Out of habit, Tony closes the bathroom door as he finishes stripping for his shower. Then he holds it open again on the pretence of asking me about the towels, and leaves it that way as he turns and steps out of his underpants, giving me a glimpse of his parted bum, the droop of his balls, the entire way that he is made. Realising that I still have my drink in my hand, I take a swig of it, feeling it burn in my throat—a little touch of blessed reality.
Tony turns on the shower and steps in. I watch him broken and multiplied in reflection of the many bathroom mirrors as he soaps himself. The water clatters, dribbling from the points of his elbows, the tip of his cock. He has a wide, strong back, has Tony. He’s more beautiful than any man I’ve ever had—including, yes, even including Francis. Yet I’m somehow reminded instead of those sour stairways after a pickup in Leicester Square; those cheap, uncurtained back rooms, and the sense of regret that came even before the beginning. By the time Tony comes out again, wrapped modestly enough in a New Dorchester towelling robe, I feel tired. Washed up. Washed out. Dead or dying.
“I don’t want you in that way, Tony. I almost wish I did. But…”
“That’s okay.” He rubs a towel across his sticking-up hair, trying hard not to look relieved. He has his blood group tattooed across his upper arm; the small blue circle stretches and contracts as he moves.
“Can they really give you orders to do this?” I ask.
“It isn’t like that.”
“What is it like then?”
He flops down beside me on the bed, smelling of soap, wet hair, clean flesh, new laundry. “It’s just a suggestion that’s made…”
“Why you?”
“I didn’t tell you how I made the money that helped keep my mother and sisters after Dad died, did I? It was easy enough. I took the ferry across to the docks at Liverpool. If nothing else, I always knew I was good looking—a pretty boy. I never thought I was doing it for any other reason but that. But then I had a fling with a Major a couple of years ago when I was in Rhodesia. We were bored, lonely… We were found out, of course.”
“That woman at the pool you waved to…?”
“I can hope, I suppose.”
He lies back on the bed, his broad arms crooked up, his hands clasped beneath his neck. Bits of him are sticking out; young tender flesh—but it no longer matters. I lie beside him, just relishing the sense of simple human closeness for what, if things go according to plan, will probably be the last time in my life. Together, we stare up at the ceiling.
Tony nudges me later from a doze. He’s dressed again, and clearly has been sitting watching me from the side of the bed whilst I mutter and drool until—what? Three-forty, for God’s sake. Saint George is still at prayer in his darkened forest. The Bells’ bottle is half empty.
“You’d better get undressed and in between the sheets,” he tells me. “I was told to be gone before the morning.”
“Before…?”
He shrugs. Smiles. I’m so glad we didn’t spoil this night by fucking each other. “There’s going to be an air raid alert first thing.”
“For real?”
“Of course not.” His hand touches my arm. “It’s just another part of the show.”
I sit up, dragging the shot-silk coverlet with me in spears of static and pain. “That explains why there’s only Westminster Abbey down on the itinerary…” I mutter as I look around for my tablets and shake them out and gulp them down.
“Could be.”
“You must have seen some action, Tony.”
His face is a picture for a moment. He thinks we’re back to sex again. “Yes. I was in Rhodesia. One of the first.”
“What was that like?”
“It was hardly a proper war. We just walked in through Bechuanaland. Half the country wanted us there—whites especially. Arrested a few League of Nations soldiers and put them back on the boat to Belgium…”
“But that’s not what you’re for, though, is it? You’re the KSG. A political force…”
Tony’s gaze trails away from mine across the carpet. The rumour was that ten to fifteen thousand people vanished in the first weeks of British re-occupation of Rhodesia. They were gathered up in trucks by local “Modernist sympathisers”, guided and supported by the KSG. They were taken to camps to be tortured, questioned, killed, whilst refugees poured along the roads and old enmities were settled. Blam blam as history grinds on and flies gather over the corpses. The pattern, by now, is familiar enough.
“It’s not worth it, is it, Tony?”
“What?”
“What you’re doing. Get out of the KSG while you can, give your life a chance.”
