While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

  It shouldn’t have surprised me that at the darkest moments of history, the libido, rather than do the decent thing and make itself scarce, rears its figurative head more unrelentingly than ever. I was young enough, however, to believe my supposedly aimless ramble had only by coincidence brought me into the vicinity of the Earl’s Court underground station. To shelter from the rain there, I reasoned, would be the most natural thing in the world.

  So I hurried in. It was an old station, damp and drafty. The tiles on the walls of the ticket hall were sweating, a degraded-looking char was listlessly nudging a body of mop water around the floor, at the ticket office an elderly woman was arguing with the ticket clerk over change. And at the gate to the platforms, just where I expected him to be, taller than I remembered and looking quite dashing in his dark uniform, his shiny dark cap, stood Edward. A train had just pulled in; a crowd of newly arrived passengers surged through the gate. His brow furrowed with concentration, he eased them by, took their tickets, tore the green cheap day returns and gave the second halves back with hardly a blink. No would-be fare beater could get past his gimlet green eye. Then everyone had got through except for an old woman who stood on the other side of the gate from Edward, furiously emptying her purse, seeking out amid the refuse that had collected there the little stub that might free her. “I know I have it somewhere,” she muttered.

  “It’s all right, Mum, you can go through, I trust you,” Edward said.

  “Well, that’s kind of you,” the old woman said, “though I should hope you’d know me by now. I’ve only been coming through this station twice a day five days a week for the last thirty-six years.” She waddled past. He laughed and leaned back, his left leg shaking the way it had at the meeting. Then he saw me.

  “Well, hello,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Sheltering from the rain.”

  “It’s pissing buckets, isn’t it? What luck, though. I’ve been meaning to ring you up, only the night after the last time I saw you Mum went down with the influenza and Dad went and broke his leg and now he’s in hospital. So I’ve been having to do a lot around the house, I can tell you. And we don’t have a phone; to call I have to go down to the pub, where everyone can hear—”

  “Of course,” I said.

  There was a quivering roar as another train entered the station. “That’ll be the Hounslow,” he said. “I’ll have to get busy again in a second. But I wanted to tell you what I’d read this week. I read The Well of Loneliness by Miss Radclyffe Hall—”

  “The Well of Loneliness! But it was banned.”

  “My sister Lucy got a copy. It opened up my eyes, let me tell you.”

  A screech sounded, brake sparking against track. “Uh-oh, here come the elephants. Listen, I’d love to talk to you some more—”

  “Why not drop by?” I ventured. “After you finish work?”

  He gulped, as if literally digesting the offer, then said, “All right, yes. I finish at five. Would that be all right?”

  “Perfect. See you later, then.”

  “Yes. Later.”

  The crowd engulfed him.

  The rain had stopped by the time I got outside again. Water spots stained my spectacles. With my shirttail I wiped them clear.

  On the way home I bought sandwiches and cream cakes. The flat was already scrupulously clean—a symptom of my current enthusiasm for all activities that did not involve arranging words on a sheet of paper—so I had a bath, shaved, scrubbed my face and teeth vigorously, then sat down to wait.

  The bell rang promptly at quarter past five. “Sorry I’m late. I got held up,” Edward said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Come in.”

  We shook hands. He was still carrying the same worn satchel, though this time he had on a tie.

  He wiped his feet on the mat. Nervously we took our places on the sofa, having made sure first that a respectable distance separated us.

  “Would you like some tea?” I asked. “It’s just made.”

  “Oh, that would be lovely, yes.”

  I poured the tea and sat next to him again on the sofa. Stiffly he sipped, did not look at me. The silence stretched out. Even though earlier in the afternoon I had drawn up a mental list of conversation topics—the underground, Upney, Spain—I now found myself unable to think of a single thing to say. It was as if, having gone to bed together on the occasion of our first meeting, Edward and I could not quite reconcile ourselves to the fact that our bodies knew each other so much more intimately than our minds did.

  “I was sorry to hear about your dad,” I said finally. “Is he all right?”

