by Barbara Vine
No one could have passed through Leythe without regularly taking part in sexual activity, and taking part in it as a matter of course. You did it, and that was that. Of course there were variations and gradations, there were differences of degree and of kind. Absolute buggery, uncompromising, gross perhaps, a matter of hygiene or relief, like defecation, took place all the time. There was nothing remotely romantic about it, no kissing, for instance, or touching or even preliminary talking. You knew that you did it with this person or that and you got on with it, it was necessary, inevitable. A sign was made or a code word spoken without the least embarrassment, and that was that.
Love existed, of course, or rather a lustful or sentimental obsession. James Gilman, five years my senior, was in love with me and wrote bad poetry to me. Prefects were always in love with some first- or second-year, and in a few cases this idol was kept on his pedestal, the recipient of love letters or even sonnets, his photograph on a study desk. Mostly, though, he too was used in the way of all flesh.
I’ve no doubt it had always gone on. After I left school and had things in some sort of perspective I’d look at photographs of an eminent politician or distinguished churchman, old boys of Leythe, and reflect on their school days, or rather their school nights, sodomy in the dorm or in the bushes behind the prefects’ garden. Had such pasts ever been used for blackmail in the cases of politicians or Secret Service people? Had blackmailers broken up marriages and ruined careers with this evidence? Somehow I doubted it. It was all so much a part of public-school existence as to be silently accepted and taken for granted that I could only imagine a (for example) heritage under-secretary or bishop of somewhere laughing incredulously if challenged.
And what of me? Leythe’s Cities of the Plain hadn’t made me think of myself as homosexual, any more I suppose than it had made that heritage minister and that bishop. This was what you did when you were a child, like eating sweets, smoking joints if you could get them, not washing much. But when I became a man I put away childish things.
Had I? Had Emily been right? Not in accusing me of being homosexual but in defining me as such by reason of my tastes and ways? Yet I’d never before found a man attractive, if ‘attractive’, that over-used word, goes any distance to express what in those first days, weeks, I felt for Ivo. I’d never before been sexually drawn to a man. At Leythe it wasn’t a question of attraction, only of physical need on the most basic level. You didn’t look at faces or eyes or body shape, still less have that indefinable sense of another’s essence.
On the other hand, I hadn’t been much attracted by women either. I sometimes needed sex, that was the same as at school, but who with – that was less important. In my case, it had been with those who had indicated their willingness, even their eagerness. None of it had been very successful. I was low-sexed, some people were, I believed this until that moment at Martin’s when I touched Ivo’s face and he kissed me.
When Martin came in with the key and his fussy bit of string Ivo started to laugh. It didn’t seem to me the kind of laughter the key and string might provoke but the laughter of surprise and perhaps delight. He was laughing at himself and at me, at my audacity perhaps. Of course Martin took it as some kind of applause for what he’d done. He got Ivo to give him the outer door key and then he put both on his piece of string which he insisted on looping round Ivo’s neck.
‘You can give me your own key back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Now you must go. As it is you’ve outstayed your welcome by ten minutes. We have work to do. We are in the serious business of English prose.’
He began pushing Ivo towards the door, one hand in the middle of his long, flat, elegant and suddenly enormously desirable back. I could see the knot in the string lying against the brown skin of his neck. I felt a bit sick.
Ivo said, ‘Are you teaching him to write a blockbuster, Martin? Something very sexy and bold?’
‘Off you go,’ said Martin. ‘And wear that string whenever you go out.’
‘I’ll never take it off. I’ll wear it in the bath.’
He said nothing to me, not goodbye, not that it had been nice meeting me, and I was glad he didn’t. It meant more that he said nothing. I listened for his feet on the stairs, for the door downstairs to close, but there was silence. Martin came back, his black cat draped round his neck, and began talking about the colloquial contraction, as usual, and then, for some unstated reason, about Bunin’s short stories, which he recommended me to read. My heart had begun to beat very heavily, making a thudding I thought he must hear.
