On Loving Josiah (16 page)

That night, Thomas took a cup of tea to bed with him. He sat propped up against a wooden headboard, enjoying the slight
discomfort
of it.

His Bengali wife, Benita, had been a virgin when he’d married her in Warwick in 1986, when he was twenty-seven. Beautiful, pure, unassuming, Benita had been the librarian at the University where he’d had his first teaching post and lectured in Latin Literature. Her simplicity of spirit had enchanted Thomas; and she’d been the
first woman in his life who’d looked up to him to provide the right answers, to make him feel manly. In short, he had desired her more than any other woman he had ever met.

What a sorry thing it is when worldly matters intrude on the unworldly! For Benita had underplayed the resistance of her family to their impending marriage.

‘They so want to be modern!’ Benita had exclaimed. ‘They so want to accept you as their own!’

Which was true, though Benita forgot to emphasize the word ‘want’: for they had indeed wanted to, but could not, accept Thomas, even for their daughter’s sake. Only insiders would have understood there was a distinct lack of joy at their wedding, for everyone was on best behaviour and as civil as could be, but even the Hindu
celebrations
after their marriage in a registry office lacked lustre.

For all his desire, however, this business of the taking of the
virginity
had become, by its fifth week, more of an engineering than a romantic feat, as Benita (who was a bit older than Thomas, and had years’ worth of virginity-related anxiety to dispel) had used brute force to push his slender hips away from hers. And even though their sex-life was non-existent, Thomas had himself an insurmountable rival in the bedroom, namely the telephone and Benita’s mother.

Night after night Benita’s mother used to call as they were lying in bed together, and it occurred to Thomas that Benita had even asked her mother to phone so late, ‘to be saved by the bell’, as it were. And then Benita would proceed to talk in Bengali, right there in bed beside him, for twenty or even thirty minutes every single night. When Thomas had complained, Benita had accused him of not recognizing the importance of the family.

‘Just because you English ignore your own parents, why should I ignore mine?’

‘Can’t you get your mother to phone earlier?’

‘They eat just as soon as my father gets home.’

And before that?’

‘I’m at the library till half past seven, as well you know!’

And so the lovely Benita, the possession of whom he had yearned for for the best part of a year, continued to elude him forever. By the time Thomas was awarded a fellowship at Corpus three years later, they were divorced.

Thomas sipped at his tea and considered. For six years, now, he had been celibate, assuming an almost monkish existence, his body as separate from himself as if it had been a mere adolescent appendage.

But that night, O blast Samantha, it wasn’t his wife he was
thinking
of. The most important kiss of his life had happened in the Bavarian forest, when he was fifteen and on a German exchange with a boy called Hans. They had been skating together on a small, hidden lake and the sun was setting. And yes, if Hans had been Hannah, the strength and seriousness of that moment would have been lacking. But do moments like that define you? Do they cast you in that role forever?

He was still lost in thought at half past eight the following morning while riding on his bike into college. ‘And if I am incapable of love, should I mind? Is it a defect in my character?’ And would such a defect, quite happy, quite silent as it was back then in
November
1998, have been preferable to the upheavals which were to occur in his soul over the next few years? Thomas Marius was riding his bike too fast. A pale, blond boy with a satchel on his back was on the zebra crossing on his way to the school opposite. There was an accident – Thomas clipped the back of his satchel and the boy fell.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry.’

The boy told him not to worry, he’d been quite in a dream himself. His name was Josiah.

THOMAS MARIUS
had barely noticed that he lived opposite a school. Why should he? During the week he was in college; at weekends, the school was shut. But ever since crashing into one of its schoolboys his curiosity was roused; not least because the boy in question had left behind him a charming drawing of a tall beech tree, probably, as Thomas surmised (owing to its shape and the fact it had been drawn on the back of an old cereal packet), used as a bookmark.

