A Case of Knives Read online

  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.

  Membership of the London Library is non-transferable. Hal’s is of no use to anyone. My hospital is linked with one in Westminster and sometimes it would have been convenient to dine at Hal’s flat, or even to sleep there. But what had not been spoken between us in now over two years made this impossible. I saw him sometimes in restaurants, but his timetable was very different from mine. He and his friends would take meals in the middle of the morning or at dead of night. ‘Property’ did not seem to get in the way. They read newspapers and ate breakfast in night clubs. I did these things at home. When I did glimpse his ‘pack’, I was jealous. He would not acknowledge me. He was a king among his courtiers and I not even the joker. I do not think his friends ever noticed me. The only places where there was a possibility of crossing were the very expensive Italian restaurants which are favoured by models, male and female, or the Connaught where some of these children, Hal’s ‘set’, were to be seen softening up a parent behind the screens. In one white-tiled basement, I saw a group of Hal’s friends order steak and red wine. They were all white in the face and their wrists showed. They spat out the meat once they had chewed it white; the wine they drank till they were sick. Anne was with me. ‘Very slimming,’ she said, and she ordered sweetbreads and three types of green vegetable and a jug of water with our wine. When it came she said an old Scots grace: ‘ “Some hae meat and canna eat, and some hae nane that want it, but we hae meat and we can eat and so the Lord be thankit.” Begging your pardon, dear,’ she added, ‘but thank God too that we don’t know those ghouls. Think, Alexander would have been one of them, maybe.’

  So, how could I introduce Hal to Anne? In the third year of my love, I began to resume my visits to other shiny white-tiled places underground. There was even a regular boy, but in a way that is a danger and blunts the edge. I think he was drawn at that time to what must have been very evident in me. Deep in love with an indifferent Hal, I had advanced hyperaesthesia. He was a nice enough, lazy enough boy, and it took very little at that time to hurt me quite a lot, so he kept face with the wildest of his friends without upsetting himself by having to do anything very rough. I jangled with uncomfortable lust for Hal.

  Anne’s clothes gave the opportunity, and it was easy and pleasant when we at last all met at her house. Hal was like a boat with the wind behind him among those bolts of silk; Anne had a high old time with him, dressing him up in her clothes. I would not allow her to paint his face. I could see her classifying him incorrectly. Of course, many of her acolytes were young men who worked in the service of clothes, men of the cloth of her particular church, but it made me hot to contemplate that she thought my sexless Hal just such a Cedric or Alun. So much of my own physical life has been to do with harshness that it astonished me, when I saw Hal’s neck coming from the neck of one of Anne’s gowns, a vatic grey purple, that neck almost without an Adam’s apple, to know I wanted only to protect it. ‘Such a little neck,’ I said to myself, and felt weak with paternal tenderness, as though I were sending him to war.

  Anne was loyal. She did not see Hal alone, though he would have liked this. She did collect and drop the young and it was a conferral of prestige to be in her train for a time, a graduation in style.

  Tertius and he seemed not to get on at all well and I left it at that, in a way a little relieved that Tertius’s worldly way would not spoil my Hal.

  We had no routine, but there were things we did together which I am sure he did with no one else. We went to church, for instance. Each Saturday we chose a service from the newspaper, and, if I was not working, we went either to Sung Eucharist or to Evensong. My Jewishness is not offended by such excursions. I very much care for the music. Sometimes, I induced Hal to come to one of the City churches at lunch-time for some organ music. I love the swell, the sound so unlike that I produce from my grand piano. The music of the organ is like that of the sea; the church becomes a shell conveying the beating and soughing into the little shell of the ear. Hal seemed to like these outings.

  We went to the sea itself in winter, and in autumn. Not many people would wish to take long pointless outings with someone with whom they were not in love, but Hal often initiated them. He loved docks, shipyards, piers. Chatham was the favourite. For the last four years before Cora, we went often. There is a figurehead with flaking rouge at the side of the Admiral’s House, and no flag on the flagstaff. Hal is patriotic in a highly coloured way and I am moved by this. It was not always easy for me to get away from the hospital for a whole day, but when I did, it was to the sea that we went.

  I cooked for him, the sort of food he would not find in his restaurants. I cook with precision and invariable success; I do not talk about it during or afterwards and I always wash up. This is a rare combination which I have from my mother. I make very good bread, in batches, which I give away. I do observe Passover, and bake no bread for its duration.

  I taught him about his own
country, of which he was ignorant. I should have loved to teach him of Europe but he went abroad with his jetsam crew, usually to destinations involving no demands on his brain. ‘Not a holiday otherwise,’ he said, and he went off to another island with a beach or country with a coast.

  I myself hardly believe that I have known him for so long and established so deep a bond with another person, for deep it is, despite its ostensibly thin substance. I have wondered whether this is what keeps me so preoccupied with Hal; he is in flight from me and might transform himself, if I grow too close, into something other, not a beast, not a tree, but a white indifferent flower.

  What kept the power between us fairly balanced were my seniority and Hal’s need of me, which appealed to me at all times.

  I understood him; I knew that when he was unkind, it was for a reason, and that when he was apparently cold it was because he felt too much.

  Hal is shy. Over the past six years he has learnt from me many of the characteristics which should, in one of his breeding, be innate. Yet it took me to teach him to read, to dress, to walk in his capital city, to take his spoons and forks in order and not to hold them as pencils. I am puffed up with pride when I see him as he should be, at ease anywhere. It is odd that he needed to be taught, but I think that this must have to do with sending these boys away to school so young. So few of them have parents who share a name, let alone a bed, how can they learn a coherent manner and easeful grace? And the television, I suppose, saps the springs of action so that the poor brutes mistake the natural thirst for knowledge for a hypernatural thirst for experience. Those of these boys who go to university seem to use it rather to regress and to soak and to dip their flies in amber; perhaps I was more of a university to Hal than university would have been.