Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘I didn’t know there was such a thing.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘how old are you. Thirty-three, thirty-four years old. Been married a few years, there’s a baby on the scene. Don’t blame yourself too much for lecherous thoughts. This is also a phase you’re passing through. But someone like Peter; natural to him isn’t natural to you or me. He was a sick man.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you fire him?’

  ‘It wasn’t anything he did. At least, not that I know of. But the whole presence of the guy. The dirty clothes, the beard. We went out of our way to make ourselves sociable. It was suggested he change his name for publicity reasons: the case in Boston attracted a certain amount of press. But who’s he kidding with this Pattieson business? You think I don’t know who Peter Pattieson is? I run an English department, for God’s sake.’ (Peter took his new name from the narrator of Walter Scott’s novels – which is how I managed to break down his reserve. I found him out.) ‘It’s insulting, to the boy involved as well. As if this whole thing were an excuse for dressing up. And then stories started getting back to me, things he said.’

  ‘Like what?’

  A boy came in from the wings, dragging a plastic container behind him across the floorboards. He looked up at Heinz and me. A boy already with the stamp of the theater on him, the pallor and pimples, the narrow expressive structure of face and limb. He wore a collared shirt buttoned up to the top and tucked inside his tight legged trousers. ‘Mind if I set up?’ he said, gesturing at the stacks of folding chairs to the side. ‘Dr Schwarz lets me out early to set up.’ Heinz considered him. ‘Give us five minutes, and we’ll be out of your hair.’ So the kid sat down on one of the folding chairs with a patient expression, until Heinz repeated, ‘Five minutes. Out of our hair. This is grown-up time.’

  ‘Like what?’ I said again, when the boy was gone.

  ‘At lunch Peter’s overheard telling a story about a friend of his. The punchline goes something like this. Anyone who considers a high-school girl sexually immature has never gone down on one.’

  ‘You heard him say this? I thought his preference ran the other way.’

  ‘It was reported to me. His friend supposedly said it; Peter was just repeating the joke.’

  ‘So on the strength of something somebody tells you about something somebody once told Peter, you turn against him. You hired the guy because he wasn’t convicted, and you convict him on that?’

  ‘I don’t convict him. I quietly have a word with him, about what we consider acceptable lunchtime conversation in this school. And by the way, I’m perfectly capable of hiring a guy according to the presumptions of the law and at the same time thinking he’s a sick son of a bitch. Afterwards, Peter refused to talk to me, and pretty soon after that, when the sympathies of the rest of the faculty became clear, he refused to talk to everybody else. What are you looking at me like that for?’

  ‘Ten years seems a long time to live in purdah.’

  ‘He could have broke out of it whenever he wanted to.’

  ‘By doing what? These things get to be a habit. Probably he thought, by speaking to him the way you did, you showed your suspicions about the Beaumont case. Let’s say he really is innocent. That’s a hell of a thing to live with.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t fiddle the Beaumont boy, I’m willing to believe that much. But this was certainly not an innocent man.’

  ‘Even if he never did anything? Even if he only thought it?’

  ‘Let me tell you something about sexuality. Nobody only thinks it. Not with the opportunities Peter had. Now answer me a question. The story about going down on high-school girls, does it sound like him or not?’

  ‘Yes, it sounds like him. It sounds like the kind of thing he would have mocked you and me for, mature, healthy, heterosexual men. For thinking about in class.’ But I wasn’t sure. Both of us at this point were aware of the way our voices carried, across the stage and into the empty rows. It also surprised me how angrily I had taken Peter’s side. My sympathies with Heinz were basically stronger and deeper. He seemed to feel something similar and asked, more gently, ‘So what are these stories about then, the unpublished ones?’

  ‘Fiddling boys,’ I said.

  Afterwards, he walked me as far as the school gates – through the birch wood, then up a flight of stone steps, expensively set into the sloping earth, and along the parking lot.

