James was off to work early, so I walked home through the awakening streets. I moped about in the flat, now furious with Phil, now reproachful, and held a hundred imaginary conversations with him, in which I would often speak out loud—‘What do you mean, you did it out of pity?’, ‘How could you imagine that I wouldn’t find out?’, ‘I’ve never heard anything so absurd in my life …’ and on and on. But when the phone rang I was terrified to answer it and embroil myself in the meanness and misery of arguments. I sat on the bed looking at it and summoning my resolve; but when I did pick up the receiver it was someone I had been at Winchester with—one of those City youngsters—informing me of the memorial service for a not-much-liked don.
I was apprehensive about going to the Corry too, but after a day of fretting, squalid inactivity, I decided to take the chance. It was Phil and Bill who were the naughty ones and I refused to be cowed by them further. My mood was all torn, and had not been helped by my finding, when I was in the bath, a single dark hair (too dark to be mine) trapped on the soap in a long looped wiggle like Corporal Trim’s flourish with his stick. It wouldn’t just wipe off, and I had to scratch at it and gouge at the soap with a fingernail to get rid of it, all knotted up as I was with revulsion and pathos. It was the most thoughtlessly intimate of all the reminders of Phil in the flat—his trainers, his throw-away razors, his bits of paper—insisting it could hardly be over. The Corry too, of course, was running with the idea of him—but he was nowhere to be seen, and Nigel, who would have noticed, assured me he had not been in the pool. I looked abruptly into the weights room, but Bill’s worried features were not to be made out either.
I did, however, run into Charles on my way out. He was sitting in the melancholy cafeteria, looking through the plate-glass windows at the gym-floor below. He was finding it difficult to drink hot coffee from his flimsy plastic beaker. I sat down heavily opposite him.
‘Fascinating athlete, that young man down there,’ he said.
I followed his gaze to the shirtless figure dancing at the punchbag. ‘Yes, that’s Maurice. He’s a dream, isn’t he. Not, however, musical.’
‘Quite so, quite so. I must get him a job.’
‘I think you’ll find he’s got one already,’ I said with a little fading snigger. Charles was looking at me closely, and I looked down, and then away again to Maurice, cutting and jabbing in wonderful ignorance of his spectators and their quandary.
‘I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I,’ said Charles.
I shook my head. ‘You’ve made a mess of things! Dear Charles. I’ve been thinking about this all the time but I still don’t know what to say. But you have not made a mess of anything. Except, of course, that I can’t do the book.’
‘You could.’
‘I can’t.’
He followed Maurice again. ‘You’ve no idea of the quite extraordinary, powerful and—my dear—entirely kind conviction of rightness I had when I discovered who you were. It was such a perfect idea; too perfect perhaps to be enacted by decent human beings. Good punching! Marvellous boy! But perhaps, when your grandfather … is dead—and I’m dead—you’ll come round to it.’
‘All I could write now,’ I said, ‘would be a book about why I couldn’t write the book.’ I shrugged. ‘I suppose there are enough unwritten books of that kind to make that of some interest.’
Charles was not following me. ‘It was naughty to keep back so much—though I kept thinking you would be bound to learn about all that from other people. I felt sure our friend Bill, for instance, would spill the beans.’
‘Bill’s a pretty careful, secretive character,’ I said, my benign and contemptuous views of him appearing to me suddenly at the same time.
‘We’ll still be the most terrific friends, won’t we? I mean, it has been worth it, even if, you know …’
‘Of course it has.’ I didn’t want to get caught up in all this today. ‘What brought you into the Club?’
‘Oh—a meeting. Very dull, I’m afraid. And you’ve been swimming, I imagine. Gosh how I envy you,’ he unnaturally rushed on. ‘There’s nothing like it, is there? It’s one’s real element. It was a thing one missed most frightfully inside—you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘I must say this coffee’s quite revolting. I must get them to do something about it. Maurice you say? I’ve seen him before, of course. And now I think I’d better shuffle home. You couldn’t, my dear …?’
