Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  For the joy of it was …

  He found me funny

  and, like Elizabeth Bennett, Matthew was one who dearly loved a laugh. He was talented. He played the piano like an angel, his athleticism was outstanding and he was academically competent. I don’t remember what degree he later took at Cambridge, but it was either a First or a 2:1 as well as an inevitable triple haul of sporting Blues. Verbally, however, he was ordinary. He had no rhetoric, no style, no wit nor any easy companionship with words. Since I seemed to him to have all these things, he looked on me as extraordinary and would roll and roll about with laughter whenever I wanted him to, which was often, a kitten on the end of my verbal balls of wool. Never too far … I learned early on that like a kitten he could suddenly bore of a game, suddenly appear to think it all rather facile and beneath his dignity. Often then, just when I sensed that moment might come, I would stop the joking at its still pleasurable height, shake my head and express some deep thought of frustration, anger at the political injustices and criminal stupidity of “this place” as the school was mutteringly called by all.

  Once, I remember, I was in the Thring Centre, typing out the whole of a P. G. Wodehouse novel on one of the big IBM electric typewriters. Frozen Assets, the book was, I recall. I did this sort of thing a great deal, I adored the feel of typing, watching the keys leap and smack the paper, making words appear with such clean magical clarity; I loved too the way I could monitor my noticeable improvement in accuracy and speed and God how I gloried in the admiration when boys clustered around gasping in amazement at the rapidity with which my fingers could fly over the keys without my even looking down. Today’s qwerty generation would think me abominably slow, of course, but in those days typing proficiency was a most eccentric and enviable attainment.

  I was alone however in the typing and Gestetner room, that February evening, just clacking away at the keyboard.

  I didn’t hear him come in, but a fraction of a second before he cleared his throat to speak I felt a presence in the room, a presence that I later convinced myself I had known was his even before I heard his voice.

  “What are you doing?”

  A great surge went through me that tingled my cheeks (still does, you know, to remember it) as I heard that voice. Something else there was too. Something that alerted me to the possibility that all was not well with him.

  “That you, Matteo?”

  I called him Matteo: it was my nickname for him. I scorned the “Ozzie Two” that had become “Ozziter” as far as the rest of the school was concerned. To be given a private nickname, even if it is carelessly, almost disdainfully given, is a massive compliment; successful nicknaming is an absolutely essential weapon in the armoury of any romantic seducer. I had discovered that his middle initial (unlike his brother he turned out to have just the one) was “A” for Anthony, which made him M.A.O. I had experimented with the idea of calling him the Chairman, as in Mao, but that seemed obvious. Then it struck me that Matt. A. O. sounded like the Italian for Matthew, so Matteo it was, from me and me alone. I once walked on air for a week when I overheard him ticking off a contemporary, Madeley-Orne, who had dared to call him that.

  “Matteo is not my name,” he had said hotly.

  “I’ve heard Fry call you that.”

  “Yes, well Fry calls everybody weird things, but that doesn’t give you the right. He calls you Makes-Me-Yawn, if it comes to that.”

