The Beast (17 page)

‘How long’s this been going on?’

‘Oh, only for a few weeks. He’s quite nice. It’s nothing serious of course.’

‘Are you living together?’ Benjamin said, unable and unwilling to keep the sulkiness out of his voice.

Meg, however, preferred not to hear it, and laughed. ‘No, not yet. I thought about it—I mean I thought maybe we were getting a bit old for—you know. But then I thought really it’s sort of funny. And Alberto was kind of impressed when I told him you would have to approve him first.’ She laughed again. ‘I think he thought we were a bit perverse, too.’

Benjamin raised his eyebrows, and made no comment. He wasn’t concerned with what some boy thought about him and his behaviour.

Still, when they got outside and he saw, standing by a red and shining car, a thin young man who was clearly nervous at meeting ‘the older brother,’ Benjamin was civil enough to him. He didn’t actually shake hands with him, but he did nod and give a sort of smile; and allow him to take his bags, and put them in the car.

And when he got in the car himself (he insisted on sitting in the back, though both Meg and the young man tried to put him in the front), he even went so far as to tell Alberto, in answer to questions asked in an unfortunately good English—he would have preferred a more solid language barrier—that yes, he had had a good flight, and no, it wasn’t his first time in Italy, and no, he hadn’t been to Gaeta before. But that was only for the first five minutes; and after that he just sat slouched and sloppy in the back seat, listening to Meg and Alberto trying to talk happily together and ignore his presence, and telling himself what a pompous fool he was.

He even imagined that Annie, his cleaning woman, was watching him; and muttering, from some dark curtained corner, ‘shit’ …

But he couldn’t help it, he told himself. He honestly had nothing against this boy—who, though probably no more than two years younger than himself, if that, seemed to be whole generations younger; or at least made him feel generations older—and would, probably, if he was going to be around much of the time, even get to like him. It was just that he didn’t want him here, this morning; and didn’t want to be in any way dependent on him, or beholden to him.
He
liked to control the situation.
He
liked to be responsible. And above all he didn’t like being made to feel—as he undoubtedly was at the present—that he was the third member of a group. And once again he had a
vision of himself lying on the deck of the Rosenthals’ yacht, surrounded by people of equal, or almost equal fame and talent as himself, drinking and talking and laughing … Of course those people would have been silly, and false—just as he would have been if there—but at least he would have been a distinguished presence amongst them. Whereas now, he had been put into the position of being an ungainly, pompous, and priggish chaperone; not only not equal to the two people theoretically in his charge, but actually inferior to them in those things which seemed important to them; which were youth, beauty, easy
unaffected
talk and laughter—and shiny red cars.

Oh, how he despised himself, and how he hated Alberto—yes, and Meg too—for making him despise himself. He was on holiday. He wanted to relax. He wanted to be happy.

He lay, sweating and uncomfortable, in the back seat, and let the occasional tear run down his cheek.

*

However, when they finally got to Gaeta and the villa Meg had rented for them—he had written her telling her to get somewhere
nice
, whatever it cost—things started, at last, to look up. Because the villa was very nice—clean, light, airy, with a great many white drapes that shifted slightly in the breeze, almost on the beach, surrounded by umbrella pines, and with a large swimming pool. The heat was less oppressive than it had been in the city, and—now that he was out of that wretched car—he could begin to feel that things were under his control again. He also noted that since the villa was a little way up the coast, away from the town, Alberto and his car would probably come in quite useful; for shopping, and for taking them out in the evening.

Benjamin chose a room for himself at the back of the house; Meg one at the front. Alberto pointedly didn’t bring his bags in at all; aware that he was still very much on probation, and that it was by no means certain he was going to stay at all.

Meg whispered to Benjamin, ‘You don’t mind if he does, for a day or two, do you?’, and Benjamin said ‘Oh,’ and appeared surprised. But no, he thought—and would tell Meg later—he didn’t mind. Not any more. Because now, at last, Alberto notwithstanding, they were alone together. Their summer had started …

He was still lying there two hours later, half asleep, when Alberto came from the beach to find him; came sleek and sheepish to ask if it would be all right—if he could stay for a few days.

Benjamin gazed at the boy as if what he had asked had been, in some way, hurtful. He gazed at him with bulging eyes and soft, pouting lips. He gazed at him as a priest might gaze at a supplicant whose prayers were unworthy; and for so long that the boy began to shift about on his bare feet, to look down at his thin brown body as if he were ashamed of his near nakedness, and eventually to smile.

And only then did Benjamin answer; say, in a small, hurt voice, ‘But I already told Meg you could.’

Alberto smiled again, looking quite desperate now, and nodded. He murmured ‘Yes.’ He cleared his throat. He said ‘Yes, she told me.’ And finally, holding his hands behind his back, he said ‘I mean, is it all right if I stay
with
Meg?’

Oh, how he loved this scene; and how, year after year, it was always the same. Greek boys, German boys, French boys, Italian boys; shy boys, brash boys, stupid boys, bright boys. They all approached him in a different way—some suspicious, some resentful, some angry and some nervous—but all of them, eventually, acted alike. Shifting from one foot to the other, looking embarrassed, smiling foolishly. Because what they wanted only he, apparently, had the power to give them; and they wanted it enough to make them forget for a moment all their notions of masculine pride, all their arrogance, all their sense of power. They were children begging for a candy, who were
prepared, in order to have that candy, to place themselves as putty in the hands of a bulbous-eyed, overweight god—for they made him into a sort of god—and allow him to make of them what he would. Which was—an official escort to a god’s sister. An official escort who had no rights, no freedom, no existence outside his capacity as official escort; and who would—and let there be no
mistake
about it—be ruthlessly dismissed at the end of the summer.

