While England Sleeps (29 page)

Philippa’s mouth remained open, not so much in a smile as in a rictus. “I’m not sure what to say,” she answered at last, “except that I should imagine it was never Teddy’s intention to cause anyone—”

Channing came by. “Brian, are you all right? I could hear you clear across the room.”

“Channing, I’m Philippa Archibald. We met decades ago.”

“Yes, of course. How are you?”

“Your brother was just telling me the most extraordinary story.”

“So I gather. Brian, are you sure you’re all right?”

I smoothed my tie.

“Yes,” I said. “Fine.”

The weather got better. During the night spiders spun webs atop the box hedge that by dawn were finely coated with moisture. Most mornings I woke without memory, as if in the course of the night my very self had been erased, and I was now a blank page, an empty vessel. Unfortunately this sensation lasted only a few seconds, before memory came pouring back in, blotting the page, spilling over the vessel’s rim.

It was August. Caroline had not yet got back from Bath. Channing was off on one of his weekends. No one home except me and Nanny, who rattled about downstairs and had not enough to do. I, too, had not enough to do: had no one to eat dinner or lunch with, no books to read, nothing to write. So I rose; went into the bathroom; lathered the shaving soap and smeared the resulting foam over my face. I watched in the mirror the slow progress of the razor as it dragged down the length of my cheeks. If I applied just the smallest extra pressure, I knew, I could damage myself—and then, before I had a chance to think any more about it, a rose-red bloom was flowering on my cheek. I pushed again: another bloom. Three more. I pulled the blade away. Now blood was sliding down my cheeks like rivulets of rain on a window, the stubbly water in the basin was pinkening.

I heard a rapping on the door. “Who is it?” I called.

“There’s someone here to see you,” Nanny announced.

“Who?”

“He won’t say.”

“Oh, Christ. All right, tell him I’ll be right down.”

I wiped the blood off my face—almost immediately it started flowing again—then pulled on some clothes and headed downstairs.

“Yes, who is it?” I said when I got there.

In the hall stood Nigel.

“Good God, Brian, do you always slice yourself to ribbons when you shave?”

“I don’t—that is, the razor must have been dull.”

“Clearly.” He gave me a once-over. “You’re thinner than the last time I saw you.”

“So are you.”

We stared at each other uneasily.

“Well?” Nigel said. “Aren’t you going to welcome me back?”

“What? Oh, Nigel!” And I fell—literally—into him.

He seemed bewildered, even dismayed, and didn’t know what to do with his arms.

“Welcome back,” I murmured into his stiff collar. “Oh, Nigel, welcome, welcome back.”

We retreated to my bedroom, where I finished cleaning myself off. “Can you stay long?” I called from the bath. “Can you stay for lunch? Tea? Dinner?”

“I have no plans for the rest of my life,” Nigel said.

“Good. Neither do I.” I reentered the bedroom. “When did you get home?”

“Yesterday.”

“From?”

“Stockholm.”

“And Fritz? Where’s he?”

“Fritz is—Fritz had—well, he’s no longer with me, that’s all.” He closed his eyes.

“Nigel?” I said. “Nigel, what’s wrong?” And sat down next to him on the bed.

“Don’t worry,” Nigel said, “he’s not dead. Not yet anyway. But you know, it’s been mad these last months! We’d settle in one country for a few weeks, try to start up a normal routine, only to get a call or a visit from Immigration. Holland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium. One after the other, Fritz’s name turned up on one of those bloody undesirables lists, they found us and turned us out. It felt like we were being squeezed out of Europe. And all the while that lawyer, Greene, kept putting us off, promising us it would just be a matter of days before Fritz got his new papers. But the papers never came. Just bills. Bills and more bills. All kinds of unforeseen fees.

