While England Sleeps (16 page)

She lit two cigarettes and handed one to me.

“And have there been others?”

“Others?”

“Besides Simon—and me.”

“Oh, goodness, yes. Are you shocked? I shouldn’t think you would be. After all, it must have been clear from the beginning that I wasn’t what your aunt described.” She puffed out rings of smoke. “To tell the truth, I’m seeing someone now, but I don’t think it’ll amount to much. He’s married, you see.”

“Really.”

“Well, yes. Actually, to be completely honest, it’s worse than that. He’s my boss, at the publishing house. Not much to speak of in terms of looks. The tiniest willie, but he has a certain
authority
I find attractive. Anyway, it’s just one or two afternoons a week at a Pimlico hotel.”

“And what’s that like?”

“Well, that’s the surprising thing. One’s supposed to feel cheap and sullied, isn’t one? But once I’d actually done it, I didn’t at all. I considered it a grand adventure, an episode from the novel of my life, you know: this is the chapter where Philippa goes to a Pimlico hotel with her powerful, handsome, alluring boss, for an afternoon of love she will never forget. Except that I will forget it. It was quite forgettable, really. Quite . . .
drab
. I ought to break it off.” She laughed, then ruffled my hair. “I suspect,” she went on, “that you have something to confess to me as well.”

I looked away.

“Well,” I said, “it’s true that .
.
. I’ve never been with a woman before.”

“That was obvious,” Philippa said. “Oh, please don’t take that remark the wrong way. You’re wonderful. I adore you. It’s just that I could tell you didn’t quite know your way around. Yet. It was as if you were constantly having to consult a map.”

I blushed, and laughed.

“No, Brian, actually what I was referring to was—well, it
is
fairly well known—that you’re homosexual.”

I gulped. I hadn’t known it was well known.

“But I want to say that doesn’t bother me, because I for one don’t perceive sexuality as something rigid. I’m sure under the proper circumstances I could very happily make love with a woman, and will.”

“Philippa, I hope you don’t think I was trying to hide anything from you.”

“Of course not.”

“I always intended to end up with a woman—no, not intended, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, I always felt it was my
destiny
that I should fall in love with a woman. Which is not to say there’s anything wrong with love between men—only I always suspected it wasn’t the end of the road for me. Do you understand?”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Philippa said, “love occurs between people, not sexes. Why limit ourselves? It’s 1936; it’s practically the future.”

“Or on the other hand, it’s practically the end of the world.”

“In that case, we should gather our rosebuds while we may, shouldn’t we?”

“Exactly.”

She offered me another cigarette. The romantic mood had passed; we were both, as the French say,
pensif
.

I looked at the clock; it was nearly eleven-thirty. I would have to rush if I was going to catch the underground before it shut down for the night.

“You’re welcome to stay,” Philippa said.

“I’d love to,” I said. “But I’ve got an engagement early tomorrow morning.”

A shadow passed over her face—disappointment, or else relief. I dressed. Indeed, it was only as I descended the stairs from her flat that I began to fathom the potential consequences of what I’d just done. One rarely becomes conscious of betrayal until after the act is finished.

As I went into the tube station I realized I was still carrying her strong smell on my hands, so I stopped to wash. A youth slouched near the urinals. He glanced at me in a way that was impossible to misinterpret. To my great astonishment and shame I had an instant erection—not surprising, really; I am often most excitable just after sex. “Quite a big one,” the youth said. “Want me to take care of it?”

I didn’t answer him. He unbuttoned me, pulled my cock from my trousers and began to stroke it.

Right there in the middle of the tube station lavatory, where anyone could have walked in and seen us.

He knelt in front of me to get a better look, and I came ferociously, all over his face.

We finished just in time to catch the last train. While he spat and washed his face, I buttoned up and headed onto the platform.

“Hey, where’re you rushing off to?” he shouted after me. “What’s your name? Mine’s Sydney.”

I didn’t answer him. I hurried away as fast as I could.

“Hello! I’m talking to you! Hey! What’s the matter, you think you’re too good to talk to me? Well, you can stick it up your bum, mate. Frigging snob, I’d like to knock your frigging teeth in.”

But he did not follow me onto the train. I was going west, of course. He was going east.

At the flat, breath whistled, sweet as ever, through sleeping Edward’s slightly parted teeth.

Chapter Eight

The world was ending, but in London women gossiped and argued over the price of mutton, men drank ale and wanked each other in public lavatories before going home to eat the mutton their wives had argued over. Meanwhile, across a sliver of water, much of Madrid had been destroyed; in Seville, Quiepo di Lieno filled the radio waves with his private hatred; in Irún, Republican refugees, defeated, scuttled across the water to France. As for the Republican side—our side—it was becoming each day more crippled by its own internal warfare. We were losing. Death upon death, and still Anthony Eden preached “non-intervention.” The fool! Couldn’t he see he was playing into Hitler’s hands? (Then again, Lady Abernathy hadn’t seen; many in England didn’t see, for which they would one day suffer.)

Chaos reigned in the little theater of my private life as well, but I pretended everything was fine. Who was it said the denial of corruption signals the deepest corruption? It’s true. Only in the journal did I dare report the truth, with the result that what was once a source of pleasure became bitter medicine. I dreaded touching the pen to those pages where conscience obligated me, for once, to speak things as they were.

The irony was that in spite of all the lying I did, I never became proficient at it. I was an inept liar. Then again, I suspect there is rarely such a thing as a
good
liar; there are just people who want, and people who do not want, to believe.

That I managed to pull it off as long as I did, in retrospect, astonishes me.

