BRIAN ALDISS
Comfort Zone
A novel of Present Day Discontents

All hands shall be feeble and all knees

shall be weak as water.

They shall also gird themselves with sackcloth,

and horror shall cover them;

and shame shall be on all faces,

and baldness upon all their heads.

– Ezekiel, vii

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

1. The Anchor

2. A Note from the Summerhouse

3. Flying Iran Airways

4. Kate Standish Returns

5. The Antiquity of Restaurants

6. Mrs Arrowsmith’s Establishment

7. Types of Rudeness

8. Bumology

9. Baal is Mentioned

10. A Garden Party

11. Headington and Disappointment Street

12. The Secret Shooting

13. Akhram’s Tale

14. A Hint of Eternity

15. Bangalore on the Line

16. Real World Stuff

17. A Funeral for Old Holderness

18. Preparing for the Tropics

19. Another Visit to Eagles Rest

20. Haggard’s She

21. Quetzalcoatl & Co

22. The Meeting at the Village Hall

23. Every Existing Thing Has a Reason

By the same author from The Friday Project

Copyright

About the Publisher

Phantom Intelligences open Thomas Hardy’s drama The Dynasts. The Shade of the Earth interrogates the Spirit of the Years. This is their first exchange.

Shade of the Earth

‘What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?’

Spirit of the Years

‘It works unconsciously, as heretofore,

Eternal artistries in Circumstance,

Whose patterns, wrought by wrapt aesthetic rote,

Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,

And not their consequence.’

1
The Anchor

A crouching figure was illuminated by the stub of a candle burning on a saucer. The figure was that of a full-skirted woman, kneeling before the candle on the floor of a little dark room in a hired house. Scalli – she now called herself Scalli, for none of the English for whom she worked could pronounce her real name – Scalli in her little dark room abased herself before the figure of her god. She addressed that imaginary figure, which she saw clearly, asking him to preserve her daughter, who was so far away. Her dog lay beside her in what it considered a reverential position: begging. Scalli also begged.

‘Oh, mighty Baal,’ Scalli said, ‘I know I am nothing in your sight. I know I am mere filth on the ground over which you walk. Yet I beg you hear my despicable voice. I cry out to you for my daughter Skrita in Aleppo. In Aleppo she lies sick. As you rose again from the dead, so I beg you, raise up Skrita. I cannot be by my daughter’s side. I beg you to be there in my stead and raise her back to health, oh mighty Baal!’ She rose slowly from her crouching position and went to sit on the side of her unmade bed. There was nothing else she could do, trapped in this alien land of England.

At this hour of a summer evening, the road running through Old Headington was quiet. Two young people, both female, one black, one white, strolled along the pavement and turned down Logic Lane. Sorrow is a constant; fortunately, we take a while to learn that. Out of friendliness, Ken Milsome walked with Justin Haddock to the crossroads. They had been drinking tea with Ken’s wife, Marie. It was no more than three hundred yards from this point to Justin’s house. Justin’s legs, a permanent trouble, were not troubling him too badly this evening. The two men stood together, watching the desultory traffic. Both morning and evening rush hour choked the road with cars driving to or from Oxford’s ring road; but at this time of day the automobile might not have been invented. Justin was wearing a panama hat, to protect his head from the sun: that head from which a generous proportion of hair had retreated. On the corner, opposite where the men stood, was the Anchor, one of the two village pubs – this the bigger and sterner of the two. It had been bought by a married couple but had recently been put up for sale. Rumour had it that this couple, unlikely as it might seem to most of the villagers, had been born in the chilly reaches of Siberia.

‘I was sympathetic at first,’ said Ken.

‘She’s Russian, the wife,’ said Justin.

‘Latvian,’ said Ken. ‘They’re both Latvian. She should have played to her strengths and served borscht and blinis or whatever Latvians eat. All she served was cod and parsley sauce.’

‘With chips?’

‘No doubt. She complained that she has no customers. “And I have so clean floor,” she told Marie. But she wouldn’t allow swearing in her pub, if you can believe it.’

‘What? One goes to a pub in order to swear,’ said Justin. ‘Not just to drink. A sentence without a swear-word in it is a jigsaw with one piece missing … For some of us at least.’

‘Some students from Ruskin College were in there, and one of them swore. This Latvian lass turned them all out.’

‘Not exactly a gesture towards financial success … She should be running a church, not a pub.’

‘She told Marie about it. Marie said she was crying, that all she could say was, “And I have so clean floor.” Marie was sympathetic, being no enemy of clean floors herself, but in the end she got sick of it and told the woman straight that for anyone entering a pub, the cleanliness of the floor was hardly the thing uppermost on their minds. She told the woman to get her finger out.’

‘I don’t suppose that did much good.’

‘It didn’t. You know what Latvian fingers are like.’

Ken, an American, spent much of his time with the various computers in his study. He was a leading protagonist in WUFA, the World United Financial Association, as yet just a winged phantom designed to manage more equably the obscure workings of the World Bank. He had explained the workings of WUFA more than once to Justin, without great effect. Every so often, Ken disappeared to conferences in Stockholm, Orlando, or Istanbul. Justin, an older man, considered his days of wandering were done. The recession proved a godsend as an excuse. Justin lingered, hands in pockets, wondering about the present moment in English life. No one seemed to think it odd that the village had acquired its ration of Latvians, Muslims and Chinese. Yet it was hardly a rational process that brought them here. Some came by reason of wealth, some by reason of poverty. It was just – well, just Chance. Someone ought to do something about it.

