‘No,’ he said softly. ‘It wasn’t very nice of us.’ The gin, and the agitation of his feelings, had unsettled perspectives; things tended to slip sideways if he looked at them too long. ‘Not nice at all,’ he repeated.
‘Well, it’s not as bad as all that,’ Foley said. ‘It’s just not like you, that’s all.’
Moss took a slow step forward and stood still again, still wearing his smile. ‘No, quite unforgivable,’ he said.
‘Did you have a nice drive with Max?’ Foley asked, with a sudden gleam of vindictiveness.
‘I drove,’ said Moss. ‘Max wasn’t in a fit state. We started off with Max driving but he was going all over the road. I made him stop and change over.’
‘My, my,’ murmured Foley, quite foiled.
‘Yes, we changed over. Max doesn’t take proper care of himself. That’s what I was telling him. “You don’t take proper care of yourself,” I said. “Do you want to kill yourself?” I said. “You’ll kill yourself one of these days, driving like that.” Do you know what he did when I said that? He just made these mooing noises like a cow. What it was, you see, he’d had too much to drink.’
‘Yes, I rather suspected that was the case,’ Foley said.
Moss took another step forward. He was quite close to Foley’s chair. The tall standard lamp which Foley had been reading by was beyond the chair and a little to the rear of it, and Foley’s shoulders and head were full in the rather harsh white light. With a drunken intensity and brilliance of focus – a kind of visual rage – Moss looked down at Foley’s face in profile, the pale, immaculate parting in the hair, the long scornful lash of his left eye, the ear set gracefully close to the head and whorled more delicately than is common in a man. Moss was never afterwards to recall the events of the evening except in conjunction with this beauty of Foley’s, this almost hallucinatory radiance under the lamp. ‘Max has asked us to a party on Saturday, to meet Simon,’ he said.
‘That’ll be nice,’ Foley said.
Moss rested his hand on the back of the chair. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ he said slowly, ‘that I am subject to these hot flushes?’ Foley glanced up quickly and then away again. ‘No you didn’t,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact. Why don’t you sit down?’
‘I feel better like this. Didn’t I ever tell you about them?’
‘How do you mean, hot flushes?’
‘It’s difficult to describe. I’ve had quite a few of them lately. I sometimes get them in the day but more often at night when I’m in bed. There’s a feeling of warmth in the chest, round my heart, and it spreads all over my body. It’s not so bad at first, actually, because it’s mixed up with feelings, usually like a sort of happiness, but after a bit it affects my breathing. Like drowning or something of that sort. And just before it starts to go away, there’s always a point when I feel that I’m going to die.’ Moss paused for a moment, then added, ‘I’ve never told this to anyone but you.’
‘You ought to see a doctor about that,’ said Foley. He was impressed. Perhaps because of the drink Moss was speaking more vividly than usual. ‘I should see a doctor if I were you,’ he repeated.
‘I don’t think a doctor can help me much,’ Moss said, with a rather peculiar emphasis.
‘They can do a lot these days,’ he replied vaguely, bothered by Moss’s nearness and immobility and by the possible gravity of these hot flushes.
There now followed a rather long silence between them, during which Foley could distinctly hear Moss breathing. The chief characteristic of Moss’s breathing was the heavy downstroke through the nostrils. The sound of it tonight, together with Moss’s proximity, Foley found unnerving enough to attempt eliciting more speech from Moss as an alternative.
‘What did you talk to Max about?’ he asked, directing the question at the ceiling.
Moss spoke immediately and smoothly as if responding to a cue: ‘People don’t understand Max, he doesn’t take the trouble to explain himself of course, he lets people think what they like. Max has a lot of courage.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Foley said mildly.
Moss looked straight before him and said, ‘He’s got no time for women, of course.’
‘Well, you don’t say,’ said Foley. ‘You must be joking.’
‘He admits it,’ proceeded Moss steadily, ‘freely. He told me so himself, just tonight. He said to me, “I am as queer as a coot.” Those were the very words he used.’
‘But surely,’ Foley said, ‘surely you didn’t need to be told.’
Moss could find nothing to say to this. The telling was precisely what had been needed, and for a long, long time. He might have gone on as always before, possessed by a guilt that came wretchedly prior to any action. In any case he had no skill at inferences. He could not see any way of conveying to Ronald the great difference between supposing something and hearing it admitted. No one in all Moss’s life had said it to him, until tonight. He had heard it, of course, reported of others, and the more direct forms of that reporting had run in his mind from schooldays, a soft and contemptuous jingle, nancy-fairy-pansy-pooff: affecting his own modes of judging. Even the obliquer references had been slighting, or dismissive at least, pushing their objects away, beyond the rim of acquaintance, a disgracefully aberrant minority whose deviation was so great as to swamp all other human attributes they might have laid claim to – simplified to the point of monstrosity by this long course of innuendo. This then had been Max’s gift, that he had told it, that he had embodied the quality of being queer – and with this all Moss’s sordid or melodramatic associations – in himself; in his frail, consistently human and consistently present self. And, because he was so much more than this, particularly in his needs, Moss had been enabled to see that one may be this and yet go on being the self one was before. An inestimable gift. Max could not have known or even suspected the effect of his words on Moss; they had cost him nothing to say; and he had proceeded to talk of other things in a tone not much different. But a couple of gins later, as though he had indeed calculated his effects, he replied to a random question in a way which finally melted the pathetically thin membrane of reluctance and protest in which Moss had been sealed. ‘Of course,’ he had said, ‘you can’t go by me. I never got over Simon.’ ‘But it was twenty years ago,’ Moss had said, expostulating. ‘You can’t go on feeling like that for twenty years.’ And Max had smiled, shaping his mouth and widening his eyes with conscious charm, yet at the same time meaning it when he said, ‘Well, I do, you know.’
