The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian Aldiss
a few shops by different doors on my way to meet you. That’s why I was slightly late.’ So she had noticed she was late.
‘Virginia, darling, I want to tell you something. I want you to understand that I do dearly love you. It’s not just sexual attraction. I know all about the age difference between us, but it makes no difference to me – I love you just as you are. And I know more about you and your private life than you may think. It has no effect on my feelings for you.’ I said that rather hastily, for a slight flicker of expression came over her face, a tiny change, something so transient – and then she directed her gaze down at the tablecloth.
The intuitive core in me felt her alter; but of course I overruled that and went on. ‘It’s true you are being watched, Virginia, but not for the reasons you imagine. You are being watched by Christopher Spaldine and he intends you no good. He has nothing to do with anyone in the house, but he wants to get revenge on you.’
Half-smiling, she said, ‘Christopher Spaldine? He was one of the boys in the art club, wasn’t he?’
‘He was one of your lovers, Virginia!’
She kept looking at my shoulder with a fixed expression.
I babbled on, offering to guard her and I know not what else; but I had lost contact with her.
The meal was an absolute failure.
We paid the bill, half each at her insistence, and went outside. She was walking rather briskly, her short-cut fair hair bobbing, her head just slightly on one side. I held her arm. There were other people all round us; she could disappear.
‘Come and spend the night with me, Virginia. Please – let me hold you in my arms, just as I used to do!’
I was terrified by the way she walked; she held herself stiffly and moved too fast. I manoeuvred her into a stationer’s shop and talked to her earnestly. She stood gently by me, picking at a thread on her coat, as I tried simultaneously to explain and discount the things Spaldine had told me.
Looking at me, smiling rather crookedly, Virginia said, ‘We had better stop seeing each other, Horry, if you really believe those indecent things Christopher Spaldine said about me.’
That floored me. In the midst of my stammered explanations she said, ‘Darling, I don’t want to hurt you – you have been a dear boy. But if you are connected with all these other people, then I mustn’t have any more to do with you.’
Her face was really rather hard and determined as she spoke.
All these other people … Tears stood in my eyes in exasperation. I clutched her child-like body; Two assistants were standing behind the counter, grinning covertly and thoroughly enjoying our exhibition.
‘Listen,’ I hissed, for all the world like Spaldine himself, ‘Come away! Leave everything! We’ll go and live in another part of London. We’ll get a little flat – I’ll write to Father for money. You shall have no more worries, I swear. I’ll never leave your side. We’ll begin life again together!’
‘I must go, Horry, I must go. You know I couldn’t live with you if you are a friend of Spaldine’s – I have evidence to prove he is in my cousin’s pay.’
In her agitation she pushed from me and hurried from the shop. She was buttoning up her gloves as she went, and it was frightfully important they should be buttoned. I stood there for a moment reeling. I knew it was hopeless. Then I had to follow or she would be gone for ever.
I passed the grinning assistants. ‘Fuck off!’ I said.
Virginia was walking slowly along the Strand. Unable to think what to say to her, I stayed a pace or two behind her. She turned left, down one of the side streets that lead to the Embankment. Perhaps she was going to throw herself in the Thames?
She started when I humbly touched her arm.
‘Forgive me for upsetting you by anything I said, dearest Virginia! I hate Spaldine’s guts – I told you, he attacked me, so he hates mine. Nor do I know any other single person in the world who knows you. Your past life is no business of mine, Virginia. I love you. Don’t turn me away!’
‘You’re very sweet,’ was all she said. We walked side by side silently. We stood looking at the Thames.
The intuitive core in me told me that she was seeking for ways to cast me off finally. I made an error then that I was to make again a few years later, more fatally. I begged her to marry me.
She stood there against me, her head down, as I grasped her arms through her thin coat – a ridiculous position, I suppose.
Finally, she looked up at me, with her face full of sweetness and gentleness. She said, ‘What an amazing history we have had, Horry! You are a wonderful person and we have been like two children together, haven’t we? But I have deeply misled you. Please don’t be hurt. I’ve always warned you that life is much more complicated than you think. My own life is too involved for anyone else to contemplate. I already owe several thousand pounds to people – you could not shoulder such debts.’
‘Are you telling me the truth?’
‘It’s all too true, I’m afraid. But I can’t marry you for a different reason. I am already married. My husband was a terrible gambler, and I am saddled with his debts …’
‘You’re married …’ It was as if I was drowning. No air reached my lungs.
‘It was wrong of me not to tell you, darling, when you have been so sweet. Everyone who gets mixed up with me comes to grief.’
She lifted my hand and kissed it, glanced almost furtively at me, and then hurried off, walking with her quick light gait up the street we had come. I stood staring, my feelings curdling within me. She glanced back once before she disappeared. I started to cry, burying my eyes in my knuckles.
Was she married? Only a month before, I would have believed her had she told me she was a German spy. Now I did not know what to believe. If she said what she said just to shake me off, then her gambit was a success. I was beaten. There was nothing I could do for her; whichever way I turned, she would see my move as a hostile one, part of the plot against her. There was no room for truth in her world of lies.
How would you judge Virginia Traven? For years I made no attempt to pass judgement. She hurt me, but hurt seems intrinsic in human relationships, and the hurt was not her intention – in almost any situation, she was the injured party. As for her lies, they enriched and widened my narrow little world.
There remains the sexual aspect of the matter. How much harm did she do to the boys she seduced, to the boys with whom she so genteelly and discreetly lay? Speaking for myself, I was delighted to be seduced, I thirsted for it, I went to great pains to be seduced. The same would undoubtedly be true of the odious Spaldine and Angel-Face Knowles. Virginia was no harpy, devouring all who came along her path. She only took in those who sought her out, and there was nothing perverted in her actual love-making.
True, Spaldine was unbalanced by the affair; but I found some evidence, thinking back, that he was unbalanced long before Sister arrived at the school. He had run away from school once – one of only three boys who ever did so; that might seem like a sane act against the insanity of Branwells, but nobody who listened alertly to Spaldine would have regarded him as an apostle of reason.
And there was Knowles. Did he develop a mother-fixation through his thrilling association with Virginia? He became quite well known in later life as a mountaineer, and I read with curious insight in an illustrated magazine article that his wife was ‘several years older’ than he. Was that an attempt to relive the Virginia experience? I believe it much more likely that he was that way inclined long before, or why would he have been drawn to Virginia in the first place?
Virginia had powerful advantages over all the other girls I knew in those days, first among which was her experience. She was past the age of being embarrassed or of thinking of sex as a dirty joke. I was still at that age; so were my girl friends, like Esmeralda. Loving for Virginia, and consequently for her favoured