Most nights I still spent with Edward; we talked and read and made love. Other nights I dined with Philippa, either at her flat or at a restaurant, before or after a concert; or we lingered at a club she belonged to near Oxford Circus; or we took long walks along the Embankment, or on Hampstead Heath. We had begun to have a reputation as a couple; indeed, Emma Leland commented on how good we looked together—“both of you so literary, like the young Woolfs!”

We spent a lot of time laughing at Emma Leland.

One evening Anne Cheney rang to invite me to a dinner party she was planning to host. “And bring that lovely Philippa,” she added.

It was eight o’clock, and Edward and I were reading on the sofa, and even though he had his eyes in his book, I knew he was listening—fiercely.

I slipped up only once: I said, “I’ll check with her and let you know.”

“Who was that?” Edward asked afterwards.

“That was Anne Cheney. George Cheney’s sister. She’s invited me to supper next week.”

“Ah.” A beat of silence. “And who is it you’re supposed to check with?”

“Caroline.”

“I see.”

He went back to his
Communist Manifesto
, I to my novel.

Then, a few minutes later: “Couldn’t she have called Caroline herself?”

“What?”

“Anne Cheney. Couldn’t she have called Caroline and asked her directly?”

“She didn’t know the number,” I said.

“I see,” Edward said again, before returning to his reading.

Of course I told just as many lies to Philippa. I told her I lived alone. I told her I’d never had a real male lover, just a series of nameless partners with whom I engaged in uncomplicated, never terribly satisfying sex.

“And what exactly do men do together? Do you mind my asking? I’ve always wondered.”

“Really, Philippa—”

“Don’t be flustered. Just tell me.”

“A lot of wanking, mostly.”

“Have you ever buggered anyone?”

“No. Never.”

“When you walk down the street do beautiful men take your breath away?”

“To tell the truth, I’ve always had more of an eye for beautiful women.”

“Actually so have I. Does that make me a lesbian?”

“I don’t think so.”

I lied about the evenings I didn’t spend with her. I told her I spent them in Richmond, with Channing and Caroline. I also told her I couldn’t ever sleep at her flat because of my tutoring job, and that she couldn’t ever sleep at my bed-sitter because of the landlady.

Only once did she ring me in the evening, when Edward was home. I said she was Nigel’s sister.

Shuttling between them left me sexually exhausted. At no time in my life have I had so much sex, or enjoyed sex less. Afterwards, in Los Angeles, it became my ambition for a few years to fuck as many men as I possibly could in a week.
Then
it was for pleasure. But in London, in 1936, I found myself making love to both Philippa and Edward primarily in order to ward off any suspicions either of them might have as to the existence of the other.

Sex too, in other words, became a lie, part of a vast scaffolding of lies that in the end existed only to support itself: whatever it had initially been intended to bolster had long since fallen away.

With Edward I had trouble maintaining an erection. It wasn’t so much that my attraction to him had lessened as that guilt and terror had undermined it. Thus my body—its new smells, fatigue and depletion—betrayed me. Since Philippa was a woman, the problems with her were more endemic, the largest of them being that in order to achieve climax, I found myself having to summon into my mind images of fornicating men. Of course the instant I felt the orgasm beginning I’d hurl these images from my head, I’d open my eyes and stare into Philippa’s face or at her breasts, and while this method sometimes worked and I’d come in what seemed an agony of love for her, more often the orgasm subsided, forcing me to close my eyes and start the process all over again. Oh, don’t think I felt
nothing
. Touching her breasts and sexual parts, I could perceive rising inside me, very remotely, some vestige of heterosexual desire—a feeling barely felt, rather like touching the bedpost when your right arm has gone to sleep. So why couldn’t I, with time and concentration, coax that desire out of its hiding place, into the forefront? Why couldn’t I transform my lust for hairy chests into a lust for pincushion breasts? It seemed entirely within reason.

If Philippa perceived my imaginative betrayals, she never let on. To be honest, in my deluded state, I took relief from the calm surface she presented without ever considering what eruptions might be brewing beneath it; as long as Philippa
seemed
to accept things as they were, I assumed that she
did
accept things as they were. It was necessary to believe I was falling in love with her, if for no other reason than because being in love with Philippa was proving to have significant financial benefits. Ample checks from Aunt Constance were pouring in at a steady rate. “Consider the enclosed
mad money
, since
Betty Brennan
is selling
briskly
, “she wrote. “By the by, can I expect to be hearing an
announcement
any time soon? Edith Archibald has a quite
marvelous
champagne at the ready.” Normally I laughed at Aunt Constance’s delusions, but this time they meshed with my own so exactly that I wrote back to her with great haste, informing her that things between me and Philippa were becoming “serious.” The next day she rang to say she would come into town that afternoon to help me shop for an engagement ring, the cost of which she would of course help to defray.

Today I shake my head in appalled horror as I recall that ludicrous expedition, the two of us giddily traipsing from jewelry shop to jewelry shop, looking at ring after ring, and I convinced at every turn we’d run into Edward. (What I’d say to him I pushed to the back of my mind, refused to contemplate.) Finally we settled on a simple gold band embedded with two tiny diamonds, after which we lunched at the Lancaster, where I extracted from Aunt Constance a promise not to mention my intentions to anyone until Philippa had in fact accepted my proposal. “Oh, but of course,” she averred, her eyes twinkling with conspiratorial glee.

She insisted on giving me taxi fare, which I used not to ride home but rather to go to a public lavatory in Shepherd’s Bush notorious for its “activities.”