The Blue Grotto, by Amos Rossetti - Part 1

PREAMBLE

I know of a charming grotto on the northern face of Capri, an island some small distance from Naples in Southern Italy. It is accessible only to swimmers and the tiniest paddle-boats through a cleft in the rock-face. It is obscured from sight, positioned at the base of a thirty foot cliff, hidden by the foam of wave crests, and without beaches or promontories close by from which to overlook.

From dawn to dusk boats sweep past the entrance, clockwise around the island to Sorrento, counter-clockwise to Amalfi and further out across the gulf to Palermo, to Corsica and Cagliari. The routes are carved into the face of the erratic waters, torrid and placid by turns,  roughly incised throughout numberless centuries by numberless hulls, many of which drowned and came to rest at the rocky bed of that gulf. And of this vast and motley flotilla – the corsair galleons, the fishermen, the submarines and the ferries – most aboard will have sailed past the grotto quite unaware of its existence, although nowadays it is better known.

The demigods of sea and wind have ravaged Capri. Its waterline, like some hideous ribbon around a parcel, is freckled with pores of which the grotto is just one. Through time the island’s sleek, moon-coloured façade became disfigured, and the rock itself was hollowed out with winding veins and cavities: an old rosewood timber, outwardly impeccable, ridden with weevil grubs. Some of these hollows are empty, and whistle in the wind. Some are clogged with earth and the deep roots of myrtle and cypress trees, such that the island’s haunch is awash with lush, subtropical greenery. Other patches of the island, those facing windward, are by contrast quite barren, battered by salt and spume.

And so in amongst the wilderness, organic and lifeless, manmade and god-made, to spy out that particular grotto to which I refer is to find a needle in a haystack, or a certain brick in a great wall. To find it requires purpose and patience and a good map, or, as I had on my first visit, a knowing guide.

The closest mainland port of convenience is Sorrento, an hour’s drive from Naples, and there, at a price, you will find an armada of pleasure-boats at your disposal, manned by cheery, boisterous, and for the most part disreputable sailors. The distance from Sorrento’s marina to the grotto, depending on the route taken and the condition of the sea, is between ten and twelve nautical miles (or thirty, should you travel from Naples itself). Two hours later, or half that under steam, you will arrive at the island’s north face, and a quite shallow inlet where larger keeled boats must drop anchor at once. The rest of the journey to the grotto can be swum, or rowed in a dinghy. The partly submerged ingression, at the foot of a sheer cliff, is perhaps eight feet at its widest and much less in a swell. In stormy weather, which is rarely forewarned, you must time your entry so as not to be dashed to a pulp against the roof of the cave. And beware also the coral teeth along the sides, which given the opportunity will flay you into slithers.

A short tunnel, approximately twenty feet in length, opens into a vast chamber and the rocky floor falls away beneath you, out of sight. The temperature of the water falls with it.

Glancing behind, the entryway to the grotto forms a neat triangle, like a white pupil in the heavy black iris of the cave’s interior. The crests of waves sweep into that fissure, one after another, plugging the gap momentarily and blotting out the sun. But the grotto stays lit somehow, brightly enough to discern a companion’s features, for instance, or details on the wall of the cave. The seawater itself is the medium for this unnerving glow, and through a simple quirk of architecture. There is a second notch in the rock-face, somewhat larger than and several feet beneath the first, also leading inside the grotto. It is fully submerged at all times, though not so deep down that questing eel-like sunbeams cannot reach it through the swell.

And in certain hours of the day, when the sea and sky are aligned just so, these coiling, sinuous rays penetrate the interior through that second notch, and illuminate the cavern from beneath. From the white sandy floor, up through the cold, pulsating current comes an eerie light: neon blue, pale and soft.

Part 2

I.

I first came to Capri, and to the grotto, in the final week of April, nineteen-fifty. I was seventeen years-old, and until then had never travelled abroad. In fact, I had been outside of London only a few times before, once as an evacuee in the opening months of the Second World War. I took the train from Paddington Station, along with my siblings and dozens of other children, to our respective foster homes in deepest greenest Gloucestershire, a region unlike anything we had known, all meadows and wains and horse carts, like a pastoral scene from an old-fashioned postcards. Where, we wondered to ourselves, were the chimneystacks and terraces? Where were the underground stations? The Industrial Revolution, it seemed to us, had turned back a little after Swindon – ran out of steam, you might say.

These two particular journeys, the first to Stroud and the second to balmy Capri, were closely related, for on both occasions I was a guest of the Barclay family. Mr Julius Barclay, the patriarch, fifty three years-old on our first meeting, owned and managed a number of farms in Gloucestershire, and was exceedingly rich by the county’s standards, although to see him you would not know it. He habitually dressed as a labourer in slacks and denim and leather boots, except on Sundays when he wore tweed for church, and he was otherwise as modest and unassuming as a man could be.

The Barclay family home, and mine for a time, was a large farm house on the crest of a hillock, a few miles from Gatcombe Park, mansion-like in size but rambling and discordant, without symmetry, as if an ancient hamlet had, over centuries, been subsumed into a single building. The interior was an aimless maze of chambers and corridors, of spiral staircases leading nowhere, of exposed roof timbers, of hidden passages and long-forgotten amenities.

Everywhere you looked were broken ploughshares and wagon wheels, unframed canvases propped against the walls, and books, so many books, stacked high in each room as if for burning. Feral and domestic animals roamed in packs. Potted plants had either wilted years since, or outgrown their containers and sent roots down beneath the floorboards. The kitchen alone, Mrs Barclay’s domain, was very ordered and very tidy. Copper cauldrons the size of war drums hung in place above the sideboard and a vast oak table, perhaps fifteen feet long, took up almost the entire floor, except for an alcove which housed the stove. The white-painted ceiling of this curious domed feature had a flue at its apex, to draw out smoke and ventilate the room. The stove was rarely unlit, and from it the odour of meat and simmering sauces could be overpowering.

Every meal, whether breakfast, brunch, lunch or dinner, was a great event in that household, somehow with more food than could be stomached, more drink than could be drunk, and more guests – some invited, some not – than could be properly seated. It was not unknown for a cat, or even two or three, to prowl the table-top at mealtimes, scavenging morsels and soliciting affection from diners. Occasionally they would be plucked off and set aside by Mrs Barclay, but often not for they too were part of the great show. Mr Barclay, who grew up in the house, in his early teens had built the table from the trunk of a storm-felled tree, and it promised to outlive him. The kitchen was a venerable old theatre; we were the actors and that table our stage.

I do not remember the earliest days in the farmyard so clearly anymore, except to know I never once completed my daily chores. At first Mrs Barclay had me in charge of the poultry hutch set up behind the sheds – cleaning, feeding, repairing the chicken wire and so forth – only I despised the stupid, stinking birds, and was delighted to find them all dead one morning, torn to pieces by a fox. Blood-stained feathers, heaps of soft white down and dismembered body parts littered the floor of the hutch. Footprints in the sand evidenced the speed and ferocity of the attack, and it was a wonder that no one had overheard it. The enterprising vixen had apparently burrowed two feet beneath the hutch to get in, bless her. Had I sprinkled glass shards along the hutch’s perimeter, as instructed, the chickens might have lived, but I did not regret my inaction. Though the birds perished, elsewhere a den of famished kits may have gotten through the unforgiving winter, thanks to me.

Perhaps believing the violence of the hutch had traumatised me, I was moved by Mrs Barclay to patio and gardening duties, and it was there I properly befriended Florence, the daughter of the house, who spent her afternoons making dens behind the flowerbeds. She was an only child, a little older than me, and up to that point I had caught glimpses of her around the house: not quite pretty, but almost. She was very pale at that age, and she wore old-fashioned homemade dresses, white with frilly hems caked in mud. She would appear like a ghost at the far end of a corridor, and a moment later she was gone again, vanished into some hidden cubby, out of sight with only a trail of dirt on the carpet to mark her passage.

Florence was not shy exactly, but neither was she particularly engaging. Simply, I did not interest her. Many young children inhabit imaginary worlds of their making, and hers was especially vivid; quite impervious to gloom, to boredom and to strangers. I think it was my regular appearance in the garden which led her to perceive me anew. I was no longer a fixture of the indoors. I was of the outdoors now, her choice domain.

We exchanged only a few words in those early days, but we conversed unendingly in postures and attitudes. Her huge grey eyes disarmed my urbanite swagger – or what little swagger I had managed to adopt at that age – and in a short time we were inseparable playmates. There were few other children of our age in the locale, and what few there were we studiously ignored. They would understand our games. We thatched Florence’s den with conifer twigs and clay from the riverbed, and weaved ourselves Red Indian headdresses. We harried the sheep and befriended a Longhorn bullock, up to the point where we could enter his enclosure and feed him oats by hand. We whittled lances and arrows, and concocted war-paint from berries for our battles against an invisible, relentless, insurmountable foe, which we called ‘the reaper’, or something quite daft like that. The name, I believe, came from the manufacturer’s label on a piece of agricultural machinery, a weighted rake device to be towed behind a tractor.

The reaper’s territory ranged from the diverted stream above the grazing meadow to the silage bales in the valley below and, very conveniently, so did ours, and conflict was thus inevitable. We laid traps, dug trenches and fired arrows, yielding a hectare by morning and regaining it by tea time. It was a war of attrition, fought simultaneously on several fronts.

Of course, all this imaginary bloodletting only led to further dereliction of duty where my chores were concerned, but I don’t think Mrs Barclay minded. Although both from large families, for some reason she and her husband were unable to produce a sibling for Florence – a medical impediment perhaps – and their difficulty led to much heartache, borne in sorrow and silence. They were not the type to openly complain, but that Florence, a stubborn recluse throughout her infancy, should find in me a kind of brother pleased them no end, and as such they were blinded to my idleness, or so I hoped.  

It is often difficult to recall old friends as they were in childhood; the human mind is adept to notice change, but once that change is accepted it promptly forgets the original state (think of a friend who has had her hair restyled. After just a fortnight you will not remember how she looked before). Florence was no exception. I struggle to imagine her, and indeed we two together, as we were in those days. Being now somewhat decayed and cynical, I struggle to view the world through so unblemished a lens. I no longer delight in purple sunsets – even nostalgically – or in moss-covered forest floors, or in turf expanses, twinkling with dew in the morning. But I am able to recall the hopeless devotion I felt for her, and which I suspect she felt for me in turn. She was my friend, my sister, and more than that besides. Were we uniquely paired? Honestly, I doubt it. Every painful, blissful spasm of a heartstring has been documented by a thousand love-sick writers before me, and it is vanity which compels the lover – spurned or requited – to imagine that his love, above all others, is somehow unique and original. (And worse still if he commits an account of it to paper!) Suffice to say that Florence and I fell in love as only young children can, and that the farm – or in any case, the portion of it which we were tasked to oversee – suffered as a consequence. As we grew together, so too did the strawberry beds fall into disrepair; so too did the potatoes turn to mulch in the ground; so too did the tulips wilt and the apples rot on the branch. Threads of moss which ran between flagstones on the patio were like barometer needles, gauging the intenseness of our bond, and after five years at Fersen Hall they lay untended and brazen; as thick as upturned guttering. The flagstones beneath had almost vanished from sight.

Leaving that place in early April nineteen-forty-five, a few weeks before Germany’s unconditional surrender, was the saddest day of my short life. The war, which had kept itself to itself as far as I knew, was virtually at an end, and with it my carefree days. Spring had in that year come early to the farm, only the usual promise of abundance – of berries and gillyflowers to be plucked at leisure and savoured – was this time unwelcome, for I knew I would not be there to see the promise fulfilled. My past life beckoned: a distant, unhappy memory of cramped houses and smog-filled air. I was picked up one morning from outside the deserted stables, teary-eyed, by the billeting officer in her motorcar. She was a dour-faced woman, quite spiritless; an almost cartoonish villain, rounding up the weeping children. The entire household, including a number of farm-hands, came out to see me away. I was to join my siblings, billeted with other families in the village, at the train station. Mrs Barclay gave me a small hessian sack of vegetables for nourishment on the way home: carrots, sticks of celery, plum tomatoes and the like. She held me very tightly indeed, as a mother would, and my clothes were smeared with the vegetable peelings stuck to her apron. From Mr Barclay I received a much-thumbed and beautifully bound Aeneid, the T C Williams translation. I suspect the time of my departure had slipped his mind and the book he gave me, which I never read, was something he had plucked from a library shelf on his way downstairs. I knew of and cared little for the Classical writers, Virgil least of all.

From Florence, who was too upset to personally attend my seeing off, I got a Shasta daisy, pressed and mounted onto a piece of card.  She had touched up the white petals with watercolour paint, and they wore a delicate, scarlet hue. (These colours are faded now, and most of the petals have fallen away, and the stem has bent and browned with time.)

Part 3

II.

London was not a cheerful city to return to, even in spring. Once jubilance and relief had settled there came the strain and hardship of repair, and the grief of an immeasurable carnage tallied up. Europe once again was dripping in blood. War graves appeared in the cratered turf, like so many white mushrooms, and up went the wreaths and cenotaphs. Never Again, again. Britain was virtually bankrupt, rationing continued and, for me, an intense, almost pathological boredom set in. Clear skies were smeared with grey, and the vistas – which in Gloucestershire had stretched as far as the horizon – were drawn close. Perversely, it was quietness of the farm that I missed most; the enticement of lethargy.

I did not flourish at my new school, academically, theatrically or athletically. Teachers reported my being in all things “lackadaisical”, which struck me at the time as a very ugly, inelegant word. (And it struck my parents too, though not for its verbal disharmony.) Aunts and uncles were consulted, and the local vicar too, and it was decided I should attend public school. Discipline and well-brought up peers and round-the-clock diversion would, they believed, knock the idleness out of me. Dulwich College, being close by, was naturally the first choice. The issue was one of money; my family were as poor as dogs, relatively speaking, and all hope was placed in my gaining a scholarship, which I did. Intelligence was not something I lacked, it was simply a matter of application and I could, when so inclined, harness and channel my neurons in short, sharp bursts of genius. But the admissions staff were suitably impressed by my interview (or, I should say, suitably deceived) and I began as a day boy in Michaelmas term in nineteen-forty-seven, on a generous scholarship. My parents were still beggared, but with rationing in full swing it was genuinely quite difficult to tell if one was rich or poor.

Their penury in any case was justified by a dramatic upswing in my grades. After just one term I was in contention for a number of subject prizes, including English and History (albeit not close contention). The Dulwich masters were not in fact much more competent than my former masters, and nor did the lush, manicured expanse of the playing fields inspire me to succeed where the murky, muddy pitches in Denmark Hill had not. Rather, my new success was the happy by-product of an awakening; a coming to life. Diligence replaced idleness, eloquence replaced incoherence, and for a quite curious reason: I fell in love with letters. It sounds pretentious, but it is the truth. I fell in love with the coolness of the paper beneath my fingers, and the feel of the pen between them. I fell in love with trying – vainly or otherwise – to express myself in written words. It was no sudden epiphany and I would not pretend, either, that it was not a part-emulation (typical of precocious adolescents the world over) of the quixotic, poetic, glassy-eyed wordsmiths of historical fame: Baudelaire, Byron, Da Ponte, Diderot, Horsley et cetera (alphabetised as they appeared on the school’s library shelves).  What boy has not dreamed of lyrical mastery?

I had written a great deal to Florence since leaving her, but it was only in those few months – upon my move to Dulwich – when the very act of writing became an addiction: conjuring a sentiment, watching it immortalised a moment later in bright blue ink, trailing a silver nib. It was a revelation, and not only to write letters but to read them – it was all part of the same craving. Prose and theses bored me as ever they had but letters, anybody’s, became a fascination. Streams of consciousness, terse rejoinders, billets-doux; anything which marked one human reaching out to another; anything which marked the author’s style and the way in which he expresses, and simultaneously betrays, himself. And the more I read, the more frequently I wrote in turn to Florence and the more carefully I dissected her replies when eventually they came. In free time I was rarely found outside the school’s library, scribbling away, and according to whichever luminary’s correspondences I happened to be reading at the time, so my own style adapted.  My pen-hand was chameleonic. With Donne I was florid, with Chesterton I was cynical, with Rimbaud, morose, and so on. But if Florence ever noticed the change she did not comment, and in any case she was not one to be swayed by semi-plagiarised turns of phrase. Florence transcended the coarseness of real life, and by the same token was immune to charm. To her credit her own style remained constant all her life: disordered, sweet and archaic. No sentiment, however straightforward, could be expressed in less than a page, and there were many sentiments to express. (I should have liked to see her RSVPs – a simple “yes, delighted”, or did she exasperate the hostess with endless, effusive, ambiguous rambling? I fancy the latter.)

There was, it should be said, nothing very romantic about our exchanges. They were more like letters between separated siblings. I was physically late into adolescence and although I knew of sex and romance – or of the mechanics, at least – it was a superficial understanding, part rumour and part extrapolation. I was satisfied when eventually, aged fourteen, the “facts of life” were straightened out thanks to a charmingly evasive biology textbook, supplied to me by a crooked prefect in return for a term’s worth of boiled sweets. Judging by the extensive graffiti in the margins of the book and the crisp, yellowed paper, this fabled tome had passed down through many generations of naïve and curious schoolboys. It was riddled with euphemisms, incomprehensible Latin phrases and curious black-and-white diagrams, suggestive more of an architectural floor-plan than anything recognisably human, let alone female.

Nonetheless, I digested the material within a fortnight and sold the textbook to a boy in the year below for a sixpence. But I had, of course, entirely missed the point. And so when adult love struck a few years later – tremendously hard, like the blow of an axe – it caught me in the dazed revulsion of a medical student who, for the first time in his training, stares down at the flayed, open torso of a cadaver. Everything is in its place, just as the anatomical guides had indicated, but in reality not comparable to those clean-looking, sanitary illustrations. For as anyone who has felt it knows, there is nothing clean or sanitary about love. That version belongs to fairy tales.

But now, this is to leap ahead prematurely. Let us step back and take everything in its order.

Part 4

III.

It was an overcast morning on the sixteenth of July, nineteen-forty-seven when I received in the post a letter from Florence. It was out of turn, and without the customary handmade envelope and calligraphic address. Disappointment, and even a note of concern, turned quickly to delight. She was coming to London! She would, wrote Florence, arrive in a fortnight to see her cousin in a play in Covent Garden. Mother and Father Barclay were also coming,  and looked forward to seeing me, should I happen to be free. And indeed I was free, not that that was greatly in point. I would have cancelled luncheon with the Pope if it meant being in London to see them. I felt, reading that letter, as a minor nobleman of old upon receiving word that his queen and her court will do him the honour of visiting. My pride swelled and I was full of apprehension.

I tidied my bedroom there and then, without stopping to consider why Mr and Mrs Barclay, or even Florence, would ever have reason to see it. I daresay they had not heard of Camberwell, or if they had, were not inclined to visit. I spent a month’s allowance on a proper haircut, and borrowed my father’s razor in order to shave, and to this day there is a small, ivory-coloured scar below my chin, marking that attempt for posterity. My parents were bemused by the abrupt cosmetic change in their eldest son, but they too were eager to meet, and to thank, the Barclays. Very few parents of evacuees ever had the chance to meet their children’s wartime fosters, face to face. But where to stage this coming together? My father wanted to buy Mr and Mrs Barclay a drink at our local pub, a little way off Peckham Road, but my mother insisted it was too seedy, and she was right. Our “local”, though proclaiming to welcome families, was the sort of pub you took a knife to, just in case. It was also a nest of black marketers. We would meet the Barclays in town, said my mother, at a proper restaurant and close to the Wyndham’s Theatre, where the Barclays’ cousin’s play was being shown. I was instructed to telephone Fersen Hall to organise the meeting. We did not have a telephone in our house at that time, but a neighbour two doors away did, and she was very generous with whoever wished to use it. 

It was strange to hear their voices again after a silence of more than two years. I spoke to Mrs Barclay first. (Mr Barclay, she explained, had walked right past the ringing telephone but had refused to answer it. He was suspicious of the technology, which was by that time quite established.) Once the initial pleasantries were performed she listed the various changes on the estate: a new steeplechase route to avoid the waterlogged valley-floor; a dairy barn pulled down to make room for a holiday cottage; the latest crop rotation; the village fair; the berry-laden brambles and the dizzying heights of the bulrushes. So, Arcady lived on! The proverbial trees continued to fall with an almighty clatter, out of earshot. I closed my eyes and promptly was transported backward, five years earlier, to an evening on the riverbank, beneath a cloudless tangerine and denim-coloured sky; to the smell of cut grass and pear blossom; to the foaming brook; to the steady, menacing drone of wasps and the rumbling of a harvester in some faraway field, scything corn in the last light. Had it ever existed, this Arcadian cliché? Had I dreamed those summers, the heat and the fertile rushes,  in order to escape the red-bricked monotony of Camberwell? I sometimes wondered, only half-seriously of course, whether it had all been a figment of my imagining. The only proof – up to the point of that telephone call – were Florence’s sporadic and bizarre letters, which normally did not include a return address, or references to the farm.

I realised suddenly that my mind had wandered when matters of the present broke in. Mrs Barclay’s speech had wheeled around to the upcoming London trip. Where and when could we meet? she asked, and I relayed my mother’s instructions. Once she had noted down the time and venue for our dinner, Mrs Barclay gave the telephone over to Florence, whose tuneful but aimless singing I had heard in the background during my conversation with her mother.

“Hello Florence.”

“Hullo to you.”

The conversation continued for five minutes along those lines, and was not as anticlimactic as its brevity might suggest. Nothing profound was said, it is true, but we were busily searching for familiar notes in one another’s voices. Her voice, though a little deeper and more clipped than before (mine too), was largely as I recalled it. She had retained that gorgeous, mild lisp and her laugh, when it came, was a careless trill. And she had not lost the habit of thinking aloud – talking as though to herself.  

When the fateful evening came my household was like the penultimate scene in a theatrical farce, with all the characters in a state of confusion and uproar. My mother was applying her lipstick in the hallway, using for a mirror the polished obverse of my most recent subject prize medal. My father was in the kitchen by the sink, scour in hand, exorcising a mustard stain from the sleeve of his aged and frayed corduroy jacket. Lily the dog, a Jack Russell terrier, was rushing excitedly between the two of them, creating all sorts of nuisance. I, by contrast, was a picture of serenity and composure – hair combed, tie tied and shirt buttoned – but only for having taken the entire afternoon to prepare myself. I had even studied a map of the Covent Garden area so as to appear well-informed should the Barclays ask for directions.

A bus took us into town, and the reunion was made on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Field, in Trafalgar Square. A rainstorm had cleared only minutes before, and the flagstones glimmered pleasantly. Mr Barclay had aged visibly in the past two years. His thinning hair was bright white and he had put on weight too; his neck bulged a little over his checked shirt collar. But he came forward with a youthful bound to shake my parents’ hands, and then he clapped me father-like on the shoulders.

“Terrific to see you, my boy. It’s been too long.”

Mrs Barclay stood back demurely, awaiting introduction, but embraced me as soon as she had the chance. She smelt of perfume, and beneath that of bread dough and potato peelings. I sensed an unfamiliar weakness in her grip. Florence was not there, having gone to collect their tickets from the theatre’s box office, saving time after the meal. We met her at the restaurant, a recently opened brasserie on Drury Lane. I had obtained a copy of the menu in advance, and my parents approved. It was obvious from the prices, said my father, that the restaurant’s margins came from the wine. To keep the bill down he would feign teetotalism.

Florence aged sixteen was a vision. Even my mother drew breath when she saw her, and I too was thunderstruck, though outwardly managed to appear unmoved. She had practically transfigured. It had been only two years – from what hidden pool had this finery erupted, ripe and whole? I felt cheated, almost. It was Florence Barclay of course, and yet it wasn’t, which goes to show that beauty is measured in millimetres: the bridge of one’s nose; the distance between one’s eyes; a single hair’s breadth is the yawning cavern between mediocrity and the sublime. She was very tall now, as tall as me, and terrifically lithe. Improbable cheekbones framed a thin, straight noise and tapered to a narrow and delicate chin, and once awkward features – those vast grey eyes and a high forehead – had persevered and won out.

She wore lipstick, mascara and the barest trace of rouge above her hollow cheeks. She had tanned skin  the colour of pale fallow, and her thick black hair was coiled in tresses and piled on her crown, so much of it I wondered how her neck could stand the weight. What had happened to the doe-eyed, boyish, mud-spattered urchin I left behind in Gloucestershire? Florence of the hedgerow and the cabbage patch. In just seven hundred days the sapling had rocketed to full height and bloom, and what a blissful turmoil she had whipped up. I could barely speak, her beauty was so agitating. I said nothing, of course.

Presently we were seated and wine bottles appeared before us, conveyed by sturdy, white gloved hands. Despite an age differential of nearly fifteen years, Mr Barclay and my father quickly found common ground in a love of angling – my father occasionally fished with a club near Staines Bridge – and Mrs Barclay and my mother talked at length about, of all things, house cats. It transpired that Marmalade, the Barclay family’s tom, had passed away at the age of ten. I did not let on but was secretly very pleased by the news. Marmalade had been a haughty, vicious beast, and I had nightly prayed the foxes would get him. (I had even locked him out of the house once, hoping to expedite his murder, but to no avail.) Mrs Barclay was debating, she said, purchasing one of the kittens of a neighbour’s brood of Blue Shorthairs, but was worried that Ailsa might not take to it. At this point Florence interjected, explaining that “Ailsa” was the name of a runt Cumberland piglet she had adopted a month or two before. It was house-trained up to a point, she said, and rather territorial.

“What will you do with her once she’s big?” I asked her.

“Big? Oh, I don’t know. She can come with me I suppose.”

“Come with you where?”

“Wherever I go. I heard that Oxfordshire has a forest full of truffles. Mummy knows an Oxford college bursar. Perhaps he might let us take an undergraduate’s room over summer. We could hunt for truffles in the morning and sell them in the market in the afternoon.”

“You and Ailsa?” I asked, and she nodded.

“Why,” exclaimed my mother, still half-believing the piglet story to have been an elaborate joke, “they’ll not let you keep a pig at the university!”

Mrs Barclay nodded her head in agreement. “I’m not sure the porters would approve, Florence, “ she said, “even if Geoffrey allowed it.”

“Then I shan’t go,” replied her daughter, quite serenely. “I can’t imagine I would like a place which disapproved of Ailsa.”

Afterwards, on the train home, my mother asked me – gently, careful not to offend – if Florence, though clearly a delightful girl, was “entirely right in the head”. My father guffawed.