The two friends lingered on the corner in silence, contemplating the Latvian woman’s sorrows. The sun was low, dusting the quiet street with nine-carat gold. The atmosphere was heavy and becoming thunderous, to celebrate the summer solstice. The Anchor was a large building, built of brick, tall and unwelcoming, whereas most of Old Headington was built from venerable stone; with their low roofs they showed no particular wish to dominate. This modesty included the Anchor’s better situated rival, the White Hart, just down the road, opposite the church and almost as ancient as the church itself, both in its stonework and its aspirations. After a while, the friends parted by mutual consent. Ken turned back to rejoin his wife at home, a short way down Logic Lane. The crown of the great green oak growing in their garden could be glimpsed from the main road. Justin trudged slowly towards his house, careful of the uneven pavement. The birds sang under the street lamps. His way lay past the White Hart, across the road from the church whose origins dated from Saxon times. Justin was no great frequenter of the Hart. He had heard that the owners had engaged a new foreign waiter. He hoped that waiter might prove more effective than the foreigners who had closed the Anchor. At the church gate, the vicar, the Reverend Ted Hayse, was standing listening to an earnest young man, hanging on to his bike, as if in unconscious fear that the parson, forgetting his trade, might nick it. Gripping a handlebar, this youth was leaning towards Ted Hayse, and intensely pouring out his tale.

‘Good evening,’ said Justin as he passed the pair.

‘Good evening, Justin,’ said Ted in response.

‘And even then, even then,’ the young man was saying, emphatically, ‘it was simply an accident—’

‘Talking about Chance again,’ said Justin to himself. ‘But no good speaking of Chance to the Reverend Ted. He’d naturally ascribe whatever it was to the Will of God …’ He shuffled onward, came to his gate and went into his little house. He hung his hat on a convenient peg. The house smelt comfortably of burnt toast, coupled with the elusive fragrance of the clothes Justin had washed that morning, setting them to dry on various radiators.

‘I’m home, Maude,’ he called. ‘Are you okay?’ After a pause, reply came. ‘Is Kate there? She could find it.’

‘You know Kate’s in Egypt.’ He entered what had become known as Maude’s room. Maude, his mother-in-law, was a small, stringy, bespectacled lady with a whiskery pale face and a hearing aid. She was surrounded by piles of books she had pulled off the bookshelves.

‘What are you looking for, dear?’ he asked.

She turned her dim gaze towards him, eyes grey and watery through her rectangular lenses, looking vexed. ‘Dash it, I’ve forgotten. I know it was a book I wanted.’

He was used to Maude’s fits of vagueness. ‘I’m going to pour myself a glass of something. Would you like one?’

‘Certainly not. I had one earlier when my friend from the pub popped in.’

‘Oh, the Russian woman?’

‘She’s Latvian, so she says. They are selling up, you know. Such a pity.’

‘I did know.’

‘It was called Best Behaviour in Baghdad. Grey cloth, I think. About a conversion to Islam.’

‘Not much good behaviour in Baghdad now.’ He grinned at her and left her to it, amid the increasing piles of books.

In their shared kitchen, he found a bottle of Chardonnay standing open. It had lost its chill but he poured himself a glass, to retreat to his living room. A last beam of sun filtered into a corner behind the sofa. Here he kept his art books and a small hoard of DVDs. Justin, nursing the wine glass, sank into his favourite armchair. It was the armchair Janet, his late wife, had liked. After sipping the wine, he set his glass down on an occasional table and rested, closing his eyes. ‘She have so clean floor,’ he murmured. Within a minute, he was asleep. He did not dream. These daytime sleeps, of increasing frequency he thought, more closely resembled unconsciousness. They were places, being empty, of some indefinable alarm. He heard Maude talking, or perhaps chanting, to herself. She had arrived to help look after her dying daughter and had stayed ever since. She was eighty-nine and, he considered, increasingly eccentric. He feared he must nurse her to the end, as he himself felt his faculties crumble. A genuine horror of human life gripped him.

He recalled that Gustave Flaubert, on whom he had once made a TV documentary, took a dislike to a female friend when it became evident that she put happiness above art. Perhaps Maude was sinking into a similar madness, putting religion above sanity. He stared down at his clasped hands; the freckles of old age were apparent. He was already in decay like an old tree, and had scarcely noticed the encroachment. He still relished life even if, like the Chardonnay, it had gone a trifle flat.

Maude and Justin supped together on pasta, followed by rice pudding with raspberry jam. Later, he tucked her into bed before returning downstairs and reading an old hardbound copy of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Kate Standish, his lady friend, was away in Egypt, working on her good cause again. Justin was unhappy that Kate was away so frequently. He felt that the Aten Trust for poor Egyptian children was taking precedence over their love for each other. In the night, a short sharp thunderstorm broke out with a resounding crash. Maude cried out, but he did not go to her; he thought instead of his son Dave, who might have been frightened, with no one interested in comforting him. He found in the morning that his BT answerphone no longer worked. Fortunately, he also possessed a digital phone which was functioning. Kate had given it to him as a Christmas present. But it was a bugger about the answerphone. He would have to do something about it. Some time. Everything was an effort. Maude had found the book she wanted. He would be the one who would put the piles of books back on the shelves.

