Rory's Boys

by Alan Clark

  ‘I think I need to say sorry, Victor.’

  ‘Well I do too,’ he said, clasping my hand. ‘Anyway, it seems to have been a cloud with a distinctly silver lining, so let’s move on, shall we?’

  Vic’s phone rang. It was his agent yet again. As he listened, the smile went up to maximum voltage.

  ‘Elton’s people have been on,’ he said, a little catch in his throat. ‘He’s doing another album of duets and he wants me.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘What’s the song to be?’

  ‘Elton’s put some music to a Shakespeare sonnet.’

  ‘Which one’s that then?’

  Vic gave me an oblique, almost shy smile. He crossed to the window and began to address the statues down in the garden. He spoke the words wistfully, almost in a whisper.

  ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate …’.

  Twelve lines later, he turned back towards me, his eyes spilling over. I wondered if Big Frankie, despite what he’d said last night, had declared himself today after all? And did his elderly squeeze reciprocate? Had the Poor Clares, beseeching the heavens to look kindly on Mount Royal, gone a prayer too far? At the very moment of his unmasking, had The King of Croon also fallen in love?

  ‘Elton says his tune’s a classical-rap fusion,’ said Vic. ‘Any idea what that means?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I lied. ‘Cool.’

  *

  Last night Vic d’Orsay went on television and gave the performance of his life without singing a single note. The BBC switch-board was deluged and this morning he got the best reviews of his career.

  Big Frankie had invited Elspeth and me to his flat for a ‘Sevillano fork-supper’ so we could all watch together. Dolores Potts had been asked too but, as usual, she was going what she called ‘up West’. Nibbling our tapas, we sat through items about hygiene standards in massage parlours and a Tory MP who’d invented a ‘humane’ birch. Vic, as he’d have expected, was to be top of the bill.

  Of course it helped that the Bishop was a caricature of a third-world evangelical; slamming the table, eyes rolling like a Black & White Minstrel, a few resolutions short of a conference. He condemned the concept of a home for elderly homosexuals as an obscene contradiction, demanding that they remain as outcasts in any God-fearing society. He also laid into Britain’s secular decadence in general citing, as examples, scratchcards, Strictly Come Dancing and the novels of Jilly Cooper. The interviewer, a hard-faced Geordie woman known to the tabloids as Stroppy Tits, let her perfectly-plucked eyebrows slowly rise into Norman arches.

  Vic, in a powder blue suit and a pink tie with matching hanky, lolled back as if he were about to doze off and let the torrent of bigotry wash over him. Then he sat up very straight and began to reply. Stroppy Tits, notorious for her aggressive interjections, didn’t cut in once.

  He told the nation he’d been born Victor Aronson and that he’d been a child in the Warsaw Ghetto, followed by two years in Treblinka. He’d watched his father and brother die there; he had no idea what had become of his mother and sister, but he guessed they’d perished too. Christ, I didn’t know any of this. He’d only ever said his family had died in the war.

  ‘But even as we faced this horror, we still had each other to turn to,’ said Vic. ‘If you’re Jewish, Muslim, black or any other group that gets a rough deal in our world, you’ve still probably got your family to lick your wounds and allow you your dignity. The glaring exception to this principle is the gay minority. It’s a lot better now of course but, for my generation at least, the last people you’d confide in were your own folk, in case they might stop loving you. So most of us began to live in constant fear of being found out. Your home, the one place you should be able to feel safe, could never be quite the same again. And for many people, these fears were totally justified. When their secret came out, they did lose their families, either by being literally ejected or just by the silent withdrawal of the love they’d once imagined they could always take for granted. And it still happens today, even in these shiny pink post-Millenium times.’

  In Big Frankie’s little flat, I had a mouthful of bocorones that I couldn’t swallow.

  The Bishop said that decent families had the absolute right to reject children who were an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. Keeping one under your roof would be like having a Trojan horse filled with the soldiers of Satan. Stroppy Tits’ eyebrows arched from Norman into Perpendicular Gothic.

