While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

  I bathed, had a cup of strong tea and committed to paper the events of my extraordinary evening. Soon Edward would be home. How I longed to see him! At that moment no place on earth could have seemed more welcoming to me than this old-ladyish bed-sitter, no prospect more appealing than to rest for hours in the arms of my big, bighearted boy—that is, assuming he wasn’t angry. From that day on, I resolved, I would turn down all invitations; I would stay each night at home, with him.

  He arrived just after five, his face a cipher.

  “Edward,” I said, “I’m sorry about last night. I—”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Listen, I have something to tell you.”

  We sat down.

  “You should know that after you left me at the station, I didn’t go home to Upney at all.”

  “No?”

  “No. I was in a funk, and jealous that you weren’t taking me along to meet your friend—yes, I admit it—and was just going to go home and go to bed, when who should call from the train platform but that fellow from the meeting.”

  “Which fellow?”

  “John Northrop! Of course it was quite a surprise that someone so important as him should remember me, but he did. He even knew I was living with you—what do you think of that? He asked me if I’d like to have a drink with him at the pub across from the station, and I figured, well, why not—I wasn’t planning anything in particular—so I said yes, thank you, I would very much. He ordered the drinks and then he started talking. He’s quite a speaker, I can tell you. Mesmerizing, that’s the word for it; I only wish I could talk half as good as he does. We drank down our pints and he ordered more just like that and went on telling me about the Republican struggle in Spain and the brave comrades giving up their lives—it sent chills up my spine, let me tell you, especially when he started on the terrible things the Fascists are up to, torturing women and the like. He’ll be going over to Spain himself—he’s going to be a leader of the International Brigade—and he wondered if I’d thought of joining up. Me? I said. Yes, you, he said. Somehow I get the feeling you might make a very fine soldier. That’s very flattering, I said, but what makes you think so? Intuition, he said, and hit his head with his little finger. I’ve got a good eye for soldiers. Then he asked me if I’m a Communist. I said I’m not sure. He said given my background I must be quite aware of how the bourgeois class enemy exploits the workers. So I started telling him about Frank and all his talk of the workers of the world organizing and his getting killed in that factory accident. I don’t remember exactly what happened after that—we had a couple more pints—but soon enough he was trying to convince me to join the Party and get you to join as well: how do you like that? He says given as you’re going to be a well-known writer, no doubt they could certainly benefit by having someone of your capacities working with them. Your friend Nigel Dent too. He seemed especially keen on getting him to join. I told him I’ll think about it for myself, but as for you, he’ll have to speak to you personally, you’ve got your own opinions, and he says, I know, I know, and laughs. Then I started feeling a bit sick in the head from the beer and told him it was probably a good idea that I get home now and thank you very much. We shook hands and I came back and fell into bed, and when I woke up you still weren’t home and I felt a bit cross with you—more than a bit! I was furious! And then, when I got to work, there was a package waiting for me—look at this, Brian, he gave me a book!”

  He pulled from his satchel a copy of The Communist Manifesto. “I started reading it in my lunch hour. It’s difficult, I can only read about a page every three minutes, which is slow for me, usually I can read a page in one and three-quarter minutes. But I’m getting the gist of it. And he inscribed it! Listen to this: ‘To Edward Phelan, comrade in arms. With warmest wishes, John Northrop.’ What do you think of that?”

  “Edward, listen,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry about last night; it was callous of me. I just didn’t think you’d get along with Louise and her friends. They’re very—”

  “I know, I know, you were embarrassed because I’m the wrong class.”

  I flustered. “Now, Edward, it’s nothing like that—”

  “It’s all right if that’s what you think,” Edward said airily.

  “Edward, you must believe me, this has nothing to do with class.” (But even as I spoke these words I doubted them.) “It’s just that there are certain parts of my life—everyone’s life, really—that don’t necessarily mix well with other parts.”

  He looked blank.

  “I mean, I love Nanny, but I wouldn’t have her to a dinner party.”

  “Oh, so now I’m in a class with your nanny, is that what you’re saying? The beloved old retainer in the room at the end of the house?”