  The real reason I came on Monday evenings to the Thring Centre was because I knew that Monday was Matthew’s pottery day. This was one activity I had not tried to join him in, since I had queered my pitch with the pottery department my very first term by contriving to burn out the motor that drove one of the throwing wheels and then, the very next week, breaking one of the pug-mill dyes. A pug mill, in case you haven’t been introduced, is a sort of potter’s mince-making machine. You shove all the spare offcuts of slip and old clay into a hopper at the top, squeeze them down with a lever and pure, consistent clay comes out the other end, either in one great thick sausage, or—if you fix a template or die over the exit hole—in smaller little wriggly snakes that can be used to make those coil-ware mugs, vases and pots that are still produced in woundingly huge quantities to this day, much to the distress and embarrassment of all. Fearing that during the third week I might do even more damage I was pronounced persona non grata by the staff, the pot-it-buro, as I liked to call them, and so filled my Mondays, while Matthew was there, in the Thring Centre too, by typing or playing with the gerbils that scuttled about in transparent Perspex conduits and pipes all round the building, citizens of their own Fritz Lang Rodent Metropolis. The system was designed—like almost everything else in Uppingham, from the theatre up the road that was even now rising from the skeleton of the old Victorian gymnasium, to the chairs and light fixtures of the Thring Centre—by the remarkable master in charge, Chris Richardson, who is today supremo of the Pleasance Theatre, the organisation which seems ever more to dominate the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and which now has permanent habitation in London too. Richardson was known, for no reason I can tell, as Trog—perhaps because his Hogarthian features resembled the work of the Punch cartoonist Trog. He carried the smell of pipe tobacco about with him and tolerated my arsiness, frivolity and absolute incompetence and lack of common sense in those fields of endeavour which came so naturally to him, draughtsmanship, planning and construction, because “at least I made use of the bloody place” even if my idea of making use of such a “resource,” as it would be called today, was pointlessly to tip-tap away like a temp in a typing pool.

  So there I am, doing just that, and I hear behind me the voice that is my reason for being.

  “That you, Matteo?” As if I didn’t know. And said as if I didn’t really care too much, so absorbed was I in my Important Typing.

  “Mm … You writing something?”

  “No, just typing practice really. Bored of the potting shed?”

  “Got something in the kiln.”

  “So … just kiln time then, are you?”

  “Tsserh!” That is really the best way I can render his polite giggle at my dreadful pun.

  I swung round in my seat to look at him.

  I was right. He was in distress. I suppose I had sensed it because the way he had asked “What are you doing?” had set up some chime in me, had reminded me of the way I would ask my mother precisely the same question when I knew perfectly well what she was doing but wanted her to stop because I had a grievance to air.

  “You all right, old crocus?” P. G. Wodehouse was seeping deep into my language.

  “Oh it’s nothing …”

  There was a fierce disconsolacy in his expression. I have described him to you as beautiful, which is a senseless description, a space that you will have to fill for yourself with your own picture of beauty; also I have told you he was below the average in height. There was a hint, no more than that, of stockiness about him, a solidity that prevented, despite such overwhelming beauty of countenance and body, any suggestion of the porcelain, any pretty delicacy that might de-sex and sanitise. It was enough to turn sensuousness into sensuality, but not enough to detract from his liquid grace. It was even more marked, this grounded solidity now, I noticed, as he defiantly attempted not to look unhappy.

  “How long have you got to wait before the dinner’s-ready bell goes in your oven?” I asked.

  “Oh, about forty minutes. Why?”

  “Let’s go for a walk then. All this typing is no good for my back.”

  “Okay.”

  He waited while I squared the typed sheets, switched off the typewriter, threw on its silvery dust cover and perched a scribbled note next to it: “Leave alone or die bloodily.”

  This was the era when military greatcoats were the innest thing to wear. I had a WWII American Air Force coat that was the envy of the world, Matthew an RAF equivalent: he had also, perhaps on account of his older brother, managed to get one of the old school scarves, striped in knitted wool li
ke a Roy of the Rovers football scarf, unlike the scratchy new college-style black and red that I wore. With his wrapped warmly about his neck he looked so divine and vulnerable I wanted to scream.

  It was a cold night and just beginning to snow.

  “Yippee, no games tomorrow by the looks of it,” I said.

  “You really hate sport, don’t you?” said Matthew, vapour steaming from the hot mystery of his mouth and throat.

  “I don’t mind watching it, but ‘Is this the man who has lost his soul?’ ” I misquoted: ‘The flannelled fool at the wicket and the muddied oaf at the goal.’ ” I had just read Cuthbert Worsley’s autobiography and it had sent me into quite a spin.

  “Is that what you think of me as then? A muddy oaf?”

  “I wouldn’t have said so,” I said, a little surprised. “I mean, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not sure I think of you as anything, really.”

  “Oh.”

  We walked on in silence, while I tried to work out where this was leading.

