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

The neighbours were nice people but talked only about the garden and home wine-making.

Their wine itself was passable. Rose particularly liked the turnip and tea wine. Billing stuck to the potato, which he christened ‘Spirits of Spud’.

His wandering had ceased. The phantom bugles were silenced. His dream of that long journey down the lane had not recurred for – Billing could not recall how long. He ascribed its absence to the way in which the Piranesi engraving had brought both dream and contents to the light of consciousness.

When Billing and Rose drove to London again in her old Austin, repaired at great expense, to claim the house in Shepherd’s Bush which was now theirs, he at once took her upstairs to look at the engraving in Gladys’s bedroom. Rose was not greatly impressed.

‘Gloomy, isn’t it?’

She turned and flung open the window, then leaned out and regarded the cat-traversed gardens below.

‘Do you think you’d be happy here, Rose?’ Billing asked her broad back.

‘You’ve got to be tough. Be thankful for what you can get.’ She straightened and closed the window with a few thumps. ‘Sash cord’s gone. Shepherd’s Bush is a nice area. We’ll have to clear out all Gladys’s junk … Yes, it’s fine. I mean to say, like, beggars can’t be choosers.’

He liked her grudging ways, knowing the kind heart beneath. True, there were times when, harking back in memory to his days in the USA, he regretted that she had achieved Zero Life Style. Americans of even a non-affluent layer of society always achieved a Plus Life Style in some extraordinary way. Like Italians.

Rose had a collection of china horses – he had contributed one himself, a shiny coltish thing with brittle legs. But it could not be said that she was into china horses, as an American would have been. It remained simply a collective hazard on the mantlepiece, a somewhat forlorn reminder of a lost Rosey past which had contained fields and pastureage and idle summer afternoons.

So he put his arms round her, coat and all, and kissed her.

‘Don’t really mind where we live,’ she said, kissing him slowly, ‘as long as you keep slipping it up me.’

‘Oh, god,’ he groaned. ‘Don’t worry your pretty head about that.’

Downstairs, in the main room, he contemplated the chaise-longue.

‘We’ll have to get rid of that, for a start, Hugh … I like this long mirror, though.’

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ He looked in a drawer. Among the clutter of items he saw a birthday card with yachts on. He stared at the bookcase, pulling out the odd book, hoping for something to read.

‘We’ll have to get shot of that lot,’ Rose said behind him, indicating the orderly spines.

‘Not so fast. It’s nice to have books about.’

Some were in foreign languages: German, Swedish. There were several books bound in drab green and written by a man named Bengtsholm. Looking at an inscription in ink on the title page of one of them, he realised that Bengtsholm was Gladys’s husband. After his death, she had reverted to the use of her simple maiden name of Lee, Bengtsholm presenting too many obstacles to the insular English. Many of the books in the case had been his, or were actually written by him. Billing felt awed and excited.

He opened one called ‘Of Analytical Psychology’ and read, ‘Something must be left to your own mental efforts. You might consider what it means to be complete. People should not be deprived of the joy of discovering themselves. To be complete is a great thing. To talk of it is entertaining, but is no substitute for being it. Being complete, however you phrase it, is the main thing in life.’

He stuffed the book back, recoiling. In his mind was an image of that ladder falling and the body going with it. Complete? Psychology filled him with dread – yet it was a pleasurable dread. There were mysterious doors and possibilities, as he knew.

The Psyche and Dream Journeyings. Why not just Journeys? The title caught his eye as he was about to turn away. The Psyche and Dream Journeyings … He pulled it out. It was another great long unexplored volume, with clear print, thick paper, heavy binding and plenty of footnotes.

‘We’ll have to do something about the kitchen,’ Rose called. ‘I should reckon this here oven sailed with Noah on the Ark.’

They went out the back into the damp little garden, in which Gladys Lee had not walked for many months before her death. Most of it was down to grass. An old iron bath stood at the far end, under the grey slate-capped wall. Buddleias grew. There was a rockery covered with ferns. On the whole the soil seemed too poor to sustain weeds.

‘We could do better with this,’ Billing said, airily indicating the landscape. ‘Conifers at cost. A figure or two. Trellis. Clematis.’

‘Get old Frewin down here to help us,’ she said. Frewin was the name of their wine-making neighbours. They had a good laugh about that.

By the kitchen window was a dilapidated shed containing nothing but a broom and old linoleum. Unwanted things could be stored there and eventually they could have a car-boot sale with them.

They looked up at the slate roof, the peeling windows (bathroom window frosted half-way up), rusty gutters, wrinkled brickwork.

‘It’s ours!’ they said proudly, and hugged each other. ‘All ours! Wonderful!’

‘If we sell everything, it’ll bring us in enough cash to completely redecorate inside,’ she said. ‘George taught me how to hang wallpaper. I’m a dab hand at it. We’ll make it look all lovely and light and modern inside and banish Gladys’s ghost. Oh, it will be grand! Better than Buckingham Palace.’

‘I’ll paint the outside. We’ll need to get a long ladder.’ Inwardly, he was a bit sorry about banishing Gladys’s ghost. In some odd way, he longed to preserve everything as it was, in all the seedy pomp of yesterday; but he said nothing, recognising that ultimately Rose’s practicality would triumph over his nostalgia. Probably quite right, too,