On Loving Josiah

by Olivia Fane

  But was it really as simple as that? O, ye Gods, what is ever simple? For by the time Thomas Marius’ brain had pulped every version of every event and recast it in every mould, his anxiety about this peculiar and unprecedented situation was taut and dangerous. Thomas decided he was deceiving himself. For in the same way as the sketch of the beech tree had seemed ever more beautiful, Thomas was aware that the boy was also becoming so. One lunchtime (he had never stooped so low!), he found himself spying on the boy (for what else could it be called? Nowadays his study seemed barely more than a crow’s nest) admiring the fullness of his mouth, the way he carried his broad but skinny shoulders, his long neck, like a woman’s. And what he asked himself was this: ‘Was this way of looking at him morally wrong? To admire the beauty of another being, is that always unproblematic? And above all, do I invite him for tea?’

  If things had been left to Thomas, the truth is, he would never have invited him to tea. But if Thomas’ original and surely virtuous motive had been to save the boy, because he recognized there was something about him worth saving, Josiah’s prayer was that the god-like figure who looked out over his world would be his saviour. And it was with this intention that Josiah knocked on his door one Saturday morning in March. ‘Will you teach me Latin?’ was what he asked the wracked, ruined, unshaven man on his doorstop.

  ‘Of course I will,’ said Thomas, ‘Won’t you come in?’

  It was nine o’clock; Greg was still asleep; and Thomas, suddenly woken from days of sleeplessness, saw his house as an outsider might see it. He suggested the boy might like a cup of tea, and as they walked together through the long, thin hall to the kitchen at the back of the house, he apologized for the orange paint, and yearned that his house might be sober and uneventful, clean and forthright. He noticed, as though for the first time, the lime green walls, the mockpine kitchen units, the dirty electric rings on the cooker. Thomas made the tea – two teabags in two ugly brown mugs – and they sat down momentarily at the kitchen table. But when he fetched the milk from the fridge he saw the yoghurt, and he said, ‘I tell you what. I’m taking you upstairs to my study.’

  Josiah followed him upstairs and noticed neither the decor, nor lack of cleanliness, nor the fact that the cups of tea had been left behind; for he was bathing in the warm slipstream of the man who was finally going to teach him what it was he wanted to know. And once in the study, with the door shut behind them and the old world safely cordoned off, Josiah was almost immediately aware of an unravelling of himself, a surrendering which was both physical and joyful. This is what it feels like, he said to himself, to absolutely trust another human being; to lay yourself at their mercy.

  It was Josiah who had shut the door. The moment they were alone together, Thomas was nauseous. His sense of responsibility was suddenly so acute that for all he knew one wrong move might bring about a plague in Africa. So far, Josiah and Thomas were just standing looking at each other, the former with a large open smile and the latter with a brain on overload and a lined forehead. For there was only one chair in his study, so should he go to fetch another? Would the stool from the bathroom do, or would Greg be there? Would the small armchair in his bedroom be too unwieldy to carry upstairs? Would it be too eccentric to make a stool out of a few volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary? This was the option which he chose, and happily the boy seemed delighted to sit on it, as though sitting on dictionaries was something that scholars ordinarily did. And while Thomas was negotiating his next problem, namely to choose the distance at which to sit from the boy (he was initially too unfriendly, and then, perhaps, too bold), Josiah was thinking how much nicer it was to be here than lying under his yew on these cold, dark, damp days or lying in his over-heated bedroom counting moths on the ceiling and listening to the squabbling next door.

  At last, with the seating arranged to their mutual satisfaction, and the tea thoroughly forgotten by both of them, Thomas asked his young companion his name.

  ‘Josiah,’ said Josiah.

  ‘Aha,’ said Thomas, ‘A king in the Old Testament.’

  ‘That’s right,’ enthused Josiah, ‘and he was a good king, a good and just king.’

  ‘I’m sure your parents wouldn’t have named you after a bad king,’ laughed Thomas, nervously, as a dreadful image of Scylla shoved itself into his head. ‘So then, Josiah, you want to learn Latin.’

  ‘I do,’ said Josiah. ‘Before she died, my mother used to teach me, and I remember quite a lot. The five declensions, the four conjugations, amo, moneo, rego, and audio. Is that right?’

