While England Sleeps (28 page)

“You know, by the time it was over, I’d pretty much given up. I’d got tired of arguing. I thought, well, if they’re going to shoot me, they’re going to shoot me. There’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well go with God.”

“I wouldn’t have let that happen, Edward,” I said. “I would have got you out.”

“Would you? I’m glad to know that.” He yawned. “I feel a bit better.”

“I can tell.”

“You know, I was really in a rage when I read your diary that day. Really. If you’d been there I might have hit you.”

I looked away, toward the water. “You had every right to be angry.”

“I did. You cheated on me.”

“And I lied to you.”

“And treated me badly.”

“And led you on.”

“Yes. All those things.”

“There’s no reason for you to forgive me.”

“Yes there is. This ship. This ocean. I probably owe you my life.”

I closed my eyes.

“Edward,” I said after a while.

He snored. He was asleep.

A stench woke me in the middle of the night. I stepped down from my bunk to find Edward shaking between drenched sheets. He had shit and vomited on himself.

I hoisted him out of the bed, and he cried out.

“We’re just going to clean you up,” I said, swinging open the cabin door.

“It hurts!”

“Here—just sit here.”

I pulled the stinking sheets off the mattress, hauled the mattress out onto the deck.

“Brian, it hurts!” Edward cried.

“I know, Edward! It’s all right, I’m here,” I said—holding him, stroking his hair, while his body shook.

Outside our cabin, the captain paced, cursing, praying that Edward might last till he reached England.

He didn’t care about Edward. He only cared about his own hide.

Meanwhile, inside, I parted Edward’s lips, trickled water into his mouth, spoonful by spoonful, to keep him from dehydrating.

“Edward!”

“What?”

“Edward, listen to me. There’s something I must tell you. I lied to you when I said I would have wired the newspapers. The truth is I never sent the wire. I was too afraid.”

“Yes.”

“And then I bought a ticket to Valencia. I was going to go back to London.”

“Yes.”

“You mean you knew?”

“Headley, stop crying!”

“Don’t you understand anything I’m saying? Rupert, not me, is the hero of this story!”

“I understand.”

“Edward, please hear me! You must hear me! I was going to abandon you! I was going to leave you there!”

“Stop crying! Jesus! Why won’t he stop crying?”

I opened the cabin door, stepped out into flooding sunshine.

“What’s happened?” the captain asked.

“He’s died,” I said. “He just died.”

“Madre de Dios.”

“It was typhoid, I think.”

“We will have burial at sea.”

“What?”

“Burial at sea! And when you arrive in England, you will tell them all he died in Spain, before you got on the ship,
¿Entiende?
That is what you will tell them.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’ll tell them whatever you like.”

I opened his bag, spilled its few contents onto the floor. He had managed to hold on to a few pairs of his drawers, his name sewn into the waistbands. There was a battered copy of
Journey to the Center of the Earth
, as well as
The Communist Manifesto
Northrop had given him, some tea in an envelope, some sugar in a paper bag, and his notebook.

This I opened.

March 6th [I read]. Breakfast: bread and coffee. Lunch: beans. Dinner: stringy meat and soup. Two bowel movements. No wanks. Read
CM
pp. 81–93.

March 7th. Breakfast: coffee only. Lunch: dried fish and rice. Dinner: beans. No bowel movements. Wanked once. Read
CM
pp. 93–102, plus reread chapter one of
JTCOE
.

March 8th. Breakfast: milk. Lunch: more beans(!). Dinner: tripe and potatoes. One bowel movement. No wanks. Read
CM
pp. 102–106, chapters two to five of
JTCOE
.

I pulled the sheet off his body. Looked at it. There was a small spray of pimples on his chin. These I ran my fingers over. Then I felt his hair, which was limp. Pulled open his eyes, which stared up at me, their greenness the greenness of marbles, suggestive of nothing.

His cock, deceptively small when not erect, was resting atop his balls. I touched it, and it twitched slightly. I pulled my hand back as if I’d been bitten.

He hadn’t cut his toenails in ages, it appeared. So I took some scissors and sheared off the ragged ends. They were the same yellowed color as the blouse of the woman at the hotel in Altaguera; the shape of quarter moons.

“Edward,” I said, smoothing his hair with my hand.

Then once again I covered his body.

With the coast of England just becoming visible, the captain and two of the crewmen wrapped Edward’s body in a canvas blanket and dragged it onto the deck.

A sailor played “God Save the King” on a flute.

For thirty seconds we stood, heads bowed, in silence. Then the crewmen dragged the canvas-colored mass to the edge of the railing and hoisted it over.

Head over heels the body spiraled, until, with a splash, it hit the ocean. White foam spread out in rings; the canvas darkened as it sopped up water.

Who killed him? Me? The war?

The sea swallowed Edward.

Then I went home.

Moon and Water

Chapter Eighteen

How I got from Bristol to London I cannot tell you. Somehow, however, I must have, for the next thing I remember is Richmond: the smell of grass and petrol; boats on the river. Of Spain, George Orwell wrote: “I do not think I have ever seen a country where there were so few birds.” England was full of birds: starlings, skylarks, doves, pigeons, gulls, robins, terns. The sky rang with their competing song, so much song, after the silence of Spain, that it seemed deafening.

I went to the foreign office to register the fact of Edward’s death. A young man in Oxbridge spectacles took down the information. Name of deceased? Edward Phelan. Age? Twenty. Place of death? Valencia, Spain. Date of death? April 13, 1937. Cause of death? Typhoid.

