Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  My remaining visits to Il Ghibli before he was finally hospitalised were marked with that haunted fortitude that Jayjay, with his loathing of the mawkish, managed to infuse into the terminal scene. I can see him now, lying in his bed, very gaunt and with his eyes closed, listening to a matronly friend of Marcella’s urging him that he had only to say the word and she would send a priest straight round: ‘not the usual tronnecone but a good man with no cant to him. It’s never too early for the sacraments.’ Jayjay elected not to betray by the flicker of an eyelid that he had heard but as soon as the door had closed behind her he snapped both eyes open and said ‘There are no sacraments, there are only contracts. And I’ve never signed. Perhaps you’d better tell her that, James.’ It was reassuring that even when he was waning fast the secular was still dancing doggedly within him.

  The last memory I have of him in that house is of coming into his bedroom and finding Marcella’s boy Dario sitting on his bed, laughing. Heaven knows what remains of strength it required for Jayjay to be propped up on his pillows, talking animatedly to him while wearing Dario’s bright orange baseball cap. It was many sizes too small for him and its bill jutted up at the raftered ceiling with jaunty defiance while in its shadow the dinosaur-chick eyes sparkled with flirtatious energy. Perhaps death in its camouflage of children’s clothing was not wholly disagreeable.

  15

  I suppose I don’t regret the tone with which this book opens quite enough to modify it. After all, it duly reflects the change in a relationship that had begun with a polite conversation in a Co-op and developed into that invasive intimacy which takes the place of friendship between biographer and subject. By the end the brittle, even harsh, jocularity between us had become a game: a defence against too obvious a display of affection and concern, as well as for me a way of defusing Jayjay’s undoubted ability to irritate me. How often had he pounced at an unguarded moment of mine when I let slip an unwonted sentimentality, and I had bided my time before being able to retaliate! And then at the end: how was I to have guessed the instant his mortal darkening had had its onset? Unknowing that this was to be the deathbed scene, we took our last leave of each other in Arezzo hospital through the tears of a coughing fit, my stupid bouquet of glandular great blooms no longer a sharp little jab at his snobbishness but the blunt instrument of his demise. Maybe.

  Seven months passed. Something about today’s January scud past the window (crinkled brown oak leaves driven horizontally by a freezing tramontana) makes it easier to admit to having gone back to Jayjay’s grave a scant fortnight after his funeral last year. Is how we visit a friend’s grave the only permissible way nowadays of visualising ourselves buried? Of allowing that this last tableau of a one and only existence ought to express something of private weight? I suspect this ancient urge is becoming a matter for stealth, almost for shame, in Protestant England.

  There had been a surprising attendance at the funeral service in Montecchio, given that it was a May morning of such aching beauty that to waste it on church and death seemed downright perverse. Yet the turnout showed that although Jayjay had been a foreigner with no family of his own he was well loved in the locality. According to everyone I spoke to he had been a gentiluomo in a world where the type is an increasing rarity. Most remarked on his warmth and sunniness, and maybe it was this quality that made the weather less inappropriate after all. Claudio and Marcella were there, of course, together with Dario and his two sisters. I would have thought that at not quite twelve the boy could easily have begged off, but according to his mother he had insisted on going. Of us all it was Dario who showed the most signs of grief, and he was now and then overcome with fits of the weeping that nearly exhausts itself for a minute’s respite until it discovers with a fresh shock the permanent reality of loss. I knew very well that out of the mourners that day it was Dario’s presence that would most have touched Jayjay, the one he would have valued above all.

  I am not quite sure what made me visit his grave a couple of weeks afterwards. For all that the funeral service was decently conducted there had been a certain perfunctoriness about the proceedings, as so often these days when basically secular people find themselves obliged to attend a religious rite. They are at once impatient, over-solemn and lost; and sensing their restiveness the priest becomes anxious to hurry things along. And so it went with Jayjay. No grand Latin cadences with their two thousand years of echoes, of course – not since Vatican II and Roncalli’s policy of aggiornamento, of being up-to-date. My friend was hustled into the earth with a brisk rattle of Italian, the priest on autopilot.

