While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

  “Yes.”

  “And then I bought a ticket to Valencia. I was going to go back to London.”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean you knew?”

  “Headley, stop crying!”

  “Don’t you understand anything I’m saying? Rupert, not me, is the hero of this story!”

  “I understand.”

  “Edward, please hear me! You must hear me! I was going to abandon you! I was going to leave you there!”

  “Stop crying! Jesus! Why won’t he stop crying?”

  I opened the cabin door, stepped out into flooding sunshine.

  “What’s happened?” the captain asked.

  “He’s died,” I said. “He just died.”

  “Madre de Dios.”

  “It was typhoid, I think.”

  “We will have burial at sea.”

  “What?”

  “Burial at sea! And when you arrive in England, you will tell them all he died in Spain, before you got on the ship, ¿Entiende? That is what you will tell them.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I’ll tell them whatever you like.”

  I opened his bag, spilled its few contents onto the floor. He had managed to hold on to a few pairs of his drawers, his name sewn into the waistbands. There was a battered copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth, as well as The Communist Manifesto Northrop had given him, some tea in an envelope, some sugar in a paper bag, and his notebook.

  This I opened.

  March 6th [I read]. Breakfast: bread and coffee. Lunch: beans. Dinner: stringy meat and soup. Two bowel movements. No wanks. Read CM pp. 81–93.

  March 7th. Breakfast: coffee only. Lunch: dried fish and rice. Dinner: beans. No bowel movements. Wanked once. Read CM pp. 93–102, plus reread chapter one of JTCOE.

  March 8th. Breakfast: milk. Lunch: more beans(!). Dinner: tripe and potatoes. One bowel movement. No wanks. Read CM pp. 102–106, chapters two to five of JTCOE.

  I pulled the sheet off his body. Looked at it. There was a small spray of pimples on his chin. These I ran my fingers over. Then I felt his hair, which was limp. Pulled open his eyes, which stared up at me, their greenness the greenness of marbles, suggestive of nothing.

  His cock, deceptively small when not erect, was resting atop his balls. I touched it, and it twitched slightly. I pulled my hand back as if I’d been bitten.

  He hadn’t cut his toenails in ages, it appeared. So I took some scissors and sheared off the ragged ends. They were the same yellowed color as the blouse of the woman at the hotel in Altaguera; the shape of quarter moons.

  “Edward,” I said, smoothing his hair with my hand.

  Then once again I covered his body.

  With the coast of England just becoming visible, the captain and two of the crewmen wrapped Edward’s body in a canvas blanket and dragged it onto the deck.

  A sailor played “God Save the King” on a flute.

  For thirty seconds we stood, heads bowed, in silence. Then the crewmen dragged the canvas-colored mass to the edge of the railing and hoisted it over.

  Head over heels the body spiraled, until, with a splash, it hit the ocean. White foam spread out in rings; the canvas darkened as it sopped up water.

  Who killed him? Me? The war?

  The sea swallowed Edward.

  Then I went home.

  Moon and Water

  Chapter Eighteen

  How I got from Bristol to London I cannot tell you. Somehow, however, I must have, for the next thing I remember is Richmond: the smell of grass and petrol; boats on the river. Of Spain, George Orwell wrote: “I do not think I have ever seen a country where there were so few birds.” England was full of birds: starlings, skylarks, doves, pigeons, gulls, robins, terns. The sky rang with their competing song, so much song, after the silence of Spain, that it seemed deafening.

  I went to the foreign office to register the fact of Edward’s death. A young man in Oxbridge spectacles took down the information. Name of deceased? Edward Phelan. Age? Twenty. Place of death? Valencia, Spain. Date of death? April 13, 1937. Cause of death? Typhoid.

  “And were there any effects?”

  I thought he meant “effects” as in consequences, and wasn’t sure how to answer; then I realized my mistake.

  “No, no effects.”

  “Who is the next of kin?”

  “His mother, Lil—Sparks. Yes, Sparks.”

  “Do you have an address for her?”