In the manner of a psychiatrist, Martin always ended his tutorials on the dot. An hour was what we were to have and an hour was what we got. ‘Time’s up,’ he would say, looking at the clock or his watch, or, ‘That’s it for now.’ Scrupulously, this time he had allowed me an extra ten minutes to make up for the time Ivo was there. They felt like ten hours.
At the top of the stairs I paused, trying to make myself breathe normally. Ivo’s door would be ajar, I was sure of that, and he waiting for me on the other side of it. I felt on the brink of a tremendous adventure, but one that was almost too big for me, that I wasn’t sure I could cope with. About halfway down, looking over the banister rail, I could see Ivo’s door but not see if it was open or closed. I still couldn’t see when I was outside it. I gave it a light push. The blood rushed into my face, I felt as if someone had shoved me backwards when the door didn’t give, when I realized it was shut and locked.
The house was quite silent. Outside it was starting to get dark and the hall was darkish. Suddenly the ceiling light came on. It worked on a time switch and always came on at five-fifteen in winter, but I didn’t know that, I’d never been there so late before. I thought someone had turned it on, I thought Ivo had. But the door stayed closed and the place silent. I went out, got into the car and drove home.
The experience of enduring the time lag between a sexual approach and the next move had never been mine. Possibly others had experienced it on my account, but if so I didn’t know it. I didn’t know what it was to wait, to speculate, to suffer hope deferred; to be afraid to go out in case the phone call comes while you are out and afraid to stay in lest others overhear it and hear what you say. He didn’t know where I lived, he didn’t know my phone number, he could hardly ask Martin. I told myself these things. And I told myself that he could find out if he really wanted to.
Besides, I was so ignorant. How did men behave in these circumstances? I didn’t know. I assumed as men behaved to women. A man would phone a woman and ask her out. Would a man phone a man and ask him? Our pay phone was on the wall outside the door of my room. I spent a lot of time lying on my bed, waiting for the phone to ring. I asked myself if this was love. Was I ‘in love’?
Almost recovered by now, Emily kept coming in to ask me if I was all right, if she could get me anything. She’d become a stranger. I could hardly believe that we’d been lovers. Whatever happened, I knew I’d never sleep with her again. Of course I now believed nothing was going to happen. He’d seen the way I looked at him, felt my touch, had kissed me for fun or even to teach me a lesson, to show me I’d no business gazing at palaeontologist Ph.D.s that way. But a kiss like that? What a kiss it had been. I wanted more, oh, how I wanted it. He must have meant it, he must have been serious. Was the simple answer that he now regretted his rash behaviour?
I couldn’t forget the things he’d said as Martin was propelling him to the door, about writing a sexy blockbuster and about wearing the key string in the bath. He must have meant that provocatively. I could see his worn dark face all the time and that mouth I’d kissed and those large eyes in the bluish hollows and his hands that were very long with big finger joints and his flat back with the shoulder-blades like the buds of wings. I heard his voice, deep and soft and with laughter shaking it as he said to no one, to the room, to the air, that I might be taught to be sexy and bold.
The day before we were going down Emily asked me if I’d go home with her for a few days at Ch
ristmas. To meet her parents. They were longing to meet me. I couldn’t imagine why, I was that far gone. She said I’d have to understand we wouldn’t be able to share a room at her parents’, they wouldn’t tolerate that, even if we were engaged, but if I could bear it she’d like me to come.
‘I’m not the sort of person that meets people’s parents and makes a thing of Christmas.’
I remembered just too late that I might more reasonably have said I couldn’t leave my mother alone her first Christmas as a widow. Emily thought of it and said it for me. I must stay with my mother but she could come to me, maybe for the New Year.
‘Not this time,’ I said.
‘Tim, is it because we haven’t – well, been together for quite a while now? Is it? It’s only because I’ve been ill. I really have been ill, you know.’
