She looked at me uncertainly.
“You’re not James are you?”
“No, I’m Danny.”
“My parents had a butler called Danny. Or was he the chauffeur? He may have been the chiropodist.”
This question exercised us as we made our way out of the small convenience. (Convenience?) At the last moment I noticed there were suspicious brown spots on the lino near the basin but I thought Damn it I’ve only got my handkerchief; don’t the staff in this hospital do anything? Besides she needed shepherding, Katy needed shepherding (I’d asked again) back to the ward she’d wandered out of. During our brief walk I retrieved the castigated package and since it was difficult to manage in one hand left her to totter on unaided. Well no not really totter. Without any renewed offer to see to all my washing, not even a patently half-hearted one, she went on ahead at quite a spanking rate and disappeared around the proper door with only one further scrap of communication. “I think he was the chauffeur. He was always very kind to me. Gone but not forgotten. Wish I could remember his name.”
I called it after her but felt sure she hadn’t heard.
Then I carried on to the Mary Llewellyn Jenkins ward and left the gowns with a sister who was sitting at her desk. I didn’t regale her with my little spiel. I merely said, “For the hospital. We hope they’ll come in handy. May I use your loo?” She gave me a nice smile, slightly bemused, said, “Thank you. Yes of course,” so I knew there was no way they could ever send me back to set that particular record straight.
But on my way out I may have bemused her further. “Oh could you tell Katy in the nextdoor ward her chauffeur’s name was Danny? Perhaps you could write that down for her?”
Also on my way out I noticed for the first time the little room from which I’d escaped earlier. The door of it was closed. I had no wish at all to see inside.
Fortunately the johns attached to Mary Llewellyn Jenkins were as well-stocked as their brother john was lacking. There was even disinfectant! I smuggled out both this and a J-Cloth and dealt efficiently with the scouring of the basin and the removal of those brown spots from the lino. I then returned the bottle, binned the cloth and made good use of their large green bar of Lifebuoy—plus nailbrush! Gosh did I feel virtuous! During my blessedly unencumbered—and unconstricted—return to Pack Hill I thought Hey bugger me am I going to have a tale to pass on to Richard and Hermione when I put in my request for a surely justified exchange of handkerchief. (“Why what did you do with it?” Rather casually: “Oh … you know … just happened to dry an old lady’s bottom. As you do.”) In the meanwhile it was Brad to whom I spoke. “So does that finally answer your question?”
For he had once asked me whether I could imagine looking after him in the most fundamental fashion if he ever happened to catch AIDS or anything else ultimately as incapacitating.
“No,” I’d replied. “So please don’t include it on any list of things to aim for.”
“Then you’re saying you don’t love me sufficiently to wipe my bum?”
“Not true. What I’m saying is—simply—why do we have to cross our bridges? Of course I could easily enough just give you the answer you’re wanting. But until one actually finds oneself in that position…? A bit like being tortured in the war. Sometimes I’m sure I’d have said ‘No—please—I’ll tell you anything!’ no matter how many thousands of lives might have depended on my keeping quiet. But then I think Well perhaps you can’t ever be quite sure until the contingency arises. Maybe—somehow—from somewhere you do in fact manage to draw the strength. I hope so but I also hope—just as fervently—that I’ll never have to find out.”
Brad hadn’t been impressed. “I see. So you compare wiping my bum to being tortured by the Nazis?”
“Not entirely. But in either case I feel I’d have to close my eyes and think of England.”
“I’d wipe your bum like a shot.”
“Yes but you’re older and wiser not to mention incredibly much nicer. However, just hold on until I’m a bit older and wiser and incredibly much nicer, then we can reopen the whole debate. In the meantime when I say I love you as I happen to be saying, you difficult old man, you’ll know the sentiment is frightfully well considered; contains nothing of the glib.”
It had been bedtime and I remembered only too well the tussle which had followed on from these remarks. “And you have the cheek to call me ornery!” I told him now. I laughed and felt exuberant and broke into a run and felt free and wondered what he might be doing at this moment and whether I was filling his thoughts as much as he was filling mine; and as I came to a standstill and wiped the sweat off my face and blew my nose I thought about the possibility of my very shortly catching up with him and launching myself into his arms—and I felt almost unbelievably happy. (Actually it didn’t even occur to me that I had blown my nose on an already damp handkerchief; damper than just my sweat alone should have made it. And in retrospect I think I feel glad that this hadn’t occurred to me. Poor Katy.) Indeed I could hardly recall a time when I’d felt happier. Not even when he and I had first got together; and that would have taken quite a fair amount of beating.
