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    Life in the West
    Life in the West
    Life in the West
    Ebook424 pages6 hours

    Life in the West

    By Brian W. Aldiss

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    First in the acclaimed Squire Quartet—from the author of “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” the basis for the movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
     
    Thomas C. Squire, creator of the hit documentary series Frankenstein Among the Arts, one-time secret agent and founder of the Society for Popular aesthetics, is attending an international media symposium in Sicily. It is here that he becomes involved with lovely, but calculating Selina Ajdina. Alongside the drama of the conference is the story of Squire’s private life—the tale of his infidelity, the horrifying circumstances surrounding his father's death, and the threatened future of his ancestral home in England.
     
    Winner of two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Brian W. Aldiss challenged readers’ minds for over fifty years with literate, thought-provoking, and inventive science fiction.
     
    “A complex, thoughtful and beguiling story by one of our best novelists.” —William Boyd
     
    This ebook includes an introduction by the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781497608382
    Author

    Brian W. Aldiss

    Brian W. Aldiss was born in Norfolk, England, in 1925. Over a long and distinguished writing career, he published award‑winning science fiction (two Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award); bestselling popular fiction, including the three‑volume Horatio Stubbs saga and the four‑volume the Squire Quartet; experimental fiction such as Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head; and many other iconic and pioneering works, including the Helliconia Trilogy. He edited many successful anthologies and published groundbreaking nonfiction, including a magisterial history of science fiction (Billion Year Spree, later revised and expanded as Trillion Year Spree). Among his many short stories, perhaps the most famous was “Super‑Toys Last All Summer Long,” which was adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick and produced and directed after Kubrick’s death by Steven Spielberg as A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Brian W. Aldiss passed away in 2017 at the age of 92. 

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    3/5

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    • 2/5
      Aldiss is, of course, better known for science fiction - in fact, I'll wager that, for most people, he's only known as the author of the Helliconia trilogy, or that story (Supertoys Last All Summer Long) which inspired Kubrick / Spielberg's A.I. But he's what many people would consider a 'serious' author, too. In fact, it wouldn't be unfair to say that, at times, he's a bit too serious. This is a novel of ideas. More than that, it's a novel of ideas written in, and set in, the late 1970s, when men were Male Chauvinist Pigs (complete with capitals), and Marxist academics seemed to be on the point of overthrowing the established order. It's also in parts an English Country House novel; a spy thriller; a satire on the workings of what we were only beginning to call the Media; a spirited defence of science fiction; a David Lodge-style academic conference novel; a tale of thwarted and misdirected passion; and a semi-autobiographical family history.Which is, to be frank, over-egging the pudding somewhat. Aldiss has some interesting ideas, and several which have not stood the test of time at all - in the end, it is these which make the book such tough going at times; there is no conscious irony in the earnest way in which Marxism is put forward as a real alternative, particularly in academic circles. None of the characters forsee that the marketplace might be the future for academia, and as a result, it seems somewhat stilted and one-sided. In addition, Aldiss seems determined to present all his characters as unappealing - more than simply flawed, Tom Squire is unpleasant and plain stupid at times; his wife Tess is by turns hopelessly wet and teeth-grindingly obtuse; and all of Tom's friends fall out with him at some point, despite the fact that they must all have come across his obnoxious - in truth, merely irritating, but it's presented as obnoxious - behaviour many times before. Tom has, of course - this is 1979 - a younger mistress who worships the ground he walks on, oblivious to any of his flaws. It just doesn't quite hang together.And yet, I read it to the end. Aldiss is a stylist, and the story has a clever, elegant structure. And I also desparately wanted Tom Squire to meet his sticky end. In a way, he does, of course, but I think we're meant to see it as a triumphant climax. Anthony Burgess chose this as one of his 99 best novels in English since 1939; I'm afraid I struggled to see why. Perhaps if I had read it in pre-Thatcherite times; perhaps if I had mixed in Marxist academia it would all seem more real. Not yet a period piece, in the end it's a curiosity. File under 'read again in 30 years' - it will surely be a historical novel by then.

