While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

  . . . and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red busses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

  —George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

  Contents

  Prologue: 1978

  The Underground Bird

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Shadow of an Umbrella

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Moon and Water

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue: 1978

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Prologue: 1978

  In the early 1950s, history and politics conspired to create a circumstance in which it was impossible for me to ply my chosen trade—namely, writing. Because I had briefly been a Communist in 1937, the film studios on which I depended to earn my living now dared not hire me, the American publishers that had brought out my earlier novels let them lapse out of print. So I decided to take advantage of the situation by writing the one story I could never publish in my lifetime. When, after all, would such an opportunity arise again?

  It was, coincidentally, the story of why I became a Communist in 1937. The answer—in brief—was love.

  I have not always been a screenwriter, just as I have not always been an American. Once, in fact, in what seems now a very distant part of my life, I was English and a novelist, well respected, though in histories of the period I will probably be better remembered for the friends I made than I will be for what I wrote. Then one spring afternoon shortly after V-E Day I followed a young man into the public lavatory at the Tottenham Court Road tube station. Together we went into a stall, whereupon, before I could touch his cock—it was, I am pleased to report, prominently erect—this young man handcuffed me and announced that he was an officer of His Majesty’s police. Well-positioned friends managed to suppress the coverage of my arrest in the tabloids; nonetheless the incident left me ill disposed toward the country of my birth, with the result that three weeks after being found not guilty of immorality for lack of sufficient evidence, I boarded a ship bound for America, vowing that I should never return to England as long as I lived.

  After a few aimless months in New York, I went to Los Angeles, where people invited me to a lot of parties. In those days being English had some cachet in Hollywood, as did being a novelist. Still, the ambition of intellectual dilettantes on the West Coast of America—as opposed to their brethren on the East—has never been so much to pedestal serious artists as to corrupt them. Vast sums of money were offered to me if I should do a screenplay; of course I accepted, and discovered, to my surprise, that I had a talent for “screwball comedies.” I wrote a total of twenty-two over a ten-year period, nineteen of which were produced. These days they are little appreciated, though a few—Casino and Living It Up, in particular—periodically feature on those programs that intercut old films with competitions in which viewers call in the answers to movie trivia questions and win toasters, vacuum cleaners and the like. Each time one airs I receive a small residual payment, a payment that once, by identifying what animal Paulette Goddard was likened to in the credit sequence of Cukor’s The Women, I managed to supplement with a La-Z-Boy rocker and a year’s supply of Lemon Pledge. “And so today’s winner on Dialing for Dollars is Mr. B. W. Botsford of West Hollywood. Congratulations! And now back to The Prescotts Divorce, starring Gloria Gallahue, Dick Maynard and Jinx Morgan.” And written by—I hesitate to add—Mr. B. W. Botsford of West Hollywood.

  The Prescotts Divorce. I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext. As for the actors I made into stars, they are the sort who nowadays feature in that peculiar series of little paperback books called Whatever Happened to . . ., books in which you learn that Gloria Gallahue waits tables at a Denny’s in Tempe, Arizona, that Jinx Morgan, after fifty face-lifts, landed the role of Magenta Porterfield on Secret Sturm und Drang, that Dick Maynard became a washing machine salesman and disappeared into the suburban San Fernando Valley, the cultivation of which, along with the blacklisting of many good men and women, is what the nefarious decade of the fifties, at least in America, will chiefly be remembered for.

  “Mr. Botsford, is it true that in 1937 you were a card-carrying member of the Communist Party?”

  “I never carry cards. One is so likely to lose them.”

  Suddenly the commissions ceased. Film stars, fearful of being blacklisted themselves, stopped inviting me to their parties (though privately, in anguished, guilty voices, they begged that I “understand”). I never ratted on anyone, but then again, I never stood up to McCarthy and his cronies, either. One exposure tends to lead to another. Being branded a Communist in Los Angeles in 1955 was bad enough; being branded a homosexual Communist in Los Angeles in 1955 would have been more than my English upbringing could have survived.

  No one can say I spent those years unprofitably, however. Their profit was simply a secret, not to be shared.

  Because, in that blackest spring of 1955, I wrote a novel I never published, a novel that, for the twenty years since, has sat moldering among candy wrappers and cat toys in my kitchen. Well, now I am an old man, poor and invisible, unappreciated except by a single eely-skinned film studies graduate student from the University of Rochester, so I am going to hide the manuscript behind the cuckoo clock in my living room. Yes, the cuckoo clock with the big bugged-out eyes that I always used to joke were the eyes of God. No one but God is going to be allowed to read the manuscript while I’m alive, though after I’ve passed on, some archaeologist of the obscure may unearth it and think it worth bringing to the attention of the public. Or not. Or perhaps the discoverer will be a maid or mover, who will take one look at the yellowed pages and throw them in the trash.

