The Boy I Love (23 page)

Adam poured the tea and Patrick saw that his hands shook a little as he handed him his cup and laughed nervously. ‘You know, I don't know your name.'

‘Patrick.'

‘Adam.' After a moment he said, ‘That what's the
A
stands for. Adam. He – the person who wrote those letters – he couldn't write my name, obviously. Well – it's
obviously
if you've read them, I suppose. Have you read them?'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Oh, don't be. Really, don't be! I don't even know why I kept them. He would have been amazed that I didn't simply burn the lot.'

‘Why didn't you?'

‘I forgot about them, to be honest.'

As if he knew how blatant his lie was he took off his glasses and polished the lenses on a corner of his shirt. He wasn't wearing a collar and his sleeves were rolled up past his elbows as though he was about to do heavy work. His fingers were ink-stained, the nails bitten to the quick. Patrick thought of Paul taking one of those childish-looking hands and pressing its palm to his mouth. He would have just arrived here, still stinking of the long journey home, the rattle of the train still in his head, fear as dogged as a shadow at his heels. He would toss his kit bag down and pull Adam into his arms and they would cling together wordlessly. Or at least Paul would be silent; there were so few words in him he could barely imagine his greeting.

Adam might dare to speak. Adam would have a mouthful of words for Paul to suppress.

Patrick picked up a biscuit and took a careful bite, expecting staleness. But the shortcake was sweet and buttery; he finished it in a couple of mouthfuls and washed it down with hot, strong tea. He felt comforted, as though he hadn't realised how hungry he'd been.

Sharply Adam said, ‘Why did you bring the letters back?'

‘They're yours.'

‘But you wanted them.'

‘They were on my conscience.'

Adam laughed shortly. Disconcerted, Patrick looked down at his teacup. He thought of the boy who wrote the letters, a sweeter, more optimistic Paul than the man he knew. He looked up at Adam, wanting to guess from his expression how much he still loved Paul, his need to know as irresistible as the urge to worry a rotten tooth.

Adam suffered his gaze only for a moment. He stood up abruptly. ‘We'll go upstairs. That's what you came for. All I can say is I'm glad you had the excuse.'

Patrick followed him up the stairs. He felt outsized, his feet too big for the narrow treads, the threadbare carpet disintegrating with each heavy step; the house seemed to shrink so that he felt he would have to bow his head as he walked through the bedroom door. He remembered how Adam's bed had seemed small as a child's and imagined it buckling beneath his weight. On the landing he stopped, his hand still grasping the stair rail; the walls were closing in on him. He saw Paul in the shell hole calmly closing Jenkins's eyes; there was blood on his fingers where they had brushed against the wound in the side of the man's head. He had wiped the blood on his tunic, casually, as though it were dust from a bookshelf. There was a fine spray of blood on his face. This had seemed ordinary, too.

Patrick sat down on the top stair. He held his head in his hands and part of him was aware of how melodramatic he must look to the frail, wary man waiting in the bedroom doorway. He told himself that in a moment he would clamber to his feet and behave in a way that was as close to what was expected of him as he could manage. He would make love to
A
and it would be Paul's body he was breaking into, fucking him with all his heart and strength that he might weaken him enough to be comforted. It was terrible how brave Paul was; by rights such brittle self-containment should have been easy to break.

Paul had said, ‘I love you, Patrick.' He said the words instead of goodbye, standing in the shop doorway before leaving to walk in the direction of Parkwood and his wife and child.

Adam sat down beside him, keeping still and silent so that eventually Patrick felt himself leaning against him, felt the other man's arm rest lightly around his shoulders. He smelt of coal fires. He remembered how sweet he tasted when he'd kissed him. Patrick closed his eyes; his breathing became steadier. After a while Adam took his hand and led him to the bedroom.

Free first chapter

All the Beauty of the Sun

Soho, May 1925

W
ATCHING ANN BRUSH HER
hair, Edmund had the idea that he should ask her how he compared to the other men she slept with. Did she like him more? Was he in some way better or worse? Clumsier perhaps? Or more tender, energetic, desirable? He wondered if he really, truly wanted to know, because of course, no one asked such questions, no one with any pride, or any sense at all of conviction. Lawrence Hawker, for example, would never be so crass. Hawker was older, a careless, sophisticated man, someone who, in Edmund's heart of hearts, he thought of as one of the grown-ups.

Edmund knew he should, conventionally, be jealous of his rival; but jealousy would make him unconventional within their tight little circle. Besides, Hawker and he weren't rivals: Ann slept with them both, and he suspected that Hawker cared even less about this than he did. All the same, Edmund would like to know if she cared more or less about him. He supposed he wanted to know that at least. At least he would like to know that he made some impression, some
something
.

Lying on his back in her bed, his hands clasped beneath his head, the sheet crumpled beneath his body, he laughed because there was something absurd in all this that he hadn't realised until now; he had been taking promiscuity seriously when perhaps he should have thought of it as a parlour game:
bed-hopping – the winner the first to finish with his pride still intact.

