by Barbara Vine
29
1
The forest might be green and wild to the north, a real woodland of grassy dells, but here it was dusty, it was shabby, and even in spring the trees looked weary of the struggle to remain standing. Along a path, into the depths, it grew quieter, a little more like the country. The sound of traffic from the conjoined roads faded; the light was left behind. The sky was a luminous gray, not really dark, a mass of broken, shining, variable cloud, from which the moon emerged and retreated and appeared again.
John was quite near home. Both his own home, where his mother was and his brothers and sisters, and the house he lodged in. One house was in a street half a mile to the west, the other a little farther away to the south. He decided he was far enough away. They wouldn’t come here, any of them. Only one sort of human being came here after dark, the sort he had come to find.
The directness of this thought caught him up, frightened him. He told himself he should not have put it so boldly, even to himself He had come merely to look around, to see if what he had heard said was true. On the paper, in the office and the press, the rumors moved around. He had no idea where they came from, but they were there, mentioned by the older men with worldly wisdom or sniggered at. Not, of course, if girls were present. He had listened to the stories and he, too, had sniggered or cast up his eyes in the required way. But he remembered, he stored up his information.
The forest, they said. Up by the reservoir. Forest Road, Grove Hill, around the back there. That’s their stamping ground. You go up there, lad, and you want to keep your back to a tree.
Only he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to express it, either. He had just come to take a look around. Because it was a possibility for the future, something to think about and consider the pros and cons, whether this way of life was for him. The others were not possibilities. Not the baths—probably not the baths—and never, never, the other choice. As soon as he’d known about those subterranean places, as soon as that boy at school had told him, he had stopped ever using a public lavatory. He never went near one after that. It was no problem in the navy—there were other problems, God knows!—but since becoming a reporter … He always had to go home or use the one in the office or go into a pub, or if all else failed, go behind a tree somewhere.
He had come, here, to the only option. Now he was in the depths of this triangle of spoiled forest, in the middle probably, approaching the little cluster of ponds, he asked himself how it would be for him if nothing happened. Would he feel relief or disappointment? Must it even be one or the other? What he could not face was going on as he was. Taking Sheila about, squeezing his eyes shut before he kissed her, imagining always something quite other, fantasizing. Looking at his brothers, envying James his normalcy, his desire for his pregnant bride, envying Stephen for being still a child. And what of Desmond—what did he feel for him? Speculation. Doubt and certainty. Wondering always if Desmond, so young still, so handsome, might be the same way inclined?
It was sequestered in here, yet it was open, the trees scattered, the ponds so many bright eyes, looking back at the sky. The seat, no more than a bench, was in the open but with the enclosing woodland behind it. You go up there, lad, you want to keep your back to a tree. It was silent and still, no wind, but he was aware of movement somewhere. Nothing he could hear—rather, a vibration through the earth, a sense of not being alone. He might have been imagining it.
He sat down on the bench. For the first time, now, he looked about him, really looked. Across the water, behind him through the trees and between their trunks into the darkness, ahead, up to where the path met an intersecting ride. The moon had sailed out into a clear patch of sky. Up by the ride was another bench and a man was sitting on it. A person, anyway, but it wouldn’t be a woman. Not a woman in here, alone, at night.
After a moment or two he turned his gaze away from the figure on the other bench. He lit a cigarette. He would give himself ten minutes, the time it would take him to smoke that cigarette. Then he would go. Not to his room but back to the house down by the Midland arches, see them all, lie down to sleep on the settee, and, before he slept, decide. What to do. Never to go out with Sheila again, that was the first thing, the kind thing. It wasn’t fair on her, the way he had been behaving, because he could never, never … Never again. Those times in the Philippines came back to him and he banished the memory by a physical effort of clenching his hands, opening them, pressing his fingers against his head. He drew long and deeply on his cigarette.
He would go to the doctor. Not his doctor, of course, not the doctor where Mother went and the boys and the children. Whatever doctors might say about the sacredness of patients’ confidences, he would never trust to it. If anyone told his mother, he would kill himself Another thought to be suppressed, crushed, deadened. He would go to a doctor not in the National Health and pay him and the doctor would send him somewhere to be cured. The cigarette was more than half-smoked. He looked across the water, the smooth surface of the ponds, each of them reflecting a picture of that tumbled sky. And then he became aware that the man on the other bench had moved.
How was he aware of it? He hadn’t looked. He had sensed only a disturbance of the space to his left, just as earlier he had been warned of another’s presence by a vibration through the earth. Now he looked. The man was coming this way. Perhaps he should go. He put out his cigarette, ground the stub into the clayey soil, looked down at his own knees. The man would come up to him and ask him something, ask him for a light most likely. And he would get out his lighter and snap on the flame and in it see a young face.…
Instead, the man sat down on the bench, the far end from him. John looked at him and quickly away. The clouds had massed and darkened and the moon had gone behind them. He couldn’t see much. When the man lit a cigarette, the flame seemed very bright. John lit another. They sat at opposite ends of the bench, smoking, and John thought again, When this cigarette is finished, I’ll go; I’ll leave then and go home.
