Sandel

by Angus Stewart

  'To whom?' Lang asked distinctly. 'What about me being assaulted in my cave for lack of your precious progeny? Aren't you responsible to my infirmity?'

  'Ideally, yes. But then, ideally, you would be to mine.'

  In the hiatus Lang refilled both their glasses.

  'How can you be sure the boy isn't hurt?'

  David watched the level of the decanter curiously. The reduction of a moment of happiness and human communion to an academic discussion of its advisability seemed to him to be without meaning, so that he could only reply wearily.

  'One can be sure of nothing. But if you're driving at the idea of deviation's being somehow instilled during youth, it's a fallacy - as you'd discover if you read your text books. Where a condition isn't innate, then the sort of imaginative sensibility where it may take root obviously is. Germination is as arbitrary as anywhere in nature. Remember the sower whose seed fell on differing soils? It's more arbitrary than, that, because man has a mind, and its susceptibilities - its responses are limitless....'

  'So good minds, and stony - evil minds.'

  'Or yielding and unyielding minds? No, the pun's out of place. Say simply normal minds and abnormal minds. And normality of mind isn't necessarily a virtue.'

  'You should be on a committee,' Lang said dully. 'I still don't follow this tenuous suggestion of yours that because bigamy is accepted in one age David Rogers can take choir-boys to bed in his.'

  'You've got it all wrong.' David was patient. 'I implied no such connection. I instanced another deviation from the norm merely to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of conventional morality. Incidentally, I wish you'd drop this choirboy angle -it isn't nice.'

  'No,' said Lang. He drained his port. 'Nevertheless - to pursue other ages - no doubt you'll be reminding me next of paederasty in Lacedaemon?'

  'On your insistence. What was the result?'

  'I don't know. Wretched small boys wandering round clutching sore behinds, I imagine.' Lang was at his smoothest.

  'On the contrary there was no adultery or neurosis.'

  'You astound!' Lang affected incredulity. 'What was Plutarch's Latin for "neurosis"? But this is all rather a stale line, you know,' he went on, dubiously consulting the dregs of his port 'Greeks and Gide; free-love; scraps of D. H. Lawrence...'

  'I'm not suggesting Christ co-habited with anyone!'

  Lang's response, sensibly enough, was to ignore him.

  'Incidentally, what about the aborigines of Kimberley who are temporally presented with boy wives when the tribe happens to be a bit short of girls?' Lang spoke with increasing irony. 'Then, let's see, we've the Dorian boy-marriage-by-capture, the Crusaders' little pages, the Chinese professionals, modern Turks and Albanians, the American hobo's prushun - though I believe they've recently been replaced by pumpkins.... Goodness, what a lot of precedents you've over-looked!'

  'I don't do quite so much vicarious reading,' said David. The sooner you're put away in a monastery full of other solitary monks the better.'

  Lang stretched his long legs. He was unmoved by the childish jibe.

  'But what about your reclamation, David? My offer of marriage still holds good.'

  'Sorry,' David said, deliberately misunderstanding him. Try Ricks. I only like boys.' He felt suddenly tired of the bickering game. It could serve no propose. Yet they both went on playing it mechanically.

  'That plural betrays you,' Lang said.

  'It was figurative; adapted to jest.'

  'I know. But who else would? It demonstrates what I said earlier. One day you'll slap out an epigram like that and it'll bounce back disastrously. Few people's intelligences are going to admit the sort of intellectual latitude you demand.'

  'Maybe' David said. 'But I can't deny Tony for all that. Call it perverse pride if you like. Whose side in this argument are you on now, anyway?'

  'That of rationality and the angels - as ever.' Lang said piously.

  'I see. Bruce sticks to the big battalions, but can lend a Samaritan hand to heresy where he chooses! Talking of parables and my marriage, did I ever tell you about the hippopotamus?'

  Lang was now looking at him wearily: he shook his head.

  'Well. There was a rather restless hippopotamus, see? And its friends and relations, other hippopotami, observing its distress, all came and stood around it in a big circle one day -the way hippopotami do. They said, "August!" - that was his name – 'August! We strongly advise marriage.' August nodded his head sagely; then he said, "Yes. But I don't know a camel." '

  Lang looked quite blank.

