Three Brothers

by Peter Ackroyd

  Ernest now seemed close to tears. He put his spoon in the soup and said nothing. Daniel enjoyed sitting beside Stanley. He savoured his presence, and would from time to time lean over so that their bodies briefly touched.

  The conversation, formal and hesitant, turned to a new album by a rock group of whom Daniel had never heard. “I hate that capitalist shit,” Stanley said.

  “Capitalist? What’s so capitalist about entertaining the people?”

  “The people? The people are fuckers.”

  Daniel and Stanley went together to the college bar. “Hughes is a slug,” Stanley said. “He leaves a trail of slime. He uses words without knowing their meaning. He is all pretence.”

  “I don’t mind him,” Daniel replied.

  “Oh you don’t mind anything. You don’t mind the world. You want to get on in it.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Daniel experienced a sudden sharp surge of anger. No one had ever made him angry before.

  “What’s wrong with it? Wherever you look, there’s hypocrisy. There’s sham. No one ever dares speak the truth. Say what they really think.”

  Daniel felt that Stanley was accusing him of some crime that he was not aware he had committed. “Why do you think I want to get on?”

  “Because you’re weak.”

  “Like Hughes?”

  “No. Not like that. He is weak in the soul, in the life force. You are weak in the mind.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t know yourself. So you don’t trust yourself.”

  Again Daniel felt the anger rising within him. He felt threatened. He felt that he was being goaded. “I don’t know how you can say that.”

  “I am not attacking you. I am attacking the false you. The false Daniel Hanway who works too hard and is nervous all the time.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Cruel to be kind. That’s the phrase, isn’t it?” Stanley went over to the bar, and brought back two more pints of lager. “Sup up,” he said. “Where I come from, we can drink that down in two minutes.” He had a cheerful grin that Daniel had not noticed before. “You mustn’t take me too seriously.”

  Another student came up to them. “Have either of you got a copy of Troilus and Criseyde?” They shook their heads. “Oh well. Thought I’d ask.” When he walked away, they sat in silence for a few moments.

  “Why is it,” Stanley asked him, “that we are all so uneasy with each other?”

  “Lack of confidence?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’ve been looking for some ideal friend. Some companion.” Daniel had been hoping to say this for some time. “But I’ve found no one.”

  “I don’t think,” Stanley said, “that I’ll make it to thirty. I won’t survive that long. I’ll burn the years away. I’m always going to be poor. I know it. But I don’t mind that. Poverty sings.” His eyes were very bright; he was looking away, over Daniel’s shoulder, with an expression of eagerness upon his face. “I don’t think I could stand to live for very long. It just gets harder all the time.”

  “I know what you mean,” Daniel said. “Everything is difficult. I can’t look forward at all without shuddering.”

  “Shudder. That’s a good word. Like slither.”

  “Or mother.”

  Stanley looked perplexed. “Now that’s a strange association. What have you got against your mother?”

  “Nothing. I haven’t seen her for ten years.” Then he told him the story of his mother’s disappearance. He had never discussed it with anyone before. But in the company of Stanley he wanted to make an emotional impression; he wanted to convince him that in some way he had been deprived of love. In the telling of the story he feigned more hurt and surprise than he believed he felt. But his words were more truthful than he realised.

  They were sitting in a corner of the bar, within an alcove on the walls of which were various film noir posters. Daniel had fallen silent after explaining how his father had never mentioned his mother again. Stanley then bent forward and kissed him on the lips. There was no one else near them. Daniel’s eyes widened, and he looked at Stanley in astonishment. Then he returned the kiss with such passion that he bit Stan’s lip. “Be careful,” Stanley said curtly. And then he added, “I don’t want this thing to happen. But it will happen.”

  Daniel was still breathless. He was shaking with nervous excitement. “Do you want us to?” Stanley nodded. “I never thought—I never knew—”

  “That I was queer? Well, I am. Sort of. And I am not. I knew you were. As soon as I saw you.” Daniel blushed.

