Comfort Zone. Brian Aldiss
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said Maude, close to tears. ‘We really should call the police.’
‘I don’t think Deirdre would like that,’ said Guy. ‘At all.’
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t,’ said Justin.
They made their way slowly back up the hill towards home, passing the White Hart as they did so. A man on the other side of the street, walking on the cobbled stretch of pavement, was about to turn into the pub. He caught sight of Justin and Maude and made the drinking gesture of lifting his elbow with his hand near his mouth. ‘Let’s join George,’ said Justin to Maude. ‘I need a drink after all that.’
‘I can’t stand that man Guy. There’s something wrong with him.’
‘No, Guy’s all right. He has a lot to put up with. That dreadful wife, for one item …’
‘I am convinced they have separate bedrooms!’ she replied distinctly. ‘You go and have a drink, dear. I’m off. I need a rest.’
Justin followed George into the pub. George Ross was the local plumber. He also worked elsewhere, but the failures of ancient plumbing systems in Old Headington were sufficient to keep him in business for the rest of the century. He bought himself an Old Speckled Hen and Justin a glass of Australian Shiraz. They settled down comfortably behind one of the old wooden tables. The pub was almost empty. George had a round jovial face and a neat beard. Justin believed him to be amazingly clever, capable of thinking spacially in a way he could never manage himself. ‘I saw you were coming out of Righteous House,’ said George. ‘You friends with them?’
‘Far from it. George, you might know this. Do Guy and Deirdre sleep together? Maude would like to know.’
George grinned. ‘Plumbers know everything. Separate rooms. Deirdre’s room is thick with mementos of her family. At a guess it was last century when Guy last got his leg over.’
They started talking about women. While admitting how much they liked them and their company, complaint crept in like a hungry slug among lettuces. Justin complained about Kate’s frequent visits to Egypt, while George complained about a divorce that he had not really wanted.
‘I go into a house to fix their toilet. I see at once that the works are all this plastic stuff. It doesn’t stand up to use. When I first went into the trade, it was all metal – copper mainly. Now this plastic stuff is perpetually having to be renewed. Marriage seems to have gone the same way!’ They both chuckled at the analogy. Justin told George about the Iraqi girl who had suddenly disappeared.
‘There must be a good reason for it,’ said George. ‘You don’t suspect Guy of doing her in, do you? Don’t go to the police, though, Justin, at least not yet. They’re no good at these racial things. Ask someone who might know. There’s a very nice Iraqi works here in the pub of an evening, calls himself Akhram. He worked with me for a spell. Akhram should know something about her. Maybe he met her. It wouldn’t be surprising – this is supposed to be a village, isn’t it?’
When it came to suppertime, Justin tried to assemble something edible to detain Maude, to whom he was determined to lecture. There was almost nothing worth eating in their pantry. He turned over a can of sardines, on the bottom of which was stamped the legend, Best Before June 1999. He replaced it on the shelf. A quiche with cheese and tomato needed only twenty minutes to warm up. The microwave had not been used since his wife died, as far as he knew. He popped the quiche into the gas oven at Mark 5. Two tomatoes looked edible. The last five inches of a cucumber had to be thrown into the swing bin. He spread two slices of a ‘seeded batch’ with a margarine named on the lid as Bertolli with the additional information that Bertolli was ‘The New Name for Olivio, with pure Bertolli oil’. Accompanying it, he put a jar of Frank Cooper’s Fine Cut Orange Marmalade on the table. He emptied the dusty contents of a sachet of Batchelors’ Oxtail Soup into a mug, pouring over it boiled water from the electric kettle, adding a generous dash of the sherry he had recently claimed to hate. He switched off the television set, which sat on the top of the extinct microwave. A man and a woman were collecting items from a house to put into an auction sale. They hoped to raise nine hundred pounds, so that the couple could take their paralysed daughter to Disneyland in Paris. As Justin plunged them into darkness, they had just found a nineteenth-century horse whip in a back bedroom.
When Justin bought No. 29, Clemenceau, the house was in a poor way. He had had every inch of electric wiring and every inch of plumbing pulled out of the house and new wiring and new pipes installed. He had directed George Ross to run the water supply from the mains through a water meter, and was glad now that he had had the forethought to do so. Janet had not been feeling well even then. The bell on the timer pinged as Maude appeared. She had assumed a silken dressing-gown. Justin struggled to get up from his chair and went to collect the quiche from the oven. As he served Maude, Justin said, ‘Now, dear mother-in-law, I fear I must put a case to you and ask you to be patient.’
‘I’m always patient, dear son-in-law,’ she replied, blinking at him, ‘but let me just say that this tomato has passed its sell-by date.’
‘Okay. That’s not important.’ He waved it away with a gesture. ‘Maude, the world is in a terrible state. It always has been, but these days we are better informed of that state. Over-population and their – our – usages are causing a potentially calamitous global heating. However, I do see at least two hopeful elements at work. The European Union is one of them. For centuries, European nations soaked every kilometre of land with blood and corpses, for dynastic, territorial and particularly religious reasons. Now, instead, we settle arguments by sitting round a table and arguing. It is a magnificent social experiment. The second hopeful element I see is the way in which women, having won the right to vote and thus to be included in our political system, have to a great extent been able to make all kinds of remarkable contributions to our—’
Her eyes had lit upon the booklet Justin had just acquired. ‘This looks interesting, Justin.’
‘It contains paintings by Heath Robertson. Did you hear a word I said?’
‘Oh, really, Justin, you would try the patience of a donkey. I know all this and on the whole I agree with what you say. Let’s eat this quiche in peace. I’m still recovering from our visit to – what is it? – Righteous House …’
Admittedly, the quiche was not of the best. Or of the hottest.
‘All right. To my main point. The progress I have mentioned applies to the West, not to the Middle East – or to much of the rest of the world, including Africa, but it is the Middle East I want to talk about. There, the religion prevailing is the Muslim religion. Do you doubt that? Do you doubt that women subjected to this religion suffer greatly?’
‘I do think things are getting better there.’
Justin said, ‘Let me tell you a personal tale. I was flying back from New York, where I’d been shooting some documentary footage. Ayatollah Khomeini had just been installed in Iran. You remember they’d kicked out the pro-Western Shah? I flew back to Britain by Iran Airways, thinking I might find a subject on the flight, okay?’
Indulgently, she said, ‘You’ve told me all this before.’
‘I watched the passengers coming aboard. I was the only Westerner. The Iranian men all settled comfortably in the rear seats. Then there was a gap before the front seats, where all the women sat. There was no communication between the two groups. The kids were supposed to sit in the middle. Instead, they ran about in the aisle, shrieking. No one did a thing – no control.’
‘Couldn’t you have complained?’ Maude asked.
‘No. I was the one Englishman on board. Drink was forbidden. But it happened there was an English stewardess aboard, so there was a natural bond between us. She smuggled me a gin – a bottle which had somehow eluded capture when the rest of the booze was offloaded. This young woman was full of hatred and anger. Her Iranian husband had just divorced her. No apology. No explanation. He simply walked round her three times and that was it. Of course she was hurt and furious. She couldn’t wait to get back to the UK, where she hoped never to see an