Loving Monsters (28 page)

– I can’t tell you. You’ll laugh at this old fool keeping a last school secret from over sixty years ago when most of the boys are long dead and the rest beyond all caring. Yet I told nobody then and cannot say the name now. I never shall. I shall die without saying it to anyone. It will fall out of my brain into the earth and dissolve. –

It’s true you never mentioned Michael’s surname. I noticed it at the time because you’re generally punctilious about names. It was a small thing, but it stuck.

– Maybe I wanted you to notice. That’s the worst of clandestine love: it’s the one secret bursting to be told. The surname doesn’t matter but Philip himself matters dreadfully. Now you know, and you’re the only person I’ve told in over sixty years. You’ve not yet dismissed it with one of your jocular remarks and I’m aware it leaves me with some explaining to do. I know it’s absurd, but although Philip has in some sense been my life I hardly knew him at all. A two-year age gap in adolescence is anyway quite a gulf, and most boys have no inclination to mix with their juniors, who simply strike them as childish. Also, in a formally streamed school one had one’s own contemporaries and classes and games teams and it was quite possible to go for days without bumping into someone from a different niche in the school. Apart from anything else he was a boarder and I a day-boy. Still, I befriended a couple of his classmates enough to discover he was an avid reader of
Popular
Flying,
in which the earliest Biggles stories were being published at the time. When Johns himself visited the school I had him sign an autograph for Philip as well as for myself. I hoped it would buy me into my idol’s favours but all it did was slightly increase his stock among his contemporaries. So how, you’re going to ask, could a junior with whom I had almost no contact (and that only over a scant
eighteen months more than half a century ago) have become my life?

– Dear James, I wish I knew. It might have made sense had we been physical lovers, but we never were. Largely innocent I may have been, as we all were, I was still aware of those sorts of erotic possibility. One never did that with real friends, only with people one didn’t necessarily like at all. It was part of the code, I suppose: a protection against love which was so important for the maintenance of a good school or even of British society. No, it wasn’t sex I wanted with Philip but everything. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. I wanted his soul. I wanted to
be
him, seamlessly. To inhabit his bones.

– I was partly
foudroyé
because of his looks, obviously. Michael was handsome but Philip was downright beautiful, there is no other word. Not at all effeminate, just beautiful, flawless. It was like being confronted with a masterpiece. Even his contemporaries seemed slightly respectful, which is hardly something that comes naturally to a bunch of ink-stained fourteen-year-olds. Of course this was the eye of love, and I could always hear that little sceptical voice inside saying he was just another scruffy kid though admittedly a lot less plain than some. But it made no difference and anyway his looks are not the whole story. He had about him an intriguingly foreign air. I think I mentioned they were a missionary family in Tanganyika Territory? When I first saw Philip he’d just arrived back from a summer spent in Africa and he was a study in brown and blond. I remember being fascinated by the colour of his neck against his shirt collar, by his hands against his cuffs. Among us pallid English children he was an exotic, and it was that which did for me. It was as though my entire sixteen years had unwittingly been lived in a world slightly out of focus and in that instant’s glimpse a synapse closed or a critical molecule shifted and a new universe sprang into being with pin-sharp clarity. And all might still have been well if it hadn’t done something to my heart at the same time. How was I to know that at that moment, which not even an onlooker could
have detected, my life’s entire course would be set? I went on believing what we were constantly told: that our futures depended on studying hard and passing the right exams, that qualifications were the key to everything. Yet as it turned out I need not have bothered to sit a single damned exam. The lightning-stroke of Philip had bleached away everything else and pointed me in a direction neither his nor mine, a direction I willy-nilly took up and have gone ploughing along ever since, further and further away as though I were intent on leaving the solar system. And it has led me here, for apparently the Valle di Chio mysteriously intersects with the outer reaches of the solar system. I’m sitting here on this terrace in Italy, talking to you on this astonishing summer’s day, all because one morning in Eltham in 1934 for maybe thirty seconds I saw a boy looking at a notice board. And
that
is the story of my life, so maybe you can stop writing and I can stop talking.