  “Hah!” Edward said. “He fell in the gutter outside the pub, that’s how he busted his leg. He was pissed to the gills. Mum says he’s got what’s coming to him; she won’t have us showing him any sympathy. And to make matters worse, she’s flat on her back with the flu, poor old girl. And to top that off, Nellie’s gone and run off to Glasgow to take care of her old grandma—or so she says—leaving the two brats with us to take care of, so the place is a bit crowded right now. Nellie’s my sister-in-law. Except as she and Frank were never married legally. Oh, they were going to do, only then Frank got killed in that accident I was telling you about. He left behind Nellie and little Headley and another one on the way—that’s Pearlene. Always fond of strange names, Nellie is. Anyway, she’s not been living with us, just on us—she and the kids were in Walthamstow, in furnished rooms—and then the same day Dad breaks his leg and Mum’s down with the flu, suddenly Nellie announces old Grandma’s sick in Glasgow and can we take the kids. But it’s all right. Lucy hates it, of course, but Sarah’s good with children. Sarah’s my other sister. She’s quite simple.”

  Anxiety, which left me at a loss for words, clearly had the opposite effect on Edward.

  “My goodness, your family life certainly is complicated,” I said.

  “Well, like I was telling you, that’s why I couldn’t come to see you. I’d finish with work and have to race home to help out before Lucy went off for one of her evenings. God knows where she goes, really. She’s got her own life, though she’s only eighteen.”

  “By the way, Edward, how old are you?”

  “Twenty in three months and fourteen days. Where’s your toilet? When I drink tea I’m a sieve, I tell you.”

  I pointed him toward the lavatory. He did not close the door. I could hear the loud spray of his pissing, then the familiar wheezing crash as the lavatory flushed and water came down in torrents.

  He was still buttoning his fly as he returned to the sofa. “I do talk a bit,” he said, sitting down. “You’ll have to excuse me. Mum says sometimes I’m like a tap that won’t shut off; not that she’s any better, mind you.”

  “Don’t apologize. Your family sounds fascinating.”

  “Well, we aren’t the average.”

  “More tea?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  I poured it out. Edward turned; we smiled at each other. Tentatively I put my hand on his head and pulled it toward mine. We kissed; with our tongues we opened each other’s mouths. Then we were standing, guiding each other to the bed.

  My fear that, like the first time, Edward would simply lie back and expect me to relieve him proved to be ungrounded. Instead he scrupulously undressed me, examining, with an almost clinical curiosity, each part of my body as he uncovered it: my toes, my feet, my calves and thighs and stomach. Would he approve of what he found? How pale my body appeared to me at that moment—pale and soft and English! His, by comparison, had a high color and a hardness that I found enviable as well as exciting. Then his hand found my cock.

  It was dark when we came, simultaneously, our mouths pressed together to stifle each other’s cries.

  Afterwards we lay still, not touching, silent, both of us slightly taken aback by the extent to which we had abandoned all pretense of decorum. In what seemed like another life (but it had been minutes ago!), I recalled Edward on his knees, his bum pointed in the
air, wanting me to bugger him. I recalled the jangling crash as his belt fell from the bed onto the floor.

  I got up and made more tea and brought it to the bed, along with the cakes and sandwiches I’d bought. We were both ravenous. We lay naked in bed, stuffing cream cakes into our faces. Edward’s cock—so big and angry when it was hard—had shrunk to almost nothing. “A grower, not a shower,” Nigel would have said, but Nigel was nowhere near now. Nigel was away.

  Edward told me more about his family. His “dad,” it turned out, was not his father, just his mother’s most recent husband. Her name was Lil, and she had been a music hall dancer. The bunch of them—Lil, “Dad” (his lack of a surname seemed to signify his interchangeability with past and future versions), Edward, Lucy, Sarah, and now the incongruously named Headley and Pearlene—shared a crowded little two-bedroomed house. Because Edward had been given the dining room, Lucy and Sarah were forced to share a bedroom, much to Lucy’s consternation.

