The White Devil (20 page)

Andrew gripped the phone in his hand until his knuckles went white. He whirled around with a gasp. The phone flew from his hand and hit the floor with a clatter.

An empty office stared back at him. Dr. Kahn’s papers throbbed under the fluorescent lights as if they had been supercharged with a light of their own. Then they subsided, that sickly, oppressive gas draining from the room like it was being sucked away through a straw.

Andrew cautiously picked up the phone. Four texts pulsed there, waiting for him.

U still there?

I frightened u off didn’t i.

Oh damn it. I was only joking.

Thanks thanks awfully

He thumbed clumsily into the phone.

I’m here
, he explained.
Someone came in, that’s all
.

THAT THURSDAY, HE
found Dr. Kahn waiting for him behind her desk. Her eyes were small, round, and black-brown, peering at him over her reading glasses as though they could bore through steel plate.

“I’ve brought you the best background books in the collection,” she declared, not waiting for him to settle in. “Now tell me what you’ve made of them.”

Andrew felt a nervous tremor. He placed his hand on one of the books—the shaggy blue one,
Byron at Harrow
, by Patrick Burke, published in 1908—as if it might transmit the knowledge by electric circuit.

Byron and Harness were two years apart at Harrow
, Andrew began.

Byron cut an angry and exotic figure at Harrow. His clubfoot disfigured him; the metal contraption doctors gave him to correct it embarrassed him; and his eagerness to prove himself through fistfights and show-offy displays in class drew attention to him. He had a chip on his shoulder because, despite his title and his wealth, Byron had come into his inheritance unexpectedly, at age ten, and had had a troubled childhood. His father was a scoundrel, philanderer, and drunk—he had earned the nickname
Mad Jack
—and had abandoned Byron and his mother not long after marrying her for her money. Mrs. Gordon, his mother, was obese and—at least by her son’s account—something of a maniac, given to tantrums and harangues. So while being
George Gordon, Baron Byron
made Byron one of the loftier students at Harrow from a social perspective, his clanging foot and uncertain upbringing gave him a lot to prove.

“Not bad, as far as it goes,” said Dr. Kahn. “Nothing new, of course. Go on.”

Andrew proceeded.

Byron was also something of a sexual prodigy. His physical beauty was widely commented upon. There were hints that he had been sexually molested by one of their housemaids when he was as young as eleven, and that an aristocratic male neighbor, a Lord Grey, had fallen in love with him at thirteen.

“Mostly conjecture,” noted Dr. Kahn sourly. “Though not necessarily false.”

Harness, on the other hand, was more difficult to describe. The facts that survive came through in Byron’s own letters about him. At Harrow, Harness was small, sickly, pale, a member of the local poor but with a beautiful singing voice and a love of plays and playacting. Harness first came to Byron’s notice because, like Byron, he had a limp. (A shelf had fallen on him, the accident taking place in his childhood home in Northolt.) Byron felt compelled by sympathy, and, according to the letters, declared
If any fellow bully you, tell me, and I’ll thrash him if I can
. That was the beginning. The injury healed. They
took up
with one another. The details are sketchy here . . . Andrew hesitated.

“Yes?” prompted Dr. Kahn.

“Am I allowed to fill in with my own speculation?” Andrew asked nervously.

Her mouth tugged, fighting a smile. “That’s rather the idea, Andrew.”

Andrew pressed on: The Lot was overcrowded and run-down. The two boys were in love. Harness would be constantly abused for being a
town lout
. So they went to the only place in the house—the cistern room—where they would rehearse, or . . .

“Yes?” Dr. Kahn prompted again.

“You know. Fool around.”

“What all teenagers need. A place to experiment sexually.”

“Right. And that’s why Harness goes back there. As a ghost. It’s their secret place.”

Dr. Kahn became stern again: “But there were many schoolboys who had schoolboy affairs. Not all, surely, are coming back to haunt the Hill. We’d never make it down the street for the crowd. What made this one special?”

Andrew was stumped. “I’m not sure.”

“I have a rule,” she said. “It’s silly. But it helps me a great deal in my research. Would you like to hear it?” He said he would. “First find the heart. Then find the start.” She blinked at him. “Don’t confine yourself to chronological order. Find the most powerful part of their story and build out from there. Where did they feel the greatest love?”

“In the cistern room.”

“But that was only at Harrow.”

Silence.

“For goodness’ sake, Andrew, you mean you’ve only been reading the Harrow books? Did you see the marks I made in Byron’s letters?”

“Those are from later,” he protested. “Like, 1807.”

“You’re not paying attention,” she said testily. And to Andrew’s surprise, she crossed the room, leaned over him, and began spreading open the volumes and pounding their spines flat like an overzealous baker.

