A Place Called Winter (8 page)

‘I’m so sorry,’ he managed at last. ‘You’re rather a relief,’ he repeated, to show he could. ‘It only happens when I’m frightened.’

‘Well I’m not remotely frightening,’ Mr Browning said. ‘I’m only an actor. Those two on either side of your pretty wife, with the beards, now they’d make any man stutter.’

Harry glanced at Winnie, who noticed and narrowed her eyes slightly, privately amused as Robert held forth about something that seemed to involve salt, pepper and both his forks. ‘My brothers-in-law,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ Mr Browning said but did not apologise. ‘I could probably help you, if you came to me. I do a little voice instruction on the side, when not pursuing my glorious career.’

‘Oh,’ Harry began, then remembered to fill his lungs before he started. ‘I’m not sure I could—’

‘I wouldn’t charge.’ Again that discreet, interested little smile.

Food arrived, and because their table was an afterthought and was rather crushed into a corner, they had to shift slightly in their seats to allow the waiters to serve them. In shifting, Mr Browning ended up sitting with his knee against Harry’s within the damask tent of tablecloth. Because he was drunk on Notty’s excellent champagne, Harry took a moment or two to register the warm pressure of another man’s leg against his own and a moment or two more to remember that the appropriate response, as practised in crowded railway carriages and omnibuses across the capital, was to say nothing that might embarrass the other party but simply to move his leg aside.

Mr Browning looked at him directly as Harry lifted a forkful of crabmeat to his mouth, smiled and, still looking at him, pressed his knee into his again. ‘You have nothing to fear,’ he said. He scarcely needed to lower his voice because the others were now making so much noise.

The waiters had not long before filled their glasses, but Harry felt as though he had just drained his in a single, head-spinning draught. A rush of warmth mounted to his cheeks. He was not remotely delicate, but had he stood suddenly, he would surely have fainted. He was taken with a strong urge to laugh out loud, but instead managed to say, ‘I’m afraid of nothing,’ which was so untrue – he had always been a coward and was demonstrably not of the heroic type – that he then did laugh, as at some uproarious witticism, at which Mr Browning watched him with a kind expression, like someone waiting for another to finish choking.

Then he briefly cupped a hand on Harry’s knee and said, in what felt like a shout but was probably no more than a murmur, ‘My name is Hector, and when you undress tonight, you’ll find my card is in your trouser pocket,’ adding, by way of explanation, ‘My father was a prestidigitator.’

Harry had never been given to nightmares, or even to remembering his dreams much, although for a year after his mother’s death he had often cried himself to sleep, as much from a new fear that he would die in his slumber as from the unremitting sorrow at her loss. Around the confusing onset of puberty, when the dire but unspecific warnings of the Harrow chaplain and the filthy jokes and teasing of the older boys began to make a kind of sense, he had one dream so repeatedly and memorably that it came to resemble a recollection rather than a product of his sleeping imagination.

He was in a group in a classroom or gymnasium under the instruction of some teacher or other when a smartly uniformed man strode in unannounced with a letter. Evidently deferring to some far greater authority, the teacher hastily opened the letter and read it, and then he and the visitor searched through the class. The other boys stepped aside, as if knowing they weren’t the ones sought, but Harry just stood there, waiting, knowing, once he had experienced the dream already, how it would end. As the man in uniform grew nearer, he became aware that he was extravagantly handsome, like a prince from a legend or the young Lord Kitchener, yet also dangerous, a man who could have one killed with a flick of his gloved hand. The other boys parted like a treacherous sea, leaving him exposed, yet the sea wasn’t precisely treacherous, since he wanted to be found.

The moment that invariably woke him, when the teacher pointed him out and the uniformed man’s eyes finally met his own, was as thrilling as it was heart-stopping.

Chapter Eight

The next day was given over to a flutter of packing and preparation. Harry and Winnie and Phyllis and the nursery maid were travelling to Chester for the christening of Jack and George’s firstborn.

