The Summer Isles (27 page)

The New Dorchester seems worn out, too. Voices are low, and all but one of the bars have closed. The night staff are out with mops and vacuum cleaners in some of the communal spaces, doing their night duties. Tony Anderson stands close beside me as we wait for the lift.

“Don’t mind if I come up, do you?” he says to the burnished steel door as it slides open. He presses the right button for my floor. The cables draw us up the dark shaft. I can smell the whisky coming off his flesh.

I unlock the door of my room for him. We step inside. The main lights, too hard, too bright, flicker on. Everything here is immaculate, unchanged. Saint George is still at prayer in his forest of fragmented glass. The sheets of my huge bed are drum-taut. I sleepwalk over to the tall ash-and-ebony cabinet and pour out two drinks from the first bottle that comes to hand. I watch as Tony takes his and swallows, and then force myself to knock back my own. His face is paler now, dotted with silvery beads of perspiration.

“You don’t need to do this, you know.”

“That’s okay.” He smiles and licks his lips. “Perhaps I could borrow your bathroom…”

I shrug and wander away from him, propping myself half-up on the vast bed as he puts down his drink, loosens his collar, steps out of his shoes. I reach to the line of buttons and make the lights grow dimmer. Saint George fades, the forest darkens. His face is a picture of piety, a younger version of John Arthur’s; or Francis Eveleigh when he wasn’t John Arthur and the world still seemed full of love and life and hope and honour. That night on the train to Scotland.
Clatter tee tee.
Telegraph lines rising, falling. The scent of the smoke and the feel of far away. The incredible pressure of flesh against flesh. He took everything then, did Francis—my money, my dreams, my love—and he’s been giving it all back to me ever since.

Out of habit, Tony closes the bathroom door as he finishes stripping for his shower. Then he holds it open again on the pretence of asking me about the towels, and leaves it that way as he turns and steps out of his underpants, giving me a glimpse of his parted bum, the droop of his balls, the entire way that he is made. Realising that I still have my drink in my hand, I take a swig of it, feeling it burn in my throat—a little touch of blessed reality.

Tony turns on the shower and steps in. I watch him broken and multiplied in reflection of the many bathroom mirrors as he soaps himself. The water clatters, dribbling from the points of his elbows, the tip of his cock. He has a wide, strong back, has Tony. He’s more beautiful than any man I’ve ever had—including, yes
,
even including Francis. Yet I’m somehow reminded instead of those sour stairways after a pickup in Leicester Square; those cheap, uncurtained back rooms, and the sense of regret that came even before the beginning. By the time Tony comes out again, wrapped modestly enough in a New Dorchester towelling robe, I feel tired. Washed up. Washed out. Dead or dying.

“I don’t want you in that way, Tony. I almost wish I did. But…”

“That’s okay.” He rubs a towel across his sticking-up hair, trying hard not to look relieved. He has his blood group tattooed across his upper arm; the small blue circle stretches and contracts as he moves.

“Can they really give you
orders
to do this?” I ask.

“It isn’t like that.”

“What is it like then?”

He flops down beside me on the bed, smelling of soap, wet hair, clean flesh, new laundry. “It’s just a suggestion that’s made…”

“Why you?”

“I didn’t tell you how I made the money that helped keep my mother and sisters after Dad died, did I? It was easy enough. I took the ferry across to the docks at Liverpool. If nothing else, I always knew I was good looking—a pretty boy. I never thought I was doing it for any other reason but that. But then I had a fling with a Major a couple of years ago when I was in Rhodesia. We were bored, lonely… We were found out, of course.”

“That woman at the pool you waved to…?”

“I can hope, I suppose.”

He lies back on the bed, his broad arms crooked up, his hands clasped beneath his neck. Bits of him are sticking out; young tender flesh—but it no longer matters. I lie beside him, just relishing the sense of simple human closeness for what, if things go according to plan, will probably be the last time in my life. Together, we stare up at the ceiling.

Tony nudges me later from a doze. He’s dressed again, and clearly has been sitting watching me from the side of the bed whilst I mutter and drool until—what? Three-forty, for God’s sake. Saint George is still at prayer in his darkened forest. The Bells’ bottle is half empty.

