Authors: Candia McWilliam
I watched her watch me till I was out of sight. It was eighteen hours since Hal had told me he wished for a wife. Once home, I washed up, and finished the champagne. I toasted myself in the mirror of the drawing-room; in its golden pediment a tired but friendly enough lion pulled two boisterous naked golden men in their chariot across an Arcadian landscape. ‘Cora, our complaisant wife,’ I thought, and went satisfied to bed. I looked into Hal’s room and blessed his shade as I did always when he was not there.
It is time for me to try to describe the years between my first sight of Hal and the announcement at breakfast six years after that. So far, I am aware, I have not suggested that Hal is an agreeable person. Of course, it is not necessary to be agreeable to be beloved, but I must try to convey what power it is that he has over me.
When I seek my bad boys at night, or in zones where it might as well be night, I am hunting out not so much a particular way of looking, as a certain deportment. It is not what the unaroused analytical or aesthetic eye would find beautiful; it may well have an equivalent for what is called a ‘normal’ man in flossy hair, gross breasts and a trashy lasciviousness which he would deplore in his own house, and would prefer not to see after it had served its use. I am not ashamed about this, though it is trite. There is conformism in pornography; I can see this is so between bouncy-chested girls and their leather-limbed boys on bikes. But why should husky window cleaners and big scaffolding climbers strut and swell in a way as satisfactory to me and men like me, as, no doubt, it is to their wives? Are they conscious of the connoisseurship which goes into the contemplation of their singlets, their jeans, their donkey jackets, their laced yellow boots fudgy with cement? I am not speaking of the pretty boys with their aping of workmen’s clothes. I like boys and men who would think all the foregoing words sick; intermittently, this is bringing me to admit, I like the company of people who mistrust and dislike me. I must like the tarnished-metal smell of my own fear. In a straightforward way, I like the healthy appearance of men on building sites and other places of urban endeavour; there is something too much of Socialist Realist posters in country toilers. The country men do not seem to be so inviting of the subtitling my senses give the gritty teabreaking knots of navvies in the street or over my head, calling babel to girls on hot afternoons. I am not what Tertius calls a cruising queen, in a state of constant heat. I know that there are those who see in every demolition site a seraglio, for whom a visit from the heating engineer is full with erotic promise. I simply feel, about four times a year, drawn to something which is not of the life I inhabit, which is not controllable, ordered and poised.
All I can say is that I, almost on principle, eschew most theories about this type of thing, and after it is over I must say that I feel no shame about myself at all (I have never coerced anyone, though I cannot make out my appeal for them; can it honestly be money? Once or twice I have even thought it must be something so simple as novelty or curiosity – like going on safari), no shame, as I say, and a perfect absence of complication. This absence is like grace to me. Then the complications reaccrue, I behave well, I deal with my multifarious acquaintance, I save lives and have to let them slip, I live my life with Hal.
That is, I do not live my life with Hal. He lives in his flat in Westminster and I live in my flat by the canal. Our two ménages are not a maintained fiction for the sake of propriety – they are the case. Hal and I are not lovers. Sometimes, as though it were an accident that we found ourselves together, or as though he were in a sleepy stupor, Hal will let himself loll against me. Sometimes he has let me tousle him about. Occasionally, utterly passively, Hal has allowed me to deceive myself into believing I am as much to him physically as, let us say, his own hand. No, less than that. After these unreciprocal episodes, which have too much, to my taste, of deceit and mock horseplay to them, Hal is invariably unkind to me, treating me as though I were a seamy old man having soiled an
ingénue
. He is nastier to me the more nearly he has been completely pleasured but I cannot resist. He touches me rarely, and always with a semblance of accident. He has a celibate’s seductiveness, as though his chastity went before him into rooms like a cat, treading the laps of old men, winding about the legs of young women, sitting heavy on the shoulders of women old enough to be his mother, showing its lifted tail to boys his own age. He sleeps sometimes at my house, otherwise in his own flat, where I have never been.
