Forgotten Life (2 page)

Clement was taking the cases upstairs.

‘Good idea. Hang on a moment.' Michelin, who lived with them, was out.

The time was 10.50. Or alternatively, 5.50, New York time.

His head rang.

In their bedroom, he set down the cases and opened one of them. In it, approved by Customs, lay Green Mouth's latest prize, the High Homeric Fantasy Award, sculpted in fibre glass.

To please her, possibly to revive her, he took it downstairs and placed it on a table before her. She smiled wanly.

‘Oh, that!' said the Top Priestess of Epic Fantasy. It is magnificent. It consists of a bust of Homer with two little cupid wings sprouting from his grey locks, just above his ears. This is no mere
ha
flim-flam. This is a literary award, bestowed by earnest young judges of the various sexes. On the back of the revered Greek story-teller's head are etched the titles of the ten Kerinth novels and the one collection of short stories, with their dates of publication.

What's more, this award is electronic. Inside the skull is concealed a lithium battery smaller than a dime. Clement switches on. Homer's blind eyes light up. The wings flap at a dignified pace. Homer nods.

Sheila smiled. ‘Wonderful, but … tea?'

He brought her tea in her Libra mug, accompanied by two Hedex, and sat on the edge of the sofa clutching his own mug.

‘You could go up and lie on the bed.'

She nodded, clasping the mug between stubby fingers, looking down into the tea. ‘I wonder if Michelin made any biscuits.'

After they had sipped for a while in silence, she yawned and looked rather sullenly round the room, as if to orient herself.

It was not a remarkable room, except that successive owners had spared the elaborate Victorian fireplace, before which an electric fire now stood. Sheila had chosen a blue, green and gold decor, and had not pushed the green too heavily. The wallpaper was a dark blue, the chairs and sofa were green and gold. Gold birds fluttered in the folds of blue and green curtains. A large rococo-framed gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece. To the left of the fireplace stood a glass cabinet housing some of Sheila's awards for fiction, including the International
Otherworld Fiction Award sculpture of Tazz riding a mazoom. In the bookcase to the other side of the fireplace, above the sets of Dickens, Galsworthy, and Dornford Yates, her own books were on display, with
Brute of Kerinth
, the first in the series, facing outwards into the room.

Postcards from all over the world were ranged along the mantelshelf, like illustrations from other people's lives lived under bright blue skies. Photographs of Green Mouth mixing with important people hung framed on the wall behind the door. Beneath them was a small eighteenth-century side-table bearing a large Chinese vase converted into a table-lamp. Similar conversions involved the mock gas brackets which projected from the wall over the fireplace. The white leather rhino which served as a footrest – present from a grateful and enriched publisher in Germany – had never seen the forests of Sumatra.

The stillness in the room was also in a sense man-made. The Winters had had all the windows double-glazed, to shut out noise from the street.

To the rear of the room, by a curtained archway leading through to the conservatory, a music stack with discs, records and cassettes waited in an alcove. There hung an enormous gouache, painted for a bygone dust jacket, of Gyronee, Queen of Kerinth, standing bolt upright with a spear and a sort of dog, gazing into the purple future.

Beyond the queen stood a bureau at which Sheila often sat to answer her fanmail. Her study suite was upstairs on the first floor. Clement's little study was up another flight, on the second floor, under the eaves that pointed in the direction of the University.

‘Back to reality,' she said, setting down her mug. ‘I suppose Michelin is in Summertown shopping.'

‘She'll be back soon. Shall we have a snort of something?'

‘Shall we? Just wine for me.'

‘Wine it is.' He went through to the kitchen and uncorked a bottle of Mouton Cadet, whistling as he did so.

Michelin had collected up the mail and piled it on the dresser. As he put the corkscrew back into the drawer, Clement looked it over. Most of the letters were for Sheila, addressed to her under her famous
pseudonym; most of them came from the United States. Sorting casually through the collection, he found some bills and a small package addressed to him. He recognized his sister Ellen's writing.

The package was registered. Evidently Michelin had signed for it. He frowned, but made no attempt to open it just yet. Like Sheila, he felt a reluctance to allow the real world back in: the world of bills. On Kerinth, bills were never presented or paid; no one worked, except peasants. Sisters, if they sent packets, sent them by hand – probably by a messenger on a telepathic erlkring. The messenger would arrive in a lather, perhaps seriously wounded, and the packet would contain something portentous. A lover's heart, perhaps, as in
The Heart of Kerinth
.

