, more suffocating.

The room was ill-lit. Amid dark shadows, propped in one corner, sat Gladys Lee. She was shrouded in dust sheets and sunk in her final demented stage, her eyes red-rimmed. She beckoned Billing forward. Her mouth fell open with a terrible crack, revealing broken sticks of teeth.