As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  “Well, it’s this. I don’t believe I can ever free myself now from the importance of pure physical sex, even with someone I love as much as you, because you taught me that importance at such an absolutely vital moment of my life. If you hadn’t done so, I should have gone on to be a dried-up, repressed old bachelor, but as it is, I can’t . . .”

  “You can’t have it off with someone of twenty-five. I think I can take that part as read now.”

  “All right. Make it difficult for me to say. Anyway, with anyone else but you, it would be twenty-two. Only you look so young.”

  Leslie had reached for one of the many little bottles, and said, “Sage. Now chop an onion . . . Perhaps I should be going to witch doctors, not you. ‘Oh Mr. Doctor, whatever shall I do? My boyfriend won’t fuck me, ’cos I don’t look twenty-two.’ ” And he had added, “I saved you from spending your life masturbating—oh, mentally, if you prefer—on your father’s photograph. All right, so he got killed at Arnhem. That doesn’t make him the ideal lover for an intelligent handsome son. Mental necrophilia, ugh! And as for that bloody housemaster horror, who told you that love between men was a fine ideal so long as it remained ideal . . . All public schools ought to be netted then gassed like vermin. And I save you from all that filth and now you throw my five-o’clock shadow in my face. All right, yes. So I am bitter. Go and see all these precious doctors. It’s the sort of goofy idea that Zoe would recommend.”

  As he remembered the little domestic melodrama, he felt a sudden surge of anger. Perhaps, as his pick-ups sometimes said, he asked to be conned. All Leslie’s talk about the free sex life of the working class. Wasn’t it like Perry on his Mother’s pluck, just a confidence trick that the Grants put over the more guilty middle class, over himself and Zoe? For a moment, the thought that the whole of his happy years with Leslie had been only a superior confidence trick, in which he had been left holding the forged five-pound note, made him tremble with anger. He pushed his long legs against the wall opposite to relieve the tension. Only the costive sweet expression upon her majesty’s face broke through his sense of murderous anger with all life—with Truefitt, his housemaster, with Leslie, with Perry, with Zoe, with Sir Alec, with Nelson Hart, with Alexandra, with the witch doctors, with Erroll, even with Mrs. E.—scene by scene they had acted out their parts with him as stooge, turning him into a sterile mutant. But there was something about the very iciness of Queen Mary’s gracious smile, the ramrod discipline of her carriage that said to him “and what do you think they made of me? and did I complain?” Drawing in his legs, relaxing his muscles and his anger, he said aloud, “All right. As one queen to another. No self-pity.” It was the sort of joke that Leslie had taught him to make, but he did not laugh, for he never found that he made jokes from a sense of pleasure.

  And then he cupped his face in his hands with an access of self-disgust: to start to blame Leslie who had given him his happiest, most fruitful years, had done everything that he could to prolong the union (massages, casual clothes, hair removers), and, then, when it was clear that nothing could make it work, had so reasonably gone off with Martin and taken all the blame. Leslie who had been so unfairly blamed by everyone, by Zoe, even, Zoe, the guardian angel of their homosexual marriage. For although it was absurd to talk as Leslie had of Zoe being the cause of his consulting doctors, she had been the occasion for his final decision. He remembered St. James’s Park, five years ago, a summer afternoon, before them the lake and the island. What he and Zoe were watching on this warm summer afternoon amid the throng of foreign tourists, were the wild-fowl, jostling and swarming for the visitors’ offerings of bread.

  He must have been boring her to death. No, others would have been bored. But the wonderful thing he had found with Zoe was that he could talk ramblingly without its seeming foolish.

  “And so, you see, the control of genetic diversity in cultivated species is only a human ordering parallel to the less strictly controlled, more wasteful selection occurring in wild species,” he had told her.

  And she had come back, as always, fiercely. But all their talk was a half-accepted parody which only his years with Leslie could have allowed him to accept as intellectually respectable.