  ‘How long ago did you learn all of that? That’s very impressive.’

  ‘Seven or eight years ago now. But I made myself remember it. For years I would repeat what she taught me night after night. She made me feel like I was learning a secret code. But I only know a part of it, and probably after repeating it so much I’ve got it wrong, like Chinese whispers. I want you to teach me what I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m sure I could do that. Incidentally my name is Thomas Marius.’

  ‘I know,’ said Josiah, coolly. ‘It was written on a folder I caught sight of in your briefcase the other day. And you teach at Corpus Christi College.’

  ‘That’s right. What else do you know about me?’

  ‘That you live with a creep. I don’t know what his name is, but I’ve watched him go in and out of your house.’

  ‘And do you watch me go in and out of my house, too?’

  ‘Oh yes! Of course! And I watch you standing by your window, right here!’ Josiah got up and walked over to the exact spot. Then he leant on the sill and looked out towards the school. ‘You have a great view. You can see everything.’

  ‘I’m lucky,’ Thomas said, his cheeks reddening.

  ‘So will you teach me?’ asked Josiah, without looking round.

  ‘Of course I will,’ said Thomas, too ebulliently.

  They agreed to meet at nine o’clock every Saturday morning. For the seven days and nights Thomas had to fill before they met again it was as though every synapse was on red alert. When he opened the window to return Josiah’s wave that first morning, the shot of fresh, cold air which blasted through his study was the first fresh, cold air he’d ever noticed. And long after Josiah was out of sight, Thomas stood there leaning over the sill and letting his head feel the full force of it. Even the colours of the car roofs seemed rather splendid that morning, and he felt he understood their purring engines while they waited patiently at the traffic lights, and their sense of anticipation as they revved like greyhounds in the stalls. He remembered something his father had told him about birds not being afraid of cars because they knew that they weren’t animals, and caught sight of a robin remaining grave and undeceived in the branch of a poplar tree opposite him.

  And in the same mood he saw a neighbour of his struggling home with some heavy shopping bags, and sprinted down the stairs to rescue her.

  ‘I’ve lived here four years,’ he said to the woman in a hairnet with incipient beard, ‘and I’m afraid I don’t even know your name. Imagine that, I don’t even know your name…’

  ‘Call me Marjory, duck,’ she grinned, revealing a row of immaculate white teeth.

  Thomas briefly considered what a rare sight it was to see a woman so old with teeth in such good condition, and almost complimented her, but suddenly remembered his mission.

  ‘Marjory, here, give me those bags!’

  ‘Well, all right then. I won’t complain,’ said Marjory with alacrity, as she handed them over to him.

  ‘They’re very heavy,’ observed Thomas.

  ‘It’s good quality coal in there.’

  ‘Does that mean you’ve got a real fireplace in your house?’

  ‘Well, I’m not putting coal out for the birds, am I?’

  ‘But are you allowed to use real coal in Cambridge?’

  ‘Whatever makes you think you can’t?’

  ‘There’s no law against it?’

  ‘You can’t stop people be
ing warm, I say.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ mused Thomas, as he left the bags by Marjory’s front door.

  So within the hour he was ready for Josiah’s return visit. It had never occurred to him that the small Victorian mantelpiece in his study could be unblocked quite so easily, revealing a small grate; and the pleasure of moving around furniture to get the best possible effect was quite new to him. Up came two small armchairs from the sitting room, and a small coffee table. If they needed to use his desk, he would bring up a chair from the kitchen, but in his mind’s eye this is where the two of them would sit together, and he would teach him everything he knew.

  But there were a further 166 hours to dispose of. He sat in one of the armchairs to consider textbooks. A book he’d enjoyed as a boy was by one F. Ritchie, old-fashioned, yes, but which would give Josiah a solid grounding in grammar, far surpassing the new-fangled Cambridge course which he’d always been faintly suspicious of. And look! There was his old Kennedy’s Latin Primer, perfect! If his mind had been less restless, he would even have been happy.

