The Children's Book (43 page)

Julian was planning a campaign to come close to Tom, without being at all sure what he wanted, finally, to achieve. He was himself very strung up, his nerves full of electricity, a state he intensely enjoyed. He had looked at himself in the hotel bedroom mirror, before they set out, trying to see his body through Tom’s unimaginable eyes. He was slim, and looked agreeably wiry inside his cord jacket and egg-blue shirt. On the other hand he was—small, short—there was no good word for it. He had his Italian ancestors’ olive skin, and dark line of moustache. His eyes were deep-set. His hair was slick, that was how it liked to be. How did he look to Tom, who was red-gold and casual, and sculpted where Julian was drawn with pen and ink?

Julian was good at being in love. He had needed to know about sex. He had needed, precisely, to know what an emission felt like in contact with another body, as opposed to his own hand and sheet. But he was clever enough to know that what he really liked about being “in love” was the state of unconsummated tension. Public school made one a connoisseur of beautiful boys, boys in surplices with angel-faces, always deliciously
veiled in sweat as they toiled after a football or swung a bat, boys anxiously kneeling at the toe of one’s boot, polishing a shoe. The beauty of them was the danger—even more, in some cases, the impossibility—of touching them. Their grave or gentle or mischievous faces hung in the half-dark before the imagination as one wrote one’s clever essay on Plato’s Forms of the Good, or as one snuggled one’s head into one’s solitary pillow and slept. Of course, one had to believe that these lovely creatures were,
in potentia
, the longed-for intimate friend, from whom nothing need be hidden, by whom everything would be understood, forgiven and admired. But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated. “Love is a standing, or still growing light / And his first moment, after noon, is night.” “What will it be, when that the watery palate tastes indeed / Love’s thrice repured nectar?”

Did he really want to know?

He sometimes thought, he chose to love people like Tom, who seemed simple, good in some way, and opaque, so as to preserve some essential loneliness, or solitude, in himself, that he needed more profoundly than any human contact. He liked to make Tom smile. He liked to give him things, and see him flush with pleasure. But he liked this best when he had got back into his solitary bedroom, and could look at himself taking pleasure.

That was not the morality anyone taught him. Love is the highest thing, the books said, the teachers said. He had to think it must be. Or might be. So he would love Tom, and see how it felt, and suffer, delectably, the distance between them.

They left the omnibus and stood in a queue in the Porte Binet to buy tickets. They travelled on the moving pavement past various attractions and the windows of Parisian houses, some decorously shuttered, some offering glimpses into foreign drawing rooms and balconies. Each strip of the escalator had regular posts with brass knobs, to steady those changing speed. Women giggled and gripped their skirts as they made the little jump. Gentlemen and pickpockets offered arms to steady them. Julian and Tom, indulging in boyishness, gripped each other’s arms and made several rapid transitions. There were thousands of people, from hundreds of towns and countries, carrying bags of food, elegant canes, parasols, parcels. There was a smell that was foreign. Julian
knew it was garlic, added to cheese. Tom didn’t. He sniffed it, like a hunting dog in a field.

They went on the Great Wheel. They sat side by side in the sunlight in their little cart and rose into the blue sky, next to the erect iron cage of the Eiffel Tower and the belching chimneys of the powerhouse. They saw the river and its bridges, the imaginary palaces along its front, the huge Celestial Globe inside which you could whirl around the zodiac.

Julian remarked lightly that he was afraid of vertigo. Tom touched him with a reassuring hand, and said that the secret was to look out, not down. He said he was happy up there, and confessed that he was more worried by a kind of choking feeling in crowds. He said he was unsure whether he could ever live in a big city. What did he want to do, Julian asked. They were still mounting. Julian remembered the Donne quotation again. At the very top, at the apex, he should touch Tom. Tom said he liked being up on the downs, and didn’t know what else he might want, though he supposed he had to want to do something. They both laughed at the idea of thinking, up above Paris, in the sky, of being “up” on the “downs.” They began to descend, and at that exact moment Julian swayed against Tom, as if by accident. Tom shrugged comfortably in response. There was no electric prickle.