“Easy on the books!” he said, withdrawing to safety.

“These are still in print,” she declared. “Mere information.”

Andrew, she sniffed, was confining himself too much to the Harrow period. The answer, she said, waited for them in Cambridge (
Trin. Coll. Cam.,
Andrew recalled from the Harrow Record), where Byron had matriculated, and where Harness had followed.

“There,” she said, stabbing a page with her index finger. Andrew read:

TO ELISABETH PIGOTT, 1806 [a childhood friend who would not judge, Dr. Kahn editorialized]

He certainly is perhaps more attached to me than even I am in return. During the whole of my residence at Cambridge, Harness and I have met every day, summer and winter, without passing one tiresome moment, and separate each time with increasing reluctance. I hope you will one day see us together. He is the only being I esteem, though I like many. He has, just in this week past, presented me with a ring, a carnelian, the expense of which he bore himself completely. He offered it fearfully, as if I might refuse it. Far from doing so, I said my only dread was that I might lose so precious a token.

“What does that tell you?” she demanded.

“He esteems Harness.”

“Oh, bollocks,” exploded Dr. Kahn. “Harness gave him a ring! A second-rate stone, but it cost him more than he could afford, which was nothing, and he nearly fainted with anxiety doing it. Now, when do men give people rings, Andrew?”

“When they want to get married,” he answered meekly.

She flipped pages furiously, this time in the poetry volume, and read aloud: “
There is a Voice whose tones inspire such softened feelings in my breast, I would not hear a Seraph Choir. . . .
Harness was an actor, remember? With a beautiful singing voice? That’s how he earned his place at Harrow, and at Cambridge: in the choir. All right, let’s keep going.” She turned the page. “Here we are.
There are two Hearts whose movements thrill, in unison so closely sweet, that Pulse to Pulse responsive still they Both must heave, or cease to beat.
Pulse to pulse is flesh to flesh, don’t you agree? This is not unconsummated. This is your partner, someone with whom you’re wrapped in the blanket of juvenile love.”

There are two Souls, whose equal flow

In gentle stream so calmly run,

That when they part—they part?—ah no!

They cannot part—those Souls are One.

Dr. Kahn regarded the page. “They cannot part,” she muttered. “See the date?” She flipped the book and held it for him to see.

“1807,” he said quietly.

“Yes. Boring old 1807.”

She pulled up a chair beside Andrew, then crossed her arms over the books and spoke to him, earnestly, energetically, as she might to a colleague or a peer. Byron, she said, began dreaming of a
life
with Harness. One that mimicked heterosexual marriage. And he was utterly deluded. How deluded, she promised to reveal shortly. “But first,” she said, “let us examine the fantasy he spun of their life together.” She placed another letter to Pigott in front of Andrew.

Harness departs for a mercantile house in town in October, and we shall probably not meet till the expiration of my minority. . . .

“Coming into his
majority
,” she interpreted. “This means that Byron is licking his chops at all the money he thinks he will inherit with his estate at Newstead. Have you seen Newstead Abbey? It’s worthy of drooling. Big, grey, medieval. Peacocks all about. One feels smug merely pulling into the car park.”

But Byron was always overextended, spending lavishly on fancy coaches, liquor, clothes. He was eventually forced to sell Newstead Abbey, which had been in the family since the 1500s. Like a hip-hop star who goes quickly bankrupt from mansions, cars, and bling, she explained.

Andrew snorted at the unexpected reference. “Where did that come from?” he drawled.

“I have nieces,” she replied tartly. “Read.”

Andrew read.

Harness departs for a mercantile house in town in October, and we shall probably not meet till the expiration of my minority when I shall leave to his decision either entering the firm as a partner through my interest . . .

Meaning, Dr. Kahn elaborated, that Byron, like a sugar daddy, intended to fund his boyfriend’s career. The equivalent of getting the trophy wife her real estate license or interior decorator’s business.

. . . or residing with me altogether.

Alternatively, she added, Byron would make Harness a housewife.

He shall have his choice. I certainly love him more than any human being, and neither time nor distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable disposition.

Andrew stopped her. “So I mean, it was a little ahead of his time, I get it. But . . . English people are tolerant of gays, right? Look at Mr. Baldridge,” he said, referring to one of the school’s science masters, who lived with a companion.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you the world has changed, Andrew,” she said. “Homosexuality was against the law then. They could never cohabitate in that manner. Never. Not only was it illegal, it was a capital crime. Part of England’s Bloody Code, punishable by instant death.”

Andrew looked at the book, feeling stung.

