by Denton Welch
‘Could I really bath here?’ I asked.
‘If you don’t mind using my water. I’ll promise not to pee in it. I’m not really filthy, you know.’
Archer laughed and chuckled, because he saw me turning red at his coarseness. He lit another of his peasant cigarettes and began to unlace his boots. He got me to pull them off. I knelt down, bowed my head and pulled. When the ski boot suddenly flew off, my nose dipped forward and I smelt Archer’s foot in its woolly, hairy, humid casing of sock.
‘Would you just rub my foot and leg?’ Archer said urgently, a look of pain suddenly shooting across his face. ‘I’ve got cramp. It often comes on at the end of the day.’
He shot his leg out rigidly and told me where to rub and massage. I felt each of his curled toes separately and the hard tendons in his leg. His calf was like a firm sponge ball. His thigh, swelling out, amazed me. I likened it in my mind to the trumpet of some musical instrument. I went on rubbing methodically. I was able to feel his pain melting away.
When the tense look had quite left his face, he said, ‘Thanks,’ and stood up. He unbuttoned his trousers, let them fall to the ground and pulled his shirt up. Speaking to me with his head imprisoned in it, he said, ‘You go and get your clothes and I’ll begin bathing.’
I left him and hurried up to the hotel, carrying my skis on my shoulder. I ran up to my room and pulled my evening clothes out of the wardrobe. The dinner jacket and trousers had belonged to my brother six years before, when he was my age. I was secretly ashamed of this fact, and had taken my brother’s name from the inside of the breast-pocket and had written my own in elaborate lettering.
I took my comb, face flannel and soap, and, getting out my toboggan, slid back to Archer’s chalet in a few minutes. I let myself in and heard Archer splashing. The little hall was full of steam and I saw Archer’s shoulders and arms like a pink smudge through the open bathroom door.
‘Come and scrub my back,’ he yelled; ‘it gives me a lovely feeling.’ He thrust a large stiff nailbrush into my hands and told me to scrub as hard as I could.
I ran it up and down his back until I’d made harsh red tramlines. Delicious tremors seemed to be passing through Archer.
‘Ah! Go on!’ said Archer in a dream, like a purring cat. ‘When I’m rich I’ll have a special back-scratcher slave.’ I went on industriously scrubbing his back till I was afraid that I would rub the skin off. I liked to give him pleasure.
At last he stood up all dripping and said, ‘Now it’s your turn.’ I undressed and got into Archer’s opaque, soapy water. I lay back and wallowed. Archer poured some very smelly salts on to my stomach. One crystal stuck in my navel and tickled and grated against me.
‘This whiff ought to cover up all remaining traces of me!’ Archer laughed.
‘What’s the smell supposed to be?’ I asked, brushing the crystals off my stomach into the water, and playing with the one that lodged so snugly in my navel.
‘Russian pine,’ said Archer, shutting his eyes ecstatically and making inbreathing dreamy noises. He rubbed himself roughly with the towel and made his hair stand up on end.
I wanted to soak in the bath for hours, but it was already getting late, and so I had to hurry.
Archer saw what difficulty I had in tying my tie. He came up to me and said, ‘Let me do it.’ I turned round relieved but slightly ashamed of being incompetent.
I kept very still, and he tied it tightly and rapidly with his hamlike hands. He gave the bows a little expert jerk and pat. His eyes had a very concentrated, almost crossed look and I felt him breathing down on my face. All down the front our bodies touched featherily; little points of warmth came together. The hard-boiled shirts were like slightly warmed dinner-plates.
When I had brushed my hair, we left the chalet and began to walk up the path to the hotel. The beaten snow was so slippery, now that we were shod only in patent-leather slippers, that we kept sliding backwards. I threw out my arms, laughing, and shouting to Archer to rescue me; then, when he grabbed me and started to haul me to him, he too would begin to slip. It was a still, Prussian-blue night with rather weak stars. Our laughter seemed to ring across the valley, to hit the mountains and then to travel on and on and on.