    Book preview

    Life in the West - Brian W. Aldiss

    Life in the West

    The Squire Quartet: Book One

    Brian W. Aldiss

    Open Road logo

    Life in the West is dedicated to the other

    Distinguisehed Persons

    Chen, David, Iris, Maysie, and Michael

    by no means forgetting Felix, Elena, Derek, and Janet

    to show them what one of their number was up to

    before we sampled life in the East

    and walked the Great Wall together

    B.W.A.

    Introduction to the E-Reads Edition

    The first volume of the Squire quartet, brisk and chatty. Published on 6th March 1980—as a loving card from my wife reminds me, still tucked into her copy of the book.

    We were living on a quiet North Oxford street and our younger children were seriously into education. We were always moving house, depending on our fortunes.

    Meanwhile, Tom Squire is in Ermalpa in Sicily, for a conference on the popular arts, dubbed ‘the arts of no refinement’. He claims that the pop art of one generation becomes the classic of the next. Homer was, in his day, the Bronze Age equivalent of the TV soap opera. Squire is for the new, insisting we rise up to change.

    Later, back at Pippet Hall, Squire is filming and being filmed. The traditional pretty girl in a swimsuit is with him. She remarks that We are all symbols to each other as well as real people.

    This is the period of the Cold War. Much discussion takes place. Squire and his wife quarrel bitterly. Over Christmas, Squire’s mother, Patricia Squire, dies.  

    I had been attending a conference in Palermo, a conference with a strong Communist flavour, and not particularly enjoyable. It was over. I was standing on the dockside, looking north over the sea. This story began to build up in my mind, the conference, the players from various countries, where the economic blocs seemed irreconcilable. And meanwhile, Squire’s difficulties at home where he and his wife were indeed symbols to each other, as the girl in the swimsuit had said.

    When I had returned home to that house in Charlbury Road, I launched into the novel.  My mother died during that period; that melancholy event is recorded when Tom Squire’s mother dies, just before Christmas. You have to go on, whatever happens. Maybe the Army taught me that. Or maybe I had known it even as a small boy.

    Anyhow, Squire has to press on. Trouble in Jugoslavia, where he is almost killed. separation from Teresa, his wife. More human experience, more meditation. More striving to penetrate the thickets.

    He recalls a note given him in Ermalpa, in which Vasili Rugorsky, the friendly Russian, proposes they visit Nonreale cathedral and Squire pays the bus fare. Our government keeps us poor as saints. 

    They get to Nonreale and enter the cathedral. Rugorsky praises the elaborate artwork. Squire is unimpressed. Without God, I can see no meaning in anything, says Rugorsky. He asks, Do you ever feel that you have come to the end of everything in your life?

    So the questioning goes on, the faltering marriage, the symbols, the seasons, life itself...

    Brian W. Aldiss

    2012

    I walked beside a sea aflame,

    An animal of land. The fire

    Of stars knocked at my earthbound frame;

    East grapples West, man maid, hope Fate;

    All oppositions emanate

    From constellations of desire.

    Burning below hair, flesh, and teeth,

    An image of the Bright One lies,

    A lantern hid in bone. Beneath

    That vision, teeth and hair begin

    Again; wolf grins to wolfish grin

    As smile I in my lover’s eyes.

    Too soon that love with false-bright hair

    Is dead: the house stands silent. I

    Fare forth across the world’s despair,

    Its muteness, oratory, and banners,

    To seek not truth but modern manners.

    The head must win what heart let die.

    Prelude

    Spring 1977

    A period in the history of the West known as the late nineteen-seventies. One of the milder inter-glacial periods, when textbooks describe the North European climate as ‘pleasantly cool and damp’.

    Over the European Economic Community, eight o’clock of a windy and rather chill spring evening. Television screens brighten everywhere, in flats, houses, and apartments stretching from Scapa Flow to the Gulf of Otranto. Hundreds of them, thousands, millions, the characteristic burning to ward off the terrors of ancient night. So characteristic that future historians will refer to this cultural epoch as the Rounded Rectangular. The global village enjoys its nightly catharsis of violence or Kultur.