  “No, not at all—oh, let’s not talk about it anymore, shall we? I have the most extraordinary news.” And I told him about Joseph, the opium den, my encounter with his sister. This raised his eyebrows. “So Lucy’s French friend does exist,” he said. “Who is he?”

  “It’s not a he,” I said. “It’s a she. A marquise, in fact.”

  Edward looked amazed. “A lady?”

  “I suppose you could call her that, yes.”

  “So do you suppose—” He burst into a smile and shook his head. “Lucy Phelan, you are full of surprises.”

  Another postcard came from Nigel. He and Fritz had been hounded out of Utrecht and were now in Stockholm. Nigel would arrive in London Thursday week.

  Chapter Six

  As if things were not confusing enough, the world seemed to have joined into a conspiracy to mirror back all my fears. One evening, for instance, I returned to the flat after a visit to some Charing Cross Road bookshops and found Edward drinking tea with John Northrop. Even though Northrop could not have been more cordial, there was also no way he could not have noticed there was only the one big bed. After he left I suggested to Edward that perhaps the next time he was thinking of having someone up to the flat, he consult me first. We quarreled. “I live here too,” Edward said, quite rightly. “I’d just as soon move back to Upney if you’re going to start telling me what to do.”

  “The last thing I want is to impinge upon your liberty,” I said. “But, Edward, not everyone is going to be so understanding about the nature of our relationship as—”

  “So you’re ashamed to share the flat with me, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Nothing of the sort. I just think one has to be careful. Look, perhaps the simplest solution is to put in a second bed.”

  “Ah, so now you’re ashamed that we sleep in one bed. I’ll have you know my brother Frank and I slept in one bed for fifteen years, and no one said a word about it.”

  “We’re not in Upney now.”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot. We’re in Belgravia.”

  The next day Emma Leland’s fiancé, Tim Sprigg, rang up and asked if I might like to have lunch with him. This surprised me, given that I’d met Sprigg only once. All I could guess was that Northrop had gotten to Emma, and Emma to Sprigg, for he began the lunch by confessing in a low voice that for years he himself had been a slave to “homosexual tendencies,” until he met Emma and discovered in “the landscape of woman” a sense of “peace” and “well-being” his many trysts with boys had never given him. He now saw his homosexual years for what they were, he said: a wasted epoch of “immature experimentation” that led only to “emptiness,” “degradation” and, in one instance, a diagnosis of gonorrhea. “The love of a woman is enriching, nourishing,” he said. “With men there is never love, only sex.” And it was no coincidence that his conversion to heterosexuality had coincided with his conversion to Communism. “Just take a look at Oscar Wilde, or Radclyffe Hall—it’s the ultimate expression of a corrupt bourgeois mentality.” I left the lunch more confused than ever, for though I found Sprigg’s shopworn denunciations as spurious as most of the arguments the Communists use, his proclamations of newfound happiness with Emma—not to mention vivid accounts of ho
mosexual misery—reiterated my own fears too exactly for me to be able to ignore them.

  The sad truth was I hardly knew myself. And if the way I’d always got to know other people was by writing about them, then logically, to know myself, I had to turn the lens upon myself, I had to view my own life from the same detached perspective from which I might view the lives of Nigel or Louise or Aunt Constance, only this time I would be the figure at the other end of the telescope. So: adjust the focus, refine the edge. What did I see? A young man of twenty-two, with a head of wiry dark hair. Is he handsome? Well, I couldn’t say—he’s not my type. Even so, I imagine he probably has his admirers. If only he could straighten up, really, he’d look much better! And a haircut would do him good.