Jack, as ever, acted upon Harry as north upon a compass. His seemingly uncomplicated happiness, his delight in George, in fatherhood, in having little Phyllis ride on his back while he played pony, were a kind-eyed corrective and made Harry sharply aware how close to the brink he had strayed. And yet, throughout the visit, its busy pleasures, the inspections of improvements to the house and practice, the christening and lunch party after it, a walk around the old city walls, a day at the races and even a morning’s excellent riding from a stud near Tattenhall where Jack had the care of a mare and new foal, a voice was speaking to him that said nothing of family or wholesomeness.

On the long train ride home he sought to silence it by taking an interest in Winnie, but she was preoccupied on her own account, sad at parting from George, who was such a favourite of hers, and she soon let the conversation die so that she could read her novel or stare wanly out of their compartment window.

‘We could always move, you know,’ he told her. ‘Find a house in Chester. Jack assures me the cost of living is far lower there. Then you could see George every week instead of twice a year.’

‘It’s a nice idea,’ she told him wearily, ‘but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. I fear she has rather come to depend on us. The boys are either severe to her or mocking and the girls give her nothing but worry.’ When he made no rejoinder, she briefly laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘But it’s a kind thought. Thank you,’ then returned to
The Queen’s Necklace
and left him failing to read Kipling, a prey to thoughts he would much rather not entertain.

On their first day back in town, he found he was persistently shivery, perhaps through having got so wet on the ride with Jack, so headed to Jermyn Street after lunch, thinking a Turkish bath would warm his bones a little. He found he had passed the entrance to the baths, however, and made for another doorway entirely, which stood between two shopfronts. He had burnt Mr Browning’s card in the grate when he found it in his trouser pocket the morning after the trip to the Gaiety, but apparently the handwritten address on its back had scorched itself on his consciousness first.

It was a flat, he imagined. There were many such small roosts for bachelors. Thrice in ten minutes he saw women enter or leave by a door that wasn’t a shop’s. He had several times heard it said that no lady would ever be seen in the neighbourhood. He saw well-dressed women buying cheese in Paxton and Whitfield, and soap and such in Floris, but perhaps they did so with a grim, breath-holding air before slipping back up to the relative respectability of Piccadilly.

Mr Browning’s building had no knocker or doorbell, only a front door in need of paint, propped open with an umbrella stand. There was a dim glimpse of a hall with a battered table where post could be left. Presumably bell pulls or knockers were on each flat’s door further up. But what if they weren’t and Harry entered to find himself an intruder in Hector Browning’s house, or worse, if he had mistaken the address, that of an indignant stranger?

He stood on the other side of the street and started to examine the faces of the women passing by. Some were maids or cooks, to judge from the relative simplicity of their clothes or cheapness of their hats, but the others were harder to read. Smart. Smooth. Polished. Very occasionally daring. Were they blameless or scarlet?

Of course it was in the nature of respectability to reveal or imply nothing but itself. Any signs were likely to be small: the discreet callus left by a removed wedding ring, a tugged curl escaping from an otherwise immaculate chignon, perhaps only a minutely torn hem betraying the violence of a passion recently sated. And what would be the male equivalents? A hectic flush to the cheeks, perhaps. Fingernail marks to the back of the neck. Perhaps only the suggestive seaside smell he had caught off neighbours in the baths sometimes, a smell in which something was added to the usual musk of a man not yet clean.

Mr Browning was standing in the doorway. He was at once shorter and more handsome than Harry had remembered. He was in shirtsleeves and no collar, his cuffs neatly turned up, and he was relishing a cigarette and the sunshine and watching Harry with some amusement. He appeared oblivious to the throng of human traffic about them, and his attention had the effect of seeming to block it out for Harry too, so that he crossed the street without looking, causing a cabby to curse at him.

‘Mr Cane. What a pleasant surprise.’ Mr Browning held out a hand.

‘I wasn’t sure I had remembered the address,’ Harry said, only he stuttered badly on the W.

Mr Browning didn’t wince, or look away, or finish his sentence for him the way people often did, but watched with interest. ‘Forgive my dishabille,’ he said. ‘You had no appointment.’

‘Er, no. No, I hadn’t.’

‘But I’m sure we can fit you in.’ He trod out his cigarette neatly on the pavement, then headed upstairs.

