“We’re almost there,” I said.
He nodded, still absently watching the sappers as they got down gingerly to work.
“I wonder what it would be like,” he said, “if that thing were to go off now.”
“Yes, the same thought occurred to me last night.”
Last night.
“Would we know we were dying,” he said, “or would there just be a flash, and then nothing?”
In the station, an ARP warden directed us to the farthest platform, where the corpses, a great many of them, were laid out side by side in neat rows under canvas sheets. A nurse wearing a tin helmet and a sort of bandolier escorted us down the lines. She was a large, distracted woman, and reminded me of Hettie as she had been in her younger years. As we walked along she counted off numbers under her breath, and at last pounced on one of the shrouded forms and pulled back the canvas sheet. Max wore a troubled expression, as if he were in the throes of a perplexing dream. The mark on his forehead where the shrapnel had struck was surprisingly small and neat, more like a surgical incision than a wound. Nick knelt awkwardly and leaned down and kissed his father’s cheek; when he stood up again, I tried not to notice him giving his lips a furtive wipe with the back of his hand.
“I need a drink,” he said. “Do you think there are any pubs still standing?” The nurse gave him a bleak, disapproving stare.
We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get drunk, not very successfully. The Gryphon was crowded, the atmosphere even more hysterical than usual. Querell was there, and came and sat at our table. He was predicting a general collapse of morale followed immediately by widespread anarchy and internecine fighting. “There’ll be killing in the streets,” he said, “you wait and see.” He viewed the prospect with obvious satisfaction. Nick did not tell him about his father’s death. I kept thinking of Danny, and each time I did I experienced a secret surge of elation that was all the sweeter for being, in the circumstances, so shaming.
Later, Vivienne telephoned; she had come down to London, and was at Poland Street.
“How did you know where to find us?” I said.
“Telepathy. It’s in the blood. Is Nick all right?”
The telephone was hot and sticky in my hand. I was wondering if Danny were still in the house; I had an image of him appearing in the sitting room in his vest, and of Vivienne and him settling down on the sofa—that sofa—for a nice long chat.
“Nick is not all right,” I said. “No one is all right.”
She was silent for a moment.
“What are you so happy about, Victor? Has Daddy left you something in his will?”
When Nick and I got to Poland Street it was not Danny who was with her, but Boy. They had drunk most of a bottle of champagne. Boy rose and embraced Nick, with unaccustomed awkwardness. Vivienne’s eyes were red rimmed, though she smiled at me brightly. When she patted the place beside her on the sofa I recalled Danny doing the same thing the night before, and I looked away.
“Are you blushing, Victor?” she said. “What have you been up to?”
Boy was in full evening dress, except for a pair of carpet slippers.
“Corns,” he said, lifting a foot. “Killing me. But it doesn’t matter, it’s only the BBC, no one will notice.”
Presently Leo Rothenstein arrived, and the Lydons, accompanied by a pair of awkward young RAF pilots, and a woman called Belinda, a washed-out blonde with peculiar, violet eyes, who claimed to be a close friend of Vivienne’s, though I had never encountered her before. The blackout shades were drawn, and Boy forgot about the BBC and instead fetched more champagne, and then someone put on a jazz record, and the party was under way. Later, I came upon Leo Rothenstein in the kitchen, in ponderously playful conversation with the by now drunken blonde Belinda. He gave me his most domineering smile and said:
“You must feel quite at home, Maskell—it’s an Irish wake.”
And later still, when still more guests had arrived, I found myself yet again trapped with Querell, who backed me into a corner and lectured me about religion. “Yes, yes, Christianity is the religion of the slave, of the foot soldier, of the poor and the weak—but of course, you don’t consider such people to be people at all, really, do you, you and your pals the Übermenschen.” I half listened to him, nodding and shaking my head at what seemed appropriate moments. I was wondering again where Danny was—I had not stopped wondering that all day— and what he might be doing. I remembered the steely-soft feel of his shoulder, the hot, hard little bristles on his upper lip, and savoured again at the back of my throat the thick, fish-and-sawdust taste of his semen. “At least I believe in something,” Querell was saying, pushing his face close to mine and goggling at me drunkenly. “At least I have faith.”
