The Stains – Robert Aickman’s Swansong

By Christopher Barker

First published in ‘Supernatural Tales’

A key is required to unlock Robert Aickman’s last short story The Stains. This most enigmatic and depressing of tales, published posthumously in the collection Night Voices has usually been perceived as a somewhat inscrutable Chinese puzzle, even by the author’s own high standards of inscrutability. However, it might also prove to be the most revealing since it appears to possess many autobiographical components. To avoid bush-beating, the ‘key’ is this: the tale features a grieving, unreliable alcoholic, recounted in the third person by Robert Aickman – possibly a grieving, unreliable alcoholic himself.

Aickman is complicit in allowing his central character Stephen to tell lies. Very subtle hints are given early on but as the tale progresses this suspicion is confirmed. An early mention occurs on page 41 of the story (all page numbers refer to the collection Night Voices):

“He had heard of people waking thirsty in the night, but to himself he could not remember it ever happening before. He had never been like that.”

As a stand-alone comment the “He had never been like that” seems quite innocuous, but as the tale unfolds references to alcohol occur with much greater frequency, eventually enabling us to reinterpret that statement as the self-distancing criticism of an alcoholic in denial. He had not been like that, but others presumably had e.g. alcoholics. Heavy alcohol consumption causes dehydration; waking up with a raging thirst would be a commonplace occurrence for an alcoholic. So why should Stephen seek to distance himself from this experience unless he was in denial?

In the middle of the tale Stephen and Nell stay briefly in Stephen’s lichen-infested London flat, where Stephen starts admitting to his alcohol habit:

“ ‘I could do with a drink,’ said Stephen, even though he had been drinking virtually the whole afternoon, without Thread even noticing, or without sparing the time to acknowledge that he had noticed.” (Page 54-55)

“He provided Nell with a token drink also. At first she had seemed to be completely new to liquor. Stephen had always found life black without it, but his need for it had become more habitual during Elizabeth’s illness.” (Page 55)

His drinking becomes such a problem that his employer decides to retire him early. A colleague comments:

“Good God, Stephen, you’re looking like death warmed up. I should go home to the wife. You don’t want to pass out in this place.” (Page 58)

Thus we can establish that not only is Stephen an alcoholic but that he is also in denial. This is important because it makes him an unreliable witness. It provides the key by which we can reassess Stephen’s presentation of other seemingly contradictory or perplexing events. Additionally, as an alcoholic, we may reasonable assume that Stephen may suffer from that classic symptom of alcoholic dementia – delirium tremens. This may therefore be a liar who suffers from hallucination. Starting from this perspective, The Stains presents a particularly interesting challenge to the reader and the critic. Not only is Stephen unreliable but he may also be suffering from visual and auditory hallucination.

Clearly Stephen has had an unpleasant time of things. We must not be unsympathetic. He has spent several years working in a very stressful senior government post, obtaining an OBE for his efforts, before returning home each evening to a cold modern flat, a childless marriage, and a terminally ill wife. The lichen in the tale that causes the titular staining is clearly a metaphor for the spiritual, sexual and emotional malaise that Stephen suffers from. No wonder that the poor fellow turns to drink.

It is never made clear how Stephen’s car had been originally damaged. Given his alcoholism, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that he has been in a car accident, perhaps whilst drunk. The death of his wife and the possible trauma of this accident may have prompted his trip up north where he goes to convalesce with his brother Harewood.

Until the final pages I wondered whether Harewood really existed. I speculated that he might have simply been a hallucination or the schizophrenic alter-ego of Stephen. Besides, the name Harewood seems supernaturally ambiguous: “hares” and “woods” being synonymous with witchcraft and the occult. And then there is the fact that a great many of Aickman’s most memorable tales feature disturbing incidents in woods e.g. Bind Your Hair, The Next Glade, Into The Wood, The Houses Of The Russians. (Indeed, ‘hair’ – should we wish to play word games with ‘hare’ - also features in many stories e.g. Bind Your Hair, Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale.) Also there is the issue of the rare limited edition book on lichen that has been erroneously sent to Stephen instead of Harewood, a book that Stephen later claims Harewood would never have bought because of the expense.