You had to call this feeling love: it endured and remained generous through the stress of years, jealousies, separation; and though guilt and self-contempt could not be effaced at a blow from Moss’s mind – the stain of the furtive could probably never be effaced – he was brought at the least to see clearly what had before only been part of his defiance: the folly of any attempt to grade such feeling by distinguishing among its human objects.
‘He makes no secret of it,’ Foley said. ‘Personally I think he’s asking for trouble going about so blatantly.’ He paused, then added darkly, ‘Max is going to come a cropper one of these days, you mark my words.’
‘How do you mean?’ enquired Moss. He had resolved on sublety, thinking this to be at anyone’s disposal, there for the putting on, like frankness. He felt secretiveness now to be a condition of survival, since he was encamped, so to speak, right under the enemy’s cannon. There was nothing sensuous in his feeling, despite Ronald’s luminous nearness. So far, it was his mind, not his blood, that was stirred. He felt simply as though he were a secret agent conducting a delicate and possibly dangerous negotiation.
‘Well, it’s against the law, you know,’ Foley said. ‘People are tolerant enough on the whole, of course. But there are those who are very much down on that sort of thing. Anyone who wanted to could get Max into real trouble.’
‘But why should anyone want that? In any case, if he doesn’t do anything, he’s all right, isn’t he? I mean, it’s not what he says that m
atters. Besides, that sort of person, the sort who would go out of his way to get someone like Max in trouble, would be a latent himself.’
‘Would be a what?’ asked Foley, startled. He did not now for some reason find it very easy to support Moss’s regard. The former constraint of drunkenness seemed to have quite gone and Moss looked ecstatic; there was no other word for it: his eyes were wide and shining moistly and his lips were pressed tightly together as though he were repressing sounds of joy. Foley had never seen him like this before.
‘A latent,’ said Moss. ‘Max was saying that a lot of people who are very much against it are latent queers themselves.’
‘Oh yes,’ Foley said, with sudden angry sarcasm, brought out by his growing uneasiness at Moss’s manner, ‘Oh yes, we’ve all heard that before. Anyone who says it’s disgusting must be grappling with his own guilt, anyone who actually likes women must at least be both ways. You can include anybody if you go about it like that. It’s like the argument about great men, you can make quite an impressive list, with Shakespeare and Socrates and Leonardo at the top. But in fact the great majority of people who have achieved anything in art or politics or science have been ordinary heterosexual people.’
‘But they are the great majority anyway,’ Moss said. ‘So what you have just said doesn’t really mean anything, does it? Besides, I should think that Max knows more about these things than you do.’
It was the first time in their association that Moss had made a deliberately derogatory remark like this, and Foley was strangely shocked by it. It was while he was still casting about for a dignified rejoinder that Moss, who also felt he had gone too far, said slowly: ‘Max says he has loved Simon Lang all this time. He used that word. Do you think, yourself, that it is possible for a man to love another man like that?’
But this was too naive, even for Moss. Even while Foley was replying, was saying rather huskily, ‘We’re hearing rather a lot about Max tonight,’ aiming thus at a dignified rebuke, he was realising with a sort of expanding suspicion what was wrong about Moss tonight: it was not only the suppressed exhilaration, disturbing as this was, but Moss was being too humble. Always, always before, in discussing such matters, Moss had put on his man of the world manner, prudish, essentially dogmatic, which he used as a substitute for argument. This present tentativeness had been assumed deliberately, and could only mean that Moss’s conception of himself was changing, had changed. It came to Foley that Moss was not the person he had always thought him, that this creature standing so close, breathing heavily, waiting with a rather appalling docility, presumably for some sort of answer, was virtually a stranger. Even his face seemed different. There was something muffled, almost creepy, about this change. Suddenly he felt that it would be a bad mistake to prolong the conversation. He got up from his chair with a rather remarkable sideways rolling motion, ending up on the side furthest from Moss, with the chair between them.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose so. There are cases of it, aren’t there? One hears about it.’
‘In what way?’ asked Moss, who had not moved.
‘Well, I mean … Take David and Jonathan.’ Foley was beginning to feel distraught. He held the Cellini book in one hand; with the other he smoothed down his hair.
‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘the word is made to do far too much – if you see what I mean – it’s always the same word, isn’t it? We should invent some more nouns …’
Moss nodded his head sagely, as though he too had given the linguistic aspect some thought. He had noted Foley’s rather extraordinary way of extricating himself from the chair, but had not associated this with any possible mental disturbance. He was too interested in his own feelings to be for the moment accessible to such an idea. He had fallen in fact into the trap of self-absorption that awaits all green conspirators, and could not regard Foley as anything but an element of his own sense of the marvellous potential of the situation. It was with a feeling, therefore, almost of outrage that he saw Foley adopting a particular kind of smile and heard him say: ‘It’s time for bed. I think I’ll say good night.’ But before he could find any way of stopping or delaying this exit Foley, moving quickly but smoothly, was out of the room.
On reaching his bedroom Foley uttered a great sigh. He felt completely exhausted. He had no wish to think things out, to analyse further either Moss’s behaviour or his own. What he had, irreducibly, was the conviction of Moss’s duplicity. He felt a reluctance to go beyond this, into any investigation of motives. Tomorrow, he thought, or at some suitable subsequent date, I will have a proper look at all this.
It was less than ten minutes later, before Foley had got into bed, while he was still examining his features in the looking-glass above the dressing-table, that he heard Moss’s footsteps along the passage. They stopped outside his door. Through the glass Foley watched the door-knob with fearful intensity, but it did not move. He could hear nothing from beyond the door. After a few more moments of suspense, reassurance came suddenly to Foley, bred of the conviction that Moss would never enter his bedroom while the light was on. So strongly was he persuaded of this that he felt able to start a conversation.
‘Is that you, Michael?’ he called.
There was a brief pause, then Moss said, ‘Yes it is,’ in a rather grudging voice.
‘Just going to bed?’ Foley enquired, but Moss made no reply to this at all and under the stress of the ensuing silence Foley was driven to make polite mouths at his reflection, declining his head and nodding and simpering slightly. After a minute or two of this he composed his face into a noble seriousness and looked at that for a bit.
Suddenly Moss, from beyond the door, broke into speech. ‘It’s funny though,’ he said. ‘I mean, of course you come across it. Take this time I was in London, I was about twenty I suppose, no, wait a minute … it was in April 1953, and my birthday isn’t until August, so I must have been nineteen. Nineteen and a half I would have been. I was staying with my aunt in Cricklewood, she’s dead now of course. I’m going back nearly ten years now.’
Foley watched himself listening politely, head a little on one side, eyebrows raised suavely. He narrowed his eyes just enough to denote alertness, not enough to seem suspicious.
‘I was at the Regent’s Park Zoo,’ continued Moss, dates and ages now satisfactorily fixed. ‘I was watching those little deer, what do you call them, gazelles. They were all in a big enclosure. It was very hot, for April. I remember seeing in the paper that it was a record for fifty years. I wasn’t wearing a jacket. I was carrying my jacket. I was wearing one of those sports shirts with short sleeves. After a bit a man came and stood beside me. He was looking at the animals too. Suddenly this man put his hand on my elbow, partly on the elbow and partly on the upper part of my arm. He began speaking to me as well, no wait a minute, he didn’t start speaking all at once, he just kept his hand on my arm. Then he said how beautiful the gazelles were, graceful and that. He said what beautiful eyes those animals have. They have beautiful eyes, of course. He said they were his favourite type of animals. All this time he was moving his hand up and down my arm. I didn’t know what to say. He was very dark and he had curly hair. He had a foreign accent too. He was smiling and looking through the wire, not looking at me. He didn’t look at me at all. I shook his hand off and moved away a bit, but he still went on talking to me. I left him there. I walked away from him. The funny thing was, I started shaking after that. I couldn’t stop myself. I remember how strange it seemed, shaking like that on such a hot day.’
Foley sat motionless at the table. He had not been able to sustain his own regard during Moss’s story and his eyes had dropped from the glass to gaze in a distracted fashion at the toilet articles laid out on the table. After-shave lotion, symbol of conquest; the stoppered bottle of Cologne water.
Moss leant forward until his hot forehead was resting against the outside of the door. He said: ‘For some reason or other I always thought he was a Syrian. I didn’t have any reason f
or this – it just happened that the idea came into my mind that he was a Syrian.’ He could remember as if there had been no interval of time the details of the Syrian’s face he had taken in during that quick look, the thickish, constantly smiling lips, the dark drowsy eyes, the way his hair, though not seeming oiled or wet at all, gleamed in the sunshine. He remembered too the daunting grace of the gazelles. He knew now also what he must always have known without acknowledgement, that it had not been anger or outrage that had set him trembling, but the awful consonance of his own desire with that gesture, that caress. The hand which had moved, so strangely without importunity, along his bare arm had distressed and frightened him only by its confidence, its assumption of his complicity. But his assent had been forged when he was helpless, before his life became sequential to him – it was antecedent to choice. Nevertheless, on that sunny April day it had seemed that life could be wrenched into other courses; and he had walked away from the Syrian, and trembled afterwards.
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