Benjamin waited. He waited until the last grain of resistance had drained from Alberto’s brain; until the thin brown body in front of him was as empty as a deflated balloon. He waited until this void, this nothingness, was almost shrieking, begging to be given a form, to be filled in, coloured; to be created. And then, still in his small hurt voice, he said ‘Yes, of course. But why do you ask me? It’s up to Meg, isn’t it?’

What could the poor boy do; except, by way of
ratification
of his treaty of unconditional surrender, mutter ‘Meg said—’ and then falter, smile one last time, and, as Benjamin interrupted him with a ‘Oh Meg was joking,’ dive, with a great splash, into the swimming pool? Nothing. Nothing at all. And so he dived; and so Benjamin lay back, and felt, now, entirely at peace with the world …

*

He felt so very much at peace with the world that he would have been prepared to bet, on his talent or on his life, that nothing, from now on, could possibly happen to spoil his holiday. Things were exactly as they had always been, and things were exactly as they should have been. Yet that very evening something went wrong; and went—unlike the mere temporary irritation that his stay with Donald and the drive down with Alberto had caused him
—quite seriously wrong. In part there was an explanation for it; in part there was no explanation at all.

It started, the trouble, when they decided that rather than do any shopping on this their first day here, they would go into Gaeta and have dinner there. They had just driven into the town, and were looking up at the huge dark castle that dominated it, when Benjamin noticed that the place was full of American servicemen. Quite why this disturbed him he didn’t know; but disturb him it did. And as they drove round the winding, narrow streets towards the port, and he saw, anchored in the bay, a number of grey, unshiplike warships, bristling with antennae and
odd-looking
gadgets, he felt even more disturbed.

‘What
are
they?’, he said petulantly to Meg, who was sitting in the back seat; in much the same tone he had asked her, when talking of Donald, ‘Who
is
he?’

‘It’s the American Seventh Fleet, or Sixth Fleet, or something,’ Meg said brightly, obviously not at all
disturbed
herself. ‘They have a base here.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I didn’t think of it,’ Meg laughed; and then said ‘Should I have?’

‘No. Not really,’ Benjamin shrugged, and thought: no, not really. It wouldn’t have worried him if she had; the idea didn’t worry him at all.

But the reality did. There was something alien, harsh, about all those ugly boats; and something even more alien about all those servicemen wandering around. They
introduced
a note of discord into the otherwise harmonic combination of sea, old town, soft summer evening air, and general atmosphere of holiday. They introduced a note—of mockery. As if they were laughing at the whole idea of peace, and beauty, and happiness …

Of course, Benjamin thought—for he didn’t have any very radical views, politically—he wouldn’t deny that armies and navies played an essential part in the scheme of things. Indeed, he was even prepared to admit that his very existence, and the fact that he could take holidays at all depended, however unfortunately, on the existence of armies and navies. But they shouldn’t have been here. Not
here.
Not while he was drinking at the pure fountain of innocence or whatever it was that Meg represented. They belonged, somehow, to the other eleven months of his year; to success, to money, to ambition; to, even, art. But they did not belong to his month away; to—what else could he call it?—his love.

Yet they were here; and here, undoubtedly, they would stay; and he would just have to put up with them. As he would have to put up with the disturbance they caused him; the sense of their jeering at him, their mocking him; their telling him that
we
—and your other eleven months of the year—are the way, and the truth; and it is your love, your dream of purity and innocence that is a lie.

However, by the time he and Meg and Alberto were sitting in a restaurant under a kind of bower of vine leaves illuminated with little red and yellow lights, surrounded by other holiday-makers amongst whom there was not one serviceman, Benjamin had pulled himself together enough to reason that he probably felt as he did because any servicemen reminded him of his parents and all
they
represented; and to tell himself that, after all, he didn’t have to come into town very often; if ever.

Still, he wished they hadn’t been there, those men with their ugly boats; because he liked to think that he was responsible, during this month with Meg, not only for her, but for everything. He liked to think that he created the
whole of their time together; created the weather, where they stayed, what they ate, whom Meg slept with, and the whole atmosphere. He created it and controlled it. But these men and their ships he hadn’t created, and couldn’t control. They were intruders, and, potentially, a threat.

What happened next, as they sat at the table in the hot night, with the wine and the fruit before them, and the sound of laughter around them, was far worse, and far from making him think that he would, as with the presence of the servicemen, be able to put up with it, made him curse Meg for ever having suggested that they come to this town, curse Donald for having asked her to stay near Rome—so he could go and make some cheap film!—and curse himself for ever having agreed to such a scheme. They
should
have been in Greece now.

They were looking up at the huge dark castle above them—and one could see it, vast and bleak, from
everywhere
; there was no escaping it—when Alberto, quite casually, told him that in that castle, being kept prisoner, was a German war criminal; a man who had ordered, and helped carry out, the massacre of hundreds of innocent people …

Benjamin felt that he had been kicked in the stomach. His eyes swum, the wine tasted sour, and the vine leaves above him became only nesting places for mosquitoes. Alberto, thin dark handsome boy that he was, became a hideous, withered, frightful old man. The people around him—the happy, laughing tourists—became a chorus of demons. The servicemen—and that was the real reason for his unease at their presence!—were nothing but the slaves of the devil. Meg—his beloved Meg, Meg the beautiful, Meg the true—became a pale captive; an elected princess doomed to sacrifice. And above them all, in his dark castle,
in his huge and dreadful lair, lay the monster. A monster who was, theoretically, a prisoner himself; but a monster who nevertheless ruled all those who lived in the shadow of his castle. A greedy, ravenous monster, sitting up there in the summer night, crying out, howling out—and how one could hear him, his voice shriller than those of the bats!—for blood. A monster whom not only—like the servicemen—Benjamin couldn’t control, but a monster who actually controlled him; him, and this whole town.