False Colors (9 page)

“I feel...I am such a burden to you,” said John, watching Alfie open the shutters of their lodging house on Castle Street and stand for a moment outlined against the fragrant sky. He could tell from the set of Alfie’s back that the man was sighing; whether in relief at the end of another anxious night, or in pleasure at the view and the fresh early morning air, John wasn’t sure.

He hadn’t been able to see the view himself—carried ashore in the grip of high fever, the axe wound badly infected and wrongly treated by a terribly apologetic Dr. Harper. Alfie had made the arrangements, banned Harper and brought one of the local physicians, applied the salves, changed his bandages, held him tight as he shook and raved, soothing his fever with cool cloths. Somehow he had also managed to make sure the
Meteor
’s men were fed and housed, given such shore leave as they could be trusted with, and the ship herself careened and scraped.

He was owed more than a moment of standing and admiring the harbor; more than John could very well say. Yet though he knew he was being selfish by speaking, cutting short Alfie’s moment of contemplation, John still felt weak and prone to tears, and he wanted the familiar presence back by his side, not all the way over there across the room, inaccessible.

“Not a burden but a joy.” Alfie returned, just as he’d hoped, to draw up the room’s single, black Spanish chair beside him and take his hand. At the touch, John closed his eyes and smiled, comforted.

“You are…” he said, for the lemon sharp sunlight touched only the end of the bed, illuminating bare plastered walls, ancient floorboards and the faded red coverlet, leaving the further end of the room, where he lay, in deeper darkness by contrast. A warm, private darkness in which things could be said which could never be said in daylight. “You are the best man I have ever met.”

The morning crept over Alfie’s face and made his eyes glisten, softened his slightly coarse features until his face seemed as fair and oval as one of Joshua Reynold’s idealized portraits. When he licked his full lips they glistened too, turned up and inwards, in a self-deprecatory smile of great sweetness. “You can’t have met many then, sir.”

His warm hand held John’s, reassuringly, and if a part of John wondered whether hand-holding was still in order, now he was getting better, he was not willing to give it up just yet. In fact, watching Alfie sitting there between light and shadow, elbows planted on his knees, with his coat off and his cravat undone— shirt gaping to reveal the strong column of his throat, the dip and ridge of his collarbone—he felt almost as though he witnessed something holy. As though he saw through flesh to glimpse God’s work in its pristine, unfallen condition. He wanted to reach out and touch it; to explore it with his fingertips, to properly appreciate the artistry of it.

“You awe me,” he said, trying to express something of this. “I never yet met a man so tempestuous and yet so…” but he couldn’t say “tender”, not even in this animal-smelling little world they had shared together for so many days. “Loyal,” he finished, instead.

Alfie’s smile untucked, his lips parting to show his fine white teeth. “You don’t ask me what I see when I see you.” He raised his free hand and unstuck the limp hair that stuck to John’s forehead, pushing it away from his face. “It might surprise you.”

John, who hadn’t noticed the tickle of hair loose on his face before, nevertheless sighed with relief to have it gone. But the gesture reminded him once again of the musty sickroom smell of the place, and his own smell, having lain a fortnight abed, sweating through the hot Spanish days. “Well, your hours of nursing should soon be over,” he said. “I mean to sit up today, by the window, perhaps. Can you see if our landlady will draw me a bath and change the bed? The stink of me is enough to drop the local pigeons out of the sky.”