  ‘Lots of gay people spend years trying to rebuild some sort of family unit,’ Vic went on. ‘Some manage it, by finding partners or by creating a circle of loving friends. But some never do. For many old guys like me, the gay life hasn’t been that easy. The simple idea behind our project is to give at least a few of them a space to be themselves. And we’re hoping it’s an idea that might catch on.’

  ‘It’s over forty years since the law changed in Britain,’ said Stroppy Tits. ‘Elton’s out, George Michael’s out. What’s kept you?’

  Vic sighed and smiled.

  ‘Honey, my sexuality has never been a problem to me. It was no secret to my friends, colleagues or indeed to my darling exwife, but I baulked at telling the wider world. I felt I’d earned a break from discrimination. And it was another time then. Lord Montagu, Johnnie Gielgud, the great Alan Turing. Even after the law changed, sodomy didn’t sell records, at least not to the lovely ladies who appreciate my sort of music. But I’m ashamed of that now and I’m sitting here trying to make up for it.’

  ‘Why can’t you love gay people?’ demanded Stroppy Tits of the Bishop, who claimed that he did love gay people, but believed that they should be chemically castrated to help them find their way to God.

  Vic replied that he wasn’t a huge fan of God’s. He wasn’t impressed by God’s CV he said, God having not turned up for work a few too many times; Vic himself having been present on the most notorious occasion when God had overslept. The Bishop called him a blasphemer as well as a pervert. Vic shook his head and sighed again.

  ‘For most of my life I’ve gone around singing songs about love,’ he said. ‘And I really do believe in moons in June, red roses for a blue lady and dancing under the starlight. Aren’t those the moments that we tuck under our arms as we head towards our graves? It’s what separates us from the beasts of the field, among whom the Bishop reckons I should be numbered. But I see no love in this man here or in people like him. He is the abomination, not me. And I will stand up to be counted against him and his sort until my dying day.’

  Big Frankie punched the air.

  ‘Yeah Papi, you tell that fucker! Beggin’ your pardon Miss Wishart.’

  The Bishop slammed the table a bit more, chucked in Leviticus and declared that buggery would destroy the planet faster than global warming.

  ‘One last question Vic d’Orsay,’ said Stroppy Tits. ‘Before your parents perished, did they find out you were gay?’

  Vic opened his mouth but nothing came out. He took a slow sip of water, then another. Stroppy Tits waited then repeated the question.

  ‘There was a boy in my hut,’ he said. ‘A few years older than me. About seventeen maybe. A pink triangle on his jacket. Alone. No family. A nice kid, always smiling in a place where there was little reason for that. My brother told me not to talk to him, but we became friends nevertheless. One day, my brother found us in a corner of the hut together. Our fingertips were touching. That was all. But my brother saw. He must have told my father. My father died about a month later, my brother very soon after. Neither of them had spoken to me during that time.’

  In front of the TV, Big Frankie began to shake. Elspeth lowered her eyes and fixed them on her plate. I just felt a weariness sweep over me like the flu. A weariness at the whole damn thing.

  ‘Now honey,’ Vic was saying on the box. ‘My thoughts are turning to a free night-cap in your green room. Will you join me?’

  ‘I’d be delighted, Mr d’Orsay,’ said Stroppy Tits. They both
pulled off their mikes and abandoned the table, leaving the Bishop on his own as the credits charged over him like stampeding cattle.

  Big Frankie was crying and laughing at the same time. Elspeth sat silently finishing her food. Every now and then, she’d been giving me odd sidelong glances. But there would be no more conversation now. I got up and said goodnight.

  In my own flat, I poured myself a large whisky. I’d decided to wait up for Vic. There was no way I’d be able to sleep without seeing him, saying something, though I’d no idea what that might be. Those layers I’d sensed in him went deeper and darker than anything I could have imagined. But he’d survived. How come I couldn’t quite say the same?

  There was a ring at my door. Elspeth asked if she could come in. I led her upstairs. She peered at me with those wee green eyes.

  ‘That’s what happened here, is it not?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That’s what happened here, to you. What Mr d’Orsay was talking about on the television. Your grandmother found out about you, disowned you, barred you from this house? That’s why you never left Glenlyon in the holidays. It all makes sense now. Is that not true?’

