by Barbara Vine
The french windows were also still open and the green garden glimpsed beyond them still sunlit, but the dim shadowy spaces between were no longer empty. I saw the figure of a man, straight, thin, almost gaunt as far as I could tell, standing at a table in the far room where the open windows were. He was leaning a little forward, his hands resting on this table, his head lowered as if he were reading something, a newspaper perhaps, that was spread out on its surface. Against the light, greenish, wintry, pale, his figure looked very dark, revealing nothing of himself except, by some mysterious indefinable process, that he was young.
At the sound of Emily’s voice, he looked up and in our direction. She had begun, quite shrilly, on her diatribe, but only then with the preamble: ‘There’s something I want to ask you.’ I couldn’t see his face and he made no other movement. He looked, stared even, then turned back to his paper or whatever was on the table.
That was all, yet it made a lasting impression on me. I don’t know why. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I’d taken it for granted Dr Steadman was old. Martin had made him sound old, a palaeontologist, ‘poking about’ in rocks, an eccentric, a fresh air fanatic. But this man had been young, not as young as I, maybe ten years older, but still young.
It wasn’t surprising perhaps that I dreamt about him. Or about the man I’d created to fill the dark shell of the newspaper reader, standing against the dazzlement. In the dream, instead of going upstairs to Martin, I did what I’d been tempted to do on my last visit and walked on through the open doorways, a whole series of doorways, many more of them than in life, until I came to the french windows.
Outside I could see the garden, more beautiful than I’d ever imagined it, an Italianate garden of low stone walls and stone vases of lilies and moss-grown paths overhung by trees with dark shiny leaves and trees with cypress fronds. A dark, still pool was just outside the windows, on its rim an earthenware jug pouring a perpetual stream of water. The sky was the bright blue of summer and the green turf was full of small summer flowers.
I tried to open the french windows but they were locked and there was no key. The urge to get out there became very strong, much stronger I think than it would have been in reality. But in my dreams I was often a child with a child’s whims and violent needs. I rattled the handles and began banging on the glass. Of course all this was no use. Something told me I must find the key, the key was somewhere in the rooms behind me, and I turned round and began going back the way I’d come.
A man came out of the shadows and walked towards me. The darkness had deepened and his face was hidden, only his lean, straight and extremely graceful figure was visible as he moved closer and closer. When we were face to face, in silence and without warning, he put his arms round me and kissed me on the mouth.
I woke up at once, breathing rapidly and tossing this way and that. I thought I must have an erection, for I was excited and unhappy at the same time, but I hadn’t. All of it had been in my mind and of course I knew how it had got there. It was the result of Emily’s suggesting I might be gay or that I talked the way some gay men do.
When we didn’t have a lecture, and we didn’t have many, she was a late riser. But the next morning she knocked at my door very early and came in, saying she’d had a sleepless night worrying about what she’d said to me. She wanted to apologize. She hadn’t meant to accuse me of being gay, she knew I wasn’t guilty of that, she had reason to know, if anyone had, and with that she got into bed with me.
‘I don’t know why you use words like “accuse” and “guilty”,’ I said. ‘You’re supposed to be liberal and open-minded, or you say you are, you ought to take homosexuality for granted, as just another way of being, not as some sort of crime. When you apologize for calling me gay you act as if you’d accused me of telling lies or doing something violent.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ she said, but she couldn’t understand what I was talking about. ‘I only meant that if you talk like you’re gay, Tim, people will think you are.’
‘And that would matter?’ I said.
‘It would matter to me.’ She mumbled something into my neck and I had to ask her what she’d said. ‘I’m sort of getting to love you a lot,’ she said.
I couldn’t do anything about that except ignore it. I’d never defended being gay before but I found myself going into quite a spirited defence of the gay way of life. And all the time, with Emily’s body curled up against mine and her hands on my chest – she was sweating slightly – I felt more and more how distasteful she was becoming, how I was losing even my liking for her. Her cheek was resting in the hollow of my shoulder and from time to time a drop of saliva slid from the corner of her mouth on to my skin. It wasn’t exactly dribbling, but I was glad I could only feel and not see it.
