Brian Aldiss - Ruins

The text of this edition was generated by scanning an earlier print copy of the story in its first edition. The text is a product of its period and presented here as it was in its first publication.

That afternoon, they went to the movies to see Ali McGraw in Love Story , Ashley’s movie of the moment, which was showing in Times Square. Afterwards they took tea in the Algonquin lounge since Ashley had an interest in the hotel cat. They happened to meet some old friends there, one of whom had known Hugh Billing in his musical days. They all visited a few bars, ate Mexican in the only Mexican restaurant they knew, took in some jazz on the fringes of Harlem and arrived back late at the apartment.

A cable announcing the death of Hugh’s mother was awaiting him.

‘Do you want me to go to Great Britain with you? I have never been in Britain,’ Ashley said. ‘We could take a look at London and Land’s End.’

‘I’d better go alone. They say you travel faster that way.’

She said nothing for a moment, contemplating him, certain he would not return. ‘That’s just an airline ad, isn’t it? Something eats at you all the time, Hugh Billing. Your brain sure is your erogenous zone.’

‘It’s not that,’ Hugh said, thinking maybe he should shave off his moustache or trim it just a bit. He tried to recall what London looked like.

The years had flown since Billing was last in his native country. London, seen from the taxi as he rode in from the airport, frightened him. Dirt, graffiti, crowds, miscellaneous people. Why should someone wish to write UNDERARM ODOUR KILLS on a brick wall under a flyover? He felt himself unchanged, although he was older and his moustache was trimmed. He was thin and neat of figure – an ethos of frugality, learnt from a woman in California, had ensured as much. But he could no longer think in an English way. His clothes were American, he spoke American. The shower in his London hotel wept all the night on to the cracked tiles and was cold towards him in the morning.

The years had flown. His old friends had gone from their favourite haunts. Most of those who had worked in the music business had retired or died. His sister June was dead, her widowed husband working for a shipping line in the Persian Gulf. Other people he had known had either gone abroad or had been scattered, as if a squall had blown up.

The years had flown. Only the lawyers who had sent the cable to New York were friendly, in their professional way. They gave him details of his mother’s death, where the funeral was to be held, and the address of Gladys Lee, who was handling the arrangements for a small reception after the burial service. Gladys Lee was no relation of Billing’s: she was his absent brother-in-law’s old mother. Mrs Gladys Lee. He barely remembered her. Everyone at the reception looked strange and short of Vitamin C.

‘Your mother and I weren’t on too good terms, to be frank, Hugh. She was … not sincere. Still, live and let live.’ She put a hand up to her mouth. ‘In a manner of speaking, that’s to say.’ He couldn’t get used to the English idioms. Gladys was so ancient; Billing wandered off to talk to someone else.

‘I’ve just come back from Spain. It’s a wonderful place, very orderly for a Mediterranean country. I’ll say that for Franco – he does keep everything in order.’ The man who was talking to Billing across their sherry glasses was evidently of the old school, his dark suit and the aroma of moth balls it exuded being ideal for funerals. ‘I hate death, don’t you? Always have done.’

At the same time, he was looking Billing up and down through his horn-rimmed spectacles. He found Billing odd and Billing knew it. Only women – themselves almost always odd, Billing reflected – found him okay, accepted the fact that he fitted nowhere.

The front room of Gladys Lee’s small terraced house was crowded with people who seemed puzzled by Billing. They were all old and had perfected ways of talking in patent accents. He remembered none of them. Their hearing aids were aligned against him.

The man with the horn-rimmed spectacles led Billing over to a man mouldering in an armchair, bald of head and dull of eye, whom he introduced as his elder brother, Arthur. Arthur was scratching at his left cheek as though to check its blood-content.

‘He won’t be long for this world, will you, Arthur?’

‘Don’t let’s seem to hurry him away,’ Billing said, on the older brother’s behalf. Wasn’t Arthur allowed to make his own decision regarding mortification? Typical English, he thought. What’s wrong with the country?

‘Your mother liked Arthur,’ said the horn-rimmed man pointedly, as if pronouncing a curse. ‘Flo liked you, didn’t she, Arthur?’

Arthur smiled, sighed, and returned to his cheek.

The funeral service, too, had been a disaster. The preacher had been late and either coldly inebriated or just over the safety limit of a nervous breakdown. Clasping the prayer book upside down, he had muttered furtively over grave and coffin, casting his words to the disinterested wind.

Straining his ears, Billing caught the words ‘… whom God hath joined … cast asunder.’ The wedding service having been intoned, the mourners made their way back to Gladys Lee’s place, to seek in her sherry a refuge from mortality.

‘You weren’t at the service?’ Billing now enquired of Arthur, not long for this world.

The bald man looked up and smiled in the general direction of Billing. He raised a glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and, drinking, spilled some of the liquid down his chin. His furry white tongue failed to reach the elusive drops where they clung to the wrinkles of his face.

‘I’m excused funerals,’ he said. ‘Being blind, I don’t see the point any more.’

Could he actually be making a joke? Billing was uncertain. He had lost his ear for English irony.

‘You’ve got your sense of humour still. That’s the main thing.’ He recalled that one spoke in such a way at family funerals.

Arthur nodded thoughtfully and fumbled with his chin as if it were newly discovered territory. ‘I don’t get as much fun out of visual gags as I used to,’ he said with regret.

Seeking relief, Billing looked about for a gleam of happiness, for the sight of a pretty woman. But pretty women had been debarred from this shabby-genteel part of London. There was only old Gladys Lee in her pearls, fragile but grand, playing queen in her generally unvisited rooms.

They’re so isolated, these people, Billing told himself. As I was. The Americans are much more ingenious at coping with their loneliness. Patriotism is another form of psychotherapy over there. He thought of the mountains of Utah, where he had once skied. Those wild mountains, the way American skiers dressed in bright garments to flash down their slopes like Martians, the sudden fogs which embraced the Snowcat. Loneliness there had been grand opera, solitude a momentary thing with commercial value.

It was not only the English people. Gladys Lee’s room and everything in it were old. No disgrace in that, or commercial value either. It was just that he had become used to new things: not so much in New York, which was to him curiously ancient, filled with old Jewish and African habits, but the great stretches of Middle America, blue-grass country, where all the furniture in all the houses had been manufactured only the year previously from extruded creamy plastic.