Remembrance Day Read online

  Remembrance Day

  THE SQUIRE QUARTET

  Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.

  Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.

  Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.

  Brian Aldiss

  Remembrance Day

  Dedication

  for

  Doris Lessing

  a bad terrorist

  with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Remembrance Day

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1 A Visionary

  2 Displaced

  3 Despatched

  4 Adopted

  5 Accepted

  6 Salvation

  THE SQUIRE QUARTET

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Epigraph

  Those who constantly recall their history are doomed to repeat it.

  Hengist M. Embry

  It is difficult to say to what extent a deeper understanding of the mystery of personality would ensure that these tragedies did not arise, since the still deeper problem of destiny itself is involved. We cannot say with any certainty whether it is, in the deeper sense, inevitable that certain persons should meet a certain time, and with certain results. A lifelong study of such mysteries indeed inclines to such belief.

  The Nature of Genius

  Dallas Kenmare

  Introduction

  This third volume in the Squire Quartet is probably the most complex, and least popular of the four. It may have too many characters in it for a lazy reader. Yet the critics liked it.

  The Daily Express described it as, ‘a crisply philosophical novel on the topic of disaster.’

  The Daily Telegraph called it, ‘an enjoyable companion piece to Forgotten Life.’

  Unlike the earlier novels in the Quartet, in Remembrance Day we meet the rural poor: Ray Tebbutt and his missus, Ruby.

  Ruby has a goat she loves, and raspberries she picks. Memories of their childhoods during wartime intrude on their lives. Peace is still troubled; better perhaps to live in a backwater.

  They are getting by, living frugally. Ray has acquired a credit card; the card is used only for identification purposes. They never pay for anything with the card in case they fall into debt. But Ray is browbeaten into lending a considerable amount of money on his card, and has problems in getting it back from a more prosperous neighbour.

  Both Thomas Squire and Clement Winter, protagonists of the earlier novels, put in appearances. Ruby and Ray Tebbutt live not far from Squire – who is now past his days of fame – in deepest Norfolk. There comes a prolonged supper of rabbit pie, at which the squires and the Tebbutts sit and discuss the current state of play. Squire remarks - giving their current spate of IRA bombing as an example – that when underdogs seize power they rule no more wisely than those they supersede. (Power is also a leading subject in the fourth volume of this series.)

  The great going world is buzzing with actions and ideas. The IRA is active in England. Learning and ignorance advance cheek by jowl, as usual.

  Eventually, Ray Tebbutt gets his money back. So Ray and Ruby decide to go for a stay in a quiet little hotel called the Dianoya, in Yarmouth.

  I once came across a gravestone in a Yarmouth graveyard bearing the name of Embry, and this story ends with an American professor called Hengist Morton Embry – a man who seeks advancement, one way or another. He has prepared a report on a bomb outrage at the Dianoya Hotel where several people have died. He is going to see Professor Stern, the principal of Anglia University. The people killed in the explosion, and their moratoriums, fortify Embry’s theory that misery attracts more misery. He claims it is time for a new understanding of life.

  Stern is left alone to think and decide. The TV is on in his room. It is Remembrance Day, with the ceremony at the Cenotaph. He reflects on the endemic wars being commemorated. England is a good peaceful place. But some things need changing …

  Brian Aldiss

  Oxford, 2012

  1

  A Visionary

  Spring 1990

  Professor Hengist Morton Embry was at the wheel, gliding along through Fort Lauderdale, pointing out the sights to his English visitor.

  ‘This is the place if you want to eat fish. Absolutely first rate. I was there two – three nights ago, with Bobby Strawson and her crowd. Try the dolphin. Not the mammal, the fish. Go upstairs for better service. There’s a waitress without a bra, and they serve a good Australian Shiraz.’

  Gordon Levine was impressed. He would not have expected such information, so crisply delivered, from an English professor of Stochastic Sociology – even if there was such a thing – in an English town. Embry had facts spilling from his fingertips.

  Fort Lauderdale slid by, malls, slummy bits, houses of the wealthy situated on well-tended canals. Levine was paying his first visit to Florida, and liking it. The month was March, the temperature was warm. He had already taken a swim in the hotel pool and exchanged a few words with the influential Bobby Strawson, organizer of the ASSA conference. He was impressed by the air of efficiency and glamour exuded by la Strawson. Equally, he was impressed by the charisma of this important professor, who had taken time out to show a stranger the town.

  Embry was the sort of scholar referred to as outgoing, though Levine had glimpsed a more thoughtful person beneath the surface. He had already given Levine some insights into other members of the ASSA, the American Stochastic Sociology Association.

  Embry was an untidy man, moderately massive, given to large ties which hung over one shoulder of his cotton jacket like the tongues of wolfhounds. Academically, he was considered brilliant; yet he could schedule a neat eight-stream conference in a matter of moments, totting up all the scholars involved, friend and foe, like columns of figures. So why was this paragon accepting a sabbatical year in England at the Anglia University of Norwich, opening a new department? This was the question Levine put to his companion as they surveyed Fort Lauderdale.

