* Public Record Office, FO141/538.
12
I can’t fault him for being less edgy than his biographer, after all. Nor can I blame him if now and again I tire of a certain prosaic quality in his narrative. It is only the thought that he is being evasive that exasperates me, but I can’t think what would change that now. He is ill, I am in no doubt about it. For the first time I wonder if we can ever make a book out of this. I have gained a friend, but I may yet have to file our relationship ignominiously as ‘Bits of a Biog.’.
There is still much in Jayjay that I envy. He is thoughtful, although I’m not sure he ever drifts very far from the world, being satisfyingly tied to it by sensualities of all sorts as well as taking an easy pleasure in being who he is. That is how I should like to be, too (I think as I stare out of the window over the Val di Chiana’s panorama). That is how I should like to be if I were a stronger personality. I have this fatal weakness for floating away, even as I sound brisk and occasionally forceful. I can imagine people who have met me over a dinner table reflecting later that although the words I spoke came over as individual enough at the time, the person who spoke them now seems smoky, insubstantial. Whereas anyone meeting Jayjay over dinner would carry away the clear impression of a solid and ever-present persona, not one that would slink off, leaving its owner vacantly crumbling bread until jerked to his senses to blurt ‘I’m so sorry – I must have missed that.’
Yes, I am a little jealous of the man whose life I have stupidly trapped myself into writing. He came well disguised but I can now see he is another incarnation of that figure whom I have been meeting throughout my life, the person who knows what he is doing. In my days of youthful travel I would run into people of my own age waiting in an Indian bus terminal at midnight or urging me in the small hours to do a bunk with them from a fleapit hotel in Recife because expected funds hadn’t arrived. These characters always seemed to have a next step to take and to know why they were taking it. I lacked this inner plan. Adrift in a continent, I could never see why any particular destination might be preferable to any other even though I generally liked it well enough once I had got there. And the same uncertainty or rootless docility has dogged me through the years to the point where I can acknowledge it as mine. When one has passed fifty one can disown nothing.
But I do regret it. Much of the time, if not most, I regret it. Apart from anything else, who but a weak and indecisive person would have allowed himself to drift into a late cohabitation and then let both that and his only child drift away like one of those small clumps of thistledown that float in through an open window, eddy around a few inches above the kitchen floor for a while and float out again? Inconceivable that Jayjay would have let such a thing happen. And nor is it because I don’t care enough. I do. Amo et fleo (or I should say: I believe I have loved, I have watched myself weep). It is mainly that I have so little conviction of the weight of love and tears. The moments in my life when I have been most content are those when I was not in love and still less shedding tears. If I have to visualise them, an image comes to me that originated perhaps on that distant Asian coast, or maybe in this very house until four or five years ago when I finally put electricity in. It is of sitting at a table before an open window. Outside it is night, and an oil lamp on the table lights up the page of a book or a half-scribbled letter. What I can hear is the soft buzzing of the lamp: a hollow sigh of hot gases rushing up the chimney, together with the faint hiss of oil burning on the broad wick. It is the sound that defines silence. Beyond the lamp, out in the night’s velvety warmth, there may also come the spongy lolling of wavelets on a level beach or else the machine-like chirr of crickets. Yet the lamp, while not making these in any way inaudible, somehow enfolds them in its hush. From its hot little heart it radiates silence, and out and out that silence spreads until it pervades the universe. At that moment my lamp is both at the centre of the universe and filling it. The very sky asprawl with starfields has something to do with that flame, as if the constellations were rustling up through the glass tube to spread out and set in an instant in deep interstellar cold. Thus my little lamp creates the firmament around it even as it shrinks it, and all in this clear, resonating silence. Time dissolves, and love and tears shrivel to join the seared midges and insect detritus falling slowly on to the golden page. They fall and fall in company with Why me? Why here?‚ and only that vast speck of resounding flame is steady. This happens, and brings balm. But I don’t think it happens to Jayjay, and why should it? He has too much else. Well. Even these days I still light my oil lamp from time to time. I may tell myself I’m economising on electricity but the truth is I like its smell and sound. Also, I think better by lamplight.
