The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

Some of these Hitlers later volunteered to fly with the Kamikazes.

Many women volunteered to be raped by the Wehrmacht and turned nasty when the requirements were filled. When a concentration camp was set up, it was rapidly filled; people have a talent for suffering. The history of the war was rewritten a bit. They had Passchendaele and the Somme in; a certain President Johnson led the British forces.

The war petered out in a win for Germany. Few people were left alive. They voted themselves second-class citizens, mostly becoming Jewish Negroes or Vietnamese. There was birching between consenting adults. These good folk voted unanimously to have their subconsciousnesses removed, leaving only their ids.

I was on the floor. My study. The name of the vinolay was – it had a name, that rather odious pattern of little wooden chocks. I had it on the tip of my tongue. When I sat up, I realised how cold I was, cold and trembling, not working very well.

My body was rather destructive to society, as the Top Clergy would say. I had used it for all sorts of things; nobody knew where it had been. I had used it in an unjust war. Festival. It was called Festival. Terrible name, surely impeded sales.

I could not get up. I crawled across the floor towards the drink cupboard in the next room. Vision blurry. As I looked up, I saw my old aunt’s manuscript on the table. One sheet had fluttered down on to the Festival. I crawled out into the dining-room, through the door, banging myself as I went. Neither mind nor body was the precision ballistic missile it once had been.

The bottle. I got it open before I saw it was Sweet Martini, and dropped it. It seeped into the carpet; no doubt that had a name too. Weary, I rested my head in the mess.

‘If I die now, I shall never read Aunt Laura’s life …’

Head on carpet, bottom in air, I reached and grasped the whisky bottle. Why did they make the stuff so hard to get at? Then I drank. It made me very ill indeed.

It was Siberia again, the dread reindeer sailing eternally their ships across the foggy ice lakes. They were munching things, fur and wood and bone, the saliva freezing into icicles as it ran from their jaws. Terrible noise, like the knocking of my heart.

I was laughing. Whoever died dreaming of reindeer – who but Lapps? Digging my fingers into the nameless carpet, I tried to sit up. It proved easier to open my eyes.

In the shady room, a woman was sitting. She had turned from the window to look at me. Gentle and reassuring lines and planes composed her face. It took a while to see it as a face; even as an arrangement against a window, I greatly liked it.

The woman came over to look closely at me. I realised I was in bed before I realised it was my wife. She touched my brow, making my nervous system set to work on discovering whether the signal was a pain or pleasure impulse, so that things in there were too busy for me to hear what she was saying. The sight of her speaking was pleasurable; it moved me to think that I should answer her.

‘How’s Aunt Laura?’

The messages were coming through, old old learning sorting out speech, hearing, vision, tactile sensations, and shunting them through the appropriate organs. The doctor had been; it had only been a slight one, but this time I really would have to rest up and take all the pills and do nothing foolish; she had already phoned the office and they were very understanding. One of my brothers was coming round, but she was not at all sure whether he should be allowed to see me. I felt entirely as she did about that.

‘I’ve forgotten what it was called.’

‘Your brother Bob?’

My speech was a little indistinct. I had a creepy feeling about whether I could move the limbs I knew were bundled with me in the bed. We’d tackle that challenge as and when necessary.

‘Not Bob. Not Bob. The…the …’

‘Just lie there quietly, darling. Don’t try to talk.’

‘The…carpet …’

She went on talking. The hand on the forehead was a good idea. Irritably, I wondered why she didn’t do it to me when I was well and better able to appreciate it. What the hell was it called? Roundabout?

‘Roundabout …’

‘Yes, darling. You’ve been here for several hours, you know. You aren’t quite awake yet, are you?’

‘Shampoo …’

‘Later, perhaps. Lie back now and have another little doze.’

‘Variety …’

‘Try and have another little doze.’

One of the difficulties of being a publisher is that one has to fend off so many manuscripts submitted by friends of friends. Friends always have friends with obsessions about writing. Life would be simple – it was the secret of a happy life, not to have friends of friends. Supposing you were cast away on a desert island disc, Mr Hartwell, what eight friends of friends would you take with you, provided you had an inexhaustible supply of manuscripts?

I leaned across the desk and said, ‘But this is worse than ever. You aren’t even a friend of a friend of a friend, auntie.’

‘And what am I if I’m not a friend of a friend?’

‘Well, you’re an aunt of a nephew, you see, and after all, as an old-established firm, we have to adhere to certain rules of – etiquette, shall we call it, by which –’

It was difficult to see how offended she was. The pile of manuscript hid most of her face from view. I could not remove it, partly because there was a certain awareness that this was really the sheets. Finally I got them open.

‘It’s your life, Bruce. I’ve written your life. It could be a bestseller.’

‘Variety… No, Show Business …’

‘I thought of calling it “By Any Other Name” …’

‘We have to adhere to certain rules …’

It was better when I woke again. I had the name I had been searching for: Festival. Now I could not remember what it was the name of.

The bedroom had changed. There were flowers about. The portable TV set stood on the dressing-table. The curtains were drawn back and I could see into the garden. My wife was still there, coming over, smiling. Several times she walked across to me, smiling. The light came and went, the flowers changed position, colour, the doctor got in her way. Finally she reached me.

‘You’ve made it! You’re marvellous!’

‘You’ve made it! You’re marvellous!’

No more trouble after that. We had the TV on and watched the war escalate in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Returning health made me philosophical. ‘That’s what made me ill. Nothing I did…under-exercise, over-eating…too much booze…too many fags…just the refugees.’

‘I’ll turn it off if it upsets you.’

‘No. I’m adapting. They won’t get me again. It’s the misery the TV sets beam out from Vietnam all over the world. That’s what gives people heart attacks. Look at lung cancer – think how it has been on the increase since the war started out there. They aren’t real illnesses in the old sense, they’re sort of prodromic illness, forecasting some bigger sickness to come. The whole world’s going to escalate into a Vietnam.’

She jumped up, alarmed. ‘I’ll switch it off!’

‘The war?’

‘The set.’

The screen went blank. I could still see them. Thin women in those dark blue overalls, all their possessions slung from a frail bamboo over a frail shoulder. Father had died about the time the French were slung out. We were all bastards. Perhaps every time one of us died, one of the thin women lived. I began to dream up a new religion.

They had the angels dressed in UN uniform. They no longer looked like angels, not because of the uniform but because they were all disguised as a western diplomat – nobody in particular, but jocular, uneasy, stolid, with stony eyes that twinkled.