When she realized I wasn’t going to make love to her she fell asleep for a while and then got up. We were to have a talk that afternoon given by our new writer-in-residence, quite a well-known post-modernist, but before that Emily wanted us to have lunch together at some café/wine bar she had discovered on the river. She’d arranged to meet Sophie Dunbar and Karen Pryce for lunch in the university cafeteria but she would put them off. It was such a lovely day for December. I said I was going to work in the library, I meant to work there through lunchtime and have a sandwich half an hour before the lecture was due to start.
‘I do love you, Tim,’ she said, as if I needed reassuring.
There are only two possible replies, short of the brutal, to ‘I love you’. One is ‘I love you too.’ It was the other I gave her.
‘I know,’ I said.
Emily and I went together to Martin Zeindler’s because it was a tradition he’d established that members of the creative-writing class should pair off when they came to him for tutorials. Thus, Sophie paired with Karen, Jeffrey Brown with Selina Bridges and so on. We were the only pair sexually, or in her eyes romantically, involved with each other. I made up my mind, at that time, two weeks before the end of term, that this must change. When we returned to P. in January we’d still be living in the same house, and that might be awkward though inevitable, but sharing a bed would be out and I’d pair off for Martin’s tutorials with someone else, Ann Friel perhaps, a quiet, studious girl, and leave her partner, Kate Rogers, available for Emily.
Had I only known it, I’d already paid my last visit to Martin’s in Emily’s company. We were due to go there again two days before the end of term but Emily got flu and stayed in bed. One of the other members of our household, a graduate student called Roberta Clifford, volunteered to look after her. She’d had flu herself, was probably responsible for giving it to Emily, and wasn’t afraid to be in and out of the sickroom. Emily was insistent that I keep clear.
Thus I went to Martin’s alone in Emily’s car. As I approached the house I wondered if I should see Dr Steadman and rather hoped I wouldn’t. It wasn’t the first time I’d dreamt of people in a sexual situation, as sexually involved with myself, and then felt diffident at the prospect of encountering them in the flesh.
The weather had become much colder. There was frost in the air at only four in the afternoon. It seemed unlikely that the tenant of the ground-floor flat would have left all his doors open today, and in fact he hadn’t. His front door was shut and, I don’t know why, for no reason, it looked implacably shut to me, as if the occupant had left and locked it up in as many ways and as tightly as possible.
Martin asked me to read my new chapter aloud to him. Sometimes he preferred it that way. He would sit with his eyes closed, his head resting against a cushion, looking more than ever like Sutcliffe, in a mask perhaps made for Mme Tussaud’s. That afternoon, as usual, he wanted no lights on until it became too dark to see even with the utmost eye-strain. I’d seated myself by the window to get the maximum light from a sunset that was dyeing the sky orange and the roofs of the city below various shades of crimson.
Not for the first time, during a reading, I thought Martin had fallen asle
ep. It had been the occasion on past visits for exchanges of smirks and shrugs between Emily and myself. But there was no one to smile at today. I came to the end, stopped and looked down into the street below. A man was getting out of a car in front of the house. He slammed the door and stood a moment, looking up. Although I’d never seen his face, not even in that dream, I knew who it was. My eyes met his and I immediately looked away, in fact pushed my chair away and stood up, my heart beating violently.
‘Why have you stopped?’ said Martin, who hadn’t been asleep. ‘Have you finished? Is that it?’
‘That’s as far as I’ve got,’ I said.
‘No critic will ever accuse you of prolificity,’ he said, ‘provided you get so far as to be of interest to critics. Why are you standing there as if you’ve seen a ghost? Have you? You’ve gone as white as one. Perhaps you’ve caught Emily’s flu.’
I was about to sit down again when there came a loud knocking at Martin’s door.
