The Untouchable (38 page)

“No,” I said, “it’s not true of everyone. Not of Boy, or of you, either, I suspect. Is there room for me to sit there?”

“Well, there’s lots of things I haven’t done,” he said. “Lots of things.” He put out a hand and patted the space beside him. I stood up, feeling impossibly tall and teetering, as if I were on stilts. I did not so much sit beside him as tumble down on to the cushions in a heap. He had a faintly meaty, faintly rancid smell; from childhood suddenly I remembered the stink that marauding foxes used to leave behind in the garden in the early morning. I kissed him awkwardly on the mouth
(bristles!),
and he laughed, and pulled back his face and looked at me,
quizzical and amused, and shook his head. “Oh, Captain,” he said softly.

I tried to take his hand, but that did not work. I touched his shoulder and was startled by the hardness of it, the hardness, and the unaccustomed muscular responsiveness; I might have been feeling a horse’s flank. He waited, tolerant, mocking, fond.

“I don’t know … what you do,” I said.

He laughed again, and took me by the wrist and gave it a yank.

“Come here, then,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

And he did.

Do not trouble yourself, Miss V., there will be no graphic descriptions of The Act, of bodies pounding in unison, of the cries and the clawings, the delighted easings, the familiar spasm in unfamiliar surroundings, and then the gentle falling into calm—no, no, none of that. I am a gentleman of the old school, awkward in such matters, a touch prudish, even. The bombs of course lent drama to the occasion, but to tell the truth, these stage effects were a bit overdone, a bit vulgarly Wagnerian, as that unlikely Hampstead policeman earlier in the night had understood. The city quaked, and I quaked, both of us under an irresistible but very different manner of assault. I had no sense of entering into a foreign or an unknown land. True, lovemaking with Danny Perkins was a wholly dissimilar experience from the cool and always faintly preoccupied ministrations of my wife, but I knew where I was; oh yes, I knew where I was. I thought it highly probable that I would not survive this night, in which the intensity of the passion I was experiencing seemed as likely to do for me as the bombs raining down on the city, but I contemplated the prospect with perfect detachment; death was a bored and slightly resentful attendant, sitting impatiently at the other side of the room, waiting for Danny and me to finish so that I might be taken up and led away to the final exit. I felt no shame in the things I was doing, and was having done to me, none of that awful sense of transgression that I might have expected. I do not think I felt any real pleasure, either, that first time. In fact, I felt like nothing so much as the volunteer in a crude and remarkably
vigorous medical experiment. I hope Danny would forgive me for making this comparison, but it is, I am afraid, accurate. In subsequent encounters he inflicted such exquisite, tender torments on me that I would have wept at his feet and cried out for more—there was a particular thickening effect at the root of my tongue, an ecstatic, panicky sensation of choking, that only Danny could produce in me—but that time, as the bombs fell and thousands died around us, I was the splayed specimen and he was the vivisector.

Afterwards—what a pity, in a way, that there must always be an afterwards—Danny made us a pot of strong tea, and we sat in the kitchen drinking it, he wearing my jacket, that was much too long for him in the sleeves, and me huddled in Boy’s grey dressing gown, shamefaced, and ridiculously pleased with myself, as the dawn struggled to break, and the all-clear sounded, and a sort of ringing silence descended, as if a vast chandelier had come crashing down somewhere close by and smashed into pieces.

“That was a bad one,” Danny said, “that raid. I don’t think there’ll be much left standing after that.”

I was shocked. Indeed, it is not too much to say that I was outraged. This was the first time he had spoken since we had left the sofa, and all he could come out with were these wretched banalities. What did I care if the entire realm had been flattened! I watched him with sulky curiosity and a swelling sense of umbrage, waiting in vain for him to register the momentousness of the occasion. It is a reaction I in after-years was to see often in other first-timers. They look at you and think, How can he sit there, so offhand, so unmoved, so firmly back in the ordinary, when this amazing thing has happened to me? When I have had a great deal of pleasure from them, or they are very beautiful, or married and anxious (all this in the wholly inappropriate present tense, I notice), I try for their sake to pretend that I too feel that something great and transfiguring has occurred, after which neither of us will be the same ever again. And it is true, for them it has been a revelation, a transformation, a light-stricken falling down in the dust of the road; for me, however, it has been just a … well, I shall not use the word, which anyway I am sure
Miss V. thinks only properly applies, if properly is the way to put it, to what she and her plumber, or whatever he is, I have forgotten, do together on their pull-out divan after the pub on a Saturday night.

