Three's a Cloud

By Brian Aldiss

JUST BY ACCIDENT, Clemperer had shaved when he got up at noon. Consequently, he was looking not too much the tramp when he drifted into his destiny at Karpenkario's, the Greek place on the waterfront, at nine in the evening.

Clemperer knew nobody at Karpenkario's place. That was its attraction for him. He was alone in the world and he knew it. He hated the bars full of false friendship, where acquaintances who had seen him only half a dozen times before in their lives, slapped his back and cried, "Come on, old pal, haven't seen you in a long time; how about a drink?" Equally, Clemperer hated loneliness. But at least loneliness was clean and honourable.

He bought a double whisky at the bar. He had already downed four elsewhere. Instead of drinking where the other people were drinking, he carried the glass with him, pushing-through the crowd, which consisted mainly of sailors, and made for the quiet restaurant behind. The air was clearer here, reminding Clemperer of his stale old wisecrack about his not being able to see unless the atmosphere was full of cigarette smoke.

Only one of the restaurant tables was occupied. A man and woman, strangers to Clemperer, sat at it.

That was the beginning of everything. Clemperer did what he never did: he went and sat down with the man and the woman, instead of choosing an empty table.

"You might like a look at the menu," the man said, handing film over a typed sheet smilingly. "Fortunately the food here is better than the typing."

It did not hit Clemperer all at once, because he was partially drunk, but the sensation he felt was as if he had arrived home. That was odd: Clemperer had no home. Four years earlier, on his fortieth birthday, he had flung up the bachelor flat he had hitherto called home, and the Motivation Research job which paid for it, and had gone out into the world, wandering from town to town in search of what he privately called his destiny.

He raised the whisky, paused, lowered it again, setting the glass with ponderous care on to the table.

"Your coffee sounds good," he told the girl. "I must have a cup. It'll help to clear my head."

He had meant to say "smells good", not "sounds good". It was the sort of slight verbal slip he often caught himself making, much to his annoyance. In this case, it rudely implied that the girl was drinking noisily; yet by her smile she appeared to have grasped his real meaning. How seldom you found anyone like that, Clemperer reflected.

He ordered a big jug of coffee, offering the others a cup, which they both accepted.

Meanwhile, he looked them over carefully. There was nothing extraordinary about them. They looked faintly unhappy. One sat one side of the table, one the other, and their hands met on the polished oak. The man was about Clemperer's age, but better preserved, obviously more prosperous. He looked as if he might still have a hope. Behind his spectacles, his grey eyes held a wealth of friendliness.

The girl was more striking. She was not pretty, but neat enough to be very attractive. At a guess she was twenty-one. Her dark hair was short, without curl, while in her long, squaw face was set a pair of the darkest, saddest eyes Clemperer had ever encountered. In her was some unguessable grief, as thick as fog - yet now she was happy.

At some time, then or later, he found their names were Spring and Alice.

It occurred to him that he might offer some sort of apology for sitting down at their table without invitation, little as that apology seemed needed. When he spoke, his diffident tongue again betrayed him.

"I didn't mean to intrude," he said, "I know very well that three's a cloud."

They took it as a trouvaille.

"There you have it," Alice said, peering at him through the wigwam of her vision. "What's more homogeneous than a cloud?"

"C.f. a cloud of unknowing," Spring said, "floating along in a mystery."

"I really meant to say `cloud'," Clemperer admitted, making his slip again. Then he gave up. Perhaps the dark side of his mind knew best; perhaps he really had intended to say "cloud".

From the Greek waiter, he ordered a dish of Arab Kuftides, with spaghetti and chile sauce. It was not the kind of thing Clemperer usually did; he rarely ate after midday-it was just throwing good food away on a bad ulcer. His current theory was to try and drown the damned thing in alcohol.

That reminded him about the untouched whisky; he called the waiter and got it taken away.

"I'm sorry if I smell of whisky," he said. "Once you start drinking whisky you smell of it all through. I'll sober up soon."

"There's no hurry," Spring said.

Spring did not speak much. He did not eat much, though occasionally he stirred the dish before him with his fork. Alice was stubbing out her cigarette ends in the mashed potato on her plate. Now and again she mopped her forehead with a tissue from the carton of Kleenex beside her. Both of them seemed to be ... waiting.

