Walcot Read online

  BRIAN ALDISS

  Walcot

  HarperVoyager

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

  This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager in 2015

  Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2009

  First published in Great Britain by Goldmark 2009

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

  Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 978-0-00-748226-9

  Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-748227-6

  Version: 2015-10-19

  Dedication

  To Ronnie

  with remembrance of Ruth

  with regards as always

  Epigraph

  God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.

  – Francis Bacon

  Novum Organum

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1: Barefoot

  Chapter 2: An Adult Breath

  Chapter 3: Almost Drowned

  Chapter 4: An Absolute Slave

  Chapter 5: ‘Bloody Cripples!’

  Chapter 6: Earth Sciences

  Chapter 7: The New Widow

  Chapter 8: Kendal, of All Places

  Chapter 9: A Good Old Row

  Chapter 10: A Slight Change of Plan

  Chapter 11: Carnage on the Road

  Chapter 12: ‘War or no War …’

  Chapter 13: ‘We’re Okay Here …’

  Chapter 14: Over the Boundary

  Chapter 15: Le Forgel

  Chapter 16: A Lesson in Aristotle

  Chapter 17: The Wehrmacht Pays a Visit

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1: What a Wild Man

  Chapter 2: Hoarded Biscuits

  Chapter 3: Christmas at Gracefield

  Chapter 4: ‘Please Not to Shoot Us’

  Chapter 5: Endless Carnage

  Chapter 6: Kiss Whom You Like

  Chapter 7: Leaving Home

  Chapter 8: Old Children

  Chapter 9: Ex-Army Furniture

  Chapter 10: A Man About Town

  Chapter 11: A Break in Torremolinos

  Chapter 12: The Disastrous Party

  Chapter 13: On the Grand Canal

  Chapter 14: Elizabeth Sips Her Wine

  Chapter 15: ‘I Must Love Abby’

  Chapter 16: A Modernizing Government

  Chapter 17: In the Alley

  Chapter 18: Blood on the Ice

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1: A New Line of Thought

  Chapter 2: Guernica

  Chapter 3: One of the Poor

  Chapter 4: ‘We Don’t Want no Trouble’

  Chapter 5: Some Family Conversation

  Chapter 6: Over Jurassic Sand

  Chapter 7: Another Invitation

  Chapter 8: Supper at Sandy Bassett

  Chapter 9: Tolstoy Unread

  Chapter 10: Violet in Her Bath

  Chapter 11: Flight to Austin, Texas

  Chapter 12: The Future of the World

  Chapter 13: An Arrival From Venice

  Chapter 14: The Known Unknowns

  Chapter 15: The Sacrifice

  Chapter 16: A Fuller Understanding

  Notes

  About the Author

  Also by Brian Aldiss

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  ‘You are free men, whatever that means.’ So says Steve Fielding to some German soldiers, whose lives he spares during the closing events of a world war, in the freezing cold Ardennes. But Steve, as we learn in this complex unfolding of a life, is himself not a free man.

  We find him first of all as a child, playing alone on a Norfolk beach – the beach that gives this complex tale its title.

  Already, like a tide, doubt enters his life. Is he in danger? High on the dunes, a woman, almost a stranger, looks to see if Steve is safe.

  So the question arises, to be solved if possible: do Steve’s parents wish to get rid of him? In love, in war or peace – or in an uncertain interlude between the two – the uncertainty continues to tease.

  As this delightful and complex story unfolds, the reader meets new astonishments and some strange old events.

  Questions remain, but now there’s beloved Verity – and a cheetah – and of course the sort of unexpected we all expect to meet.

  A long and intriguing story unfolds before us.

  Brian W. Aldiss

  Oxford, 2015

  PART ONE

  1

  Barefoot

  At high tide, the sea lapped close to the dunes, leaving little sand to be seen. The remaining sand above the high tide mark was as fine as sifted salt. Spikes of marram grass grew from it like quills from a porcupine. No stones were visible. The small waves, white and grey, seethed against their limits. How lonely it was, this wild coastline.

  When the tides began their retreat, they revealed first a line of pebbles, grey and black. The pebbles gleamed like jewels until the sun dried them, when they became as grey and inert as if they had grown rapidly old and died. Occasionally among the stones lay a small, dead crab, its up-turned belly the respectable white of death.

  The pulse of the sea appeared to quicken; its faltering waves had left the slopes of the beach and were now retreating over level territory. Venturing down to follow this august daily event, you found your feet sinking into the wet sand, and so you kept moving. The sand squelched with every step you took, turned pale, went dark. Went slurp.