Immediately, like a fond old roué, I sought to introduce Danny to what used to be called the finer things of life. I brought him—my God, I burn with shame to think of it-—I brought him to the Institute and made him sit and listen while I lectured on Poussin’s second period in Rome, on Claude Lorrain and the cult of landscape, on Francois Mansart and the French baroque style. While I spoke, his attention would decline in three distinct stages. For five minutes or so he would sit up very straight with his hands folded in his lap, watching me with the concentration of a retriever on point; then would come a long central period of increasing agitation, during which he would study the other students, or lean over at the window to follow the progress of someone crossing the courtyard below, or bite his nails with tiny, darting movements, like a jeweller cutting and shaping a row of precious stones; after that, until the end of the lecture, he would sink into a trance of boredom, head sunk on neck, his eyelids drooping at the corners and his lips slackly parted. I covered up my disappointment in him on these occasions as best I could. Yet he did so try to keep up, to seem interested and impressed. He would turn to me afterwards and say, “What you said about the Greek stuff in that picture, the one with the fellow in the skirt—you know, that one by what’s-his-name—that was very good, that was; I thought that was very good.” And he would frown, and nod gravely, and look at his boots.

I would not give up. I pressed books on him, including, not without shyness,
Art Theory of the Renaissance,
my favourite among my own works. I urged him to read Plutarch, Vasari, Pater, Roger Fry. I gave him reproductions of Poussin and Ingres to pin up on the wall in the little boxroom off Boy’s bedroom that was his private place. I took him to hear Myra Hess playing Bach at lunchtime in the National Gallery. He endured all these trials with a sort of rueful tolerance, laughing at himself, and at me for my delusions and childish desires. One Sunday afternoon we went together to the Institute and descended
through the deserted building to the vaults in the basement, where with all the solemnity of a high priest inducting an ephebe into the mysteries of the cult, I unwrapped my
Death of Seneca
from its burlap shroud and held it up for his admiration. Long silence; then: “Why is that woman in the middle there showing off her titties?”

The price he exacted for submitting himself to so much culture was the frequent excursions that we made together into the world of popular entertainment. I had to accompany him regularly to the theatre, to musicals and farces and comedy reviews. Afterwards we would go to a pub and he would give me a detailed critique of the show. He was a harsh critic. His most scathing denunciations were reserved for the male soloists and the boys in the chorus. “Couldn’t sing for toffee, that one—hear him trying to do that high note at the end? Pathetic, I call it.” He was very fond of the music hall, too, and at least once a week I would find myself squirming on a hard seat at the Chelsea Palace of Varieties or the Metropolitan in the Edgware Road, while fat women in floppy hats sang risqué ballads, and sweating magicians fumbled with scarves and ping-pong balls, and check-suited Mephistophelian comedians flung themselves about the stage on rubber legs, making double entendres, and shouting catch-phrases I could not understand but which sent the audiences into swaying transports of mirth.

Boy too had a weakness for the music hall, and often accompanied us on these jaunts Up West. He loved the noise and the laughter, the brute euphoria of the crowd. He would bob and stamp beside me in his seat, cheering the fat singers and joining in the refrains with them, hugging himself with glee at the comedians’ blue jokes, making wolf whistles at the mighty-thighed, no longer young girls in the chorus. It was as well the darkness hid the rictus of contempt with which I regarded him as he swayed and shouted. Another attraction of these occasions for him was the rich opportunities there were after the show for him to pick up lonely young men. Boy knew about Danny and me, of course—Danny had told him what had occurred as soon as he had woken up that morning from his drunken stupor. I imagine they both had a good laugh. I had waited, not without trepidation,
for Boy’s reaction; I don’t know what I had expected him to do, but Danny was supposed to be his lover, after all. I need not have worried. As soon as he heard, Boy came lumbering down the stairs and clasped me in a close and noisome embrace and gave me a fat wet kiss full on the lips. “Welcome to the Homintern, darling,” he said. “I always knew, you know; something in those soulful eyes.” And he cackled.