"They're odd people", Clemperer thought, feeling once more that warm sensation of being home. He had been aware of his own oddity for too long.

"Drinking's only a way of trying to get under the normal hard surface of loving," he said apologetically. He had intended to say "living", not "loving", but again he sensed they both understood what he meant. "Some people only know that way of doing it. What I mean is, you can go right through life without really becoming intimate with another person, without really touching their identity with your identity-true identity. When you're stewed in drink, you at least swamp yourself in your own identity, and then you don't need anyone else so much."

And he thought in startlement, "Why the hell am I talking this sort of stuff? I've never talked like this to anyone, never mind to complete ____________ ". But he could not bring himself to think the word "strangers". Whatever they were, they weren't strangers, not now he had once met them.

"When you're drunk or when you're dead you don't need anyone so much," Alice said, seeming to do half the talking with her eyes. "But otherwise, the trouble is we none of us have a true identity until we have someone to share it with-someone capable of sharing it."

"If people would only consciously realize it," Spring said, "that's all anyone spends their life doing: looking for the right person to reveal their identity to."

"It's a hard search always," the girl went on, looking at Spring. "The compensation is that when you find that kind of person, you know. Nobody need say a thing. It just feels right."

"I'm really intruding on you true," Clemperer protested, not that he felt that way at all inside. His tongue had turned "two" into "true".

"You know you're not," Spring and Alice replied together. "Can't you trust your instinctive responses?"

"I'm forty-four," Clemperer said, smiling wearily; "I've grown out of the habit."

To his mild horror, he began telling them the whole story of his life. It was an ordinary enough tale, at least until the revolutionary moment four years ago, when he had entirely broken with his old way of life: a tale of continuous inner discontent. Clemperer could not stop it; it all came bubbling out, and the grey eyes and the great black ones listened carefully to every word.

At last he finished. The uneaten remnants of his meal had grown cold; Alice's glass was crammed full of tissues. Clemperer made a gesture of self-deprecation.

"I don't know why I tell you all this," he murmured.

"Because now you tell us," Alice said, "you see it all in a different light. You can grasp now that your life did not happen the way you thought it did at the time."

"You're right!" Clemperer exclaimed. "AII my past has been heading towards this moment, this moment of revelation ... thus puts a meaning to it...."

For so much else he wished to say, he could uncover no words. He saw them all as icebergs floating on a great sea; the sea was. .. being, having, knowing; and under all his new happiness ran a river connecting him with them. A vast restlessness overcame him. He wanted to run, sing, wave his arms. Here at last was a moment for which to celebrate and be alive in every cell.

"Let's go outside," Spring suggested. "Every so often I have to air my sinuses."

"That's what I was going to say," Clemperer exclaimed.

"Of course," Spring said, laughing. "It's nice to have someone to do these little things for you, eh?"

They pushed their way out into the night. A bluff summer wind blew along the sea front. The clustered dinghies rocked contentedly by the jetty. All along the harbour wall, the sea cast up its spray at the feet of the white lamp standards.

Clemperer seemed to experience neither the night nor the gale. Alice had linked herself between the two men like a catalyst, her young squaw face mysterious in shadow. She was frightening-because she was eating her heart out, and Clemperer was now part of that heart.

"I've got it" he exclaimed suddenly. "It's a gestalt! We're a gestalt! You know what I mean-the whole we represent is something greater than the sum of our parts. We've combined, and something has happened beyond us."

They looked at him curiously. For the first time, he had surprised them, filling their countenances with wonder. All three were conscious of saying many things in silence.

"We -Alice and I- thought we were complete until you arrived," Spring said gravely. "Directly you turned up, we realized that was not so. You are a vital part of whatever it is. You'd better try and explain your contribution."

He was so happyl He was not just the junior partner they were allowing to accompany them. They were equals: his share was one third.

"Let me tell you this first of all," he began, "although you being you, it may not need saying. Usually-in fact, up till this very evening-I was never the sort of person you are now seeing. A lot of people are different in the company of different people, but now I'm really different. Usually, I hate people-if a man or woman becomes my friend, they do it the hard way, the barriers have to go down one by one, and there are lots of barriers. You two by-passed all of them, somehow. And another thing, at this time of night, the acute pain-joy of living flares up in me...."

"We're all Night People here," Alice interposed gently.

