The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
his life increasingly on that exploration in recent years; both ‘Frankenstein’ and his fatal love affair sprang from it. It was a quest for that richness of experience, an intensification of it before it died from beyond his clutches, which turned him to Laura: and Tess’s subsequent rejection of him that had left him isolated.
The vodka was cool in his throat. He was not acutely unhappy. Isolation was nothing new to him. Perhaps he could soon face the fact that reconciliation was not possible between him and his wife.
In which case – he would have to sell up Pippet Hall.
He closed the shutter and walked from the room, taking the papers he needed with him.
‘All I really want now is your silence.’
Silence had a sinister quality. He equated it with death, and only rarely with spirituality. The silence Teresa demanded from him was death, not spirit. And silence was unique in this respect; it was something one could demand and unfailingly receive. Ultimately, inevitably, he would become silent under her indifference.
If he dreaded silence, there was something he dreaded more: forms of language which masked silence, the absence of feeling. Teresa still felt intensely; he could still hurt her. So there was hope. But all around him he encountered defensive lack of feeling. Official language, the language of the military or of bureaucracy, Marxist jargon – all these were enemies of simple human experience. Instead of conjuring experience, they annihilated it in their repressive structuring.
At least Teresa had spoken to him directly. The worst thing was a woman talking Marxism or one of those other desiccated male languages. One good reason for continuing to love women, even when the going was rough, was that, on the whole, they stayed too human to go for ideological language.
He climbed the stairs, hesitated before their bedroom, and went instead down the passage to the old nursery. He opened the door, half-expecting to find the interior a glowing brown, as he remembered it from childhood, with the warmth of the stained floor and walls enhanced by a coal fire. Instead, he was greeted by Dulux high gloss white paint.
John’s old red wooden fire-engine stood on top of the cupboards. The dolls’ house stood on the table by the window, where he and Adrian had played for long hours with their Meccano.
He gazed blankly out of the window. A rabbit had joined the starlings on the lawn. What would become of the old place if he gave up? Fall into ruin? Wrenched from its purposes and turned into an institution?
Laura had visited Pippet Hall only twice. Once with the film team, before there was anything between them, to play the Sex Symbol in the Georgian House episode. Once last autumn for a weekend, just before they separated for good, following the party at Claridge’s.
As Teresa complained, he had managed to defer that inevitable parting for a month or two, but only because work on ‘Frankenstein’ had continued for longer than anticipated. The break had been final. He could not bear to see her again, to speak impersonally to her. He had dived back to work, she had gone on to play a more interesting role; he had watched her on television recently, as an injured wife in a Play of the Week. Damned good she was.
And when they had parted, nine months ago, she’d been damned good then. Nothing to complain about.
Delays and hesitations inseparable from creativity occurred. Some incidents had to be re-shot. Some of the scenes involving the CSO process had not worked as well as expected. A model had to be re-made. ‘World Dream Design Centre’, the episode they filmed in Hollywood and Los Angeles, had its troubles. Ash fell ill. August turned into September. Definite boundaries became blurred. An electricians’ strike further delayed progress.
But by the first week of October, all thirteen episodes of ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’ were completed to the satisfaction not only of the British but of the German, American, and Australian interests involved in the production. Everywhere, quiet and sometimes noisy confidence grew that something special had been created.
After a grand farewell party at Claridge’s, attended by all the crowned heads of television, and some from the arts world, Squire drove with Laura in her car, back to her flat.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I realize for the first time that we’re all a stunning success.’
‘Wait till you read the reviews …’
The flat was tiny without being cosy. It occupied part of a house on the run-down fringes of Canonbury. Laura’s husband, Peter, was away on a photographic assignment, she knew not where. He had left a scrawled note without saying.
They bought pitas on the way to the flat, stopping at a kebab house in Essex Road. They ate standing in her narrow kitchen as they said goodbye.
Both of them trembled. Laura leaned against the breakfast bar, unable to touch him. Both of them dropped pieces of lettuce, tomato, and meat, in their anguish at facing this final moment.
The mansion, once moderately grand, designed for a prosperous middle class with servants, had been divided into several flats. It was always full of mysterious young people, designated of course as ‘students’, whenever Squire was there. Bicycles blocked the hall passage. Laura’s flat was decorated with her husband’s photographs, framed in metal. Generally shots of streets, taken from ingenious angles no one else would have thought of. Never a shot of Laura in the nude, or even dressed. Silly bugger.
The furniture looked cheap but was expensive, Laura said; it was too low to get out of easily. Laura and Peter quarrelled all the while, she said, excusing a general neglect.
When he went to pee in the toilet, his eyes came level with a packet of sanitary towels lying on the window sill. The sight of them moved and obscurely hurt him: though on this evening of parting everything brought him close to tears. He thought of her vulnerability. Didn’t vulnerable and vulva derive from the same Latin root? She would have taken care to keep her Tampax out of sight a few months earlier. They were both of them going down the drain – like the Tampaxes, eventually – and he had to remember that she, at twenty-six, felt acutely that youth was passing.
He returned to the kitchen and his half-eaten pita.
‘I’ve really fucked things up for you, my love. It’s as well I’m disappearing at last.’
‘You haven’t fucked anything up. I was just a mess till you came along. Your dear steadiness – you have been that way all your life, I can tell. I didn’t need an older man, I needed you.’
‘It goes too deep for me to say. I was muffled for so long. With you – no guard possible, no guard needed …’
‘We’ve had something so worthwhile together. In that sense, I don’t mind parting, though I’ll hate myself for saying it when you’ve gone … I’ll never forget you, Tom. You’ve changed me, given me so much, so many things …’
‘Nothing – nothing compared with what you’ve given me. With you I’ve been aware of the whole world again. You’ve made me whole again …’ A piece of mutton fell to the floor. He kicked it in the direction of the sink.
‘You’re such a dear, dear person.’ She reached out and touched his neck. He clutched her wrist, still brown from the summer they had had.
‘Don’t be hurt. Grow. Continue. My love and gratitude will always be with you, for whatever that’s worth. Laura, dear Laura …’ He spoke indistinctly, munching the bread.
‘We’ve had such travels together, gone so far.’
‘I’ll never forget what a weight you were when you fell asleep on me on the plane back from LA.’
‘And try not to forget how many miles it is to the River Bug.’ Her lip trembled as she said it.
‘Perhaps one day we’ll meet in that little romantic Polish village whose name we remember so well.’
‘You mean Molly Naggy?’
‘I think it was Lolowsky Molehold.’
‘Anyhow,