“And were there any effects?”

I thought he meant “effects” as in consequences, and wasn’t sure how to answer; then I realized my mistake.

“No, no effects.”

“Who is the next of kin?”

“His mother, Lil—Sparks. Yes, Sparks.”

“Do you
have
an address for her?”

“I believe so.” I rooted in my wallet. “Seventeen Newbury Crescent, Upney.”

“Is there a telephone?”

“I don’t believe so, no.”

“Would you like to inform her yourself, or shall we send a telegram?”

“I believe it would be better for you to send a telegram.”

Afterwards I burned Edward’s clothes without ceremony; I burned his duffel bag and his books. I kept his notebook. I almost kept his toenail parings, imagining I might enshrine them, the way Catholics enshrine the physical remains of saints. But in the end I burned these too.

For weeks I cocooned myself in Richmond; I saw no one but Nanny, my brother and my sister. They treated me solicitously, with care.

My journal mentions a celebration when Channing passed his medical examinations. I do not recall it. What I do recall are endless hours in the kitchen, playing cards with Caroline and Nanny. The whistle of the teakettle. The leafy late-afternoon light.

“Do you ever wonder,” Caroline asked me once, “if people who are in physical pain every minute of their lives, from the minute they’re born—if they know it’s pain?”

In May, I started going out again: just a few minutes at first, to look at the boats on the river; then on brief walks into Richmond. It seemed an excessively sweet and guileless place, with its cottage gardens and teashops and jonquils. In the newspaper I read that Miss Flora Avery of Abinger Hammer, Dorking, had grown a seventy-five-pound marrow in her garden, that Mrs. Mabel Allen of Basingstoke claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in the bark of an ancient elm. No one spoke of the war.

Caroline went to Bath to stay with some cousins, leaving Channing and me alone in the house. My brother had emerged from years of self-imposed asceticism to become, for the first and only time in his life, a social creature. He was forever trying to talk me into accompanying him to balls and weekend house parties. I didn’t go, just as I didn’t go to Upney, didn’t sit down with Lil to tell her what had really happened. And if I had, would she have taken comfort in the truth? Or would she have thrown me out her door, cursed me as I hurried away from her, rushing down the Upney streets?

Aunt Constance took me to lunch at the Lancaster. I was very somber. To my surprise, she did not probe but instead regaled me with anecdotes about a trip to America she had taken in March. Afterwards she sent me a rather large check and a note the sympathetic nature of which took me by surprise: “What you have been through,” she wrote, “redeem through the
nobility
of art.”

I took her at her word. I sat down and wrote out what had happened, got so far as to describe my meeting with Edward and our first happy days together, then stopped. For the story I had to tell was not noble. Rather, it described the supremest moral failure. Not its transcendence, not its defeat: the failure itself. And what possible good could come from telling a story like that?

Instead I went back to my old novel. I finished it rather quickly, and within a few weeks Alderman had purchased it for the princely sum of forty-five pounds.
The Train to Cockfosters
, I titled it. It was dedicated (oh, coward!) “To E.P.”

“Imagine Cockfosters,” Avery says to Nicholas late in the novel, as he has said to him repeatedly. “What do you see?” This time Nicholas looks at “the elemental blue line snaking upwards towards a mysterious blue north. What he saw was ice-blue houses with ice-blue lawns perched on the brink of nothing, the air itself thinning out to a radiance too pure for human inhalation.”

Hell, in other words, leads to heaven, which is numbness; the pain of existence dulled. That I should have craved such a state tells a lot about the way I was feeling back in those dark summer days of 1937.

In June, Channing finally got me to go to one of his parties. It was for an old chum of his, a girl named Polly Granger. Everyone at the party was terribly jolly, and having just a smashing time, as was I. Whenever I had the chance, though, I stole away to corners and drank.

At the bar a familiar voice accosted me. “Brian, is that you?”

I turned and saw standing behind me Philippa Archibald, or, rather, a new incarnation of Philippa Archibald: she had had her hair cropped much like Louise’s and was wearing a sleeveless sheath.

“Philippa, what a surprise!” We kissed.

“How
are
you?” she asked emphatically.

“I’m all right. And you?”

“Couldn’t be better. I gather you’ve been in Spain.”

“Yes.”

“And was it everything you hoped?”

I considered this question. “No,” I finally said. “No, I can’t say it was.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Brian.”

“Thank you.”

A few nervous seconds passed.

“Myself, I’ve just returned from America,” Philippa added brightly.

“Really!”

“Yes! New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles. Quite extraordinary; you really must go there. And when you do, be sure to visit the Grand Canyon. It’s the most amazing—”

“Philippa, have you heard from your uncle Teddy?”

“Teddy? Not recently, no. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I heard some news of him in Spain. You know, he’s become a Communist.”

Philippa laughed. “Yes, yes. At the moment. Teddy is, shall we say, ideologically promiscuous—”

“He killed a boy.”

“What?”

“No, I must correct myself. He didn’t kill the boy. I killed him. He merely .
.
. facilitated his death.”

Philippa put her long fingers over her heart. “Brian, perhaps you’ve had a bit much to drink—wouldn’t you like to sit down?”

“Ask him,” I said, “about Edward Phelan. He was a deserter from the brigade. He took him in, promised to get him a passage back to England. Then he betrayed him. They put him in prison, and he died.”