  “And you say it was Lucy who gave you The Well of Loneliness?”

  “Some people march to a different drummer,” Edward said. “Lucy marches to a different orchestra.”

  “The Well of Loneliness,” I said. “Extraordinary, for a girl of her—”

  “Hey, excuse me, but just because we didn’t go to public school doesn’t mean we’re know-nothings. We’re quite up on what’s going on in the world of high culture, my sister and me, thank you very much.”

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to imply—it’s just—The Well of Loneliness—and when I think of my own sister—though perhaps that’s been Caroline’s problem all along—”

  Edward laughed.

  “And you think Lucy’s—well, like Miss Hall?”

  “She certainly doesn’t dress in men’s clothes, if that’s what you’re asking. At least in front of us.”

  He finished the last of the sandwiches, then announced he had to be going. My heart sank, I so badly wanted him to stay.

  He stood before me, dressing—a spectacle I found nearly as arousing as the spectacle of his undressing. Then, when he had finished, he sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Brian,” he said, “remember the last time we spoke—you said if I ever needed to, I might stay the night here?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “I was just asking because—well, with Headley and Pearlene, things are getting rather cramped at home. I don’t even have my own room no more, I have to share it with them, and I’m not sleeping much as a result, I can tell you. And yesterday Mum said—well, she said, ‘Edward, it would make everything lots easier if you found somewhere else to stay for a while, once I’m over this influenza—just a month or so, mind you, until Nellie’s back’—and I was thinking . . . perhaps I might stay here, if you’d have me. Of course I’d pay my share; we’d split everything down the middle—”

  “I should think that would be wonderful,” I said.

  Edward seemed surprised at how readily I had assented. “Well, lovely, then,” he said. “That will be lovely. Probably I’ll move in beginning of next month—if that’s all right.”

  “Whenever you like. Sooner if you like—tomorrow—tonight!”

  He laughed. “Mum’s got to get over her flu, remember. Until then she needs me around the house.”

  “I know. I suppose I’m just eager, that’s all.”

  “Me too.”

  “Are you?”

  With astonishing gentleness, he cupped my face in his hands.

  “You really do have the most beautiful eyes,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  As I mentioned earlier, I was working, back then, on a novel. A good part of it took place on the trains and in the stations of the underground, which was one reason I considered my encounter with Edward mystically significant. Since early childhood, after all, I had nurtured a passion for the underground that Nigel thought ridiculous and that, when queried, I found myself hard-pressed to explain. (Most true passions are difficult to explain.) What can I say, except that I loved everything about the underground? I loved the deep tunnels, the smoky trains, the intricate interlocking of the lines, each of which had its own particularities, its identity, if you will. I used to loiter at Richmond Station just so I could gaze at the red circle speared with blue; watch the trains coming and going; mostly, study the map, its vaguely insectoid shape, its tangle of colored yarn that, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be something more sensible: a simulacrum of connectedness; a game of choices. I’d stand for hours asking myself questions such as, if I needed to go from Chancery Lane to Rickmansworth, which would be the shortest route? Which would be the longest? Which would allow me to ride on the most colored lines? To take the quick route seemed obvious to me then, even crude, the alternative of the unimaginative mind. I preferred—I believed in—the long way round.

  The red circle, speared with blue, contained the name of the station. It promised other stations: Richmond promised Kew Gardens, which promised Gunnersbury, which promised Turnham Green and Stamford Brook and Hammersmith and London. London! The deep lines, the Piccadilly and the Northern and the Bakerloo! The escalators that tipped down what seemed like miles, the endless tubular corridors with their warm odor of exhaust, the wind of the trains, the mysterious, subterranean wind of the trains. To the north, more stations. To the east, to the west, more stations. Stations spawning like islands, all waiting to be visited, and the name of each one contained, identically, within that red circle, that blue spear!

