"I wonder in my turn", he said, "if you know an Englishman who lives on that street, who is my sisters' next neighbour . . ."
"Oh," I said.
"A very mysterious man. They say they have never seen him but they hear him late in the night, swearing and singing and banging the doors or something. He is always very drunk and though it is disturbing for them they are frightened to speak to him."
"Have you heard him yourself?" I asked, hoping I could discount this as scandalous hearsay.
"Oh yes, I have . . . " and then I watched it dawn on him with a lovely blush and a kind of setting of the face against his mistake. He took a long draught of beer, and with the oddly magnified attention I was paying him I saw his open lips very clearly through the glass and his teeth refracted through the pale beer, which slid into his mouth in three deep swallows.
"I often am very drunk," I admitted, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder and shaking him matily. I glanced aside to Edie, who was sculpting around herself for Alejo's benefit some imaginary bustier, and who topped it off with a sceptical coup d'il in my direction. "And to be absolutely honest, your sisters can make quite a lot of noise themselves." Oh, the ghastly give-and-take of life.
One or two others were hovering, as if hopeful of an introduction to Agustin, whom Alejo had never before been able to persuade to come to this place: they were raising their eyebrows at him over Alejo's head while I clumsily tried to keep him with me. But I had had my turn. Alejo was kissing one of the newcomers and tugging his cousin away to meet him.
After a blurred further hour of drinking and more than my ration of cigarettes, Edie and I found ourselves outside again with the two Spaniards. It was refreshingly cool, though they were wearing less and were less numbed by drink and paced about as we said goodbye. Alejo was going on to the Bar Biff with five or six others. He kissed Agustin with sensible fervour on both cheeks, which seemed to give his friends a licence to do the same; the boy stood there like a reluctant bride as his new acquaintance filed towards him. Then we three were alone—of course it was a night for him to be away from Alejo's. I was their escort . . . We rambled home under brilliant stars. I dimly recall one or two diversions to show them historic things, my voice echoing off the darkened houses, Agustin standing in a street-lamp's soft gleam, shivering and expressionless.
Much later in my room, sitting with Agustin, Edie already in bed, flat out with drink and fatigue. The boy must think we're a couple, or he wouldn't have come up to see, and accepted a cup of whisky. My Uncle Wilfred's motto going through my mind: "You don't want girls around, spoiling everything"—not always true, that. Whole quarter-hours passing in two or three minutes. Agustin is worried about his cousin and the life he is leading—he doesn't disapprove, it's not like that, though if his aunt and uncle in Trujillo knew . . . I tell him it is all fine, I am talking up the overall excellence of Alejo's lifestyle and the things he likes to do, as if I had known the boy and taken an interest in his welfare for years: it seems to make me more trustworthy . . . Agustin is scared by stories he has heard—he speaks superstitiously of drugs, pornographic films, disappearances. Perhaps a friend of Alejo's has been kidnapped. For a while I concentrate on him so hard that I can't take in what he's saying. It's like sometimes you can't understand, when people speak too clearly. I am devastated by his beauty, which seems to me on another plane from when I first saw him.
He tells me 2.30 has just sounded from the church. We are standing at the top of the stairs and I ask him with laborious irony if it is all right to go disturbing his sisters at this hour: it has been very quiet there. He says it is fine, they are both away for the night in Antwerp. "Oh," I say, with a muggy sense of opportunity. I take his left hand between both of mine and stroke the back of it for a moment. I lean into his anxious breath and trace with my fingertips the quick-pulsing blue vein in the miracle of his neck. He pushes me to arm's length, frowns a disappointment that cuts to the heart, and holds out a hand. We shake once, twice, and he springs down the shadowy stairs without a word.
A Sunday morning swim was what Edie always had. She rose from the bed like a zombie at 8.30 and I heard the flush of the loo and the humourless rhythmic grunts that accompanied her exercises. Incredible how she did it. I pulled the duvet over my head, thinking with satisfaction that I was too lazy to become a creature of habit. I didn't seem to have a hangover yet. I wanted to go back into the shallow dreams of old friends, brought to mind by all the nostalgic talk we had been having . . .
She was standing at the bedside with a mug of tea. What a brick. "Time to get out your deviant swimwear," she said. What a fiend. I writhed and kicked and bawled but it was no good. "And shall I give Agustin a knock?"
