by Barbara Vine
Still, the editor wasn’t satisfied. “You don’t seem to understand what the filthy buggers do. Do you know, I heard of one of them who put tomato ketchup on his privates to look like a woman with her monthlies.”
“You’re not asking me to put that in, are you? Aren’t we supposed to be a family newspaper?”
“I’m not asking you to put it in, Mr. Ryan, I’m just giving you an idea. You write about them as if they’ve got TB, poor sods.”
But that was enough for John. He was more disgusted with himself than with the editor. He was betraying himself and his kind, his nation, and he’d heard the cock crowing once too often. He said he’d done his best, could do no more, and someone else must be found to write it. By then, he didn’t much care, even if he was putting his job on the line. He had a job move in view. In fact, he had two possible jobs in his sights.
That same day, from his office, which was no more than a partitioned-off area of the printing-press room, with a phone in it and a typewriter, he put a phone call through to the Mile End Public Baths. The door was shut. Not that it mattered. If anyone overheard, they would only suppose he was pursuing his research for the wretched feature they all still thought he was writing.
A cockney voice answered. He knew they had men’s days and women’s days and he asked which days were for men only. Tuesday, Thursday Friday, and Saturday. Did he need to bring towels? No, and no soap or shampoo, either.
Tomorrow was Tuesday, but that was too soon. Besides, he had a council meeting to cover. Someone with good shorthand was needed for that, and John was proud of his. Thursday? He wouldn’t go in on Thursday but would use the evening to watch. Find the place and check out its environs, see what was in the wind.
On Wednesday evening, he did what he always did when he wasn’t working, went home. Had his evening meal at home. The concept of the high tea was going, he sometimes thought, being replaced by a cup of tea and biscuit in the afternoon and something you either called dinner, if you had pretensions, or supper, if you were what George Orwell had called upper lower middle class. John had written a leading article about changes in mealtime and meal customs for the paper. It had provoked plenty of readers’ letters. But at home, they still had high tea, and he loved it. Those meals were by far the best of his week. Tinned fruit to start with and evaporated milk, ham and tongue (chicken for a great treat) and hard-boiled eggs and lettuce and tomatoes, thin-cut brown bread and butter, then ginger cake or a Dundee cake, maybe Bakewell tarts, biscuits, and a chocolate bar for everyone.
His mother was the best cook in the world. He liked to tell her that and see her pleasure. She had had a hard life. But her big family of loving children was her reward. There must be plenty of women, he thought, who would like to have a lot of children if only they could have them already big and sensible and independent. She had brought hers up the hard way, six children, never much money, and, after his father died, perhaps not much love. Well, not much of that sort of love. You only had to look at Joseph to know that.
Joseph was at home; he always was. John couldn’t remember a single evening when Joseph had taken his mother out anywhere. They stayed at home with the children, who weren’t Joseph’s but might as well have been. He treated them as his own. Stephen, Mary, Margaret, Desmond, James, and himself. Aged fourteen, nearly sixteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, and the one who had been away and seen the world and come back, oh, so thankfully.
Joseph said grace. He was a devout Catholic but behaved more like a nonconformist, reciting “For what we are about to receive” and reading the Bible every evening. Desmond wasn’t there. At work, his mother said. Desmond worked in a London hotel, doing what, John didn’t know, perhaps as a porter. He was always vague about what he did. John missed him; he liked everyone to be there.
James’s wife of a month sat between him and Mary. Her pregnancy had begun to show. John thought he longed for the coming baby almost more than its parents did, perhaps really more, for James and Jackie had had to get married and very likely wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been pregnant. But he knew his mother rejoiced in the prospect of her first grandchild and Joseph did, too, after his first anger was over.
It had been left to John to explain things to Stephen. He was going to use this evening to do that, take him aside after tea and have a quiet, reassuring word. Joseph had made Stephen feel the disgrace of it. He had spoken with his customary measured gentleness, but the words he used were harsh. James and Jackie had committed a sin and now must make restitution, must marry, never mind their feelings—those had nothing to do with it. They had to marry and come to live with James’s mother and stepfather, inconvenient though it might be, crowded though it would certainly be, for they had nowhere else to go. Sin, Stephen was told, must always be paid for, and the payment was unpleasant and painful.
John, of course, took a different line. They went up to the bedroom Stephen shared with Desmond, ostensibly for John to look at Stephen’s cigarette-card collection. There, first of all, he told Stephen to remember he owed Joseph a lot; he must always love and respect Joseph. But he need not take everything he said too seriously. This wasn’t the big tragedy Joseph said it was and it certainly wasn’t some exceptional crime that every right-thinking person condemned.
“Uncle Joseph called it a sin,” Stephen said.
“I know. But, believe me, this is something that happens all the time. Some of the strongest feelings we have when we’re young are our sexual feelings and they are the hardest to resist. I think Uncle Joseph has forgotten that. James and Jackie couldn’t resist their sexual feelings and the result is that they’re going to have a baby. That doesn’t sound like a crime, does it?”
Stephen asked thoughtfully, “What would be a sin, then?”