    The light brightens. Music, and the sight of a savage tropical landscape. The peaks of mountains covered with rain forest stand out against a fast-moving sky. The forest also appears to move, crawling across the screen as if its trunks were a myriad legs. It sweeps beneath the viewer. A river is revealed, dark-flowing, hemmed with sand.

    As the viewpoint sinks, a long-boat is revealed, pulling in to one of the banks of the river. Six tourists climb ashore, gazing up at a towering and broken cliff face. From every cranny of the cliff, trees and creepers grow. At one point, tangled creepers hang down into the water.

    The viewpoint moves in to reveal the boatman in close-up. He is a lean and aged Dayak, with a polished brown countenance, a wrinkled forehead, and hollows at cheeks and temples. He rests his hand upon a no less worn wooden post which marks the start of the ascent up the cliff.

    Floating down, the viewpoint rests upon the Dayak’s arm and hand.

    On his wrist is an LC digital quartz timepiece and calculator. Its case, finished in gold and stainless steel, glints in the sunshine. With its perimeter punctuated by studs, it resembles momentarily, in the dazzle of its reflection, some armoured insect from a much earlier period of Earth’s history. But a slight move of the boatman’s wrist, and the six square ceaseless digits are revealed. They grow larger, writhe into red letters. The red letters come swimming forward to fill the screen, forming the legend:

    FRANKENSTEIN AMONG THE ARTS

    The party moves from the boat, trudging through the sand with their heads down. They climb the cliff by a winding path from which lizards scurry. Cloud shadow comes and goes. The tourists walk along a raised plank walk through dense primary forest, often having to brush creepers aside. The detached voice of Thomas Squire is heard.

    ‘We’re in some of the oldest jungle in the world, older than the jungles of the Amazon or the Congo. Successive Ice Ages, which caused so much change elsewhere, had no effect on this luxuriance. Listen to its rich silence — you can hear the murmur of antiquity. Transitory-seeming things like silences and pollen have proved themselves capable of enduring over millions of years.’

    As his voice lapses to allow the voice of the jungle to take over, another legend swims into view:

    Episode One:

    Eternal Ephemera

    The party of tourists continues deeper into the forest, emerging suddenly under a ravaged hillside. They pause; they are seen to be of mixed race, two Caucasian, the others Mongoloid; all are dressed similarly, male or female, in comfortable travelling clothes. They walk towards a strangely-shaped cave resembling a whale’s mouth. Stalactites and fallen stone about its rim reinforce this impression and give the appearance of teeth, broken but still functional. One by one, the party moves into the great mouth.

    ‘We are entering the limestone mountains of a part of Malaysia called the Tinjar National Park. Few tourists from the West ever visit here. These caves are dangerous. Not only do they shelter snakes, bats, and a spiteful variety of centipede, but there are concealed abysses on the cave floors, down which an unsuspecting traveller can drop, sometimes for hundreds of feet. Despite these dangers, when we enter here, we are coming into one of the most ancient homes of mankind.’

    From inside the whale’s mouth, the foliage outside appears pale and translucent, like spray off a sea. From a deep darkness into the light, bats begin to pour, more and more of them, flying like leaves in an October wind, ceaselessly.

    ‘Human beings, homo sapiens, lived in these caves 40,000 years BC, at a time when the last Ice Age had its grip on Europe, and the draughty caves of the Dordogne sheltered our remote forebears. In that long period of time, these bats have not changed in any way, as far as we know, while mankind has changed in so many remarkable ways that we often forget that we have also hardly changed at all.’

    The bats continue to pour out into the daylight, thousands upon thousands of them, and still no cease to their numbers. The rustle of their wings follows the viewpoint into the throat of the cave, which is uncertainly illuminated by a floodlight.

    ‘In terms of centuries, a human life is ephemeral. The things we do, the things we make, our alliances and enmities, are even more ephemeral. These paintings were executed one forgotten day thousands of centuries ago.’

    In the uncertain light, faces loom, bodies of men, animals, bright fish, plants, all in mysterious relationships and preserved under a glistening film of limestone. Then the light dies. Something can still be seen in the darkness; it is the liquid crystal display of the boatman’s watch, on which the seconds flit rapidly by.