  “The other day,” I wrote in my journal, “I was standing next to an old man at a public lavatory, an old codger, who watched while I pissed, all the while wanking furiously his pathetic limp willie in the hope of getting his nut off before the next bobby wandered in to arrest someone. His willie, his oldest and dearest friend, had not aged with the rest of his body, I noticed. Willie still looked exactly the way he looked when the old man was a young man and could do it five times a day without effort. And yet Willie was tired. He’d never had the chance to live out his biological destiny. Instead the million billion microscopic homunculi that churned inside his sagging balls had been wasted, they had taken their turn climbing into the giant slingshot and been ejected and found themselves landing—splat!—only on hairy stomachs and stubbly faces and dirty bed sheets, where they suffocated in seconds. These million miniature men must swim up-river to where the egg—that winking, blond, fur-bedecked Jean Harlow of an egg—beckons them; it is what they were born to do. But the old man never gave them a chance. Instead he just kept coming into urinals (disgusting), or his handkerchief (a tragic waste), or that convulsing tunnel that looks familiar but something is not quite right about it and at the end, instead of that sexy egg, is a piece of shit.”

  I did not mince my words, I see now. My disgust was visceral, vivid. Yet according to the journal it didn’t stop me from fucking Edward against the wall the next afternoon.

  That week Aunt Constance rang. Philippa Archibald was back in London.

  It was mid-November. We met at the Hotel Lancaster, where Aunt Constance, as threatened, had booked a private dining room. Of course I made sure, for once, to arrive as late as possible.

  “There you are!” Aunt Constance scolded as the prehistoric porter announced me. “We had nearly given up!” She stood, bustled over and gave me a “naughty boy” pat on the cheek, but the relief in her voice was audible.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Constance,” I said. “Tube trouble, you know.”

  “Oh, you and your tubes! I will never for the life of me understand this childish passion of yours! To prefer riding dirty trains through smelly tunnels when you could just as easily take a taxi . . .”

  “Taxis can be expensive, Aunt Constance.”

  “The bus, then! Ah, but I’m being rude. Now let me introduce you. Edith, may I present my nephew Brian Botsford. Brian, this is my dear friend Edith Archibald.”

  “How do you do,” Edith Archibald exclaimed breathily, standing from the table and shaking my hand in what seemed to me an excessively energetic way. She was about sixty, with black eyes like raisins and the narrowest waist I had ever seen.

  “And may I introduce my niece, Philippa? Philippa, Mr. Botsford.”

  “Hello,” Philippa said, reaching out her hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Her half-crooked smile spoke volumes. It seemed to say, I don’t like this any more than you do, but what can we do? We might as well make the best of a bad situation.

  “How do you do?” I said, and took my seat. Perhaps it was not going to be such a dreadful evening after all.

  A hostess came in with menus, the perusal of which provoked a heated discussion between our two elder stateswomen as to the extent to which large amounts of runner beans did or did not benefit the digestive system. I looked around. We were sitting at a square table in a small dark box of a room. Heavy velvet curtains enshrouded the windows. Across from me—directly over Aunt Constance’s head, in fact—a huge landscape painting in a peeling gilt frame had been hung at a precarious angle. It was so dirty that in the dim light you could barely make out its subject: it seemed nothing more than a coffee-colored morass, from which, intermittently, a pair of human or animal eyes gleamed out.

  “Brian,” Aunt Constance said, “Philippa was at school with your sister Caroline.”

  “So I gather.”

  “How is Caroline?” Philippa asked.

  “Oh, she keeps busy. Fixing everything up at the old house, you know. There’s a lot of work since our parents died.”

  “I didn’t realize they’d died,” Philippa said. “I’m sorry.”

  “And I gather you two even met once,” Aunt Constance went on. “When you were children.”

  “Did we?” Philippa asked. “To be honest, I can’t recall. Can you?” She smiled at me quizzically.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, it’s perfectly all right.”

  Our aunts were now staring at us with such looks of concentrated panic that we both burst out laughing. This broke the ice, as it were. They laughed too. For the first time that evening I actually looked at Philippa. She was really very pretty, I thought: gray-eyed and fine-boned, with hair dyed the rich, burnished color of terra-cotta.

