I went over and held him. ‘Darling heart, of course people want you. You’re so adorable.’ I kissed away the tears that weren’t there. I found him very slightly repellent.
‘They don’t. No one ever wants to fuck me.’
I chuckled almost. ‘I’ll fuck you—here and now, if that’s what you want,’ and I let my hand drift down his back and over his big schoolboy bum. He smiled shyly.
‘That would never do,’ he said.
It wouldn’t of course. I held him away from me, looked at him frankly. ‘Last night,’ I reminded him.
‘Oh last night. I was driving home, full of these kinds of thoughts. I’d just been on one of those really appalling calls, to certify someone dead—suicide—at least three weeks ago—locked room—in this weather. You can imagine—no, I think you can’t imagine actually. One could hardly go into the room … I was coming along the Park, about nine o’clock—it was very heavy and still, you remember. The Creation was on the wireless, the Karajan from Salzburg last year, you know, with José van Dam, gloriously good. And suddenly it was that unspeakably sublime bit ‘Seid fruchtbar, Alle’—go forth and multiply, fill the heavens and the seas and so on? I thought I’d never heard anything more beautiful and profound—I was in hysterics—I had to pull over and put on my hazard lights and I sat there weeping and weeping until it got on to a jolly section, which it always does with Haydn, bless him.’
‘It is a good bit.’
‘Unutterably great. Did we use to listen to it? I felt as though I knew it but hadn’t heard it for a thousand years. Anyway, back here, I thought what does this all mean? It means we must be as creative as possible—even if we can’t actually have children, we must give ourselves completely to whatever we do, as I’ve always sort of thought, we must make something out of everything we do.’
‘Quite so.’
‘And I thought, I must have a man.’
I was relieved that he saw the funny side of it. ‘Of course, I was still on call. All the same I put on some sexier clothes and a bit of mascara and really looked quite nice—a bit bald, but clearly an exceptionally nice guy. I had that old shirt with the button-down pockets that I put my bleep in—it looked like a packet of fags, I hoped. I went off down the Volunteer. I knew I couldn’t get drunk or anything, but I sipped my way down a Pils for about half an hour and then fell quite naturally into chat with a fellow—a Scotsman, but pleasant, black hair, jeans, sweatshirt, that sort of bruised look about the eyes, vulnerable, but dangerous: you know the type. You’ve probably had him, indeed.’
‘Oh, him …’ I played along.
‘I bought him a drink, we talked about music: he said he played the violin. I said did he know The Creation? He did not, needless to say. I was trying to decide whether to accept a drink if he offered me one when another Scot came up and slapped him on the back and off they went.’
‘I hope you weren’t put out.’
‘The resolve did wobble a little. But I knew what I had to do, or rather what I had not to do. I hung about for a minute, but as can happen there it dawned on me dismayingly that I was by far the most attractive person in the room, and I wanted something ravishing and epic. I was about to go, I thought I’d tootle down to the Coleherne perhaps, then I wouldn’t be too far away if the bleep went. Then I saw this guy come out of the loo—lean, tanned, denim top and bottom and, what I noticed first of course, a big curving prick sort of lolloping about. He walked through the bar in a very come-and-buy fashion, looked at me, then looked away at once and went out on to the street. I realised who it was, that bloke I was once rather worked up about at the Corry and you were horrid about, very thin but quite muscled and somehow incredibly sexy.’
Out of an unaccustomed sense of decency I had never told James about the afternoon I had had this boy, Colin, had even cut him when I ran into him at the Club with James a week or two later. ‘I think I know the one,’ I said.
‘He was what I really wanted, though the look he gave me wasn’t very encouraging. And then, naturally, having seen what I wanted I came over all incapable, and faffed around at the bar, and then I went to the loo. But when I finally left the pub, it must have been about five minutes later, beginning to feel a bit miz, there he was outside, leaning against the pillar at the corner, one foot raised behind him—very rent-looking, actually, which should have made me wonder, but I found I was talking to him. Really tat stuff about haven’t I seen you at the Corry et cetera, but I know you’ve told me it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you say something. In spite of my earlier doubts, he was amazingly keen and responsive, said where shall we go, I was completely practical and said I had a car just round the corner, we could go to my flat, and suddenly the whole thing had just taken off and I didn’t feel apprehensive at all, just happy, almost, and sexy.’
‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘Really good.’ I hadn’t liked him much myself but I even felt a shade possessive now about him, and then decided to be generous, and wished James well with him.
‘Anyway, we got in the car, put on our seatbelts; I made a little grab for him, which he didn’t seem to mind—I just had to get a feel of it, you know. Then he calmly reaches in his jacket pocket, as it might be for a fag, and hoiks out this kind of fob, and says, very pleased with himself indeed, “You might as well drive round to the station, I’m a police officer.” ’
I was quite speechless and James was shaking from the recollection and from having brought off his story. I had been with him all the way at a nodding, trainer’s distance and then he had knocked me out. But it wasn’t quite over. ‘I didn’t say a word, but started the car, and of course just as I did so my bleep went. Then I saw the evening was inevitable in a different way, and the irony was all working overtime in that hideous way it can do. So it was my turn to grope in my breast pocket for my little professional accoutrement. I tried to make something of this with what now seems a fantastic gallantry and said how neither of us was what he seemed. I needn’t have fucking bothered. He changed completely and became all textbook—not actually taken down and used in evidence et cetera, but calling me sir and not giving an inch (as it were) …’
‘James,’ I had become angry. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything about this for obvious reasons. I have had that man—Colin he’s called, isn’t he?’ He nodded. ‘I picked him up on the Tube, ages ago, just after we’d seen him at the baths. He followed me off the train, almost invited himself back to my place. I fucked him. He fucked me. He’s as queer as—whatever is very, very queer: me, you. He can’t possibly get away with this pretty policeman thing.’
James looked at me very closely. Under no other circumstances could all this have been good news to him.
I carried on being angry all day. My tiredness made it harder to resist and as I went into town later I was muttering audibly about people around me, and when they showed signs of offence, deviating abruptly into sarcastic good manners. I was full of outrage at an act in which the brittle shoppers in Liberty’s (where I went to buy socks) and the incurious drifters of Oxford Street (who got in my way) seemed all to be careless conspirators. At the Corry, I did a few ferocious exercises and then flaked out and dropped into the pool with more than usual relief. But even there the slowness and clumsiness of others enraged me, and I was becoming the victim of one of those premature oldsters who bump into one on purpose, just for the muffled charge of contact. I wondered what I would do or say if I saw Colin. Was the whole matter strictly speaking sub judice? Would it have been any service to James to deal angrily, even ironically, with the officer who had charged him? I had all sorts of plans, not necessarily the wiser for their violent neatness.
James’s experience, like mine with the skinheads, made me abruptly selfconscious, gave me an urge to solidarity with my kind that I wasn’t used to in our liberal times. In the busy one o’clock changing-room, cross though I was, I looked at the others, the bankers, the teachers, the journos, the advertising johnnies, the managers of hamburger outlets, th
e actors, the consultants, the dancers from West End musicals, the scaffolders, the rack-renters, queuing for the hair dryer and clouding the air with Trouble for Men, with a kind of foreboding, as an exotic species menaced by brutal predators. It was outrageous that Colin should have joined the brutes. I could see him clearly in memory, his tan and his weird eyes—hungry and yet chilly—and his habit of hanging about, the feeling he gave that something might happen.
Afterwards I went to have my hair cut. A while ago I had affected an old-fashioned barber in Neal Street, who would keep me trimmed and tidy for £1.05—a guinea, as he always insisted. In the window were black-and-white photographs of men tipping their heads forward, and inside, where one waited, a colour poster of the Prince and Princess of Wales simpered above the boxes of Durex. The shop was an outpost of neighbourly simplicity amid the chic revamping of Covent Garden, and Mr Bandini, who ran it with his middle-aged bachelor son Lenny, would talk with motiveless fluency about boxing and about life during the war, and the hard time he had had then. Unlike modern studios, where each haircut has the pretensions of a work of art, Mr Bandini’s shop, with its floral linoleum, its clippers and ivory-handled razors, gave me the reassuring feeling that exactly the same thing had been happening in it for half a century. There was something melancholy but entrancing in imagining the hundreds of thousands of identical, routine haircuts that Mr Bandini had given as the decades slipped by. Though, like other Soho Italians, he had been interned in the war, he had been at work on this spot for almost forty years. I could easily imagine Charles, in handsome middle age, popping in for his fortnightly short back and sides and a friction of eau de quinine.