A short time later, as our bus hurtled by Streatham Hill Theatre on its right, he said to me: “Son, she’s a watercolour, that girl. Do you know what I mean by that?” I shook my head. Imaginative, if not often profound, metaphors were a speciality of his.  “What I mean is she’s all fey charm and beauty, but no substance. Like a watercolour. You’re smitten is clear enough. I saw the way you looked at her, but trust me, she’d slip through your fingers.”

I did not put much in store by his comments. I think it was his way of putting me off her, perceiving – quite correctly – that on a physical level if nothing else, she was far out of my league. I mulled on that physicality and decided at length that it was an un-self-conscious, unexploited prettiness, and all the prettier for being so; all the more seductive for its being open-faced and absent-minded.

Apparently she did not realise, as her fellow diners had, that she ought to have been in Vogue, or Tatler, draped in mink, adorned with pearls; elbows on bony, jutting hips. These fevered thoughts, and others much more distasteful, ran through my head in the moments before she kissed me hello, and would continue to run in the moments, days and years which followed.  At the beginning it was a mere infatuation, albeit quite intense, coupled with and confused by an enduring brotherly regard. But it was a light torture; endurable and almost pleasant in its way. And what I would not have given, just five years thence, to return to that scene and remain there, in the bearable, larval stage of obsession. For in hindsight was it not the best time of all? Spring with all her promises, before summer’s unforgiving heat.

The Barclays were staying with friends of theirs near Regents Park, and before we parted ways after dinner I had arranged to meet Florence in the park the following morning. I had practically insisted on it. She was due to return home with her parents on the twelve-ten from Paddington station, after which we would doubtless return, following a summer hiatus, to penned correspondence. It felt inadequate. What purpose did our letters serve, after all, if not place-holding for literal closeness? And here we were within the same city limits, beneath the same rainclouds and sunbursts. A crow setting off from my window would be at hers in just twelve minutes. She was so close I could almost feel her. The ratchet wheel had turned, and absurd though it sounds, in order to justify – if justify is indeed the right word – the tenderness of our letters, I was determined to contrive some intimate moment between us,  nothing more than a half hour stroll, or a seat in the shade of a tree. Dinner, though pleasant enough, had seemed more like a familial reunion – a formality between distant cousins, when one set passes through the county of the other. I could not bear to simply return to letters.

The next morning I was up at the crack of dawn for a paper round which technically belonged to my younger sister, but which I occasionally covered. The sky was overcast, and there was a chill in the air. The spell of unbroken warmth was, so it appeared, on the verge of turning. Escorting me on the round was Philip, a neighbour and former school-friend, though from three years above. He too had been evacuated to Gloucestershire, on the very same train as me and billeted to a cottage just a mile or so from Fersen Hall in the direction of Cirencester, only he returned to London after a matter of weeks, desperately homesick. His was a sweet, simple, unadventurous soul. The extremities of our paper round – Denmark Hill in the West, Peckham Rye in the East – marked the boundaries of his universe. Everything outside these limits was, to Philip’s mind, a barbarous hinterland, devoid of kindness and comfort, inhabited by the alien and unfamiliar. But within those limits, there was not a feature he did not know like his own back garden. Every street and alleyway, every paving slab and wooden fence was beloved, and burnt into his memory.

Philip knew of Florence from our conversations, but as a rule did not approve of women. Females, he said, were frivolous, vain creatures, and “a toxin to virtue”. Where he had learnt such a phrase, and whether the lesson was drawn from personal experience, I could not say. But his advice to me was to make as great an effort as possible when, in a matter of hours, I would see her. There was nothing to lose, he said: overplay my hand and there was all summer to cool down, but underplay it and I would be haunted by what I could have done. To give Philip his due, it was sound advice. After all, it is surely better to regret one’s action than one’s inaction.  

It was raining hard by the time I reached Marylebone, a bus and a train from Camberwell. I had a pre-war map, crumpled and sodden, which I held over my head as an umbrella. My brown loafers were almost black with wet, and the socks inside were filthy. I found the café, just off Spanish Place, and settled at a table in the window.

From nearby St James’s came the hourly chimes, drifting dimly in the hissing rain, and then later the half-hour chimes. The morning was slipping away, and with no sign of Florence. I had enough change for a second cup of tea, but only if I was prepared to walk the first leg of my return journey. However, the proprietress, an aproned Juno, took pity on me, and I was given a hot cocoa on the house. In those days cocoa was a relative luxury, but it was scant consolation. Florence still had not appeared and since I hadn’t the address of the Barclay’s friends, with whom they were staying, there was nothing I could do but wait. On a sunnier day I might have strolled conspicuously about the residential squares nearby, hoping to run into them, but it was no such day. Down came the rain – down, down, streaks as thick as vernal grass in a meadow, but leaden grey. Rivulets had swelled and burst their narrow banks, and the flagstones were awash. Whirlpools had formed above sewers; the gutters were flooded.

Sometime later, when the worst of the rain did let up, I walked to Paddington Station, thinking I might see the Barclays on their way to the train, but I could not. The concourse was teeming and the air was thick with noise and evaporation. Wide-brimmed hats, furled umbrellas and the struts of towering luggage dollies, pushed by uniformed porters, made it impossible to discern a familiar face. All of London seemed to have crowded into the terminal that afternoon. Perhaps the Barclays were there, perhaps they were not, but at length I returned to Camberwell, utterly deflated.

I will not bore you with an account of the remainder of that summer, for little of note occurred and certainly nothing relevant to our story. I confided in my friends (but not Philip, for I knew I couldn’t bear his quiet triumphalism) and we resolved that Florence, at best, was a scatter-brain who had overlooked our meeting, and at worst was a heartless conniver. In all honesty I never doubted her heart, but also struggled to see how she might forget an arrangement in so short a time, given its obvious – albeit unspoken – poignancy. But we young men were every bit as fickle as we imagined women to be. Heartache was put to one side and fresh, pretty faces emerged to fill the void.

With newfound seniority my friends and I came to enjoy a greater degree freedom at school and at home, and we were invited to drawing rooms in Kensington and Bloomsbury, in splendid houses of stuccoed or redbrick façades and pillared porticos, where girls of our acquaintance held tea parties on the weekend. Beneath watchful motherly eyes we convened around polished tables, and spread strawberry jam on scones with bone-handled knives, and drank Ceylon tea from porcelain cups. It was like a game of dressing-up, and for these girls it was a training ground. My father teased me for social climbing, but was secretly very pleased. He firmly believed in the bettering power of education, and hoped that I would be first in the family to have a degree. These plummy-voiced daughters of civil servants and diplomats, whose older brothers had been at Dulwich or who had boarded at schools in the countryside, were now – almost without exception – reading at Oxford or Cambridge, and dutifully I raised my own ambitions to match. I was a penniless scholar, said my father, who would “seize the world by the throat” and discard all limitations.  

But of course nothing turned out so simply, for there was one girl who had seized my especial attention. Her name was Mathilde Siedliska. She was half-French and half-Polish (“which half’s the bottom half?” ran the joke amongst my friends), and she was rumoured to be a princess from an exiled royal dynasty. This was almost certainly not true, but it was the kind of allurement which hooked us in those days. (She did have a wealthy aunt in New York, but I imagine those are ten a penny in certain circles.)

Mathilde was not classically beautiful, nor especially elegant. She was outspoken in all matters: the less she knew of a subject, the more ferociously she argued her position. She was bullish and pouting, almost lewd, and – I prayed – deeply sinful. She was plainly different to the other girls, who sipped and tittered placidly, cooing like doves on a perch. They were caricatures of saintliness, who competed amongst themselves to be the most genteel, most correct hostess. I even found in one home in Russell Square, when snooping on my way to the bathroom, a miniature, well-thumbed guide to “etiquette and proper form”, authored by a countess. The page marked with a ribbon instructed the reader on how to politely stir milk into one’s drink: three times clockwise, three times counter-clockwise, and never permitting the spoon to touch the cup. Such lunacy! But as I said: Mathilde was different. She was two years older than Sophie, her flaxen-haired second cousin, who hosted with the greatest regularity and finesse. Mathilde drank her tea and stirred it just as the countess’s manual prescribed, but always with a subtle smirk, as one who perceived the charade for what it was. She spoke of modern painters, and of the musicians whose records played on the gramophone, as if she knew them. And perhaps she did. She was tanned, and wore garish jewellery. Her lips were plump and sensuous. She was known to smoke cigarillos from the Philippines. I could not have pointed to the Philippines on a map, but she had gone there for a holiday recently, she said, with her father, who we gathered was someone important in the French diplomatic corps. (Why, I wondered, was everybody’s father in the diplomatic corps? It seemed to betray a lack of imagination.)

Part 5

IV.

I have said already that we were fickle young men, and it is true. After almost half a year of fortnightly tea parties we began to yearn for something meatier. Sophie and her ilk, refinement personified, were frankly as dull as ditch-water. I compared them – not out loud, of course! – to some of the rough, boisterous neighbourhood girls I had grown up with: bare-legged, foul-mouthed, playful urchins. Sadly, I was no longer invited to partake in their games. (My parents, whilst poor, were more respectable than theirs, and my move to public school was the final, permanent frosting of our relationship.) For Sophie’s type, politeness was not so much a mask as a hardwiring. Everything in life ran according to instructions and protocol, and mimicry of one’s elders. You risked wedding them not out of love, nor of physical desire, but for the sake of their damnable “proper form”. And what a frustrating life it would amount to: an unending carousel of social climbing, of affecting airs and grace, of peering over garden fences. (Did they have garden fences? Perhaps estate boundaries.)

Percy, a quite moronic but very amusing friend of mine, happened at one point to mention a certain unlicensed nightclub near Cambridge Circus, which sounded extremely debauched, with American-style jazz bands and dancers on podiums. He said his roguish uncle (how clichéd!) had told him all about it. We were spellbound by the idea of all that naked – or, realistically, semi-naked – feminine flesh… This, mind you, was more than ten years before Paul “the King of Soho” Raymond set up his revue in Walker’s Court, before the Soho area took on an artificial, synthetic kind of degeneracy.

It is fair to say that I was worldlier than many of my Dulwich peers, who, to put it kindly, had from the cradle been smothered by privilege, but even my worldliness stopped short of the authentically depraved, and I was thrilled by the idea. We knew the winding streets by day, as well as by dusk, but by night – when the trumpets blared and the devils arose to play – it was an unfamiliar, beguiling maze. But Percy being Percy, he had no scheme whatsoever for getting us into this club, and I don’t believe he even knew the address. It was Mathilde who came to the rescue. We were picnicking in Battersea Park on a spring afternoon with some of the girls, chaperoned of course, and deliberately segregated by gender. We boys were arguing amongst ourselves about cabs and false moustaches, all in strained whispers. The girls sat apart and discussed whatever inanities they liked to discuss. After some time Mathilde, doubtless bored with their conversation, crossed the divide to join in our debate. At first she was unnoticed, but then she interrupted Percy:

“Oh, you surely mean the Natchez?”

Percy had thus far been calling the club in question “the Nacho”. Immediately we turned to her, agog.

“You’d not get in on a Friday night, that’s for sure,” she said, pausing to sip her lemonade. “Policemen loiter near the entrance in disguise, and raid it once a week. Bertram – that’s the owner – he can’t afford to be caught with underage drinkers on the premises.”

“Indeed – I had heard as much,” replied Percy, a deeply absurd young man, keen to repair his standing but not knowing quite how.

“We could go there in the Easter break,” said Mathilde. “And on a Wednesday or a Thursday night, things might be more relaxed. Or we could forget Natchez altogether. Some friends of mine from art school are organising a little party in a flat off Curzon Street in two Saturdays’ time. There’d be a band. We could have some cocktails at mine beforehand – daddy’s away in Toulouse – and go onto the party once we were merry.”

Her proposition met with a startled silence. Dancing girls were one thing, but cocktails? I had not even held a cocktail before then, let alone gotten merry on one, and as for the party... Except for family events – tedious and forgettable – I had never been to one. Indistinct schoolboy fantasies abruptly took shape, and promptly were stirred up again into frenzy. It was that promise of dissolution, rather than of opulence, which most attracted me to Mathilde’s idea. Let the barons hold on to their coronets; I envied them only their liquor and their wayward daughters. Had Mathilde instead offered some squalid, Hogarthian romp in Bermondsey, complete with tattooed sailors, gypsy guitars and moonshine, I would have been just as eager.

“Have you really been to the Natchez?” I asked her afterwards. We were walking, she and I, in the direction of the embankment. “You weren’t fibbing?”

“Why would I say I had, if I hadn’t?”

“To tease Percy?”

She laughed. “Oh, that was a bonus. The boy’s an ass. But I don’t want him to get arrested.”

“Kind of you.”

“No, not really. Can you imagine Percy being arrested? I think I’d die laughing. I’d positively die.”

 “Well, come to think of it – so would I.”

“But, see, if he were arrested, Sophie would surely find out I was there, and then she’d tell daddy, and that’d be the end of it.”

“Ah.”

The end of what, I did not ask. I never spent much time in those days trying to fathom Mathilde. It was clear from the off just how starkly unalike we were – how unalike our upbringings had been, and how unalike we had formed as a consequence. We were hewn from a different rock to one another. I was a flint on the strand, tossed aimlessly about in the surf, choked in foam. Mathilde was a precious gem whose dazzling facets were hidden from full view, and whose worth presumably defied measure. I gained little from her directly, and kept her close only that I might bathe in her refracted glory.

The fateful evening came after what seemed a very long wait. Dappled skies were swept clear, and in the parks and gardens pale shoots gave way to fragrant, pink-tipped buds. April, and the Easter break, were at last upon us, and it was time for the party. From a charity shop near to Clapham Common I had purchased what I believed to be a raffish blazer-pullover ensemble, and I matched it with a bow-tie which had belonged to my grandfather. I polished my brogues until the leather wore thin, and stuffed into my breast pocket a silk handkerchief. I side-parted my hair and, seeing that my lips were dry and colourless, applied the very tiniest, most imperceptible smudge of my mother’s lipstick. And aside from cosmetics, it was clear my school friends had pursued a similar “look”. We convened at around half past six at a bus stop near Kennington, and to a passer-by we might have been posing for a clothing catalogue, albeit not a stylish one. The general effect on Kennington’s public was, unfortunately, one of mirth and puzzlement. Percy, in a frilled shirt, could have passed for a pubescent Lord Fauntleroy, right down to the daring, effeminate buckled shoes. Yevgeny – in spite of his name he was thoroughly anglicised – wore a double-breasted blazer one or two sizes too large. Hubert, the most handsome of our set – and who, just four years thence, would marry Sophie – wore a tweed jacket, a shooting tie, a checked shirt and bottle-green corduroy trousers. He looked like an Edwardian country squire. But no one else, at least, had thought to wear a bow-tie. Thus suited and booted we set off for Mayfair, almost too nervous and thrilled to speak. We drew towards our destination, and peered eagerly at the pedestrians outside. Fur coats appeared on one or two as we approached the north embankment, and were thereafter commonplace; heels grew taller and hemlines more daring. Smart, inscrutable gentlemen tapped their umbrella canes on the pavement, strode quickly to whichever club or casino they were happening to grace that evening, and their companions – coifed, immaculate – hung on to their arms for dear life. Car horns blared rudely; lights flashed; expectation was palpable. 

We alighted at Piccadilly Circus and walked the rest of the way. On arrival we had half-expected to find the usual crowd at Mathilde’s father’s apartment (which, incidentally, was palatial: decorated professionally, and at considerable expense) but besides our hostess we were presented only with Emilia, whom we half-knew, and a middle-aged man whose name, or pseudonym, was utterly preposterous. Tragically, I have long since forgotten what it was. Emilia and this gentleman were plainly very drunk already, and Mathilde was under the spell of some narcotic.

“So good of you to come,” she simpered, leading us inside. “So, so good of you to come.”

Her pupils were dilated and her eyelids wide apart. At first she was sedate, but a moment later was bounding and energetic. She rushed over to a wooden cabinet in the living room, the ceiling of which was dizzyingly high, and began to mix our drinks for us with peculiar, sinister-sounding liqueurs from various dusty flagons, and with arbitrary measurements. I asked for a Cuba Libre – it was the only highball I knew the name of, having read about it in my mother’s copy of Vogue – and received a tumbler of white rum on ice, and with the tiniest, subtlest hint of lime juice. Percy’s Cuba Libre, a minute later, came in a martini glass, had Coca-Cola in it, and tequila, but no ice. By the second round of drinks, an hour later, it had mutated yet again into a rum-and-lemonade cocktail, was served with a lime wedge, and was profoundly disgusting. Presently Emilia, red-headed and petite, was flirting desperately with the unnamed gentleman, but he seemed oblivious and had eyes only for Hubert in any case. He claimed to be a philosopher and had arrived in London that very morning from Calais. He had a long beard and long hair, and there was more than a hint of Rasputin in his eyes. We boys didn’t know what to make of him. The only bearded, middle-aged men we knew were our house masters at Dulwich, and they were strict, paternal figures whose sole interest was education, and what they termed “the public school ethos”. This particular kook, whom Mathilde seemed hardly to know, spoke of little else but the vibrancy of speed, the “cleansing power of violence”, and the shortcomings of Italian futurism. He drank his gin neat.

By half past nine crackling Mozart segued into fast, mesmeric jazz, and the drinks had their way with us. Percy was very sick in the toilet, and we tried to send him home.

“No…no, no – it’s too far gone. That’s to say…we’re too far gone…Mustn’t stop now.”

He was insensible, but rather sweet-looking in his stained frills.

“Alright Perce,” I said, “so how about a sit down? Just pop here a moment, there’s a good boy.” I laid him down beside the hat-stand outside the bathroom and placed a cagoule over him, like a duvet cover. “When you’ve had a nap we’ll sort you out with another drink – what d’you say to that?”

But Percy didn’t say anything – he had fallen asleep. Hubert and I left him to re-join the party. Emilia was now standing on a leather-bound ottoman, trying to jig and spilling wine on the carpet in the process. I watched as the purple stains bloomed in the fabric. Our nameless philosopher friend was sketching the Léger with a fountain pen on a white handkerchief, and a copy of his crude study was made on the table beneath where the ink soaked through. All the while Mathilde waltzed grandly about the dinner table, led by an invisible partner. Her eyes were closed and her head was tilted serenely. She was humming a tune to herself, and I watched her for some time, wondering where she had learned to dance.

Presently, the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed for ten and Mathilde announced that we would move on to Curzon Street. In truth we were in no state to move anywhere. The world was pitching before me; Hubert and Yevgeny were bleary-eyed and dishevelled; Emilia was drunk; Percy was unconscious. Only Mathilde was still vitalised. The walk should not have taken more than fifteen minutes but we spent twice as long, staggering hither and thither. Percy had to stop a number of times to be sick, and at one point Rasputin encountered a policeman, altercated with him, and was eventually wrestled into a waiting paddy waggon. I was relieved to see him go, and Mathilde seemed unconcerned.

The party was in full swing when we arrived. It was on the upper floor of a townhouse split into apartments, and though majestically proportioned it was visibly rundown. Chandelier fittings hung empty and on the walls were ornate, sinuous lamps, the bulbs of which were black and burned, or cracked open like eggshells. Fragments of plaster lay in conical piles by the wainscoting. A once cavernous fireplace had been ripped out, and in the space was a pyramid of green wine bottles – six layers high – the labels of which were stained and illegible. I do not doubt they were old, eminent wines; misprized and gaily quaffed.

But this is to say nothing of the revellers themselves, who were eye-catching in the extreme. In the living room, or what had once been the living room, were gathered about three dozen young men and women, some with their faces painted with spots and stripes, and others wearing elaborate headdresses of ostrich and peacock feather. The “band” was a pair of bored-looking foreigners in the corner, West Indians perhaps, one with a trumpet and the other with a tambourine, and their music was very fast and peculiar. The eccentric carousers, plumages flailing, were dancing and writhing on the uncarpeted floor, out of time to the music and with bottles of cheap champagne in hand. Mathilde had disappeared to the bathroom with Emilia and we boys were left alone in the doorway, gazing in at the jamboree, roused and horrified.

“Steel yourselves,” murmured Yevgeny, and we stepped forward as one, uncertainly, into Gomorrah.

Mathilde reappeared in the room with Emilia almost half an hour later – both looking flushed and dishevelled – by which time I was ensconced on the chaise-longue between a pair of budgerigars (or that, at least, is what the young women claimed to be dressed as). One yanked my bowtie loose, and the other charged my empty flute with exotic-coloured punch from a jug at her feet. Drops of it splashed over my shirt and trousers.

“Tell us who you are – who you really are,” slurred the budgerigar to my left. Her warm breath smelled of ripened peaches.

“He’s a spy,” whispered the budgerigar to my right. “Look how he’s dressed.”

“I assure you, ladies – “ I replied, in what I hoped were mock-gallant tones, “— I am no spy.”

“He’s lying,” said the budgerigar to my right, her sharp talons sinking into my thigh.

“Yes…he’s lying,” chirped the other. “We should torture him until he confesses.”

And from a clutch bag she produced a flick knife. For a dreadful moment I believed she would stab me, and was in the motion of recoiling, but then she erupted with laughter.

“For cutting apples!” she cried, holding the blade up. And it was indeed the kind for fruit, not more than one and a half inches long. From my flute I extracted a hefty quarter of lemon, and with the knife she split it three ways. We sucked on our ration until our eyes watered, and dissolved again into laughter. I felt giddy with excitement. After a time I gathered they were second year art students at Goldsmiths’, and the prettier of the two, called Esther, was a former girlfriend of the host, whom she pointed out to me: a very tall, muscular fellow with a shaven head and a deep, fresh-looking tan. He was naked but for a loincloth and a quiver filled with arrows his feet were bare. He was dancing by himself and looked quite forlorn.

“Tarzan, Lord of the jungle,” announced Megan, the less pretty budgerigar, whose breath smelled of peach. “But his real name is Elmo van Solling.”

Elmo was a sculptor, explained Megan in almost reverential tones, and he was squatting in the apartment since his father had ejected him from the familial home, following some lurid, heart-breaking scandal involving Elmo and a politician’s son.

“Oh dear,” was all I could say at first. That, and: “How regretful.”

“Isn’t he something?” said Esther.

I shrugged. “Perhaps…he is certainly rather striking.” In truth he was mesmeric.

“Go and dance with him,” said Megan, and Esther nodded eagerly.

“Yes, go and dance with Elmo,” she agreed.

“Why? What’ll I say to him? I haven’t even got a costume.”

The theme was “birds and beasts”, and I was clearly neither. Mathilde ought to have warned us; there is nothing more awful, except perhaps the reverse, than arriving at a fancy-dress party in civilian clothes. In the end, we all went up to dance with him, the budgerigars and I, and we held hands and span in a circle, to and fro, back and forth, until we were dizzy and delirious. Elmo smiled sadly. Up close I could properly admire his pronounced, angular features, like one of Breker’s marble warriors, though his tightly cropped hair gave him the look of a prisoner. For that reason, perhaps, I found I was too nervous to meet his eye. He could not have been older than twenty-two, but he struck me as so worldly; so very much in his element that he could afford to be downcast, so solemn, amid all that euphoria surrounding him. I tried to speak every now and then, but the words wouldn’t form, and in the end I left the talking to Esther. From the look in her eyes, I gathered she was still in love with him, and I think Megan loved him too. As we danced, they shot questions at him – of his work, of his younger sisters, of his artist friends. His family, I guessed from what little constructive conversation took place, were German or Austrian expatriates. (I happened to know that Solling was the name of a range of foothills in Saxony. The original “von” preposition had been altered, presumably, to evade anti-German sentiment in one or both of the wars, like the Battenbergs who became the Mountbattens.) Eventually we were joined by other revellers, one at first, then two or three, and then several at a time, and our circle became a dense, torrid, writhing mass of bodies, with Elmo and me virtually stationary at its core. The heat was tremendous and my fortitude, undercut with punch, finally crumbled. Feathers brushed up against the bare skin of my neck, sweat spewed in geysers, and through the forest of limbs there came bestial whoops of exhilaration. The music had tipped into frenzy, and I could not say exactly what happened, or with whom. I only recall the feeling of ecstatic abandon.

An hour later, during a lull in the music while the band took refreshments, I left Elmo and his harem to find the others. Hubert I spied in the hallway. He was slumped in a chair against the wall and he looked tired and irritable. His tie was loose and his top button undone.

“Filthy degenerates,” he muttered as I approached. He was glaring at a young couple kissing frantically in the doorway through which I had just passed. The girl was evidently a tigress, but her partner’s get-up was less clear. He wore a black leotard, and pinned to his lower back was a kind of tail. (In fact he had come as the Minotaur, but the exquisite papier mâché bull’s head he had abandoned next to the toilet earlier that evening. I came across it when looking for Percy.)

“Let’s get out of here,” said Hubert. “I don’t like these people.”

“Oh?”

“They aren’t our people. We shouldn’t have come.”

“No?” I would have given the world not to miss it. And as for “our people”, in truth I knew I wasn’t one of Hubert’s people either. In that respect I was a free agent.

“Where’s Yevgeny?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“Gone home probably.” Yevgeny lived in Westminster, a short walk away. It was his habit to leave parties entirely unannounced.

“Mathilde? Emilia?” I asked. He shrugged again.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s well past midnight. Let’s go.”

I was sorely tempted to send him off without me. I wondered if Elmo would let me sleep on the battered chaise-longue, if such a feat was even possible. But then again it was past midnight and the party had, if anything, grown larger and wilder. Nobody would be thinking about sleep until at least four or five o’clock, and I simply hadn’t the willpower or the stamina.

“Alright then Hubert. I’ll find Percy, you find Mathilde to say goodbye, and we’ll meet back here in five minutes, come what may.”

I found Percy in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He was curled cherubically at the foot of a poster bed, unconscious, grasping in his vomit-stained hands an overhanging slither of duvet, as a leper might grasp at the trailing hem of a passing messiah. The room was dark, filled almost to the ceiling with mess, and the bed itself was occupied by an unclad couple, thankfully also asleep by that point. There was a trail of red handprints along the carpet, leading from a puddle of red wine in the bathroom someway down the hall, through the bedroom door, and ending where Percy presently lay. It appeared he had been asleep beside the toilet earlier in the evening, had awoken, and had sought out a nest in which to sleep off his intoxication. He had crawled infant-like along the hallway and eventually spied the bed through the open door, but not possessing the strength to pull himself into it had made do with the floor. I wondered if he had noticed the couple’s intrusion, or if in fact they were already using the bed, in which case had they noticed his intrusion? I shook him awake, whereupon he emitted a very long, lamenting sigh. His limbs moved slowly and cautiously.