Perhaps there is nothing so frustrating as being misunderstood quite in this way, as having these bizarre reasons put forward to account for one’s conduct. I felt like telling her to go away, to leave me alone, I never wanted to see her again. Outside the door the phone started ringing and she went to answer it before I could stop her. I had a little fantasy about its being Ivo at last and Emily not having the least suspicion but listening just the same when I spoke to him, the veiled way I would speak to him and make him, somehow make him, suggest we meet now. I’d borrow her car for the last time. I could be there, in the middle of town, in ten minutes.
It wasn’t him. It was Roberta’s mother. But that phone call did something for me, or Emily did it, with her talk of meeting parents and being engaged, pointers to a dismally conventional way of life into which I could so easily and irrevocably be drawn. I asked myself, as I jumped up, what I had to lose. I could be humiliated but at least I’d have tried. Perhaps it’s ridiculous to say to yourself that if you don’t take a certain step you’ll regret it all your life, but that’s what I did say.
‘Can I borrow the car?’
I suppose she had a right to ask me where I was going. It was her car. She was always asking me where I was going, when I’d be back, and often if she could come. Well, it was her car. But people who do this make people like me into liars. I often told Emily lies and now I foresaw that if things worked out, if what I wanted but hardly dared think possible, if that happened, I should be telling her more and more lies, happy lies, blissful lies, to keep her quiet and keep her away.
‘You can’t be going to Martin. Martin’s gone away. Didn’t you know? He was going this morning.’
So much the better. It seemed a good omen. I think I visibly shivered at the thought of Ivo alone in the house, but she didn’t notice.
‘He’s left a book he’s lending me with the man downstairs.’
It was very improbable. It wasn’t the kind of thing Martin would do. I didn’t care. I went down the passage to the bathroom and had a shower, considered spraying myself with the male scent someone had left on the shelf, but thought better of it as meretricious. Emily was still in my room. I was suddenly afraid she’d say she was coming with me and I could think of nothing to say that would stop her. She looked listless and pale, she watched me dress in silence. I had a brilliant idea of calling into a wine shop on the way and buying champagne. I couldn’t afford champagne but I did have enough money in hand to pay for it. Then I decided that would be worse than arriving smelling of Dunhill cologne.
Emily took off her jeans and sweater and got into my bed, turning her face to the wall. I gave her a kiss on the cheek, just to be friendly I suppose, or for old times’ sake. It seemed best to say nothing, to leave her and deal with this when I got back. I might be capable of dealing with anything when I got back – or I might not.
At Martin’s the hall light was still on. I took it as another good sign. I was no longer afraid, no longer anxious, no longer feeling sick. I rang his bell. The time he took to answer was very long and I could feel my euphoria sinking, changing, cooling. A dark cloud began to replace it, a cloud with a voice coming out of it and saying, You’re absurd, you can’t do this, no one does. Then it was his voice, his only.
I said, ‘It’s Tim Cornish.’
He said nothing. An age passed, the door buzzed and opened as I touched it. In the meantime he had opened the inner door, the one to which he so often mislaid the key. I found him standing just inside, in the hall, and all the other doors were closed.
‘You’ve surprised me,’ he said.
As a matter of fact, I’ve surprised myself. I wasn’t sure I could write about him and me as we once were; I didn’t think I’d be able to recapture the feelings of it and the tone, my breathless, permanently excited state, my recklessness, the headlong nothing-else-matters atmosphere in which I lived at that time. But I have. It would be less strange if I felt the same now or had felt it the following year, if it had lasted. The strangeness of being able to recall it so precisely lies in its transience. I remember it as clearly as I remember my love for Isabel. The difference is not in the intensity of recall but in the pain.
What is it in most people that requires, in order to maintain passionate desire, a reciprocal coolness, a mild indifference? I’m not talking about one loving and one letting himself be loved. That would be too crude. I’m only saying that a lover must be a little hard to get, to a degree capricious, holding back always something of himself, reserved, not invariably to be found at home waiting. Ivo was like that at first, for a while he was like that, my amused, light-hearted, curious, surprised lover. I was the one who needed and demanded, who was peremptory, stimulated by a ‘no’ but unwilling to take it for an answer.