The moral dilemma facing Thomas at that time was whether he ought to return it. The morning of the accident, he had picked up the bookmark from the zebra crossing and had called after the boy, but the boy had disappeared in the general hubbub at the school gate and Thomas had simply put the bookmark in his briefcase and biked on. In fact, no dilemma presented itself until the moment Thomas realised that he liked the bookmark and he wanted to keep it. If, the first time he saw the drawing of the beech tree he had considered it ‘well executed’, by the end of a week it had become an object of genuine beauty. In which case, its artist might be missing it badly, and it needed to be returned.

So if it had been Thomas’ custom to leave his house at about twenty past eight, he now went upstairs to his study at that time where he had a good view of the school and of all those entering and leaving the gates. The first time he saw the boy again, why, he had the bookmark there on his desk ready to give back to him; but something held him back, and if that ‘something’ had been at first waiting for an appropriate moment, when he wasn’t surrounded by
other children, that innocent ‘something’ began to be transformed into something else. For the boy had begun to fascinate him.

He decided that the boy was about fourteen; and that, as he had confessed on the morning of the accident, he lived in a dream. He had never seen him talk to another child, and seemed to have
developed
a knack of being invisible to them. But he was not exactly an outsider, either; he never set himself apart from the crowd, and was, quite often, in the midst of it. But it occurred to him that he had never seen the boy smile, and the expression on his face was
generally
one of absence.

Then one morning Thomas opened the door to the postman, who was in the throes of shoving his
Classical Journal
through the
letterbox.
It was still only eight o’clock, but he noticed the boy walking quickly towards him a full half hour earlier than usual. He was also walking alone. This was his chance.

Up to his office he ran, two steps at a time, squeezing past Greg who was on his way down to his yoghurt-fest, and opened up his briefcase on his desk. Where was the bookmark, for God’s sake? From his window he watched the boy coming closer, closer still, but where was the bookmark?

He snapped the briefcase shut and took it down to the hall with him; and his sudden sense of urgency to restore the lovely thing to its rightful owner rid him of his natural timidity. He opened the door and called out, in the nick of time, ‘Hello there! I’ve got something that belongs to you!’

Josiah turned towards him. He was both curious and calm.

‘I’m so sorry to spring upon you like this! But not only did I crash into you the other day but I robbed you of a rather lovely… well, I think it’s a bookmark, but correct me if I’m wrong.’

Thomas moved back into his hall and said, ‘Come in, I’ll find it for you.’

Josiah said nothing but was pleased to follow him. He knew
exactly what it was that the man had picked up, he had at least a dozen of them, but he had often wanted to know what it was like in the man’s house. For if Thomas had noticed Josiah, Josiah had certainly noticed Thomas, standing at an upstairs window.

Josiah watched while Thomas put the telephone on the floor and put his briefcase on the small hall table. ‘Now, where is it?’ Thomas was muttering to himself, as he began rummaging through the case.

‘Do you like orange, then?’ asked Josiah.

Thomas looked up. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The walls,’ offered Josiah.

‘The truth is,’ said Thomas, ‘I don’t really like orange. No, I don’t like orange at all.’

‘Me neither,’ said Josiah.

‘Here it is! At last! Is it a bookmark?’

‘It is,’ said Josiah, taking it back. ‘Did you use it?’

‘As you can see, I did.’ Thomas picked up the book in whose pages it had been nestling.

‘Catullus,’ said Josiah. ‘He spoke Latin, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, he did speak Latin. And he wrote Latin, too. This is a fine book, and one day…’

‘I know it’s a fine book.’

‘Ah, you’re a Latinist already?’

‘Odi et amo.’

‘Heavens, that’s very good!’

‘I hate and I love.’

‘Do you learn Latin over at your school, then?’

‘No. My mother taught me those words. Catullus was her favourite poet. I’m afraid that’s all I know.’

‘So your mother was a Classicist?’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘She studied Latin and Greek.’

