I agreed. ‘He does look pretty naughty.’
‘Oh, he’s wildly naughty.’ Staines lowered his voice. ‘And you know the most ridiculous thing about him. What do you think he does?’
‘Absolutely everything, I should imagine.’
‘True, true,’ Staines almost boasted. ‘But I mean as a job?’
‘He’s not one of your butchers, is he? I don’t know—a florist …’
‘No!’
‘I can’t guess.’
‘My dear, he’s a policeman. Isn’t it wonderful?’ I blinked and then rolled my eyes in a way I would never have done if I had been genuinely amazed. ‘In fact I first spotted him on the beat—you could see at once he was something special. But what I say is, with boys like that in the police force, things can’t be all bad!’ He began to move off, but returned to his subject. ‘Not an eyelash, though, not a teardrop, of innocence. The one I’d have loved to do, the really innocent one, was your little friend Phil …’
I wondered at first if I was going to have to strike a bargain. ‘I’d like to buy one of your studies of Colin.’
Staines had virtually left me, so that he called out to me as Guy Parvis pressed himself upon him, ‘Dear, I’m far too dear!’ And then mouthed, in a kind of grimacing secrecy: ‘I’ll give you one …’
Now I was alone with Aldo again. I wasn’t utterly utterly uninterested in doing something with him afterwards, but the social work was a strain, so I struggled back upstairs. I planned another drink before escaping, and looked round the main gallery too to see if there was anyone else I wanted to escape with. It was as full as it sensibly could be now, and there were some interesting punky-looking boys with public-school voices as well as real leather queens and a sprinkling of those dotty types with monocles and panama hats who seem to exist for ever in some fantastic Bloomsbury of their own.
I was excited by a heavily built man with thick slicked-back hair, and was showing an implausible degree of interest in the picture hanging just by his right shoulder, when the bell went again. We both turned, though he looked away at once while I, seeing Charles shuffle in, felt my mood lighten with friendliness and a flicker of guilt. I had been neglecting the old boy, and seeing him now in this noisy, confusing place recalled my responsibilities. I went to help him.
‘Ah … ah …’, he was saying, looking regretfully to left and right.
‘Charles! It’s William.’
He took my arm at once. ‘I know perfectly well who it is. What an orgy … Good heavens.’ He gave off, close to, the elderly smell of sweat and shaving-soap. ‘We almost didn’t come,’ he admitted, with what I took for humorous grandeur.
‘I’m very glad you did. I haven’t seen you for ages.’
He was prodding his other hand behind him, like someone searching for the armhole of a coat. ‘This is Norman,’ he explained, as another man, thus encouraged, came forward from his shadow. ‘The grocer’s boy.’
Norman reached round Charles to shake my hand. ‘I’m the grocer’s boy,’ he confirmed, very happy, it seemed, to be remembered by his juvenile role. As he was a man in his mid-fifties I found it hard to place him at first. ‘I used to work in the grocer’s in Skinner’s Lane,’ he said, smiling, nodding, ‘years and years ago, when Lord Nantwich first moved in.’
I cottoned on. ‘And then you joined the merchant navy and sailed all over the world.’ He smiled again, as at the successful recitation of an old tale.
‘I left the service some time ago now, though.’ Service, one could see, was something he was proud of, and his whole manner spoke of it. He was soberly dressed, in an ill-fitting grey suit and shiny casual shoes of a kind that had been fashionable in my earliest childhood (my father had worn something very similar on family holidays). The suit, which was broad in the shoulders and stood off the neck, was the sort of thing that students bought in second-hand shops, and on one or two of the modish boys in this room could have had a certain chic. Norman’s wearing of it was without irony and he reminded me, as the man in the lavatory had reminded Charles forty years before, of a College scout, habituated, stunted by service. His face shone.
‘Norman dropped in this afternoon,’ said Charles. ‘Quite amazing. I hadn’t seen him for over thirty years.’
‘I sent him a picture of me from Malaya, though.’
‘Yes, he sent me a picture from Malaya.’
‘I was surprised Lord Nantwich recognised me, even so.’