Was Ellen sending him something equally vital?

He suppressed such questions, left the package on the dresser, and went back into the front room to Sheila, carrying the bottle and two glasses.

After the first glass, she fell asleep. He spread a tartan rug gently over her. He stood regarding her. With her eyes closed she looked characterless, despite the noble nose and noticeable chin.

Taking the opportunity, Clement went quietly upstairs to his study. There his dead brother's papers awaited him, stacked on the desk, tumbling out of boxes on the floor; the mortal remains of Joseph Winter in folders and old brown paper bundles. For all practical purposes, Joseph in death had taken over Clement's study.

When Sheila had made her remark, commonplace enough, about coming back to reality, she had spoken, Clement thought, with contempt as well as resignation. Reality for him meant something different, something with the texture of puzzlement, for to enter his study was to feel himself entangled in the affairs of his late brother.

Some time soon, he would have to drive over again to his dead brother's flat. It was two months since Joseph had suffered his final heart attack. His flat remained, ensconced in that limbo of small London streets where Chiswick subsides ignobly into Acton amid a welter of little furniture dealers, junk shops, discount stores, and auto repair shops. There Joseph Winter had lived in his semi-academic
obscurity with a succession of women, while books and documents had piled up around him.

Clement felt only mild curiosity about the women. The books and documents, willed to him, were his responsibility. He had collected some, almost at random, culling them from wardrobes and mantelpieces. He was also engaged with a series of secondhand booksellers, trying to screw from them a tolerably fair price for Joseph's old volumes, some of which, dealing with Joseph's subject, South East Asian history, were of value.

The question of the books could be resolved. They were the subjects of a mere financial transaction. It was the unpublished work, particularly that dealing with Joseph's private life, which presented more than a problem, a challenge, which made Clement feel that his own life was being called into account.

Clement slumped in his chair, forearms resting on his knees, so that his hands dangled in space.

‘Joseph,' he said aloud – quietly, bearing in mind that Sheila was asleep – ‘what am I going to do about you?'

Since the brothers had never known what to do about each other in life, it appeared unlikely that the question would be resolved now, when one of them had folded up his mortal tent and stolen away.

Clement Winter left home shortly after nine the next morning, keeping an eye open for his next-door neighbours, the Farrers, whom he detested. It was a Tuesday, quite a sensible, neutral day of the week – the day, in fact, when he usually held his clinic; but this week as last he had cancelled it, using the excuse of his American trip. Which was as well; jet-lag still made him feel slightly dissociated. Both his legs ached, the left in particular. He walked consciously upright, but a little stiffly.

This walk was his daily exercise. The car remained in the garage. He had changed his more daring American rig for a familiar light grey suit from Aquascutum, as better suited to the environs of Carisbrooke College.

Sheila was still in bed, presumably divesting herself of her Green Mouth personality at leisure. Though he guessed she would soon be working again. Michelin had taken her breakfast up on a tray: orange juice, a mixture of Alpen and All-Bran, two slices of brown wholemeal toast, and a mug of best Arabian coffee with cream. Clement had looked in on her after his breakfast and had taken her the
Independent
. They had murmured endearments to each other.

Now he was playing the role of one more Oxford don, greying, distinguished, as he walked down the Banbury Road to Carisbrooke.

Boston had been cold and rainy. Oxford was remarkably hot. A
June heatwave lay over the British Isles. The newspapers were already circulating tales of old ladies fainting in the streets. In Oxford, Clement reflected, it would be old dons.

As he entered the College grounds, a slightly falsetto tooting sounded behind him. Turning, he saw a blue car of no significance drawing into the car park. His research assistant, Arthur Stranks, waved at him from the driver's seat.

Out of politeness, Clement turned back, and stood waiting while Arthur parked the car and climbed out, to walk sideways towards his boss so as to keep the car within his sight.

‘Isn't she a beauty?' he said. ‘I bought her last week, er, in Kidlington, zero miles on the clock. Cheri's mad about her.'

‘I'm not much of an expert on cars,' Clement said, searching the new acquisition for some kind of distinguishing mark. He recalled that previously Arthur had driven a dilapidated Mini with printed jokes in the rear window. ‘What is it?'

‘She's the new Zastava Caribbean,' Arthur said, standing on tiptoe in his trainers, a habit by which he expressed enthusiasm as well as elasticity. ‘Jugoslav-made, newly imported. The Kidlington garage is the only garage in all Oxfordshire where you can buy it. Sole agents. Er – Cheri and I will be able to drive everywhere in it.'