Wartime London, which I had always imagined half bombed to bits, the rest of it keeping going on five-shilling dinners and a lot of selflessness and doing without, emerged quite differently in Charles’s journal. It appeared (and I suppose this was the other side of my apprehension about war) as an era of extraordinary opportunity, when all kinds of fantasy became suddenly possible, and when the fellow-feeling of allies and soldiers could be creamed off in sex and romance.
September 26, 1943: My birthday … It’s so dull being as old as the century, it makes one’s progress seem so leaden & inevitable, with no scope for romantic doubts about one’s age. However, a beautiful, hazy pre-war sort of day—lunch at the Club with Driberg, who was very flattering & said he thought I only looked 42. He told me about some of his exploits, though I was perhaps a shade reticent about mine: with him one simply doesn’t know where they’ll end up—careless talk etc. We lamented the still frequent attacks & insults meted out to coloured servicemen, by the English though mainly of course by the Yanks. It seems all Driberg’s attempts to counter the foul American laws, in Parliament & out, have been unsuccessful. Never mind, he said, he tried to make it up to them personally.
Afterwards I wandered through Soho & then in Charing Cross Road saw three black GIs loitering along rather idyllically, smoking cigarettes & looking at girls. They had that touching quality which off-duty soldiers so often do have, as if they knew they ought to be up to something but didn’t quite know what it was. There was a fat one, a thin one & an inbetween one with a lost, ingenuous expression which was decidedly heart-stopping. He was clearly the butt of his two smart friends’ humour & had an infinitely tolerant, good-hearted glow about him. I walked beside them to pick up their talk, & then went on & took up an insouciant pose on the other side of Oxford Street, by the Lyon’s Corner House.
By some sublime, birthday miracle they split up on the corner opposite, Fat & Thin turning back down Charing Cross Rd as if to have a second, more determined go at something they had funked or got wrong the first time, while my friend crossed over & then crossed again, to the far side of Tottenham Court Road. When I strolled over myself he was looking at the posters at the little cinema there. He appeared uncertain about the prospect of an afternoon of This Happy Breed and something else with Jack Hulbert in. He asked me if I’d seen these films, & I said I had (which I hadn’t) and that they were unutterably tedious. It seemed to me that if he cd be kept out of the cinema then there were possibilities: I wasn’t going to go in with him & sit it out expectantly in the dark for hours on end, smoking American cigarettes. I said why didn’t he come & have a swim at the Corinthian Club, that’s what I was going to do. Like a child who had been hoping for guidance, & with only the faintest hint of adult irony or doubt, he came along, & when he saw the bombed-out far end of the building under all its tarpaulins & scaffolding reacted to it as though it were a cause for personal sympathy and congratulation.
I cd hardly wait to get him in the showers, but I hired him some drawers & a towel & drew out our time in the pool as if I were only there for the exercise. Roy (his name, Roy Bartholomew) was a clumsy swimmer, but jolly fast, soldier-fit & divinely constructed. I tested him gently by saying how muscly he was, & he flexed his arms & had me punch him in the stomach—at the same time saying how I shd see so-and-so in his regiment, who evidently has the biggest muscles imaginable. I discovered he likes to box, & wished for a moment I was twenty years younger & cd have taken him on.
In the showers he was all I cd have hoped for, flawed only by a little appendicitis scar; but he was selfconscious—not, I realised, about nudity, but about showering with whites. He was like other American negro servicemen I’ve seen in the Corry, used to segregation & despite their often transcendent beauty & presence somehow cowed or fearful of rejection. The regulars, however, were impressed, & Fox was very pointedly doing his ‘Get a bunk on last night, Charlie?’ patter, while young Andrews lathered his conversation with my Lord this and my Lord that—which of course impressed Roy in turn.