“You’d better get undressed and in between the sheets,” he tells me. “I was told to be gone before the morning.”

“Before…?”

He shrugs. Smiles. I’m so glad we didn’t spoil this night by fucking each other. “There’s going to be an air raid alert first thing.”

“For real?”

“Of course not.” His hand touches my arm. “It’s just another part of the show.”

I sit up, dragging the shot-silk coverlet with me in spears of static and pain. “That explains why there’s only Westminster Abbey down on the itinerary…” I mutter as I look around for my tablets and shake them out and gulp them down.

“Could be.”

“You must have seen some action, Tony.”

His face is a picture for a moment. He thinks we’re back to sex again. “Yes. I was in Rhodesia. One of the first.”

“What was that like?”

“It was hardly a proper war. We just walked in through Bechuanaland. Half the country wanted us there—whites especially. Arrested a few League of Nations soldiers and put them back on the boat to Belgium…”

“But that’s not what you’re for, though, is it? You’re the KSG. A political force…”

Tony’s gaze trails away from mine across the carpet. The rumour was that ten to fifteen thousand people vanished in the first weeks of British re-occupation of Rhodesia. They were gathered up in trucks by local “Modernist sympathisers”, guided and supported by the KSG. They were taken to camps to be tortured, questioned, killed, whilst refugees poured along the roads and old enmities were settled.
Blam blam
as history grinds on and flies gather over the corpses. The pattern, by now, is familiar enough.

“It’s not worth it, is it, Tony?”

“What?”

“What you’re doing. Get out of the KSG while you can, give your life a chance.”

He stands up, finally almost drunk as he places his tumbler down on the polished bedside table a little too carefully. He crosses the room to pick up his jacket. “It’s too late for that,” he says, smiling lopsidedly as he brushes at some imaginary fluff from the lapels and pulls it on. Buttons jingle as he tugs at the sleeves, pulls the pockets straight and smoothes and buckles the belts. He combs his hair, stoops to lace his shoes, re-checks his already perfect parting in the mirror.

Once again as he leaves my room, even now half-marching, dark angel of death and delusion, young male beauty personified, Captain Tony Anderson of the KSG scares me.

I was summoned to the Headmaster’s office at the Friary School mid-way through the 2B’s morning natural history lesson. This was in 1932 and the
Daily Sketch
and I had, after six relatively glorious years, finally parted company. My moment of fame had been and gone, I was 52, already the second oldest master at the school, and I’d began thinking about retirement, of selling my mother’s house and moving to some quiet cottage with a view of the sea that I might just be able to afford if I lived frugally. On that particular day, I was covering for Green, and had just about run through my sum total of knowledge about the life cycle of the cabbage white. Ink pellets were flying. Desk lids were banging. Even now that John Arthur had succeeded in stabilising the economy and staff weren’t being fired quite so regularly, a summons to the Head was usually a bad sign. Today, though, I was almost grateful.

Still, all the usual suspicions went through my mind as I waited outside the oak door for the minute that it always seemed to take Harks to realise someone had knocked on it. Poor results, perhaps, in the new Basic Grade exams? Or my sucking off that foundry worker outside the Bull at Shenstone last Saturday evening?

“Come in!” Harks shouted, seemingly quicker than usual.

Inside, it was a shock to find that he was actually out of his desk, standing as if to greet me. It was a running joke in the senior staff room that Harks didn’t have a lower portion to his body.

“Ah, Brook!” Since my
Daily Sketch
years, Harks had decided that my employment records were at fault, and addressed me in all written correspondence—which was his usual way of dealing with people—as Brook without the
e.
I doubt if he even knew what my first name was. I certainly didn’t know his. “Take a pew, take a pew. Mrs. Cringle will be in with some tea in a moment. She’s promised to see if she can rustle up some biscuits…”

I slumped down, totally confused.