  The soup arrived. Philippa was speaking with some animation about her job in book publishing, as all the while our aunts nodded and beamed at each other. How different Philippa was turning out to be from what I’d imagined! Aunt Constance had led me to expect a harelipped saint, one of those creatures hideous of face but bountiful of soul who spend their spare time doing things like taking care of maimed sparrows. Instead the real Philippa was knowing and self-assured and no doubt had men lining up outside her door. Even the harelip scar—a pale-red scallop on her upper lip—she carried with surprising panache.

  We had much in common; among other things, Philippa was very knowledgeable about Spain, having spent quite a bit of time as a child in the company of a bachelor uncle who lived in Gibraltar. Now she kept actively abreast of events there, so we spoke about the PSOE and the Falangists, the threat of Franco and the Republican hope, our mutual disillusionment with the Party and our shared conviction that nonetheless it offered the greatest prospect of freedom for the greatest number. Aunt Constance interrupted periodically to say she found politics a bore, while Aunt Edith kept trying to finish an interminable anecdote about a bad oyster she’d eaten while on holiday in Santander. Every now and then they smiled or winked at each other conspiratorially, as if in congratulations for a job well done.

  We had coffee in the lounge. Here a host of unhappy women besieged our chaperones in quest of Aunt Constance’s autograph, giving Philippa and me a brief moment of privacy. I asked her where she lived. “Just off Sloane Square,” she said. “I’ve got a little bed-sitter. And you?”

  “Earl’s Court.” I neglected to mention Edward.

  Philippa leaned confidingly over her coffee cup. “I must tell you, I’d been dreading this evening.”

  “So had I,” I admitted.

  “I tried and tried to put it off—”

  “Me too!”

  “I mean, my aunt’s not a bad sort—goodness knows she always has the best intentions—but if you could see the men she’d set me up with before! Well! You’d certainly understand my hesitation.”

  “I must say Aunt Constance described you . . . rather differently than you are. I believe the adjective that kept coming up was ‘responsible. ’ ”

  “Yes, yes, that is what they would all like me to be.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “Oh, hardly.”

  “Really!”

  She cast me a rakish glance, then said, “Pleasant surprise, this evening, isn’t it?”

  “
Yes,” I said, smiling shyly. “Very pleasant.”

  “Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Aunt Constance asked as she buttoned up my collar. “All the fuss and bother you put up! And didn’t I tell you you’d have a lovely time? Next time you should really trust your aunt Constance, dear. She does have your best interests at heart.”

  She tucked something into my pocket and sent me off into the night. Philippa had already left by taxi. Really, I was thinking as I rode the tube back, this had been pleasant. Philippa, after all, was quite pretty. And intelligent. I thought I’d quite like to see her again, though how much this feeling was the result of the fears that had recently been plaguing me, and how much a reaction to Philippa herself, I wasn’t prepared to guess. Still, it did seem to me that one should follow instinctive attractions to their logical conclusions, especially if one was only twenty-two. One should hardly be expected to have the course of one’s life predetermined when in fact it had barely begun.

  Remembering, suddenly, Aunt Constance, I reached into my breast pocket and found a twenty-pound note stuffed there, folded in eighths.

  When I got home that evening Edward kissed me brightly. He had gone out drinking with Northrop again and was full of gossip and chatter. I felt tired and said I thought I would go to bed early, but Edward said he was too wound up to sleep and that he would instead read his Communist Manifesto for a while. This was a relief to me, as I needed some time to sort out my reaction to meeting Philippa. Was I really attracted to her? I was wondering. Or was she just the first woman to come along since it had entered my head to start looking at—noticing—women?

  After a while Edward got into bed. As always, he put his arms around me, kissed my neck, rubbed against me so that I could feel his erection. How annoying, I thought. He’s distracting me from the very interesting train of thought on which I’ve embarked. I tried to push him off—“I’ve got a headache!” I shouted in a shrill Cockney falsetto—but he persisted, and when he started fumbling inside my pajamas, I lost my resistance. At first I thought we would just have a wank, but Edward wanted me to bugger him. “Please, Brian,” he said. “I need it tonight.” I said no, I was too tired. “Please?” he said again. “No,” I said, then felt his fingers wrap around my cock and knew I was lost.