‘I know she learnt Latin.’

‘And does she teach you now?’

‘She’s dead. It’s all right. She died a long time ago.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Thomas, and he meant it.

‘I’d better get to school, then.’

‘Can I not offer you anything? Like breakfast?’

‘I’ve eaten, thanks. I’d better go.’ Josiah smiled awkwardly. Then he turned on his heel and left.

This glimpse into the boy’s history only managed to exacerbate things. When Thomas took up his customary position in his study to watch him go into school the following morning, the boy waved at him. And suddenly he felt terribly ashamed. So he stopped looking out for the boy, and tried to get on with his work. And when he couldn’t work, he decided to invite the boy for tea.

At first, his feelings about such an invitation seemed relatively simple. There was no law against befriending strangers, after all; and he was no child. He was a kouros, a handsome youth, worthy of any Greek sculptor’s attention; yet his good looks were by no means the most pressing reason he was attracted to him. There was a quality in his character, a certain wistfulness, which roused his curiosity, and curiosity had been the driving force in Thomas’ life.

Why the passion of Thomas’s life, hitherto, had been books, was because he had found books so very much more interesting than people. The character of your average person, he had brutally decided many years previously, could be reduced to a thumbnail sketch: nice/nasty; stupid/clever; wise/obtuse – and the third
category
didn’t even exist until he returned to Cambridge after the demise of his marriage. But the exciting thing about ideas was that they existed over and above the people who happened to have them, and a work of scholarship thrilled him inasmuch as the writer had fallen away, or ought to have. For the self and
prejudice
were as one – for what was prejudice but the public display of personal desires and aversions? And what was the self but the
private catalogue of those same desires and aversions, for one’s own personal use?

Which was why his interest in the boy stupefied him.
Undergraduates
arrived in Cambridge more or less complete – with the personalities they would have for the rest of their lives: he could plot them on his mental graph and they rarely threw up any surprises. But the boy was endearingly imperfect, in the sense that he was not complete. When Thomas looked for the exact expression to describe his peculiar quality, he had to resort to the Latin:
perfecte imperfectus,
for there were two strands in his character which ran parallel to each other and were prima facie contradictory; namely, that he was more self-reliant than most adults, in that he seemingly had no interest in nor derived any self-esteem from his peer group. Yet at the same time there was a hole so large in his life that those few moments with him betrayed (or so it seemed, as he replayed their encounter a hundred times in his head) almost a manic desperation for whatever it was that was missing. And as the days turned to weeks he understood why he was becoming obsessed: because he felt that he, Thomas Marius, could help him find it. And that was why the boy must come to tea, and he must issue that invitation as quickly as possible.

But was it really as simple as that? O, ye Gods, what is ever simple? For by the time Thomas Marius’ brain had pulped every version of every event and recast it in every mould, his anxiety about this
peculiar
and unprecedented situation was taut and dangerous. Thomas decided he was deceiving himself. For in the same way as the sketch of the beech tree had seemed ever more beautiful, Thomas was aware that the boy was also becoming so. One lunchtime (he had never stooped so low!), he found himself spying on the boy (for what else could it be called? Nowadays his study seemed barely more than a crow’s nest) admiring the fullness of his mouth, the way he carried his broad but skinny shoulders, his long neck, like a woman’s. And what he asked himself was this: ‘Was this way of looking at him
morally wrong? To admire the beauty of another being, is that always unproblematic? And above all, do I invite him for tea?’

If things had been left to Thomas, the truth is, he would never have invited him to tea. But if Thomas’ original and surely
virtuous
motive had been to save the boy, because he recognized there was something about him worth saving, Josiah’s prayer was that the god-like figure who looked out over his world would be his saviour. And it was with this intention that Josiah knocked on his door one Saturday morning in March. ‘Will you teach me Latin?’ was what he asked the wracked, ruined, unshaven man on his doorstop.