At twelve noon as usual, he boiled water in his kettle and made two cups of instant coffee. He called Scalli to join him. When he had first employed Scalli, he had tried to avoid the woman, and had left her to drink her coffee alone. But gradually he realized it might be pleasant to get to know her, particularly when he was missing Kate. They sat facing one another at the kitchen table as usual. He liked talking to Scalli. Although her main topic of conversation was her dog, on which she doted, she was an intelligent woman, and he imagined there was little intelligent conversation in her life.

‘I read in The Times that Syria has held a general election. What do you think about that?’ he asked her. Scalli said that one of her cousins had written from Damascus to say all was peaceful.

‘He tells that they suffer many fears and shut up their shop with boards, but nobody did not riot. He has an Iraqi young man to work for him which came across the border in fear of the war which you wicked Britishers make. My daughter is sick in Aleppo – made worse by the election.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ Her hair was pale and cut short. She wore a faded blue dress with a high neckline. Her chin receded while her nose compensated by being rather long. Her skin was slightly withered. For all that, Justin was pleased by her blue eyes and dark eyebrows, and a general alertness. She gave him a doleful smile, accompanied by an inclination of the head.

‘To make the phone call to Syria, it’s so much expense.’

Maude looked round the kitchen door. She was wearing her old brown hat. ‘I’m just going out. I shall be back in time for lunch.’

Justin said with a touch of sarcasm, ‘So, another lesson on being Islamic?’

‘Whatever you may think, my decision is between me and my soul.’ She nodded towards Scalli, as if for confirmation.

‘Are you going to be a little Sunni or a little Shi’ite?’ Justin asked. He was disturbed by his mother-in-law’s espousal of Muslim faith, and occasionally – as now – his annoyance leaked out.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

He was anxious. Excusing himself to Scalli, he hurried to one of the front windows, in time to see Maude closing the gate behind her. She set off down the street, moving slowly with the aid of a stick, and turned, as he had anticipated, left down Ivy Lane.

Maude walked at a steady falter, entering the drive of the Fitzgerald house. She waved to Deirdre Fitzgerald, who was gazing from an upper window. Deirdre returned the merest of nods.

‘Grapefruit face!’ said Maude to herself. The Fitzgerald home, named Righteous House, as wrought-iron lettering in the tall gate announced, had been built in 1919, in a style dating some two centuries earlier. It was faced with white marble; its windows with their pouting sills were shaded by blinds pulled half down, giving the façade a look of world-weariness, as Deirdre herself looked weary and as if designed some centuries earlier.

Maude proceeded to the rear of the house, crossing a lawn where no daisy had ever trod. The back of the big house was of brick; evidently the costly stone fronting the house served only as a mask. She came to a summerhouse, sheltered by two silver birch trees. This summerhouse, all of wood, had a small balcony at the front, facing south, towards Righteous House. Mounting the balcony, Maude tapped at the door.

A young woman opened immediately, welcomed Maude in, and then locked the door from the inside. She was of the lightest coffee colour, with beautiful deep-set dark eyes and a neat fleshy nose. Her intense long black hair was coiled over one shoulder, her head covered by a light shawl, the ends of which were tied beneath her chin. She clasped prayerful hands together. ‘Salaam Aleikum.’

Maude had learnt to respond in kind. In the summerhouse was the scent of sandalwood. A joss stick was burning. Om Haldar was the name of this young woman who, with grave courtesy, settled Maude in a cushioned wicker chair. She brought her visitor a plastic bottle of mineral water, which she opened for the old lady, pouring some of the water into a glass.

‘Are you well, Om Haldar?’ Maude asked. She could hardly bear to take her gaze from the girl, so graceful were Om Haldar’s movements, and her every gesture, some of which rattled the bracelets on her arms.

‘I am perfectly well, thanks to Allah.’ With these words Om Haldar flashed a sad smile, showing even white teeth. She was also perfectly remote, despite her closeness. She gave a quick glance through the window to see that no one was approaching across the lawn.

‘This morning, we will speak of the Hadith, the deeds and sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Are you prepared, please, Mrs Maude?’

‘Yes, I brought my notebook.’ She produced the notebook from a capacious side pocket and then looked up expectantly at her instructress. Om Haldar had never questioned Maude about the reason she was turning to Islam rather late in life. Maude’s impulse was obscure even to herself. She knew only that she had been offended by her daughter Janet’s funeral service, by the perfunctory way the parson had read the prayers and, in particular, the manner in which the coffin was almost dropped into its grave.

