While England Sleeps (6 page)

Needless to say, I did not go to war until later.

Chapter Three

It continued, unremittingly, to rain. Then one morning, for just a few moments, the sun came out. In the street old women looked into the sky with amazement, deflated their umbrellas, then shook them out like wet dogs. For ten minutes or so the sun shone smugly in the slate-blue sky, as if to mock their hesitation, their lack of faith—and then a drop of water fell, and another, and another, and in what seemed a matter of seconds the sky had clouded over, rain was sheeting down as the disumbrellaed populace, victims of a heavenly prank, rushed madly for shelter.

I woke early. I always woke early in those days—dragged from sleep by a panicked need to switch on the wireless and hear whether the war had started yet. In the post box was a letter from Nigel. He had fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old Bavarian boy called Fritz and with him had fled Berlin for Paris.

The last week things got so bad I started fearing for our lives. Each night I could hear screams coming from the street, and in the morning I would step outside to find fresh blood spilled on the pavement. Nearby the
Nazijugend
practiced their absurd little calisthenic drills, almost like a taunt. What bothered me, however, was not the sight of the blood but the smell of it. Faintly metallic and salty, like semen. By the way, the Nazis do not like homosexuals primarily, according to everyone, because a number of the Party’s original high officials were homosexuals themselves and believed they could combat the threat of exposure by practicing excessive brutality. Few of them survived the purge. And do you remember the little florist’s shop where we used to buy those glorious roses? The couple who ran it? Both handsome, rugged fellows, their arms corded with muscles, their hair thick and blond and blazing. They walked to work each morning holding hands, and told Horst that their love for each other was as unwavering as their faith in the great Aryan nation. Together they joined the Nazi Party. Horst begged them not to do it, but they insisted that the party objected only to decadent homosexuals, whereas they themselves were not decadent homosexuals at all, they were Aryan brethren, united, their love an exalted flame. A few weeks later they disappeared. The flower shop was sacked, the windows smashed, the roses torn and ravaged. No one has heard from them since.

The station, by the time we left, was a Gomorrah, a hell. Who was a Jew, who was traveling on false passports, who would and would not be allowed to leave the country? I saw a family: an elegant-looking man wearing a
pince-nez
and a smooth black suit, his wife carefully buttoned into a sable coat, rocking a baby whose nose was running, while their other child, a miserable-looking little girl in a green pea coat, sat stone still on a curb. Nervously they guarded boxes and trunks and suitcases piled haphazardly like an Italian hill town. There was a smudge on the man’s cheek, a stain on his shirt. On closer inspection I saw that one of his eyes had been blackened. Clearly they needed quite desperately to get out of the country. And would they? In such a situation you can only think of yourself.

Fritz and I boarded the train. I was treated cordially—the Führer does so love the English—though I worried for Fritz, who had hinted his papers might not be entirely in order. Whatever problems there were, however, the inspector either failed to notice or chose to ignore. He had a more important priority, that being the hunting out of those attempting to flee on false passports.

Across the platform from our train was one bound for Amsterdam. As it left, smoke puffed up in billows. I caught a last glance of the man with the
pince-nez
. He was arguing with an inspector, while his elegant wife and sick baby and stoic little girl stared at the departing train. They got smaller and smaller until they disappeared into the smoke. Thus we left Germany.

Paris is a relief, by comparison. We have rooms in an old pension near Saint-Sulpice. No plumbing and an elderly neighbor who appears to be a leper, but at least here we have escaped the smell of blood—forever, I hope, though I doubt it. We make love obsessively, madly. Our energy is undepletable. Last night I had seven orgasms.

This is not natural. This is the end of the world.

I folded the letter inside the envelope. I needed to walk, even though I had no umbrella, even though the rain was pouring down now with a force that made me wonder if that brief spasm of sunlight had been a dream. On the street, in spite of the downpour, a boy was picking his girl some flowers that the council had planted along the pavement. An old woman approached them, shaking her umbrella. “You don’t do that!” she shouted. “Maybe in Germany, yes, but this is England! You don’t pick flowers in England!”

