While England Sleeps (7 page)

It was dark when we came, simultaneously, our mouths pressed together to stifle each other’s cries.

Afterwards we lay still, not touching, silent, both of us slightly taken aback by the extent to which we had abandoned all pretense of decorum. In what seemed like another life (but it had been minutes ago!), I recalled Edward on his knees, his bum pointed in the air, wanting me to bugger him. I recalled the jangling crash as his belt fell from the bed onto the floor.

I got up and made more tea and brought it to the bed, along with the cakes and sandwiches I’d bought. We were both ravenous. We lay naked in bed, stuffing cream cakes into our faces. Edward’s cock—so big and angry when it was hard—had shrunk to almost nothing. “A grower, not a shower,” Nigel would have said, but Nigel was nowhere near now. Nigel was away.

Edward told me more about his family. His “dad,” it turned out, was not his father, just his mother’s most recent husband.
Her
name was Lil, and she had been a music hall dancer. The bunch of them—Lil, “Dad” (his lack of a surname seemed to signify his interchangeability with past and future versions), Edward, Lucy, Sarah, and now the incongruously named Headley and Pearlene—shared a crowded little two-bedroomed house. Because Edward had been given the dining room, Lucy and Sarah were forced to share a bedroom, much to Lucy’s consternation.

“And you say it was Lucy who gave you
The Well of Loneliness
?
”

“Some people march to a different drummer,” Edward said. “Lucy marches to a different orchestra.”

“
The Well of Loneliness
,” I said. “Extraordinary, for a girl of her—”

“Hey, excuse me, but just because we didn’t go to public school doesn’t mean we’re know-nothings. We’re quite up on what’s going on in the world of high culture, my sister and me, thank you very much.”

“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to imply—it’s just—
The Well of Loneliness
—and when I think of my own sister—though perhaps
that’s
been Caroline’s problem all along—”

Edward laughed.

“And you think Lucy’s—well, like Miss Hall?”

“She certainly doesn’t dress in men’s clothes, if that’s what you’re asking. At least in front of us.”

He finished the last of the sandwiches, then announced he had to be going. My heart sank, I so badly wanted him to stay.

He stood before me, dressing—a spectacle I found nearly as arousing as the spectacle of his undressing. Then, when he had finished, he sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Brian,” he said, “remember the last time we spoke—you said if I ever needed to, I might stay the night here?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I was just asking because—well, with Headley and Pearlene, things are getting rather cramped at home. I don’t even have my own room no more, I have to share it with
them
, and I’m not sleeping much as a result, I can tell you. And yesterday Mum said—well, she said, ‘Edward, it would make everything lots easier if you found somewhere else to stay for a while, once I’m over this influenza—just a month or so, mind you, until Nellie’s back’—and I was thinking  . . . perhaps I might stay here, if you’d have me. Of course I’d pay my share; we’d split everything down the middle—”

“I should think that would be wonderful,” I said.

Edward seemed surprised at how readily I had assented. “Well, lovely, then,” he said. “That will be lovely. Probably I’ll move in beginning of next month—if that’s all right.”

“Whenever you like. Sooner if you like—tomorrow—tonight!”

He laughed. “Mum’s got to get over her flu, remember. Until then she needs me around the house.”

“I know. I suppose I’m just eager, that’s all.”

“Me too.”

“Are you?”

With astonishing gentleness, he cupped my face in his hands.

“You really do have the most beautiful eyes,” he said.

Chapter Four

As I mentioned earlier, I was working, back then, on a novel. A good part of it took place on the trains and in the stations of the underground, which was one reason I considered my encounter with Edward mystically significant. Since early childhood, after all, I had nurtured a passion for the underground that Nigel thought ridiculous and that, when queried, I found myself hard-pressed to explain. (Most true passions are difficult to explain.) What can I say, except that I loved everything about the underground? I loved the deep tunnels, the smoky trains, the intricate interlocking of the lines, each of which had its own particularities, its identity, if you will. I used to loiter at Richmond Station just so I could gaze at the red circle speared with blue; watch the trains coming and going; mostly, study the map, its vaguely insectoid shape, its tangle of colored yarn that, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be something more sensible: a simulacrum of connectedness; a game of choices. I’d stand for hours asking myself questions such as, if I needed to go from Chancery Lane to Rickmansworth, which would be the shortest route? Which would be the longest? Which would allow me to ride on the most colored lines? To take the quick route seemed obvious to me then, even crude, the alternative of the unimaginative mind. I preferred—I believed in—the long way round.

