While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

  I had a bath and shaved, wondering the whole time how I might best resolve the situation. What if I brought Edward along? I tried to envision the group that would result—me, Louise, her undoubtedly very sophisticated Paris friends, and Edward, in his ungainly, ugly, too-small suit. Surely he would throw the rhythm off, make everyone uncomfortable. They would look down on him, which would pain me—and Edward as well. On the other hand, he might regard the evening as a grand adventure; Louise might find him rustic, charming; her Parisian friends might flirt with him . . .

  No, under either circumstance, it would never do.

  I put on a suit and brilliantined my hair—I looked quite dapper, I thought—then headed down to the station to have a talk with Edward and catch the train.

  “Well, what a surprise,” he said when he saw me. “Are you going out somewhere, then?”

  “I’m afraid so. Remember I told you about my friend Louise? Well, she’s come into town on the spur of the moment. I’m to meet her at the Savoy, and then we’re going to a party.”

  A whole spectrum of emotions passed over Edward’s face as he realized I wouldn’t be inviting him along: regret, anxiety, jealousy, anger, envy.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I was wondering why you were so dressed up.”

  “Sorry not to have given you any advance warning. Louise just called this afternoon.”

  “No, it’s no problem. Anyway, I planned to go out myself tonight. Visit Mum and the girls, call in at the old pub.”

  He said this so hesitantly I knew it couldn’t possibly be true. Nonetheless I smiled. “Well, that’s lucky, isn’t it? Do give them my love.”

  “Of course.”

  A strangled second passed.

  “Well, I must be off, then. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  We shook hands.

  “Brian!” Edward called as I passed.

  “What?”

  “I may just stay the night in Upney, if I’m out too late. So don’t be surprised if you come home and I’m not there.”

  “Whatever you think is best.”

  The train was at the platform. As I approached it, I turned and saw Edward staring after me. I got on. The doors shut.

  I found and took a seat. I was trying to excite myself about the prospect of my reunion with Louise; really, there was no one in the world I had more fun with. And yet I also felt guilty about Edward, and frustrated to be feeling guilty. He and I were adults, after all, free to do as we pleased. If he’d chosen to go out by himself, I wouldn’t have cared. (Or would I have? And of course he never did choose.) Really, I felt like saying, enough of this. You’re not a child; you’re a man.

  Still, the image of his crestfallen face haunted me. And what would he have for supper? Fish and chips, grease and vinegar soaking the paper cone? I hoped he really would go to Upney, to the comforting arms of his mother. Anyway, it would never have done for him to come along. He would never have “fit in.”

  At seven-fifteen I arrived at the Savoy. It seems to me to be my fate always to be early and to have for friends, exclusively, the sort of people who always arrive late. Louise sailed in around ten past eight. She was swathed in black crepe and silk and doused with perfume, had smeared kohl on her eyes and bobbed her hair and spit-curled it over her forehead. In her florid, aromatic wake trailed two thin men wearing fedoras.

  “Darling, I’m spectacularly sorry,” Louise said. “I just couldn’t make up my mind what kind of outfit one ought to wear to an opium den, and then the keys to the room went and hid behind the dresser, and then there was the most extraordinarily long wait for the lift—someone must have been ravishing the lift-boy. You look glorious. Are you in love?”

  “As a matter of fact—”

  “Let me introduce you before my friends think I’m frightfully rude. This is Alexei, and this is Joseph.”

  “How do you do?” Alexei said, extending toward me a pale, elongated hand on which were displayed many heavy rings. Everything about Alexei was attenuated—his fingers, swanlike neck, nose. As for Joseph, he was in fact not a man at all, but a raven-haired woman, quite beautiful, dressed in a man’s topcoat.

  “Enchanté,” Joseph said.

  “Joseph ne parle pas anglais,” Louise said.

  “Ah,” I said, then apologized in my schoolboy French for speaking only schoolboy French.

  While Alexei ordered drinks, Louise told me everything that had happened to her since we’d last seen each other: a complicated litany of fêtes, déjeuners, soirées, evenings à l’opéra. How different her life in Paris had been from Nigel’s!