I gave him my arm, and we made our way slowly up to the hall. I knew that, although he came to meetings and could get the coffee changed, he valued being seen with some young thing more, as a sign that he belonged and was wanted. I felt my familiar bafflement with him, and that our meeting had not been at all as I hoped. It was so brief and profitless.
‘You won’t kind of believe me when I say this,’ he began. ‘But old Ronnie Staines has found something most frightfully interesting. Not what you’re thinking; indeed quite the opposite, by all accounts. I’m going to go and see it tomorrow after lunch. Ronnie said actually he wondered if you would come. And I think—I daren’t tell you more—that you should bring that friend of yours you’ve told me about, the Prancing Nigger buff, you know.’
‘It’s an invitation I could normally resist—but Ronnie has promised me some pictures, which I must go soon to collect. I suppose I could do it all at once.’ It was typical of my friendship with Charles that I told him nothing about what really mattered to me while he had laid himself bare, systematically, decade by decade. ‘I was going to mention it to you: my friend James, the Firbank buff, has got into a bit of trouble with the law, picked up by a policeman who just happens to be one of Ronald’s porno models. I don’t know, I thought it might be useful to get hold of the photos.’
Charles absorbed this information with the narrowed eyes and thoughtful nod of someone beyond surprise at human duplicity; but he said nothing.
‘So I will come. But honestly Charles, I’m not on for any more bellboys-get-it-up-the-bum stuff. I’ve had it up to here with all that lately. If not to here.’
‘I promise you, my dear,’ he said, with cloying candour.
James had expressed an interest in Staines, and a dirty-minded and vengeful interest in the pictures of Colin: I liked him in that mood, when he got rid of his selfless wretchedness and we could drunkenly slag people off together. I knew he would be ready to visit the photographer’s house.
There was no word from Phil that night. I was in a tense, vacant condition, but I drank a bottle of wine, and managed to sleep. Dreamlife was wildly disturbed, however. There was a barely remembered sequence in which I met Taha, who was a very old but beautiful man, and began to interview him about Charles and their life together. And there was another, more vivid, in which Phil and Bill were going off on holiday. They were loading up the roofrack on my old Fiat with tentpoles and buckets and spades, and standing about in the road with various other things they had brought from my flat. I wanted to help but kept getting in the way. ‘Be careful where you put that,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget about the blind spot.’ Phil was already in tiny swimming-trunks and Bill gave him a saucy slap on the rear, leaving a large oily handprint. Across the top of the windscreen the sticker read ‘PHIL and BILL’. It was funny, I thought, as I came round, how you never did see cars saying ‘GARY and CHRIS’ or ‘LANCE and DEREK’. They would probably have got smashed up.
James came to lunch with me, and I had taken special care to stuff some aubergines and make a bitter and original little salad. I felt something of that homely, maternal impulse which would occasionally surface in me at times of strain. One could potter pathetically with one’s chicory and watercress and enjoy an almost creative feeling. James, of course, had been hard at work for hours, and I thought what a great narcotic a job could be; and then one earned one’s own money.
‘How are you getting on?’ he asked.
‘I feel pretty helpless. I thought it was a good thing there had been no sordid row or anything, but o
ne would like some kind of contact. It’s so stupid. I don’t know what’s going on. Why doesn’t the little fucker ring me? I feel furious for a while, and then—well, I love him so much. I want to be with him again. And then at other times I feel like a sort of Pantaloon figure, who’s been hoodwinked. Actually I don’t see how any of us can do anything without a certain loss of dignity.’
‘You could just go round to the hotel.’
‘What, and find them frigging away again? I’m not into that.’
‘I thought you thought it couldn’t possibly still be going on.’
