While England Sleeps (2 page)

An elderly hostess took our order. Given the delicately constituted natures of most of its clientele, the Hotel Lancaster could be relied upon to serve eminently bland meals, which pleased Aunt Constance, who was slave to an insolent stomach.

“I am having some trouble writing,” I said when the hostess had gone. “Each time I sit down to work at my novel I become obsessed with some tiny chore that needs to be done, or my eye fixates on a spot of dirt on the wall, or the page itself starts to break up into an abstraction.”

“And are you thinking I might advise you?” Aunt Constance asked.

“Well—yes. Rather.”

“Oh, dear.” She put down her water glass. “You see, I don’t suppose I ever
have
had any problems in that particular area, except—yes, once, as I recall, years ago, I had written two novels and I simply couldn’t think of an idea for another one. This didn’t trouble me at the time. As I remember, I simply said to myself, ‘Constance, you’ve written your novels, now you must settle down and be an ordinary woman and do what ordinary women do.’ So I went out to the garden and started making a bouquet of roses, and somehow I thought of a girl named Rose, and a yew tree, and a soldier, and I dropped the roses, went inside and wrote
Kilkenny Spring
. Now, dear, before I forget, here is a copy of my latest for you. It is the story of a char with nine children and a fondness for Bovril.” Chuckling, she handed me
Betty Brennan
, inscribed, like all her other books, “to my dear great-nephew Brian, with hope for his future novelistic career.”

“Thanks very much, Aunt Constance,” I said. “I shall begin it on the train.”

“Yes, well, if you like. Not my best, I fear, but it will have to suffice. A pity. My readers do have such expectations of me.” She fished her spectacles out of her purse and peered at me diagnostically. “Now, dear, how are you getting along? Have you met a girl yet? Would you like to be introduced to Edith Archibald’s niece Philippa? According to Edith she is an extremely pleasant girl, though shy, probably due to the harelip—oh, of course it’s been surgically repaired. An avid reader, Edith says—”

“Aunt Constance, you know I don’t have time for girls. My
work
.”

“Brian, how old are you now?”

“Almost twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three! When I was twenty-three, Freddie and I had been married five years already! You must start thinking about the future, my dear. The fact is I haven’t much hope for Channing, he is lost in books, and as for Caroline—well, I don’t mean to be cruel, but she’s nearly twenty-five. It really is most probably too late.” With her shoulder she indicated her fellow residents at the Hotel Lancaster, all eating alone. “Trust me,” she said. “It is terrible to be old and alone. Oh, not for me—I have decades of memories to draw on. But never to have known love, never to have felt the strength of an arm draped over one’s shoulder, the warmth of his lips pressing against—” Stopping short, she coughed and desisted. Little did she know that the warmth of his lips pressing was
exactly
what I longed for.

“Now, here’s what I propose: a small dinner, with Philippa and Edith. I shall arrange a private room. How does that sound?”

It sounded beastly.

“You know your poor mother would have wanted it. It was her fondest wish to see at least one of her children—”

“All right, Aunt Constance. Yes. I’ll come.”

“You won’t regret it. From what Edith’s told me, Philippa Archibald sounds like a most
stable
young woman. And now, dear, let me give you some more money. That jacket you’re wearing is positively threadbare.”

At least there was no pretense with Aunt Inconstance. Doing as she pleased brought one immediate rewards.

It was gray every day that year, no sun for so long it became a thing of memory, all London a perpetual sneeze and nose-blow. Mediterraneans would have gone mad, Americans would have called lawyers and threatened to sue, but we English accept bad weather with the same glum equanimity with which we accept semidetached houses and Wall’s sausages. In their vaguely depressed way, people got on with things, which meant waiting in endless rainy queues. Queues everywhere: if you put a sign on a wall that said, “Queue here,” they would have lined up in front of it.

I was at an odd moment in my life. For the past two years I’d been living in Germany, ostensibly writing. In fact I’d spent most of my afternoons smoking cigarettes in cafés and most of my evenings smoking cigarettes in a leather-curtained bar. There were beers, there were boys. Mostly there were cigarettes.

