Any Human Heart (12 page)

God knows how far it might have gone but I came to my senses and gently broke it off. I stood up, and at once abandon was replaced by awkwardness and embarrassment. We were both out of breath. She pulled her shawl about her and smoothed the rumpled bodice of her dress beneath it. But for one brief second, before she turned her head away, I saw the other Tess. She looked at me, I would say, with a pure and stirring carnality.

I apologized. She apologized. I said we’d both become upset, become a bit carried away. She agreed. I said I’d better be going and pulled on my warm, damp coat.

‘Will you come again, Logan?’ she asked. ‘I mean, now that Peter’s—’

‘I can pop up from time to time,’ I said carefully. ‘But only if you’d like me to.’

‘I get back from work after six,’ she said, ‘but I always have Sundays off.’

‘Well, Sunday’s a possibility. Look I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

‘Don’t give it a thought,’ she said. ‘It’s something just between the two of us. No one else need know.’

‘I’ll come up next Sunday, then,’ I said, my voice suddenly mysteriously dry and husky.

I cycled back to college in a dream of lust.

Of course now, as I write, the doubts have set in — and the shame. How would I know what a look of pure carnality is? And what am I doing, thinking these hot and feverish thoughts about the young woman my oldest friend Peter is in love with? For all I know everything I read as enticing might have been no more than sympathy and concern.

Le Mayne was very hostile about my last essay on Pitt the Younger. ‘Beta-gamma, gamma-double-plush he said. ‘Most unimpressive. What do you mean he died of gout? You don’t die of gout and, anyway, what’s that got to do with his career? Keep this up and I can guarantee you a third. What’s going on?’

I muttered something false about family problems. He knew I was lying.

‘But you’re not making the least effort,’ Le Mayne said. ‘I can see that a mile off. You can be wrong — or wrongheaded — that’s allowable. But I refuse to tolerate anyone who won’t even try.’

I made the usual abashed promises. He both frightens and irritates me, does Le Mayne: I find myself simultaneously wanting to please him and wanting to tell him I don’t give two figs for his approval. Is this the definition of a good teacher? Reminds me of H-D.

I had tea with Peter in Balliol and gave him an edited version of my visit to Tess. His father thought he was in some gambling syndicate, he said, or was a hopeless drunk: not for a second did he suspect there was a whole other side to his life. But he would have to go very, very carefully. I volunteered to keep the lines of communication open between him and Tess. We were interrupted by a man called Powell,
¹²
another historian, as it turned out, whom I vaguely knew. His tutor was Kenneth Bell. Peter seems to be very thick with the Etonians at Balliol — there seem to be dozens of them. I started moaning about Le Mayne and the stultifying dullness of the History course and Powell suggested I change to English Literature. He said he had a friend reading English who raves about a young don called Coghill at Exeter.
¹³
‘Just across the road from you,’ he said. He invited me for drinks: his friend could fill me in.

It’s not a bad idea, this possible move. I long to junk history, though I’d lose my exhibition, I suppose. Wonder if it’s too late?

Postcard from Tess: ‘Dear Logan, please try to come before lunch on Sunday. I shall be busy in the afternoon. Yours sincerely, Tess Scabius.’ She doesn’t want me there as the light begins to fade. I can read the signs. So much for the ‘pure carnality’ of her look.

Drinks with Powell and his friend Henry Yorke at their lodgings in King Edward Street. Powell is affable; Yorke has that slightly clipped reserve you often find in Etonians. I can never tell whether it’s as a result of chronic shyness or majestic self-assurance. Yorke said he was writing a novel — ‘Like the rest of Oxford,’ I said — which brought a glare from him. He thought Coghill was wonderful. I think I’d better sound out Le Mayne about changing before I meet this Coghill fellow.

A day in the Bodleian writing my essay on Henry VIII for Le Mayne — going for alpha. I want him to understand that this move to English Literature is not because I can’t do History. I met up with Dick in the King’s Head — the old friendship re-established. He had a plaster cast on his foot and needed a walking stick to get about. He said he’d broken two toes in his foot. When I asked him how he said ‘fishing’.