8
The pub was called The City of Quebec. It was in a quiet turning off Oxford Street close to Marble Arch. Not simply a gay pub but a known meeting place for older men attracted to younger ones and vice versa. Brad confessed himself bewildered. “I just don’t see why young guys should fancy men old enough to be their dads. The other way around of course—no mystery. But in your own case you’ve still got a father, a father whom apparently you get on well with. So tell me where the attraction lies. I mean in general; I promise I’m not fishing.”
I truly couldn’t enlighten him.
“You may as well ask why I’m gay as why I go for older men. Or why alone in all my family I’m into westerns and musicals and like vegetable marrow.”
“Fair enough,” he’d said. “Mine then not to reason why. Mine merely to appreciate and feel happy.”
Not that I’d ever viewed Brad as old. When we had met I was twenty-four, he forty-three, but I’d never been the kind of adolescent who thought you were virtually past it at thirty and completely washed up at forty. Besides not only did Brad look fighting fit and youthful, there were men at the Quebec who were well into their seventies, even some who were almost certainly over eighty (not for nothing was the place indulgently referred to as The Elephants’ Graveyard), men who even at that age, perplexingly, still attracted lascivious attention and by no means just from the over-fifties … or indeed perhaps not at all from the over-fifties; a seventysomething with the arm of a thirtysomething draped lovingly around his shoulders was assuredly no uncommon sight even if sometimes—to Brad every bit as much as me—it could begin to verge on the distasteful. But Brad looked like a positive youngster in that sort of assembly and for the two of us to find ourselves drawn to one another wouldn’t have seemed in the least unnatural to any of the pub’s countless patrons.
I had only been to the Quebec a couple of times and no way would I have gone that evening if I hadn’t just survived the final breakup with my current boyfriend. “Well okay I’ll show him!” I’d thought. “Plenty of other good fish in the sea.” But sitting on the top deck of the No 16 staring out a bit unappreciatively, even blindly, at the charms of Kilburn High Road—I was en route from my bedsit near Cricklewood Broadway—I had no high hopes that the couple of hours ahead were going in any way to lighten my depression; and I very seriously considered dismounting at the next stop and getting drunk at a pub much closer to home. In short it was only my inherent meanness, the fact that I’d already paid my fare, which all too probably prevented me; I was at that time stacking shelves in a supermarket and needing to be careful with my cash, despite a determinedly forgiving and not ungenerous set of parents. So I stayed on the bus and thought bloody hell what a life and what a total mess I’d made of it and sodding bloody Jonathan could just bloody well sod off and take a running jump. But I was close
to crying by this stage so I did try to concentrate at least a little on the life that was being lived in Kilburn.
And in Maida Vale. And along the rest of the Edgware Road. About which not even remotely had it crossed my mind, in primary school in the Midlands, on my first hearing of this noble thoroughfare—and being induced to draw a Roman regiment marching up it stick-limbed to the north—that it would one day provide me with a bus route (southwards) to The City of Quebec. I suppose I couldn’t claim to be a prescient child. But now I wondered bleakly if the percentage of gays in Roman times would have been roughly the same as it was today and vaguely envied them their massed ranks; although on the other hand it had never once occurred to me, and surely never would, to sign on in any of Her Majesty’s armed forces.
We eventually got to Marble Arch after stopping it seemed at every possible traffic light and every possible request stop. It had begun to rain and of course I hadn’t thought to bring my umbrella—I very seldom did, unless it were actually raining when I left home. Therefore I ran and may have reached the pub in something like a minute when normally it would have taken three. As I went in a man was coming out. Our eyes met and held and I was aware of the quickening of my pulse independent of the fact that I’d been running. “Oh hell,” smiled the man. “It’s raining anyhow. There’s just got to be time for another drink. My name’s Brad by the way.”
As it turned out, there was time for another two drinks (each I mean) and there would certainly have been time for several more—Brad phoned the people he was supposed to be meeting for dinner and asked if they’d forgive him just this once if he cried off. Before that however we had already started to get acquainted.
“I’m assuming Danny,” he had said lightly after we had shaken hands, “that you’re here on pleasure and not business?”
He was asking more tactfully than others had sometimes asked me in gay bars or clubs whether I was rent; and in fact before my meeting with Jonathan I had occasionally considered such an option—it would have boosted my income no end. But at least sodding bloody Jonathan had saved me from that (he was in many ways a decent bloke; possibly his worst crime lay in being a lot too young for me—he was barely twenty-nine) and for this I must eternally be thankful. I could now hardly believe my wavering self-respect had ever sunk so low.
“Just came in for a drink,” I replied, “and to be with other people.” Which was the complete truth, apart perhaps from my inaccurate use of the singular. For I hadn’t even gone there looking for a pick-up. One-night-stands had never been of much interest. This wasn’t to say I sometimes hadn’t had them; but only when there’d seemed a good chance of their leading on to something more.