“Meant for my brother,” Stephen tells Nell. “It’s always happening. People don’t seem to know there’s a difference between us.” (Page 49)

As Stephen has zero interest in lichen and lives hundreds of miles away from Harewood, this mixing-up of the brothers by an unknown bookseller seems completely inexplicable. Might the two brothers therefore be one and the same person? Clearly Aickman wanted to imply this possibility. However, in the final scene Harewood officiates at Stephen’s funeral, so this must effectively rule out the notion that he might not exist (assuming of course that Stephen ever existed).

But we are entitled to question the existence of Nell. The clue to her intangibility might be in Stephen’s mention of a “knell” when talking about the demise of the fairground (page 60). Stephen makes reference to the word knell (as in ‘death knell’) and she, Nell, repeats the word, only pronouncing it as “Nell”, her own name. This is typically beguiling Aickman. He frequently employed oddly suggestive nomenclature for his characters e.g. Mr Superbus and Myrrah in The Visiting Star.

The sudden breakdown and disappearance of Harewood’s wife Harriet – a sister-in-law who ‘baited’ and unsettled Stephen - at precisely the same time that Stephen seduces the imaginary Nell leads us to suspect that she (Harriet) may herself been Stephen’s lover, voluntarily or otherwise, and that the incident drove them both in to madness. Thereafter Stephen may have become so de-stabilized and confused that he reassembled this incident into the strange relationship that he subsequently enjoyed with Nell. After all, the only tangible facts to be drawn from the story are these: a grieving, alcoholic widower stays with his brother- and sister-in-law; the sister-in-law has a nervous breakdown and is admitted to hospital; the widower goes mad himself and dies. Everything else is conjecture, including Nell’s existence.

Stephen’s sexual frustration is obvious from the outset. He has had long-standing issues with Harriet as mentioned above. After all, what does “baiting” suggest? Teasing and entrapment ordinarily, but in Aickman’s world, sexual ambiguity is never far away. Additionally Stephen’s relationship with his late wife Elizabeth was sexless, as evidenced by references to their childlessness and her long illness. Stephen also sexualises Doreen, Harewood’s cook, and suggests that Harewood – an otherwise respectable man-of-the-cloth - is having an affair with her, perhaps for no other reason than because Stephen wants it to be true (or perhaps to assuage his own guilt at having seduced Harewood’s wife).

“ ‘You will be rather more dependant upon Doreen for a time,’ added Stephen. ‘I suppose that may well be,’ said Harewood. Stephen fancied that his brother almost smiled.” (Page 38)

Continuing with sexual issues, Stephen is immediately attracted to Nell, whom he seduces quickly. The words he uses to describe their love-making are selfish and predatory rather than romantic or affectionate. For example:

“Nell was lying on her front. Seemingly expectant and resistant at the same time, she clung like a clam. Her body was as brown as a pale chestnut, but it was a strong and well-made body. Her short hair was wavy rather than curly. Stephen was ravished by the line of it on her strong neck. He was ravished by her relaxed shoulder blade. He was ravished by her perfect waist and thighs. He was ravished by her youth and youthful smell.

‘Please turn over,’ he said, after tugging at her intermittently, and not every effectively.” (Page 31)

Note that Aickman uses the word ‘ravished’ four times, even though he seeks to invert the ravishment e.g. Stephen being ravished by Nell. In several of his stories an odd perspective on rape is expressed, almost as though Aickman’s male characters believe that women wish to be forcefully seduced. For example in Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale, the narrator says: ‘One can see why so many men are drawn to rape and such.’ (Page 176.)

Contrasting with this forcefulness is the timid ineffectuality of many of Aickman’s male characters: in Ringing The Changes, the elderly husband is powerless to prevent his wife being ravished by dead men; and in the above quotation from The Stains, Stephen tugs ‘intermittently’ at Nell ‘not very effectively’.

Aickman draws attention to Nell’s “well-made” and “perfect…..youthful” body, as though it might be a dream image of an unreal girl. Stephen also comments that his brother would do well to locate a “youngster” for sexual escapades like he has. Yet Stephen is old, close enough to sixty-five to qualify for early retirement, and his brother is even older. Nell’s age is not mentioned but she must surely be in her late teens or early twenties. Are these age disparities simply lustful yearnings on the part of a ‘dirty old man’ or do they represent an emotional response to Stephen’s confrontation with illness and death?

There is one ambiguously disturbing scene, superficially brimming with dark erotic symbolism, but which may in fact be little more than an inverted “Carry-On” style joke. Stephen chances across Harewood slumbering in a chair and mumbling to himself.