  Not much of this ended up finding its way into the novel, which had aspirations to literary seriousness. Regretfully, I only went so far as to let my passion fly for a few short paragraphs, during which I described the underground as “another London, subterranean and sinister and Gothic.” The novel had for a hero a neophyte writer (of course), one Nicholas Holden, who watches with fascination the expansion of the Piccadilly Line out to the distant suburb of Cockfosters, where his friend Avery James, the brilliant young painter, lives. Like Nigel, Avery is aggressively antibourgeois, and so the dreaded suburbs come to embody for him exactly the opposite of what they embody for most people; genius lingers in the semidetached houses, and the moment when the train emerges out of the tube and into the light is a moment of revelation:

  All at once the blackness lifted, and we were thrust into cold sun and dust. For a few seconds I had to shield my eyes against the massive brightness, the backs of houses bearing down on me through the train’s windows. Oh, how I longed to descend once again into that dark vein, where I could see as Avery saw—with the Inward Eye!

  Nicholas craves “the end of the line,” which is both death and a safe haven, “that elusive center, the center that will hold.” And yet he does not quite believe that the distant suburbs to which the Piccadilly Line takes him actually exist: “How could one believe in Arnos Grove, in Enfield West, in Southgate, when one was standing in a crowded cavern deep beneath the earth, and a hat was flying down the platform, blown by the hot, bitter, smoky wind? Hyde Park Corner is reality, but Cockfosters, shimmering Cockfosters, is an ideal!” In fact Cockfosters was nowhere—a station near a cemetery off a suburban road—but I didn’t care about that. I loved the name. I loved all underground stations with peculiar names—Headstone Lane, Old Street, Burnt Oak, Elephant & Castle. Also, I loved that Cockfosters was both the end of the line and somewhere no one I knew had ever had reason to visit. Not a community or town, exactly. Rather, a place invented by the underground. A terminus. The end of the map, the edge of the flat earth the map imagines. Beyond Cockfosters you could not go. You had to turn back. The tracks themselves stopped. The miles of tracks simply, mysteriously stopped.

  “Imagine Cockfosters,” Avery is always saying to Nicholas in the novel. But Nicholas’s problem is that he cannot imagine Cockfosters. That was my problem as well. Nor did I ever, in all my years in London, dare to go there. Oh, I nearly did. I got as far as Southgate once, where the escalators have gleaming gold handrails. Then I got scared. I tur
ned back. You see, I was afraid that if I actually went to Cockfosters, I would discover it was just a place, like any other place. Shops and houses. Women carting groceries. And that reality, for some reason, my youthful imagination could not bear to contemplate.

  That was the novel that, in the fall of 1936, I had written half of; the novel that, to my chagrin, I did not seem to have it in myself to complete and that I knew I would never complete until I, like Nicholas, “imagined Cockfosters,” something at the moment I could not find it in myself to do.

  Since I seemed to be incapable of doing any work on my novel, therefore, and since not writing was driving me mad in much the same way that writing had driven me mad back when I wrote, I decided to return to journal writing. Simply to put things down, to get sentences onto paper, was my goal. I had no ambitions beyond the restoration of sanity. Toward that end, I bought a notebook with a mottled black-and-white cover that suggested ink spills and exuded a comforting, musty aroma, the aroma of stationers’ shops on rainy days. I also bought a natty blue Waterman’s fountain pen and several bottles of ink.

  Here is how the journal begins:

  Autumn 1936. I must write. Something, anything.

  I was thinking, the other day, about the names of the underground stations and what they suggest. Here is what I came up with:

  Old Street: the pavement is erupting. Cobwebs gird the entrance to Miss Havisham’s dress shop. A grocer specializes in a brand of custard powder not available since 1894.

  Elephant & Castle: The elephant is Indian and has an emerald on her forehead. The castle is Briana’s castle from The Faerie Queene: Briana, whose lover (an ogre) demanded that she sew for him a shroud of human hair. Knights and damsels arrive by train, are lured within and shorn of their locks and beards. For the rest of their lives they will wander in madness through the forest of the station, tearing at what was once their hair.