While England Sleeps (15 page)

For several minutes we were silent, Nigel blowing out smoke.

“And what about Spain?” I said at last. “Everyone seems to be going. Even Emma Leland said she planned to motor down in her little roadster!”

This elicited, from Nigel, only a halfhearted laugh. “I suppose I’ve been so preoccupied with Germany I’ve missed Spain. By the way, have I shown you a picture of Fritz?”

“No.”

For the first time all afternoon a look of something like hope flushed Nigel’s face. “Oh, I have one right here. It’s not really a very good likeness, but you’ll have some idea.”

He took from his pocket a blurry snapshot in which a boy with short-cropped blond hair and babyish cheeks, dressed in traditional Bavarian
lederhosen,
stood proudly on some sort of rock. “What a lovely summer that was!” Nigel said. “So much sunshine; everything seemed possible.” A smile came over his face that reminded me of Nanny when she recalled the brief, blissful honeymoon she and her husband had had at Brighton before he went off and was killed by a tractor.

Love makes us young, but the world makes us old.

The oddest news came from Upney! Edward went to visit his family and when he came back announced that his sister Sarah no longer harbored amorous feelings toward Mr. Snapes at the post office; instead she had transferred her affections to me! “It’s true,” Edward said. “Lucy found her diary. She adores you and lives for your next visit, though of course she won’t dare ask when that might be; she’s terribly afraid of giving herself away, poor thing. So Lucy and I were thinking, really, you ought to come to supper another time. Sarah’s a good girl, she really is—just simple—and you can’t imagine what a thrill it would give her. Oh, don’t worry, she won’t expect anything of you. She’ll just want to gaze at your manly profile . . . It’ll make her month, that’s what it’ll do. Hell, it’ll probably make her year!”

The next afternoon Philippa Archibald rang, inviting me to dinner at her flat the following Saturday.

Chapter Seven

All that week I debated whether to tell Edward the truth—that I had received a dinner invitation and was once again, in spite of my promises to the contrary, going off and leaving him alone. And in the end I lied. I said Nanny was sick and that I felt obliged to visit her in Richmond. He said he understood and insisted fervently that I bring Nanny his best wishes for a swift recovery, even though Nanny didn’t know him from Adam, and I promised to do so, all the while wondering what other, more criminal lies this still innocent one might presage.

In the bathroom I shaved and washed. “Your good suit! You do love your old nanny,” Edward said—heartbreakingly, in total innocence. “What other boy would get dolled up for an old woman that used to wipe his backside?”

“I like her to know she’s appreciated,” I said.

He saw me to the door. “What will you do with yourself tonight?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Read. Have a wank with Northrop.”

I looked at him.

“Just kidding,” he said.

His smile, as he saw me off, threatened to do me in.

As usual, I overestimated how long it would take me to get to my destination by tube, and arrived at Philippa’s building a full half hour early. So I wandered about the King’s Road, looking in shop windows, until it seemed a decent hour to ring her bell.

“Come in,” she said, kissing me jovially on the cheek. “I’ve just finished washing my hair.”

“Am I early?”

“No, no, I’m late. Come on.”

A trail of puddles led from where she stood to the open bathroom door. Soapy, slightly greenish water was still rocking in the tub.

“Talk to me while I dry off,” Philippa said casually. She was wearing a Japanese kimono tied around the waist with a blood-red sash. Splotches of wet outlined her slightly protuberant stomach, her breasts and nipples, the curves of her upper thighs. A lingering odor of violets—her soap no doubt—overpowered the little flat, as did the steam that was wafting out of the bathroom. Harems, I thought, must have smelled like this.

I looked around myself. The flat was just one room, slightly smaller than mine, and so crammed with bibelots and odd, mismatched pieces of furniture one could barely walk: brightly colored pillows, creaking bookshelves, an Oriental rug dusted with cat hair (though no cats were to be seen), an old horsehair sofa, taken, I would later learn, from the library of her parents’ country house.