When I say that my life opened like a grand piano, I do mean it. Let me first describe his appearance. In the chemist’s he
was
Englishness to me, his hair in a pale lick over a face without a wrinkle. He had none of the fat rubicundity to be found in fair Englishmen. His hair was silver blond and heavy; it fell at the back of his head into a V and shaded below that into paler grey-blond feathers. At whatever angle his face was seen, it was edged with light. His skin had no soapy shine, no visible pores, but a matt down, a bloom without shine or variety of texture. Could that cover him, that surface too fine to perceive with the naked eye? I imagined that, magnified many times, the skin of this boy about whom I as yet knew nothing would reveal itself of a preternaturally orderly pattern, minutely tessellated honeycomb. Like most people who blind with their beauty, Hal looked as though he would not understand a word of what, with a constellation of similar dazzled thoughts, was turning in my head. Romantic intellectuals ascribe to the beautiful not cleverness but a wise vision. Usually what the beautiful have is . . . beauty. His features were regular and slightly flat. When men want to imply that a girl’s face would look fine beneath their own, they say ‘kittenish’: there is something inviting about very slightly mongoloid features. Hal’s eyes were blue, his lashes black with surprising blond ends; his upper lip was square and had at its left corner a flat coffee-coloured stain. He was about six feet tall and very thin with bowed thighs. He was wearing a pair of jeans, thin-skinned brown shoes, a creamy jersey and a white shirt whose collar was roughly turned up, for warmth it appeared, to support the muffler he wore, a plain pennant of clear blue tied like a stock. His jacket was old, outgrown, patched. The clothes told me that he was not in the Forces or the City; perhaps that he did not work at all; that he was a gentleman. He was stowing a navy and white spotted handkerchief in his pocket. His long legs were clothed in that pale cotton blue of old outdoor paint and salty days at the seaside. I just saw him at that high turning tide of beauty between boyhood and manhood. He had still the child’s look of self-absorption, but he moved like a swift adult, a man with much to do, all the time in the world to do it, but so much energy that each movement was compounded of force and ease.
It was he, so young he was, and so respectable-looking I, who spoke when he saw we were buying the same shaving foam; not, as I said before, myself. I lie in my memory, wishing to protect him; but he was innocent and the innocent need no defence. He said he had to collect a painting from the framer in the concealed yard behind St James’s. I had never seen this hidden part of London, so from topographical curiosity (so he thought) I accompanied him, and in return offered him those formal, rather deathly gardens behind Mount Street, with their benches donated by Americans, and ‘some lunch in Scott’s’. That ‘some’ was important; its implication of equality, that we were both simply men in need of food at an hour when food was customarily taken.
We sat at the bar and ate sandwiches and drank Guinness. Immediately, I felt we shared much. He was quick to demarcate groups. He could identify types. There were some flushed Irishmen drinking ‘more pop waiter’, all one word, for a race run that day; there were the lawyers up at the bar; there were the quiet men who sell pearly treasures over their oysters and use the restaurant as the counter of their shop; there were men in royal blue suits with clammy-lipped women eating fish in sauce and drinking pink wine.
Hal came from Dorset. Hal Darbo, he was called. He had three brothers. Their names Saxon, Norman, Roman. He was working in property. That explained the jacket, which he very properly referred to as a coat. He had to look right for selling country properties today; tomorrow it might be a suit to wear and a church to sell – ‘suitable for conversion’, as he put it, not smiling, though English was his first tongue. We finished our pudding (I had a savoury, my unassuageable Dead Sea thirst for salt made raw with love and black beer), I gave Hal my card, and I walked to the hospital singing like those inflamed men you see falling off the pavement in university towns, once Horus Professors of Arcana and now spinning drunks, the tuned brains awash. I am sure if I had been run down that day as I danced to my work, my blood would have run gold.
Hal telephoned me a week later. For a year or so, I dared not touch him, save by rationed accident. I remember each of them that year, the touches; before I had even questioned him about his private life at all, I imagined he liked girls. Most ‘older men’ protect themselves with this over their boys.
