While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

  “It is good to be out of there.”

  We sat down to tea, which the maid brought in along with a set of lovely blue-and-gold enamel cups—“Eighteenth century,” Rupert informed me. “They belonged to Queen Beatrix and are the only set of their kind still in existence.” Next I complimented him on the sofa. “Yes, it is lovely, isn’t it? But it’s covered in a very rare type of Indian handwoven silk that, if it’s ever stained, is impossible to clean.” “Oh, really,” I said, endeavoring to hold my cup at a distance. Then he showed me his collection of antique crystal vases. “Three are chipped,” he pointed out, “the result of clumsiness on the part of domestic servants.” No wonder the poor maid’s hands shook as she picked up the tea tray!

  We finished off our tea and Rupert showed me up to my room. “I think you’ll find you have everything you need,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m sure I will.”

  I started to unpack, but instead of leaving he sat down on the edge of the bed. Needless to say I felt rather self-conscious, his sad eyes fastened on me as I put away my clothes.

  “How’s your mother?” I asked him.

  “The same. Pain is her companion, her daily tormentor. She can hardly get out of bed now, but I visit every day, which is a great pleasure for her. Really, she’s too good for the earth.”

  In fact the woman was a beast, and not nearly as sick as she pretended. When she bought Rupert the house in Cadogan Square I had hoped it might mean a final severing of the umbilical cord. Instead he simply replicated her fondness for objects that were both impossibly delicate and irreplaceable. (Why is it that the rich, who have been spared material worry, feel obligated to create, all around themselves, the potential for disaster?) Rupert was, at twenty, a decidedly unformed young creature who had chosen to emulate the habits of the extremely aged. And yet somehow they didn’t quite stick to him; you couldn’t help wondering how long the “stage” would last.

  I finished unpacking and was eager to write in my journal, so I told Rupert I wanted to have a nap before dinner. Regretfully he stood. “Are you sure there’s nothing else I can do for you?” he asked, his eyes wide and wet as ever. “No, I’m fine, really,” I said. “All right,” he said, then, with extreme slowness, shut the door behind himself.

  I flung myself onto the bed. Poor Rupert! Most of my friends had no patience for him; for them, he was merely an example of the deadening self-indulgence into which the bourgeoisie was irrevocably descending. Rupert and his kind, according to my friends, were dead branches on a living tree that must be pruned for the sake of the tree.

  I understood this point of view. Still, there was something so sad and ineffectual about Rupert, locked up in his palace with all his precious objects to protect and no occupation and that beastly mother summoning him to her sickbed every half minute, that I couldn’t help but feel a kind of pity for him. I doubted he had ever had sex with anyone, male or female. He loved to hear my recitations of erotic philandering and yet would never himself have dared venture even to the pubs I sometimes frequented, with their cargo of friendly police and guardsmen. Instead, ludicrously, he seemed to have attached all his erotic feelings to me, lingering at my door or staring longingly into my averted eyes, hoping against hope, I supposed, that I would invite him in for seduction. What a laughable thought—I, who had no aptitude for seduction! He would be a cold and anguished lover, I suspected. I could not imagine him naked; he dressed and held himself in such a way as to discourage contemplation of his body, even, perhaps, to deny the existence of a body at all. And yet, somewhere under there, there had to be nakedness.

  We ate a quiet, congenial dinner that night, during which most of the conversation focused on Digby Grafton’s wedding, to which Rupert—but not I—had been invited. Afterwards, pleading fatigue, I excused myself and took to my room.

  At half past twelve—I was already in bed—the door creaked open. “Brian, I’m dreadfully sorry to wake you, but I’ve just had the most frightful row with Mother. Might I sit down?”

  “Of course, Rupert,” I said.

  He tiptoed in, perched on the edge of the bed, then began his tearful litany of regrets—how Mother was always chastising him and telling him what a failure he was; her agony and pain, which justified everything; his loneliness and need for love. I knew what he wanted, yet somehow could not bring myself to give it to him—I drew back from his white, fleshy forearms, the soft black hairs on his wrists. So I consoled him as best I could, explaining that certainly Mother didn’t mean it, that she loved him desperately and it was only the pain speaking, and eventually, feeling ashamed and realizing he could get no more from me, he apologized for the interruption and bade me good night.