Danny did not come home that night, or the following night, or the night after that. I held off for as long as I could, and then went to Boy. At first he could not grasp what I was concerned about, and said I should not worry, that Danny knew his way in the world, and could be depended on to look after himself. Then he peered at me more closely, and laughed, not without sympathy, and patted my hand. “Poor Vic,” he said, “you have a lot to learn; our kind can’t afford that sort of jealousy.” And the following week, when I found Boy one afternoon in bed with Danny, I stood in the doorway and could think of nothing to say, could think of nothing to think. Danny, lying on his side, did not realise I was there until Boy said cheerfully, “Wotcher, Vic, old son,” and then he stirred, and turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder and smiled sleepily, as if I were someone he had known a long time ago, and of whom he retained only a confused and vaguely tender impression. Then something opened in me, briefly, frighteningly, as if a little window had been thrown open on to a vast, far, dark, deserted plain.
THREE
13
It is time for me to speak of Patrick Quilly, my quondam catamite, cook and general housekeeper. I miss him terribly, even still. When I think of him I go hot with guilt and shame, I am not quite sure why. I torment myself with the question of whether he fell or jumped, or even if—dear God!—he might have been pushed. I met him when he was working as a sales assistant in a jewellery shop in the Burlington Arcade. I had dropped in one day to buy a rather nice silver tiepin I had spotted in the window; it was intended as a gift for Nick to mark the occasion of his maiden speech in the House, but I ended up giving it to Patrick, in celebration of another, quite unmaidenly accession, when he came that night into my bed. He was tall, as tall as I am, and very handsome, in a sulky, glowering sort of way. His upper torso was remarkable, all muscle and stretched tendons and excitingly wiry body hair, but his legs were comically thin, and he was knock-kneed, a matter about which he was particularly sensitive, as I discovered when I was unwise enough to make a light-hearted allusion to it (he sulked for a whole day and half a night, but as dawn was breaking we made up, very tenderly; I could not have been more… accommodating). He was, like me, an Ulsterman—Protestant, of course, despite the Christian name— and had joined the army at an early age to get himself out of the Belfast slum where he was born. He went to France in 1940 with the Expeditionary Force; I often wonder if I came across his letters home, in my capacity as censor. When the Germans invaded, he was captured at Louvain and spent the rest of the war in what seems to have been a not at all disagreeable prison camp in the Black Forest.
After our first night together he moved in with me straight away—I still had the top-floor flat at the Institute then—and immediately set about reordering my domestic life. He was a tireless tidier-up, which suited me, for I am something of an obsessive myself, in that way (queers seem to come in only two varieties, the sloven, like Boy, or the monk, like me). He was quite uneducated, and of course, as was my way, I could not resist trying to introduce him to Culture. The poor boy really did work at it, much more diligently than Danny ever had, but still got nowhere, and was laughed at for his pains by my friends and colleagues. He minded this terribly, and smashed a cut-glas
s decanter one day in tearful rage after Nick had amused himself throughout a luncheon at the flat by imitating Patrick’s Belfast accent and addressing cod questions to him on the subject of seventeenth-century painting, about which, I should point out, Nick knew somewhat less than Patrick did.
Patrick had a great love of good clothes, and frequented my tailor with enthusiasm and a blithe disregard for the state of my account. But I could not resist indulging him, and besides, he was achingly desirable in a well-cut suit. There were many places to which I could not bring him, of course, for no matter how presentable he might look, he had only to open his mouth to reveal what he was. This was a recurring cause of friction between us, though his resentment was much alleviated when I took the risk and allowed him to accompany me to the Palace on the day my knighthood was conferred. Mrs. W. even had a word for him, and you can imagine the effect. (I often wonder, by the way, if Mrs. W. is aware of her iconic status among the queer fraternity. Certainly her mother in her day revelled in the role of the queers’ goddess, and was fond of making jokes about being the one real royal among a palace full of queens. Mrs. W.’s humour, however, is less broad, though she does like to tease, in her straight-faced way. Dear me, I miss her, too.)