  ‘What’s in this for you?’ he asked me, with a hand on my shoulder. ‘Why don’t you get back to your own work? Honestly, I’m glad the Byron isn’t your responsibility. It means I can be straight with you. Yes, I’ve read them, or near enough – read over them. A little goyish, to my taste. A little blue-blooded, with all that that entails. Country houses, sexless marriages, Continental tours. Okay, two hundred years later we have our own tours, called cruises, from which God defend me in my old age. But that Peter should have lost himself in these fantasies doesn’t surprise me. He had no people. You and I – perhaps we don’t make it to synagogue as often as we’d like. And I understand your personal history is a little complicated, but this also is the Jewish experience. We have people. The man who wrote these books has ink running in his veins. Everything is books with him. I thought maybe something had happened to you after ten years in England. A Quiet Adjustment is three hundred pages of repression, of a particularly English kind.’

  He wasn’t finished, and I felt rising within me the counter-arguments I wanted to get off my chest. We stood on the curb of the school drive, which winds along the side of the hill, downwards and outwards, to the subway station. A late September day still warm enough to make me feel the heat of my ideas in my armpits and smell them, too. Certain conversations also involve a form of arousal.

  ‘I’ll tell you why I didn’t mind that novel you wrote about the school,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you were expecting more resentment from me, maybe even hoping for it. The teachers are all inverts or perverts. I don’t mind that. But in the end, what the girl learns is, she is the child of love. That was the phrase you used – I have a head for quotation, too. There is no love in these Byron books, and I thought, something has happened to the young man I knew. It’s a relief to learn you’re not responsible. Maybe you had obligations to his friendship I don’t understand. Whatever they were, what you’ve done must be more than enough. Leave him alone; he was no good. Not that I blame him entirely. At his funeral, I introduced myself to his mother – a short, red-faced, real Irish-looking woman, whiskery with drink. Everybody else pretending that what had happened to this man of advanced years is not that he killed himself. Except her. “It was only to spite me,” she says. “As a boy he said he’d kill himself to haunt me. And now he has.” A real piece of work.’

  There was more along these lines. Maybe fifteen minutes later I kissed him goodbye on both cheeks, a habit we had somehow fallen into because of his insistence on the blood kinship. And in fact, walking to the station, I felt very strongly (mixed with nostalgia and less sentimental regrets about the course my life might have taken) the passion of our former friendship. His beard was still short enough you could feel it redden your skin. But it was a relief, as it always had been, to escape the school grounds and turn my back on the world of children.

  *

  I was staying with some friends of my parents, and when I got back to their apartment, it was empty – one of those grand old New York apartments, with high ceilings and interconnecting halls and rooms, whose large windows overlook the cheaper, newer buildings all around it. Their rooftops seemed to be covered in aluminum foil. Hatches and vents and pipes occasionally broke the surface; there were deckchairs, too. A long way below, you could see a slice of Broadway, crawling with traffic and people. In my head, I was still carrying on the argument with Heinz. After sitting down to a glass of cloudy water in the kitchen, I stood up again to get Peter’s last manuscript, which I spread out carefully over the kitchen table. It was hand-typed, loose-leaf. I’d been schlepping the pages around in my backpack fr
om Boston to Philadelphia and felt a little guilty about the state they were in.

  The manuscript was divided into three chapters. Peter had written the titles in black ballpoint on the front page of each: ‘Fair Seed-Time,’ ‘Behold Him Freshman!’ and ‘A Soldier’s Grave.’ As if he came up with them only afterwards. There was also a cover page, with the words CHILDISH LOVES typed in capitals across it; underneath, Peter had added the quote from Byron that serves as the motto to this book. I started reading, to see if what Heinz had told me would change my reaction to the story. ‘Fair Seed-Time’ begins the summer after Lord Byron turns fifteen. He’s just come home from Harrow School to stay with his mother. Home is Southwell, a provincial town a few miles east of Newstead Abbey, the Byron family estate; but Newstead’s in bad shape, the Byrons have no money, and the young lord has been forced to rent out the only habitable part of the Abbey to another nobleman, Lord Grey. All of this I remembered more or less from my Masters in English lit. It was hard to see any personal angle, anything that reflected Peter’s own life. But by the end I wasn’t so sure, and I sat in the quiet kitchen staring at the last couple pages for several minutes – until I heard the front door opening, at which point for no good reason I quickly put them away.