" .. and so I generally arrange to be well stewed by now, to keep the voices out. Usually I have an odd impediment in my speech, sort of a Freudian slip, which has now completely left me, as if my old brain cogs have got their teeth back in. I have stopped saying the wrong words - I've found locks I want my keys to fit. Then, for another thing, I heartily distrust mysticism, emotion or any such clack as I-we-are now talking. It's suddenly no longer clack; it's the one real thing I've ever known, to be walking here with you."

"Of course you're surprised," Spring said. "It is surprising. It's staggering! When it first happened to Alice and me, we thought it was just love. (Why that 'just'?) Now you come along and prove it's something more again."

"... as we had begun to suspect," Alice concluded. It was dreamlike the way they each supplemented the other's meaning. "Tell us about the gestalt. Expand and expound!"

"I've never been content because I've only just stumbled on you," Clemperer said. "Maybe all discontented persons in the world are just waiting for their Stumbling Time. . . . I can feel-I can feel that we three are a big thing, bigger than three people; we are in some way aloof from time and space. As you said, this meeting has had the power to alter my past; probably It can alter our future, too. This thing has never been described. It's not telepathy, for instance, although feeling alike we shall obviously think along similar lines. It's not a menage a trois or what's usually implied by the term, although basic sexuality may provide some of the binding force. If it has been found before, the finders have kept quiet about it. We are treading what is virtually a new trail, an unbeaten track. We can't know where it leads ... until we arrive."

He went on talking, elucidating for the benefit of all, carried away by his vision. As they strolled along the windy front, the lights overhead seemed to float by like suns, each casting its starlight slowly on their faces.

At last Clemperer broke off.

"It's very late," he said, suddenly apologetic again. "You know it's amazing how I seem to know all the important things about the two of you, but none of the trivial ones which everyone sets such store by. Don't you want to get home or something now?"

"We be but poor holiday-makers, sire," Spring said, with an odd mock-lightness. "Our homes are far apart."

He pointed over the dark sea, where a yacht lay at anchor, its lights rocking gently with the swell.

"See the yacht? Our berths are there. Alice and I only met because a mutual friend-the owner of the yacht invited us for a cruise round the coast with several other people. I think we will stay ashore tonight; we can board first thing in the morning; they won't worry about us ... and someone there will look after my wife."

Those last few quietly spoken words told Clemperer everything he needed to know about the pool of sorrow in Alice's eyes; the subject was not referred to again between them.

"Karpenkario's stays open all night," Clemperer said simply.

They walked back in silence, a weird, loud silence which felt more important than all the talk. Occasionally, Alice would use a tissue on her forehead; letting it go, she would watch it sail bravely away on the increasing wind-along, round and up, right over the rooftops of the poor houses which faced the sea.

At Karpenkario's, they managed to get a small back room. It contained a card table, chairs, and litter on the floor; but it was better than going back to Clemperer's room. He had deliberately not suggested that. A vision of its unmade bed, the empty whisky bottles peering blindly from the ever-open wardrobe, the clothes on the floor, a pat of butter festering on the wash-basin, rose before him, provoking only a sad smile from him. All that belonged to the aimless past. He could no more have taken Alice and Spring there than a snake could resume its sloughed skin.

They ordered coffee and began to talk again. Endless talk, the river running swift and sure beneath it.

The gestalt became more intense as the night wore on, till it seemed to envelop them like a collapsed tent, almost smothering them. Outside, the wind howled and banged down a side passage, sounding dustbins and charging loose doors, lamenting over rooftops. It grew to symbolize for them the new power lurking just beyond their conscious thresholds, until it seemed that within themselves there might be a force which could whip away their self-control like straw-for ever.

They became slightly afraid. But chiefly they were afraid because they no longer knew what they represented, and their old, safe selves had been lost eternally on the midnight tide.

"This gestalt," Alice said, at one point in time, "what do you think we can do with it?"

"Or what is it able to do with us?" added Spring.

"Is it a force of good or evil?" asked Clemperer.

"I think it is beyond good or evil," the girl said, peering down squaw-faced into the depths of some unimaginable well. "Whatever it may be, it is beyond all the laws and rules. What's usually called . . . supernatural...."

Now it was as if they were frozen together. Tired, cold, vitiated, they sprawled closely across the table, moving no more than the patient alligator which awaits its prey. They looked like bundles of old clothes.