I opened the oven door and shoved my hands into the linked asbestos pockets of the oven-gloves, slapping them together a few times as if I were a lunatic in some restraining garment. A good garlicky smell blossomed. ‘I don’t honestly believe they can be having an affair,’ I said carefully. ‘On the other hand, I do believe that the heart, and more particularly the willy, have some very strange ways. It’s just possible,’ I allowed as I squatted down, ‘that a handsome eighteen-year-old could prefer a waddling fifty-year-old to someone as beautiful and well-endowed as me.’
James embarrassedly ruffled the top of my head, but I shouted ‘Out of the way!’ as I made for the table. The oven-gloves were never as efficient as they should have been.
After lunch we popped into James’s Mini and made the two-minute journey over the avenue to Staines’s house. These were the very streets where little Rupert had seen Arthur and Harold at their miserable business: I looked out for them, in a fairly ridiculous and superstitious way. I wanted to save Arthur. At least, I think that’s what I wanted to do to him. It was a strange conviction I had, that I could somehow make these boys’ lives better, as by a kind of patronage—especially as it never worked out that way.
Staines was on his very best behaviour, though it didn’t fool me. One could perceive his slight polite disappointment that James was not more beautiful. The ego was smartly suited, buttoned up, and though at any moment I expected some rude eruption, a comic photographer’s surprise the split second before the flash, the most explosive thing about him was the pink of his socks. Charles was already there, glass in hand, at the end of lunch, and I introduced him to James, whose enthusiasm was precisely modulated to disguise the intimate knowledge he had of him from me. We strolled through at Charles’s pace into the studio, and I heard him saying to James: ‘So you’re the Firbank fellow, eh? I knew him, of course—though not well, not well …’
Staines let down a roll of white paper from the ceiling and had us sit in a row in front of the projector on its high table. As he turned the main lights out and began to speak I was reminded strongly of those scenes, early on in thrillers, when the agent is briefed and shown film clips of leading suspects, taken largely from the back of moving cars.
‘I’m going to show you a short piece of film which I believe will interest you all. It’s part of a whole lot of home-movie stuff I’ve just bought at Christie’s. Most of it’s too madly dull for words—you know, gay young things arsing around with no shame. I just thought it might be fun, and give me some sort of ideas for some Twenties and Thirties—er—pictures I want to make. And then in amongst it there was this fragment—quite exceptional …’
The bright white square at which we had been looking was convulsed with running black and grey, and white flashes. The first thing we could make out was a brief and static view of a lake with steep woods around it. The light in the picture was strangely bleak, and a hundred little lines ran up and down the screen. Even so there was something mysterious about that seemingly black circle of water. Remembered books suggested it was an extinct volcano. ‘Aha,’ said Charles, very smugly. The camera angle jumped to include, possibly by mistake, the bonnet of an early-looking motorcar.
‘You know where we are, Charles,’ said Staines from behind the purring projector.
‘Oh yes—Lake Nemi. Unmistakable.’
There was then a shot held unnecessarily long, of a tin sign saying ‘Genzano—Città Infiorita’.
‘I think we all know where we are now,’ Staines added patly. An old peasant in a hat and carrying a stick as tall as himself limped into view, looking troublesome.
The following sequences took place presumably in the precipitous streets of Genzano. Here was the car again, drawn up outside what might have been the town’s smartest café. The citizens, some aware of the camera, some at least showing no awareness, went stiffly up and down the pavement, turning flickering smiles or frowns. Some of them were getting up from the tables outside under the awning, couples bustling off, while others, with raising of hats, went into the absolute blackness of the interior. One side of the picture was then obscured by a man’s back. He half-turned and wavered in evident response to the cameraman’s protest, and shuffled away to the left. Then he reappeared full-length further off, and took up a position against the car, full of Chaplinesque fidgets, crossing his arms, cocking an ankle on the running-board, turning his head in ladylike parody from side to side.
