Brian Aldiss - The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

Happily, self-reproach does not play a great part in my nature. My faults were early brought home to me; I have never lost them, or my deleterious habits. Yet they have never weighed too heavily because of my intimate knowledge that faults and weaknesses are essential components of everyone’s nature. Perfection is only a pose of weakness.

This knowledge has permitted me to write as frankly as I have done here. It’s a boyhood I describe, not a case history; to many who will not care to say so, my experiences will awaken resonances.

All I regret are my literary flaws, which will not permit me to relive here those early years. All I can do is to re-tell them, as honestly as possible, from the standpoint of age and memory.

Only at this point will I admit how inadequate my talent is to breathe life again into – to resurrect – that dear occasion when Virginia and I were complete and, for an indefinite span, all-in-all to one another.

‘Now I’d better get my patient a cup of tea,’ she said. Whatever she said was invested with a peculiar charm, a sort of irony, a sort of semi-official … no, I can’t describe it. It was not so much that she did not take herself or me or the world quite seriously, rather that she had a not-quite-serious policy to take nothing seriously.

Glutton that I was, as she started to leave the bed I reached out for her again.

‘You’re really very ill,’ she said. But of course I was sure I would never in my life get her on the bed again.

Happily, it did not work out that way. Like the great A. K. Dancer before me, I had found love. Though it was still to be brought home to me that love, like everything else, has its flaws and weaknesses.

If it had been left to me, then, knowing no better, I would no doubt have conducted it as an affair of organs. But Virginia gently and slyly directed the affair on another course. She was not averse to sexual intercourse, but she insisted on social intercourse as well.

I was in the sickroom under her care and tutelage for fifteen days, fifteen flowering days. Not for ten years, until I made my wretched marriage, was I again to enjoy the company of a woman so exclusively and so continuously. In that time, without intending to, Virginia set her frail stamp upon me.

In that time the world stopped – though, in the last week, I had my school books and did some studying during the day. My friends came to see me and uttered rude and envious comments, at which I laughed and made coarse jokes back: made them against Virginia, lacerating myself as I did so, in order that these uncouth sods, my chums, should not guess what was really happening.

One of them, a heavy-faced boy called Spaldine who came from Spalding and was also in the art club, was particularly pressing. I knew he fancied Virginia himself.

‘You must at least have had a bit on a finger from her,’ he said.

‘For Christ’s sake, you know I’d like to just as much as you would, Spaldine, you bastard, but if anyone touched her she’d go straight to the Head, and I’d be sacked before I knew it.’

‘Go on, it would be worth it!’ Spaldine said.

And they would leave, and my mysterious lover, twice my age, would come with her rapid walk into the room seeming to behave for a moment as if our relationship was merely a formal one – as if she were perhaps as surprised by everything as I.

In the afternoons I was allowed to go up to her room, normally out of bounds, and sit on the sofa with her and even smoke a secret cigarette with her. We talked as equals. She liked to affect a drawl and speak very cynically, telling me amusing and sometimes risqué stories of her family, all of whom did interesting things. About herself she was more reticent.

The novelty and enchantment of all this filled every last corner of my life. I thought of her every moment I was awake, whether she was present or not; and she permeated my sleep, even when I did not dream of her.

Virginia’s only drawback was that she was not as lecherous as I. Except for one occasion, she would not make love with me in the daytime. Evenings and nights, she said, were made for loving: bodies, becoming part of the darkness, were more sensuous then. I laughed and asked if her old Zulu had taught her that, but she said it was true. Perhaps it is.

Coupled with this belief of hers went a strong aversion to letting me see any part of her body unclothed. Her body, she said, was her secret; no one had ever seen it since she was grown up. Only after dark could I feel it and kiss it, and then in carefully circumscribed areas. She liked having her breasts kissed, but that was about the limit.

There was nothing wrong with her body; I could feel no scars. Recalling my secret knowledge that she had in some way been badly hurt, I asked her what unpleasant things had happened in her life.

‘Nothing unpleasant ever happens to good girls, Horatio, darling.’

Later, however, she admitted that when her family had been living in Hong Kong, when she was a small girl and her father was stationed there, she had caught rheumatic fever, and only the extreme devotion of her mother’s nursing had saved her.

Every night at midnight she came down to my bed in the sickroom. I argued that we would be safer from discovery in her room, for the duty master occasionally took it into his head to wander through the whole school; in addition, I wanted to savour for the first time the glamour of a female bed; but Virginia said that in the sickroom she could hear anyone coming in time to pretend she was simply on duty, whereas if we were up in her room, and my bed was found unoccupied, there would be a great row! So we lay together in love every time where we had first lain, and the thought that we could be caught perhaps added flavour to our happiness – for in some respects we were neither of us entirely unlike children playing a role.

Eventually, that role could be played on that stage no longer. My form master came to see Sister and asked pressingly that I be returned to school as soon as possible. I had to go. By this time I was perfectly fit, and Virginia was sending me out for long walks every day.

She had to sign me off, and I had to return to the school that had been waiting, sunlit, noisy, dusty, in the wings all this halcyon time. But she insisted that I was excused sport for another week and should continue to take my walks during that period.

Twice during those walks she met me at a prearranged spot. On one occasion she and I walked to Youlgreave and had hot toasted tea-cake and big cups of tea in a little whitewashed cottage that was still there, standing empty, during the war. I passed it on one drab occasion and recalled our bygone delight with a pang; for me it was a time of happiness at once placid and shot through with revelations. Despite her sophisticated background, Virginia seemed perfectly content with me, while every remark she let drop about the wider world she knew fascinated me.

It could not last. Once I was back in school, old embargoes snapped back into force. They were too strong to overcome. Both sickroom and her room were now out of bounds to me. I had no pretexts for meeting her, or she me. We could occasionally look at each other, but that shy evasive smile held no special message for me. Ah, my lost Virginia!

I cannot say love died. Indeed, it is not dead now. But I had to live as if it were dead. I had to work and play and laugh and swear. Brown jumped eagerly back into my bed again and we pulled each other off with almost the old abandon. Harper Junior, who had been growing obstreperous lately with the onset of puberty, was made to suck himself off by torchlight, in full disgraceful view of everyone. School life is school life. Reprieves are only reprieves.

The ordeal of School Cert came and was survived. Even at the time it seemed a dim and academic exercise. As young men, we were fully aware of the torches burning in Europe, and the bayonets glinting and the crunch-crunch of marching feet. We envied and hated the Hitler Youth, with its general immorality (according to the propaganda) and the willingness of the German maidens to bring forth children. We were glad that – as yet – there was no war, but we hated the peace.