Earthly Powers (10 page)

       "I hadn't thought. There's not much to buy, is there?"

       "You hadn't thought, no. There are one or two things about. If you don't want the trouble of going round the shops, you could always give me the money, you know."

       "What's the matter with you tonight, Val?" I set the ragout on the small round table by the window. A District Line train hammered by.

       "Ah, I see this friend of yours is in trouble." He found the item about Norman Douglas. He came to the table reading it.

       "He's no friend. A colleague, you could call him." I served; the ragout had a faint odour of metal.

       "Wasn't careful, was he? I say, this stew thing smells of army mess tins or something."

       "The bully's army issue. But the civilian stuff's just the same."

       "Why can't we eat out occasionally? Soho or somewhere. It's not nice having to sleep in the odour of bully. And onions." He forked in the stew listlessly. He was supposed to be starved.

       "What's into you, Val?"

       "Not quite your usual loving boy, am I? Oh, I'm a little depressed. Hole in the corner stuff. Not much in life, is there?"

       "Love, Val, love. Try this cider."

       "Windy stuff. All right, a little. Ah, I wrote something today." And he took a scrap of paper from his inner pocket. "Listen.

       Do ye the savage old law deny. Let me repay, in age or youth An infinitude of eyes for an eye, An infinitude of teeth for a tooth.

       It needs tidying up a little, of course." He smiled, not at me, but in pleasure at his performance.

       "Strafing Jesus again," I said. "I'm not impressed. Besides, that means nothing any more. I gave it all up today. I went to Farm Street and had it all out, or up. I made my choice. You can't shock me any more with your adolescent atheism."

       "Fergus in the shop told me that in the army they split up the different religions by saying Catholics this side, C. of E. that, and fancy buggers in the middle. So you and I are now both fancy buggers." He giggled. "And you gave up Jesus for me."

       "I gave up the Church because of the inescapability of living in sin. If you like, you can say I did it for you."

       "Charmed, old thing. Awfully flattered." He forked his stew with a boy's spoiled pout making him look silly and ugly, also desirable. "I say, this is awful muck. Why don't we go and eat out? Celebrate being fancy buggers together."

       "A matter of money, Val. I have exactly two shillings and ninepence farthing."

       "Wouldn't take us very far, would it?"

       "You said you were starved. This seems edible enough." I ate some. "Many a starving German would give his back teeth for it."

       "Wouldn't need any teeth at all, would he? It's just mush." He spooned some of the thin grey sauce out of the ragout dish and deliberately let it slowly ooze onto the tablecloth.

       "Don't do that, laundry costs money. That's a silly thing to do."

       "Anyway, I don't believe the Germans are starving. I think it's just government lies. Oh, this horrible war. When's it going to be all over?"

       "Nineteen nineteen. Nineteen twenty-one. Does it matter? You're not going to be in it."

       "Nor are you. Well, I'm hungry, but not hungry enough for that muck. I think I'll go home. I can always say I'd a pain in my chest and they let me off tonight. Mother got a nice leg of lamb. Father managed to find some Christmas whisky for the butcher, ten years in the vat or something. Novelists don't have anything to barter, do they?"

       "Nor poets."

       "Except their lives, except their lives, except their lives. Die on the Somme or at Gallipoli and your poetic name is made forever. Still, I'm in the Keats tradition. A poet with phthisis."

       "You're talking silly nonsense. You could have bread and margarine and jam if you like. And a nice cup of tea." I put my hand persuasively on his. He snatched his hand away. "What is the matter with you, Val?"

       "I don't know. Don't maul me. I don't like being mauled."

       "Val, Val." I got out of my chair and on my knees beside him. I took his hands, which were limp enough, and kissed each in turn, over and over.

       "Slobberer. Making me all wet."

       "There's something on your mind. Something's happened. Tell me."

       "I'm going home." He started to get up, but I pushed him back into his chair, saying: "No. Don't say that. Don't break my heart."

       "There speaks the popular novelist. 'And then he tried to take him in his arms, slobbering over him.' No, that's not popular novel stuff, is it? Not yet." (Did he say not yet? The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet. I nearly wrote, some lines back, "1918. November the something. Does it matter?")

