Brian Aldiss - Life in the West

‘What are you going to do?’

Ash grabbed Squire’s arm. ‘Don’t laugh. I’ve accepted a job with Aussie television. They offered me something — not much. I’m on my way now, just going to say good-bye to an old friend first, then I fly to Sydney in a couple of days. Terrible, isn’t it?’

‘Very enterprising of you, Grahame. I wish you the best of luck.’

‘After all I’ve done… “Frankenstein” and all the rest of it. But the oil crisis isn’t going to go away. Inflation isn’t going to go down. I believe, if you ask me, that the Arab world is going to squeeze Europe and the US by the throat. Nothing’s ever going to be the same again. We’re going to go down the drain, till we end up like a lot of little Uruguays and Paraguays. This country’s had it, that’s my belief, I tell you frankly. We’ll have to team up with the Soviet Bloc in the end, just to keep going. Trading in furs again, before long. Well, I must dash.’ He looked at his wristwatch. Summer was closing, and the day; the light thickened in the narrow street.

‘I hope you find things better in Australia. They’ve got massive economic problems too.’

‘Don’t tell me. I’ll find out soon enough. But I’ve got a younger brother in Sydney, haven’t seen him for fifteen years. I’ll be okay. I’m talented, you know, Tom. I’ve got faith. Remember the times we had in Singapore, and Sarawak?’

‘Of course. All the best. I’d always be glad to hear from you.’

‘I’ll drop you a card. How’s Laura? See anything of her?’

‘Not lately.’

‘Lovely girl. All the best, then.’

‘All the best.’ Squire watched Ash’s departing back before taking up his cases.

The flat suited Squire well enough. He had no objection to the Paddington area. A Greek hairdresser worked at his trade in the basement of the house; sounds of clippers and bazouki music drifted up the stairs. On the ground floor was an old woman of mysterious nationality who occasionally walked a fat pug to the corner lamp post. The Iranian professor of metallurgy on the first floor was also very quiet. The young men in frilly shirts who visited him most evenings were also quiet, if not downright taciturn.

Squire rented the top floor. It was modest, and the furnishings were not even dreadful enough to be worth joking about. But the front room was large and had once been good. He found himself not displeased to be back. A sepia photograph of his parents, and a colour photograph of John, stood on the mantelpiece; otherwise the room was anonymous.

From the window, he could see the corner shop, a grocer’s run by a Pakistani family which remained open most hours of the day and night. Mr Ali Khan was the only acquaintance Squire had made in the neighbourhood; the two men now knew each other well enough for Mr Khan to confide his suspicions concerning the Chinese who ran the ‘Hong Kong Restaurant and Take-Away’, only three doors from his shop. They worked too hard and were secretive.

Having dumped his suitcases in the middle of the room, Squire went back downstairs to collect his mail, which had been thrown into an old Bovril box on the hall floor. Most of the letters were re-addressed from Pippet Hall in the firm round handwriting of Matilda Rowlinson. He had given the flat address to few people.

There was no letter from Teresa. Most of the mail looked like circulars or fan mail. He opened one letter as a kind of spot check. It came from a gentleman in Carlisle who claimed to have spent twenty years in the RAF. He had watched the ‘Frankenstein’ programme (sic) on television, and was disappointed to hear no mention of Irving Berlin, the best song-writer of this or any other century. It was time some sort of justice was done.

Squire was carrying clothes about in a rather helpless fashion, sorting out dirty items to be taken to the launderette in Praed Street, when his doorbell rang. He went to the door and dragged it open.

His brother-in-law, Marshall Kaye, stood there, bronzed, slightly ragged round the moustache, and smiling.

‘Hi, Tom, glad to find you back home. I rang your number several times. From a news item I caught, I feared the flying saucers over Ermalpa had got a hold of you.’

‘Marsh, come in.’ They shook hands. Squire indicated the muddle in his room. ‘As you can see, I’m just back. Care to sample some eight-year-old duty-free malt?’

‘Try me.’

Whilst Squire was breaking open the whisky carton, Kaye asked him about the flying saucers.

‘I saw one, Marsh. I’m convinced. I saw it, yet I still don’t believe it.’

‘Okay. It’s like seeing a damned ghost — it may scare you, but it can’t affect your life in any way. Just suppose whole squadrons of flying saucers landed, and we were up to here in little green men. It still wouldn’t affect our inner lives one bit.’

‘You think not? Would you say that as you scavenged through the ruins of London?’

‘What I mean is, some people are toppled into misery by what may seem minor factors. Others triumphantly survive the most terrible tragedies and come up smiling. Like some of the characters in Solzenhitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.’

They drank, exchanging more idle remarks. Kaye asked about the conference, and Squire gave him a brief account of the Rugorsky affair.

‘Sounds pretty hairy!’ Kaye exclaimed. ‘Was the guy flying back to Moscow today?’

‘Yes. I bought him a drink and a meal at Rome airport before we went our separate ways. Kchevov was with him, keeping close, so I had to stand him a meal too. Rugorsky was naturally cagey, because he was not absolutely sure that his friend was unable to understand English. Otherwise he was calm. He was convinced that he was going back to Moscow to face absolute destruction. He didn’t think he would see his wife — who’s in Leningrad — again.’

‘Can we do anything from this end?’

‘We can and will send letters, stressing his international importance. D’Exiteuil will help too; he has powerful friends in government, and the French, as you know, exert a bit of a pull in Moscow. But fraudulent currency transactions are a criminal offence.’

‘Guys who defraud criminals are not necessarily themselves criminal.’

‘A point of view it would be rather difficult to sustain in a Moscow court of law… Someone, probably Solzenhitsyn, spoke of the lack of character among men in the West, and the corresponding stature of so many characters in the USSR under that oppressive system. Of course, the remark is one of prejudice and can have no statistical validity, but I thought of it when parting from Vasili. He is a terrific guy. Good to have in a slit trench with you when the shit’s flying.’

‘Not so good on a cliff edge.’

Squire looked down at the worn carpet and rubbed his knees.

‘You know what I was thinking in Rome airport? He and I between us could have clobbered Kchevov in the toilets, and tied him up like a mummy with strip towels. Then I could have brought Vasili back here. The uncertainties over Pippet Hall deterred me — that’s my excuse. He would have been safe there for a while, and then we could have found him somewhere a bit more secure, in Canada, or the good old US of A.’

‘You’d have been mad. Would he have played along?’

‘Oh, probably.’ Squire looked at his watch. ‘He did his share of toilet-fighting as a young man, I’m sure… He’ll be in Moscow by now, poor sod. I feel like a worm for doing nothing.’

‘But he did try to knock you off?’

‘Maybe.’

They drank in silence for a while. Kaye rose and ambled about the room. Something in his bearing told Squire that he disliked the flat with all its shabbiness, and felt caged within it; layers of time in a Paddington room held less appeal for the American than the thicker strata of an old Greek palace.