While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

  “You didn’t mention Simon having been there.”

  She shrugged. “Nothing much happened. It’s just a bit hard to resist Simon; he does have such a—such an air. I’m sure you recognized it.”

  “Yes, I suppose I did.” I drummed the table.

  “What, are you jealous?” Philippa laughed. “But don’t worry, we didn’t actually sleep together. Anyway, it was for old time’s sake, nothing more.”

  I opened my mouth to say something more, then stopped myself. I had no right to complain.

  “Well, Philippa, I suppose I’m just a bit more old-fashioned than you are,” I said. (One of the few true things I’d said in weeks.)

  “You are quite charming,” Philippa said. “I could get used to you.” She patted my hand in a maternal way.

  “Could you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Relief flushed my heart. “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “I really am.”

  Philippa smiled beneficently and fussed for something in her purse.

  Aunt Constance rang. Did I have any news? “All in good time,” I said.

  Edward, sitting across from me on the sofa, never took his eyes out of his book.

  In the middle of the night, Edward woke me—his hands on my stomach. I knew what he wanted: a kiss, an embrace; reassurance. And I lay stone still. I couldn’t give it to him.

  Eventually he took his hands away. His breathing—steady, anxious—kept me awake, however, so I got out of bed.

  “Where are you going?” he called.

  “Just to the sofa.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to keep you awake.”

  I lay down on the sofa. I could hear him across the room thrashing, twisting. I closed my eyes, counted my breaths, fell eventually into a troubled sleep. Then it was morning; the bed was made; Edward had gone to work. I had an early date with Philippa in the evening, which required me to leave the flat an hour or so before he got home. (Uncharacteristically, I traveled by bus.) When I returned—well after midnight—he had already gone to bed. Once again I made my bed on the sofa. Once again I slept through his morning departure. Thus twenty-four hours passed in which we literally never spoke to each other.

  The next night I dined with Philippa, then went cottaging, and didn’t get home until four in the morning. There Edward sat, fully dressed, on the edge of our caved-in bed. He had switched on all the lights in the flat, even the ceiling light. Under its cruel unflinching gaze every stain on the coverlet was illuminated: salmon spread and tea, mineral oil and snot and piss and spunk.

  Edward looked up at me. In his lap he held his precious copy of The Communist Manifesto. A thin streak of blood ran down his cheek from where he’d cut himself shaving (shaving at this hour?), and sitting down next to him, I wiped it away with my finger, noticing how the blood illuminated, briefly, the coiled rings of identity around the tip.

  “Edward,” I said.

  “Where were you?”

  “Out to dinner. We got to talking rather late, that’s all.”

  “Late! It’s four in the bloody morning.”

  I lifted the book from his lap, put it down on the bed, took his face in my hands and stroked his cheeks so that tears came into his eyes.

  “What’s happening?” he asked, his voice hushed, desperate.

  “Quiet,” I said, touching my lips to his forehead. “Everything’s fine.”

  “What—”

  I kissed him. I pushed him down on the bed, pulled his trousers and his drawers down, took the bottle of mineral oil from the drawer and smeared it over his cock and started rubbing. But his cock was soft, and when I lifted his legs and tried to bugger him, my cock was soft too and kept slipping out.

  Finally I rolled off him. We lay like this for some minutes, quite still, our faces to opposite walls. He still had on his black socks, his shirt and tie and sweater.

  “What is it I’ve done?” he asked after a while.

  “You haven’t done anything.”

  “Have I irritated you? Taken too much of your time?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Is it that I had John Northrop up to tea? I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve decided, really, perhaps I stepped out of bounds, this is your flat—”

  “No!”

  Brutal silence.

  “Are you in love with someone else, then?”

  I sat up. “What?”

  “Are you? You must tell me if you are. You must.”

  “Edward, what gave you that idea? Of course I’m not. And what’s ‘in love’ anyway? Are we ‘in love’?”

  “I thought we were.”

  “I never said it.”