  ‘This mansion with the laburnums we’re coming to, that’s the Florida home of Jeff Stackpine, the Stackpine Trucks man. You think I’m side-tracking my career trajectory by taking off for a year? I don’t read it that way. The US needs a breathing space from me. I can do wonderful things in England. They’ll name the department after me.’ He ground to a belated halt at a red. ‘Traffic lights always see me coming. When did I last get a green? It’s nature’s way of telling me to slow down, I guess.

  ‘Now we’re heading for Mount Lauderdale. Have you heard of Mount Lauderdale? It’s the highest point in the city, snow on it in the winter. Coaches lose their way and have to be dragged out.’

  Levine expressed surprise. But, just as the Americans had their own views of what English weather
was like, he had his views on the extremes of the American climate.

  They turned into a less elegant road and were passing the Everglades Motel, faced with fake logs. The sign was supported by two fibreglass alligators.

  ‘There you see the real unreal America, Gordy,’ said Embry, gesturing. ‘The wish to get on, the wish to get off, the longing to have you on, the longing to have it off. See how one of those gators is female – mammal female, with boobs and blond hair? It represents some sort of displacement in time as well as space. You clear the Everglades, then you fake ’em to get ’em back. Consider the diversity of mentalities in these so-called United States, the sheer diversity of mentalities. Some of us are living, or attempting to live, in the next century, and face up to the demographic conundrums ahead. Others – don’t construe this as an ethnic remark in any way, Gordy, but some of us are still living and thinking last century, and the centuries before that, way back to primitive times, when tribes first wandered into North America.’ He knocked significantly at his forehead.

  As Embry exchanged an unscholarly word with a driver proceeding in the opposite direction, Levine said, by way of agreement, ‘I saw in a recent poll that fifty-five per cent of the population believe the sun goes round the earth, rather than vice versa.’

  Embry shot Levine a glance, half-smiling, one eyebrow crooked. ‘You mean the other way round, surely? The earth going round the sun?’

  ‘Fifty-five per cent believe it’s the other way about. Maybe it was sixty-five.’

  ‘You mean the sun going round the earth?’

  ‘That’s what fifty-five per cent believe.’

  Embry gave a snort and concentrated on the traffic ahead. Levine saw a muscle in his cheek working, one of the muscles he used for talking; maybe it never rested, even when no speech was forthcoming.

  Levine experienced a pang of doubt, sudden as toothache. Could it be that Hengist Morton Embry, founder, president, of the ASSA, was himself one of that fifty-five per cent? Or sixty-five? It couldn’t be. Could it?

  ‘Astronomy was never a subject I specialized in,’ Embry said. ‘But I do know that one American in seven carries a gun in his or her car.’

  Levine wanted to explain to him that you did not have to go to university to learn that the earth went round the sun, taking a year to make a complete orbit, because this was one of the known facts you imbibed with your mother’s elderberry wine, if not her milk. That there was a whole raft of things, a skein, a web, a map, a safety net, you absorbed like your native language itself, if you were normal, by the time you made your first date, and that that safety net was an indispensable component of – well, of Western culture. Yet here was this professor of a distinguished Illinois university – a whole lot of them managed to get down to Florida in March – who appeared to have doubts regarding a cardinal fact known to ancient Greeks. Levine had on his safety belt in the Toyota; but in the other world, that great nexus of circumstance we call life, there was no safety belt. He was sitting next to an eminent academic who believed the sun was in orbit about the earth.

  ‘Right, Gordy,’ Embry said, ‘here’s Mount Lauderdale coming up.’

  He gestured grandly and chuckled. The car was heading up a slight incline. There were trees on either side of the road, expensive properties, a neat waterway, and the slight rise in the road.

  ‘Mount Lauderdale. How d’you like it? All of eighteen feet above sea level. We’re a great country for making mountains out of molehills.’

  ‘I see.’

  Embry chuckled again. ‘Just kidding you before, Gordy. Exercising your British sense of humour … We’d best head back to the conference.’

  Embry was a Happy American. It was easy to appear Happy. It was patriotic to be Happy. It was also good business to be Happy. Good business and patriotism went together, and their lubricant was the kind of good humour in which Professor Embry specialized.

  Returning to the conference, he drove Levine past The Fronds, a gigantic shopping mall built on adventurous lines, with undulating façades and interior waterfalls. It had been standing half a year, and was due to be pulled down, Embry said, in eighteen months. The carpark beside it was full of cars. Embry took it in with a gesture.

  ‘See that? The Fronds. A fad of yesteryear, but still making millions for a guy I used to know. Sold wallpaper in Denver. We were talking about people wandering into North America thousands of years ago. That’s what they came for – the shopping.’

  He told Levine you could eat a good hotdog in The Fronds. Hotdogs went with the good business and the patriotism; hotdogs marked a guy out as a good, average joe, even if he was a professor and president of ASSA.