Agustin!
I lurched into the other room and got into the cupboard. There was the faint sound of a radio-voice, something beginning—oh, I knew it, K361. Had I done anything truly terrible? Surely not, though there was a lingering sense of pain. He'd have to be a bit of a prig to hold it against me. Had I tried to kiss him? Awful guilt-circuit of years ago. The music snapped off and then a door slammed. I went to the front window and looked down into the yard, and saw him go busily out. It was only for a moment of course, but he seemed to have displaced Luc at the summit of my mania.
Edie said, "I thought we'd agreed long ago that you didn't get involved with straight boys and I didn't get involved with queer ones, since it was in either case a recipe for heartbreak?"
"You are right," I said, standing unguarded, paunchy in my boxer-shorts. In a spirit of mortification I went to look for my swimming things.
I did feel a little queasy by the time we reached the Baths, what with the rash drinking and the anticipated misery of swimming, memories of last time, and the sense of hearty purpose in the echoing din after the quiet streets outside. The air in there had the morning-after chlorine smell of nail-varnish remover and stale cigarette-smoke.
The changing-room was busy and there were a lot of dads with their sons and friends' sons, kids screeching about, running into me as I winced and wove through the room. I found a locker and started to undress. I got my new trunks on and they seemed okay, just not very supporting: they had a good sleek feel. They were perhaps rather conspicuous. I was pulling my shirt over my head when I heard a voice I knew and then another. My heart leapt, I had no time to plan an escape: for a second or two I thought I might keep my head hidden in my shirt, and move off somewhere else like a defendant leaving court under a blanket. But I nerved myself, tugged my arms free, and looked. Luc and Patrick were sauntering towards me, and just behind them, smiling to himself, was Matt.
I was so appalled by this grouping, and what it implied, that I simply sat back with a sigh and a smile. The group themselves showed no concern, however: they were relaxed and cheerful. They didn't see themselves as a tribunal for my complex, shaming crime. They had come from the shower—the teenagers in long towels tucked round their waists, Matt naked, but holding his towel and wrung-out shorts in front of him. Luc was the first to notice me, and stepped forward with a big grin and shook my hand as if he was really fond of me, or as if this bleak male place demanded classic camaraderie.
"What extremely good luck, Edward!" he said.
"Yes, amazing." He was a hundred times more wonderful than Agustin. The pictures of him were rubbish. Despite my looming humiliation I was thinking that he wasn't wearing any clothes, only that towel, and that he was about to take it off I stood up and felt the warmth coming off his chest and face, and saw that his arms, even so, had gooseflesh.
"This is my friend Patrick, by the way, who, whom I have told you about."
Meeting them both was like meeting filmstars, their aura and beauty put weights on your tongue. Patrick shook my hand too and nodded and said he was pleased to meet me; he spoke English easily, though without Luc's tendency to parody an English accent.
Matt had been observing this and I shot him a warning glance over Patrick's shoulder. Perhaps if he didn't acknowledge me the
day could be saved; each of them was busy at his locker. I wanted to be out of there and hidden in the water: at the same time I longed to dawdle and see Luc naked—I had to see that. Matt came across and said, "Hello, my friend", and swiped a hand across my shoulder and down my upper arm in a laid-back greeting.
"Hi," I said huskily.
"Crazy swimming-trunks," he said, and then under his breath, "Your own?"—and winked as he turned away.
Luc noticed and said, "Does Edward know Matt?" in a tone of surely affected bemusement.
"Yeah, these are the guys I was telling you about," said Matt. "The ones I met down on the beach that weekend."
"Oh . . . I . . ."
"Yeah, he's the guy I was telling You about," said Luc tediously. "I said there was this young man on the beach at my friend Patrick's house and . . . You know, the house next door?"
"How extraordinary," I said. "Do you mean you were both at this tiny place no one's ever heard of at the same time? you see I've forgotten the name again."
It all depended on Matt's next sentence; I don't know why I thought I would be let down except for my jealousy of his friendship with the lads and my hang-over paranoia and the heresy of last night. I was holding on to a look of distracted marvelment. "Yeah, that time we broke into the old house."