Charles puffed and muttered something about a tifty. ‘Come and have a drink,’ I said to both of them, and I took Charles’s wrist to lead them through the crowd. I could see, as I swivelled round to pass Norman a glass of wine, that he would always be recognisable. His broad cheekbones, large mouth, grey eyes and blond hair, now indistinctly grey, were elements in a formula of beauty, whatever disappointments and desertions might have taken place. Charles was politely inscrutable, but I sensed that he was pained to be disabused. He turned away from the ‘grocer’s boy’ who had needlessly returned to destroy the sentimental poetry with which he had been invested. I felt sorry for them both. And then, drunk again, hated the past and all going back.
‘I share a house with my sister,’ Norman was explaining to me. ‘It’s very near the middle of Beckenham, quite convenient for the station and the shops.’
‘You should have brought her today,’ said Charles loftily.
Norman flushed at this, and looked around hectically at the straining torsos and ecstatic mouths upon the wall.
‘Can I come and see you soon, Charles?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been picking my way through the books, and I’ve almost got up to the end. I need some briefing.’
‘Briefing, tomorrow?’ His eye had been caught by Staines, and I watched his attention waver and then switch abruptly away. Staines reached a ringed hand to him and I heard Charles saying ‘… splendid evening, most memorable …’
I kept up with him and squeezed his arm: ‘I’ll come for tea, as before’—and he patted my hand. Then I was talking to the thick-set man, laughing overmuch so as to charm, and with my shirt half unbuttoned, running my hand over my chest. He was keen on photography, had his reservations about Staines—I agreed with him brutally—but liked Whitehaven. I told him Whitehaven had photographed me, but I saw that he thought I was taking a rise out of him. ‘Well, have you done any modelling?’ I asked.
Aldo came up and said, ‘Oh, let’s be going.’ He looked tipsy and abandoned. It was only when the three of us were virtually through the door that I realised his words had been addressed to the thick-set man rather than to me.
‘Nice meeting you,’ said the thick-set man; and other perfectly pleasant remarks were exchanged before the two of them strolled away, arm in arm. I lurched off furiously to the hotel.
11
‘Sugar?’
‘I don’t, thank you.’
‘I rather do these days. I’ve given in.’ Charles discarded the tongs, and shovelled up roughly half a dozen sugar-lumps in his bowed, flat fingers. We sat and sipped as Graham came in again with more hot water, and Charles watched his manservant with confident gratitude. At Skinner’s Lane everything was running like clockwork. ‘I have my own teeth,’ he added.
We sat, as before, in the little library, Charles’s den, the only part of the house which did not come under Graham’s orderly care. Each time I visited it there were signs of new disturbances, books moved from table to floor, old Kalamazoo folders stacked or scattered, as if some task of sorting and searching were being executed, leaving only greater confusion, like a site turned over for coins and amulets by amateurs. Books whose titles had caught my eye last time atop their teetering plinths were now cast down or overlaid by other strata: atlases with cracked spines, popular sheet-music (the ‘Valse’ from Love-Fifteen), magazines whose colour printing had freaked with sun and age and, Gauguin-like, showed brown royalty, pink dogs, pale blue grass.
I felt at home there. As we sat on either side of the empty hearth, I was reminded
of my Oxford tutorials, and the sense I often used to have of inadequacy and carelessness in the face of my tutor, whose hours with me, he came to imply, were needless distractions from his own, decades-long work on succession and the law. There was a similar maleness and candour to it, that scholarly inversion of the rules of the drawing-room that allowed one to talk about sodomy and priapism as though one were really talking about something else. There was a similar toleration of silence.
‘Most tiresome,’ Charles enigmatically resumed. ‘One lives in the past fully enough as it is, without people coming back like that.’
‘Your grocer’s boy. Yes, I confess to having been a bit disappointed.’
‘He couldn’t see that he only had meaning in the past, poor fellow.’
‘I think Martyrs were perhaps a bit much for him.’
Charles smiled wistfully. ‘I thought they’d scare him off, but he rather took to them.’