  “Only! But that’s just what we’re arguing about. You put in that ‘only’ to annoy. In fact, all your kindly explanations of your work are just done to help while the afternoon away. Dear Hamo! So they should be. And so are my explanations of what we do at the clinic and all the rest of it. Frivolous use of the serious. To me it’s the essence of any real friendship. You can’t live on separate diets of serious emotions and jokes all the time like Perry and Leslie do. Oh, look at those mandarin drakes’ wing feathers, they go through the water like, what do you call those things? Portuguese men-of-war. Or shark’s fins.”

  “How do you know they’re called mandarin?”

  “Oh, I’ve always known. Idle rentier women are like magpies. They collect any random fact in sight. Anyway you couldn’t do without names for the plants you work on. I’ve got nothing but idle vision, but at least I must name what I see. Especially if it’s beautiful like the mandarin duck. But, as I was saying, idle interchange is the only foundation for a civilized friendship. Seriousness I like to leave for action—like your work. Oh, look at the barnacle geese honking away to make a passage through the ducks to get at the bread. The whole thing’s just like I imagine some great naval base—Portsmouth, perhaps. Like you’d see it from the air. Ships steaming off in all directions and then stopping for no reason whatsoever. The tufted ducks popping up like submarines just for the hell of it. But then I can’t imagine any armed forces having any sense in their activities . . .”

  “Not a very happy parallel for the pacifist’s case. All the activities of these birds can be explained, no doubt, on the basis of territoriality, pecking order and other well-observed phenomena.”

  “Oh, evolution! Well, all I can say is just look at that pelican. Why on earth does a bird like that need a beak like an excavator?”

  “I think you’re confusing the beak with the pouch.”

  “Yes, of course I am. I shall confuse everything while we go on talking just to avoid speaking of what’s in our minds. What is happening between you and Leslie? Going off like that to Cannes or some terrible place with that tat man, and down every week-end at his gracious Thames-side residence. Has he gone mad? You two were a kind of advertisement to show how it could be made to work. To treat you like that, Hamo. I can’t forgive it. Why don’t you do something about it? Make him jealous. You’re handsome enough, Heaven knows.”

  “You shouldn’t blame Leslie. I am to blame.”

  “What do you mean, you’re to blame? Oh, you mean something physical. Well what a pair of babes you are. You must go and see your doctor. They can get these things right in a second these days. Anyway that doesn’t excuse Leslie.” And, of course, he thought, savouring a little the hardness of the wooden seat against his thighs as a well-merited punishment, he’d never had the courage to tell her—perhaps if she hadn’t been, for all her goodness and kindness, a rentier woman, perhaps if their conversation had not been only a frivolous civilized passing of time, perhaps if she had not been a woman . . . But then what man would have had time to listen? There it was, anyway, he’d left Leslie to carry the can.

  But he had gone to the doctors—an endless series of them—although not with the question she had supposed him to be asking. Leslie had been very unwilling: “Spending valuable time and a fortune of money just to learn that you once saw your father’s hairy thighs straddling your mother’s smooth belly, and heard her call out, ‘No, Algernon, no, no, no,’ and then to be told that’s why you can’t take my hoary old legs. I’d rather spend the money on an electric waste disposer.” And he had made him promise, whatever else, not to engage in a long analysis, whether Jungian, Freudian (orthodox or unorthodox) or any other. He’d agreed, because, like Leslie, in his deep convictions he thought the problem insoluble. But it was no less than his lif
e; he was a scientist committed to rational examination of phenomena; as a specialist, he knew how all too often the layman, in his woeful ignorance, underestimated what the sciences could perform. He owed it to Leslie, and God knew to himself, not to avoid sheer embarrassment. So he had gone to the doctor. But now, when he thought of all the trials by witchcraft he had undergone, his cheeks burned with shame.

  First, at least, he had kept some scientific respectability. He had seen in turn a biochemical physiologist, then an endocrinologist. But, correctly, they had mocked him. “Is it possible, Mr. Langmuir, by a series of injections to raise the age of the object of your desires to thirty years? The answer is no. We don’t have that kind of possibility. Progress endocrinology offers to our suffering age, magic it does not.” The man had been an American.