  They determined to keep their liaison a secret. It was not difficult. Their contemporaries would never have recognised or understood a relationship of this kind—it was beyond any possible range of their experience. Ernest Hughes may have sensed something—in a look, or in a gesture—but he said nothing. Sometimes he pursed his lips and looked superciliously at Daniel; but Daniel looked back at him with as innocent an expression as he could muster.

  Daniel had hoped that in Stanley Askisson he had found his ideal companion, but he was soon disenchanted. There were many times when Stanley was curt and angry with him; Daniel came to dread his harangues. Their lovemaking was often awkward and unsatisfactory. Stanley would lie on his back, looking up at the ceiling, while Daniel would try to arouse him; when he did not succeed, he felt humiliated. Stanley would pick arguments with him, and even insult him.

  “This is your life,” he said one day. He picked up a sheet of paper, and drew a series of squares with a pencil. “You are in a box every hour of every day. Work. Work.” He stabbed each square with the pencil. “I feel sorry for you. I pity you.”

  “You want me to be more like you, I suppose.”

  “You arrange your hours as if you were in some sort of military campaign. But who precisely is the enemy?” Daniel was silent. “Come on. Get out of your box. Let’s go for a walk.”

  They competed with each other in their studies. One afternoon Daniel entered Stan’s room in order to see what books he was reading and what essay he was preparing. He wanted to look at his notes. “What are you doing here?” Stanley had come in unexpectedly.

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “So why are you going through my papers?” Daniel had disordered them on the desk.

  “I was curious.”

  “You were spying on me.”

  “Why?” The word stuck somewhere in his throat.

  “So that’s it. I am your enemy.”

  “No. Of course not.” He did not sound convincing.

  Their supervisor, Eric Hamilton, was an academic who had spent his career in the college. Despite all the appurtenances of middle age, including a brown tweed jacket and a pipe, he looked oddly boyish. His clothes were always crumpled. The bottoms of his fawn trousers were spattered with mud, after his bicycle ride to the college from his small terraced house in Trumpington Street. He had a habit of tilting his head to one side, listening with a slight smile to his students’ remarks.

  “It seems to me,” he said in one morning supervision, “that Volpone comes from a city vernacular tradition.” It seemed to Daniel that half of his sentences began with “it seems to me that.” “What is the phrase Jonson employs? ‘Language that men do use.’ That is the vibrant thing. I would like to say that this has the sheer edge of actuality. Felt life. Do you see?”

  Daniel had no idea what he was trying to say, and simply continued reading his essay in which Hamilton took no particular interest. Hamilton seemed more ready to listen to Stanley Askisson, however, who could talk about felt life and the vibrant thing for as long as was necessary. Daniel sensed the favouritism, and resented it.

  So he retreated to the safety and the silence of the university library. He became known to the staff, and was told that there would be summer work in the understaffed accessions department. “You are very familiar with books,” the sub-librarian said. “Not to mention keen on them. We can
do with you.”

  Daniel put his name forward, for work in the vacation, and was accepted. He was also allowed to keep his room in college during the summer months. He wrote a short letter to his father, announcing the good news, and prepared himself joyfully for a summer of toil. Stanley Askisson was going back to his mother’s house in Hartlepool.

  And so the summer passed. He hardly noticed it. After finishing work in the library he drank alone, most evenings, in a small pub close to the college which was used by a local population of shopkeepers, workmen and retired couples. No one from the college or the wider university frequented it. He sat in the back parlour, drinking pints of bitter.

  One evening, late that summer, a stranger walked into the pub and ordered a pint of cider. “Is anyone sitting here?” he asked Daniel, pointing to the bench beside him. Daniel shook his head. “Ta.” He had thick dark hair, swept back and rendered glossy with brilliantine; he seemed to Daniel to have a coarse but pleasing face, with a day or two’s growth of stubble. “Your very good ’ealth,” he said, raising his glass.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. I won’t.” He drank down some cider, and sighed. “That’s sweet. That’s the ticket. What do you do then?”

