I let a properly respectful pause be felt. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that you were very lucky in being able to turn your caprices into a career.’ I was slow to realise how carefully Charles would measure everything I said against his wish that I should write his life. My slight nervousness, frivolousness, trying to be clever, perhaps put him off.
‘There was this absolute adoration of black people,’ Charles said, ‘you could say blind adoration, but it was all-seeing … I don’t know. I think it was more of a sort of love affair for me than for most of the others. I’ve always had to be among them, you know, negroes, and I’ve always gone straight for them.’ He put down his cup. ‘I’ve been jolly lucky with them, too. All my true friends were black,’ he added in a desolate imperfect. ‘Oh, I tangled with a few cads and sharpers, bar-room heartbreakers—’ he broke off actorishly.
‘But all your true friends …’
He was bound to slight me just a shade in replying: ‘Unwavering loyalty, you knew you would die for each other you were such pals.’
‘I hope you see me as a true friend, Charles,’ I said with half-pretended hurt. ‘And I know people—white people—who are immensely loyal to you. Old Bill Hawkins or whatever he’s called; and all these servants who fight over you.’
‘I do command loyalty,’ Charles assented. ‘In Lewis’s case perhaps too much loyalty.’ He sighed and chuckled. ‘Did I tell you about when he locked me in my dressing-room while he fought it out with Graham?’
‘Oh, I was there, if you remember.’
‘My dear child, I’d entirely forgotten. And all that sort of black magic stuff? Most unacceptable, I think, in a gentleman’s companion. He thought I’d betrayed him—but he’d been troublesome for a long time, and when he’d flogged off half of my beautiful Georgian cutlery I could no longer turn a blind eye. He’s inside again, now, I hear. He does these very artistic, kind of symbolic burglaries—with effigies of the people, and little arrangements of things. So there’s never any doubt about who did it.’ Charles chuckled and sighed again. ‘He had a way with him, though.’
‘How did you take him on in the first place?’
I was not surprised when he hummed ‘Oh …’ and wandered into his stratospheric vagueness, broken only by heavy, widely spaced, sibilant breaths: it was like the end of some visionary anthem by Stockhausen. The little gilt carriage clock whirred and chimed five.
‘One quite interesting episode,’ he said, ‘which I think would make a telling bit of the book, was about Makepeace. Did you read that in the diary?’
‘I don’t think I did.’
‘It was a little romance of mine, back in London. I was most frightfully smitten with a young Trinidadian barman at the Trocadero, who went under the charming name of Makepeace. The Troc was a very big, rather vulgar restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue, with masses of mauve marble—long since gone now, of course. I don’t know quite why I was in there, but one evening in the cocktail bar I was served by this fabulously handsome boy, and I stayed on and got him talking, though he was madly shy, but then I’ve always liked that. It turned out he’d had a rather extraordinary experience, as he’d worked his passage over on a ship—this was long before West Indians came in any number, of course—and then, missed the boat home. He walked into town from the Docks and as it was rather cold and rainy and not I suppose at all what he’d hoped for he went into the National Gallery to keep warm, and there he was found by an artist called Otto Henderson, who was a madly musical type as we used to say—and also a third-rate painter by the way—and he sort of picked him up. He lived with Otto for a bit, but Otto was a terrible drunk and it got rather difficult, so Otto found him a job in the Trocadero, where, as it happened, he knew the head barman who was very Scottish and respectable apparently but underneath, according to Otto, wore ladies’ knickers. Scottie was terribly jealous, needless to say, when I hit it off so with his black Adonis. Later on, he even threatened to expose me, but he changed his tune when I promised to tell all about the knickers.’ Charles laughed, and waved a hand in the air, as if shaking a tambourine.
‘How did it all end up?’
‘Oh, Scottie had him dismissed for drunkenness (he did put it away rather) so I took him on myself for a bit. That didn’t really work out, what with Taha in the house as well, so I farmed him out to a friend.’ His face clouded. ‘There was quite a lot of talk about it at the time. Of course in a way it helped being a Lord—the English have such a superstitious awe of the aristocracy. But it also had its disadvantages, in terms of gossip and what-have-you—the English having such prurient and priggish minds. As you will find out, my dear, when you succeed’—words which seemed to anticipate not only my succession but my success.
