Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘You must begin gently with me,’ I said to Elizabeth. ‘I am not at all a good dancer.’

  ‘I know very well what you mean. You wish to escape me, for Miss Chaworth. But my brother has claimed her now, and I have claimed you.’

  ‘You know very well that is not what I mean.’

  I danced one dance with her, and then sat out the next – not with Mrs Pigot, but on my own. The music had begun to irritate me; it was like being pulled along by the ear. Also, there is nothing so oppressive as the happiness of other people. Perhaps that accounts for what followed. I mean, there are moods in which one is peculiarly susceptible to a certain kind of injury. I had seen very little of Miss Wollaston since breakfast at Annesley. She had been amusing herself with the members of our party more inclined to amusement. But she found me between sets, looking red in the face, and breathless, but not quite so cheerful and ironical as before. She asked me if I had seen Mary or Mr Musters. She had not seen them these several dances, she said, and wondered if I had claimed my engagement with her. I told her that I had not – that I had neither seen her, nor danced with her, nor cared to very much any more. ‘Oh,’ says she, in her old way, ‘you mean, she has slighted you, and you mean now to stand on your ill-humour.’ There was more of this, and after a minute or two, she persuaded me to find Mary and claim a dance with her – if only so Miss Wollaston would let me alone.

  There is something shameful in being compelled to do what you already wish to do, and I felt very childish as I began to search the floor. But I do not think Miss Wollaston meant me any harm. I do not believe it was her idea of a joke. Mary and Mr Musters were not to be found, and I looked in the adjoining room, where Mrs Pigot was sitting. But she had not seen them either. Then Elizabeth joined us for refreshments, with a few hairs on end that stood out wispily against her forehead – she had been dancing uninterrupted since nine o’clock. I asked after Miss Chaworth and she answered, simply enough, that she had seen them go into the garden. Someone had opened the doors to the garden, to let a little air in, and she had seen them go out. These were the French doors at the back of the dining room, away from the musicians, so I pushed my way alongside the dancers to reach them. The day had been cloudless and the night was cold. The Old Bath Hotel was a fine provincial hotel in its way, and the gardens included a terraced walk with a stone balustrade and a set of steps leading to a lawn. I could see at some distance the reflection of a pond, or a fountain, and beyond that a row of trees or a brick wall. There was not much moonlight, but a hundred bright stars.

  Two small trees in pots stood either side of the entrance, with gravel at my feet that might have given me away, but I could hear Mary speaking as soon as I stepped outside. There were benches beside the door, half-hidden by the trees, and Mary and Mr Musters were sitting on one of them. So I stayed where I was for the moment, in the doorway, in the shelter of a tree.

  Mr Musters sat with his hands on his lap and his legs crossed. I could see that much through the branches of the dwarf pine. Mary herself was partly obscured by the leaves, and by Mr Musters’ back, but her voice came across perfectly clear. This is what she was saying: that she had seen him in the kitchens with one of the waiters, laughing. It gave him no pleasure to dance with her, she had seen it in his face. He was longing all the time to be away from her; he always looked much happier when he was away from her.

  It was because, he said, she had set out deliberately to make him jealous, and he was old enough, and had suffered enough for such nonsense in the past, never to permit himself to become – but he became instead a little entangled and could not finish, and Mary interrupted him. What could he possibly mean by nonsense when he made such a point of dancing with Miss Pigot? When she had been his particular companion, both on the road to Castleton and afterwards in the caverns, and when he had spoken to her exclusively on the journey to Matlock Bath?

  ‘That was only because you were flirting with your cousin,’ he said, ‘when you know very well he is in love with you.’

  ‘What, do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?’

  ‘It is him I pitied, for the way you lead him on. I remember well enough what young men suffer for such things.’

  So I crept back quietly into the hotel again, which was noisy enough to preclude any need for quiet, and made my way unobserved through the length of the ballroom to the stairs. It is now after midnight. I can still hear the music below me, through the boards, and feel through the whole house the effect of the dancing feet. Mr Becher is not yet returned and will probably wake me when he comes to bed; But since there is nothing left to write, I will try to sleep.

