Brian Aldiss - Life in the West

He hesitated, and immediately felt her interest slip away, saw it in her eyes as they switched their gaze to something happening at the other end of the room. He was tempted to lie to shield her, to say that he did believe. He was tempted to fudge the question, to say that it was a question of perspective. He found himself inarticulate, unable to reply. A thousand answers rose to his mind.

Still with her attention on the other end of the room, where mince pies were appearing, closely followed by the other children, Grace said, ‘Someone at school told me that God existed, but he left Earth at the end of the Stone Age because he could see that mankind was getting on pretty well without his help. But I guess that doesn’t explain Jesus, does it?’

With a polite smile, she made for the mince pies.

How were Jews treated in the Stone Age? He sipped at his negus.

The question of God was a matter of perspective. It was easier to believe as a child, just as it was easier to believe in Santa Claus. The mere fact of having parents to care for you made a parental God plausible. Then one acquired knowledge, and worse succeeded.

He had a disturbing memory of his mother, throwing a cup down on the flagstones in the kitchen, angry because she was having to do her own washing up. Time, one of those grey years in the late forties when, the tide of war having withdrawn, people were still coping with the effects of the flood. People like Patricia Squire expected the servants to come back after the war, expected that life would return to what it was in the thirties. But the young people of Hartisham did not intend to work at menial jobs any more. They saw their chance: they left Norfolk and went to earn good wages in the car factories of the Midlands. The thirties had been reviled in their time; money was short and nothing was as it had been in grandfather’s time, before the Great War. Now, after another war, the thirties were suddenly seen as halcyon. Time gilded them.

The seventies. Everyone complained, comparing them unfavourably with previous decades. Even the forties were now looked back upon with a certain nostalgia. Yet the time would inevitably come when the seventies would themselves be remembered as a time of peace and plenty. So they were, for all their alarms.

He pictured Grace, now munching a mince pie, as a grown woman, saying, ‘Christmases are not what they were when old Granny Squire was alive.’ And later, to her children, ‘Christmases are much more commercial than they were when my old Uncle Tom was alive…’

Plain Matilda Rowlinson brought him a mince pie. As he talked to her, his wife filled his glass with more negus. They smiled happily at each other, not needing to speak. The wine, flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg, ran across his palate, mingling with the rich taste of the mincemeat.

‘Do you think God approves of mince pies, Matilda?’ Squire asked in sudden mischief. ‘Or does he think they’re ungodly?’

She laughed. ‘I think He leaves it to each of us to decide for ourselves.’

A good answer on the spur of the moment, he thought. All the best gods should leave it to the customer to decide.

It was a question of perspective. Periods of time seemed better or worse according to what followed. When you were young and had seen nothing follow, then time was special. So with God; he was special until you had seen certain things happen, Belsen, authorized murder in Yugoslavia, or your father’s face eaten by dogs.

He strolled over to his sister and slid his arm through hers.

‘How’s things?’

‘Oh, extremely cheerful, all things considered. And you? I was just thinking that with a few of these neguses under my belt I could perhaps face looking at mother. Would you come up with me?’

‘If you like.’

‘Do you remember, people used to say “Bearing up”, if you asked them how they were.’

Deirdre filled her glass and they went upstairs. Her boys, Douglas and Tom, were playing with a Slinky on the stairs. ‘I’ll be down soon,’ Deirdre told them, ‘I’m just going to inspect your grandmother.’

Her defensive facetiousness fell away from her once they were in the small room on the attic floor. Squire stood by the window, gazing out at the iron landscape, listening to his sister’s choked sobs.

He forced himself to speak. ‘She went so suddenly when she went. A week and she was gone. Ten days ago, she was joking, and quizzing me about “Frankenstein”… Teresa had been having bad dreams. She dreamed that a black figure was trying to get into the house. I told her that we would get a better burglar alarm, but now I wonder… Well, it’s easy to believe in portents at such a time — death makes everything irrational.’

Deidre said, with a forced distinctness, ‘I blame myself that I never came over to see the old girl when I phoned and you said she was unwell. You know what it is, just before Christmas one’s always busy. It was end of term and we had to go over and see Grace in her school play, and Douglas had a cold and Tom had carol-singing and a party… Still, I should have bloody well come over. I can see that now. Poor old thing. I don’t fancy being a corpse, do you?’

Making the effort, he went over to her and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘There’s always guilt at these times. Filthy death, filthy guilt. Let it wash round you, don’t let it stay. We could all do better by everyone; it must be a cosmic law or something.’

‘Old Rowlinson could explain it, I don’t doubt.’

He could no longer bring himself to look down at his mother’s body. ‘I’ll put the lid on, if you’ve had enough.’

‘Oh, I don’t think I could bear to see you do that. Let me get out of here first.’ But she made no move to leave. She adjusted her hair. ‘Why haven’t you got flowers in here? Why hasn’t Teresa put some flowers in the room?’

‘A grey Christmas. Do you remember when we were kids and it snowed heavily just before Christmas, and we got stuck on the bridge at Wisbech? And father just laughed. He was enjoying it.’

‘They’ve both gone now. Mother was such a repository of family history — I can feel it already, there’s going to be a huge vacuum all down the left-hand side, here…’ She sketched a large position vaguely in the air.

‘Well, there’s nothing we can do. Bow to the Grim Reaper, damn him… Irrational… I keep having an irrational feeling that it’s the cold emanating from her that chills the landscape, that she’s become a dreadful natural force, that…it’s as if the corpse erupted out of the dead landscape, the way she keeps bursting into my thoughts…’

‘What’s Adrian said about it?’

‘You know Adrian; he never says much about anything.’

‘It beats me why you wanted to have the body lying here over Christmas. Bit morbid, isn’t it?’

He shrugged. ‘It was her home, after all.’

Deirdre went over to the door with a somewhat slack-shouldered walk he had noted in her lately. She put her hand on the doorknob, then hesitated.

‘Are you afraid of being alone in this house, Tom?’

‘How do you mean? Ghosts?’

She nodded. ‘Ghosts and things like that. Father, for instance.’

‘That sort of thing doesn’t worry me.’

She laughed with a partly derisive note. ‘Of course, you’re so tough. You’ve killed chaps in Yugoslavia — I try to forget that rather nasty side to your character. All the same… What about Teresa? Isn’t she scared? How’s she going to be when you’re trooping round the world doing your TV series?’

‘Oh, that won’t take many weeks.’

‘It’ll alter your lives.’

‘Not at all. And I don’t think she’s afraid of ghosts. She’s never said.’

‘I’d have thought you’d have asked. It’s an obvious enough question, stuck in a place like this. Really, I don’t think I’ve ever liked Pippet Hall, not even when I was a small child… I wouldn’t care to live here. Won’t Teresa be lonely?’