“That’s a comedown, isn’t it, after reading these beautiful poems and letters?” She passed her hands over the open page. “No doubt Byron and Harness felt the same way.

“I can forgive Byron his delusion, however,” she went on, in a musing tone. “Cambridge is a magical place, not bustling and overdiscovered like Oxford; Cambridge is
built
for secrets. You’ll see it, I hope. Walls separate the colleges from the town. From England. Shutting out
all that
. Enclosing the rest. It’s a glorious place to fall in love,” she said, now drifting away. “In the Backs, in June. The leaves and lawns all green and gold in the sunshine. And no one ever stops drinking. Pimm’s, wine, parties every day. Punting the Cam, under the cover of trees. The boys, slim-waisted and beautiful—they don’t deserve it with all that drinking, but that’s life at twenty. What’s better than a stolen kiss, your cheeks sunburned from a day outdoors, under a summer twilight?”

She fell silent.

“You want to know if I am speaking from personal experience,” she said wryly, observing Andrew’s gaping at her. “Well of course I am. I wasn’t always . . . my present age.”

He waited; she smiled mysteriously; but that was all there was.

“I’m having trouble reconciling this with what I saw of Harness,” Andrew said at last. “His face was just . . . pure fury. Nothing nice. Nothing like what you’re describing.”

“Then we’re missing a piece of the puzzle. You need to go to the Wren Library and read what’s in those letters you found. I’ll email my friend. So you see, Andrew, you may set eyes on Trinity after all. But beware. Now you know what happened there. How Byron and Harness fell in love. True love.” She tapped the book of letters. “The more precious the treasure, the fiercer the dragon.”

14

London Snog

“STOP!”

James Honey had tucked himself into one of the little wooden Speech Room chairs in the front row, with a quilt thrown over his knees and the script in his lap. He followed the lines with the point of a pencil, and was staring at Andrew over his reading glasses. “I can’t understand a word, Andrew,” he moaned, his pencil point pressed to the paper. “Not a word.”

The stage manager whispered in Honey’s ear.

“One moment, please,” the director barked.

Rebecca sidled up to Andrew onstage. “Have you done your kissing scene with Persephone yet?” She wore yet another short skirt, glossy pink lipstick, and a kind of velvety top that made her resemble a slutty and very fetching member of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. Her voice was insinuating, full of venom.

“You mean, in the play?”

“Oh, are you doing other kissing scenes?”

Andrew opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He blushed scarlet.

Rebecca smiled. “All I can say is, be careful. If Sir Alan finds out, it’ll be murder. You know he keeps a Roman sword hanging over his mantel?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Funny,” she continued. “I thought she was still going with Simon.”

Andrew turned to her—too quickly. He saw another smile creep across Rebecca’s face.

“She was with him such a long time,” she persisted.

“Yeah?” he said, forcing himself to sound casual.

“Oh, yeah. She’s
obsessed
with him.”

Andrew’s heart shriveled.

“But they went through a lot. Maybe that finally broke them up.”

He could no longer stand it. “What do you mean,
went through
. . .”

“
All right,
here we go,” Honey bayed. “From the beginning.”

“Don’t let what I said distract you,” whispered Rebecca.

“Just tell me what you mean by—”

“
When you’ve quite finished
,” Honey snapped at them.

Andrew yammered his lines without feeling. Honey kept stopping the scenes to correct him, hopping up onstage and mocking his slumping posture. Rebecca batted her eyes at him. She made pouty,
poor-baby
smiles. At the end she hugged him.
Be better next time
, she said, and wrapped him in her perfume, a cloud of cloying late-summer blooms.

BY THE TIME Andrew reached the tube station a little later, he was as soiled and exhausted by his mental journey through Jealousy as any traveler in the bush. Persephone had deceived him. She had maintained a relationship all along with some slick, rich, tall, upright, world-traveling English aristocrat; blond, no doubt, with a huge chin; sporty; with a
car
. Andrew had been kept in the dark. Some side arrangement while Simon—Simon, Simon, of course it was a Simon—did whatever Simons did. Went to Egypt for a dig. Or studied finance in Singapore. Andrew retrieved the mental snapshots of his every encounter with Persephone and ripped them down the middle. All the preparation for the weekend—the chit from Fawkes; Andrew’s roundabout explanation about a “group get-together” with members of the cast (he did not want Fawkes to know), and his lie that Sir Alan had approved the trip; and the nonstop daydreaming—had been for nothing. Less than nothing—they had added to his insult.