The dinner table I mentioned earlier was quite real. It was no mere figure for my inability to fill a seat as memorably as Jayjay always would his at any festive gathering. It was one night last winter when I went down the hill to supper with friends I have known for twenty years, all of them locals: a farmer and his wife, the farmer’s two old parents, an engineer at a pasta factory down the road together with his wife and daughter, a nursery gardener, a self-employed builder. The quantities of food were extravagant: cuisine not haute but sturdy, and produced with a lot of care. Jayjay was not there but it was just the sort of commonplace gathering in someone’s beamed kitchen at which he would have been in his element. Everyone lapsed into dialect with the first plate of crostini. Blasphemies peppered the air. The wood-fired oven threw out a cheery warmth, the cat dozed atop the extinguished television set. On the sooty walls were cheap framed pictures from Castiglion Fiorentino’s Friday market: Padre Pio with his celebrated stigmata, an all-purpose snow-and-pines scene that looked like Canada, a basket of puppies with roses bound over the handle. There was also a yellowed newspaper cutting with a barely discernible photograph of Fausto Coppi, the champion cyclist between the late thirties and early fifties, a boyhood hero of the farmer’s father.
The conversation rambled reassuringly to cover completely predictable topics. Local gossip; politics; sugarbeet; vines and olives; somebody’s operation; a boy who (pig-Madonna!) needed to stop wanking, get off his backside and do a decent day’s work (Madonna ugly-wolf!); a recipe for baldino; a woman who dyed her hair; amiable obscene jokes; much laughter; compliments to the chef … And without warning I saw heads. I saw how all our heads around the table were in some truthful way exactly the same heads that had talked around a similar table on this spot two hundred and fifty years ago or two thousand five hundred – Etruscans, whatever. Different names, different language, fairly similar food, but not different thoughts. The same heads having the same thoughts passed through them. Not for the first time I saw how our much prized individualities are a fiction. There is only this succession of heads in which the same thoughts take up residence, roost for a while and then pass on through the next generation in their long, aimless, repetitive narration. There will always be heads to host the same thoughts as ours long after our own are full of roots, just as there were before this current batch of ‘us’ was born. Who is this dim storyteller who exists outside us and goes on putting ancient jokes into generation after generation of skulls, filling them with the same banalities?
Once again I suspect Jayjay is untroubled by such moments. He would assuredly not have been the one sitting in silence, fiddling abstractedly with a chunk of bread. Had he been silent at all it would have been because he was trying to work out why baldino should look like a sort of chocolate flan, given that it is basically just chestnut flour, water and fried rosemary baked together. More likely he would have been in the middle of one of his tales of foreign parts and other times, so marvellous to people who have scarcely ever left this valley and one of the reasons why he is a perennially popular host. To the end of my life I shall be able to hear his voice: never loud, but the sort for which others fall silent on account of a certain charm and urbanity that contrasts in a piquant manner with the often risqué things he says. That odd mixture of travelle
d grandee and earthy Chianino is somehow irresistible. ‘So this Major Sansom fellow, who was in the Cairo Military Police in those war years, ordered an investigation and they discovered that the household was an efficient nest of spies because every single member of it, regardless of age or sex, was on the game. Ddio lupino!, even the cat’s culo looked like a zucchino flower…’
And yes, for this too I am jealous of the man, even though a sour and aloof little voice tells me that it’s all a bit easy, somehow.