“It’s alright Percy – let’s get you on your feet shall we?”

He sighed again, this time from the pain which undoubtedly wracked his skull. I tried to shift him bodily, but gave up after a moment’s exertion. I was of average height and lightly built; Percy was shorter but much very much heavier.

“Want help?”

I turned to see, silhouetted in the doorway – in fact, blocking much of the light – was Elmo. He had discarded the quiver and looked more naked than ever.  

“Is this your room?” I asked, and he nodded, casting an impassive eye over his ruffled bed-sheets and the entangled occupants. He came forward and I stood aside. He crouched and scooped Percy up in his arms, as easily as one might a baby.

“I will carry him as far as the front door,” he said, which struck me as more than reasonable – if anything, overly generous.

I trailed behind as he descended the staircase, every now and then protesting at his being overly good-mannered. Percy was one of my lot, after all, whether I liked it or not. We had come to the party together, and he was my responsibility – or in any case, more mine than Elmo’s. But my protests went unheeded and unanswered. Meanwhile I was entranced (and not to mention a little disturbed) by the sight of Elmo’s broad back, across which rippled vast, muscular knots and couplets, and I was put in mind – though could not say why – of great tubular pythons writhing beneath a silk sheet. It was practically indecent.

Hubert was stood waiting for us in the hallway, and he blanched a little at the sight of Elmo, cradling poor Percy in his arms.

“What have you done with him?” he cried, apparently believing that Elmo had attacked Percy, and was in the process of disposing of the evidence.  

Elmo ignored the question and placed his burden into the chair which Hubert had vacated. He then turned in the direction he had come and strode off.

“Isn’t he the one who lives here?” whispered Hubert, eyeing the titanic figure who was ascending the staircase.

“That’s Elmo van Solling. You needn’t have been so alarmed – he was helping me out. Percy was poorly upstairs.”

“Poorly how? Not drunk again, surely?”

“Again? Hubert, he never recovered from the first time.”

At this point, Percy let out a groan. His head was slumped forward into his frills.

“Hubert,” I said, “I’m going to stay here and clear up the mess Percy made upstairs. Why don’t you take him home? I’ll chip in for his cab when I next see you.”

“Yes alright. Was he sick?”

“I think so. And he got wine on the carpets.”

“Poor Percy.”

“Poor lamb.”

Part 6

V.

You may be wondering what became of Florence in all this. In spite of my running her colours up the mast early on, she was now out of sight and mind – or so, judging by my account, it would appear. In fact, just less than two months after our dinner in Covent Garden, and our abortive rendezvous the following morning, I received a letter. Even had Florence changed her usual style of envelope, I would have known my correspondent before reading a single word. There were inky thumbprints along the seal, and the erratic scrawl of the address was unmistakeable. But I did not open it. Instead I slipped it into the shoe box which contained all her letters, and pushed the box beneath my wardrobe. I can’t quite explain why; partly, I think, it was a case of wounded pride. Retrospection is torture, sometimes. I cringe to think how precious I was in those days; how puny was the hurt compared with what would come in later years, on a whole different order of magnitude, like the hissing of tin-drums drowned in the earth-quaking bellow of timpani. But I shall tell it as it was, not as I wish I could have been: for whatever reason Florence had stood me up in Marylebone, and to compound the offence had waited almost sixty days to apologise. It served to underline – to my mind, at least – how much more she meant to me than I to her, and the disparity was a humiliation. It was a betrayal and my adolescent revenge was to disregard, for a time, what I assumed to be her apology.

I told myself that as Florence’s star had set, so had others risen to take its place. Of course, what I hoped was a growing indifference to her was nothing of the kind. Simply refusing to face an upset does not cure one of it. But I was stubborn, and with each passing day her image, once so clear, seemed to fade. When my reply was eventually penned, I told myself, many months later, she would dissect it as carefully as I had in the past dissected hers. She would sense a formality, a coldness in the turns of phrase, and would understand how her indifference had stung. In the meantime there was Mathilde, and through her an entire universe to explore.

The party on Curzon Street was the first of many, and they grew increasingly dissolute, in no small part due to Elmo. His dark moods were lifting intermittently; I gathered he was back in contact with the politician’s son. (Megan relayed the news to me, and rather bitterly I sensed.) He threw dinner parties for friends and fellow artists, but rarely cooked himself, and for a lack of chairs these soirées normally took place on the carpet, with his guests sat cross-legged in a circle like Bedouins around a hookah pipe. Being still at school I could only attend those gatherings that took place at the weekend, and came to resent the liberty – and libertinism – of my newest acquaintances. I knew too well that lingering sense of having missed the event which then becomes sole topic of conversation, such as the night of the mysterious party guest who brought a live goat with him, although apparently the event was riotous even prior to his arrival. Chinese whispers undoubtedly magnified the scandal, but the version recounted to me by Esther, who was not there either, ran thus: the theme of the party was “Aztecs and Olmecs (Mayans forbidden)”, and a stepped pyramid of cinderblocks, borrowed from a nearby building site, had been constructed in the centre of the living room, plateauing at almost five feet off the carpet. Afanasiy, the Swiss-educated nineteen year-old son of a Kazakh industrialist, brought a goat as an offering to the gods. He had purchased it from a Smithfield market butcher, and probably would have murdered it too, atop the pyramid, had Elmo not intervened. When the police were called by the occupants of the apartment below – aroused, apparently, by the sound of distressed bleating – the goat had already been set free and was last seen bolting in the direction of Shepherd Street. Afanasiy, certainly quite deranged, left the party shortly afterwards and was never seen again. No one admitted to having invited him in the first place, but then who would? In anyone’s eyes but his, livestock was a step too far. The local magistrate evidently agreed, and Elmo’s household – which besides him comprised two out-of-work actors and a former solider – were fined ten shillings each.

It should be said that the vast majority of the Curzon Street gatherings were not so eventful as that evening, which I was sorry to miss. But even the tamer gatherings, profuse with smoke and chatter, were rife with allusions, inside jokes and references to people, paintings and plays (a great many of which I am sure were fictional). Missing one party, let alone two or three, meant playing a futile catch-up game at the next. I was a simpleton amongst sphinxes, and could not keep abreast of their riddling. But none were trickier than Elmo, who said little even in his lighter moods, and whose thoughts – if he had any – were carefully concealed. But I think that where Elmo was concerned, everybody felt in the dark to some extent, and that was a most irresistible attraction. His innermost circle, if it existed, was impenetrable. Who were those fortunate luminaries? What influence could they bring to bear on him? For such was Elmo’s gravity that when he moved the surrounding stars moved with him, and all but the most obstinate celestial debris fell into his orbit. He could no more turn them away than grow a second head. What few words he uttered they clung to, and when he danced they fell about him.

A consequence of Elmo’s revisiting his former beau was that Megan retreated. She was far too bland a personality to have ever stood a chance attracting him, but hope shall ever persevere until, like the glowing candlewick, it is pinched out. From doting vainly on Elmo she turned her attentions, quite unexpectedly, onto me, and within two months of our meeting on Curzon Street we were “stepping out” together. It was an artificial coupling, and not one I pursued with any great vigour. Mathilde practically commanded me to do it, and since I had never stepped out with anyone I agreed that I should learn the ropes.

“You are a mere schoolboy,” she had said to me, slipping her gloved hand into the crook of my arm. (I had somehow grown used to her exoticism, and in a short time we were practically friends.) Presently, we were strolling on Hampstead Heath on a Saturday morning, near to the ponds. Her pug, a relatively new acquisition, ran ahead of us, chasing moorhens from the water’s edge. “You are a schoolboy,” she repeated, “and you don’t understand how much you have yet to enjoy, and how much you have yet to learn. Just think what Megan could teach you.”

“But Mathilde, I don’t like her in that way – I’m not even sure she’s pretty.”

“Oh, don’t be so superficial.” She batted my ribcage with her hand. “Why, the most exhilarating men I have known were ugly, ugly things.”

I said nothing, and she went on. “Had they been handsome men, had they always been handsome men, then they’d have been vain and self-obsessed. They’d pretend to look at me, but all the while be looking behind me, trying to catch their faces in a mirror, like Narcissus gazing into the pond.” Who, I wondered, had taught her how to speak as though from a script? It was marvellous to listen to. On she went: “But the uglier man feels no entitlement. He cannot rely on his appearance. Nature has forced him to acquire intellect, or artistry, or wealth, or eloquence. The uglier man has earned my attention, and he works hard to keep it. Handsome men for the most part are lazy, idle lovers.”

“Girls – ,” I stuttered, “girls are different.” But being utterly virginal, this was baseless conjecture.

“Not so very different,” replied Mathilde. “In a similar way Nature forces ugly women, by way of compensating, to acquire certain feminine virtues.”

“Such as?”

Mathilde smiled her thin smile. “That, darling boy, is for you to find out. Let us just say that chastity and temperance do not cover it.”

In retrospect it is clear what she was driving at: what the school chaplain had cryptically referred to as “sins of the flesh”, and which I had once genuinely believed was a reference to eating non-kosher meat. But at the time I was nonplussed, and gave myself over to Mathilde’s schemes, believing she had my best interests at heart. (And what did Mathilde gain by toying with one so green, you may be curious to know? She told me later, many years later, when we were grown up and beyond our primes, that she had looked on me as unspoilt clay, ripe to be cast as her golem.) 

The day after our walk, armed with a generous allowance from my father, I took Megan to dinner in Covent Garden, at the restaurant where my parents and I had eaten with the Barclays the summer before. It is fair to say that a vital ingredient, present in the first evening, was absent from the second. We were given a table by the window, and our dismal-looking candle guttered in a draught. A radiator, adjacent to the table, rattled ineffectually. Megan refused to be waited upon, and insisted on keeping the same knife and fork for each course. It upset the well-meaning staff, who had already taken quiet offence at her outfit, every aspect of which was minimalist and roughly tailored. The hemline of her skirt rode well above the knees, and her bare arms were covered with gooseflesh. She had an opera cloak – or a coarse imitation of one – which she draped over the back of her chair. I wondered what our fellow diners thought of us. Every now and then – particularly from the more conservative-looking types – a disapproving or lascivious glance was thrown in our direction, and I’m ashamed to say that I fantasised, briefly, of being Megan’s pimp. I might well have pondered loftier sentiments, such as appreciating her graceful, swanlike poise, or the delicacy with which she ate, only I was distracted by her style of “conversation”: forthright and very much one-way. It was in fact not so much a dinner as an hour’s lecture with the option of food. I had not heard of Moses Hess. I knew nothing of his methods and treatise, and had no desire to learn.

“Your problem,” she said at one point, viciously impaling a cherry on the leftmost prong of her pudding fork, “is that you’re still in school.” The way she said it, you would think I had chosen to be sixteen, and against her sound advice. “You see, being institutionalised you have a very narrow perspective on life.”

To what did I owe such venom? Actually, nothing specific. It was an assault, she later explained, on my conformism, of which she had a “general sense”. Her surliness might have been charming – might – were it not so clearly the imposture of a well brought-up girl, rebelling against her upbringing. But I was a sixteen year-old boy and cared very little about politics and philosophy. On the back of that unsuccessful dinner I resolved, in the future, to meet only in pubs and parks; she had little money of her own, somehow even less than I had, and I resented paying to be harangued.

But in spite of the hurdles I received much kudos from school friends on Megan’s account. I was not the first to have a girlfriend, but to have one almost four years older was unheard of, and it sealed my reputation at Dulwich. Prefects, who before had not deigned to acknowledge me, were now positively warm. Even certain of the younger masters, themselves fairly recent alumni, were impressed, though of course outwardly disapproving. If my loose association with an older group had buoyed my social standing, this latest development – a real, flesh-and-blood girlfriend – sent me into orbit. I was practically celebrity. Sophie caught wind of the news through Mathilde and Emilia, and soon she too was demanding my time. I had always been, in her eyes at least, a peripheral character. She used to consider me a fraud, I suspect, and a climber, but now that I moved in a faster set – and one which reeked of scandal – suddenly I was appealing to her. Previously unsuitable because my family were poor; now suitable because, poorness notwithstanding, it was rumoured that I drank and smoked, and fraternised with subversive, anti-establishment figures. In fact the likes of Megan and Esther were about as subversive as me. They were churchgoing, poppy-wearing and tea-drinking; Middle England, in other words, but with a token streak of anarchism. A handful of their peers were rather more seditious, but most were not. Most had reached for painting and sculpture with the dream of emulating those various bohemian factions which had gone before – Joan Miró, Carl van Vechten, Juan Gris et cetera – and whose adventures had sounded impossibly wonderful. It was a kind of rigid, collective nostalgia, and one sensed it in the littlest things: the cut of a suit, the brand of tobacco, the original cabaret poster, proudly framed. It was all backwards-looking.

Though I did not perceive it at the time, what these new pretenders lacked, and which their idols had possessed, was the combination of craftsmanship and vision, and the audacity to break with the past. (After all, every entrenched style was one upon a time the avant-garde.) Elmo possessed the first two qualities, but I don’t know that he was ever courageous. Megan’s charcoal sketches meanwhile were fetching, if a little trite. She had craftsmanship, but nothing else. Her habit, I noted uncharitably, was to depict static dynamism – a figure on the verge, or in the act, of motion – and to render it entirely static once more. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said she was drawing from drawings. But in spite of my dim views on her art, when the studio she cohabited was opened to the public (the schools did this from time to time, in order to attract prospective buyers and curators) I stood by loyally, handing out glasses of very cheap , hardly drinkable wine, chatting with visitors, and appearing older than my sixteen years.

The crowds were a jumble of artists’ parents and family, friends and hangers-on, and perfect strangers who knew nothing of art, or who knew too much. On the first such evening Megan sold three abstract watercolours to a plump, red-haired professor of ancient history at Edinburgh University. They had not been marked for sale and were laid on her credenza in varying states of incompletion – a mass of uncertain swirls and shallow stains of colour. But the don, who had travelled that very afternoon from Scotland, said they evoked for him a sense of “the fourth wall removed – art as meta-fiction”, and insisted on making a quite generous offer. Though undeniably pretentious he was also very personable, and complimentary of his surroundings. In a thick Dundee accent he asked where my own paintings were, and when I explained, sotto voce, that I was not an artist at all but Megan’s school-age boyfriend, he laughed uproariously and clapped me on the back.

“Good for you!” he cried, and a few heads in the room turned to look at him. We were in the corner of the studio, huddled somewhat conspiratorially. On this most flimsy of pretexts he launched into a sad, vaguely smutty tale – in a quieter voice, mercifully – of his own adolescent romance with an older, engaged woman, back in Scotland some forty years earlier. I am now hazy on the details, but the gist of it was that they fell in love as their affair drew on, only for her to disappear one day without a word of explanation. Almost half a year on she sent him a photograph of herself in bridal attire, evidently on her wedding day, in order to explain “where mere words were deficient”. This photograph the professor, then a mere boy of nineteen years, tossed into the sea at Loch Ailort, into the calm, inscrutable deep, but the image he could never erase from memory.

Presently, however, it was clear that in time he had surmounted heartbreak, for he sported a wedding ring of his own on a stout, sausage-like finger, and he had the plump carriage and bearing of a man well looked after.

When the visitors were gone, around ten o’clock, and Megan and I were left alone in her studio, we shared a kiss. She instigated it, and did so clumsily. I had been bent double, sweeping crumbs on the floor into a dustpan, and when I rose to my feet she was there before me, just inches away, pouting madly. (It was almost a head-butt, and would have been except for my quick reflexes.) She planted her hands on my waist, and her lips on mine. I meanwhile kept a firm clasp on the dustpan and brush. There are dual clichés in respect of one’s first properly amorous encounter: either the Earth moves, such as for Hemingway’s María, or it is underwhelming in the extreme. Our kiss, half-drunken and long anticipated, fell into that second category. But I had a sense of what it ought to have felt like, though did not, and so was encouraged to persevere, not out of any keenness for Megan but from a curiosity to see Mathilde’s plans fulfilled. I had unwittingly begun what I later classed as the first of three distinct transformations: an embracement of wantonness. For the time-being, Megan was mine to explore and exploit.

These newfound delusions of rakishness took a toll on my academics. From the dizzying heights of year ten, the fruits of which weighed heavily in engraved silverware, I was now looking at top-set demotion across the board. The physics master went as far as to draw for my parents a graph of my progress in the preceding three terms, which my friends found hilarious. Even the most forgiving extrapolation pointed to disgrace in the upcoming final exams.

“Too many late nights, eh Gatsby?” said Percy, teasing in his clumsy, bovine way. He had made the Gatsby joke at least twice before.

“Existential crisis,” I replied, affecting an air of exaggerated melancholy. The others laughed, as did Percy after some hesitation. He was slow on the uptake, poor Percy, and when in doubt typically aped our other friends.

We were sitting in a wood-panelled niche in a Victoria pub, close to Westminster Cathedral, working through grimy tankards of ale. It was a Friday afternoon. We were on an art field trip and were supposed to be drawing the façade of Lancaster House on the Mall.  We had given our young tutor the slip, knowing he would be too embarrassed to report the matter. In any case we had arranged to catch a particular train back to Dulwich, and would re-join him there. If needed we would claim we had gotten lost and drawn Admiralty Arch instead. Yevgeny and another boy had both sketched the archway from memory, in the unlikely event we were called upon to prove our backstory.

“So what’ll you do?” asked Yevgeny, once the others had settled down. I shook my head.

“Not sure. I might have left it too late for Cambridge. Perhaps somewhere else will take me.”

Yevgeny grinned. “Seminary?”

“Possibly.”

“You have a vocation?”

“Oh yes – definitely.”

We spent the next hour, Yevgeny and I, foretelling my life as a priest. I would be the drunken sort, we decided – the kind to father children and embezzle the takings from the summer fête. He was a kind soul, Yevgeny.  

Part 7

VI.

Matters came to a head, and then were duly averted, when my parents came to Dulwich on my housemaster’s summons. We convened rather incongruously in the cricket pavilion where Dr Eschenbacher had been busily coaching the First Eleven after lessons had finished for the day. He was still in his whites, and his cheeks were flushed almost comically from over exertion. He was a tidily moustachioed, middle-aged man of average height and portly build – the sort whose enthusiasm regularly outpaces his athleticism. His high, domed forehead still glistened with sweat.

The boys were by then inside, and the pitch was deserted. The Barry buildings lay in view, squat and obstinate. Having partly recovered, Dr Eschenbacher took a deep breath and came straight to point.

“Your son appears hell-bent on turning his back on a deeply impressive record, and in the same way turning his back on a bright future.” He had an exaggerated drawl, probably affected. He went on: “A number of his tutors have voiced to me their deep concern.”

He paused and my father twisted to his neck to glare at me. I noticed dark smudges of oil on the folds of his collar. I knew perfectly well what he wanted to say, but could not for fear of sounding coarse in front of my teacher: “your schooling nearly beggared this family – throw it away and I’ll box your ears!” We were seated in a line on a bench, with Dr Eschenbacher and me enclosing my parents on either end. My father was very sharply focused on Dr Eschenbacher, as though he might at any moment try to dart away across the cricket pitch, but by contrast my mother seemed to find the view of the school far more engaging than the matter at hand. She had not been free to visit Dulwich when I came to interview, and this was her first time in its picturesque setting.

“In my view it is not a matter of discipline,” said Dr Eschenbacher. “By no means is your son unruly, and I am told he is not disruptive either – perfectly polite, in fact.” My mother, who was only half-listening up to this point, turned to me, beaming. It was upon catching my father’s eye that she realised she had taken the master’s faint praise entirely out of context, and the smile became an absurd grimace – a parody of disappointment and concern.

As the discussion went on a number of theories were proffered as to the root of my decay. Girls were not mentioned and nor was drink, and eventually we settled on my suffering from “ennui”, which, claimed Dr Eschenbacher, was a common enough complaint, particularly amongst the smarter boys as they approached the conclusion of their school days.

“They do not appreciate how close they are to completion. They have only to shoulder the burden a few miles further, after which point they are done with school,” he said, and then, after glancing at his watch, added, “I’m afraid we must wrap this little talk up. I have a staff meeting which I must attend.”

For my part I played the contrite sinner, eager to confess all and be absolved. I promised to adhere to an intensive study regime, with this and that master able to provide out-of-hours tutelage. I was the deserting private, discovered by my platoon ensconced in a provincial brothel – offered the chance to re-join and expunge my disgrace. But it is remarkable how ungrateful children can be about the sacrifices made for their education! In my case they were losses made in vain, and without even gratitude by way of solace.

But for a time I was off the hook. One advantage – short-lived and superficial – to having relatively unschooled parents is that they cannot properly supervise one’s homework. French, Latin, chemistry and the rest blended into a single incomprehensible gibberish. They noted the hours I spent in my bedroom each evening and assumed that I was hard at work, translating Flaubert and Hugo into meaningful English, or defining covalence and reduction. In fact I was penning notes to Megan, coaxing her to spell out the various indecencies she had hinted lay in store for us at her upcoming graduation party. Occasionally my father poked his head in the door, ostensibly to offer tea and biscuits, and what he found was a diligent young man at his table, scribbling away, pausing only to replenish the ink in his pen. And thus veiled my decline went on, uninterrupted.

In the end, the much feted graduation party did not materialise. Esther was in Europe with her parents, as were a number of Megan’s other friends, and the girl with whom she shared her studio had flunked the course. It was rumoured she had suffered a breakdown; in any case Megan had not seen her in months. But her absence, and Esther’s, put a dampener on the whole idea of a celebration. Megan went to Wales instead, the Rhondda valley, to stay with her family. In one sense I was relieved. I found the only way I could tolerate my girlfriend was with large quantities of alcohol. This is not unusual – I gather that many longstanding marriages endure upon the same principle. But for an adolescent to be drinking so much and so regularly, was patently unhealthy, and the brunt of our relationship was felt not in my heart but my liver. Megan’s absence would do me good.

Sometime later a few of us – Elmo and Mathilde, and someone else I had not met before – gathered in a tea house in Bloomsbury one wet Saturday morning. The sun was bright, but hidden. Gloom and boredom pervaded like a mist.

“Well we must do something,” insisted Mathilde. “If we don’t do something, we shall stagnate.”

“What does the word mean, ‘stagnate’?” asked a sleepy young man whose name I didn’t know. He sounded Italian.

“It means – “ said Elmo, mindlessly stirring his drink, “—it means that we will putrefy.”

The Italian didn’t know that word either, and was offered “rot” and “decompose” in its place.

“Oh yes!” he cried, suddenly quite cheery and animated. “You mean like a corpse.”

“Like a corpse,” echoed Mathilde, whose sullenness was a hangover from the previous evening. She had stayed up with the Italian in her father’s flat, teaching him to play whist. Double brandies were introduced as a forfeit, and apparently she had borne the brunt. He too had a bedraggled look, only it suited him better. He had many wrinkles for a young man, and grey hairs, and the darkness beneath his eyes hinted at corruption and fast-living. I did not introduce myself. Formalities were deliberately avoided in this set, but in any case Mathilde’s liaisons were famously short-lived. It was simply not worth the extension of one’s arm.

“It’s this city,” said Mathilde. “I feel we’ve been here forever.”

“We could take a walk?” I suggested.

“We’ve walked everywhere,” she said petulantly.

“Mitchell has a boat,” said Elmo. “It’s moored in Beaulieu. We will go to Saint-Malo for ice creams.” He gulped the remainder of his tea in one, and stood up. “Come on, we must hurry for the train.”

Mathilde squealed with delight, and the Italian laughed incredulously.  

“Saint-Malo for ice creams?” He clicked his fingers. “Just like that?”

I telephoned my parents from an outdoor kiosk and told them I was staying with Hubert that weekend, in order to study jointly. Elmo then telephoned Mitchell, the politician’s son, who was in Beaulieu at that moment, to tell him of our coming. I gathered from the tone of the conversation that Mitchell was unreceptive, but after a time he came around to the idea. Megan had once told me – again, with bitterness – that Mitchell did not approve of Elmo’s “arty” friends, and that the last time they had visited Beaulieu there had been a scene.

We arrived in Southampton by train at half past six o’clock that evening, and found a bistro-style café in which to eat. The journey had taken the wind from our sails, and we needed coffee and a square meal. The quest for ice cream, as readily as it was taken up, was postponed.

The café overlooked the River Test, and was cheerfully decorated with nautical miscellany, including a ship’s wheel and a selection of ferocious-looking mediaeval harpoons. French doors stood open and a clement breeze wafted through the room, which but for us was empty. Perhaps it is always like this in Southampton, but I was struck with the calmness of the place. Elmo, who for once was dressed impeccably, left the table in search of a telephone. He wanted to call Mitchell again, to tell him we were close by. Their meetings had become covert ever since Mr van Solling, nine months earlier, had discovered a candid love letter beneath his son’s pillow. Mercifully, Mitchell had not signed his name, or at any rate not fully, and his anonymity was assured. The letter was burnt at once, but no amount of fire could erase the state of things, and his son – with whom Mr van Solling had already a most fractious relationship – was cast out in disgrace. His father threatened to call the police on Elmo and the contents of his bedroom, I am told, were literally thrown out into the street. It was now necessary to take precautions when Elmo and Mitchell came together, in case a parent or an interfering neighbour should happen by unannounced and blow the lid off their tryst.

I noticed when Elmo returned to our table, some ten minutes later, that his hands trembling ever so slightly. He sat, took his glass in hand and drank a large mouthful of wine. He was the only one of us drinking and he had chosen a claret, dark and syrupy. He caught my eye but said nothing. The look of sorrow – or was it anxiety? – had returned and was painted thickly on his otherwise impassive features. I had a sense of impending and palpable excitement. I was a hanger-on in this trip, I knew that, but even just to witness Elmo in relative privacy was a thrill. I thought of his many simpering admirers, and what they would not have given to trade places just then.

“So this…friend of yours – “ said the Italian, in fact named Felice, to Elmo when we had finished our soup and bread, “ – he will accommodate us tonight, and we sail for France in the morning?”

“It would be prudent,” replied Elmo, “to sail out this evening with the last light. We can moor to a buoy in the estuary, about a mile down from the house. We can sleep on deck, or go ashore and bivouac.”

It sounded like great fun to me, but it was obvious that Felice had not bargained on our camping in the woods, and he was certainly not dressed for the occasion. I suspect that when he heard “yacht” he envisaged some ostentatious cruiser, a sort of miniature gin palace with cabins and amenities throughout, if not staff too. He shot a warning glass at Mathilde, who was reinvigorated with black coffee, and who pointedly ignored him.