The man leaned back. He left his cigarette in his mouth, hanging from his lip. John’s eyes were accustomed now to the new darkness and the light from the two cigarettes helped. He saw the man begin massaging himself. His eyes were closed, so he couldn’t see John looking, but John knew he knew he was looking. He saw him put his hands inside his trousers and those hands slowly moving, expertly moving, he thought. He didn’t know what to do, though do something he must. Going home now was impossible. It was as if to go home now would be an abnegation of everything, a denial of all hope and possibility, an absolute death. He must do something, so he began to do what the man was doing.
He had done it before but never like this. Never in company. Never had he even dreamed of this, of two men sitting at opposite ends of a bench, their cigarettes extinguished, the silence more profound and telling than any sound could be, their hands rhythmically busy. The man had turned his head and opened his eyes. They gazed at each other.
“Let’s go over there.”
John got up and followed the man in among the trees. He would take the other’s lead; he would do nothing on his own initiative; he would learn. The man was young, in his early twenties, ordinary-looking, thin, smelling of soap. The voice had been rough working class. John thought he would kiss him. That was how you began with girls, with a kiss, always with a kiss.
Dark in the wood, warmer. Eyes looking at him for a short moment, what light there was caught on their glassy convex surfaces. Then the lids falling, hands touching him, no kiss. He began to do with his hands what the man was doing with his. Prostitutes don’t kiss, they say—kissing is too intimate—but somehow he knew that wasn’t the reason the man didn’t kiss him; there must be some other. He thought those things while he could think, before the power of thought slid away into a deep mindless well of sensual pleasure.
2
The world was a different place. He was more alive than he had ever been, and more afraid. One evening in the spoiled forest had done that. There could be
more evenings, and once he went back, looking for the man whose name he didn’t know. He sat on the bench and looked at the water and at last someone did come. People came. Two policemen.
They were walking side by side. They stopped by the bench and one of them came over to him. “You waiting for someone?” the policeman said, and when John said he was just sitting there, he was just out for the evening, the policeman said, “Get along home now, son.” The other one said, “You’ve been warned.”
John went home. Later on, he understood he had been lucky. They had been kind to him. The police used agents provocateurs. If they had known why he was there and what he hoped for, they might easily have set him up with one of their own. For John knew now that if he had met a man and that man asked him back to his room, he would have gone. Happily, delightedly. But the two policemen had only warned him and sent him home.
It wasn’t long afterward that he was sent to report a case at quarter sessions. Two men, one very young, the other in his fifties, charged with gross indecency. While awaiting trial, the older man had attempted suicide in his cell. Both were sent to prison, though the offenses had been committed in the total privacy of the older man’s isolated house.
One of the results of this case and others like it was that John’s editor set him on researching homosexual activity. It alarmed John at first because he thought he must have been picked for a specific reason, something about his appearance or speech, some mannerism unknown to him but which betrayed him. But he was soon reassured. The choice was made on grounds of experience and his good qualities as a reporter alone. Some of the others in the office commiserated with him and there was more advice about keeping his back to the wall. One of them had recently interviewed a biologist who had produced homosexuality in male rats by segregating a group of them from females. This proved that men only wanted to be “queer” when they didn’t mix with women. Everyone in the office, including John, fell about laughing.
Perhaps only John’s was genuine derision. He had tried mixing with women but preferred now not to think of it, to forget it. He started his research by going to coffee bars the editor said he’d heard queers frequented. The only queer he had ever spoken to was the man in the forest and then only to say “Yes” and “Thanks” and “Good-bye.” He wondered if he would know one when he saw him, but in fact he had no difficulty. The two men at the next table were what someone later told him were known as “screamers.” It was easy to see why. They had shrill voices, affected manners, and made exasperated gestures when they talked. John wondered if he ever made a similar impression on people, and he resolved to be more careful, to restrain his laughter, to keep his voice down and be more low-key.
At home with his mother and stepfather and the children, it was a different world. In that house, in spite of the overcrowding, everything was orderly, neat, bright. It seemed always as if truth were spoken and words transparent in their honesty. Anyone who derided family life, called it, for instance, a cover-up of ugly secrets, skeletons in cupboards, should have to come to see their family. More than anything in the world, he would have liked to make such a family for himself. One day. To have that sanctuary, that peace, the absolute safety.
All that was strong and powerful and big about his mother was her physical size. Her spirit—once, he would have said her soul—was gentle and tender, timid and innocent. He was as nearly sure as he could be that she had never heard of men loving men, that if told, she would barely believe it. Experts—so-called experts, doctors, psychologists—were saying that it was strong, dominant women who made their sons into homosexuals. They ought to see his mother, humble, quiet, compassionate, deferring to the male viewpoint, yet she had two sons who were queers.
He was sure Desmond was. Just as he knew his eldest brother was not and his youngest brother was not. The youngest was only fourteen, but still he could tell. He would have been able to tell if he were only eight or only six. Did it matter? Not if it could be hidden and the hiding be maintained, if not forever, for years. So that his mother need never know and Joseph need never know. In the climate in which they all lived, keeping it secret was obligatory, anyway. He was beginning to find out that it would be preferable for him to have syphilis or be certified as mad than to admit his homosexuality.