*
Then one day everything changes. There are no premonitions as I bump down the track through basking Red Admirals. It is one of those hot summer mornings when lavender bushes are still being pummelled by clouds of Blues and Skippers, among which scarce Swallowtails float loftily in their blond finery. The richness of summer is coming to a head. Within a week or two the nectar flow will dry up and the remaining wild flowers turn to hay. The bees will be obliged to make the long aerial trudge down to the irrigated rape fields far below. On this morning, though, Jayjay’s garden is almost blowsy with the freight of summer sap. Maybe something in this sheer fecundity is enough to make my host aware of a thinness in the account of his life so far. Maybe my dissatisfaction has had its effect. Maybe, too, the state of his health has at last prompted him to gather his nerve. For what he is about to tell me contains elements of both confession and explanation without fully being either. He is also divulging a secret he has been keeping for so long that deciding to keep it no longer amounts to recklessness. Over sixty years a secret must surely transcend itself to become as much a part of its keeper as a pair of spectacles that brings the world into private focus; or else a habit one cannot shake, like always giving a little cough before speaking.
Whatever the reason, the scene that confronts me (outwardly the same as ever, with us sitting on his terrace with my notebook and the remains of mid-morning coffee on the table) is profoundly different today as Jayjay gazes into the blue air over Sant’ Egidio as if into a lens through which he might see his whole life refracted.
– Empty. It’s empty, isn’t it? There’s something missing from my life as I’ve narrated it. –
Not much about the heart, perhaps? Plus the odd inconsistency. Little skatings. Is this where you confess to Rosicrucianism, Jayjay? A previous life in Babylon or on one of the planets of Aldebaran? (But I’m thinking At last! Here it comes! and ready myself for a tale of military disaster, of treason, cowardice, massacre or interrogation. That’s the real reason why he chose me to write him: he sniffed out my own lapse through hints I’ve let fall in my books. We are uneasy comrades-in-arms, he and I.)
– Et in Babylonē ego … Not quite that, no. I thought I could slide around having to mention this, as I’ve done for so many years, but I find I can’t. The longer I go on talking about my life while omitting its centre of gravity the more hollow it feels, the more like a direct lie. Well, I can’t bear that. Did you ever read Berlioz’s memoirs? –
(Berlioz …?? And yet after all I must have had some unconscious inkling for after a moment’s double take it hits me with an inner thud like a long-awaited letter dropping on to the doormat. Visions of war thin away as my thesis crumbles. For Jayjay, ignominy had taken an entirely different shape.)
Not Estelle?
– Exactly. The boyhood passion that lasted him a lifetime, out-living mockery, two marriages and countless lovers. Only in my case not Estelle, but Philip. You remember Michael, the boy at school whose politics I admired? His younger brother. He was two years younger than me. It was the beginning of the autumn term and I was looking at the new timetables on the school notice board and there he was, just arrived, although I didn’t know then that he was Michael’s brother. It felt exactly like an electric shock, one severe enough to cause radical damage to the heart. Have you ever had that? Have you ever been, as the French say, foudroyé? It’s as if you had suddenly caught sight of a huge object moving across the sky which nobody else has noticed. You alone are thunderstruck, the rest of the world just goes blithely on with business as usual. And how could I have known, there in the middle of a mob of my schoolfellows all pushing and shoving around a notice board, that at barely sixteen I had just received the equivalent of a death sentence?
– At once, such love. As though gold dust were seeping through my blood. Everything I was or ever could become handed over on the spot to a perfect stranger, unconditionally. It depended on nothing, neither on recognition nor reciprocation. It was beyond all logic. It was even beyond rebuff, though I never risked that. Just a passion that could only grow and not diminish, fed by a casual word here and there whenever we bumped into each other by chance, although never is chance so painstakingly engineered as by a desperate lover. That was the secret of the whole Michael business. I know I told you I was fascinated by him but I wasn’t really, although he did impress me. Nor was I ever very interested in his politics, certainly not to the extent I made out and half believed myself. Michael was just an excuse. I cultivated him as a way of cementing a link with Philip. I’m not sure either of them ever guessed. –
What was their name?
A strange, closed look comes over Jayjay’s face, like that of a man who stands on a shore watching the ocean that has recently drowned his entire family.