  *

  I slept very badly and was almost grateful when Mr Becher retired at last, with a loud sort of quiet, and climbed into bed beside me.

  ‘Are you awake, Byron?’

  But I kept my eyes shut. I could no more speak than one can speak in dreams. And after a few minutes he turned over on his face and fell asleep.

  In the morning we most of us had a kind of shamefaced air, except Mrs Pigot. It gave her great pleasure to appear cheerful, and after breakfast she enlisted John and me to walk with her as far as the church. Another sunshiny Septemberish day, cool at first but growing warmer. John and I waited for her in the graveyard, and threw stones in a field, and lay down in the long grass of one of the graves. By the time she came out again, the horses were ready, and we recovered our spirits somewhat for the sake of bidding farewell. Southwell was returning to Southwell and Annesley to Annesley. Elizabeth and Mrs Pigot and Mr Becher installed themselves in the barouche, with John in the box. We followed them as far as Sutton and stopped a minute in the road, for a second set of good-byes and currant buns.

  ‘I suppose you had rather return with them to Southwell?’ Mary said to me.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think you find us rather … dull, in comparison with the Pigots. What was it you said of me, that I am always complaining. I am perfectly aware that my temper is very indifferent. Miss Pigot is less disagreeable. She has besides the advantages of a town; it keeps them lively.’

  ‘I have so little appetite for what you call liveliness that I intend, as soon as we reach Annesley, to ride to Newstead. I wish to be alone. It is very trying, to be always in company; I am quite talked out.’

  ‘You mean, you have tired of me.’

  ‘I have tired of nothing so much as myself, a subject I am continually reminded of by the presence of other people.’

  After a minute, she said, ‘I thought Lord Grey had returned to Newstead.’

  ‘He does not mind me in the least. I am only a boy.’

  At Annesley Mrs Thomason had set out a cold collation, just a little cold salmon, and fresh bread, and a pigeon pie; but I took my leave at once and went to retrieve Mr Becher’s horse from the stable. As I led him into the yard, to be saddled, Mrs Thomason met me with a cloth in hand, in which she had wrapped a little bread and cheese and a piece of the pie. All of which I accepted gratefully from her – she waited in the doorway to see me ride off.

  I had said it would be a relief to be alone again; in fact, it rather surprised me to find that it was. The first few leaves of autumn lay on the ground, or rather, the last of summer, which had withered off the trees, and the paths between the woods were as dry as dust. When I reached the lake, I hitched the horse to a tree and sat in the reeds and ate. Afterwards I picked a few plums from the tree, now purple and ripe and beset by birds, and ate them, too. Then I fell asleep in the sunshine. On waking, I stripped and swam out past the reeds and lay in the water on my back until I began to feel cold, though my head was hot. By the time I reached shore again and was thoroughly dry, the sun had begun to thicken against the trees.

  Owen Mealy met me at the door; he supposed I would be wanting supper and a bed. I asked him if Lord Grey was at home and said I would dine with Lord Grey.

  ‘I like that,’ he said. ‘But you may do as you please; it’s nothing to me.’
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br />   But Lord Grey heard us and called up to me.

  ‘I have the advantage of you,’ he said, when I came up the stairs, ‘by a bottle or two, which are easily made up.’

  He had in fact an indistinct, suspicious air, and looked not nearly so acceptable as he did at first – a little fatter, and less clean. It was the worst of these country afternoons, he complained; there was no possibility of keeping track of time. He found himself going to bed with the farmers. It was very shameful. Then he slept till noon. But he slept poorly, and often wondered whether he slept at all. I listened to him in this way for an hour, when Alice brought us dinner. He was easily led along; a word would do it. But he repeated himself a great deal. This seemed very dull at first, and then, not disagreeable – I found he could listen, too.