“To harm someone or to betray him, to tell lies, to be unkind. The most important in all this is the baby who’s going to be born and that he or she has a family and plenty of people to be loved by. We’ve had that, haven’t we, all of us?”
Stephen nodded.
“A family is a sacred thing, Stephen. To break up a family and destroy it, that’s a sin.”
John believed all that when he said it, knew it was true, but when he spoke about sexual feelings, he felt his voice begin to falter. He had consciously to keep it firm and strong. Later that evening, when he was back in his rented room, he had never before been so powerfully aware of the pressure and insistence of a desire for sex. He did what he had done with the man in the forest, his eyes closed, imagining the man there with him in the dark.
Would he always close his eyes in the act of sex? For him, while mostly enjoyed in solitude, it was always the act of darkness. He was twenty-five years old and he had only once had sex the way he really wanted it, with a man, and then it had been incomplete. It had been a glimpse of something that might be wonderful, and then the curtain had fallen.
5
His interview with the editor of the newspaper that might or might not offer him a job was the next day. It was on the outskirts of London, a highly regarded paper, but still only a weekly. The other one, the one he was still waiting to hear from, was a daily and prestigious, but a very long way away, in the West Country. Being away from them all in the navy had been bad enough. Could he face it again? The train journey took five hours; he would be cut off from them for weeks on end, would maybe come home for a weekend once in every four.…
Still, he hadn’t yet heard from that one, while the editor of the weekly wanted to see him that afternoon. It was a mere bus ride away. Was he damaging his career prospects for the sake of his family? Perhaps, if he had a career in newspapers at all, if being a journalist was really what he wanted.
He thought of his half completed novel lying in a canvas bag under his bed, the novel he could never make time to finish.
He was nearly late for the interview because before he left he had to check up on a story about a Leyton man who planned to row across the Atlantic, get a photograph, have a look at the boat.
Nearly late but not quite. The editor seemed impressed by some of the things he had done and by his shorthand note. But he didn’t offer John the job there and then, only said he would let him know. John went back by tube instead of on the bus, and when the train came to the Bank station, he got off and changed on to the Central line. He had a job later, no more than picking up the details of a residents’ association meeting from the secretary, but it was in Leyton and he thought of going to see his mother first. And maybe Desmond would be at home. It was a couple of weeks since he had seen Desmond. But instead of going on to Leyton, he got out of the train at Mile End.
All day long, he had forced himself not to think about the baths and the things those men had said in the coffee bar. He had constantly deflected his thoughts, and that hadn’t been too difficult with the job question uppermost in his mind. Now, in the train, it had come back. He told himself he was only going to have a look. He would look at the outside, case the joint, see who went in, check, for instance, if it really was men only this evening.
The baths were easy to find. They were where the man on the phone had said they were. Opposite, on the other side of the wide arterial road, was a little café with an uncurtained front window and glass panels in its door. John checked that a window table was free and went in.
He had to eat, after all. He couldn’t expect his mother to feed him every evening. He asked for a cup of tea and sat at the table in the middle of that quite big window, from which the baths could clearly be seen. It was a long building of brown brick with a flight of wide steps at the front leading up to swing doors. He ordered shepherd’s pie with peas and carrots, apple crumble and custard. If he saw any obvious queers going in, he’d eat his food and go and never come back.
The first man went in after about five minutes. He was tall and heavily built, wearing an old blue pinstriped suit and a shirt without a collar. John could see plainly from his window. Another man with his hair cut very short all over his head, the way the GIs’ had been, was next. Both of them looked like ordinary, normal men, husbands and fathers. But John couldn’t eat. He was too excited, too keyed up.
Three more men went in, two of them quite old. John hadn’t expected people like that, not elderly men with bald heads and big bellies, one of them with a white moustache, the other in a long overcoat, even though it was June and warm. Their seniority reassured him, though. They seemed to make the place respectable. These were municipal baths, after all, people went to them for all sorts of reasons. He wasn’t sure that he wanted respectability; indeed, in a way, he knew he didn’t but he wanted things to look proper, to look as if this was what all normal men did, like going to the pub.
He paid for the food he hadn’t eaten, crossed the road, and approached the steps. It was nearly seven o’clock and he had to pick up the residents’ association meeting agenda at eight, so it was too late to go in. Or he told himself it was. He told himself that he’d go another time. When he had more time. His heart beat with a heavy rhythmic plodding, the way it had in the forest. He began walking around the building, down the street on the left, looking us at windows far too high for anything behind the glass to be seen. Along the street behind where the facade was, there was a plain high brick wall, slightly sinister because it was windowless, up the right-hand street, and out again into the main road. Next week, then. Next Tuesday or Thursday. He went back to the tube station.
6
The way to manage it was by not thinking. Or by thinking of other things. Forcing it. He thought of the possible jobs. The editor of the weekly had written, offering him the job, and he had accepted it. Anything to get away from the Independent and those sniggerers and that rabid editor, the hot, stinking press, the rush and panic. Of course, it might be as bad in the new job, but at least it would be different.