Heart racing, Harry followed him, taking in a length of worn red stair-carpet and hunting prints. He imagined the talk of appointments was for the benefit of passers-by, so was perplexed when, businesslike, Mr Browning showed him into a consulting room hung with diagrams of the lungs, mouth and tongue and illustrations of the various arrangements of lips and tongue. Among them, not especially apropos, were hung engravings of ancient Greek sculpture: charioteers, discoboloi, wrestlers.

‘Never mind the rhotacism or the stutter for now,’ Mr Browning said. ‘We need to get you to breathe properly. At the moment your speech is air-starved, like a bird in a box. Take off your jacket, please, and your waistcoat, so I can see what’s going on. That’s right. I’ll hang them here for you. Now. Feet apart. A little further. Now breathe.’

‘I am breathing.’

‘No you’re not. Breathe in. Fill your lungs. Keep breathing in. All the way. Now breathe out. There. Too quick. Too starved! Stop being so afraid.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Trust me. You’re terrified. Breathe in again, and this time say a nice long
ah
as you breathe out.’

Harry did as he was told, while Browning watched him critically.

‘Again,’ Browning said. ‘Don’t flinch. I need to touch you to feel what’s happening.’ He stepped up behind Harry and placed the flat of one hand on his solar plexus. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Nice slow one. Louder. Louder! That’s better. I want you always to think of your breaths when you speak. Always be aware that you are using air to form the words and that you need plenty of it. Breathing is natural but it’s incredible how bad most people are at doing it. They breathe with barely a third of their lung capacity and their speech is starved and hobbles as a result. Were you often scared as a boy?’

‘Usually.’

‘Of a man?’

‘Usually.’

‘Hmm. Now. I need to touch you in two places at once.’ He kept one hand in the middle of Harry’s chest but placed his other a hand’s span lower, on his belly. ‘Good,’ he said, so close now that Harry felt his words on the nape of his neck and could smell the citrus tang of his shaving preparation. ‘You have some muscle there. Now I want you to use it. Breathe in and say a long
ah
again. Don’t be so self-conscious. All my neighbours are out at work, and anyway, nobody could care less. But this time, as you’re exhaling, I want to feel you pressing out on my other hand down here as hard as you can. I’ll press in but I need you to resist me.’

Feeling absurd and giddy all at once, Harry did as he said, pressing out on the grasp that was burning into him, feeling sweat break out on his chest and back, and the
ah
he produced seemed like a shout, like no noise he normally made.

‘Good,’ Browning said, hands still in place. ‘Now breathe normally and say,
I wasn’t sure of the address
.’

‘I wasn’t sure,’ Harry began, with no hesitation, no stutter, then broke off as he felt Hector Browning plant a firm kiss on the nape of his neck.

For a minute or two they stood there, Browning’s lips and nose pressing from one side and his hands from the other, and then, very, very hesitantly, Harry brought his hands up to rest on top of the other man’s, at which Browning kissed him again and brought one of his legs forward so that it nestled between Harry’s.

‘I hav—’ Harry began, and stuttered.

‘Stop,’ Browning murmured. ‘Breathe in. Now tell me.’

‘I have absolutely no idea what to do,’ Harry said, without stuttering.

‘I know exactly what to do. Turn round.’

Harry turned to find Browning’s handsome face inches from his own. Browning smiled, then kissed him on the lips.

There was a small bedroom off the consulting room, and a minute bathroom with a view of drainpipes.

Some forty minutes later, as they lay panting and naked across the bed, which was so narrow that one or other of them had always to be beneath the other, Browning murmured, ‘Most of my students come in the late mornings. I am always free between half past two and four o’clock. My door won’t be locked. If I’m out when you arrive, just get in the bed and wait for me.’

They were lovers for over a year. Animal instinct told Harry that the only way to stay sane during such an undertaking was not to analyse it. But of course he did analyse it, because he was moderately intelligent, sensitive and underoccupied, and because there were usually a hundred and sixty-four hours of each week’s hundred and sixty-eight when they were not together. He was soon an expert at the risk he was taking. The notorious trials of the 1890s had left their mark. If caught, they risked imprisonment with hard labour as well as a lifetime of disgrace.

‘But we won’t be caught,’ Browning insisted. (It was an oddity of their intimacy that Harry could never quite think of him as Hector and never called him anything.) ‘The ones who are caught are the fools who stray beyond their class or age group.’

