The Marble Quilt (10 page)

Having just returned from a fruitless trip to Guernsey and several other places where Robbie was supposed to have got up to no good, Bosie received a tip that during the years just after Wilde's death, while he was living in Campden Hill, Robbie had “victimized”
sixteen-year-old William Edwards, who subsequently went off to South Africa and died.
Go to Campden Hill
, a tipster told him,
go to a certain address and ask for Mr. Edwards. He will tell you what you need to know
. So Bosie went. His hope was to persuade the boy's father to testify against Robbie at his trial. But when he knocked at the door of the address given, he was told not only that no Mr. Edwards lived there, but that no Mr. Edwards had ever lived there.

At an utter loss, looking up and down a street lined by “at least 150 houses”—this was probably Campden Hill Road, near Holland Park, now one of London's most notorious cruising grounds—Bosie sent up a prayer to Saint Anthony of Padua (the patron saint of lost objects) and waited. It was then that a little boy strode up to him and asked him if he needed help. Bosie stated his dilemma; the little boy smiled and explained that all the numbers in the street had recently been changed. Then he took Bosie by the hand and led him to the right house.

“I firmly believe,” Bosie wrote later, “that the child was an angel … He was a most beautiful little boy, and he had an angelic face and smile.” Just as Bosie did.

When you go to heaven you can be what you like, and I intend to be a child
.

At the trial Mr. Edwards testified that in 1908 his son William had come home wearing a shirt with the name “Ross” printed on its collar. His older son, a soldier, testified that after William's disappearance he had gone to a bar on Copthall Avenue in search of Robbie, who had tried to buy his silence and then, when he refused the bribe, threatened to accuse him of blackmail. (I am sorry to say that such a tactic sounds just like Robbie.) Emma Rooker testified, as did the Reverend Andrew Bowring, and Vyvyan Holland (his
mother had changed their name), and Bosie. Robbie himself testified—not very well, apparently, for in his summing up the judge complained that his performance had been inadequate. “I waited and waited, but I waited in vain for any moral expression of horror at the practice of sodomitical vices … It was certainly not so emphatic a denial as you would expect from a man with no leprosy on him.”

After three hours the foreman of the jury announced that it had failed to reach a verdict. The judge sent them back. The foreman returned with the same news. Later it was revealed that they were split eleven to one in favor of acquittal—yet the holdout refused to budge. In future ravings, Bosie would insist that this gentleman—who robbed him of complete victory—was a plant, a vassal of the nefarious Sir George Lewis.

Not long after, Robbie died. He did not live to be old. Bosie lived to be old.

“You've got more books than the bookstore,” Christopher says, slinging his backpack off his shoulder and sitting down on John's (the counselor's) sofa.

From across the room, where he's opening a bottle of wine, John looks at him cautiously. Is there reproach in Christopher's voice? he wonders, the reproach of youth, of a generation that disdains history? Or is
he
too much of a skeptic? Perhaps, he thinks, Christopher is expressing simple wonder. This is closer to the truth. The fact of the matter is that John's apartment—in which there are only books, buckling shelves full of books, books piled on either side of the sofa—somewhat intimidates Christopher. From near where he's sitting he picks one up, turns to the title page.
Real Presences
, he reads,
Is There Anything in What We Say?
He puts the book down as if it's bitten him, picks up another.
Roger Hinton: A Life
, by Jack McMaster. “Oh, the old guy who was lecturing,”
he says, glancing neutrally at the photograph on the back of the jacket. (It is the same photograph that was on the lectern.)

“Do you read much?” John asks, sitting down next to him, handing him a glass of red wine.

“I like to read.”

“Who do you like?”

Who
, not
what
. What embarrasses Christopher now is that he can't remember the names of any authors. It's as if the question itself has expunged them from his brain.

“Dennis Cooper,” he says after a moment, grateful at least to have successfully grasped at something. “I heard him at A Different Light, too.”

“Anyone else?”

“Those vampire books.”

“Oh, Anne Rice? Yes, I like the early ones.”