‘Would you mind going to see who that is? Of course I know who it is, no one else bangs like that. I mean, would you go and let him in, please. Since you’re on your feet, as they say.’
I also knew who it was. Who else could get into the house without ringing the bell? I could see his face before opening the door, it was imprinted on my mind’s eye from that brief glimpse at the window, a lean, dark face with hooded eyes, the lips full, the cheeks hollow, almost cadaverous, a weary look, worn and tired, the look of one who suffers sleepless nights. Black hair, a lock falling across a lined forehead.
We all have a type. I used to think we didn’t. Now I know better, oh, how much better! That is my type, male or female, the face that is oval yet thin, the sensuous mouth, the large eyes black as night, life-weariness overspreading it, a kind of latter-day decadence, youth worn out by dissipation but still youth, the kind that pays no heed to health or care or prudence. This was Ivo’s face that I opened Martin’s door to and stood looking up at, for he was a little taller than I.
For all Emily’s admonition, I’ve no idea what he was wearing. If I noticed, I don’t remember. Something informal, I suppose, jeans I expect, I never saw him in a suit. He looked at me as if he remembered the dream. It was as if he had willed me the dream and acted in it.
‘I’m Martin’s student,’ I said, and then, ‘Won’t you come in?’ as if he’d already demurred.
His voice was accentless, beautiful, simple, rather deep. ‘I’ve lost my key again. I suppose I should say “mislaid”. No doubt it’s downstairs in there on the table.’
By then we were inside the room with Martin. As soon as he realized who his visitor was he adopted the scolding tone I had heard him use to Ivo on the phone. I later learnt this was habitual. The only way he felt he could handle Ivo was by a kind of irritable bossiness that was at the same time quite friendly, even paternal.
‘You are always losing that key. Or, to put it more accurately, leaving it behind. What would you do if I were out, I wonder? Why don’t you put it on the same ring as the outside door key and hang them both round your neck on a string? That would be the best way. You really are very tiresome.’
‘Yes, I know. I know all that. You’ve told me before. You’ll just have to accept it as one of my faults, Martin, like leaving doors open. Now will you please introduce me to your student?’
‘I should have thought you could do that yourself. Ivo Steadman, Timothy Cornish; Timothy Cornish, Ivo Steadman. Dr Steadman to you. He is known as “Tim”, Ivo. What a pity we aren’t brought up like the Americans; advance, stick out a hand and say, Hi, I’m So-and-so.’
We didn’t shake hands. I felt, though I was wrong, that he’d lost interest in me. He began walking round the room, looking at things. This was Ivo, typical of him, very much the way he always was, a restless man, a man of a devouring curiosity who noticed every new thing and had to examine it, read it or speculate about it. In fact it was a week since he’d been in this room and during that time the Economist and the Spectator had found their way to the table along with two new novels and an old paperback of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity; some bulbs in a pot were poking shoots through the very black earth; Martin had changed one of the Venice pictures for a painting of a Victorian girl, a copy of a Millais perhaps; a letter lay by its torn envelope on the desk beside a small china cat Martin said one of his students had given him, perhaps as a Christmas present. Ivo wandered about looking at all this, scrutinizing the picture, picking up the pottery cat and looking under its base to see what kind of porcelain it was, even reading the letter. He put a cigarette in his mouth and gazed about him for the means to light it.
‘I don’t allow smoking here,’ Martin said. ‘You know that, I’ve told you …’
‘Umpteen times. I wonder what the origin of that strange expression is? Umpteen? I hope you know, you ought to know, oughtn’t he, Mr Cornish? Anyway, I’m not smoking. I can’t find a light in this museum.’
‘Of course I know its origin,’ Martin said. ‘First World War army slang. “Umpty” was signallers’ slang for a dash in morse. It signifies an indefinitely large number.’
His temper much improved by the chance to answer a fairly obscure question – as it always was – he began expounding on the word ‘teen’ and its many meanings. It might, for instance, mean ‘hurt’ from Old English teona or ‘to grieve’ or ‘to distress’. Trust Martin not to come up with a simple definition: it might have just meant ten.