From that moment, inconsolable, she had sworn to have nothing more to do with the C of E. Yet, lonely woman that she was, she felt the need for a faith. And one day she had happened upon Om Haldar. She had never asked the young woman what she was doing, or why she was living in the Fitzgerald summerhouse. Although she was curious by nature, she liked the mystery; it reinforced the sense of adventure in turning to a new faith. To turn to this young woman was to turn to her faith. She thought – or liked to think – that behind the courtesy of this young woman lurked a terrible story. She revered, even loved, this strange girl with her isolating courtesy. Perhaps she could ask the withdrawn Deirdre Fitzgerald about it one day?

‘Unfortunately, terrorists and obsolete traditions have given the name of violence to we Muslims,’ the girl had said by way of introduction. ‘Although I have my reasons to regret some of the laws of my country and my religion, I wish to stress to you, kind Mrs Maude, that for many centuries we have been peaceable. The West has in the past benefited from our learning. You may have heard of the Taliban, who banned women from education, but that was not the case everywhere.

‘So now,’ she said. And again there was this distance which Maude found intriguing. ‘We speak of the Five Pillars. These are the basic religious duties, gladly entered upon. Firstly there is Shahada, where the formula we use is the declaration of faith expressed in the phrase, “There is no god but God.”’

As she continued, Maude scribbled industriously in her notebook. There is no god but God. Yes, she thought, that must be true – but what did it mean? It meant nothing as yet, but first she had to believe and then meaning would dawn. That meaning could bring some happiness into the void.

When her session was over, Maude struggled to her feet, formally paid her teacher and said goodbye. She always wanted to kiss Om Haldar, but did not know if it would be acceptable. The session was closed, and Om Haldar turned her gentle back on her pupil. The way to the gate and the road wound close to the rear of Righteous House. As Maude was approaching the house she heard a shrill voice within calling to her maid: ‘Vera, Vera, go and see who that is walking about my garden!’ A minute later and a young woman whom Maude knew as Vera looked out of the back door.

‘You all right, ma’am?’

Maude said gently, ‘Please tell your missus it’s Maude. I visit Om Haldar every day at this time – and with her permission.’

‘Mrs Fitzgerald is a touch short-sighted.’

‘Thank you, Vera. I’m sorry if you were upset.’

The maid grinned. ‘I’m not upset. I’m used to it.’

Once she was alone again, Om Haldar’s manner changed. She moved more briskly. She snatched a stout stick of a type known to the Irish as a shillelagh from its hiding place beneath a rug and laid it under the sofa on which she slept, so that she could more easily grab it if she was attacked.

A coloured curtain hung over the rear wall of the bungalow, concealing a wooden door. She checked that the bolt was secure. Going about these protective measures, Om Haldar sang to herself in a low voice.

Grasses glitter with the dews of morning

For the little birds to suck.

Where I come from no birds or dews

Came to greet the dusty pinks

That herald one more starving dawning

Where the wild dog comes and drinks –

The Great alone feed, while for us to pluck

No mangoes, schooling, justice, luck

I drown in all my thoughts, my sorrows.

How can my pa be so unkind

Who once held me on his knee?

How can I ever purge from mind

The death, the dagger? I can see

But pa is blind. From vengeance, death, I flee.

My yesterdays and worse tomorrows

Surely are not writ and signed?

Here amid this land of strangers

Much I see is clean and neat

Much I see is calm and sweet

And yet they have no god to praise

And those I know breed dangers, dangers.

Allah, let me see your face –

I must be ever on my ways

Or I will die for my disgrace –

My little fault, my love, my days –

To some other foreign place …

She took her duster to clean the windows and to watch, singing to herself, hoping Allah would understand her plight and be merciful.

Justin’s house, Clemenceau, was solid. He had grown fond of it. Clemenceau aspired to none of the grandeur of Righteous House. It stood with its sturdy façade towards the street; it was the house in which Janet Haddock had died. It marked the end of the street, beyond Ivy Lane. The street was one-sided. On the other side of the road opposite Clemenceau was a wilderness of trees and bushes, behind which lurked a small special school. Sometimes, standing on his front doorstep, Justin could hear the cries and calls of a different species of being: schoolchildren. Since his wife’s death, or – as he sometimes liked to describe it – the divorce, this old grey house of his had become the necessary shell of the crustacean within. Clemenceau was one of the old modest stone-built houses standing not exactly close, not exactly apart. It had originally consisted of two rooms at ground level and two upper rooms. Later, two more rooms, an upper and a lower, had been tacked on. Then a room serving now as a living room had been built to the rear. When Justin bought the house, he had greatly extended it, lengthening it with a generous hall and study, above which was a room Janet had liked to call her own, together with a spare bedroom and toilet en suite. This simulation of organic growth in the building presumably marked an increase in British fortunes across the years. When he lay in bed of a night, he listened to the many noises the house made to itself, a succession of creaks, bumps and groans, as if the old place were talking to itself, muttering about its early past before central heating was invented. In the back garden, Justin had turned up the remains of a well, with an old mattress stuffed down it. Also, as he dug himself a vegetable bed, the yellowed bones of an aged dray horse had been uncovered. These were further indications of an earlier, less comfortable, age. Justin crept about his familiar rooms. A certain dread lurked that he might, through infirmity or impoverishment, have to forsake the house in exchange for a single room. He had a relationship with the house. Not quite a love affair, more a kinship: a place where he might cling to his humanity as long as possible. He had filled the place with etchings and paintings and some of his own abstract oils. The walls of several rooms were choked by books; books on or epistles by Byron or Mary Shelley and her group, histories of World War Two, catalogues of Kandinsky exhibitions, learned works on G.B. Tiepolo’s etchings, biographies of John Osborne and the letters of Kingsley Amis, works on Sumatra and other countries, and of the solar system. It was not so much that he feared death: he hated to think of his library being broken up. That was the final dissolution of personality, of his personality and of Janet’s. Sometimes he chose to forget Janet was dead and imagined her living in Carlisle. Surely she would return, wanting to see their son again?