       "Be honest with me, Val, darling. Tell me what the matter is."

       "Go and sit down. You must get used to not kneeling any more."

       "Some things have to be done kneeling." It was a coarse thing to say; it was the spray off a mounting wave of desire. He ignored that but looked at me with a lifted upper lip. I went to the gas ring and put the kettle on for tea. I had no coffee.

       Val said, "It's all take with you and no give."

       "I give my love, my devotion. But I take it that you've begun to want more."

       "Not me. Not want. I'm tired of having only an audience of one for my poems."

       "Ah. I see. So you're letting that come between us. I've tried to place them, you know that. I've shown you the letters of rejection. But they all say you must keep on writing."

       "Jack Ketteridge, that pal of Ezra Pound's. He's been given an old handpress. By someone both loving and generous."

       "I'd give you an old handpress if I had one. I'd give you anything."

       "I don't mean that, silly. I don't want a handpress. I want to be printed, not to print. Ketteridge is calling his little enterprise the Svastica Press. Apparently the svastica is a Hindu sun symbol. It means good luck too. He'll do my volume for twenty pounds. Two hundred copies. That's cheap, I think."

       "So that's what all the sulks were about. I never give you anything. And you know I can't give you twenty pounds. Why don't you ask your father?"

       "I prefer to go," Val said, "to those who say they love me. And I don't mean what my father calls love, which is just possession and bossiness."

       "I'll get the money. Somehow. An advance on royalties, perhaps. Though I'm not really ready to start the next novel, the one I've told you about, the modern Abelard and Eloise—"

       "I know, the man who has his pillocks blown off at Suvla Bay. I know too that you don't like taking money in advance. You've told me often enough about it making you resent doing the work when you've spent the money and thus doing it badly. I know, I know, Ken. You needn't bother. I just want you to know my motives, that's all."

       My heart sank, the water bubbled cheerfully. Faith. Faithfulness. I had stemmed the thought at the very moment of unwinding the can of corned beef: what right had I to expect fidelity if I was myself withdrawing it? Superstition was already replacing faith. And here it was coming now, my punishment. Men are right to be superstitious. I said nothing for the moment, keeping my back to Val, making tea, weak tea because I was near the end of the packet of Lipton's Victory Blend. At length I said, in what in my fiction in those days ("And in your later days too, dear" Geoffrey) I would have termed a strangled voice: "Who is it?"

       "I want you to understand me properly, Ken. Do turn round and look me in the eye. I want money, not for myself, but for what I think's important. Oh, I may be stupid thinking it's important, but it's all I have."

       "You have me." I looked into the pot to see how the tea was drawing. "Had me."

       "This is different, Ken, you old stupid, you know it's different. Anything for art. Bernard Shaw said something about it's right to starve your wife and children for the sake of art, art comes first."

       "No, no, it doesn't." I poured two cups of tea and put canned milk and grey wartime sugar on the table. "Love first, faith, I mean fidelity. Who is it? I want to know who it is."

       "You won't know him. He comes into the shop, he has an account. A great seeker of first editions of Huysmans. He knew Wilde, or so he says. Older than you, of course."

       "And richer. Prostitute," I then said. "Whoring. You don't know what love is."

       "Oh yes I do. It's eating corned beef stew, or not eating it, and then getting cramps in a single bed and smelling the ghost of onions at dawn. Sounds a bit like Blast, doesn't it? That Rhapsody on a Windy Night man. Well," and he cocked his head at me whorishly, "do you fancy a bit of a farewell tumble, dearie?"

       "Why do you do this? Why?"

       "Perhaps," he said solemnly, "it's to make you turn against me. That tea looks awful. Warm cat piss. One thing anyway. No more Saturday afternoon tumbles and the odd night with the onions. My dear father and mother have known nothing, guessed nothing. Caution, Ken, is it right to be so cautious? Well, no more caution. After the leg of lamb tonight—and I'd better go now or I'll have to eat it cold—I tell them I'm leaving. Yes, leaving. We always have dinner late and then father gets somnolent. This will wake him up."