  “And have you seen Nigel?” I asked anxiously.

  “Yes, once. At Café des Flores. The boy was there too: what was his name—Wolfgang?”

  “Fritz.”

  “Yes, Fritz. Good-looking but common as dirt. Boys like that are a dime a dozen. Then again, Nigel has never exactly been what I would call discriminating. And he does like a waif type. Personally, I prefer rich men.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Who—Nigel?” She paused, as if to consider. “Well, he was happy to see me, which took me by surprise. I mean, darling, you must admit, I’ve never been his favorite. To be honest, I always suspected he was a bit jealous of my friendship with you. This time, though, he positively ran to me. It was as if he were so starved for gossip and conversation that he would have welcomed his worst enemy. You’d think he’d been exiled on Elba for the last twenty years! And in a sense he has. They’ve barely left their wretched little pension in weeks. This business of getting Fritz emigrated has positively consumed him. Now, if it were up to me I’d advise him to drop the boy altogether; it’s costing him far too much—yes, yes, I know, I’m one to talk. And Fritz is quite pretty, if you like that type of blond, girlish boy. Still, it broke my heart. The things we do.” She batted her eyelashes melodramatically, then cast a glance toward Joseph; in the course of her monologue a heated discussion—close to argument—had begun between her and Alexei. “They do this all the time,” Louise confided in a low voice. “Bicker, bicker, bicker. So tiresome.” Then, coming even closer: “Darling, I have the most wonderful confession to make. Joseph is my lover. Yes! She seduced me! And it’s the most astonishing thing—they say only a woman can know what to do to a woman, and it’s true! I’m putty in her hands! I’ve never known such pleasures! The other night I screamed so loudly the couple in the next room called the hotel detective!” She laughed in delight, then turned to make sure Joseph wasn’t catching her words. “Now, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s just not true, I haven’t become a lesbian. I’m afraid I’ll always adore men and their charming organs. This is merely a coup de foudre for me. Unfortunately I’m afraid it may be a bit more than that for Joseph. Such a pity. Still, I must say, when I think back to some of the men I’ve had, what clumsy oafs they were—well, a woman of such, shall we say, skills as Joseph is to be recommended. Everyone should try it at least once, darling.” She sipped her anisette, or whatever she was pretending to imbibe. (Louise liked encouraging other people to drink better than drinking herself.) “Brian, dear, don’t you ever think what a pity it is that you’ll never have the experience of being made love to as a woman by a woman?”

  “Don’t you ever think what a pity it is that you’ll never have the experience of being made love to as a man by a man?”

  “Life is unjust,” Louise said, then lifted her glass. “To homosexuality, then.”

  “What are you toasting?” Alexei asked.

  “Homosexuality. Homosexualité.”

  We all lifted our glasses and clinked.

  “Darling,” Louise said, “I’ve been talking up a storm, as usual. You must promise next time we meet to bind my mouth with tape. Now tell me about you.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Louise, we ought to be going,” Alexei said. “We’re already late.”

  “Oh, dear, yes. I suppose. Is the car waiting?”

  Indeed it was: a
black cab ordered in advance. Crowded together in the back, we drove for about half an hour. At first I tried to keep track of where we were heading—it was generally east—then gave up. Do not be fooled by the underground map’s orderly network of colored lines: real London is a maze that circles and doubles back and folds in on itself. They say that to become a cab driver here, you must first acquire something called “the knowledge,” which, once obtained, puts in the hands of its possessor the capacity to locate without maps even the obscurest Hampstead mews. (Shall we call the angel on the driver’s shoulder, then, the “mews” of cartography?)

  Conversation during the ride was conducted almost exclusively in French. “We are speaking about Paulette,” Alexei said in English at one point. “Have you met Paulette? She is the Marquise of—I cannot remember. Joseph . . .” But then he got caught up in the discussion and forgot to finish his translation.