He stands up, finally almost drunk as he places his tumbler down on the polished bedside table a little too carefully. He crosses the room to pick up his jacket. “It’s too late for that,” he says, smiling lopsidedly as he brushes at some imaginary fluff from the lapels and pulls it on. Buttons jingle as he tugs at the sleeves, pulls the pockets straight and smoothes and buckles the belts. He combs his hair, stoops to lace his shoes, re-checks his already perfect parting in the mirror.
Once again as he leaves my room, even now half-marching, dark angel of death and delusion, young male beauty personified, Captain Tony Anderson of the KSG scares me.
I was summoned to the Headmaster’s office at the Friary School mid-way through the 2B’s morning natural history lesson. This was in 1932 and the Daily Sketch and I had, after six relatively glorious years, finally parted company. My moment of fame had been and gone, I was 52, already the second oldest master at the school, and I’d began thinking about retirement, of selling my mother’s house and moving to some quiet cottage with a view of the sea that I might just be able to afford if I lived frugally. On that particular day, I was covering for Green, and had just about run through my sum total of knowledge about the life cycle of the cabbage white. Ink pellets were flying. Desk lids were banging. Even now that John Arthur had succeeded in stabilising the economy and staff weren’t being fired quite so regularly, a summons to the Head was usually a bad sign. Today, though, I was almost grateful.
Still, all the usual suspicions went through my mind as I waited outside the oak door for the minute that it always seemed to take Harks to realise someone had knocked on it. Poor results, perhaps, in the new Basic Grade exams? Or my sucking off that foundry worker outside the Bull at Shenstone last Saturday evening?
“Come in!” Harks shouted, seemingly quicker than usual.
Inside, it was a shock to find that he was actually out of his desk, standing as if to greet me. It was a running joke in the senior staff room that Harks didn’t have a lower portion to his body.
“Ah, Brook!” Since my Daily Sketch years, Harks had decided that my employment records were at fault, and addressed me in all written correspondence—which was his usual way of dealing with people—as Brook without the e. I doubt if he even knew what my first name was. I certainly didn’t know his. “Take a pew, take a pew. Mrs. Cringle will be in with some tea in a moment. She’s promised to see if she can rustle up some biscuits…”
I slumped down, totally confused.
“I’ve received a letter this morning,” Harks began, rubbing the cream vellum between his fingers as if he still didn’t quite believe it. “From the Vice Chancellor at Oxford. It seems that they’re seeking to widen their, ah, remit. Trying to get in some fresh educational blood. Your name, Brook, has been mentioned…”
A cool day, the year’s first frost covering the allotments. The sky a pale English blue. The bells, the bicycles. That odd little man Christlow who called himself a scout but was in fact the personal servant to a few of us dons. Worn stone steps. Faded luxury. Casement windows. The college principal Cumbernald taking me for lunch at the White Horse jammed between Blackwells and Trinity as if he really had every reason to welcome me, fraud that I clearly was. An applewood fire was burning in the snug’s grate, I remember, and Cumbernald told me that he was newish to the college himself, and that
we’d make a fine team together as we ate sharp ham-and-cheddar rolls and a few of the other dons wafted in from dim smoky corners to give me their own Varsity tips. I confided to Cumbernald about the book I’d always planned to write, and he nodded gravely. By the time we’d opted—yes, why not?—for a third pint of Pedigree, I didn’t feel like an impostor. I felt as if I was gliding at last into the warm currents of a stream along which my life had always been destined to carry me.
I remember that the news vendors were selling a Special Extra Early edition of the Oxford Evening News as we walked back along High and Cumbernald regaled me with a few of his own supply of Oxford stories. He bought a copy and we stood and read it together. Other people were doing the same, nearly blocking the street. It had just been announced that a British Expeditionary Force had landed at Dronacarney north of Dublin, and that a task-force fleet led by HMS Hood had already accepted the surrender of Belfast, barring a little fighting around the Falls Road, without needing to do more than turn her guns upon that loyal City. I think Cumbernald actually whooped and punched the air. That was most people’s reaction. It was a fine day to be British.