The red circle, speared with blue, contained the name of the station. It promised other stations: Richmond promised Kew Gardens, which promised Gunnersbury, which promised Turnham Green and Stamford Brook and Hammersmith and London. London! The deep lines, the Piccadilly and the Northern and the Bakerloo! The escalators that tipped down what seemed like miles, the endless tubular corridors with their warm odor of exhaust, the wind of the trains, the mysterious, subterranean wind of the trains. To the north, more stations. To the east, to the west, more stations. Stations spawning like islands, all waiting to be visited, and the name of each one contained, identically, within that red circle, that blue spear!

Not much of this ended up finding its way into the novel, which had aspirations to literary seriousness. Regretfully, I only went so far as to let my passion fly for a few short paragraphs, during which I described the underground as “another London, subterranean and sinister and Gothic.” The novel had for a hero a neophyte writer (of course), one Nicholas Holden, who watches with fascination the expansion of the Piccadilly Line out to the distant suburb of Cockfosters, where his friend Avery James, the brilliant young painter, lives. Like Nigel, Avery is aggressively antibourgeois, and so the dreaded suburbs come to embody for him exactly the opposite of what they embody for most people; genius lingers in the semidetached houses, and the moment when the train emerges out of the tube and into the light is a moment of revelation:

All at once the blackness lifted, and we were thrust into cold sun and dust. For a few seconds I had to shield my eyes against the massive brightness, the backs of houses bearing down on me through the train’s windows. Oh, how I longed to descend once again into that dark vein, where I could see as Avery saw—with the Inward Eye!

Nicholas craves “the end of the line,” which is both death and a safe haven, “that elusive center, the center that
will
hold.” And yet he does not quite believe that the distant suburbs to which the Piccadilly Line takes him actually exist: “How
could
one believe in Arnos Grove, in Enfield West, in Southgate, when one was standing in a crowded cavern deep beneath the earth, and a hat was flying down the platform, blown by the hot, bitter, smoky wind? Hyde Park Corner is reality, but Cockfosters, shimmering Cockfosters, is an ideal!” In fact Cockfosters was nowhere—a station near a cemetery off a suburban road—but I didn’t care about that. I loved the name. I loved all underground stations with peculiar names—Headstone Lane, Old Street, Burnt Oak, Elephant & Castle. Also, I loved that Cockfosters was both the end of the line and somewhere no one I knew had ever had reason to visit. Not a community or town, exactly. Rather, a place invented by the underground. A terminus. The end of the map, the edge of the flat earth the map imagines. Beyond Cockfosters you could not go. You had to turn back. The tracks themselves stopped. The miles of tracks simply, mysteriously stopped.

“Imagine Cockfosters,” Avery is always saying to Nicholas in the novel. But Nicholas’s problem is that he
cannot
imagine Cockfosters. That was my problem as well. Nor did I ever, in all my years in London, dare to go there. Oh, I nearly did. I got as far as Southgate once, where the escalators have gleaming gold handrails. Then I got scared. I turned back. You see, I was afraid that if I actually
went
to Cockfosters, I would discover it was just a place, like any other place. Shops and houses. Women carting groceries. And that reality, for some reason, my youthful imagination could not bear to contemplate.

That was the novel that, in the fall of 1936, I had written half of; the novel that, to my chagrin, I did not seem to have it in myself to complete and that I knew I would never complete until I, like Nicholas, “imagined Cockfosters,” something at the moment I could not find it in myself to do.

