Amsterdam (7 page)

There was the time, for example, way back, when Vernon stayed for a year and never once offered to pay rent. And was it not generally true that over the years it had been Clive rather than Vernon who had provided the music—in every sense? The wine, the food, the house, the musicians and other interesting company, the initiatives that took Vernon to rented houses with lively friends in Scotland, the mountains of northern Greece, and the shores of Long Island. When had Vernon ever proposed and arranged some fascinating pleasure? When had Clive last been a guest in Vernon’s house? Three or four years ago, perhaps. Why had he never properly acknowledged the act of friendship that lay behind his borrowing a large sum to see Vernon through a difficult time? When Vernon had had an infection of the spine, Clive had visited almost every day; when Clive had slipped on the pavement outside his house and broken his ankle, Vernon had sent his secretary round with a bag of books from the
Judge’s
books page slush pile.

Put most crudely, what did he, Clive, really derive from this friendship? He had given, but what had he ever received? What bound them? They had Molly in common, there were the accumulated years and the habits of friendship, but there was really nothing at its center, nothing for Clive. A generous explanation for
the imbalance might have evoked Vernon’s passivity and self-absorption. Now, after last night, Clive was inclined to see these as merely elements of a larger fact—Vernon’s lack of principle.

Outside the compartment window, unseen by Clive, a deciduous woodland slid by, its winter geometry silvered by unmelted frost. Farther on, a slow river eased through brown fringes of sedge, and beyond the floodplain, icy pastures were laced with dry-stone walls. On the edges of a rusty-looking town, an expanse of industrial wasteland was being returned to forest; saplings in plastic tubes stretched almost to the horizon, where bulldozers were spreading topsoil. But Clive stared ahead at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.

In Penrith some hours later, it was a great relief to step away from this brooding and go along the platform with his bags in search of a taxi. It was over twenty, and he was happy to lose himself in small talk with the driver. Because it was midweek and out of season, Clive was the hotel’s only guest. He had asked for the room he had taken three or four times before, the only one with a table to work at.
Despite the cold, he opened the window wide so he could breathe the distinctive winter Lakeland air while he unpacked—peaty water, wet rock, mossy earth. He ate alone in the bar under the gaze of a stuffed fox mounted in a glass case, frozen in a predatory crouch. After a short walk in total darkness round the edges of the hotel car park, he went back indoors, said goodnight to his waitress, and returned to his tiny room. He read for an hour and then lay in darkness, listening to the swollen crashing beck, knowing that his subject was bound to return and that it would be better to indulge it now than take it with him on his walk the next day. It wasn’t the disillusionment that forced itself on him now. There were his memories of the conversation, and then something beyond—what had been said, and then what he would like to have said to Vernon now that he had had hours to reflect. It was remembering, and it was also fantasizing: he imagined a drama in which he gave himself all the best lines, resonant lines of sad reasonableness whose indictments were all the more severe and unanswerable for their compression and emotional restraint.

What actually happened was this: Vernon phoned in the late morning, using words so close to those Clive had spoken the week before that they seemed like conscious quotation, a playful calling in of a debt. Vernon had to talk to him, it was very pressing, the phone wouldn’t do, he had to
see
him, it had to be today.

Clive hesitated. He had intended to catch the afternoon train to Penrith, but he said, “Well, come round and I’ll make supper.”

He rearranged his travel plans, brought up two good burgundies from the cellar, and cooked. Vernon arrived an hour late, and Clive’s first impression was that his friend had lost weight. His face was long and thin and unshaved, his overcoat looked many sizes too large, and when he set down his briefcase to accept a glass of wine his hand was trembling.

He downed the Chambertin Clos de Beze like a lager and said, “What a week, what a terrible week.” He held out his glass for a refill, and Clive, relieved that he had not started with the Richebourg, obliged.

