While England Sleeps (14 page)

I did not mince my words, I see now. My disgust was visceral, vivid. Yet according to the journal it didn’t stop me from fucking Edward against the wall the next afternoon.

That week Aunt Constance rang. Philippa Archibald was back in London.

It was mid-November. We met at the Hotel Lancaster, where Aunt Constance, as threatened, had booked a private dining room. Of course I made sure, for once, to arrive as late as possible.

“There you are!” Aunt Constance scolded as the prehistoric porter announced me. “We had nearly given up!” She stood, bustled over and gave me a “naughty boy” pat on the cheek, but the relief in her voice was audible.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Constance,” I said. “Tube trouble, you know.”

“Oh, you and your tubes! I will never for the life of me understand this childish passion of yours! To
prefer
riding dirty trains through smelly tunnels when you could just as easily take a taxi .
.
.”

“Taxis can be expensive, Aunt Constance.”

“The bus, then! Ah, but I’m being rude. Now let me introduce you. Edith, may I present my nephew Brian Botsford. Brian, this is my dear friend Edith Archibald.”

“How
do
you do,” Edith Archibald exclaimed breathily, standing from the table and shaking my hand in what seemed to me an excessively energetic way. She was about sixty, with black eyes like raisins and the narrowest waist I had ever seen.

“And may
I
introduce my niece, Philippa? Philippa, Mr. Botsford.”

“Hello,” Philippa said, reaching out her hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Her half-crooked smile spoke volumes. It seemed to say, I don’t like this any more than you do, but what can we do? We might as well make the best of a bad situation.

“How do you do?” I said, and took my seat. Perhaps it was not going to be such a dreadful evening after all.

A hostess came in with menus, the perusal of which provoked a heated discussion between our two elder stateswomen as to the extent to which large amounts of runner beans did or did not benefit the digestive system. I looked around. We were sitting at a square table in a small dark box of a room. Heavy velvet curtains enshrouded the windows. Across from me—directly over Aunt Constance’s head, in fact—a huge landscape painting in a peeling gilt frame had been hung at a precarious angle. It was so dirty that in the dim light you could barely make out its subject: it seemed nothing more than a coffee-colored morass, from which, intermittently, a pair of human or animal eyes gleamed out.

“Brian,” Aunt Constance said, “Philippa was at school with your sister Caroline.”

“So I gather.”

“How is Caroline?” Philippa asked.

“Oh, she keeps busy. Fixing everything up at the old house, you know. There’s a lot of work since our parents died.”

“I didn’t realize they’d died,” Philippa said. “I’m sorry.”

“And I gather you two even met once,” Aunt Constance went on. “When you were children.”

“Did we?” Philippa asked. “To be honest, I can’t recall. Can you?” She smiled at me quizzically.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly all right.”

Our aunts were now staring at us with such looks of concentrated panic that we both burst out laughing. This broke the ice, as it were. They laughed too. For the first time that evening I actually looked at Philippa. She was really very pretty, I thought: gray-eyed and fine-boned, with hair dyed the rich, burnished color of terra-cotta.

The soup arrived. Philippa was speaking with some animation about her job in book publishing, as all the while our aunts nodded and beamed at each other. How different Philippa was turning out to be from what I’d imagined! Aunt Constance had led me to expect a harelipped saint, one of those creatures hideous of face but bountiful of soul who spend their spare time doing things like taking care of maimed sparrows. Instead the real Philippa was knowing and self-assured and no doubt had men lining up outside her door. Even the harelip scar—a pale-red scallop on her upper lip—she carried with surprising panache.