The advent of Patrick marked the beginning of a new phase of my life—the middle period, one might say—a time of rest and reflection and deep study which I was glad of after the hectic years of the war. The London scene had quietened dramatically anyway, especially after Boy went to America, though the tales of his doings that came back to us from across the Atlantic livened up many an otherwise dull dinner party. In the main, I was uxoriously content. That is only a technical misuse of the adverb. Patrick had all the best qualities of a wife, and was blessedly lacking in two of the worst: he was neither female, nor fertile (I ask myself, in these days of protest and the pursuit of so-called liberation, if women fully realise how deeply, viscerally, sorrowfully, men hate them). He took very good care of me. He was an amusing companion, an excellent cook, and a superb if unadventurous lover. He was also a resourceful pander. Utterly free of sexual jealousy, he brought me boys with the shy eagerness of a cat depositing half-chewed mice at its master’s feet. He was something of a voyeur, too, and it took me some time to get over my instinctive prudery and let him watch while I cavorted in bed with these half-wild creatures.
The staff at the Institute accepted Patrick’s presence in my life without remark. Of course, we were exquisitely discreet, at least during the hours when the galleries were open to the public. Patrick loved to throw parties, a few of which did become worryingly rowdy, for his friends tended to be on the rough side. The following morning, though, by the time my hangover and I had struggled up, the flat would be set completely to rights, the stragglers ejected, the cigarette stubs and the empty beer bottles cleared away, the carpets swept, the atmosphere as cool and calm as the bluish interior of Seneca’s bedroom in the Poussin above my desk, which had not, after all, been stolen by one of the guests, or smashed in a romp, as I in my drunken nightmares had envisioned it would be.
Vivienne never came to the flat. I met her in Harrods one day when I was with Patrick, and after I had made the mumbled introductions we stood talking for a minute, and I was the only one who was embarrassed. Nick thought Patrick a joke. I had hoped he would be jealous—Nick, I mean. Yes, pathetic, I know. Patrick on the other hand took a great shine to Nick, and had an irritating way when he came to visit of following him about, like a large, friendly and not very bright dog. It did not seem to matter how badly Nick behaved, Patrick always forgave him. Nick was advancing into middle age at a stately, seigneurial pace. He had put on flesh, but what would have been a coarsening in others was in him the assumption of a lordly mantle. He was no longer the downy, fascinatingly demonic beauty he had been in his twenties; let us be honest, he looked like a typical High Tory grandee, portly, pinstriped, with that marvellous, all-over pale-gold sheen that the very rich and powerful acquire with the years, I do not know how. That youthful pomposity, which I used to find both comic and endearing, had, like his physical self, grown steadily heavier, squashing the last traces of a sense of humour that anyway had never been one of his stronger qualities. Where once he asserted, with the enthusiasm and certainty of youth, now he pontificated, fastening on to one with the fixed, menacing stare of the bully, daring one to contradict him. He had progressed through the years, a one-man caravan, accumulating the precious goods of life, money, power, renown, a wife and children—two big bright girls, one the image of their mother, the other of her Aunt Lydia—and now wherever he appeared he carried the weight of these riches with him, like an Eastern potentate padding along in front of his retinue of veiled women and burdened slaves. Yet I still loved him, helplessly, hopelessly, ashamed of myself, laughing at myself, a prim, middle-aged scholar pining after this overfed, overconfident, pompous pillar of the Establishment. How deluded I was. Love, I have always found, is most intense when its object is unworthy of it.
At the end of one of those drunken, revelrous parties at the flat I confessed everything to Patrick about my other secret life. He laughed. This was not the response I had expected. He said he had not had such a good laugh since the day his commanding officer in France was shot in the backside by a German machine-gunner. He had known that I had been something significant in the shadowy world of the Department, but that I had also been working for Moscow he thought a grand joke. He knew what it was to live clandestinely, of course. He wanted all the details; he was greatly excited, and was particularly ardent in bed afterwards. I should not have told him all those things. I got carried away. I even named names, Boy, Alastair, Leo Rothenstein. It was foolish and boastful of me, but oh, I did enjoy myself, just letting it all spill out.