  Early the next morning I caught the all-day flight to London out of Newark. I sleep very badly on planes. In response to this problem I try to reduce all activity, mental and physical, to a minimum: drinking water, staring at the seat in front. I lie dormant, as if eight hours occupied by the upright tray-table will pass more quickly than the same stretch of time taken up with random impressions. It doesn’t, of course, and besides, I don’t have such strict control over my mind. Even when my eyes were closed, I thought about Peter. On our lunchtime expeditions, our escapes from the school grounds, he used to walk holding his hands behind his back. Probably he thought me not much older than one of his students. When I spoke, sometimes he stepped towards me, leaning in to listen. He also seemed very pleased to be talking himself. Once he confessed, quite seriously, that he’d never read Tom Jones. This is what passed for intimacy between us. Was there really anything I could learn about him from what he had written? All the way to Heathrow, I drifted in and out of this question, and got nowhere.

  Fair Seed-Time

  It seems to me very cruel that a boy should be sent away to school for much of the year, where he is regularly abused and made to feel painfully any inferiority of station or person, and then, when he is sent from, school between terms, should be shut out from his ancestral home. For ten years I was kept out of Newstead by an accident of birth – and death. My cousin had not died, and my great-uncle had outlived him. But now they are both dead. Mr Hanson, who advises me on these matters, has explained that the estate is entangled, and I have seen for myself that it is in ruins. You must be patient, he says. God help me, but I am not.

  My mother tells me I have a home, that it is called Southwell. I have been here a week and we are both heartily sick of each other. Yesterday we had a small party to welcome our tenant at Newstead, Lord Grey de Ruthyn. My mother invited the Reverend Becher, and Mrs Pigot, and her daughter Elizabeth – who, with her brother John, make up the only tolerable society in Southwell. Most of the afternoon, I refused to give up my room and was only persuaded to come out when I overheard Lord Grey offering ‘to the young Lord the use of his Park, for shooting in’.

  ‘If it is shooting you have come to talk about,’ I told him, when he repeated the suggestion, ‘you will find the society here very agreeable, for no one talks of anything else.’

  But I thanked him for his kindness. He is a fair, lively, acceptable-looking young man, who will if he wishes it turn a great many provincial hearts. About the average height and dressed very properly according to the fashion. My mother says to him, with her hand on my hair, ‘I was scarcely eighteen at his birth,’ which is a lie – she is out six years.

  ‘Well,’ he said to me, on his departure, ‘I am not one of those men whom it pleases to promise hospitality for its own sake. I shall spend the summer in Caernarvonshire, in the mountains with my cousins. You are welcome to all that’s mine, my bed and table, etc.; after all, they are yours. I have them only on lease.’

  When he was gone, Elizabeth declared, ‘He looks as if he means to marry one of us.’

  ‘And I wonder what you mean by that,’ Mrs Pigot took her up. ‘He distinguished nobody so much as Lord Byron, which is just what he ought to have done.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s just what I do mean,’ Elizabeth said. Her manner is pretty and arch, which conceals effectively the narrowness of her face and eyes – it is the Pigot face all over, stretched thin and dark. But she wears her brown curls low across the ears and cheeks, to fill them out.

  ‘His lineage is poor,’ my mother broke in, understanding nothing but that the question of marriage had come up. ‘I have looked into the de Ruthyns and cannot find their title in the peerages of England, Ireland or Scotland. I suppose he is a new peer.’

  ‘At least he has a handsome name. Lord Grey de Ruthyn sounds very well.’

  Our drawing room overlooks the Town Green, through two great French windows, against which my mother has placed a table each, with pots on top and flowers in them to receive the light. She now began to pull one of them aside to improve her vantage. Reverend Becher protested – he is perhaps becoming too much the clergyman. But Elizabeth assisted her and they pressed their noses to the glass.

  ‘He is mounting his horse, the boy has given it him,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He believes he is observed – there, in a single great stride he is on. Shall he look up to make sure? He will. Oh, he has seen me.’ And then, with a giggle, ‘He has saluted. What a fine young man he appears, with the addition of a horse. It is a great shame, we have no such advantages to set us off.’