– I can’t tell you. You’ll laugh at this old fool keeping a last school secret from over sixty years ago when most of the boys are long dead and the rest beyond all caring. Yet I told nobody then and cannot say the name now. I never shall. I shall die without saying it to anyone. It will fall out of my brain into the earth and dissolve. –
It’s true you never mentioned Michael’s surname. I noticed it at the time because you’re generally punctilious about names. It was a small thing, but it stuck.
– Maybe I wanted you to notice. That’s the worst of clandestine love: it’s the one secret bursting to be told. The surname doesn’t matter but Philip himself matters dreadfully. Now you know, and you’re the only person I’ve told in over sixty years. You’ve not yet dismissed it with one of your jocular remarks and I’m aware it leaves me with some explaining to do. I know it’s absurd, but although Philip has in some sense been my life I hardly knew him at all. A two-year age gap in adolescence is anyway quite a gulf, and most boys have no inclination to mix with their juniors, who simply strike them as childish. Also, in a formally streamed school one had one’s own contemporaries and classes and games teams and it was quite possible to go for days without bumping into someone from a different niche in the school. Apart from anything else he was a boarder and I a day-boy. Still, I befriended a couple of his classmates enough to discover he was an avid reader of Popular Flying, in which the earliest Biggles stories were being published at the time. When Johns himself visited the school I had him sign an autograph for Philip as well as for myself. I hoped it would buy me into my idol’s favours but all it did was slightly increase his stock among his contemporaries. So how, you’re going to ask, could a junior with whom I had almost no contact (and that only over a scant eighteen months more than half a century ago) have become my life?
– Dear James, I wish I knew. It might have made sense had we been physical lovers, but we never were. Largely innocent I may have been, as we all were, I was still aware of those sorts of erotic possibility. One never did that with real friends, only with people one didn’t necessarily like at all. It was part of the code, I suppose: a protection against love which was so important for the maintenance of a good school or even of British society. No, it wasn’t sex I wanted with Philip but everything. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. I wanted his soul. I wanted to be him, seamlessly. To inhabit his bones.
– I was partly foudroyé because of his looks, obviously. Michael was handsome but Philip was downright beautiful, there is no other word. Not at all effeminate, just beautiful, flawless. It was like being confronted with a masterpiece. Even his contemporaries seemed slightly respectful, which is hardly something that comes naturally to a bunch of
ink-stained fourteen-year-olds. Of course this was the eye of love, and I could always hear that little sceptical voice inside saying he was just another scruffy kid though admittedly a lot less plain than some. But it made no difference and anyway his looks are not the whole story. He had about him an intriguingly foreign air. I think I mentioned they were a missionary family in Tanganyika Territory? When I first saw Philip he’d just arrived back from a summer spent in Africa and he was a study in brown and blond. I remember being fascinated by the colour of his neck against his shirt collar, by his hands against his cuffs. Among us pallid English children he was an exotic, and it was that which did for me. It was as though my entire sixteen years had unwittingly been lived in a world slightly out of focus and in that instant’s glimpse a synapse closed or a critical molecule shifted and a new universe sprang into being with pin-sharp clarity. And all might still have been well if it hadn’t done something to my heart at the same time. How was I to know that at that moment, which not even an onlooker could have detected, my life’s entire course would be set? I went on believing what we were constantly told: that our futures depended on studying hard and passing the right exams, that qualifications were the key to everything. Yet as it turned out I need not have bothered to sit a single damned exam. The lightning-stroke of Philip had bleached away everything else and pointed me in a direction neither his nor mine, a direction I willy-nilly took up and have gone ploughing along ever since, further and further away as though I were intent on leaving the solar system. And it has led me here, for apparently the Valle di Chio mysteriously intersects with the outer reaches of the solar system. I’m sitting here on this terrace in Italy, talking to you on this astonishing summer’s day, all because one morning in Eltham in 1934 for maybe thirty seconds I saw a boy looking at a notice board. And that is the story of my life, so maybe you can stop writing and I can stop talking.
Loving Monsters Page 24