My left leg touched his right knee at
Rosenkavalier
; he was tapping his foot, or began to just as our legs touched, and the friction made me stupefied with him, so that I could see only him, not the stage at all. All brightness came from that singing wedge of warm dark to my left which contained his face. That November I touched his hair with my left hand by the timberwolves’ enclosure in the zoo; he had said he liked wolves. I replied, ‘I can hear them from my flat in the middle of the night.’ He was so guileless that he replied, ‘Well, I’d love to do that.’ When I touched his head, I looked in that trice at my hand on that silvery hair, sugared with gold. I imagined that if I took the hair in my mouth, it would diffuse like spun sugar. There was my hand, each white metacarpal with its black hairs.
And the other times of touching; in my car, at my home, after the first time I fed him there, when we reached simultaneously for the wine (he was not falsely diffident in his acceptance of hospitality), and in winter in St James’s Park when we rescued a poor frozen bird and put it in one of those boxes where they wait for the warden – ‘Who probably eats them,’ said Hal, and I was sad he should be cynical, for I felt it showed the world had perhaps already been unkind to him in some way. I remember looking out that day over the lake. The air was blue, the earth white, the lake black, clear and solid. Frozen in by her flat pink feet was one of the pelicans, droll and the more pathetic for that drollness. In the clear air you could see the targe of her eye. It was as flat as an heraldic device; were there drops of blood on her breast?
In that first year, I so longed for him that lacing my shoes became an allegory of love. At the same time, my work extended in range and variety – what some might call hubris. I found even the smallest and most faulty organs full of good omens, as I read the small entrails between the green drapes. I was full of the spiritual energy of unanswered desire.
I did not long for him at that time in the simple, direct way I longed for the passing boys. I should have hated to shock him with any touch other than paternal. I felt I was taming him, gentling him down. During that year and the next I was like a lover separated by a sea or continent from the beloved. I attempted to make myself dear to him in small daily reconstructions of the best of myself – letters, telephone calls, tangible thoughtfulness – for his pleasure. I was not constructing a false self; loving him made me good. I thought of Hal and his well-being. We were seen together only twice in that year, once by Anne, who said that he was made to be gift-wrapped and left it at that, and once, I assume, by some poodlefaker of Tertius’s, because Tertius mysteriously revealed himself to know a little about Hal and myself.
There was obviously no mistress in my life, surely Hal observed this? His set appeared to be a carefree group of young people, all having shared fun. Most had fallen into that dreary pocket of premarital cohabitation which can, I am told, appear so glittering to the young person whose alternative is fierce serial passion and a happy animal scratching of any itch. Nowadays the pram in the hall is a new erotogenic tool. Many of his friends lived already in large London houses, filling the servants’ quarters and nurseries with flowers and wine and friends. Being the children of the rich, they had proper silver and real glasses without obligation of fidelity to their sleeping partners. Hal dined out a great deal, and went to the cinema, so I did not see very much of him, unless there was a specific outing; I feel this must have been his diffidence. He may have reflected that I was a very busy man with an entirely separate life; he may have thought about the whole thing very much less than did I. At my age, of course, I could not easily be assimilated into his circle.
I decided to introduce him artfully into mine. I made him a life member of the London Library half-way through our second year (I am quite certain Hal did not think of the year thus). This was selfish, I do admit, but I felt like the older party in an arranged marriage, aware of the pending contract while the spouse-to-be plays marbles in the sun.
He does not very much care for books. I, unforgivably selfish, thought that everyone must care, very much. I had gathered from his talk that he was not very widely read, but I, again, made the mistake of referring this observation to myself, thinking that what had kept him from books was the possession of brothers, just as what had kept me from the company of other children was my books. The London Library, of which I did not become a member till rather late in my life, has always seemed to me like a continually flowering garden. I like the shady
piano nobile
and meccano walk-ways and stolen teas; I love the storage racks which you can pull out and spin flat. I like the confirmation that others think, that thoughts are being trimmed and fed and watered and that books, their compost, are tended, turned and replenished. To Hal it was dark and full of dull people sitting still. I had thought of our meeting for drinks in summer, of the gravid erotic silence of libraries and how he would emerge and see me in a new light, or, better, a new darkness.