  What did it matter, you ask, seeing that Jayjay and I were both godless? But it had less to do with God than with the having-been-human, with the shortly-to-cease. Something was left unsatisfied. The peculiar dignity he had possessed, sitting at the table on Il Ghibli’s terrace and talking to the smoke pouring up from Claudio’s prunings or else addressing the summit of Sant’ Egidio – this demanded better acknowledgement now he was himself less than smoke. No doubt it would have been even worse had we lived in Britain. He once remarked that the land that had given both of us birth and which until so recently had prided itself on the restrained gravity of its great public obsequies could no longer understand or bear the idea of dignity, mistaking it for pompousness or else for depression, something to be either mocked or counselled away. So I duly found myself there on a blue May afternoon, an atheist foreigner in the cemetery at Montecchio standing by the grave of another atheist foreigner. I had chosen the moment with some thought. At two o’clock in the afternoon the Montecchese would still be chatting in their kitchens or dozing. I would have the place to myself. No-one would come to replace flowers or votive candles for at least another two hours.

  Jayjay’s new stone was glaring brash and nude. At that moment a Red Admiral alighted on it, hooked its feet into the incised ‘Jebb’, let the hot sunshine fall on its enamelled wings and began stropping its antennae. Jayjay would have liked that, too. There were several early butterflies around, attracted by the sprays of fresh flowers tucked into the rows of marble niches. From behind these flowers peered oval photographs of the dear departed, smiling as though still claiming the right to be undead. To my intense surprise I began hearing in my head passages from the Order for the Burial of the Dead from the 1662 English Prayer Book. Stuff heard and learned in childhood, of course, back in the days before well-meaning philistines had bowdlerised the Church’s central texts: part of my generation’s cultural heritage, a generation that was probably the last to have grown up with it and its robust cadences as part of their basic education. (I recalled Jayjay lamenting this once. ‘Never mind the bloody meaning,’ he had said. ‘It’s the sound that matters. If you can make something sound weighty and beautiful, it becomes so.’ At that moment I’d felt close to him.) And now here I was beside his grave, hearing phrases I had scarcely thought about in thirty years as if reading them from tablets. The preening butterfly glowed and sopped up the sun. The words took on a magnificence divorced from mere meaning. It was the measured sonorousness of spells, where the careful sequence of sound and cadence conjures solemnity until the day stands still and the voice becomes small and the awesome strangeness of living and dying bulks huge in the air all around. Nothing else exists. It eclipses castles and cypresses and blue horizons. It freezes the snake of dusty road on the distant valley floor with its trembling flare of sunlight off a car’s chrome or windscreen. It silences the doves in their spring rut. Gradually meaning distils back out of sounds. This meaning has no connection with modern reassurance. It brushes aside sympathy and counselling. There is no truck with the consolations of ghosts or cryogenics. The meaning is flinty, uncomfortable. The sonorities are not after all a gorgeous diversion. They are a stern seventeenth-century confrontation with the irreducible. You are scarcely more alive than him you mourn, they say. He is now permanent, you are still temporary. You are here by the skin of your teeth, by the grace of God. You have no rights, you have only your wro
ngs. Prepare now to follow, because if you can stop your silly capering for a moment you will perceive there is no alternative and certainly nothing of greater importance. (Bury your head in your hands. Feel the skull, how it yearns to emerge.)

