by Olivia Fane
One night he came in and found them kissing on the sofa in his now iris-blue sitting-room; he’d rushed past them and up the stairs, and Cilla had followed him up to apologise.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘we’re pushing you out of your own house. We’ll stay in the bedroom, Tom. Don’t mind us.’
But that was when he really did begin to mind. The walls weren’t even particularly thin, but perhaps, Thomas thought, as he lay there listening, I’m too conscious of it. Is there an aural equivalent to a peeping Tom? Should I tell them to be quieter? Is that the more moral thing to do, or is it simply the less liberal?
At first Greg was the one he was angry with. Not being exactly a man of fashion, he’d taken Cilla’s rather tight-fitting tunics to be a mark of innocence: he’d even considered that the reason why they were so short was that she’d worn them while she was still at school, and had never had sufficient money to replace them with something a little more modern. The first time he heard Greg say to her, ‘You’ve been a naughty girl, my little one,’; the first time he heard a slap, and then two, why, Thomas was on the point of entering and rescuing the poor girl; but the giggles which ensued confounded him. He lay there in the dark, his heart beat resounding in his chest, alert to every Gregorian grunt and squeak of the old mattress, and so uncomfortably present was he in that little menage that he fancied he could smell salted herring on Greg’s breath.
Occasionally it was all he could do to resist running into the room and shouting ‘Stop!’ Would Cill want him to? he wondered. Was she being raped night after night while he was lying idly by? For the girl would often shout ‘No! No!’, and vigorously, too. And human beings were sufficiently complicated to shout ‘No!’, mean ‘Yes!’, and then, when considering everything in the cold light of day, deeply mean ‘no’ after all. And if even the participants in a rape didn’t know whether ‘yes’ meant ‘no’ and ‘no’ meant ‘yes’, however was a jury supposed to know it?
And then a most unfortunate thing happened. For while Greg was guilty and his girlfriend innocent, things were at least bearable. But overnight there was a sea-change: her noes turned to yeses. The timbre of her voice changed: initial alarm at Greg’s violent advances turned to greed for them. And Cilla suddenly became Scylla in all her terrible glory. Thomas could bear it no more. He got out of bed, tightened his pyjama cord and put on his dressing-gown. Upstairs he went to his study at four in the morning, scanning the shelves until he found what he was looking for. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book XIII: here you are, Scylla, bathing in the fountain up to your waist, but look down, Scylla! You think you’re so pretty, don’t you? You look happily for your reflection. But all you find in the water are three monstrous, barking dogs, and you thrash about trying to escape them, but you can’t, dear Scylla, because don’t you understand they’re part of you?
Cilla didn’t come down to breakfast the following morning, and Thomas was relieved. He felt he could never look her in the eye again. Greg ate his yoghurt with his customary precision, and for some reason Thomas said to him,
‘I always think how tasty those yoghurts look. Do you mind if I try one?’
‘Go ahead,’ said Greg, surprised, and looking up only briefly from his own, in case he should miss an interesting subsidence of sugar.
In fact, Cilla was only to remain in his house for a further three months. There were no signs of her imminent departure, though Thomas had by now become distinctly less observant and solicitous, and their now occasional tête à têtes in the early evening had become stiff and consisted only of the briefest formalities. But when she was gone, Thomas felt in some way responsible for it; or rather that he had misjudged her. He wanted to write her a letter to tell her how sorry he was that she had left so suddenly and without saying goodbye; he wanted to ask Greg for her address, or at least to be given some small clue as to what had happened between them. But Greg was as unforthcoming as ever, and wouldn’t have told him about Cilla’s pregnancy for the world.
‘Well,’ said Samantha, who that afternoon had dressed herself up in silk and leather and spent an hour applying her make-up, ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re gay. And in this day and age, they’re not exactly going to imprison you for it! I’m being no more prying than if I were to ask you your middle name.’
‘If I tell you my middle name, will you leave? This is my tutorial hour and I, thank God, am not your tutor.’ Thomas sighed and was as bored as he sounded.
