Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  He puts in the last stitch, my legs thrash for the last time as he neatly knots his thread; the nurse gets off my legs and the torture appears to be over.

  Enter at this point a plump, middle-aged carabiniere, who is unshocked by the assault to the point of indifference, but with a touch of satisfaction that one more ingenuous member of the public now realises what the real world is like and the shit-heap it is that the police are toiling to clean up.

  ‘Who were these people? What did you do to them?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘Well, they can’t have been Italians. Were they black?’ And to make sure I do not mistake his meaning, he draws a face on a pad and scribbles over it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were they Moroccans?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The nurse cleans me up while medicine and the law confer.

  ‘I would not go to a country where I did not speak the language,’ says the doctor, confirming that Wilfred Thesiger he isn’t.

  Now Rupert and the nurse help me up from the table and suddenly, seeing us side by side, a solution to the crime presents itself to the policeman, a solution (the police being the same the world over) which hardly makes it a crime at all.

  ‘This one,’ he says, indicating me, ‘is much older than the other one.’

  The opinion of the law is given medical endorsement when Doctor Death nods thoughtfully. They consult our passports and I am revealed as old enough to be Rupert’s father; perhaps they had hitherto thought I was his father – but not any more.

  Now there is no longer any mystery about this crime in either of their minds: strolling down to the seafront at eleven at night, this oddly matched couple have been up to no good; what this sorry-looking, middle-aged Englishman is not saying is that on that seedy promenade some advance had been made, a gesture even, and the honour of the Italian male impugned. The wound I have received is virtually self-inflicted, an entirely proper response to an insult to Italian manhood for which a blow on the skull is perfectly appropriate. We had been cruising; it was our own fault.

  That there was no truth in this assumption I hesitate to say again, as laying stress on one’s innocence seems to presuppose the opposite. This happened is the most that one can say; to get into why it happened, why it should not have happened, or how one did nothing to make it happen, implies that there is an alternative story that could be sketched out, the denial in itself conferring some authenticity on the alternative. I see now how women who have been attacked find themselves incriminated when they are asked to explain it, and how, in classic fashion, by simply recounting the circumstances of an assault, the victim becomes the culprit. In Kafka (about whom I had written) it is almost a commonplace, the lesson (and this is in Kafka too) now written on my own flesh.

  Just by telling the story one loses the facts, shakes them out and makes them available for interpretation and rearrangement. Instinctively, in telling the story one guards against misinterpretation, but to lay stress on the innocence of one’s conduct is to imply that there have been other occasions, similar situations, dark nights with boys on seafronts where one’s behaviour might be more blameworthy. But this too was false in my case, so far from the truth it was almost comical.

  I have never been able to cruise and have never had much inclination to do so, though seeing it as a definite shortcoming, one of several masculine accomplishments I have never been able to master – throwing a ball, for instance, catching the barman’s eye, pissing in public. It was partly that, never feeling I would be much of a catch, I saw no point in trawling the streets for someone who might feel differently. And then, too, I was quite hard to please.

  Homosexual friends, I had noticed, never seemed all that choosy when they caught someone giving them the eye. Quick as a fish they were off on the trail of their quarry, a ritual of flight and pursuit that involved glances over the shoulder, looking in shop windows and hesitation at street corners, until when eventually one or other of the parties decided to close the gap and actually speak, it came as no surprise and was almost a joke.

  It was a knack I did not have as well as a disinclination, and was reinforced by a fastidiousness that was disabling too. Friends invariably dramatised and romanticised such encounters, some of which must surely have been commonplace and many, though spiced up by the unexpected, downright dull. But what never ceased to astonish me (and fill me with a kind of wonder) was the persistent readiness for such casual flings and the rapidity with which, regardless of previous plans or engagements, they would, the opportunity unexpectedly presenting itself, dart away after some unknown man in response to a glance which, as often as not, I had not even spotted.

  Some of these considerations I dramatised in the screen adaptation of Joe Orton’s biography Prick Up Your Ears.

  (Orton sees a youth coming.)

  ORTON: Look at the package on this. He’s lovely.

  HALLIWELL: (frantically) Where? Where?

  ORTON: Here. (The youth looks back.) We’re on.

  HALLIWELL: How? What did he do? I didn’t see anything.

  ORTON: What do you want, a telegram? Come on. (They follow.) He’sbuilt like a brick shithouse.

  HALLIWELL: He’s probably a policeman.

  ORTON: I know. Isn’t it wonderful?

  HALLIWELL: We don’t want it to make us late for the Proms.

  ORTON: Listen, sweetheart, which do you prefer, him or Sir MalcolmSargent?

  Halliwell’s wail of complaint is truly mine: my first consideration would always be Sir Malcolm Sargent, or whoever, until, that is, the moment passed, when I would be left wretched at my own timidity. ‘One walks about the streets with one’s desires,’ wrote T. S. Eliot, ‘and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches.’ Still, living life in Orton’s bold, head-on sort of way, which I was never able to do, seemed to me to have a morality of a sort. That all other fancies and preoccupations – the ties and tugs of social life, for instance, the need to keep appointments and the overriding obligations of work – should, at the prospect of sex, be straight away rendered provisional and be instantly dispensed with might be thought, if not admirable, at least praiseworthy; between keeping a promise and turning a trick no contest: it was a question of priorities.