“Finally we ended up in Brussels. We were asleep one night at the hotel, when there was a loud rapping at the door. A telegram had arrived from Stuttgart, saying that Fritz’s grandmother in Mainz was very sick, probably dying. Fritz started packing immediately. Of course I tried to talk him out of it—to go back to Germany, right then, was sheer madness. But he insisted. He said that if he didn’t go and say farewell to his grandmother, he’d never forgive himself. In retrospect, I think he knew what was up. I think he was simply exhausted. He was tired of running. Oh, he said he’d be all right; he said if he’d got this far there must be a guardian angel protecting him, and in any case the world could not have become such an uncivilized place that a boy couldn’t go home to see his grandmother when she was dying. Anyway, this was his mother’s mother, and she was not on speaking terms with his father. She would hide him, he said. It turned out he’d got himself a false passport made up in Paris—rather a scrappy-looking document, I must say, but functional, in a pinch. This was the first I’d heard of it.

“I took him in the morning to the train. You can imagine the tension of our parting, knowing there was a good chance we’d never see each other again. Of course in the station like that we couldn’t kiss; instead we hugged, and then he was off. He promised to wire me the next day to let me know he’d got through safely. But no wire came, not that day or the next. Finally Horst made some calls. It turned out that Fritz had been stopped by the Gestapo and arrested almost as soon as he’d crossed the border. The telegram was probably a hoax perpetrated by his father, or some rotten Nazi friend he’d confided to along the way. He did—does—have a habit of talking too much.

“And you know what I felt when I got that call? It was odd. Not grief. No, I felt relief. A peculiar mad relief. Because finally, after all these months, it was over. It was finally out of my hands. I packed up; I made plans to come home. Meanwhile I found out that Fritz had been charged with everything from attempting to change his citizenship to taking part in ‘unnatural acts.’ I went to Stockholm and waited with Horst for the outcome. Funny: I’d become so used to worrying every time I got on a train about passport checks and whatnot, I almost forgot that traveling alone, as an Englishman, I’d have no problem. Also, I had plenty of money for a change, not having to pay for Fritz.

“A few weeks later the news came in. Apparently Fritz’s father had managed to use his influence to have him released, at which point he was immediately conscripted—which is what Herr —— wanted from the start, as if the army will make him less queer. More likely, Fritz’ll end up getting buggered by his commanding officers. But it could have been worse. They could have put him in a concentration camp. They’ve put lots of homosexuals in concentration camps lately.”

He lit a cigarette. I looked away, out the window.

“After that I got on a boat for London. I got home yesterday. Mother’s very conciliatory, but somehow nothing seems real. The only thing I take comfort in is the thought that if Fritz dies, he’ll at least have got out early. He’ll have missed the worst of it, which we’ve got to look forward to.”

“I’m sorry, Nigel,” I said, after a decent interval had passed.

“And now, back in England, I feel so out of touch! It’s as if while I was trying to save Fritz, everyone I knew somehow got miles ahead of me, and now I’m stranded, far, far behind them.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I admitted.

“I would imagine you would. You’ve been in Spain, from what I hear.”

“Yes.”

“And what happened to you in Spain?”

“Something very similar to what happened to you in Brussels.”

“Ah, yes. I gather there was a boy. He ran off and joined the brigade, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“He died.”

“I’m sorry, Brian.”

“Well, it was months ago. Since then I finished my novel. It’s to be published, you know. I’m sure you’ll loathe it.”

“Most likely.”

“In the meantime I sit here all day. Sometimes I go cottaging. Just your run-of-the-mill wretched buggerer. You know what I was thinking about doing when you arrived?”

“What?”

“Slitting my wrists.”

“Saved by the bell,” Nigel said.

He stood then; stretched his legs. I stood as well. We were looking at each other, smiling fondly, when the strangest thing happened. Nigel touched me, on the shoulder. My mouth opened in surprise. “Ssh,” he whispered. Very gradually his hand moved to my cheek, stroked the wounds there. I closed my eyes. He kissed me.