  “I believe so.” I rooted in my wallet. “Seventeen Newbury Crescent, Upney.”

  “Is there a telephone?”

  “I don’t believe so, no.”

  “Would you like to inform her yourself, or shall we send a telegram?”

  “I believe it would be better for you to send a telegram.”

  Afterwards I burned Edward’s clothes without ceremony; I burned his duffel bag and his books. I kept his notebook. I almost kept his toenail parings, imagining I might enshrine them, the way Catholics enshrine the physical remains of saints. But in the end I burned these too.

  For weeks I cocooned myself in Richmond; I saw no one but Nanny, my brother and my sister. They treated me solicitously, with care.

  My journal mentions a celebration when Channing passed his medical examinations. I do not recall it. What I do recall are endless hours in the kitchen, playing cards with Caroline and Nanny. The whistle of the teakettle. The leafy late-afternoon light.

  “Do you ever wonder,” Caroline asked me once, “if people who are in physical pain every minute of their lives, from the minute they’re born—if they know it’s pain?”

  In May, I started going out again: just a few minutes at first, to look at the boats on the river; then on brief walks into Richmond. It seemed an excessively sweet and guileless place, with its cottage gardens and teashops and jonquils. In the newspaper I read that Miss Flora Avery of Abinger Hammer, Dorking, had grown a seventy-five-pound marrow in her garden, that Mrs. Mabel Allen of Basingstoke claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in the bark of an ancient elm. No one spoke of the war.

  Caroline went to Bath to stay with some cousins, leaving Channing and me alone in the house. My brother had emerged from years of self-imposed asceticism to become, for the first and only time in his life, a social creature. He was forever trying to talk me into accompanying him to balls and weekend house parties. I didn’t go, just as I didn’t go to Upney, didn’t sit down with Lil to tell her what had really happened. And if I had, would she have taken comfort in the truth? Or would she have thrown me out her door, cursed me as I hurried away from her, rushing down the Upney streets?

  Aunt Constance took me to lunch at the Lancaster. I was very somber. To my surprise, she did not probe but instead regaled me with anecdotes about a trip to America she had taken in March. Afterwards she sent me a rather large check and a note the sympathetic nature of which took me by surprise: “What you have been through,” she wrote, “redeem through the nobility of art.”

  I took her at her word. I sat down and wrote out what had happened, got so far as to describe my meeting with Edward and our first happy days together, then stopped. For the story I had to tell was not noble. Rather, it described the supremest moral failure. Not its transcendence, not its defeat: the failure itself. And what possible good could come from telling a story like that?

  Instead I went back to my old novel. I finished it rather quickly, and within a few weeks Alderman had purchased it for the princely sum of forty-five pounds. The Train to Cockfosters, I titled it. It was dedicated (oh, coward!) “To E.P.”

  “Imagine Cockfosters,” Avery says to Nicholas late in the novel, as he has said to him repeatedly. “What do you see?” This time Nicholas looks at “the elemental blue line snaking upwards towards a mysterious blue north. What he saw was ice-blue houses with ice-blue lawns perched on the brink of nothing, the air itself thinning out to a radiance too pure for human inhalation.”

  Hell, in other words, leads to heaven, which is numbness; the pain of
existence dulled. That I should have craved such a state tells a lot about the way I was feeling back in those dark summer days of 1937.

  In June, Channing finally got me to go to one of his parties. It was for an old chum of his, a girl named Polly Granger. Everyone at the party was terribly jolly, and having just a smashing time, as was I. Whenever I had the chance, though, I stole away to corners and drank.

  At the bar a familiar voice accosted me. “Brian, is that you?”

  I turned and saw standing behind me Philippa Archibald, or, rather, a new incarnation of Philippa Archibald: she had had her hair cropped much like Louise’s and was wearing a sleeveless sheath.

  “Philippa, what a surprise!” We kissed.

  “How are you?” she asked emphatically.

  “I’m all right. And you?”

  “Couldn’t be better. I gather you’ve been in Spain.”

