He was prefacing every remark with ‘Oh’ as if unsure of the way statements might begin. ‘Oh … the Queensberry, yes.’
‘Not far from here, then.’ I took my key from the lock.
‘No.’
‘Well, see you.’ I was making off down the alley of lockers and would soon have been lost to his view, when he said:
‘Yeah, you ought to come over some time.’
I half turned and grinned: ‘I’d like that.’ He didn’t grin back; in fact he looked very serious—and there had been something about the way he said ‘you ought to come over some time,’ casual and comradely and yet pondered, or even rehearsed, that convinced me that this was the same uptight, hungry boy I had blown in the Brutus, and that he needed my help, had passively picked on me as the one to show him what it was all about. I held his gaze a little longer, thinking of saying, ‘Well, how about tonight?’ Arthur-less, I was moronically ready for it, but somehow I deferred. I sensed he was relieved when I said, ‘Next week some time?’
‘OK.’ He lifted his right hand a few inches off the bench in a strangely touching, almost secret wave. Two other hearty figures pushed past me, coming in red and sweaty from the gym. ‘How’re ya doin’, Phil boy,’ said one of them in the routine American disguise of some British queens. I went on into the gym, believing that some kind of agreement had been made, that it filled his thoughts now as it did mine. Then for a few minutes I made myself think about something else, concentrated on my exercises on the mat, stretching and limbering up. Because I was so easily moved by people, I had learned to distance myself, just in those moments when I felt them taking hold: I made myself regard them, and even more myself, with a careless, almost cynical detachment. But as I gathered, spread and folded up my body now, endeavouring to feel alive all over, ready and independent, I saw Phil again, in one of those odd coups d’oeil, typical not only of his hesitant mobile manner but of so much of gay life, where happiness can depend on the glance of a stranger, caught and returned. Aptly enough, I was lying on my back, with my legs in the air, wide apart. Between them I saw him pass the open gym door, his bag in his hand, his shirt-sleeves rolled up in tight bands around his biceps. He went by, but a second or two later stepped back again, and peeped into the gym. Our eyes met, I raised my head, he looked for a moment longer, and then, moved perhaps by the secrecy which characterised his doings, without smiling, turned and went off. As I sat up it was as if a fist squeezed my heart and cracked a tiny flask at its centre, saturating it with love.
An hour or so later I found James in the shower. He held out his hands to me in a pathetic gesture; the fingertips were white and puckered.
‘A long time, eh?’ I commiserated.
‘There’s just been nothing, darling. I don’t know why I bother.’
‘Nor, I confess, do I.’ James, in his maudlin way, was waiting around for something worth looking at to stroll in. ‘How long, as a matter of interest?’
He had no watch on. ‘It may be as much as half an hour.’
‘You must be jolly clean, anyway.’ I pulled off my trunks, and noticed him peek, with the neutralised sexual interest that existed between us, at my dick.
‘Spotless. But enough of me. How are you?’
‘In a strange position.’
‘Tiring of His Speechlessness the Khedive of Tower Hamlets?’
‘Oh—no, that’s all over ages ago.’
‘Oh …’ A veneer of commiseration covered a discernible pleasure at the news. I chose not to expand on it.
‘No, it’s my queer peer, you remember? He wants me to write his life.’ James gave me an old-fashioned look.
‘Whitewash, I imagine?’
I considered this. ‘I think not, actually. He talks of handing over diaries, telling all.’
‘But what is there to tell?’
‘I think a lot. I’ve just been to see his memorabilia. It’s all very suggestive. He was in Africa for a long time, I gather. It’s the queer side, though, which would give it its interest. I have the feeling that’s what he wants made known.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Nantwich, Lord, Charles.’
‘Oh really,’ said James irritatingly. ‘Well, it would be interesting, then.’
‘You know about him?’ I stumbled. Because he had come into my life up the back-stairs, I had fatuously assumed that no one else could have heard him announced.
‘A certain amount. He’s the sort of chap who crops up in the lives of other people. Kind of diplomatic-artistic, Harold Nicolsony circles. In fact, he must be about the last person in those circles not to have had his life written. You must do it.’
