Strangeness by Thomas M. Disch & Charles Naylor

Author:Thomas M. Disch & Charles Naylor [Disch, Thomas M. & Naylor, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0380414341
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1978-11-30T21:00:00+00:00

Heat pumped down the valley from the secret fastnesses of Flat Crags, from the dry fall at Hell Ghyll; up in the high gullies, the rock sang with it. Further down, the hanging Langdale oakwoods were sapless, submissive—heat had them by the throat. A sense of immanence filled the unlovely living room of the Lyall cottage, reeked on the stairs, fingered out from the bedroom like ectoplasm from a medium. Lyall took to staring for hours at the crack in the wall, hands clasped between his knees. His wife was quiet and tense. Her despairing cry in the dark still hung between them.

Into this strange stasis or prostration, like a low, insistent voice, a thousand small accidents introduced themselves: the insect bite, the hand slipping on the can-opener, a loss of balance on the stair—cuts, rashes, saucepans dropped, items lost or broken; a constant, ludicrous, nerve-wracking communication from the realm of random incidence. For half a day the kitchen taps refused to give water of any sort, then leaked a slow, rusty liquor even when turned off; four slates fell from the roof in an afternoon of motionless air; Lyall’s wife suddenly became allergic to the sun, and walked about disfigured.

Lyall’s response to these events was divided equally between irritation and apathy. He brooded. Several times he took me aside as if to broach some mutually embarrassing subject, and on each occasion failed. I couldn’t help him: the raging contempt of his Cambridge days, applied with as much rigor to his own motives as to those of others, was by now a memory. Out in one of the barns, cutting a piece of zinc to mend the roof, he said, “Don’t you ever regret your childhood, Egerton?”

I didn’t think I did; I didn’t think childhood meant much after a certain age. I had to shout this over the screech of the hacksaw. He watched my lips for a while, like a botanist with an interesting but fairly common specimen, then stopped working.

“In Bath, you know,” he said, brushing his lank hair off his face, “it was all so clear-cut. A sort of model of the future, with neat sharp edges: English, Classics, Cambridge; and after that, God knows what—the Foreign Service, if the old dears had a thought in their heads.” He laughed bitterly. “I had to play the piano.” He held up the hand with the dirty ball of bandage on the thumb. “With this.” He looked disgusted for a moment, but when he turned away, his eyes were watering.

“I was really rather good at it.”

This picture of the young Lyall, shut in some faded Regency drawing room with a piano (his limbs protruding amazed and raw from the tubular worsted shorts and red blazer his maiden ladies would doubtless have insisted upon), was ludicrous enough. He compounded it by yearning, “We never deserve the future, Egerton. They never tell us what it’s going to be like.”

When I tried to laugh him out of it, he went angrily off with, “You might show a bit of interest in someone else’s problems.

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