  It was as though life with all its engagements and obligations, its goals, duties and diversions, was for these rovers but a path beside a fast-moving stream of sex into which they were ready to plunge, literally at the blink of an eye. Half a smile, a second look – that was all it seemed to take. This was certainly not how I saw it, though strictly as an onlooker, as apart from anything else I was never quick enough off the mark to be a participant.

  Besides, while the readiness was all, there were other necessary components: it required a certain self-esteem, for a start, a notion of oneself as meriting some interest, sexual or otherwise, and this I lacked; I could not see I was worth a second glance, let alone be worth pursuing. I did not like myself, so why should anybody else? Then, too, such encounters involved risk, of which a risk of rejection was not the least, a risk of being beaten up was another and, in our newly straitened circumstances, the risks attendant on any sex.

  Such ease of encounter wasn’t to be attained or even struggled after. Like so much else in life it was bestowed, though not on me.

  Pierre Loti said ‘I am not my type’, and so it was with me. The predicament, if it is a predicament, is not unusual and those who find themselves in it can console themselves that they are luckier in the long run than those who find their reflection a cause for congratulation. Take Peter Cook, who, as a young man, always gazed at himself with both pleasure and interest, but for whom growing old must have been particularly depressing. Losing one’s looks means less to those who have no looks to lose. Or should, but this is not the whole truth of it, naturally, as there can be few mortals who are not vain of something: in my case it is of always having looked younger than my age, owing to the inherited character
istic of having kept my hair, and my hair having kept its colour. So, too, did my father; on his deathbed at the age of seventy-one, his hair still as full and brown as it had always been. That apart, though, I look at myself and reflect that the face is not worth stopping for, and so, until I was well into my thirties, few did.

  This was partly self-fulfilling. Had I liked myself more (or thought about myself less) things might have been different, or different sooner. Though it’s the sort of reach-me-down psychology bandied about on afternoon TV shows, to like oneself more does, I see now, make one easier to like. I just wish I had come by the knowledge earlier in life.

  Still, the walks I used to take every night around the streets of Headingley and Meanwood were, I suppose, cruising of a sort, and I wonder now whether that was the construction my parents put on my suburban rovings. It was not sex but the beauty of the city that had me in thrall, which might seem eccentric, except that the Victorian painter Atkinson Grimshaw had found the same in the streets of Leeds, so I was in good company.

  When I came home and filled my notebooks with descriptions of the sunset, treating it as if it were an ideal landscape and the clouds an alternative world, there was, I’m sure, a part of me that knew that the world I was really looking for and never found was darker and more furtive and not ideal at all.

  But I was a romantic boy, and though to cruise meant employing skills I never managed to acquire, I felt my failure to acquire them was a disappointment rather than a disability, more regrettable than not being able to roller-skate or dance, but not much more.

  In such matters, though, I retained an innocence long after it could be seen as becoming, and a timidity inappropriate in someone of forty, so that on the rare occasions when I was unambiguously approached I generally failed to divine the true nature of the encounter until it was too late. Asked by a perky young man for the time on the tube platform, I pointed to the clock a few yards away and got on the train, only to see him still waiting on the platform, smiling – I would like to think wistfully. I got off at the next stop and caught the next train back but he had, of course, gone.

  Another similar exchange was more comic. I was walking in Regent’s Park when another stroller stopped and (with no sign of a cigarette) asked me for a light. I explained that I had no matches as I had not long stopped smoking, but caught, as I stammered out this excuse, a flicker of amused despair, presumably that someone could be so stupid. As I walked on, the true nature of the approach dawned on me and I stopped and called back: ‘But thank you very much for asking.’ There, too, I went back five minutes later but to no purpose.*

  Having a public face complicated things. Did one get looks, it was hard to sift one sort of interest from another, the searching look, the second glance, ascribable to having been seen on the screen rather than foreseen on the pillow.

  These failed encounters, though, invariably depressed for days afterwards, not because of a sexual opportunity missed but because they brought home to me my instinctive avoidance of risk. Risk was what I didn’t want (or did), so I avoided not merely the risk but those areas where risk was likely to be encountered. To be bold was always my second thought, and always too late. With me, it’s not a case of having left undone the things I ought to have done; I’ve left undone those things I ought not to have done too.*

  I saw these fumbled passes as indictments of my own timidity; I had only to bring one off, I used to think, and my life would change its course. But I never managed it. So for this Italian policeman to assume that I had been attacked because I was doing something which had been persistently beyond my capacities to do, and which had defied all aspiration, seemed particularly unfair. If it was an offence, not only had I not committed it, but it was beyond my capabilities to commit.