“We were in court three hours this morning and we won. You’d think that would be the end of it. But the whole staff’s against me, almost all of them. The building’s in an uproar. It’s a marvel we got a paper out
tonight. There’s a chapel meeting going on now and they’re certain to pass a motion of no confidence in me. Management and the board are standing firm, so that’s fine. It’s a fight to the death.”

Clive gestured toward a chair, and Vernon flopped into it, put his elbows on the kitchen table, covered his face with his hands, and wailed, “These prissy bastards! I’m trying to save their arse-wipe newspaper and their piss-pot jobs. They’d rather lose everything than dangle a single fucking modifier. They don’t live in the real world. They deserve to starve.”

Clive had no idea what Vernon was talking about, but he said nothing. Vernon’s glass was empty again, so Clive filled it and turned away to lift two poussins from the oven. Vernon heaved his briefcase onto his lap. Before opening it, he took a deep, calming breath and another slug of the Chambertin. He sprang the catches, hesitated, and spoke in a lower voice.

“Look, I’d like your view on this, not just because you’ve got a personal connection and you already know a little about it. It’s because you’re not in the business and I need an outsider’s view. I think I’m going mad …”

This last he was murmuring to himself as he delved into the case and produced a large cardboard-backed envelope, from which he pulled three black-and-white photographs. Clive turned the heat off under the sauce
pans and sat down. The first photograph Vernon put in his hands showed Julian Garmony in a plain three-quarter-length dress, posing catwalk style, with arms pushing away a little from his body and one foot set in front of the other, knees slightly crooked. The false breasts under the dress were small, and the edge of one bra strap was visible. The face was made up, but not overly so, for his natural pallor served him well, and lipstick had bestowed a bow of sensuality on the unkind, narrow lips. The hair was distinctively Garmony’s, short, wavy, and side-parted, so that his appearance was both manicured and dissolute, and faintly bovine. This was not something that could ever be passed off as fancy dress, or a lark in front of the camera. The strained, self-absorbed expression was that of a man revealed in a sexual state. The strong gaze into the lens was consciously seductive. The lighting was soft, and cleverly done.

“Molly,” Clive said, more to himself.

“You got it in one,” Vernon said. He was watching hungrily, waiting for a reaction, and it was partly to conceal his thoughts that Clive continued to gaze into the picture. What he felt first was simple relief, for Molly. A puzzle had been solved. This was what had drawn her to Garmony—the secret life, his vulnerability, the trust that must have bound them closer. Good old Molly. She would have been creative and playful,
urging him on, taking him further into the dreams that the House of Commons could not fulfill, and he would have known that he could rely on her. If she had been ill in some other kind of way, she would have taken care to destroy these pictures. Had it ever moved beyond the bedroom? To restaurants in foreign cities? Two girls on the town. Molly would have known how. She knew the clothes and the places, and she would have adored the conspiracy and fun, the silliness and sexiness of it. Clive thought again how he loved her. “Well?” Vernon said.

To forestall him. Clive put out a hand for another picture. In this, a head-and-shoulders shot, Garmony’s dress was more silkily feminine. There was a simple line of lace around the high sleeves and neckline. Perhaps it was lingerie he was wearing. The effect was less successful, unmasking completely the lurking masculinity and revealing the pathos, the impossible hopes of his confounded identity. Molly’s artful lighting could not dissolve the jawbones of a huge head or the swell of an Adam’s apple. How he looked and how he felt he looked were probably very far apart. They should have been ridiculous, these photographs, they
were
ridiculous, but Clive was somewhat awed. We knew so little about each other. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man’s privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by
the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element—mind.

For the first time Clive considered what it might be like to feel kindly toward Garmony. It was Molly who had made it possible. In the third of the pictures he wore a boxy Chanel jacket and his gaze was turned downward; on some mental screen of selfhood he was a demure and feasible woman, but to an outsider what showed was evasion. Face it, you’re a man. He was better off looking to camera, confronting us with his pretense.

“So?” Vernon was becoming impatient.

“Extraordinary.”

