Brian Aldiss - Life in the West

Losing interest, Slobodan gave Squire a cigarette. Both men lit up. Squire was ashamed of how much his hand shook.

‘Come and look see this. It’ll cheer you up. Here’s Milo Strugar’s killer, okay.’

Slobodan turned and set his foot against the shoulder of the man Squire had shot, so that head and narrow face rolled over in Squire’s direction. A further nudge from Slobodan’s boot brought the head into a beam of sunlight, which blazed in through a gap in the roof. The features of the dead man were unpleasantly illuminated, so that Squire’s stomach lurched again. The features were heavy and sagged in death. On the left cheek was a large mole, its long dark hairs glinting in the sun. It made the man look harmless in death.

There was no doubting his identity.

‘You killed Slatko, my clever young friend!’

Squire had studied the dead man’s photograph a number of times in Belgrade. Codename Slatko had been active ever since Stalin ceased to be Tito’s patron and master; he was the Russian colonel in charge of softening-up operations in Yugoslavia prior to a Soviet take-over. As head of Department XIII of Soviet Counter-Espionage, he was answerable only to the Soviet Central Committee. Slatko’s presence here in Istra showed how confident the Russians had become of defeating Tito. Perhaps the stolen arms were to reinforce an intended strike presided over by Slatko, and timed to take place while the West had its energies and attention involved with the Berlin air-lift. If so, Slatko had been over-optimistic.

‘You killed Slatko,’ Slobodan repeated. He embraced Squire.

‘I need a crap,’ Squire said.

The official break between Stalin and Tito, marked by Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform for hostility to the USSR, came less than two months later. From then on, the Yugoslavs went their own way, negotiating a difficult path between East and West.

By that time, Thomas Squire had returned to England. He had been too successful — the Yugoslavs feared attempts on his life. They gave him an enormous party in Belgrade and sent him home.

Squire returned to his own country in a curious mental state.

What he could confess to no one, and what most deeply disturbed him, was that he had perversely enjoyed killing. It satisfied a black greedy thing in his psyche. For months, he could not rid himself of the vision of Slatko dying, the leg kicking, the Istran sunlight blasting through the broken building.

The department de-activated him, and Squire returned to private life. Following family tradition, he went up to Cambridge, and spent three years there reading Medieval History, without great distinction. Among his friends were James Rotheray and Ronald Broadwell, later to become Squire’s publisher.

He invested the money paid by the BIA, and a legacy that accrued to him on his twenty-first birthday, in a directorship in a city insurance firm. Then he settled down to pretending that he took himself for an ordinary man. Several years passed before he could realize that he was an ordinary man.

‘By the way,’ d’Exiteuil said, turning an unfriendly face to Squire as they were leaving the conference hall. ‘You said yesterday in your opening speech that we had to forge a methodology for the future. Well, we have one, despite anything you or Fittich may say to the contrary. It’s Marxism. Academic Marxism. And it’s already started to run future culture. Popular arts, after all, can never belong to reactionaries like you. We have to shape them to the needs of society. You will be out of it from now on, as I expect you will discover after the conference.’

Two women stood at a window looking out, one intently, one restlessly.

The house was low-built of red brick, with seven bays and two stories. It dated from the Regency period. Even in the sunny days of this fitful Norfolk July, its rooms remained shady.

Pink flowers of tamarisk pressed against the window, growing in sandy soil. The house stood on a spit of land at one end of Blakeney quay, with long perspectives of sea and marshes to both the back and front. The rear of the house was sheltered against winter winds by trees and a high wall.

In the front of the house, the windows were square casements, low to the ground, with white-painted shutters on the inside. The two women stood together at the living-room window, Deirdre Kaye with her arms folded, Teresa Squire with binoculars to her eyes, searching the distance.

The linked circles of Teresa’s vision passed over the lively scene of the harbour, with its porcupine-quill quota of masts of dingeys, with near-naked children fishing for gillies at the harbour-edge. They lifted slightly and passed beyond the main channel to the distant sea, the glittering mud of low tide where terns fed, the bars of sand, the marshes and dykes, to a pale stretch of beach backed by the blue North Sea. On the stretch of beach four ponies moved.

Even from this distance, the glasses enabled Teresa to distinguish the copper heads of Deirdre’s two boys, Douglas and Tom, Deirdre’s husband, Marshall, and her own estranged husband, Tom, riding in a line by the water’s edge. She stared for a long while at Tom’s image, wavering in the heat rising from the land. He resembled a phantom progressing underwater. He had drowned in heat and absence.

‘Well, I’ll go and knit a doormat or something,’ Deirdre said.

‘They’re out on the point — coming back here, I expect,’ Teresa said, lowering the glasses and turning to her sister-in- law. ‘The boys look terribly brown. So do you, Deirdre. How long have you and Marshall been back from Greece?’

Deirdre went over to a low table and lit a cigarette from the lighter standing there. ‘A week. Sorry I didn’t send any cards. The house still smells shut up, doesn’t it? It’s almost as hot in Norfolk as it was on Milos. I can’t believe it.’

‘There was nothing but rain and cloud here all June.’

Deirdre swung round to confront Teresa.

‘Look, let’s not beat about the bush, Tess. How much longer are you going to keep the children over at Grantham with your mother? It’s bad for them and for everyone. You know Tom’s still willing to have you back. I think you should stop acting up and return to Pippet Hall at once.’

‘That’s really our private business and nobody else’s.’ The words were said defensively. Teresa clutched the binoculars and looked anxiously at Deirdre, who was a head taller than she. Deirdre promptly wreathed herself in smoke.’ It’s not simply a question of his “having me back”, as you put it. I just can’t take his unfaithfulness any longer. Sorry, but I just can’t.’

Grace came into the room, carrying a large cat.

‘Get out, will you?’ Deirdre told her oldest child. ‘I’m having a row with your aunt.’

As Grace faded from the scene, pulling a face, Deirdre said, ‘I wanted to say this to you before they return and Tom finds you’ve arrived. I personally am baffled, completely baffled, by how you are behaving. This talk about Tom being unfaithful — I mean, you realize that’s old-fashioned for a start?’

‘You’d probably call it by a nastier name. It hurts me, as it does most women. Men think they can get away with too much.’

‘Well, Tom doesn’t think that because Tom isn’t that kind, though he may have had a bit on the side occasionally. I want to say two things to you. First of all, you ought to try and realize that he’s experienced difficulties in life — well, so have we all; but last year and this are in a way his great years. A\s I see it. They’ve come a bit late, but they’re wonderful for him. Last year, the excitement of conceiving the “Frankenstein” series and getting it filmed and the book written; then, this year, the tremendous success of the book and the series. The book’s reprinting and they’re now re-running the series, in case you haven’t bothered to watch the box, with all your other enterprises. It’s a triumph for Tom and for the family. You realize that he thinks he’s doing something for England, for the West — silly though you probably find that. And in the middle of it all, you — you have to muck everything up, so that he’s left Pippet Hall in despair and gone to live in his club in London. How do you think he feels? You’re his wife — haven’t you more sense of him as a person than to let him drift like that?’