We reached the hotel a little the worse for wear. The soles of my patent-leather shoes had become soaked, and there was snow on my trousers. Through bending forward, the studs in Archer’s shirt had burst undone, and the slab of hair hung over one of his eyes. We went into the cloakroom to readjust ourselves before entering the dining-room.
‘Come and sit at my table,’ Archer said; then he added, ‘No, we’ll sit at yours; there are two places there already.’
We sat down and began to eat Roman gnocchi. (The proprietor of the hotel was Italian-Swiss.) I did not like mine very much and was glad when I could go on to œufs au beurre noir. Now that my brother was away I could pick and choose in this way, leaving out the meat course, if I chose to, without causing any comment.
Archer drank Pilsner and suggested that I should too. Not wanting to disagree with him, I nodded my head, although I hated the pale, yellow, bitter water.
After the meal Archer ordered me crème de menthe with my coffee; I had seen a nearby lady drinking this pretty liquid and asked him about it. To be ordered a liqueur in all seriousness was a thrilling moment for me. I sipped the fumy peppermint, which left such an artificial heat in my throat and chest, and thought that apart from my mother, who was dead, I had never liked anyone so much as I liked Archer. He didn’t try to interfere with me at all. He just took me as I was and yet seemed to like me.
Archer was now smoking a proper cigar, not the leaf-rolled cigarettes we had had at lunch-time. He offered me one too, but I had the sense to realise that he did not mean me to take one and smoke it there before the eyes of all the hotel. I knew also that it would have made me sick, for my father had given me a cigar when I was eleven, in an attempt to put me off smoking for ever.
I always associated cigars with middle-aged men, and I watched Archer interestedly, thinking how funny the stiff fat thing looked sticking out of his young mouth.
We were sitting on the uncurtained sun-terrace, looking out on to the snow in the night; the moon was just beginning to rise. It made the snow glitter suddenly, like fish scales. Behind us people were dancing in the salon and adjoining rooms. The music came to us in angry snatches, some notes distorted, others quite obliterated. Archer did not seem to want to dance. He seemed content to sit with me in silence.
Near me on a what-not stand stood a high-heeled slipper made of china. I took it down and slipped my hand into it. How hideously ugly the china pom-poms were down the front! The painted centipede climbing up the red heel wore a knowing, human expression. I moved my fingers in the china shoe, pretending they were toes.
‘I love monstrosities too,’ said Archer, as I put the shoe back beside the fern in its crinkly paper-covered pot.
Later we wandered to the buffet bar and stood there drinking many glasses of the limonade which was made with white wine. I took the tinkly pieces of ice into my mouth and sucked them, trying to cool myself a little. Blood seemed to rise in my face; my head buzzed.
Suddenly I felt full of limonade and lager. I left Archer to go to the cloakroom, but he followed and stood beside me in the next china niche, while the water flushed and gushed importantly in the polished copper tubes, and an interesting, curious smell came from the wire basket which held some strange disinfectant crystals. Archer stood so quietly and guardingly beside me there that I had to say, ‘Do I look queer?’
‘No, you don’t look queer; you look nice,’ he said simply.
A rush of surprise and pleasure made me hotter still. We clanked over the tiles and left the cloakroom.
In the hall, I remembered that I had left all my skiing clothes at the chalet.
‘I shall need them in the morning,’ I said to Archer.
‘Let’s go down there now, then I can make cocoa on my spirit-lamp, and y
ou can bring the clothes back with you.’
We set out in the moonlight; Archer soon took my arm, for he saw that I was drunk, and the path was more slippery than ever. Archer sang ‘Silent Night’ in German, and I began to cry. I could not stop myself. It was such a delight to cry in the moonlight with Archer singing my favourite song; and my brother far away up the mountain.
Suddenly we both sat down on our behinds with a thump. There was a jarring pain at the bottom of my spine, but I began to laugh wildly; so did Archer. We lay there laughing, the snow melting under us and soaking through the seats of our trousers and the shoulders of our jackets.
Archer pulled me to my feet and dusted me down with hard slaps. My teeth grated together each time he slapped me. He saw that I was becoming more and more drunk in the freezing air. He propelled me along to the chalet, more or less frog-marching me in an expert fashion. I was quite content to leave myself in his hands.