Searching for a remark, I glanced toward the bathroom door and saw, to my amazement, that Philippa had shed her kimono and now stood naked, toweling herself. She had ample pubic hair, a darker color than the hair on her head.

“My,” I said, “you certainly do have a lot of books. Are they as chaotic as mine, or do you keep them in some sort of order?”

“Oh, they’re very carefully ordered, but according to a system so peculiar and personal that only I could possibly ever locate anything. I’d make a rather terrible librarian, I’m afraid; you see, I’d be inclined to put
The Mill on the Floss
next to
Bleak House
because I read them both in the summer of 1927 on Spanish trains.”

“It seems to me as sensible a method for organizing a library as any.”

“Do you think so?” She pulled a blue frock patterned with tiny roses over her head. “Button me up, will you?” I did. “I’ve only prepared the simplest supper, a sort of vegetably stewy messy thing, plus cheese and bread. I’m afraid I’m not much of a cook, but I’m told my seasonings are unusual.”

“Anything would be preferable to the Hotel Lancaster.”

“Wasn’t that food appallingly bland? When I got home I had to cook myself a curry.”

“Did you? I would have liked to have done, but we—I didn’t have anything in the house.”

We sat down to table. The fact that we had met through our well-meaning aunts was lending to the evening a thrilling quality of forbiddenness that under normal circumstances it would never have had. That, plus the fact that Philippa, as far as I knew, had no idea I was homosexual, a lack of knowledge on her part I found liberating, until Edward’s happy face appeared in the looking glass across the room, accusing me.

Philippa really had had the most extraordinary life. For example, her father was seventy when he married her mother, who was twenty-two. He was a widower at the time, with grandchildren—some of them older than his new wife. He died only a few months after Philippa was born, at which point her mother was married again, this time to a tea merchant somewhat closer to her own age. They had three more children. Philippa never knew her older siblings very well—“they were more like distant aunts and uncles”—while the younger ones, all girls, lived in a world of secret languages and doll intrigues from which Philippa, home on holiday, found herself necessarily excluded. Only during the summers she spent with Uncle Teddy in Gibraltar did she feel welcomed. Uncle Teddy, she said, was a single man of means, independent, intelligent, reckless. He took Philippa to all kinds of unsavory places—gambling houses and brothels—as well as to the palaces of dukes, one of whom tried to feel her breasts.

They spent weeks exploring the wild back regions of Spain, and toured the Balearic Islands; Philippa said she would never forget Minorca, with its miles of crisscrossed stone walls that went on forever and had no apparent purpose and had been there since the beginning of time. Nor would she forget the primitive
pueblos
of Aragon, the markets where women stood on the streets selling clay pots big enough for a child to sleep in. They had stayed at a
fonda
in Beceite, the proprietress of which, Tia Cinta, had a gangrenous leg. Tia Cinta took a fancy to them. “Send me a postcard from England,” she said. “Of course,” Philippa said in her schoolgirl Spanish. “To whom should it be addressed?” “Just send it to Tia Cinta, Beceite,” the old woman said. “But aren’t there other Tia Cintas in Beceite?” “Yes, three others, but none of them ever gets mail!”

Philippa’s tone, as she told these stories, was measured, even. Not a hint of rancor or resentment; indeed, she seemed to go to great lengths to avoid placing blame—her mother, she said, really
had
tried her hardest not to favor her new little girls, her stepfather treated her as if she were his own daughter, even her three sisters made every effort they could to include her. It was not their fault that the intimate world of the nursery left no place for her; it was nobody’s fault; she harbored no bitterness. And yet I could detect in her voice, if not bitterness, then a faint cynicism, even a fatalism. For instance, when we spoke of Spain, she shook her head and smiled slightly. “Of course,” she said, “there is no hope.”

“No hope?”

She stared into her wineglass. “I’m afraid not. You see, the Republicans are fatally divided. They pretend to present a united front, but behind the battlements the Anarchists are plotting against the Communists and the Communists are plotting against the Anarchists, and in the middle are so many foreigners drawn by idealism, who somehow imagine that if they can liberate Spain, they can save Europe.”