I took him back to Brook St & opened a bottle of champagne. Taha looked at me very knowingly before going off to see his uncle, & then, having the place to myself, I more or less did what I wanted. There was a statutory preamble of remarks about girlfriends and what-have-you, but that out of the way we started kissing & stroking each other pretty uninhibitedly, & stripped off & had it away on the sofa & then on the floor three or four times. I must say he was absolute bliss, with that kind of innocence that so appeals to me, & very manly & friendly—nothing affected or girly about it. I’ve never known anyone ejaculate such quantities. Even the last time, when I brought him off by hand, it shot right up into his face.
September 27: In a moment of foolishness I’d given Roy my telephone number. I was out most of the morning & didn’t return home until 5 or so, when I asked Taha if there had been any calls & he said ‘No Sir’ with a noticeably self-satisfied air. It wd have been wonderful to have had Roy again, but I found I was glad not to, & decided that if he shd get in touch I wd not see him. Any repetition wd lack the spontaneity & beauty of yesterday, & I wd rather remember it as one of those rare & wonderful days when two strangers come together in deliberate ignorance of each other for their mutual pleasure.
September 28: A fairly terrible day, which seemed to have been designed as the counterpart to Tuesday, all choking catastrophe instead of the sentimental camaraderie & avoided intimacy of that brief afternoon. Taha went out for me after lunch to deliver some papers to GS & to find me if he cd some flowers—I had a sudden yearning for those great bronze chrysanthemums. As I sometimes do, I imagined him going through the streets on my behalf, saw him by some supernatural, aerial sixth sense moving among the people, pointing to the flowers, taking the long, top-heavy cone of paper in his hands … I knew how people noticed him, sometimes were rude or cruel, all of which only deepened my pride in him. It was a mystery—for as he ambled about the prosaic London streets he moved too in the realm of my imagination, inviolable, invested with my love.
He took an age to return & when he finally did come in with the chrysanthemums in a vase I asked him if everything had passed off all right, feeling a little anxious at the confidentiality of the things I gave him to carry—not on his account, whom I trust utterly, but lest he shd be waylaid. He said he was very sorry and cd he
ask me something. I said of course. He said he wanted to marry Niri. I congratulated him, shook his hand, wished him every happiness, & said I looked forward to meeting his intended. He went out & shut the door, & a minute or two later I heard him leave the house.
It was only then that I allowed myself to absorb the news, or rather to be transfixed by it, for it filled me with the most piercing anguish, & as he went out, wearing—I knew—his comical broad-brimmed hat, it was as if something within me had been released & I found myself gasping for breath, tears rolling down my face & the whole room & its furniture & pictures & books somehow sodden & heavy with the misery of it. It is true that the announcement of any marriage, however dear to me the couple & however perfectly suited to each other, invariably fills me with the blackest gloom; it may lift after a day or two, though not before an enduring sense has been instilled, not of the beginning of something new, but of the irrevocable ending of something innocent & old. But when the innocence is that of my own Taha … I felt it almost as if he had died—or worse, been magically translated into some other element. It was as if I saw him through field-glasses dancing & singing in a place so far away that when he opened his mouth, when his lips moved, no sound disturbed the silence.
I went round & round the room, mastering my feelings & then yielding to them again. I fetched up in front of the chrysanthemums, which he had arranged in the tall Tang vase that used to be in the hall at Polesden. They were utterly immaculate, ripe yet dry & glossy, the colour of their great clustering heads autumnal while their leaves were green. They might almost have been lacquered art-works, & one had to squeeze them or pinch their petals to prove that they were perishable. I ran over the brief scene of a few minutes before again & again in my mind, each time with renewed pain, & recognised the unspeakable deference with which he had as it were offered the flowers & suppressed his own excitement. He showed, as so often, his tender & acute intimation of my feelings while not altogether being able to contain his own. I understood too in time why he had been so cocky for the last few days, pulled as he must have been between gaiety & apprehension. So the chrysanthemums—in that way that inanimate things have of implicating themselves in moments of crisis—swam before my eyes like emblems of his years of fidelity, and festive tokens of his future, now elegiac, now heartlessly splendid.