The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

He shook his head, dislodging nothing. He had parked beside Metoz cathedral. It was several centuries old, but built of a coarse yellow stone that made it, now prematurely floodlit in the early evening, look like a Victorian copy of an earlier model.

The ground fell steeply at the other end of the square. Stone steps led down to a narrow street, all wall on one side and on the other prim little drab narrow façades closing all their shutters against the overwhelming statement of the cathedral.

Across one of the façades, a sign said, ‘Hotel des Invalides’.

‘Krankenhaus,’ Charteris said.

He pulled his suitcase out of the boot of the Banshee and dragged himself over to the hotel, walking like a warrior coming across a desert, a pilot walking over a runway after a mission. He emphasised the tragedy of it slightly, even grunting as he walked. The other cars parked in the square were a shabby bunch. Removing his gaze from his own egotistical landscapes, he saw this part of the cathedral square had been bought up as a used car lot. There were prices in francs painted to one side of each windscreen, as if denoting the worth of the driver rather than the vehicle.

The Hotel des Invalides had a brass handle to its door. Charteris dragged it down and stepped into the hall, into unmitigated shadow. A bell buzzed and burned insatiably until he closed the door behind him. He walked up the corridor, and only with that motion did the hall take on existence. There was a pot plant dying here beside an enormous piece of furniture – or it could be an over-elaborate doorway into a separate part of the establishment. On the walls, enormous pictures of blue-clad men being blown up among scattering sandbags. A small dense black square figure emerged at the end of the passage. He drew near and saw it had permed hair and was a woman, not young, not old, smiling.

‘Haben Sie eirt Zimmer? Ein persortn, eine Nacht?’

‘Jahr, jahr. Mil eine Dusche oder ohne?’

‘Ohne.’

‘Zimmer Nummer Zwanzig, Monsieur.’

German. The lingua franca of Europe.

The madame called for a dark-haired girl, who came hurrying and smiling with the key to room twenty. She led Charteris up three flights of stairs, the first flight marble, the second and third wooden, the third uncarpeted. Each landing was adorned with large pictures of Frenchmen dying or conquering Germans in the first world war.

‘This is where it all began,’ he said to the back of the girl.

She paused and looked down at him. ‘Je ne comprends pas, M’sieur.’

No windows had been opened for a long while. The air smelt of all the bottled lives that had suffered here. Constriction, miserliness, conservation over all. He saw the red limbs leaping again as if for joy within the bucketing autostrada cars. If there were only the two alternatives, he preferred the leaping death to the desiccating life. He knew how greatly he dreaded both, how his fantasy life shuttled between them. One more deadly mission: blast Peking, or spend ten years in the hotel in Metoz.

He was panting on the threshold of Zimmer Twenty. By opening his mouth, he did so without the girl hearing him. She was – he was getting to that age when he could no longer tell – eighteen, twenty, twenty-two? Pretty enough.

Motioning to her to stay, Charteris crossed to the first of two tall windows. He worked at the bar until it gave way and the two halves swung into the room.

Great drop on this, the back of the hotel. In the street below, two kids with a white dog on a lead. They looked up at him, becoming merely two faces with fat arms and hands. Thalidomites. He could not shut away the images of ruin and deformity.

Buildings the other side of the alley. A woman moving in a room, just discerned through curtains. A waste site, two cats stalking each other among litter. A dry canal bed, full of waste and old cans. Wasn’t there also a crushed automobile? A notice scrawled large on a ruined wall: NEUTRAL FRANCE THE ONLY FRANCE. Certainly, they had managed to preserve their neutrality to the bitter end; the French experience in the two previous world wars had encouraged that. Beyond the wall, a tree-lined street far wider than necessary, and the Prefecture. One policeman visible.

Turning back, Charteris cast a perfunctory eye over the furnishings of the room. They were all horrible. The bed was specially designed for chastity and early rising.

‘Combien?’

The girl told him. Two thousand six hundred and fifty francs. He had to have the figure repeated. His French was rusty and he was not used to the French government’s recent devaluation.

‘I’ll take it. Are you from Metoz?’

‘I’m Italian.’

