A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  Mr Browning’s building had no knocker or doorbell, only a front door in need of paint, propped open with an umbrella stand. There was a dim glimpse of a hall with a battered table where post could be left. Presumably bell pulls or knockers were on each flat’s door further up. But what if they weren’t and Harry entered to find himself an intruder in Hector Browning’s house, or worse, if he had mistaken the address, that of an indignant stranger?

  He stood on the other side of the street and started to examine the faces of the women passing by. Some were maids or cooks, to judge from the relative simplicity of their clothes or cheapness of their hats, but the others were harder to read. Smart. Smooth. Polished. Very occasionally daring. Were they blameless or scarlet?

  Of course it was in the nature of respectability to reveal or imply nothing but itself. Any signs were likely to be small: the discreet callus left by a removed wedding ring, a tugged curl escaping from an otherwise immaculate chignon, perhaps only a minutely torn hem betraying the violence of a passion recently sated. And what would be the male equivalents? A hectic flush to the cheeks, perhaps. Fingernail marks to the back of the neck. Perhaps only the suggestive seaside smell he had caught off neighbours in the baths sometimes, a smell in which something was added to the usual musk of a man not yet clean.

  Mr Browning was standing in the doorway. He was at once shorter and more handsome than Harry had remembered. He was in shirtsleeves and no collar, his cuffs neatly turned up, and he was relishing a cigarette and the sunshine and watching Harry with some amusement. He appeared oblivious to the throng of human traffic about them, and his attention had the effect of seeming to block it out for Harry too, so that he crossed the street without looking, causing a cabby to curse at him.

  ‘Mr Cane. What a pleasant surprise.’ Mr Browning held out a hand.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I had remembered the address,’ Harry said, only he stuttered badly on the W.

  Mr Browning didn’t wince, or look away, or finish his sentence for him the way people often did, but watched with interest. ‘Forgive my dishabille,’ he said. ‘You had no appointment.’

  ‘Er, no. No, I hadn’t.’

  ‘But I’m sure we can fit you in.’ He trod out his cigarette neatly on the pavement, then headed upstairs.

  Heart racing, Harry followed him, taking in a length of worn red stair-carpet and hunting prints. He imagined the talk of appointments was for the benefit of passers-by, so was perplexed when, businesslike, Mr Browning showed him into a consulting room hung with diagrams of the lungs, mouth and tongue and illustrations of the various arrangements of lips and tongue. Among them, not especially apropos, were hung engravings of ancient Greek sculpture: charioteers, discoboloi, wrestlers.

  ‘Never mind the rhotacism or the stutter for now,’ Mr Browning said. ‘We need to get you to breathe properly. At the moment your speech is air-starved, like a bird in a box. Take off your jacket, please, and your waistcoat, so I can see what’s going on. That’s right. I’ll hang them here for you. Now. Feet apart. A little further. Now breathe.’

  ‘I am breathing.’

  ‘No you’re not. Breathe in. Fill your lungs. Keep breathing in. All the way. Now breathe out. There. Too quick. Too starved! Stop being so afraid.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Trust me. You’re terrified. Breathe in again, and this time say a nice long ah as you breathe out.’

  Harry did as he was told, while Browning watched him critically.

  ‘Again,’ Browning said. ‘Don’t flinch. I need to touch you to feel what’s happening.’ He stepped up behind Harry and placed the flat of one hand on his solar plexus. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Nice slow one. Louder. Louder! That’s better. I want you always to think of your breaths when you speak. Always be aware that you are using air to form the words and that you need plenty of it. Breathing is natural but it’s incredible how bad most people are at doing it. They breathe with barely a third of their lung capacity and their speech is starved and hobbles as a result. Were you often scared as a boy?’

  ‘Usually.’

  ‘Of a man?’

  ‘Usually.’