  But Thomas couldn’t be still. Because for every generous concern about the boy, there was an opposing one, one which he tried hard to fathom. For why, O why, was he so absurdly pleased? What was it that he felt the boy could give him? What was it, exactly, that he had already given? Here was no educated equal, offering him food for thought on a topic that interested him. Yet the boy himself was that topic: he wasn’t a means to an end, he himself was that end… No, it was even more than that, for the boy wasn’t a mere trinket which he wished to put in his pocket and possess, somehow. It was true that his physicality excited him, not in any sexual way, but in the way one might be excited by a fine tree in the Botanical Gardens. Yes, Thomas, who had never been in the slightest bit observant before, and who had lumped humanity together under the report card, ‘has talent, but works well below par’, found himself intrigued by the boy’s fringe, which tended to fall into his eyes, and the way when he was sitting he would hold onto his knees with outstretched palms, and the pretty shape his lips assumed when he was thinking. His trousers were too long for him, and his coat too large, but he held himself proudly and he had more dynamism in him than any undergraduate. No, not ‘dynamism’, which suggested activity; rather dunamis, the Greek word: he had power, an inner strength, a potentiality. No, smiled Thomas to himself, I don’t know a child like him. And then, reluctantly, he acknowledged that he had never known a child.

  He took solace in the fact that the Greeks would encourage him; he trusted their judgment in most things, and remembered that his copy of Plato’s Symposium was among the pile of books on his bedside table. He fetched it, and saw that his hands were trembling; and when he settled back in the armchair to consult it he closed his eyes and questioned why the book should alarm him so.

  As an undergraduate he’d read the dialogue through with a couple of friends. And true to the spirit of a symposium, they had lain sprawled over pillows on the floor, drinking wine together. For God’s sake, what had happened to philosophy, that it had become as dry as dust and dull as ditchwater! For those Greeks were lovers of life as well as truth. And they didn’t categorize, analyse, cut, squeeze and push for meaning, they felt it in their hearts, they recognized it. In vino veritas: those were the days, when to surrender was to receive the truth, and wine was considered a help rather than a hindrance.

  Even Catullus, claiming to be pius when he was committing adultery with a married woman, sought a truth over and above the mores of their time. For any living culture will have customs and angles on life which define it, and set them apart from other cultures. And some cultures, and this is the point, are better than others, in that they have a better understanding of how things are by nature and a greater aspiration to seek and achieve how things might be even better; and truth is ever their criterion. Without truth, all dissipates, all is equal and nothing is of value.

  Thomas lay back, eyes closed. Calmer now, he even smiled, while he brought to mind Plato’s recommendation than an army should be made up entirely of pairs of lovers, men and their boyfriends. Back in 1980, Thomas and his friends had been beside themselves with laughter – was the laughter uneasy? No! No! No! All these gay Greeks, what a joke, bet they could teach the Green Jackets a thing or two. He opened his Symposium and the book fell open on a well-worn page:

  So if there were some way of arranging that a state, or an army, could be made up entirely of pairs of lovers, it is impossible to imagine a finer population. They would avoid all dishonour, and compete with one another for glory: in battle, this kind of army, though small, fighting side by side could conquer virtually the whole world. After all, a lover would sooner be seen by anyone deserting his post or throwing away his weapons, rather than by his boyfriend. He would normally choose to die many times over instead. And as for abandoning the boy, or not trying to save him if he is in danger – no one is such a coward as not to be inspired with courage by Eros, making him the equal of the naturally brave man. Homer says, and rightly, that God breathes fire into some of his heroes. And it is just this quality, whose origin is to be found within himself, that Eros imparts to lovers.’

  Sixteen years later, and the passage made perfect sense to him. Of course, Kenneth Dover had a lot to answer for, with his book on Greek homosexuality, who had done for the Classics what Freud had done for psychology, a massive reduction of all that is human and interesting to a description of mere animal drives. The mistranslation of eros caused our minds to take a wrong turn, our use of the word erotic was simply mistaken. Whatever happened to love, pure and simple? And whence the random, modern decision that a love which is passionate is necessarily sexual? Dover would have us imagine that Plato’s ideal of an army was a vulgar, homosexual orgy – except, of course, he’s too academic, too unbiased, to admit to the word ‘vulgar’. Let us all enjoy our bodies, like the Greeks! he seems to be singing in his turgid text.