  'A parable, Bruce! Surely you understand such things?'

  David looked at his watch. It was three in the morning. That left him only seven hours to change the Series 4's rear axle and get over to Silverstone. Outside it was still raining. He got up.

  'So you're maintaining your stand then?' Lang asked. His enquiry was oddly tentative, as if he supposed the silence might have produced conversion.

  'Presumably. Isn't it as inevitable as your sticking to yours? Intolerance arises from two things - contradictory ones: a man's guilt, which only finds absolution in the solidarity of the herd; and the necessity of maintaining whatever is most precious to himself as an individual. He feels that his salvation depends upon it. Who can say it doesn't?'

  "Then we're each of us condemned to isolationism?'

  'Surely,' David was excited. 'And no doubt your God cunningly devised it like that to make us ultimately dependent upon Him. I don't know. What I do know is that you'll never stop people coming together in love. You'll never know what makes them sympathetic to one another, and it's probably as impertinent to enquire as it is to cast judgement. Perhaps even discussion is meaningless, if only because one can have no valid part in other people's reality.'

  Throughout this speech Lang had been shaking his head. Now he said:

  'This isn't a defence of your behaviour, but a hysterical admission of your being alone. The damnable thing is that you like it. One could almost believe that you'd involved the boy to achieve it.'

  'No,' David said; and when he reached the door, 'No.'

  'Wait, I haven't finished yet.' Lang got up with an agitation that was unusual in him. 'You're trying to resurrect Peter. This Tony is a projection of him. But the folly of it is that through a combination of the child's precocity, and your own need for some sort of orientation, you've entered into a relationship that you would have found unthinkable with Peter. Peter's death might have given you a lot of valuable things. Instead, you let it make you an outsider. The realisation you're looking for can't be found with this bloody boy. Not only is it wrong, but by seeking to transpose fantasy into actual behaviour you're not finding yourself but getting more hopelessly lost.'

  'Maturity is the modification of the fantastic by the real.'

  'Of course!' Lang was nervously picking up various society cards on his mantelpiece. 'But you're proceeding from the wrong fantasy. You must know it can't work. Yet some bloody-minded conception - preconception I should say ‑ drives you on ...' He faltered, and looked away. 'It's something you didn't use to have ... this cussedness.'

  David watched him steadily; still holding the doorknob. Now that the inanity between them had evaporated he felt relieved. Yet the uncertainty, from which they both acknowledged the inanity as springing, wasn't diminished.

  'You're right, anyway, about the loneliness,' he said. 'I found Tony in a vacuum. Beyond that ... what? I love him. Of course it may be that everything we know is an illusion. What have we that's absolute?'

  David lay sprawled for a moment on top of the Master, wall He was soaked to the skin. The thunder still rumbled overhead like tanks marshalling in the uneasy dawn. Sheet lightning flickered like giant flash-bulbs, weirdly protracted in slow motion. It lit the sleeping edifice of St. Cecilia, and the soaring buttresses of Tony's Temple.

  'Good morning, sir,' a voice said.

  David looked down into the night porter, torch.

  'Now don't fall, sir.
Just let me have your name.'

  'Tony Sandel' said David. 'No ... wait a minute. It's David Rogers. I'm not sure. I don't think it makes much difference ...'

  'Soon know.' the porter said soothingly. He seemed to consult a list of some sort. 'Mr. Rogers, sir. We don't appear to have a Mr. Sandel.'

  The shape on the pavement wasn't a dustbin. It was Crawley. He sat hunched under the rain with his feet in the gutter. They stared at one another.

  'I'm waiting to see the sunrise,' Crawley said. 'It's something I've never done before.' He trailed his finger in the torrent flowing beneath his knees. 'Rogers ... Jean's left me. It was yesterday afternoon. We went to Abingdon on the top of a bus. I think we looked at the river … there were ducks and things. She stamped her foot in a teashop and said, "Take me home!" Everyone turned to look ...'

  'Did that worry you?' David was cautious.

  Crawley seemed unable to find words.

  'You see, Rogers, with her I was ... real. Myself. She gave me ... validity. Something I couldn't find here. She doesn't belong to the university. We could be real together. We were going to be married ... No, don't sit down in the rain, man.'

  'I'm soaked, anyway,' David said.