He heard Maude enter the house, but did not go to greet her. She went quietly to her part of the ground floor they shared. He had recently redecorated the downstairs lavatory with a soothing green emulsion paint. A pretty green summer dress of Janet’s hung on the back of the door. He had yet to make up his mind to part with it. Like the rest of the house, this lavatory was fairly shipshape. It was only the outside drains and gutters that still required the attention of the elusive builders.

He was comfortable enough in his house, even sharing it with Maude. No one had ever broken into it. Nevertheless he was uneasy, not understanding what trouble Maude seemed to be involved in. He had spoken to Guy Fitzgerald, with whom he was on fairly formal terms. Guy owned Righteous House; he was an anaesthetist at the JR, the local hospital, the John Radcliffe. He had shed no light on the matter of Maude’s conversion, or of who was living in his summerhouse, beyond the fact that he thought their lodger held no immigration papers.

Justin’s living room was unremarkable, somewhat dated. Janet had furnished it; he had never changed it, except to add a large TV screen to one corner. The windows looked out on the garden and his courtyard. Morning sun flooded into this room. The sun tried to tempt a big unkempt succulent standing on the window sill to flower. This tousled plant had not flowered for three years. He forgave it, liking its grand disorder. When and if it ever flowered again, it would give forth the most brilliant blossoms, opening mouths of unimaginable colour.

At the front of the house was a smaller and smarter room. He had taken some trouble with its furnishings. The basic colour was a sober deep blue, markedly enlivened by a large rug fashioned from many multi-coloured squares and rectangles of a durable wool. He had installed a small settee of a plump nature, on which he often sprawled to read the TLS. There had been a time when the afternoon sun had filtered into this room, making it glow with an amiable beauty. Over the years, trees such as leylandii and a magnificent horse chestnut had grown up on the perimeters of the school on the opposite side of the road, absorbing the sun’s rays; so that only little trembling points of gold now broke through into this evening room. Justin’s kitchen was old-fashioned, his pantry sparse. He rarely went into the dining room. Only when Kate came to spend the night with him did they have breakfast there. Eggs and bacon always featured on those happy occasions. In these various rooms he maintained himself and Maude. He had even learnt to tolerate the incantations Maude was learning from Om Haldar.

2
A Note from the Summerhouse

Marie Milsome called on Justin, to see that he was not starving himself while Kate was away. ‘How goes WUFA?’ he asked.

‘Don’t ask,’ Marie said. She brought him a package of home-made tongue sandwiches. Justin was immensely fond of Marie. He brewed some coffee and they went into the garden with it, to sit ensconced on wicker chairs under the sun umbrella. Marie was a handsome, well-set-up woman in her sixties. Her generous head of hair was dyed somewhere between ginger and gold; she flew once a month to her hairdresser in Paris to have her hair attended to. Not only was she adroit at swearing: the world, or many of its aspects, troubled her. There she and her husband were much in agreement. ‘Was the world always in its present muddle or were we just too young to notice?’

‘At least the world was not so over-populated,’ Justin said.

‘Shagging took one’s mind off worse things,’ she said with a smile. ‘Probably better things too …’

‘Such as?’

Justin had advertised for a gardener. A man called at the side door, dragging a dog with him. He announced himself as Hughes. Justin did not immediately take to the fellow, but he showed him into the courtyard, where Marie was sitting, in order that he might gain some idea of the garden. The new arrival was a big hollow-chested man in his fifties, wearing a mustard-coloured jacket at least two sizes too large for him: evidently bought from the Oxfam shop. His well-worn face might have come from the same source. The jacket stood away from him at the neck, hunching back at the shoulders, as if, of all the people who had worn the garment previously, this customer was its least favourite. Justin introduced himself and Marie and asked the man’s name.

‘Jack Hughes,’ he said.

‘Oh, how delightful,’ said Marie, piping up. ‘We are reading Zola’s J’accuse in our French class. Was your mother reading J’accuse when she was pregnant?’

Hughes was completely baffled. In a short while he said he did not want the job and left, scowling and muttering to himself, dragging the dog after him.

‘I could have killed you!’ Justin exclaimed, and both he and Marie burst into laughter. Little did they anticipate the note, written in pencil, pushed through Justin’s door, saying You was rude. I did not have no mother, see.