“What will you have?” he asked.
He bought us double Scotches—and not merely Grant’s or Bell’s but Glenfiddich; it transpired that neither of us had ever been much of a beer-drinker. We sat on one of the red crescent-shaped couches, nylon sprayed with Scotchguard, and under one of those huge purification pipes which were now a feature of the place; and since today was Wednesday and the pub relatively uncrowded we had the couch entirely to ourselves. Behind our heads Shirley Bassey quietly belted out the fact that like Frank Sinatra and innumerable others she did it her way; but after a grimace of resignation from Brad and a responsive but not altogether honest shrug of sympathy from myself we instantly forgot about her. “Do you come here often?” asked Brad. He said it perfectly straight-faced yet even so he got a laugh, brief but spontaneous. “Good,” he said. “If you hadn’t done that I’d have had to get right up and walk away.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Oh I’d have taken my drink with me.”
“I still don’t believe you. And if I did I think I’d be the one who had to get up and walk away. You’d be too frightening. Intolerant. Completely unrelaxable with.”
“Is that a word?”
“Certainly. As of this minute anyway.”
“And if it wasn’t before I don’t know how the world ever got on without it.”
“I have to admit you don’t seem too enormously frightening.”
“I hope I’m not,” he said. “I fear that sometimes I don’t suffer fools gladly but that’s honestly not something I’m proud of and I’m really doing my damnedest to correct it.”
“Tonight?”
“There—and I’d told myself you wouldn’t notice!”
“How foolish of you! And I too sometimes fear I don’t suffer fools gladly.”
“Impasse.”
“Isn’t it a little soon,” I asked, “for strangers to be flirting?” Apparently I already felt quite dangerously at home. I wondered if this was partly an expression of relief. That there could actually be life after Jonathan. Though I knew it was anyway a failing of mine: frequently to come on a bit too strong. I hadn’t yet drunk much of my whisky.
“My God! Which of us did you suggest was frightening? How old are you Danny?”
I told him.
But like you,” I said, “I hope I’m not. Frightening. That’s really the last thing in the world I’d want to be. We seem to have a lot in common.”
“Tell me about yourself.”
“What d’you want to know? Born in a village near Nottingham. My mother a teacher, my father ex-RAF. I’ve three older brothers and two older sisters who’ve all settled in various parts of the Midlands. None of them gay. Five nephews and six nieces. Are you finding this fascinating?”
“Yes.”
“I’m a big disappointment to my mother and father but nevertheless they love me and I love them. We’re a pretty close-knit family all except for me.”
“Why should you think you’re a disappointment? Because you’re gay?”
“Partly that perhaps. But more because I walked out of university in the middle of my course. They feel I’m only half-educated—and the sad thing is they’re right.”
“What were you reading? And where was it?”
“I was reading Law. At Newcastle. But it was a bad choice of subject. I should have switched.”
He waited for me to go on.
“You see, I liked the thought of all that money which solicitors and barristers can rake in. But you can’t imagine how dry and dispiriting the actual work was. And when I finally admitted to myself that I was never going to make it—well by then I was just so tired of being with people of my own age. In the main I found them shallow and juvenile even though I was probably equally shallow and juvenile, but in a different way. Have you had enough?”
“No. You give a pretty good impersonation of someone who’s a lot more than half-educated.”
“Thank you. But that’s only bluff.”
“I see. So what happened when you left university?”
“I came to London to seek fame and fortune.”
“And…?”
“And I’m still working on it. In both departments.”
“Fame?” he asked. “As what?”
“Don’t laugh. At the start I had some idea of going in for modelling. Or even acting. Remember I was still only nineteen.”
“I’m not laughing. Not at all. And now?”
“I think I’d like to write. Steamy adventures of a young gay down from the provinces. Tasting life in the big city.”
“And planning to remain?”
“Oh very much so. Didn’t someone once say that if you’re tired of London you must be tired of life?”
“Yes good old Doctor Johnson. But that was before traffic pollution and mobile telephones and—I think—Miss Shirley Bassey.” (Here I ought to say that Miss Bassey had long since been replaced by Liza Minnelli and Abba, several songs from Abba, and now by another lady—“Jerry Sothern,” said Brad—who was plaintively asking if she’d recognize the light in his eyes/which no other eyes reveal/or shall I pass him by/and never realize/that he was my … ideal? For some reason the wistful quality of the singer’s voice or the poignancy of the lyric itself, with all its emphasis on—according to Brad—the haphazard
ness of fate, had briefly attracted the attention of us both.) “This young gay down from the provinces though: how does he manage to get by?”
“He stacks the shelves at Price-As-You-Like-It. In Cricklewood Lane.”
On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory Page 5
