by William Boyd
You can imagine what effect her complicity had on me. I felt she was behaving more like a game and spirited older sister rather than my aunt. I was sure it was significant. We were co-conspirators; it drew us closer.
That first evening, the two of us at dinner, adjacent, the corner of the table between us. The limping gardener doubling as a butler (the real one had been killed at Loos). Sherry, oxtail soup, whitebait in cream sauce, claret, lamb cutlets, Bercy potatoes, apple charlotte, Welsh rarebit, port. I in my new suit (I had shaved with Vincent’s blunt cutthroat), my back warm against the dining room fire, my face hot, two red highlights on my cheeks like coins. I seemed to be breathing deeper, as if my lung capacity had doubled and the circumference of my nostrils had mysteriously expanded. Faye, in three-quarter profile. Smudged eyes, winking cameo on a velvet choker, a dusting of powder on the downy hair in front of her ears, the finest lines on her face and top lip. A dress of aquamarine. Silk? It shone and shifted in the candle glow. I was bold with wine. I felt ten years older and talked to her as an equal, another adult. The game and spirited older sister had quietly stolen away. I put my fork down and smiled. This could be my house, my wife even. I felt brimful of a strange, cocksure composure.
“You know, you look so like Emmeline when you smile.”
Blood ties crept between us like chaperones. I felt both sad and irritated for a moment. But it was a useful prompt.
“I was going to ask you … that is, if you don’t mind. I was wondering—you said you had a lot of letters from her, from my mother. Could I—if it’s all right—see them?”
“Of course.” Touch on my arm. I thought the flannel would smolder. “I’ll look them out for you. Are you terribly hot, John?”
“Me? No, no. Fine, perfect.”
That night I left my own room and walked across the upstairs landing and along the corridor towards her bedroom. I stood outside the door, a faint luminescence from a nearby window highlighting the graining of the oak door and the metalwork of the latch. I sent my restless presence into her room and waited for it to be noticed. Was she lying awake, stirring beneath the sheet and blankets, thinking about me, wishing I had the courage to creep quietly into her bed? I stared at the mute and neutral door as if expecting it to become miraculously transparent.… It is at instants like these that believers in the existence of telepathic communication either win or lose disciples. If it worked at all, then it would work tonight. I stood outside and concentrated. All she had to do was call my name. I felt a pounding in my frontal lobes. My brain power could have driven an electric motor. But I heard nothing, just the creaks and settlings of an old house.
That was my moment. I should have taken it. A year or two later, I believe, I would have gone in, perhaps with some useful fabrication to hand (a moment’s grief, a night terror) to allow a plausible embrace. I cannot blame myself; it asks a lot of a person to possess that conviction and worldliness at seventeen. And yet I had run away from school; my life was already set on that frenzied precipitous course from which it never subsequently deviated. But for some reason I was stalled by inertia. After God knows how many breathless minutes I realized I was shivering vigorously, and slunk back to my room and my cold solitary bed.
The atmosphere was different the next day. Not significantly so, but definitely altered. Faye, it seemed to me, had realized that the license of the previous night was too heady and distracting. The prosaic older sister returned. I came down to breakfast and found her on the point of leaving—“visiting.” On her way out she showed me two box files full of my mother’s letters.
I took them into the drawing room and began to read them through. I ate my lunch alone and read on into the afternoon. I felt exhausted, having run gauntlets of harrowing emotions.
It is bizarre, to say the least, to read about a familiar world as yet unaltered by, and indeed indifferent to, your presence. Here was our apartment, Kelpie’s Court, Edinburgh, the High Street, my father, Thompson, Oonagh … Thompson proved the biggest strain. Here was the little plump boy, doted on, drenched in his mother’s love. I have rarely envied Thompson. Sometimes I envied his money, but only fleetingly. But that day in Charlbury I felt the writhing vicious force of envy squirm into every corner of my body. I could have killed him, then, it was so all-powerful. Killed him with glee, so consumed was I by acid resentment of his good fortune. He had known Emmeline Todd, and been loved by her.
Calmness returned gradually.
They were loving candid letters between sisters who were close friends. My mother—sweet, good-natured, generous—fully aware of all life’s pleasures … The letters were fascinating; I heard a voice, encountered a person of whom I was only dimly aware—and then only in some gaudy, sentimental idealization—but they provided me with no hard facts. They were chatty and inconsequential.
And then, quite unheralded, in September 1897:
… Donald has arrived. He seems well, all things considered. We had him to dinner last Tuesday. He is temporarily staying in rooms in Hanover Street but plans shortly to move.…
The unremarked arrival suggested mutual knowledge. Both sisters knew him. From then on Donald’s name made regular appearances: what he was doing, where he was thinking of buying a house, his disdainful reflections on the academic caliber of his colleagues …
Then: March 14, 1898.
… My dear Faye, I wish I could confide in you all that Donald says to me. I will say but this, whenever we are alone he speaks only in tones of tender moving respect. What am I to say to him? It is indeed a ghastly dilemma and I am powerless to respond in any way that will satisfy him, even though my feelings, as you will understand, are as equally engaged upon the matter.…
I noted the date. This seemed to be the moment when ordinary friendship developed into something more passionate.