Marie left. Justin was alone again, thinking as he always thought, worrying about Maude. He could not understand how she had been moved to espouse a religion where women were so subject to male domination. In the house, a sickly smell assailed him. His cleaner, Scalli, had been over-liberal with the disinfectant again. He wandered about the house, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. In one of his rooms, facing south, stood a glass-fronted cabinet. Although Justin was far from being a rich man, he had made a small collection of bodhisattvas, each about twelve inches high. He had four of them. These strikingly elaborate figures wore crowns and in general looked forbidding. Justin had no great interest in Tibetan Buddhism; he simply admired the alien nature of the figures. He had become so accustomed to them that he hardly glanced at them from one month to the next. But now he realized that one of the figures was missing. It was the bodhisattva which clutched a fish in its left hand. He began to look round the house to see if anything else was missing. That seemed not to be the case. He went to sleep in his armchair. He woke with the lost figure still in mind. He was philosophical. He had bought the bodhisattva fairly cheaply in Chengdu, China. He suspected that a Chinese merchant had stolen it from a Tibetan monastery. There was something like justice in the fact that it had now been stolen again – from him. He liked not thieves, but justice. If Maude had needed money to pay whoever she was paying for instruction into the Muslim faith, she would have asked him directly. He must tackle Scalli about it. ‘Tackle tactfully,’ he thought.

He was suffering from a headache, doing nothing. A woman called Hester phoned Justin. She said they had gone out together forty or more years ago. Did he remember? He pretended that he did. It was absurd of her to ask such a question. Hester? Hester who? She was having an exhibition of her abstract paintings at the Greystoke Gallery in Oxford. She hoped he would come along. ‘Are you all right, Justin?’ she asked. ‘You sound a bit down.’

‘I’m okay. Are you all right?’ He had already forgotten what she had said her name was.

‘I’ve been having a terrible time. I caught a bad dose of flu at the beginning of last year. Of course, I’m middle-aged now. Well, a bit more than that, really. I mean to say, my Maggie is coming up for thirty-one. It’s sad to see your children grow old, and I know she doesn’t get on too well with that daft husband of hers. Anyhow, it took me ages to recover from the flu – and then I went blind in one eye.’

‘That was bad luck, Hester.’ Her name had come back to him. He thought he had better pronounce it before it was gone again.

‘Well, for an artist, you know … I thought it was the flu but the doctor said it was the acrylics. I’ve just gone through the laser treatment and, thank God, my sight’s restored.’

‘Was it painful, the treatment?’

‘So here we are, talking about our illnesses …’

‘It’s an occupational hazard when you are eighty.’

‘Really! I’m only sixty-nine, you know. My friend Terry – I tell friends it’s short for Terylene – she says the reason why no one likes old people is because all they can talk about is their illnesses.’

Justin chuckled. ‘She could be right. Add a smell of wee …’

‘I hope you will make it to the Greystoke Gallery. It would be nice to see you again. Or at least interesting. Oh, and I forgot to tell you, my father has died.’

Hester? He tried to conjure up a face. No luck.

Justin Haddock (or, as he prefers, Haydock) is eighty years old, and there are many faces he can no longer conjure up. For him, life is rich in small events, even phone calls. He values its everydayness, knowing he will not live for ever. To survive for a goodly number of years is all very well, thinks Justin. The vital thing is to maintain something of a social life; it is there that enjoyment lives. This is not so easy when one’s wife – as in Justin’s case – has died. Or did Janet go to Carlisle? Surely Carlisle had just been a silly joke. It had become stuck in his throat like one of his warfarin pills. And again, he wondered about the world in which he lived: and about the lives of those about him. There might be someone hiding in his house of whom he was unaware. Supposing Maude unwittingly brought in a villain, a thief … He stood gazing out of the window. He was fine. Must not fall over … He seeks for an understanding of why we live our lives as we do – an ample enough theme for any novel. One thing in particular he likes about his mother-in-law Maude is her rejection of what he termed ‘the Christian rigmarole’ – the idea that bodies locked into a coffin would be resurrected and face judgement somewhere, perhaps in a celestial version of the Old Bailey. How could anyone believe that in the twenty-first century? Yet because of his religious upbringing, his rejection of the ‘rigmarole’ produced in him a certain feeling of unease: an unease justified by events, and by an alien religion.

A long while ago, back in the 1960s, Justin made a name for himself with a televised two-parter play entitled, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Justin wrote the screenplay from a book of that title, and took over as its producer at the last moment when the original producer fell ill. It was a lucky opportunity which lifted his career. The Worm Forgives was the story of a man who had served in World War Two and afterwards deliberately chooses the harsh life of a small farmer, to be close to the natural things he thinks most important. Carthorses and all that. And a beautiful woman who had been a Land Army Girl. This production marked the beginning of Justin’s comparative fame. That fame is long behind him. Now he is adjusting to obscurity as well as decrepitude. Old Headington is a real place. It is a stony suburb of some antiquity within the embrace of the city of Oxford, where forgotten things belong. Most of the characters in this story are fictitious. They are not real. Nor am I Justin Haydock; but Justin’s pains and uncertainties are real enough – all a part of experience. If you are fortunate enough to live that long. Only in your eighties do you realize how beautiful the world is. Or parts of it.