  Stretches newly revealed were bare, immaculate, except perhaps for that baby crab, soft to the touch as you bent down to it. What caused it to die? Did crabs become ill?

  Everything about you shone with a joyous newness.

  The small ripples of waves as they rolled back towards their mother sea were transparent, and consequently looked as golden as the sand beneath them. They were so beautiful it was essential to pat them with bare feet, to jump up and down in them, splashing.

  So you followed this grand revanche, as if you, too, were determined to get back into the real sea. You were hopping about in a world of ceaseless movement; these waves, or very similar waves, would never stop, would still be rolling back and forth in their interplay with the beach for eternity, or until you grew up, whichever time was the nearer. You felt very close to eternity because everything here was marvellous, and in this year before the nineteen-thirties had dawned, you had the entire beach all to yourself.

  Look to left, look to right. Along the great expanses of beach, not a single person was to be se
en.

  All through that slumbrous summer you were there, playing on the sands. And in those bygone summers the sun shone always overhead, undeterred by cloud. The sun was there when you arrived on the dunes in the morning, pausing and taking in the whole wonderful spectacle, and when you departed in the late afternoon; at that time, the red ball of it was only just beginning to slope down towards those dunes.

  The retreating waves swirled about a fishing boat. It was Mr North’s boat, anchored on the sand. Mr North, rowing strongly, went out in it at night, when you were in bed asleep, with your arms about your golliwog. The sea eroded a bowl in the sand round the stern of the boat before retreating further, to leave the craft high and dry, a perch for the odd seagull.

  At last the wavelets left the dunes as far away as possible. Their strength exhausted, they sank back into the embrace of the sea. The sea made little fuss as it swallowed them. This was the enchanted, the bronze, the salty and sublime, the interminable and august month of August, when everything is in compliance. The blue morning sky overhead was occasionally flecked with ribs of thin cloud, into which the sun was as yet still climbing.

  Every day was calm and hot, in both reality and memory.

  Very distant were the dunes, shallow as the breasts of an adolescent girl. They were perhaps half a mile from the lip of the sea. The sea was perceived as friendly, luxurious, playful, puppyish. You wore only a bathing costume and a round, grey, felt hat. You were completely solitary. You were able to exercise your imagination, free from interference. One year, you had a small wooden boat, which went exploring and survived many hazards.

  On that stretch of fresh sand, firmer now, baked to the brown of the crust of one of your mother’s pies, what adventures could be had! This was a newly discovered land, yours alone. It was the beginning of the world on which as yet no plant could grow, no animal would tread.

  And there were rivers on this new-found land, miniature Amazons which wound towards the sea, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow, delta-like. They carved cliffs an inch high in the damp sand as they went. A spade, a wooden spade, could deflect some of their tributaries.

  The sea, in its munificence, had also left behind, to punctuate this generous plain of sand, pools of various shapes and sizes. The sun glinted on them, spilling diamonds and daggers. You could lie in these pools; they were warm baths, more luxurious than any man-made bath. Little fishes were trapped here. Shrimps would come and tickle your toes. Sometimes you splashed, but never made much noise. You were in a secret, far-away land, where it was polite to be silent. You were encompassed, though, by a great shell of sound, sung by the sea in its conversation with itself; this was the resonant music of your happiness – though you were frequently unaware of it, or even of the fact that you were happy.

  To either side of you the beaches stretched hazily into the distance, to Happisburgh in one direction, to Bacton in the other. No one was to be seen, even as far as all the way to where the view dissolved into vibrations of heat, nor was any ship to be spotted out to sea. Nothing lay between you and this unveiled nature, which would last for only a few hours, until the tide came rushing back to reclaim its territories, spilling over itself in rude haste.

  You arrived barefoot on the beach. You had with you a rubber pail and a little paper Union Jack on a stick, a wooden spade and a bun wrapped in greaseproof paper in case you became hungry during the hours you are alone here.

  Your mother baked the bun. You meant to repay her generosity by taking her back swarms of shrimps in your pail. She would throw the shrimps into boiling water and you would eat them together, on brown bread and butter, for tea. You were always distressed to see the shrimps go into the boiling water, although your mother told you that they died instantly. The idea of dying instantly held no appeal to a small boy only four years old. You did not know what it meant.

  You spent days alone on the sands last summer, when you were only three. Your mother remained in the bungalow and read romantic novels by Norah Lofts, borrowed from the library. Norah Lofts and Ethel Mannin; of the two, she preferred Norah Lofts.