  Then the witchcraft had grown more intense. Sitting before desks, plugged into electric circuits, reclining on couches, gazing at points of light (Mr. Langmuir, you are getting sleepy. Oh so sleepy. Soon you will be asleep, cared for, all your troubles smoothed away. You are in strong arms, Mr. Langmuir, how peaceful you feel with those strong muscles to crush you, what strength in the black hair on those arms, you are sleeping now as happy as a little child, sleeping with a grown man . . .). It was Leslie who had brought it all to an end. He could look back now and tell the exact moment when Leslie had felt that they had both suffered enough humiliation.

  It was the day when he had returned with that ridiculous pile of books to verify Dr. Laibach-Troppau’s “helpful quotations”. All the lines of Leslie’s face, as he had looked the titles over, had been drooping with misery to read this vague humanistic muddle—translations of the poems of Goethe and of August von Platen, the Loeb translation of the Greek Anthology, Gide’s Corydon, Mann’s Death in Venice. And on top of the pile of books, a membership card for the Y.M.C.A. Leslie tore up the card and threw the pieces into the waste-paper basket. He took the books from the room, and, from the window, Hamo saw him descend into the basement area and stuff them into the dust-bin. Then he came back up into the room and, approaching Hamo from behind, he bent over and kissed him on the forehead. “Hamo Langmuir doesn’t like chicken,” he said. A week later he had left permanently for Martin Abdy’s.

  The cost to himself had, in the first months, been an almost unbearable loneliness, and had assumed, above all, the form of unassuageable lust. Knowing nothing of “picking-up”, he had soon been the lighter of a good deal of cash, of clothes and a valuable microscope. But once again, when Leslie knew of this, he had come to his assistance. It was Martin, in fact, who, having an interest in some clubs (he had interests everywhere), knew of the chain of desirable young men which had ended in Brian—and all of high physical excellence, for as Leslie said, “At least you can pay me the compliment of keeping up your standards.” And not one, until Brian, more than anonymous, wishing to be more. They left no trace upon him, and, to the relief of his conscience, he left no trace upon them.

  “No, y’know, I don’t notice like. I mean it was quite a bit of a giggle once. I went back with this guy . . . I didn’t even remember the house, let alone the guy himself. And then he had this sort of mole. It was on his left leg. And it all came back to me. I don’t think he knew. Well, it’s natural, isn’t it? I mean, you know . . . like you’ve got other things to think about.”

  “Well, my friend makes very good money, you see. And as soon as I’ve finished the apprenticeship, I shall start in at Yvette’s too. The tips alone are fab. Well, I mean with these rich bitches. I shall give up the game then. But we’re very extravagant really. Entertain a lot, you know, people in for drinks. And my friend likes everything just so. And it doesn’t seem fair if I don’t contribute. But I try not to notice the clients. Well, they’re not of interest to me anyway. I mean what you do and that wouldn’t appeal to me really, would it?”

  “I’ve got this chick I go out with. And I was talking with her one night and I started on about this pop-group guy I’d been with. She properly let me have it. ‘I don’t mind you going with them,’ she said, ‘especially if they pay good, but I don’t think you ought to let it be personal.’ I got thinking about what she said, and well, you know, I saw what she meant. So I never give any thought to them. It’s just a business deal. Though, mind you, I always do my part as well as I can. But I mean when we was coming across the street here, if you was to have been knocked down by a lorry, that wouldn’t have concerned me, would it?”

  As a result, until Brian, some of his best scientific work had been carried through. Catching a glimpse of his sad expression reflected in the glass of Queen Mary’s portrait, he felt that a little self-mockery might not come amiss. Preening his moustache, he said aloud, with an attempt at self-caricature, “Yes, I can safely say that my working hypothesis, which seemed so shaky, has stood up to such evidential testing as, given the imprecise data of personal relationships, it proved possible to set up.” Splendidly, in fact, until Brian thought he’d got clap; then followed the youth’s real terror of seeing the doctor, of how to explain, of whether such an explanation would inevitably mean trouble with the police, and so on. Leslie, on the telephone, had soon allayed these alarms. Martin knew exactly the right specialist. And so, still shamefacedly, he had accompanied the frightened Brian; only to learn that it was a false alarm. But there was no escaping now the flood of welled-up gratitude and sentiment, thickening to syrupy self-pity, that had been released from Brian’s loneliness. The emergence, in short, of a personality, and the beginning consequently of his own impotence.

