The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
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relief. Beside the panel was a little pasteboard card with his surgery hours and reminders to patients to present their health cards, all neatly written out in French and Flemish.
He strolled down the side street and on to the main road, where the quiet was instantly lost. The garish seaside street carried a lot of through traffic, often international traffic hurrying from France through to Holland or Germany. Taking the undercut, Morré crossed the road and walked a couple of blocks to Etienne’s place. On the way, he stopped at a little flower stall and bought her a posy of blue cornflowers; they would soften the blow of what he had to say.
Etienne lived over a magazine and paperback shop in a flat she shared with two other young Belgian ladies – both happily away on holiday at present. Her pleasant little living room looked over the low dunes and the wide beach to the sea.
‘You are very late this evening, Eddie,’ she said, smiling as she let him in.
‘Perhaps so, but why attack me for it? It’s my misfortune, isn’t it – or so I would have thought it if you had greeted me lovingly!’
‘Eddie, don’t be that way! I did not reproach you, my darling!’ She stood on tiptoe, as he had noticed she often did. She was short and very shapely, in a little blue dress that went well with the cornflowers. She looked very sexy standing like that.
‘Please come off your tiptoes,’ he said. ‘You are trying to fool me.’
‘Darling, I was not – and I swear to you, I did not even notice I was on my tiptoes. Does it disturb you to see me on my tiptoes? It’s not usually reckoned as an indecent posture, but if it offends you, I promise I won’t do it again.’
‘Now you are trying to humour me! You know nothing maddens me like being humoured! Why can’t you speak to me like a reasonable human being?’
She flung herself down rather prettily in the wide armchair. ‘Oh, believe me, if you were a reasonable human being, I’d make every effort to talk to you like one. You’re absolutely nuts, aren’t you, Eddie?’
He had a brilliant idea. It would scare the pants off her. ‘Yes, you have uncovered my secret: I am nuts.’ Without undue haste, he lifted up the cornflowers before him and ate them one by one. Then he wiped his hands on his handkerchief. ‘I am nuts and that is what I wished to talk to you about this evening.’
‘I have to go out almost at once, Eddie …’ She looked as if she would have liked to faint. When he sat down close to her on the straight-back chair with the tapestry seat that was an heirloom from her old Flemish grandmother, she became rather fixed in expression, and said nothing more.
‘What I was going to tell you, Etienne, darling, what I especially came over for, was to say that I feared our engagement must be broken off. It’s not so much that we are not suited, although that is a consideration; it is more that I don’t even seem to know what century I am living in – from which it follows, I suppose, that I don’t even know what country I am living in – which in turn means that I don’t know what language I am speaking, or what my name is. In fact I don’t even know what planet I’m on, whether it’s the Moon, or Earth, or Mars.’
Etienne gestured out of the window towards the beach, where two sand yachts were bowling merrily along.
‘Take a look for yourself. Does that look like Mars? You were born on this coast; you know the North Sea when you see it, don’t you?’
‘Don’t interrupt me! Of course I can see it’s the flaming North Sea –’
‘Well then, don’t talk so stupid! Look, Eddie, I’ve really had about enough of your nonsense! You come up here every Saturday night and break off our engagement –’
‘I do not! I’ve never broken it off before, often though I’ve been tempted to!’
‘You do, too! You don’t know what you do do! How do you think I like it? I’ve got my pride you know! I can take emotional scenes as well as the next girl – in fact sometimes I rather think I enjoy them in a kinky sort of way. Maybe I’m the kinky kind –’
He shook a fist under her nose. ‘No self-analysis, please, at least while I’m speaking! Have you any interest in me or haven’t you? And who am I? Who indeed? Man’s eternal quest for identity – pity I have to carry mine out with such rotten partners.’
‘If you’re going to be insulting, you can go, Eddie Morré! I know perfectly well what’s wrong with you, and don’t think I’m not sympathetic just because I don’t show it. You have built up that fine little dentist’s practice just so’s you will have enough money to support me comfortably when we get married, and the overwork has resulted in brain fatigue. Poor Eddie! All you need is a little rest – these fantasies about Mars and the Moon are just phantoms of escape filtering across your over-heated cerebellum, reminding you of the need for rest and quiet. You know how damned quiet it is on Mars.’
Tears filled his eyes. It seemed she really was sympathetic. And perhaps her explanation was correct. He threw his arms round her in perfect forgiveness and attempted to kiss her.
‘Do you mind! Your breath stinks of cornflowers!’
The two vast human figures confronted each other in the tiny artificial town-room. Sparked by sudden anger, he grasped her more closely. They struggled. Nobody was there to see a chair tipped over and they rolled on to the floor, arms round each other’s necks. After some while, they were both still. Then one of the figures rose and hurried out of the apartment, slamming the door in haste.
Plainly, he was in need of some form of purification. When it was dark, he changed into clean garments and walked down to the burning ghats. The usual crowds of beggars stood and lay in the temple doorway; he gave to them more generously than usual.
Inside the temple, it was stuffy, although a cool breeze moved near the floor, fluttering the tiny lights of the faithful – who were not many this evening, so that they formed only a small cluster of insects in the great dim hallowed interior of the hall.
E. V. Morilal prostrated himself for a long while, his forehead to the stone, allowing his senses to go out amid the generations who had pressed foreheads and feet to this slab in the solemn contortions of devotion. He felt no devotion, only isolation, the opposite of devotion, but the sense of other human beings was some sort of balm.
At last he rose and walked through the temple on to the ghats. Here the smells that lingered in the building took on definition: wood smoke, burning unguents, the mouldy Ganges slowly trundling by, bearing its immemorial burden of holiness, disease and filth. As ever, there were a few people, men and women, bathing in their clothes off the steps, calling on their gods as they sank into the brown flood. Morilal went tentatively to the edge of the water, scooping up a handful of the stuff and pouring it on his shaven crown, letting it run pleasurably down into his clothes.
It was all very noisy. There were boats plying on the river, and children and youths shouting on the bridge, some of them with transistor radios.
‘Hello! Back in the twentieth century now!’ Morilal thought sharply.
Restless, he shuffled back and forth among the funeral pyres, some of which were unlit, awaiting midnight, some of which were almost burnt out, the human freight reduced to drifting ash or a bit of recalcitrant femur. Mourners crouched by most of the biers, some silent, some maintaining an arbitrary wailing. He kept looking for his mother. She had been dead three years; she should have been immolated long ago.
His old friend Professor Chundaprassi was walking slowly up and down, helping himself along with a stick. He nodded to Morilal.
‘May I have the honour and pleasure of joining you, professor, if I do not interrupt a chain of meditation?’
‘You interrupt nothing, my friend. In fact, I was about to ask if you would delight me by joining me, but I feared you might be about to engage in a little mourning.’
‘No, no, I have only myself to mourn for. You possibly know I have been away for some while?’
‘Forgive