Mitchell arrived half an hour later in a battered four-wheeled drive, and he parked over the road from the café, scattering a small flock of wood pigeons. Once unravelled from the driver’s seat I saw that he was very tall, only an inch or two shorter than Elmo, lightly built, bespectacled and with thick, dark hair parted to the side. His skin was pale, his eyes bright and his nose slightly askew, perhaps from a sporting injury. He wore tennis whites and a pullover, and had his sleeves buttoned to the wrist, in spite of the warm weather. His lips were pursed, and I detected something in his manner – not haughtiness exactly, but rather a studied play of self-assurance. I had seen the same look in his father in press photographs. He strode over to us, across the deserted and dusty road, and my heart fluttered a little as at the appearance of a celebrity, which he almost was. We were stood in a line outside the café like privates on parade, awaiting inspection from our commanding officer.

He shook my hand. “Mitchell Lewis, how do you do?” But as I began to introduce myself he had already turned to Felice to shake his hand in turn. Mathilde he knew already and they kissed on both cheeks. At last he came to Elmo, who stood at the end of our rank, and I watched them carefully. They drew to full height, like pugilists sizing up. Neither smiled, and seeing them in profile I was struck by what a handsome pair they made. Both were very tall, but quite different in terms of build and carriage. Elmo had a weightiness, an unmistakeable kind of solidity to his frame. One could insert him in the place of a steel girder, or the column beneath a great pediment – he would not buckle. Mitchell, though broad at the shoulder and reasonably muscled, was somehow effeminate-looking, though perhaps only in relation to Elmo. He had a wasp-like waist, much like mine used to be, from which his torso tapered only slightly. His hips were slim and his legs were thin and long.

“Good evening,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. He put his hand on Elmo’s shoulder, close to his neck, and it lingered there a very short while. Elmo blushed – I had never seen him blush before – and he squeezed Mitchell’s elbow in response. And that was it: no kiss, no embrace. Just the squeezing of an elbow, over in the space of a heartbeat. We then climbed into his car and drove off in the direction of Beaulieu.

The radio played something louche and jarring by Gershwin. A short time later we turned off the main road onto a mud track about a mile long, and headed through a series of opened farm gates. The further we drove, the more overgrown the track became. Rigid conifers lined the path, and up ahead they thinned out as we approached a clearing. Mitchell’s father’s country pile was a grand affair, at least in terms of the plot.

The house itself loomed some way from the main drive, hidden by a copse of ash trees, and it appeared quite square and brutal-looking, built in red sandstone and with castellated ramparts. The surrounding garden was meticulous and vast, the dimensions of a small London park. The lawn was mowed to the height of a bristle, and punctuated here and there by clumps of tended brambles, vegetable beds and flowering shrubs. A bench beneath a plum tree was the only sign that humans were, in theory, welcome in this sprawling, strangely bare allotment. Thick woods bordered the property on all sides, but through a chink in the palisade one could see dusk playing on the river, which was at that hour receding to its low tide.

“Welcome to the homestead,” said Mitchell, peering at me in the rear view mirror. Felice was also a first-time visitor, but by his sullenness – in contrast to Mathilde’s gaiety – he had made himself unpopular rather quickly.

“Drop us by the jetty, Mitch,” said Elmo. “We can ready the boat whilst you fetch victuals.”

Mathilde was seated in the rear between Felice and me, and she leaned forward to be heard above the radio. “Now which of you two is the captain? We’ll be very confused if you go ordering one another about.”

“Mitchell is the captain,” said Elmo. “I’ll be in charge of flags.”

“Oh no. I must be in charge of flags,” Mathilde protested. “It’s all I know how to do.” She proceeded to relate the story of her last voyage. The captain of the Dover-Calais ferry, apparently quite enamoured of Mathilde, had taught her how to semaphore.

“Don’t give Mathilde the flags,” snapped Felice. “She will only sink us… Christ, I need a cigarette.”

The two of them began bickering, and in the end we settled on Mathilde as the figurehead, Mitchell as the captain and Elmo as his deputy, or “Hardy to Mitchell’s Nelson” as Felice eloquently put it.

The yacht, which hardly looked seaworthy, was moored at the end of a short pier, jutting from a dell in the woods. Coiled ferns poked up between the planks, and the struts were cloaked in ribbons of dripping kelp. It was difficult to say which looked older: the pier or the yacht. Such was the uniformity of disrepair one might well have been made for the other. The boat’s sole concession to modernity was an outboard engine, expertly jimmied to the stern, and this alone was untouched by marine florae.  

“The good ship Salacia,” said Elmo, by way of introduction. “Thirty-six sturdy feet of wood and canvas.”

Felice tutted disapprovingly, but he was happier now for Mitchell had given him a cigarette.  

After a further hour we were launched, and we motored at low speed downriver, cutting through the haunting, heavy stillness, which lay about us like an immoveable fog. It was a little after eight o’clock and the sun was perched on the horizon out west, ready to fall beneath the treeline with its champagne veil in tow, but already we were cast in shadow. A few other masts peeked up from hidden bends and dark lagoons ahead of us, but the vessels on which they stood were moored and deserted, and the pleasant chugging of our engine was met by silence. Mathilde, Felice and Elmo were sat in a circle on the bow, playing card games. I sat in the cockpit with Mitchell, who was helming. He wore sailing gloves, which seemed a little pointless given how dry it was. We passed a bottle of beer between us, and I felt giddy and serene. Mitchell, visibly more relaxed, had become talkative. 

“It’s God’s Country,” he said, indicating the marshes and the forest which surrounded us. “Everyone says that about his own backyard, but here it’s true. Have you been to Exbury, or Emery Down?” I shook my head. “Well you must. And when you do, tell me God doesn’t walk those cobbles, and run His hands through the hedges of lavender. You see over there,” he pointed to a thatched cottage roof nestled in a spinney, some two hundred yards to starboard, beyond the marshes, “that’s all which is left of Old Milton hamlet. That’s the house my mother grew up in.”

“Who lives there now?” I could make out silvery wisps drifting up from the chimneystack.

“It went to mummy’s cousin about twenty years ago,” said Mitchell. “I haven’t been in a long while. I wonder what they’ve done with the old place.” He then asked me what I did and I said I was still at school, soon to be sitting my final exams. He chuckled, but without condescension.

“So you’re, what, seventeen?”

“Sixteen,” I replied.

“And this lot have adopted you?” he said, nodding to the others.

“Seems so.”

“And who’s the wop? Don’t think I’ve seen him before either.”

“His name is Felice. Mathilde brought him.”

Mitchell smirked. “Rummy bird, her.” There was a lull in conversation, and then he asked me how I knew Elmo. I related the story of the budgerigars, and the party on Curzon Street. I may have been too descriptive, for a shadow crossed his face and I knew at once what he was thinking. When the silence became intolerable I chose to grasp the nettle.

“You don’t approve of his friends.” I said.  

He shook his head. “It’s not that. I don’t care who his friends are.” He didn’t seem especially annoyed but then added, inexplicably: “You wouldn’t understand.”

The words were framed – unwittingly I think – as an accusation and we fell quiet once again, busily digesting his tone, startled by the acidity. The beer bottle stopped moving between us, and from some reed-bed in the near distance came the sharp, reproachful cry of an egret.

He and I spoke again shortly before bedtime. As it was so mild an evening we had decided to sleep on board, above deck, and a vast picnic rug was laid out. The boat was forty feet from tip to tail, so there was plenty of room. Furs and duvets were conjured from various stows and life jackets were set out as pillows. Nightcaps of Irish cream were made up and shared around.

With the view to setting off promptly at dawn I took a seat in the cockpit to read the tide tables by candle-light, when Mitchell appeared over me.

“About before,” he said, keeping his voice down. “Please understand, I didn’t mean anything offensive by it.”

 “I didn’t take offense,” I replied, though of course I had. He then took a seat beside me.

“But even so,” he said, “it must have sounded patronising. It was nothing about your age… I daresay you’re a brighter sixteen year-old than I ever was…heck, it took me twenty years to get the hang of those tables! And here you are, new to the game, whizzing through them like you wrote the damned things.”

I listened in silence, waiting for him to arrive at the point.

“See, I only meant that there’s a backstory…context, you know? Though you’ve probably heard it  already… Have a smoke?”

I took a cigarette, and he held out a lit match for me. I did not smoke as a rule, but felt compelled to on this occasion. The cigarette was a bargaining chip, and if I wouldn’t take it he had nothing else to offer. Between exhalations I shook my head.

“I don’t partake in gossip,” I said, and was pleased at how equable, how adult, it sounded. Mitchell eyed me for a short time, wavering between trust and suspicion.

“You don’t say.”

“Well, what more can I say Mitchell?” My expression was pained, but I was quite enjoying his attention. “If you won’t tell me what you’re getting at…”

After a long pause he spoke up and his voice was quieter than before, and rather hoarse.

“I love him, you see. That’s the sum of it.”

For the matter-of-fact tone, he might have been declaring the cricket score, or that day’s share price movements. I nodded dumbly. Such a turn in conversation was not expected, or for that matter especially welcome.

“Do you think he loves me?” asked Mitchell.

“Elmo? I honestly couldn’t say. Shouldn’t you talk to him about it?”

He shook his head. “Can’t bring myself to. I want the answer, but at the same time I don’t. You know what I mean? One of those situations where truth is almost worse than uncertainty.”

“Uncertainty?”

“I know there have been others…men and women.”

I thought at once of Esther, the poor dope. Which others had Elmo seduced? Mathilde would know – I would make a point of asking. Mitchell took my silence as admission, and he turned away.

“It would be simpler just to forget him,” he said. “Except that he won’t play along. The whole thing reeks of scandal – what if the press caught wind of it? My father would disown me, like his did. Thank Heavens I didn’t sign that letter!”

“Indeed. But don’t dwell on it.” I might as well have said nothing – he was peering into the darkness, orating to an unseen audience.

“I should have been thinking about my career, but instead I was wasting time at his silly parties, with his silly friends. Have you heard the kind of absurdness which went on? Virtually scandalous. If it was just him and me, that would be different. But he’s always got an entourage – a blasted circus troupe with him the whole time. I leave London to shake him off and he follows me here. Where else can I go?”

It was difficult to tell given the low light, but I am sure he had tears in his eyes. His voice had diminished to a quaver.

“I mean – have you ever been alone with him?”

I shook my head.

“Oh Jesus,” he cried suddenly. “Give me strength. Why am I lumbering a schoolboy with all this?” He rubbed his tendons, as if soothing a migraine. I was desperate for us to be interrupted, but the others were away on deck, bickering loudly over some trivial wager. Not really knowing why, I apologised.  

“No,” he replied. “No, I’m sorry. I only wondered if perhaps you knew…if you had some insight… but you’re so young. Would you even know if you saw?”

I sensed that he was pleading with me to divulge secrets that I didn’t in fact possess; to grant him hope, or to shoot him dead and put an end to his misery. It occurred to me to be entirely blunt, to withhold nothing whatsoever. So I told him I knew Elmo only as an outsider; I knew him as the epicentre of a vast, formless clique, whose members came and went and loved freely; who sought pleasure and disdained constancy as unnatural and archaic, and who lived, as far as I could tell, only for want of a better pastime. I told him I did not know whom Elmo truly loved. He was spoilt for choice, but did not revel in the circumstances. I said I saw him only now and then, and felt unduly privileged on the rare occasions he spoke to me, such as today. I was in awe of the devotion he commanded, of the sombreness with which he acknowledged it, and of his apparent inability to reciprocate.  

When I had finished, some minutes later, Mitchell nodded. The glimmer in his eyes was gone, and he was smiling.

“I think we’ve tumbled down the same rabbit hole, you and I.”

I won’t detail anymore of the boat-trip for now, for it strikes me as somewhat gratuitous. Suffice to say we did not reach Saint-Malo – being almost two full days’ sailing from Beaulieu as I later learnt – and were diverted by a squall to anchor in the bay near to Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. We went ashore in an inflatable life-raft, which was stored in one of Salacia’s cabins. The sun reappeared at midday and we made a tour of the gardens, and Felice insisted on scaling the cliffs to photograph the view with his Kodak camera. In amongst the rest he took a shot of Mitchell and Elmo with their hands around the other’s shoulders, each one beaming insensibly into the camera, and he was kind enough to make me a copy. He sent it to me a year later by post, long after he and Mathilde had gone their separate ways. I still have the photo, and whenever I see it I am reminded of Mitchell’s desperate appeal: “Do you think he loves me?” Young Mr Lewis – poor, tortured soul. The answer was so blindingly obvious.

More important than the remainder of the trip is what occurred on my return to London that evening. My nervousness at being found out – having played truant on a weekend’s revision – was, in the end, unnecessary. I walked through the front door and was greeted by a cheerful mother and an ambivalent father. My sisters were at the kitchen table playing dominos.

“Hello dear,” said mother. “How was Hubert – did you two get a lot done?”

“A great deal. I’m exhausted now.”

“I’m not surprised. Why don’t you get an early night?”

I was up the stairs and into my bedroom when she called to me.

“Oh, and a letter came for you. I’ve left it on your pillow.”

I saw she had. The letter was from Florence, and I tore through the envelope with a sense of impending victory. In amongst all the excitement I had nearly forgotten that little scheme of mine! What desperate pleading lay within it? Of course, my triumphalism underscored what little distance I had made from Florence; how far I had not come along. But all I could think at the time, as I slipped my fingers inside the tear and withdrew the letter, was the profound justness of what I supposed to be Florence’s misery. And with what bitterness I reflect, even today, on the shameless joy I felt in those moments, before the artifice imploded.

I sat at my table and unfolded the letter. My eyes were drawn instinctively to the middle section of the first and only page, beyond the opening pleasantries, and to the stark phrase: “mummy died shortly after midnight”. An utterance caught in my throat, and for a minute I sat in perfect silence, reading and re-reading the letter. Mrs Barclay, wrote Florence in strangely clinical phrases, had taken a sudden turn for the worse following a drawn-out but stable decline, and the illness was that which she had referenced in her previous letter: a cancer of the bones. She had died at home in the company of her husband, her daughter and her physician in the early hours of Friday morning, and “was in relatively good spirits, up to the point of her slipping into unconsciousness”. Florence had considered telephoning me, she wrote, in order that I might travel to her mother’s bedside, but surmised – correctly, as it turned out – that I would arrive too late. The funeral was to take place imminently. Attached to the letter by paper clip was a signed cheque, drawn on Mr Barclay’s current account. A post script explained it was to cover the train fare. I wept bitterly.

Part 8

VII.

A taxicab met me outside Stroud train station in the late morning. A small suitcase sat beside me in the car, containing a change of clothes and a kind of floral wreath which my mother had assembled hastily the evening before.  Following a short drive through winding country lanes we arrived in the valley on which Fersen Hall looked out. Mist had pooled in the vale’s basin and the surrounding hills, illuminated by the pale sun, appeared as islands in a sea of fog. The house itself was relatively unchanged. There were alterations to the grounds, such as a newly planted tree here and there, and a fence relocated, but the house was as I recalled. If anything the colours were muted, but that could well have been the mist – or even my imagining that the estate, somehow, was itself in mourning. The taxi came to a halt in the stable yard, and I alighted and paid my fare. The crunch of tires on gravel must have alerted the household to my arrival, for across the yard a door opened and Florence was there in a black dress which reached down below her ankles. She grasped the fabric in her two hands to prevent the hem dragging on the stones, and she ran to me and fell into my arms. We stood there a while, entwined and stricken, until she withdrew abruptly.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. Her eyes were unfocused and her long eyelashes were sodden with tears, clumped together like wet fibres of a barley spike. “Daddy is waiting in the hall, and the cars should arrive soon to pick us up.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “I’m so happy you came.” She looked at me, searching suddenly. “I had wondered, if perhaps…”

My stomach sank with guilt, but the accusation – if it could be so described – was left unfinished. I was led in silence into the hall where Mr Barclay sat in a wooden chair beside the grandfather clock, which had stopped some years earlier and was never mended. He wore a black suit and was hunched over a walking stick, gazing intently at the cold stone floor between his legs. The years had been unkind to him, or, I wondered, was it only the past few months? There was little left of the once sturdy, aged rancher. He looked up at the sound of my footsteps and smiled wanly.

“It is good to see you, my boy. You are well?”

I nodded. “Well enough sir.”

“And your trip?”

“Well enough.”

I noticed I had, without thinking, adopted the accent of a Stroud farm hand, and his turn of phrase as well. But if Mr Barclay suspected mockery, or an ill-timed stab at humour, he did not comment, and before we could say more there came to us the low rumblings of the approaching cortège, rubber screeching and squealing on the loose gravel. A shout went up in the courtyard. Florence took her father’s arm, who had risen to his feet, and I walked behind them through the doorway, out to the black cars. The hearse itself, some way back in queue of vehicles, was a carriage, ridden by a young man in dark livery and drawn by a pair of stallions, one almost black and the other pearl-coloured. (Florence told me later that the pearl horse had been her mother’s.)

The roads were deserted of other vehicles and what few pedestrians there were moved to the edge of the road as we came by – they bowed their heads, and those in caps doffed them. I was struck by the quaint, old world feel of the spectacle. It was not as if Mrs Barclay had been some grand baroness, and these pedestrians her feudal subjects, but all the same they were deeply reverent. Or perhaps this was a fanciful misperception – perhaps they had never known Mrs Barclay and they bowed their heads only out of respect, and for fear of death’s dominion. 

The village church I knew well: a small, unremarkable building of Norman design and Victorian elaboration, like any one of hundreds up and down the country. I took my usual pew beside Florence – Mrs Barclay would ordinarily have sat on my right. By midday, quarter of an hour later, every bench was filled, and even the arcades were thick with people – many, judging by their dress, were from the farm. Martial ensigns of heavy rich fabric hung between pillars, commemorating this or that platoon drawn from the local boys, obliterated in foreign mire, immortalised in artless gold embroidery.  These curious banners gave to proceedings an air of grandiose, pompous lament quite at odds with the reality. The deceased could not have been further from soldiering and human conflict.

As the rear doors opened the organist struck up a thunderous dirge, and the congregation bowed their heads. Mrs Barclay’s coffin, shrouded in a pall and festooned with wreaths including my own, was borne along the aisle by six carriers, and put to rest on the dais before the altar. The dirge concluded, silence fell and the vicar came forward to the lectern.

I have never been particularly religious, it has to be said. True, like my peers I am culturally Christian, but that is the end of it. I am happy not to go along with it, to sing the hymns and make the signs of the cross, but when the churchgoers have gone you won’t catch me at it. The Anglican Church, to me, was ever the foremost element of Englishness – that loose confederation of motifs and institutions which define our mongrel race – but alongside the monarchy, public schools, the armed forces and cricket, I was supremely indifferent. But in that little Norman church where I had used to while away the Sunday mornings, I was transported – although not spiritually. It felt like a homecoming: a five year gulf bridged within an hour, but under the most tragic circumstances imaginable. Presently, Florence and a number of cousins – none of whom resembled her – stood to make readings, and Mrs Barclay’s sister played on the organ the refrain to Pretty Girls of Mayo.

There followed some traditional hymns, and then the vicar’s sermon. The vicar was a man in late middle-age and had a robust, healthy look to him: tall and broad shouldered like an athlete. He began with reminiscences, and I gathered he had come to the parish some four years or so earlier, not long after my own departure. From anecdotes he turned to the readings, and from there to the lesson.

“It is tempting in such a time as this – “ he said, drawing to the climax of what was surely a familiar discourse, “— to permit our grief to overcome us.” He paused theatrically, and glanced at the congregation. “It is very human, after all. Even Christ our Lord, not long before his own death on the cross, wept for Lazarus. But his very human grief was portentous, for he knew that victory was close at hand; he knew that through his imminent sacrifice we would achieve immortality – not here on Earth, brutish as it is, but in Heaven…” The vicar paused again, drawing the palms of his hands against the edge of the lectern. “We celebrate our sister’s life, and we mourn her passing from it, but only insofar as we yearn for her companionship once again. That too is human: to yearn for the familiar and the beloved, when we know all such things are fleeting. Our sister is in her father’s house now, in paradise, and for that we must be grateful. Our sister is freed from suffering, and for that too we must be grateful. Draw your minds to the earlier hymn, and in particular to the penultimate verse. Consider its triumphant tone: ‘Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?’ Where indeed… Grief is tinged with defiance. So grieve we must, but for our sister’s sake let us be defiant.”

The vicar folded his notes and put them aside. A little later the organ struck up again, and soon after that the coffin was borne aloft and carried outside. The congregation followed in due course, and a procession was made to the churchyard, where a fresh plot lay gaping.

A reception was held at Fersen Hall, but Florence and I did not attend.  

“Let’s go around the garden,” she said, and took my arm as we passed out the kitchen door and onto the patio. The moss was still rampant, and almost black with the dew and rainfall it had sponged. We made a beeline for the flower-beds, water squelching underfoot. A chilling breeze rose suddenly and passed on; joined its kinsfolk dancing and rolling in the broad vale beyond.

“I thought something was amiss,” she conceded when I brought up, falteringly, the matter of my irresponsiveness. “But all the same I had imagined there was good reason – that perhaps you were very busy and would reply to me when you could.”

Oh, sweet Florence. Had it not crossed her mind that I was wretched and pitiful?

“Of course,” she went on, “As I explained in the letter, I was very sorry to have left you as I did. Our holiday plans changed at the last moment, and I wasn’t able to let you know in time. I hope you weren’t put out?”

I shook my head glumly. Her first letter – that which was stowed away – I had read that morning on the train to Stroud. News of a cancelled ferry had compelled the Barclays to rush for an earlier service. She wrote from Capri explaining, and detailing her mother’s frailty, by that point no longer concealable. The letter had taken a long time to arrive, but I had at first not noticed the foreign postmark and peculiar stamp. It was an innocent but disastrous oversight; a detail which could have bypassed anybody, in theory.  

“I didn’t read the letter Florence,” I said. “That’s the truth. I put it away because I was upset – you do understand?”

But she had turned away by this point to gaze at the hedgerow. In a quite dreamy voice – at odds with her earlier, relative clarity – she said: “Do you remember our den, just in there?”, and pointed to a gap in the hawthorn where we used to scurry. Red berries now dangled in the entrance, and foxgloves had grown up around it. Obstructing the gap itself, menacing intruders, were clumps of nettles, primed with venomous, glassy barbs.

“Florence?” I said.

“…only we’re much too big now.”

“For heaven’s sake, listen Florence.” 

She turned her grey eyes on me. “Oh, I am listening.” Her softness was a rebuke. “But I was reminiscing at the same time. It is quite possible to do both at once. You aren’t angry, are you?”

“Angry? Me? No, not at all. I just wanted to know you forgive me.”

“But you do sound exasperated,” she said, which was true. “And what have you done which needs forgiving? Shall we walk to the pond? I want to see if any tadpoles escaped from the herons – ghastly birds.” And before I could say anything else she was floating away across the lawn, beyond reach, the train of her dress sprawling out behind. And that was Florence: a cousin to reality, many times removed. I gave up trying to apologise. It was clear she did not perceive her initial slight or my subsequent, much clumsier retort. I had not appreciated that I was unable to wound her in any conventional sense, for in her heart she believed I was that same kind-hearted boy of ten years earlier. Except bodily, she had not grown up. And what a way to live, I thought: inured against anything unseemly in human nature, simply by refusing to acknowledge it.

I had no desire to stay on at Fersen Hall under the circumstances. I had left it years before on the cusp of spring, and now it was strewn, like a Hallowe’en bride, in white and wintry cobwebs. The warm sun did not penetrate the dusty window panes, and the corridors lay gloomy and deserted, more aimless than ever before. Overhanging deciduous trees, years earlier had, as if playfully, prodded and tapped the windows in a gust; now they scratched at the panes with spidery, witchlike fingers. In the place of wildness was desiccation and even Florence’s warmth, apparently unaffected by season and weather, was insufficient to lift my spirits.

A tea was held in the drawing room late in the afternoon, and I arrived with excuses well-rehearsed. Only a few cousins remained from the funeral, and I asked for news on the trains to London.

“But young man, you have only just got here,” wheezed Mr Barclay, handing to me a cup and saucer. “I had visions of you staying on a while.”

I protested weakly. “My exams, you see…”

At that, Mr Barclay’s resolve melted and nodded sadly. He was at heart a very sensible man, and schooling thus was a trump card. Had he a son, he would have delighted in overseeing the boy’s education, and he had no intention of impeding mine. But Florence, rolling a peeled quail’s egg in a dish of celery salt, took a much firmer line.

“No, you can go next week. Leander – ", she said, referring to one of her cousins about my age, “ – Leander is doing his exams too. Fettes gave him time off and he’s brought all his books down. You can study with him in the library if you need to.”

Wilting in her bright gaze, I yielded. We compromised on three days, and I telephoned home to tell my parents.

Part 9

VIII.

Those few days at Fersen Hall were for the most part ghoulish. The weather remained stale and indecisive and we few residents, permanent and temporary, gathered together almost by instinct. I studied with Leander in the library each morning, but we did not warm to one another. I found him to be standoffish, and needlessly competitive about our work. In turn, I suspect he thought me frivolous and undisciplined, which I was. At one point I doodled in the margin of the notebook he had leant me, and when he noticed he was furious; to see his reaction you would think I had desecrated some priceless saintly relic.

I had noticed a trend in the extended Barclay family: that the women tended towards feyness and the men, as though to compensate, were fiercely pragmatic and determined. Taken as a whole they were well-balanced, but individually insufferable with the wrong audience. During our sessions Leander would often speak to me – nay, lecture me – about his plans for life beyond school. Every milestone was set out: which university (Cambridge), which college (Pembroke), which degree (medicine), and even which specialism. I told him I did not know what pulmonology was, and he threw me a disgusted look. After university he would join a practice in Harley Street, he said, after which point it seemed an element of chance crept into this otherwise impeccably charted journey.

“If I’m made a partner of the practice by the time I’m twenty-eight, I shall stay in London,” he explained without prompting. “Otherwise I shall start my own practice abroad, probably in Hong Kong or Singapore. A man can climb the ladder much quicker in the colonies.”

I nodded glumly. If I had to pinpoint the moment when I turned decisively against pursuing a university education, it was then. I could not imagine anything less exciting than three years alongside Leander’s ilk. Would he mellow at Pembroke or grow yet more tedious, exposed – as of course he would be – to hordes of kindred spirits, each one a budding pulmonologist, whatever that was, with his sights on sturdy Harley Street, or the chancier, more exotic climes of Singapore.

“What about you?” he said at last, in a quite unfriendly tone. We were sitting in the bay window of the library, which looked out over the unkempt gardens, the grazing meadow, the ha-ha and the rolling forest beyond. This was part of a scheduled revision break, to clear our heads before we changed subjects.