       I, during the above, moved with the slowness of a tired old man to the bed with its harlequin cover and sat on the edge. The tea steamed untasted. "You propose telling them you're going to live with another man?"

       "Ah yes, but they're so innocent. They'll think: Well, at least he's not going off to live in sin with a woman. What I'll say is that I'm sick of living at home. I want to come home as late as I please. And if they say young, you're too young, I say: Yes, young, but not so young as some killed at Ypres and on the bloody Somme. This, I'll say, is the new age, the modern world. Two men sharing a flat in Bloomsbury. Though, between you and me, Ken dear, it isn't a flat. It's quite a nice little house full of books and bibelots."

       "Who is it? I want to know who it is."

       "You've asked that already, in exactly those words. 'A certain monotony of locution.' Who was the beastly reviewer who said that? Ah, the Times Lit Supp, wasn't it, no names no packdrill. Look, a last loving kiss and then I must fly. I'm starving."

       And so he left me starving. I lay on the bed and wet the pillow. Then I smoked a cigarette (I had almost written: lighted a cigarette with Ali's Maltese cross present). I had given him no last loving kiss, the little whore. I brooded less on Val's perfidy than on the injustice of the what I would have called had the term been available then Sexual Establishment. Nothing to hold together two male lovers, or female either, no offspring, no sense of the perpetuation of a name and a family face over the centuries. But of course I had nothing to offer a wife or wife surrogate—no house, no income. The great clanking chains of Justice sounded from without, a Piccadilly Line train supplying the basic fantasizable datum. My washed eyes took in my mother's letter, the French scrivener's hand in violet ink on the envelope, the Battle postmark on the decollated head of George V. Home, warmth, the bleeding patients passing from the surgery through the hall, my mild father with blood on his hands, my mother's precise English with the Lille tonalities. I had gone out into the world and the world was making me bleed.

CHAPTER 13

My mother said in her letter that they were managing, but her heart was torn with the tearing of France. They had enough to eat, an advantage of living in a farming district, and Father, rather in the manner of Irish country doctors, was prepared to take his fees occasionally in eggs and butter. Tom, my brother, in the Royal Army Medical Corps at Boyce Barracks, had completed a gas corporal's course, whatever that was. My sister Hortense, named for my mother as I had been named for my father, had had as good a sixteenth birthday party as could be expected in these sugarless times. Father Callaghan of St. Anthony's in St. Leonards had heard from Dublin that his cousin Patrick's appeal had been rejected and that he was to hang for his part in the abortive rising of last Easter. My mother hoped I was happy in London and was herself so happy that I would be coming home for Christmas. If only Tom too could get leave, but that apparently was too much to ask for. All this was written in neat violet-inked French, making the news about Father Callaghan's cousin somewhat remote and literary, and even the butter and eggs seemed to belong to Un Coeur Simple.

       I finished the letter, buried my head in the pillow for another passionate cry, this as much to do with lost innocence and the mess of the world as with Val's defection. Then I dried my tears, smoked another Gold Flake, and got up to look at my eyes in the cracked blue mirror of Mrs Pereira. Then I washed them in warm water from the kettle, soaking a tea towel corner for the purpose, and afterwards took several deep breaths. I had books for review; I could review them more comfortably in Battle than here, in the smell of onions and among the remembered smells and sounds of Val. I had money enough for a single fare to Battle; there was, I knew, a train from Charing Cross just after nine.

       And so I packed my little bag, put on my arty hat and my warm coat, and went out into the dark that was crowned by a zeppelin moon to Baron's Court station. I travelled to Earl's Court, changed, arrived at Charing Cross. The station milled with soldiers and sailors, many of them drunk. There were whores in trim boots and boas, also grim respectable ladies ready with grim looks for fit young civilians. Such patriots had once been ready with white feathers, but there had been too much handing of that badge of cowardice to men blinded at Ypres not well able to understand the meaning of the proffer. I was looked at, but no more. I decided, as I sometimes did, to limp to the train. It was as much a certificate of immunity as a uniform.