  Beware, I tell myself with a start. Don’t become too carried away by all this eschatology, these solemnities. You should heed Jayjay’s own warning which he once expressed in his usual forceful manner: ‘Just remember, behind all dignity something ignominious is forever capering, flashing its balls.’ Very well, then, I will think more about my friend than about his being dead. I will ponder certain aspects of his character that I still need to clarify, in particular the two words he so often used to describe himself: impostor and lover. In his case they are intricately connected. At one level, of course, there was nothing of the impostor about Jayjay, who was at all times every inch himself. He knew very well who he was. Even when mischievously affecting a role he was still the same person using the same old wit and charm to try on the part for size. I admit his repeated assertion of being an impostor used to irritate me if only (as I said earlier) because it had the same effect as the Cretan asserting that all Cretans were liars. Finally, though, he was not claiming to be an impostor in order to deceive other people. It was not to do with deception but with concealment. He did it to hide himself, to dissemble, and it had congealed into a lifetime’s habit. What he had concealed almost until the end, even from his own biographer, was of course the true nature of his love. (Neither pathetic nor predatory, he had cheerfully observed of himself not long before he died: ‘Instead of being a raving sociopath I am merely a harmless pervert with charming manners. That’s the advantage of a decent upbringing.’) Oh how I miss that sardonic accuracy!

  And suddenly, standing there in the little camposanto, I am struck belatedly with one of those insights whose sheer force guarantees their correctness. I had just been writing up the account of Jayjay’s death in Arezzo hospital and had duly noted down the last words I ever heard him speak. In the midst of racking coughs he had seemed to gesture weakly at his nurse with an empty beaker, croaking ‘Fill it. Oh, fill it!’ Yet he had spoken in English, a language the bilingual Jayjay would never have used to an Italian nurse, especially one from whom he urgently needed something. I now had no doubt that my friend’s last thought and cry had been for Philip, for the real but imaginary lover who had looked at a notice board one long-lost autumn day and who in some sense had been living with him ever since.

  The beloveds who elude us; the beloveds who were, and are not; the beloveds who never were. What are these else but great works of the imagination, a lifetime’s solid stonework? We build them like lighthouses on our eroding headlands: solid, reassuring, futile, sending out the same message over and over in all weathers to which no answer comes or is any longer expected. Sometimes they even coexist with flesh-and-blood partners, standing behind and occasionally outshining them until the ordinarily loved are reduced to mere silhouettes. That secret love of Jayjay’s which endured for almost seventy years and went unknown to all but him: what was it? A possible answer came to me one afternoon while idly watching the bees fly back from the fields of sunflowers far below. They were labouring up from a storm zone into bright sunlight. Behind them in the distance the fields they had left were being thrashed by dark-grey columns of rain under a purple sky and a dilute rainbow was struggling to emerge. It reminded me banally of how Wordsworth’s heart had famously leapt up when as a child he beheld a rainbow, and he had trusted it would still leap when he was old. At once I wondered if that was not exactly what Jayjay had meant when he spoke of Philip’s bolt of lightning and the ‘poetry’ of his enduring presence it had sparked in him. Once the rainbow had done its work Wordsworth need never have seen another. Thereafter it suffused every landscape he surveyed. Likewise, once Jayjay had bidden farewell to Philip on a ship’s deck in Suez the boy might as well have died. Whatever had flashed so marvellously in him had gone on shining for Jayjay with the lingering voltage of the original coup de foudre.

  What was this if not a case of the commonplace transfigured? We have entered the terrain of burning bushes. Those who have never known a similar angel alight and scald a lifetime’s sensibility should hold their tongue. In their easy philistinism they cry, ‘A rainbow? How limp! How conventional!’ or ‘A boy? How creepy!’, seeing only the outward guise in which an arrested instant chooses to robe itself. Rainbows and boys are simply items on the endless list of agents which for somebody somewhere have been for a heart-stopping moment inhabited by a power not their own. The transcendence blazed briefly and was gone without ever leaving the mind, and thereafter everything appeared differently lit, fractionally duller of shade. And those who suffer this can do nothing but look back as Wordsworth and Jayjay did with the sad certainty that it will never again happen with such intensity. Angels come but once in a single guise. Their residues are ruin and devotion and sometimes poetry of varying merit. Nothing for it but to make do.