“After school? Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t given it much thought.”

“You’ve spent too much time with my cousin, “ he replied. “You can’t just muddle through life, directionless, you know?”

“She seems to manage,” I said, rather petulantly.

“Florence is different. All women are. A man, on the other hand, has to know what he’s about.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

“You ought to try for Cambridge,” he said. “It’s alright if you don’t know straight away what it is you want to read – you can always change. If science isn’t your forte you could do theology or English. Your next task is to choose the right college. I’ve got a friend you should speak to. He’s a third-year at Jesus, doing Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic literature.”

“I should like that very much,” I said, staring out at a flock of sheep in the near distance, beating a laborious path to the shelter of the woodland. “This friend of yours sounds extremely interesting.”

I began instead to think about art school. The seed of the idea had long lain dormant, but now it warranted serious consideration. True, I had no discernible artistic talents, but that had not prevented so many of my friends from signing up. I have written here, or at any rate should have written, that great artistry comprises vision, craftsmanship and bravery. Good artistry, however, can be achieved with as few as two, or even just one, of these elements. Craftsmanship I did not have, but vision and bravery I was sure I could fake. Through Megan I had learned to talk the talk, and when eventually I was exposed as a phony, by then it would be time to get a proper job anyhow. All that remained was to avoid flunking my exams; I was not stupid enough to believe I could bluff my way through life on a wing and a prayer. A man needs something to fall back on…

Respite, or something like it, came at meal times when I escaped the confines of the library, and Leander’s superior attitude. We all took turns preparing the food and I paired myself with Florence, who was an excellent cook. Every ingredient came from the garden, even the meat. She never shot or trapped rabbits herself, but she was adept at skinning them. (One of the most incongruous sights I have ever seen was Florence kneeling on the lawn in a beautiful summer dress, knife in hand and bloodied to the elbows, like a surgeon at Trafalgar. In front of her lay the corpses of two hares, turned inside-out. She dried and salted the pelts, and later on knitted them into fetching pillow covers.)

“A productive morning?” asked Mr Barclay during the final such luncheon, addressing Leander and me. I glanced at my study partner, who kept his eyes on his plate.

“Very productive,” I said. “Your nephew and I make a good team.”

Leander snorted derisively, though I don’t know if anybody but me noticed.

“My dear wife,” said Mr Barclay, quite mournfully, “had very high hopes for young Leander. He intends to be a doctor, did you know?”

I nodded. “Yes, he mentioned it in passing.”

“And what will you be studying this afternoon – more history?”

Florence interrupted. “No daddy, he’s resting from study. He will help me with my piano practice.”

“Ah, yes. Yes, he must not strain himself,” said Mr Barclay, and Leander snorted again. He was being really quite rude. “I hope your time here has not been stressful? It cannot be much fun revising all day when you could be playing outdoors.”

“I would otherwise be revising in London, sir,” I said. “The change of scene is healthy.”

“Indeed. And I appreciate the company, now of all times. Florence, too, I think. We would have been very lonely without you.”

I was ashamedly gratified that Leander, by implication, had been excluded from the compliment. I do not know what he made of his uncle but evidently he found Florence quite exasperating, understandably. As a blood relative he was perhaps immune to those other charms of hers, which in my mind absolved her entirely.    

That afternoon, the last before my evening train to London, I spent in the drawing room with Florence, beside her on the duettists’ piano stool whilst she played, turning the brown brittle pages of some obscure concerto. The ink of the notes was faded into the score, the flags and stems almost indistinguishable from the tanned sheets upon which they were printed. Florence’s long slender fingers spanned an octave with either hand, or seemed to, and moved over the keys with a startling grace and vigour. In spite of the fire the long room was bitterly cold, such that our breath was vapour, and the room was a mess of piled up chairs, opened drawers and sheet music lying all about – as though in the aftermath of a frenetic burglary. But it transformed when she played. It became somehow grand, somehow palatial, and seemed to groan with heat. Really, I should not dwell too long on a scene which by its nature eludes description – after all, how can I convey the sound, and the way it moved me? I could tell you the piece she played, and perhaps even the manner in which she played it, but without Florence physically beside me it was nothing, and I know this because I have heard the music since, snatches of it on the radio and the notes, though reminiscent, rang hollow. Nothing would compare to that first, last and only performance.

When she had finished the piece some quarter of an hour later I took my turn and played some ditties which I knew from memory. Florence sang to the tunes she recognised, and I to the tunes she didn’t. In the corner of the room the fire crackled and wheezed, and I pictured Leander in the library along the corridor, trying his hardest to concentrate in spite of the racket. Comforted by the vision, I played as loudly as I could manage, hammering away at the ivory.  When I had exhausted my repertoire, which did not take long, Florence and I sat in a comfortable silence, and music seemed to reverberate even though the keys were still, as if notes were leaking from the saturated air. Apropos of nothing Florence took my hand in her own, and rested her head on my shoulder. I felt her warmth, and breathed in the pleasant, earthy scent of her hair. My heart thumped so loudly I worried she might perceive it.   

“I’m glad you came back,” she murmured. “It’s just like before.”

I could see our distorted reflections in the curved, polished walnut of the instrument, seemingly conjoined. But how did Florence view the scene? Arresting, oblivious Florence. She saw it not, I suspect, as a natural progression from our childhood but merely a continuation of it.

As for me, I burned.

The train to London that evening was a good trip for resolutions. It was largely black outside, and panes of pale light grew and dimmed on the carriage floor as we rocketed past trackside lamps. I drifted into a state of trance; of enhanced but limited focus. I resolved to end things with Megan. To put it bluntly I had taken what I could from the relationship, and it was time to call it off before either of us could be hurt. The question was how to go about it. For a teenage boy to break up with a young woman was a humiliation, and one which she deserved to be spared. My hope was that Megan did not regard me with any great fondness – I was a compromise, after all. She had idolised Elmo van Solling in the time he was with Esther, and afterwards too, and I thought if I appealed to that latent, fruitless adoration, I might engineer a situation in which Megan broke up with me. Granted it was unsound, ethically and logically speaking, but it was also harmless and face-saving. The second resolution, reached between Kemble and Reading, concerned my academic future.

I was in Camberwell by ten o’clock, and sat down with my mother for a late supper at the kitchen table. From upstairs came the intermittent creaks of a family bedding down for the night. The shadow of a moth flitted over the cutlery.

“Your old dad will be sore,” said my mother, spooning another fishcake onto my plate. I had just told her that I was having doubts about university. “It’s what he most wants – for his son to have a degree.”

“But it isn’t like I’m an only child. There’s Ruth and Katie.”

“Oh, but that isn’t the same.”

I knew it, of course. And what is more, my younger sisters Ruth and Katie were not academic, and neither had expressed a desire to take their studies further than school. Their interests lay in homemaking and cookery, and they would become what Megan termed “breeders”: females upon whom suffrage was wasted, and whose aims in life did not extend beyond the maternal and matrimonial. I had not dared to tell her that all my female relatives fell into this category, and seemed perfectly content. Her family, I understood, were more progressive in this respect: artists, writers and socialist agitators. She and her siblings had been educated in mixed gender schools, and were destined to become rabble-rousing adversaries of the Establishment.

“Well what do you think, mum?” I asked her. She had become distracted by a stain on the tablecloth, and was now humming to herself. It was a marvel how she could flit so peacefully from one set of thoughts to another.

“What, me? Oh darling, I don’t mind either way. I don’t know about universities and all that – it’s your father who’s interested. I just want you to be happy.”

“Well, I don’t think I would be happy at university. I think it would bore me.”

“So that’s your answer. What’ll you do instead – go into electricals like your dad?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t decided yet. Listen, what would you say if I were to become an artist? Or at least, go to art school?”

“Be a painter you mean? I didn’t know you could paint.”

“I can’t really.”

“Oh, well son…it sounds a bit daft then.”

“You don’t have to be able to paint, mother.”

“You’d make things then, like statues?”

“Sculptures. Maybe. Something like that. What do you think dad would say?”

“Your father would have a fit. You know what he thinks of Mr Picasso and all the rest.”

“I don’t, but I can well imagine. Will you speak to him?”

“Now why should I do that?” she protested, but not too loudly to wake those upstairs. The walls and floors of the house were paper-thin.

“Please mum.”

And so I left to her to soften the blow, which in hindsight was a terrible mistake. It was clear she had relayed a highly bastardised version of my proposal to my father, apparently even naming “Mr Picasso” as someone I might one day emulate. She was at least correct in foreseeing his disapproval.

It was made clear to me during a particularly raucous breakfast some days later that my future lay in a university degree, or in my father’s business, delivering furniture and refrigerator units around Southeast London.

“The third way is the highway,” he said, indicating with his thumb the direction of the street. My sisters tittered – they adored domestic strife, but were too well-behaved to cause any themselves.

So that was that. Either I went to Oxford or Cambridge, or more likely a redbrick given my grades, and studied economics for three years, and kept up with Elmo and Mathilde in the holidays, and Florence by post, or I traded imagination and ambition for a life on the road, installing white goods in restaurant and hotel kitchens. Of course, refrigeration was not the only racket in town, and there was nothing to stop me finding other work – but what to do? The one advantage of working with my father was a friendly, or relatively friendly, overseer. I was not built for manual labour, and I hadn’t the connections or the skill to make a living from my creativity, such as Elmo did with his sculpting. I relied on my parents for an allowance, without which I could ill afford what my well-to-do friends called “a lifestyle”. It is a crime, frankly, when pleasure is stifled by poverty. The “Kemble-to-Reading” resolution, you will agree, did not go to plan. Without parental support, and without the possibility of a scholarship, I could not hope to enrol in art school.

Meanwhile the other, slightly Machiavellian scheme of mine was taken up and championed by fate. I saw Megan a few days later, in a basement flat in Vauxhall. She was busy with some friends of hers constructing a float for the annual Chelsea Arts Club ball, only a week away.

It was difficult, through the scraps and sawdust, to see the form of the thing beneath, but from Megan’s account, and judging by the sketched designs lying about the room, it seemed they envisaged a kind of gigantic talking cloud on wheels. By C.A.C. ball standards this was fairly conservative: Megan had shown me photographs of the previous year’s event at the Royal Albert Hall, which featured dazzlingly attired harlequins dancing about a maypole, and jugglers and fire-eaters, and even a dog. Except for the Labrador these were students from London’s various arts and performing arts academies, roped in by the C.A.C. “ents” committee.

The pay was not good and the refreshment sporadic, but the event was something of a spectacle. Where else but the C.A.C. ball could impoverished students fraternise with “the quality”, and where else could the quality let loose the strictures of dress-code and protocol? For most striking of all was that they did not look out of place, these performers; many in fact were outshone by the guests themselves, who donned all kinds of ludicrous, outlandish getups.

In many cases you could hardly tell them apart. It was difficult to believe such scenes of eccentricity and rowdiness could come out of a city only a few years before torn to rubble by V2 missiles and incendiary bombs. But there they were, dated as proof that London’s wild ones were irrepressible. These were Hubert’s degenerates in their absolute element.

“Hand me the craft knife,” barked a woman, who looked about my mother’s age. She had shoulder-length straight hair, of a sort of honey colour, and sunken, tired-looking eyes. Her chin was strong and upright, her brow rather heavy, and I fancy she would have made a handsome man. Confiding none of this to her, I handed over the knife from the table beside me, and she snatched it away without even a murmur of thanks.

I knew from her haircut and surly manner that this was Megan’s former studio cohabitant, who had had a nervous breakdown but was now apparently well recovered. She barked at me a number of times that afternoon, and always for the most tenuous infraction. Mathilde, who seemed to know all the artists, had previously described her to me as a “charmless, talentless harridan”, but I for one quite enjoyed her discourtesies. There is much to be said for politeness, but with Sandra – for that was her name – you would know precisely what you had done to offend her, and very quickly too. Bluntness is a kind of charm.

Later on Megan interrogated me on the boat-trip. She had been with her family in Wales so was unavailable in any case, but suspected, and probably rightly, that it was the kind of impromptu jaunt to which she would not have been invited. In the court of van Solling she had only ever been in favour on the basis of her friendship with Esther, Elmo’s very brief love interest. He moved on, and she and all her faction were gently cast aside.

I knew also that Megan was not overly fond of Mathilde and I thought, this time wrongly, that she suspected I was secretly smitten with her. To appease Megan I played up the role of Felice, although I well knew by that point he had returned to Italy under a storm cloud.

Megan asked me what he did. We were in the flat’s bathroom, lit by a single small window of frosted glass. She was bent over a rusty sink, washing glue from her fingers. She did not look at me when she spoke. I was perched on the bathtub, also rust-stained, with a watered down bottle of beer in hand.

“Oh, well…Felice has fingers in lots of different pies.” It sounded cryptic – the unexciting truth was that I didn’t know. Was he in business? I could not recall any mention of it.

“And he likes Mathilde?”

“Tremendously, I think.”

“I wonder why. And what did you think of Mitchell?”

“Brusque.”

“So what does Elmo see in him?”

“I couldn’t say. Stability?” I had meant it as a joke, but Megan nodded seriously. She was watching me in the mirror.

“Listen,” she said, affecting an absentminded tone. “Next week, at the ball – we could do with an extra pair of hands to push the float. If you’re free…?”

It was an invitation – delivered so offhandedly – that I had almost lost hope of receiving. Of course I should I want to go! My friends had talked of nothing but the ball for what had seemed like months.

“Next week? Yes, I think I’m available.”

“It won’t be much fun – it’s a heavy float and you’d be hidden away in the cloud. You might get some complimentary champagne at the end.”

“Megan, I’d heave a cloud all night for a snifter of champagne.”

It did not raise a smile, and I got away from the flat as soon as I could, citing a commitment to visit Elmo in his workshop – in fact, this had been at my insistence; Elmo’s indifference I had taken for assent. I gave Sandra a hearty “adieu!” for the sheer hell of it. She scowled at me.

Elmo’s workshop was actually just a yard behind a tea shop, with a large plastic sheet tented on bamboo sticks to shield his work from the elements. A slope in this roof channelled any rain over the wall and into the adjacent street. Tools lay about an anvil in the centre of the yard. Twisted limbs of metal pointed this way and that, and cones of sawdust littered the paving stone floor. Despite the flames in the crude, coal-powered forge – not much more, really, than a trough on stilts, ventilated by drilled holes in its underside – the temperature in the yard was freezing. It was very distant from the high-ceilinged, Parisian-style atelier which I had imagined was his place of work, and I struggled to contain my disappointment. But of course, my approval was not the sort of trophy Elmo vied for.

Right then he was seated by the anvil on a three-legged stool, hunched over to inspect the copper head of a sledgehammer. He wore shorts and a white linen shirt with an apron over it. How he could stand the cold, I did not understand. The head of the hammer was apt to come loose from the shaft, he explained, and he was interested to see if he could bind it to the shaft with cords of leather, like a Palaeolithic axe-head.

A partly finished sculpture – and the only evidence of the studio’s output – stood against the fabric-covered wall of the makeshift marquee. It was the height of an adolescent: two cords of polished bonze alloy, bi-tonal, twisted around one another, spurting like a plume of water from a rough, blackened base. Nodes and tributaries frayed off the two cords and coiled into themselves, and eventually – for it did almost seem that the sculpture were in motion – those intertwining cords split apart, turned and felt back down into the base, now pockmarked and glazed in soot. It had been made with the help of a metalworker, at a dedicated forge near Hitchin, and transported by truck to Elmo’s studio for his final adjustments.

I was no connoisseur of sculpture, and knew nothing of its contemporary forms, but if I had had the opportunity, I would have stayed there and studied that piece for days, every niche and bulge. For all its liquid frivolity, the monument was at least a quarter-tonne of solid metal. Nothing about it was accidental, as watercolour paint might spill beyond the pencilled boundaries laid down by the artist.

After thirty minutes or so, in which time Elmo and I exchanged very little in the way of conversation, a pale, almost ghostly face appeared at the rear window of the shop, next to a door that opened onto the yard. It was a young woman, aged around nineteen or twenty. Her dyed brown hair was coiled tidily on her crown and she wore an old-fashioned dress with a silk nautical-style collar. She rapped on the pane, and Elmo looked up. He smiled with his eyes and beckoned the young lady, who then opened the door and stepped into the yard.

“Gosh Elmo, it’s rather dank out here,” she said. She bent down, for Elmo had not moved from the stool, and kissed his forehead.

“Hello sister,” he murmured. “You’re early. “

“Hello grumpy,” she teased, and to me: “Geraldine, how do you?” I shook her hand.

“I’m a friend of your brother,” I said, by way of explanation, although what else I could have been – Elmo’s patron? – I don’t quite know.

She looked me up and down, her delicate nose wrinkled, perhaps unconsciously. “I didn’t know Elmo’s friends were welcome at his studio. I’m certainly not.” She turned to her brother. “You’ve never let me through that door, have you Elmo? Until now.” She was being playful, but her brother was evidently not in the same mood.

Elmo grunted and stood up. He went across the yard to inspect a metallic globule which was skewered and hung over the forge’s red coals.

“Anyway,” she said, “here’s what I came to show you.”

From her brown leather satchel she produced a small framed picture. It depicted a young Elmo, perhaps nine or ten, on a cold-looking beach. A tall, bushy-haired lady was stood behind him, dressed in a quite daring swimming suit, with her hands on his shoulders, crouching slightly so their faces were level.

Elmo looked at the picture for a few moments, very intently, and then, nodding his approval, returned to his work.

“It’s for his birthday next week,” she explained to me, showing the picture. “I found the photograph in an old album and got a pal of mine to frame it. Rather nice, don’t you think?”

“It’s sweet. That’s your mother?” I asked, pointing to the lady in the photograph. “She’s very handsome.”

“Oh, but that isn’t mummy. Mummy passed away the year that was taken.”

“I’m so sorry.” In fact I did recall somebody had told me that one or another, or both, of Elmo’s parents had passed away, but Geraldine was unperturbed and she waved her hand dismissively.

“Don’t be sorry. If you didn’t know already, you’ll find that our upbringing was a quite mystifying mess – particularly my brother’s. That,” she said, pointing at the lady in the picture, “is Margritte, a very darling woman who looked after us growing up, especially after mummy died. I had another copy of the picture made and sent it to her just this morning. She’ll adore it.”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Now brother,” she turned Elmo, who had his back to her, “it’s time for that drink you promised.”

Still with his back to her Elmo shook his head. He was stirring up the coals with a handheld rake.

“I’ve got work to do – don’t want the light to die.”

“Oh, but you promised!”

“Gerry, the light. Why don’t you two get a drink? I’ll be thirty minutes longer, an hour at most.”

“But can’t you come back later and use these torches,” said Geraldine, pointing to one of several halogen lamps which were jimmied to the tent poles with tape and wire.

“I prefer the natural light. Those are for emergencies.”

“Emergencies? Such as what – another blackout? Really, you are too dramatic. “

And so Geraldine and I went ahead. She did not turn her nose up exactly, when we reached the pub at the crossroads nearest to the studio, but she pursed her lips in a gesture of muted disapproval. The windows were covered inside and out with a layer of dust and grime, into which fingers had here and there traced obscene cartoons and phrases. Even without the graffiti, nothing about the place was seemly. I had suggested it because I knew it was cheap and nearby.

I held the door open, and Geraldine – who had hesitated and might otherwise have suggested we go elsewhere – acquiesced. We took a table near to the back, close to the open door which led into the garden. The pub was virtually empty.

“I’ll get us drinks,” I said, imagining that a strong sherry would act to cloak the pungent atmosphere. The bartender not only failed to ask my age, but was kind enough to push across the bar a bottle with at least five measures still inside. The cork was sealed with brownish ring of dregs and the label was mouldering and illegible.

“No one’s drunk this stuff in years. Can’t stand it myself. Why don’t you take the lot.” I had only paid for two glasses, and thanked him profusely, grasping the bottle like a trophy and returning to our table. Geraldine frowned and studied the label.

“It looks quite old,” she said. “Nineteen thirty-eight it says here.”

 “A good vintage,” I replied, nonchalantly. I was joking of course. I knew nothing whatsoever about fortified wine, and whether or not they even had vintages, but Geraldine nodded thoughtfully. Silently she had revised her opinion of the place – perhaps it was a shabby trove of connoisseurs. With some effort I released the cork and filled our glasses to the brim.

We toasted the king, and the remaining sunlight.

“May neither die.”

Sherry is not a drink I have ever particularly enjoyed, but on this occasion it was most amusing to watch Geraldine progress at lightning-pace through the early phases of intoxication: she became incrementally louder, and more outspoken, less genteel. She began to slur her syllables – just the odd one or two at first, but with growing frequency. After our second sherry I noticed that she only drank when I drank, as if our right hands were cuffed together. When I lifted the glass to my lips, so too did Geraldine, a split-second later. If I hesitated, so too did Geraldine. It cannot have been a conscious mimicry, but all the same I did watch her carefully for a hint of a mischief. There was nothing to be found: her eyes were bright green, and her thin smile vacant. A strand of hair had escaped the fetters of her styling and dangled sweetly on her forehead.

Another sherry and her candour gave sudden way to glassy-eyed reflectiveness.

“Did he not like the picture? He seemed indifferent to me.” She was referring to the photograph she had had framed for Elmo.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him. He had his mind on work. I’m sure he loved it – a keepsake for him and Margaret.”

“Margritte,” she corrected.

“Of course. Sorry.” There were a few seconds of silence. “So – how often do you see her, Margritte?”

“We haven’t seen her in years. She lives in Algeria now, with her second husband. He’s a very nice man called Alain who is, at least judging by the photographs – ”, she lowered her voice to a whisper, “half-native.”

Knowing as much about the Algerian situation as I did about sherry, the allusion passed me by. 

“And Elmo misses her?” I asked. Geraldine nodded. I did not recall him mentioning Margritte at all, but then he rarely spoke about his upbringing, and the salient characters of his past. I knew versions of it, from friends and onlookers, but successive layers of paint may very well shroud the picture beneath, rather than enhance it, and after a little prompting Geraldine, loose-tongued and with unmistakeable eagerness, moved to apply her own coat. I had a sense that she, like many of us, yearned for his attentions, and as his sister it seemed somehow doubly tragic.   

The siblings had had a governess until Elmo was thirteen years-old, and Margritte was she – a young war widow from Rosenheim, in Bavaria. She travelled to England in the mid-nineteen twenties looking for work whilst pretending to be French, much as her eventual employer had assumed a fictional Dutch heritage in the decade before. At first, Geraldine explained, Margritte was only occasionally present in the van Solling household, cooking meals now and then, and giving lessons in French and German to the children, of whom Geraldine was at that time the youngest. Persephone was born in April, nineteen thirty-six.

Her birthday was not celebrated in the van Solling household, for the date also commemorated her mother’s death, from labour-induced hypertension. Mr van Solling blamed the midwife – tried even to have her charged with manslaughter by gross negligence – but in truth no one could have predicted it. Persephone was her fourth child, and with the lowest birth weight. There was no reason to suspect the birth would go so wrong. From that day forward, Mr van Solling “withdrew”, in Geraldine’s words. He became very distant and cold, in particular towards Elmo. Why so? Perhaps with his wife’s passing he became increasingly possessive of that family which remained. Elmo was not “flesh and blood”, being his mother’s child from an earlier relationship, and nor did he resemble his mother in the way that his sisters did. He was the cuckoo in a warbler’s nest.

Margritte became a live-in from that summer, mothered the children – and Elmo especially, for he needed it most – and took complete charge of their education, though from what I gathered she taught her wards very little in the way of traditional academics, focusing instead on epical poetry – in the original medieval German – and art, and also botany. I recalled that Elmo, in his bedroom at the squat, kept a potted edelweiss which loyally bloomed each July: a lion’s paw in a white double-starlet. The soil he used was stony, and mixed with pulverised chalk in order – he explained – to mimic the mild alkalinity of alpine soil. Personally, I have never seen the beauty of these mountainous flowers; they are nothing beside even the commonest tulip in terms of scent and clarity, but clearly they symbolised for Margritte – and the van Solling children by extension –  a certain place and time and way of life, long since shattered by war and the steady march of progress.

For their bedtime stories Margritte conjured up scenes from her own childhood on sun-baked Bavarian hillsides, bristling with edelweiss, meadow-grass and conifers, and the higher peaks draped thinly with snow.

When Elmo reached the age of thirteen, his father sent him to boarding school in Switzerland, ostensibly to normalise his education but in fact to remove him from sight. Although Elmo never spoke of it, it was here, so Geraldine claimed, that he was regularly beaten and perhaps even raped by certain of the older boys in his boarding house. The desperate letters he wrote home to his sisters and governess were censored by the school, leaving the recipient to garner what she could from the tone. Correspondence in the other direction was similarly edited, compounding Elmo’s sense of isolation.

Outside of term-time his father arranged for him to attend a holiday camp outside Lausanne, where a distant cousin could be relied upon to keep watch over him. It was at this camp, during otherwise wretched, lonely, miserable weeks, that Elmo first learnt to sculpt, something which he then took up at school, as a formal discipline. Quite soon he was too big to be a target for bullies – over six feet tall by the age of fifteen, and with a prodigious build – but by no means was he happier, and by his accounts he passed every free moment of the day alone in the school’s art studios, moulding clay, stripping cables and beating copper.

Kolomon Moser, the Austrian graphic artist, was his idol, as well as the architect Henry van de Velde, and in nineteen-forty-one, aged just fifteen, with the aid of a bursary he travelled to New York City to study his Belgian Building before it was dismantled and rebuilt in Virginia. He stayed there as a guest of Annabelle Siedleska, the mother of a fellow student.

“ – You know Mathilde?” asked Geraldine, and I nodded. “Well Annabelle is Mathilde’s auntie. It’s how those two became friends – through Annabelle. I sometimes wonder if she and Elmo were…” Geraldine paused, blushed a little, and abruptly changed tack. “So, you see, when Elmo wasn’t at school he was travelling,” said his sister. “We never saw him, not even at Christmas.”

“How awful to have him absent for so long.” In fact, I was thinking how fortunate Elmo was to have seen New York at such an age. It went some way explaining his glum indifference to London.

“Quite awful,” she said, and a wistfulness had entered her voice. “And his letters were pointless with so much redacted. I never heard what he wanted to tell me. He is very poetic you know, in his letters. We’re only half-siblings, it’s true, but I love him very much. I wonder if he realises that.”