    ‘These paintings were not intended to last. Perhaps they were intended to please or function — whatever that function was — just for a day. They are beyond taste. There is an old saying, it is De gustibus non est disputandum, meaning, It’s useless to discuss questions of taste; yet this series of programmes is designed to discover more about taste, and why and how taste changes.’

    Further in the cave, the light reveals pictures of two lizards, curving their bodies round bosses of rock. One lizard is green, one red.

    ‘Did the prehistoric painter prefer green to red? Some gentlemen prefer blondes, some black-haired beauties. There is always a reason for our preferences, sometimes an important reason. We may prefer Beethoven to Bert Bacharach; there may be a political reason why we like rock’n’roll more than Ruddigore. Are the reasons why a church moves us more than a warehouse purely religious? What makes us read one sort of book in preference to another, or flip from one TV channel to a practically identical one?’

    More lizards, and a strange creature that is a kind of man with a tail, or else an anthropomorphic lizard.

    ‘Nothing like this imaginative creature exists in the caves of Europe. Nor do we find in these paintings that emphasis on hunting which is so pervasive in the caves of Europe. It is almost as if a marked difference between the thought of the East and the West existed all those thousands of centuries ago, even as it exists today. Could the greater passivity of temperament in the East relate to the absence in this part of the world of larger animals of the hunt which were common throughout Europe? We can as yet hardly formulate such questions, never mind answering them. In the middle of the twentieth century, we still stand in the middle of unfathomed mystery.’

    Darkness, then light again, light moving into a larger cave, where stalactites and stalagmites come together in great folds, like closing teeth. One wall is covered with the outlines of human hands. The hands are all open, palms facing towards the spectator, hundreds of them, stretching up into the darkness, interspersed with strange squiggles reminiscent of intestines. The light moves slowly. The hands continue, palms glistening from their coating of limestone; countless hands, one gesture.

    ‘We don’t know what these hands mean or meant. They symbolize man — the prehensile fingers, the opposed digit. They reach out to us, as if in supplication. We cannot touch them.’

    He places his hand against one of the painted hands. His own palm glistens when he withdraws it.

    ‘Time and limestone intervene between us. I know nothing more poignant than this wall of hands.’

    The hands thin out at last. The wall becomes rougher. The light dims. Someone’s shoulder gets in the way. The music is sombre, romantic, cool, Borodin’s ‘Steppes of Central Asia’ strained through a synthesizer, with acoustics added. Crimson, such as hides behind eyelids, fills the screen; from it, a narrow corridor emerges, and large shattered stones which could have been brought here from outside.

    Bones lie in a recess, in the wall. Squire’s hand reaches down and lifts up a skull from which the bottom jaw has dropped away. The forehead gleams, shadows lie in the eye sockets.

    ‘We can admire the aesthetic qualities of this extremely functional object. However, we would be less appreciative if we knew this to be the skull of a brother who had died only last week. Why is that? Are there degrees of being dead? Perhaps there are even degrees of being alive — we all know that some people are more lively and alert than others. Perhaps the life force is less democratically distributed than we suppose.’

    A bright green beetle runs out of one of the eye sockets as Squire lowers the skull to the floor.

    ‘Let’s ask no more questions for the moment. I believe the answers to a lot of trivial-seeming questions to be profound, to concern politics, life and death, religion, and to lead directly to our imaginative perception of the world. A T-shirt advertising Coca-Cola holds a key to the wearer’s personality: we move from casual preference to the prevailing winds of the individual psyche.’

    The viewpoint swings. Now we are returning to the light of day. The members of the party are revealed as six blundering figures, their hands touching the walls for security. This is the throat of the whale, through which bats still whistle like a dark outgoing breath. A patch of daylight ahead is an undersea green.

    ‘We like to imagine that the men and women who lived and died here 40,000 years ago were haunted by symbols, taboos, superstitions, omens. Yet the same must be said of us today, although our lives in the twentieth century are fortified by elaborate cultural superstructures. Interplay between superstructure and individual is complex. Do we like China because it appears friendly, fear it because it is large, mistrust it because it is communist, or idealize it because it is remote? An individual must choose between cultural superstructures.’