Slyly John throws an arm around the back of the sofa, behind Christopher's neck. It may be the very immorality of what he's doing—the fact that by inviting a client home he's breached both the written and unwritten ethics of his profession—that excites him tonight, even more than the simple miracle of having convinced Christopher to come to his apartment. For he's not used—has never been used—to attracting. Unlike Jack McMaster, for instance (and Roger, for that matter; and
Bosie
, for that matter), John was not good-looking as a boy.
They
had that ironic loveliness of the ephebe, that delicate beauty to which the imminence of manhood lends an erotic flush. For such a beauty there has always been, will always be, a market. John, on the other hand, was at twenty both geeky and spotty; all limbs; none of the parts seemed to fit.

The irony (he sees it clearly tonight) is that while Roger aged wretchedly—Jack too—he has, as it were, grown into his body. At thirty-seven, he is a handsome man.

Now, on the sofa, he puts down his wineglass; scoots closer to Christopher, who's gazing rather vacantly at the disarranged books, the groaning shelves. “As you may have surmised,” he says, “I haven't always been a social worker.”

“No?”

John shakes his head. “I used to be an English professor. Well, an
assistant
English professor. Jack—the fellow who gave the lecture—was my mentor. My teacher.”

“Yeah?”

“I wrote my dissertation on Oscar Wilde.”

“Oh, I know about him,” says Christopher. “He was, like, the first faggot, right?”

“More or less.”

“And that guy Jack—that teacher of yours—when you were his student, did he fuck you?”

The question rather takes John aback; it also arouses him.

“Well, yes, actually,” he admits after a moment.

“So that means that if he fucked you, and that poet he was talking about fucked him, and what's his name—Oscar Wilde's boyfriend—fucked the poet, then if you fuck me tonight it'll be like I got fucked by the first faggot.”

“I guess so,” John says, laughing.

“Cool.”

“You like the idea?”

“I like the idea of your fucking me,” Christopher says, and looks John steadily in the
eye. “Will you? I really need it.”

John blushes. Suddenly Christopher is lunging at him, kissing him, kneading his erection.

“But I haven't got any condoms! I meant to buy some, only—”

“It's okay,” Christopher whispers urgently, “it's O.K.—”

“I could run out and—”

“Feel in my back pocket.”

John does. Slipping his hand inside, he paws Christopher's buttock for a moment, then withdraws a single condom in its tidy plastic wrapper.

“You think of everything.”

“There's lube in my backpack.”

“That I've got in the bathroom.”

“So where do you want to do it? Here? In the bedroom?”

“Bedroom's more comfortable.” And standing—how terrible and thrilling is this boy's eagerness—Christopher takes John's hand and yanks him to his feet.

In his later years, Bosie makes it his habit, on sunny days, to take a morning walk along the sea. Bypassing all the rubbish in Brighton, the promenade and the tearooms and holiday camps, he heads south, to where the rocky beach is emptier. Taking off his shoes, he lets the cold water run over his feet, which churn up tiny whirlpools around them before collapsing into the dense, wet life of the rocks.

It is 1944. Springtime. Though he doesn't know it, in a little less than a year he will be dead. Yet he is not a dying man. Instead he is simply an old man, one of hundreds who
stroll each morning along the promenade and the beach of this seaside town, this town of pensioners. Most of his neighbors know perfectly well who he is. “The one who ruined Wilde,” they say; or else, “The one Wilde ruined.” Such whispering and staring, even when overtly hostile, he accepts more placidly today than he might have in the past, letting it roll over his ego as gently as the water now rolling over his feet. For time has diminished the rage that once coruscated his eyes and corroded his hours. It's not that anything has changed in the world; the change was in his soul. This is why he can regard this war—the second one—with so much more composure than he did its predecessor. Cynicism is an old man's prerogative.
You should have listened to me
, he can say;
the Hun must be squelched utterly, else he will re-emerge, time and again, with greater awfulness
. Indeed, as of today only a single blemish clouds Bosie's conscience, and that is the fact that the modern German's loathing of the Jews has rendered the anti-Semitism of Bosie's earlier poetry not only unfashionable but faintly scandalous. Without disclaiming the greatness of
In Excelsis
, Bosie cannot help but regret such lines as

Your Few-kept politicians buy and sell

In markets redolent of Jewish mud …

Yet he was never one to shrink from unpopular positions.