Ann turned from the mirror above the fireplace to frown at him, hairbrush poised mid-stroke. Blonde hairs curled from the bristles, bright in the lamplight. She was naked and her skin was pale and quite perfect, wondrously so. No wonder Joseph Day wanted to paint her so often; they all did, but it was only Day who was skilled enough, whose finished results Ann decided were worth the uncomfortable, boring hours of modelling.

Turning back to the mirror she asked, ‘What are you laughing at?'

He wondered how she might react to his question,
Who do you prefer, Lawrence Hawker or me? Which of us thrills you most?
He might ask if she had slept with his friend Andrew, too – although he suspected Andrew was queer. He thought of Andrew, decided it would be best not to think about him, not now, but when he was alone, perhaps. For now he imagined asking her,
Am I different in any way?
She would laugh; he imagined she would say, ‘Silly boy!' But all the same, the thought of differences could not be unthought; he knew that he would return to these differences, worry them over and over; he knew that this worrying could overwhelm him.

The bedcovers were in deep folds at his groin and he pulled them up to his chin, cold suddenly. Her scent lingered on the sheet, warm and touching like cheap violet sweets; earlier he had noticed a blood stain on the side where she slept and had been reassured, even as a part of him wanted her to be pregnant, that part that was irrational and boorish and as desperate to be confirmed as virile as any man who had ever lived. But that part of him seemed particularly unconvincing, an under-rehearsed act he was performing for a knowing, critical audience. Besides, paternity couldn't be assured, of course; also there was the used johnnie flaccid on the floor beside the bed; he was always very careful, very afraid of disease. ‘VD kills in a particularly nasty way,' his father had told him, and he should know, the great doctor having witnessed such deaths. Edmund remembered the rest of this lecture from his father as particularly oblique, even by his father's standard, how he had talked about how he must be sure of himself and not go rushing at windmills. He had been sixteen at the time, his virginity still shaming. Perhaps his father had sensed this shame, although he didn't like to think so.

Ann picked her knickers up from the floor and began to dress. Her room was on the second floor above a pawn shop and was just big enough for the bed and a chest of drawers and a chair strewn with her clothes. A midnight-blue party dress hung from the picture rail beside a pale lemon blouse with a pussy-cat bow and jagged sweat marks under the arms. Face powder dusted the chest of drawers, where an unscrewed lipstick lay beside the crumbling square of mascara he had seen her spit into to moisten the blackness for the spiky brush. A crumbed plate and tea-stained cup, an empty milk bottle and an ashtray were lined up on the windowsill. Her shoes were everywhere: separated, upside down, small hazards of pointed heels and trailing laces. A stocking dangled limply from the bedstead, still holding the shape of her leg and foot, the toe stiffening a little; as she sat on the bed to roll up its pair she said, ‘Get dressed or we'll be late. I don't want to be late for Lawrence.'

‘No, of course you don't.'

She glanced at him, perhaps suspecting his jealousy, if indeed he
was
jealous. She looked away again, paying attention to her suspenders. ‘I promised Lawrence I wouldn't be late – this is an important night for the gallery.'

‘Whatever time we turn up, we'll be first. I'll be surprised if the others even bother.'

‘Andrew's going – he's told everyone they should see this artist's pictures.'

He snorted: how like Andrew to be so impressionable; he had his fancies, his enthusiasms that he would quickly forget. Next week there would be someone else to rave about. The thought of Andrew's excited gushing made him close his eyes in despair.

Ann patted his leg beneath the sheet. ‘Come on. Don't look so glum. You laugh for no reason and then you look glum like this,' – she pulled a face.

She stood up and returned to the mirror to pin up her hair, humming tunelessly under her breath. Occasionally she sang snatches from a repertoire of music hall songs – songs that even he, sheltered middle-class boy that he was, recognized as full of double entendre.
Dirty girl,
he thought, as he often did. The kind of girl he couldn't take home to his mother, the kind of girl a man practised on – as if anyone needed to practise. Perhaps he did. Perhaps the more he practised the more he would straighten himself out. He was using her – the thought had occurred to him before, of course. But didn't everyone use everyone? Agitated, he tossed aside the bed covers and gathered his clothes. Ann went to the window and drew the curtains. The clock on her mantelpiece chimed the hour; the coals on her fire shifted and caved in. Outside a drunk warbled a song he was sure Ann would know. Edmund pulled on his trousers and tucked in his shirt; he buttoned his flies and fastened his collar and noticed a stain on his frayed cuff. He found his tie draped in a pleasingly louche manner on the end of the bed and put it on. Ann straightened the knot, standing back to regard him quizzically.

‘Don't be sad,' she said.

‘I'm not.'

She put on her coat, handed him his, held out his scarf, all the while watching him as though she was nursery nurse to his wayward child. Ready, she unlocked the door and stepped out into the dank, dark little passageway, preceding him down the steep flight of stairs.