We made love. It was not the last time; we have made love sporadically, casually, at other odd moments, in the intervening years. No, what was different about that afternoon was that on it a rare note of tenderness entered into our fractious dialogue. It was as if, naked, we could remember we were young—boys, really. From Nigel’s lips emerged not scathing witticisms but soft noises of pleasure. His head briefly ceased to be the receptacle for that monstrous, overgrown brain; instead it became a bumpy globe, a fur-covered medicine ball, a thing to hold and kiss. Knowing it was what he liked—we knew everything about each other—I smeared mineral oil over my cock and balls and belly and let him squirm and slide atop me. He came within a matter of seconds, as was his habit. (It later became a terrible problem for him.) And I held his head as he cried out, as he bit my shoulder, his strong hands gripping my arse.

“We both have fat arses,” he said afterwards. “It is the fate of pianists—and writers—to have fat arses.”

“Is it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

It was noon. We lay together on my childhood bed and did not speak. And in a corner, not far but far enough from where we lay, grief crouched, fended off, at bay. I knew it would wait until we fell asleep before it pounced again; this time, however, when we woke in terror, we would at least not wake alone.

Chapter Nineteen

The Train to Cockfosters
was published that winter. Despite Nigel’s predictable condemnations, it got good reviews and even sold a few copies. In addition, Channing finally relented and allowed Caroline and me to rent our parents’ house, bringing each of us some income in the process. For the first time in my life I had money of my own and did not have to depend on the caprices of Aunt Constance to get by.

I rented a small flat off the Edgware Road. I started work on my second novel. Then Channing and Caroline both got married, contradicting Aunt Constance’s predictions. Only I was alone—no Edwards, no Philippas—though often in the evenings I went cottaging or hoisted myself over the fence into Dartmoor Park. I had affairs that year with many men, among them an Ethiopian dockworker, an accountant from Stanmore and a gardener from Leamington Spa, and though most of these affairs lasted only a matter of minutes, they meant something still. Who touches the body, however fleetingly, also touches the soul.

Meanwhile, in Spain, the Republicans were losing badly; in Germany, Hitler’s progeny were savaging the Jews. Oddly, this imminence of disaster provoked not panic in me so much as a peculiar calm. So Europe would destroy herself, I remember thinking. What of it? We deserved what we got. I saw no reason why the rest of the human population should be spared, either. The young, in times of crisis, resent the happiness of strangers, just as the old take comfort in it.

Once, in the Charing Cross Road, I thought I saw Lil peering into the window of a bookshop. I turned and ran the other way. A few days later, I became so convinced Lucy Phelan was sitting at the other end of my underground carriage that I got off three stops before my own. Soon I was avoiding apparitions of the Phelans as assiduously as in Barcelona I had chased down apparitions of Edward. I went so far as to stop taking the District Line, simply because its trains went to Upney.

Then one cold afternoon, in the lavatory at Green Park station, I had a wank with a rather chatterboxy boy who followed me out afterwards, told me how much he fancied me and asked if I’d like to have a cup of tea. We repaired to a grimly decorated venue off Piccadilly, where he informed me that his name was Albert and that he worked for an insurance concern in the City, in the underwriting department. Although his family hailed from Yorkshire, his father and mother had moved to London in the twenties.

“What part?” I asked casually.

“Upney,” he said.

I nearly spilled my tea.

“Or Downey, as I prefer to call it, since it is the arse end of nowhere.”

“Yes, yes, I know it.”

“You know Upney?”

“I met a family there once. The Phelans.”

“Why, the Phelans lived three doors down from my mum and dad!”

“Lived?”

“Yes. They left a few months ago. After the son, Edward, got killed over in Spain.”

I looked into my cup. You don’t want to know any more, I told myself. You don’t need to know any more.

“Where did they go?” I asked.

“So far as I know, the oldest daughter—Lucy—she’s in Paris. And the younger one, Sarah, she’s got herself engaged to a plumber’s assistant from Barking. As for Mrs. Sparks—Lil—well, it’s a sad story, the way my mum tells it. She had another son, see, who died in a factory accident a few years before. And losing her second—it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, was how Mum put it. And since her husband ran out on her, and she only made money taking in sewing, after a time she couldn’t afford to keep up the house anymore. So she moved to Tunbridge Wells. She’s got a brother-in-law there who runs a baker’s shop.”