  “No, you didn’t, did you? So perhaps I was a bloody fool.”

  I leaned away from him. “Edward—everyone has his own way of saying things. The point is, we’re still young, we’re too young to be—to be having this conversation. I need—we need—to be freer with each other.”

  “Freer! You never let me go anywhere with you or do anything with you. More and more your life’s out there, while I sit in this bloody bed-sitter listening to the water pipes rattle.”

  “Edward, you’re making too much of this. It’s natural that I should want to have my own social life. It has nothing to do with my feelings for you. Nothing.”

  He looked away. It was as if he suddenly understood that we could talk and talk and it would do no good, because one of us was lying.

  The blood on his face, I noticed, had started scabbing.

  “Look, it’s late,” I said finally. “Let’s go to sleep.”

  “As if that’s any solution.”

  “I’m just going to wash.”

  I went into the bathroom, where I ran the tap, splashed cold water on my face, examined it in the looking glass. This cannot be happening, I told the looking glass. I am altogether too young for this to be happening. Fuck off, the looking glass answered. You are not, and it is.

  I went back in. During the interval Edward had unmade the bed and taken off the rest of his clothes. He was now lying, eyes clenched closed, body S-shaped, tightly packed beneath sheet and blanket.

  Very quietly I picked up my pillow and tiptoed to the sofa.

  As if it mattered. As if he weren’t watching my every move.

  Chapter Nine

  Of course, when the end came, it came hard, and suddenly.

  First Philippa asked me to a weekend at her family’s house in Oxfordshire. Two of her younger sisters would be there, she said, as well as some school friends.

  Thinking that this would be an ideal opportunity to make my marriage proposal, I accepted immediately. (Edward, I’d decided, I would deal with only once I’d received Philippa’s answer.)

  With great trepidation I told Edward “a friend” had invited me to the country, but by this time he’d become so used to my going off without him that instead of becoming angry he reacted with a kind of glum resignation. “And what weekend would that be?” was all he asked.

  “This next one.”

  Suddenly his expression changed. “But, Brian, that’s the Friday you promised you’d come to Upney for dinner! If you don’t, it’ll break Sarah’s heart!”

  I reassured him that as I wasn’t expected at my friend’s until lunchtime on Saturday, there would be no need to cancel the dinner with his family.

  “All right, then,” he answered in a tone that suggested he’d have been happier if I had canceled and thus given him a good reason to be cross with me.

  We took the tube out to Upney on Friday evening. It had not been such a long time since our last District Line journey together—Edward scrubbed and nervous, me stinking of Aunt Constance’s cheeses. Then I’d been eager; now I only wanted the dinner over and done with, and Edward could tell. So we just sat there, side by side, not speaking.

  After a long time we pulled into Upney station. We got off. Once again Edward led me along the circuitous network of small, drab streets that led to his
home. Everything was as I remembered, except that now it was almost Christmas, so wreaths and nativity scenes had been set up in front windows, hesitant displays that suggested a fear of “putting on airs,” as if Christmas belonged, by rights, only to other streets, better neighborhoods.

  At Lil’s house we hung our coats on the coatrack. This time the never-seen dog did not bark. Perhaps he had gone to Walthamstow with Headley and Pearlene. (Two weeks before, their mother had finally come back from Glasgow and reclaimed them.) We slunk into the kitchen, and Lil—overburdened and influenzaed the last time we’d met—stepped forward from the stove, the picture of womanly vigor. She had her blond hair neatly done up in a bun, had rouged her cheeks, and wore a clean white apron over a black frock. Real or fake, the pearls that rested contentedly on her bosom seemed to confirm the old myth that the oils of a woman’s skin will give to those jewels a special luster. She kissed me with a warmth that suggested Edward had told her nothing of our troubles, then sat me down at the table with a glass of sherry. Across from me, silent Sarah furiously peeled potatoes. Someone had taken a curling iron to her flat brown hair, which now scalloped upward in large, artificial-looking waves. Sarah too had makeup on, though applied in a childish and inexpert way, as well as incongruous seahorse-shaped earrings that weighted down the lobes of her ears. She wore a brown party dress patterned with bluebells. When I said hello she blushed furiously and continued peeling.

