The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
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cried out. She told us that she saw her mother in an orange dress – she relived that forgotten time – her mother in an orange dress walked down a hillside towards her, carrying a basket full of apples. The mother was smiling and happy.
‘Afterwards, Dorothy cried a lot. Her mother had died when she was five, and she had lost all conscious memory of her. The electrode had allowed her to relive that fragment of life when she was an infant, untouched by trouble. She was grateful. The memory was a gift from a happier world. A land of lost content …’
She looked down at her hands. ‘I think I can see now, as I’m telling it to you, that Dorothy perceived a linkage between the mother’s death when she was five and the attempt of a drunken and jealous lover to murder her at the age of forty. All succeeding messes flowed from that first mess …’ She bit her lip.
He said something sympathetic. Ajdini ignored him, lighting another ‘Drina’ and gazing up into the recesses of the room.
‘I thought of Dorothy when you spoke about souls. If you have looked into living brains, seen the vulnerable exposed hemispheres, you think ever after in terms of electrical impulses, not of souls.’
‘Supposing you look more deeply and see both physiological apparatus and electrical impulses as God’s handiwork?’
‘Do you do that?’
He laughed. ‘No. But I wish I could. I am in the anomalous position of believing in souls yet not in God.’
‘So art’s a comfort, eh?’ She was smiling. ‘Not that we don’t need comforting.’
‘Art’s many things, isn’t it? A comfort for me, a source of argument for you?’
A warmth in her smile, as she responded to his teasing, touched something inside him. ‘In the face of such large questions, really art in the twentieth century has little to say. After Kafka – nothing worth having. The Theatre of the Absurd.’
She indicated the bust which impersonally supervised their conversation. ‘Do you think this cross-eyed general is elevated to the Absurd? Just a few pencil lines make a difference.’
‘They do to any of us.’
‘Will you have dinner with me, please? If I promise not to convert you to Marxism.’
‘I’d love to, but I have to go out.’ Looking at his watch, he added, ‘Now.’
He noted her immediate curiosity, and added, ‘I have an appointment. Perhaps tomorrow evening.’
‘Are you going to a brothel? I hear there are plenty in Ermalpa. Because of the poverty.’
Laughing, he said, ‘No, nothing like that.’
‘Oh, don’t be all English and bashful. If you are going, can I come with you? I won’t spoil your enjoyment, but I’d like to talk to the women.’
‘Die Spitze might like that but I wouldn’t. I’m not in the habit of taking ladies to brothels. For one thing, it’s too much like taking coals to Newcastle …’
She gave him a long look, estimating him. ‘You hardly need to pay for your women, I imagine, Mr Squire.’
He drank the last of his vodka. ‘Women don’t enter into my plans for this evening, unfortunately. Perhaps things will improve in that respect tomorrow.’
Leaving the hotel, Squire was immediately enveloped in the hot evening noise of Ermalpa’s traffic. He stood for a moment, reminded of nights in Rio de Janeiro, where a similar mechanical frenzy had prevailed. Something in the Latin temperament caused drivers to project an extended body-image into their machine, converting it to something between a penis and a clenched fist.
He moved suddenly, turning down side streets which he had memorized from his map, down the Via Scarlatti, down the Via Archimede – very dark and crooked, the Via Archimede – through the Piazza O. Ziino, into the modest avenue next to the Giardino Inglese where the British Consulate stood.
As he walked through the warm evening, Squire thought over what he had said to Ajdini; as ever, he had hedged on the question of religion. One could never get free of religion, yet wasn’t it all out of date?
Some three years ago, when Squire was still collecting material for ‘Frankenstein’, he and Teresa had visited the Britannic Centre for Demystified Yoga, to interview its founder, Dr Alexander Saloman. They drove across London to St John’s Wood, where the centre was, and found themselves at a Lebanese house. Two Arab women in white robes, complete with yashmaks, were leaving the building as they entered. A dark man in dark glasses wearing a snappy blue suit was on guard, and let them only reluctantly through a mahogany door.
Inside, all was heavy and sumptuous and dark. Large black plastic sofas, upholstered with the wet-look, greeted them. On the walls hung claymores, nineteenth-century sporting prints, and musical instruments from some obscure corner of the East. A gilded lift took them grandly up to the second floor, and to an audience with Dr Alexander Saloman. Teresa held Squire’s arm.
Dr Saloman rose to greet them. He was dressed in black – black shirt, black pullover, black slacks, black shoes, with incongruous blue socks. He wore ebony-rimmed spectacles. He was possibly in his late forties. The skin of his face was dry and folded, his hair had been reduced to stubble, either by decision or natural erosion. He had been born in Vienna, and had lived in Argentina for many years before founding Demystified Yoga and returning to Europe. They shook hands formally.
‘What is the purpose of your television series? Is it merely entertainment?’ he asked Squire, when they had sat down and Squire had refused a Balkan Sobranie cigarette.
‘We hope to be entertaining. I want to show people that there are new things in the world to be enjoyed.’
‘Why do you come to me?’ The eyes were searching and not unfriendly, though they frequently darted to Teresa, who sat staring at Dr Saloman with her head on one side. One would not trust the doctor with women.
‘I practise yoga. I like the way it puts actions before words. To my mind, that’s the right priority. Someone told me you might be interesting.’
‘Wouldn’t you say there are old things in the world to be enjoyed?’
Squire hesitated. ‘Isn’t that obvious? But my series will not be about them.’
Dr Saloman exhaled smoke. ‘Are you ambivalent about old things?’
‘Old ideas, yes.’
‘Are you religious, Mr Squire?’ He spoke almost faultless English, without accent.
‘I don’t believe in God. Yoga cured my lingering belief. I feel most days that God is within me – if he exists at all.’
He wanted Dr Saloman’s response to that, but instead the doctor turned sharply to Teresa and asked, ‘Do you believe in God, Mrs Squire?’
She smiled. ‘We all go to church every Christmas. As a matter of fact, Dr Saloman, I don’t like being asked personal questions. That’s more my husband’s line.’
‘We are persons, Mrs Squire. We must sometimes be personal.’
She laughed. ‘Oh, I’m a very personal kind of person, Dr Saloman; but on the whole only with friends.’
As she spoke, she shot a glance at Squire; he thought with some approval that she was always able to take care of herself.
The founder of Demystified Yoga nodded seriously and turned back to Squire.
‘So you have a belief in yoga?’
‘I use yoga because it creates a stillness I enjoy – a stillness in me, I mean. If God exists, he exists in stillness, or so sages have always imagined. Perhaps pranayama is God – the breath of life. Let me ask you a question – do you consider Demystified Yoga a new thing or an old thing?’
Dr Saloman said, without pause, ‘Is a