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.