  “Now, Sarah,” Lil said, “what do you say?”

  Sarah mumbled something inaudible.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Very pleased you could come to supper,” Sarah enunciated through clenched teeth.

  Suddenly her nervous knife slipped; she scraped her knuckle and began sucking on it furiously.

  A pale pink bloodstain spread out over the potato she had been peeling.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing,” she murmured, looking me in the eye for the first time and, knuckle in mouth, smiling.

  Lucy traipsed in. Her hair was longer than the last time I’d seen her. Once again she had on her face that look of aloof disinterest that appeared to be her trademark.

  “Edward!” she said in mock surprise. “To what do we owe the honor of a visit from the likes of you?”

  “Just missed Mum’s cooking,” Edward said quietly.

  “Missed Mum’s cooking! That’s a laugh!”

  “I’ll thank you not to bite the hand that feeds you,” Lil said.

  “Oh, Mum, I’m just joking.” She turned to me. “Hello, Brian. Been out much lately?”

  “A bit.”

  “How’s that lovely girlfriend of yours.”

  Edward shot me a glance.

  “Girlfriend? I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Yes you do. What was her name—Lulu?”

  “Oh, Louise,” I said with relief. “She’s gone back to Paris.”

  “What a pity! I’ll be arriving in Paris next week.” She lit a cigarette.

  “It’s true,” Lil said from the stove. “My little linnet is flying the nest. Soon it’ll just be Sarah and me left here to guard the old house, ain’t that right, Sarah?”

  Sarah said nothing.

  “And what will you be doing in Paris?” I asked.

  “I shall be an artist’s model,” Lucy said. “Paulette is taking up sculpture.”

  “Imagine!” Lil said. “I’m jealous, I am. It’s not every girl what gets to go to Paris and be an artist’s model. And this marquise—well, I thought, who does she think she is, stealing my little girl just because she never had one of her own? But then I met Paulette—imagine that, she wanted me to call her by her Christian name—and she couldn’t have been more polite. Not like those earls and dukes and what have you here in England, who won’t so much as give you the time of day if you’ve got the wrong accent. The marquise—Paulette—treated me like her oldest friend. It put my heart at ease, let me tell you.”

  “How are the children?” I asked.

  “Not here anymore, thank God,” Lucy said.

  “Lucy!” Lil said. “The way you talk about your own niece and nephew! In fact, Brian, they’re back with their mother, and it’s very considerate of you to ask. And they seem fine over there in Walthamstow. Children want to be with their mother, even if she’s an unreliable one like that Nellie. Imagine, running off when you’ve got two little angels like those!”

  “But I thought her grandmother was sick.”

  “Don’t believe it! She had a fellow there, that was the truth of it. He must have caught on to her, too, because quick as a flash she was back, just the way she left.”

  “And not a moment too soon,” Lucy said.

  “Bite your tongue, missy! I’m tired of your attitude, I am. You should be grateful to have them, your brother’s only babies. They’re all he’s left us, after all.”

  Suddenly Lil stopped cooking; tears welled in her eyes. “Now, Mum,” Edward said. He put his hands on her shoulders to comfort her.

  “I’m sorry,” Lil said. “It’s been two years, but the wound’s as fresh as the day I heard the news. I doubt I shall ever get over it.”

  For a moment, everyone was silent in honor of mothers who have lost their sons. Even Sarah stopped peeling.

  “Have you got a picture of Frank?” I asked, once it seemed decent to do so.

  Immediately Lil brightened. “Why, yes, lots. I’ll go and get them.” Taking off her apron, she bustled into the dining room.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Lucy said. “We’ll be looking at pictures all night.”