He was sad, despite his protestation. Yet he knew thaere was no reason for his sadness. Until the idea he'd had about questioning Ann over how he compared with Lawrence Hawker, he'd been fine, but a feeling of melancholy had crept over him, a feeling he knew had been lying in wait for him for a little time now, only foiled by drink and sex. In the King's Head last night he, Andrew, and Day had drunk until Susie would no longer serve them, and then they had staggered to Andrew's rooms and seen off a bottle of port. Port, for Christ's sake, inducing the most savage hangover he'd had for a while. That morning, as he and Barnes had opened the bookshop where he worked, Barnes had wrinkled his nose. ‘You smell like my old Aunt Florrie on Christmas night.' Stepping closer he made a show of sniffing him. ‘You should wash more, nice boy like you, frequent a decent barber.'

He had instinctively rubbed his chin; it wouldn't have been the first time he'd forgotten to shave. Barnes pulled up the blinds on the front windows and Edmund had stepped back from the sunlight, wincing. ‘Bitten by the vampire, were we?' Barnes had said; then in his ordinarily weary voice added, ‘Go and make the tea. There are some aspirin behind the caddy.'

Walking along Percy Street, Ann's arm through his, Edmund thought that perhaps sad was not the word for his mood; rather he was disappointed; rather he had walked into a brick wall behind which lay all his hopes and ambitions, everything he had once fondly hoped he would be. If he stepped back and jumped as high as he could, he could just about see over this wall, catch tantalizing glimpses of a life he might lead if only he wasn't so damnably lazy, if only he gave up his job at the bookshop and got down to some serious work.

Serious work. This was his father's expression, the two words always shackled together like prisoners on a chain gang. Serious work was cutting open bodies, delving about in their insides, stitching them back up restored, more often than not. Serious work was not painting, not unless he was deathly intense about it, prepared to work and work and work and still get nowhere, never catching up with the little talent he supposed he had. Seriously, he should paint and do nothing else, caught up in a maniacal mindfulness, not eating, not sleeping, fractured from the ordinary, a transcendental life.

Such seriousness seemed preposterous to him. Slowly Edmund had come to realise that he was possessed of a clerk's self-conscious heart. There were times when he could even bring himself to feel content working in the bookshop, the slow hours ticking by in steady, companionable quiet. He liked the smell of the books, particularly the old, next-to-worthless ones, those they left out in boxes on the pavement in front of the window, their spines fading without the protection of lost dust jackets. He liked the pathos of those books and their forgotten authors, those many who had tried and not quite failed; he knew he couldn't work in an art gallery, where that same, soft feeling would be unbearable.

Like it or not, however, he couldn't entirely escape into the bookshop and pretend he had never had an ambition. He knew those who did work and work and didn't give up in a fit of horrible self-awareness and pique: Andrew, who had actually sold some of his seascapes; he knew, in a way, Day, who would probably be famous some day, if he didn't kill himself first. And of course, he knew Ann, their muse. He was surprised when she decided she would like to go to bed with him, but her enthusiasm for his body did help to relieve the depleting ennui that lately he couldn't shake off, even if afterwards he was pestered by questions and doubts.

He was aware of Ann's arm through his, her warm, vital closeness. She walked quickly, easily matching his pace, although she was so much shorter. She'd once laughed, ‘Don't I look like the scullery maid out with the young master?' He was six foot three inches and broad-shouldered. As blond as her, he looked younger than his years, and as she was older than he was, he knew that she didn't take him seriously. There, that word again. Andrew, Day and all his other friends were serious. He was not.

They turned into a street where once-grand houses had been converted into flats: the cold, damp basements for the poorest; the larger, drafty rooms with their cracked window panes and bare, creaking floorboards for those who were a little less desperate. When he had first left home, he had lived on this street, in a room he thought must have been the maid's in better times: cramped beneath its sloping ceiling it was certainly like the maids' rooms in his parents' house. His window had looked out over rooftops; if he craned his neck, he could see the dome of St Paul's. Through the gaps in the floorboards he could eavesdrop on his downstairs neighbours – Russian Jews, whose exoticness made him feel as though he had arrived at a place even further away from home than they were.

As they passed his old flat, and he looked up at the attic window to see if there was a light, Ann squeezed his arm. ‘This artist – Lawrence said his work is all about the war.'

There was no light; he imagined that the attic room – where he had once, with such hope and enthusiasm, painted the rain-darkened view of roofs – was unoccupied, settling even further into disrepair. There would be dead flies on the sills, the undisturbed dust no longer agitating in the deep shaft of light that fell at noon across the sagging bed. There would be a stronger smell of damp, more evidence of mice and a colder draft beneath the door. Perhaps he could go back there, start again as if the last year had never even begun; as if he was still that enthusiastic boy, the money his father had given him for this
experiment
miraculously unspent, his naivety still happily in place.

As if he could be that time traveller, he promised himself he would work; he would put his weight behind breaking the stubbornly unyielding shell of his talent. But he remembered that the money was spent; he remembered the bookshop, its easy cosiness; he thought about his new room, its tidiness because he had realised he couldn't pretend to be a man who didn't care about a certain level of comfort and order; he recalled how cold and lonely, how
untypical
of him, that first little flat had been.