More fine days were to follow. There was easy victory in Ireland. The commemorative Victory Tower went up and up in London, and word was that the contract had been let even before the troops set out, such was the confidence that now pervaded Greater Britain. I, meanwhile, shivered pleasurably at Christmas to the soaring music of the choir at Kings. And I worked hard. For these new and nervous students who entered my rooms clutching essays and reading lists I became what I had always been, which was a teacher. I did my best and, amazingly, my best was often enough. There were gatherings, panelled rooms, mulled wine in winter, mint teas and Japanese wallpapers in the spring, cool soft air off the river on long walks alone. Our forces aided Franco’s victory over the communists in Spain, and we resigned from the League of Nations. The Cyprus Adventure came and went. Britain re-took Rhodesia. I bought myself an expensive new gramophone.
The rest of the world found it easier to treat John Arthur as a kind of Fascist straight-man to the comical Mussolini. France, Germany and the Lowlands were too busy forming themselves into a Free Trade Community whilst the USA under Roosevelt, when it wasn’t worrying about the threat in the Far East from a resurgent Japan, remained doggedly isolationist. In the Middle East, Britain’s canny re-alignment of Egypt’s King Farouk in the Modernist mould, and his recent conquest of Palestine with the help of British military advisors, were seen as no more than the par for the course in that troubled region. After all, Britain was behaving no more aggressively than she had throughout most of modern history. Even now that the whole of Kent has been turned into a military camp as a precaution against some imagined Franco-German threat, the world still remains determined to think the best of us.
Meanwhile, and despite all the puzzlements and disappointments, I grew to love Oxford almost as much in reality as much as the dream. Eights Week. The Encænia Procession. Midnight chimes. The rainy climate. The bulldogs in their bowler hats checking college gardens for inebriate sleepers. The Roofs And Towers Climbing Society.
History went on. The Jews were re-located. Gypsies and tramps were forcibly housed. Homosexuals were invited to come forward for treatment. Of course, I was a panicked for a while by that—but by then I had my acquaintance, our discreet messages on the cubicle wall at the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow, our casual buggerings when he’d do it to me first and then afterwards I’d sometimes do it to him—my soft and easy life. I had my desk, my work, my bed. I had my books, the tea rooms, the gables, the cupolas, the stares of the Magdalene deer, the chestnuts in flower, music from the windows of buildings turned ghostly in the sunlight, young voices in the crystalline dusk and the scent of ancient earth from the quads.
I was dazed. I was dazzled. Without even trying, I had learned how to forget.
16
I AM DRAGGED BACK towards morning by sleek sheets, a clean sense of spaciousness that cannot possibly be Oxford, and an anguished howling. My head buzzes, the light ripples. London, of course. London. The New Dorchester…
I fumble for my tablets on the bedside table as the sirens moan, then in the drawer beside it where beneath a Bible and complimentary New Dorchester pens and envelopes lies a card detailing WHAT TO DO IN CASE OF A FIRE OR AIR RAID. I’m blinking and rubbing my eyes at it when the door to my room swings open.
“Sorry about this, Brook.” Reeve-Ellis, already in his school tie and cardigan, leans swaying on the handle. He has PC T3308 in tow.
“Frightful cock-up on this of all days. You know what these bongo-bongo players are like—haven’t even heard of an air raid—probably think it’s the Great White God coming down to impregnate their daughters. Still, we’ve got them all going down the stairs now—even Father Phelan, which was no mean feat, the state that he’s in. So I thought I’d better look in on you as well, just to make sure you’ve got the message. There’s a good man. Just pop on that dressing gown…”
It’s pandemonium along the corridors. Half past seven in the morning and people are flapping by in odd assortments of clothing with pillow-creases on their cheeks, electrified hair. Most of them seem to be smiling, though. An air raid’s the sort of occasion that breaks down social barriers even at the New Dorchester, and no one believes it’s the real thing.
“Pretty chaotic, I’m afraid,” Reeve-Ellis steers me through the swirling roar of the crowded main atrium where hotel staff are holding up signs and arrows. “A lot easier if we go this way and find ourselves some peace and quiet.”