  Levine asked himself why he was thinking in this vein on this Florida afternoon, when palms waved their leaves against the ever-enfolding walls of commerce. Didn’t I eat hotdogs myself and without being self-conscious about it? Didn’t I succumb to the unconscious pressure of society and present a cheerful demeanour? Wasn’t it true that that demeanour became more and more my real self?

  Punching a tape into the radio-cassette player, Embry filled the car with quadrophonic sound. Male voices sang: stately, assured, harmonious.

  ‘Recognize it?’ Embry asked. ‘My passion! Medieval French Gregorian chant. Latin, as you know. A capella. I bought fifty tapes of the stuff when I taught a semester at Toulouse University, France. Can’t get enough of it. They say the world lost something when instrumental music was introduced into churches, and I believe ’em. Listen to this “Veni, Redemptor” now …’

  Levine listened. He knew nothing of the subject, had never specialized in it.

  They were back at the Hilton in time for the cocktail reception. Traffic was moving steadily up and down Highway One. Planes were landing on time, bars were doing good trade, yachts were docking in expensive marinas. Barbecues were sizzling in yards, evening soaps bubbling on TV screens. Day’s end was calm, but alert with promise all over the Sunshine State, even in the senior citizens’ condos: time for fun unobtainable in England: the sort of evening you feel you deserve, with the sun skiing through a sky containing only one decorative cloud, positioned so as to grow more golden as the hour slipped by. Happy Hour. Most of the delegates to the conference were already gathering in the pool area, where a quartet discreetly played Mozart and drinks were served by lynx-eyed Hispanic barmen.

  Palm trees, music, warmth, light-coloured clothes, Hilton service. No hassle.

  Embry was greeted on all sides. A lot of shaking hands and embracing went on. You couldn’t tell when people were not glad to see each other. Levine went along with Embry some way, moving into the heart of the crowd with a glass in his hand, exhilarated. Crazy to exchange all this for England! Here were people he knew, if only by reputation, creative people, alienists, scholars, fermenters of society, men and women, involved in one branch or another of stochastics and/or education.

  Hi there to Dale Marsh, plump and genial, wearing only a T-shirt above gaudy shorts, though most of the guests had adopted more formal attire. The legend on Marsh’s T-shirt said ‘Squint when you look at me lest you be blinded by my beauty’. Marsh was English, but had lived eight years in the States, teaching Urban Relationships in an Eastern seaboard university.

  Levine was not all that enthusiastic about meeting another Englishman, but stood to chat politely for a minute or two. With Marsh was a pretty blonde woman called something like Polly Ester – Levine did not catch the name and, unlike Americans, was afraid to ask for it to be repeated.

  ‘Funny Hen Embry should elect to spend a year in Norwich at AUN,’ he said.

  ‘Is that anywhere near London?’ Polly Ester asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘A year out at pasture and he’ll come rushing back Stateside into a government post at zillions per month salary,’ said Marsh, in a lordly way. ‘That’s how it works. That’s how the system works.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Polly, lowering her voice and sliding a bare arm through Levine’s, ‘
Hen’s got big trouble brewing here with the ASSA. It pays him to make himself scarce a while.’ In response to Levine’s surprised look, she whispered into his ear. ‘Cooking the books.’

  The phrase, he thought, was like some secret sexual signal, releasing a flush of testosterone through his arteries as he felt her warm aromatic breath in his ear. That sod Dale Marsh had always been known as ‘Lucky’ Marsh. He knew how to pick the birds.

  After the reception came dinner. They drove out, a dozen of them in hired cars, to a seafood restaurant someone had recommended up the coast in Boca Raton, where stone crabs were the juiciest.

  Embry was in good form throughout the meal, drinking heartily, expounding a blueprint for a better world.

  Levine, as a hard-pressed administrator at a university increasingly under financial pressure, did not believe in better worlds. He turned to Marsh, who happened to be sitting next to him, to express his cynicism, expecting Marsh as a fellow Englishman to respond similarly to Embry’s plans.

  ‘Things are different in the States, Levine,’ Marsh said, condescendingly. ‘In London, psychotics are guys who have discovered how life really is. Over here, that bit of luck goes to mountebanks. They can capitalize on their discoveries in ways valuable not only to themselves but to the public at large.’

  ‘Embry?’

  Marsh sucked on a crab claw. ‘You should read Embry’s book on transpsychic reality – and not just because it’s sold a million. Basically, what he says – I’m wedging his argument into a nutshell – is that the nature of self, and hence of our perceived world, is – or can be – up for grabs. He says everyone has visions, sees ghosts, or whatever. Parapsychic phenomena … Such things are dismissed as childish – which they may be – or disgraceful in our Western societies, and so are repressed or misinterpreted … well, something like that. But actually such so-called delusions are pleas from an inner self for change. Urgent communications. We must all change.’