Then Mother died, and I had to come home. I didn’t have the money to get back to Germany after that, and Aunt Constance—having concluded, apparently, that Germany was not good for me—elected not to give me any more. I had nowhere to go, so I lingered in Richmond, parentless, sorting through the detritus of Mother’s and Father’s lives, while my siblings bickered and poor old Nanny, who had been dragged back from Eastbourne to take care of us all again, tried to keep the peace. Finally I could bear it no more; I accepted a long-standing invitation from Rupert Halliwell, a Cambridge chum who was rich and had recently acquired grandiose digs in Cadogan Square.

Rupert and I had not known each other well at Cambridge: still, something in his passion for antique crystal had spoken to something in my passion for Digby Grafton, who rowed. Rupert was a short, plump, pale fellow, rather resembling one of those blancmanges or mousses Aunt Constance always referred to as a “shape.” He had fat wrists, fussy tastes, doleful eyes.

I arrived at four on a Wednesday. A cowering little maid led me into the drawing room, where soon enough Rupert joined me, looking droopy and sad as ever in his smoking jacket. “Awfully kind of you to put me up, Rupert,” I said to him as we shook hands. “Oh, nonsense,” he replied dismissively. “The pleasure is mine entirely. In any case, it sounds as if you were roasting alive in that household.”

“It
is
good to be out of there.”

We sat down to tea, which the maid brought in along with a set of lovely blue-and-gold enamel cups—“Eighteenth century,” Rupert informed me. “They belonged to Queen Beatrix and are the only set of their kind still in existence.” Next I complimented him on the sofa. “Yes, it is lovely, isn’t it? But it’s covered in a very rare type of Indian handwoven silk that, if it’s ever stained, is impossible to clean.” “Oh, really,” I said, endeavoring to hold my cup at a distance. Then he showed me his collection of antique crystal vases. “Three are chipped,” he pointed out, “the result of clumsiness on the part of domestic servants.” No wonder the poor maid’s hands shook as she picked up the tea tray!

We finished off our tea and Rupert showed me up to my room. “I think you’ll find you have everything you need,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure I will.”

I started to unpack, but instead of leaving he sat down on the edge of the bed. Needless to say I felt rather self-conscious, his sad eyes fastened on me as I put away my clothes.

“How’s your mother?” I asked him.

“The same. Pain is her companion, her daily tormentor. She can hardly get out of bed now, but I visit every day, which is a great pleasure for her. Really, she’s too good for the earth.”

In fact the woman was a beast, and not nearly as sick as she pretended. When she bought Rupert the house in Cadogan Square I had hoped it might mean a final severing of the umbilical cord. Instead he simply replicated her fondness for objects that were both impossibly delicate and irreplaceable. (Why is it that the rich, who have been spared material worry, feel obligated to create, all around themselves, the potential for disaster?) Rupert was, at twenty, a decidedly unformed young creature who had chosen to emulate the habits of the extremely aged. And yet somehow they didn’t quite stick to him; you couldn’t help wondering how long the “stage” would last.

I finished unpacking and was eager to write in my journal, so I told Rupert I wanted to have a nap before dinner. Regretfully he stood. “Are you sure there’s nothing else I can do for you?” he asked, his eyes wide and wet as ever. “No, I’m fine, really,” I said. “All right,” he said, then, with extreme slowness, shut the door behind himself.

I flung myself onto the bed. Poor Rupert! Most of my friends had no patience for him; for them, he was merely an example of the deadening self-indulgence into which the bourgeoisie was irrevocably descending. Rupert and his kind, according to my friends, were dead branches on a living tree that must be pruned for the sake of the tree.

I understood this point of view. Still, there was something so sad and ineffectual about Rupert, locked up in his palace with all his precious objects to protect and no occupation and that beastly mother summoning him to her sickbed every half minute, that I couldn’t help but feel a kind of pity for him. I doubted he had ever had sex with anyone, male or female. He loved to hear my recitations of erotic philandering and yet would never himself have dared venture even to the pubs I sometimes frequented, with their cargo of friendly police and guardsmen. Instead, ludicrously, he seemed to have attached all his erotic feelings to me, lingering at my door or staring longingly into my averted eyes, hoping against hope, I supposed, that I would invite him in for seduction. What a laughable thought—I, who had no aptitude for seduction! He would be a cold and anguished lover, I suspected. I could not imagine him naked; he dressed and held himself in such a way as to discourage contemplation of his body, even, perhaps, to deny the existence of a body at all. And yet, somewhere under there, there had to be nakedness.