‘Just tell me this, have you ever lusted for a woman? Tell me that, and I’ll go.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Thomas, looking at his watch.
‘For example, have you ever noticed that I was a woman? Has it ever crossed your mind?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘There you see, you don’t like women.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you that it might be you I don’t like?’
‘But what about desire? Desire is surely a more profound condition than mere liking or disliking.’
Thomas sighed and said nothing.
Samantha laughed easily and sat on the arm of an armchair with her legs astride. ‘Do you know, Dr Marius, I don’t think I’ve been to a single supervision without an overwhelming desire to take my shirt off, and I never wear a bra when I know I’ll be seeing you, just in case desire finally does overwhelm me.’
‘Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics Book V: read it, Samantha, and see how you share your free-flowing qualities with the animals. There is nothing profound about desire, nothing at all. Desire is the least human part of us.’
‘So, I’m in touch with my inner animal. Is that possibly the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me?’
‘Is love within your range, Samantha? Or are you pure desire?’
‘My God, I’ve traced an incurable romantic. And?’
‘And what?’
‘Have you ever loved a woman, then?’
It would have been so easy to have told the truth to Samantha, ‘I was married, once.’ But that would have been sinking to her level, playing her game. The admission would have been a defeat in itself, and he was saved from making it by a knock on the door.
Samantha pleaded, one last time, and Thomas reiterated that he didn’t have to tell her anything.
‘Come in,’ he said.
A fresh-faced undergraduate hesitated when he caught sight of Samantha, as the buttons on her shirt were half undone.
‘Adrian, sit down,’ said Thomas, more effusively than usual. ‘Don’t worry, she’s just going.’
And this was the way he triumphed over Samantha, for the time being, at least.
That night, Thomas took a cup of tea to bed with him. He sat propped up against a wooden headboard, enjoying the slight discomfort of it.
His Bengali wife, Benita, had been a virgin when he’d married her in Warwick in 1986, when he was twenty-seven. Beautiful, pure, unassuming, Benita had been the librarian at the University where he’d had his first teaching post and lectured in Latin Literature. Her simplicity of spirit had enchanted Thomas; and she’d been the first woman in his life who’d looked up to him to provide the right answers, to make him feel manly. In short, he had desired her more than any other woman he had ever met.
What a sorry thing it is when worldly matters intrude on the unworldly! For Benita had underplayed the resistance of her family to their impending marriage.
‘They so want to be modern!’ Benita had exclaimed. ‘They so want to accept you as their own!’
Which was true, though Benita forgot to emphasize the word ‘want’: for they had indeed wanted to, but could not, accept Thomas, even for their daughter’s sake. Only insiders would have understood there was a distinct lack of joy at their wedding, for everyone was on best behaviour and as civil as could be, but even the Hindu celebrations after their marriage in a registry office lacked lustre.
For all his desire, however, this business of the taking of the virginity had become, by its fifth week, more of an engineerin
g than a romantic feat, as Benita (who was a bit older than Thomas, and had years’ worth of virginity-related anxiety to dispel) had used brute force to push his slender hips away from hers. And even though their sex-life was non-existent, Thomas had himself an insurmountable rival in the bedroom, namely the telephone and Benita’s mother.
Night after night Benita’s mother used to call as they were lying in bed together, and it occurred to Thomas that Benita had even asked her mother to phone so late, ‘to be saved by the bell’, as it were. And then Benita would proceed to talk in Bengali, right there in bed beside him, for twenty or even thirty minutes every single night. When Thomas had complained, Benita had accused him of not recognizing the importance of the family.
‘Just because you English ignore your own parents, why should I ignore mine?’
‘Can’t you get your mother to phone earlier?’
‘They eat just as soon as my father gets home.’
And before that?’
‘I’m at the library till half past seven, as well you know!’
And so the lovely Benita, the possession of whom he had yearned for for the best part of a year, continued to elude him forever. By the time Thomas was awarded a fellowship at Corpus three years later, they were divorced.