‘Except, presumably, the Caribbean.'

Arthur laughed good-naturedly. ‘We'll see about that,' he said.

They walked along together.

‘I've promised not to drive too fast,' Arthur said. ‘Not with Cheri in her condition.'

Clement recalled that Mrs Stranks, who had changed her name from Cherry to Cheri – to be more interesting, her husband said – was newly pregnant.

In Clement's room, the accustomed piles of papers and books awaited him. He looked about with a show of pleasure. Here at least, he could bring some sense and order into life.

Arthur Stranks blinked a welcome through his glasses and nodded his head a bit.

‘I hope the New York conference was a success? Fun? You get the material you needed?' His manner was solicitous.

‘Some of it, some of it. I had a long conversation with Prof Stauffer and I've brought back photocopies of a bundle of his material.'

Arthur looked interested and did some more nodding. He had tidied the room while Clement was away, and the old box files now stood in military array under the wide window. The photograph of Willy Wilkes-Smith, the late Master of Carisbrooke, Clement's friend, still hung awry behind the door. Clement went over and straightened it.

Two stacks of wire baskets, six baskets tall, stood on the broad central table. They contained documents, together with photographs and cuttings culled from European and transatlantic sources. One day, with the aid of Arthur, a secretary who came twice a week, and a computer, all this paper, with which the room was slowly filling, would be processed into more paper: into, to be precise, Clement's next work, a study entitled,
Adaptability: Private Lives in Public Wars
. The title was a compromise between the academic respectability he had already achieved and the popular acclaim he felt he deserved; of course the publishers would probably change it anyhow.

‘Er, the breakdowns of the VD figures have arrived from the National Archives in Washington. Came on Thursday.'

‘Good.' He began to open letters. ‘How's Cheri? Any morning sickness?'

‘Cheri's fine. Great.'

They looked at each other across the room, expressionlessly. Clement, in a fit of good will, put down the letter he was holding and commenced to tell Arthur something about the Modern History conference he had attended before flying to Boston to meet Green Mouth.

Clement, who was rather a distant man, discovered in Arthur a desire to get a little too close in their relationship. Also, there was the generation gap, much though he might try to discount it – indeed, he disliked the very phrase. At forty-nine, Clement was conscious of his age. His once curly hair now harboured ash to dilute its previous
chestnut and, even more regrettably, was thinning in a silly fashion, behind and in front. His ruddy cheeks had become patchily sallow, in a way that made him uncomfortable before his mirror. Although no hypochondriac, he imagined himself due for a heart attack at times, and had cut down accordingly on the College port. Caring little about politics, he still clung to his liberal socialist principles, born in the early days of Harold Wilson, the first Prime Minister he had voted for, and believed those principles helped keep his faculties from ossifying.

Arthur Stranks was twenty-two and sallow to start with, a stubby young bespectacled man with a pleasant air of wishing to please. His dark hair was cut flat on top; the Scrubbing Brush cut was how Clement and Sheila thought of it. As if to assert a wildness of character acquaintances would not otherwise have suspected him of possessing, Arthur had a small tattoo on his left wrist, a bird of prey with something resembling a rat in its beak, probably holding some arcane sexual significance, thought Clement. He knew his assistant for one of Mrs Thatcher's conformists, tethered to his job and monetarist respectability, but there was another side to Stranks, a side represented in part by Mrs Stranks, Cheri, a rather silent lady of sidelong glances, sighs, and a self-evident bosom, who was always to be seen – at least by Clement – in very tight stone-washed jeans. Regarding Stranks, Clement found himself thinking of the bird with the rat and of Cheri.

Stranks had made it clear from the first that he considered it a privilege to work for Dr Clement Winter. In an early attempt to be friendly, Sheila and Clement had taken the Strankses to Covent Garden to Janaček's opera
Jen
fa
. A few months later the Strankses had invited the Winters to what was at first described simply as ‘a concert'. After accepting, Clement discovered that it was a rock concert.

When the day came, Sheila was too busy finishing a novel to go out. She had excused herself, and Clement had gone on his own with Arthur and Cheri to the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre to see Tina Turner live.

He was the only person in the audience in a suit.

