The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian Aldiss
villages that together constitute the capital, people were slipping; and, as unobtrusively, new people were slipping in, like rowboats passing unnoticed under Tower Bridge, bringing dynamite. Signs of war were apparent. Barrage balloons hung here and there. Adhesive paper criss-crossed on windows. Sandbags were up. The city was getting secret. It was after dark that the subversive aspects became most apparent. In the blackout, London hummed like the larger version of the dormitories of Branwells that it was. I was too young to realize that yet, for I had still to find my way around; but I certainly picked up the tension on my highly tuned antennae.
I had no trouble in getting a job in one of the ministerial departments now rapidly springing up everywhere. I chose it not only because it was just round the cornet from Lou Stevenson’s, but because it was housed in a gigantic building and had a STAFF VACANCIES notice on the door as well as an attractive air of mystery in its seedy porch.
My duties were both light and nebulous, consisting almost entirely of sorting an endless stack of file cards into two packs: those bearing the names of males and those bearing the names of females; and then shuffling the female pack into alphabetical order. Half the women in the British Isles must have slipped through my fingers.
One morning, as I was leaving Lou’s for the department, a letter arrived for me bearing Virginia’s ‘aristocratic scrawl’ on the envelope. I opened it and read it – a glance sufficed to do that – as I emerged among the pedestrians in the grey and sooty Bishop’s Bridge Road.
The thought of Virginia had never been far from me. On my first day in London, as soon as I had found a room and taken my few possessions from my papier-maché suitcase, I sat on the bed and wrote to her, giving her my address, announcing dramatically my arrival in the metropolis. I could not resist telling her that I had come especially to find her; although I declared that I loved her, I was careful to add that I would not make myself a nuisance to her; I longed only to see her as soon as possible.
It was eleven long days later that her answer arrived, to be ripped open in the Bishop’s Bridge Road. With what I told myself was facile despair, I had begun to assure myself that she would never reply: she had done just as I feared and vanished into the great hazy quicksands of the world.
Virginia’s tone in her note lay somewhere between guarded and chilly. She simply invited me to come and see her at 8.10 on the following night. Her letter offered at least an implied explanation for her delay in answering; her address was now in Lansdowne Lane.
At seventeen, all love’s weather is heavy. As I sorted my filing cards, I thought I would say to her bravely, before she could speak, ‘I know you have ceased to care about me; I am too proud to bother you further’; and I would turn and lose my way for ever in the dark streets of the capital. Or at another moment, I thought – well, it is immaterial now what I thought, all those years ago. All day I worked away at my trestle table, wondering at how a letter like mine could be answered by a letter like hers; for I had yet to grasp the simple principle that adults finally and sadly have to grasp, that people follow their own behaviour which they are not necessarily able to alter for anyone else. Only the immature can throw up everything and begin anew.
I had to question several people in the department before I discovered how to find her address. ‘It’s somewhere off Holland Park Avenue,’ I was told.
Those were hungry days; I was always short of cash. On the next evening I left work, went back to my room to wash and spruce myself up, watering down my hair and all that, and then returned to the streets, passing the department again to get to a little pie-and-peas shop I had found. The pies were cheap and good. With luck, with will-power, I could make that meal my tea and supper; on a bad day, and they came fairly frequently, I would be I forced by the thought of closing time to burst out of my room again later in the evening, to seek another bite to eat.
Full of pie, I headed towards Notting Hill and Virginia. Now I worried chiefly over the precision of Virginia’s timing, as implied in her letter. She wished me to appear at 8.10. Exactly what was the nicety of her arrangements that eight should be too early for her and 8.15 presumably too late?
My morale – a word we were then beginning to hear frequently – had sunk still lower by the time I reached Virginia’s address; the several wrong turnings I had taken, my base hesitancy in approaching strangers to ask the correct way, had convinced me that I was destined always to take life’s wrong turnings. Now, there I was, forty-three minutes early, if my watch was correct – and even that could not be relied upon. Rain was falling. I wore my mac, since that happened to be the only outside garment I possessed.
The house in which Virginia lived was one of a long terrace of a kind prevalent in that area of London: three storeys high plus basement, with would-be-grand steps leading up to the front door under pretentious porches. Once these had been the residences of prosperous middle-class families; by the war they were already subdivided and mysterious people came and went by private doors. Nowadays they are still further divided, and the roof which once sheltered my frail Virginia now keeps the rain off a large family of solid and stern-faced blacks.
I stood under a porch from which I might survey Virginia’s porch and detested my hopes and fears.
At 8.08 I shovelled my thoughts back into place and went over and rang at Virginia’s bell.
A man, smiling and suave and of call-up age, confronted me, nodding and grinning even more widely as I declared whom I was after, but without actually speaking, which transformed his smiles into gems of hostility. He waved me into the hall, put his hands abruptly in his pockets, and led me upstairs, leaving me outside a door on the first floor. I tapped and went in, hating every moment.
Virginia was sitting on the sofa, smoking, wearing her customary clothes and a wry expression. Sitting in an armchair was another girl of about the same age, also smoking. The room was drab; a black paper blackout dominated the room. In the hearth a small electric fire burned; over the mantelpiece was a coloured print of a man sitting on a horse in a condition print dealers refer to as ‘somewhat foxed’. The only thing that heartened me was the sight of one of Virginia’s dabby landscape sketches on a side wall.
‘Hello, Horatio! What fun seeing you down in the wicked city! Rather different from the wilds of Derbyshire! Say hello to my friend Josie. She lives here.’
I said hello to Josie, and went and sat by Virginia. I got up and took my mac off without being asked. I sat down again by Virginia; she smiled quickly and looked away from me. Her face was thin and rather lined; for the first time I realized she was really pretty old, older than she claimed to be. She offered me a cigarette from the open packet on the sofa arm.
‘How’s life in the Nursing Service?’ I asked diffidently.
‘I haven’t joined yet. A friend of mine is trying to get me a good position.’ Or perhaps she said commission.
‘I thought you said you had joined.’
‘I’m hoping to join next week.’
Conversation died. I waited for Josie to go. She lit another cigarette, examining it with intense curiosity between puffs.
‘Look, Virginia, I’d naturally like to talk to you privately, if I could.’
It turned out this was Josie’s flat. Virginia was just looking round for a flat of her own. She had left her last one because the landlady was so horrid. Desperately, I asked her to come round to my place; it wasn’t far; we could walk. She said she did not want to go out; she was expecting someone to come and see her in a little while. I pressed her harder. She and Josie looked at each other, she nodded and led me into the adjoining bedroom.
The room was only dimly lit, but I observed that it was small and extremely untidy. Clothes hung everywhere. I clutched her and told her I loved her, needed her desperately, had come to London just to be near her. She put her arms round my neck and looked up at me, half-smiling, still taking nothing seriously. She started talking about Josie, who was in love with a captain in artillery, but I cut her off. I asked if she was in some sort of trouble.
‘There is some trouble, Horatio, darling, but I would advise you to keep out of it. It’s