Ruins by Brian Aldiss (best novels to read txt) 📕

He was embarrassed to think he had echoed the man’s final phrase.

But his companion was not interested in the States. America for him was a dream. He was widowed and in his sixties. Suddenly, breaking a pappadom into two half-moons, he became talkative, though never eloquent. By scraps of revelation, like newspaper cuttings, he unfolded his present existence. His son and daughter-in-law had thrown him out of the room in their house he had occupied for five years. They were expecting a second child. His son had always been violent, even as a boy. He couldn’t explain. His friend lived nearby; he worked down the fire station. Things were difficult. He needed to get a part-time job. Unfortunately, he had lost a suitcase full of belongings. Personal things. He had to go to Kingston. It was all chaos. Really, everything was like chaos. You had to get it together. He didn’t feel he had much longer. If only he could get it all together. He planned to write a letter to his son, explaining … Perhaps it would come right in the end.

‘Yes,’ Billing said. ‘I do hope so. Look, let me pay for the meal.’

‘I was a school-teacher once. One of my pupils became an airline pilot.’

Billing looked for the man next morning at breakfast, when the smiling bright Pakistani girl who served in the hotel brought the grapefruit segments to his table. The man had gone.

Billing too had his little quest. Inspired by isolation, he renewed contact with Mrs Gladys Lee, the missing brother-in-law’s mother. It was the only family connection he could recall.

Gladys Lee had been old when he last saw her. She lived still at the same address. She answered the phone when he rang, voice creaking slightly, remembered his name without prompting and invited him round for a chat. He remembered ‘chats’. The word came back to him from long ago. He was happy she had not said ‘natter’.

‘Come and chat to me, Hugh. I mean to say, not to me, but with me … I’m tired of people who chat to me. It’s one way in which people take advantage of the old.’

He appreciated her care with words, a quality with which his years in the States had made him unfamiliar. He bought a cheap suit, threw away his T-shirt and went to visit her in her unfashionable area of Shepherd’s Bush. The streets seemed narrow, all forehead and no jaw.

Gladys Lee had one of the small terraced houses off Redan Wood Road, where a monastery had once stood. The area had been heavily bombed during the war; it was now rebuilt on a more modest scale. An old retired nurse with a glass eye came to wash Gladys and clean her house every morning.

Gladys Lee was eighty-eight. Her white hair was neatly set and she wore a string of pearls outside a well-cut green suit. She was frail, her flesh like an ancient beach.

‘Come in, Hugh.’ She made the effort of standing to greet him. She walked with a stick, bent double, and looked pained. Her pearls chattered among themselves. When seated in the tall cane-backed chair she seemed more in command and surveyed Billing with some authority.

On an impulse, he gave her his digital watch as a present. She was amazed by it.

‘It was very cheap,’ he said in apology.

‘They saved money by leaving off the winder,’ she explained.

Her living room looked out over a small damp garden, given up to ferns and green slime, to a narrow area of the street. He reconnoitred the contents of the room as if seeking out snipers; certainly, loaded as it was with unfashionable furniture and vases of dried foliage, it could provide cover for an enemy. The overall shape was indeterminate, rendered more so by the tarnished mirror over the fireplace. On the mantelpiece was lodged the postcard of the Empire State Building he had sent to Gladys over a year ago. Clearing his throat, he sat on the edge of a chaise-longue, hands clasped between his knees, and answered her questions.

He was amazed at how much the old lady found out about him within the first twenty minutes.

After that time, as though she had now heard enough, she said, ‘Well, it’s tea-time. Shall we have tea, or would you prefer vodka?’

‘As you like, Gladys.’

‘It’s not as I like, Hugh. You are the guest. However, as you are kind enough to pass the decision to me, I vote we have both the tea and the vodka. Lapsang Souchong and Cossack, I’m afraid.’

Two days later, hardly knowing why, he went back to see Gladys Lee again. He chose the morning, just before eleven o’clock, when the old nurse was still fussing over her charge. Of Alice there was no sign; doubtless she was in a mental home by now. Gladys was feeling unwell; although her hands shook badly, she greeted Billing amiably enough, though with a warning: ‘I’m not at my best this early in the day.’

She reclined on the chaise-longue with a rug over her legs while Billing took the cane-backed chair. The nurse served them tea and it was then, in the middle of their conversation, that Billing first heard the meretricious trumpets.

He was familiar with most bugle calls. This one he could not recognise. It sounded rather jazzy; perhaps it was of a non-military nature. Confused as to whether it was a bugle or a trumpet, he missed something the old lady said. Her skin, like the mirror above her, was speckled with brown, providing perfect camouflage.

The thin mendacious notes alarmed him, bringing to mind, for some reason, a scene in a forest clearing, where a monstrous something was being buried. He stood up in alarm. Muttering excuses, he went to the window to peer into the lachrymose street. Nothing was to be seen but pavement and brick and a selection of yesterday’s cars.

‘Music?’ Gladys repeated. ‘I hear nothing. You make me nervous, I’m afraid. Come and sit down. Why