  Eventually we disembarked in a chilly region of fishhouses. The air was thick with salt and silt, and there was a moldering wetness to the ground, as if it had been raining for years. We walked down a shrimp-smelling street, empty except for a drunken man urinating in a corner and a dog with bare patches in its coat like an old carpet. Somewhere not too far off, ragtime music played on an out-of-tune piano.

  Alexei led us to a swollen wooden door with a brass knocker, which he lifted. Eyes appeared through the peephole, unintelligible words were uttered, we were admitted to a room crowded with noise and light. Everyone was smoking; curls of smoke spiraled through the air like the ghosts of snakes. Having deposited our coats in the rather overstuffed little vestuary, we moved on into a large hall. Even though chandeliers had been hung and a burnished mahogany bar constructed, it was hard not to notice the collapsed state of the ceiling, the dirty plank floors.

  In one corner a jazz band rattled away. There seemed to be a thousand people in the room, men and women, women dressed as men, men dressed as women, all drunk and hysteric.

  “Darling, can you imagine?” Louise said. “In London! It’s positively Berlin. Let’s dance, shall we?”

  She grabbed my hand, pulled me onto the floor and began dancing with euphoric abandon, her silk dress rippling like water, her hands mercurially passing one over the other, knee to knee, until their movement blurred and she was a puppet on a string, a piston firing, a perpetual-motion machine. There were so many dancers, the loud clomping of feet on floorboards became audible, like a stampede of horses. Then the song ended. Louise jumped up and jackknifed my waist with her legs, surprising me with the weight of her body. I clamped her hips and started whirling like a dervish, and she put her arms out and her head back and opened her mouth and crowed. We staggered; I nearly dropped her. I lost strength, and we collapsed in a heap on the floor, laughing and breathless and exhausted.

  Collecting ourselves, we staggered to the bar, where she poured a gin and tonic down my gullet. “Oh, darling, isn’t this marvelous?” she shouted above the din. “Like the old days!” Gin dribbling onto my suit was like the old days, as was Louise herself not drinking anything; she didn’t have to.

  “So where’s the opium?” I asked.

  “We’ll have to ask Alexei about that! Apparently it’s in another room, and you need to know the password, which of course he does! Alexei’s slept with positively everyone! Let’s find him, shall we?”

  Grabbing me by the hand, she once again pulled me onto the dance floor. With great speed we navigated the room’s complex human geography.

  After several tours Alexei was located at last, chatting up a bearded chap in a turtleneck. Near him, Joseph leaned against the wall, looking supremely bored. Louise whispered something in Alexei’s ear, at which point he smiled, bade adieu to his companion and led the three of us back through the crowd to a narrow corridor, along which several young women stood flirting. We knocked at a door, which opened; eyes peered out. Alexei muttered something and was admitted, but the guard barred the rest of us from entry.

  “They’re with me,” Alexei said.

  The guard—a narrow-eyed Indian—regarded us with suspicion before reluctantly allowing us to pass. The door was shut, the jazz music instantly muffled. We were in a stuffy, dark, windowless room filled with dust and the fetid smell of unwashed bed linens. The room’s shadowed occupants—about fifteen of them—sat or lay on old velvet horsehair sofas and armchairs, the sort that if you took your fist and pounded their much-abused cushions, huge clouds of dust and skin flakes and God knows what else would puff up and hang in the air for hours.

  There was sitar music. No one spoke, no one seemed even to notice us. Then a woman beckoned Joseph, handed her a pipe, which she began to suck on . . . Joseph sucked, then offered the pipe to Alexei, who sucked and offered it to me. I took the pipe and inhaled—the flavor was sickly sweet, like Nanny’s jelly. There was no immediately discernible effect. I passed the pipe on to Louise. “Oh, no, darling, thank you,” she said. “You go ahead, I’ll just watch.” Even though her voice seemed shockingly loud in this languorous atmosphere, it failed to rouse the room’s inhabitants.

  Alexei and Joseph continued to puff at the opium; I could see their eyelids growing heavy. “Louise,” I said, “I think I’ll go back out to the party—you don’t mind, do you?”