I cycled up to Islip. I had with me presents from Peter — one hundred cigarettes, a bottle of gin, five tins of stew, a jar of plum jam and a five-pound note. Tess asked me if I could split some logs for the fire, so I spent an hour in the back garden chopping a load of greenish oak logs that a neighbour had given her. Another neighbour stuck his head over the garden wall and asked if I was Mr Scabius.

‘I’m a friend of Mr Scabius. Mr Scabius is indisposed.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ he said, then dropping his voice, added, ‘Miss Scabius is a charming young lady. We’re all very fond of her in the lane. Terrible shock to lose your parents that way — so young too.’

I agreed, mystified, and went back to my log-splitting.

When my back and shoulders were sore and I could feel incipient blisters swelling on my palms I decided to stop.

As I was washing my hands in the little scullery-kitchen, I shouted over my shoulder, ‘I’d bring those logs in if I were you, Tess, they’ll need some drying before they burn well.’

I heard Tess’s voice in my ear, very close. ‘No need to shout, Logan. I’m right behind you.’ And I felt the soft weight of her body press against my back and her arms come round to embrace me. I turned the tap off — the noise of the running water had covered the sound of her approach. I felt her lips touch my neck. ‘Come to bed, Logan, ‘she whispered.

The first time was terrible. We slid naked into bed and took each other in our arms and I squirted all over the sheets almost immediately. Then she went and got Peter’s gin and we had a glass and smoked a cigarette. I could only marvel at her nudity. It seems to me that first time of mutual nakedness is almost a more lasting memory than the sexual act. To have Tess’s ripe warm soft body pressed against mine — her breasts, her thighs, her belly — is the sensuous imprint that I take away from our encounter. The second time was better: fast (I seemed only to be inside her for seconds and couldn’t hold myself back) but it was achieved; it was genuine. ‘I get so lonely,’ was all she said by way of explanation. I asked no questions at all: I had switched off the rationalizing, analytical, moralizing side of my brain. We rolled around under the blankets and the quilt as we kissed and nuzzled and I explored the tactile possibilities of her body. Then she pushed me out of bed with little ceremony: ‘Can’t spend all day in here,’ she said. We heated up a tin of stew, she buttered some thick slices of bread and we drank neat gin. The most delicious Sunday lunch of my life. I was drunk as I cycled back to Oxford, in every sense of the word, but I remember thinking: clever girl — the chopping of logs, a Sunday lunch, an early afternoon departure — no neighbour would question her unsullied reputation.

So I sit in my room and I hear the clatter of boots on my staircase and all the bells of Oxford seem to be tolling this winter evening. I say to myself: Logan Mountstuart, you are no longer a virgin. I feel the ache in my balls — my ‘eggs’, as Dick Hodge calls them — and I try to ignore the nagging, irritating voice in my ear that is saying, she is the girl your oldest friend loves, the girl he says he wants to marry… And I say in return, it won’t happen again, it was one of those insane moments between two people that will remain entirely private and well both go back to our previous selves, unaffected. Perhaps if I repeat it often enough I might end up believing it. 7 February 1926. The date is burned, carved, stamped on the story of my life.

To Islip. Tess again. Two times. We never mention Peter. When we talk it is about things of no consequence: the woman who runs the post office, the people at the nursery.

Last week Le Mayne described my essay as ‘a return to form’.

The ‘Tess Sundays’ are over: my sex-Sundays consigned to the memory-store. Peter has gone up there today. He feels enough time has elapsed. I had five Sundays with Tess… Christ, I almost feel like weeping. But I knew it would end: I don’t love Tess and she doesn’t love me. But, bizarrely, I find I resent the fact that Peter is there, in my place. Will he be eating stew and drinking gin? It had become a ritual with us: first fucking, then gin, then lunch. I always left between 2.00 and 3.00 in the afternoon. My God, Tess — with your square impassive face, your thick brown hair, your callused gardener’s hands with the bitten nails, the clumsy way you smoked your cigarettes. You liked to masturbate me, almost as if you were conducting some fascinating new experiment with my cock, always giving a little yell of pleasure when my sperm shot out — ‘Here it comes,’ you would say, ‘I know it’s coming, any moment now!’ What am I going to do without you?