I nodded. My family was no model of accord and unity, but we were broadly functional. As such I had nothing meaningful to offer Geraldine in terms of personal advice. Above all I was curious as to how to members of a family could have come to be so un-bonded, if that is indeed the term. It is one thing not to love a child, openly or in secret, but quite another to torture that child with emphatic indifference. 

“Was it something he did,” I began, “ – Elmo, I mean – that offended your father? I’m sure the man is perfectly decent, but…”. I trailed off, not knowing how to complete the sentence. From Geraldine’s account her father sounded anything but decent. That he was a petulant tyrant must have been obvious, even to her.

“Oh, well he is, to an extent. The thing is, he never really warmed to Elmo. He was a stepson, and nothing more. Elmo’s actual father died a while ago, and when mummy died too my father no longer felt any obligation to Elmo. I’m not sure he does even now.”

“A lot of deaths,” I murmured.

“That’s right,” she said, with a fleeting spark of cheer. “Didn’t I tell you it was awfully confusing? Elmo’s father’s name was Mr Woodbine. Mummy and Mr Woodbine divorced when Elmo was a toddler. A year later mummy married daddy, and then a few years after that Mr Woodbine died, abroad, from malaria or something exotic. And a little later mummy died in labour with Persephone. A lot of deaths. People have said we’re cursed, although Elmo seems to have done the worst of all.”

“Poor fellow.”

“Poor fellow indeed. He’s an orphan, you see, biologically. And he was away so much that he didn’t have us to comfort him. I felt like I missed out on his childhood and he missed out on mine.”

“It doesn’t sound as if he had much of one.” It had dawned on me that this horrifying neglect was ultimately the price for his glamour. His sullenness was no artistic affectation; it was the inverted smile of a perseverant and deeply-rooted sadness. He was crippled by death and neglect.

“No, it wasn’t much of a childhood. Just a few happy glimmers, here and there,” said Geraldine. She was gazing intently at the picture, of the smiling child. “It’s as if he died – his soul, I mean. I suppose that sounds a little strange. His soul died and the rest of him just carried on, or tried to.”

Part 10

IX.

I had never been to the Royal Albert Hall before. If you have not visited, imagine the Roman Coliseum in redbrick, roofed by a shallow dome. It is not beautiful exactly, and resembles a gigantic pillbox strewn with flags and bunting. But in the dark, floodlit, it is as grand and imposing as the Coliseum must have been to the vanquished foreigners, brought there in chains to fight for the crowds. My own arrival, thankfully, was not so laden with fear as theirs, and in fact I was quite merry. The evening’s festivities had commenced unofficially some hours earlier, for I was invited at the last moment to a late lunch at Mr van Solling’s house in Montpelier Square, along with Elmo and his sisters.

Persephone, the youngest sister, had telephoned – a recently installed, American-made “three-hundred type” was the pride of our household –  and presumably took my father, who answered, to be some kind of insolent footman. She was excruciatingly polite, apologised for bothering me at home, and wondered if, by any chance at all, I might be available to come. I said yes, of course, but was mystified. Why had Elmo not telephoned me himself? (Although that too would have been puzzling.) And why was such a meal taking place at all, between estranged father and disowned son? That was surely not a gathering to which one invited bystanders! But before I could ask to speak to Elmo, she had hung up the telephone. I then called Mathilde at her Curzon Street flat, but she knew nothing of a luncheon and made me promise to report back to her afterwards.

The heavy black door was opened to me on my arrival at three o’clock, sharp. The girl who answered it was minute and blonde-haired, and wore a frilly apron dress. A necklace formed of a glittering pearl mesh, perhaps unsuited for one so young, hung loosely on her delicate neck. I wondered: had it come from a raid on her mother’s jewellery box? Having granted me sufficient time to absorb her, a hand shot out from behind her back.

“Persephone van Solling, how do you do?”

The “how” was pronounced “high”, and “do you do” became a single, tri-syllabic throwaway. I felt a sudden urge to genuflect and kiss her ring, by way of defusing her pomposity.

“How do you do?” I said. “I’ve brought a gift of tea.” I presented her with a Fortnum and Mason biscuit tin, unopened, which Hubert had given me for my last birthday, goodness knows why.

“You are too kind,” she replied stiffly, placing it on a table behind the door. “Do come in.”

She led me into the house, through the deserted vestibule and across a floor laid in dark, almost black stone tiles. A seemingly endless row of large imposing doors stood firmly shut on either side of the hallway as we processed along, as in the corridor of a hotel, and overhead, in step with the doors, hung chandeliers from the ceiling. Each was like a pineapple in shape and size, comprising two or three dozen glass teardrops: dusty, unpolished and – if such a thing is possible – austere in appearance. Portraits of disapproving ancestors glared from their frames, and I shivered inwardly. It was a gloomy, imposing and profoundly un-cheerful house.

At last, after a journey which seemed to last many minutes, we arrived in a kind of atrium at the foot of a flight of stairs, lit, rather peculiarly, by an ornate candelabrum sat upon a pedestal in a recess. Hideous, snarling wolves carved of wood reared up from the staircase banisters and their eyes, tiny glass beads, flickered with malice.

We came to a halt for some reason and, sensing my discomfort, Persephone was moved to apologise.

“It’s a horrid little house, I know,” she said. “Very poky and rather ghoulish. We once had a lovely place in Bohemia. Had Elmo said? Rolling meadows, beautiful conifers…” Her voice trailed off uncertainly, and it occurred to me that the “we” she referred to were her long-deceased ancestors, and that Persephone had herself never seen these rolling meadows and beautiful conifers – dim paintings of which now hung in the very much less idyllic interior of the Montpelier Square home. The idea of referring to one’s ancestors in the first person plural was something I had gotten used to, but even at Dulwich it was a relative rarity. Generally, my classmates did not have family seats. Houses were lived in until they were outgrown, at which point they were sold. There was no shame in failing to cling on to the property one was raised in. In fact, it would be considered odd, even overly-sentimental, to try. I could certainly not imagine, in decades’ time, objecting to my parents shedding our Camberwell terraced home.

“I had not thought it was poky at all,” I said to her, glancing up at ceiling several feet above me. “Quite the opposite in fact.”

“You are kind. But is isn’t exactly homely, is it? Which is an odd thing for me to say, as I haven’t known anywhere else. Not really, anyway. School, I suppose, can be home-like.” She was dithering nervously, and it occurred to me that we had stalled there, at the foot of the staircase, because she expected someone – another guest, perhaps – to emerge and greet us. But no one did. “Please,” she said at last, cutting through her own aimless musings. “Won’t you come up to the living room. Elmo is waiting to see you.”

I fell into step behind her and noticed sharp little heels on her shoes, which were at least a half-size too large for her feet. And indeed Elmo was waiting for me up there. I was almost surprised to see him. The invitation had been so peculiar that I half-expected to find it was a trap of some kind, or a practical joke. But here he was, in the flesh, looming in his former home. I was struck by how sheepish he looked: hair combed, dressed up in a jacket and tie like a schoolboy on photographs day. He approached me with a glass of white wine, dwarfed in his enormous hand. I noticed his fingernails were stained with paint, and what appeared to be soot.

“I’m sorry about all this,” he said, offering the glass to me. “Blame Persephone. It was her idea.”

The sister in question sniffed.

“It was a family idea,” she said. “Now Elmo, won’t you get me a wine too?”

“You can have some diluted Chablis.”

They moved to the drinks cabinet together, leaving me behind. I remained silent and alone until, entering the room and floating over the carpet toward me, came two almost identically dressed young women, one of whom, Geraldine, I had met already. The other introduced herself as Frederica, the eldest sister. I would not have called her pretty, but she was tall and striking, and in a way quite pleasant to look at, as striking people often are. Superficial conversation was made, which took me by surprise – had not Geraldine and I achieved an intimacy of sorts, during our time in the pub? Perhaps the sherry had erased her memory. Had I come far, she asked me? A little way. By car? No, by bus. Oh, how interesting. She and Frederica were visibly on edge, and the reason for this edginess became clear a minute or two later: their elderly father, Mr van Solling. What I did not know was that the luncheon had been engineered by the sisters in order to reconcile him with his son. Only they, the mediators, had any genuine foreknowledge. Mr van Solling, who at that moment shuffled into the room, was laying eyes on his wayward child for the first time in more than a year. One might have anticipated anger, or even affection, but he did not betray the slightest emotion one way or the other. He made straight for the chair at the head of the table and sat down. His miniscule trunk, bent with age, was swallowed up in a charcoal grey suit jacket. His club tie was faded and stained. What little hair he had on his crown was bright white. He did not wear spectacles, but I could see his eyes were glassy and focused. Turning on us, his face broke into a sneer.

“You aren’t children anymore,” he hissed. “For Christ’s sake, sit down.”

His daughters were evidently terrified of the man, for they practically sprinted to their chairs. Elmo and I made a more leisurely approach, in my case entirely affected. Once seated, we ladled soup in turn from a copper receptacle in the centre of the table. I noticed the handle of my soup spoon was inlaid with a single pearl, and it seemed not to match the remainder of the cutlery.

“Have some bread, won’t you?” Frederica handed me a wicker basket. The bread rolls were as hard as rocks. I wondered if I would be introduced at any point, or if I was expected to introduced myself. At Sophie’s tea parties, rigorously-observed etiquette meant that a stranger could not remain so for more than a few minutes. He would be circulated from group to group, relentlessly familiarised until he was bored with the sound of his own name.

The silence which followed was punctuated with slurps from the head of the table. I looked up at point to see Mr van Solling’s napkin sodden with tomato soup. He resembled a gunshot victim, and might have appeared comical but for the menacing smirk which had lingered on his features.

Perhaps detecting my gaze his head jolted upward, and I found myself staring into a set of milky-blue eyes. The pupils shrank disconcertingly as he drew focus on mine. His thin lips peeled back over soup-stained, yellow teeth, into a rictus smile.  

“How old are you, young man?” he asked me.

“Sixteen.”

“I have spaniels older than that, would you believe it?”

I said that I didn’t doubt him, though secretly wondered why these spaniels had not come to the door when I arrived. Perhaps, given their extreme age, they were infirm or asleep somewhere in the house. I became aware that the eyes of the man’s daughters, three pairs, were affixed on me as we spoke, studying my reactions. Then he asked what I did.

 “I’m at school,” I said. “Sitting my final exams this month.”

“I see. And what do you intend to do next? Not art school I hope.”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“Would you like my advice, young man? Go into the army, or the City, or the Foreign Office.”

“Well, I – “

“Avoid art school like the plague,” he interrupted. “It is a refuge of scoundrels and wasters. I dread to think how much I wasted putting this one – ,” he jabbed at Elmo with his fork, “—through it all. What does he have to show for the expense? What, for that matter do I have to show for it?” Then, abruptly, his tone softened; the fierce modulations calmed to equability. “It isn’t his fault, I suppose. He was too young to fight in the War, on either side, which is a shame. It’s an elemental force, you see, war. It has the effect of reversing the softness, the moral slack, if you will, which comes from exposure to vice. “ I was reminded of Mathilde’s poet friend, who had sketched the Léger, and his faith in violence as a great cleanser. It seemed that he and Mr van Solling were unlikely fellow pupils of the same philosophy.

“Yes, a war would have done it,” repeated Mr van Solling, this time almost wistfully. “I daresay it would have eradicated certain of his…tendencies.”

Geraldine put her glass down and cleared her throat.

“Now, daddy,” she said. “Do let’s talk about something else.” She turned to me, presuming I would leap to the rescue. “Why don’t you tell us about any good films you’ve seen recently?”

I thought carefully.

“‘Easter Parade’ was rather good,” I said. I had not actually seen the film, but Yevgeny had heaped praise on it and I was quite sure I could blag my way through any interrogation.

“Oh – Fred Astaire!” squeaked Persephone. “I adore him, though I think his head is peculiarly shaped. Do you dance?” she asked me.

“No, not very well I’m afraid.”

“You’re being modest, I’m sure,” said Geraldine. “Elmo, he is a good dancer isn’t he?”

Elmo had, until then, maintained a bored, stubborn silence, even under his father’s spiteful asides. Presently, he looked up at his sister.

“Oh, he dances divinely.”

The certainty of his remark, and the rarity of his contribution, had the unfortunate effect of killing conversation dead, and at a time when its liveliness was most needed. Yet another painful silence followed. Through the window pane, a Tudor-style latticework, I could perceive the dim, sickly yellow glow of late afternoon. The shadow of a bird passed across it, blotting the sun for a moment, and in spite of that capacious dining room I was gripped by a sudden, intense claustrophobia, and longed to be outside again.

“You are going to the ball with Elmo this evening?” Frederica asked me, and I nodded vaguely. Mr van Solling’s head jolted up again.

“Am I to understand you form part of my stepson’s rabble?” His brow was furrowed almost theatrically. “Forgive me, I had assumed from your age, or lack of it, that you were Geraldine’s suitor.” He gazed around at his daughters, and then back at me. “I gather that is not the case?”

I stammered dumbly. Had Mr van Solling truly laboured under that misconception, or was he playing a rather strange joke? In situations such as this, one has mere milliseconds to take a position. 

“Daddy,” said Frederica, for Geraldine had turned bright red, “he is not a suitor. He is Elmo’s friend, but he is not an artist. He is at Dulwich College, a scholar, and hopes to study at Cambridge or Oxford.”

“A scholar? Oh, well that is something, I suppose,” said Mr van Solling, and his daughters sighed with relief as their father pursued the diversion, apparently with some vigour. “That is certainly something. Although I do question your choice of companions.”  And then, after a long, very deliberate sip of sherry, he added: “Tell me young man, are you a homosexual?”

It is a rare and wonderful sound, a chorus of four mouths erupting soup in horrified unison. Only Elmo was not caught off guard. I daresay he had detected the build-up, the feinted retreat, and the sudden, savage strike. How many other luncheons had followed this well-rehearsed manoeuvre?

“Daddy, he is nothing of the sort,” said Geraldine very weakly. Her two sisters were too shocked to speak but Elmo, almost with a look of boredom, had begun chewing at a crust of bread.

“My curiosity is purely academic, let me assure you all,” said Mr van Solling, calmly dabbing with a napkin the soup-stained corners of his mouth, and apparently very pleased at the reaction his question had aroused. “You must excuse my forthrightness – I am no prude in these matters, but forget that others may be. I consider my son’s condition to be quite repulsive, naturally, but at the same time fascinating. I am a scientist,” he said to me, with an exaggerated air of geniality. “Perhaps you knew?”

I confessed I did not.

“An amateur scientist, I should say. And I have often wondered how it is – from a Darwinian perspective – that a deselecting trait such as homosexuality could persevere through generations. It disturbs me. And moreover, since we must not shy from that which discomfits us, I must ask the question: is my stepson corrupted because of some genetic stain which existed in his biological father? They call it the ‘English vice’, and he was, after all, an Englishman.”

“Was?” I blurted, not knowing why. Perhaps I hoped that by interrupting I might stem the flow of his venom.

“Was. Past tense. He died from syphilis, almost ten years ago.”

“Daddy,” said Frederica, “it was malaria – you know it wasn’t syphilis. Elmo’s father was a merchant seaman,” she explained to me, “and he was bitten by a malarial mosquito in Indochina, near Tonkin.”

“Nonsense!” cried Mr van Solling, with a forced joviality which quickly evaporated. “He went to bed with a local hussy, as was his inclination, contracted syphilis and died shortly thereafter. No autopsy was conducted and his corpse was not repatriated – why was that? Because he was an embarrassment. Even the Catholics wouldn’t bury him. His firm invented the malaria story in an attempt to salvage what little honour that man still possessed…” Saliva had pooled in the corners of Mr van Solling’s mouth, and his voice had increased steadily such that by now he was practically shouting.  “His unremitting promiscuity, which I daresay is heritable, was the reason his wife left him, in spite of their having a child together. Her second marriage, to me, must have been idyllic by comparison. Nonetheless,” he bellowed, “I had been of a mind, when she passed away, to transfer custody of Elmo to his biological father, the sailor. The boy was nothing to do with me, of course, and they might even have liked each other.”

How, I wondered, in the guardianship of such a callous, unhinged tyrant, had the poor boy ever stood a chance at normality? I silently thanked God for my ordinary, run-of-the-mill brute of a father.

“We would never have let you send him away,” hissed Persephone, meanwhile. Her face was red, and her eyes narrowed.

“Dear Persey,” answered her father, genial once again, “you were a babe-in-arms at the time, and would not have had a say. In any case, Elmo’s father died before I could enact the transfer legally. My solicitor at the time was too slow, alas. It is almost as if that beast died on purpose, in order to shirk his one final responsibility – in order to burden me.” Mr van Solling paused and stared dreamily into his glass, which he swirled between finger and thumb, clockwise then counter-clockwise. He awoke from the musing with a start.

“But returning to the point at hand,” he said, and my heart sank. “I should think you have spotted a hole in my reasoning.” Although his eyes were still focused on his glass, I gathered he was addressing me.

“A hole?” I asked, gingerly. In the excitement I had lost the direction of his original argument.

“Well of course, my late wife – his mother – might have been the culprit also. She might have been the carrier of whichever taint is the cause of deviance. It would not manifest itself in her, of course, being a male trait. The experiment is far from perfect, you see, as she never bore me a son, only these three daughters. We cannot be sure that Elmo is the way he is because of his biological parents, or because he chooses to surround himself with effete painters, most of whom, I gather, are themselves sodomites.” He took another sip of his sherry before adding, rather darkly: “—or worse.”

The silence which followed was the heaviest yet, but at last Elmo spoke up from the other end of the table.

“It would be very odd, father…very odd if as you say most painters were sodomites. In the interests of sustainability, from a purely mathematical perspective, is not an equal proportion of sodomites and catamites required?”

After a delay of a few seconds, Mr van Solling exploded with rage. His pale face flushed and his lips curled downwards. He flung his glass, now almost empty, against the table in front of him, and with such force that it shattered virtually into powder. The dregs of his sherry bled into the scars of the table top.

“How dare you speak like that in front of my daughters?” he snarled, trembling furiously. “Foul creature! I should take my belt to you.” And for a moment it looked as if he might in fact stand up and remove his belt; his hands were clasped on the arms of his chair. But as suddenly as he had lost it, he regained composure. He was still. The colour drained from his cheeks until they were pale once again. Before I knew it he had pulled his napkin from his collar, screwed it into a ball and discarded it beside his bowl. To no one in particular he said very quietly: “Forgive me, I have remembered some work which I must attend to. Have Smyth bring the remainder of my lunch up to the study.” And he stood up and shuffled from the room.

Once he was out of earshot, Persephone turned and wailed at her brother.

“Oh Elmo, why did you have to provoke him?”

“Damned silly idea of yours, this lunch,” he replied levelly, and Persephone began to cry.

We left the house, he and I, for a drink at the Beauchamp Arms, a short walk away. I felt guilty leaving the sisters to clear up, but Elmo insisted.

“After all,” he said, nursing his pint of ale, “it was their idea.”

“Yes, I suppose… And maybe Smyth will help.” I said this because I was curious as to their domestic arrangements, and was angling for clarity. Why had this Smyth not answered the door to me, with the elderly spaniels yapping decrepitly about his ankles? Elmo confirmed my suspicion.

“There is no Smyth.”

“And the dogs?” I asked. He shook his head.

“Died years ago.”

“Is he often like that – your stepfather?”

“Like what?”

“Maniacal. Schizophrenic.”

Elmo shook his head. “He didn’t used to be.”

“What happened?”

“He became possessed.”

“Possessed?”

“By devils.”

“Devils?”

“Figuratively.”

“Oh. You mean…when your mother died?” I had an image of Elmo’s mother as being a very soft, very beautiful woman. But perhaps Elmo’s striking looks were his father’s, the errant seaman?

“I suppose. But he never liked me.”

The pub was crowded, and I had the feeling Elmo had chosen it – as strange as it sounds – for the privacy which a crowd of strangers sometimes affords. It was quite sunny outside and the bar was doing a very brisk business indeed; the till bell seemed to chime for every passing second, and orders were bellowed and signalled from across the room as at a stock exchange when the market jitters. No one paid the least attention to us at our table in the corner. It was clear to me that Elmo was reluctant to speak at all but I was emboldened by the drink I had had, and on an empty stomach too, except for the little quantity soup I had consumed. I asked, very straightforwardly, what had happened when the letter from Mitchell was discovered. (It had played on my mind that afternoon – how precisely had the lurid scene unravelled? A letter cast into a raging fire struck me as affected, almost Victorian.) If Elmo was surprised that I knew of the incident, let alone that I should bring it up in conversation, he did not show it and he retold the story as though he were a provincial court clerk, drily reciting from a minor charge sheet. And I thought, with an unwelcome hint of bitterness, how typical it was of him to have been unsurprised, and even bored by the question. That heavy indifference marred what should have been, for me, an unforgettable social occasion: an intimate afternoon drink with the troubled maestro. The fact is that everybody knew, or imagined they knew, of his past, and he couldn’t care less. He was the consummate celebrity. What did he know about me, besides my academic record, which his sister had so eloquently recited a half-hour or so before? (And on that point, I wondered how she had come to know it – certainly Elmo had not told her.) I could not make myself interesting to him and felt, quite fairly, that my absence would not have made the slightest difference to his afternoon. He would have been there anyhow, drinking quietly at the table in the corner, with or without me. His incuriousness was a marvel.

“And what did Mitchell say,” I asked him. “I mean, when you told him the letter had been found?”

Elmo shrugged. He was looking over my shoulder at a young woman with a fetching blonde bouffant hairstyle. She was toying absent-mindedly with a locket at the end of her necklace. “He was worried,” said Elmo. “He was worried it might get out somehow, to the press.”

“But the letter was burnt?”

“Yes. But he still worried. He wants a career in the house eventually, which means a wife and family.”

I assumed Elmo meant the House of Commons. Mitchell’s father was a Hampshire Conservative MP who appeared in the newspapers more often than backbench MPs typically did, on account of his being married to a photogenic and once moderately gifted tennis player. When I was younger she had held a number of titles at a county and regional level, and even appeared once or twice in the Wimbledon Championships.

I asked how Mitchell was now. Had Elmo seen him since our trip to Beaulieu? At the second or third mention of his name, Elmo softened and his sullen, pinched lips drew outwards into a louche, obscene kind of smile – one which I had not seen before, and shuddered to think what it meant.  

“We’re okay,” he said.

“Do your sisters know you’re together again?” I asked.

Elmo sneered, exactly as his stepfather had over lunch. It was their single common resemblance, and I suppose it must have been learnt rather than inherited.

“They believe Mitchell was a phase,” he answered. “Or they would like to, at any rate. They want me back in the house, under their watch, to ensure I don’t relapse. For that, my stepfather must be brought onside.”

“It doesn’t sound like that will happen soon.”

Elmo shook his head.

A drink later and we exited the pub, and staggered off in the direction of Hyde Park.

Part XI

            X.

“‘Lo Megan.”

“You’ve been drinking,” she hissed. We were somewhere backstage in the Royal Albert Hall. I say “somewhere” because the undercroft of the Hall is vast, circular and symmetrical, and as such is completely baffling to a sop, such as I was then. Elmo, who held his drink far better, had sloped off to find his angel wings. (I was to be hidden in the vehicular nimbus, one of Heaven’s unsightly slaves, whereas he was to be one of its princes, winged and conspicuous.)  

“Only one beer,” I protested, though I felt positively marinated.

“Well there’s no time to change the cast – you’ll have to do as you are.”

I was on the verge of a retort, only I bit my tongue. This was not the best moment to argue and I was not in any case fit to do so. I asked if I might be permitted to use the toilet first, but Megan shook her head. There wasn’t time, she said. I retired to a quiet corner to change into my costume, which consisted of the trousers I was already wearing and a white cotton vest. Thus attired, I joined the rest of my team of galley slaves, whose task it would be to convey the float in its path around the stage. We had met once before at a brief rehearsal, though I had since forgotten their names. One, I believe, might have been called Jack, but which? Perhaps fittingly, all five of them were meek-looking fellows, shallow-chested and with hunched shoulders, who gazed at the floor even when you addressed them. I wondered if tyrannical girlfriends had impressed them into the role, or were they hoping to curry favour with any of the hundred or so nubile artistes who milled about in that enormous backstage area, sparingly and daringly dressed, chattering and singing to one another like exotic songbirds in an aviary. 

Presently, a hand-bell was rung and in the abrupt  ensuing silence an authoritative voice went up:

“Attention, please!” cried a young man. “Clouds one, three and five are to be manned. Angels, hauliers, if you belong to clouds one, three and five, make your way to the stage door now. Pauline, the lady with the clipboard, will direct you from there. The rest of you, stay where you are; you will be called to the stage door in five minutes. All right everyone – let’s get moving.”

There was a stampede and I was buffeted on all sides by dozens of pairs of goose-feather wings, the span of which their careless owners did not appreciate. We reached the stage door, were registered by one named Pauline, placed in order, and eventually ushered through the doorway itself. Immediately in front of us was Cloud One, manoeuvred such that we could clamber into it unseen by the guests, who were at that moment on the far side of the stage from us, about two- or three-hundred of them, chatting amongst themselves, sipping champagne and lending half an ear to the compère. He was in character as John Milton, ruffed and wigged, narrating excerpts of Paradise Lost in a wonderfully theatrical baritone. 

The float, which my team was to power, was framed like a large motorcar, with sides of canvas and card. The wheels were vulcanised rubber, and running parallel to each of the two axles, at chest height, were thick wooden struts, carefully sanded so as to be comfortably gripped. A further strut ran widthways in the space between the two axles. The six of we slaves, two abreast, took our places behind each strut. I was at the rear, partnered with a bashful mute whose limp black hair formed a curtain across his eyes. There were, I observed, hierarchies even in these lowly quarters, below deck, and he and I were third tier slaves, not to be trusted with the steering. This was the job of the first and second tier who, by varying the force applied to either left or right side of the struts, could affect a turning motion. The first tier had the advantage of a kind of windscreen – in fact a mere slit in the fabric – through which to observe the road ahead, and they could relay directional commands according to what they saw.  

I piped up: “Don’t suppose there’s time for me to pop to the toilet?”

 “Of course not!” scolded one of the first-tier navigators. “You should have gone before.”

“I know, but I’m afraid there wasn’t – “

“Shh! We’re about to move off.”

And so we were. The angels were loaded atop the float, as was clear from the shuffling sounds above our heads, and it was time to move on so that the cloud behind could be readied. At the signal from Pauline we all heaved simultaneously on the struts, and with a disconcerting creak, and a squeal of the tires, the vehicle set into a tortuous slow motion.

