‘It’s not quite as simple as that,’ Staines said. ‘Charles has a lot of feeling for the underdog, the underchap as it were. He’s made great friends that way, and changed the whole course of people’s lives. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. One doesn’t know quite what goes on, of course, but they tend to become very possessive and jealous, and then there’s usually trouble. Oh dear! Look, come inside, William, and let me show you some things.’
We were going in, and I dithered on the sill as to whether I could leave my darling Phil with Bobby. Phil looked resigned—or perhaps actually didn’t mind: I had been surprised and shamed by his tolerance of people to whom I took an unhesitating dislike. But Staines seemed to sense the problem, and turned back. ‘Come along too,’ he called, extending his arm and dropping his wrist in a perfect Shuckburgh.
‘I’ll stick by the booze,’ said Bobby, gruffly.
If the drawing-room had the unnatural, aspiring look of a room about to be photographed, the room where the photography actually went on had a cultivated air of clutter, as if the clean and discrete camera should lay claim to the turmoil, the evident symptoms of art, of a painter’s studio. Empty drums of developing fluid accumulated around an ostentatiously full waste bin, a dramatic spot picked out the workbench where the only painterly act, the touching up of prints with a fine brush, took place. Otherwise it was a deserted theatre—of the acting or of the operating kind. The powerful lights, with their silvery reflecting umbrellas, were switched off, and as the curtains were closed I had a quick recall of school play rehearsals in vacated classrooms, gestures made with imaginary props, embarrassed boys swallowing syllables, the sense of a final achievement lugubriously remote. Nonetheless I looked around admiringly and just as I still naughtily mount the pulpit when I visit a church, clutched Phil to me histrionically in front of one of the heavy unrolled backdrops of eggshell cartridge-paper. The lens of the crouching camera eyed us enigmatically, daring us to move. Phil grinned, and only saw too late what I was playing at.
‘Actually, over here is where I would want to shoot you, William.’ Behind the sheet of paper, at the rear of the studio, was a setting of another kind, a painted canvas flat showing a balustrade, a curtain tumbling down above, and a hazy impression of parkland beyond. It was similar in kind to the scene in the mysterious early photograph of Charles with a woman—though such backdrops must have been common in photographers’ studios all over the world before the war. ‘I picked it up from a demolition site out at Whitechapel,’ said Staines, coming up behind me to look at it, and resting a ringed hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s not all I picked up there, either, if you must know.’ I smirked. ‘No, I’m going to use it for my kind of Edwardian pics. So touching. You did say you’d do one of them didn’t you—you’ve got just the looks for it. Nothing naughty, nothing naughty at all.’
‘I should be pleased to,’ I decided.
‘But first I want to look out some pickies of old Charles and others. It’s all in the most frightful mess. Really I need someone—well, someone like you really—to come and sort out the archivi. It’s been a help selling lots of stuff, but still.’
Together we tugged out the wide shallow drawers in which hundreds and hundreds of photographs were laid up. Crazed, silky sheets of tissuepaper interleaved the older prints and, pulled back, revealed anonymous society faces of the Forties—I supposed—sulking, or smiling complacently. Some I wanted to look at more closely, but Staines dismissed them and hurried on; or if he told me about them they were people I had never heard of. It was depressing to think of the scene of Charles’s life crowded with such glossy Mayfair figures, the women with their jutting busts and lacquered lips, the men with their conceited crinkly hair.
‘This is all Bond Street stuff,’ Staines reassured me. ‘Some of it’s brilliant, but it’s not what we want.’ So Phil and I carried the trays of photographs through into the drawing-room—and I asked if we could see the new work too, the martyrdoms and butcher’s boys. Staines went off to hunt for other things, letters he might have had, while Phil and I sat like spoiled children on the sofa by the empty fireplace and looked through it all. There was something wanton about the way he let us rummage, and about the muddle of the system. I felt each picture encourage a question, or hint at some urgent, tawdry secret.