‘I suppose black people were comparatively rare then—in England.’
Charles half suppressed a burp of agreement. ‘There were a few seamen—they had a hostel out at Limehouse. I had some good friends there, brave, reckless fellows, many of them. There were jazz players in London, of course, who had quite a following. But I suppose most people in the country didn’t see a black person in all their lives. It was impossible to imagine the hatred that would be unleashed against them later on.’
‘You’ve seen a lot of that.’
‘You could say so.’ Charles nodded, staring fiercely at the carpet as if caught by some bitter and ironic memory. I started to speak but he cut across me: ‘There are times when I can’t think of my country without a kind of despairing shame. Something literally inexpressible, so I won’t bother to try and speechify about it.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Only last year out at Stepney there were hateful scenes—precisely hateful. Oh—National Front and their like, spraying their slogans all over the Boys’ Club, where, as you know, a lot of … non-whites go. Every day there were leaflets, just full of mindless hatred—I’m sorry to keep saying it. The horrific thing was that several of those boys were boys who used to come to the Club themselves. It’s the only time I’ve seen our excellent friend Bill get truly angry. He threw out a boy by main force, simply picked him up, carried him to the door and hurled him into the street. He’s as strong as an ox, old Bill. I remember the boy—but boy is too beautiful a word—had a Union Jack pinned to the back of his sort of coat, and Bill had torn it off, accidentally I think, as he ejected him, and was left scowling absolute thunder and holding it in his hand. I was very frightened as I’m not the man I was in a fight, but all being cowards in the bone these louts sidled away when they saw they had met their match. And I wondered to myself what on earth that flag could mean now.’ He paused, mouth agape. ‘We had an outstanding young Pakistani boy, a genius at badminton, who was horribly beaten up last winter—much worse even than you, knifed in the arm and also completely deafened in one ear. Those youngsters feel they have to go about in groups now. And then of course the police think they’re out to cause trouble.’
‘Will it ever get better,’ I said, hardly as a question.
Charles puffed helplessly. ‘I’m beginning to feel a kind of relief that I shan’t be around to find out.’
It was graceless of me to put Charles on the spot but I said I found it hard to reconcile his views on race with the film that Staines had made and he himself—according to Aldo—had paid for. But I did it with as much cheek and charm as possible. He was bemused.
‘I don’t think race comes into it, does it? I mean, Abdul is black and the others aren’t … but I don’t want any rot about that. Abdul loves doing that sort of thing—and he’s actually jolly good at it. He’s a pure exhibitionist at heart.’
‘I must say I was rather amazed by the whole affair—you know, seeing half the staff of a famous London Club about to copulate in front of the camera.’
‘I think you’ll find a good many of them do it—though not always on film, I agree. They’re a close little team, there at Wicks’s, and they like to do what I want. But then I got them all their jobs,’ he added. It was one
of those moments when I had the feeling, chilling and flustering at the same time, that Charles was a dangerous man, a fixer and favouritiser. In the world beyond school, though, perhaps one could have what favourites one wanted.
‘Even so …’ I shrugged. ‘Do you have any idea what will happen to the film?’
‘Well, it’ll have to be edited and everything of course, which is actually frightfully difficult with blue films, the continuity, and putting the close-ups in the right place. We have some contacts—well, friends really, who do all the technical side. We made a few mistakes in the last one we did—filmed over several days so that the boys could come up with the goods, but then you found, if you had an eye for such things, that they’d somehow mysteriously changed their socks in the middle of a fuck or whatever.’
‘I didn’t realise this was such an established business—I’m astonished.’
‘This is our third,’ said Charles, with the personal satisfaction of the amateur. ‘Much the best. It should be ready quite soon; and then we’ll put it out to one or two of those little basement cinemas in Soho where there are people we know. I don’t suppose you ever go to such places.’