  'Funny,' Crawley began to muse again. 'Love's an elaborate thing. One reveals so much. Builds so much. So many inter-dependencies. And then.... Do you have a sheet of paper?'

  David produced a page of blank score. 'I've nothing to write with.'

  'No! No!' Crawley said, almost in agony. He crouched over the gutter, sheltering the sheet of score from the rain, and began to make a paper boat. A lamp standard near the Taylorian splashed a pale light on the road. Crawley launched his boat with its pin-stripe sails. It carried only a few yards along the gutter and became stranded.

  'I'd sensed it coming. I can see that now. But somehow one doesn't believe it. Because one doesn't want to, I suppose. Have you another bit of paper?'

  'What will you do?' David asked.

  'I don't know. I won't find another Jean. One re-adapts, doesn't one? Life would be unbearable if one didn't. I suppose I'll grow another mask.'

  Crawley made to launch the second boat, then crumpled it in his hand.

  'We used to play Pooh-sticks at Godstow,' he said. 'You know the game.'

  'Yes'

  Crawley rallied suddenly. 'Blast the emotions of women! The trouble about them is that one never knows what's real, and what the artifice of the moment. But Jean wasn't like that. Or rather, we'd gone beyond it. Beyond the initial manoeuvres of courtship. Those can be more trying than fun for a man.

  'I'll do other things I've never done before,' he went on, becoming gloomy again. 'I'm going to smoke and drink. Really I'm not here to see the sunrise. I didn't want to dream. I have a recurrent one. I'm clinging to a rope ... it's vertical, suspended from nothing, going nowhere. My hands begin to slip and they burn. But it doesn't matter because I'm too tired to hold on any more.'

  "You can hold on to a spanner, I bloody hope?' David said after a minute.

  'A what?'

  'Tools. I could use help on a car that's got to be ready for a race track by morning.'

  'Racing?' Crawley looked helpless. 'It's against University Regulations, isn't it?' Nevertheless he stood up. Near the Radcliffe he startled the night with his first cigarette. When the coughing died away, he said, 'Look. Rogers, I don't think I know your name.'

  David smiled faintly. Less than half an hour ago he'd forgotten it himself.

  Chapter 17

  The track was murderous: that was immediately apparent. The rain had stopped, but the damage was irreparable. The converted perimeter of the old airfield glistened damp yellow under a morning mist. Here and there were streaks of burnt rubber beneath the transparent film of moisture. Patches of oil spread slow rings of colour that twisted in agony like fallen rainbows.

  David buckled his helmet, and squared his shoulders against the squab of the Series 4 as it vibrated beneath him on the starting grid. He looked over towards the straggling line of spectators by the pits. Girls in sheepskin jackets and headscarves. A few limp mums with papier mache national emergency coffins. All that was usual for a club event. Immediately on David's left a slim-nosed Lotus Seven was sniffing the ground like a dachshund. David let his own revs dwindle and listened to the snuffling. Over-square Ford 105E probably. He could leave it standing on the grid. On his right was a Zagarto-bodied Fiat-Abarth, its engine buzzing like a bee in a tin. Rich man's car. Not a hope in hell. Behind him were scattered an assortment of Sprites and Berkeleys, a Morgan, a Fairthorpe, and a Turner. Thoroughly business-like all of them. The Series 4 was the nearest approximation to a road car, if only because he'd forgotten to knock off his hub caps. Gentleman Rogers.

  The starter had raised his flag. David ran his revs up to 3,500 and held them steady. It would mean a new clutch. So be it. Inevitably, he began muttering into the scarf around his mouth. 'Boys' Bumper Annual,' he said. 'Big Red Racer. Picture covers, and pages like blotting paper. Daring Dick. Watch it ...'

  The car's back wheels lashed the grid. Instinctively he checked the slide and was away. 'Rogers in the lead,' he said smugly into the scarf. The Abarth whined past him, and they were both glancing treacherously into the sharp right-hander of Copse. 'Rogers gives way saving the life of a rival driver,' David muttered.

