Brian Aldiss - Ruins

He was amazed at how much the old lady found out about him within the first twenty minutes.

After that time, as though she had now heard enough, she said, ‘Well, it’s tea-time. Shall we have tea, or would you prefer vodka?’

‘As you like, Gladys.’

‘It’s not as I like, Hugh. You are the guest. However, as you are kind enough to pass the decision to me, I vote we have both the tea and the vodka. Lapsang Souchong and Cossack, I’m afraid.’

Two days later, hardly knowing why, he went back to see Gladys Lee again. He chose the morning, just before eleven o’clock, when the old nurse was still fussing over her charge. Of Alice there was no sign; doubtless she was in a mental home by now. Gladys was feeling unwell; although her hands shook badly, she greeted Billing amiably enough, though with a warning: ‘I’m not at my best this early in the day.’

She reclined on the chaise-longue with a rug over her legs while Billing took the cane-backed chair. The nurse served them tea and it was then, in the middle of their conversation, that Billing first heard the meretricious trumpets.

He was familiar with most bugle calls. This one he could not recognise. It sounded rather jazzy; perhaps it was of a non-military nature. Confused as to whether it was a bugle or a trumpet, he missed something the old lady said. Her skin, like the mirror above her, was speckled with brown, providing perfect camouflage.

The thin mendacious notes alarmed him, bringing to mind, for some reason, a scene in a forest clearing, where a monstrous something was being buried. He stood up in alarm. Muttering excuses, he went to the window to peer into the lachrymose street. Nothing was to be seen but pavement and brick and a selection of yesterday’s cars.

‘Music?’ Gladys repeated. ‘I hear nothing. You make me nervous, I’m afraid. Come and sit down. Why are you nervous?’

‘Perhaps it comes from next door.’

‘The Armstrongs do not play music at this hour of day. They’re very quiet. He used to be with the Admiralty.’

After a while the music faded, was gone, was forgotten.

Billing rented a room near Covent Garden, above a veterinarian and pet shop infested with budgerigars, another English obsession. It was 1982 and already the unemployment queues were growing, but he found himself a job as porter in a supermarket. He had seen supermarkets from the administrative side in the days when his father had opened one in their home town. It soon became apparent to him that better ways of laying out the store existed, so that facilities for both staff and customers could be improved at little expense.

The manageress of the supermarket, Mrs Dwyer, was a pleasant woman of about Billing’s age. She dressed brightly, was efficient, and did not bully the girls who worked at her cash-desks. Billing spent several evenings in his room, drawing and colouring plans. When they were complete, he presented them humbly to Mrs Dwyer for her consideration.

‘I like a man with a few brains in his head,’ Mrs Dwyer said, approvingly, crossing her legs and adjusting her skirt.

The next time one of the directors of the chain was visiting, Mrs Dwyer summoned Billing into the office. As a result of their discussion, Billing was offered an office job with the parent firm. He travelled from shop to shop as an unofficial time-and-motion study man, creating new space from old. Once his work took him as far afield as Slough. He still visited Gladys Lee.

Gladys often surprised him, upsetting many of his preconceptions about the elderly. In Billing’s limited experience, old people complained about the present day and told interminable stories about silly things they had done in their youth, whilst sneering about any silly things one did in one’s own youth. Gladys was not at all like that.

She had done a lot of silly things, like being ship-wrecked off Madeira, getting lost in a storm in Marseilles, spending a night locked in a church in Cortina and marrying a crazy Swede. These matters she related almost incidentally; they were always subject to her clear perspective on the nature of human life, which was not so much a Christian one – Billing was surprised to find her quietly pagan – as one filled with many of the traditional Christian virtues.

She said as she poured Billing a cup of tea, ‘I often dream of him,’ meaning the Swede she had married. ‘Though it’s difficult to see people’s faces in dreams, don’t you find? … I told him when we were first married that I did not wish to live in a world in which he had no existence, yet here I still am.’

‘And pretty permanent, by the looks of things,’ Billing said, heartily.

‘You think so?’

To break a difficult silence, he said, ‘I have a dream which keeps returning over the years.’

She vaguely indicated the bookcase behind her. ‘In one of those books … I don’t look at them as often as I used to … in one of them, it says that recurrent dreams are the consolation of those who have failed to reach adulthood. Is that the case with you, do you suppose?’

Suddenly he thought of Cathy, with her childlike dream of becoming a Hollywood star. Her waif-like body, the casual way he had lost her on the way to the baseball game, rose again to reproach him. Surprising himself, he said, ‘I don’t seem to be any good at keeping hold of love when I have it. Is that … that’s not a failure to reach adulthood, is it?’

She never gave him any answer he might expect.

‘I’m afraid your mother was a very charming woman,’ she said. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Hugh. I liked Florence … I just was not sure whether she liked me. She made people unsure. Perhaps she made you unsure.’

Billing laughed. ‘I know she did swank a bit. Tell me what you remember about her.’

He heard nothing to upset him. Gladys was too wise for that. He soon found that he benefited in a mysterious way from her company.

Despite this, Billing experienced guilt. He could not understand why he now shunned other company. ‘Company’ had once been so dear to him that he had surrendered his identity to it. Nor could he understand why he so enjoyed being with Gladys. As he sat in his room wondering, he heard again the call of the meretricious trumpets and jumped to his feet.

His left knee gave him trouble. A twinge of rheumatism, no doubt. England was so damp. Nevertheless, the tinny sound drove him into the street.

The noise vanished. Perversely, he now longed to hear it again.

It was a mild day in early autumn. The season made him think with sudden longing of his little Jewish ex-wife in Denver, so long ago. He wandered through the night. Occasionally he rested, dozing fitfully against the flanks of buildings. As it grew light, he strolled in the Notting Hill area, not far from Gladys’ house, watching street markets open. He felt becalmed. He was waiting for something, something like a tune.

Wandering soon became a habit with him. Night after night, he wandered across London, listening for trumpets. Once or twice, almost daring himself to do it, he went to the terraced house where Gladys lived, sat himself down on the doorstep and dozed. Church clocks chimed, strange dreams visited him, scavenging dogs sniffed him.

He became known around the early markets. The men there called him ‘Jimmy’. He often helped them to put up a stall or unload a lorry. He was invariably polite and good-natured in a mild way, as if professing scarcely to know himself. He began to neglect his daytime job.

Gladys’s eighty-ninth birthday approached. He bought her a little silver box with an embossed cherub from a stall in the Portobello Road, a huge bunch of dahlias from Kensington Park Road and a card with yachts on it from a W H Smith branch.

On the day itself, Gladys Lee wore a new costume, green tweed with a green velvet collar. The pearls were in evidence, also the digital watch. When he called at three o’clock she was feeling well, she told him, and sat with a large-print book beside her on the chaise-longue.