We had much in common; among other things, Philippa was very knowledgeable about Spain, having spent quite a bit of time as a child in the company of a bachelor uncle who lived in Gibraltar. Now she kept actively abreast of events there, so we spoke about the PSOE and the Falangists, the threat of Franco and the Republican hope, our mutual disillusionment with the Party and our shared conviction that nonetheless it offered the greatest prospect of freedom for the greatest number. Aunt Constance interrupted periodically to say she found politics a bore, while Aunt Edith kept trying to finish an interminable anecdote about a bad oyster she’d eaten while on holiday in Santander. Every now and then they smiled or winked at each other conspiratorially, as if in congratulations for a job well done.

We had coffee in the lounge. Here a host of unhappy women besieged our chaperones in quest of Aunt Constance’s autograph, giving Philippa and me a brief moment of privacy. I asked her where she lived. “Just off Sloane Square,” she said. “I’ve got a little bed-sitter. And you?”

“Earl’s Court.” I neglected to mention Edward.

Philippa leaned confidingly over her coffee cup. “I must tell you, I’d been
dreading
this evening.”

“So had I,” I admitted.

“I tried and tried to put it off—”

“Me too!”

“I mean, my aunt’s not a bad sort—goodness knows she always has the best intentions—but if you could see the men she’d set me up with before! Well! You’d certainly understand my hesitation.”

“I must say Aunt Constance described you .
.
. rather differently than you are. I believe the adjective that kept coming up was ‘responsible. ’
”

“Yes, yes, that is what they would all like me to be.”

“And you’re not?”

“Oh, hardly.”

“Really!”

She cast me a rakish glance, then said, “Pleasant surprise, this evening, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, smiling shyly. “Very pleasant.”

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Aunt Constance asked as she buttoned up my collar. “All the fuss and bother you put up! And didn’t I tell you you’d have a lovely time? Next time you should really trust your aunt Constance, dear. She does have your best interests at heart.”

She tucked something into my pocket and sent me off into the night. Philippa had already left by taxi. Really, I was thinking as I rode the tube back, this
had
been pleasant. Philippa, after all, was quite pretty. And intelligent. I thought I’d quite like to see her again, though how much this feeling was the result of the fears that had recently been plaguing me, and how much a reaction to Philippa herself, I wasn’t prepared to guess. Still, it did seem to me that one should follow instinctive attractions to their logical conclusions, especially if one was only twenty-two. One should hardly be expected to have the course of one’s life predetermined when in fact it had barely begun.

Remembering, suddenly, Aunt Constance, I reached into my breast pocket and found a twenty-pound note stuffed there, folded in eighths.

When I got home that evening Edward kissed me brightly. He had gone out drinking with Northrop again and was full of gossip and chatter. I felt tired and said I thought I would go to bed early, but Edward said he was too wound up to sleep and that he would instead read his
Communist Manifesto
for a while. This was a relief to me, as I needed some time to sort out my reaction to meeting Philippa. Was I really attracted to her? I was wondering. Or was she just the first woman to come along since it had entered my head to start looking at—noticing—women?

After a while Edward got into bed. As always, he put his arms around me, kissed my neck, rubbed against me so that I could feel his erection. How annoying, I thought. He’s distracting me from the very interesting train of thought on which I’ve embarked. I tried to push him off—“I’ve got a headache!” I shouted in a shrill Cockney falsetto—but he persisted, and when he started fumbling inside my pajamas, I lost my resistance. At first I thought we would just have a wank, but Edward wanted me to bugger him. “Please, Brian,” he said. “I need it tonight.” I said no, I was too tired. “Please?” he said again. “No,” I said, then felt his fingers wrap around my cock and knew I was lost.

After that I fucked him ferociously—a rare nighttime fuck that culminated in my coming up his arse with unusual, growling abandon, at which point I worried: how might Philippa react if she found out what Edward and I did together? Might someone tell her?

We washed and got back in bed. Edward had already fallen asleep: his breath went in and out, sweet as a baby’s. How content—how
easy
—he seemed to be with himself. He did not question, as I did. I suppose it was a matter of class.

To be honest, I envied his unproblematic capacity to accept.