“Harewood was murmuring contentedly. ‘Turn over. No, right over. You can trust me’; then, almost ecstatically, almost like a juvenile, ‘It’s beautiful. Oh, it’s beautiful.’” (Page 41.)

A first reading would initially appear to suggest that Harewood is fantasising about sex. Clearly Aickman wishes to suggest this given the previous comments about Stephen’s own sexual liberation and Harewood’s perceived attraction to Doreen the domestic. Possibly anal sex is alluded to (“Turn over…..you can trust me”) - unless of course Harewood is fantasising about Stephen’s own recent sexual encounter with Nell, in which Stephen turned Nell over because she was lying on her front. But how could this be unless Harewood and Stephen were one and the same person? Harewood isn’t meant to know about Nell, so how could he dream about her?

Aickman deliberately puts dark thoughts into one’s mind in precisely the same manner employed by the playwright Harold Pinter. But are we as readers justified in reading anything carnal into this particular scene? After all, the words spoken may be entirely innocent of all sexual allusion. For all his “sly, morbid eroticism” (a quote from Barry Humphries in his curious bookdealer-bashing introduction to this collection), Aickman is seldom gratuitous on matters sexual. Ambiguous and suggestive certainly, but rarely gratuitous. Additionally the devoutly ecclesiastic Harewood appears to be a model of probity; he is also an authority on lichens. If one were to place the above utterance in the context of a strange dream monologue between Harewood and some specimens of lichen under his personal examination – a conversation overheard perhaps by a sexually-frustrated brother - then the sequence might assume a wholly innocent guise.

The use of the word “it” in Harewood’s speech must refer to a definite object e.g. lichen or a part of the anatomy. The darker possibility is of course that upon turning over an anonymous woman in his dreams Harewood ecstatically glimpses a growth of lichen instead of a sexual organ. Certainly this could underline the themes of eroticism, obsession and death that run throughout the story.

Although both interpretations are possible, Stephen’s unreliability and his sexual obsession contrast unfavourably with Harewood’s more distinguished bearing, suggesting that the we should side with Harewood and give credence to the innocent ‘plant growth’ explanation. But in doing so we must then consider whether or not Aickman would intentionally slip in a double entendre Carry-On / Benny Hill style joke into one of his stories since the words spoken by Harewood undoubtedly do possess double meaning.

Elsewhere in other tales Aickman has made similar jokes: calling a mysterious and enigmatic character “Mr Bermuda”, for example, an obvious reference to the Bermuda Triangle. Even in The Stains we have a very hammy Dr Who joke:

“ ‘I trust you’re not sickening, Stephen. It would be a bad moment. Dr Gopalachari’s on holiday. Perhaps I ought to warn you.’

‘Dr Who?’

‘No, not Dr Who. Dr Gopalachari.’ ”

(Page 21)

Unfortunately for those unimaginative folk who like all ambiguities cleared up – and these are usually the sort of people who don’t like Aickman’s stories anyway – there is no definitive interpretation. There are arguments to be made for both explanations. Aickman has hedged his bets and allowed his readers to interpret the story as they wish e.g. darkly or comically.

The Stains is one of Aickman’s most unremittingly bleak and pessimistic stories. Even when something positive happens, for example Stephen’s love affair with Nell, it is depicted in an unpleasant and nihilistic fashion. Instead of showering Nell with warm joyous love their erotic coupling is cold and deathlike. Stephen disregards Nell’s unwillingness to visit London. He also initiates her into his own misery by pushing alcohol upon her. He demonstrates an equally selfish disinterest in his brother’s anguish at Harriet’s breakdown. Grief and self-misery have blinded Stephen to all but his own polarised interests. Of significance to this is the fact that Nell’s father was himself blinded by the lichen. Throughout the tale lichen serves as a metaphor for illness, death and the cloying nature of long-term relationships. There is also much sexual imagery, all of it disturbing, none of it romantic. The story ends with Stephen dying next to the spring where he first seduced Nell. The spring itself symbolises many things e.g. youth, lust and sustenance. We can reasonably assume that Stephen dies of an alcohol-related illness: we know that he has been drinking very heavily and that no other illness is referred to. Nell has by this stage vanished, if she ever existed.