  Edward laughed—it seemed as if it were the first time in years—and then Lil came back with picture albums that she spread out on the table. We looked at Frank as a baby, held in the arms of his father. Frank throwing a ball. Frank and Nellie at a dance. Then all four of the children as children, gathered nervously around a small, ratlike terrier. The little girls on horseback. The entire family posed formally in their Sunday best, staring at the camera with that particular gravity—almost terror—that seems so typical to photographic portraits of the working class: as if, by the mere fact of sitting before this imposing shutter-eyed machine and recording their existence, they feared they were “putting on airs.”

  A quiet descended, the hush of a roomful of beings suddenly lost in collective memory, familial memory. Things fleeting, and gone. Children grown, brothers dead. “That was the year the dog got hit by a milk truck—remember, Sarah? I’ll never forget the poor little thing waddling around, up to its neck in snow.” A chorus of “Yes, ah, yes.” Clear as morning. Close as you’re standing. As if it were yesterday.

  Edward was smiling. He had his hand on his sister’s shoulder, and he was smiling. And I knew that for the first time in days, perhaps even in weeks, he was thinking not about me but of other, older things, here in his family’s house, this house he’d been raised in, this house with its cache of experience that dwarfed my brief tenure in his life. This house where everyone loved him and would gladly say what I, in Earl’s Court, would not.

  We went in to dinner. I was seated between Sarah, who ate methodically and would not look up from her plate, and Lucy, who smoked cigarette after cigarette, complained about the meat, swirled her potatoes around with her fork. There was both wine and beer. It seemed that every time I emptied my glass it was refilled before I had a chance to ask. The extent to which I was enjoying myself surprised me—I hadn’t expected to. It was as if, after weeks of self-imposed misery, Edward and I were being given a holiday, a chance to forget our troubles, to talk of other, incidental things and feel at home. From reluctance and poutiness Edward’s hardy, happy, optimistic old self reemerged, the way a desiccated flower, given water, comes back to life; his first hesitant bites gave way to faithful appetite. Such bashful hopefulness in his green eyes that I couldn’t help but wonder if he and his family had conspired in planning this evening, to remind me of everything I stood to lose along with him.

&n
bsp; And of course, by the time the dinner was over, it was too late—and we were both too drunk—to catch the last train back to Earl’s Court. I protested; I had to be in Oxfordshire in the morning. “Never mind,” Edward said. “We’ll get up early and I’ll take you to the station.” It seemed I had no choice.

  Once again, we put away the dining room furniture; once again, Edward dragged out the narrow cot. The women bid us good night. When I kissed Sarah on the cheek she smiled and blushed bright crimson.

  And then the door closed. We undressed tenuously, as if, in the absence of those cheer-inspiring women, in the wearing away of the liquor, the old misery might return at any moment, might fall like a sheet, muffling and silencing and separating. But it did not.

  Cautiously we got into the narrow bed. There was not enough room not to touch. It had been a week since we’d last made love. Instinctively we reached for each other, we kissed, groped, burrowed inside each other’s pajamas, our hands laying claim to whatever flesh they could find.

  Later, I held Edward while he slept—peacefully again, the way he used to—and stared at the odd bits of furniture silhouetted in the moonlight: the crib from which that silvery-eyed child had gazed at me; the sideboard with its smell of mutton; the little cabinet where Lil kept her photograph albums. I thought how nice it was to see Edward sleeping again. I thought that I could love this family more than my own, given half a chance. And yet it seemed beyond question that the next morning we would wake up very early, that I would catch that train to Oxford, that I would leave him.

  It started to rain: just a few drops at first, then a downpour, sheets heavy enough to bend and break the fragile young stems in the window boxes. Spring in London often brought cruel surprises: a last late frost that would kill them all. But of course it wasn’t spring. The window boxes were empty.

  Still, I took comfort in the rain and held Edward tightly as it beat its old drums around us.

  The bells on the alarm clock went off at six, boring into our sleep. Edward’s body spasmed. Even though I knew he’d woken up, he pretended he hadn’t; he kept his arms clutched tightly around my chest so that I had to push and wriggle, until reluctantly he relinquished his embrace.