Before turning in, Billing took a stroll alone in the garden. He wished to see the old bath which had played such a vital part in his victory over Dwyer. The black water which half-filled the receptacle lay still, without a ripple. It reflected the moon, full that evening and shining overhead, sublimely free of the rooftops and chimney pots.
His heart seemed to open as he gazed up at it. Not just a dead world but a symbol trailing its mythic connotations across the sky. Beautiful, inspiring. He recalled some of the strange associations the doomed people in his book had conjured up: the moon, for instance, as a female spirit, as the Anima in men’s minds.
The book of dream journeyings made mention of the baboons at the great temple of Borabadur who perform a gesture of adoration when the moon rises. All savages fear the dark, some believing the day to be God’s creation and the night the product of the devil, of Satan. So the moon is a heavenly promise. Its crescent is symbolic allusion to the power of the feminine principle. ‘Diana, huntress, chaste and fair …’ There is a timeless quality about her, suggesting wisdom. When the Anima is encountered in dream wanderings, it is like a visitation from the moon among the thickets of the night; and then the Anima often manifests herself as a young woman, to offer guidance or temptation. Her appearance is frequently a sign that a period of confusion and trouble – the night journeying of the psyche – will give way to the daylight of individuation. Anima dreams can be memorably vivid, lingering on in retrospect as tokens of hope long after other dreams have faded with break of day. All this and more, for the books on Gladys’s shelves were ample in discussion. Billing hardly knew whether or not to believe them, but the fact was that he wished to do so, for obscure reasons, and so he remained entertained if not convinced.
As he walked by the bath with these and similar thoughts in his mind, his gaze on the sky, the moon, at the extreme end of his walk before he turned about, appeared to become entangled in the bare branches of an ash tree.
So greatly did this sight move Billing that he stumbled back inside the house, as if he could bear no more loveliness.
He thought of that loveliness again after he and Rose had made love, after he turned the light off and darkness filled their little room. In his present complacent state, he realised, he had had no dreams he remembered for some while. Nothing, except the nightmare provoked by George Dwyer’s flung brick. It was as though the moon had not shone on his sleep.
The pale moonlight was already at their window panes. Humbling himself, Billing carefully formed words like a prayer in his mind: ‘Oh, Anima, I believe in you. Visit me, speak to me, in my dreams tonight, fair creature.’
On waking, he knew the Anima was alive in his mind, almost as tangible as Rose’s head on the adjacent pillow. She was there, leaving only as his eyes opened. She spoke to him.
What she said was: ‘Your parents loved you all along.’
Billing rose in a daze and went into the bathroom. He stared at himself in the mirror, feeling his face. Letting water run into the bath, he went and sat in it naked. He sighed, shook his head, marvelled.
It was the truth. Something had responded to his entreaties. He never doubted for one moment that she – fickle though she might be – had visited him, had spoken – and of course had spoken truth. Undeniable Anima, undeniable truth.
Lying back in the water gasping, he clasped the soap like a heart to his chest. Yes, yes, she had spoken! He was in communication with himself. The psyche had made a true dream journeying and returned from it with treasure. His parents loved him.
His father loved him. All these years, the ghost of his father, of that falling ladder, had not been laid. In his childish mind, he had seen himself as either the subject or the object of the accident, as responsible for it, or as purposely injured by it. He had held the belief that his father died to punish him. Somehow the poisonous error had always lodged within him like a wound.
Of course that was nonsense. His father loved him. His Anima declared it.
Again the ladder was falling. Again he heard his father’s hoarse cry for help. Then the smash of ladder and body against the concrete walk. He was running towards the smash, crying for his father not to be hurt. His father made no reply – his father who loved him.
It was all clear. He could recall it all for the first time. The fearful blankness had gone.
And his mother came running, pushing him away in her fright, clasping his father’s body.
He remembered it all. The weeping that followed. Weeks of weeping. His helplessness. His guilt. The funeral to which his mother thought it best not to allow him to go. His boyish agony over that: as if he had been turned away from the very grave. And all the time she and his father had loved him. Their dear son, their dear only son.
The joy could no longer be withstood. With a great shout, he jumped out of the bath and rushed into the bedroom, naked and dripping, to the sleeping Rose.
‘A miracle, a miracle!’ he shouted. ‘Rose, wake up.’
She sat up and threw back the bedclothes.
‘Come in,’ she said, ‘you daft bugger.’
About the Author
Brian Aldiss OBE was a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. Born in Norfolk in 1925, after leaving the army Aldiss worked as a bookseller which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work, the story ‘Criminal Record’, appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Passing away in 2017, over the course of his life Aldiss wrote nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories – becoming one of the pre-eminent science fiction writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Also by Brian Aldiss and published by HarperCollins
When the Feast is Finished
Finches of Mars
Report on Probability A
The Malacia Tapestry
The Male Response
Walcot
The Primal Urge
Brothers of the Head
Enemies of the System
Comfort Zone
Eighty Minute Hour
Jocasta: Wife and Mother
The Brightfount Diaries
Super-State
A Chinese Perspective
Life in the West
Forgotten Life
Remembrance Day
Somewhere East of Life
The Hand-Reared Boy
A Soldier Erect
A Rude Awakening
Dracula Unbound
Frankenstein Unbound
Moreau’s Other Island