Phil, of course, had no idea what we were looking for. But he was very quick to spot that the subject of one photograph, taken from an odd angle so that he seemed to turn into a kind of naked coastline, was Bobby. And Bobby turned up quite a bit, in soulful vigil at a window, or in his whites, more dazzling then, against a bright white wall in Tunis, or, less convincingly, leaning into lamplight over an old book. There were some camp fantasies—Bobby as sailor; or as Airforceman, with perched cap and oiled kiss-curl. In one, dated eighteen years ago, he appeared, wearing only sandals and a cincture of vine-leaves, between two classical garden statues. Staines could have had no difficulty in inducing that expression of tossed-back pagan pleasure: degeneracy was already evident in the luscious good looks and the unclassical softness of his body. It seemed that Bobby must have run off with the much older man, by then perhaps an acclaimed society portraitist with the entrée to country houses. I imagined Bobby being pampered and disapproved of by their hostesses, and, though the Sixties were beginning, posing for the adoring Staines in the artistic, Sicilian manner of an earlier age.
When Staines came back, empty-handed, I asked him about Sandy Labouchère and Otto Henderson. ‘There is a picture of them,’ he said, ‘somewhere. I didn’t actually know them much—I’m too young, you see, really to be of use to you … They were a gruesome couple when I met them: Labouchère was a hopeless drunkard, and so was Henderson. They stuck together, more or less, painting the most extraordinary pictures, morbid to a degree and full of decadent young men twice as large as life—in all respects. Otto was really a cartoonist, of course, though sometimes he managed to get work in the theatre. I saw some strange opera he did, with the most shaming caryatids and things, and slaves. It had the most uncomfortable-looking furniture in it; I remember one critic said, “Mr Otto Henderson was responsible for the misère-en-scène”.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Do you know, he may well still be alive. I haven’t heard of him for an age: he was living, the last time I had news, in a basement in Earl’s Court, I think it was, with a sort of sect. When his friend finally drank himself to death, poor old Otto did become a bit queer. I’ve got a painting by Labouchère, by the way, if you’d like to see it. It’s rather specialised, so I keep it stored away.’
‘I would be interested.’
‘It is rather amusing.’ Staines warmed to the idea. ‘Why don’t you, um, Phil, come and help me with it, and William can get on with the photographs.’ I let them go and soon after came on a picture of Charles: it was just the sort of thing I wanted for my book. Aged perhaps fifty, thickening but handsome, he was sitting in a high-backed chair in front of the big pedimented book-case in the library at Skinner’s Lane. Leaning round the chair, proffering a glass on a salver, was a white-jacketed black. He was surely supposed to be looking at his employer, but had been caught as, for a second, he followed the direction of his gaze, and showed to the camera a shy, devoted smile.
I put out various other pictures, of people who were beautiful or eccentric enough to ask about and who I hoped might have a place in the crazed mosaic of Charles’s life. In one of the drawers I was surprised to find a stiff, creamy envelope, embossed ‘Staines, Photographer. New Bond Street’, containing a set of enigmatic, rather beautiful nudes: a thin young man, turning away his head, or slatted by shadow from a venetian blind, or crouched apprehensively on the bare floor of the studio. The boy’s face was always partly hidden, and his personality obscured in the sinister melancholy of the compositions. Even so, I knew who it was from the distinctive curve and mass of his cock—Colin, James’s Corry pal whom I had had on that hot afternoon at my flat a few weeks before.
&nb
sp; I had started to get a bit excited about this, when I felt a presence in the room. Bobby was standing at the French windows, looking at me expressionlessly. I started tidying up, shuffling together the pictures I wanted. ‘Ronny not here?’ Bobby said; he already sounded a little drunk.
‘No, he’s gone to look for something.’
Bobby let a weary smile onto his lips. ‘I should come with me, if I were you.’ I took this as a bald proposition, but when he had crossed the room to the door, and turned and said, ‘Oh, come on,’ I felt that it wasn’t, and that some kind of trick had been played on me.