3
The consultant in contagious diseases he went to interview at the local hospital called himself a liberal. He told John he was opposed to anything that might curb prostitution because that would turn more men toward homosexuality. John asked him if he thought of homosexuality as an illness and, if so, whether it was one of the diseases he was a specialist in.
“Venereal disease is my subject,” the man said none too pleasantly. “But, yes, I do think of inverts as sick men. You notice I call them ‘inverts’ and not ‘perverts.’ In my opinion, they are to be pitied, not condemned. Our task is to cure them, not send them to prison.”
“How will you do that?”
John really wanted to know. If there was a possibility, he wanted it. In a curious way, from observing him, watching him, he thought Desmond wouldn’t want it. But he did. He wanted to feel for Sheila or some other girl, any girl, the desire he had had for the man in the forest.
“How will I do it? I shan’t. I’m a physician. We must pin our faith on the psychiatrists. Aversion therapy is the up-and-coming thing.”
The psychiatrist John talked to was convinced a failure of family background was responsible. Many homosexuals were fatherless or their mothers didn’t know how to be mothers. As a result, boys grew up as feminine souls in male bodies. John thought of his own family, of the mother he thought of as perfect, the woman who had remarried solely, he was sure, to give her children a father.
He wondered what the psychiatrist would say if he told him the truth, if he could possibly imagine telling anyone the truth. But he knew the answer. He would be told it only looked that way to him, that his mother wasn’t really passive and gentle, Joseph wasn’t really strong and dominant, and the family members weren’t really happy, but suppressing their true feelings. That was the way psychiatrists always talked. They had an answer for everything.
Next day, he went back to the coffee bar. The “screamers” weren’t there, but other queers were. He could tell. He should have felt at home among them, but he didn’t. A woman was staring at the two at a corner table, at their longish hair, their tight trousers and too-sleek sports jackets. John thought, If one were a dwarf and put to live on an island where there were only dwarfs, would one feel better about things or worse? He didn’t know. But he knew a solution to all this was possible. If you could live and be yourself and do what you wanted and everyone else accept and even like you and be pleased. Of course it was ridiculous, impossible; it would never happen.
Abnormal, sick, mad, filthy, wicked, resistant to a caring society’s desire to cure you, that’s what you were and would always be. Why wasn’t Desmond weeping and distraught for the blow fate had dealt him? Why was he happy?
John ordered a coffee and a cheese roll. Seeing those others affected him in a way far from the editor’s intention when he had set him on this assignment. It made him want to go back to the spoiled forest. Of course he couldn’t go back there, because police patrolled it. But there were other places, the London parks, Victoria Park, for instance, the nearest one to where he lived. There were public conveniences. He hated the thought of that because it put what he wanted to do on a par with peeing and shitting. Love shouldn’t have his mansion in the place of excrement, as someone ought to have written but hadn’t.
Almost without knowing it, at least without thinking about it first, he moved his seat to the empty table next to the one where the longhaired men sat. They would think he had only moved to be nearer the window. He ordered another coffee. He was afraid to be seen looking at the men and he only gave them a covert glance, but it was long enough to see that one of them had plucked his eyebrows. Sheila had started doing that, but you could hardly imagine a man … John
began to feel excited.
He was very near them. He could hear everything they said. One of them was a hairdresser; the other worked in a men’s outfitters. They talked about customers and clients and not in the way heterosexuals would have. A sentence made him shiver.
“All those beautiful butch men in there naked.”
He hadn’t heard everything they said, evidently. He’d missed what led up to that. They couldn’t have meant the hairdresser’s or the clothes shop, that was for certain. Then, rapidly, after more overheard words, he knew.
“Take care. They wouldn’t let people with permed hair within miles.”
“I’ll have to grow my eyebrows.”
“Oh, do. And we’ll go, shall we?”
John didn’t stay any longer. He had a curious feeling that he needed air. It had been quite fresh in there, smelling sweetly of coffee and pastries, but he had felt as if he were being choked. He stood outside, taking deep breaths. It was a long time, all of half an hour, before he allowed himself to think coolly of what they had said, the place they had named, the venue they were going to. Where he could go. If they could, why not he, too?
It was the perfect place. Anonymous, they had said. You could be invisible, or almost invisible. And the beauty of it was you could go therefor a … well, legitimate purpose. Many did. Perhaps most did. Not a park or an open space where the police walked, not a sordid place of excrement. The reverse of that really.
A place of absolute cleanness. Of purity. Nothing you did there could be dirty or squalid because, by definition, all dirt was washed away in those surroundings. There, in that whiteness, you would be whiter than the snow.
4
The piece he wrote for the paper was too sympathetic, the editor said. It turned homosexuals into misunderstood men or even sick men, putting them on a par with sufferers from a congenital disease. That frightened John. He thought the editor seemed suspicious of him and, rewriting his article, he put in a lot of statistics of the number of men convicted of “grave and degrading” homosexual offenses.
