‘How was the apple-and-cinnamon strudel?’ Duncan said.
‘Disappointing,’ Alan said. ‘Very disappointing. And such a lot of work, too. There was a story on the cookery page in the magazine I got it from that you were supposed to be able to read a love letter through the pastry when it was done, which I suppose tickled me rather. I said to Mother, after I’d been slaving away at the pastry, I’ve got a lovely old 1890s ceramic rolling pin that only gets taken out on very special occasions, I said to Mother, come on, we’ll see if we can read an old love letter through this pastry. And she said, well, I’m sure I don’t want to read any of your love letters and I’m not at all convinced that I have any of your father’s to hand, so we ended up attempting to read a circular from the head of German through it, not at all the same thing although I do see it maintained the Austrian theme.’
‘Who’s coming?’ Duncan said to Christopher. ‘And what’s the topic tonight?’
‘Socialism, gay rights, equality and lesbians,’ Christopher said. ‘Seems a bit much. It was Andrew’s idea. Speak of the devil.’
‘In any case,’ Alan said, as he and Christopher took their cups of tea from Arthur, ‘hello, Andrew, I was just talking about an unsuccessful apple strudel I attempted, in any case I don’t believe the quantities were right. It was really unpleasantly sour. Now, I don’t ask for anything too sickly sweet, I don’t care for that, but this, it really made Mother and I wince. We ended up sprinkling Demerara sugar on top just to make it palatable. It’s the last time I cook anything from Mother’s Family Circle.’
Andrew stood, with a faint impatient air, barely in the door. He carried a folder of documents and, in his hand, a Sainsbury’s carrier bag full of books. His beard was full, and his T-shirt carried a hand-printed message about GAY PRIDE 1977. His shorts were bright blue, tight and short, and he wore brown leather Jesus sandals. He was a hairy man – his legs and arms seemed surrounded by an aura, half an inch thick – and was sweating lightly. ‘Is this everyone?’ he said. ‘I thought there’d be more tonight. How are you, Alan?’
‘Thank you, Andrew,’ Alan said. ‘I’m feeling really a lot more myself, it’s kind of you to ask. I’ve been out for two weeks now, and fingers crossed … I never thanked you for the cake you brought into the Charing Cross. Beetroot, so original. Of course, I couldn’t eat anything much, my appetite was completely shot, but it came in so handy for visitors and for the nurses, too, to tell the truth. They were shockers.’
‘You’ve not been ill, have you, Alan?’ Christopher said quickly.
‘Oh, no, nothing like that, Christopher,’ Alan said. ‘Just gall bladder, nothing … Well, anyway, the beetroot cake was a lovely contribution.’
‘Not up to his standards,’ Duncan said quietly to Arthur, as they went through the day’s takings. ‘Sixty, sixty-one, -two, -three and …’ he counted through the change ‘… don’t disturb me, now, that’s -six, -seven and …’ There was a long pause as Duncan furrowed his brow. ‘That’s seventy-two pounds seventeen, better than some days, not so good as a few. There was ten pounds sixty in change in the till this morning. And three cheques.’
‘Excellent,’ Arthur said. ‘That’s excellent. Three people paying with cheques, that’s an improvement.’ (He meant that people were not so worried about leaving their names when they paid; his thought, which Duncan followed, was about frankness and openness. Someone who wrote, ‘Twelve pounds payable to The Big Gay Bookshop’ – one day everyone would be like that.)
‘And no bloody credit cards today, either,’ Duncan said. ‘That’s another thirty pounds – no, twenty-nine pounds, no, thirty-one forty-nine. That’s … Where’s the calculator?’
‘Christopher,’ Arthur called. ‘We need your help.’
‘No good at mental arithmetic,’ Christopher said, ambling over. ‘Simon’s better at it than I am.’
‘The nation’s finances are in these fumbling hands,’ Duncan said, quite fondly – this exchange was a regular one. ‘What happens when Lawson says to you, Quick, Duffy, what’s last year’s income tax receipts minus government expenditure minus the National Debt? How much money have we got to spend on tea and biscuits and a new bridge in Norfolk that the Ministry of Defence wants?’