That first time I stayed with him until some time in the very early morning. I must have been there for at least ten hours. Now I can’t remember whether or not we ate anything but I know we drank a lot, the champagne that I didn’t take but that he had in his fridge, brandy and a bottle of claret. I was still drunk when I drove Emily’s car home.
Naked with him, his hard lean body a raft for me to lie on, I asked him when I should see him again.
‘January.’
‘It’s too long,’ I said. ‘I can’t wait that long.’
‘Three weeks will pass quickly. Suppose it were the Long Vacation? What would you do then?’
‘Die,’ I said in the petulant tone of a boyfriend of Dorian Gray, someone’s sweet catamite. I was already learning how easy it is in my situation to slip into this coquettish mode. ‘You could come to N. and stay.’
‘With Mother? That would hardly do.’
‘In a hotel or a Bed and Breakfast.’
‘Not a B and B. No boys in the rooms during the hours of darkness.’
He laughed, but he came to N. If I’d known I’d meet him, as if by chance, strolling in Orford Street on New Year’s Eve, I might not have drunk my half of that bottle of red wine, a panacea for despair, and dented Emily’s car trying to park it between a truck and a van. I dented the van too, but the truck was unscathed. She was waiting up for me, tearful, pink-nosed, in a brown dressing-gown and slippers with button-down collars round the instep. She’d watched it all from the downstairs front window. I promised to pay for everything, I made wild promises, my head starting to bang, the smell of Ivo on my fingers.
‘You’ve been with another girl.’
‘I haven’t.’ I swore I hadn’t, I came up with the funniest thing I could think of. ‘I swear by all I hold sacred,’ I said. ‘I swear on my mother’s head.’
That struck me as so hilarious I started laughing, I couldn’t stop, I was manic with it, laughing so much that I fell on to the floor and rolled about laughing. I thought Emily was going to kick me but still I couldn’t stop. Then Sharif in the room above banged on the floor with a shoe. Emily started to cry. She ran upstairs, sobbing.
It’s hard to imagine it now, the laughter. The drunkenness and cruelty as well, for now I can see that I was cruel to Emily. I was laughing at her, at everything, the way children do with happiness, for I was happy. I went home to N. next day with a dry mouth and a
headache, but happy.
Rain was falling and went on falling day after day on to the brown choppy sea. There was nothing to do but read. I tried to borrow £500 from my mother so that Emily wouldn’t lose her no-claims bonus, but she said she hadn’t got it. She’d just handed that sum to Clarissa for a package holiday they were going on together to Tenerife. In the afternoon of December 31st, a day on which no rain had fallen, I came out of the newsagent where I’d been to buy the TLS and saw Ivo coming up the slope from the sea.
‘Not a fossil to be seen on your beach,’ he said.
‘Isn’t there?’ I was breathless already. ‘I’ve never looked.’
‘A very tame English beach, a pussy-cat of a beach.’
It was the first hint I had that he was used to wilder beaches and stranger shores. We went along to the Latchpool for tea: scones with clotted cream, madeira cake. The windows in the lounge give on to the terrace and the terrace on to the road, the sea wall, the hills of shingle. He said he had just arrived, was staying two or three miles up the coast in a hotel that hadn’t long been converted from a simple pub. His bedroom had a view of the nuclear-power station. Talking about it made him start laughing but he said he liked that, the grim, grey bulk of it, it was an antidote to his euphoria, it kept him from losing his head.
‘Can we go there?’ I said.
‘If you’re sure you don’t want another cup of tea.’
New Year’s Eve. A great storm got up that night and we lay in his bed at the Kestrel listening to the onslaught of the waves against the wall below. Once or twice a wave came high enough to lash the bedroom windows with spray. It wasn’t quite true about the power station. You could only see it if you leant right out and craned your neck.