  I stared back at her. The flippant denial was on my tongue but it stuck there like a toffee and wouldn’t come out. Apart from Ms Prada, I’d never admitted it to anyone. Not sure why. For Christ’s sake, it shouldn’t have been that difficult now, when a tsunami of water had gone under the bridge. Vic had just bared his soul to tens of thousands. And it would be good to tell somebody who wasn’t paid to listen, who wouldn’t glance at their watch to see if my hour was up yet. But the truth I needed to tell her wouldn’t come either. Instead I felt my throat close, my mouth contort and my eyes begin to glaze over. Fuck, it was going to happen.

  ‘Och, Rory Blaine,’ said Elspeth. An arm encased in a baggy green cardigan reached out towards me.

  *

  I waited for Vic on the front steps of Mount Royal with Alma and the bottle of whisky. The night was mild and still; the rooks were asleep. The soft hum of the small-hours traffic out on Spaniards Road seemed to come from another world. I suddenly realized I’d not been beyond the gates for nearly a week. When we’d been under siege, I’d been too anxious to desert the house, as if it might somehow be gone when I returned. This was my watch after all.

  I was back in myself now. Elspeth had said we needn’t speak of it again if I didn’t want to. I’d told her I’d like to leave the option open if that was okay and she’d said that it was.

  It was nearly one o’clock before Vic’s taxi swept through the gates. Big Frankie bounced out across the grass like one of those balloon things that chased Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. He hauled Vic from the cab, insisting he needed a nice cup of cocoa before bed, but Vic declined with a pale smile. He was tired as a toddler home from the beach, but too excited to sleep.

  ‘Perhaps a very small whisky though,’ he said, eyeing my glass. Frankie looked crestfallen, till Vic kissed his big hand and thanked him for waiting up. We went inside to the Red Damask Drawing-Room. But instead of sitting down, Vic opened the jib door that led to the Chapel Gallery.

  ‘You’re going to drink in there?’ I asked.

  ‘Toots, for a man of noble lineage you’re amazingly middleclass sometimes,’ he said.

  The Chapel Gallery was dominated by two Baroque thrones from which previous Ashridges had looked down on their servants and the rest of the world. Vic threw on the lights, slumped into one of the thrones and put his feet up on the velvet balustrade. He reached for the bottle and took a slug.

  ‘I often sit here,’ he said. ‘It’s such a glorious place, way too good for the likes of God. It pisses me off the way religion was always able to hijack art. Paying half-starved geniuses to cloak its superstitious bullshit in such incredible beauty.’

  We drank silently for a while. Robin Bradbury-Ross’s electronics boys had done an impressive job, brushing Laguerre’s ceiling with light and shade as subtly as he’d done with his paint. Cibber’s alabaster reredos sparkled like sugar, the fat putti looking like they could easily fly off their pediment and join us for a nightcap.

  ‘So how did I do?’ Vic asked eventually.

  ‘I don’t think you need me to tell you that’

  Alma was splayed out across Vic’s belly as if it were a hearthrug. He had a talent for inducing adoration that was vaguely annoying.

  ‘I’m really sorry about what happened to you in the war. You’d never mentioned any of that.’

  ‘Well some stuff is so goddam grim that talking about it seems redundant.’

  ‘But you talked about it tonight. To the nation even.’

  ‘I’d not planned to,’ he replied. ‘Maybe it was that African asshole or maybe just one of those moments when such things needed to be aired, shaken like a dusty old blanket.’

  I had a question though I wasn’t sure I had the right to ask it.

  ‘How do you cope with what your father and brother did?’

  ‘Do you remember that first day we met? You asked how I could care for your grandmother with her awful views and I said there comes a time when you just have to forgive everything? It’s fucking hard of course, but it’s best in the long run or you can eat yourself away. I guess my father and brother saw my sexuality as one more staging-post in their humiliation. They were both dead within weeks. I used to wonder if that was my fault. Anyhow, whatever sin they committed against me, they expiated it pretty damn quick.’

  He stretched out an arm and I topped up his glass.

  ‘Try to forgive, Rory. Like I did. It really helps. It’s one of the few things the Bible-bashers have got right.’

  ‘Lost you,’ I said. ‘Forgive who?’