We went through the hall and into the studio, Bobby for a moment halting and blocking my view before letting me too see what was going on. Staines, stooping over the tripod, his right eye jammed into the viewfinder, was aware of us, and flapped his left arm behind him to keep us back and have us observe professional etiquette while he was concentrating. ‘Try not to smile,’ he said. Leaning against a tall white plinth, shirtless, his skin lubricated, almost glittering in the studio lights, the top button of my trousers undone, Phil grew suddenly guilty and selfconscious. That deep and telling blush of his that I loved pumped up into his cheeks and forehead and into his short back and sides, and soaked downwards, over the strong shaft of his neck, fading into his glossy chest.
On the way home we stopped off at the Volunteer, and had a beer outside on the pavement, caught up in that sad, erotic mood of an early evening in summer—working people going home, the first queens coming into the pub, dusty tiredness mixing with anticipation. I gazed up and down the street, said little, and from time to time looked ironically at Phil, I think shocked to find how easily he could be manipulated, slightly sick with a feeling that perhaps I wouldn’t be able to keep him. That afternoon I had turned him into pornography, and I was shaken to find Staines following my own instinct so literally, so instantaneously; proud, too, but with the unease of a sexual braggart. Phil himself had an air of compromised but defiant success about him.
As we turned into my road he was hobbling and said, ‘Will, I’m busting for a piss.’ The tight waistband of my trousers squeezed cruelly on his bladder, swollen with a couple of pints of lager. By the time we had entered the house and climbed the stairs he hardly dared move, and clutched at himself with a babyish moan of need. I unlocked the door and as he slipped in caught him by the arm and made him stand where he was. Then I knelt down and undid his shoes and pulled his socks off: he was jiggling on the spot, gasping ‘Man, hurry up!’ But instead of letting him go I led him onto the lino of the kitchen, and he stood there, obedient and desperate. I took off his shirt, and undid the top button of his trousers, restoring his porno image—some tough, cocky, bemused little tart. His dick was already half-hard from the desire to piss, and as I kissed him, and bit him, and licked his tits, I whispered to him to let it go. I slipped my hands between his legs and squeezed his balls, and watched his eyes widen as he overcame his inhibition. He looked grateful, almost ecstatic, as the first shy stain blossomed in his lap, his cock jacked up under the thin skin-tight cotton, and then it was all happening, it pumped out, on and on, his left leg darkening and glistening as it drenched down. An abundant, infantile puddle spread on the lino, and when he had finished I went behind him, pulled down his trousers, pushed him to the floor and fucked him in it like a madman.
Later we shared a bath with foam up to our ears, like they always discreetly have in films. Phil needed some slacks and falling fondly back now on my notion of him as my little soldier, I gave him my old army fatigues. He padded about in them, and rummaging in the pockets brought out some loose change, a spunk-stiffened hanky, and a folded white card. I looked at the card, which bore a national insurance number, and on the other side the name ‘Arthur Edison Hope’, and his address.
8
Next day I was earlier at the Corry than usual, swimming with the lunchtime set before going east to Charles and then, alarmingly, perhaps futilely, beyond. Phil was back to work on an awkward split shift, and I would see him in the evening, over at the hotel.
The shower room was crowded, so that I had to wait at the entrance with one or two others, anxious to be through and in their offices again, eyeing the more determined lingerers with a sceptically raised eyebrow. The gross-cocked Carlos cooed ‘Hey, Will’ and beckoned, so I jumped the queue and joined him under his nozzle, his rose. ‘Is very busy,’ he acknowledged, ‘but I like to see the boys.’ Here was the conscience of the Corry in a phrase. He soaped my shoulderblades in halting, appreciative arcs, slowly moving further down my back, and I began to get a hard-on.
Andrews the gym instructor was across the way, austerely washing his head with coal tar soap. With his wiry, pre-war, slightly bowlegged body and his square, thin-lipped, grizzled head, he seemed to be scrubbing away in search of some lost puritanical cleanness; and as he left to dry he looked at Carlos and me with an almost regimental reproach. His place was taken by a dal-coloured Indonesian boy with strong yellow teeth, enormous hands and an exceptionally extensile cock, which, quite ordinary in size to start with, filled out lavishly with a few casual strokes of a soapy hand and was burdensomely erect a few seconds later when he grinned across the room—in response, of course, to Carlos’s frank appreciation.