“It’s true.” Alfie grinned. “I was watching them plummet past the window when you woke. I’ll do it now, if you’ll eat first.”
Closing his eyes, John let the bed enfold him once more. There seemed to be a little more to him now than mere insatiable desire for sleep—a space for him to become again a rational being. The itchy wrongness of all his limbs subsided, and he probably could eat something undemanding, if he tried. He touched the bandage that swathed him from one side of the body to the other, and it was dry. If he pressed, his hand no longer felt as though it would sink in up to the wrist. “Mmm…” he said, drifting into a warm, umber colored mist, on a boat made of eiderdown, and only woke up again when the servants banged the bathtub against the walls as they were trying to get it through the door.
He watched drowsily as the girls scurried up and down stairs with pitchers of water, filling it. White bloused and dark haired, their skin glowed golden from the sun, and their liquid eyes were knowing, amused. Their skirts brushed across the floor, the whisper mixing with pouring water into a sound soothing as rain. The open door let in the aroma of
cadereta de langosta
cooking, and an acrid rubbish tip smell beyond the back door of the kitchen, where piles of parings were fought over by poor children and mangy dogs.
Closer to him, he could smell the lavender they added to the water. John watched as they set out soap and towels. Alfie brought out his shaving kit from the chest at the foot of the bed, and thoughtfully stropped the razor as he watched this activity with the demanding eye of a good First Lieutenant. John smiled at the thought, for there was a flavor of the military about the whole operation. A flavor he found more reassuring than the fact that when the bath was full, a fire lit in the grate and two kettles of water reserved for rinsing, only one of the girls went away. The chambermaid—a burly creature with very fine eyes, but the beginnings of a black moustache, and the prettiest one, whose wavy hair was bright hennaed red at the ends—remained.
John did not like this so much, nor that when Alfie helped him to sit up, get the nightshirt over his head, the two of them looked at one another and smiled.
“I help you,” said the redhead, with arched, suggestive eyebrows, “on bath. Adoncia, she help your friend.”
A distaste for all things corporeal washed over John then; for loose women and—because he was fair-minded—for the loose men who encouraged them. He was always getting these offers and it tired him. Was it so hard for them to believe there might be one man in this world with some modesty and self control, who didn’t wish to swive the first piece of skirt to throw herself into his lap? He pulled the coverlet tight over himself and leaned into the arm Alfie had put around him, to help him stand, feeling more dirtied than ever.
“Come on now, girls.” Alfie gave her a roguish grin and a regretful look. “Give the man a chance! Can you…?” this to John, as he encouraged him to get to his feet. John had no desire to get up and stand naked before the women’s measuring eyes, but he tried, for Alfie’s sake.
Not even pride could keep him on his feet. He would have slithered gracelessly to the floor and lain there, gasping and helpless as a fry dropped on deck by a passing gull, had it not been for Alfie’s strength. There was something deeply comforting, in fact, in being held so, like a child in its father’s arms. Sighing, he let his head rest against his friend’s cheek and closed his eyes.
“You see?” Alfie said wryly. “Nothing standing at present. You’d be wasting your time. Just change the bed today, and come back in a day or so.”
Dimly, John felt he should be insulted by this, but he was too grateful to be lifted over to the bath and gently sat down in clean warm water. The rest of the world went away while he breathed in scented steam, his vision going as misty as the surface of the water.
“I soap—”
“I don’t think so. Listen….”
He could hear Alfie spinning some implausible tale about religious vows and penances, and wondered why he couldn’t just tell the truth.
Doesn’t everyone in this room believe that fornication is a sin? Why then is it so difficult to understand that the thought of it fills me with unease?
“There,” said Alfie’s warm brown voice at his back, after a moment of blankness when he must have fallen asleep again. The sounds of bed-making and scornful Spanish conversation behind him only threw into relief how much John wanted them all to go away. He looked up and found Alfie giving him a sideways look, lopsided and wry, ancient as the oldest profession. “But are you sure you won’t? She’s a pretty, plump little thing, you don’t fancy her soaping you down, with her arms too short to reach around you without her pressing her fine bosom to your back—the water making the white blouse on her transparent as a veil?”
Suiting his actions to his words, Alfie had unwound the bandage and set it aside, and was now soaping John’s shoulders, big hands firm and warm, slippery, but ever so slightly rough against John’s skin. His insides tightened and his belly fluttered with a sudden wash of lust, thin and pitiful in his weakness, like overwatered grog. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t talk like that!”