Clive handed the photographs back. He could not think clearly with the images still in his view. He said, “So you’re fighting to keep them out of the paper.”

It was part tease, part mischief, as well as a wish to delay voicing his thoughts.

Vernon was staring at him, amazed. “Are you mad? This is the enemy. I just told you, we’ve got the injunction lifted.”

“Of course. Sorry. I wasn’t quite with it.”

“My idea is to publish next week. What do you think?”

Clive tilted back on his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “I think,” he said carefully, “your staff is right. It’s a really terrible idea.”

“Meaning?”

“It’ll ruin him.”

“Dead right it will.”

“I mean, personally.”

“Yup.”

There was a stalled silence. So many objections came crowding in on Clive that they seemed to cancel each other out.

Vernon pushed his empty glass across the table, and as it was filled he said, “I don’t get it. He’s pure poison. You’ve said so yourself many times.”

“He’s vile,” Clive agreed.

“The word is he’ll be mounting a leadership challenge in November. It would be terrible for the country if he was prime minister.”

“I think so too,” Clive said.

Vernon spread his hands. “So?”

There was another pause while Clive stared up at the cracks in the ceiling, shaping his thoughts. At last he said, “Tell me this. Do you think it’s wrong in principle for men to dress up in women’s clothes?”

Vernon groaned. He was beginning to behave like a drunk. He must have had a few before arriving. “Oh, Clive!”

Clive kept on. “You yourself were once an apologist for the sexual revolution. You stood up for gays.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“You stood up for plays and films that people wanted to ban. Only last year you spoke up for those
cretins who were in court for hammering nails through their balls.”

Vernon winced. “Penis, actually.”

“Isn’t this the kind of sexual expression you’re so keen to defend? What exactly is Garmony’s crime that needs to be exposed?”

“His hypocrisy, Clive. This is the hanger and flogger, the family values man, the scourge of immigrants, asylum seekers, travelers, marginal people.”

“Irrelevant,” Clive said.

“Of course it’s relevant. Don’t talk crap.”

“If it’s okay to be a transvestite, then it’s okay for a racist to be one. What’s not okay is to be a racist.”

Vernon sighed in fake pity. “Listen to me—”

But Clive had found his trope. “If it’s okay to be a transvestite, then it’s okay for a family man to be one too. In private, of course. If it’s okay to—”

“Clive! Listen to me. You’re in your studio all day dreaming of symphonies. You’ve no idea what’s at stake. If Garmony’s not stopped now, if he gets to be prime minister in November, they’ve got a good chance of winning the election next year. Another five years. There’ll be even more people living below the poverty line, more people in prison, more homeless, more crime, more riots like last year. He’s been speaking in favor of national service. The environment will suffer, because he’d rather please his business friends than sign the accords on global warming. He wants to take us out
of Europe. Economic catastrophe! It’s all very well for you”—here Vernon gestured around at the enormous kitchen—“but for most people …”

“Careful,” Clive growled. “When you’re drinking my wine.” He reached for the Richebourg and filled Vernon’s glass. “A hundred and five pounds a bottle.”

Vernon downed half the glass. “My point precisely. You’re not becoming comfortable and right-wing in your middle age, are you?”

Clive answered the taunt with one of his own. “You know what this is really about? You’re doing George’s work. He’s setting you on. You’re being used, Vernon, and I’m surprised you can’t see through it. He hates Garmony for his affair with Molly. If he had something on me or you, he’d use that too.” Then Clive added, “Perhaps he has. Did she take any of you? In the frogman’s suit? Or was it the tutu? The people must be told.”

Vernon stood up and put the envelope back in his case. “I came round hoping for your support. Or at the least, a sympathetic hearing. I didn’t expect your fucking abuse.”

He went out into the hall. Clive followed him, but he did not feel apologetic.

Vernon opened the door and turned. He looked unwashed, wrecked. “I don’t get it,” he said quietly. “I don’t think you’re being straight with me. What is it you really object to about this?”