Pleasure rose in him, a sudden feeling of gratitude that not all good things had been eroded. In this rotten stuffy room, it was as if he breathed again the air of the mountains.

‘I’ve been living in Italy since the war, right down in Catanzaro,’ he told her in Italian.

She smiled. ‘I am from the south, from Calabria, from a little village in the mountains that you won’t have heard of.’

‘Tell me. I might have done. I was doing NUNSACS work down there. I got about.’

She told him the name of the village and he had not heard of it. They laughed.

‘But I have not heard of NUNSACS,’ she said. ‘It is a Calabrian town? No?’

He laughed again, chiefly for the pleasure of doing it and seeing its effect on her. ‘NUNSACS is a New United Nations organisation for settling and if possible rehabilitating war victims. We have several large encampments down along the Ionian Sea.’

The girl was not listening to what he said. ‘You speak Italian well but you aren’t Italian. Are you German?’

‘I’m Montenegrin – a Jugoslav. Haven’t been home since I was a boy. Now I’m driving over to England.’

As he spoke, he heard Madame calling impatiently. The girl moved towards the door, smiled at him – a sweet and shadowy smile that seemed to explain her existence – and was gone.

Charteris put his case down on the table under the window. He stood looking out for a long while at the dry canal bed, the detritus in it making it look like an archaeological dig that had uncovered remains of an earlier industrial civilisation.

Madame was working in the bar when he went down. Several of the little tables in the room were occupied. He could tell at a glance they were all local people. The room was large and dispiriting, the big dark wood bar on one side being dwarfed and somehow divorced from the functions it was supposed to serve. A television set flickered in one corner, most of those present contriving to sit and drink so that they kept an eye on it, as if it were an enemy or at least an uncertain friend. The only exceptions to this were two old men at a table set apart, who talked industriously, resting their wrists on the table but using their hands to emphasise points in the conversation. One of these men, who grew a tiny puff of beard under his lower lip, soon revealed himself as M’sieur.

Behind M’sieur’s table, and set in one corner by a radiator, was a bigger table, a solemn table, spread with various articles of secretarial and other use. This was Madame’s table, and to this she retired to work with some figures when she was not serving her customers. Tied to the radiator was a large and mangy young dog, who whined at intervals and flopped continually into new positions, as though the floor had been painted with anti-dog powder. Madame occasionally spoke mildly to it, but her interests were clearly elsewhere.

All this Charteris took in as he sat at a table against the wall, sipping a pernod, waiting for the girl to appear. He saw these people as victims of an unworkable capitalistic system dying on its feet. The girl came after some while from an errand in the back regions, and he motioned her over to his table.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Angelina.’

‘Mine’s Charteris. That’s what I call myself. It’s an English name. I’d like to take you out for a meal.’

‘I don’t leave here till late – ten o’clock.’

‘Then you don’t sleep here?’

Some of the softness went out of her face as caution, even craftiness, overcame her, so that momentarily he thought, she’s just another lay, but there will be endless complications to it in this set-up, you can bet! She said, ‘Can you buy some cigarettes or something? I know they’re watching me.’

He shrugged. She walked across to the bar. Charteris watched the movement of her legs, the action of her buttocks, trying to estimate whether her knickers would be clean or not. He was a fastidious man. Angelina fetched down a packet of cigarettes, put them on a tray, and carried them across to him. He took them and paid without a word. All the while, the M’sieur’s eyes were on him.

Charteris forced himself to smoke one of the cigarettes. They were vile. Despite her neutrality in the Acid Head War, France had suffered from shortages like everyone else. Charteris was pampered, with illegal access to NUNSACS cigars, which he enjoyed.

He looked at the television. Faces swam in the green light, talking too fast for him to follow. There was some nonsense about a cycling champion, a protracted item about a military parade and inspection, shots of international film stars dining in Paris, something about a murder hunt somewhere. Not a mention of the two continents full of nut cases who no longer knew where reality began or ended. The French carried their neutrality into every facet of their lives.

When he had finished his pernod, he went over and paid Madame at her table and walked out in the square.