"There's something we-it can do," Clemperer said. "I can feel it, but I can't define it."

"It's only function is to bind us always," Spring said, almost sharply, "to hold us together wherever we are, whatever happens. And what could be more valuable?"

"We are Night People," the girl murmured. "At least we can always suffer together."

Then they spoke no more, and the wind howled without stirring them, scream, scream, screaming beyond the brick beyond the room beyond their unity. Clemperer was asleep but not asleep: in his mind's corner, he heard their last words repeated over and over-those words which would later prove so very laden with meaning "We can always suffer together .... Its function is to bind us always.... Wherever we are, whatever happens it will hold us together ... always."

Each of them faded into a portion of the same trance, as dawn malingered in like moonlight.

She stood on the quayside with Spring, smudging one last tissue over her complexion. They had to get back to the yacht; the owner expected them--he was going to sail round Jedder Island today, whatever the weather. They would be back in port by nightfall; they would meet again then. Behind them, a ferryman waited to pilot them hack over the rocking waters to the yacht.

In the tension of the moment, Clemperer found himself using conventional phrases of farewell. It did not matter. Whatever he or they did would never matter; each would always understand; their faith was limitless; the last barriers had gone with the night.

He touched both their cheeks with his, the greasy ones, the grey, stubbly ones. Contact with them almost choked him. He loved them infinitely. They were gentle people, understanding, accepting, entirely open to the wounds of the world.

They went off in the boat. The bully morning air blustered about Alice's dark head. There was a lack of bitterness in parting; it was not a real parting. Yet Clemperer felt defeated. He had said, "We are in some way aloof from time and space," and now it seemed obviously untrue. To know nothing-that was existence. Clemperer turned away, heading wearily back to his room.

He slept.

At five in the afternoon, he woke screaming. A pane of glass in his window had shattered. He sat up on his frowsty bed, unable to orientate himself. At first he believed himself drowning. The waters had been pouring over him, lashing his face. His lungs had been clotted with spray.

Clemperer rose dazedly, staggering off the bed.

The wind had smashed his window. Dying at daybreak, the gale had now goaded itself into a full-size storm, cannonading in from the sea over the supine town.

Something else was also wrong, something he felt inside. Clemperer was fully dressed, even to his overcoat. Taking a brief gulp of water from the tap, washing it round his tired mouth, he hurried from the house. It was strange not to wake in a whisky haze, strange to wake to a purpose. Spring and Alice were in trouble, danger had them.

Hurrying down the narrow sloping streets, he arrived at the harbour. Directly he saw the people lining the sea wall, he knew; indeed, he had known before. Everyone stared out to sea, most silent, some shouting and pointing. As he ran past them, Clemperer caught salty crumbs of talk: a yacht was in difficulties, the lifeboat was out, the Jedder Current made a rescue awkward.

He ran up the long hill to the highest point of the cliffs, running as he had not run for years, running like one possessed.

From the top, Jedder Island was a dark smudge on the skyline. The black clouds were busy erasing it with their spurting bellies. Even as he looked, the rain rushed in across the sea, dashing for the coast, patterning the breakers, striking him in the face with a handful of drops as hard as pebbles. In a moment, he was drenched through his coat.

But in that last clear glimpse over the waters, Clemperer had seen the yacht-seen it heel over and slide beneath the churning surface. The lifeboat was nowhere near it, cut off by an angry race of green foam that marked the Jedder Current. For anyone aboard the yacht, there could have been no hope of life; it had gone down in an instant

"Clemperer !" In his ears he heard their ringing cry as the craft went under, bearing them with it.

Now he was dead inside, neatly novocained of all sensation. The storm bellowed in his face, hissed in his ears, but inside him was only silence as wearily he made his way downhill again, slipping and bumping down regardlessly. He walked in a dream, shouldering, a passage through the sombre crowd still waiting by the harbour. Hardly conscious of the direction he took, Clemperer crossed the road and padded wetly into Karpenkario's.

Alice and Spring were sitting waiting for him at their old table. They were wetter than he was, but they were smiling.

Postscript:

The 60’s group, Three’s a Cloud, so often misspelled was so-named after I read this story. The name seemed to encompass everything that a good group should aspire to in terms of musical communication and incredibly we often seemed to achieve that aspiration.