‘Well, I should turn very briskly to the principal who sits behind me and pass him an urgent note,’ Christopher said, ‘telling him to his great surprise that we’ve found we’ve got a nice lot of money left over and we don’t know what to spend it on. Lawson tells everyone they can’t spend money, that’s his job. I can’t believe you ever worked in the public service.’
‘Not just me,’ Duncan said. ‘Paul did, too. I met him first in the unemployment office. We were dealing with the unwashed together. He didn’t last long. He was even worse than me.’
‘I forgot that!’ Christopher said, with a brave cheerfulness. ‘Paul in the civil service! What a fantastic image! They didn’t sack him, though, did they? He just left, didn’t he?’
‘Well, I can’t really remember,’ Duncan said. ‘It was so long ago. Well, not so long ago – it’s just that stuff’s happened, it’s hard to think of him ever being there. They didn’t send anyone to the funeral, at any rate.’
Together they thought about Paul’s funeral, six months before; that cold December day, his respectable father no one had ever met, sitting for form’s sake with the mother everyone knew, divorced years before. And a handicapped sister smiling at everyone. The parents had seemed numb in the Northamptonshire chapel, and about them a hundred people Northamptonshire had never seen or experienced. One boy in full Adam Ant drag with a white stripe across the face and a pirate jacket; a girl in a fluorescent pink leather catsuit; a woman in an emerald taffeta ballgown. Half the queens had been wearing their black PVC raincoats, tightly belted. If any of them had been asked, they’d have replied, ‘Oh, Paul specifically asked me to wear it.’ Duncan had just worn a suit and a black tie, which, he’d noticed on the train, had glitter in its material. He had tried to put on the normal one in his flat, first thing that morning. But he must have reached for the wrong one. He had cried over breakfast, and cried again in the shower. Paul had put him off and put him off, saying in a postcard, ‘Oh, no, I’m fine, come when I’m out of hospital, they’re not worried.’ He hadn’t seen him for six weeks. The last message he’d had from him was on the back of a postcard with a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh on the front, and the farewell message, handwritten in blue biro in Paul’s looping, confident hand, had said, ‘Suck a black man’s cock for me, darling.’ He had been spared blindness, then. The next he had heard was a hoarse-voiced man announcing himself as Paul’s father, and Paul had died in the hospice. Paul had been thorough, however, and had made a list of everyone who should be invited to the funeral with their phone numbers. The restaurant must have closed for the day; the funeral was full of its waiters and customers, beautifully dressed and weeping in squadrons. Bonnie Langford had come, even. Over the coffin was a six-foot-by-four photograph of Paul, soft-focus and unrecognizable. The hearse was glass-sided and pulled by black-plumed horses; the coffin brought in by beautiful muscular boys in frock coats. The music was Donna Summer, at which everyone smiled, and a fat girl singing ‘Va, Pensiero’ with a struggling organist – he’d never had to play it before, he’d confided to Arthur, who had got his phone number anyway with an expression of big-eyed sympathy. Every detail was planned and specific, and very Paul, while at the same time not evoking him in the slightest. It was all what he would have wanted it to be. On the way back, Duncan, Andrew, Christopher, Nat, Arthur, Simon and Freddie Sempill, who had invited himself, they had got a bit drunk at the wake and got drunker on the train. They had gone parading up and down in the carriage, their funeral clothes awry, performing Paul’s encounter at the dole office with the Yorkshire bricklayer in search of work. ‘I can see you’re firm, and if I had but a single opening I could insert you into, it would be my pleasure,’ Nat recited, and then a woman in a blue hat and a pink scarf deep in
Anita Brookner had stood up and complained that there were women and children in the compartment. ‘Our fucking friend’s died,’ Arthur said, outraged, and Nat had said, ‘Honestly.’ But then Duncan had stood up and in a moment of inspiration, drunk as a lord, had responded by saying the other thing Paul was famous for saying: ‘When I go to bed with a man,’ he had said once, and Duncan now said for the benefit of the carriage and the complaining woman, ‘I expect him to maintain full erection – full erection – from the moment of nudity onwards. Do I make myself plain? The very first moment of nudity. Anything else – anything that falls short of that – I regard as a personal insult.’ And then they all joined in, with laughter and applause and cheering even, and chanted, ‘Anything else I regard as a personal insult,’ and laughed and laughed, like football supporters on a drunken train. There were more of them, for once, than the normals. There had been people leaving the compartment. Fuck them. Two days later, Duncan had told Arthur that he’d better find somewhere else to live than the room over the bookshop.
