Comfort Zone

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?