And if he’d known what was going through my head—well, then, he wouldn’t have slept half so peacefully, now would he?

Nigel arrived the next morning. He was to be in London only a few days, he told me, and would be occupied almost the entire time trying to raise the money for Fritz’s emigration. No visits to his publishers or his old piano teacher? “Goodness no, I haven’t the time for that! But listen, why not come by Mother’s house for tea on Monday. Would that be all right?” I said that of course it would be.

I got to St. John’s Wood around four-thirty. It was a sunny day of a type rare in England in winter; I smarted as I recalled Rupert Halliwell’s fatal umbrella. Nigel’s mother let me in—she wore on her face the look of a woman who has sold herself into prostitution for love of a worthless rake. “I must apologize for Nigel not being here yet,” she said, leading me into the drawing room. “He had an appointment with that Mr. Greene, the solicitor who is supposedly going to help his friend emigrate to South America. Would you like some tea in the meanwhile? And I’ve put out some of Nigel’s new music magazines for you to look at.”

I thanked her and told her that would be lovely, then sat down to peruse the magazines. Mrs. Dent had arranged them in the shape of a fan.

Nigel blew in a few minutes later, breathless and cursing the underground. “For no good reason the train stopped—just
stopped
—between Oxford Circus and Regent’s Park, and for a full quarter of an hour we sat there, we didn’t move at all. So frustrating! Hello, Brian.”

“Hello, Nigel.”

We embraced. He had gained a bit of weight and needed a haircut; otherwise he looked fine.

Mrs. Dent brought in tea, then pattered off to parts unknown.

“How’re things going with your book?” I asked.

“Supposed to have it finished next month. I won’t, of course.”

“And the piano?”

“Haven’t been in one place long enough to practice. Frau Lemper is ready to disown me. Milk?”

“You know I take milk, Nigel.”

“Yes, of course. Sorry. And no sugar, right?”

“Right.”

“So tell me what’s up. How’re you earning your daily wage these days?”

I started explaining to him the details of my tutoring job. “Um,” he said. And, “Ah.” He kept raking his hand through his hair, looking over his shoulder as if he were expecting a messenger to arrive at any moment. Even the saga of Lady Abernathy—even the opium den—failed to capture his attention.

“By the way,” I said, “John Northrop’s been over quite a bit lately. Remember him? I think he’s quite keen to get you into the Party.”

“He thinks I’ll bring them respectability,” Nigel said. “Well, darling, my price is higher than he can afford. You can tell him
art
is my ideology and that I have no intention of writing for the Party.”

“Right. Well, if that’s how you feel about it.”

Once again he glanced over his shoulder expectantly.

“Nigel,” I said, “whatever’s bothering you, you’re not hiding it very well.”

“I’m not.”

“No, you’re not.”

He stared into his cup. “It’s just a bit difficult for me, being away from Fritz,” he said finally. “Of course I know he’s perfectly safe—he’s with Horst’s brother and sister-in-law in Stockholm, and they’re sure to take good care of him. Still, the poor boy’s awfully frightened, and I don’t blame him. There are terrible rumors coming out of Berlin. Remember old Dr. Hirschfeld, who ran that sexological institute? They say he’s been shot. They say homosexuals are being rounded up and herded into concentration camps. His father won’t accept what he is. Fritz thinks that if he can’t reform him, his father will just throw him to the dogs. And this solicitor, this Greene—I know he comes highly recommended, but I just don’t trust him. He’s an old Jew and he works out of a grimy little office in Soho, and every time I ring him up he gets cross with me and tells me everything’s in order, the papers should arrive any day, and please not to bother him anymore. But he’s been saying that for weeks, and they haven’t arrived! And on top of that I’ve still got to raise five hundred quid to pay the bastard off!” He lit a cigarette. “All that keeps me going—well, I imagine us in Ecuador. Far away from all this bloodletting. God willing, in a month we’ll be there, and Fritz will finally be safe.”