By the point of our third lap of the stage, I confess I almost lost continence. My bladder was a glowing molten orb, searing my innards and weighing deep into my pelvis. I was practically doubled up with the strain, and at last – sensing I had just moments in which to act – I let go the handle, to the puzzled protests of my fellow slaves, and turned and burst through a split in the canvas chassis. Disoriented for a moment – as when a sportsman bursts into the light and noise of the arena – I then sprinted between clouds the twenty yards or so to the nearest stage exit, tore through it and stumbled down a flight of steps, near the bottom of which were the toilets. Meanwhile, of course, with one side of our cloud significantly depowered, the entire vehicle veered to the right and two startled angels – not Elmo, mercifully – actually tumbled from their celestial perch, let free their handfuls of confetti and landed on the floor with an audible thud. The foil confetti meanwhile, glittering and picturesque, formed up in their wake ‘like blossom scattered behind a falling apple’, according to one rather poetically-minded society reporter. The guests, who for the most part were not paying close attention, did not notice anything was seriously awry. The path that the vehicles were intended to take was deliberately meandering in any case, so as to represent the mysteries and unpredictability of The Divine. That the leading cloud should swerve erratically was, accordingly, no very great surprise, and as for the fallen angels these could be explained away quite easily as symbolic. Of course my sudden appearance, dashing across the stage, was peculiar, but being just one element of a vast display Paradise was by no means lost, if you will excuse the pun, and the performance was noted by that same society reporter, present in the audience, to have been ‘finely choreographed and wonderfully eccentric’. 

Megan, however, was spitting feathers.

“You complete and utter fool!” she hissed, each syllable dripping with poison. We were backstage by this point, in one of the larger changing rooms. Our phase of the entertainment was finished, and bustling around us were dozens and dozens of young men and women – jubilant and fabulously painted – tearing off their costumes, pulling on shirts and trousers and reassuming their former identities. I was slouched in a wooden chair feeling very sorry for myself: nauseous from the alcohol, dizzy with hunger and mortified for having let down Megan so publicly and in so absurd a manner.

“I’m truly sorry, Megan,” I said, “really –”

She cut me off: “I don’t want to hear it. You turned up late, and drunk, and then you ran off stage halfway through the performance for a toilet break? How are old are you again?”

“Well, sixteen, and – “

“I know! I know how old you are.  It was a rhetorical question!” she shrieked. “Do you know what that means? ‘Rhetorical’? And while we’re here, are there any other concepts I need to explain to you, such as the effects of alcohol on a human being?”

Now a few disconcerted faces were turned in our direction. Performers noted Megan’s face, red with anger, and mine, red with embarrassment. Megan, in turn, noted their curiosity, but did not quieten down – not, that is, until Elmo appeared beside her, or, more precisely, above her: the crown of her head barely reached his sternum, and when she noticed his looming there she jumped with fright, as though electrified. 

“Elmo! I didn’t see you there, which is odd because…well…But how are you? You were wonderful, by the way – such a performance. Divine.” She placed a tentative finger on his wrist, and withdrew it a moment later, joltingly.

Like his fellow archangels, Elmo had sprawled motionless on his throne throughout the entire show. He had had no speaking part, and nor was he required – like certain seraphim – to blow into a mock-trumpet. For all intents and purposes he had been part of the scenery, no more a performer than the vast cotton balls representing wisps of vapour, or indeed his throne. Presently he said nothing, but acknowledged Megan’s flattery with a barely perceptible nod of his head, and eventually, when the tension of his characteristic silence grew oppressive, she made an excuse and disappeared into the crowd. I saw he was carrying his angel wings, meticulously folded, in a large paper bag.

A far-off clash of cymbals and the ominous beating of a war-drum signalled the next performance had begun.

“The devils are up,” I muttered to myself, and then to Elmo: “Shall we find something to eat?”

We struck south, down Exhibition Road, and after a long walkdiscovered we had lost ourselves in a curving maze of residential streets. Terraced townhouses loomed above us on every side, some as many as five storeys high, and up ahead they veered this way and that, or stopped abruptly. One had only to remove the numbers nailed to each door, and chaos would ensue; no man could possibly find his way home in such a kaleidoscopic sprawl.

“We’ve been here before,” said Elmo, peering up at a flickering street-lamp. It did indeed look familiar.

“Well, we can’t have come full-circle; it was only a crescent.”

“Hm. Actually, I’m wrong.” Elmo took a step closer to the street-lamp. “It isn’t the same.” But he did not elaborate on whatever distinguishing feature he had noticed; it might have been a spider’s web dangling from a strut, or the tilt of the post itself. 

“Why couldn’t the Luftwaffe have flattened all this?” I muttered. “They’d have saved us a lot of hassle. Ah, look here!” On the corner of a silent junction ahead, quite out of place in its surroundings, was a dingy workmen’s café, half-filled with what looked like a party of miners. Each man wore a head-torch and bulky overalls. They were in fact railway labourers, awaiting their shift on the Underground. We slunk to a table beside them and ordered sandwiches and beers. The proprietor raised an eyebrow but in the end did not question my age. I think – but do not know – that in any case it is legal for a sixteen year-old to drink if the drink is ordered with a meal. Whether sandwiches constitute a meal is for the courts to decide; certainly these specimens were dwarfish and sparsely packed out, hardly constituting a meal. The labourers were drinking coffees, very black and strong-smelling, but one man, a tall wiry fellow with doleful eyes and bristly, sand-coloured hair, edged forward and asked me for a sip of beer. By the sounds of it he was a Cockney. At once I pushed the bottle to him across the table, and to see the way his eyes rolled when the amber-coloured liquid fell on his tongue, you would think he had imbibed some regenerative elixir. A broad, imbecilic smile stretched across his face, and his eyes opened wide. He stammered his thanks, and asked if he might have a further sip. I nodded. Predictably requests then came from his colleagues, emboldened by his conduct, but they eyed Elmo nervously all the while. He appeared quite detached from the situation, and not exactly welcoming. But nonetheless within a few minutes both our bottles were empty and I ordered another couple with what little money I had left. These too did not last, and I shuddered to think what lives were endangered by the not-quite-sober workmanship that night on the subterranean train lines.

After the café we went to a nearby pub, on the recommendation of the workers. It was almost deserted when we arrived, except for a table nearest to the bar. The table was small and oval-shaped, and around it were a half-dozen or so chairs with ornate, elongated backs, reaching high above the crowns of their occupants. And one such occupant, a portly, bespectacled gentleman with a thick and well-groomed moustache, looked up as we entered.

“Hey ho!” he cried out. “You’re one of the angels, surely?”

He gazed at Elmo with particular interest.

“Yes, I wouldn’t forget that face,” he said, and turning to his neighbour: “Margot, I tell you it’s him.”

Elmo looked away. I smiled emptily at the stranger, hoping the mood would not be ruined. I felt as if I were escorting a surly drunkard, desperately fending off provocations.

“You were at the ball?” I asked cordially, and the man nodded.

“We had to leave early because Margot here was tired.”

“Oh, do sit down Nigel,” muttered his companion, Margot, tugging on his unfettered shirt tails. He had risen to his feet and seemed intent on conversation. He batted her hand away.

“Don’t mind her,” said Nigel to me, winking conspiratorially. “She’s in a huff. I insisted on a quiet drink before bed. I told her we can’t go to bed before eleven on the night of the C.A.C. ball!” And then he chuckled heartily. I wondered how quiet the drink had been. Poor Margot.

Nigel insisted on paying for our beers, which we took to the other end of the pub and nursed in relative privacy. My headache had disappeared and into the void of my skull, billowing and groping like steam, came a gentle but unmistakeable euphoria.

“Do you think Megan is very angry with me?” I asked.

Elmo shrugged. “Hard to say. Probably.”

“Angry enough to…you know?” It was difficult to keep the hopefulness out of my voice.

“To what?”

“To…oh, never mind.” I swallowed a quarter of my beer in a single gulp. “Here’s to un-forgiveness, and new beginnings.”

“And new ends.”

“And to Florence.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

We clinked glasses, and downed the remainder, not for any particular reason other than to be done with it and move on.

Our next stop – even further south, close to the Embankment – was a real dive. It was the basement floor of a detached, cube-shaped building, the façade of which was peeling and the underlying plaster cracked along the entire width. We might have walked past without noticing at all, except that a basement window happened to be thrust open in those valuable few seconds. Floating up in the warm, putrid night air came clouds of thick tobacco smoke, and the sound of music. Cautiously we descended the iron stairwell, to about halfway down, and peered through the open window. It was a curious scene we beheld. Through half-closed shutters we saw a room, not much bigger than the living room of my house in Camberwell, and with a makeshift bar in the far right corner.

Adjacent, nearer to the window, was a Wurlitzer jukebox; the elegant, arching frontispiece was visibly dented, and the glass cover – a washed-out pastel yellow – was dim and fractured. Besides the barman there were six or seven customers, all male, and all better dressed than their surroundings demanded: tie-pins, sharp collars and starched bibs. One of their number, who looked to be a teenager about my age, danced gaily and by himself in the centre of the room, singing along with the Anderson sisters in a delicate, reedy voice. 

“This is more like it,” whispered Elmo, with a slight, sly grin.

“I don’t know. It seems pretty low-down.”

“Altogether low-down,” said Elmo, straightening and descending the last few steps. A fragile-looking basement door rested on its hinges and Elmo pulled it to. As in a parody of a Wild West movie, he entered the saloon and the music halted abruptly (this mechanical failure was, of course, coincidental) and the drinkers twisted their heads to discern the stranger, approaching through the gloom with his child-sized sidekick close behind.

“Can I help ye?” asked the bartender, following a momentary wordless standoff. I pegged him as a Dubliner; he spoke just like Philip, my neighbour, whose parents had come over a decade earlier to escape the Troubles, only to then endure the Blitz. When Elmo asked for a drink the bartender explained, in as few words as were grammatically possible, that this was not a public house, and that we would have to leave.

“Proi-vate house, see?” he grunted, and gestured to the sparse, unmatched and decrepit furniture. “My living room.”

“Some living room,” I said. “Why don’t you give us a drink then, as hospitality?” I would not have dared, were I sober, to parley with such impudence. In any case, I was almost paralytic with nerves.

“Can’t do it,” drawled the bartender. “Proi-vate house. Ye’ll have to go.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” cried one of the drinkers from the sofa immediately behind us. He was a monstrously fat creature; hoarse-voiced, pillowed in surplus flesh and barely contained by his brown three-piece suit. His face, however, was open and kindly, and his eyes were a startling powder blue. He resembled a gigantic baby. “Jimmy,” he said, addressing the bartender, “they ain’t the coppers. If ye don’t serve them, ye’ll not make a shilling all bloody night!”

“Not with regulars like you, ye wretched miser,” scowled Jimmy, and his fat friend chortled delightedly. 

We ordered whiskies and took a seat on a bench next to the jukebox. The dark, smoke-filled room pitched slanted this way and that, but gently, almost amusingly. The young dancer kicked the machine close to where the glass screen had shattered, and after a second or two of squealing vinyl the Anderson Sisters track was taken up again. I saw he was bare-footed.

“Does that from time to time,” he explained, perceiving that I was watching him. He too had an Irish accent, and it melded gorgeously with his rather effeminate diction. I tried my hardest to smile.

“What have you got there, big lad?” he asked Elmo, pointing at the paper bag resting at his side. Bright white goose feathers were peeking out the top of it.

“Angel wings,” I said, for Elmo had made no signal he might reply. “He was playing Gabriel in a show.”

“Were you now?” said the boy still looking at Elmo. “God’s Own Messenger”. I was struck by his precocious, uncanny self-assurance, and wondered, was he older than he appeared? To my eyes he could not have been more than fifteen, or sixteen at a stretch. I studied him carelessly.

His slight frame, his narrow hips and jawline leant him a curious appeal – androgynous, I suppose – and I was reminded suddenly of Florence, upon whose recollection I suffered a pang of longing. Where was she now? In a much more heavenly place than this, I knew. Permitting a moment of self-pity, I wondered what had possessed me to become so drunk. I felt wretched and diseased; it was not the riotous inebriation, with the likes of Yevgeny, that I was used to. They were carefree evenings, but this unfortunate example struck me as being directionless, nihilistic and wrapped up in unglamorous vice.  

“Do you mind if I put them on?” asked Patrick, meanwhile, pointing at the bag, and to my immense surprise Elmo nodded. He reached into it and carefully extracted the wings, which were joined by coat-hanger wire and folded over one another. He handed it to Patrick. The young man, with equal care, unfolded them, located the straps and slid his arms inside. The wings of the archangels, made of canvas and cloth, were particularly intricate. According to Megan each pair had woven into them no fewer than two-hundred individual feathers. And since Elmo’s studio and tools were commandeered for their manufacture, it was agreed that he could keep his pair as a souvenir, though he was hardly famous for sentimentalism.

The remainder, several dozen pairs of wings, would disappear into the capacious costume trove of a drama school somewhere, for use in a future event. These particular wings, the pair Elmo had kept, were tailored for his considerable frame – in particular the great distance between his shoulders – and on Patrick they seemed comically oversized. But he was delighted nonetheless and presently, as one track died and another was taken up by the jukebox, he executed a nimble, startlingly graceful turn, en pointe. One or two of the other drinkers, who had been watching closely, snorted with derision.

After an hour or so the basement began to fill up with new arrivals, trickling in from the street in ones and twos, drably attired and bored-looking. From what little conversation could be overheard, I gathered the majority were Irish. A few paused a moment to stare at the feathered waif, strutting to and fro on the uncarpeted, dusty floor, like a rutting cock pheasant. He was in fact a very talented dancer. As yet another song drew to an end and silence descended, one stout, red-faced old man stepped from the crowd and abused him in the most obscene terms.

“Oh, leave off granddad,” the young man replied, quite unfazed. I had a feeling the two had met before. Perhaps it was not their first altercation, and it did not seem to be entirely sincere.

“Another dram?” asked Elmo, half an eye on Patrick’s performance, but I shook my head. I felt full to bursting, and the various drinks were merging in my stomach, blending into some noxious tonic.  

“I’ve had enough for now, Elmo,” I said. “I’ll wait, at least until I feel my toes again.”

Elmo grunted and went up to the bar, hustling his way to the front of the queue. It was odd that despite his conspicuousness, in that crowd he did not look like a giant among men. Rather, it was those crowded around him who resembled dwarfs – stunted, stout creatures, like Neanderthal throwbacks, shuffling about the waist of an evolutionary pinnacle. I was marvelling at the illusion, and probably with a vacant, doe-eyed expression, when the dancing boy sauntered over, hips undulating, weight on his toes, heels not touching the floor. He reached me, but did not take a seat for his wings would not permit it.  

“I’m Patrick by the way,” he said. I nodded.

“Is that right?” I said. I had not meant to sound hostile, but his appearance – and most of all his sensual, coquettish postures – were unsettling, and I felt wary of him, almost intuitively. I had met his type before at parties, normally Mathilde’s, and found them to be pretty harmless, but behind me was more than a decade’s habituation to the prejudice of my age. I remember in my first month at Dulwich, when we were still too young to grasp the meaning of the word, for the ‘offence’ of voyeurism Percy was beaten in the showers after a P.E. lesson, and quite savagely. The mob of students, some armed with cricket stumps, remained unclothed as they meted out the sentence, which wrapped up the event in a farcical overtone, although at the time it was horrifying to witness. Poor Percy. How, I ask, could you perceive voyeurism in a shower filled with twenty or more young boys, without cubicles or dividing curtains? The accusation was ludicrous, but from then on we showered facing the wall. Deviation from the norm, however minor, was intolerable, and perhaps predictably it was Percy who became, over time, the most bigoted of anyone. 

“Your friend,” said Patrick, nodding sideways to the bar, “of the Herculean frame – are you two close?” He had to speak loudly to be heard above the growing noise, in which even the jukebox drowned.

“Close? How d’you mean?”

“Oh, you know. Inseparable. Intimate. Knowing one another, biblically.”

I grasped his meaning at last, and shook my head. “Not like that.”

“But he is…?”

“I really couldn’t say. Look, what’s it to you?”

“Oh, just curious,” he replied. “Just wanted to be sure I wasn’t stepping on any toes, if you get my meaning. Quite a specimen though, your friend, wouldn’t you say?”

I shrugged. Truthfully, I was far too drunk to properly affect indifference. But if Patrick thought me rude, or flippant, he did not show it. Out of genuine curiosity I asked him who he was, and how he had come to be dancing alone in such a grotty place at this.

“Now, now,” he wagged his finger playfully. “It isn’t half bad. There’s a whole gang of us regulars, mostly bog-Irish, and there’s a tight-knit feel to the place. It’s a real community.”

“But why’s it underground?”

“Well, I don’t know about that. If I had to guess, I’d say these are…er…unlicensed premises, or at least not fully licensed,” he said, adding: “it’s a grey area, in my expert legal opinion.”

“A speakeasy?”

“You could say that. But catering to a narrow demographic.”

“Irish?”

“Irish queens,” said Patrick, in a stage whisper. He then giggled inexplicably. “Pink shamrocks. But you knew that, surely? It’s why you came.”

“We were just in the neighbourhood.”

“Oh, you mean you just happened by?” A teasing, sceptical eyebrow curved and crested. “A very likely tale, friend”

“We’re on our way home,” I said, though I had no idea what Elmo’s longer term plans entailed. Did he intend to return to Montpelier Square, to his sisters and his gruesome stepfather, or back to the chilly squat? Either way, for his own good he had to be away from that pit. An Irish pub, catering to pansies? It was altogether too ridiculous. Did Elmo have a nose for obscure subsections of depravity? But Patrick was telling the truth, of course. There were no women on the premises, which was not odd in itself for many venues cater just to one sex, but at least one or two men here – with fresh eyes I now perceived them – were carelessly tactile: a hand around a waist here; a chin upon a shoulder there.

“Well, wasn’t that a stroke of luck?” sang Patrick, meanwhile, in answer to my explanation. “Yes, I am a lucky boy. We don’t get many new faces here, as you can probably tell.” He pointed his thumb at some of older clientele, including the gnarled man who had abused him earlier.

At this point Elmo returned with a single glass of whisky, and sat down.

“We haven’t been introduced properly,” said Patrick to Elmo, offering his hand and his name, adding: “But my friends call me Paddy.”

“How do you do, Patrick?” replied Elmo, presenting a limp hand to be shaken, which Patrick grasped but did not shake. “I’m Elmo.”

“You can’t be local with a name like that,” simpered Patrick and then, seeing Elmo wasn’t baited, he changed tack altogether, arriving straight at the point. “Why don’t we – all three of us – go around the corner to my flat. It’s a bit gloomy down here tonight.”

“It’s a basement,” I said. “It’s always going to be gloomy.”

Patrick turned to me, and the hint of a contemptuous smile appeared and vanished from his features.

“This is ‘the Fisher King’,” he said. “A private public house, open to the Irish diaspora and, of course – “, he stole a glance back at Elmo, “ – to archangels who happen to be passing by. Tonight it is gloomy, granted. I can only recommend you visit on a Saturday night.” (It was then a Friday.)

Eventually Elmo sighed. “Alright then, let’s get out of here.” He swallowed the remainder of his whiskey and slammed the glass down on the table. Patrick detached himself from the wings and folded them back into the bag. A few of the regulars leered at him as we made our way out, and I overheard a few obscene put-downs, which Patrick ignored.  

‘Around the corner’ had been an exaggeration. Patrick’s flat (or rather his cousin’s flat, unoccupied for the time-being) was almost a mile away, in a southerly direction. I was gratified, but barely, that we were drawing ever closer to Camberwell: my homeward journey would be less arduous. Rather like Patrick’s beloved Fisher King, the flat was situated on the basement floor of a shabby townhouse. Ugly, evergreen creepers had worked their way along the guttering; the aerial roots jutted either side like the limbs on some grotesque, gigantic millipede. Sundry refuse – chicken bones, vegetable peelings and the like – was scattered on the pavement outside; the work of rats or foxes, probably, feasting in the upturned bins. 

Downstairs, the flat itself was marginally more presentable. The carpet in the hallway was new, or at least freshly cleaned, and it padded pleasantly underfoot. The dappled wallpaper meanwhile was peeling in places. In the living room Elmo was shown to the sofa, over which a tartan rug had been thrown to cover the holes. I was directed to a wooden chair by the window. A set of iron bars, and not to mention a thick layer of grime on the glass pane itself, were as effective as any curtains in blocking the view of the pavement outside. The streetlight on the pavement appeared as a dim, distant beacon, as on the peak of a hill. The room itself was decorated half-heartedly: a cheaply framed print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a potted plant, a variety of ornately bound French encyclopaedias. I wondered, what was the owner’s profession? Meanwhile his cousin, who had left us temporarily to fetch “refreshment”, returned from the kitchen, heralded by an old Dixieland jazz record from an unseen gramophone. I recognised the tune as one of my father’s favourites.

“Some wine,” he announced gaily, flourishing a pair of half-filled tumblers. He then darted away a second time to fetch the bottle, and his own glass. I attempted some arithmetic – how many beers and whiskeys and wines had I consumed already that evening? Sherry at lunch, beers after lunch, whiskeys after the show…The precise summation defied me, blurred as it had been through the marbled, grimy glaze of a tankard. Patrick returned. His lips, I noticed, were vividly scarlet. Had they been that way in the pub? I could not remember.

Without so much of a glance at me, he walked straight to the sofa and took a seat. “So,” he murmured, looking intently at Elmo. “Tell me what you do. Tell me all your favourite things. You must be a sportsman. I’m a prop forward myself.” His tone was light-hearted, jocular, but his eyes were focused and his creeping hands were steady. I was not a part of his game, and I looked on in silence and discomfort from the side lines. Was I expected to make my excuses and leave? It was nearly midnight, according to the clock on the mantelpiece, and I had no money. Could I ask to borrow a taxi fare? I decided to wait and watch for an opportunity to interrupt. I felt quite unwell, and had long since given up on diverting Elmo.

He was an attractive creature, Patrick, I decided, very much so: indeterminate, lithe as a nymph, lusty as a satyr, and evidently quick-witted. But what was Elmo’s response to his flirtations? Nothing but a slight, sideways smile, and occasionally a single syllable by way of response. I remember thinking how odd it was, given Elmo’s apparent disinterest, that he had agreed to come here in the first place. It was a mediocre South London apartment, and grimy as the Fisher King had been, in terms of atmosphere it was – relative to this place – like some Hispanic city square in the roiling heat of a Mardi Gras pageant. 

But besides that I do not recall a great deal of the ensuing conversation (not that I was invited to participate), for after only fifteen minutes or so I began to feel very ill. My surroundings, having pitched unsteadily for four hours, now bucked and rolled in every conceivable axis. The jazz music accelerated and decelerated, and seemed to loop back on itself every couple of bars. A throbbing nausea worked up through my chest.

“Excuse…excuse me Paddy,” I grunted. He looked up at me, wide-eyed and expectant. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Out the door,” he pointed towards the kitchen. “Go left and left again. Are you alright?”

I arose and staggered away in the direction he had indicated, passed through a white door, reaching the bathroom by some miracle and vomiting precipitously into the open toilet. The suddenness, the violence of it was breath-taking, and I could feel the vessels in my eyes strain from the pressure. After several retches, once my stomach was totally evacuated and I had pulled the toilet chain, I slumped against the bathroom wall and wiped my forehead, which dripped with cool sweat.

“Hell,” I rasped, spitting and spluttering. “Oh hell.”

More than anything I was tired; I longed to close my eyes and sleep, but for fear of choking I kept myself awake and alert. First I needed to get home, and away from Patrick and his peculiar seduction. I concentrated on the sound of the music; I traced through half-closed eyes the faded arabesques and curlicues which patterned the bath-tiles opposite. A shower curtain, stained and folded concertina-style, was draped over the sink, unattached from its rails on the ceiling and apparently discarded. I focused on its cloying mildew scent – anything but to drift into unconsciousness on a stranger’s bathroom floor. 

In hindsight it is obvious what had happened. The regurgitated wine, still visible in the toilet basin despite the flush, was altogether the wrong colour: a translucent reddish-brown, like ripe, pale madeira. I am certain Patrick had mixed something into my drink in order to incapacitate me, to send me to sleep, but I daresay he had not imagined it would work so quickly or indeed so violently. He may not have been a practised potion-maker, which is understandable. He was perhaps unused to hangers-on spoiling his evenings. What had been the magic ingredient – barbiturates? No. They are anticonvulsants. Laudanum? Maybe.

(I knew more about that sort of thing than a boy of my age should. Dr Benson, a chemistry master at Dulwich – and also my form tutor – had served at Passchendaele with the Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to the Royal Berkshire Regiment. He was about sixty or sixty-five by the time he taught me, and was famous with his pupils for his wandering mind and utter disregard for the syllabus, and for that reason I knew – besides the order of the Battle of Delville Wood – the names and properties of virtually all known sedatives and analgesic – that is, pain-killing – opioids.)

In some ways it is fortunate my body reacted how it had. But for my stomach turning inside out, much more of the sinister compound would have dissolved into my bloodstream. As it happened, I was able to retain consciousness and even a semblance of control, and after a short time the dreadful iciness of the floor tiles had me back on my feet, albeit unsteadily.

Neurons fired, muscles throbbed and vessels pumped reassuringly. Ten minutes later, with a relatively clearer head and sturdier limbs I groped my way back to the kitchen, and from there to the living room. En route, however, within touching distance of the last doorway, a terrible cry went up in the room ahead of me, less of abject pain than of shock. But it was cut short – smothered – by another sound, like the heavy slap of a rolling pin into a lump of dough. And there it was again, that sickening ‘slap’, and there again a second later. Sensing an urgency I rushed through the door, into the living room, temporarily blinded by the lights. Patrick was curled up in the corner of the sofa, shielding his head and body with his hands, cowering and wailing. Elmo was poised over him with fists clenched, raining blow after pulverising blow, each with his full weight behind it. His eyes were fixed and his movements rhythmic, almost trance-like. After the ninth or tenth clout, Patrick stopped wailing and the only sounds he made were curious, almost cartoonish squeals as the air was forced from his lungs. Somehow, this noise was worse than his crying.

I lurched forward, grabbing hold of Elmo’s left arm and attempting to wrench him away. Of course, this had no effect. Elmo paused a moment, straightened up, and with the careless ease of a colossus swatting away a fly, he cast me backwards. I was thrown off my feet, tripping on the coffee table and somersaulting over it, landing in a heap of newspapers. My stomach still ached from vomiting, and my head ached with the strain of panic.