  It was difficult for me to go back to sleep after that. Digby haunted my thoughts: his beautiful dark skin and wheat-colored hair. Digby naked by the lake, shaking water from his body, the drops hanging like beads of glass from the hair on his chest and legs and around his long, disinterested cock, which of course was normal and rose only for girls. My obsession with that cock, my longing to draw back its helmet of foreskin and lick the treacly fluid dripping from the head, kept me thrashing, so much so that I had to wank off four times before I was finally able to get to sleep.

  The next morning I woke late, cross and with a sore throat. Rupert was in the sitting room, endlessly turning an irreplaceable silver spoon in an irreplaceable china cup presumably filled with the rarest and most perishable of teas. He informed me in curt tones that he had invited a guest to dinner, a “charming lady” who took great pleasure in meeting “artistic young people” and in whose good graces it was imperative that he should establish himself. “And it would probably be a good idea not to bring up politics, Brian. Lady Abernathy is—well, rather unmodern in her ideas. We wouldn’t want to shock her.”

  I stared out the window. Rain thudded against the glass, so much rain that I wondered for a moment if perhaps that was Rupert’s problem, if like so many Englishmen he had simply got soggy in the head. I wished I could concoct an excuse to get out of the house that evening; unfortunately none came to mind. As Rupert’s guest, I appeared to be his slave.

  The phone rang. To my amazement, it was for me.

  “Brian, it’s Rose Dent. Nigel’s mother. I hope you don’t mind me ringing you here; your sister gave me the number. I’ve called to tell you Nigel’s in London.”

  I was shocked. Nigel hadn’t given me any indication he intended to visit London.

  “How long is he going to be here?” I asked hopefully.

  “Oh, but that’s just it. He’s leaving tomorrow. He’s been here a fortnight already.”

  “A fortnight?”

  “Very busy, I’m afraid. But he did wish to see you. Tell me, could you pop round for tea today—say, around four? But I must warn you that Nigel has a cold and might not be in the best of spirits.”

  I said of course I would come. She rang off, and I sat down to ponder why on earth Nigel might have come to London for a fortnight and not called me. This wasn’t like him.

  Nigel and I had been inseparable since public school, where I fagged for him—shined his shoes, made his bed, and so forth. You could say our relationship hadn’t progressed much since then. Even now the bark of his disapproval reduced me to a quaking first former, desperate to please this older, bigger, deep-voiced master, and in the end always flubbing the simplest task. I “followed” him to Cambridge, then to Stuttgart, where he went to study piano with the renowned Clara Lemper, and from where he wrote the first of his “Letters from Abroad”—essays on musical and political themes that would later make him more famous even than his recordings of Ravel and Liszt. In Stuttgart we practically lived together, and, though I now had a deeper voice than his, I continued to shine his shoes and make his bed. I was, as far as I knew, his closest ally: we shared early drafts, confidences, even lovers. Oh, certainly, our friendship had a fractious edge. He tormented me regularly, the way an older brother will torment a younger. Sti
ll, I loved him and had no doubt that he loved me. For him to have spent two weeks in London without ringing me—well, something would have had to be gravely wrong.

  I passed the afternoon in a state of restless anxiety, then at three headed off to the Dents’ house in St. John’s Wood. The rain was pissing down and I had left my umbrella on the underground and so asked Rupert if I might borrow one. Drearily he rummaged in a cupboard before locating the necessary implement.

  The tube ride to St. John’s Wood took almost forty minutes, presumably because of the weather. Happily the rain had cleared up by the time I got there. I walked through a puddled and intermittently sunny atmosphere to the Dent house. I was sent up to his room—Mrs. Dent’s room, rather, claimed by Nigel for the duration of his stay. There he was, in bed, very red in the nose, surrounded by papers and books. The place reeked of cigarettes. On the floor were stacked stained teacups, which Mrs. Dent hastily gathered.

  “Hello, Brian. How nice to see you,” said Mrs. Dent.