They thought about that day of Paul’s funeral. ‘No,’ Christopher said in the end. ‘They probably wouldn’t have known about it. There’s such a turnover of staff in that bit of the civil service, no one would have remembered him.’
‘Let’s make a start,’ Andrew said. ‘Are you staying tonight? Arthur? Duncan? It can’t just be the three of us.’
Arthur agreed with a bad grace.
‘It’s socialism, gay rights, lesbian feminism tonight,’ Andrew said, his voice rising brightly, like a hostess offering a particularly alluring and yet healthy quiche to a weight-watching guest. ‘It’ll be fun.’
‘So my landlord – he says to me, he’s one of them, he says,’ Arthur said, continuing some long-abandoned fragment of conversation. ‘You know – one of those.’
‘We’re all one of them, I thought,’ Christopher said.
‘That’s what I thought. He kept saying it,’ Arthur said. ‘But then he came out with it, why he didn’t expect we ever saw one of his type in BGB. The thing is, Arthur,’ he dropped into impersonation, cocking his head somewhat, ‘I don’t see any reason to hide it, I’m just a Thatcherite, and I don’t see why not. I think we should all be so proud of that woman after what she achieved last year. I for one certainly intend to vote for her.’
‘Oh,’ Christopher said, as they sat down. ‘One of them.’
Andrew made an elaborate chest-crossing gesture; Alan made a deal out of not hearing what Arthur had said, perhaps confirming what Duncan had heard him say in private, that he saw a good deal of Mother in the Prime Minister and would hardly not vote for her.
‘Don’t call it the BGB,’ Duncan said to Arthur. ‘It’s the Big – Gay – Bookshop. It makes me think that you’re going to talk me into hiding behind initials.’
‘Anyway,’ Andrew said. ‘Thanks for coming. I thought we might start tonight by looking at this article I found in the radical press, about lesbian separatism.’
He started to pass pieces of paper round, purple, camphor-smelling Roneos.
‘Where are the lesbians tonight, then?’ Alan said. ‘Why are we talking about them when they’re not interested enough to come to the discussion?’
‘They’re separatismed,’ Duncan said.
‘Still,’ Andrew said. ‘I think their situation raises some really very interesting questions.’
6.
In the end, four more people came, apologizing for their late arrival. There were a couple of people who were irregular attenders, the guy from Leicester and Arthur’s co-lodger Tim, and then Nat had come as he had promised, though George hadn’t, and a person whom nobody had known or recognized, who must have read about the gay men’s group in City Limits. Like most people who had just read about it and turned up, he had sat with eyes burning and saying nothing; he might come again but probably wouldn’t. The discussion came to an end, and everyone was standing up and taking their mugs to wash and continuing it with each other. Duncan went upstairs to turn the lights out and check the windows were locked. Of course, he said to himself, if it did raise interesting questions, you might wonder what the answers to those questions were, and if you couldn’t think of those interesting answers, you might wonder whether those interesting questions were questions at all, or worth speaking out loud. If you wanted lesbians to come to a discussion, too, it might be better not to call your group the Gay Men’s Group. He foresaw another evening-long discussion about the group’s name.
Downstairs, voices were raised. He knew exactly what about.
‘No,’ Arthur was saying, as he came back into the shop. ‘No, you can’t. You can buy copies. You can’t just take them.’
‘Is this a community resource or not?’ Andrew said. He was holding seven copies of A Boy’s Own Story, apparently about to hand them out to the group. Only one was still on the table.
‘Yes, it is,’ Arthur said. ‘And we want it to stay here. So if you want it to keep going, you pay for the books.’
‘We’ve had a really interesting discussion about it,’ Andrew said. ‘And now you’re preventing those who haven’t read it from going away and reading it.’
‘No, he’s not,’ Duncan said. ‘We would be delighted if everyone read it. You just need to buy a copy first.’
‘Not everyone can buy a copy,’ the boy from Leicester said. ‘Not everyone can afford a full-price book. Seven pounds ninety-nine – that’s a lot of money to a lot of people.’
‘Well, in that case, a lot of people can borrow copies from well-intentioned people who actually buy their books, once they’re finished with it,’ Arthur said. ‘You don’t borrow them from us.’