***

We should now turn the spotlight away from Stephen and onto Robert Aickman himself. Tellingly, Stephen’s dead wife is called Elizabeth. Given the themes of the tale, and the old chestnut that writers write from experience, it would not be unreasonable to assume that in this tale – written shortly before the author’s death – Aickman may have been commenting obliquely upon his relationship with Elizabeth Jane Howard. Aickman probably drew from previous experiences before: in Ringing The Changes, a youthful newlywed wife experiences a sinister sexual encounter whilst on her honeymoon, which is probably an ambiguous comment upon his parent’s own experiences. Aickman’s twenty-three year old mother had confessed to her son that her wedding night experiences - allegedly never repeated - with his fifty-three year old father had been ‘worse than I could ever have believed possible’ (refer The Attempted Rescue).

Aickman famously lamented the break-up of his relationship with Howard and referred to it frequently both in interview and autobiography. It seems pretty clear that he wasn’t able to move on with his life emotionally, exemplified by the themes of loneliness and isolation that dominated his later work. Howard probably resented this as evidenced by her uncomplimentary and dismissive comments about Aickman and his ghost stories in a recent autobiography. Her irritation with Aickman suggests that she resented his obsessive mourning for the termination of their relationship. And if in The Stains he sought to blame Howard for his own misery then little wonder that she took umbrage.

It is known that Aickman claimed to have written his most successful stories in a dreamy trance-like state, transposing his ideas quickly down onto paper. If true this would support the notion that many of his dark imaginings were complex glimpses into his own subconscious psyche. These dreams probably resulted in The Stains. Somewhere in the murky depths of the tale there may be not-so-thinly-veiled references to Elizabeth Howard. Only Howard would be in a position to comment authoritatively on this, and this seems very unlikely to happen. Neither should it: Howard is perfectly entitled to keep the matter private, irrespective of how confessional Aickman may have been.

Yet Aickman is for me at his weakest when trying to describe the mechanics of a relationship. He seems to have no real understanding of how a family or a marriage works. Aickman analyses the wrong things in naïve detail, as though he is guessing what really happens in a happy or well-functioning family. His occasionally arrogant and distant narrational tone – that which has been branded ‘mandarin’ by many - becomes distinctly pompous when he broaches this specific subject. Additionally, there are precious few sparks of genuine warmth or empathy in any of his fictional relationships: all of his characters are out for what they can get, sexually or materialistically, and they invariably exist in solitary existential environments, conspicuously aloof from the family unit in which they are supposed to reside. In contrast, when Aickman writes about single people - or when he describes a family from a child’s perspective - he usually succeeds in creating a far more authentic atmosphere. It is only when he tries to assume a tone of patronising familial authority – e.g. in telling us how couples and families operate - that his literary limitations are revealed.

Aickman wasn’t capable of leading a ‘normal’ happy family life. His priorities were unconventional. “I had tried to be what Robert wanted,” wrote Howard in her autobiography, “I’d tried, but I couldn’t keep it up.” Perhaps Aickman had tried to establish absurd relationship protocols in real life, just as he did in his prose.

Aickman grew up in a very odd household, as was ably depicted in his autobiography The Attempted Rescue. As mentioned earlier, there was a thirty year age gap between mother and father, and he (Robert) had been the result of the alleged only sexual encounter between his parents. His father was also very fond of alcohol and dominated the family home with his selfish and eccentric habits. In particular Aickman recalls how he and his mother would sit around for hours waiting while his father got ready to take them out for day trips, with the result that they invariably arrived just as things were closing. Echoes of these miseries exist in Aickman’s fiction: in The Fetch, the young narrator recalls childhood memories in which his father drunk excessively to escape the horror of a family haunting; in The Inner Room, a family day out is gloomily marred by the late start of the sojourn and a car breakdown. Even a visit to a toyshop is portrayed in a painfully despondent manner. Aickman also claimed that as a child he lay terrified in bed feigning sleep as his father stood ominously over him for long periods of time, breathing alcohol fumes across the bed. Is it any wonder that he had such a strange perspective on family life?

Aickman’s close relationships were unsuccessful: his first wife left him to join a convent, and the love of his life Elizabeth Howard subsequently rejected him. Additionally Aickman had no children of his own. He also fell out with his best friend Tom Rolt, with whom he had set up the Waterways Association. So whilst Aickman had some devoted friends (usually paid women friends who would cook, type and clean for him!), he seems to have been singularly unsuccessful in cultivating important long-lasting relationships.

We know that Howard resented Aickman’s morbid obsession with her after the ending of their affair. But where should our sympathies lie?