“For Christ’s sake, stop!” I was on my back reaching out to him, imploring uselessly. Even in the half-light I could see as his fist withdraw – readying to plunge again like a piston-head into its chamber – that it was spattered with blood. I took a hold of the spilt wine glass on the carpet beside me, and flung it as hard as I could. It span in the air, scarlet dregs arced outward, and through some utter fluke the glass struck Elmo’s temple and shattered. Not in a hundred attempts could I have duplicated the feat. The damage was limited and superficial – a single, minute laceration – but it caused him to stop dead, and perhaps it brought him to his senses. He turned to look at me and his face, also liberally sprinkled with Patrick’s blood, was a picture of calmness. It was terrifying. Not a single muscle twitched, and his eyelids hung lazily, half-descended.

“Oh, Elmo. What have you done?” I said, and began to cry, half from exhaustion and half from distress. Meanwhile Patrick began to make strangled, gargling sounds, from deep in his throat, and I realised that he too was crying. It came as an immense relief, if not actually a cause for celebration, for it meant that he was alive. His delicate body had somehow survived the onslaught, although, as I saw when I had clambered to my feet, he was in a very bad way. A bloody rivulet coursed from both nostrils and ran straight into his open mouth, where its sprayed and simmered with his breathing, like a crimson geyser in its pre-eruption froth. I thought I heard – though cannot have; it was my imagination – the sound of broken incisors rattling about his tonsils.  His eyes were swollen, as was the flesh around his cheekbones, and he had a weeping cut above his right brow. I had seen my fair share of rough-and-tumble, in the school playground and in the streets. I had even thrown a punch or two, in anger or self-defence; I had drawn blood and bled in turn. But nothing compared to the sight of Patrick when Elmo had seen to him. I recalled the memory of a photograph in a newspaper from many years before, which had startled me almost as much. It depicted the mangled features of a Primo Carnera victim, published the morning after one his heavyweight title defences. I don’t remember which (given my age at the time, it was presumably one of his last). My father showed me the photograph after breakfast one Sunday morning, but covertly, for my mother had insisted the newspaper be thrown out precisely to avoid the children seeing it.

“Here, son,” he had whispered, through a wide, lurid grin, proffering with tobacco-stained fingers the crumpled broadsheet like a winning lottery token. “Feast your eyes on that mess.”

I felt quite faint. The wounded pugilist was photographed with his head against the canvas, his bloodied lips parted and his tongue lolling uselessly between. His eyes were closed, purplish and swollen. Why, I wondered, had nobody tried to help him? Why had the reporter simply peered through his lens, and flashed the bulb?

As for poor Patrick, in the end we left him. There was not a telephone in the house with which to summon a doctor, and Patrick had been incommunicative, perhaps deliberately. His airways had cleared and he was sobbing gently to himself as I milled about the room in a panic, unmoved from his place on the blood-stained sofa. Elmo had wanted to rouse a neighbour, but I dissented. By this point perhaps quarter of an hour had elapsed since the violence.

Heightened passions had receded, adrenalin had ebbed away, and I was suddenly very clearheaded. We could not, I reasoned, alert the police or the ambulance service, or anyone in fact. I was not guilty of anything besides underage drinking, but all the same I could not afford my parents learning what had happened. As if our binge was not enough, there was also the Irish bar, men-only, and very grubby indeed. Who would believe we had stumbled into it unknowingly? Patrick was an habitué, well-known if not well-liked, and word of our being there with him was sure to emerge, somehow. The hint of impropriety alone was damning. I thought of my poor mother, burning with shame. The neighbourhood gossips would surely catch wind of it. And my father, too, would be appalled. If not disowned outright, I could look forward to being belted to within inches of my life. And Ruth and Katie, what would they think of their old brother, gallivanting about in such places, and in such company? I could not risk their knowing.

“Leave him be,” I called to Elmo, who was in the kitchen fashioning an cold-pack from a tea towel. “He’ll live. Let’s just put some distance between us.”

Outside the house, Elmo and I parted ways. He had become unaccountably sullen in the preceding minutes, muttered something about “needing to see a fellow”, and he stalked off in such a way and at such a speed that it was clear to me I should not follow. He passed beyond the reach of a streetlight at a crossroads some way off, and darkness fell from his shoulders, cloaking him, swallowing him up.

Part XII

I did not see Megan again for almost three months, by which point my school career was finished and I had chosen to defer university until I had a clearer idea of what I would do with my life. The question of our continued relationship – if ‘question’ is not too strong a term – was resolved quite emphatically by the encounter. It was entirely by chance that we met, in the market place at Borough, where she was shopping for flowers for a niece’s birthday, and where I worked three days a week with my friend Maurice on the cheese and dairy stall operated by his father. I had spied her in the late morning across the concourse, a wicker basket rested in the crook of her elbow, fingering the gaudy petals of a rose-red chrysanthemum. I crept up behind her and called her name, causing her to jump with fright.

Once she had regained composure she explained why she was there. I told her I had never heard of little girls wanting gifts of tulips, or any sort of plant for that matter. It was dolls that they liked. But she would be joshed on the matter, and was quite cold in terms of her manner.

“What is it you want?” she snapped.

“It’s lovely to see you too, Megan. I haven’t been following you. If you must know I work over there on the cheese stall.  It was merely a happy coincidence.”

She rolled her eyes and continued her walk along the flower-seller’s stall, occasionally shooting queries at the vendor about certain bulbs and blooms. It gave me the chance to regard her in profile. She had lost some puppy fat and looked healthy, and she was well turned out. I noticed she had dyed her hair blonde and it suited her. I hung back, hands in pockets, and said nothing. At last, when she had purchased a small bunch of irises, she turned to me.

“I suppose you’ll want to buy me a drink?”

“A drink?”

“Yes, you know – ” and she made a sipping motion with her hand.

“Ah, yes, a drink… The trouble is that I can’t leave the market. But I have some tea in my flask. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind sitting on a stool and having some tea?”

In fact, there was no stool, and moreover the tea belonged to Maurice. But at that time he and his father were away on an errand, and so the flask – and the stall – was unguarded. I made a mental note to top it up with water afterwards and hoped he would not notice the dilution.

It was clear that Megan did not appreciate the ramshackle state of the place. Borough Market was not a tourist destination until many years later. At that time it was entirely authentic, catering to local shops and restaurants. The cheese on the stall smelt too strongly, complained Megan, and the tea was too hot to drink. She winced as it ran onto her tongue and abandoned the cup besides a wheel of brie.

“So, who have you seen recently?” she asked.

It was quite telling, I thought, that her opening question – besides demanding to know what I was doing there, and asking for a drink – was whom I had seen recently, and not how I was. Nevertheless I reeled off a few names, some of them made up, but in truth I had hardly seen anyone. Mathilde had telephoned just once recently for the briefest of catch-ups and she had done much of the talking. She was wrapped up in Felice, and from the sounds of it a number of his friends too. Elmo I had not seen nor heard from since when he clobbered Patrick on that strangest, most distressing of evenings. No one seemed to know where he had gotten to. In my life then only Maurice was a regular fixture.

“And what about you, Megan?” I asked her. “What have you been up to?”

“I have joined a curatorial collective in Balham. We’re putting on a contemporary sculpture exposition in a fortnight, so I have been extremely busy speaking with prospective exhibiters and inspecting their works.”

I worded my pleasant surprise, and as if she had read the thought which crossed my mind, in a quite malicious tone she added:

“I haven’t approached Elmo. His style is nowadays considered rather old-fashioned.”

“Oh?”

“Too humanoid, too unaffected. Nobody is doing it anymore. As I said, rather old-fashioned.”

I had always considered his sculptures to be anything but humanoid, and certainly they were not unaffected. I thought of the twin helices like human arms, spiralling tortuously into a melted pool. I was no critic, nor even an informed amateur, but those metallic interlaces were to me deeply expressive. He had cast sorrow in a bronze alloy.  

“It would be good to see what you manage to collection for the expo,” I said, having lost the train of conversation. Megan stared at me, almost crossly. She then picked her basket off her knee where it was resting and stood up, straightening her dress as she did so.

“It was nice to see you,” she said. “I suppose I’ll see you again soon at one of the parties.”

“Yes, one of the parties,” I replied gloomily, wondering where or when these might occur, and my hands emerged from their pockets, uncertain of what gestures to enact. “So about…us, Megan?”

“I don’t think there is an ‘us’,” she said curtly. “Do you?” And with that she spun on her heels, a monumental three or so inches off the ground, and marched away in the direction of London Bridge.

Half of me wanted to dance a jig. I had dreaded having to undertake the inevitable conversation. But the other half felt strangely empty. I did not mind so much that my conduct had offended Megan – if I had learned anything from our relationship it was that she more or less set out to be offended, and was in turn frequently offensive. What I had minded was the mention of “the parties”. Which parties were these? Mathilde had not mentioned any, and no invitations were forthcoming from other quarters. Had I focused my attentions too closely on Elmo, to the detriment of useful friendships elsewhere? And in doing so, with Elmo’s apparent withdrawal from public life, it seemed very much as if I had backed the wrong horse.

An answer of sorts came some time later when I attended, some months later around Christmas time, a Dulwich College event for recent and not-so-recent alumni. It took the form of drinks and canapés in the headmaster’s suite and the purpose of the occasion, so I gathered, was to provide a careers network for new leavers. Established barristers and merchant bankers would share the fruits of their experiences, and where feasible arrange for pupillages, apprenticeships and favourable references for promising young Old Alleynians. I was there mainly to get a square meal. My parents and sisters were on a camping weekend in the New Forest, to which I was not invited, and so I was half-starved. After quarter of an hour of tedious chit-chat with a self-important financier – one whom I vaguely recalled five years earlier, as a school prefect, had been absolutely the worst sort – I caught sight of Hubert and Sophie stroll entering the room, arm in arm. Sophie was not the only female in the room, but certainly the only one of her age group. I made excuses to the financier and moved to intercept the couple.

“Well, old mucker!” cried Hubert, clapping me on the shoulder and laying it on just a bit thick. “It’s been a long time, how are you sir?” Hubert had been away for his first term at Cirencester to read agricultural and estate administration, edging ever closer to country squire-dom.

Sophie too seemed pleased to me, and with Hubert away in search of drinks for they two, we held the briefest of conversations. She was clearly most interested in news of Mathilde, with whom I gathered she had not had a great deal of contact in the preceding nine months or so.

“You see the thing is,” she said, at last approaching the point, and with a needless delicacy, “I’m organising my father’s sixtieth birthday party and I just don’t know whether to invite her. Daddy doesn’t want a big affair, and so numbers are limited.”

“And do she and her uncle not get on?” I asked. We were standing beside an ornately painted and quite ancient-looking grandfather clock which, besides the rhythmic, practically arthritic clunk of its pendulum, seemed to be whirring manically as if a cog somewhere in its workings had come loose on its axel and was spinning uncontrollably. I had the peculiar impression of a third, rather noisy participant in our conversation.

“Oh, nothing as extreme as that,” answered Sophie, unfazed by the clock. “But I do feel as if Mathilde has gone off the rails a bit and I don’t want to have her to it if she’ll act improperly.”

I said that I could not imagine Mathilde acting improperly, and it was the truth. At an orgy she would be indecent. At a church wedding she would be perfectly charming. In every circumstance her behaviour would be proper.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Sophie. “But you must allow she has some unsuitable friends, like that great big Dutchman with the odd name.”

“Van Solling?”

“Yes, that’s the one. Doesn’t he just sound like a character in some vampire novel? The kind who would suck your blood or sleep in a crypt or do something else unspeakable.”

I was going to ask if she had ever met him, but we were interrupted by Hubert returning with glasses of suspiciously thin-coloured wine and a small plate laden from the buffet. Nothing looked appealing, but given that rationing was still in full swing it was an impressive effort by the school’s cook. Sophie brought Hubert up to speed with our discussion.

“Oh, the colossal mute? Queer fish. Yes, I remember being at a party with him. Weren’t you there too? I think Percy was sick all over the chap’s bedroom, poor sod.” I was not clear if he meant Percy or Elmo.

“Well I’ve clapped eyes on him just the once,” said Sophie. “He was pointed out to me in the street a while ago – in Marylebone, I think. But anyway, the rumour is that he’s abroad with a politician’s son, sailing his yacht on the French Riviera.”

“Well what sort of rumour is that?” asked Hubert, his mouth filled with masticated croutons.

“I mean that he and the politician’s boy are not quite just friends.”

Apprehension dawned on Hubert and he narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Can’t stand for that. I knew there was something about him. Here,” he turned to me, “was he not a pal of yours?”

I denied it. Cowardly though it was to do, I could reasonably protest that Elmo and I never were exactly “pals” – acquaintances perhaps.

“Hm, could have sworn it,” said Hubert. “Who’s the politician Soph?”

“You know Roderick Heather-Sykes?”

“Good Heavens, not the cabinet minister – well I never.”

Mr Heather-Sykes was in fact a shadow cabinet minister at that time, an MP for an East Anglia constituency and, coincidentally, like Mitchell’s father he was also married to a minor sporting celebrity, in this case a golfer of some renown. They might even have been at school together, and that is perhaps how the rumour mill had come to confuse the true identity of Elmo’s lover, unwittingly shielding Mitchell from the cruelties of gossip and media attention.  

“And they’re rumoured to be away together, are they?” I asked Sophie, affecting a merely casual interest.

“So they say. In any case, if my father caught wind of it I am pretty certain he wouldn’t want Mathilde at his sixtieth. He wouldn’t like her to be fraternising with sorts like that. Doesn’t look at all good.”

I nodded, and looked around the room for someone else to talk to. It was one thing for Sophie to be wrapped up in the perceptions of Society – she was young and aspirational, after all – but to imagine that her sixty year-old father would snub his own niece to appease the snobs and chatterers was, frankly, rather depressing. What was the point of aging if not to break free of petty social conventions, and be excused? I liked to believe I was immune to all that rubbish, perhaps because I had no standing which to lose. But in that room, besides the pompous – and, I suspect, actually quite junior – financier, there were only a number of stern-looking men of my father’s age, moustachioed and outwardly joyless. One or two, judging by their laden plates, were also in attendance mainly for the free food.

I smiled at a meek, bespectacled man of about five and a half feet tall, who caught my eye as he stepped out from behind a larger guest. His thin, sandy-coloured hair was neatly combed; his suit was black, and his small pink hands were clasped before him. He had an undeniably clerical air, and I was unsurprised to discover – upon joining him in conversation – that he was in fact the new school chaplain.

“Hoping to recruit for the seminary, Reverend?” I joked, when he told me about his posting. He shook his head and laughed beautifully, like a trilling songbird. He proceeded to explain that he was hoping to garner interest in the alumni gazette, responsibility for which he had inherited from his predecessor. He then asked if I wished to sign up to receive the publication. I certainly did not, but to avoid hurting the man’s feelings I provided the address of an aunt, whom I knew would not register the mistake. In any case much of the post she received went straight into the kindling basket by her stove, unread but ultimately un-wasted.

I left the event a short time after that, having entirely failed to grasp a helpful leg-up into the world of salaries and steady employment. But I was chirpy as I made my way up the gravel driveway, towards the common. I had been fed and watered, so to speak, and best of all had heard news of Elmo. So he was yachting with Mitchell? Safe and far away from grey, oppressive London. It was certainly for the best. God only knew what possessed him to switch on the boy Patrick in the way he had, as a habitually docile hound turning suddenly vicious and mauling a stranger’s thigh. Dogs which did that were usually shot afterwards, or kept on a chain forevermore, but Elmo had somehow escaped either of these fates. I wondered if Mitchell knew – or cared – what lay behind his lover’s urge to escape. And I wondered if he would look me up when he returned.

The run of positivity continued when, the following weekend, I received a letter from Florence asking if I would like to join she and her father in Capri for a short holiday which they were planning to make over Easter. Mr Barclay was increasingly enfeebled and worried that it might be his last chance to visit the cottage there. It was proposed that I sail to Gibraltar where they would meet me, and together we would sail on a specially chartered ferry to Capri with a number of other expat islanders.

Now, I have written it matter-of-factly, for that was how it happened, but I should be clear that this was absolutely what I had dreamed of for many years, to be alone with her in that paradise. There was nothing matter-of-fact about my reaction. I had never expected to be invited to Capri, nor really vied and jostled for the chance. I had sincerely believed it was their private retreat – a kind of inviolable sanctuary where none but their own were bidden. Certainly, that is was I had gathered from what little the Barclays spoke of it. It was not a holiday home in the conventional sense of the term, for the leisure and entertainment of one’s friends, like a rich man’s hunting lodge, or a chalet in the low Alps. And so to be asked to step behind the familial veil was an honour, and doubly so – perhaps triply so – because it was Capri, and thus exotic beyond measure. I had at that point in life never been abroad and had been outside of London only once or twice. With family I had visited the seaside, in Suffolk, and found it to be grim beyond description. It was November at the time, all fog and frigid spray. It was no poor reflection on Southwold, which I am sure – in sunshine, at least – is the stuff of postcards. I had not seen nor felt the Mediterranean sun in my life, and I envisaged a warm sea, Roman ruins and a tropical, deserted island; Florence and I alone, in a kind of rustic splendour. I saw glimpses of her tanned skin; slim limbs in the spume; hands held and wet, translucent hems, and I shivered with anticipation. At the thought of it my imagination grew quickly rich and fevered.

At that time, before civilian air travel was popularised, Capri’s non-native inhabitants were mostly wealthy artist-types and cultured European businessmen. The brash tycoons and luminaries would come later, in the sixties and seventies. Mr Barclay, neither an artist nor really a businessman, had inherited the cottage – a mile or so from the island’s marina hub – from his elder half-brother, who had purchased an acre plot for a pittance in nineteen-twenty, and a few years later built the cottage with a view to cultivating a citrus grove. The Sorrento-type lemons, he reasoned, would make exotic curds and syrups for sale in Britain and the United States, and it might have been a lucrative enterprise too, judging by similar ventures elsewhere.

But the war put an end to many of the best laid plans. Trade restrictions in Italy and an increasing mainland hostility to native Britons – whipped up in a compliant populace by Fascist thugs – spurred Mr Barclay’s half-brother to return to England, to his family’s home outside Hereford. When he perished from flu, quite soon after that, the title of the property was passed down to his half-sibling, but it was a long time before Mr Barclay was able to visit, and when he eventually did he discovered the grove had withered from neglect. Dense clumps of basil and marjoram had sprung up at the feet of the rotten trunks, like flowers on a grave, and the cottage itself was a nesting hive for warblers and turtle doves. It didn’t matter much to Mr Barclay, at least not economically, since he had his holdings in Gloucestershire to look after – profitable for the time-being – and so the acre plot and the cottage were permitted to decay as nature intended, to be used intermittently by Mr and Mrs Barclay and their daughter as a holiday home.

It was on these trips to Capri where Florence acquired her suntan, seemingly never fading, as well as that stubborn odour of exoticism. (I wonder, though, would a pallid Florence really have been more forgettable?) So whilst Mr Barclay tended to the thicket which annually enveloped the borders of the cottage, Florence would explore the forests and the caves and the township, and swim in the sea. When she was older she would also swim out to the boats which moored in the smaller of Capri’s two harbours, near to the picturesque limestone crags, sometimes for curiosity’s sake, and sometimes to offer sprigs of parsley or basil, or a cluster of eggs to the boats’ occupants. These items she stowed in a watertight bag, tied loosely to her neck with a plaited woollen rope. Some boat owners would wave her off – being weary of intrusion – but most were delighted to haul her aboard, where she was tipped for her efforts and plied with almond sweets and pudding wine. Precisely what these worldly sun-seekers thought of her I cannot say, emerging dripping from out the blue like some gorgeous nymph of an ancient fable. I suppose, like everybody else, they fell very quickly under her spell, and in a way she too fell under theirs, for it was on these boats amongst deposed nobles, nautical captains and captains of industry, voguish artistes and hangers-on, where she learned to imitate the subtle pouts and purrs, chic hairstyles and makeup – some of the wickedest weapons in her armoury.

And so, presently, I wrote back to tell Florence I should be delighted to join them, and soon afterwards began budgeting for the trip, in particular the ferry ticket, for which even a third class fare at that time unaffordable. Considering my income from the market stall, and the threat of being charged rent by my parents, no amount of accounting chicanery could produce the required sums in time for Easter. If prevailing rates of saving persisted I would be more than twenty-three years old by the time I could afford the trip. I pondered which of my friends had sufficient cash which they wouldn’t mind loaning out but could think of no one, and so I begana campaign of frugality.  I sold a pocket watch to a fellow marketer, as well a pair of running shoes, which I believed I would no longer require.

My turn in fortune came in the tall and rounded form of Philip, my old school friend, who one evening had joined my family for dinner, as on occasion he would. It was a running (and slightly cruel) joke in our house that Philip – socially quite an awkward young man – made his appearances at our table only ever because my mother, whenever she encountered Philip in the neighbourhood, would blurt out an invitation for want of anything else to say to him. She was too unerringly polite to avoid Philip altogether, and yet so inept at small talk – which with Philip was virtually impossible anyway – that the only means by which to avoid actual paralysis on the roadside was to offer him dinner and scuttle off on a made-up errand.

And here he was, having joined us directly from his new work at the car repair shop near to Tulse Hill, and apparently having not washed his hands of grease beforehand. On his chin and cheeks was a soft, almost downy stubble, and his thick brown hair was unkempt. We ate dinner in near silence and Philip chewed ponderously, his heavy brow creased in thoughtfulness. Dressed as he was in grey-coloured mechanic’s overalls, he resembled some philosopher-golem, carved out of rock and older than the Earth. Katie and Ruth found his appearance to be hilarious, and they gawped openly. At last, my father ventured to engage with our guest.   

“So…”, he said, between mouthfuls. “What is it exactly you do at the garage, Philip?”

Philip looked up at the sound of my father’s voice, and his face was one of slight surprise, as though he had not expected there to be a conversation held during the meal. Perhaps his own family ate in silence. He glanced at my mother, almost accusingly. She was the culprit, his eyes seemed to say – she was the one who had lured him there under a false pretence. Finally, albeit with some resignation, he addressed the question.

“My specialism is single-barrel carburettors,” he said. “But the vehicles which come into the shop have a wide range of problems – more often structural.”

“I see,” my father replied. “So not just engine work.”

“No.”

The conversation, if it could be called that, would otherwise have petered out there and then, perhaps like a vehicle with a malfunctioning carburettor, only Philip happened to add, in a sort of afterthought, that he only worked at the garage until three o’clock each afternoon. The time then was seven o’clock in the evening, which begged the question: having finished work, for what reason had Philip remained in his overalls for four whole hours?  My mother rose to the bait, and Philip explained.

He had a personal project, he said. Much earlier that year an uncle had sold him a car for a nominal sum, a broken down Ford Model ‘A’ roadster, from the early nineteen-thirties. Philip was restoring the car with a view to selling it on. At the sound of this, my father perked up. He was not a motoring enthusiast by any means, but Philip’s venture was a prime example of the kind of entrepreneurial zeal which he found lacking in his son.

“Well, what about that!” he cried, leaning forward in his chair, and for a moment is looked as if he might slap Philip on the back. “Good for you.” My father was positively beaming. “And when do you expect to finish?” he asked.

“Sometime next month, I expect,” said Philip.

“Next month, eh?” my father repeated, and again: “good for you.” He then lifted his glass of beer in a half-hearted toast, which nobody – least of all Philip – reciprocated. In fact, Philip appeared to be nonplussed by the attentions which my father was lavishing on him, and evidently he would have preferred to eat his dinner in peace.

Later on, nonetheless, during pudding when conversation had once more lulled, my father returned to the topic of the roadster. It had plagued him in the interval, clearly – as would any conversation which is interrupted before its climax; the vital questions unasked.

“Do you reckon you’ll turn a profit on this Ford, once you’re done?” he asked Philip.

My mother scolded him. “It’s rude to talk about money at the dinner table,” she said, and Ruth and Katie tittered quietly. In fact, money was often discussed at our dinner table, but my mother was prone to putting on appearances in front of guests, even those as unglamorous as Philip.

“Oh, leave off will you?” replied my father. “No one else is talking,” he said, which was true.

Philip then cleared his throat and named a figure. This was what a prospective buyer had quoted him, he said, and in terms of my Borough Market wages it was almost a half-year’s salary. Philip would, in barely one month’s time, have that amount in a lump sum. I almost gasped aloud at the thought of it. The money – which, if only a small part mine, would solve the immediate problem of travel costs – seemed so close at hand that I could reach out, almost, and grasp it.

He, Philip, would make me a loan, I decided. So long as I kept my position at the market, I would not have to worry about being unable to repay him; it was only a question of the speed with which I could do so, and since Philip lived with his parents and socialised minimally, what possible need did he have for immediate cash? I would indebt myself for years if it only meant that I could sail to Capri and spend a summer there with Florence, to an exotica beyond the horizon – beyond the whitish fog of the Channel, and the grey oppression there in London – to a place where the skies were clear and warm, and where she, where she was all my own.

Dinner wound up shortly after that, uneventfully, and I offered to walk Philip home on the pretext of wishing to drop in on another former school friend en route. The absurdly named Connor O’Connor was a real person, although our friendship was entirely fictional. At school we had never gotten along. We were not enemies as such, merely indifferent to one another. I had not seen him since moving to Dulwich, but he often provided – unwittingly – an alibi for my elicit errands in the neighbourhood. His family, two parents and six siblings, lived above the butchers on the corner of Blenheim Grove and Rye Lane, which was just far enough from our house to be unfamiliar territory. My mother was unlikely to happen by on one of her shopping trips, pop in to see the O’Connors and, in doing so, blow my cover. But in any case neither of my parents were ever close to the O’Connors, who were a little too rough around the edges for their tastes, and being Catholic Irish as well they were not fashionable to know at that time.

Once Philip and I were out of earshot of my parents, tramping up the pavement in the balmy lamp-lit haze, I broached the subject of his making me a loan. To my surprise, he did not blanche. He did not even ask what I wanted the money for, and I felt oddly compelled to justify myself. It was not the first time I had borrowed money – I was not squeamish in that regard – but previous creditors had invariably wanted to know what lay behind the request. I suppose you would undergo the same sort of interrogation with a bank manager who wants to know that he’ll see his money again – that you aren’t planning to abscond with it, to build a new life in Panama, or wherever it is these chancers go. But Philip was uninterested. Uncharitably, I concluded that this was because he had no social life to speak of. Once a month or so he might be persuaded to venture out and drink a beer in a pub, but more often than not he spent his evenings at home, reading a book or simply dozing in a chair beside the wireless set. It was not an expensive lifestyle, and thus he had no actual need for the money – or no immediate need in any case. We agreed terms for repayment, shook hands and parted ways.