Thomas sipped at his tea and considered. For six years, now, he had been celibate, assuming an almost monkish existence, his body as separate from himself as if it had been a mere adolescent appendage.
But that night, O blast Samantha, it wasn’t his wife he was thinking of. The most important kiss of his life had happened in the Bavarian forest, when he was fifteen and on a German exchange with a boy called Hans. They had been skating together on a small, hidden lake and the sun was setting. And yes, if Hans had been Hannah, the strength and seriousness of that moment would have been lacking. But do moments like that define you? Do they cast you in that role forever?
He was still lost in thought at half past eight the following morning while riding on his bike into college. ‘And if I am incapable of love, should I mind? Is it a defect in my character?’ And would such a defect, quite happy, quite silent as it was back then in November 1998, have been preferable to the upheavals which were to occur in his soul over the next few years? Thomas Marius was riding his bike too fast. A pale, blond boy with a satchel on his back was on the zebra crossing on his way to the school opposite. There was an accident – Thomas clipped the back of his satchel and the boy fell.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry.’
The boy told him not to worry, he’d been quite in a dream himself. His name was Josiah.
Chapter Eight
THOMAS MARIUS had barely noticed that he lived opposite a school. Why should he? During the week he was in college; at weekends, the school was shut. But ever since crashing into one of its schoolboys his curiosity was roused; not least because the boy in question had left behind him a charming drawing of a tall beech tree, probably, as Thomas surmised (owing to its shape and the fact it had been drawn on the back of an old cereal packet), used as a bookmark.
The moral dilemma facing Thomas at that time was whether he ought to return it. The morning of the accident, he had picked up the bookmark from the zebra crossing and had called after the boy, but the boy had disappeared in the general hubbub at the school gate and Thomas had simply put the bookmark in his briefcase and biked on. In fact, no dilemma presented itself until the moment Thomas realised that he liked the bookmark and he wanted to keep it. If, the first time he saw the drawing of the beech tree he had considered it ‘well executed’, by the end of a week it had become an object of genuine beauty. In which case, its artist might be missing it badly, and it needed to be returned.
So if it had been Thomas’ custom to leave his house at about twenty past eight, he now went upstairs to his study at that time where he had a good view of the school and of all those entering and leaving the gates. The first time he saw the boy again, why, he had the bookmark there on his desk ready to give back to him; but something held him back, and if that ‘something’ had been at first waiting for an appropriate moment, when he wasn’t surrounded by other children, that innocent ‘something’ began to be transformed into something else. For the boy had begun to fascinate him.
He decided that the boy was about fourteen; and that, as he had confessed on the morning of the accident, he lived in a dream. He had never seen him talk to another child, and seemed to have developed a knack of being invisible to them. But he was not exactly an outsider, either; he never set himself apart from the crowd, and was, quite often, in the midst of it. But it occurred to him that he had never seen the boy smile, and the expression on his face was generally one of absence.
Then one morning Thomas opened the door to the postman, who was in the throes of shoving his Classical Journal through the letterbox. It was still only eight o’clock, but he noticed the boy walking quickly towards him a full half hour earlier than usual. He was also walking alone. This was his chance.
Up to his office he ran, two steps at a time, squeezing past Greg who was on his way down to his yoghurt-fest, and opened up his briefcase on his desk. Where was the bookmark, for God’s sake? From his window he watched the boy coming closer, closer still, but where was the bookmark?
He snapped the briefcase shut and took it down to the hall with him; and his sudden sense of urgency to restore the lovely thing to its rightful owner rid him of his natural timidity. He opened the door and called out, in the nick of time, ‘Hello there! I’ve got something that belongs to you!’
Josiah turned towards him. He was both curious and calm.
‘I’m so sorry to spring upon you like this! But not only did I crash into you the other day but I robbed you of a rather lovely… well, I think it’s a bookmark, but correct me if I’m wrong.’
Thomas moved back into his hall and said, ‘Come in, I’ll find it for you.’