We ate a quiet, congenial dinner that night, during which most of the conversation focused on Digby Grafton’s wedding, to which Rupert—but not I—had been invited. Afterwards, pleading fatigue, I excused myself and took to my room.

At half past twelve—I was already in bed—the door creaked open. “Brian, I’m dreadfully sorry to wake you, but I’ve just had the most frightful row with Mother. Might I sit down?”

“Of course, Rupert,” I said.

He tiptoed in, perched on the edge of the bed, then began his tearful litany of regrets—how Mother was always chastising him and telling him what a failure he was; her agony and pain, which justified everything; his loneliness and need for love. I knew what he wanted, yet somehow could not bring myself to give it to him—I drew back from his white, fleshy forearms, the soft black hairs on his wrists. So I consoled him as best I could, explaining that certainly Mother didn’t mean it, that she loved him desperately and it was only the pain speaking, and eventually, feeling ashamed and realizing he could get no more from me, he apologized for the interruption and bade me good night.

It was difficult for me to go back to sleep after that. Digby haunted my thoughts: his beautiful dark skin and wheat-colored hair. Digby naked by the lake, shaking water from his body, the drops hanging like beads of glass from the hair on his chest and legs and around his long, disinterested cock, which of course was normal and rose only for girls. My obsession with that cock, my longing to draw back its helmet of foreskin and lick the treacly fluid dripping from the head, kept me thrashing, so much so that I had to wank off four times before I was finally able to get to sleep.

The next morning I woke late, cross and with a sore throat. Rupert was in the sitting room, endlessly turning an irreplaceable silver spoon in an irreplaceable china cup presumably filled with the rarest and most perishable of teas. He informed me in curt tones that he had invited a guest to dinner, a “charming lady” who took great pleasure in meeting “artistic young people” and in whose good graces it was imperative that he should establish himself. “And it would probably be a good idea
not
to bring up politics, Brian. Lady Abernathy is—well, rather unmodern in her ideas. We wouldn’t want to shock her.”

I stared out the window. Rain thudded against the glass, so much rain that I wondered for a moment if perhaps that was Rupert’s problem, if like so many Englishmen he had simply got soggy in the head. I wished I could concoct an excuse to get out of the house that evening; unfortunately none came to mind. As Rupert’s guest, I appeared to be his slave.

The phone rang. To my amazement, it was for me.

“Brian, it’s Rose Dent. Nigel’s mother. I hope you don’t mind me ringing you here; your sister gave me the number. I’ve called to tell you Nigel’s in London.”

I was shocked. Nigel hadn’t given me any indication he intended to visit London.

“How long is he going to be here?” I asked hopefully.

“Oh, but that’s just it. He’s leaving tomorrow. He’s been here a fortnight already.”

“A fortnight?”

“Very busy, I’m afraid. But he did wish to see you. Tell me, could you pop round for tea today—say, around four? But I must warn you that Nigel has a cold and might not be in the best of spirits.”

I said of course I would come. She rang off, and I sat down to ponder why on earth Nigel might have come to London for a fortnight and not called me. This wasn’t like him.

Nigel and I had been inseparable since public school, where I fagged for him—shined his shoes, made his bed, and so forth. You could say our relationship hadn’t progressed much since then. Even now the bark of his disapproval reduced me to a quaking first former, desperate to please this older, bigger, deep-voiced master, and in the end always flubbing the simplest task. I “followed” him to Cambridge, then to Stuttgart, where he went to study piano with the renowned Clara Lemper, and from where he wrote the first of his “Letters from Abroad”—essays on musical and political themes that would later make him more famous even than his recordings of Ravel and Liszt. In Stuttgart we practically lived together, and, though I now had a deeper voice than his, I continued to shine his shoes and make his bed. I was, as far as I knew, his closest ally: we shared early drafts, confidences, even lovers. Oh, certainly, our friendship had a fractious edge. He tormented me regularly, the way an older brother will torment a younger. Still, I loved him and had no doubt that he loved me. For him to have spent two weeks in London without ringing me—well, something would have had to be gravely wrong.