  You stayed with her in a bungalow named ‘Omega’, which belonged to the family. You believed Omega to be the name of a flower, even when you were told it meant ‘The End of Things’. The bungalow was built, in a way, at the end of things. The country seemed to you utterly remote. It was rare for anything but a farm cart to pass along the road at the foot of Omega’s garden. The bungalow stood at one side of a pathway dignified by the name of Archibald Lane. When you walked up Archibald Lane towards the sea, you had a cornfield on your right. In those distant days, cornfields were gay, with red poppies and blue cornflowers, the seeds of which went into the bread to make it tastier.

  At the top of the lane, just before the dunes, stood two old railway carriages, joined together to make one long carriage. Here lived the North family: a mother, a father and two quite big boys with sandy-coloured hair. They all had freckles. Your mother mistrusted people who lived in old railway carriages, but you were fascinated by them. You enjoyed being in the carriages, sometimes running from end to end in your excitement. Mrs North and her boys were kind to you. She sometimes sat you down and gave you a cold sausage to eat. Mrs North was freckled and pretty. Her eyes were blue. She wore an old blue apron. The North family were remarkably cheerful. You laughed a lot when you were together. Mr North was a fisherman; his was the boat high and dry on the sands. He slept in the day, when tides were low.

  Sometimes when you were alone on the beaches for all the hours of the day, especially when the tide came racing in, you might turn and see Mrs North standing on the dunes, watching for you, shielding her blue eyes with a brown hand. You would wave. She would wave back.

  You were busy. You were building a splendid castle on the edge of one of the warm pools. You were kneeling, determined to get the towers just right, when the water started to lap about your knees. You ignored it. You knew what it implied, but you are concentrating on getting the castle to look its best before the invading tide washed it all away.

  The castle was completed. You stood up. Waves were racing across the acres of sand, covering them. You watched them, fascinated by the speed of the race. Soon the waters were dashing against the walls of your castle. It began to crumble. A tower fell into the flood. You removed the paper flag from the still surviving tower and put it in your pail with the shrimps. You collected up your spade. It was time to move to safety; but you wanted to watch the destruction of the splendid castle. It was a pity your mother was not there to see and admire it, but the beaches did not interest her.

  The castle succumbed slowly. You knew you had better go; it was not so easy. You floundered through a pool now flooded by the new waters, then there was a deep gully to negotiate before you could reach the safe, dry slope of the higher beach. The gully looked deep and menacing now. You waded in. The current was fierce; it carried you sideways. You held pail and spade high. There was an unexpected pool underfoot. You staggered and went under. In your unwanted ducking, the shrimps were reprieved from the pot and the paper flag was washed away. You could see it go, but you were too frightened to do more than struggle for the safety of the shore. The rank water you swallowed in your ducking made you cough and splutter.

  Once you were on the dry sand, you were cross with yourself for being frightened. Some way out to sea now, you could see a safe stretch of sand. But it was inaccessible, separated from the shore by a waste of water which heaved and tumbled in a hostile manner.

  Would you say that this was the period of your life when you felt yourself to be closest to Nature?

  Those sun-drenched, soul-drenched days alone? You believe I was in touch with all that was grand yet transitory. But who can speak for a lad only three years, four years old, when one’s psyche is not yet developed?

  What did you think about, there on the sands all day? Did you feel you were being encompassed by a great soul?

  I doubt I was even aware of time – only of time as lo
cal, affecting the comings and goings of the sea at Walcot, and the possible arrival of teatime.

  So you were sent to play on the beach?

  I believe that was the case. Yes.

  The sea and the time bound to destroy the finest castle you might build?

  Of course. It was in the nature of things.

  You sat and watched as the tide raced in. Well, you would be back again tomorrow, when that new world, ever fresh, would be revealed once more. Tomorrow, the little pools, the arcane rippling and ribbing of the sand, would be there anew; only you would be there to appreciate them. And there was still a whole week before the holiday had to end.

  You looked up at the mackerel sky and it was then that there was a disturbance in the thin cloud, and a golden bird came speeding down. When it stood before you you could see that it was in fact vaguely human in form, seeming youthful, despite its long beard. You observed that it had no genitals.

  It spoke. ‘Have you been good today?’

  You did not know what exactly to answer. It was obvious to you that opportunities for being ‘bad’ were strictly limited when you were alone on the beaches.

  ‘Are you a Christian?’ it asked.