And then there was the West Country daily. They had written suggesting Saturday for an interview. He had liked that, because it meant they understood he had obligations here, couldn’t simply get on a train when he chose and travel 220 miles. They were allowing him a weekend. That might well mean they were keen to have him. And in spite of telling the weekly he would join them in July, he was keeping his options open. He wasn’t obliged to take the job just because he had accepted it. That sort of thing was standard practice if something better turned up. But could he contemplate going 220 miles away from them all?
These speculations served very well to keep his mind off the baths until he was on the steps, walking up toward those swing doors. Then a torrent of feelings descended, of fear, and a very real sense that he might be undertaking something that would damage him, that he would always regret. But he pushed open the doors and went in.
He was in a hall or foyer. On the left was a cash desk and above it a hanging sign that listed the price of a bath, the use of the swimming pool, the steam bath, and the days which were for men and those for women. A woman of about sixty sat at the receipt of custom. He hadn’t expected women here, and the sight of her made him feel better. She wasn’t in the least like his mother—she was older and much shorter and fatter—but he fancied she had a motherly look, placid, sensible, calm. She wore a blue sweater and a checked crossover overall.
He paid for the steam bath. She gave him a ticket and directed him toward a pair of green rubber doors. On the left was an opening like a serving hatch. A man, the very man with the crew cut John had seen the previous week, was handing in his ticket, so John did the same. It was easy when you knew how. Would all of it be easy?
Behind was a very big room in which stood three long wardrobe rails with wire baskets on hangers swinging from them. On each basket was a metal disk with a number on it. The crew-cut man went into a changing room and John followed. Out of sight, he pressed his hand against his heart and felt the steady, rapid pounding. But as he held his hand there and breathed deeply, the pulsation slowed.
He copied what the other man did, took off his clothes, put them into the basket, his jacket over the hanger, his cigarettes and matches into one of his shoes, the change from his pocket into his handkerchief, which he knotted twice and put into the other shoe. The towels he had taken he arranged as the other man did, one around his body up to his waist, sarongwise, the other draped across his head and shoulders. An attendant had appeared, and when John turned away from his basket, he told him to keep the disk on its band with him, either as a wristband or on his ankle. John put it around his left wrist.
The next room was full of chairs made of Bakelite or perhaps one of the new plastics, brown-and-white chairs. People sat about having cups of tea. That was another sight which surprised John, these old men decorously toweled, sitting chatting and smoking, drinking tea out of thick white china cups. He had expected something like a cross between the school swimming bath and a Roman orgy.
The place was lit by greenish fluorescent strip lights and the walls, tiled in white, had turned grayish, or perhaps the harsh light had discolored them. But it was pleasantly warm. The way it had been most of the time he was in the Philippines, warm and close and damp. The old men had horrible bodies, all bulges and folds of flesh, the skin mottled white like a fish on a slab, their legs seamed and knotted with dark gray veins. But they brought him reassurance. It couldn’t be for sex that they came, and when he saw one of them looking at him, he put that covert gaze down to simple interest at the sight of a newcomer.
Another hatch had a tea lady behind it, younger than the other one, but middle-aged and respectable-looking. He would have been disconcerted by some dizzy young blonde. You could buy buns and sweets as well as cups of tea and this was where you bought your soap and shampoo.
More doors, one with STEAM above it, another labeled MASSAGE, SHOWER, COLD PLUNGE. When the left-hand door opened, steam billowed out, clouds of it accompanying the young man who emerged, making for the next room. John followed cautiously. More old men here and some beautiful young ones. The atmosphere of respectability was fading. John felt it recede, to be replaced by a sense of danger,
of tension.
The man he had followed, who was about his own age, also had a towel wrapped around him and he walked erect, slowly, showing himself off, heading for the cold-water pool. A group of onlookers watched. Not one of them could be under sixty. What went through their minds? Did they think a man like that proud walker could be in search of a father figure? Some hopes!
The young man let his towel drop to the floor and stepped into the cold water. John couldn’t take his eyes off him. It was all so unlike what he had expected. The young man had white skin and light hair, butter-colored. He came out of the water, picked up his towel, and went into the shower room, followed by another man, older but still young. John went in there, too. He told himself he must do something, have a shower perhaps, something innocent.
The blond was washing himself with soap on a loofah. His companion—if he was his companion—said to him, “Want me to do your back, mate?”
A towel was spread out on a bench and a vigorous soaping began. Was this a pickup or did all men, normal men, behave like this at the baths? Perhaps. John took a shower. When he came out, the loofah massage was still going on. The older one said, “Was that okay, mate?”
“Great, thanks,” came the answer. “You want to get done?”
They went together into the shower. John moved away. But they weren’t long. One said to the other, “Fancy a spell in the hot room?”
John followed them in. In a quarter of an hour, he felt he had received more education than could ever have come to him from advice or books, if such books existed. The hot room was like a kind of amphitheater. Or he thought it must be. He couldn’t see the highest levels of the terracing, for the steam was too thick up there. The two young men had disappeared into the mist.
It was like walking into a hot cloud—at ground level, the pale mist of a summers morning, but up there it was white, dense, rendering everything invisible. Then, with a return to that heavy beating of his heart, he thought he could discern up on the fifth level, in one corner, a sensuous movement. No more than that. No one was on the fourth level, though there were one or two on the third.
