Brian Aldiss - The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

No such reflections detained Spaldine. He was pressing on with his tale of disenchantment.

Still on the trail of Sister – and now more savagely than ever, I gathered – he had cycled in to Nottingham and hammered on the door in Union Street. The slut (described by Spaldine as ‘a little honey in sexy pink slippers’) had opened up to him and shown him Virginia’s room upstairs. Virginia was in, and alarmed to see him. He was furious and created a big scene, during which she wept. Later she soothed him and said that even if her situation was not quite as she had represented it, it was certainly not as her father had represented it. He was a cruel man who had turned out her and her mother, so that he might live in sin with the red-haired woman. He was currently trying to disinherit her from the money due to her in her grandfather’s will.

All the time Spaldine raved on about the lies Sister had told him and the damage she had done him, I was aware how my hatred of him was growing. He referred to her as a snake-in-the-grass, using the expression several times, but he was my snake-in-the-grass; plainly, he had bullied Virginia, and had still been screwing her in Union Street, even when he had begun, by his own admission, to hate her. To think I’d met him in Nottingham, that very day, shortly after he had been seeing her, had bought him a cup of coffee, had never suspected a thing!

How I felt about Virginia was another matter. I was then unsure how I felt; an immense lake of sorrow was growing inside me, but partly it was because I regretted she had become involved with Spaldine.

However, it was clear that many of Spaldine’s charges against her were correct in essence. Virginia had deceived everyone. The wealthy upper-class background she had sketched was a myth – as I should have seen, had I had more experience, from her worn clothes and the shabby rooms in which she had to live.

‘You realize that the bitch is even now having it off with somebody else?’ Spaldine said. ‘She came down here because she couldn’t get enough round Nottingham.’

‘She’s allowed to choose, isn’t she?’

‘Don’t give me that stuff! She’s got an obligation to me – to us, let’s say, hasn’t she? To me, anyhow. Just because she was sacked from school …’

‘What? She was sacked? Are you sure? She never told me she was sacked!’

‘She never told you a bloody thing, Stubbs!’

‘She told me she wanted to join the Nursing Service.’

‘Oh did she! She told me she had to come to London to act as principal witness in some involved divorce case concerning a friend.’

‘Well, she mentioned that to me too – perhaps both are true.’

‘Look, they’re neither true, you silly clot! I reckon she got bunked!’

‘You’ve no proof.’

‘I reckon the Head found out what she was up to. Christ, man, she must have had half the Upper School across her at one time or another. Someone on the staff would have been bound to find out!’

‘You’re just guessing, and you’ve no right to say that. I don’t see you’ve got any right to watch her house, either – much less clobber anyone who comes out.’

He shambled up to the bar and bought two more half-pints of beer and a packet of Woodbines. I watched him and saw what a radically unattractive fellow he was, his fair hair standing up in spikes, his nose pudgy and dismal and his trousers filthy from our scramble. No doubt I looked as bad myself. The knuckles of my left hand were bleeding badly, and I had wrapped them in a dirty handkerchief. Two sordid young men of seventeen, Virginia’s lovers! Poor dear Virginia!

Spaldine put the beer down and lit a fag. I cadged one off him. A couple of old women were watching us covertly, attracted by Spaldine’s vehement manner, doubtless. I gave them a good hard stare, mean-mouthed, and they looked away.

‘See, something fishy’s going on round at hers,’ Spaldine said. ‘I bloody know there’s some other bloke having it off with her. She put me off meeting her tonight, you know. She doesn’t want me any more, that’s for sure!’

‘Wouldn’t it be better to resign yourself to the worst? You can’t make her’ (I gulped) ‘love you.’

‘Are you bloody daft? Look, what I thought we’d do is this. We can have a plan of action, see? With two of us it’s easy. We take it in turn to watch her place. She generally goes out in the morning. Instead of following her, we could slip in there and one search her room while the other kept look-out. Then we could find this other bloke’s name and address …’

‘No! Spaldine, try and see this from a sensible angle …’

‘No, listen, you don’t know what I was going to say!’

‘I don’t want …’

‘Listen, never mind that! I wasn’t going to say we should go and beat him up. I reckon perhaps I was wrong there. Wrong tactics! We go round and see this other bloke and just scare him off , you see!’ He delivered this looking at me hard, his eyes blazing with inspiration, – watching to see the delight dawn on my face as I took in the brilliance of his plan.

‘Balls!’ I said.

‘No, don’t you see … Look, we can act a bit tough with him to show him we can’t be mucked about. But we tell him, just tell him, all about the downright lies Sister has told us. That should scare him off.’

‘Why? Has it scared you off, Spaldine?’

He looked away from me, let his gaze travel jerkily over the bar.

‘I’ll have to do it myself, then.’ He took a meditative sip of his beer. ‘You’re about as much good as a wet fish, Stubbs,’ he said. He drained the rest of his glass, set it down on the table and wiped his lips. ‘And I don’t want to see you round by hers again,’ he said. He stood up, nodded severely, and marched out through the door.

I sat there, finishing my beer more slowly, and went out into the streets; if I hurried I could get back to my pie-and-peas shop before it closed. There would be time enough to suffer when my stomach was less empty.

In fact, my stomach began to suffer directly it was full of pie-and-peas. My entrails, all my insides, had undergone awful contortions of coldness during the episode with Spaldine. Leaving the pie-and-peas shop, I had to make for the nearest public lavatory at the double.

It was one of those subterranean London affairs, and as I sank down on the seat in my stall, the subterranean nature of my life was borne in on me. My coming to the bloody capital was meant as a great gesture of love; but so submerged was everyone in the animal hurly-burly of their lives that nobody had noticed it. Nobody. Only my stomach, as it emptied, gave indications that the gesture had ever been made.

All round me were other declarations of abortive love. Beside, the usual boastings about length and frequency of climax and pleas for assignation with eighteen-year-old R.A.F. boys, several case histories were scrawled on the door and walls. One was about a fellow luring a news-girl into his kitchen on a Sunday morning and sucking her off on the table. One began, ‘My older brother is in the Merchant Navy and when he comes home he has to share my bed with me.’

I read them with detached interest as I wiped myself. Written large by my right-hand side was a pencilled notice: ‘Why Shit Here When There Are Better Stories in the Next Cubicle?’

The story of my life, I thought.

My ‘Virginia Journal’ had travelled south with me. Sitting on my bed and laying it on my rickety little bedside table, I spent some hours writing it up, trying to make sense of what was happening.

There is some happiness now in seeing that even then I was generous to Virginia, although I believed that society imposed a sort of obligation on me to judge her harshly and to hate her for her way of life: but that was a hangover from the kind of judgements exercised by a previous generation. Naïve though my sentiments were, they ended with a sentence that now pleases me a lot: ‘I never gave Virginia a single present (more poverty than meanness), and she never gave me one, but yet she gave me more than I can say.’