While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

  Such thinking excited me—anything smacking of rebellion did—but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it was a choice.

  There was another reason I didn’t swear off women, the way Nigel and the others did, and that, put simply, was fear. What would it be like, I worried, growing middle-aged and old as a homosexual? Old queens, I knew, lingered in public lavatories, perpetually ignored or scorned or asked arrogantly for money. How desperately I didn’t want to end up like them! And how much more pleasant a prospect it was to envision myself, at seventy, in a house in the country with a warm hearth, and all around me the voices of children and dogs.

  As I said earlier, I was in those days an aficionado of the London underground and would sometimes spend hours poring over an underground map, enraptured by the elegant bright colors and odd station names. This map offers only the roughest simulacrum of reality. It shrinks the vast journey to the suburbs, it magnifies the clogged network of veins that underlies the City, it smooths out every unsightly curve and angle. The result is an illusion of order and coherence, discrete and colorful lines seamlessly linking one destination to another. Yet riding on the underground, one believes that map, one feels oneself traveling not under the panicked confusion of urban life but rather through the map itself, pulsing smoothly along a red line to the point of intersection with a brown line that in turn will take one to the point of intersection with a green line. Aboveground the world continues in its disorderly way; belowground everything connects.

  So it was with the girl I imagined I’d someday marry: she was the end of the line that was my hypothetical youth.

  I remember, in the early thirties, watching with great interest the expansion of the Piccadilly Line out to Arnos Grove, Southgate, Cockfosters—remote suburban stations that for me were hypothetical, for who would ever have occasion to visit them? The same with adulthood: though I knew it existed, it remained as abstract a destination for me as the suburbs the underground was rapidly inventing.

  Yet I did end up going there, before the year was out.

  From Nigel:

  I write from Paris, but will have left before you receive this. Fritz can stay no longer. As we feared, the Gestapo are onto him. Last night in a restaurant two men at the next table tried to approach us. Horst, who was with us, insisted they were just German businessmen, but Fritz says he recognizes agents when he sees them, and I am inclined to believe he knows from whence he speaks. The police are also watching him, so I thought it best we get out of France. We go to Utrecht tomorrow, presumably en route to Stockholm. No address in Utrecht as yet; we shall have to look for a hotel. I have got in touch with the solicitor I mentioned in my last letter, one S. Greene; he has assured me he can obtain for Fritz both a visa and passage to Ecuador, but his fee is £750! So far I have borrowed a hundred from Mother, on the basis of which Greene has begun the negotiations—my only fear is that it will be too late for Fritz. Poor Fritz—he is only twenty! For the first time he looks haggard and genuinely fearful. All last week he never went out, just sat in our room, staring at the door, dreading the knock. I try to keep him cheerful, but it’s difficult—and God knows where I shall find the necessary £650!

  Once we are settled in Utrecht I shall come over to London briefly to speak with Greene. I don’t dare bring F. with me; Greene has checked—his name is already on the English list, no doubt thanks to his father. Will wire you new address in Utrecht once we have one; meantime you can send letters poste restante. Must rush to catch train. N.

  Edward arrived in my flat the first Sunday in October. “Hello,” he said cheerfully. “Hello,” I said cheerfully.

  We kissed. His cheeks were red and cold, and he was huffing slightly.

  He set down his three battered, bursting cases and went to wash his hands. “Tea?” I asked. “Yes, thank you,” he answered, then proceeded to unpack with amazing rapidity and concentration, hanging his suits in the wardrobe, stacking his socks and shirts in the drawers I’d emptied for him, propping his books on the shelf I’d designated as his. As he put each item away, he crossed it off a list he’d brought, just to make sure nothing had been lost or forgotten. (In that same bruised black notebook, I learned later, he kept logs that tracked the hours he slept each night, the clothes he purchased, his bowel movements, weight, even the amplitude and intensity of his orgasms, not to mention the books he read, every one of which was meticulously registered by title, author, publisher and both date and place of purchase or borrowing. Of course he kept his books alphabetized—such a contrast to my own, which were a chaotic jumble!)