  ‘Your grandmother.’

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘Educated guess,’ said Vic, tickling Alma’s tummy as he sipped the scotch. ‘You’ve never said and I’ve never asked, but am I wrong?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said. It was clearly my night for telling the world.

  ‘Maybe you could start by remembering the extenuating circumstances in your case.’

  ‘Lost you again.’

  ‘Your grandfather.’ Vic scanned my face and saw nothing there. ‘Jeez, is it possible?’

  He gently detached Alma, heaved himself up from the throne and circled the Gallery, the glass in his fist.

  ‘Sir Archibald Blaine swung both ways, with a very pronounced swing in our direction. I can’t believe you never knew that, it wasn’t exactly a state secret.’

  Christ. I could only shake my head.

  ‘He married your grandmother for the Ashridge loot. It was The Depression. Shipbuilding on the Clyde was having a shit time. Everybody knew about Archie Blaine but they somehow forgot to tell Sibyl and her parents. He clearly managed to get it up at least once or you wouldn’t be here now but then it was back to the wee laddies in Kelvingrove Park. Unfortunately Sibyl had married for love. She was a proud girl from a proud family and she’d been tricked, used, humiliated. She grabbed your infant dad from his nursery and fled back here to mummy and daddy. Apparently she never saw Archie Blaine again, though people like the Ashridges didn’t divorce in those days. So Sibyl sat in Mount Royal, inherited it, turned herself into a social lioness, took the occasional discreet lover and eventually went slightly batty. Anyway, hell hath no fury; that’s why she hated gays. Wouldn’t knowingly have them in the house. One of them had scorned her big time and nobody did that to Sibyl. I got all this decades later from Wallis Simpson. Sorry to name-drop.’

  I reached for the bottle. A piece of a jigsaw, big as a meteor, had come out of nowhere, smacked me in the face and fallen into its rightful place.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Vic.

  ‘Yep.’

  And I was. As I glugged the whisky, I felt a sudden easing; as if some tiny muscle which had been in spasm for years had relaxed itself. Her cruelty had been irrefutable, but she’d had some sliver of excuse. It hadn’t been just my cri
me, but somebody else’s too.

  Vic looked suddenly knackered. He’d had a big night after all. We both had. We went back into the Gilded Hall.

  ‘We’ve nearly done it, haven’t we toots?’ he said, looking round the echoing space, the gilding shining as it hadn’t done in three hundred years. ‘The goddam house is coming alive again. We’re going to be okay, aren’t we?’

  ‘Sure we are, Victor,’ I said.

  ‘Toots, whatever anybody else hits you with, you’ve always got yourself to fight back with. Remember that. It works.’

  I watched him till he’d reached the top of the staircase. He’d drunk more than was good for him and the leg affected by the stroke still occasionally gave way.

  So I’ve got myself to fight back with he says. Fine, except I’ve not yet got a clear picture of who that is. All those years ago in Oz, after Matty Rice had gone, I’d set out to bury myself, just like I’d tried to bury Granny. That had been the big mistake of course. That was why I went to the eau-de-nil room with the droopy azalea. Was I getting anywhere? Fuck knows. But two remarkable things had happened tonight. I had wept in the lap of Elspeth Wishart and discovered that my story was more complex than I had known it to be. I was still filled with the sense of easing that had come over me in the Chapel, the sense that I’d just put down a burden and that the ache would soon begin to fade. I crossed over to the portrait of the young princess with the sapphires in her hair and whispered up to her.

  ‘Granny, I’m sorry. Sorry for what happened to you in your life. And I’m sorry that my being what I am hurt you even more. But it wasn’t my fault. Could you not have understood that?’

  Then I threw all the switches and left her in the blackness.

  *

  I’ve never been able to recall the nice man’s face, not even vaguely. I suppose I’d just blotted it out; a common post-trauma response according to Ms Prada. But I’d been fifteen back then, hormones raging. I’d have sucked off anyone, age and looks immaterial as they say on the more desperate websites these days. When I’d offered to show him the folly in the Wilderness, my heart had been bursting under my velvet jacket. I’d never taken such a risk. Never. That night had been my last under the roof of Mount Royal.