April 7, 1898:
… Donald and I talk and talk of what might have been if things had only been otherwise. Oh Faye, I try to stop him but he seems so full of emotion that if I do not let him the Lord alone knows what effect continued restraint might have. Sometimes I fear for his health.…
June 13, 1898:
… Donald came with us to the Trossachs. He seemed in good spirits. I had made him promise not to unburden himself. Innes knows nothing, suspects nothing. Professor and Mrs. McNair were our companions and it was essential that Donald should remain composed.
But yesterday I stayed behind while the others went walking. Then Donald returned early and of course, the two of us being quite alone, he could not hold himself back. I cannot tell you what an afternoon it was, Faye. Let me say only that in the end he wept. It was terribly sad and yet strangely uplifting to see what power true passion has over a spirit at once so strong, civilized and intelligent as Donald. I wept too, of course, you know what I am like, and we comforted each other.…
I stopped there, my mouth dry and rank, hands visibly shaking. “… we comforted each other.…” How easy it was to penetrate the opaque euphemism. I read on. That afternoon during the walking tour of the Trossachs seemed to have been cathartic. Donald appeared to shake off his feverish melancholy. There was no more talk of weeping. The letters became full of “a splendid, heartwarming day with Donald …”; “Donald was in fine form …”; “at dinner Donald’s old warmth and humor seemed to return as he told us of …”
Sometimes there were further hints: “Donald now seems to understand the impossibility of changing anything, knows that all must continue as it is. He is resigned and says he can find a form of contentment.…” And: “We talk often of that wild, mad day last month and see it now as a final railing against frustration and heartbreak.…”
I went back through the letters and slowly charted the course of their love affair, how they were condemned by the dignity and honor of their own positions, and the impossibility of ever requiting their love. My mother never referred adversely to my father, never complained or criticized. It was clearly one of those passionate relationships not so much doomed as
stillborn, both parties knowing in their hearts that nothing can come of it, but seizing a moment’s consummation as some sort of futile symbol of what might have been.
Then. July 21, 1898:
Dear Faye,
I am with child again. I do not need to tell you how fear mingles with joy. Innes is delighted, but I have not said anything to anyone else but you, not even Donald.…
Not even Donald. Why not? I watched the process of my own prenatal growth with a horrid fascination. My mother’s joyful anticipation (she prayed I would be a girl …) and her prescient fears for her own health, after the narrow escape she had had with Thompson, made ghoulish reading. But I could not finish her last letter, dated two weeks before my birth. It started:
Darling Faye,
I feel a little fitter today. Perhaps everything will be fine after all.…
I knew I could not stand the strain of those terrible, fatal ironies. I put the letters back in the box file. I felt I should cry, but I was too exhausted for tears. I had learned too much and my brain jabbered with argument and supposition. I was too preoccupied with new knowledge to weep over my dead mother. Unless I was very much mistaken, all the evidence seemed to point to one conclusion. I knew it all now—although, deep in myself, I had half-known it for years. My true father, it seemed, if the letters were to be believed, was Donald Verulam.… I rubbed my face. This needed further confirmation. It was too much to handle at this juncture.
Faye returned.
“Sorry I stayed away; I wanted you to have a chance to read them on your own.”
She glanced at me, clear-eyed and, I thought, interrogatively.
“I’m very grateful,” I said slowly. “I know they’re private … but I had to find out about her. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No. Not at all. I don’t really have the right to keep them from you. Even if …”
She did not know what to say. Now she would not meet my eyes.
“It’s all right,” I said, still with some caution. “I always half-suspected, funnily enough. Just from talking to Donald.”
She visibly relaxed, then blushed. “I’m glad,” she said.
“But I completely understand. Now. And I don’t think anything was wrong,” I said boldly. It was my turn to touch her arm. “Thank you. It was very important for me to read them.”
She looked me in the eye, seized my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek.
“You’re a special boy, John James Todd. Donald told me. Very special. I’m glad you read them. I … I telephoned Donald this morning. He’s coming down this weekend.”
* * *
I was not sure quite how to take this. I saw what she was trying to do, but it was both good and bad news. I knew at once that the weekend would hold a necessary confrontation and possible recognition, but it also meant the end of my brief sojourn with Faye. After the tense conversation about the letters, a relaxed amiability settled upon us again. But as the week passed I became more agitated at the thought of Donald’s arrival because I knew from the way Faye spoke about him that she and Donald were now more than friends. And this bothered me. Can you understand it? I felt proprietorial. Foolishly (I knew this), I was still fascinated by her. The letters had brought us even closer. I regarded her as my legitimate interest. Donald belonged to another area of my life, with which I also had to come to terms. Having the two overlap was most unwelcome.
Perhaps, perhaps I might have got through everything—Donald, Faye, my future—if I had not let myself down once again. Another crass error of judgment.