  His clothes securely put away, Edward next went into the bathroom and set out his tooth powder, brush, comb, razor and shaving mug. Lil had sent a fruitcake with him, and this we ate with tea, after which he got up, took the tea things to the kitchen and thoroughly rinsed them, as if to demonstrate his responsibility, the extent to which, having moved in, he now took a proprietary pride in the place.

  I had fetched an old gramophone from Richmond a few days earlier. Now I put on a record. To my amazement, Edward took me in his arms, and we started dancing, two awkward, ungainly men, neither having the slightest idea how not to lead. It was dusk, sweater weather, the first gusty autumn drafts seeping in under the doorframes and window frames. Even so we stripped off our clothes, our bodies flushed with heat, our erections swatting each other, silky leg hairs softly slipping, while the voice on the gramophone bleated and Edward’s voice matched it, note for note.

  Edward kissed me. The record stopped. I bent onto my knees, I started kissing his chest, his stomach, going further down . . .What I wanted to do I knew was depraved. I should have been thinking, It will shock Edward, he’ll run screaming away . . . but his indrawn breaths, as I kissed his body, encouraged me, and then there was his cock, hard and springy as a mushroom, the tip pearled with glistening dew, just inches from my lips. God knows I felt ashamed—really, I thought, I should go and hand myself over to the sexologists right away—and so I started making my way back up his stomach, toward his mouth, but he pushed my head down again, and said, “Do it,” his voice raspy.

  “Edward, do you know—”

  “Do it.” There was need and anger in his voice. He pulled my head toward him; the tip of his cock skidded my teeth. I took it in. His cock ballooned, Edward jolted and shuddered and came without warning, suddenly flooding my mouth with his semen, warm and slightly thickened and tasting a bit like a sauce of milk and flour that has had too much salt added to it. Then he pulled back, he dropped to his knees, his chest shivering, his eyes huge and hungry, and ran his fingers through my hair and, kissing me, sucked his own sperm from my mouth, licked the spillage off my face, so that I knew there was no limit, no distance we could not go with each other.

  I ran into John Northrop one afternoon at the grocer’s. To my amazement, he recognized me, though whether from school or from the meeting he’d presided over, I couldn’t be sure.

  Northrop, as I recalled, was from Shropshire, and physically he was a proper Shropshire lad, right out of Housman: big, blond, hale, though the muscle that braced his huge chest and abdomen was running to fat, no doubt the result of one too many beers. Irretrievably heterosexual, too. And yet there was something both sexy and reassuring about his bearishness. You felt you could trust him to do something absolutely filthy to you without causing permanent damage.

  He suggested a pint, and I accepted. “I’ve been following your career since school,” he told me, once we were settled at the pub with our beers. “Oh, I know, you’re thinking, That Northrop, he’s probably illiterate, but the fact is I do rea
d a novel here and there, or a short story in a magazine. And God knows your friend Nigel Dent’s become famous enough lately, not only with his piano-playing, but also those letters he writes for the newspaper. Where is he now?”

  “Utrecht.”

  “Fellows like you, with a talent for the word, I don’t have to tell you, you’re just what the Brigade needs. Those pamphlets we’re always publishing, for example. I always say they really could be something, if only those leftist hacks knew the first bloody thing about putting one word after another. I’m no exception. Oh, yes, stand me in front of a podium and I can whip a room into a frenzy. But ask me to write a pamphlet? I’m a wreck. I tear my hair. I throw the typewriter out the window.” He laughed, shook his head, took a sip of his beer. “Now, if we had fellows like you and Dent writing, that could make a difference.”

  “I’d have to think about it,” I said.

