Original Sin (10 page)

Peace, the old order, the old security, had all vanished. Rupert found difficulty in managing stairs so James had installed a bed for him in the drawing room and he spent most of the day there or in the conservatory when it was sunny. There was a lavatory and shower on the first floor and a room little bigger than a
cupboard which James had made into a kitchen fitted with an electric kettle and a double burner where he could make coffee or toasted sandwiches. The first floor had become, in effect, a small self-contained flat which Rupert had taken over and on which he had imposed his untidy, iconoclastic, mischievous personality. Ironically the house had become less peaceful now that it was home to a dying man. There was a constant stream of callers, Rupert’s present and old buddies, his reflexologist, the masseuse who left behind her a smell of exotic oils, Father Michael who came, so Rupert said, to hear his confession but whose ministrations seemed to be regarded by him with the same amused indulgence with which he accepted those concerned with his bodily needs. The friends were seldom there when James was home, except at weekends, although the evidence of their visits met him every evening: flowers, magazines, fruit, bottles of sweet-smelling oils. They gossiped, made coffee, were given drinks. Once he said to Rupert, “Does Father Michael enjoy his wine?”

“He certainly knows which bottles to bring up.”

“That’s all right then.”

James didn’t grudge Father Michael his claret as long as the man knew what he was drinking.

He had provided Rupert with a brass handbell, strident as a school bell, which he had found in the Portobello Market, so that Rupert could summon him from his bedroom above if he needed help in the night. He now slept badly, half expecting to hear that clamorous summons, imagining, half-awake, the rumble of deathcarts in plague-ridden London, the wailing call, “Bring out your dead.”

He could remember every word of that conversation two months ago, Rupert’s watchful ironic eyes, his smiling face daring him to disbelieve.

“I’m just telling you the facts. Gerard Etienne knew that Eric had AIDS, and he made sure that we met each other. I’m not complaining, far from it. I had some choice in the matter. Gerard didn’t actually tuck us up in bed together.”

“It’s a pity you didn’t exercise it, the choice.”

“But I did. I don’t pretend that I gave it much thought. You never knew Eric, did you? He was beautiful. Very few people are. Attractive, handsome, sexy, good-looking, all the usual adjectives, but not beautiful. But Eric was. I’ve always found beauty irresistible.”

“And that’s all you required in a lover, physical beauty?”

Rupert had mimicked him, eyes and voice gently mocking.

“And that’s all you required in a lover? My dear James, what sort of world do you live in; what sort of person are you? No, that wasn’t all I required. Required. Past tense, I notice. It would have been a bit more sensitive to watch your grammar. No it wasn’t all. I wanted someone who fancied me too and had certain skills in bed. I didn’t ask Eric whether he preferred jazz to chamber music, or opera to ballet, or, more important, what wine he preferred. I’m talking about desire, I’m talking about love. Christ, it’s like explaining Mozart to the tone-deaf. Look, let’s leave it at this: Gerard Etienne deliberately threw us together. At the time he knew that Eric had AIDS. He might have hoped we’d become lovers, he might have intended us to become lovers, he might not have cared a damn either way. Perhaps he was amusing himself. I don’t know what he had in mind. I don’t much care. I know what I had in mind.”

“And Eric, knowing he had an infectious disease, didn’t tell you? What in God’s name was he thinking of?”

“Well, not at first. He told me later. I’m not blaming him, and if I don’t you can keep your moral judgements. And I don’t
know what he was thinking of. I don’t pry into my friends’ minds. Perhaps he wanted a companion for the last mile or so before he set off to explore that long silence.” He had added: “Don’t you forgive your friends?”

“Forgiveness is hardly a word to use between friends. But then, none of my friends has infected me with a fatal disease.”

“But my dear James, you don’t exactly give them the chance, do you?”

He had questioned Rupert with the detached persistence of a trained investigator, needing to force the truth out of him, desperate to know. “How can you be sure that Etienne knew Eric was ill?”

“James, don’t cross-examine me. You sound like a prosecuting counsel. And you do love euphemisms don’t you? He knew because Eric told him. Etienne asked him when he could expect another book. The Peverell Press had done rather well with his first travel book. Etienne had got it cheap and probably hoped for the next one on the same terms. Eric told him there wouldn’t be one. He hadn’t the energy or the inclination. He had other plans for the rest of his life.”