Prosper Cain was very busy, on behalf of the Museum, and on his own account. He was exchanging information and advice with the new Austrian Museum of Applied Arts. He was interested in purchasing new metalwork, from the Scandinavians. He was concerned by the enthusiasm of one of the jurors at the Exposition, George Donaldson, who had purchased a collection of examples of the new Art Nouveau furniture, which he was to present to the Victoria and Albert. Cain himself took pleasure in the company of the designers from Austria, Germany and Belgium. The fact that he was a military man produced social awkwardness in certain French contexts. He felt he was judged guilty of the whole military adventure in South Africa, of which in fact, both as a soldier and as a political animal, he disapproved.

He also had problems with French military men over the Dreyfus affair. It had always seemed likely to him that the unfortunate Jewish officer, condemned six years ago for treachery and sent to Devil’s Island, was innocent. With the fury of his supporters, and the investigations of
the brave, and the suicide of his principal accuser, it became a certainty that he himself had been horribly betrayed. Last year, a decrepit shadow of a man, he had been brought back and retried. And found guilty again. This had appalled Cain as much as it had appalled Dreyfus’s French supporters. Dreyfus had now been offered a pardon, to avoid an international incident, or national violence in the streets, on the occasion of the Exposition. That was rich, Cain thought, a pardon for a crime he had never committed.

Tensions ran high between the French and the English. The French published wicked caricatures of the Widow at Windsor, resembling a demented and malign spider or witch with bulging eyes. There was talk of international tension leading to a war between France and Great Britain. Cain smiled at the fierce dedication of a vase by Gallé, mounted in silver, bearing a ragged flamboyant iris in appliqué, and a quotation from Zola on Dreyfus.
“Nous vaincrons. Dieu nous menè.”
A similar vase had been presented to La Bernhardt, who was also a passionate Dreyfusard.

Julian had arranged to meet his father in the Bing Pavilion, and went early, so he could saunter with Tom through its delights. Julian was suspicious of English aesthetes. Wilde he found silly and sordid, without knowing his work very well, and Aubrey Beardsley delighted and alarmed him with glimpses of a malign naughtiness which he liked to see but did not wish to share. He did not know, at nineteen, who he was going to be, and was acutely aware of this. But he was not going in for mascara, pot pourri, and green chrysanthemums. Like Kaiser Wilhelm and Prosper Cain, Julian secretly liked the mixture of opulence and severity in a well-cut military uniform. But he had no intention of joining the army, that was one thing he knew. At the Exposition he discovered a European self who needed to think precisely about the new European elegance. He found his velvet jacket sitting more sharply on his shoulders. He thought he might buy new shoes.

Siegfried Bing, from Hamburg, had introduced Japanese art to French connoisseurs, and had a gallery in the rue de Provence where he showed very modern paintings—not only the Impressionists, but the Symbolists and the dreamers. His pavilion was a make-believe small mansion. It was later transported to Copenhagen. This was another aspect of the Exposition that resembled Russian fairytales of flying
houses, or Arabian tales of palaces transported overnight to lands beyond the oceans and deserts. This sense was in turn made more intense by the Palace of Mirrors, which from inside was a false infinity of exotic Middle Eastern vistas, in which you yourself were endlessly repeated from every angle, over and under, advancing and receding, or hanging in the void. And as well as that, there was the Upside Down Palace, in which, as in a tale for small children, you could plod across the ceiling and stare up/down on the tables and chairs. On its façade was a fresco showing two darkly slender young females with black-gloved fingers, fine waists, rounded small buttocks visible under their clinging garments, and swirling skirts or peacock tails. They stood in front of a fairytale house in a forest. They looked back invitingly over their shoulders. Julian was unprepared for Tom’s comment, which was to regret that his mother couldn’t see them, she would have liked them so much. They had transparent shawls floating like wings from their shoulders.