  ‘But I’m shy,’ I should have protested, and that would have said it all. Or since making such an assertion on one’s own behalf itself demands a degree of boldness, so to say you are shy you need to be quite unshy, I should have left it to Rupert. Except that he was not unshy too, so that made two of us. I suppose we must have looked like two prep-school masters, an older one and his much younger colleague, and though not quite Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford, hardly a predatory pair.

  Later, when we were back in England, I wondered too (this wondering and the quest for certainties the most persistent feature of the whole episode) if some of the now evident hostility of this policeman and this doctor had to do with my poor Italian. I had, throughout, described our attackers as ragazzi which I took to mean ‘young men’, or rather ‘youths’. Did it mean that, I wondered, or did it mean boys who were much younger? Was I describing an assault such as occurs in Suddenly Last Summer when Sebastian is, Orpheus-like, torn to pieces by street urchins?

  ‘Youths’ was what I meant, with its connotations of aimlessness, indolence and being on the loose, the associations of the specific the opposite of those of the general: youth is freshness, vigour and vitality; a youth is indolent, dull and up to no good.

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He looked like a youth.’

  That was what I wanted to say, but had I said it? Did ragazzo mean that? I subsequently discovered that that was exactly what it did mean, and so I need not have concerned myself; need not have concerned myself in any case since whether the culprits were youths or boys plainly did not concern that carabiniere. I was the real culprit; to him they were just specimens of affronted Italian masculinity.

  The rest of the story is soon told. The carabiniere took Rupert off on a half-hearted run round the town and seemed surprised that the youths were not still hanging about at the scene of the crime. He told us that if we wanted we could report to the police station the next day, but that there would not be much point.

  In this sorry saga the real Samaritan was the taxi driver who had ferried us to the clinic in the first place, horn sounding, white handkerchief hung out of the window; maybe he just liked the excitement. But he waited while I was patched up, and was there to take us back to the hotel in the small hours. No matter that his car must have been covered in blood, he went off without being paid, and ironically, in view of the carabiniere’s eagerness to put the blame on blacks or Moroccans, he was an Egyptian.

  Next day, we drove back to Fiumicino. Our plane tickets were invalid for immediate return so we spent £600 on new ones. Back in England, the travel insurance company, a large and reputable firm, refused to refund this fare on the grounds that we had not contacted them first for permission to return. So, unrobbed by our assailants, we ended up having our pockets picked by some respectable gentlemen in the City.

  The wound had been covered in thick layers of elastoplast so we came back through Heathrow with me sporting this tipsy pink pill-box on the side of my head. I noted how invisible even a minor disability makes one, people preferring to look away rather than suffer embarrassment or fellow-feeling.

  I put my bloodstained clothes in the washer (with Pre-Wash and Water Plus), wondering if this was how murderers went about it. At the dry cleaners I had to explain the state of my sports coat. The Spanish assistant shrugged: ‘Then it’s the same there as it is here.’ But for days afterwards I kept coming across spots of blood on clothes I had not even been wearing and on my body, too. Several baths later, in a crack behind my ear, I found crystals of dried blood.

  When, in due course, I took my head along to the local health centre, they were full of admiration for the neatness of the stitching on my cerebral sampler. Having yet again recounted the circumstances of the attack, I felt that, without saying so and with the kindest of smiles, they too felt that the carabiniere’s interpretation came closer to the truth. I was past caring.

  What remained for months afterwards was a thick welt across the crown of my head, like one of those mysterious marks that in SF movies single out those members of the human race who have been doctored by creatures from another planet.

  While I still believe that a second blow, had it landed, would have killed m
e, I acknowledge that what happened on that shabby Italian seafront was no more than happens half a dozen times on a Saturday night in Glasgow or Leeds – or even Morecambe, another shabby seaside place which nowadays, I’m told, accounts for a disproportionate share of the personal injuries and assaults treated at one of our local hospitals. Bored youths are, I suppose, universal.

  Never attacked or struck in anger since I was a child, I see my life as wrapped in almost Edwardian complacency. Even in New York, where one is primed to expect violence, I used to walk home in the 1980s through the empty streets of Tribeca at one or two in the morning and never came to harm. Before this I would no more have thought to cross the street to avoid the stumbling drunks who blunder at night around Camden Town than I would think twice before crossing a field of cows. Whereas the other evening, as I was walking up Bond Street, someone shouted and I nearly jumped out of my skin. And yet there are Asians in our cities for whom the likelihood of such incidents must underscore their every day.

  I have described elsewhere* how my mother, while suffering from depression, spent a few days in the admissions ward of the local hospital and how, having seen patients with every species of mental disturbance, I walked the streets of Lancaster and saw madness on every corner. Having seen it plain in that terrible ward, I now saw variations of it in the faces of every other passer-by. And so it was for a while after Ladispoli. ‘You could have done it,’ I would think of some innocent eighteen-year-old, ‘Why not you?’ – violence like madness, discernible in every other face. In time this passed but violent scenes on film or television still leave me impatient, injected very often into scripts out of the same vacuity with which, in real life, it is often inflicted – or was inflicted on me.