Josiah said nothing but was pleased to follow him. He knew exactly what it was that the man had picked up, he had at least a dozen of them, but he had often wanted to know what it was like in the man’s house. For if Thomas had noticed Josiah, Josiah had certainly noticed Thomas, standing at an upstairs window.
Josiah watched while Thomas put the telephone on the floor and put his briefcase on the small hall table. ‘Now, where is it?’ Thomas was muttering to himself, as he began rummaging through the case.
‘Do you like orange, then?’ asked Josiah.
Thomas looked up. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘The walls,’ offered Josiah.
‘The truth is,’ said Thomas, ‘I don’t really like orange. No, I don’t like orange at all.’
‘Me neither,’ said Josiah.
‘Here it is! At last! Is it a bookmark?’
‘It is,’ said Josiah, taking it back. ‘Did you use it?’
‘As you can see, I did.’ Thomas picked up the book in whose pages it had been nestling.
‘Catullus,’ said Josiah. ‘He spoke Latin, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, he did speak Latin. And he wrote Latin, too. This is a fine book, and one day…’
‘I know it’s a fine book.’
‘Ah, you’re a Latinist already?’
‘Odi et amo.’
‘Heavens, that’s very good!’
‘I hate and I love.’
‘Do you learn Latin over at your school, then?’
‘No. My mother taught me those words. Catullus was her favourite poet. I’m afraid that’s all I know.’
‘So your mother was a Classicist?’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘She studied Latin and Greek.’
‘I know she learnt Latin.’
‘And does she teach you now?’
‘She’s dead. It’s all right. She died a long time ago.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Thomas, and he meant it.
‘I’d better get to school, then.’
‘Can I not offer you anything? Like bre
akfast?’
‘I’ve eaten, thanks. I’d better go.’ Josiah smiled awkwardly. Then he turned on his heel and left.
This glimpse into the boy’s history only managed to exacerbate things. When Thomas took up his customary position in his study to watch him go into school the following morning, the boy waved at him. And suddenly he felt terribly ashamed. So he stopped looking out for the boy, and tried to get on with his work. And when he couldn’t work, he decided to invite the boy for tea.
At first, his feelings about such an invitation seemed relatively simple. There was no law against befriending strangers, after all; and he was no child. He was a kouros, a handsome youth, worthy of any Greek sculptor’s attention; yet his good looks were by no means the most pressing reason he was attracted to him. There was a quality in his character, a certain wistfulness, which roused his curiosity, and curiosity had been the driving force in Thomas’ life.
Why the passion of Thomas’s life, hitherto, had been books, was because he had found books so very much more interesting than people. The character of your average person, he had brutally decided many years previously, could be reduced to a thumbnail sketch: nice/nasty; stupid/clever; wise/obtuse – and the third category didn’t even exist until he returned to Cambridge after the demise of his marriage. But the exciting thing about ideas was that they existed over and above the people who happened to have them, and a work of scholarship thrilled him inasmuch as the writer had fallen away, or ought to have. For the self and prejudice were as one – for what was prejudice but the public display of personal desires and aversions? And what was the self but the private catalogue of those same desires and aversions, for one’s own personal use?
Which was why his interest in the boy stupefied him. Undergraduates arrived in Cambridge more or less complete – with the personalities they would have for the rest of their lives: he could plot them on his mental graph and they rarely threw up any surprises. But the boy was endearingly imperfect, in the sense that he was not complete. When Thomas looked for the exact expression to describe his peculiar quality, he had to resort to the Latin: perfecte imperfectus, for there were two strands in his character which ran parallel to each other and were prima facie contradictory; namely, that he was more self-reliant than most adults, in that he seemingly had no interest in nor derived any self-esteem from his peer group. Yet at the same time there was a hole so large in his life that those few moments with him betrayed (or so it seemed, as he replayed their encounter a hundred times in his head) almost a manic desperation for whatever it was that was missing. And as the days turned to weeks he understood why he was becoming obsessed: because he felt that he, Thomas Marius, could help him find it. And that was why the boy must come to tea, and he must issue that invitation as quickly as possible.