Since I seemed to be incapable of doing any work on my novel, therefore, and since not writing was driving me mad in much the same way that writing had driven me mad back when I wrote, I decided to return to journal writing. Simply to put things down, to get sentences onto paper, was my goal. I had no ambitions beyond the restoration of sanity. Toward that end, I bought a notebook with a mottled black-and-white cover that suggested ink spills and exuded a comforting, musty aroma, the aroma of stationers’ shops on rainy days. I also bought a natty blue Waterman’s fountain pen and several bottles of ink.

Here is how the journal begins:

Autumn 1936. I must write. Something, anything.

I was thinking, the other day, about the names of the underground stations and what they suggest. Here is what I came up with:

Old Street: the pavement is erupting. Cobwebs gird the entrance to Miss Havisham’s dress shop. A grocer specializes in a brand of custard powder not available since 1894.

Elephant & Castle: The elephant is Indian and has an emerald on her forehead. The castle is Briana’s castle from
The Faerie Queene
: Briana, whose lover (an ogre) demanded that she sew for him a shroud of human hair. Knights and damsels arrive by train, are lured within and shorn of their locks and beards. For the rest of their lives they will wander in madness through the forest of the station, tearing at what was once their hair.

Burnt Oak: Burnt during a war. When you touch the leaves, ash rubs off on your fingers. If you cut into the charred bark, a resin runs out that is black as pitch and carries the smell of death.

“We will probably have left Paris by the time you receive this,” Nigel wrote that week.

This is what happened. A few nights ago Fritz and I were drinking wine in a cheap bistro, when suddenly, uncontrollably, he started weeping. I asked him what was the matter, and he said that he felt very sorry because he had not been truthful with me. Oh, he had not
lied
to me, never that—nonetheless he had somewhat rearranged the facts of his background. It turns out that his father is not, as he told me previously, a carpenter from Dusseldorf. His father is ——, an army general and well-known Nazi! Apparently one afternoon last year Frau —— happened upon Fritz and one of his cousins
in flagrante delicto,
after which there was hell to pay. Fritz was ordered immediately into the army, at which point he fled to Stuttgart, where he ended up eking out a living as a thief and male prostitute, every moment on the watch in case his father’s “spies” had caught up with him. Needless to say the story thrilled me, adding as it did to the sense of illicitness that underscored our love affair. But: “There is more, Nigel—oh, Nigel, I hardly know how to tell you—” It turns out that a few years earlier a friend of his had coerced him into signing several petitions being circulated by the Communist Party. There was every likelihood the police had got his name from one of those petitions, and therefore every likelihood, when we left Germany, that he would be held back at the border—he got through on sheer luck, in the end, and had not told me in advance of our departure because he feared my anxiety would give him away. “So you see? I have deceived you. I wouldn’t blame you if you never forgave me.”

I admit I was a bit shaken to learn we had run such a risk without my knowing it. Nonetheless I said that he was probably wise not to tell me—I am notoriously bad at keeping a straight face—and that there was no reason for him to feel remorseful. He thanked me for being so generous, then said that the real problem was what would happen should he be forced to return to Germany—no doubt his father had the Gestapo on his trail even now, in addition to which his passport would run out in just under a year. To reassure him I promised that I would do everything in my power to help him emigrate to South America. This seemed to put him at ease.
I
felt oddly uneasy, however.

Two days later I returned from shopping to find Fritz miserably ensconced on a bench in the courtyard of our pension, handcuffed, while a policeman argued with a rather seedy-looking middle-aged man and a leprous old woman shrieking accusations in the background. It seemed that the old woman, the owner of the pension, had summoned the police, claiming that Fritz was a male prostitute and that he was bringing clients back to our room when I was out! The policeman had found Fritz in the room with this man, though even he had to admit that they had been doing nothing untoward; indeed, Fritz insisted he had invited the fellow back for a game of cards. The matter was then dropped. Nonetheless, the policeman told Fritz he would be wise to get out of France. Before leaving he took down Fritz’s name and passport number. So it seems likely that any day now we will be asked to leave. The question is where to go.