  “You don’t …” he blurted in some confusion, “… you don’t like me then?”

  “Well of course I like you, you daft onion. I’m not in the habit of going for walks with people I dislike.”

  “In spite of the fact that I’m a flannelled fool and a muddy oaf?”

  “I’ll let you into a secret, Matteo. The reason I hate games so much, and don’t you dare tell anyone this, is simple … I’m no bloody good at them.”

  “Oh,” he said again. Then. “Why do you like me then?”

  “Christ, Osborne,” I said, getting a bit senior in my panic at the direction all this seemed to be going in, “I like most people. You seem harmless. You’re polite and most importantly of all, you laugh at my bloody jokes. You fishing for compliments here or what?”

  “No, no. I’m sorry. It’s just that. Well. It was something someone said to me.”

  Oh fuck here we go, I thought. His brother has been warning him off. Some jealous son of a bitch has been whispering. The game is up.

  “Who said what to you?” I asked, trying to smother the swallowing nervousness I felt.

  “It doesn’t really matter who it was. Just someone in my House. I was sweeping the corridor, you know, and he started … he started trying stuff.”

  “He made an advance you mean?” I said. Advance? Well what other word could I have used?

  Matthew nodded, looked away and out it all came in a hot, indignant tumble. “I told him to leave me alone and he called me a tart. He said that everyone could see the way I played up to certain pollies and to people like Fry, who I was always hanging around with. He said I was a pretty-boy pricktease.”

  In my head, even as I winced at hearing such words from him, I rapidly ran through a list of possible names that might fit the picture of this bungling, asinine, spiteful brute from Redwood’s and at the same time just as rapidly selecting, from a whole suite of possible reactions, the right stance for me to take on this choked and miserable confession: outrage, indignity, tired man-of-the-world cynicism, fatherly admonition, comradely sympathy … I considered them all and settled on a kind of mixture.

  I shuddered, half at the cold, half at the horror of it all. “This place!” I said. “This fucking place … thing is, Matteo, it’s a hothouse. You wouldn’t think so with the snow falling all around us, but it is. We live under glass. Distorting glass. Everything is rumour, counter-rumour, guesswork, gossip, envy, interference, frustration, all that. The secret of survival in a place like this is to be simple.”

  “Simple?” It was hard to tell whether the clear swollen globes of moisture that glistened at the end of his lashes were melted snowflakes or tears.

  “In a way simple. Rely on friendship.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “If you’ve got a good friend, you’ve never really got any reason to worry. You’ve always got someone to talk to, someone who’ll understand you.”

  “Like you and Woody, you mean?”

  It wasn’t what I meant, of course. It was far from what I meant.

  “Yes. Like me and Woody,” I said. “I could tell Jo anything and I know he’d see it in its right proportion. That’s the trick in a place like this, proportion. Who would you say is your best friend?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know,” he said, almost sulkily. “You see, thing is, I know, because my brother told me …”

  “Know what?”

  “You know, that I’m … you know, pretty.” He got rid of the word as if its presence had been souring his mouth like a bad olive.

  Pretty! God I hated that word. Pretty boy, pretty boy … only a lumpen, half-witted heterosexual would think Matthew pretty. He was beautiful, like the feet of the Lord on the hills, he was beautiful. Like the river, like the snow that was falling now more thickly than ever, like nothing on earth, like everything on earth he was beautiful. And some roaring hairy-pizzled Minotaur had dared to grab at him and call him a pretty-boy pricktease. Even his own brother had used that word.

  “Pretty?” I said, as if the idea had never struck me before. “Well you’re exceptionally good-looking, I suppose. You’ve got regular features, unlike me with my big bent nose and my arms ten foot long. But ‘pretty’ isn’t a word I would have used. Morgan is pretty, I would say.”

  Morgan was a Fircroft new boy, on whom many eyes had fallen.

  “Thomas Morgan?” said Matthew in surprise. “Oh.” Was there just a touch here, the merest hint of wounded vanity in his reaction or was that my imagination?