Harry was thinking that they weren’t of quite the same class, then remembered that his sister-in-law was now a chorus girl, which had rather blurred such distinctions.

‘Besides,’ Browning went on, ‘you come to me for speech lessons, of which you speak to no one because you’re so terribly ashamed.’

He meticulously wrote Harry a cash receipt for a lesson after their every meeting, although no money changed hands, of course. Harry filed the receipts in his desk at home, then decided that was ridiculous, so took to burning them once they were a week or so old.

Terror of discovery would steal up on him now in idle moments, usually amidst family. In a crowded, overheated scene, it was like an icy draught only he could detect. Or he would wake in the night and not be able to sleep for the compulsion to imagine the worst. And yet, paradoxically, this terror seemed to form an intrinsic part of the excitement his meetings with Browning brought him.

He had never had a job, so until then his life had enjoyed a smooth interconnectedness, like that of a young woman. But now, like any working man’s, it acquired compartments. He did not stop loving Winnie and Phyllis. If anything, he began to love Phyllis all the more, the moment he began to risk losing her for ever. Winnie had quietly ceased visiting his bed not long after their move to Ma Touraine – a thing he accepted with guilty relief, even though he never tired of her private company and conversation. He regarded his wife with new understanding, knowing now the strain it must have cost her to keep her unquenched feelings for Whitacre in one box of her heart, her love for her child in a second and her respectable wish to survive in yet a third. Secrecy, he began to see, was corrosive, less of his intimate relationships than of his self-respect. He had never felt so unmanly or immature.

His afternoon visits to Browning’s brass bed exposed his clothed life for a sham, even as they awoke in him a whorish shamelessness he recognised as his buried essence.

It was a part of the thrill he felt in the little room, as Browning played him and ploughed him, that his lover forced the admission from his lips. ‘You like this, don’t you?’ he would ask. ‘You want this, don’t you?’ and Harry never once stammered when he answered yes and found he could even laugh at the recognition of himself the confirmation brought.

There was a mirror over the little room’s overflowing chest of drawers angled precisely to reflect them on the bed. Harry rarely looked at himself below the neck at home, unless fully dressed and about to leave the house, and was aghast at first, then fascinated, at the sight of himself, so pale, yet flushed with lust, on all fours before a handsome, hairy-bodied man.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that he became eaten up with jealousy.

‘Do you see other men?’ he began to ask, or something like it, and Browning would invariably smile and kiss him and answer in some variation of ‘You will never know,’ which was worse than any flat denial. It was inevitable, too, perhaps, that the ecstasies Browning drove him to would eventually drive him to say he loved him.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Browning would say. ‘Don’t let’s ask for the impossible,’ or ‘Let’s just enjoy what we have,’ or, worst of all, a smiling but unreciprocating ‘I know.’

Harry didn’t love him with his brain. He knew Browning’s wit was cruel and his thinking shallow. He knew that Browning, though understandably vain, was taken up, to the point of tediousness, with the tiny world in which he worked.

And yet, had Browning produced two tickets to the Paris boat train and said, ‘Come live with me where we can be ourselves,’ Harry knew he would have had no hesitation in deserting everything and everybody to go with him.

Had Browning reciprocated, been sentimental or even clinging, Harry might have pulled away or lost interest, but the strictness and control the other exercised over him had the reverse effect. He had no souvenirs or keepsakes, beyond what scent of his lover lingered beneath his fingernails for a few precious hours after each meeting. Letter-writing was of course impossible.

He did put pen to paper, however. Browning was out one afternoon when he let himself in. Tipsy from a good lunch with Winnie, who had come into town with him to drop off a dress for a client then been waved off on the train on the pretext that he was visiting his broker, Harry had soon bored of lolling, half naked, on Browning’s dirty bed, so had written him a rather saucy, unsigned billet-doux in an autograph book on the bedside table. They hadn’t discussed it in the heat of Browning’s arrival but he was fairly certain he had read it. He wrote more in the same little book on other occasions when he was kept waiting. He allowed the writing to become anything but romantic, as he sensed Browning would dislike that, making his short effusions flatteringly pornographic, using words he still could not speak aloud even in the button-breaking heights of passion.