  Supposing, however, that the manuscript survives, and that in some unimaginable future you, reader, have sat down to peruse it, I ask only that you be gentler with my memory than history has been. Because my incumbency in the halls of fame was brief, do not, like the editors of Whatever Happened to . . ., remember me merely for the long downward spiral it precipitated. I was a young man once, who smoked cigarettes on the Quai d’Orsay, who fell in love with a boy named Edward in a basement near the Earl’s Court tube.

  Under no circumstances should the narrator of this story be construed as “reliable,” particularly where history is concerned; the politics of those times confuse me now as they confused me then; I was a social, rather than an ideological, Communist. More important, as a writer I have always valued the personal over the global, for who, after all, populate our globe but beings who are both ridiculous and beautiful? Memory may be an unreliable guide, but it is also the only guide I have. Be sure of this, though: I never altered anything to make myself look better.

  Finally, if you perceive, in this frank admission of moral failure, some small belated modicum of courage, its author’s efforts will not have been in vain. We do what we can, even if usually we do it too late.

  The U
nderground Bird

  Chapter One

  It began like this: a bird flying through the chambers of the underground, like a fly caught in a nautilus. No one noticed but me. First the wind blew—that smoky, petrol-smelling wind that presages the arrival of the train—and then the twin lights pierced the darkness, and then there it was, gray and white, a dove, I think, chased by the train’s smoking terror. It fluttered and hovered above my head for a moment, as if trying to figure out where the sky was, then sailed up the exit stairs and was gone.

  The train pulled in. I got on. It was June 28th, 1936—my mother’s birthday. (But she had died six months earlier.) In Germany, flocks of Hitlerjugend bullied the customers at Jewish stores; in Spain, the infant republic battled the Fascist threat; in England, women in shops argued over the price of leeks. Worst of all, I could not write. A neatly typed copy of the novel I’d started the year before was sitting in a bureau drawer at my parents’ house in Richmond. I couldn’t even bear to look at it.

  I was on my way to lunch with Aunt Constance, and as usual, I was late. Aunt Constance was a widow, and a novelist in her own right—much more famous than I could ever hope to be. Each April and November, with gratifying punctuality, she produced a tome, which unhappy women all over England flocked to buy. This was because her works, unlike mine, eschewed sex and scenes of high dudgeon in favor of the chronicling of small domestic transports.

  She supported me in those days between the wars, though capriciously, sending checks that arrived according to no particular schedule and that were written for such wildly disparate amounts that my brother, Channing, and I had privately started referring to her as “Aunt Inconstance.” In return I was expected to meet her for a monthly meal at the Hotel Lancaster, a dreary establishment just off the Edgware Road, where she installed herself on the occasions of her visits to London. All the inmates at this institution were women, and most were permanent: widows without means, retired secretaries—in short, her readership. I remember it as a languorous, stupefied place, its lounge insulated from sunlight by heavy curtains, its lamps so dim you could barely read by them. The Lancaster’s pace was slower than mine, with the result that when I rushed in, I inevitably knocked over an ancient denizen on her way to the dining room, or startled the porter, who spent most of his day in a stupor bordering on catatonia. In the lounge, various soft, heavy figures sat or reclined in various soft, heavy chairs. An arrhythmic snore spiraled upward into a whistle before sinking back down to earth.

  This afternoon Aunt Constance was dozing on a chintz sofa. Her eyelids fluttered when I leaned over her.

  “Oh, Brian. Hello, dear. You certainly are prompt. I was listening to the wireless.”

  “Hello, Aunt Constance.”

  She sat up. “Let me look at you. Yes, you are too thin. Hasn’t your sister been feeding you?”

  Hoisting herself out of her seat, she escorted me into the dining room. She looked splendid, as usual: florid and floral, her silky abundant hair pinned atop her head in the shape of a brioche. While we fiddled with our menus she inquired after my sister, Caroline, my brother, Channing, most especially after our poor besieged childhood nanny, whom we had dragged out of peaceful retirement to keep house in the wake of Mother’s death. Nanny had been the model for the heroines of no fewer than six of Aunt Constance’s novels.

  Channing and Caroline were quarreling, I told her, because Caroline had reorganized the kitchen. Caroline believed in order and the future, while Channing felt that to move as much as a single spoon from the place Mother had appointed for it was to desecrate her memory.

  “I have seen peculiar symptoms of grief before,” Aunt Constance observed. “My treasured housekeeper, Mrs. Potter, when her husband went, took to sleepwalking, while the Shepard girl became immoral. The strangest case, however, was Maudie Ryan. Do you remember Maudie Ryan? She was with your mother at school. Her fiancé was exploded in France during the war, after which she cooked and cooked. Cakes, puddings, hideous spicy stews.” She shook her head in disapproval at the mention of the stews. “You must be patient with your siblings, dear. They don’t feel as literally as you do.”

  An elderly hostess took our order. Given the delicately constituted natures of most of its clientele, the Hotel Lancaster could be relied upon to serve eminently bland meals, which pleased Aunt Constance, who was slave to an insolent stomach.

  “I am having some trouble writing,” I said when the hostess had gone. “Each time I sit down to work at my novel I become obsessed with some tiny chore that needs to be done, or my eye fixates on a spot of dirt on the wall, or the page itself starts to break up into an abstraction.”