It clearly wasn’t Charles, though even a sensible person, I knew, might act up like this when a camera was running. It was a taller but thinner man. Moreover it was a bona fide queen. He had on elegant, unEnglish light suiting, with a bow-tie and a broad-brimmed straw hat which gave him a sweetly arcadian character, at the same time as shadowing his face. Then, overcome with embarrassment, he walked rapidly towards the camera, loomed in with peculiar closeness for a couple of seconds, high cheekbones, a long curved nose, funny little mouth.
James was gripping my arm. ‘It’s Ronald Firbank,’ he said.
‘I don’t think there can be any doubt, do you?’ said Staines.
‘That’s certainly him,’ pronounced Charles.
‘If it’s what I think it is,’ said James, ‘it must be at the very end of his life.’ And in the next little bit he was laughing and suddenly it was going wrong: he had started to cough and cough, doubling up, his long hand gestured the camera away.
I understood then, in the next scene, why he looked so frail, had the air of a man nonetheless confronting a threat. He was tackling a steep cobbled hill at the top of which a church was outlined in the late afternoon sun. His whole walk was anyway extraordinary, not best calculated for getting from one place to another, a business of undulating hands and picked tiny steps, and yet obviously inescapable: that was how he walked. A couple of small children at the roadside watched him pass and then started to follow him. One understood their sense that anything so conspicuous must be done deliberately, as an entertainment or as the origin of a procession. A taller boy, a ten-year-old in ragged clothes, joined them, imitating the novelist’s walk. The little ones, emboldened, skipped round him, running ahead as well to see him coming on, openly curious, asking questions, it seemed, of two or three syllables. The hectic jerkiness of the film lent them all a fantastical twitching energy. Then Firbank’s hand went into his pocket and flung backwards a scatter of nickel coins.
Unsurprisingly the next scene showed the crowd about twenty strong. They were reaching the brow of the hill, capering around, others almost marching, but in a volatile Firbankian way, like some primitive disco dance. They were calling and waving their hands, and then chanting something together—a name, an epithet. The camera, with a certain artistic flair, concentrated on the youngsters: tots and urchins with a droll seriousness to them, rowdy pubescent boys bursting out of children’s clothes, and others, with their wide-eyed Italian faces, gazing into the lens as they half-strode, half-loitered with the crowd, plucking at the sleeve of the heart.
And yet it was the mood which fascinated. This marionette of a man, on his last legs, had been picked on by the crowd, yet as they mobbed him they seemed somehow to be celebrating him. He became perhaps for a moment, what he must always have wanted to be, an entertainer. The children’s expressions showed that profoundly true, unthinking mixture of cruelty and affection. There was fear in their mockery, yet the figure at the heart of their charivari took on the likeness
not only of a clown, but of a patron saint. It was a rough impromptu kind of triumph.
There was a brief tableau in which order had been more or less imposed. The children gathered round Firbank and glared and grinned at the camera; Firbank flapped his hat in his hand and looked hot and bothered. A little girl tugged at his trousers and he pulled his pocket inside-out with a drooping and muffled gesture to say he had no more to give. He smiled too, but showed that he wished it was all over: it was a tiring situation for so childless and singular a man. In the final few seconds he was walking away by himself: there was something decisive and businesslike about him; in spite of everything he was in a hurry, he had work to do. Then a fat boatered man and a woman with a parasol were parading past a tent with the word STEWARD on it. ‘Ah, that’s the end of our film,’ said Staines, and put out the projector’s bulb. We were in virtual darkness for several seconds, and James squeezed my hand and I felt his charge of emotion.
‘It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said, in the way that one does to a host, but he meant it.
‘Quite a find, eh?’ Staines agreed, putting on the light. ‘I want to turn it into a little feature, with a commentary perhaps by you, Mr Brooke, if you would care to.’
‘I’ve got some ideas about it,’ said James.
‘I’ve been to Genzano, of course,’ muttered Charles, who did not want to be left out. ‘They have this festival of flowers, and the main street is carpeted with … er … with flowers.’