    One of the party, a woman in jeans, has stumbled. She bends so that we see she has a badge pinned to her hip pocket. The legend on the badge reads, ‘Friends of the Earth’.

    ‘In the last two centuries, an infrastructure of man-made objects has proliferated. Mass-produced goods are everywhere, from badges to weapons of destruction, and we find it oddly difficult to pronounce upon them; their very plenty seems to ensnare judgement. ‘

    The speaker produces from his pocket a slender box of matches. The box is black, simply embossed with a gold head in an antique-style Chinese hat and the one word, ‘Mandarin’. The box slides open. Inside lie some twenty matches with white heads. They fill the screen, rough wooden shafts culminating in smooth bulbs.

    ‘This is a give-away packet of matches from my hotel in Singapore. The matches are wood, the box plastic. It is a neat and beautiful product, and totally beyond the technology of our fathers. It is worthless. Can we then call it — beautiful? Because it is worthless, is it valueless?’

    We are back in the mouth of the whale. The bats have all flown at last, the tourists have disappeared. The speaker is silent. There is no music. Just the ancient cave.

    A great column of limestone stands at the cave-mouth, moulded by the forces of water. Orchestral strings wake in startlement as two figures mysteriously appear on either side of the column. One of them — she moves forward, smiling — is a golden girl in a bikini, her blonde hair bouncing about her shoulders. She goes barefoot. The other figure remains unmoving. With his back to the light, we see him merely as a brutal silhouette. He rests one arm nonchalantly on the limestone, waiting.

    ‘These two are our Sex Symbol and our Dark Figure. They represent the two poles of life and death, and will be with us as we explore the familiar. They both loom large in our minds, as they do in the world, and they dominate how we feel about those questions of tone, form, smell, and colour which shape our preferences.’

    The caves are left behind. Sea glints through the trees. The viewpoint rises past mountain peaks remote in their encampments of cloud. Soon we are flying over the isle-spattered sea.

    ‘No part of the globe is more beautiful than South East Asia; nowhere can life be more pleasant than in Malaysia. The climate is tolerable, the food good, the scenery superb, and the people kind and friendly. What’s more, just south of Malaysia lies the most extraordinary city in the world — Singapore.’

    As we rush across the waters of the South China Sea, we can observe Squire for the first time. He is a tall sun-tanned man in his late forties, with grey in his thin crop of sandy hair. His is what is called a strong countenance, but there is possibly little outstanding about him. Nor does he dress obtrusively. He wears only a blue short-sleeved shirt, rather faded, shapeless cotton trousers, and a pair of sandals. His manner is cool but sociable as he speaks to camera.

    ‘In 1818, Mary Shelley published her novel, Frankenstein. It was something more than the Gothic novel it superficially resembled. It portrayed the scientist in a role we recognize today, or at least we did yesterday, as a man who strikes out for himself, discarding old authorities, caring little for the social consequences of his inventions. The result is a reign of confusion by the creature that Frankenstein, the scientist, has created. The welter of mass-produced goods which surrounds us can be described as Frankenstein’s legacy.’

    Singapore and its skyscrapers glitter beneath us. The river flashes a signal from the sun, then we are down.

    ‘This marvellous city, too, is part of the legacy. It is as much a technological product as a digital quartz watch.’

    A pleasant quayside, shaded by trees. The busy river beyond. In the background barges, boats, old buildings, a jumble of roofs, glittering high-rise structures beyond. In the foreground, a statue of a man gazing inland.

    ‘This is reputedly the spot where Sir Stamford Raffles first stepped ashore. It is decent and undoctrinaire of the Chinese to have left the statue in place when they took over from the old British colonial regime which created the city. But I find Singapore an enlightened place. Raffles landed here a year after Frankenstein was published, in 1819. He turned this island into one of the liveliest places on Earth. Just a few fishermen lived here when he landed. Now, in one of the cleanest and most prosperous of cities, there are two and a half million citizens. The principle of free trade which Raffles laid down is still observed. This is definitely a Chinese and Malayan and Indian city, not a Western one. They have our crazy worship of speed, but don’t share our veneration for open space, so they indulge neither in building sprawling suburbs, which are anti-city, nor in shooting men to the Moon; the Chinese in particular live happily in high densities, and the death rate is one of the world’s lowest.’