  Thomas in his anger leapt up and began urgently seeking instances of the Greek word erastes, ‘lover’. Here we are, Pericles, urging his citizens to be ‘lovers’ of Athens – for God’s sake, would Dover suggest the Parthenon was a Freudian masterpiece? What has happened to us all? What has happened to our minds, to our spirits, when all we see are bodies? For ten thousand years the greatest civilizations have been making the same point, that the human spirit is greater than the body, that an obsession with the body diminishes the spirit, and then for a mere eighty we turn our backs on such an obvious truth and make the bizarre claim that human beings are all about bodies after all, like it or not. And the worst of it is, perhaps in the end we malleable humans will actually fulfil such an abysmal description of ourselves, and we’ll call it truth.

  But the paradox was, the more Thomas enthused about the human spirit over the weekend, the more connected to his body he became. He suddenly noticed the smoothness of a particular shirt against his skin, or found himself standing closer to a friendly face in the queue in the corner shop; he was suddenly aware of the minutiae of the weather: a cool breeze invigorated him, the sun on his face warmed him, whereas previously Thomas had even been unaware of the changing seasons. And on the Sunday, when he made a rare excursion to the Botanical Gardens, he found himself particularly entranced by the patterns he saw amongst the bare branches of fruit trees, and the softness and colour of a rare Alpine moss. Then, on the Monday, he was back in his college rooms, and a supervision with the Noxious Newnham Three, as he thought of them.

  Unfortunately for him, the subject of their supervision was to be the second century C.E. Greek novel by Longus, Daphnis and Chloe. Personally he didn’t like the novel: the story of a simple goatherd and a nubile shepherdess falling in love and never quite having sex because no one had told them what to do was rather trite and irritating. In fact, it was even a set text for that summer’s exams – he personally had put in a vote for good old-fashioned Thucydides, a magnificent stylist, as he had tried to convince the examiners – but the mood of the tim
es was one of ‘discourses’, sexual discourses in particular, and the progressives had won the day. That sex should be Samantha’s favourite subject also irritated him, because he wanted to bore her into submission with accounts of phalanxes and battle-lines.

  So the three assumed their own particular battle-line before him, and Samantha, as usual, was dressed for business: leather trousers and a tiny pink t-shirt.

  ‘You look cold, Samantha,’ he said to her, ready for the fray.

  ‘I’ve always found coldness a mental thing, myself,’ she retorted.

  ‘How did you get on with the essay, then? Any joy?’ Thomas addressed the three of them.

  ‘I’ve never heard you use the word “joy” before!’ exclaimed Samantha.

  Jane and Henrietta shot her a look and a sigh and she momentarily shut up. Henrietta had her essay on her knee, and she said, ‘Shall I read it out, Dr Marius?’

  ‘Yes, thank you Henrietta,’ said Dr Marius.

  Henrietta read out the title: ‘Purity and Innocence in the story of Daphnis and Chloe: are they necessary bedfellows?’ and then began: ‘Very little is known about the author of the book, Longus, except that he lived in the second century C.E.. We have, however, extensive knowledge of the milieu in which he wrote: namely that virginity was highly prized, and, if unmarried, the loss of it meant an end to any marriage prospects. Indeed, a guardian would have the right to sell his ‘impure’ ward into slavery. We also know that the only sure way for a woman to be treated respectfully by society was that she should be of aristocratic birth. Therefore in Longus’ novel, as was de rigueur in the New Comedy of the time, it was important that its heroine be proved to be of good birth. This was surprisingly easy, as rich families would regularly expose superfluous daughters so that the family wealth should not be dissipated by paying out large dowries to their future husbands. The baby would be left with trinkets, which, in drama and fiction at least, would be recognized many years later by a highly respectable family only too happy to reclaim their lost daughter. So Chloe is pure on two counts: blood and chastity, as Longus’ readers require her to be. But she herself is ignorant of the meaning of either ‘good family’ or ‘chastity’, which has the effect of doubling her purity (as her natural character has not been corrupted by knowledge, Garden-of-Eden-style) and also reinforcing the social mores of the time – namely, that such a charming and happy story could not have happened if Chloe had not been of good birth and had not been a virgin.’