  “Yes.”

  “And was it everything you hoped?”

  I considered this question. “No,” I finally said. “No, I can’t say it was.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Brian.”

  “Thank you.”

  A few nervous seconds passed.

  “Myself, I’ve just returned from America,” Philippa added brightly.

  “Really!”

  “Yes! New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles. Quite extraordinary; you really must go there. And when you do, be sure to visit the Grand Canyon. It’s the most amazing—”

  “Philippa, have you heard from your uncle Teddy?”

  “Teddy? Not recently, no. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I heard some news of him in Spain. You know, he’s become a Communist.”

  Philippa laughed. “Yes, yes. At the moment. Teddy is, shall we say, ideologically promiscuous—”

  “He killed a boy.”

  “What?”

  “No, I must correct myself. He didn’t kill the boy. I killed him. He merely . . . facilitated his death.”

  Philippa put her long fingers over her heart. “Brian, perhaps you’ve had a bit much to drink—wouldn’t you like to sit down?”

  “Ask him,” I said, “about Edward Phelan. He was a deserter from the brigade. He took him in, promised to get him a passage back to England. Then he betrayed him. They put him in prison, and he died.”

  Philippa’s mouth remained open, not so much in a smile as in a rictus. “I’m not sure what to say,” she answered at last, “except that I should imagine it was never Teddy’s intention to cause anyone—”

  Channing came by. “Brian, are you all right? I could hear you clear across the room.”

  “Channing, I’m Philippa Archibald. We met decades ago.”

  “Yes, of course. How are you?”

  “Your brother was just telling me the most extraordinary story.”

  “So I gather. Brian, are you sure you’re all right?”

  I smoothed my tie.

  “Yes,” I said. “Fine.”

  The weather got better. During the night spiders spun webs atop the box hedge that by dawn were finely coated with moisture. Most mornings I woke without memory, as if in the course of the night my very self had been erased, and I was now a blank page, an empty vessel. Unfortunately this sensation lasted only a few seconds, before memory came pouring back in, blotting the page, spilling over the vessel’s rim.

  It was August. Caroline had not yet got back from Bath. Channing was off on one of his weekends. No one home except me and Nanny, who rattled about downstairs and had not enough to do. I, too, had not enough to do: had no one to eat dinner or lunch with, no books to read, nothing to write. So I rose; went into the bathroom; lathered the shaving soap and smeared the resulting foam over my face. I watched in the mirror the slow progress of the razor as it dragged down the length of my cheeks. If I applied just the smallest extra pressure, I knew, I could damage myself—and then, before I had a chance to think any more about it, a rose-red bloom was flowering on my cheek. I pushed again: another bloom. Three more. I pulled the blade away. Now blood was sliding down my cheeks like rivulets of rain on a window, the stubbly water in the basin was pinkening.

  I heard a rapping on the door. “Who is it?” I called.

  “There’s someone here to see you,” Nanny announced.

  “Who?”

  “He won’t say.”

  “Oh, Christ. All right, tell him I’ll be right down.”

  I wiped the blood off my face—almost immediately it started flowing again—then pulled on some clothes and headed downstairs.

  “Yes, who is it?” I said when I got there.

  In the hall stood Nigel.

  “Good God, Brian, do you always slice yourself to ribbons when you shave?”

  “I don’t—that is, the razor must have been dull.”

  “Clearly.” He gave me a once-over. “You’re thinner than the last time I saw you.”

  “So are you.”

  We stared at each other uneasily.

  “Well?” Nigel said. “Aren’t you going to welcome me back?”

  “What? Oh, Nigel!” And I fell—literally—into him.

  He seemed bewildered, even dismayed, and didn’t know what to do with his arms.

  “Welcome back,” I murmured into his stiff collar. “Oh, Nigel, welcome, welcome back.”

  We retreated to my bedroom, where I finished cleaning myself off. “Can you stay long?” I called from the bath. “Can you stay for lunch? Tea? Dinner?”

