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

you merely hem you in. These lorries – sorry, trucks – they put you right in the middle of a mental traffic jam.’ They were leaving the suburbs now.

The driver shot Billing an innocent look. ‘Is England full of cookies like you?’

Gazing out at the bleached landscape, Billing suddenly recalled the Cotswolds, orderly fields, sheep, church spires, comfortable homesteads and a steady rainfall. He longed for a taste of scones and jam, the sight of a winding road, old ladies with library books to be changed.

When they came to Waterloo, Iowa, Billing stopped off. He saw that the garden centre run by the two Jajack mothers had given place to a shopping complex. The American appetite for shopping never ceased to impress him. The complex was bigger than a cathedral. He arrived at Ludmilla and Josef’s house just in time for Josef’s funeral.

‘He never made it to Brno. We never rode in the High Tatras,’ Ludmilla said, gazing calmly at Billing from under a cute little black hat. Waterloo, Iowa, was a long way from LA and people still made concessions to mourning.

While comforting the widow, Billing was overwhelmed by a tide of love. It burst over him unexpectedly, like a spring thaw in the Arctic. It was pure, as sparkling as a stream, as fresh as happiness, as toothpaste. Never had he wanted to console anyone so much. Most of the girls he loved needed consoling.

Taking Ludmilla into his arms, Billing gazed into her beautiful tear-filled eyes and begged her to marry him. He had led an irregular life, but that was over. She was an exile, so was he; they would make a home together.

‘There’s a home here,’ Ludmilla said, with a sob that shook her upper parts.

He assured her they would go wherever she wished, anywhere rather than stay in Waterloo, Iowa. Even to Brno in Slovakia, if she wished. He promised he would learn Czech.

‘Slovakian,’ she sobbed.

Brushing the irrelevancy aside, he confessed to her how he had felt about her, how he had never forgotten her during his four years in California, how he had previously said nothing out of respect for Josef. His coincidental arrival at this time must mean something, must mean that they were intended for each other.

‘But Karel …’ she whispered. ‘There’s Karel …’

She wept again and declared that she was happy in Waterloo, Iowa. She had never wanted to go to Brno. She had never wanted to ride in the High Tatras. She was scared of horses – and of High Tatras, come to that. All that was Josef’s dream, not hers. She had been longing for years to marry Karel, Josef’s handsome younger brother. He was the one scowling across the parlour at them, the muscular one, with the little finger missing from his left fist. She appreciated Billing’s kindness and why didn’t he take another cut of the spiced ham?

He headed for New York, to spend another two years of oblivion there, as though years were as inexhaustible as American miles. During this time, on an impulse, he sent a postcard to England, to Mrs Gladys Lee.

When he returned to the surface again, so did images of England. His money from the Remedial Domesticated Space project had all gone. New York was too world-weary to buy RDS. Billing found work around the Village until he had saved his air fare. Then he clipped his moustache, bought a cheap digital watch and returned home.

The eighties had arrived in England, despite delays. Billing himself had changed. He admitted as much to himself as he confronted gritty old London: he was thin, strange, inexperienced, in a city now as cosmopolitan as New York and almost as dangerous. Billing wore a T-shirt and spoke what passed here as American. He was neither young nor old. He surveyed the traffic with a mid-ocean eye. In this sluttish town he felt like a virgin.

Old friends had not returned to favourite haunts. His dead sister’s husband was not to be found. Probably working for the Arabs. He remembered his mother’s funeral, bleakly asking himself if it was because of her death that he had stayed so long abroad. In his hotel, the central heating sighed and made poltergeist noises after dark. Of remedial spaces he found none. Madness would pass unnoticed in such a place.

An older man spoke to Billing on the stairs – a surprising event in itself in an establishment where guests made themselves shadowy, withdrawing into doorways and silences to obscure the stain of their lives.

The man told Billing of a reasonable Indian restaurant nearby where one might eat cheaply.

‘We could go there this evening, why not?’ said Billing, on impulse.

‘You’re American, ain’t you? I thought you was.’

There was a short cut behind a broken fence between two streets.

A path led across a waste lot where an Edwardian block of flats had been demolished and nothing built in its place. Sorrel and nettles fringed the path. It was country for two yards. Walking along it to the restaurant, Billing remembered that he had recently had his recurrent dream again, his consolation.

Together with the reassurance he felt lay a deeper, more permanent sensation, a suspicion that somehow he had allowed himself always to live cheek-by-jowl with his real life. Why this displacement? It was as if he had a doppelgänger; or, rather, as if he were merely a doppelgänger.

‘What do you make of England?’ the old man asked Billing, over a chicken biryani. He had a pale skin, a thick moustache and thinning hair, and the soft indefinable accent of someone born in one of London’s outer suburbs. His suit was of sombre, durable tweed; it would see him out.

‘I can’t tell. In the USA life is so much more expansive.’

‘It’s getting very expensive here, too. Everything’s going up. It’s the government, you’ve no idea.’

‘What I mean is – well, there’s just more hope in the United States. It may be an illusion, but optimism improves – well, it improves the quality of life.