WHEN SHE ARRIVED
—striding down the Hill in a dress that dropped only to mid-thigh, a pattern aswirl with Matisse colors, bloodred and jungle green, her legs bare, her hair a snake swarm of black curls, sunglasses balanced over her brow—his heart skipped three beats. He forced himself to remain cold. He realized what a clod he looked like alongside her, with his khakis and his checked oxford shirt and his sneakers. He was glad. Let her be disappointed. Let her see what a poor match they were, now that they were stripped of the school uniform. She was stylish, European, upper crust; he was an American middle-class nothing. Let her regret it, as much as he did.

“Hello,” she said brightly. Then she took in his scowl. “Everything all right?”

“Yup,” he replied coldly. “Let’s go.”

“Why are you acting strange?”

“How am I acting strange?”

“You’re all funny.” She bit her lip. “I sent you a crass text and now you think I’m a whore. Is that it?”

“Nope. You’re late.”

“I was getting ready,” she said, striking a pose. “And now you’re supposed to say it was worth the wait.”

“Come on.” He turned and mounted the filthy stairs of the tube station and shoved his credit card into the ticket machine.

THEY RODE IN
silence on the squishy, purple-flecked cushions of the Metropolitan line, through every flavor of suburb. Persephone dropped her sunglasses to her nose and scowled. Andrew kept his face turned to the window, watching pass the wide, green fields of some minor college, dotted with flocks of pigeons—or were they seagulls?—then the tract housing, slabs of that grey brown brick unique to English row houses; then finally the industrial yards: rusting train cars, a depot for old postal vehicles. At the Finchley Road stop, Persephone rose and without a word bolted out into a redbrick station and pounded up the stairs. Andrew followed, and continued to follow her up a steep hill. A bustling commercial street gave way to curling drives where muscular, mansionlike homes perched on landscaped lots, hedged in by brick walls and rhododendrons. Persephone maintained her furious pace forward, sunglasses down, forcing him to follow at a sheepish distance. At last they reached a plateau, where a few shops and a pub popped into view. Persephone finally stopped outside the pub.

“If we’re not going to speak, we may as well get drunk,” she announced.

Beaten copper lined the bar. Cigarette smoke and the smell of cooking beef and potatoes swirled inside. Andrew was starving but felt the single five-pound note and the two pound coins in his pocket, and saw the chalked menu above the bar—nothing below nine pounds—and instead calculated the number of pints he could buy. Beer.
A sandwich in a can
, his friends at home called it.

They ordered lagers. They were not carded. They did not tick glasses. They drank.

“So this is where you grew up,” Andrew observed.

She ignored this. They were in a fight. Somehow, without any prelude. So she was in no mood to share reminiscences. “How was rehearsal?” she asked in response, an edge in her voice.

Andrew stared at her. Should he say it? Should he ask her? He knew he would never get over it if he didn’t. And he wanted to get over it. Her dress scarcely covered her, wrapping her no better than the skin of a summer nut when it bulges ripe from its casing.

“Who’s Simon?” he asked.

She sat stunned a moment. Then her face twisted. “
Rebecca
,” she said. “I knew it.”

“What about her?” Andrew backpedaled quickly.

“I lied to my father to set up this weekend, you know. I lied to my mother to get permission to use the house. I told her I was having Kathy and Lizzie and Louise over, all my old friends from North London Collegiate, because we haven’t
seen
each other, and it was going to be so much
fun
, couldn’t we
please
. And she knew it was balls. She kept saying,
You were not such good friends with those girls
. And she’s right. I wasn’t.” She looked at him. “I take a risk. Only to have
you
”—she spat out the word, disgusted—“take
their side
—again. You fling it in my face. Why didn’t you say something before we got on the bloody tube?” she snapped. “I would have left you there.”

Andrew said nothing. He knew he was ruining it. Spoiling their weekend—and all that was supposed to go with it. But he didn’t know what else to do.

“Well, if you want to ask me a question, ask it.” Persephone was nearly shaking in anger.

“I just did. Who’s Simon?”

“Simon was my boyfriend,” she said. “There.”

“Was?”

Andrew watched, bemused, as Persephone glugged half a pint of beer. She didn’t answer. Should he leave it at that? But no; it was not enough.

“Rebecca,” he said, “seemed to think you were still together.”

“Well, Rebecca is a cunt!”

Heads turned: half amused, half surprised. A few murmurs of commentary.

“Did you and Simon go out for a long time?”

“Stop it, Andrew!”

“How do you think I feel?” he countered. “I thought we were . . . I don’t know . . . going out . . .” She snorted. “Then I hear this . . .”

“Slander? Hearsay? Gossip? Malevolent crap from some stupid bitch?” Now people at nearby tables were turning to stare, conversation dying around them. “And you drag me all the way here to throw it in my face? When I’m taking you home with me?”