The rain was coming down so powerfully I had to keep my head bent in order to see where I was going; rainwater sheeted the lenses of my spectacles. I was thinking of Rupert’s terrorized maid, heedlessly shattering some irreplaceable piece of china. What would Rupert do? Shout at her? Fire her? Doubtlessly. So Rupert fires the maid, the maid must move back with her mother, the two of them, together, hate Rupert and his precious china. Rupert, in the meanwhile, buys another piece of china, hires another maid, watches the maid break the china, fires her and hires another maid and fires this maid as well. Soon all the maids hate Rupert, while Rupert hates his mother and his schoolmasters and me, though he dares not say so. Hitler, Nigel told me, wanted once to be a painter but failed to gain admission to an art academy. If Hitler had been admitted to art school, might he now be a contented watercolorist, and Europe at peace?

I was no innocent. I was cruel to Rupert, those evenings when he came to me, longing to be loved. I enjoyed rejecting him. Rejecting him excited me. Losing his umbrella, perhaps, excited me.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that at the darkest moments of history, the libido, rather than do the decent thing and make itself scarce, rears its figurative head more unrelentingly than ever. I was young enough, however, to believe my supposedly aimless ramble had only by coincidence brought me into the vicinity of the Earl’s Court underground station. To shelter from the rain there, I reasoned, would be the most natural thing in the world.

So I hurried in. It was an old station, damp and drafty. The tiles on the walls of the ticket hall were sweating, a degraded-looking char was listlessly nudging a body of mop water around the floor, at the ticket office an elderly woman was arguing with the ticket clerk over change. And at the gate to the platforms, just where I expected him to be, taller than I remembered and looking quite dashing in his dark uniform, his shiny dark cap, stood Edward. A train had just pulled in; a crowd of newly arrived passengers surged through the gate. His brow furrowed with concentration, he eased them by, took their tickets, tore the green cheap day returns and gave the second halves back with hardly a blink. No would-be fare beater could get past
his
gimlet green eye. Then everyone had got through except for an old woman who stood on the other side of the gate from Edward, furiously emptying her purse, seeking out amid the refuse that had collected there the little stub that might free her. “I know I have it somewhere,” she muttered.

“It’s all right, Mum, you can go through, I trust you,” Edward said.

“Well, that’s kind of you,” the old woman said, “though I should hope you’d know me by now. I’ve only been coming through this station twice a day five days a week for the last thirty-six years.” She waddled past. He laughed and leaned back, his left leg shaking the way it had at the meeting. Then he saw me.

“Well, hello,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Sheltering from the rain.”

“It’s pissing buckets, isn’t it? What luck, though. I’ve been meaning to ring you up, only the night after the last time I saw you Mum went down with the influenza and Dad went and broke his leg and now he’s in hospital. So I’ve been having to do a lot around the house, I can tell you. And we don’t have a phone; to call I have to go down to the pub, where everyone can hear—”

“Of course,” I said.

There was a quivering roar as another train entered the station. “That’ll be the Hounslow,” he said. “I’ll have to get busy again in a second. But I wanted to tell you what I’d read this week. I read
The Well of Loneliness
by Miss Radclyffe Hall—”

“
The Well of Loneliness
!
But it was banned.”

“My sister Lucy got a copy. It opened up my eyes, let me tell you.”

A screech sounded, brake sparking against track. “Uh-oh, here come the elephants. Listen, I’d love to talk to you some more—”

“Why not drop by?” I ventured. “After you finish work?”

He gulped, as if literally digesting the offer, then said, “All right, yes. I finish at five. Would that be all right?”

“Perfect. See you later, then.”

“Yes. Later.”

The crowd engulfed him.

The rain had stopped by the time I got outside again. Water spots stained my spectacles. With my shirttail I wiped them clear.