Inside was a series of various furnished rooms, all different, all rich and simple together, with shining woodwork, mottled and inlaid with other woods, with fabrics woven from stiff damask and spider-light threads, with tapestries and burnished copper, with glass, and fine ceramics, and touches of gilding that glittered in dark corners. Julian took a secret pleasure in “framing” Tom in these unlikely stage-sets. He looked as if he had wandered into the citrus-wood and damask off an English village green, having just put down his bat. He looked also like a Greek statue of a young athlete, who would not have been out of place here, naked but crowned with filigree vine-leaves.

They went into what was perhaps the most beautiful room, a dressing-room by Georges de Feure, all in moony colours, with furniture of dappled Hungarian ash, decorated with silvery copper inlay, hung with a shimmering silk tapestry of blue and grey formal flowers, shifting shape in the light, woven on a woof of silver threads. The chairs were covered with blue-grey cloth embroidered with white silk roses. Julian thought he would have liked to see Tom in a silk dressing-gown, standing in that room—he imagined the gown in midnight-blue, he imagined it in dark pewter, he combined the two, whilst Tom strode around with genuine curiosity and repeated that it was a pity his mother could not see it. “It would give her so much for her work,” said Tom. He pushed his hands through his fair thatch, making temporary horn-stubs. They moved on into a bedroom, where a great bed was spread with an embroidered cover in every muted shade. Julian tried to imagine
Tom spread naked on it, whilst Tom stood a little stiffly taking an interest in the bed-curtains. A large number of fashionable ladies and gentlemen came into the little room and exclaimed over the fittings, and made aloud several observations about inhabiting the bed. Tom said suddenly that he was tired, he felt oppressed, he should be glad if they could sit down.

They sat in an adjacent café, waiting for Prosper Cain. They ordered
citrons pressés
, and Tom deranged his hair with his fingers a little more. Julian couldn’t think what to say to Tom, and Tom said nothing, so Julian said

“Doesn’t it seem odd that Herr Susskind turns up, just like that?”

“Does it? Everybody in the world seems to be here. I can’t get my breath for being crushed by people. I admit there are so many, the chances of meeting any particular one can’t be very high.”

“I think he fixed it with Charles. I think he knew we were there. Maybe he has a thing about Charles.”

“A thing?”

“Maybe he’s in love with Charles. He seemed excited.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of that. It’s odd, though. I bumped into them together, once, in Hyde Park. I was going through with Papa. They pretended not to see us, and we pretended not to see them. Papa said it was gentlemanly to look the other way. I didn’t quite know why, but I could see everyone was embarrassed.”

Julian said “Have you ever been in love? Really in love?” Tom looked down at the table. Julian immediately thought he had gone too far. Tom was in fact thinking that Julian was sophisticated, and would mock the true answer. Nevertheless, he said

“Only in the imagination.”

“A mysterious answer. What do you mean by that?”

Tom was dumb. Then he said “I don’t know why I said that.”

“Do you mean love in the imagination with real people you don’t love—in the flesh, so to speak? Or in the imagination with ideal people you don’t know at all?”

Tom looked up, and flushed. Julian was looking at him with a quizzical, but amiable grin.

“More the second. But they get mixed. You wonder what it would be like, you know—”

What Tom meant by “what it would be like,” was in fact a reference to knights and damsels riding together through forests, heading from the city into the vacant and the unknown. He had had a habit since childhood of inserting his imagination into Sir Gareth, in Tennyson’s “Gareth and Lynette,” who had been bidden by his mother to be an anonymous kitchen-knave in the ashes of King Arthur’s Hall, and who had ridden on his first quest with the scolding and jeering young woman, who said he smelled of the kitchen, like a foul agaric, but had slowly come to know how strong and gentle he was, who had been sorry, and watched over him like a mother in his sleep. He had no idea why he had picked on Gareth, and not the more complicated and passionate Lancelot.

Julian said

“I suppose we try it out in books, or on beautiful boys at school. Until we find something real—”

Tom flinched, and Julian remembered what he imagined had been done to Tom at Marlowe.

They sipped their
citrons pressés
. Julian said “Don’t you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you—all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven’t met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures—unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.”

“When I think that thought,” said Tom, “I think of caves of ice, I don’t know why, with things frozen into weird shapes, and tunnels all bored into it—”