The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss
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second wife, was up. Guiltily Rodney also rose, and performed several timid exercises to flex his backbone. Youth! When it was going it had to be husbanded. He touched his toes.
The audience had its first laugh there.
By the time Rodney had got into his Sunday suit, Valerie’s cuckoo clock was chuckling nine, followed by the more sardonic notes of his ormolu chimer. Valerie and Jim (Rodney had conscientiously shunned a literary name for his only offspring) were already at the cornflakes when he entered their gay little kitchenette.
More laughter at the first sight of that antiquated twentieth-century modernity.
‘Hello, both! Lovely morning,’ he boomed, kissing Valerie’s forehead. The September sun, in fact, was making a fair showing through damp mist; a man of forty-two instinctively arms himself with enthusiasm when facing a wife fifteen years younger.
The audience always loved the day’s meals, murmuring with delight as each quaint accessory – toaster, teapot, sugar tongs – was used.
Valerie looked fresh and immaculate. Jim sported an open-necked shirt and was attentive to his stepmother. At nineteen he was too manly and too attentive … He shared the Sunday paper companionably with her, chatting about the theatre and books. Sometimes Rodney could join in about one of the books. Under the notion that Valerie disliked seeing him in spectacles, he refrained from reading at breakfast.
How the audience roared later when he slipped them on in his study! How he hated that audience! How fervently he wished that he had the power to raise even one eyebrow in scorn of them!
The day wore on exactly as it had for over a thousand times, unable to deviate in the slightest from its original course. So it would go on and on, as meaningless as a cliché, or a tune endlessly repeated, for the benefit of these fools who stood on all four sides and laughed at the silliest things.
At first, Rodney had been frightened. This power to snatch them all, as it were, from the grave had seemed something occult. Then, becoming accustomed to it, he had been flattered. That these wise beings had wanted to review his day, disinter his modest life. But it was balm only for a time; Rodney soon discovered he was simply a glorified side-show at some latter-day fair, a butt for fools and not food for philosophers.
He walked in the tumble-down garden with Valerie, his arm around her waist. The north Oxford air was mild and sleepy; the neighbours’ radio was off.
‘Have you got to go and see that desiccated old Regius Professor, darling?’ she asked.
‘You know I must.’ He conquered his irritation and added: ‘We’ll go for a drive after lunch – just you and I.’
Unfailingly, each day’s audience laughed at that. Presumably ‘a drive after lunch’ had come to mean something dubious. Each time Rodney made that remark, he dreaded the reaction from those half-glimpsed countenances that pressed on all sides; yet he was powerless to alter what had once been said.
He kissed Valerie, he hoped elegantly; the audience tittered, and he stepped into the garage. His wife returned to the house, and Jim. What happened in there he would never know, however many times the day was repeated. There was no way of confirming his suspicion that his son was in love with Valerie and she attracted to him. She should have enough sense to prefer a mature man to a stripling of nineteen; besides, it was only eighteen months since he had been referred to in print as ‘one of our promising young men of litterae historicae’.
Rodney could have walked around to Septuagint College. But because the car was new and something that his don’s salary would hardly stretch to, he preferred to drive. The watchers, of course, shrieked with laughter at the sight of his little automobile. He occupied himself, as he polished the windshield, with hating the audience and all inhabitants of this future world.
That was the strange thing. There was room in the corner of the old Rodney mind for the new Rodney ghost. He depended on the old Rodney – the Rodney who had actually lived that fine, autumn day – for vision, motion, all the paraphernalia of life; but he could occupy independently a tiny cell of his consciousness. He was a helpless observer carried over and over in a cockpit of the past.
The irony of it lay there. He would have been spared all this humiliation if he did not know what was happening. But he did know, trapped though he was in an unknowing shell.
Even to Rodney, a history man and no scientist, the broad outline of what had happened was obvious enough. Somewhere in the future, man had ferreted out the secret of literally reclaiming the past. Bygone years lay in the rack of antiquity like film spools in a library. Like film spools, they were not amenable to change, but might be played over and over on a suitable projector. Rodney’s autumn day was being played over and over.
He had reflected helplessly on the situation so often that the horror of it had worn thin. That day had passed, quietly, trivially, had been forgotten; suddenly, long afterwards, it had been whipped back among the things that were. Its actions, even its thoughts, had been reconstituted, with only Rodney’s innermost ego to suffer from the imposition. How unsuspecting he had been then! How inadequate every one of his gestures seemed now, performed twice, ten, a hundred, a thousand times!
Had he been as smug every day as he was that day? And what had happened after that day? Having, naturally, no knowledge of the rest of his life then, he had none now. If he had been happy with Valerie for much longer, if his recently published work on feudal justice had been acclaimed – these were questions he could pose without answering.
A pair of Valerie’s gloves lay on the back seat of the car; Rodney threw them into a locker with an éclat quite divorced from his inner impotence. She, poor dear bright thing, was in the same predicament. In that they were united, although powerless to express the union in any slightest flicker of expression.
He drove slowly down Banbury Road. As ever, there were four subdivisions of reality. There was the external world of Oxford; there were Rodney’s original abstracted observations as he moved through the world; there were the ghost thoughts of the ‘present-I’, bitter and frustrated; there were the half-seen faces of the future which advanced or receded aimlessly. The four blended indefinably, one becoming another in Rodney’s moments of near-madness. (What would it be like to be insane, trapped in a sane mind? He was tempted by the luxury of letting go.)
Sometimes he caught snatches of talk from the onlookers. They at least varied from day to day. ‘If he knew what he looked like!’ they would exclaim. Or: ‘Do you see her hair-do?’ Or: ‘Can you beat that for a slum!’ Or: ‘Mummy, what’s that funny brown thing he’s eating?’ Or – how often he heard that one; ‘I just wish he knew we were watching him!’
Church bells were solemnly ringing as he pulled up outside Septuagint and switched off the ignition. Soon he would be in that fusty study, taking a glass of something with the creaking old Regius Professor. For the nth time he would be smiling a shade too much as the grip of ambition outreached the hand of friendship. His mind leaped ahead and back and ahead and back again in a frenzy. Oh, if he could only do something! So the day would pass. Finally, the night would come – one last gust of derision at Valerie’s nightgown and his pyjamas! – and then oblivion.
Oblivion … that lasted an eternity but took no time at all … And they wound the reel back and started it again, all over again.
He was pleased to see the Regius Professor. The Regius Professor was pleased to see him. Yes, it was a nice day. No, he hadn’t been out of college since, let’s see, it must be the summer before last. And then came that line that drew the biggest laugh of all; Rodney said, inevitably: ‘Oh, we must all hope for some sort of immortality.’
To have to say it again, to have to say it not a shade less glibly than when it had first been said, and when the wish had been granted already in such a ludicrous fashion! If only he might die first, if only the film would break down!
And then the film did break down.
The universe flickered to a standstill and faded into dim purple. Temperature and sound slid down to zero. Rodney Furnell stood transfixed,