The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss
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on the little brass knocker and vanished into the hall. Mrs. Snowden paused in the porch, stopping to look at the houses on the other side of her high brick wall. When this house had been built, it had stood in open fields; now drab little semi-detacheds surrounded it on three sides. She paused and hated them. Catching herself at it, she tried instead to admire the late afternoon light falling on the huddled roofs; the sunshine fell in languid, horizontal strokes – but it had no meaning for her, except as a sign that it was nearly time to blackout again.
She went heavily into the house, closing the door. Inside, night had already commenced.
Her granddaughter marched round the drawing-room, banging a tin lid against her head. That way, she could hear the noise it made. Mrs. Snowden reached for the DON’T card, then let her hand drop; the action was becoming automatic, and she must guard against it. She went to the gram-wire-TV cabinet, of which only the last compartment was now of use, and switched on. Conditions at home were a little better since the recapture of Iceland, and there were now broadcasts for an hour and a half every evening.
Circuits warmed, a picture burned in the half-globe. A man and woman danced solemnly, without music. To Mrs. Snowden it looked as meaningless as turning a book of blank pages, but Pauline stopped her march and came to stare. She smiled at the dancing couple; her lips moved; she was talking to them.
DON’T, screamed Mrs. Snowden’s sudden, dumb card.
Pauline made a face and answered back. She jumped away as her grandmother reached forward, leaping, prancing over the chairs, shouting defiance.
In fury, Mrs. Snowden skimmed the card across the room, crying angrily, hating to be reminded of her infirmity, waving her narrow hands. She collapsed onto a music stool – music, that dear, extinct thing! – and wept. Her own anger in her own head had sounded a million cotton-wool miles away, emphasizing the isolation. At this point she always crumpled.
The little girl came to her delicately, treading and staring with impertinence, knowing she had the victory. She pulled a sweet face and twizzled on her heel. Lack of hearing did not worry her; the silence she had known in the womb had never left her. Her indifference seemed a mockery.
‘You little beast!’ Mrs. Snowden said. ‘You cruel, ignorant, little beast!’
Pauline replied, the little babblings which would never turn into words, the little noises no human ear could hear. Then she walked quietly over to the windows, pointed out at the sickening day, and began to draw the curtains. Controlling herself with an effort, Mrs. Snowden stood up. Thank goodness the child had some sense; they must blackout. First she retrieved her DON’T card from behind the ancient twentieth-century settee, and then they went together through the house, tugging the folds of black velvet across the glass.
Now Pauline was skipping again. How she did it on the low calories was a matter for wonder. Perhaps, thought Mrs. Snowden, it was a blessing to be responsible for the child; so, she kept contact with life. She even caught an echo of gaiety herself, so that they hurried from room to room like bearers of good news, pulling blackness over them, then sweeping on the sonic lights. Up the stairs, pausing at the landing window, racing into the bedrooms, till new citadels were created from all the shabby darknesses. Pauline collapsed laughing on her bed. Seizing her, tickling now and again, Mrs. Snowden undressed her and tucked her between the fraying sheets.
She kissed the girl good night, put out the light, closed the door, and then went slowly round, putting out all the other lights, downstairs, putting all the lights out there.
Directly she had gone, Pauline climbed out of bed, stamped into the bathroom, opened the little medicine cupboard, took out the bottle with the label ‘Sleeping Pills’. Unscrewing the top, she swallowed a pill, pulling a pig’s eyes face at herself in the looking-glass as she did so. Then she put the bottle back on its shelf and slammed the little door, hugging to herself this noisy secret.
None of these things had names for her. Having no names, they had only misty meanings. The very edges of them were blurred, for all objects were grouped together in only two vast categories: those-that-concerned-her and those-that-did-not-concern-her.
She trailed loudly back to her bed in the silence there was no breaking, making pig’s eyes all the way to ward off the darkness. Once in bed, she began to think; it was because of these pictures she stole her grandmother’s pills: they fought the pictures and turned them eventually into an all-night nothing.
Predominant was the aching picture. A warmth, a face, a comforting – it was at once the vaguest yet most vivid picture; someone soft who carried and cared for her; someone who now never came; someone who now provoked only the water scalding from her eyes.
Elbowing that picture away came the boring picture. This tall, old-smelling person who had suddenly become everything after the other had gone; her stiff fingers, bad over buttons; her slowness about the stove; her meaningless marks on cards; all the dull mystery of who she was and what she did.
The new picture. The room down the road where Pauline was taken every morning. It was full of small people, some like her, in frocks, some with short hair and fierce movements. And big people, walking between their seats, again with marks on cards, trying with despairing faces to make them comprehend incomprehensible things by gestures of the hand and fingers.
The push picture. Something needed, strange as sunlight, something lost, lost as laughter …
The pill worked like a time-bomb and Pauline was asleep where only the neurosis of puzzlement could insidiously follow.
Mrs. Snowden switched the globe off and sank into a chair. They had been showing a silent film: the latest scientific advances had thrown entertainment back to where it had been in her grandfather’s young days. For a moment she had watched the silent gestures, followed by a wall of dialogue:
‘Jean: Then – you knew he was not my father, Denis?
‘Denis: From the first moment we met in Madrid.
‘Jean: And I swore none should ever know.’
Sighing, Mrs. Snowden switched the poor stuff off, and sank down with a hand over her forehead. TV merely accentuated her isolation, everyone’s isolation. She thought mockingly of the newspaper phrase describing this conflict, The Civilised War, and wished momentarily for one of the old, rough kind with doodlebugs and H-bombs; then, you could achieve a sort of Henry Moore-ish anonymity, crouching with massed others underground. Now, your individuality was forced on to you, till self-consciousness became a burden that sank you in an ocean of loneliness.
Right at the beginning of this war, Mrs. Snowden’s husband had left for the duration. He was on secret work – where, she had no idea. Up till two years ago, she received a card from him each Christmas; then he had missed a year; then, in the paper shortage, the sending of cards had been forbidden. So whether he lived or not she did not know; the question now raised curiously little excitement in her. Heart-sickness had ceased to be relevant.
Mrs. Snowden had come to live here in her old home with her parents after she had been declared redundant at the university, when all but the practical Chairs closed down. In the lean winters, first her mother, then her father died. Then her married daughter was killed in a sound raid; Pauline, a tiny babe, had come to live with her.
It was all impersonal, dry facts, she thought. You stated the facts to explain how the situation arose; but to explain the situation …
Nobody in the world could hear a sound. That was the only important fact.
She jumped up and flicked aside an edge of curtain. A rag of dirty daylight was still propped over the serried chimney-tops. The more those houses crowded, the more they isolated her. This should be a time for madness, she said aloud, misting the pane; something grand and horrid to break the chain of days. And her eyes swept the treble row of old textbooks over her bureau: Jackson’s Eighteen Nineties, Montgomery’s Early Twentieth Century Science Fiction, Slade’s Novelists of the Psychological Era, Wilson’s Zola, Nollybend’s Wilson … a row of dodos, as defunct as the courses of Eng. Lit. they had once nourished.
‘Dead!’