  I have decided to return to Harrow, I told him. There is nothing to keep me here. It will please my mother but that cannot be helped. At least, it will displease no one else.

  Lord Grey’s sympathies were of the nodding kind. We sat together at the little work-table in the long hall, in front of a fire. Dusk was still in the air, and we needed no other light.

  ‘Shall I make up your bed in the hall?’ Alice said, clearing the plates away.

  ‘There’s no need of that,’ Lord Grey said. ‘We don’t mind bed-fellows, do we?’ and he pulled her on his lap and tried to kiss her. But she was too quick – and it occurred to me for the first time I was drunk when she evaded me, too.

  ‘I shared a bed last night with Mr Becher,’ I told Lord Grey, upon retiring to his room.

  ‘I hate sleeping alone,’ he said.

  We undressed and got into bed and lay in the dark, for about ten or fifteen minutes, until I was certain Lord Grey was asleep. He breathed heavily and peacefully and gave out the still warmth of a body asleep. But I could not sleep, and after a while opened my eyes again and found him looking at me.

  ‘One can’t be always among women,’ he said.

  After a moment, he went on: ‘At school we found other ways of amusing ourselves, but it is damnably difficult, away from school.’

  We lay like this for another few minutes, and I had the strong impression of being again in the narrow boat with Mary, and the rock pressing heavily down upon me. He turned over abruptly on his side and rested his head on his hand. ‘I should be happy to pretend we are at school – it makes little difference to me, being older.’

  His face in the dark looked very large and soft.

  ‘Are you cold?’ he said, for I had really begun to shiver.

  ‘Let me warm you.’ But he stayed as he was when I made no reply. ‘Perhaps you would find it easier if I showed you the way. It is easily done.’

  I put my head against his neck and closed my eyes.

  ‘There is nothing to cry about,’ he said, sounding by this point perfectly sober and sensible. ‘You will find it a great comfort. Look at me.’ But I kept my eyes shut, and he continued to speak. ‘We may please each other as much as we like. And there is none of that dressing up required by women. Though as for that, if you prefer it, I will send for Alice; it is sometimes simpler at first in the company of a third. But I think you have no need of her.’

  Afterwards, I did sleep; and he slept, too. And then it was morning, with the green dull light of morning in my eyes. I lay very quietly, so as not to wake him.

  2

  Last August, my wife and I moved with our three-year-old daughter to Boston for the year. I had a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute, which is a part of Harvard, to find out what I could about Peter Sullivan. This offered me a reprieve from the business of teaching, but of course it offered no reprieve from the business of Other People’s Work. On the first day (of class, I want to say, but there were no classes) we met for a kind of assembly in the grand converted gymnasium of old Radcliffe College. The fellows introduced themselves to each other, standing up one at a time like alcoholics. When it was my turn, I said, ‘I’m writing a book about a guy I used to teach high school with.’

  ‘Tell us more,’ the Dean called out. I had tried to sit down.

  ‘By the time I knew him he had basically stopped talking. But he wrote novels, and after his death I managed to publish two of them. I think he might have slept with his students. Some of them; or one of them, anyway. I want to find out what you can learn about people from the books they write – how much is true. He grew up in Boston.’

  We set up house in the bottom half of an old Victorian double-decker on the Cambridge side of Porter Square. A dark, cool, heavily windowed apartment with many of the built-in features you used to find in Ivy League dorm rooms: paneling and pillars, glass bookcases. The first two weeks were entirely taken up with settling in, finding a nanny for our daughter, a rug for the sitting-room floor. Buying a car. We drove down to my sister’s house in New Haven, where I still kept a few things from the last time I had lived in America, a decade before – when I was teaching at Horatio Alger. The posters I had proudly framed for my first apartment had survived undampened in my sister’s garage, and we hauled them back to Cambridge and hung them again on the rented walls. As if nothing much had happened in the past ten years, only marriage and the birth of a child.