It was night, night in its early stages when the clouds still carried hints of daylight through the upper air. The floodlighting was gaining on the cathedral, chopping it into alternate vertical sections of void and glitter, so that it looked like a cage for some gigantic prehistoric bird. Beyond the cage, the traffic on the motorway snarled untiringly.

He went and sat in his car and smoked a cigar to remove the taste of the cigarette, although sitting in the Banshee when it was still made him oddly uneasy. He thought about Angelina and whether he wanted her, decided on the whole he did not. He wanted English girls. He had never even known one but, since his earliest days, he had longed for all things English, as another man he knew yearned for anything Chinese. He had dropped his Montenegrin name to christen himself with the surname of his favourite English writer.

About the present state of England, he imagined he had no illusions. When the Acid Head War broke out between the US and China, Russia had come in on the Communist side. Canada and Australia had aligned themselves with America, and Britain – perhaps still nourishing dreams of a grander past – had backed into the war in such a way as to offend her allies while at the same time involving most of the other European nations, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia amongst them – and France always excluded. By an irony, Britain had been the first country to suffer the PCA Bomb – the Psycho-Chemical Aerosols that spread hallucinatory mental states across the nation. As a NUNSACS official, Charteris was being posted to work in Britain on rehabilitation work; as a NUNSACS official, he knew the terrifying disorder he would find there. He had no qualms about it.

But first there was this evening to be got through … He had said that so often to himself. Life was so short, one treasured it so intensely, and yet it was also full of desolating boredom. The acid head victims all ever the world had no problems with boredom; their madnesses precluded it; they were always well occupied with terror or joy, whichever their inner promptings led them to; that was why one envied the victims one spent one’s life trying to save. The victims were never tired of themselves.

The cigar tasted good, extending its mildness all round him like a mist. Now he put it out and climbed from the car. He knew of only two ways to pass the evening before it was time to sleep; he could eat or he could find sexual companionship. Sex, he thought, the mysticism of materialism. It was true. He sometimes needed desperately the sense of a female life impinging on his with its unexplored avenues and possibilities, so stale, so explored, were his own few reactions. Back to his mind again came the riotous movements of the autostrada victims, fornicating with death.

On his way towards a lighted restaurant on the far side of the square, he saw another method by which to structure the congealing time of the French evening. The little cinema was showing a film called SEX ET BANG-BANG, forbidden to anyone under sixteen. He glanced up at the ill-painted poster, showing a near-naked blonde with an ugly shadow like a moustache across her face, and muttered, ‘Starring Petula Roualt as Al Capone,’ as he passed.

As he ate in the restaurant, he thought about Angelina and madness and war and neutrality; it seemed to him they were all products of different time-senses. Perhaps there were no human emotions, only a series of different synchronicity microstructures, so that one ‘had time for’ one thing or another. He suddenly stopped eating. He saw the world – Europe, that is, precious, hated Europe that was his stage – purely as a fabrication of time, no matter involved. Matter was an hallucinatory experience, merely a slow-motion perceptual experience of certain time/emotion nodes passing through the brain. No, that the brain seized on in turn as it moved round the perceptual web it had spun, would spin, from childhood on. Metoz, that he apparently perceived so clearly through all his senses, was there only because all his senses had reached a certain dynamic synchronicity in their obscure journey about the biochemical web. Tomorrow, responding to some obscure circadian rhythm, they would achieve another relationship, and he would appear to move on. Matter was an abstraction of the time syndrome, much as the television had enabled Charteris to deduce bicycle races and military parades which held, for him, even less substance than the flickering screen. Matter was hallucination.

Charteris sat unmoving. If it were so, then clearly he was not at this restaurant table. Clearly there was no plate of cooling veal before him. Clearly Metoz did not exist. The autostrada was a projection of temporal confluences within him, perhaps a riverine dualogue of his entire life. France? Earth? Where was he? What was he?

Terrible though the answer was, it seemed unassailable. The man he called Charteris was merely another manifestation of a time/emotion node with no more reality than the restaurant or the autostrada. Only the perceptual web itself was ‘real’. ‘He’ was the web in which Charteris. Metoz, tortured Europe, the stricken continents of Asia and America, could have their being, their doubtful being. He was God. …

Someone was speaking to him. Dimly, distantly, he became aware of a waiter asking if he could take his plate away. So the waiter must be the Dark One, trying to disrupt his Kingdom. He waved the man off, saying something vaguely – much later, he realised he had spoken in Serbian, his native tongue, which he never used.

The restaurant was closing. Flinging some francs down on the table, he staggered out into the night, and slowly came to himself in the open air.

He was shaking from the strength and terror of his vision. As he rested against a rotting stone wall, its texture patterning his fingers, he heard the cathedral clock begin to chime and counted automatically. It was ten o’clock by whatever time-level they used here. He had passed two hours in some sort of trance.

In the camp outside Catenzaro, NUNSACS housed ten thousand men and women. Most of them were Russian, most had been brought from one small district of the USSR. Charteris had got his job on the rehabilitation staff by virtue of his fluent Russian, which was in many respects almost identical with his native tongue.

The ten thousand caused little trouble. Almost all of them were confined within the tiny republics of their own psyches. The PCA Bombs had been ideal weapons. The psychedelic drugs used by both sides were tasteless, odourless, colourless, and hence virtually undetectable. They were cheaply made. They were equally effective whether inhaled, drunk, or filtered through the pores of the skin. They were enormously potent. The after-effects, dependent on size of dose, could last a lifetime.

So the ten thousand crawled about the camp, smiling, laughing, scowling, whispering, as bemused with themselves and their fellows as they had been directly after the bombing. Some recovered. Others over the months revealed depressing character changes.

The drugs passed through the human system unimpaired in strength. Human wastes had to be rigorously collected – in itself a considerable undertaking among people no longer responsible for their own actions – and subjected to rigorous processing before the complex psychochemical molecules could be broken down. Inevitably, some of the NUNSACS staff picked up the contagion.

And I, thought Charteris, I with that sad and lovely Natrina …

I am going psychedelic. That vision must have come from the drug.

He had moved some way towards the Hotel des Invalides, dragging his fingers across the rough faces of the buildings as if to convince himself that matter was still matter. When Angelina came up to him, he scarcely recognised her.

‘You were waiting for me,’ she said accusingly. ‘You are deliberately waylaying me. You’d better go to your room before Madame locks up.’

‘I – I may be ill! You must help me.’

‘Speak Italian. I told you, I don’t understand German.’

‘Help me, Angelina. I must be ill.’

‘You were well enough before.’

‘I swear … I had a vision. I can’t face my room. I don’t want to be alone. Let me come back to your room!’

‘Oh no! You must think I am a fool, Signor!’

He pulled himself together.

‘Look, I’m ill, I think. Come and sit in my car with me for ten minutes. I need to get my strength back. If you don’t trust me, I’ll smoke a cigar all the time. You never knew a man kiss a pretty girl with a cigar in his mouth, did you?’

They sat in the car, she beside him looking at him rather anxiously. Charteris could see her eyes gleam in the thick orange light – the very hue of time congealed! – bouncing off the walls of the cathedral. He sucked the rich sharp smoke down into his being, trying to fumigate it against the terrible visions of his psyche.

‘I’m going back to Italy soon,’ she said. ‘Now the war’s over, I may work in Milano. My uncle writes that it’s booming there again now. Is that so?’

‘Booming.’ A very curious word. Not blooming, not booing. Booming.

‘Really, I’m not Italian. Not by ancestry. Everyone in our village is descended from Albanians. When the Turks invaded Albania five centuries ago, many Albanians fled in ships across to the south of Italy to start life anew. The old customs were preserved from generation to generation. Did you hear of such a thing in Catenzaro?’

‘No.’ In Catenzaro he had heard the legends and phobias of the Caucasus, chopped and distorted by the kaleidoscopes of hallucination. It was a Slav, and not a Latin, purgatory of alienation.

‘As a little girl, I was bilingual. We spoke Squiptar in the home and Italian everywhere else. Now I can hardly remember one word of Squiptar! My uncles have all forgotten too. Only my old aunt, who is also called Angelina, remembers. It’s sad, isn’t it, not to recall the language of your childhood? Like an exile?’

‘Oh, shut up! To hell with it!’

By that, she was reassured. Perhaps she believed that a man who took so little care to please could not want to rape her. Perhaps she was right. While Charteris nursed his head and tried to understand what was inside it, she chattered on a new tack.

‘I’ll go back to Milano in the autumn, in September when it’s not so hot. They’re not good Catholics here. Are you a good Catholic? The French priests – ugh, I don’t like them, the way they look at you! Sometimes I hardly seem to believe any more … Do you believe in God, Signor?’

He turned and looked painfully at her orange eyes, trying to see what she was really saying. She was a terrible bore, this girl.

‘If you are really interested, I believe we each have Gods within us, and we must follow those.’

‘That’s stupid! Those gods would just be reflections of ourselves and we should be indulging in egotism.’

He was surprised by her answer. Neither his Italian nor his theology was good enough for him to reply as he would have liked. He said briefly, ‘And your god – he is just an externalisation of egotism. Better to keep it inside!’

‘What terrible, wicked blasphemy for a Catholic to utter!’

‘You little idiot, I’m no Catholic! I’m a Communist. I’ve never seen any sign of your God marching about the world.’

‘Then you are indeed sick!’

Laughing angrily, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him. As she struggled, he shouted, ‘Let’s make a little investigation!’

She brought her skull forward and struck him on the nose. His head seemed to turn cathedral-size on the instant, flood-lit with pain. He hardly realised she had broken from his grip and was running across the square, leaving the Banshee’s passenger door swinging open.

After a minute or two, Charteris locked the car door, climbed out, and made his way across to the hotel. The door was locked; Madame would be in bed, dreaming dreams of locked chests. Looking through the window into the bar, he saw that M’sieur still sat at his special table, drinking wine with a crony. Madame’s wretched dog sprawled by the radiator, still restlessly changing its position. Charteris tapped on the window.

After a minute or two, M’sieur unlocked the door from inside and appeared in his shirtsleeves. He stroked his tiny puff of beard and nodded to himself, as if something significant had been confirmed.

‘You were fortunate I was still up, M’sieur. Madame my wife does not like to be disturbed when once she has locked up the premises. My friend and I were just fighting some of our old campaigns before bed.’

‘Perhaps I have been doing the same thing.’

He went up to his room. It was filled with noise. As he walked over to the window and looked out, he saw that a lock on the dry canal had been opened. Now it was full of rushing water, coursing over the car body and other rubbish, slowly moving them downstream. All the long uncomfortable night, Charteris slept uneasily to the noise of the purging water.

In the morning, he rose early, drank Madame’s first indifferent coffee of the day, and paid his bill. His head was clear, but the world seemed less substantial than it had been. Carting his bag out to the car, he dressed himself in his lifesuit, inflated it, strapped himself in, and drove round the cathedral onto the motorway, which was already roaring with traffic. He headed towards the coast, leaving Metoz behind at a gradually increasing speed.

Multi-Value Motorway

She too was obsessed with pelting images. Phil Brasher, her husband, was growing more and more violent with Charteris, as if he knew the power was passing from him to the foreigner. Charteris had the certainty Phil lacked, the gestalt. Certainty, youth, handsome. He was himself. Also, perhaps, a saint. Also other people. But clearly a bit hipped, a heppo. Two weeks here, and he had spoken and the drugged Loughborough crowds had listened to him in a way they never did to her husband. She could not understand his message, but then she had not been sprayed. She understood his power.

The pelting images caught him sometimes naked.

Nerves on edge. Army Burton, played lead guitar, passed through her mind, saying, ‘We are going to have a crusade.’ Lamp posts flickered by, long trees, a prison gate, furry organs. She could not listen to the two men. As they walked over the withdrawn meaning of the wet and broken pavement, the hurtling traffic almost tore at their elbows. That other vision, too, held her near screaming pitch; she kept hearing the squeal of lorry wheels as it crashed into her husband’s body, could see it so clear she knew by its nameboards it was travelling from Glasgow down to Naples. Over and over again it hit him and he fell backwards, disintegrating, quite washing away his discussion, savage discussion of multi-value logic, with Charteris. Also, she was troubled because she thought she saw a dog scuttle by wearing a red and black tie. Bombardment of images. They stood in a web of alternatives.