She rotated the wineglass and coolly appraised the resulting red waves.

“But the enemy is known,” I interjected. “And if the enemy is known, and the goal—that enemy’s defeat—is clear, there’s no reason that people with philosophical differences can’t fight alongside one another. No one could possibly stomach the Fascist barbarities—”

“There are Republican barbarities as well. Perhaps not as many, but still—”

“I think the reports of priests being murdered are exaggerated.”

“I hope you’re right,” Philippa said, “and doubt it.”

Later, on the horsehair sofa, she asked about my life. So I described for her the house in Richmond, the deaths of my parents, my unhappiness at Cambridge and first encounters with Nigel. I did not mention my homosexuality, did not mention Edward or Digby Grafton or any lovers, for that matter (though I confess I dwelt on my friendship with Louise in a way that suggested it was more than a friendship). What a liar I was becoming! I had lied to Edward, and now I was lying to Philippa.

Then, quite casually, Philippa hoisted her legs over my lap. I stopped talking. I looked at her. Her expression hadn’t changed at all. What it suggested, if truth be told, was a kind of monumental indifference: if I responded to her, she seemed to be saying, fine; if not, so much the better.

I, on the other hand, for my own reasons, felt it to be of the utmost importance that I respond to Philippa—and enjoy it.

So I kissed her. I was a little drunk—I suppose we both were. She took down her hair, and all I could think was that it flowed over her back like water, and I reached to touch it, wondering if it would slip through my fingers. She closed her eyes and kissed me back. Her mouth seemed so small, compared to Edward’s! Small and delicate and hungry.

Her clothes fell open, the buttons on the back of her dress pulling free like a glissando, uninterrupted. She was barefoot, wore no brassiere, only the simplest white cotton knickers. By comparison, I had on a jacket, tie, wristwatch, shirt, vest, drawers, socks and garters and shoes, the laces of which I had tied in double knots. “You’re wrapped up like a Christmas package,” Philippa said as she struggled to undo it all. I only hoped, once unwrapped, I wouldn’t prove disappointing.

How different her body was from a man’s! She had, for instance, tiny hands and feet, but her wine-red nipples were huge and hard and purposeful—such a contrast to the pale-pink buds on Edward’s chest, with their coronas of chaff-colored hair! She had very pretty breasts, round and firm, about the size of pin-cushions. Her sexual parts eluded my powers of description. I thought of envelopes within envelopes, lined with scented paper; envelopes made of flesh; or lettuce leaves, darker on the outside and paler within. Entering her was not so different, really, from entering a man: a bit wetter and silkier, perhaps. And as Nigel once remarked, you have to be more polite at the front door than the back.

We lay motionless on the sofa for some moments after the act was finished, glued together by sweat and semen and the fluids that seeped from between Philippa’s legs. Finally she rose and went into the bathroom. I heard water running. When she came out again, she was wearing the kimono with the red sash and carrying an oyster-colored dressing gown, which she handed to me. I wrapped it around myself. I had started shaking.

“Are you cold?” Philippa asked, putting her arm around me.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’re sure.” Like a worried mother, she felt my head for fever, then went into the kitchen and came back with hot tea. I drank it down, and within a few minutes the shaking subsided.

“I don’t know what came over me,” I said. “Excitement, I suppose.”

“It’s natural,” she said. “Now just relax.”

I told her I would try.

Postcoitally, Philippa spoke more freely and easily than before. I learned, for instance, that she had had a lover since she was fifteen. The same boy. Simon something; he was with the foreign office. They had met in France on a summer holiday and were at Oxford at the same time. Of course she always assumed they would marry. But then they came to London, embarked on their different careers, and mysteriously, a gulf seemed to open between them. “We’d been inseparable practically since we were children,” was how she put it. “Our lives had been one life. And then, suddenly, they weren’t.”