  ‘Hmm. Now. I need to touch you in two places at once.’ He kept one hand in the middle of Harry’s chest but placed his other a hand’s span lower, on his belly. ‘Good,’ he said, so close now that Harry felt his words on the nape of his neck and could smell the citrus tang of his shaving preparation. ‘You have some muscle there. Now I want you to use it. Breathe in and say a long ah again. Don’t be so self-conscious. All my neighbours are out at work, and anyway, nobody could care less. But this time, as you’re exhaling, I want to feel you pressing out on my other hand down here as hard as you can. I’ll press in but I need you to resist me.’

  Feeling absurd and giddy all at once, Harry did as he said, pressing out on the grasp that was burning into him, feeling sweat break out on his chest and back, and the ah he produced seemed like a shout, like no noise he normally made.

  ‘Good,’ Browning said, hands still in place. ‘Now breathe normally and say, I wasn’t sure of the address.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure,’ Harry began, with no hesitation, no stutter, then broke off as he felt Hector Browning plant a firm kiss on the nape of his neck.

  For a minute or two they stood there, Browning’s lips and nose pressing from one side and his hands from the other, and then, very, very hesitantly, Harry brought his hands up to rest on top of the other man’s, at which Browning kissed him again and brought one of his legs forward so that it nestled between Harry’s.

  ‘I hav—’ Harry began, and stuttered.

  ‘Stop,’ Browning murmured. ‘Breathe in. Now tell me.’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea what to do,’ Harry said, without stuttering.

  ‘I know exactly what to do. Turn round.’

  Harry turned to find Browning’s handsome face inches from his own. Browning smiled, then kissed him on the lips.

  There was a small bedroom off the consulting room, and a minute bathroom with a view of drainpipes.

  Some forty minutes later, as they lay panting and naked across the bed, which was so narrow that one or other of them had always to be beneath the other, Browning murmured, ‘Most of my students come in the late mornings. I am always free between half past two and four o’clock. My door won’t be locked. If I’m out when you arrive, just get in the bed and wait for me.’

  They were lovers for over a year. Animal instinct told Harry that the only way to stay sane during such an undertaking was not to analyse it. But of course he did analyse it, because he was moderately intelligent, sensitive and underoccupied, and because there were usually a hundred and sixty-four hours of each week’s hundred and sixty-eight when they were not together. He was soon an expert at the risk he was taking. The notorious trials of the 1890s had left their mark. If caught, they risked imprisonment with hard labour as well as a lifetime of disgrace.

  ‘But we won’t be caught,’ Browning insisted. (It was an oddity of their intimacy that Harry could never quite think of him as Hector and never called him anything.) ‘The ones who are caught are the fools who stray beyond their class or age group.’

  Harry was thinking that they weren’t of quite the same class, then remembered that his sister-in-law was now a chorus girl, which had rather blurred such distinctions.

  ‘Besides,’ Browning went on, ‘you come to me for speech lessons, of which you speak to no one because you’re so terribly ashamed.’

  He meticulously wrote Harry a cash receipt for a lesson after their every meeting, although no money changed hands, of course. Harry filed the receipts in his desk at home, then decided that was ridiculous, so took to burning them once they were a week or so old.

  Terror of discovery would steal up on him now in idle moments, usually amidst family. In a crowded, overheated scene, it was like an icy
draught only he could detect. Or he would wake in the night and not be able to sleep for the compulsion to imagine the worst. And yet, paradoxically, this terror seemed to form an intrinsic part of the excitement his meetings with Browning brought him.

  He had never had a job, so until then his life had enjoyed a smooth interconnectedness, like that of a young woman. But now, like any working man’s, it acquired compartments. He did not stop loving Winnie and Phyllis. If anything, he began to love Phyllis all the more, the moment he began to risk losing her for ever. Winnie had quietly ceased visiting his bed not long after their move to Ma Touraine – a thing he accepted with guilty relief, even though he never tired of her private company and conversation. He regarded his wife with new understanding, knowing now the strain it must have cost her to keep her unquenched feelings for Whitacre in one box of her heart, her love for her child in a second and her respectable wish to survive in yet a third. Secrecy, he began to see, was corrosive, less of his intimate relationships than of his self-respect. He had never felt so unmanly or immature.