‘I can see that he must have been pretty hot stuff once,’ I conceded. ‘And the shop-boy thing is so glamorous, all the whistling and the boredom, and the way they’re trapped there, on show.’
‘He used to go out on a bicycle,’ Charles corrected my over-warm reconstruction. ‘He did the deliveries with an apron on.’
I lifted the fluted shallow teacup to my lips, and my eyes rose again, as they inevitably did in this room, to the chalk drawing above the fireplace. Taking a risk on it, I said, ‘Is that Taha in that picture?’
Charles was looking at it too, and repeated the name, but stressing it differently. ‘Yes, yes, that’s him,’ he said, with a sad breeziness.
‘He’s very beautiful,’ I said honestly.
‘Yes. It’s not an especially good likeness. Sandy Labouchère did it soon after we got back from Africa—you can see he had a rather brilliant line when he wanted to. But he hasn’t brought out the child’s gaiety, a kind of radiance … He was the most beautiful thing on earth. You just wanted to look at him and look at him.’
‘Is he still alive?’ I asked, unable to imagine him going the way of the grocer’s boy into banal middle age; but Charles muttered ‘No, no,’ unanswerably, and then bashed on: ‘So you’ve read all the books I gave you.’
‘Yes, I have. Well, I haven’t read every word, but I’ve taken a pretty fair sample.’ He nodded reasonably. ‘I would read them really thoroughly, of course, if I decided to take on this … job.’
Charles was quite quick and tactical. ‘Quite so, quite so,’ he said. ‘But tell me, I don’t know what sort of impression those books give. Do they appeal at all to, to a younger person?’
‘Oh, I think they’re very interesting indeed. And you’ve done so much,’ I obviously went on, ‘and known such extraordinary people.’
He sighed heavily at this. ‘I ought to have been able to make something of it myself; but it’s too late now. As you get near the end of your life you realise you’ve wasted nearly all of it.’
‘But that’s not the impression I have at all. I’m sure you don’t really think that,’ I said, in the way that one blandly comforts those whose torments one cannot imagine. ‘I mean, I really am wasting my life, and it’s not like what you were doing.’
Charles took this up directly. ‘I’ve no time for idleness,’ he said. ‘I want you to have a job.’
‘I just don’t want the wrong one,’ I said, sounding spoilt even to myself. ‘I’d like it if I could simply disappear, like you did. It was wonderful how you could disappear into Africa.’
‘One disappeared,’ Charles admitted. ‘But one also remained in view.’
I came back to it carefully, weighing the weightless teacup and saucer in my hands. ‘What I rather got the impression of is that you were lost in a dream. It’s very beautiful that feeling the diaries give of a constant kind of transport when you were in the Sudan. It’s like a life set to music,’ I said, in a fantastic impromptu, which Charles ignored.
‘We were doing a job, of course. It was exceedingly hard work: relentless and exhausting.’
‘Oh, I know.’
‘But you’re right in a way—of me, at any rate. It was a vocation. Not all of them in the Service saw it in quite the same light as I did, perhaps. Many of them hardened. Many of them were dryish sticks long before they reached the desert. They write books about it, even now—fantastically boring.’ Charles shot out his foot and sent a book across the hearth-rug to me. It was the memoirs of Sir Leslie Harrap, privately printed and inscribed to Charles: ‘With best wishes, L. H.’. A photograph of the author, in puzzled superannuation, took up the back of the dust-jacket.
‘He was one of the people who went out with you, wasn’t he?’
‘He was a good administrator, loyal, fair, stayed on longer than me, went back in fifty-six to help with the independence arrangements: utterly sound—Eton, Magdalen. Not a breath of imagination in his body. It was reading his book—what’s it called? A Life in Service—that made me realise I didn’t want to write anything of that kind. There is a book in my life, but it’s almost entirely to do with imagination and all that. The facts, my sweet William, are as nothing.’
I looked on abashed. ‘You have published something about the Sudan though?’
