Brian Aldiss - The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

‘Oh, my Christ! Stubbs!’ he gasped.

We went into a little pub, mopped ourselves up in the Gents’, and then sat at a table and talked over half-pints of bitter and cigarettes.

Spaldine was full of jealousy and bile. Once he started the tale of his grievances, he could not stop. And the target of his love and hatred was Sister Traven – as he called her thoughout his account.

He had first made love to Sister at Branwells about three weeks before I did. He had been entirely more precipitate than I. He had gone up to her room sometimes in the early hours of the morning and had stayed till dawn. He was crazy about her.

No coherent feelings, apart perhaps from amazement at my own pain, came to me as he talked. Although I interjected remarks, and they came from numbed lips, they were innocuous remarks that apparently rendered him quite insensible to any effect he was having on me.

‘What about Pepper? He was the prefect in your dormitory. Didn’t he ever find you were missing?’

‘I always went up to Sister Traven’s room in my pyjamas and dressing-gown. Then if I met anyone I could say I was feeling sick, see? Pepper, he used to sleep till the Five-to Bell! From Sister’s room you can hear old Scrimbleshanks going across the quad to ring the Rising Bell. That was the signal for me to leave her. She never wanted me to leave her.’

‘Nobody ever caught you getting back to dorm?’

‘You can always make excuses, can’t you, Stubbs? Been for a shit, or something.’

That he could equate that with lying with Virginia!

Forgetting his anger, Spaldine began telling me some of the stories of her earlier life which I had heard. But there were alarming little differences between his accounts and the ones I had received, the only one of which I remember was that she told Spaldine (later in their relationship, this was) that when her family was living in Tanganyika she and her sister had been pursued by hornets and had had to jump into a lake with all their clothes on to avoid the insects. It was a distorted echo from my own life, coming back to me disturbingly now.

Spaldine had soon begun to guess that Sister was taking other lovers. At one time he suspected me, but his brief conversation with me in the sickroom had deflected his suspicions; frankly, he said, he regarded me as too yellow to try any such thing. So he had kept watch elsewhere.

‘Do you mean to say you deliberately spied on her?’

‘I wasn’t going to let anyone else get up her if I could help it, was I?’

‘Weren’t you?’ Several lifetimes of hatred drifted between us, mine only mitigated by sorrow for poor innocent Virginia, who had somehow been cozened into taking this lout into her bed. As I looked at the blunt and detestable features of the lout, I recalled how this was the fellow who used to toss himself off and press his fingers against the base of his beastly prick, so as to save his beastly semen; had he told her that, I wondered?

Hating to hear every word, I nevertheless needed to hear more, as if the poison never poisoned enough. Interrupting him curtly, I went and bought two more half-pints, thinking that that put paid to pie-and-peas for the next day.

When I set his drink in front of him he lifted the glass and sipped without a word of thanks, frowning, still involved with his hateful story.

Watching Sister became his obsession, and soon he found confirmation of his suspicions.

‘Who do you reckon was getting stuck across her? I’ll tell you! Angel-Face Knowles!’

‘Knowles! No! He was just a kid!’

‘He was getting stuck across her, I tell you, slimy little bastard!’

Knowles could only have been fifteen. Knowles’s parents were extremely rich. Knowles managed to hire a car from the village; he met Sister at a prearranged spot, and they were driven away somewhere – Spaldine never managed to find out where, but he saw them drive off in the general direction of Derby. He tackled Knowles about it later.

Apparently Knowles was eager to boast of his escapade. He said they had checked into a hotel and he had been registered as Sister’s son! I had no means of knowing whether this happened, or whether it was a fantasy of Knowles’s or of Spaldine’s. Spaldine was revealing himself as a highly unbalanced character.

He had threatened to report Knowles to the Head; Knowles, a cool customer, dared him to do it. Spaldine then hit him, and Knowles promised that if another blow landed then he would go to the Head and make his report on Spaldine. Checkmate.

Knowles lived over in Cheshire, so Spaldine at least had the holidays clear, as he imagined. He could think about nothing but Sister – his family considered him mad. He decided he must cycle over to Traven House to see her.

Another revelation was coming. I saw it in his eyes. My stomach was chilled with beer and anguish. I had to excuse myself and go into the Gents’ for a pee. As I stood there, I was saying to myself, half-aloud, ‘What’s he going to say next? What’s he going to say next?’

When I got back to the table Spaldine had craftily lit a fresh cigarette, thus saving himself the necessity of offering me one. He blew smoke out across the table and said, ‘You never went to Traven House, did you?’

‘I was going, but we changed our plans.’

‘Like that was it? Give over, Stubbs. I know who changed the plans! She did – she had to! She doesn’t live at Traven House any more than I do.’

‘You’re lying, Spaldine!’

‘Look, I turned up there about twelve o’clock. Great big house all going to pot, it is! An old man answered the door, some sort of a butler, I suppose. I asked for Sister and the old boy said there was nobody of that name there, very poker-faced. Of course, I said I knew better. They’d got birds nesting under the porch affair. I kicked up a bit of a fuss. The old bloke started shouting. Eventually a chap calling himself Captain Traven turned up. He could have been sixty or seventy, I suppose. Anyhow, he sent the aged retainer away and tried to sort things out a bit. I told him why I was there, and he asked me in for a beer. He was civil enough – he’d been in the Army, he said. Walked with a limp. It was a funny house, a lot of sporting what’s-its on the walls. As I say, he gave me a beer. I needed it. And we had a chat. They’d got a kind of a billiard room there.’

‘What relation was this captain to Virginia?’

From what Spaldine said, I gathered that the captain squeezed more information out of Spaldine than Spaldine squeezed out of him. The captain sounded a shady character, the way Spaldine told it, but a few words from Spaldine could have made the Archbishop of Canterbury sound like a cheap crook.

The captain had evaded Spaldine’s question about Virginia, much as Spaldine evaded mine about her. He had talked about the failure of business interests. A hag-like woman with dyed red hair had appeared, lit a cigarette, and inspected Spaldine; she asked him if he was staying for lunch (to which the captain had sharply said ‘No’), and then drifted off without another word; Spaldine said he was willing to bet that the hag was not the captain’s wife.

‘What did he say about Virginia?’

Spaldine had led the conversation round to Virginia, and the captain told him that she was his daughter – his only daughter; after his second marriage she had become very difficult; eventually she had left under a cloud – this many moons ago, Spaldine gathered – with mutual vows that she would never return. She had tried to set the house on fire.

The repulsiveness of this story owed much to the obnoxious character of the man who was telling it, but it had certain features in its own right that exercised very little appeal on me. Even supposing Spaldine had inserted no lies of his own into the account, there was no telling how much of the story was a fabrication of the captain’s. Spaldine had said of him, by way of description, that he wore ‘a sort of military dressing-gown’; and somehow this detail alone was enough to conjure up in my eyes a whole career of unscrupulousness. I felt myself close to the dusty source of that terrible ill which I always knew had been done Virginia at some period in the past.