  “I’m an undergraduate.”

  “Ah. An undergraduate.”

  “What do you do?”

  “This and that. Sometimes this, and sometimes that. Sometimes both together.” He tapped the side of his nose. “You’re queer, aren’t you?”

  Daniel was alarmed and embarrassed. “What makes you think that?”

  “The way you looked at me. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind queers. I like them. What do you study?”

  “English literature.”

  “Literature? Is that a fact? What’s your name?”

  “Daniel.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Dan.” He held out his hand. “I’m Sparkler.”

  “That’s a strange name.”

  “You can call me Spark or Sparkie or Sparkle. I’m quick, you see.” The young man now held up Daniel’s watch. “Never shake hands with a stranger, Dan.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “It’s a gift, isn’t it. Can you keep a secret?” Daniel nodded. “Let’s go to another pub.” When they got outside Sparkler turned the corner and led him into the back yard. “Look,” he said. He plunged his hands into his pockets, and brought out watches and wallets.

  Daniel was astonished. “Are you a thief?”

  “That’s right. A tea-leaf. I came down here because the coppers don’t know me.” He stuffed the objects back into his pockets. “Let’s move.”

  Daniel walked with him in a state of some bewilderment. He found himself enjoying the company of this good-looking young man, and was in fact exhilarated at the thought of his being a petty criminal. “How long,” he asked him, “have you been doing—”

  “The thieving? Ever since I was that high. I’m a natural, aren’t I? It’s my calling. I get to travel. I’m my own boss. I don’t pay no tax.”

  “Have you ever been caught?”

  “Caught? Caught? Can you catch a firefly? You can catch fleas, I know, but not with your hands you can’t. No more can they catch me. You ask too many questions, undergraduate.” He laughed, and put his arm around Daniel’s shoulders, causing him a shock of pleasure. “You’ve got to be hard. Hard and smart. And quick. These mods aren’t hard. They’re all flannel. You’re a Londoner, aren’t you?”

  “Camden.”

  “Why is a London boy doing literature, then?”

  “I just like it.”

  “Can you write good English?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Let’s go in here.” Sparkler took his arm from Daniel’s shoulders, and led him into another pub. “Two of your very finest pints, landlord,” he said as he went up to the bar. “I feel a terrible thirst coming on me. Makes me see red.”

  “Pints of what exactly?”

  “Two pints of Bulmer’s best. My young friend here insists on the best. Now then, gentlemen. I have a pack of cards about me somewhere.”

  “No betting allowed,” the landlord said.

  “No bets. No bets. Just a bit of harmless fun.” Then he performed a card trick, to the delight of the locals, before retiring with the two glasses to a corner of the pub where Daniel was sitting. “Keep them happy,” he said. “And then they don’t ask questions. They accept you. So you can write good English, can you?”

  “Yes. I can.”

  “I have a load of stories to tell, don’t I? You can write them down for me. How many pockets can a pickpocket pick before he pips Sparkler? I’ll give you something in return.” He winked at him, and then stretched his legs beneath the table. Daniel’s mouth went dry, and with trembling hand he raised his glass and drank from it. “This is what we’ll call it. The Sparkler Papers.”

  “It has a ring to it.” Daniel was still thoroughly bewildered by the events of the evening. Why had this good-looking stranger taken such an interest in him? Had they really met by accident or coincidence?

  “I’ll tell you about the time when I met a very kind lady. She took care of me when I was broke. She looked after me. One day you may meet her. When you come up to London. Have you got a pen on you?” Then he wrote down a telephone number. “Ring me the week before. Then I can give you my address.” He leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “You can suck my cock.” So began Daniel’s “transcription” of The Sparkler Papers.

  Whenever Daniel went up to London, he told Stanley Askisson that he was visiting his father. In truth he had forgotten all about his family. It was something from which he had escaped. So in the vacations, instead of returning to Camden, he resumed his job at the university library. He was allowed to stay in his college rooms, too. Except for his one day a month in London with Sparkler, he devoted his time to work among books.