We had a row, Patrick and I, on the night that he died. This is a source of continuing, hardly bearable remorse for me. There had been squabbles before, of course, but this was the first real, stand-up, no-holds-barred fight I had permitted between us; the first, and the last. I cannot remember how it started—something trivial, I’m sure. Before we knew it we were going at it hammer-and-tongs, raving at each other, lost to ourselves in an exultant transport of fury, like a pair of demented, doomed lovers at the climax of a bad opera. I wish I had known of the real doom that awaited poor Patrick just a few hours later, for then I would not have said such dreadful, dreadful things to him, and he would not have sat up brooding into the early hours, would not have got drunk on my best brandy, would not have staggered out on to the balcony and plummeted through the whistling dark to his death four flights below in the moonlit courtyard. I was asleep when he fell. I wish I could report some bodeful dream, or say that I started awake in inexplicable dread at the moment of his death, but I cannot. I slept on, and he lay there on the stones, his poor neck broken, with no one to see him die or hear his last breath. The porter found him, when he was doing his morning rounds; the sound of the fellow’s boots on the stairs woke me. “Beg pardon, sir, I’m afraid there’s been an accident…”
At the time I was undergoing yet another round of interrogations by the Department, and curiously enough, this turned out to my advantage, for Billy Mytchett and his people were as anxious as I was to keep the matter quiet. They thought that after years of questioning I was about to crack and tell all, and the last thing they wanted was the canaille of the press sniffing about. So someone had a word with the police and, later, with the coroner, and in the end not a mention of the matter appeared in the papers. I was so relieved; a scandal like that would have gone down very badly at the Palace, where I was still pleasurably ensconced. I stayed inside the flat for weeks, frightened of outdoors. Miss McIntosh, my secretary, brought me groceries and bottles of gin, carrying them up all those flights of stairs herself, despite her years and her arthritis, bless her virgin’s kindly heart. I soon realised, however, that I would have to give up the flat. Patrick’s mark was everywhere; how I wept, bent double at the kitchen table, rolling my forehead on my fist, w
hen I picked up a tumbler one day and found his five fingerprints clearly visible on the fluted sides. I found something else, too. When eventually I worked up the courage to go out on to the balcony, I noticed that the catch on the French window was broken, in such a way that it seemed it might have been forced. I asked Skryne if the heavies had been in the flat, rummaging for evidence against me, but he swore he had sent no snoopers in at all. I believed him. Yet the doubt lingers in my mind; did Patrick come upon an intruder in the flat that night, some stealthy searcher who left no trace, unless you count a smashed body lying all aheap in the silence and the moonlight? Surely I am being fanciful? Patrick, ah, poor Patsy!
By the time hostilities in Europe were drawing to a noisy close I held the rank of major and had taken part in some of the most significant Allied intelligence offensives of the war (imagine here a simper of modesty, a gruff clearing of the throat). Despite my diligence, however, and my successes, I was never able to climb to the very highest reaches of the Department hierarchy. This was, I confess, a source of resentment and humiliation. Nick was at the top, and Querell, and Leo Rothenstein, and even Boy was sometimes given a hand and hauled up to take part in the Olympian deliberations on the Fifth Floor. (What a comedy they must have played out up there, the four of them!) I could not understand why I was excluded. Hints were dropped which suggested that I was seen to be a shade too raffish, that I enjoyed the deceptions and the double-bluffs too much to be taken completely seriously. I thought that rich, especially when I considered Nick’s capriciousness and frequent negligence in matters of security. And if I was regarded as dangerously louche, what about Boy? No, I decided: the real reason I was consistently blackballed was that I was being punished for my sexual deviation. Nick may never have mentioned my affair with Danny Perkins, or the many other such affairs I had enjoyed après Danny, but he was, after all, my wife’s brother, and the uncle of my children. The fact of his own scandalous liaisons—for example, the simultaneous affairs he had carried on with the Lydon sisters right up to and, some said, well after his marriage to Sylvia—did not count, apparently. I need hardly say that I refrained from voicing these complaints. One must not whine. It is the first rule of the Stoics.
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