‘Come on, Duncan,’ Andrew said. ‘You said you thought it was the most important book in years.’
‘Yes, I did,’ Duncan said. ‘So important, you ought to pay for it, not just waltz off with it. I’m sorry. The answer’s no. Do you want to buy copies? I really recommend it.’
Two of them did: five of the copies went back on the table. Sometimes Duncan really hated gay liberation. As they left, Tim was saying to the boy from Leicester that he could borrow his copy when he’d finished with it; he wouldn’t be long. And after that he didn’t mind lending it again. Everyone would enjoy it, he was sure, he said pointedly, as they all headed off to the not-really-gay bar near by. Suddenly Duncan realized he was really very hungry; he hadn’t had any lunch.
7.
Duncan was woken by the phone, and for a moment was confused. ‘My God,’ he said, levering himself out of bed and reaching for the silk dressing-gown he kept on the bedside chair. It was freezing cold in the flat – he’d been warm as toast under the continental quilt and had overslept. ‘My God,’ he said, looking at the clock in the hallway as he picked up the phone.
‘You weren’t asleep?’ Dommie said, at the other end of the line.
‘I was, actually,’ Duncan said. ‘I thought I’d have a little lie-in.’
‘Oh, a little lie-in?’
‘No, Dommie,’ Duncan said. ‘Not what you seem to be suggesting. We’re going to Brighton, aren’t we?’
‘You’ve really only just woken up,’ Dommie said. ‘I’ve been up for hours. Have you looked out of the window?’
Duncan pulled back the heavy brown velvet curtains and peered out. ‘My God, it’s snowing,’ he said. ‘Are we still going?’
‘It says it’s not too bad on the weather,’ Dommie said. ‘It’s settled a bit, but it’s not supposed to carry on. What do you reckon?’
‘Oh, all right,’ Duncan said. ‘And Arthur’s arranged for his friend Tim to come and help him out in the shop. If we get stuck in Brighton, mind …’
‘Celia will be very pleased,’ Dommie said, and there was real pleasure in her voice.
‘Celia won’t notice or care where she is,’ Duncan said, but not crossly. ‘She’s happy in Brighton or Tooting or wherever.’ This was true. Celia, Dommie’s daughter, was eighteen months old, and cheerful in temperament. There was no need
to cart her across three counties to show her a good time. Today’s trip, to Brighton and the Lanes so that Duncan and Dommie could buy all the Christmas presents they needed, was more of a day out for the pair of them.
Duncan couldn’t understand why it was so cold in the flat, and went to turn the thermostat: it had to be turned almost to the top of the dial before the system juddered into noisy life. The bath yielded water slowly, and you had to run the hot tap for a few minutes before the temperature was raised to anything above that of the room. There was no question about it: the boiler, which should have been replaced four years ago, was now going to have to be replaced. The money was there, just about – he had managed to invest what was left of his father’s after buying and doing up the shop and the flat, and it brought in enough of an income that he didn’t have to panic immediately when the shop had a quiet week or two. But when he looked at it coldly, he had the same sort of income as he’d had at the unemployment exchange as a junior clerk. The only advantage he now had was that he didn’t have to pay anything in rent or mortgage, since he’d bought the flat outright. But anything that needed money spending on it, like the boiler or the car, filled him with terror. Only that week, he had paid a queen in Highgate’s boyfriend three hundred pounds to take away a book collection. Not quite out of kindness – there were some nice things – but he wouldn’t have taken the whole collection if its owner hadn’t been buried the day before. How much did a new boiler cost? Eight hundred pounds? A thousand? Two thousand? He had no idea. He knew he didn’t have a thousand pounds in his current account, and it would have to come from savings.
Existence was such a drain. He felt his energy going out of him like money. He wished he did not think of his personal resources, like money, like the contents of a bank account, but there it was. Everything that was good in him spilt out, like water from a holed bucket, and he had no idea what happened to it. The shop window, ceaselessly installed, ceaselessly broken, ceaselessly replaced – and that was another bit of expenditure, since the insurance was no longer going to cover the constant shatterings and seemed to think it was the bookshop’s own fault for not having a solid wooden cover, like a sex shop in Soho. Shivering in the bedroom, he dressed in his drainpipes and a favourite black poloneck; just the thing for Brighton in December.
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