The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
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minutes, hour, and date. The dial stretched right round his wrist.
‘Perhaps one day Seiko will produce a watch like this for those specialists who still study the first lingua franca of Europe, Latin. Taste may please itself; it is judgement which is answerable to others.’
The door swung wide. As the focus zoomed in on the hall, a grandfather clock standing there began to strike twelve in stately tones.
The girls and the dog, all strangely excited, were installed in her mother’s small town house.
She had used the pretext of going down to the shops for groceries to walk on her own. The sun shone. The pavements were hot and dusty. Tourists stood about in appropriate clothes, some of them licking ice-cream cones. She wore no coat, and felt absurd carrying her mother’s stiff shopping-basket. A boy ran up and asked her what the time was. She felt out-of-character, exposed to the world, and could scarcely answer the lad.
Although her open-work shoes were unsuited to walking, she walked. She chose the meaner streets. No one would recognize her, although her father had been a town councillor. The desperation of her thoughts drove her on, an endless disquisition tormented her forward. Someone she passed, staring curiously into her face, reminded her that her lips were moving, in protest, explanation, or accusation.
By the River Witham she stood, staring at its dull pent surface, thinking of all the reasons why she hated rivers, towns, and especially rivers in towns, with their strong flavours of poverty, affliction, distress, aimlessness, winter, death. Backing away, she ran from the water and her thoughts. She walked among trees, glad of a small wilderness, though scarcely conscious where she went. Her father had walked her here with her younger sister, long ago, when they were safe in their innocence. He had been amusing then, amusing and kind: boring only to her adult perceptions.
She blundered into a tree, feeling the dusty bark under her fingertips, calming herself a little before continuing in a less distraught fashion. So this was what freedom was like. Painful and bewildering though it was, at least she was away from Pippet Hall; she was her own self. A doubt crossed her mind – perhaps she would not care for her own company. She found even the silences of the leafy grove an anguish.
Sun shone ahead on a small gravelled clearing, where a bust stood on a central pillar. She went and sat down on an oak bench, sliding off her shoes, lying back so that sunlight poured into her closed eyes and open mouth.
After a while, she took note of her surroundings. She stared at the bust on its pillar. There was an inscription underneath; it read:
In Memory of Ernest Albert Davies
1896–1977
Councillor
He fought for and Saved this Pleasant Place
Erected by his Fellow Citizens
Her father had spent years fighting both town council and a supermarket chain, who wished to level North Wood and make commercial use of the site. Her mother had written to her, telling her of the ceremony, only a few days ago; she had scarcely taken it in at the time, with more urgent things to occupy her.
Now she sat and gazed at the metal representation of her father’s face. He looked sternly beyond her. A thrush alighted on his head.
Setting the empty shopping-basket down beside her on the gravel, she began to weep for all that was bygone.
6
Putting Our Socialist Friends to Rights
Ermalpa, September 1978
By pulling back one curtain, the room could be sparingly filled with morning light. Objects were revealed but, casting no shadows, scarcely acquired reality.
He had slept naked. He put on a pair of blue swimming trunks and stood in the middle of the room in tadasana. He breathed slowly, concentrating on the expelled breath, letting the lungs refill automatically, letting air return like a tide, to the abdomen, the ribs, the pectorals; then a pause and a topping-up with still more air. Then a pause and the controlled release.
He went into trikonasana, straightening and locking his legs with, first, his right fingers at his right ankle and his left arm raised, and then, second, his left fingers at his left ankle and his right arm raised, head always turned up towards the lifted thumb, knees locked.
After some while, he went into various sitting poses, concentrating on parvatasana and, to keep his abdominal muscles in trim, navasana. Finally, he went into a recuperative pose, the sarvangasana, with his feet high above his head and toes hanging down. He breathed gently, without strain, staying as he was, hanging in the air, for about fifteen minutes, before relaxing into savasana, eyes closed, brain inactive.
When he returned to the world, he reflected as always with gratitude on the brief refuge of meditation. Nothing could reach him there, neither his own follies nor the follies of other people. The paradox was that he had banished God by discovering him through the disciplines of yoga; what he had come upon was a timeless region at the back of his own skull: a small chamber shaped by countless generations of blood and perception. It had been there awaiting him all the time. It was as close as he would ever get to Eternity.
Putting on yachting shoes and draping a towel round his neck, he went down through the hotel, still empty of guests, and took a slow swim up and down the outdoor pool. Only one other delegate of the conference was there, an Italian whose name Squire did not remember. They nodded to each other and wished each other good morning as Squire did six lengths and a few dives. As he went back to his room, an aroma of coffee reached his senses.
He felt well prepared to face Thursday and the second full day of the conference.
The dining room of the Grand Hotel Marittimo was full of fresh flowers. Sunshine poured in the far end of the chamber, and the fatherly waiters were moving unhurriedly about their business.
Thomas Squire settled himself at a table with d’Exiteuil, who had managed to find himself a copy of Le Monde, the two Frenzas, Cantania, and the Romanian delegate, Geo Camaion. The latter nodded silently at Squire and continued to eat sausages and tomatoes. Gianni and Maria Frenza were chattering happily to each other over plates of fried egg and bacon. Gianni wore a silk sweater; his shaggy black hair, streaked with grey, reached to its collar. His wife looked attractive; she wore a plain brown dress to match the heavy dull gold of her hair. Squire observed that d’Exiteuil frequently gazed at her from behind his newspaper.
Squire ordered continental breakfast from a paternal waiter. He was finishing his orange juice when Geo Camaion, who had reached the toast stage, leaned forward, and remarked in French, ‘I found your speech of yesterday, Mr Squire, charmingly insular, as we expect your countrymen always to be.’
He was a small neat man with good features and a nobly furrowed forehead. He spoke in such a friendly way that only a tapping finger on the cloth revealed his inner tension.
‘In what respect did you find it insular?’ Squire asked.
‘We don’t expect the English to understand that there are other people in the world – other poets, for instance, than Shakespeare, and other film actors than Errol Flynn.’
The croissants were not good, tasting too oily. Squire wiped his fingers on his napkin and said, ‘Surely you fellows haven’t been locked behind your frontiers for so long, Mr Camaion, that you have forgotten that Errol Flynn was Tasmanian, not English? Talking of people being locked in, I hear that your President Ceaucescu has finally allowed Peter Doma to leave his native land. Is that so? Wasn’t Doma persecuted because he complained about the police system in Romania?’
‘Doma! Doma was a client of propaganda hostile to our country!’
‘I see. Won’t there be more hostility to your country now that you have shown how you persecute an individual, and even his dog, if he happens to disagree with the way things are run? Aren’t I right in believing that Doma was even attacked because his wife was Jewish?’
Camaion’s eyes were very round. ‘How dare you? Isn’t