  Maybe poets can cope with it better. Maybe they can use their skill to spread scented fragments of that original vision throughout a lifetime’s work as sparingly as a cook shaves a truffle. But when it happens to the life of the affections it leaves behind the ashes of dissatisfaction. The ghost can never be completely exorcised. Surely this was why Berlioz had to track down Estelle, his stella montis, when she was fifty-one, and also why Jayjay put private detectives on to tracing Philip when he, too, was in his mid-fifties. It was as if by forcibly dressing their obsessions in the ageing flesh of physical reality they might finally relegate them to the past. But in Jayjay’s case, at least, it didn’t work. Maybe for those struck young there never can be complete recovery, and a life grows around its wound like an oak around a lightning-sear. In that sense it was not an old man they had screwed up in Jayjay’s Italian coffin but an adolescent who had lately been roaming the streets of the pre-war Eltham he so vividly recalled. It must have been this that made it seem as though Jayjay, no matter his wanderings, had always been concentrated on his sixteenth year. By contrast I felt my own lifetime spread thinly and ineffectually over the entire planet.

  Yet to describe him as scarred but stoical is too sentimental. Jayjay’s was, after all, only one more of the countless ways of being briefly alive, and my memories are overwhelmingly of a man who turned things to advantage and contrived to live with energy and gusto. He may never have loved certain people as they would have wished, and the one person may never have returned his devotion, but these are commonplaces of human existence. Other pleasures still extend on all sides like branches heavy with summer fruit, and these Jayjay had abundantly plucked.

  From time to time I still kick myself for not having guessed the true nature of the man’s secret, for having been so beguiled by my own ghosts. Not failed derring-do, then, but love. He had as good as told me when he recounted the story of Captain W. E. Johns’s ‘secret love’ (Jayjay’s own words) for the lifelong partner to whom he was not married. At the time, of course, I was naively thinking in terms of a woman: a failed marriage about which Jayjay would tell me in due course. Yet with hindsight his inclinations had been obvious from the beginning. The only physical presences he ever described with any sort of precision or tenderness were those of boys. This was true even of the sex scenes he voyeuristically watched or took part in. Yet I had missed these things and tell myself most others would as well. Too straight? Too stupid? As Jayjay astutely knew, it was enough to scatter women with erotic promise about the narrative and no-one would look any further. I am sure he took a malicious pleasure in watching me painstakingly throwing myself off the scent time and time again. Nor can I take much reassurance from a farther reflection. If it was not on account of my war experience that he had felt kinship with me, what exactly was it that made him say I was the only possible writer he could have worked with? Frère or semblable?

  Well. Maybe a biographer’s summing-up, no matter how inept, acts for him like some form of exorcism. I have begun to feel
freer of my former subject. At least now I can return to my own life. I can go back to my Asian shore and pursue my investigations there without the sense of having left a project unfinished, of time running out. But it is a scant consolation that it took the death of my friend to make this possible. I was (and am) surprised that writing Jayjay’s life, a literary chore that had started so casually in Castiglion Fiorentino’s Co-op, should have turned out to be no chore at all but an experience that constantly made me stop in the middle of everyday tasks and reflect. Such moments occurred while brushing my teeth or as I watched my bees at the end of their gallant flight paths wearily batting the air currents, laden with nectar, coming home. Our true affections, inscrutably hidden away, work and work, moved by an ordering and conventions not ours, responding as though to smells and sounds and light which arrive at an oblique angle to those of common day. It is no use hoping these uncommon loves will obey proprieties, still less the law. Outside, all sorts of miserable weathers may prevail. Inside, there is the slow build-up of a kind of sweetness. This, according to Jayjay, is part of the art. It is vital to say little and to know how little there is to say. Explanations are for those who think it matters to explain things. The only recourse is to live the one life, scrupulously dissembled, to which greater freedom accrues the more constrained it becomes. I realised that failed fathers, too, may live by this maxim.