Owning Up: The Trilogy (45 page)

I took her to the Caribbean as well but she didn’t care for that either, finding it too dark. It was Reggie she approved of. ‘So amusing,’ she said, and so he was, but my relationship with him was about to end, sexually for ever, socially for a short but bitter time.

In Reggie’s sitting-room was a large photograph, taken in the misty Bond Street style of the period, of a very beautiful young man. It was, he told me, his best friend, Perry Edgebaston, who was away in the country. I gathered he was rich as well as beautiful, and I had a feeling that I’d seen him before. Reggie said he’d be back in London soon and of course I’d meet him.

The day of Perry Edgebaston’s return Reggie gave a party for him and I asked if I could bring a school friend of mine called Guy Neale who, although entirely heterosexual, even at Stowe, was sophisticated enough to do no more than raise an amused eyebrow if the party developed along the lines that Reggie’s parties usually did.

I have mentioned Guy before as it was he who had first played me a jazz record in his study some four years earlier, and who was furthermore the cleverest of the Anarchic trio of whom the other members were Tony Harris Reed and myself. I had remet him by chance several weeks before in Sloane Street. Guy, who was wearing the uniform of a Corporal in the RAF, told me that he was working in Harvey Nichols,- the upper floors of which had been commandeered for the duration, and not yet relinquished. He had given me his office telephone number and we had spent several evenings together. There was something Sphinx-like about Guy. He was tall, rather reserved, and his eyes were of a penetrating pale blue with curiously-shaped pupils, more like a cat than a human being. He said little, but what he did say was original or witty, the words chosen with great care as if they were precious objects and too rare to squander. He painted small, strange, very personal pictures of figures wearing pastel clothes moving purposefully but mysteriously about rather sombre landscapes, and had sold one to Mesens after I’d introduced them. I liked to introduce Guy to everybody, because he was one of those people whose approval I actively solicited, and I would bring him parts of my life as a puppy brings in bones to lay at the feet of its master and looks hopefully up at him wagging its tail.

At school his interest in jazz had led him to learn to play the blues and he had formed a small band with which I was sometimes allowed to sing. It was in this role that he gained the sobriquet of ‘Jesus’, partially because we felt that jazzmen must always be called something strange like Muggsy or Pee Wee, but mostly because his manner of greeting or leaving his acquaintances involved a smile of beatific benevolence accompanied by the raising of the right hand in benediction. Now in London, we had begun to see quite a lot of each other.

He enjoyed drinking, although only gin, but whereas alcohol worked on me to produce a manic excess, a state he did nothing to discourage, in him it led to no more than a heightening of his verbal fantasies. One night, in a Fitzrovian restaurant, he had pointed out Cyril Connolly, or ‘Saint Cyril’ as we called him out of respect for his editorship of
Horizon.
Very drunk, I crossed the room and knelt at his feet. ‘Thy blessing, St Cyril,’ I invoked, ‘grant us thy blessing.’ Connolly looked rather perplexed to find an Ordinary Seaman carrying on in this bizarre way, but suggested amiably enough that I write something about naval life and send it to the magazine. I thanked him, rose unsteadily and staggered back to Guy, who had initially suggested the whole absurd enterprise knowing that, in my condition, I would carry it out immediately. It was he, too, who discovered a talent competition to be held in the Paramount dance-hall in Tottenham Court Road and proposed that, as his piano playing had considerably improved, and I had boasted to him of my success as a singer in naval concerts, we should enter in the hope of winning the ten pounds prize money. We did so under the name of The Melly Brothers but were not even placed. Years later Guy, who enters and leaves my life at irregular intervals, told me how amused he’d been at my insistence on this billing. ‘It never occurred to you to call us The Neale Brothers,’ he said, ‘not for an instant, but then it wouldn’t, would it?’

So Guy and I went to Reggie’s party for Perry, who arrived rather late looking more beautiful than any boy I’d ever seen. I
had
met him before. He’d come down to Stowe during my final year with one of those parties of trainee Guards’ officers who were allowed to spend six months at Oxford or Cambridge to establish their right to return there if and when they came back from the war. I’d come upon Perry sitting on the steps of the Egyptian Entry on the North Front. He was green with drink but even so memorably glamorous. I’d asked him if I could help him and he’d managed a wan smile before turning aside to be sick. Not the most auspicious first meeting but I’d never forgotten him and here he was.