“All I wanted to know was whether . . .”

“Whether I’m a slut,” she finished. “It never goes away, with you. And I had a nice surprise for you. A surprise that I’d planned out. Did you know that? But I’m clearly wasting my time.”

She slugged back the remainder of her beer, banged the empty glass on the table, and marched out.

Andrew slumped in his chair.

His neighbors eyed him. He tried to decide whether to stay in London drinking up his five pounds, or do the prudent thing and go straight back to school.

He finished his beer.

He walked outside. There were some picnic tables there, in an enclosure, with beer logo’d umbrellas over each table.

Persephone sat at one, her back to him.

He hesitated. Almost walked off. But that would be cold. She was there. She was waiting. It was a peace offering.
Take it.
Cautiously, he approached. He waited, a step behind her, in her peripheral vision. She said nothing. So he sat down on the bench next to her. Still nothing. He lit a cigarette. He handed it over to her. He held it there a moment. Then, as if stirring from deep thought, her white, slender hand reached for it. She took it. Puffed. She shook her magnificent hair back, out of her face. Her sunglasses shielded her eyes.

“There’s something very satisfying,” she observed, “about the word
cunt
.”

“It’s a great Anglo-Saxon word,” Andrew agreed.

“It really is,” she replied. Then, after a moment: “Aren’t you going to offer me another drink?”

He practically leapt from the seat. Reconciliation. Hope. He returned with two more pints and a receipt for a credit card charge to his father’s account.
Dad be damned
. The sun winked through a thin spot in the woolly sky.

“What do you want to know about Simon?” Persephone asked when he sat down. “Let’s get it over with.”

Andrew’s throat tightened. “Are you still in love with him?”

“I hate him.”

“Why?”

“Honestly, I don’t like to talk about it. I could kill Rebecca.” She added: “You have nothing to worry about.”

“How long has it been since you’ve, you know . . .”

“Seen him?” she finished. “Months and months.”

They went through a lot together
, Rebecca had said.

Don’t ask it, you idiot! She’s talking to you again. You got your answer.

He decided he would try starting the date over.

“You know,” he said, “that’s a lovely dress.”

She smiled, a growing rosy grin on those enormous, puffy lips. She understood. She raised her sunglasses.

“Why thank you, Andrew. And how nice of you to meet me today.”

“What’s my surprise?”

“You’ll see.”

Then Andrew asked her about herself. (That was what you were supposed to do on a date, wasn’t it?) Persephone, charged with adrenaline and an edgy tone of self-mockery, let it all hang out. Where did her father get his title? Was he a knight? A lord?

Sort of
, Persephone answered.
Baronet. It’s a shit title, really. Some seventeenth-century Vine bought it off the king, who used the money to kill Irish. That’s what my mother says. Drives my dad crazy
.

And what was the deal with her parents? Were they divorced?

Her mother lived half the year in Greece. They were old-fashioned. Stayed married but hated each other.
They fight over me. It’s like a contest,
she said.
I’m the sole judge in this endless Olympics, and they’re the U.S. and the Chinese, bribing me, sucking up, showing off, cutting down the other one. They haven’t had sex in twenty years. And where do you think it all goes?
All the
lust
? They must have it. They are
of the species. . . .

Andrew felt buzzed from the beers—the thin remnants of their second pints at the bottom of their glasses, and they still had had nothing to eat—and he didn’t really know if there was an answer to this question. But then it came.

It all goes to me
, she finished—she was drunk now, slurring her words, telling him this almost aggressively, as if saying, Hey, you want to hear my shit? You want to see how worthless and scabby I am?—and he half wished he was not hearing it, because he could tell these things were painful to her, but he was also fascinated (maybe his baggage was not so heavy in comparison; he felt pedestrian, in fact, compared to this pan-European erotic dysfunction).
Phone calls and dinners and presents, like I’m dating them both, trying to keep each one at bay so the other doesn’t go mad with jealousy. Monitoring how much attention the other gets. If it gets to be too much, threatening to take me to Athens or to Harrow altogether. That’s when I started sneaking out. Just . . . running away from all of it. That’s when I started going with Simon. The bad years. I was fifteen. The last time they lived together.
(“Going with” . . . was that a euphemism? At
fifteen
? Andrew marveled. He remembered himself at fifteen with his learner’s permit and a brand-new Adam’s apple gawking around green Connecticut, just having shed his interest in manga.)
She’d call me
boulaiki, Persephone continued. Boulaikimou
. My little bird. Very sweet of course. It also means, my little pussy.

Andrew coughed.

I’m getting pissed
, said Persephone.
Do you think I’m horrible yet?