The show, the noise, the audience, the enthusiasm, had overwhelmed him. Until that evening, he had never heard of Tina Turner. She was a light coffee-coloured lady wearing a tight-fitting white two-piece which laced up over her exuberant breast, and, even more effectively, a huge wig like a lion's mane. As she screamed her songs at the audience, the mane shook with fervour. The stage could barely contain Tina Turner. She prowled and stamped about it, shrieking her strange love laments, as if seeking a way of getting at the audience and devouring it.

She was a marvellous and, to Clement, a terrifying spectacle. His ideal of feminine beauty had been formed at about the age of ten, when he distinctly recalled rubbing a pubescent penis against a photograph of Miss Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr had been presented as static, even icy, with the best bits (as he had put it to himself) always chastely concealed. This secretiveness, this pretended show of privacy, had enhanced Hedy Lamarr's stunning beauty. All such artifices were flung out to allow Tina Turner's beauty full play. He was looking at a new age, heralded triumphantly by the singing, the stamping, the tossing mane.

And, like the other males in the audience, Clement was filled with lust. That was what he found terrifying. Savage though Tina might appear, barbaric though the noise was, he saw or imagined a delicacy to her limbs, her hands with their long red claws. In particular, there was a sunny good humour about the whole performance from which it took him days to recover.

The audience, clapping and shouting, was another matter. Art and Cheri beside him were suddenly half-naked, which was to say in T-shirts; paying him no attention, they became part of the mass-mind. Clement, too, dropping his jacket on the floor, also gave in. The whole great cavern became a pool of amplified noise and heat and emotion. And Tina Turner, her carnivorous teeth gleaming at the fun of it all.

The next morning found Clement out of sorts with himself. He
sent his suit to the cleaners in Summertown. There were worlds which were not his.

Since then, Clement had kept a mental distance from his assistant. He feared that Stranks and his wife, who had really looked astonishing in that T-shirt, might invite him again into those lower depths. And was affronted that they never did.

Now he averted his eyes from the sinister tattoo, and called his attention back to the reason that had brought them to this untidy room.

‘Better pick up the threads again,' said Clement, after they had talked for some while. He rubbed his hands together, staging enthusiasm, but doing no more than frown at his chair.

‘How's Sheila?' Arthur needed more conversation before starting work. ‘Er – her side of things go okay?' He had the habit of beginning most sentences with ‘Er', often accompanied by a quick and useless adjustment of the spectacles.

‘Oh, her tour went like a bomb. She's good on television, and they're respectful to the English accent, you know. Especially in the south. She's a bit exhausted – no wonder.'

‘Should think so. She likes America?'

‘Very much so. Whiskey sours. And of course she is so popular there. The Americans have an enthusiasm we lack.'

‘They're not so critical, are they?'

Clement found this rather an unfortunate remark, but all he said, as he sat down, was, ‘You and Cheri must come round again soon. Sheila will tell you all about it.'

The last time Arthur and Cheri had come round to Rawlinson Road had been quite a success. He had read a couple of Green Mouth novels; no doubt the essentially conservative nature of epic fantasy had its appeal. Clement had spent much of the evening talking to Cheri. It had not been unpleasant. He remembered now that at sight of the tiny swimming pool she had said brightly, ‘I must bring my costume next time.'

Arthur was still postponing a move towards the table.

‘Er, I was reading about Zola in one of the weeklies.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Emile Zola … Seems as if when he was writing his novels he was transported into a sort of totally different thingey – state of being. Rather like being possessed – a state of possession. Terrible visions, intense nightmares, dreams of er, sexual ecstasy, intimations of murder. Quite different from his normal life. A different plane of being … I wondered if – excluding the murder business, of course – if other writers also experienced that kind of transformation … A different frame of mind entirely.'

Clement laughed briefly. ‘You'd have to ask my wife that question.'

Something in Clement's tone caused Arthur to fall silent. He retreated to his own desk. His trainers made squeegee noises on the parquet flooring.

This was a signal for Clement to resign himself to work. He pulled various items from his briefcase, arranging them on the table before him.

The main bulk of work on
Adaptability
was already finished, although some chapters required last-minute revision. There were appendices to be drawn up – mainly Arthur's task – the vexatious notes to be gone over, and various references to be checked. He would be only a few months over his publisher's deadline. Yet, he realized, the trip to the States, the appearance at the symposium – where American full professors seemed to lead such affluent lives – and the outing to see his wife in action at Fantacon XIX, had unsettled him. He regarded the cordilleras of paper before him without appetite. They certainly would not be printed up in an edition of 1.5 million.

He found himself thinking again of his dead brother. He owed Joseph something. Consanguinity could not be denied.