    We are moving into the business centre of the city. The shops and hotels are bright, and sparkle with electronic clutter in a rapture of newness. The streets are lined with trees and flowers; they shimmer with well-nourished automobiles.

    ‘Singapore trades with the world. It survives on the principles of hard work and strict discipline. There are fines for dropping litter, imposed immediately, fines for contravening strict laws of hygiene, and the press is censored, like the press throughout most of the world today. Some find the Prime Minister of this city state, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, autocratic, and exercise their consciences on behalf of his subjects. In my opinion, anyone conversant with the history of this part of the world must admire what Mr Lee and his energetic subjects have achieved.’

    He has stopped before an open-air food stall, and eats a sizzling satay from a stick. Beside him, the Sex Symbol appears and sinks two rows of white teeth into a similar skewer full of meat.

    ‘You can eat where you wish and not get ill from contaminated food. Good for trade.

    ‘We in the West no longer care so much for work and discipline. That is why places like Singapore represent the coming century, the twenty-first century, while the nations of Europe sink back towards the nineteenth. Singapore is winning the economic war, as work and discipline always do. Singapore plays globally something of the role played by London in the last century. I know which city I’d rather live in.

    ‘To my mind, Singapore is the dishiest workshop ever invented, where people are on the whole as happy and as handsome as people can ever be at our present stage of evolution. It is no utopia. What it is is a shining example of capitalism, unmatched in the communist world. It is a staggering work of man’s imagination. It is also the biggest mass-produced goodie in the history of the world. Whether or not you like it is a question — the sort of question we want to explore — a matter of taste.’

    We are crossing Merdeka Bridge, driving along the fast Nicholl Highway in dense traffic. The sun is going down. The city lies in front of us, suddenly insubstantial as sunset brightens behind it.

    1

    The International Congress

    Ermalpa, September 1978

    Two men were walking in Mediterranean sunlight only four blocks from their hotel.

    An observer following behind them would have learnt much from their backs. One was a comparatively small-built man, with thick heels on his shoes to compensate for a lack of height. He was thin almost to the point of being emaciated, so that, as he talked, which he did with a wealth of gesture, his shoulder blades could be seen moving beneath his jacket like two ferrets working back and forth in a cage.

    He wore a brown suit with a faint yellow stripe, a neat suit light enough in weight for the climate, but somewhat worn. It was shiny round the seat. It was an expressive suit, the jacket flapping slightly as its owner vigorously demonstrated a point, or looked up sharply laughing, to see if his companion was also enjoying the joke. This sideways glance would have enabled an observer to catch a glimpse of a thin yellowish cheek belonging to a man slightly on the shady side of forty, and a neat beard shot through with grey.

    The feature that announced the man in most companies, however, was his flow of copper hair. As if to compensate for the meagreness of his stature, the colourlessness of his cheek, his hair blazed. He wore it amply, down to his collar. In the sixties, it had trailed considerably further down his backbone. Now as then, it showed no white hairs.

    The hands, when they appeared, were small and sharp, more useful in debate than games. They were the chief illustrators of gesture, and scattered words rather than spreading them evenly.

    Their possessor was a Frenchman by the name of Jacques d’Exiteuil, the chairman of the conference.

    D’Exiteuil’s companion was taller and more solidly built than he, and stooped slightly, although he was at present walking briskly and with relish, smiling and nodding his head in a genial manner at d’Exiteuil’s remarks. The observer would not have seen a slight developing paunch, although he would certainly have noticed the bald spot below the crown of the head. The surrounding hair was decidedly sandy, with a crisp dry curl to it. The white hairs in it were no more plentiful than d’Exiteuil’s, though the latter was the younger of the two men by some eight or nine years.