Patrick looked up with triumph, even admiration: "So you did break into the house?" and Luc frowned at me.
"You mean you both?"
I would have blustered and given myself away if Matt hadn't ended his game and said, "Not him, no—I was with an old friend of mine."
"We never saw him," said Luc coolly. "Or her."
"Perhaps you snore a lot?" suggested Patrick. I thought hollowly of the other losses, and how stupid Matt was to rely this much on his glamour and his lies. The boys seemed so innocent in his company, unsuspecting, flattered by the attention of this lean swimmer ten years older than them with his casual sharp knowledge of what was what. That was how con-men worked. The boys didn't see the stiff-up hard-on he flashed at me as he turned and pulled his jeans over his naked arse—how he was turned on by danger and deceit. I watched Luc absorbing the fact that a man might not wear underpants, and thought aloofly of the things I'd eased up that same backside.
Patrick pursued Matt with a few more questions, slipping out of his towel and drying his arse so that his cock swung back and forth. It was a sumptuous monster, with a lazy confidence of mastery about it, a veined softness and sheeny bloom that suggested astounding powers of extension and engorgement: in fact the whole genital ensemble was just about the most breath-taking I had ever seen. But it wasn't the right moment for me. I was utterly on edge for Luc (I spotted his smiling glance at it). He was taking an age piling his folded clothes on the bench in front of his locker, which was just too far off for me to keep up easy chat from in front of mine. I was spinning the thing out in the most dreamy way, whilst vainly trying to hold my stomach in—I only had my glasses, watch and socks left to take off. I affected a concern with the state of my toes, and peered between them as though for signs of athlete's foot. I made a clumsily cheery interruption to what seemed to have become an absorbing conversation between Matt and Patrick about football, I hadn't been able to pay attention. I remembered Edie, several determined laps into her routine. And would Luc never drop his towel? What was he so shy of? I thought of perhaps setting fire to it, or asking to borrow it.
The moment came when I had to take off my glasses, the last thing I put into my locker. Now I would need to get really close to him if the vision when it came was not to be a mere blur of pink and gold. Then:
"Hi!"
It was a voice I knew, and I prickled with displeasure even before I figured who it was: the pushy little Englishman who had detained Luc in the street on the very morning after the St Ernest escapade. I reached for my glasses again. Yes, it was him, fit and compact, dripping from the pool.
"Oh, hi!"—Luc's indiscriminate pleasantness, like a dog; it seemed to rob our lovely earlier greeting of half its value.
"I saw you in there," said the man, nodding and making little muscle-shifting hunches. "You're pretty good." Luc smiled and vaguely shook his head. "But you're not getting those turns quite sharp enough." He put a hand on the boy's shoulder as if to say that it was only a small thing, he'd help him get it right if he liked; then glanced down at me, taking in the fact that I was here, on the scene, again; and dropped his arm in a gesture of temporary concession. "Well, better take a shower!" What a world of exclamations he lived in. I looked at him coldly as he retreated.
"I think you've got an admirer there," I said, shamed and somehow treacherous. At which Luc frowned. And then the bastard was back:
"Oh, I found the Fratry, by the way." He smiled as if this really was their own private success. "Absolutely fascinating!" And Luc now not knowing how to react, whilst his admirer, my hateful and forward rival, gave a little wave and darted off.
"When is it we meet again?" I boomed out wretchedly. But somehow Luc failed to hear. He strode away from his empty locker with all his clothes in his arms, entered one of the four changing-cubicles preserved, I had imagined, for the clinically insecure or for those who perhaps for some religious reason . . . and bolted the half-door. Ten seconds later, like the rape of Danae, there was a scattering of coins from an upturned pocket and a smothered "Fuck". A few centimes came spinning towards me across the damp tiled floor.
Chapter 13
A day of steady rain, a constant whisper in the street, rising in a hiss and then fading when a rare car came past. Sitting under a lamp at Paul Echevin's desk I imagined the indolent persistence of the rain out along the roads of Flanders and at the coast, on hotel porches and empty esplanades. Paul saw me daydreaming—I think, hard worker though he was, he had caught the mood of it too: we exchanged a wistful smile above the stacks of cardboard folders.