Justin was proceeding slowly along the Croft, an ancient walkway situated beside a high and venerable wall which runs from one side of Old Headington to the other. He encountered a thin man with a lined tanned face. It was Jack Hughes, unmistakable in that yellow jacket, the fellow who had applied for the job of gardener and then decided against it. He was leading his small black dog on a length of string. He put out an arm and stopped Justin. The sleeves of the jacket shot up almost to the elbow, revealing a tattooed arm and a red fist. He asked how old Justin was. Justin told him. ‘Nice dog you have there.’

‘You and that woman with you made fun of me,’ Hughes said. ‘Don’t you have no sense of feeling?’

‘I’m sorry, it was just a joke. We were not making fun of you.’

Hughes lowered his arm. ‘Talkin’ French at me …’

‘Speaking a word or two of French is not in itself an indication of a lack of feeling.’

Hughes still looked threatening. Nor did the dog look particularly friendly. ‘Yes, you was makin’ fun. I don’t like being made fun of. I would beat you up if you wasn’t so old. You made fun of me just because I’m poor and down on me luck. I’ve had a rotten life. It’s all I can do to keep myself together. I got no friends I can trust, apart from this here dog.’

In an attempt to mollify, Justin said, ‘I like your dog.’

‘It don’t like you.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

Hughes shot Justin a glare of hatred, hunching up his shoulders to deliver the glare. ‘I don’t s’pose you are. Why should you be? My mother died the day I was born. Cold and waxen. Cold and waxen she was. I can never get it out of my mind. I go to church. I pray. But always there’s that death of my ma in my mind. It was so unfair. An aunt looked after me. Kind enough, religious. It’s like something lodged in my mind.’

Justin bit his bottom lip. ‘Look, I’m sorry, Mr Hughes. Please accept my apologies if we offended you, but I must get on.’

‘Do you read your Bible, may I enquire?’

‘Of course not. I have no religion.’

‘That’s Oxford for yuh! You could learn som’ing. Take Ezekiel.’ Hughes reined in his dog and struck a pose to declaim, ‘“Also out of the mist thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man—”’

‘Fine, thanks, great stuff, but I must be off. I have to go to the bank.’

Hughes seemed not to have heard. He continued his quotation, with gestures. ‘“And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings.” It’s going to be like that and I’ll be glad of it!’

‘It’s nonsense, man. Ezekiel must have been raving mad, face up to the fact.’

Hughes stuck his face close to Justin’s. The dog sniffed his trouser leg. ‘I served my country. I was in the Falklands War. What does this rotten country care about me? It’s like I got a plum stone stuck in the back of my throat.’

‘Sorry, I must get on.’ He saw to his relief that a man and a woman had entered the Croft and were approaching. He knew them.

‘I’m uneducated.’ Hughes was shouting now. ‘I know that. Dirt poor. I can twig you despise me. P’raps you’re right. But you can’t help being what you are, can you, now?’

‘Well, that’s debatable.’

‘How do you mean, debatable? I’m telling you—’

Maurice and his wife Judith were close now. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Mr Hughes. I need to speak to—’ Justin turned swiftly and, calling to Maurice, said, ‘Oh, the very man, I need to have a word with you …’ Thus he escaped from a fellow he was beginning to think was probably mad and dangerous. But Hughes still had something else he wanted to say. ‘Oi, Reg!’ he called. ‘I hear as you wrote a book once.’

Justin looked back, exasperated. ‘No, never, you are thinking of my friend, Tony Kenny. He has written many books.’

Hughes lapsed from an aggressive stance into something more abject. ‘I thought about writing a book once. My life would make a good novel.’

‘Come on,’ said Maurice to Justin. He ventured to take Justin’s arm. They hurried on.

‘You look a bit shaken,’ said Judith, ‘I don’t wonder. What a horrid man. How on earth did you get to know him?’

‘I’ve just had to listen to a quotation from Ezekiel.’

‘Yes, come and have a sit down, Justin. A cup of coffee,’ said Maurice. ‘Ezekiel is a real visionary, isn’t he?’

Rowlandson, that was their name. Pillars of the church, he remembered. And, like Hughes, dotty about Ezekiel! He took a quick look back down the Croft before they turned the corner. Hughes was still standing there in his ill-fitting jacket, looking at the backs of Justin and his friends. One hand remained raised, as if he had forgotten it. The Rowlandsons lived nearby, in The Court, a grand house towards the end of the Croft. Justin was glad to sink on to their sofa. Maurice assumed his friend had been about to be attacked. Justin said that Hughes was unbalanced. But he had told Justin that he was too old to be hit, or words to that effect; Justin laughed as he admitted it, though indeed he did not find it particularly amusing. ‘I can’t help feeling sorry for the fellow. Well, not exactly sorry … He said he was a regular churchgoer.’

Judith entered with a coffee tray in time to catch this last remark. ‘You’re not religious, are you, Justin? At least, we never see you in church.’

He said that as a boy he had prayed silently and constantly throughout the day. He then regarded himself as almost a saint, and certainly praying afforded some comfort. Only when he was older and looked back on an unhappy boyhood, did he see he had not been religious but neurotic. He smiled at Judith apologetically. ‘Nowadays, I’m neither religious nor neurotic.’

‘You would find a great deal of strength in Jesus,’ said Maurice, kindly.