  ‘Oh, you do very well, my dear, as it is,’ my mother said, sharply enough, and restoring the table to its place. ‘Perhaps you have made a conquest. A new peerage is better than none at all.’

  She fears very much I will marry Elizabeth, because we are so comfortable together. But I will never marry, I tell her, and least of all for comfort.

  *

  This journal, in fact, is a comfort to me and a great relief, for in it I may complain as much as I like about my mother. Even Elizabeth grows tired of the subject, especially as I admire so much her own. Mrs Pigot is kind, plain and sensible, whereas Kitty is only plain. ‘Why do you some times call your mother Kitty?’ Elizabeth asks me, and for the rest of the afternoon (as the weather is fine, we have decided to walk a part of the way to Newstead, upon the promise I have made her to return even before she absolutely demands it), I consider this question. ‘Because she is a widow, I suppose. It is what my father called her.’

  ‘Do you remember your father?’

  ‘He died before my third birthday.’

  ‘But do you remember him?’

  ‘He died in France. For a short time, I believe, he lived with us in Queen Street, in Aberdeen. And then he moved a little away from us, to the other end of Queen Street, before he moved away altogether.’

  ‘But do you remember him?’

  ‘Kitty says I mayn’t but I do. He used to kiss me on the – on my foot to make me laugh, so whenever he approached I sat down suddenly the better to lift my leg, and sometimes hurt myself and cried, which made him laugh.’

  ‘Poor little Byron,’ Elizabeth said, ‘from Aberdeen.’

  ‘I remember enough of both of them together to inherit a horror of matrimony.’

  The headmaster at my school, Dr Drury, has told me that I have a fine memory and might make a name for myself as an orator. My future, I am sure, lies in politics. Indeed, I have a great interest in histories of all kinds and wish to set down as distinctly as I may, merely from the recollection, a record of everything I have said and heard and felt. This seems to me an admirable plan. Novels I have read, too, for which I rather despise myself. It is quite a joke with the Pigots that I always have
a book in hand, and Mrs Pigot has put aside a chair in a bright corner of their drawing room, pleasantly secluded beside some drapes, which she calls Byron’s Chair, and refuses to let anyone else sit in it. And there I may sit and listen as much as I please.

  Elizabeth accuses me sometimes of speaking only with her. She says there are a hundred others, even in Southwell, worthy of my confidences and reflections. For example, the Reverend Becher. Anyone would suppose we was always making love, she says, from the way they startle us together.

  ‘You know I mean never to marry,’ I tell her.

  It amuses us both to be the subject of so much gossip, especially as it makes my mother anxious. In fact, I confide in Elizabeth less than she imagines, and she isn’t quite as pretty as she appears. Kitty, to warn me against her, once reported what she had heard: that Elizabeth, being teased about our intimacy by some ladies, had put them off by declaring she could never marry a Scot.

  My mother means to poison all of my affections, and not just the filial.

  At the moment she coughs incessantly, which is her own fault. Last week she took it into her head to berate Flossie, the maid-of-all-work, for throwing the kitchen scraps into the street instead of giving them to the pig, and she stood on the doorstep in the wet gloaming, looking on, while the poor girl gathered them up. Now the weather, as she says, has got into her lungs as well, on top of everything else (there is a bucket of drips on the landing by the stairs). It was as much as she could do ‘to give us respectable airs’, but at present even this exceeds her ‘little strength’.

  Yet only yesterday I received proof of strange affinities. I walked out in the morning to inspect a horse Reverend Becher had offered for my use, since I mean to ride to Newstead in the coming week. It was a clear bright cold morning, which looked like warming in the course of the day; but on my return, out of a clear cold sky, a shower of rain fell. Afterwards I stood in front of the fire in our sitting room, rubbing and blowing against my fingers, when I had a strong impression of my father, taking my hand in his own, and performing the same function. Perhaps I was one or two years old. I believe the house in Queen Street was very cold; that my father used to complain of Kitty’s economies.