‘Well, I’m glad I asked you. I’ll get reading.’
‘He’s surely incredibly old.’
‘Eighty-three, he claims. He wanders rather, and it’s hard to tell what’s what and what, as it were, isn’t.’
‘What’s his house like, frightfully grand?’
‘Frightfully grandish. Very nice, actually—stuffed with pictures, blacks, for the most part. He has a somewhat terrifying servant who’s horrible to him and looks like a criminal. I must say I’ve become rather fond of the old boy. He has a Roman mosaic in the cellar and there are rather awful decorations of Romans with great big willies, Tom of Finland avant la lettre, but not what you expect to see in the homes of the aristocracy. Lord Beckwith, certainly, would frown on them …’
‘It’s too exciting. I’ll look some things up for you when I go home.’
I didn’t sleep well that night. It was hot enough to sleep without any covering, but I woke in the small hours feeling just perceptibly cold. The day’s spasm of emotion for Phil recurred and recurred, and the prospect of the Nantwich book, which was alluring, was also oppressive; suppressed guilt and helplessness over Arthur, as well, added their weight, and as the first light felt its way around the curtains, all the things which showed promise seemed only troublesome, agitating the white sheet of a future imagined without them. I started to fantasise over Phil, but didn’t have the heart for it, had at last no sensation of sex, somehow, in my person. I dozed off, and dreamt of having tea with him in the British Museum; there was a mood of intense restraint between us, and when I woke I could not believe that we could possibly become friends.
Uncharacteristically, though the birds were cheeping from four in the morning, I lay in bed slovenly and indecisive until eleven o’clock. By then I had more or less resolved not to write Charles’s memoirs, and to keep my life clear of interference from the demands and misery of other people. Even so, the vacuity of a whole wasted morning showed me how much I needed demands to be made. Sleepier for having overslept, I shaved as the bath ran, the steam repeatedly obscuring my image in the mirror. At first flushed with the heat of the water, I sprawled in the bath till it cooled. I remembered sharing a bath at school with the house tart Mountjoy (it rhymed with ‘spongy’) and the long talk with my housemaster, Mr Bast, which had ensued. Mr Bast had taken the opportunity, in that zealous, companionable way which housemasters have when they rediscover the pastoral nature of their vocation, to criticise the lack of one in me. ‘You’ve got a good brain, William,’ he said; ‘you’re good at games—and I can see why the other boys find you attractive (oh yes, I know all about that). But you should have better things to do with your spare time than messing around with Mountjoy. You lack vocation, William, that is what troubles me.’ At that disaffected age, I felt it was a lack to be proud of. In the following weeks I messed around with Mountjoy far more than before. ‘This is my vocation,’ I would tell him, as we met up after books and sloped off over to Meads for a quick one.
I was nearly asleep when the phone rang; I lurched dripping into the bedroom, sheltering myself in an enormous bath towel. It was James.
‘There are various references in Waugh’s Diaries,’ he said.
‘To Nantwich, you mean?’
‘Yes. They’re mostly only glancing—he must have known him at Oxford, and after. Ther
e’s no Oxford diary of course. The most interesting one is before Waugh goes to Africa: “Dinner with Alastair, who returns to Cairo on Sunday. We ran over the Abyssinian plan again. Later we were joined by Charlie Nantwich. He was quite drunk, having been at Georgia’s. Georgia says he is having a liaison with a Negro waiter at the Trocadero, and it is not going well. We pretended to know nothing. He passionate about Africa, beauty, grace, nobility etc of Negroes. He gave me copious advice, which I promised to remember. A. very quiet.” ’
‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Is that all about him?’
‘That’s the main thing. Quite juicy, isn’t it? Dearest, you must do this. You are going to, aren’t you?’
I rubbed at my legs with the towel. ‘Actually, I’ve just about come to the decision not to.’
‘Well, I think you’re mad.’
‘I know.’
‘Look, he’s obviously selected you specially. You’re meant to do it.’ In James a scientific mind coexisted with a fantastic and romantic belief in Providence. ‘And you’ve got fuck-all else to do. And you can write—your essay on Coade Stone vases was heart-breaking. And you’re very keen on the grace, nobility and so forth of Negroes. It’s an ideal opportunity. If you don’t do it, some other creep will get on to him. Or worse, the old boy will die. It would be an inestimable advantage,’ James concluded, ‘to do it while he was alive, to talk to about it all.’