  Daniel and Stanley stood outside the examination schools, where their finals were to be held. Daniel had not been able to sleep the previous night. He was filled with such alarm that he was sick that morning, retching violently into the hand basin in his bedroom. The world spun about him. Only when he had washed and dressed did he regain some semblance of ordinary life. Outside the building he dug his hands deep into his pockets to keep them from shaking. Stanley was smoking a Players cigarette, and was making nervous jokes about running out of ink.

  Three months later the results were published. Daniel had obtained a first-class, and Stanley a second-class, degree.

  “Now I see things from the point of view of failure,” Stanley said. Then he burst into tears.

  Daniel put his arm around him. “It will be all right,” he said.

  “No. It won’t be all right. It will never be right again.”

  “You’re taking it too seriously.”

  “And you’re not?”

  There was an immediate change in their relationship. They were no longer intimate. In fact they tried to avoid one another as much as possible. Daniel had performed so well that he was offered a research fellowship by the college, a post that he accepted with enthusiasm. This was the place in which he now wished to settle and to prosper. Stanley Askisson drifted to London where, after taking a civil-service examination, he found himself a junior clerk in the Ministry of Housing. Soon enough he was working directly for Cormac Webb. Daniel Hanway, meanwhile, had begun work on his dissertation on “The Criminal Element in Eighteenth Century Literature.” He continued to see Sparkler in London.

  VII

  Red red robin

  IT WAS raining, a mild and gentle rain that shrouded the city in a pearl-grey light. Sam was walking through what was for him still an unfamiliar part of London, south of the river. He sensed a difference of atmosphere; there was no urgency, no energy, in the air. The rain billowed around the houses like a bland mist. He pushed open a gate and walked up a small front path between patches of grass; he rang the bell, and the door opened a fraction before he was admitted.
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  Fifteen minutes later he came out across the threshold. It was still raining. He was accompanied by a middle-aged woman, who stopped and put her hand up to a pocket in her jacket. “I almost forgot,” she said. “Take it.”

  “I don’t want this, you know.”

  “Still, I like to give it to you.”

  He took the envelope and, without looking back, went into the street. He did not look up until he passed St. George’s Church in Borough High Street. An old woman was sitting on its worn steps, her hair tied together with rags. Sam reached into the pocket of his jacket, and gave the envelope to her. He knew that it contained a five-pound note. He was given the same amount every week, and always handed the money to the first vagrant he saw. And who was the woman in the house from whom he had received the money? Sam had found his mother at last.

  Three months earlier he had entered the church of Our Lady of Sorrows in Camden, where he had first seen the statue of the Virgin. He had been hoping, ever since, that the chapel and the statue would somehow reappear and that the nuns would also return. What had come and gone might come again.

  He sat at the back of the church, his hands clasped in front of him; he repeated some words that the nuns had recited to him. “Ave maris stella, virgo et puella.” The door leading from the porch was suddenly opened, and there stepped a woman into the nave wearing a white raincoat and a blue scarf. She entered one of the pews, and Sam saw her for a moment in profile. Hurriedly he left the church and stood on the gravel path outside the porch. What should he do? Should he talk to her? Would she recognise him? He feared another rejection—that was how he put it to himself—and so he decided to wait in the street where she would not notice him. A few minutes later she left the church and came out, taking off her scarf as she swung open the wooden gate in front of her. She turned left and walked quickly away. Sam decided to follow her, at a careful distance.

  She entered the underground station at the top of Camden High Street, and stood in line for a ticket. Sam hated this station. It had an acrid smell of old machinery, and the booming sound of trains echoed from the depths; the dank atmosphere was filled with foreboding. He did not appreciate the world under the ground. Yet he waited in the queue, unwilling to let his mother out of his sight, and then followed her down the escalator to the southward-bound platform of the Northern Line.