  “And are you thinking I might advise you?” Aunt Constance asked.

  “Well—yes. Rather.”

  “Oh, dear.” She put down her water glass. “You see, I don’t suppose I ever have had any problems in that particular area, except—yes, once, as I recall, years ago, I had written two novels and I simply couldn’t think of an idea for another one. This didn’t trouble me at the time. As I remember, I simply said to myself, ‘Constance, you’ve written your novels, now you must settle down and be an ordinary woman and do what ordinary women do.’ So I went out to the garden and started making a bouquet of roses, and somehow I thought of a girl named Rose, and a yew tree, and a soldier, and I dropped the roses, went inside and wrote Kilkenny Spring. Now, dear, before I forget, here is a copy of my latest for you. It is the story of a char with nine children and a fondness for Bovril.” Chuckling, she handed me Betty Brennan, inscribed, like all her other books, “to my dear great-nephew Brian, with hope for his future novelistic career.”

  “Thanks very much, Aunt Constance,” I said. “I shall begin it on the train.”

  “Yes, well, if you like. Not my best, I fear, but it will have to suffice. A pity. My readers do have such expectations of me.” She fished her spectacles out of her purse and peered at me diagnostically. “Now, dear, how are you getting along? Have you met a girl yet? Would you like to be introduced to Edith Archibald’s niece Philippa? According to Edith she is an extremely pleasant girl, though shy, probably due to the harelip—oh, of course it’s been surgically repaired. An avid reader, Edith says—”

  “Aunt Constance, you know I don’t have time for girls. My work.”

  “Brian, how old are you now?”

  “Almost twenty-three.”

  “Twenty-three! When I was twenty-three, Freddie and I had been married five years already! You must start thinking about the future, my dear. The fact is I haven’t much hope for Channing, he is lost in books, and as for Caroline—well, I don’t mean to be cruel, but she’s nearly twenty-five. It really is most probably too late.” With her shoulder she indicated her fellow residents at the Hotel Lancaster, all eating alone. “Trust me,” she said. “It is terrible to be old and alone. Oh, not for me—I have decades of memories to draw on. But never to have known love, never to have felt the strength of an arm draped over one’s shoulder, the warmth of his lips pressing against—” Stopping short, she coughed and desisted. Little did she know that the warmth of his lips pressing was exactly what I longed for.

  “Now, here’s what I propose: a small dinner, with Philippa and Edith. I shall arrange a private room. How does that sound?”

  It sounded beastly.

  “You know your poor mother would have wanted it. It was her fondest wish to see at least one of her children—”

  “All right, Aunt Constance. Yes. I’ll come.”

  “You won’t regret it. From what Edith’s told me, Philippa Archibald sounds like a most stable young woman. And now, dear, let me give you some more money. That jacket you’re wearing is positively threadbare.”

  At least there was no pretense with Aunt Inconstance. Doing as she pleased brought one immediate rewards.

  It was gray every day that year, no sun for so long it became a thing of memory, all London a perpetual sneeze and nose-blow. Mediterraneans would have gone mad, Americans would have call
ed lawyers and threatened to sue, but we English accept bad weather with the same glum equanimity with which we accept semidetached houses and Wall’s sausages. In their vaguely depressed way, people got on with things, which meant waiting in endless rainy queues. Queues everywhere: if you put a sign on a wall that said, “Queue here,” they would have lined up in front of it.

  I was at an odd moment in my life. For the past two years I’d been living in Germany, ostensibly writing. In fact I’d spent most of my afternoons smoking cigarettes in cafés and most of my evenings smoking cigarettes in a leather-curtained bar. There were beers, there were boys. Mostly there were cigarettes.

  Then Mother died, and I had to come home. I didn’t have the money to get back to Germany after that, and Aunt Constance—having concluded, apparently, that Germany was not good for me—elected not to give me any more. I had nowhere to go, so I lingered in Richmond, parentless, sorting through the detritus of Mother’s and Father’s lives, while my siblings bickered and poor old Nanny, who had been dragged back from Eastbourne to take care of us all again, tried to keep the peace. Finally I could bear it no more; I accepted a long-standing invitation from Rupert Halliwell, a Cambridge chum who was rich and had recently acquired grandiose digs in Cadogan Square.

  Rupert and I had not known each other well at Cambridge: still, something in his passion for antique crystal had spoken to something in my passion for Digby Grafton, who rowed. Rupert was a short, plump, pale fellow, rather resembling one of those blancmanges or mousses Aunt Constance always referred to as a “shape.” He had fat wrists, fussy tastes, doleful eyes.

  I arrived at four on a Wednesday. A cowering little maid led me into the drawing room, where soon enough Rupert joined me, looking droopy and sad as ever in his smoking jacket. “Awfully kind of you to put me up, Rupert,” I said to him as we shook hands. “Oh, nonsense,” he replied dismissively. “The pleasure is mine entirely. In any case, it sounds as if you were roasting alive in that household.”