‘You’ve obviously thought about this far more clearly than I have,’ I said flippantly but truthfully.
‘I’d do it myself, but you know how it is—the sick to heal …’
‘I agree there are reasons for doing it. I’ve just been preoccupied with the reasons for not doing it.’
‘It’s too pathetic. I know you think you’re too grand to do any work, but you’ve got to commit yourself to something. Otherwise you’ll end up an old-young queen who’s done nothing worthwhile. Famous last words of the third Viscount Beckwith: “Fuck me again”.’
I smirked and half-laughed. ‘I thought my last words were to be “How do I look?” ’ James, himself in his grandest mood, was doing his occasional lecture, for which he stood in, it struck me, as an updated version of Mr Bast. ‘It’s just the thought of it going on for years and years, and perhaps not being interesting in the least.’
‘There is also the thought that it will undoubtedly be a bestseller. Come on, he was obviously testing you out at his house—what did you think of the pictures, how did you react to the statue of King Thingamy.’
‘There’s no doubt of that, and he obviously fancies me.’
‘Surely you can handle that, my dear,’ James objected silkily. ‘I mean, you may have to pleasure him once or twice. Mostly with these very old queens they just ask you to go swimming in their pool, or they burst into the bathroom by mistake when you’re having a bath. They just like to have a look, you know.’
‘For God’s sake, James, I’m not bothered about all that. It’s me that’s doing him a favour in the first place. He’s already seen me in my birthday suit several times. He hasn’t got a pool. That’s why I know him.’
‘Promise me you’ll do it. Write the book, I mean.’
‘But darling, you know how it is,’ I squirmed. Instinctively I was playing with myself. ‘I mean, I hate the idea of tying myself down. I want to go out all the time and—you know.’
‘As far as I know, writing books does not preclude having sex. Admittedly some great authors have gone without: Jane Austen, for example, never partook of coition while she was working on a book. Bunyan, too, I believe, wrote the whole of Pilgrim’s Progress without a single fuck. But no such restraints need apply to you. Why, within half an hour of finishing your day’s work you could be in some back room, buggering away like nobody’s business.’
I quite enjoyed these sarcastic smacks. ‘Anyway, I don’t have to make my mind up yet. I said I’d let him know in a few days. It’s partly that I’ve never done anything like this—you know, there must be so many professional biographers. I’m completely inappropriate.’
‘Do you think he doesn’t know that? He knows he could set any of the latter-day Mrs Asps on to it. He’s chosen you because he thinks you will understand. After all, you saved his life once; now he wants you to do it again.’
‘Don’t get carried away with the poetic justice of the whole thing,’ I requested. ‘Look, I’ve got nothing on, and I’ve made the carpet all wet.’
‘All right. But I thought I’d better set you straight on this one. I’m late for my visits as it is—boils, babes, buboes, they’re all being kept waiting. That shows you how important I think it is.’
‘Okay, dear. I’ll speak to you soon.’
‘Okay. Just think what fun it will be choosing your author’s photograph for the dust-jacket.’
‘Mm—I hadn’t thought of that.’ We were both laughing as we hung up.
Three days later I left St Paul’s station, and skirting round the back of the Cathedral headed for Skinner’s Lane. The weather was still hot, but windless and grey: there was a glare in the sky, but I cast no shadows on the pavement. The lane itself and the house were smaller than in my thoughts.
I rang the bell and prepared myself and my expression for the curt reception by Lewis and the subsequent pleasure of Charles in seeing me and knowing that I would take on the work. Over the phone I had agreed at least to look at some of the material; I was to tell him in a month if I thought that I could turn it into a book. ‘I know it’s queer,’ he had said. ‘I’m not famous. But the book could be.’ As before, nothing happened, so I rang again, stepping back as I did so into the street, in the way that callers do, both to nerve themselves for an encounter and to lessen the embarrassment that comes from being one of the street users who is seeking admittance to the private realm of the house. The windows were as opaque as before, but because I now knew what waited behind them I looked at them as if I could see through them into the friendly cluttered library and the silent dining-room.