‘He died for our sins, I understand,’ said Justin. ‘Rather presumptuous, I always thought.’ Silence fell as they drank their coffee.

As Justin was leaving, Judith thrust a small book into his hand. ‘It’s the Book of Ezekiel, with charming pictures done by a Mr Heath Robertson. I think it may be a comfort for you, dear Mr Justin.’

One of Justin’s lady friends, Mrs Wendy Townsend, drove him to the Manor Hospital for an appointment with his cardiologist. ‘It’s not so warm today, Justin, sweetie. You should have worn your scarf.’ He had a feeling Wendy was slightly moving in on him since Kate was away so much.

‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’

‘And you are still taking your furosemide like a good boy?’

‘Of course. I love it. And the other stuff Dr Reid put me on.’

‘The spironolactone.’

‘Yes. Exactly. Spironolactone. Pretty name, isn’t it?’ Professor Kenneth Fellows, the cardiologist, did not keep them waiting for long. He ushered them into his consulting room and made sure they were comfortable.

‘You’re looking better than when we last met, Mr Haydock. I want you to have an ultrasound scan, just so that we can check your kidneys. Nothing to worry about. We want to see that all’s well below, and that the prostate is not too enlarged. Are you sleeping any better now?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Good. And do I see you are losing a bit of weight?’

‘I’m losing bodhisattvas.’

Wendy Townsend said, ‘We have suppers with plenty of vegetables. No pork pies these days! We’re doing very well. I tell Justin that he should be eating sensibly but he mustn’t starve.’

‘That’s excellent. And asparagus is just coming in.’

‘I love asparagus.’ She told the consultant how she had been up early the previous Sunday and driven to Gray’s Farm. She got there just after nine, when there were no more than five people picking the asparagus; but by the time she left before ten the field was crowded with people. So she invited Justin to supper, she said, and they enjoyed fresh asparagus served with a fried egg on top. Justin liked it that way. When she was a little girl, the family had grown asparagus in their back garden. Her father had been a well-known accountant. Cocking her ear on one side, she enquired, ‘Mr John Townsend? No? … Well, never mind.’

Justin knew Wendy was talking too much. Part of the moving-in-on-him business. He showed his embarrassment by staring fixedly at the floor, hands clasped. The professor nodded. ‘Well, good to see you both, and keep taking the warfarin regularly, Mr Haydock. The secretary will give you a date for your next blood test.’ He filled in the requisite form and handed it to Justin.

In the car on the way home, Justin said, ‘I can’t believe how much blood they have extracted from me over the last month.’

‘They only take a tiny amount, love,’ Wendy said, patting his knee. He reflected that his knee was among his most valuable possessions.

Wendy stopped the car by Justin’s front door. He turned his face to hers and they kissed before he climbed out. He would have been embarrassed not to do so, knowing she expected it. Leaving and entering cars were major difficulties. He had little control over his legs, particularly with regard to lifting them. The birds sang under the street lamps. He found the front door unlocked. Either his mind must be going or Maude had returned. He was glad to be back in No. 29. The builders were not there. The house was quiet but oddly unwelcoming.

‘Anyone there?’ he asked. He thought there was someone in the front room. He went to look. No one was present, but he remained disturbed.

‘You’re there, are you?’ came Maude’s voice.

‘Maude? Hello? Like a cup of tea or a coffee?’ A prolonged silence. Then came her voice. ‘Tea, please.’

In the kitchen, Justin brewed two cups of tea. The tea bag was one of Marks & Spencer’s extra-strong teas. He carried the tea into the living room, placing his Carlisle mug on a mat before sitting down in his favourite armchair and calling Maude. But had someone just looked through the doorway and then swiftly withdrawn his head? He got up and went to look in the hall. No one was there. He could hear nothing. ‘Old age,’ he told himself. ‘Going bloody daft.’ He scanned the printout Professor Fellows had given him in the consulting room. His INR was 1.4. He was to take 3 mg of warfarin every evening at six. He immediately fell into sleep; it was indeed a steep fall. He became asleep without warning. When he roused, his tea was barely lukewarm. He had the impression that someone or something had been standing over him. He dismissed the idea. Justin sat where he was, leaning back, relishing his lethargy, missing Kate.

‘You’re awake at last!’ He was startled. Maude was sitting by the door.

‘How long was I asleep?’ he asked.

‘Justin, I must tell you something.’ She spoke in a low grave voice. ‘I resolved to tell no one, but someone ought to know, in case a crime has been committed.’

He stared at her. She was certainly pale and worried. When he asked her what the matter was, again she paused. ‘Let me get you another cup of tea – that one’s stone cold.’

‘No thanks, Maude. What’s up?’

Then she spoke. She had gone round to the summerhouse for her lesson in Muslim ethics as usual. She admitted for the first time that these sessions were held in the Fitzgeralds’ summerhouse, where the Fitzgeralds had given shelter to a refugee. ‘She was not there. Of course I was surprised. There was a note on her side table.’ Maude fiddled in her jacket pocket, to produce a sheet of lined paper, possibly torn from a notebook. Without speaking, she handed it over to Justin. The note simply read:

I must leave here. Thank you. Blessings.

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