  His afternoon visits to Browning’s brass bed exposed his clothed life for a sham, even as they awoke in him a whorish shamelessness he recognised as his buried essence.

  It was a part of the thrill he felt in the little room, as Browning played him and ploughed him, that his lover forced the admission from his lips. ‘You like this, don’t you?’ he would ask. ‘You want this, don’t you?’ and Harry never once stammered when he answered yes and found he could even laugh at the recognition of himself the confirmation brought.

  There was a mirror over the little room’s overflowing chest of drawers angled precisely to reflect them on the bed. Harry rarely looked at himself below the neck at home, unless fully dressed and about to leave the house, and was aghast at first, then fascinated, at the sight of himself, so pale, yet flushed with lust, on all fours before a handsome, hairy-bodied man.

  It was inevitable, perhaps, that he became eaten up with jealousy.

  ‘Do you see other men?’ he began to ask, or something like it, and Browning would invariably smile and kiss him and answer in some variation of ‘You will never know,’ which was worse than any flat denial. It was inevitable, too, perhaps, that the ecstasies Browning drove him to would eventually drive him to say he loved him.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Browning would say. ‘Don’t let’s ask for the impossible,’ or ‘Let’s just enjoy what we have,’ or, worst of all, a smiling but unreciprocating ‘I know.’

  Harry didn’t love him with his brain. He knew Browning’s wit was cruel and his thinking shallow. He knew that Browning, though understandably vain, was taken up, to the point of tediousness, with the tiny world in which he worked.

  And yet, had Browning produced two tickets to the Paris boat train and said, ‘Come live with me where we can be ourselves,’ Harry knew he would have had no hesitation in deserting everything and everybody to go with him.

  Had Browning reciprocated, been sentimental or even clinging, Harry might have pulled away or lost interest, but the strictness and control the other exercised over him had the reverse effect. He had no souvenirs or keepsakes, beyond what scent of his lover lingered beneath his fingernails for a few precious hours after each meeting. Letter-writing was of course impossible.

  He did put pen to paper, however. Browning was out one afternoon when he let himself in. Tipsy from a good lunch with Winnie, who had come into town with him to drop off a dress for a client then been waved off on the train on the pretext that he was visiting his broker, Harry had soon bored of lolling, half naked, on Browning’s dirty bed, so had written him a rather saucy, unsigned billet-doux in an autograph book on the bedside table. They hadn’t discussed it in the heat of Browning’s arrival but he was fairly certain he had read it. He wrote more in the same little book on other occasions when he was kept waiting. He allowed the writing to become anything but romantic, as he sensed Browning would dislike that, making his short effusions flatteringly pornographic, using words he still could not speak aloud even in the button-breaking heights of passion.

  He often remembered now a chilling little exchange he had overheard between his cousins, the country ones who had so little to do with him. One had spoken with disgust of the way a neighbouring landowner beat his dog, and the other had sighed, ‘Yes, the man’s a brute, but it’s an outlet, I suppose . . .’

  Chapter Nine

  Harry had been at the theatre again. Under cover of supporting Pattie’s less than glorious but nonetheless continuing career at the Gaiety, he attended her first show there, and its replacements, assiduously, until he knew every banal song and facile dance step off by heart. The latest offering was the usual drivel and froth, no more profound than its predecessor, but the gentlemen of the chorus, fronted by Browning, had a rather daring number in swimming costumes. (Browning said these were damnably hot and itchy to dance in.)

  Tonight, at short notice, Pattie had stepped forward to sing a solo for an actress who was ill. Harry had gone on his own because Winnie had a wedding dress to complete, and had rather enjoyed himself even though, to his consternation, Browning was nowhere to be seen. He called at the stage door afterwards to pass on his congratulations to Pattie. He sent up his card to her and couldn’t help noticing that several of the departing actors, including Cora Lane, seemed surprised to see him waiting there in the yellowish light.

