Free Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss

sunshine or something like that?”
    Glad of the diversion, I said, “Someone told me today that the bad weather was caused by all the cannonballs discharged on the field of Waterloo last year.”
    Shelley burst into laughter. “I hope you have something more tremendous than that to tell us.”
    Put on my mettle, I told them as simply as I could of how Tony, Poll, and Doreen had made their “Feast,” burying their doll (I substituted doll for scooter) and covering the mound with flowers, and how, at the end, as a simple token of courtesy or affection, Tony had presented his penis for Doreen’s pleasure.
    Although Shelley smiled only faintly, Byron roared with laughter and said, “Let me tell you of an inscription I once saw scrawled on the wall of a low jakes in Chelsea. It said, The cazzo is our ultimate weapon against humanity’! Though the Italian word was not employed, come to think of it. Can you recall a graffito more charged with knowledge?”
    “And maybe self-hatred, too,” I ventured, when I saw Shelley was silent.
    “And below it another hand had scribbled a codicil: ‘And the vagina our last ditch defense’! Your noble savage of the slums is nothing if not a realist, eh, Shelley?”
    “I liked the tale of the Feast,” Shelley said to me. “Perhaps you will tell it to Mary when she comes over, without adding the—unimproving tailpiece.” His gentle manner of saying it robbed the remark of any reproof it might otherwise have carried.
    “I’ll be delighted to meet her.”
    “She’ll be here in an hour or so, when she has dried off from her boat trip with Polidori. And when she has fed our little William and tucked him into bed.”
    That name—little William!—recalled me to more serious things. The sick, chiseled visage of Frankenstein returned before my eyes. I fell silent. The two poets talked together, the dogs slunk back into the room and fought under the window, the fire flickered. The rain fell. The world seemed very small. Only the perspectives of the poets were large: they had a freedom and a joy in speculation—even when the subject of speculation was a gloomy one—which steadied one’s faith in human culture. Yet I could see in Shelley some of Victor’s nervous mannerisms. Shelley looked like a haunted man. Something in the set of his shoulders suggested that his pursuers were not far behind. Byron slouched back stolidly in his chair, but Shelley never kept still.
    A servant was summoned. The laudanum bottle was brought out. Byron tipped it gently into his brandy. Shelley consented to having a draft in wine. I took another glass of wine myself.
    “Ah, a man can drown in this stuff!” said Byron, appreciatively sipping.
    “No, no, you need a whole lake to drown properly,” said Shelley. “In this stuff you float! ” He rose and began to dance round the room. The dogs yapped and growled about his heels. He ignored them, but Byron lurched to his feet with a bellow. “Get those mankey hounds out of my room!”
    As the servant was kicking them out, Mary Godwin entered, and I found myself flushing—part with the wine, no doubt, but mainly with the agonizing exhilaration of confronting the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

VIII
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    To see her standing there! Although my emotions were engaged, or perhaps because they were engaged, a flash of revelation lit my intellect. I perceived that the orthodox view of time, as gradually established in the Western world, was a mistaken one.
    Even to me then, it was strange that such a perception should dawn at that moment, when dogs were barking, wind was blowing in, everyone was making a hubbub, and Mary Shelley stood before me. But I saw that time was much more like the growth of Mary’s reputation, devious and ambiguous, than it was like the straight line, moving remorselessly forward, which Western thought has forced it to prefigure.
    That straightness of time, that confining straightness, was one with the Western