When he got me upstairs, he put me into one of the bunks and told me to rest. The feathers ballooned out round me. I sank down deliciously. I felt as if I were floating down some magic staircase for ever.
Archer got his little meta-stove out and made coffee—not cocoa as he had said. He brought me over a strong cup and held it to my lips. I drank it unthinkingly and not tasting it, doing it only because he told me to.
When he took the cup away, my head fell back on the pillow, and I felt myself sinking and floating away again. I was on skis this time, but they were liquid skis, made of melted glass, and the snow was glass too, but a sort of glass that was springy, like gelatine, and flowing like water.
I felt a change in the light, and knew that Archer was bending over me. Very quietly he took off my shoes, undid my tie, loosened the collar and unbuttoned my braces in front. I remember thinking, before I finally fell asleep, how clever he was to know about undoing the braces; they had begun to feel so tight pulling down on my shoulders and dragging the trousers up between my legs. Archer covered me with several blankets and another quilt.
When I woke in the morning, Archer was already up. He had made me some tea and had put it on the stove to keep warm. He brought it over to me and I sat up. I felt ill, rather sick. I remembered what a glorious day yesterday had been, and thought how extraordinary it was that I had not slept in my own bed at the hotel, but in Archer’s room, in my clothes.
I looked at him shamefacedly. ‘What happened last night? I felt peculiar,’ I said.
‘The lager and the lemonade, and the crème de menthe made you a bit tight, I’m afraid,’ Archer said, laughing. ‘Do you feel better now? We’ll go up to the hotel and have breakfast soon.’
I got up and washed and changed into my skiing clothes. I still felt rather sick. I made my evening clothes into a neat bundle and tied them on to my toboggan. I had the sweets Archer had given me in my pocket.
We went up to the hotel, dragging the toboggan behind us. And there on the doorstep we met my brother with one of the guides. They had had to return early, because someone in the party had broken a ski.
He was in a temper. He looked at us and then said to me, ‘What have you been doing?’
I was at a loss to know what to answer. The very sight of him had so troubled me that this added difficulty of explaining my actions was too much for me.
I looked at him miserably and mouthed something about going in to have breakfast.
My brother turned to Archer fiercely, but said nothing.
Archer explained: ‘Your brother’s just been down to my place. We went skiing together yesterday and he left some clothes at the chalet.’
‘It’s very early,’ was all my brother said; then he swept me on in into the hotel before him, without another word to the guide or to Archer.
He went with me up to my room and saw that the bed had not been slept in.
I said clumsily, ‘The maid must have been in and done my room early.’ I could not bear to explain to him about my wonderful day, or why I had slept at the chalet.
My brother was so furious that he took no more notice of my weak explanations and lies.
When I suddenly said in desperation, ‘I feel sick,’ he seized me, took me to the basin, forced his fingers down my throat and struck me on the back till a yellow cascade of vomit gushed out of my mouth. My eyes were filled with stinging water; I was trembling. I ran the water in the basin madly, to wash away this sign of shame.
Gradually I grew a little more composed. I felt better, after being sick, and my brother had stopped swearing at me. I filled the basin with freezing water and dipped my face into it. The icy feel seemed to bite round my eye-sockets and make the flesh round my nose firm again. I waited, holding my breath for as long as possible.
Suddenly my head was pushed down and held. I felt my brother’s hard fingers digging into my neck. He was hitting me now with a slipper, beating my buttocks and my back with slashing strokes, hitting a different place each time, as he had been taught when a prefect at school, so that the flesh should not be numbed from a previous blow.
I felt that I was going to choke. I could not breathe under the water, and realised that I would die. I was seized with such a panic that I wrenched myself free and darted round the room, with him after me. Water dripped on the bed, the carpet, the chest of drawers. Splashes of it spat against the mirror in the wardrobe door. My brother aimed vicious blows at me until he had driven me into a corner. There he beat against my uplifted arms, yelling in a hoarse, mad, religious voice, ‘Bastard, Devil, Harlot, Sod!’