  In fact, what had happened was this. I ran into my future wife practically coming off the plane from New York. She was the daughter of the Hampstead couple whose basement I lived in. Was, is: her parents are friends of my parents, and we knew each other slightly as children. Caroline had just finished university when I got to London. She was interning at a documentary film company and ‘squatting’ in her parents’ attic until she could afford a place of her own. My bedroom window underlooked the small front garden and the tops of the cars parked at street level. Every morning I saw her emerge from the house in a smart coal-grey coat and modest skirt, with a leather briefcase (a graduation gift) in hand, and walk downhill to catch the bus that would take her into Bloomsbury. This was an image to fall in love with if you were homesick, unemployed, and twenty-three years old. I fell in love.

  On those rare occasions when I had the chance to speak to her, she laughed at my jokes because she didn’t understand them, and her accent had the peculiar clarity and lightness of the English upper-middle classes – as if her tongue were a sharper instrument than mine. I loved most of all hearing her play the teenage daughter when her mother was home. The basement flat had no washing machine, so I had to use the one upstairs, which gave me an excuse to waste time in their kitchen. Not just to shove my clothes in but to hang them out afterwards to dry on the radiators; to come up again when they were dry and carry them stiffly downstairs. Caroline’s mother always put the kettle on when she saw me and quietly laid out whatever was in the fridge; and I sat down, with a voice all thumbs, and tried to keep up with the brisk intimate patter of their family life.

  For several years after leaving New York, I kept my apartment there, renting it out when I could. A symbol in brick and board of the fact that my roots were elsewhere. Caroline and I sometimes used it as a summer getaway, though she never slept well in it. The noise from 2nd Avenue sometimes woke her at night, and when she couldn’t fall back asleep, her thoughts began to race, and everything, including me, began to seem alien to her: the traffic, the lights coming through the French blinds, the heavy, air-conditioned coolness of the city. I told her to wake me. Two in the morning in New York is a good time to feel the enormity of the years ahead of you, and we had nothing to do all day but recover from the night behind us and eat pancakes and wander the streets. But she was glad when I sold the place. Now my old bachelor posters were back on our walls, and we were back in America.

  *

  The Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies surrounds a green Oxford-style quad. Curving lanes run through it. There is an old New Englandish clapboard cottage, housing a part of the administration; a brick-fronted library with storey-high windows; a building with a turret; and several long-limbed oaks shading the grass and the little stone benches propped against their t
runks. My office window overlooked the quad.

  The first thing I did by way of real work was also what required the least effort – the least stepping out of my office. The Radcliffe paid one of the Harvard undergrads to take out library books for the Fellows, and I ordered copies of Byron’s letters and journals and poems, and Marchand’s Portrait (which Peter had access to himself) and MacCarthy’s Life (which he didn’t), and tested ‘Fair Seed-Time’ against them. The title, of course, comes from Wordsworth not Byron. It is the famous opening of The Prelude: ‘Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.’ I found an odd echo of the word in one of Byron’s journal entries: ‘What a strange thing is the propagation of life! A bubble of seed which may be spilt in a whore’s lap … might (for aught we know) have formed a Caesar or a Buonaparte.’ But none of this was likely to yield much insight into Peter’s private life. What I wanted was to find the parts of his story that didn’t stand up to the history, which he might have invented himself or drawn on his own experience for. Peter had been accused at Beaumont Hill of improper sexual relations with a teenage boy. ‘Fair Seed-Time’ tells the story of the rape, or seduction, of a teenage boy. It struck me as unlikely that there was no connection between them.

  I began by going over Byron’s letters, sentence by sentence, and looking for anything Peter might have used. This turned out to be dispiriting. The letters are twelve volumes long. Any life, even a life as vivid as Byron’s, contains a great deal of material unsuitable for fiction; and I waded through pages of description, in-jokes, plans, apologies, printers’ corrections, and intimate references to people I had never heard of. But there were discoveries that made the task bearable. Throwaway lines from the letters would suddenly reverberate, because I had read them before in one of the novels. And I still remember the excitement I felt on coming across, in one of the later journals, the following entry: