by David Rees
Nobody ordered me out, which shows perhaps that in Holland people have the good sense not to try and protect you from growing up. Some of the magazines were undoubtedly revealing, though I learned nothing I didn’t know already. I thought of Dad’s remark about silly decisions, and on the strength of that I did not waste my money on buying one; and I went out into the sunshine feeling not corrupt or depraved, but rather virtuous.
By lunch-time I’d seen a man swallowing fire and a juggler throwing knives (there was street entertainment everywhere, watched by large, appreciative crowds of tourists); refused the offer to share a joint with a gang of German kids I got talking to on one of the bridges; gazed at the outside of the royal palace in the Dam, a pretty modest effort, I thought, compared with the size of Buck House; and enjoyed lots of window shopping. There were shops that sold nothing but clogs, and I tried on a pair; klompen, I learned, was clogs in Dutch, a lovely-sounding word, very appropriate for the objects it described. But I didn’t buy any; I’d never wear them—they were too uncomfortable. My only purchase was a little windmill, made of blue and white Delft china, in a shop that sold all sorts of Delft souvenirs—human figures in traditional Dutch costume, and tiles, as well as the normal things you’d expect in such a place, like mugs and vases and dishes. I hadn’t yet seen a real windmill, so I reckoned a china one wasn’t a bad substitute. Then I went into the Oudekerk (the old church); I’d been attracted to it because of the strange and beautiful music its bells played four times an hour, on the quarters, the half, and the hour itself. It reminded me of Adrian’s harp. Amsterdam, in fact, was a city full of sweet, musical noises. On the pavements men played barrel organs, fantastic, ornate machines that churned out the old creaking sounds of old creaking tunes, like ghosts of carousels from ancient fairs. The church was incredibly quiet after the hubbub of the streets. Tall, whitewashed walls and silence.
A ham sandwich and a seven-up was my mid-day meal, then a slice of delicious sticky lemon cake I bought in a patisserie which at home would have been the best cake shop in town, but here was just one out of dozens I’d seen. I’d get fat if I lived in Amsterdam. I wandered on, over a canal that had been filled in and concreted, past another church that was standing, curiously, right in the middle of a road, and into a very different sort of area. I glanced up at the street name— Zeedijk—then at my map, which showed I was in the middle of the onion, the oldest bit of the city, the ground on which it had started centuries ago. There were a lot of rough men prowling about, but nothing too dreadful, I felt, could happen to me during the day. I turned into an alley; I’d seen a wide canal and a bridge at the end—it would lead me, presumably, out of the onion’s centre. And I knew immediately that this was the red light district: it was so blatant. The women, wearing as few clothes as they possibly could, stood in the windows—big, plate glass windows—of little ground-floor apartments, and smiled and beckoned. It was embarrassing, but at the same time—exciting. I wanted to look: were they attractive? But not be observed. One of them said, in English, “Why don’t you come inside?” She wasn’t a great deal older than me.
So that is what it is all about, I said to myself.
I found a rare patch of grass by the side of the road— rare, because public gardens and parks did not exist in Amsterdam’s inner city, and what blossom there was could only be seen in window boxes or cut, ready for sale, in the flower market—and I sprawled out on my back, staring up at the sky. I tried to make my mind go blank but it wouldn’t—it was full of conflicting jumbled thoughts, like the clothes spinning round in a washing machine; Dad and Adrian and Mum and Nic and Miranda, Alresford and Bournemouth and Amsterdam. And sex, and silly decisions. Why did life become so complicated and contradictory as I got older? I spent most of my childhood wanting to grow up, and now I’d arrived, or nearly arrived, nothing was straightforward any more. Wasn’t there one single pleasure I could have that would make me entirely happy, even if it was for just a brief while? Apparently not.
The absence of flowers here made me think about gardens. Like the pensioners of Bournemouth, I felt I wanted to make a garden. Maybe that’s what I would do when I went home to Alresford; Mum and Aunt Bridie couldn’t possibly object as they left Tralee so derelict. I tried to picture the grounds of our house when I’d finished with them, but the only image that would come into my head was the concert hall, the Winter Gardens. Growing up should be like passing from winter gardens into summer gardens, I thought, but maybe one of those places was just a more complicated version of the other, with mazes and paths that led nowhere. Or did they lead eventually round some unforeseen corner to exactly everything I’d always wanted? Whatever everything I’d always wanted might be; my ideas about that were totally vague.
The Indonesian meal was excellent. A rijsttafel, lots of small dishes like a Chinese dinner—chicken with almonds and peppers, shrimp, beef, sweet and sour pork, bean shoots—but the flavours were much more subtle than anything I’d get in a take-away in Winchester. Dad was in a good mood; the sauna had obviously cheered him up. “It unwinds you,” he said, when I asked him if he’d enjoyed it. “Cleanses you. All your muddled thinking evaporates. Then I sat in the most enormous jacuzzi I’ve ever seen.”
“What’s a jacuzzi?”
“A hot tub, a bubble bath. It was big enough to accommodate a hundred people in comfort. Positively Roman.”
“So you’re feeling better?”
He laughed. “I certainly am!”
“Are you a typical Taurus, Dad?”
“That rubbish! But, well, if you like. . .yes, I could be. Obstinate, not too sensitive, fond of routine. And a glutton for the good things of life. On the plus side, artistic, creative, hard-working. . . and faithful, believe it or not. Why?”
“Oh, I just wondered.”
“The wanderer wondered. How was Sagittarius’s day? Typical?”
I leaned back in my chair, my hands behind my head. “I had a good time,” I said, and I mentioned the Oudekerk, the fire-eater and the juggler, the cake shop, and the royal palace. Then, emboldened by a second glass of wine, I told him about the alley off the Zeedijk.
Expressions of astonishment and concern flitted across his face. “What do you expect me to say? I imagine you’re aware of the risks in places like that. Disease. Robbery. But . . . have you ever considered it’s degrading to women?”
I thought about that for a moment, then said “No.”
“Perhaps you should consider it, then.”
“I read somewhere that desire is an appetite. Like hunger. It needs satisfying.”
“Rather more satisfying if both parties want it and they’re in love.” He pushed his empty plate away. “I’ve never done anything like that in my life,” he said, and he looked a bit disgusted.
“Are you . . . angry?”
“Listen. . . you were curious, which is normal. But if a man spent all his time paying money for that, I’d say there was something radically wrong with him. There are better ways of fulfilling oneself as a sexual being, and of spending one’s guilders.”
“Yes. I’d already worked that out.”
“Good.”
“Like this food, the girl was Indonesian.”
He sighed. “A poverty-stricken immigrant, and because of economic distress . . . You know, the whole history of the world is about men demeaning women. Sir Matthew Hale, who was the Lord Chief Justice in the seventeenth century, said it was impossible for a man who raped his wife to be guilty of that crime, because—quote—‘by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract’. In other words, he believed a man can do what he wants with his wife and she has no say in the matter. Deplorable. Women, Michael, are not objects to be used.”
I felt uncomfortable, and I had no answer, as so often with what he said. I almost resented the fact that he ran verbal rings round me with such ease. I decided to change the subject, and asked “What did Mum feel . . .
when you left her?”
“Not a used object, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“No. No, I wasn’t . . . I was just interested.”
He lit a cigarette, helped himself (but not me) to more wine, and said “You’re entitled to know, and I’m surprised Nora hasn’t told you. I didn’t leave her, in the way those brutal little words always suggest when they’re uttered by ignorant people. ‘She ran off with another man.’ ‘He walked out on her.’ As if the breakup of any relationship is as simple as walking out of a door! Our problem . . . my problem, that of being married and gay . . . it wasn’t something we could reach a compromise about. Though we did a lot of talking at the time . . . for weeks on end; I was searching for a whole variety of possible solutions that would not destroy the marriage. She was adamant that I should go. I didn’t want to; it was the last thing I wanted! But she was right. I saw that eventually.”
“Was there anybody else involved?”
“You mean did I have a lover? No.”
“Why was Mum so adamant?”
“She did what she did believing it was the best thing for her and you. She was very much motivated by observing other marriages in which the husband and wife stayed together for the sake of the children, even though there was nothing left of love or affection between the two adults. She thought it was dreadful for kids to be brought up in such an atmosphere, and I agree with her. She was wrong, however, to see me as a contaminating influence . . . absurd!”
“None of this makes any difference,” I said, “to the fact that I’ve missed out.”
“Do you think,” he asked, “you’d have been a better person—a happier, more fulfilled person—if I’d been there all the time?”
“I can’t possibly know the answer to that! Can I?” He refused to be deflected from this line of questioning, however, and said “What do you feel it has done to you?”
I thought about that for a while, then said “A friend of mine at school summed me up, not long ago, as intelligent, inquisitive, full of life—but cold. I didn’t have much feeling. We were talking about the fact that I’ve never fallen in love, and that he had.”
His eyes widened. “In love?”
“I’m sixteen! Why not?”
“Good Lord, it isn’t something that happens to everybody at the same age! It isn’t like doing ‘O’ levels! There really isn’t a law that says because you’re thirteen, or twenty, or fifty-seven, you’ve got to have done X or Y. It makes me angry—all those competitive parents turning their kids into more little competitors! ‘My Willie could walk at ten months.’ ‘Samantha was potty-trained at nine months.’ ” I laughed; he was good at putting on ludicrous voices. “ ‘Stephen began piano lessons at three!’ And so on. Does the kids untold harm.”
“In what way?”
“They learn to think life is one great big race to the top. So they spend all their years kicking other people aside instead of forming real friendships and good relationships and healthy marriages. Don’t be someone like that, Mike.”
I was afraid I already was. I tried to turn the conversation back to a question I’d asked but which he hadn’t answered. “What did Mum feel when you left?” The waiter brought the bill, and Dad studied it, frowning. “The end of the world,” he said. “I don’t know if she’s ever got over it. I have. Yes . . . it’s much easier to be the one who departs than the one who stays, though at the time I thought the opposite. Events proved otherwise.”
“Now you're the one who stays.”
He finished his coffee, and counted his guilders. “You’re referring to Adrian?”
“Yes. And I think . . . you’ll get over it more easily than Mum did.”
“You know what your trouble is?” he said. “You’re too damned smart.”
“You’re still sleeping badly.”
“How do you know?”
“I hear you.” We shared a bedroom at the hotel, and every night this week he had woken in the small hours, hunted in the dark for a book to read, then crept downstairs. At dawn I would hear him return. He never disturbed me so much that I couldn’t get back to sleep, and on the whole I enjoyed being in the same room with him. It was intimate, in a pleasant kind of way, as if he didn’t object to what we saw of each other—both of us wandering around in the nude, for instance. Parents— Mum and my aunt were typical examples—always seem to hide themselves from their children, hide what they really think or feel, or their bodies; how much they earn, or the fact that Grandpa was a penniless photographer, which means you end up not wanting to be close to them, to confide in them. Dad was an extraordinary exception.
“The whole thing hasn’t properly hit me yet,” he said, as we left the restaurant. “Your visit, these few days here. . . they’re helping to postpone looking at it all squarely in the eye. I won’t know what Adrian’s absence does to me until you’ve gone home to Alresford. As for now . . . well, I’ve sometimes sat in that hotel lounge not seeing the words on the page I’m reading. When I come back to bed, it’s very reassuring to observe your sweet innocent face on the pillow.” “Sweet innocent face! Huh!”
“I say to myself ‘that’s my son!’ With a . . .a . . a sense of joy, almost. And I think . . . now you’ll decide, probably with a lot of truth, that I’m indulging in self-justification . . . I think being a father isn’t necessarily having to be physically present the whole time, making model aeroplanes or doing your maths homework, not at your age. It’s a feeling. A kind of love.”
Being a son, too, was a kind of love. That friend who’d told me I was cold was wrong. I could feel love, too. “Thank you,” I said, “for talking like this . . . and for letting me talk.”
He grinned, then looked away from me, suddenly shy and embarrassed. “Shall we go back to the hotel? There’s a chess set in the lounge. Do you play?”
“For my school, as it so happens.”
“We’ll see if your ability at chess is better than your skill on the tennis court.”
It was. I beat him twice, and the third game ended in stalemate.
The remainder of the week passed all too quickly. I spent much of it wandering, and thought I should never tire of Amsterdam’s street life. I went on a conducted tour of the royal palace, but that was my only organized piece of culture. Dad visited the sauna several times, bought lots of books, and found new restaurants to eat in. Some days we spent together; we went on a train ride to Delft one afternon and saw the tombs of the Dutch royal family—very unfussy and simple I thought, and though the only British royal tomb I’d seen was equally unfussy (William the Second’s black sarcophagus in Winchester Cathedral) I imagined some of our monarchs were fitted out in rather more lavish splendour than Queen Wilhelmina in Delft. I liked the train journey: it was a pleasant surprise to find the Dutch used their railways more than we did in England; the platforms were crowded, and the trains frequent. I bought a postcard of Delft Station and sent it to Nic.
On Friday it was good bye; the bus journey to Schiphol Airport, a long walk round the duty-free shop—“the biggest and best in the world,” Dad said, as he stocked up on incredibly cheap gin and cigarettes, and a camera for me—then the renewed terrors of the plane taking off, the brief flight, and a dull, drizzly London.
“I have to go home tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t want to.”
“Why do you have to?” Dad asked. “Some important date?”
“No.”
“Stop another week. Stop as long as you like.”
“But what would Mum say about that?”
“You’ll have to ring and get permission.”
“Hmmm.”
“I’m not going to do it for you.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“We could improve your tennis. And my chess. You can swim, or see your girlfriend while I try to bang out a few paragraphs on the typewriter. We could go to another concert . . . though on second thoughts I’d rather steer clear of the Winter Gardens. Drive to Poole or Salisbury or the Ne
w Forest, as I suggested once before and we never did. Whatever you want.”
“I’ll ring her.”
When we opened the front door, Dad said immediately “Someone’s been in here.” Burglars? It all looked quite normal to me, but I didn’t know the house as well as he did; if an object had been moved or was missing, he’d realize at once. On the kitchen table was a letter. “Adrian,” he said, picking it up. “You make your phone call.”
Mum was not pleased when she heard my request. “I thought this would happen,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let you go down there in the first place.” “Why?” I said, hotly. “He’s my father and I have a right to see him!”
“He has too much charm. Too much influence.”
“You’ve nothing whatever to worry about if you’re imagining he could influence me into being homosexual!”
There was a very silent silence, as if the fearful word itself had killed her stone dead. “How much longer do you intend to stay?” she asked, faintly.
“Another week.”
“Well. . . that’s it then, a week and no more. I want you back here next Friday afternoon. I . . . hope, Michael, I’ll find the same person who left here a fortnight ago.”
“I haven’t been corrupted or depraved. Not even mildly shocked . . . I’ve been having a nice time, and I’d like it to go on for a bit. We’ve . . . just returned from a few days in Holland.”
“Holland! you mean . . . Holland! Whatever were you doing there?”