A few weeks earlier Olive, who had been ill for several years, finally died. This was both a sorrow and a relief for Bosie. True, they had not lived together for decades; still, with the coming of war their once acrimonious relations had at least resolved themselves into a state of cease-fire that did not disallow the possibility of friendship. Often they dined or took tea together—sometimes in Bosie's modest ground-floor flat at St. Ann's Court, more often at Olive's much grander digs at Viceroy Lodge, which looked onto the
sea. For Colonel Custance's death had left Olive a rich woman—a fact that she sometimes lorded over her estranged husband, as for years he had lorded over her his self-proclaimed spiritual and poetic superiority. (No one admired Bosie's poetry more than he did; by the same token, he admired no one else's poetry—with the possible exception of Shakespeare's—more than his own.)

In Brighton, though, the tables were turned. Now it was Bosie who, as a consequence of his poverty, had to apply to Olive for money. She made him an allowance that she was not above occasionally threatening to suspend. No doubt the disparity in their circumstances—which, by keeping Bosie's income low, she could be certain to maintain—pleased his wife. In her will she left to her husband an opal necklace (rather ironic, considering his dislike of opals), all the money in her bank account, and an allowance of £500 per annum. (All this, however, went into receivership, as Bosie had never discharged an earlier bankruptcy.) To their son, Raymond, she left her flat at Viceroy Lodge, which did not prevent Bosie from moving in almost instantly upon her death. For a few months he lived there quite happily, until Raymond, who had for many years been an inmate at St. Andrew's Hospital, decided that he wanted to give “life outside” a try, and evicted his father. At the time Raymond was in his early forties—the same age that Bosie was when he took on Robbie Ross in court. In 1926 Raymond had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and admitted to an asylum for “electroconvulsive therapy and narcosis.” (Not incidentally, that same year he had fallen in love with a grocer's daughter named Gladys Lacey, but his parents and grandparents had disapproved of the match, and kept him from marrying her.)

Let us now say that the morning of which I am writing—the morning when Bosie takes a walk along the beach—is the same morning on which Raymond is scheduled to arrive in Hove and displace his father. It is still early; Raymond's train won't pull in for hours. As Bosie strolls up and down the beach, I imagine that he is trying to suppress the rather petulant displeasure that Raymond's decision to come to Hove has provoked in him. After all, as he well knows, his son's release from the hospital where he has been living, on and off, for twenty years is—has to be looked at as—a good thing. It means that Raymond is getting well, with which Bosie has no argument. And yet must his getting well require turning his father onto the street? On the surface, at least, Raymond has been nothing but cordial to Bosie, has even vowed to give him an extra £300 per year as soon as Olive's will has gone through probate. Even so, it
does
seem hard. (All right. Let's just say it.) Bosie's weeks at Viceroy Lodge, under the capable management of Olive's maid Eileen, have been happy ones. There he has entertained, among others, his old friend Lord Tredegar and his wife, Olga, the former Princess Dolgorouki, as well as several members of the younger literary generation (by younger I mean those in their fifties), invited for elaborate teas featuring toast, scones, cream cakes, jam puffs, tarts, and other schoolboyish treats with which their middle-aged stomachs proved unable to cope. The juvenile character of these gatherings, though bewildering to Bosie's guests (after all, he was now in his seventies), delighted the host, who still looks upon his childhood years as the best of his life. His old friend Wellington, for instance, he often thinks about these nights, as he thinks about Alfred, the schoolboy he seduced away from Robbie Ross, and the boy at Oxford who blackmailed him, and the rent boys with whom, sometimes in Oscar's company and sometimes out of it, he was able to revive, for a moment, a lost dream of laddish camaraderie:
tremendous friends
. This is something he's
realized only lately: when he was a wicked young man, what he was really after wasn't sex; it was those innocent attachments of boyhood to which sex—alas—only sometimes took him back. For though the route from childhood to manhood is a clear, straight path, to return, he has learned, one has to take back roads, stumble up rocky paths, try to make sense of deceptive and illegible signs. You rarely get where you want to be, and when you do, the magic place is never as you remembered.