I turned the pages of an album of Orst's prints, looking for a reference but lulled and taken care of like a child with a picture-book. It was a subtly different world from that of the paintings: a haunted domain of gleams and shadows and briar-tangled paths. In some of the little etchings people were hinted at in the dark hatching but not quite defined, like figures seen tilted against the rain in the blur from a moving car. There was "Le Carrosse de l'Archeveque", where the spidery last light came in at the coach's window, but it was hard to know if the dark bulks on either side were benighted travellers, cloaked and veiled, or merely spectral presences against the dim upholstery. There were glimpses of legends that I didn't know, or maybe no one knew: I had to take them on trust like manifestations from the beyond, to be scried and construed according to my needs. Often the titles were mere phrases, taken perhaps from a tale or poem, "II resta debout devant la troisieme porte", "Encore dans la chambre de ma vieille parente"; a scene in which a man stumbled down a spiral ramp into deepening darkness bore the frightening inscription, "Que fera-t-il là, l'insatiable?" I had a sense of mysteries without solutions, or sometimes of ecstatic solutions to problems that had never been formulated. There was a series on "The Kingdom by the Sea: d'apres Edgar Poe", that had no bearing on my memory of the poem, and another on "The Kingdom of Allemonde": the instinct for lost realms and haunted, ailing royalty was deep. Allemonde was a dream-terrain of sunless forests and ruined towers, steeped in a mood of fate, though somehow without causality; the groping figures on cliff-tops and stairways seemed too passive to be tragic—at times a flare lit them against the dusk and lent them a certain pathos, like marionettes.
I had pages of the catalogue beside me in typescript, with their scrupulous details of date and measurement, and provenances that often trailed into appropriate vagueness, present whereabouts unknown. I had to confirm some quotations from a volume of Legendes flamandes that Orst had illustrated. It had just enough purpose to it to keep up my self-esteem: that is to say now and then Paul had made a mistake, an extract was not from the page his note claimed it was, or a name was misspelt—little lapses in scholarship
that made me useful and were changing my understanding of him. We both seemed to know that this dusty, fiddly checking was in a way intimate work, it steadied some private tremor: just the years going by, perhaps.
I was reading the story of the False Chaplain. A great Knight was married to a beautiful Lady, and they lived in a castle by the sea. The Knight went out hunting and generally doing good, and the Lady walked in her garden or sat with her women and made lovely tapestries. All seemed well, but as the years went by they were troubled by one thing: they had no children. And however hard they prayed, nothing could alter that fact. The Lady was sorrowful and spent long days in supplication to God, asking her Chaplain how she could atone for the great sin in her heart which God was punishing her for in this way. And the Knight was angry; and then he too would ask the Chaplain for absolution.
At length the Chaplain, who was a fair and soft-spoken young man, said to the Knight that he must go away on the Crusade that was about to set forth and seek forgiveness from God within the walls of Jerusalem itself. Only then, he said, could the Knight and the Lady hope to be blessed with offspring. So the Knight armed himself and rode off and left the Lady in the care of the Chaplain to wait and pray.
Now praying was not really what filled the Chaplain's thoughts, for he had conceived on the first day he saw her a great passion for the Lady, the more terrible for being damned by the highest precepts of his order and his honour. And as the weeks went by he worked upon the Lady, and slyly disclosed his love to her, as if he were speaking only of God's love. And she, who liked and trusted the Chaplain, found her feelings soured and disturbed by the young man's passion. Then one day, when they were sitting in the garden bower that overlooked the sea, the Chaplain said that if he himself were to lie with her, then God's will might surely be done, and her womb would flower.
When she saw the true nature of his love she shrank from him, and kept apart, and met with him only at the hours of their daily devotions. But the Chaplain's fever burned all the more fiercely for her spurning. And as the weeks turned into months, he found ways of being with her, banishing her women with terrible threats of God's vengeance, and ordering the Castle as if it were his own. He visited great humiliations on her, but always she prayed, for her husband, for herself, and for the Chaplain too, that he might repent; and always she turned him away. Then for days he would deny her food, or keep her in a guard-room without light, saying it was God's will that she should mortify herself. And he would put wild animals with her at night, snakes and toads that the local children trapped in the woods. And still she said no. And still she prayed. And at the day's end he would make her come to him to confess her sins.
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