  “I haven’t shit for three days,” Nigel announced. “Just wanted you to know.”

  Mrs. Dent left hurriedly.

  It was obvious that he was indeed not in the best of spirits—in fact he was in a bloody beastly frame of mind, cruel and teasing, as if testing how much I would take from him before I lashed back. Still, I was determined not to give in.

  “So what’s brought you to London, Nigel?” I asked, trying to sound as if I really didn’t care.

  “Negotiating a contract with Heinemann. They want to collect my ‘Letters from Abroad.’ I’m not sure, though. Heinemann is not exactly avant-garde.”

  Pride and envy coursed through my blood in equal measure at this information. Also bewilderment; the Nigel I knew, upon receiving such monumentally good news, would have called me instantly.

  “Nigel, that’s wonderful,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “Yes, well. Now I’ve got something to say to you, Brian, and it isn’t going to be pleasant. I’m sure you’re wondering why I haven’t rung you up when I’ve been in London close to a fortnight. Well, that’s why I wanted you to come by today, to explain to you that I’ve had it with you. You annoy me thoroughly. You’re sniveling and loud and altogether too much of a presence. You parrot my views. You dress embarrassingly. And as for that story you sent me—dreadfully bad. Unspeakably bad. I thought you had potential once, Brian, I really did, but you’ve quite extinguished what little hope I had for you with this”—he held the offending sheets out in front of him, as if they positively reeked—“this loose stool.”

  My mouth opened in instinctive protest. “It’s only a first draft—” I began.

  “A first draft! A first draft!” He gave one of his whooping laughs. “You really are such a big girl’s blouse, Brian, the biggest blouse any girl ever wore. I attack your story, which, by the way, I honestly consider to be shit, and what do you do? Do you defend it, or yourself? No! You try to sneak away from it, you try to disclaim it.”

  “But really, I think you’re right, it does need work—”

  “But that’s just my point! First draft my arse—you thought it was brilliant until this minute! If you really aspire to be a literary man, you must learn to hold your own, and not just gobble like a turkey and agree with what everyone else says just to please them. And you must get out of the habit of changing your views so that they match mine. If you say, ‘I think S. is a good poet,’ and I say, ‘I think he’s shit,’ the next minute you’re kicking dirt back like a cat to cover it up. Which brings me to my final point. Tonight, as you may have heard, Anne Cheney is having a dinner in my honor. I don’t know if you’re invited, but if you are, I should prefer you not attend. And if you do attend, I shall leave.”

  The bluntness of this demand stunned me. “Well, all right, Nigel,” I said. “If that’s how you feel, I think I shall leave right now.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, you’ve just arrived. Have some tea.”

  I glared at him.

  “Oh, you’re pathetic. Just because I’ve said what I’ve said, you act as if we’re no longer friends. All right, go then, if that’s how you feel.”

  I walked out of the room, upsetting, along the way, a cup of cold tea his mother had somehow neglected to clear away. Nigel took no notice and, getting out of bed, followed me into the hall. “A new piece I’ve written,” he announced, thrusting an envelope into my hand. “It’s about left-handed pianism. It is to be the leadoff for the new volume.”

  “Thank you,” I said. We shook hands grimly, and I departed.

  On the tube ride back I read Nigel’s essay—it seemed brilliant to me, which made me even more miserable—and arrived back at Rupert’s around six. Almost as soon as I’d stepped through the door I had the ghostly sensation that I was not holding something I should have been holding. Of course—it was Rupert’s umbrella! So before going into the sitting room, where Rupert was waiting with tea, I asked the maid if I might use the telephone. Nigel’s mother answered: no, she was sorry, I hadn’t left any umbrella; indeed, as far as she was aware, when I arrived I hadn’t been carrying an umbrella at all. I thanked her and rang off, feeling annoyed at the money I would have to waste replacing not only Rupert’s umbrella but my own. Two in two days was a record, even for me!

  Rupert was in his smoking jacket, pouring tea. He seemed to be in considerably higher spirits. “Hello! Do sit down. I’ve just had a fresh pot brewed. How was Nigel?”