  The doorkeeper’s runner, a youth with angry spots, returned, handed him back his card and said he was sorry but Miss Wells was ‘suddenly indisposed’. Harry thought little of this: Notty was probably with her, and he had no doubt that by now, Notty had become her lover. Pattie, he suspected, was too much the sensualist, too little the tactician, and had misplayed her cards and found herself with a gold watch and a lover instead of a plump engagement diamond, a stable future and the remote possibility of a title. She now often stayed with friends in town rather than come home after a performance, behaviour that nobody challenged or questioned, perhaps for fear of what it might drive her to confirm. Mrs Wells and Winnie had taken to sighing when she was spoken of, and referring to her, as often as not, as poor Pattie. Notty still came to Sunday lunches occasionally, but any hope of marriage was a pallid, sickly thing.

  Life in Strawberry Hill had become more comfortable in the last year, since both Robert and Frank had married. Robert had wooed and won a client’s wealthy widow and was living in pompous splendour in Richmond. Frank had found his Elfine quite unassisted, a bosomless bluestocking with no sense of humour, who matched him so perfectly she might have been bred for the purpose. They had taken on and restored a house Mrs Wells had inherited from her mother in distant Camden.

  So not only did they all now have more space, but Harry was growing used to acting as head of the otherwise female household. There were times now, after a good lunch perhaps, and playing badminton with the girls on the lawn, when he felt his life richer than Browning’s, in his suite of bachelor cells, where the nearest grass was a public park and the nearest loved ones heaven knew where.

  There was one room left lit when he came home. He thought nothing of this since it was a household custom always to leave a lamp burning in the sitting room at the front of the house to welcome anyone out late. When he had bolted the front door behind him and hung up his coat and hat, he stepped into the sitting room, thinking to put out the lamp, and found Robert in there, waiting in an armchair with a book.

  ‘Robert, hello. What a nice surprise,’ he said, though it wasn’t entirely.

  Robert had jumped up as he entered, evidently nervous. From the smell of him, the glass of whisky he was drinking was not his first. ‘Please sit down,’ he said, not shaking the hand Harry automatically offered, but covering the awkwardness of not doing so by patting at his jacket pockets. He had not dressed for dinner.

  ‘Robert, is something wrong? Is it Winnie? Have you eaten?’

  ‘Do shu
t up and sit down,’ Robert said, his voice uneven.

  Harry sat.

  Robert remained standing, swaying slightly. Harry had rarely seen him drunk before and, being sober himself, was peculiarly sensitive to the older man’s tension.

  ‘Just answer me this,’ Robert said. ‘This one thing.’ He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and drew out a small, silk-covered notebook that Harry did not immediately recognise, as it was appearing so much out of its usual context. ‘Is this handwriting yours?’ He fumbled the little book open to a page where Harry immediately identified one of his pornographic messages to Browning.

  Harry hesitated, wondering by what grotesque accident such a thing had travelled from the obscure Jermyn Street flat to his brother-in-law’s sweaty possession. He was glad he had drunk so little earlier; even so, he needed to choose his words with a care he was not sure he could muster. The fear that had been rumbling in the background of his thoughts all year was threatening to make his hands shake. He discreetly clasped them to his knees, picturing policemen at the door of Ma Touraine, imagining the fuss, Mrs Wells nervously charming them and saying they must have made a mistake. It was not oakum picking or hard labour in a quarry he dreaded, he realised, nor exposure in a courtroom, but the unstoppable process by which his wife’s family and his brother would pass from bafflement to revulsion.

  ‘Who else knows?’ he asked, somehow managing not to stutter.

  ‘Is it your handwriting, man? Because if it isn’t, I must involve the police in a case of attempted blackmail.’

  Harry nodded. ‘It’s mine.’ And now he stuttered. ‘I . . . I mean the bit you showed me is.’

  There was no fire in the grate, simply one of the pretty paper fans Winnie made. Robert crouched down, tugged the fan aside so clumsily it would never sit right again and tore the little book apart. He lit a taper and set fire to the first pages, then dropped section after section to burn on top of them. The brief flare was merry and the lamplight seemed much dimmer when it had died down.