  “I have no plans for the rest of my life,” Nigel said.

  “Good. Neither do I.” I reentered the bedroom. “When did you get home?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “From?”

  “Stockholm.”

  “And Fritz? Where’s he?”

  “Fritz is—Fritz had—well, he’s no longer with me, that’s all.” He closed his eyes.

  “Nigel?” I said. “Nigel, what’s wrong?” And sat down next to him on the bed.

  “Don’t worry,” Nigel said, “he’s not dead. Not yet anyway. But you know, it’s been mad these last months! We’d settle in one country for a few weeks, try to start up a normal routine, only to get a call or a visit from Immigration. Holland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium. One after the other, Fritz’s name turned up on one of those bloody undesirables lists, they found us and turned us out. It felt like we were being squeezed out of Europe. And all the while that lawyer, Greene, kept putting us off, promising us it would just be a matter of days before Fritz got his new papers. But the papers never came. Just bills. Bills and more bills. All kinds of unforeseen fees.

  “Finally we ended up in Brussels. We were asleep one night at the hotel, when there was a loud rapping at the door. A telegram had arrived from Stuttgart, saying that Fritz’s grandmother in Mainz was very sick, probably dying. Fritz started packing immediately. Of course I tried to talk him out of it—to go back to Germany, right then, was sheer madness. But he insisted. He said that if he didn’t go and say farewell to his grandmother, he’d never forgive himself. In retrospect, I think he knew what was up. I think he was simply exhausted. He was tired of running. Oh, he said he’d be all right; he said if he’d got this far there must be a guardian angel protecting him, and in any case the world could not have become such an uncivilized place that a boy couldn’t go home to see his grandmother when she was dying. Anyway, this was his mother’s mother, and she was not on speaking terms with his father. She would hide him, he said. It turned out he’d got himself a false passport made up in Paris—rather a scrappy-looking document, I must say, but functional, in a pinch. This was the first I’d heard of it.

  “I took him in the morning to the train. You can imagine the tension of our parting, knowing there was a good chance we’d never see each other again. Of course in the station like that we couldn’t kiss; instead we hugged, and then he was off. He promised to wire me the next day to let me know he’d got through safely. But no wire came, not that day or the next. Finally Horst made some calls. It turned out that Fritz h
ad been stopped by the Gestapo and arrested almost as soon as he’d crossed the border. The telegram was probably a hoax perpetrated by his father, or some rotten Nazi friend he’d confided to along the way. He did—does—have a habit of talking too much.

  “And you know what I felt when I got that call? It was odd. Not grief. No, I felt relief. A peculiar mad relief. Because finally, after all these months, it was over. It was finally out of my hands. I packed up; I made plans to come home. Meanwhile I found out that Fritz had been charged with everything from attempting to change his citizenship to taking part in ‘unnatural acts.’ I went to Stockholm and waited with Horst for the outcome. Funny: I’d become so used to worrying every time I got on a train about passport checks and whatnot, I almost forgot that traveling alone, as an Englishman, I’d have no problem. Also, I had plenty of money for a change, not having to pay for Fritz.

  “A few weeks later the news came in. Apparently Fritz’s father had managed to use his influence to have him released, at which point he was immediately conscripted—which is what Herr —— wanted from the start, as if the army will make him less queer. More likely, Fritz’ll end up getting buggered by his commanding officers. But it could have been worse. They could have put him in a concentration camp. They’ve put lots of homosexuals in concentration camps lately.”

  He lit a cigarette. I looked away, out the window.

  “After that I got on a boat for London. I got home yesterday. Mother’s very conciliatory, but somehow nothing seems real. The only thing I take comfort in is the thought that if Fritz dies, he’ll at least have got out early. He’ll have missed the worst of it, which we’ve got to look forward to.”

  “I’m sorry, Nigel,” I said, after a decent interval had passed.

  “And now, back in England, I feel so out of touch! It’s as if while I was trying to save Fritz, everyone I knew somehow got miles ahead of me, and now I’m stranded, far, far behind them.”