    The taller man wore slacks of light brown colour and fashionable cut, with a neat Scandinavian canvas jacket patterned with vertical stripes of red, brown, and white. The jacket fitted smoothly across strong shoulders. This man also gesticulated as he spoke, but his gestures, like his walk, were looser than his companion’s and less precisely aimed. When he turned his head, a powerful countenance was revealed, tanned of cheek, with heavy lines — not necessarily misanthropic — running from nose to chin, bracketing a full, square mouth.

    He was guest of honour at the conference, and he signed his cheques Thomas Squire or, more impressively, Thomas C. Squire.

    Although the scene and the city were strange to them, neither Squire nor d’Exiteuil paid much attention to their surroundings, beyond stepping out of the way of the occasional more aggressive pedestrian who refused to move out of their path. They were discussing the state of the world, each from his own point of view. Both had strong and opposed beliefs, and blunted some of the force of what they had to say in order to proceed without undue argument.

    The first day’s business of the conference was about to start. The two men worked in different disciplines. D’Exiteuil was primarily an academic, with a good position in the Humanities Faculty of the Sainte Boeuve University in Paris. He and his wife Séverine d’Exiteuil had made several experimental films. Squire was a small landowner, a director of a London insurance firm, and an exponent of popular aesthetics. He had become something of a national hero in the late sixties, when he planned and executed the Hyde Park Pop Expo in London. For that spectacular event, he had received the CBE. His more recent television work had reinforced his success.

    The conference was d’Exiteuil’s brainchild.

    D’Exiteuil and Squire had known each other for many years. They corresponded irregularly and met occasionally — the previous New Year at Squire’s publisher’s home outside London, or at conferences or symposia, once in San Francisco, once in Stockholm, once in Poland, and twice in Paris.

    Though they were in some respects enemies, they shared close common interests. The Frenchman recognized in the Englishman knowledge and wit; the Englishman recognized in the Frenchman integrity and application. All these qualities both admired. Because they could also be useful to each other, they had discovered a way to talk to each other which seemed, over the years, to function effectively.

    The relationship, while not a friendship, had proved more durable than many friendships, and was valued by both men.

    When they came to the bottom of the side street down which they had been progressing, they reached an entry to the harbour. Before them stood a low double wall, in the middle of which had been planted bedding plants and cacti. The two men stood by the wall, looking across at a desolate area which stretched between them and the water; it was given over mainly to cracked concrete, grass, and dull square concrete buildings left over from Cubist paintings. An old lorry moved slowly among cranes. In the distance were warehouses, wharves, warning notices. Then the sea, or a section of it, tamed by a confining wall which terminated in a lighthouse. Beyond that wall lay the Mediterranean.

    ‘Looks promising,’ Squire said.

    ‘I don’t mind sitting on a beach with a book,’ d’Exiteuil said, ‘but I can’t bear going on or in the sea. Are you a yachtsman?’

    ‘Not really, but I did once sail right round Sicily with a couple of friends. I wouldn’t mind doing it again. Shall we go and stand at the water’s edge?’

    D’Exiteuil looked smartly at his wrist watch.

    ‘We’d better go back to the hotel. It is fourteen minutes to nine o’clock. You and I have to set a good international example, Tom. On the first day, if not later.’ His English was fluent and almost without accent.

    ‘As you say.’ A headland crowned with palm trees stretched out into the sea to one side of the harbour, and there a white sail could be seen.

    As they turned away, a boy ran up carrying newspapers. D’Exiteuil bought a copy and scanned the front page.

    ‘The Pope sends a message to the peoples of Poland.’ He ran a finger further down the page. ‘Scientists forecast 20,000 cool years ahead. The glaciers retreated to their present positions about 11,000 years ago, but now the cooling is beginning again. During the next 20,000 years, we can expect that considerable depths of ice will build up over the Northern Hemisphere. They could reach as far south as Milan. The cause is irregularities in the Earth’s orbit.’

    He looked up, grinning.

    ‘So says Oggi in Ermalpa. It means the end of England.’

    ‘Yes, and France. Not a political collapse but a geophysical one.’

    They walked briskly up a side street, where men in aprons were sweeping shop fronts, brushing water into the gutter. The first side street they had tried was entirely blocked by parked Fiats, beached like whales on either pavement as well as down the centre of the roadway. The street they were traversing held a mixture of offices, apartments, shops, and a restaurant or two. Outside one of the restaurants, men in shirt-sleeves were unloading containers of fish from a cart. They paused to allow the two visitors to pass.