On the way home I bought sandwiches and cream cakes. The flat was already scrupulously clean—a symptom of my current enthusiasm for all activities that did not involve arranging words on a sheet of paper—so I had a bath, shaved, scrubbed my face and teeth vigorously, then sat down to wait.

The bell rang promptly at quarter past five. “Sorry I’m late. I got held up,” Edward said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Come in.”

We shook hands. He was still carrying the same worn satchel, though this time he had on a tie.

He wiped his feet on the mat. Nervously we took our places on the sofa, having made sure first that a respectable distance separated us.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked. “It’s just made.”

“Oh, that would be lovely, yes.”

I poured the tea and sat next to him again on the sofa. Stiffly he sipped, did not look at me. The silence stretched out. Even though earlier in the afternoon I had drawn up a mental list of conversation topics—the underground, Upney, Spain—I now found myself unable to think of a single thing to say. It was as if, having gone to bed together on the occasion of our first meeting, Edward and I could not quite reconcile ourselves to the fact that our bodies knew each other so much more intimately than our minds did.

“I was sorry to hear about your dad,” I said finally. “Is he all right?”

“Hah!” Edward said. “He fell in the gutter outside the pub, that’s how he busted his leg. He was pissed to the gills. Mum says he’s got what’s coming to him; she won’t have us showing him any sympathy. And to make matters worse, she’s flat on her back with the flu, poor old girl. And to top
that
off, Nellie’s gone and run off to Glasgow to take care of her old grandma—or so she
says
—leaving the two brats with us to take care of, so the place is a bit crowded right now. Nellie’s my sister-in-law. Except as she and Frank were never married legally. Oh, they were going to do, only then Frank got killed in that accident I was telling you about. He left behind Nellie and little Headley and another one on the way—that’s Pearlene. Always fond of strange names, Nellie is. Anyway, she’s not been living with us, just on us—she and the kids were in Walthamstow, in furnished rooms—and then the same day Dad breaks his leg and Mum’s down with the flu, suddenly Nellie announces old Grandma’s sick in Glasgow and can we take the kids. But it’s all right. Lucy hates it, of course, but Sarah’s good with children. Sarah’s my other sister. She’s quite simple.”

Anxiety, which left me at a loss for words, clearly had the opposite effect on Edward.

“My goodness, your family life certainly is complicated,” I said.

“Well, like I was telling you, that’s why I couldn’t come to see you. I’d finish with work and have to race home to help out before Lucy went off for one of her evenings. God knows where she goes, really. She’s got her own life, though she’s only eighteen.”

“By the way, Edward, how old are you?”

“Twenty in three months and fourteen days. Where’s your toilet? When I drink tea I’m a sieve, I tell you.”

I pointed him toward the lavatory. He did not close the door. I could hear the loud spray of his pissing, then the familiar wheezing crash as the lavatory flushed and water came down in torrents.

He was still buttoning his fly as he returned to the sofa. “I do talk a bit,” he said, sitting down. “You’ll have to excuse me. Mum says sometimes I’m like a tap that won’t shut off; not that she’s any better, mind you.”

“Don’t apologize. Your family sounds fascinating.”

“Well, we aren’t the average.”

“More tea?”

“Yes, thank you.”

I poured it out. Edward turned; we smiled at each other. Tentatively I put my hand on his head and pulled it toward mine. We kissed; with our tongues we opened each other’s mouths. Then we were standing, guiding each other to the bed.

My fear that, like the first time, Edward would simply lie back and expect me to relieve him proved to be ungrounded. Instead he scrupulously undressed me, examining, with an almost clinical curiosity, each part of my body as he uncovered it: my toes, my feet, my calves and thighs and stomach. Would he approve of what he found? How pale my body appeared to me at that moment—pale and soft and
English!
His, by comparison, had a high color and a hardness that I found enviable as well as exciting. Then his hand found my cock.