We began to chat and he explained that the reason he’d been out of London was because he’d been to a first night disguised as a Portuguese princess and somehow the
News of The World
had heard about it and was trying to track him down. After a short time we found we were holding hands, a little later kissing, and suddenly I found myself telling him I’d fallen in love with him and he admitted the same to be the case with him. I said we must tell Reggie, so we waited until everybody had gone and there were only Guy, Reggie, Perry and me left and then I told him, and he was very angry indeed.

You might wonder why I found it necessary to tell Reggie at all. He didn’t object to casual promiscuity and anyway I could have come up from Chatham without telling him to stay with Perry. I suspect my real reason was largely selfish. I wanted to sleep with Perry right away, but of course I had to rationalise it as the straight thing to do. After all this was love. I needed to commit myself, to avoid anything dishonest or underhand.

Reggie was sitting at his dressing-table when I broke the news. Guy, who’d liked him instantly, was sitting on the bed. Reggie began screeching about treachery, breaking off only to ask Guy, who politely declined, restating his total heterosexuality, to stay the night. Meanwhile, as a physical expression of his anger, he was slapping on rouge and eye shadow and spraying himself with expensive scent. He turned suddenly and drenched Guy with it too, a phenomenon which, as it was very strong, must have taken some explaining away in the RAF office in Harvey Nichols next morning. Perry was a traitor, Reggie told him, and I was an ungrateful little slut. He never wanted to see either of us again. I regretted this but not enough to recant and soon found myself in Perry’s service flat in Tite Street and a minute or two later in Perry’s huge Jacobean four-poster with its carved cherubs and swathes of fruit.

Next morning I woke to find the curtains being drawn by a white-coated, wizened youth with a very bad complexion and a compliant air. He vanished and returned with breakfast for two on a tray with legs, and most of the newspapers. When he finally disappeared for good, I asked Perry what his attitude was to finding him in bed with a sailor. Perry told me he was quite used to it and not just sailors. Servicemen of all nationalities had left their hats or caps on the hall table, and on one rare occasion when Perry didn’t pick up anyone, the waiter had come in with the double breakfast and, with considerable incredulity, had said, ‘Alone sir?’ before going off to rearrange his tray. Later on we decided to christen this dwarfish figure Fairy Grogblossom after the character in Beachcomber.

I had the day off and so began to get to know Perry a little and to find him more and more enchanting. I was surprised by his flat. The furniture at Reggie’s was Harrods 1930s Regency, but Perry’s, brought down from his country house in Hampshire, was all real and splendid stuff. To me though it looked rather shabby; the gilt chipped here and there, the original chair covers in need of replacement – the oldest furniture I had till then seen in use, rather than in museums, was Victorian. I was impressed by the flowers however; masses of lilies or orchids in every corner of the room.

Perry and I left it a day or two before making it up with Reggie, but from then on saw him most days we were together. The morning chocolate in Fortnum’s, the lunches or dinners at the Jardin des Gourmets were resumed. We all went to the Palladium to see a bill headed by the great Tessie O’Shea wearing a dress of splendidly opulent purple and orange, and along to Eton for a day of wine and sun which I was quick to equate with the visit to Brideshead paid by Charles Ryder (me) and Sebastian Flyte (Perry), in Waugh’s recently published book. I have always had this bad habit of comparing every situation in my life, every landscape or building, with something in literature or painting. It’s as if I can only see or experience anything through these grids.

I was really proud to be with someone as beautiful as Perry. I even invited him to tea on the
Argus
and he came, driving down from London in his great Bentley for which, somehow, he always seemed to find petrol. We’d made the mess very pretty with a tablecloth ‘borrowed’ from the officers and, while my messmates treated this visit with a certain sardonic amusement, they were very nice to Perry and afterwards showed him everything including the engine room, now only used for heating as the
Argus
would never sail again. The old stoker in charge became very skittish as he explained the machinery, obviously revelling in being able to exploit the sexual symbolism so easily to hand. Later this man, a Geordie as it happened, became a perfect pest, showing up when I was alone on night watch and making insistent propositions which I had no intention of accepting. He wrongly believed that this was because I thought his age might have affected his virility. ‘When ah git gahin,’ he told me, ‘Ah’v got a barkboon lak a fookin elephant.’

Perry was very touched by the sailors’ ease and friendliness and I was pleased too.

One thing that amazed and rather worried me about Perry was his extravagance. Being an exhibitionist, I thoroughly enjoyed strolling down Piccadilly with him, both of us carrying huge bunches of flowers bought at Harrods, but I was appalled by what they’d cost and I tried to help him mend his ways. ‘Perry,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘was about to spend twenty pounds on a vase, but I stopped him and found him a perfectly adequate one in Chelsea for a pound!’ What I didn’t realise was that Perry probably didn’t find it adequate at all but was too nice to say so. I assumed that everybody shared my middle-class tastes and my belief, if frequently betrayed in the event, in such middle-class virtues as thrift and making do.