It felt like the first day of spring today and Dick and I walked out to Wytham for tea. The roads were dry and the verges full of dandelions, the white thorn all spumy billows. On the way I told him about Tess and our Sunday encounters. Then he asked me who she was and, for some reason, I told him the whole story.

‘Does Peter have any idea?’ he asked.

‘God, no — at least I hope not.’

‘Well, all I can say,’ Dick paused to kick at a pebble on the road, ‘is that it’s a pretty repulsive way to carry on.’

‘You don’t understand, she’s not that kind of a girl—’

‘Not her, old chap. You. I think your behaviour is utterly contemptible.’ He looked at me. ‘You go way down in my estimation, way down. You must admit, it’s damned low stuff.’

And I did feel ashamed, for a while, for the first time. And Dick, having expressed his honest opinion, left it at that and we talked about the coming strike and whether the government would really let it happen.

Came back to college and read
North by Night
by Butler Hughes instead of writing my essay. Flashy but intriguing novel.

SUMNER PLACE

The strike is on — the
Daily Mail
wasn’t printed today. The Old Brompton Road very quiet with no buses and no building work going on. The big hole in the road at the corner of Bute Street — where they’re repairing the sewers or something — was empty of workmen, only a couple of abandoned pickaxes and a spade lying around symbolically at its foot.

I went down to Chelsea Town Hall and volunteered as a special constable. I was sworn in and given a wrist band, a steel helmet and a truncheon and ordered to report to the police station. There I was assigned to a proper policeman, Constable Darker. Darker is a handsome man in a brutal kind of way, with a broad cleft chin and dense silky eyebrows. For four hours we walked the streets of Knightsbridge but saw no sign of riot or mayhem. The only anxious moment came when Darker went to explore up an alleyway beside a public house, leaving me standing outside it. Four men who were going into the pub — working-class men, I would say — stopped and stared at me. One of them said, ‘Look at that, will you? A special cuntstable.’ And they all laughed. I wandered off a few yards, swinging my truncheon on its thong, trying to look at ease, praying for Darker’s return, but they went into the pub without more ado. Presently, Darker came back, took a look at me and said, ‘You all right, Mr Mountstuart? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ I didn’t tell him about my encounter with the men. Strange and somewhat worrying to think how obviously my fear and concern were written on my face. I asked Darker, in the interests of solidarity, to call me Logan. He told me, a little uncomfortably, that his Christian name was Joseph. I think he would prefer me to call him Constable, or Darker.

Telephone call from Dick Hodge: he says he’s learning to drive trains in Edinburgh. Some trams have been wrecked by strikers in Hammersmith, apparently, and there are rumours that a special constable was kicked to death by a mob in Leeds.

Darker and I spent the morning directing traffic at the junction of the King’s Road and Sydney Street — which was hardly taxing, as the roads are still very quiet. Anyway, Darker said he was going to pop off for a cup of tea and a smoke and asked if I could handle the junction on my own for ten minutes. Absolutely, I assured him.

All was going well until I waved a small motor through to turn left on the King’s Road. It immediately stopped outside the Palace Theatre and the driver got out — it was Hugh Fothergill. The conversation went something like this:

ME: Hello, Hugh. How’s Land? Haven’t seen her for—

HUGH: What the hell do you think you’re doing?

ME: I’m a special—

HUGH: You’re a scab. D’you think this strike’s some kind of game?

ME: (alarmed) I just happen to think that when the country’s in crisis you have to pull together—

At which point he spat in my face, pointed at me and yelled in his loudest voice — THIS MAN’S A DIRTY, STINKING SCAB! A few passers-by stopped and looked round. A man in a bowler hat shouted: Let him do his duty! There was another shout of Scab! Hugh glared at me, climbed back into his car and drove off and the King’s Road returned to normal. I wiped away Hugh’s spittle and a minute later Constable Darker strolled up. ‘How’s it going, Logan?’ he asked. ‘Nip off and have a fag if you fancy. There’s a coffee stall down by Shawfield Street.’ Every time Darker abandons me something unpleasant seems to happen. Maybe I’ll cry off with flu tomorrow… When I stood at the stall, later, smoking, holding my mug of coffee, both my hands started to shake, quite visibly. Delayed shock, I suppose. Something tells me I’m not cut out for politics.