‘Oh—yes, I did a little book in the war; part of a series that Duckworth brought out on various different countries, I can’t quite remember why. It wasn’t much good. Fortunately almost all the stock was destroyed when a bomb hit the warehouse. It’s probably worth a fortune now.’ He laughed hollowly; and then lapsed into a vacant half-smile. I was trying to decide whether or not he was looking at me, whether this lull was an enigmatic path of our intercourse or merely one of Charles’s unsignalled abstentions, a mental treading water, ‘blanking’ as he called it. I thought, not for the first time, how odd it was to know so much about someone I didn’t know. A person could only reveal himself as Charles had done to me in love or from a deliberate distance. For half a minute, as I took in his heavy frame, the eyes dark and somnolent in his pink, slightly sunburned head, either reading seemed possible.
‘If you’ve looked at the diaries for when I first went out,’ he said, ‘then you’ll understand how young and aspiring we were. We were quite sophisticated in a way, but with that kind of sophistication which only throws into relief one’s childlike ignorance. It was a bizarre system, when you think about it. There was one of the vastest countries in the world, and they sent out to govern it a handful of boys each year who had never in their brief lives experienced anything even remotely comparable. It wasn’t like India, of course, there wasn’t the same element of domination—indeed, the whole enterprise was utterly different. Anyone could go to India, but for the Sudan there was this careful selection, screening don’t they call it nowadays. They got some worthy Leslie Harrap types of course, and plenty of sprinters and blues to keep things running on time, and they also got their share of cranks and unconventional fellows. There were possibly more of the latter. It was an absurd system and yet very, very subtle, I’ve come to believe. It singled out men who would give themselves.’
‘They didn’t make objections to people’s—private lives?’ I carefully queried, reaching across with the teapot.
‘Thank you, my dear. No, no, no. On the gay thing’ (he unselfconsciously brought it out, seizing a lot of sugar again) ‘they were completely untroubled—even to the extent of having a slight preference for it, in my opinion. Quite unlike all this modern nonsense about how we’re security risks and what-have-you. They had the wit to see that we were prone to immense idealism and dedication.’ Charles sipped his tea excitedly. ‘And of course in a Muslim country it was a positive advantage …’ We laughed at this, though the implications were not quite clear.
‘I’m sure you weren’t such innocents as you make out,’ I said. ‘You must have been trained, after all.’
‘We read a book about the sort of crops and stuff, and did a bit of Arabic.’ Charles shrugged. ‘And then they sent us up to the Radcliffe Infirmary to watch the operatio
ns. The idea was that if you saw a lot of blood and severed limbs and so on it would prepare you in some mysterious way for the tropics. They’d bring in chaps who’d been run over, or undergrads who’d tried to do themselves in, and we all had a jolly good look. Fascinating, in a way, but of no obvious benefit for a career in the Political Service.’
Charles was in knowingly good form. ‘So you simply followed your instincts much of the time?’
‘Mm—up to a point. There was a tendency to treat Africa as if it were some great big public school—especially in Khartoum. But when you were out in the provinces, and on tour for weeks on end, you really felt you were somewhere else. If you’d had the wrong sort of character you could have gone to the bad, in that vast emptiness, or abused your power. I expect you know about the Bog Barons in the south—truly eccentric fellows who had absolute command, quite out of touch with the rest of the world.’
‘It sounds like something out of Conrad.’
‘So it is often said.’
‘I must say, I see you as more of a Firbankian figure—or at least that’s how you seem to see yourself.’
‘I don’t know about that …’ Charles rumbled.
‘It’s this idea that rather appeals to me, of seeing adults as children. His adults don’t have any dignity as adults, they’re all like over-indulged children following their own caprices and inclinations …’
‘Well, I don’t know!’ Charles gave a brusque laugh of disagreement.
‘Don’t you feel that, though? I’m always being struck by it, especially with very grand and humourless people who can’t afford to see that they’re behaving just like prefects. And men are often like that together—I don’t mean … gay men particularly, but the sense I have that men don’t really want women around much. I think most men are happiest in a male world, with gangs and best friends and all that.’
‘I believe I’ve always conducted myself with dignity,’ said Charles.