“I don’t know many men who would say no.”
“Shame on them!” John hissed.
Why, chastity is simple.
He didn’t understand why everyone seemed to find it so difficult.
Alfie did not reply to his anger, only bent his head and smiled that damnable knowing smile. He had taken off his waistcoat and rolled up his sleeves, and his own linen was soaked, molding itself to a lithe but powerful chest. Pressing down on John’s head he tipped it forwards, and John found himself sluiced with water which trailed in skeins of silver off his newly shaggy hair into the bath. He closed his eyes against the soap, but an animal sense seemed to radiate from his flushed skin, allowing him to feel the man bending over him as though they were pressed together. Encircled by Alfie’s presence, his body seemed to pull towards the other man’s as one pole of a magnet to the other— and that was before Alfie’s fingers were in his hair, soothing and slippery and very warm. Alfie’s voice was all but inaudible, a velvet touch against the side of his face. “I know few women who would say no to you.”
He couldn’t find the anger this time, floating as if on opium clouds. “Shame on them too.”
“You’re very beautiful, John. Inside and out.”
There was something about being whispered to in that smoky dark voice that made him shift beneath the ministering fingers, discomforted. What did the man think he was doing? Had he made some agreement with the girls that required John to join in? He…didn’t know if something like that would come as a relief. Surely it was better that Alfie be a pander than a…. “I don’t think you should say that to me.”
“Permission to say a thousand other things, very much along the same lines, Sir?”
“No.” John’s conscience, never very quiescent, raised its head like a gazelle scenting a lion on the wind. “Permission denied.”
There was a silence, and then Alfie laughed, ruefully. “You’re a hard man to please,” he said, and rinsed off the soap. They had put vinegar in the rinsing water, to counteract the soap, and the smell of it was sharp as a rebuke. It brought tears to John’s eyes.
I really am very ill still,
he thought, for that small tone of disappointment in Alfie’s voice to bring him so low.
But what else was I supposed to do?
There were things men did not say to other men, no matter how strong their friendship.
“What is ‘Alfie’ short for?” he said instead, steering them back into safer water as the lieutenant squeezed the water from his hair and pulled him to his feet to be toweled dry. “You can’t have been given that name as a child, surely?”
Alfie knelt to dry his feet, and looking down at that bent back, at the top of his round head and the tendrils of sunny bright hair in springy damp curls about his face, John wished with a panic that he had another cloth to wrap about his hips. He was not normally a particularly modest man, but at this moment he felt excruciatingly self-conscious and exposed, particularly when Alfie looked up, cheek so close to John’s thigh he could feel the heat of it like a minor sun.
But Alfie, thank God, after looking in his eyes and perhaps seeing the terror there, for once refrained from saying anything suggestive. “‘Aelfstan,’” he said, with a sigh. “My parents were antiquarians. I believe they met over some fossil or fascinating bone somewhere. ‘Aelfstan Petyt Donwell,’ to make it worse— ‘Petyt’ after the author of
Jus Parliamentarium,
you know. A book which I may proudly say I have never opened.”
He maneuvered John back across the floor to the newly made bed, and after examining the wound and declaring it would do well for a bit of fresh air, he helped him on with a clean nightshirt and lowered him gently back down to the pillow. “And so you have your revenge for my embarrassing you,” Alfie said. His eyes as he looked down were full of warmth, though John thought he saw lingering sadness also. It dismayed him.
“I should have known better than to try. Go back to sleep, sir. Soon you’ll be well, and I won’t have the chance again.”
Embarrassment?
Was that what it was? John closed his eyes, ashamed of his recent thoughts. A little gentle ribbing at his “holier than thou” behavior? A mild and friendly dig at John’s prudishness?
Oh dear Lord, I almost…almost suspected him of something unthinkable.
Ungrateful wretch that he was! What kind of a reward was that for the man’s days of patient care? Well, he would not entertain such thoughts ever again.
He wanted to find some way to apologize without actually admitting to his suspicions. Wanted to say,
“Never have the chance to embarrass me again? No, please do. Your needling enlivens my rather dull life,”
but the effort of the bath had been too much for him. His determination to do battle against the shadow of regret in Alfie’s eyes slithered away like an unhitched cable into the depths of the sea, and he fell asleep at once.

The following week, John felt recovered enough to take short walks about town, and they sat at a table outside a cafe, soaking up the reviving sunlight, the hot wind blowing the scent of olives and oranges down on them from the hills. Coffee steamed in a tall pot before them, and fresh fruit attempted to vie with the plate of custard-filled
ensaimades
for their attention. Vainly, as it proved, because they were too busy looking down at the waterfront and the harbor beyond to care about either.