How in love was I? I believed totally. I carried Perry’s photograph in my wallet, showing it to sailors in exchange for their thumbed and creased snaps of ‘the tart’ or ‘the wife’; I rang him frequently from the urine-scented public phone-box in the dockyard, and felt a rising sense of excitement as the train from Chatham rattled across the Thames towards Victoria Station, and yet when the break came I felt little more than mild remorse and was able to weep only a few self-pitying tears. Admittedly there was by then something else happening in my life, but I’d expected to feel at least some despair. Not for the first time nor the last did I feel that there was a dimension missing in me. I suspected an emotional frivolity, an inability to scale heights or plunge into chasms. I can cry easily enough but, whatever people say or do, I feel cheerful again in an almost obscenely short time. I have never experienced the gnawing rodents’ teeth of jealousy, but have equally missed out on a passion that transforms the landscape. My emotional life, like Coward’s Norfolk, has been flat. As to why Perry and I broke up, although it would no doubt have happened anyway, the fault was mine; an example, on a more involved scale, of the ‘Melly Brothers’ syndrome.

I’d asked him to stay with me in Liverpool and he’d come. It had been perfectly all right, although my mother had found him less ‘her cup of tea’ than Reggie, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Perry wouldn’t share my view of this port as the centre of the universe. I took him around to meet my remaining great-aunts, uncles and cousins sitting waiting for death in front of flickering steel grates in Victorian squares or decaying Gothic mansions. I took him on walks through public parks which for me pressed every Proustian button. We drank with my father and his friends in a public house called The Albert, which was for me the exciting proof that I had grown up. I encouraged my mother to tell him stories of her theatrical friends and the parties she gave for them in the Twenties and Thirties. I introduced him to my circle of homosexuals, proud to impress them with so beautiful a friend, and Perry, having very good manners, never let me know that he found any of it less memorable, less extraordinary than I.

Later, after a lot of unsubtle hinting, he asked me to stay the weekend with him in Hampshire. A large Georgian house at the end of a long drive; his mother kind and talkative, his sisters reserved but friendly enough. A butler unpacked for me. An elderly American, a fellow guest, observed how he liked to put out half a cigarette before going to sleep because, relighting it in the morning, it had acquired ‘a nice spicy taste’. I was impressed by portraits of earlier Edgebastons, Victorians glowering hairily through discoloured varnish, a Regency romantic with open collar and flowing dishevelled locks, sensible Georgians in front of wooded prospects, melancholy Jacobeans, sly Elizabethans, and furniture that seemed to demand silk ropes across it.

I sucked up to Perry’s mother like anything. She responded. Had I a great-uncle who had been an MP? A Sir George Melly? No, he was my great-great-uncle (I suppressed the fact he had no knighthood), a Liberal representing Stoke-on-Trent. That would be he, and she remembered how, when she was very small, Sir George and her grandfather, both very old gentlemen, had walked arm in arm on the terrace after dinner. I glowed with snobbish pride. The Anarchist and the Surrealist never even stirred in their sleep.

On returning to Chatham I wrote a fulsome bread-and-butter letter to her, and a passionate affirmation of love to Perry, who had decided to stay on for a week or so. In the letter I proposed a programme: on my weekends off he and I should spend one in Liverpool, one in London and one in Hampshire with his mother. I took it for granted he would fall in with this scheme. Undoubtedly it helped him make up his mind that it was time for Fairy Grogblos-som to serve breakfast to a more varied cast. Next time I saw him he told me an alarming tale, which I believed then but which, in retrospect, I think may have been a kindly if inventive fiction. I had, it transpired, put the thank-you letter and the love letter in the wrong envelopes. His mother had passed my letter to him along the row of sisters at the breakfast table, announcing rather icily that there seemed to have been some mistake. He had sent my letter to her in the opposite direction. She had not read it and had said no more on the subject, but there was no question of my revisiting the house. I asked him twice more to Liverpool, but he made excuses. In London he became more evasive, and finally, with a certain incredulity, I realised it was over. I asked him point-blank. He didn’t deny it. I cried a bit. He was kind but firm. A week or two later I rang up and suggested a drink. He accepted and afterwards, for a time, we met occasionally. I saw less and less of Reggie too. The Surrealist and the Anarchist woke each other up. I began again to visit the Mesens more consistently. I didn’t know it but a new chapter in my sentimental education was about to open.