  “Oh, not at all, darling,” Louise said. “In fact I’ll join you.” She whispered something in French to Joseph, who whispered something back. A brief argument ensued; Joseph turned her back. Grabbing me firmly by the arm, Louise led me out of the lair. “She knows I won’t tolerate possessiveness,” she whispered as we strode past the narrow-eyed guard and out the door, into the world, where light and noise once again engulfed us. I was squinting as I tried to adjust to the light, Louise nattering on about Joseph. Then I heard a voice calling my name—“Brian? Is that you?” —but I was still squinting and couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I turned, forced my eyes open. The blurry girl before me coalesced. I knew her, but I couldn’t say where from.

  “Brian, whatever on earth are you doing here?” the girl said, and laughed, and then I knew. It was Lucy Phelan.

  “Lucy!” I said. Nothing more, I was so surprised to see her. She stood before me and laughed and laughed, holding her cigarette into the distance. She was arm in arm with a heavy woman in a smoking jacket. “I told you I had a French friend!” Lucy said. “This is Paulette—the Marquise de Beaumesnil.”

  The marquise was, like Joseph, monocled. She had a fat, cherubic face and a wide grin.

  “Enchanté,” I said, shaking her hand, then introduced Louise.

  “The marquise and I go back years,” Louise said archly. “How are you, darling?”

  “It seems I can go nowhere without encountering you,” the marquise said in a low, heavily accented voice.

  “Dear Marquise, I am ubiquitous. And who’s your little friend?”

  “This is the dear sweet Lucy of whom I have spoken so often. Lucy, I would like you to meet Louise Haines. We know each other from Paris.”

  “What a delight,” Louise said, and held out her hand to Lucy, who took it. Smiles etched on their faces, they appraised each other. I could tell each recognized something in the other, some unnamable commonality neither could bear to look at for too long. Women of their ilk, I have noticed, invariably despise each other for mirroring back those aspects of themselves they would really rather not confront.

  “She is charming,” Louise said to the marquise, letting go of Lucy’s hand. Then, turning to me: “And how do you know this ravishing creature?”

  “He’s buggering my brother,” Lucy piped in.

  “Really,” Louise said, baring her teeth. “How delightful. Why haven’t you told me about this, Brian?”

  I was going to answer her—I really was—but I suppose at that moment the single puff I’d taken of the opium kicked in, for I was suddenly stuporous and couldn’t seem to formulate a sentence. In addition, I had become captivated by the charcoal-colored paisley swirls in the black fabric of Louise’s dress and
felt determined to follow them to their logical conclusions.

  “Perhaps it’s time for another drink,” Louise said. “Will you excuse us?”

  “Of course.”

  “Goodbye, Brian!” Lucy called. “Be sure to tell Edward you saw me!”

  Louise steered me toward the bar. “Darling, I’ve been remiss. I haven’t given you the slightest opportunity to fill me in on all your new friends.”

  “Oh, I hardly know Lucy,” I said.

  “And her brother?”

  “He lives with me.”

  “That is news,” Louise said, then ordered me another gin and tonic.

  I told her briefly about Edward, then switched to what seemed to me at the moment the much more fascinating topic of the Piccadilly Line extension. “Forgive me for saying so,” Louise interrupted at one point, “but your life does sound frightfully dull. You must get terribly envious of the characters in your novel—they seem to have so much more fun than you do! Anyway, no doubt as soon as you’re finished with this one you’ll begin writing a book about me and all my adventures, which will be an enormous success and earn you pots of money while I languish in some gutter!” She threw back her head and laughed. In fact the idea of writing a novel about her hadn’t crossed my mind until that moment, but now that she suggested it, it seemed a rather good one.

  The rest of the night is a blur. I have no idea how I got home—somehow, however, I must have, for at two o’clock the next afternoon I awoke in my own bed, my head pounding, convinced that I had committed sins of the flesh with someone other than Edward. (Who it was I could not for the life of me recall.) No one else was home, or in the bed with me, which was a good sign. I had a distant recollection of riding the underground, riding and riding, arriving at some remote destination, and then having to get on another train and ride back. What this destination was, however—Edgware? Cock­­­­­­fosters?—I couldn’t have said.