So now my rather prickly line sprang back and snagged on my own moral woollies. I was embarrassed and laughed. ‘Well, yes, I have sometimes been to them.’
‘I think they’re jolly good value,’ Charles went on in candid, reasonable tones. ‘I mean, you pay your what is it, fiver, and nine times out of ten you’ll see something that really takes your fancy.’
‘I confess I go to them more for the off-screen entertainment,’ I archly bragged.
‘Ah yes … well …’
‘In fact, I first got off with my current friend in a cinema in Frith Street. He was very shy afterwards about admitting that it had been him—in the dark, you know. He’s a very shy boy, actually, but in those places people seem to lose their inhibitions.’ Charles was not paying attention, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been telling this story. I still wasn’t wholly sure it had been Phil that I had felt up that day in the basement of the Brutus. Blushing, abstruse, he would not, when I put it to him, confirm or deny it. If it had been him, then he seemed to want it forgotten; if not, then he showed an odd readiness to be incorporated into some half-apprehended fantasy of my own. If it had been him, that squalid and exaggerated little episode must alter my understanding of him, open up the faintly sickening possibility of there being another Phil, whom I could not account for. He might have been at the Brutus at this very moment—or at the Bona or the Honcho or the Stud …
‘It’s always gone on, of course,’ Charles recalled. ‘We had little private bars, sex clubs really, in Soho before the war, very secret. And my Uncle Edmund had fantastic tales of places and sort of gay societies in Regent’s Park—a century ago now, before Oscar Wilde and all that—with beautiful working boys dressed as girls and what-have-you. Uncle Ned was a character …’ Charles sat beaming.
‘I’m always forgetting how sexy the past must have been—it’s the clothes or something.’
‘Oh, it was unbelievably sexy—much more so than nowadays. I’m not against Gay Lib and all that, of course, William, but it has taken a lot of the fun out of it, a lot of the frisson. I think the 1880s must have been an ideal time, with brothels full of off-duty soldiers, and luscious young dukes chasing after barrow-boys. Even in the Twenties and Thirties, which were quite wild in their way, it was still kind of underground, we operated on a constantly shifting code, and it was so extraordinarily moving and exciting when that spurt of recognition came, like the flare of a match! No one’s ever really written about it, I know what you mean, sex somehow becomes farcical in the past,’ Charles looked at me very tenderly. ‘Perhaps you will, my dear.’
‘Are you finished, my Lord?’ Graham was enquiring in his complaisant basso.
‘Graham, yes, yes. Do clear away. And William, I must give you just before you go something else to read.’ I hopped up, alert to these covert stage directions in Charles’s talk, and helped him up too. He shuffled round his chair, and looked about for whatever it was. I was convinced he knew where to find it, and had politely and theatrically introduced this air of uncertainty. He handed me a document of several pages, the size of a pamphlet of poems, bound in black shot silk boards and tied legalistically with pink ribbon. ‘Don’t read it now,’ he cautioned. ‘Read it when you get home.’
Graham had gone out with the tray, and we followed a few moments afterwards, Charles’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Thanks so much,’ I said.
‘Thank you, my dear.’ He leant on me and—which he had never done before—kissed me on the cheek. I clumsily patted him on the back.
On my way home I stopped at the Corry for a swim. It was that transitional half-hour before six o’clock, and the last of the afternoon customers—oldsters, college boys, the unemployed—were combing their hair and wringing out their trunks as the evening crowd, the workers, began to pour in and down the stairs. In twenty minutes every locker would be taken, and those who had been held up in traffic, late for their fitness classes or for a squash booking fast elapsing, would come cantering through the swing doors flushed and swearing. Like restaurants and Underground stations the Corry had its times of day, and to come in on a weekday afternoon or a Sunday evening was to find it in the unhindered possession of a small number of people—like a school at half-term, when only the masters and those boys who live abroad are left. The pool, the gym, the handball court had the grateful calm of places only briefly reprieved from habitual clamour. As I arrived the calm was yielding fast.