“And those included you.”

“Eventually. It was two weeks after that conversation that Etienne arranged the river trip. Suspicious in itself, wouldn’t you say? Not Etienne’s kind of jolly at all. Chug chug down dear Old Father Thames to inspect the flood barrier, chug chug back again with smoked-salmon sandwiches and champagne. How did you manage to avoid it, by the way?”

“I was in France.”

“So you were. Your second home. Odd that old Etienne has been so content to spend all these years away from his native land. Gerard and Claudia don’t go there either, do they? You’d think they might occasionally like to see the place where Papa
and his mates had such a jolly time popping away at Germans from behind the rocks. They never go and you can’t keep away. What do you do there, check up on him?”

“Why should I do that?”

“It was only a remark, I meant nothing. Anyway, you’ll never pin anything on old Etienne. He’s been authenticated; there’s no doubt there, the genuine hero.”

“Go on about the river trip.”

“Oh, it was the usual thing. Giggling typists, Miss Blackett a little tipsy, red puffy face, that awful virginal archness. She’d brought that draught-excluder snake with her. Hissing Sid they call it. Extraordinary woman. Absolutely no humour, I would have said, except about that snake. Some of the girls hung it over the side threatening to drown it, and one of them pretended to feed it champagne. In the end they wound it round Eric’s neck and he wore it all the way home. But that was later. On the way upriver I took refuge in the bow. Eric was standing there alone, perfectly still, like a figurehead. He turned and looked at me.” Rupert paused, and then said almost in a whisper: “He turned round and looked at me. James, what I’ve just told you, better forget.”

“No, I shan’t do that. Are you telling me the truth?”

“Of course, don’t I always?”

“No Rupert, not always.”

Suddenly his reverie was broken. The kitchen door was flung open and Rupert’s buddy thrust out his head. “I thought I heard the front door. We’re just off. Rupert was asking if you were back. You usually go straight up.”

“Yes,” he said, “I usually go straight up.”

“So what are you doing out here?”

He asked it with little curiosity, but James replied: “Musing on the third chapter of Ecclesiastes.”

“I think Rupert wants you.”

“I’m coming now,” and he mounted, painfully as an old man, to the disorder, the warmth, the exotic overcrowded muddle that was now his sitting room.

It was nine o’clock and on the top floor of a terraced house off Westbourne Grove Claudia Etienne lay in bed with her lover.

She said: “I wonder why one always feels randy after a funeral. The potent conjunction of death and sex, I suppose. Did you know that Victorian prostitutes used to service their clients in graveyards on the flat tops of the tombs?”

“Hard, cold and sinister. I hope they got piles. It wouldn’t turn me on. I’d keep thinking of the rotting body underneath and all those bloated worms creeping in and out of the orifices. Darling, what extraordinary facts you do know. Being with you is an education.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know it is.” She was wondering whether he, like her, had more than historical facts in mind. “Being with you,” he had said, not “loving you.”

He turned towards her, propping his head on his hand. “Was the funeral ghastly?”

“It managed to be tedious and grim at the same time: canned music, a coffin which looked as if it had been recycled, a liturgy revised to offend no one, including God, and a parson
who did his best to give the impression that we were engaged in something that had meaning.”

He said: “When my turn comes I’d like to be burnt on a funeral pyre by the sea like Keats.”

“Shelley.”

“That poet, whoever he was. A hot windy night, no coffin, lots of booze and all one’s mates swimming naked then dancing round the fire, all being happily warmed by me. And the ashes could be washed away by the next tide. Do you think if I left instructions in my will someone would arrange it?”

“I shouldn’t rely on it. You’ll probably end up at Golders Green like the rest of us.”

His bedroom was small and the floor space almost entirely occupied by a five-foot-wide Victorian bed in ornamental brass, the high bedposts crowned with knobs. From these Declan had suspended a Victorian patchwork quilt, in part badly tattered. It hung above them as they made love, lit by the bedside lamp, a rich patterned canopy of gleaming silk and satin. Some shreds of the silk hung down and she had an impulse now to pick at them. The scraps were, she saw, lined with old letters, the black spider-marks of the long-dead hand plainly visible. A family’s history, a family’s troubles and triumphs pressed down upon them.