O the difference of man and man. Sometimes in the showers, which only epitomised and confirmed a general feeling held elsewhere, I was amazed and enlightened by the variety of the male organ. In the rank and file of men showering the cocks and balls took on the air almost of an independent species, exhibited in instructive contrasts. Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school. Carlos’s Amerindian giant swung alongside the compact form of a Chinese youth whose tiny brown willy was almost concealed in his wet pubic hair, like an exotic mushroom in a dish of seaweed. On the other side of me a young businessman displayed one of those long, dispiriting foreskins, which gather very tight about the glans and then bunch and dribble on childishly for an inch or so more. Beyond him the cock of one of the weightlifters, radically circumcised, was in its usual ambiguous form, not quite at ease, not quite at attention. I looked obviously and lovingly at him as he turned slowly from side to side, unaware of me and lost in his serene, numerical weightlifter’s world. I couldn’t wait any longer, and at the merest word to Carlos took him dripping and giggling to the lav, where we brought each other off swiftly and greedily.
How hopelessly different life must appear to Charles, I thought, as I took the train to St Paul’s. When one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? What does one do, seeing the lustful, disrespectful world going about its business, the young up one another’s arse? Was there ever an end to it, this irresistible, normal, subnormal craving for sex? Or did it go tauntingly on?
At Skinner’s Lane the door was opened by the new man. He was not unlike Lewis, a plausible ex-con, with regular good looks enlivened by a pale scar running up his left cheek almost to his eye. It touched me as a strange coincidence, today of all days.
‘Mr Beckwith?’ he said, with the complacency of one who knows just what’s going on. ‘His Lordship is expecting you.’
Charles was sitting in the library with The Times. He didn’t get up but looked jolly, and chuckled to see me. I went over to him, and he slipped his arm round my waist, as parents shelter and draw to them a tired or evasive child. ‘Can you think of anything to go in there?’ he asked.
There was one word of the crossword to do, and as I had filled the whole thing in quite quickly that morning I decided I would only pretend to think for a second or two before coming out with the answer. ‘ “Hurry to start mischief in the women’s quarters”,’ I quoted. ‘Well, I should have thought it was “HAREM”, but …’ The three across answers, which gave the first, third and final letters of the word had been uncompromisingly filled in with ‘SCREW’, ‘AZALEA’ and ‘PRESURIZE’ (sic).
‘C blank Z blank P,’ Charles pondered. ‘I’m dashed if I can think of
anything. I seem to have boxed myself in.’
‘I don’t think some of these answers can be right,’ I said kindly. ‘ “I hear of a line in a bottle”, for instance, must be “PHIAL”.’
Charles was pleased that I had fallen for it. ‘Oh, I don’t do the clues,’ he said, in a tone of voice and with a little downward slap of the hand which conveyed tired contempt, an almost political feeling of disaffection. ‘No, no, no,’ he smiled; ‘I do the alternative crossword, as they call things nowadays. You have to fill in words which aren’t the answers. It’s much more difficult. It’s a kind of solitaire, you see, you have to make a clean sweep of it. And then often, I’m afraid, you get buggered in the last corner.’
I nodded and thought about this. ‘You could invent a word, then, I suppose,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, let’s,’ said Charles.
‘Well how about “CO-ZIP”—to do up your flies with somebody else’s help. Or “CO-ZAP”—getting together to blast something.’
‘Oh, co-zip! co-zap! Which do you think?’
‘Let’s have co-zap.’ I gave the paper back to him and he wrote it in in biro. His lettering was quavering but emphatic, and he seemed completely satisfied with the whole thing.
‘Now, my dear William, some coffee is just coming. It’s Graham, by the way, the new man. A model of devotion. And tell me how you’ve been getting on.’
‘You’ve given me some surprises,’ I said, sitting down opposite him as I had on my first visit.
‘Pleasant ones, I hope.’
‘Pleasantly mysterious, yes. The two lives of Bill Hawkins were quite unexpected. And quite unexplained,’ I added.