He, PC T3308 and I struggle against the flow until we reach an eddy beside the hotel souvenir shop where the crowds are thinner and another PC—K2910 according to his shoulder badge—is standing guard at the door marked NO ADMITTANCE that Reeve-Ellis led me into two days ago. PC K2910 follows us as we go in, then locks the door from the inside. The howl of the siren, the sound of people moving, suddenly grows faint. This early in the offices, there are no phones ringing, no typewriters clicking. But for the three men who are with me, I’m suddenly alone.
“Along here,” Reeve-Ellis says, shoving his hands into his cardigan pockets. PC T3308 strides ahead of me. PC K2910 keeps just behind. Their shoes squeak. They smell faintly of rubber. Reeve-Ellis holds opens the door with an EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY sign just past his office that leads to a damp and dimly-lit concrete tunnel. The door slams shut behind us, setting off ripples of echoes. Here, at last, the New Dorchester’s carpets and luxury give out. The passage begins to slope down. There’s a faint growling of some kind of motor. Water drips from tiny stalactites on the roof. The air smells gassy and damp. A chill runs down my neck.
We reach a gated lift, which PC K2910 drags shut, then activates with his keys, clanking us down past coils of pipework to some kind of railway platform, although this isn’t the normal Underground; the tunnel at each end is too small.
“Dreadfully uncomfortable, I’m afraid,” Reeve-Ellis says as an earthy breeze touches our faces and the rails begin to sing. “Temporary expedient, of course…”
An automatic train slides in, wheezing and clicking with all the vacant purpose of a toy, hauling a line of empty hoppers behind it. The final one has pull-down wooden seats, and a notice that someone has picked away at to read USE OF POST OFFICE NEL ONLY. PC K2910 hops in first, then helps Reeve-Ellis clamber over. I try taking a step back, wondering about possibilities of escape. PC T3308 bumps shoulders with me.
“Might as well just get in, sir,” he says, offering a large, nail-bitten hand.
Hunched in our toy train, we slide into the tunnel. I’m conscious of my slippered feet, my bare calves and ankles beneath the dressing gown, my gaping pyjamas, the huge sliding weight of the Thames that I imagine now lies above us. Our breath smokes, and is snatched away. Grey wires along the walls rise and fall, rise and fall. In what light there is, with me squashed on one side against Reeve-Ellis’s bony body, I study the two policemen who squat opposite me. PC T330
8 is bigger and older, with the jowelled meaty face and body of an old-fashioned copper. PC K2910 is freckled, red-headed, thin; he seems too young, in fact, to be a policeman at all. Falling through my head in rhythm with the clicking rails, I can hear the cheery voice of some Look At Life commentator booming out over the one-and-nines. A new tunnel under London… Mail from Inverness and Calcutta… Parcels from Adelaide and Sutton Coldfield… Postal orders and love letters, saucy post cards, holiday photographs, birthdays and bits of wedding cake, car licences, good and bad news, hopeful competition entries, letters from the bank manager…
We disembark at another mail station, and travel upwards in another gated lift. Then, suddenly, the walls are almost new—fresh painted the same municipal green that once covered the walls of the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow, and somehow, as the bare overhead lights slide across it, scarred with similar marks and messages. PC T3308 grips my arm. There are doors leading into offices, but apart from the odd broken-legged chair, the place is empty, abandoned. We’re still deep underground.
“It’s in here,” sighs Reeve-Ellis, opening a door after PC K2910 has found the right key. He clicks on the light. There are three chairs and a desk, one battered four-drawer filing tin cabinet with tea or rust stains down the front. A pre-redesign map of the London Underground sags on rusty pins from the notice board. Fat pipes run across the ceiling.
PC K2910 shuts and then re-locks the door. PC T3308 widens his stance and folds his arms.
“You may as well sit down, Brook.” Reeve-Ellis points to the chair on the far side of the desk, facing out from the wall. It’s a standard tubular-frame thing, although old and stained, and I notice as my body settles into it and my shaking hands reach out to grip the armrests that it gives off a sour, unfortunate smell. The air is warm in here, almost swimmingly hot. The heat comes, I suspect, from those thick green-painted pipes spanning the ceiling. We must be near the boilers that service this seemingly empty building. I can sense—more a feeling than a sound, a grating hum that comes up through the floor into my slippered feet and ripples over my skin.
The Summer Isles Page 21