His kingdom, and it seemed to her a kingdom, lay beneath them. The shop, the whole property, was owned by Mr. Simon—she had never learned his forename—and he rented the top two floors to Declan at a ridiculous sum and paid him with equal frugality for managing the shop. He himself was always there in his black skullcap to greet favoured customers, sitting at a Dickensian desk just inside the door, but otherwise he took little part in buying and selling although he controlled the flow of cash. The front of the house was arranged under his
personal supervision, the pick of the furniture, pictures and artefacts displayed to advantage. It was the back of the ground floor which Declan had made his domain. It was a long conservatory of strengthened glass with at each end two palm trees, the slender trunks of iron, and the fronds, which trembled as the hand brushed against them, sheets of tin painted a bright green. This touch of Mediterranean sun contrasted with the conservatory’s faintly ecclesiastical air. Some of the original lower panes of glass had been replaced by oddly shaped pieces of stained glass from demolished churches: a jigsaw of yellow-haired angels and haloed saints, lugubrious apostles, fragments of a nativity scene or of the last supper, domestic vignettes of hands pouring wine into pitchers or lifting loaves of bread. Placed in happy disorder on a variety of tables, piled up on chairs, were the objects acquired by Declan and it was here that his personal customers rummaged, exclaimed, admired and made their discoveries.

And there were discoveries to be made. Declan, as Claudia admitted, had an eye. He loved beauty, variety, oddity. He was extraordinarily knowledgeable in fields of which she knew little. She was as amazed by the things he knew as by the things he didn’t know. Occasionally his findings would be promoted to the front of the shop when he would immediately lose interest in them, but his love for all his acquisitions was fickle. “You do see, Claudia darling, how I had to have it? You do see how I couldn’t not buy?” He would stroke, admire, research, gloat over every acquisition, give it pride of place. But three months later it would have mysteriously disappeared to be replaced by the new enthusiasm. There was no attempt at display; objects were jumbled together, the worthless and the good. A Staffordshire commemorative figure of Garibaldi on a Horse, a cracked Bloor Derby sauce tureen, coins and medals, stuffed birds under
domed glass, sentimental Victorian watercolours, bronze busts of Disraeli and Gladstone, a heavy Victorian commode, a pair of art-deco gilt wood chairs, a stuffed bear, a heavily encrusted German air force officer’s cap.

She had said, examining the latter: “What are you selling this as, property of the late Field Marshal Hermann Goering?”

She knew nothing about his past. Once he had said in a broad and unconvincing Irish accent, “Sure, aren’t I just a poor Tipperary boy, my ma dead and my pa off God knows where,” but she didn’t believe it. There was no hint to background or family in his light, carefully cultivated voice. When they were married—if they were married—she supposed that he would tell her something about himself, and if not she would probably ask. At present an instinct warned her that it was unwise and kept her silent. It was difficult to imagine him with an orthodox past life, parents and siblings, school, a first job. It sometimes seemed to her that he was an exotic changeling who had spontaneously materialized in that crowded back room, reaching out acquisitive fingers to the objects of past centuries, but himself having no reality except in the present moment.

They had met six months earlier, sitting in adjacent seats in the tube on a day when there had been a major breakdown on the Central Line. During the seemingly interminable wait before they were instructed to leave the train and make their way along the track, he had glanced at her copy of the
Independent
and, when their eyes had met, had smiled apologetically and said: “I’m sorry, it’s rude I know, but I’m slightly claustrophobic. I always find it easier to cope with these delays when I have something to read. Usually I have.”

She had replied, “I’ve finished with it. Do have it. Anyway I’ve got a book in my briefcase.”

So they had sat together, both reading, neither speaking, but she had been very aware of him. She told herself that this was a result of tension and of a touch of fear. When the instructions to leave the train had at last come there was no panic, but it had been a disagreeable experience and for some very frightening. One or two comedians had reacted to the tension with attempts at crude humour and loud laughter, but most had endured in silence. There had been an elderly woman sitting close to them in obvious distress and they had half-carried her between them, helping her along the track. She told them that she had a heart condition and was asthmatic and was afraid that the dust in the tunnel might cause an attack.