Ivo stood there in silence, listening perhaps or perhaps not, the unlighted cigarette in his long brown fingers. I felt for the matches in my pocket, took them out and, risking Martin’s rage, struck one and held up the flame. I came close to Ivo. My hand wasn’t quite steady. Somehow I knew he was aware of the reason for my hand’s shaking. I thought he might take hold of my wrist and I held my breath, but he didn’t. The flame met the end of the cigarette and the end glowed brightly as Ivo drew in a long inhalation.
We stood there, about a foot separating our faces. I stepped back a little. I heard Martin say,
‘I shall go and look for that key. It may take me a few minutes to lay my hand on it. When I come back I hope you’ll have finished with that disgusting object that is smoking the place out. And then perhaps you’ll leave us, Ivo, there’s a good chap. I am, after all, supposed to be teaching “Mr Cornish” something, that is why he is here.’
He started laughing, no doubt at the idea of himself or anyone calling me Mister. I heard him chuckling on his way to the door and the door close behind him. I had never supposed I would be thankful for Martin’s obsession with shutting doors and keeping draughts out. It had always irritated me. Now the soft click the door made was music.
The strange thing is that I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t shy or diffident, I had no diffidence. It was rather like the best stage of being drunk, when inhibition has lifted but before there’s any loss of coordination or any muzziness, when a feeling of tremendous excitement comes, though the aim and object of that excitement is never defined. I wasn’t drunk and my excitement had an aim. I was without rational thought, not to mention caution or any idea of being sensible. But at the same time I was hardly aware of my body, only of my mind or my self.
I say ‘at the same time’ but time, too, had gone, had departed. The door was shut, Martin was never coming back, or rather, if it was four-thirty when he left it would be four-thirty when he returned, no matter how long he was absent. Ivo and I were in a pocket or vacuum left out of time.
Our eyes were on each other. Without looking at what he was doing, he ground out his cigarette in a stone vessel that might or might not have been an ashtray. I went close up to him and laid my hand on the side of his face, on his cheek, drawing my fingers very softly and slowly down. I was breathing as if I couldn’t get my breath.
He let me touch him, his face and his neck, and breathe in the smoky smell of him. For a moment I thought he was going to smile, he’d made a little sound that might have been a gasp of amusement or pleasure. I
don’t know if he smiled then, he may have done, but I couldn’t see. His face went out of focus as he brought it to mine and kissed me on the mouth.
Like the dream, yet not like the dream. He wasn’t touching me except with his mouth and I felt faint, I was afraid I would fall. I held on to him with my hands, I held him in my arms. The blood was banging in my head, or perhaps it was the blood in his head, or both, I couldn’t tell. I’d lost awareness of the separateness of our mouths too, which part was his, which mine, in the long warm exploration, the hot bitter-tasting darkness, as if we were two adventurers dependent on each other, travelling through an unknown world.
He took my hands down, stepped aside, tossed back his hair. Martin came in with a key and a piece of string to hang it on, whether meaning this seriously or as a joke I never knew.
4
The newspaper I buy in Orford Street on my way to Consortium House has been running articles on teenage sex. Parents, teachers and the children themselves have contributed to these pieces and yesterday an interview appeared with the headmaster of my old school. It was the same man too. After all, it’s only seven years since I left school.
They began letting girls in at sixth-form level a year after I left. Now they start as the boys do at Common Entrance. The Headmaster of Leythe, Basil Warwick Eliot, told the journalist writing the piece that there’d been one or two ‘incidents’ since the girls’ advent (his word). One girl had actually been made pregnant, though not, he insisted, by a Leythe boy. The interviewer asked if his wasn’t a sexist attitude and he defended himself at length. The one thing he did say which interested me, in the way that only such total ignorance and misunderstanding can be interesting, was that in all his time at the school and in that of his predecessors there had never been the least suspicion of homosexual ‘vice’. I’m not much given to laughter these days but that made me laugh.