I took advantage of the crowd, and of the need I always felt on leaving Charles to be childish and naughty. In the showers were a gaggle of Italian kids, in London on a language course. The Club often played host to these groups, and though their bored ragging was a nuisance in the pool the members by some unspoken agreement forgave them everything for their sleek brown bodies, the tiny wet leaves of their swimwear and all their posturing and tossing back of curls. I halted under a fizzing nozzle before going down to the pool and looked them over frankly. It was impossible, with my opera-goer’s Italian, to understand what they were saying, but as they took notice of me I heard their chatter sprinkled with cazzo … cazzo, slurred, whispered and then called aloud, almost chanted, so that they fell about in coarse, lazy giggles at their audacity.
When I got back to the flat I was half expecting Phil to be there, and remembered as I slouched sulkily and randily around the kitchen taking a glass of Scotch in great hot nips that he had arranged a couple of nights ‘off’ to see some South African friends, and, tomorrow, to go to a leaving party at the ‘Embassy’. In the sitting-room, remote control in hand, I tripped from channel to channel on the TV, trying to find something attractive in the personnel of various sitcoms and panel games. Abandoning that forlorn pursuit, I put on the beginning of Act Three of Siegfried and conducted it wildly, with great tuggings at the cellos and stabbings at the horns, but without, after five minutes or so, having made myself feel the faintest interest in it. It was in a reluctant mood that I finally settled down at my writing-desk to read Charles’s precious document. When I untied it I found it to be, unlike anything else of his I had seen, an elegant fair copy, from which a compositor could easily have set type.
Although it would have been allowed, I did not keep a journal over those six months. From the start I saw that what I wanted to say, although ‘hereafter, in a better world than this’ it might find other readers and do its good, would have brought nothing but scorn and salacity at the time. And later, long after the start, when I thought writing might earn some slight remission of my solitude and pent-up thoughts, I shunned it, mistrusted it like one of those friends to whom one is drawn and drawn again and yet each time comes away cheapened, wasted or over-indulged. My journal has always, since my childhood, been my close, silent and retentive friend, so close that when I lied to it I suffered inwardly from its mute reproach. Now, though, it seemed to hold out the inv
itation to something shameful—self-pity, and, worse, the exposure of my narrow, treadmill circuit of memories and longings.
There was too my catastrophic change of station. I had fallen, and though my fall was brought about by a conspiracy, by a calculated spasm of malevolence, its effect on me at first was like that of some terrible physical accident, after which no ordinary thoughtless action could be the same again. The fall had its beginning in that very fast, dazed and escorted plunge from the dock after the sentence had been given, down and down the stone stairs from the courtroom to the cells. I had the illusion—so active is the faculty of metaphor at moments of crisis—of being flung, chained, into water: of a need to hold my breath. In a sense I kept on holding it for half a year.
Chaps did keep journals there—little Joe his childlike weekly jottings for his wife eventually to see, ‘Barmy’ Barnes his notebooks of visions and apocalypses—but they were licensed by their childishness and barminess; whereas I had been violently removed from my rightful lettered habitat, and as an invisible and inner protest refused to write a syllable. Now that I am home again I may write a few pages, merely to attest to what happened—and perhaps to feel my way towards recovery, to patch up my for ever damaged understanding with the world.
One thing I notice already is that since leaving prison I have had long and logical dreams of being back in it, just as when I was in it I dreamt insistently and raptly of happy days long before and also of a day—now, as it might be—when I had been released, and various longed-for things would happen, or promise to happen. Dreams had a powerful and sapping hold on me there. I am the sort of sleeper who has always dreamt richly, so perhaps I should have been prepared for the futile mornings, sewing mail-bags, filling infinite time with that cruel simulacrum of work, but whelmed under in the world of last night’s voyagings, their mood of ripeness and reciprocation. These—and other waking wishes—had such supremacy over the prison’s abstract, cretinous routines that to tell the story of those months with any truthfulness would be to talk of dreams. When, after evening Association—at some infantile early hour—we were sent to our cells, I gained a kind of confidence from the certainty that another world was waiting, a certainty, if you like, of uncertainty, the only part of my life whose goings-on were subject to nobody’s control. The prisoner dreams of freedom: to dream is to be free.