I was looking forward to my last day alone with Faye. The weather was still warm and we had planned a picnic the night before (we would have to take the little girls, but I did not regard them, properly speaking, as people). The intention was to motor to Oxford, hire a punt and punt up the Cherwell to find an isolated stretch of riverbank. We were sitting at breakfast contemplating the pleasures of the day ahead when through the door came Peter Hobhouse, a day early.
My cousin was a year or so older than I, but he looked considerably more in his uniform—khaki jacket, jodhpurs, high-laced boots, peaked cap. Peter was a big bland fair-headed fellow, with round unformed features and permanently rosy cheeks. We made a strong contrast side by side—almost two different ethnic types: prototypical Celt and pink and ruddy Anglo-Saxon. He was perfectly friendly but I instinctively disliked him, despite all the help he later gave me. I have no idea why; it was an honest—or rather, a simple—prejudice. Perhaps it was just his soft burliness, his unwarranted easy manner, as if to say, “Life holds no surprises for me.” However, we shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. Faye told him I wanted to join a public school battalion and, to my vague embarrassment, he energetically shook my hand again and said, “Congratulations.”
Thank God, he declined to come on the picnic, despite his mother’s entreaties. But I should have recognized that his arrival altered everything. Here was her son; my role as “nephew” was firmly reestablished, just as her’s was as “aunt” and “mother.” All this was lost on me: that is the kind of person I am.
We hired our punts at the boathouse at the bottom of Bardwell Lane. The sky was cloudy but the air was sweet and cool. There was a faint breeze. Thrushes and blackbirds sang in the horse chestnuts, great green continents of leaves.
It took me about ten minutes and about the same number of collisions with both banks of the river to gain some sort of insight into the dynamics of punting. Eventually we made our way cautiously but not too erratically upstream. My clumsiness had afforded Faye and the girls much amusement and our mood as we set off was, I thought, ideally merry. They laughed again, but more circumspectly, when we were overtaken by a punt energetically and skillfully propelled by a one-armed soldier (Oxford was one large convalescent home).
We punted for half an hour up the placid Cherwell as it wound through the fields and water meadows of Kidlington. Presently, we found a suitable spot and moored the punt. We spread two traveling rugs on the bank and unpacked the wicker picnic basket. We ate cold chicken and game pie, Stilton and apples. The girls drank fizzy lemonade, Faye and I a cider cup. The weather improved, grew milder; we got some sun. The day seemed summery but there was a latent spring coolness that made it invigorating and kept away the flies and wasps. I drank too much cider cup deliberately.
After lunch I played a furious game of tag with Alceste and Gilda while Faye read a book. I ran and shouted, twisted and turned, tiring myself and them. Soon I felt flushed and sticky with sweat. I persuaded the girls to wander some way down the bank to feed a family of ducks that were swimming there. I went back to Faye. She had erected a small ivory-colored parasol with a long fringe and sat beneath it, her back resting against a pollarded willow. She was wearing a flared sand-colored golfing skirt and a coral blouse with a scalloped collar. A wide straw hat lay on the rug beside her. She looked cool and serene. I looked at her. The dark shadows beneath her eyes. I gulped cider cup. A mild fire of alcohol flared in my body. Now or never.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she said. “It’s ages since I’ve done this. I’m so glad we came.”
I sat down beside her, panting slightly.
“You look hot,” she said.
“I think I’m going to have a dip. Coming?”
“No fear!” she laughed. “Brave you. Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
We had brought swimming costumes as more of a gesture than indication of serious intent. Faye halfheartedly tried to dissuade me, but I snatched up my costume (Peter’s) and went farther down the bank, away from the girls. Behind a clump of hawthorn I slipped off my clothes and pulled on the costume. It was a little large; the shoulder straps kept slipping off. I thought about diving, but I did not want to distract the girls from their duck feeding, so I waded in. The water was icy—it seemed to drive the breath from my body. Here the Cherwell flowed torpidly; there was barely a perceptible current. I sank beneath the brown water up to my chin and felt the cold band my skull like s
teel. Out in midstream I looked over to Faye. She was watching. I waved.
“What’s it like?”
“Freezing!”
“Told you!”
I felt my throat contract in shocking anticipation of what I was about to do. I gave it no thought; there was only one path I could take. I swam to the side and hauled myself out. Behind the hawthorn I stripped off my costume. I looked down at myself. The black hair on my chest and stomach was slicked into a flat wet pelt. I could hardly see my cock and balls, so shrunken were they from the cold. My head was entirely empty of thoughts. I was a creature of guts and glands.
I heard a bird call, the distant quack of ducks, Gilda and Alceste’s thin cries of pleasure. I massaged myself back into some approximation of virility, feeling the warm blood surge. I still kept all thought at bay. I had to show her I was no longer a boy.
“Aunt Faye? Could you bring me a towel, please?”
Through the screen of leaves I saw her get to her feet, take a towel from a canvas bag and saunter over, smiling. I held the sodden costume in front of me. She came round the bush. Her face instantly tightened with surprise. She offered me the towel.
“There you are.”
As I took it I let the swimming costume drop. Just for an instant there was nothing there. She saw. I wrapped the towel around me.