While England Sleeps (10 page)

“You think I’m making it up, but I’m not. We’re leaving next month, my friend and I, to live in this absolutely wonderful flat on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and I shall spend all day reading in cafés and drinking gallons of very black French coffee.”

Friend! How fond this family was of that maddening and elusive word!

“You remind me of a girl I used to know,” I said. “She had several French friends as well. But wouldn’t you know it, every one of them just happened to disappear with all her money the day before the two of them were supposed to elope.”

“My friend would never do that. My friend has all the money in the world.”

“I hope so, for your sake.”

A scream issued from inside the house. I turned to see what had provoked it, but only caught a glimpse of Edward hastily backing off from frosted glass. “Oh, Headley!” Lucy said. “I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate children, and once I arrive in Paris I shall be glad never to see another one again.”

“I don’t know how to break this to you,” I said, “but there
are
children in Paris.”

“Not on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.”

“Perhaps not.” We were silent for a moment. “So I suppose you don’t want children of your own?”

“Oh, no. They would only get in the way. I intend to spend my life painting pictures and writing books and performing in plays. That’s the difference between us, you see: my brother wants to improve himself, but I want to change the world.”

“You may change your
mind
when you’re older. About children, I mean.”

“Shall not.”

The door swung open; Edward sauntered out like a peacock. “And what are you two gossiping about?” he asked.

“I was just asking Mr. Botsford if you buggered him, and he told me he buggered you,” Lucy said. “Is that true, Edward? What does it feel like? Was it the first time? Was it bliss?”

Edward’s brilliant tail feathers instantly fell. “Mother’s got coffee and cake,” he stammered. “If you want some, come into the dining room.”

We followed him back inside. Conversation returned almost immediately to the apparently indefatigable topic of Cousin Beryl’s teashop in Dorking. Sarah did not reemerge from internal exile.

Eventually I stood, expressed my heartfelt thanks to the family and said I must be going.

“But it’s nearly eleven!” Lil said. “The trains’ll stop running soon, and in any case it’ll take you hours to get to Earl’s Court. Why not stay here tonight and catch the train back in the morning with Edward?”

“Yes, why not?” Lucy echoed.

I hesitated. “Really, that’s kind of you, but there can’t possibly be room.”

“You can share Edward’s bed,” Lil said.

“Somehow I’m sure he wouldn’t mind that,” Lucy said.

Edward glared at his sister, but said, “No, no, that would be fine.”

My cheeks flushed, the idea so excited me—it would, after all, be the first time Edward and I had actually spent the night together. Still, I felt obliged to hesitate.

“Well, if you’re sure it won’t be too much trouble,” I said, “then thank you.”

“Now, if you boys would just set up the beds, I’ll get Sarah to help calm the children,” Lil said, then retreated to the kitchen, while Edward and I pushed the table to the corner and set up a pair of narrow beds that had been dismantled and stowed in a closet, as well as a rather rickety-looking crib. The children, who had already fallen asleep, were carried back in and carefully laid in their places. Pearlene made not a sound, while from his cot Headley wheezed asthmatically.

“Good night, lovey,” Lil whispered, so as not to wake the children. “Very happy to have met you. Edward knows where the towels are.” She gave me a wet kiss on the cheek, a kiss that lasted, I thought, a bit too long, then departed, closing the door behind her and leaving in her wake a pronounced milky smell.

And finally Edward and I were alone—alone, that is, except for the sleeping children. We stripped to our drawers—embarrassed, somehow, to be doing so—then climbed together into his narrow bed. It was cold; I felt Edward’s nipples, hardened from the chill, rake against my chest. Reaching down, I pulled off his drawers; he did the same to mine, so that the two pairs bunched together at the foot of the bed. His erection silky and stone hard against my own.

For a long time we lay together, rubbing and shifting and trying to relax ourselves, even though our bodies were continuously pressing each other into states of arousal. Only our fear of waking the children kept us chaste. I don’t know how we slept, and I certainly wasn’t conscious of falling asleep, but at some point I opened my eyes, and heard a cock crowing, and saw that the room had filled with smoky dawn light. No time at all seemed to have passed.

Pearlene had woken. From her crib, she gazed at me, her gray eyes wide as planets, while across the room her brother exhaled ragged ribbons of breath. Edward had his arm draped over my chest. I could feel little bursts of warmth on my back as he breathed against me. I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair—as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.

Chapter Five

It seems to me that some explanation is required now of my attitude toward homosexuality back in the fall of 1936.

To start with, at that time I’d gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless—and incredible though it may seem—I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn’t worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I “grew up” it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing’s friend Peter Lovesey’s brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn’t have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Nigel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished
us
from “normal” men—though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an act of rebellion, a way of flouting the rigid mores of Edwardian England, but they were also fundamentally misogynists who would have much preferred living in a world devoid of things feminine, where men bred parthenogenically. Women, according to these friends, were the “class enemy” in a sexual revolution. Infuriated by our indifference to them (and to the natural order), they schemed to trap and convert us, thus foiling the challenge we presented to the invincible heterosexual bond.

