Comfort Zone. Brian Aldiss
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house, Clemenceau, was solid. He had grown fond of it. Clemenceau aspired to none of the grandeur of Righteous House. It stood with its sturdy façade towards the street; it was the house in which Janet Haddock had died. It marked the end of the street, beyond Ivy Lane. The street was one-sided. On the other side of the road opposite Clemenceau was a wilderness of trees and bushes, behind which lurked a small special school. Sometimes, standing on his front doorstep, Justin could hear the cries and calls of a different species of being: schoolchildren. Since his wife’s death, or – as he sometimes liked to describe it – the divorce, this old grey house of his had become the necessary shell of the crustacean within. Clemenceau was one of the old modest stone-built houses standing not exactly close, not exactly apart. It had originally consisted of two rooms at ground level and two upper rooms. Later, two more rooms, an upper and a lower, had been tacked on. Then a room serving now as a living room had been built to the rear. When Justin bought the house, he had greatly extended it, lengthening it with a generous hall and study, above which was a room Janet had liked to call her own, together with a spare bedroom and toilet en suite. This simulation of organic growth in the building presumably marked an increase in British fortunes across the years. When he lay in bed of a night, he listened to the many noises the house made to itself, a succession of creaks, bumps and groans, as if the old place were talking to itself, muttering about its early past before central heating was invented. In the back garden, Justin had turned up the remains of a well, with an old mattress stuffed down it. Also, as he dug himself a vegetable bed, the yellowed bones of an aged dray horse had been uncovered. These were further indications of an earlier, less comfortable, age. Justin crept about his familiar rooms. A certain dread lurked that he might, through infirmity or impoverishment, have to forsake the house in exchange for a single room. He had a relationship with the house. Not quite a love affair, more a kinship: a place where he might cling to his humanity as long as possible. He had filled the place with etchings and paintings and some of his own abstract oils. The walls of several rooms were choked by books; books on or epistles by Byron or Mary Shelley and her group, histories of World War Two, catalogues of Kandinsky exhibitions, learned works on G.B. Tiepolo’s etchings, biographies of John Osborne and the letters of Kingsley Amis, works on Sumatra and other countries, and of the solar system. It was not so much that he feared death: he hated to think of his library being broken up. That was the final dissolution of personality, of his personality and of Janet’s. Sometimes he chose to forget Janet was dead and imagined her living in Carlisle. Surely she would return, wanting to see their son again?
He heard Maude enter the house, but did not go to greet her. She went quietly to her part of the ground floor they shared. He had recently redecorated the downstairs lavatory with a soothing green emulsion paint. A pretty green summer dress of Janet’s hung on the back of the door. He had yet to make up his mind to part with it. Like the rest of the house, this lavatory was fairly shipshape. It was only the outside drains and gutters that still required the attention of the elusive builders.
He was comfortable enough in his house, even sharing it with Maude. No one had ever broken into it. Nevertheless he was uneasy, not understanding what trouble Maude seemed to be involved in. He had spoken to Guy Fitzgerald, with whom he was on fairly formal terms. Guy owned Righteous House; he was an anaesthetist at the JR, the local hospital, the John Radcliffe. He had shed no light on the matter of Maude’s conversion, or of who was living in his summerhouse, beyond the fact that he thought their lodger held no immigration papers.
Justin’s living room was unremarkable, somewhat dated. Janet had furnished it; he had never changed it, except to add a large TV screen to one corner. The windows looked out on the garden and his courtyard. Morning sun flooded into this room. The sun tried to tempt a big unkempt succulent standing on the window sill to flower. This tousled plant had not flowered for three years. He forgave it, liking its grand disorder. When and if it ever flowered again, it would give forth the most brilliant blossoms, opening mouths of unimaginable colour.
At the front of the house was a smaller and smarter room. He had taken some trouble with its furnishings. The basic colour was a sober deep blue, markedly enlivened by a large rug fashioned from many multi-coloured squares and rectangles of a durable wool. He had installed a small settee of a plump nature, on which he often sprawled to read the TLS. There had been a time when the afternoon sun had filtered into this room, making it glow with an amiable beauty. Over the years, trees such as leylandii and a magnificent horse chestnut had grown up on the perimeters of the school on the opposite side of the road, absorbing the sun’s rays; so that only little trembling points of gold now broke through into this evening room. Justin’s kitchen was old-fashioned, his pantry sparse. He rarely went into the dining room. Only when Kate came to spend the night with him did they have breakfast there. Eggs and bacon always featured on those happy occasions. In these various rooms he maintained himself and Maude. He had even learnt to tolerate the incantations Maude was learning from Om Haldar.
Marie Milsome called on Justin, to see that he was not starving himself while Kate was away. ‘How goes WUFA?’ he asked.
‘Don’t ask,’ Marie said. She brought him a package of home-made tongue sandwiches. Justin was immensely fond of Marie. He brewed some coffee and they went into the garden with it, to sit ensconced on wicker chairs under the sun umbrella. Marie was a handsome, well-set-up woman in her sixties. Her generous head of hair was dyed somewhere between ginger and gold; she flew once a month to her hairdresser in Paris to have her hair attended to. Not only was she adroit at swearing: the world, or many of its aspects, troubled her. There she and her husband were much in agreement. ‘Was the world always in its present muddle or were we just too young to notice?’
‘At least the world was not so over-populated,’ Justin said.
‘Shagging took one’s mind off worse things,’ she said with a smile. ‘Probably better things too …’
‘Such as?’
Justin had advertised for a gardener. A man called at the side door, dragging a dog with him. He announced himself as Hughes. Justin did not immediately take to the fellow, but he showed him into the courtyard, where Marie was sitting, in order that he might gain some idea of the garden. The new arrival was a big hollow-chested man in his fifties, wearing a mustard-coloured jacket at least two sizes too large for him: evidently bought from the Oxfam shop. His well-worn face might have come from the same source. The jacket stood away from him at the neck, hunching back at the shoulders, as if, of all the people who had worn the garment previously, this customer was its least favourite. Justin introduced himself and Marie and asked the man’s name.
‘Jack Hughes,’ he said.
‘Oh, how delightful,’ said Marie, piping up. ‘We are reading Zola’s J’accuse in our French class. Was your mother reading J’accuse when she was pregnant?’
Hughes was completely baffled. In a short while he said he did not want the job and left, scowling and muttering to himself, dragging the dog after him.
‘I could have killed you!’ Justin exclaimed, and both he and Marie burst into laughter. Little did they anticipate the note, written in pencil, pushed through Justin’s door, saying You was rude. I did not have no mother, see.
Marie left. Justin was alone again, thinking as he always thought, worrying about Maude. He could not understand how she had been moved to espouse a religion where women were so subject to male domination. In the house, a sickly smell assailed him. His cleaner, Scalli, had been over-liberal with the disinfectant again. He wandered about the house, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. In one of his rooms, facing south, stood a glass-fronted cabinet. Although Justin was far from being a rich man, he had made a small collection of bodhisattvas, each about twelve inches high. He had four of them. These strikingly elaborate figures wore crowns and in general looked forbidding. Justin had no great interest in Tibetan Buddhism; he simply admired the alien nature of the figures. He had become so