  The cars roared down Hanger Straight like the charge from a shot gun. Stowe Comer. Tears streamed from David's eyes, tickling his ears. Insane alignment. He might never have been to school at Brands Hatch. The Series 4 slashed broadside across the track into Stowe. Too fast. 'Discs,' David said calmly now. He clamped the pedal: dragged the wheel down for twelve inches; relinquished it for six. He hauled it round another eighteen, and let it spring back nine. His strength had concentrated like anger in his fingers and wrists: otherwise all his body, save his calf muscle, was relaxed. The car squirmed dangerously in his hands like a live weasel. But he was through now; aligned and accelerating on Club Corner, an arrow still quivering from the shock of the bow. 'Rogers' estate to pass to Tony Sandel. Codicil. Port for Lang.' He was through Club. The gentle sweep of Abbey Curve received him, a greased blowpipe. The hay bales fused together. A Cresta Run of butter-pats. He was rocketing away down the home straight.

  'Rogers, as he lay dying, stretched out his arms towards the lovely ladies with flowers in their hair, and said, "Give me lilies with full hand. Make my coffin of sandalwood, and I'll sleep happy with the ants. Pour a libation of white wine into the Temple, and then let Sandel sing ..." ' The car took Woodcote like a trolley-bus with an upper deck load of mercury. David didn't care. 'Afterwards do not neglect to feed Sandel sufficiently ...'

  The words left his lips but not his ears. He wondered whether his taking part in the race was anything more than the gesture of an enfeebled mind. A form of non-genital exhibitionism; and one where he was his own audience and commentator. He threw the car accurately into line for a corner. What did the exercise of power conceal? Was Daring Dick a confrontation of emptiness? Driving racing cars was patently a pursuit of the insane.

  Sobered, David sat on the tail of the Turner. Someone had cruelly dented her backside, peeling the paint to the bare aluminium. He moved his wheel to the right and the Turner, rear slid left across his windscreen. He brought his left hand down, but couldn't get past on the other side either. For some moments he moved his wheel in slow arcs to and fro, whilst the tail of the Turner oscillated back and forth like a shuttlecock between his windscreen pillars. He bounced the image off the pillars at the exact moment of contact every time. Dick had found a new game.

  But the Turner was pulling away. David scowled. The car must be powered by a Climax engine. He thrust out his jaw and relaxed his forearms. Steadily he drew out the Bowdenex cable that opened the throttles; a long, satisfying pull. The engine whined up to a diabolic crescendo.

  Still the Turner drew away. They'd been nose to tail through the long curve of Becketts, and were now flat out on Hanger Straight. Suddenly
David stiffened. The shock, cramping his forearm, exploded the fingers of his left hand like a bomb-casing. The Turner was shitting on the track. At least one con rod had gone clean through the sump, flooding the ground with oil. David snatched his gear lever through the gate. The box howled in protest. He stood on the brake; at the same time dragging the car from its trajectory as sharply as he dared. Too late. His off-side wheels ran, locked, into the spread of oil. The car slithered wildly, span, struck a hay bale, and keeled over with a rending of naked metal on the road. In seconds it was a ball of flame.

  David's back was broken. Somehow he'd become detached from the car. Searing pain in his legs grew fainter as warmth spread through his head.

  Dark forms stood over him. They were wrapping a sheet about his body, and he fought against it because he couldn't die yet. He was watching another sheeted figure, standing upright on a hillside. Small creatures milled about its base. They had four-cornered hats and black wings like eagles. He knew now that they were going to unveil a statue. The black figures were prancing around it. He had to know what it was. The form beneath the shroud was hard, angular. Tony's body must be carved from box wood; his lips tinted with the blood of a cherry tree. It might be transparent as water. When he realised this panic seized him. He was afraid for the crystal figure because its chest was ice cubes and might melt in the sun. It couldn't be destructible.

  David saw the boy once more. He alone was standing before him. He felt that he had created the boy; sculpted him in clay that is nearly dry; its graphite texture tolerant of fine etching. In the moment of consolidation he was exhausted, unable to move except to throw away his tools. He would never need them again. He was afraid of their strangeness. But now something was wrong. Perspective had contracted as swiftly as a jazz trombone. He was hurled against his creation when he should stand back from it; cast into the terror of its inception. Then he knew that he had not created the boy, and would never begin to comprehend him: that like a fly struck to the floor during the performance of a symphony he might only lie helplessly beneath the alien music.