Such thinking excited me—anything smacking of rebellion did—but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it
was
a choice.

There was another reason I didn’t swear off women, the way Nigel and the others did, and that, put simply, was fear. What would it be like, I worried, growing middle-aged and old as a homosexual? Old queens, I knew, lingered in public lavatories, perpetually ignored or scorned or asked arrogantly for money. How desperately I didn’t want to end up like them! And how much more pleasant a prospect it was to envision myself, at seventy, in a house in the country with a warm hearth, and all around me the voices of children and dogs.

As I said earlier, I was in those days an aficionado of the London underground and would sometimes spend hours poring over an underground map, enraptured by the elegant bright colors and odd station names. This map offers only the roughest simulacrum of reality. It shrinks the vast journey to the suburbs, it magnifies the clogged network of veins that underlies the City, it smooths out every unsightly curve and angle. The result is an illusion of order and coherence, discrete and colorful lines seamlessly linking one destination to another. Yet riding on the underground, one
believes
that map, one feels oneself traveling not under the panicked confusion of urban life but rather through the map itself, pulsing smoothly along a red line to the point of intersection with a brown line that in turn will take one to the point of intersection with a green line. Aboveground the world continues in its disorderly way; belowground everything connects.

So it was with the girl I imagined I’d someday marry: she was the end of the line that was my hypothetical youth.

I remember, in the early thirties, watching with great interest the expansion of the Piccadilly Line out to Arnos Grove, Southgate, Cockfosters—remote suburban stations that for me were hypothetical, for who would ever have occasion to visit them? The same with adulthood: though I knew it existed, it remained as abstract a destination for me as the suburbs the underground was rapidly inventing.

Yet I did end up going there, before the year was out.

From Nigel:

I write from Paris, but will have left before you receive this. Fritz can stay no longer. As we feared, the Gestapo are onto him. Last night in a restaurant two men at the next table tried to approach us. Horst, who was with us, insisted they were just German businessmen, but Fritz says he recognizes agents when he sees them, and I am inclined to believe he knows from whence he speaks. The police are also watching him, so I thought it best we get out of France. We go to Utrecht tomorrow, presumably en route to Stockholm. No address in Utrecht as yet; we shall have to look for a hotel. I have got in touch with the solicitor I mentioned in my last letter, one S. Greene; he has assured me he can obtain for Fritz both a visa and passage to Ecuador, but his fee is £750! So far I have borrowed a hundred from Mother, on the basis of which Greene has begun the negotiations—my only fear is that it will be too late for Fritz. Poor Fritz—he is only twenty! For the first time he looks haggard and genuinely fearful. All last week he never went out, just sat in our room, staring at the door, dreading the knock. I try to keep him cheerful, but it’s difficult—and God knows where I shall find the necessary £650!

Once we are settled in Utrecht I shall come over to London briefly to speak with Greene. I don’t dare bring F. with me; Greene has checked—his name is already on the English list, no doubt thanks to his father. Will wire you new address in Utrecht once we have one; meantime you can send letters
poste restante
. Must rush to catch train. N.

Edward arrived in my flat the first Sunday in October. “Hello,” he said cheerfully. “Hello,” I said cheerfully.

We kissed. His cheeks were red and cold, and he was huffing slightly.

He set down his three battered, bursting cases and went to wash his hands. “Tea?” I asked. “Yes, thank you,” he answered, then proceeded to unpack with amazing rapidity and concentration, hanging his suits in the wardrobe, stacking his socks and shirts in the drawers I’d emptied for him, propping his books on the shelf I’d designated as his. As he put each item away, he crossed it off a list he’d brought, just to make sure nothing had been lost or forgotten. (In that same bruised black notebook, I learned later, he kept logs that tracked the hours he slept each night, the clothes he purchased, his bowel movements, weight, even the amplitude and intensity of his orgasms, not to mention the books he read, every one of which was meticulously registered by title, author, publisher and both date and place of purchase or borrowing. Of course he kept his books alphabetized—such a contrast to my own, which were a chaotic jumble!)

His clothes securely put away, Edward next went into the bathroom and set out his tooth powder, brush, comb, razor and shaving mug. Lil had sent a fruitcake with him, and this we ate with tea, after which he got up, took the tea things to the kitchen and thoroughly rinsed them, as if to demonstrate his responsibility, the extent to which, having moved in, he now took a proprietary pride in the place.

I had fetched an old gramophone from Richmond a few days earlier. Now I put on a record. To my amazement, Edward took me in his arms, and we started dancing, two awkward, ungainly men, neither having the slightest idea how not to lead. It was dusk, sweater weather, the first gusty autumn drafts seeping in under the doorframes and window frames. Even so we stripped off our clothes, our bodies flushed with heat, our erections swatting each other, silky leg hairs softly slipping, while the voice on the gramophone bleated and Edward’s voice matched it, note for note.