There was still no response, and I found myself complaining under my breath, ‘You did say four o’clock.’ There was no one else about, though after ringing the bell a third time and also, to command attention but not to seem importunate, knocking soundly a couple of times, I looked round again to see if I was still alone. A middle-aged man had now appeared at the end of the lane, and as he passed and went into one of the derelict properties across the way I felt obliged to go through a minimal pantomime of impatience and perplexity. This involved trying the door with the flat of my hand and finding that it was unlocked and gave, slightly, inwards. I pushed it half open; and darted in.
In a voice quite unlike my own, I called out ‘Hello’. There was no reply. The library door, on the left, was open, so I went cautiously in. It looked untidier than before, with papers and cuttings spread on the main table: this I attributed to Charles’s search for material for me. I was surprised, as I turned to leave, by the sudden rising, yawning and shaking of a large black cat. It had been lying in Charles’s armchair by the fire and stared at me for a moment with something close to enmity before looking away, licking itself, and carrying on as if I weren’t there. It was a beautiful animal, tall and slender, with a nose both broad and long, and erect, triangular ears; it seemed a ceremonial more than a domestic cat, and its voiceless indifference to me heightened my sense of unease and irreality.
I did not try the dining-room but went, knocking and looking in, to the drawing-room at the back. It was empty and orderly, with folded newspapers, a sewing-basket and a darning mushroom on a side-table—things that a masculine household must have. From here a door was open into the kitchen, which I had not seen before. With its wall-cupboards with frosted glass sliding doors, its stoneware sink, round-topped Electrolux fridge and green enamelled gas-range, it resembled a colour plate from my dead grandmother’s just post-war copy of Mrs Beeton; the plugs, which were of black Bakelite and only two-pinned, perfected the image. At a small table under the window Charles and Lewis
evidently ate their meals. The pans and plates of a modest lunch stood untouched in the sink.
I felt a strong desire to loiter and look, but also, in case I was observed, to appear not to. And I began to worry about Charles. If Lewis was not around the old fellow might have collapsed undiscovered. I had not noticed whether there were bells in the rooms. I might be alone in the house with a cat and a dead man. It was an idea I did not find wholly unattractive. I strolled back through the hall, glancing at the pictures; hesitating at the foot of the stairs I peered at a little sketch of a dragoman, just a few swift lines that denoted turban, smile, sword and curled-up shoes. As I turned I saw a figure move beside me. My heart leapt and continued to pound when I realised it was only myself swivelling towards the dim old mirror I had looked in before. The gloom made it more mysterious and nervousness quickened my reaction. I did not wait to look at myself, but started to climb the stairs.
I never wore metal-tipped or noisy shoes, preferring to sneak around unheard. Still, the treads of the stairs themselves so moaned and cracked as I went up that there was no chance of being furtive and I climbed boldly, two at a time, to the first floor. In the silence as I stood at the top I heard another dull noise, faint but heavy, and the indistinct sound of a voice talking. It seemed to come from the room at the back of the house, the one above the drawing-room, which would very likely, I thought, be Charles’s own bedroom. I didn’t want to interrupt what might have been a private rite, but I acted on a more reasonable belief that something must be seriously amiss. When I pushed open the door and went in it was at first impossible to say which was really the case.
‘Charles,’ I said clearly.
‘For God’s sake!’ The reply was desperate, muffled and close at hand. ‘Open the bloody door—please!’ I can only have taken a second to work this out, but already there came the pent-up banging I’d heard before. I crossed the room to a smaller door whose handle I tried and a moment later turned its stiff brass key; it was a door which was rarely locked, but which, gratifyingly, still could be if need be. Charles was not gratified. He had retreated to the other side of what was evidently a little dressing-room, with a chest-of-drawers, an open wardrobe, and a corner washbasin against which he leant, red in the face, his tie and collar undone, a look of both apprehension and fury on his face. He made me think of a boxer, penned in his corner, honour-bound to make a final and fatal sortie. He had no idea who I was.