  Feeling a sharp cramp in his left thigh he stretched his leg only to sense a muscle in his calf seizing up. In this position, however he moved, he would be more closely knotted. The seat, this room, this house, this country, all were a box too small in which to set things right. He rose and left the box. The trial was over. The charged man was released, but placed on probation for the rest of his life. As always, taking to the lavatory barricades, which he had done from boyhood whenever hostile forces seemed to be closing in, had helped to renew his strength. As always, too, at the end of this detailed review of his reasoned defence, it was the seemingly irrelevant thought which proved the most valuable: personal relationships such as those with Perry and Zoe (last hangovers from the heady spree of his days with Leslie) were incompatible with his regime; as to Alexandra, it would be more fitting for him (who had neither advice to give nor base to offer it from) to send her his paltry cheques by post with an expression of good wishes, and thus to leave her free.

  He urinated, then pulled the chain. Reminded of a joke of Leslie’s, he laughed aloud, as very seldom even in company. “The sound of Hamo’s think-tank emptying,” Leslie had explained once to friends. As his laugh echoed away in the small room, the joke seemed a desolate whimsy. It needed, as people said, the proper setting. As for the awful Dr. Laibach-Troppau (awful? intellectually disreputable—well, what can be more awful?), he had said, “Go East”; and now he was about to do just that, although by the roundabout Western route through time’s barrier. Who knew what unknown, what fruitful cultivars he might find there in that primitive peasant economy? Beauty, at any rate, the perfect form, where religion, diet, climate, language were all impenetrably alien, would stand alone, anonymous, unspoiled by muddying claims of human intimacy.

  He had promised Leslie, too, that he would take every opportunity, follow every clue that might lead to perfect enjoyment on this trip. “You’re too choosey,” Leslie had said, “all this anti-gay thing of yours.” “Well, I don’t like homosexual company.” “Stop being so stuffy. Even the most depressing old queen may lead to something.” “Nonsense. These worlds are entirely separate.” “Not outside Europe. At least I don’t think so. Hold on a minute. Yes, Martin says it’s quite different outside Europe. Any contact may lead anywhere. Even a sailor’s hornpipe—and we know that’s your low point thing—may point the way to a college opening. So promise you’ll go up every avenue.” And he had promised. Doctor Laibach-Troppau and Les
lie!

  He closed the lavatory door with a firmness that came from a sudden elation—memory’s arts were left behind, now he would walk through the doorway of Eden into a world to feast the senses without troubling the sense—what could not be understood could be enjoyed unspoiled. Perhaps it was what that gnomic German charlatan had meant when he urged him to be bold. Meanwhile, as he grasped the knob of the drawing-room door, he faced this short interval of an already rejected human contact as an irrelevancy.

  Hamo Langmuir’s departure from the drawing-room had passed unnoticed. Five people, feeling their way into the future, manœuvring for love, for lust, for mastery, for pity, for simple recognition as human, had little time to hear the scratchings of the past that troubled Hamo’s mind. Indeed as each went into attack under the pretext of that most all-embracing human cause, the worth of Leopold Bloom (involving, of course, also that of his wife Molly, née Tweedie), their battle-cries of assault had been far too loud for anyone to hear any sound but his or her own voice. Hamo made his return, however, to a battle fully engaged, to strengths tested and probed, to alliances formed and broken, and now they could see him enough to register his irrelevance. Perry, with a gesture of his glass, referred him to an empty chair; Zoe put a finger to her lips to enjoin silence; Rodrigo drew a fold of his grey suede coat aside to let him pass, as one would for a stranger coming down the aisle of a cinema; Ned put out one hobnailed mountain-crossed-with-bovver-boot as another kind of person might claim his living-space at the same cinema; Alexandra paused in her rapid, tense speech until he was seated. Zoe held her left arm back over her shoulder and then released it in a short, sharp gesture of command, “Go on, darling,” she said, as though she were starting a hurdle race. Alexandra, indeed, took up her course with the breathless panting of one at the end of her tether.