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

Somehow the bottom fell out of my life. You know I was a – what they call a drop-out in the States.’

‘Well, you’re back in bloody England now, mate. You want to be yourself. Hang on to what you’ve got and be thankful.’ She clutched the fawn handbag, illustrating her point by instinct.

He looked down at the beer stains. ‘But who am I? I lack continuity … I don’t know, Rose. Work’s not important to me.’

‘What is?’ she asked him sharply. Then, when he did not reply, repeated, ‘What is important to you, then?’

She puffed her cigarette, watching him not unkindly.

He drank his drink and looked across the bar. ‘I never have any luck. With women, for instance – I seem to lose them all. They never stay. Nothing’s permanent. That’s the hallmark of my existence. Nothing solid to show, just ruins.’

‘Don’t talk so silly, man. You’re lucky to have women at all … Besides, ruins are permanent. That sort of attitude will get you nowhere. Strike a light, Hugh, I don’t have to spell it out, but if I wasn’t married to Harry, I’d move in on you and try to set you to rights a bit, really I would.’

He laughed with sad pleasure. ‘I could do with a bit of that, that’s certain. How about trying anyway?’

Sighing, she said with a wistfulness unusual in her, ‘What a little lost lamb you are …’

She drained her glass. ‘I must get off home. Look at the time. Now, mind you turn up for work tomorrow and don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘Rose, dear, you’re lovely. London’s full of people and not a one like you.’

‘Just as well. Bloody fool that I am.’ She blew him a kiss as she went through the door.

He sat for a while over his empty glass before leaving. Rose’s cigarette stub smouldered in the ashtray beside him. He returned to his room. Drawing the curtains, he opened the cupboard where he stored biscuits and marmalade on one shelf and brought out his drawing materials from the lower shelf. Then he settled down at the table, shoulders hunched in concentration above the cartridge paper.

After work next day, he took his drawings round to Gladys. She had given him a key to her front door. As he let himself in, he wondered apprehensively if the time would come when he walked in and found her dead. Serve him right for making an insensitive remark about her looking permanent. Perhaps his little ex-wife was dead too, somewhere across the ocean.

But no, Gladys was as usual in her living room, standing with the aid of her stick, peering out of the window. He went over and kissed her furry cheek. She vibrated slightly.

‘I’ve brought you something to look at. It’s silly. I’m all right on plans but I can’t draw for toffee.’ Another English phrase.

He spread his pictures out on the floor as she settled herself slowly in her accustomed position on the chaise-longue.

‘How are you feeling today, Gladys?’

‘I’m all right,’ she said, constrainedly, looking down at what he had drawn. She spent so long looking at the pictures that he started to apologise all over again. Gladys cut him short.

‘Don’t run yourself down, dear. They’re rather good. They’d be better if you had proper artistic materials. The colours in fibretips are too garish, too what I call chemical. Think how lovely this church would look if you had a real stone tint, eh? Not that black.’

‘They call it grey on the lid. I tried to sketch phases of my recurring dream for you. You asked or I wouldn’t have bothered. My one recurring dream.’

Billing sat on the carpet by her feet and explained his dream. Pleasure filled him as he spoke. He suspected Gladys was lapsing into the insanity of the aged, but the thought did not alarm him.

He would have been no more than four when the dream first visited him, he said. Thereafter, it returned from time to time. He could not say how often. He could not say when the dream last visited him; not since he had returned from the United States, from Iowa, from New York, from wherever he imagined he had been.

In the dream, he was walking down a long country lane, weary and lost. Sometimes, details of the journey remained clear. Sometimes, he saw stones beneath his feet. In later versions of the dream he saw hedges covered in dust, dying foliage. On one occasion, he passed burnt-out cottages. Once, dead cattle. The countryside was always calm and deserted.

He was approaching a church, standing on a slight rise ahead, an old stone-built church with a square tower, in the Early English style. Dusk was falling. It was always near sunset in his dream. The ground was obscure with mysterious movements.

His sense of isolation increased when two figures, dark against the westerly sky, moved from a place of concealment. They stood in the middle of the tawny road, awaiting his approach. Both wore old-fashioned clothes. One was male, one female; the woman wore a poke bonnet and a stiff black bombazine dress, while, in the earlier versions of the dream, the man wore a high silk hat. They were rigidly immobile, not moving till he was close.

They were waiting to greet him. Their hostility was a mere figment of his anxiety, his lostness. They were smiling at him. Nobody, certainly no strangers, had ever been so glad to see him. They took him by the hand and escorted him from the road to the rear of the church.

The grand-looking church, he was surprised to find, was in truth nothing more than a ruin, a half-demolished shell, its interior blackened by fire. This he could see clearly, for this interior was lit by the setting sun. He paused, looking askance at the man, who smiled and indicated that he should proceed.

A flat area like a stage had been cleared in front of the ruin. Some of it was paved in tile. Another building