“I’ve received a letter this morning,” Harks began, rubbing the cream vellum between his fingers as if he still didn’t quite believe it. “From the Vice Chancellor at Oxford. It seems that they’re seeking to widen their, ah,
remit.
Trying to get in some fresh educational blood. Your name, Brook, has been mentioned…”

A cool day, the year’s first frost covering the allotments. The sky a pale English blue. The bells, the bicycles. That odd little man Christlow who called himself a scout but was in fact the personal servant to a few of us dons. Worn stone steps. Faded luxury. Casement windows. The college principal Cumbernald taking me for lunch at the White Horse jammed between Blackwells and Trinity as if he really had every reason to welcome me, fraud that I clearly was. An applewood fire was burning in the snug’s grate, I remember, and Cumbernald told me that he was newish to the college himself, and that we’d make a fine team together as we ate sharp ham-and-cheddar rolls and a few of the other dons wafted in from dim smoky corners to give me their own Varsity tips. I confided to Cumbernald about the book I’d always planned to write, and he nodded gravely. By the time we’d opted—yes, why not?—for a third pint of Pedigree, I didn’t feel like an impostor. I felt as if I was gliding at last into the warm currents of a stream along which my life had always been destined to carry me.

I remember that the news vendors were selling a Special Extra Early edition of the
Oxford Evening News
as we walked back along High and Cumbernald regaled me with a few of his own supply of Oxford stories. He bought a copy and we stood and read it together. Other people were doing the same, nearly blocking the street. It had just been announced that a British Expeditionary Force had landed at Dronacarney north of Dublin, and that a task-force fleet led by HMS Hood had already accepted the surrender of Belfast, barring a little fighting around the Falls Road, without needing to do more than turn her guns upon that loyal City. I think Cumbernald actually whooped and punched the air. That was most people’s reaction. It was a fine day to be British.

More fine days were to follow. There was easy victory in Ireland. The commemorative Victory Tower went up and up in London, and word was that the contract had been let even before the troops set out, such was the confidence that now pervaded Greater Britain. I, meanwhile, shivered pleasurably at Christmas to the soaring music of the choir at Kings. And I worked hard. For these new and nervous students who entered my rooms clutching essays and reading lists I became what I had always been, which was a teacher. I did my best and, amazingly, my best was often enough. There were gatherings, panelled rooms, mulled wine in winter, mint teas and Japanese wallpapers in the spring, cool soft air off the river on long walks alone. Our forces aided Franco’s victory over the communists in Spain, and we resigned from the League of Nations. The Cyprus Adventure came and went. Britain re-took Rhodesia. I bought myself an expensive new gramophone.

The rest of the world found it easier to treat John Arthur as a kind of Fascist straight-man to the comical Mussolini. France, Germany and the Lowlands were too busy forming themselves into a Free Trade Community whilst the USA under Roosevelt, when it wasn’t worrying about the threat in the Far East from a resurgent Japan, remained doggedly isolationist. In the Middle East, Britain’s canny re-alignment of Egypt’s King Farouk in the Modernist mould, and his recent conquest of Palestine with the help of British military advisors, were seen as no more than the par for the course in that troubled region. After all, Britain was behaving no more aggressively than she had throughout most of modern history. Even now that the whole of Kent has been turned into a military camp as a precaution against some imagined Franco-German threat, the world still remains determined to think the best of us.

Meanwhile, and despite all the puzzlements and disappointments, I grew to love Oxford almost as much in reality as much as the dream. Eights Week. The Encænia Procession. Midnight chimes. The rainy climate. The bulldogs in their bowler hats checking college gardens for inebriate sleepers. The Roofs And Towers Climbing Society.

History went on. The Jews were re-located. Gypsies and tramps were forcibly housed. Homosexuals were invited to come forward for treatment. Of course, I was a panicked for a while by
that
—but by then I had my acquaintance, our discreet messages on the cubicle wall at the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow, our casual buggerings when he’d do it to me first and then afterwards I’d sometimes do it to him—my soft and easy life. I had my desk, my work, my bed. I had my books, the tea rooms, the gables, the cupolas, the stares of the Magdalene deer, the chestnuts in flower, music from the windows of buildings turned ghostly in the sunlight, young voices in the crystalline dusk and the scent of ancient earth from the quads.

I was dazed. I was dazzled. Without even trying, I had learned how to forget.

I
AM DRAGGED BACK
towards morning by sleek sheets, a clean sense of spaciousness that cannot possibly be Oxford, and an anguished howling. My head buzzes, the light ripples. London, of course. London. The New Dorchester…