Howard’s criticism of Aickman in her autobiography may have been a reaction to the ever-burgeoning popularity of Aickman as an important proponent of the ghost story. Perhaps she decided that sooner or later their relationship would be analysed by inquisitive Aickman disciples and that they might form unjust opinions. Additionally it might even be possible that the six ghost stories that comprised We Are For The Dark were all written (or at least conceived) by Aickman, and that Howard only agreed to put her name to the book so as to repay a favour to her partner (Aickman had been instrumental in getting Howard’s first novel published; they separated shortly after both books had been published)). For these reasons she might have wanted to put the record straight especially if she saw something unpleasantly personal in The Stains.

Aickman complained of being haunted by noise and voices. These he believed were real ghosts. Yet auditory hallucinations are common in alcoholics, as are delirium tremens. Many of his tales feature memorable scenes in which alcohol or the effects of alcohol are vividly depicted (No Time Is Passing, Ringing The Changes, The Fetch). Additionally, Aickman died of prostrate cancer, a disease sometimes associated with alcohol. Could we not argue that he was – like Stephen in The Stains - simply in disingenuous denial of various truisms, including his own addictions?

It may be that The Stains was a personal confession, much as M.R. James’ own A Vignette is said to be. Both tales are curiously self-revelatory and both were written shortly before the deaths of the two respective authors. Aickman would because of his wide reading in the ghost story genre have been aware of the autobiographical nature of the James tale. Perhaps he set out to emulate it?

Elsewhere Aickman seems to have paid homage to other famous ghost stories and writers (whilst nevertheless inserting trademark Aickmanisms to make each tale his own). Bind Her Hair has strong Machenesque overtones e.g. erotic witchcraft and atavism on a muddy mountainside. The Cicerones is very strongly Jamesian. And in The Stains, the insidious lichen echoes the memorable William Hope Hodgson tale A Voice In The Night. But whereas Hodgson simply had his lichen a one-dimensional physical horror, Aickman casts it as an ambiguous entity that then serves as a metaphor for more troubling psychological issues. In contrast, Aickman’s early tale The Trains (1953) appears to have influenced Robert Bloch’s story Psycho (1959), what with its random entrapment of victims in a remote house, its sexually-charged transvestism and its slasher-style horror. Elsewhere, Daphne du Maurier seems to have borrowed Aickman’s small red-hooded girl-creature from Bind Her Hair in her own tale Don’t Look Now, written a decade or so later. These hugely successful films created several startling images which Aickman should probably be credited for.

Aickman launched his story-writing career with a volume that was jointly-authored with Elizabeth Howard, featuring his debut tale The Trains. He ended it with the similarly-titled story The Stains - which coincidentally features a character called Elizabeth. In The Stains the central character is driven into drink and then death by the termination of a relationship with an Elizabeth. These real life parallels could be viewed as a bitter-sweet parting shot. For that reason I believe the tale to be unkind. It was an unpleasant note for Aickman to end his career on. After all, it was not Howard’s fault that Aickman failed to cultivate further meaningful relationships. His failure to do so is surely his own responsibility. His inability to get over Howard appears to have led to much retrospective dwelling of a deeply morbid nature; like Miss Haversham in Dicken’s Great Expectations, only with a suitably Aickmanesque twist.

Despite having enjoyed a successful career Aickman seems to have departed from this world a deeply unhappy person. Anyone who declines medical treatment effectively registers a preference for death over life. Even the fact that he saved our canals from dereliction seems to have given him little solace in his final years. His writing seems to have provided little joy either: I was once told that after his death several unopened boxes of new books were discovered in his flat, gratis copies of his own work sent to him by publishers for passing on to friends and family. Instead of being thus distributed in life they were in death sent to a local bookshop, to be disposed of cheaply and insignificantly, perhaps even being consigned to the ignominy of a ‘bargain bin’.

The Stains is a harrowing account of emotional disintegration and quite probably reflects Aickman’s own descent into a moribund and possibly alcoholic depression, one that terminated in the blissful release of death. This makes for an acutely painful and discomforting read. Reading The Stains is like being forced to watch a hopelessly depressed friend commit suicide whilst you stand by powerless to intervene. Readers should acquaint themselves with this important tale not for any entertainment value – rest assured, there is none, not even for the most sardonic connoisseur of schadenfreude - but purely to further their understanding of Robert Aickman.