What really worried me, of course, was what Nick would think. Even the possibility that he would tell Vivienne was nothing compared with the prospect of his disapproval or, worse still, his ridicule. I should say that at that stage I did not for a moment think that I had turned overnight into a fully fledged queer. I was a married man, wasn’t I, with two young children? This fling with Danny I took to be an aberration, an experiment in living, an exotic indulgence licensed by the times, the sort of thing that so many others of my acquaintance had gone through at school but which I with characteristic tardiness had only arrived at in my thirties. True, I was startled, not to say shaken, by the emotional and physical intensity of these new experiences, but that too I could take as merely another symptom of the general feverishness of the extraordinary times through which we were living. I suppose these were the kind of things I planned to say to Nick if he should challenge me. I saw myself in a Noel Coward pose, world-weary, polished, briskly turning aside his remonstrations with the flick of an invisible ebony cigarette holder. (“For goodness’ sake, dear boy, don’t be so conventional!”) But he did not challenge me. On the contrary, he observed a total silence, which was more alarming than any expression of abhorrence would have been. It was not just that he never said anything: he did not register by the slightest sign what he was thinking. It was as if he had not noticed—in fact, sometimes I wondered if perhaps the thing was entirely beyond his comprehension, and that it was this that kept him from seeing what was happening, and from attacking me, or turning from me in disgust. As the years went on, and I acknowledged my true nature to him, if not in so many words then certainly in unignorable deeds, we developed a tacit understanding which, so I thought, embraced not only our friendship but my relations, as
he saw them, with Vivienne and the children and the Brevoort family in general. I can never decide which I am more of, an innocent or a fool. Equal parts of both, perhaps.

The day after that night of revelation is lit in my memory with a garish, hallucinatory glare. At mid-morning, when Danny had gone back to his room to sleep—Danny loved to lie in bed in the daytime, wrapped in voluptuous, wool-warm communion with himself—and I was bracing myself to step out into what I was convinced would be an utterly devastated city, a telephone call came, from a person whose identity I never did manage to trace, and even whose gender was uncertain to me, but who seemed to be a Brevoort relation of some sort, to inform me of the discovery earlier that morning in Lisle Street of the body of my father-in-law, sprawled on the pavement in a tacky puddle of his own blood. I assumed a felony had been committed—that sprawl, that spilled blood—and asked if the police had been called, which provoked a puzzled, crackly silence on the line, followed by what I thought was a snort of laughter, but was probably a sob, and a long, gabbled explanation in which the words
flying shrapnel
seemed to me to strike an incongruously comic note. More phone calls followed (how had the telephone lines survived such a night?). Vivienne rang from Oxford. She sounded tight-lipped and accusatory, as if she were holding me at least partly to blame for the tragedy, which perhaps she was, since I was the only immediately available representative of the vast machine of war in which her father had been inadvertently caught and crushed. Her mother came on the line, urgent and incoherent, saying she
had known, had known all along;
I took her to mean she had foreseen Max’s death and was adducing it as another confirmation of her gift of second sight. I listened to her blathering, making sympathetic noises now and then, which was all that was required of me; I was still in a state of love-drunk euphoria which nothing could fully penetrate. I thought, with callous irritation, of the lecture? had been meant to be embarking on at this very moment to my class at the Institute; Big Beaver’s death, on top of the air raids, was going to mean a serious disruption of my teaching schedule in the immediate future. Then there was the question of my books: would I have
to find a new publisher now, or could I count on the practically senile Immanuel Klein to continue his late partner’s support of me? Really, it was all extremely inconvenient.

Vivienne had commanded me to find Nick and tell him the news. He was not in the house, and I could not reach him at the Department. It took me until lunchtime to track him down, at the Hungaria, where at one end of the dining room a noisy crowd was happily at feed, while at the other, blue-aproned waiters were sweeping up the glass and splinters from a window that had been blown in by one of last night’s bombs. Nick, in uniform, was lunching with Sylvia Lydon and her sister. I hung back in the doorway for a moment, watching him talk, and smile, and turn his head sideways and up in that characteristic way of his, as if to toss back from his forehead the glossy black wing of hair that was no longer there, except in my memory (he was already balding; it rather suited him, I thought, but he was very touchy on the matter, for he had been vain of his hair). There was sunshine on the table, and the girls—Sylvia languorously feline in Nick’s presence, Lydia officially a spinster by now but giddier than ever—were laughing at a joke that Nick had made, and suddenly I wanted to turn and walk away rapidly—I could see myself striding out the door and down the stairs—and leave it to someone else to extinguish that frail square of sunlight on the table, where Nick’s hand rested, holding a cigarette from the tip of which there rose a thin, frost-blue plume of smoke, sinuous, hurrying, like a chain of shivery question marks. Nick turned his head then and saw me, and although his smile remained in place, something behind it faltered, and shrank. He rose, and came across the dining room, keeping his gaze on me, one hand in a pocket, the other trailing his cigarette. When he reached the doorway where I was standing he stopped short a pace and held his head to one side and looked at me, smiling, tense, apprehensive, defiantly nonchalant, all at the same time.