As I cowered under his blows, I remember thinking that my brother had suddenly become a lunatic and was talking gibberish in his madness, for, of the words he was using, I had not heard any before, except ‘Devil’.
AN OLD BOY TAKES ME OUT AT REPTON
It must have taken place on the Speech Day of 1930, I think.
I remember standing rather forlornly by the school shop (for no one had come down to see me) and wondering whether to go on staring at the cricket match or to slip away and hide myself either in the library or the fields.
As I stood there, I suddenly realised that I was being watched. Two prefects from another house and two recent Old Boys were gazing at me and talking in subdued voices. My embarrassment became acute; I felt that I must have transgressed some unwritten rule or behaved in some horribly gauche way.
After several minutes’ deliberation one of the Old Boys came up to me rather hurriedly and nervously. I could remember his face; he had only left the term before.
‘Are you at a loose end?’ he asked as casually as he was able. ‘Would you like to go for a drive with us? We’ve got a car.’
The honour, the unusualness, the general dreamlike quality of the whole episode, tinged as it was with something hidden and urgent, made my head swim. I think my chief feeling, apart from flattered vanity was one of surprise, almost of alarm, that I should have been approached in broad daylight. Anyone might see them talking to me, I said to myself.
Of course, I never thought of doing anything but accepting. Although I was filled with trepidation and fear, I knew I must accept. To refuse would be utterly boorish when these great people had so honoured me. Also I knew that I would be haunted by my cowardice and the thought of what pleasures I might have missed.
‘Thanks awfully,’ I said gruffly.
‘Oh great!’ he said lightly; but I could tell how relieved he was that I had accepted his suggestion with no gapings and wonderings. ‘The car’s outside.’
He led me hurriedly through the ‘Hole in the Wall’ and the others followed.
‘We’ll sit in the back,’ he said, bundling me into the old-fashioned limousine. The other Old Boy took the wheel, and the two prefects squashed in beside him.
My alarm and unsteadiness were increasing. As the car bowled along I felt my inadequacy acutely. I knew nothing of their world. I did not drink or smoke. They would discover how dull I was. How little I swore. How I knew nothing of women at all. How impossibly bad I was at games.
The Old Boy sat beside me rather stiffly, not saying anything. The two prefects opened the divided glass window and shouted pleasantries to him. Me they good-naturedly ignored. It was undoubtedly the kindest treatment, but it did not help me to feel easier. I felt that for once they had lifted the taboo on younger boys talking to older ones, but they had only done it because they were tolerant and because it was Speech Day and because they wanted to please this particular Old Boy, who had been an athlete and was rather dashing in his way.
Now that we were in the country our driver was rattling along recklessly, giving whoops of delight if we went over a hump-backed bridge or narrowly missed some other vehicle.
I was frankly terrified and must have shown it, for my companion said gravely, ‘Don’t be frightened. He’s all right.’ He put his arm round my shoulders loosely and I felt it to be perfectly natural, until the others, looking through the partition shouted, ‘Oogh, Oogh,’ gleefully and derisively and then slammed the window shut.
We sat there uncomfortably, in that aromatic, leathery stuffiness, until we found ourselves shooting through an open gate into a rough-grass field. The car lurched about madly over the tussocks. We were thrown up to the ceiling and then on to the floor. The others in the front shrieked joyfully till the car came to a standstill at the bottom of the field against a wood.
My companion swore at his friend with playful roughness, giving him quite a considerable punch on the body. The others disappeared in a knot of three, leaving us alone.
We walked into the wood constrainedly. I did not know what was going to happen. I felt again horribly inadequate.
The Old Boy sat down on a tree-stump and said awkwardly, ‘There doesn’t seem to be anywhere else, you’d better sit here.’ He smiled shamefacedly and patted his knee.
I held my breath and sat down. He held me very gingerly, as if I were a ventriloquist’s doll. My body was taut. I could not relax. I didn’t know what it was all about. I didn’t want to be a prig. I wanted to be nice; but I also wanted to escape.