‘Of course I will,’ said Thomas, ‘Won’t you come in?’

It was nine o’clock; Greg was still asleep; and Thomas, suddenly woken from days of sleeplessness, saw his house as an outsider might see it. He suggested the boy might like a cup of tea, and as they walked together through the long, thin hall to the kitchen at the back of the house, he apologized for the orange paint, and yearned that his house might be sober and uneventful, clean and forthright. He noticed, as though for the first time, the lime green walls, the
mockpine
kitchen units, the dirty electric rings on the cooker. Thomas made the tea – two teabags in two ugly brown mugs – and they sat down momentarily at the kitchen table. But when he fetched the milk from the fridge he saw the yoghurt, and he said, ‘I tell you what. I’m taking you upstairs to my study.’

Josiah followed him upstairs and noticed neither the decor, nor lack of cleanliness, nor the fact that the cups of tea had been left behind; for he was bathing in the warm slipstream of the man who was finally going to teach him what it was he wanted to know. And once in the study, with the door shut behind them and the old world safely cordoned off, Josiah was almost immediately aware of an unravelling of himself, a surrendering which was both physical and joyful. This is what it feels like, he said to himself, to absolutely trust another human being; to lay yourself at their mercy.

It was Josiah who had shut the door. The moment they were alone together, Thomas was nauseous. His sense of responsibility was
suddenly
so acute that for all he knew one wrong move might bring about a plague in Africa. So far, Josiah and Thomas were just
standing
looking at each other, the former with a large open smile and the latter with a brain on overload and a lined forehead. For there was only one chair in his study, so should he go to fetch another? Would the stool from the bathroom do, or would Greg be there? Would the small armchair in his bedroom be too unwieldy to carry upstairs? Would it be too eccentric to make a stool out of a few volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary? This was the option which he chose, and happily the boy seemed delighted to sit on it, as though sitting on dictionaries was something that scholars ordinarily did. And while Thomas was negotiating his next problem, namely to choose the distance at which to sit from the boy (he was initially too unfriendly, and then, perhaps, too bold), Josiah was thinking how much nicer it was to be here than lying under his yew on these cold, dark, damp days or lying in his over-heated bedroom counting moths on the ceiling and listening to the squabbling next door.

At last, with the seating arranged to their mutual satisfaction, and the tea thoroughly forgotten by both of them, Thomas asked his young companion his name.

‘Josiah,’ said Josiah.

‘Aha,’ said Thomas, ‘A king in the Old Testament.’

‘That’s right,’ enthused Josiah, ‘and he was a good king, a good and just king.’

‘I’m sure your parents wouldn’t have named you after a bad king,’ laughed Thomas, nervously, as a dreadful image of Scylla shoved itself into his head. ‘So then, Josiah, you want to learn Latin.’

‘I do,’ said Josiah. ‘Before she died, my mother used to teach me, and I remember quite a lot. The five declensions, the four
conjugations
, amo, moneo, rego, and audio. Is that right?’

‘How long ago did you learn all of that? That’s very impressive.’

‘Seven or eight years ago now. But I made myself remember it. For years I would repeat what she taught me night after night. She made me feel like I was learning a secret code. But I only know a part of it, and probably after repeating it so much I’ve got it wrong, like Chinese whispers. I want you to teach me what I don’t know.’

‘I’m sure I could do that. Incidentally my name is Thomas Marius.’

‘I know,’ said Josiah, coolly. ‘It was written on a folder I caught sight of in your briefcase the other day. And you teach at Corpus Christi College.’

‘That’s right. What else do you know about me?’

‘That you live with a creep. I don’t know what his name is, but I’ve watched him go in and out of your house.’

‘And do you watch me go in and out of my house, too?’

‘Oh yes! Of course! And I watch you standing by your window, right here!’ Josiah got up and walked over to the exact spot. Then he leant on the sill and looked out towards the school. ‘You have a great view. You can see everything.’