  “If you go in for that sort of thing, that is,” I added hastily. “Personally, as I say, friendship is my credo.”

  He nodded dumbly and I took a chance.

  “Look,” I said, and I put my arm round his shoulders and squeezed. “That’s what friends do in a natural world. It’s affection and support in a universe where we all need affection and support. But in this place it’s ‘queering’ and it makes people point and sneer. You and I know it’s friendship, but when someone like that vile cunt in your House tries it on with you, he kids himself that it’s your fault. Always remember that he’s the one who’s scared. He may insult you but secretly he’s terrified that you’re going to tell your brother or your housemaster or the whole House. That’s why he’s trying to kid himself that you led him on. It’s the old, old story. Just like Potiphar’s wife and just like every rejected rapist the world over. But don’t let what your brother said worry you. He meant well but he’s obviously made you doubt everyone’s motives towards you. Those millionaires who are convinced that people only like them for their money, you know the type? Well, you don’t want to become the equivalent, do you? Someone who only believes that people like you because you’re good-looking. You wouldn’t want to live like that. That’s nothing but the lack of confidence trick.”

  He had allowed my arm to stay around him without protest. It was dark. No one could see us.

  It was the finest achievement of my life so far, arrived at with bluff, deceit, hypocrisy, manipulation, abuse of trust and a few exploitative elements of gimcrack wisdom and genuinely good advice. Good advice, like a secret, is easier to give away than to keep.

  I let my arm drop and returned my hand to the warm interior of my greatcoat pocket. “Do you think you’re pretty?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Well there you are then. You can’t live your life in the shadow of other people’s opinions, can you? As I say, keep it simple.”

  “Thanks, Fry,” he said. “I wish I knew how you know all these things.”

  “Hey, come on. You’re only in the second term of your first year. You’re thirteen years old. You’re not expected to know the secrets of the universe.”

  “I’m fourteen actually,” he said. “It was my birthday last week.”

  Jesus, he was only … what, six months younger than me?

  “Well, fourteen, then. Still, you can’t …”

  “The same age as you. But you just seem to k
now everything.”

  The bass line to the badly produced dance track of my life. “How come you know everything, Fry?”

  I want to reply, “How come you think I know everything? Or, how come you think I think I know everything? How come that?”

  Well, I must be honest, I do have some idea how people might believe it.

  Take for example the selection of photographs to accompany this book. What a job. To find a single photograph of me in which I don’t look like a smug, self-satisfied creep who has just swallowed a quart of cream and knows where he can get his complacent paws on another. That photograph of me, standing next to my brother dressed for his first day at Chesham Prep, my smugness there qualifies for swagger, pride in him at least. You should see the photographs I had to discard.

  Every time I pose for a photograph I try and smile a friendly smile, a sort of “Hello there! Gosh! Crumbs! Isn’t this jolly!” sort of smile. Every time the photograph comes out I see a silken smirk on my face that makes me want to wail and shriek.

  Vanity of course, as the preacher saith, all is vanity. Maybe I should have let you see my graduation photograph and a few other pictures that would have sent you doubled-up to the vomitorium.

  So that look, that oh-so-pleased-with-himself look, combined with a lamentable propensity to explode with unusual words, to spout like a thesaurus and to bristle with look-at-me-aren’t-I-clever general knowledge … I’d be the fool of the world if I didn’t see how that might give others the impression that I thought I knew all the answers. But then you see, I am the fool of the world.

  Matthew was no exception to the general view of me. He looked up to me, physically because I was a foot taller and intellectually because he sincerely believed that I had access to wisdom and knowledge that were denied him. I did a lot of reading, and I had a good memory, everyone knew that of me. He thought that this knowledge gave me power, even when he knew, as everyone knew, that I was always getting into trouble, getting into more and more trouble all the time: he couldn’t have known that so much of that was on account of him or that I was on the verge of getting into the most serious trouble of my life so far that very week.