The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
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and sipping.
‘What is middle age for, Marsh?’ Teresa asked her brother-in-law. ‘I’ve yet to find out.’
‘Well … it’s a sort of reprieve-period, in my book. You’ve finished mating and the furtherance of the species. Your waistline becomes more important than the rat-race … I guess it’s a time when you’re supposed to become wise and good.’
Laughing, Squire brought his glass over and sat down by the fire with them. ‘Most people get more awful in middle age, not more good, and take to drink or politics. Although revolutionaries start young, other shades of politician get involved only when they’re past the optimal breeding age.’
‘Must be a correlation there,’ Kaye said, laughing.
‘When I was a child,’ Adrian confessed, ‘I thought that acquiring knowledge would infallibly make one good. Now I suspect it warps the soul.’
‘That’s a useful bit of knowledge to have.’
Squire said, ‘We can recognize distinct stages in a man’s life. Puberty. Mating. Family-rearing. After that, with the initial biological directives losing their force, he turns to complaining about the state of the country.’
‘Sorry to hear your directives are losing their force, Tom,’ Adrian said.
Kaye took the remark more seriously. ‘I’m all for complaining about the state of the country. I know it’s rather an obsessive British occupation, but in the States it’s regarded as unpatriotic, which it shouldn’t be. Why, we’ve had to import Solzhenitsyn to do the complaining for us. That’s bad.’
Deirdre looked up from her book. ‘Stop grumbling about America, Marsh. Just because they have their own way of doing things.’
‘Good old America,’ he said. ‘So close to God, so far from everyone else.’
‘It is disconcerting the way Russian thinking of various types has so greatly influenced the West, on both the Left and the Right,’ Squire said, reaching for the decanter. Adrian jumped to his feet.
‘I’m going to bed. Politics is something I gave up, along with whiskies that do me good. Thank God that Britain, for all its faults, is not a political nation. To hear you talk, Tom, with your knowing insinuations that there are KGB agents snooping round the grounds, you’d think the poor old country was a dead duck.’
‘As to that,’ said Squire, leaning back and pointing a hand at his brother, ‘as to that, Adrian, old sport, will you dream more sweetly in your whisky-free sleep if I tell you categorically that there is a dedicated band of Soviets and their Warsaw Pact hyenas, all with the most unfriendly intentions towards this sceptred isle, within six or seven miles of this comfortable fire?’
Adrian did his sawn-off laugh. ‘My dear Tom, you are getting to be, you know, a bit of a bore with this Lord Chalfontism of yours. Perhaps it really is compensatory fantasy for lack of the old biological drive.’
Squire stood up, set his whisky glass on the table, and raised his right hand, arm extended, to shoulder level. He swung the arm until it pointed almost due north.
‘That way’s the coast, right? You wouldn’t disagree there. Not more than five miles away as the crow flies or the shell whizzes, right? All round our shores, hugging the two-mile limit, are Soviet spy-vessels, monitoring everything that goes on ashore. Five and two make seven.’
‘Rubbish!’ said Adrian. ‘We’d never let them.’
‘We can’t stop them.’ Squire lowered his arm. ‘They’re seven miles away, sitting in a well-armed ship of modern design. They monitor everything, local radio, police reports, the lot. Plus anything their numerous secret agents ashore like to beam out to them. How come you don’t know this, Adrian? It’s no secret. Is it that you don’t want to know it?’
‘It can’t be true. What could they learn? Anyhow, we probably do just the same to them.’
‘We haven’t got the vessels. You know how the defence budget has been pared away by successive governments year after year for thirty years. That’s right, isn’t it, Marsh?’
Kaye drained his glass. ‘We’re even closer to the bastards at Blakeney. You can see them through the binoculars. Let’s get to bed, Tom. This is no talk for Christmas Day. Maybe, as Solzhenitsyn says, the Third World War is already lost. Just don’t quote me.’
‘I think you’re both being defeatist,’ Adrian said, stoutly. ‘In any case, even if it were true, they’d never dare attack us.’
‘Your trouble, Adrian,’ said Kaye, lifting his glass, ‘is that you’ve given up your sense of history along with your taste for whisky. Think they care about Christmas, six miles from here? They’re for abolishing it for good and ever …’
8
Sublimated Coin Warfare
Ermalpa, September 1978
The side street appeared unusually busy. Cream Fiats poured down it like salmon in broken water, bravely plunging into the stream of traffic choking the harbour road. Tyres squealed, brakes whined, a thin blue haze rose from the sun-battered street.
As Herman Fittich, Carlo Morabito, and Thomas Squire emerged from the bar into daylight, they paused to adjust to the noise and glare.
‘It’s the hour for lunch,’ Morabito said. ‘What you are viewing are not automobiles but foil-wrapped empty stomachs.’
There was a lot of shouting in the streets. A fat woman was calling from an upper window. Squire was mildly surprised at the activity; the northern myth that people in hot countries were lazy died hard, though it should have given its death rattle, as far as he was concerned, on his visit to Sao Paulo, the busiest city in the world, where the blazing temperatures, far from acting as a soporific, accelerated the pace of life, as a burning building accelerates the movements of those leaving it.
He glanced up at the gesticulating woman framed in her window. In the hard blue sky above the street, an intense point of light gleamed. It moved to one side, stopped, then suddenly accelerated in an arc and vanished behind the shaggy pediments of the Via Enrico Stabile.
It could have been an aircraft reflecting the sun; in which case, its power of acceleration was unthinkable. Even if it was much nearer the rooftops, it was amazingly silent and fast. And what was it?
‘I think I’ve just seen a flying saucer,’ Squire said, trying to keep his voice calm.
His two companions made a few jokes as he tried to describe what he had seen. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous – I speak in the vein of one who confesses to an idiocy …’
‘Well, it’s always an embarrassing situation to be the sole possessor of a bit of truth,’ said Fittich consolingly. ‘I remember once I saw ball lightning when I was walking in the Tyrol with a friend. We were in our chalet for the night and not drunk, when this globe about the size of a goldfish bowl entered at the open window. It was completely silent, which was eerie.’
‘So was my You-Foe,’ said Squire, glancing upwards again.
‘It did a tour of the room while we sat petrified, and eventually floated out of the window. I jumped from my bed and watched it sail down among the trees. My girl friend said we should tell no one, but I was then young and foolish in the pursuit of truth, and rashly recounted the incident to my scientific colleagues at the university. They of course assured me that ball lightning did not exist because it contravened natural laws. These days, I believe that ball lightning is quite acceptable, like much else that was once regarded as heresy.’
They walked slowly up the street. Morabito said, ‘Italians will believe anything. Sicilians especially are very superstitious people. They can believe in the Virgin Mary, UFOs, witchcraft, Marxism, fascism, and Santa Claus all in one breath.’
‘Why should there not be flying saucers?’ Fittich asked. ‘After