  “Rupert,” I said, “I’m afraid I’ve lost that umbrella you loaned me. Awfully sorry. I’m such an oaf when it comes to umbrellas.”

  His smile disappeared.

  “What?” he said.

  “I said I’m afraid I’ve lost that umbrella you loaned me.”

  “Where?”

  “On the underground. Rupert, I—”

  “Then it’s hopeless. We’ll never get it back.”

  He stood, turning away from me, his face ashen. Really, I was thinking, all this fuss over an umbrella!

  “Of course I’ll replace it,” I offered.

  “Replace it! Good God, don’t you have eyes? Didn’t you see the silver on the base? The ivory handle? The monogram?”

  “Well, as I said—”

  “That was no ordinary umbrella you lost, Brian! My God, it was antique! From before the war! Worth a hundred pounds, at least!”

  “A hundred pounds,” I repeated faintly. “Oh, God.” I sat down, aghast—a hundred pounds for an umbrella! Then I stood up again. “I’ll call the lost property office at Baker Street,” I said. “Maybe someone—”

  “Don’t even bother. Any idiot could tell how much that umbrella was worth. Probably it’s being dismantled as we speak, the silver melted down to sell, the ivory—” A tear snaked out of his left eye. He fell back into the cushions in an attitude of despair, and I turned away, overcome by contradictory emotions: horror and guilt at having lost something of such value, and at the same time amazement that Rupert would have loaned me the umbrella in the first place. Certainly had I been aware that it was not just an ordinary umbrella, I never would have taken it.

  “Rupert,” I said finally, “I don’t care if it cost a thousand pounds; I’ll replace it”—wondering where on earth I’d come up with that sort of money. But Rupert gulped and heaved, and with what seemed Herculean effort recovered his good breeding.

  “Don’t give it another thought; it’s in the nature of umbrellas to be lost. I’ve simply overreacted because of its sentimental value, for which I apologize heartily. Now have some tea.”

  He poured out the tea, which by now was bitter and black, and with great wrenching and ripping hauled the conversation away from that fatal object with which we had both become—and would remain for some time—horribly and unalterably obsessed. “Did I tell you about Daisy Parker’s wedding? What a nightmare that was! Her old flame showed up, drunk, just as I was giving my toast!” I hardly listened. Instead my mind was crawling backward, trying to recollect the exact moment the umbrella
had been misplaced.

  After tea I went upstairs to rest but could not stop thinking about the wretched umbrella, which in truth I had hardly looked at. Was I a fool not to have appreciated its value? No, it had simply never occurred to me that there could be such a thing in the world as a hundred-pound brolly!

  Around seven-thirty the doorbell rang. Dutifully I dragged myself downstairs. Across the living room sofa from Rupert, a jowly old woman was peering through an old-fashioned pince-nez at the antique crystal collection. I recognized her face, though I wasn’t sure where from.

  “Brian, may I introduce Lady Abernathy? Lady Abernathy, Mr. Botsford.”

  “How do you do.”

  Her hand barely grazed my own, and she returned to examining the crystal. I sat next to Rupert. A mask of politesse barely covered the stricken look that had taken his face like a palsy.

  “Brian is a writer,” Rupert said to Lady Abernathy, as we sat down to table. “He’s just about to finish his first novel.”

  “Ah,” Lady Abernathy said. “And am I correct in presuming that it will be a modern novel?”

  “I suppose you could say so. Yes.”

  “Then I’m afraid I shall never read it. The other day, I attempted to read a novel by Mrs. Woolf that dear Rupert had recommended. Quite horrifying. After fifty pages I was obliged to reach for my Bible.”

  “So you value traditional works, Lady Abernathy,” Rupert said.

  “There is only one novel I consider worth reading anymore—Jane Eyre. I read it every Christmas.”

  “Ah, the Brontës,” Rupert said. “So quintessentially English.”

  “Rupert,” Lady Abernathy said, “I have brought a letter I wrote. I wondered if you might read it and give me your opinion before I post it.”

  “Of course,” Rupert said. “And to whom is the letter to be sent?”

  “To Mr. Hitler.”