    The top of the street formed an intersection with the broad Via Milano. The Via Milano divided its opposing traffic flows with narrow islands of green on which palm trees grew. Traffic was thick at this hour.

    A short distance along on the other side of the road, the Grand Hotel Marittimo faced them. It had a heavy façade of lichenous stone, with a high portico imitating a grander structure. It was set back only slightly from the uproar of the road. Despite its name, it offered its guests no glimpse of the sea from its old-fashioned bedroom windows. Last century, perhaps, it had stood where it could command a splendid view of the sailing ships in the harbour. Since then, upstart lanes of banks, offices and shops had come between it and the water.

    Above the entrance, a nylon banner hung. On it were the words:

    FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF INTERGRAPHIC CRITICISM

    Of the four doors of thick plate glass set inside its porch, only one opened. The two men bowed to each other and went through it.

    The heat, light, and noise of the outside were replaced by a melancholy coolness.

    The foyer of the Grand Hotel was extremely capacious. Its floors and balustrades gave an impression of marble, its reception desks of fumed oak. To either side, this effect tailed off into cloakrooms or petty chambers in which a man might wait for a mistress, or smoke a cigar, or pretend to write a letter. In one petty chamber stood a glass case offering Capodimonte pottery and other objects to the tourists’ gaze. A similar case (both with curly bronze feet, betraying their age) displayed a number of silk ties.

    Such subsidiary matters did not detract from the chief glory of the foyer, a centrally placed white marble of Paolo and Francesca in the Second Circle of Hell, by Canova. Squire had identified it as soon as he entered the hotel the previous evening, recalling involuntarily the volume of Dante’s Inferno with Doré illustrations, which his father had bought, and the line where Dante comments on the fate of these lovers:

    Alas! by what sweet thoughts, what fond desire,

    Must they at length to that ill pass have reached!

    When he had first read the passage, he had been too innocent to understand what the lovers had done to deserve such punishment. This morning at the hotel breakfast table, between pineapple juice and bacon and eggs, he had written a postcard to his daughters, referring to the statue jokingly as ‘two undressed people retreating from something rather nasty’. Whilst writing, he had averted his mind from the actual situation of Ann and Jane, who were in the care of his sister Deirdre in Blakeney.

    The postcard had come from a temporary stall set up on the threshold of the conference hall. The stall had extended itself this morning, and was staffed by smiling students, two girls, presumably from the faculty of Ermalpa University involved with the conference. Prominent on the bookstall among other titles were the English edition of Frankenstein Among the Arts, published by Webb Broadwell, and the new Italian translation of the same, Frankenstein a ‘laBellaScuola’ in its glowing orange jacket. Also on display was the American paperback edition of Squire’s earlier book, a collection of essays entitled Against Barbarism. It was published when television had still to make him famous, and had not achieved an Italian translation.

    Standing by the bookstall was a white board announcing that the television series had been captured on videotape and would be shown in its entirety over the four evenings of the conference, Wednesday to Saturday inclusive, at twenty-three hundred hours. In the small conference hall. No admission charge.

    Delegates were crowding round the stall, which did brisk business. A number of other delegates stood about the main foyer, in groups or singly. The sight of them was enough to remind d’Exiteuil and Squire, if they needed reminding, that they were fragments of a greater whole, and they moved away from each other without a word of parting.

    The polyglot d’Exiteuil appeared to know everyone here. He could have been observed at breakfast, making a courteous round of the tables, welcoming his guests. Squire, who spoke no Italian, knew few people. He moved politely among the delegates, smiling and nodding.

    ‘Ah, Signor Squire. Good morning.’

    Squire looked at the slender man who confronted him. He was fairly typical of what Squire regarded as the medium-young generation of Italians: born after the Second World War ended, but torn by the divisiveness of the peace. He had dark liquid eyes, which darted nervously about as if the foyer was full of enemies. He had a trim beard, kept his hair oiled and combed,

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