Brian Aldiss - The Squire Quartet

Although Blakeney was so near, Deirdre, Marshall, and their children always slept at the Hall on Christmas night. It was part of the tradition. When they were younger, this had been a time for drinking too much brandy and port and playing childish games after the children had gone up to bed. Now they were more staid, and Uncle Willie drove himself off to Norwich at nine-thirty in order, as he explained, to look after his flat and his cat.

Squire and Mrs Davies went to see him off at the front door.

‘You’d better look after your granddaughter, Madge,’ Uncle Willie warned Mrs Davies, as he wound a woolly scarf round his neck. ‘Do you know what Grace said to me?’

‘I’m sure it was something very precocious, Will. Young girls reach the age of – become young ladies very much earlier than they did in my day. I can’t understand it. It must have been something in the diet when we were young.’ She smiled at him teasingly.

‘Come, my dear, you are still a beautiful lady, and Ernest is a very lucky man. Blossoms that flower late go on flowering into the winter.’

Squire, slightly surprised at this flight of fancy from his uncle, asked, ‘What did Grace say to you, Uncle?’

The old man hesitated, then chuckled. ‘Why, she told me that she’d had a dream in which she had gone down to the beach, and there she had seen a fully grown male seal sporting in the waves. Although it was a bit rough, she took off her clothes and joined him, and put her arms round him and held him tight. She said it felt lovely. Those were her words: “It felt lovely.”’

‘She is getting to that age …’

‘It was her comment afterwards that shocked me. She said, “I expect it’s a premonitory dream about enjoying sexual intercourse, don’t you, Uncle?”’

While Squire and Uncle Willie laughed, Mrs Davies pretended to look affronted. After Willie had gone, she said as she retreated with Squire from the chilly regions of the front door, ‘Willie Squire is such a nice man. Ernest and I have always admired him. A pity he doesn’t marry again. I suppose even marriage is unpopular or something these days – so many people seem to be getting divorced.’

‘Most of them tend to remarry. It’s what Dr Johnson calls the triumph of hope over experience.’

‘I’m so glad that you and Teresa are happily married, and have this lovely house, full of such exquisite workmanship.’

‘Sometimes I am afraid she feels imprisoned here.’

‘Oh, no, not Teresa.’

He took her arm and led her into the warm living room, where her husband was already setting out a Scrabble board.

Later in the evening, the children submitted to Adrian’s ghost story and then climbed upstairs to bed. Madge and Ernest followed them, and the Rowlinsons left.

Marshall Kaye threw an additional log on the fire and stretched out before it on the sofa, next to Adrian. Deirdre smiled at her husband and returned to the novel she was reading. Teresa trimmed the candles, which were now the room’s sole illumination, while Squire poured everyone a malt whisky.

‘Not for me,’ Adrian said, waving a hand. ‘I’m fighting against middle-aged fat.’

‘You’re very thin, Adrian,’ Teresa said. ‘A whisky would do you good.’

‘It’s refusing all the whiskies that would do me good which keeps me thin.’

‘Middle age should not be devoted to abstinence,’ Kaye said, raising his glass and sipping.

‘What is middle age for, Marsh?’ Teresa asked her brother-in-law. ‘I’ve yet to find out.’

‘Well … it’s a sort of reprieve-period, in my book. You’ve finished mating and the furtherance of the species. Your waistline becomes more important than the rat-race … I guess it’s a time when you’re supposed to become wise and good.’

Laughing, Squire brought his glass over and sat down by the fire with them. ‘Most people get more awful in middle age, not more good, and take to drink or politics. Although revolutionaries start young, other shades of politician get involved only when they’re past the optimal breeding age.’

‘Must be a correlation there,’ Kaye said, laughing.

‘When I was a child,’ Adrian confessed, ‘I thought that acquiring knowledge would infallibly make one good. Now I suspect it warps the soul.’

‘That’s a useful bit of knowledge to have.’

Squire said, ‘We can recognize distinct stages in a man’s life. Puberty. Mating. Family-rearing. After that, with the initial biological directives losing their force, he turns to complaining about the state of the country.’

‘Sorry to hear your directives are losing their force, Tom,’ Adrian said.

Kaye took the remark more seriously. ‘I’m all for complaining about the state of the country. I know it’s rather an obsessive British occupation, but in the States it’s regarded as unpatriotic, which it shouldn’t be. Why, we’ve had to import Solzhenitsyn to do the complaining for us. That’s bad.’

Deirdre looked up from her book. ‘Stop grumbling about America, Marsh. Just because they have their own way of doing things.’

‘Good old America,’ he said. ‘So close to God, so far from everyone else.’

‘It is disconcerting the way Russian thinking of various types has so greatly influenced the West, on both the Left and the Right,’ Squire said, reaching for the decanter. Adrian jumped to his feet.

‘I’m going to bed. Politics is something I gave up, along with whiskies that do me good. Thank God that Britain, for all its faults, is not a political nation. To hear you talk, Tom, with your knowing insinuations that there are KGB agents snooping round the grounds, you’d think the poor old country was a dead duck.’

‘As to that,’ said Squire, leaning back and pointing a hand at his brother, ‘as to that, Adrian, old sport, will you dream more sweetly in your whisky-free sleep if I tell you categorically that there is a dedicated band of Soviets and their Warsaw Pact hyenas, all with the most unfriendly intentions towards this sceptred isle, within six or seven miles of this comfortable fire?’

Adrian did his sawn-off laugh. ‘My dear Tom, you are getting to be, you know, a bit of a bore with this Lord Chalfontism of yours. Perhaps it really is compensatory fantasy for lack of the old biological drive.’

Squire stood up, set his whisky glass on the table, and raised his right hand, arm extended, to shoulder level. He swung the arm until it pointed almost due north.

‘That way’s the coast, right? You wouldn’t disagree there. Not more than five miles away as the crow flies or the shell whizzes, right? All round our shores, hugging the two-mile limit, are Soviet spy-vessels, monitoring everything that goes on ashore. Five and two make seven.’

‘Rubbish!’ said Adrian. ‘We’d never let them.’

‘We can’t stop them.’ Squire lowered his arm. ‘They’re seven miles away, sitting in a well-armed ship of modern design. They monitor everything, local radio, police reports, the lot. Plus anything their numerous secret agents ashore like to beam out to them. How come you don’t know this, Adrian? It’s no secret. Is it that you don’t want to know it?’

‘It can’t be true. What could they learn? Anyhow, we probably do just the same to them.’

‘We haven’t got the vessels. You know how the defence budget has been pared away by successive governments year after year for thirty years. That’s right, isn’t it, Marsh?’

Kaye drained his glass. ‘We’re even closer to the bastards at Blakeney. You can see them through the binoculars. Let’s get to bed, Tom. This is no talk for Christmas Day. Maybe, as Solzhenitsyn says, the Third World War is already lost. Just don’t quote me.’

‘I think you’re both being defeatist,’ Adrian said, stoutly. ‘In any case, even if it were true, they’d never dare attack us.’