  “Of course,” Northrop said. “By the way, are you still planning on going over to Spain? Things are getting pretty hot over there, let me tell you. The stakes get higher every day.” He lowered his voice. “I did notice you didn’t sign up at the end, at that meeting. You left with that other fellow instead. Young fellow.”

  “Yes?”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “He shares my digs.”

  “What’s his job?”

  “Works at the tube station. He’s a ticket taker.”

  Northrop smiled broadly. “You see? You’re a Communist already! By asking that young fellow to share your rooms, you challenged bourgeois complacency.” He raised his glass in a toast. “Balls to the class system, I say! Workers of the world, unite!”

  “Cheers,” I said.

  Northrop coughed.

  “So why didn’t you sign up, in the end?” he asked next.

  “I suppose I got cold feet,” I admitted. “I mean, really, men like you and me—what do we know about battle? All the fighting we’ve ever done was on cricket fields.”

  “They say once a gun’s in your hand you’re a soldier,” Northrop said.

  “I suppose you’ll be going over.”

  “Oh, yes. And I’ll tell you why. Because someday, when all of this is over, among those of us who are lucky enough to survive, there’s going to be a reckoning. We’re going to look each other over and say, Where were you when the chips were down? What did you do? And when that day comes, I want to be able to answer, I fought. I risked my life and fought, and I’m proud to have done it, no matter if I’m legless or eyeless or like that fellow in the novel by Hemingway.” His teeth gleamed. “Sometime in the next two years someone’s going to change the world. Someone’s got to. What’s at stake is whether it’s going to be us.”

  Grimly I stared into the dregs of my beer.

  “Spain’s our chance. I intend to be there even if I have to die there.”

  “And if we lose?”

  He looked away.

  “We won’t lose,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “We can’t afford to,” Northrop said. “They can afford to. They can always afford to.”

  I looked at the clock. “Gosh, Northrop,” I said, “it’s been wonderful chatting with you, but I’ve got to run. The market’ll be closing in half an hour.”

  I thrust some coins at him. He didn’t refuse them.

  “Think about what I said,” Northrop called to me as I headed out the door.

  “Oh, I will,” I said. “You can count on that.”

  “And mention it to Dent as well, if you see him! I’d love to have the chance to chat with him next time he’s in London; did you see that piece of his in The Gramophone? Quite extraordinary.”

  “I’ll pass on your regards,” I muttered grimly, wondering why I hadn’t realized all along it was Nigel he was really after.

  Aunt Constance got me a job, tutoring a cretinous fat child with bulbous lips and just the faintest trace of a mustache. The child was stupid and had an obnoxious habit of parroting its parents’ views—“It’s the opinion of my father that only the lazy and useless are unemployed,” etc. Still, that same father paid well, and as the child had as little interest in learning as I had in teaching, our afternoons together, while always dull, were never strenuous.

  The child—I forget its name—left at four. Then, around five-thirty, Edward came home, bearing groceries. We drank our tea, he washed up, we made love. We almost always made love in the afternoon, Edward and I. Rarely at night, when shadows claimed the furniture, and a mysterious softness enveloped the bleach-cleaned atmosphere of the flat. Never in the morning, even though, as is usual with young men, we woke with erections. Either the sun was too merciless; or we had overslept and Edward was late for work; or we were hesitant to kiss until we’d brushed our teeth, at which point we found ourselves awake, our minds on other things.

  No, the tea hour was our time: the hour, in England, for starched collars and crumpets. How thrilling and dirty it was to strip off at five in the afternoon, to stand naked and hard in the immodest light, while upstairs our lady neighbors spread their toast with Marmite and spoke of the Royal Family! I liked to fuck Edward against a particular wall where the sun came down in louvered columns. Bars of light bisected his rump while he leaned there, hands in the air, his mouth against the wallpaper. As cooking smells wandered in from neighboring flats, I’d take him like that, bugger him relentlessly, until he came in a wet patch against the wall. It was always dark by then. Half naked, I’d rush to the kitchen for a cloth to wipe up the stain. Then we’d clean ourselves off, turn on the wireless and cook supper.

