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

street. Did I? I can’t recall now, it’s all so long ago, but there she was. She was smiling. It’s no good arguing, I said. I saw her so clearly …’

Gladys lapsed into abstraction, but after a few seconds resumed.

‘There was nobody about at all. Just the moon. I wondered that everyone wasn’t out in the street, just as in Stockholm, because it was such a noise. I don’t mean Stockholm, I mean Madrid. What did I say Stockholm for? One of the big airliners from Heathrow had crashed on Shepherd’s Bush. I could hear it – appalling.

‘It caught fire and kept on and on ploughing through row after row of houses, burning like a torch. You could watch all the people jumping clear and skyscrapers falling. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I rang your phone number and eventually a very grumpy man answered, but he said you weren’t in. He said it was four in the morning and I should go back to bed, although it was as light as day. It was a wonder the plane didn’t strike this house. They come over so low, you know. Perhaps they are German. Where are they all going?’

‘I hope you weren’t frightened, Gladys. It was just something you imagined.’ He regarded her anxiously, picturing her frail figure alone in the moonlit street, trying to place in the sky the rending noises she heard in her head. Possibly the crashing airliner was a herald of one of her ‘attacks’ of which she had once guardedly spoken. When the cells of the brain stem collapsed from lack of oxygen, perhaps they both sounded like, and actually were, an air disaster, exemplifying what she had said about the spiritual and physical being metaphors for one another.

‘What was I talking about?’ she asked, looking fixedly at him. Her face took on a mask-like quality. ‘What did you say about Stockholm?’ With no marked transition from her state of confusion and without changing her tone of voice, she went on. ‘As I told you, my first husband was Swedish. He was a psychoanalyst, although he came to reject much of Freud’s teaching in view of his own experiences with his patients. I have his books over there; you must read them some time.’ She waved her stick in the direction of her bookcase. ‘I’m afraid I don’t look at them as often as I used to …

‘I helped him a great deal. He valued my feminine insight. Oh yes, there is such a thing as female insight, although people make themselves sick nowadays trying to deny it. Wearing tights, too, is bad for female hygiene …’

She looked for a long while at a picture of a horse and a peasant beneath a tree. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather tired, Alice … I wanted to ask you this: have you had any recurring dreams throughout your life? Perhaps you would bring me a glass of water.’

Distressed, Billing hurried to the kitchen to fetch her a drink. The kitchen was the room in which he had first met the Alice whom Gladys’s words accidentally conjured up.

He held the glass to Gladys’s lips. Her livid hooks of hands closed over his, shaking the glass until the water splashed her dress.

‘What can I do? Call the doctor?’

‘That man will do me no good. No, leave, Hugh, leave. I hate being ill. Even more, I hate you to see me ill. Leave. Come tomorrow, come tomorrow and I’ll be better. Come tomorrow and we’ll talk about dreams. You will come?’

He kissed her cheek. ‘Bless you, Gladys, dear. Of course I’ll come.’

Billing took a bus back to his digs. Mrs Dwyer was waiting for him, standing about the hall in her fawn coat, clutching a fawn handbag under one arm. His heart jumped.

‘I need a drink, Rose,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit upset. Come round the corner to the pub and let me buy you a drink. How are you? Lovely to see you.’

As they settled companionably at the bar, Mrs Dwyer said, ‘I was just going home. I’ve been hanging about here for an hour. I must be daft.’ She lit a cigarette from a gold lighter, looking him in the eye meanwhile.

‘My husband will be furious when I get home, want to know where I’ve been, what I’ve been up to and so on and so forth and all about it. I thought we were meant to be liberated, but not me, no.’ She laughed, a curt vexed action which pinched her face.

‘I’m sorry to keep you, Rose, I’ve been seeing an old friend. What’s the trouble?’ Even as he asked, he knew. He had not been to work for three days. He had simply forgotten.

It was none of Mrs Dwyer’s business, she said, messing about with an ashtray, and they scarcely saw anything of each other any longer, but she had been at head office and had happened to hear Mr Motts Senior say that he would be forced to sack Hugh Billing if he did not pull his socks up.

Billing clutched Rose Dwyer’s hand on the stained wood of the bar. It was a firm, dry hand, its nails painted carmine.

‘You’re good to me. Thanks for warning me.’

‘I’m fond of you, Hugh. You know that, I suppose. Why do I say such things? What’s your problem?

‘Have you got a woman or something? Your suit’s all creased.’

He looked anxiously round the lounge bar, searching the faces of the other drinkers. ‘What’s that tune they’re playing? It must be very popular nowadays. I’m always hearing it.’

‘I don’t hear any tune,’ she said flatly. ‘No juke box here. Only that Space Invaders contraption.’

‘Haven’t they got tapes or something playing? It can’t be in my head. Bugles or trumpets – I can’t quite tell which. Is it Herb Alpert?’

She looked impatiently at him, pursing her lips. ‘Stop changing the subject. If it’s not women, what is your problem?’

Shaking his head, he withdrew his hand. ‘It’s no good asking me, Rose.