  It is curious to me, in retrospect, that though I fucked him routinely, Edward showed little interest in doing the same to me. I wondered about this. I never had been buggered, although once I’d experimented with a carrot from the larder—the sensation I recalled most vividly, from that attempt, was numbing cold. And certainly I hadn’t experienced anything like the paroxysms of pleasure that claimed Edward, those afternoons against the wall—paroxysms so intense I couldn’t help but wonder what I might be missing. A carrot, after all, is not a cock—at least, judging from the way Edward carried on.

  One afternoon we were horsing around on the bed. I lifted my arse in the air and just stayed like that. At first Edward seemed taken aback. He did nothing. Then he wrestled me around onto my stomach.

  Another time, when he came home from work, I arranged myself against the wall where I fucked him, in much the same position he usually assumed. “Doing stretching exercises?” he asked as he headed into the kitchen to pour himself some tea. “Stretching exercises, yes,” I said. If indeed Edward understood what I was trying to tell him, it appeared he was not going to let on. Indeed, I couldn’t help but wonder if, having discovered in me a dependable source of pleasure, he feared lest I should become so addicted to the joys of taking it up the bum that I’d lose my interest in “being the man” for him.

  In those days I enjoyed an active social life. There seems to be so much to do when one is young! Dinner parties, salons, soirées . . . A wealthy dowager who enjoyed the company of clever homosexuals invited me regularly to her Thursday afternoons, and I usually went, if for nothing else then for the food, which was good and plentiful. Then there were those little suppers concocted by my Cambridge chums—clumsy, drunken evenings where one ate spaghetti off mismatched plates, standing up in the kitchen, and argued politics. And I had other friends, wealthy friends like Rupert, who hosted balls at country estates where the lawns glistened wetly and hundred-year-old carp swam in the ponds. These activities I relished—I think all writers do, trapped as we are most of the day in the solitary confinement of our brains. Indeed, until he came to live at my flat, it never occurred to me that Edward’s arrival might curtail them. Now, however, with each invitation I received, I found myself obliged to make a choice: should I bring Edward along (and in so doing offer our relationship up for public scrutiny)? Should I continue going out alone (and risk hurting him)? Or should I simply stop goin
g out altogether?

  I confess that for the first few weeks I opted for the third, and easiest, alternative. It hardly felt like a sacrifice; my relationship with Edward was still so new that even the most alluring proposal paled in comparison to the prospect of a night alone with him. The bloom, however, must eventually fade from every love affair, even the most durable, and ours was no exception. I remember waking one morning feeling just the slightest tinge of boredom, like a child who balks at having to eat the same thing day after day for breakfast; a satiation, if you will; the tiniest, most tentative bud of wanderlust . . . Then I knew it would be only a matter of time before the invitation arrived that was just too tempting to pass up.

  It came soon enough. One afternoon, out of the blue, Louise Haines, with whom I had been friends in Germany, rang up. I was delighted and surprised, not having seen or heard from her in almost two years.

  “Darling, how are you?” she exclaimed in her signature raspy contralto. “I’ve just arrived a week ago. I’ve been dying to call you, of course, but you know how things are—so much to do. Yes, I’m here with friends from Paris, and there’s been just all of London to show them, and then on Saturday, of course, I had to go to Ruislip to visit Mother—too trying! Can you ever forgive me? Now, you must meet us tonight at the Savoy. Seven-thirty. No, I shall not take no for an answer; we’re going to the most fabulous party—it’s in an opium den.”

  It was already four-thirty. I had spent the morning trying to write, the afternoon with my horrifying pupil; Edward wasn’t due back for another two hours, and when he arrived, what would we do? Drink tea, read, have a fuck . . . It all seemed, suddenly, so boring, so cozy and domestic! (How angrily I thought those words, not knowing a day would come—this one—when cozy domesticity would be the thing I longed for most!)