– An odd case indeed, you’re thinking. It doesn’t make sense. Well, nor to me. But it may at least make sense of things in my story which must otherwise have struck you as anomalous. I could see you were not altogether won over by the explanation I gave for going to Suez, for instance. You thought it strange that my father would have banished me to bring me to my senses and get me away from Michael’s dangerous political influence, and you were right. The truth was almost the reverse. I badgered him to find me a job in Suez. Philip had told me he was going out to Dar-es-Salaam to see his family for the first time in two years. He said he’d always liked Suez, for some reason, and I came to associate the place with him as a name in a fantasy world I was creating for us both. As I mentioned, there were quite a few boys at Eltham whose families were overseas, either Bible-thumping or doctoring or running the Empire, and they were the ones I tended to befriend. Some fascination attached to them because they felt different, they knew different things, odd languages and weird customs. I imagined they were familiar with stifling markets in Mombasa or Madras or had drunk cows’ blood with the
Masai and knew the smell of opium in the back streets of Shanghai. My adolescent obsession with Docklands warehouses and cargo vessels was all part of the same thing. I think I described it as being a kind of poetry for me. And everything met in Philip. He became an icon. He personified Overseas for me, he embodied the landscape for which I yearned. So I imagined that by getting a job in Suez I might gain a foothold in his enviable world as well as being physically closer to Tanganyika. Pathetic! Of course. But that’s how children are when in the grip of love. Maybe we all are. Perhaps that’s the whole point of icons: to annihilate the rational.

– So because I went on at him my father reluctantly found me the job with Anderson & Green in order that I could at least survive in Suez. Why Suez? he wanted to know, and I spun him some tale. Actually, it must have been a relief to get me out of the house because I’d become intolerably moody and mooning and cross. I used to be driven into inner frenzies of jealous despair each time I saw Philip laughing with his friends, other boys his own age. Even glimpsing their names on a games list gave me a miserable shot of adrenaline. Once I overheard him talking to another colonial kid in some African dialect and my jealousy ran wild. What secrets were they sharing under cover of a language understood by no-one else in the school? Oh paranoia, envy …! Was Philip telling his friend how embarrassing and repulsive my attentions were? Worse, were they lovers? But the very worst of all was that nothing excludes like a foreign language and I realised I should never get close to him. Always and always I would be shut out. Even now, at practically eighty, I can catch sight of two kids with their arms around each other and still feel a distant pang of exclusion, like the memory of an ache for something that probably doesn’t even exist for them any more than it did for Philip. So at the time, eaten alive by adolescent dissatisfaction, I must have been a horrid creature to have around the house which probably made it a little easier for my father to arrange to put a lot of miles between us at my request.

– I found out Michael wasn’t going home to Africa that summer: he had long since left the school. Philip would be travelling alone and I was able to meet him in Suez on the British India’s
Kenya.
That, incidentally, was the occasion when I first got hold of the company pass from ‘Pusser’ Hammond, not when we went to meet the
Otranto.
It was very strange seeing Philip in Port Taufiq. I went aboard on some invented pretext and found him up on deck taking pictures of the harbour with his Kodak. ‘Good Lord!’ I said, elaborately amazed. ‘What an incredible thing! Fancy you being here!’ and so on. ‘Oh, gosh,’
Jebb‚
he said, blushing a bit with surprise. You must remember that orders of seniority were significant then and to him I not only counted as a senior in terms of school but now, having left the College, I was an adult with a job. For one awful moment I thought he might ‘Sir’ me. Fatuous chit-chat for five minutes, at the end of which we shook hands and wished each other goodbye. It was one of the few times I had ever physically touched him, and it was the last. It was also the last time I ever saw him, spoke to him or heard his voice. Like Lot’s wife I risked a backward glance but he’d gone back to his Kodak. –

And from that moment you became pure salt.

– For all the hopeless tears I shed over that boy you might well say so. –

Did he know?

– I’ve always wondered. He must have noticed something. We’re all quick to sense other people’s interest in us, adolescents doubly so. At some level he undoubtedly knew, but I wouldn’t think the knowledge ever became fully conscious. Too difficult. Too threatening, even. Anyway there it is. And I’ve no idea what you call it. You could hardly describe it as an affair since that implies the active involvement of at least two people. How is it possible to love somebody you don’t know? Infatuation? Calf love? Phrases like that have all the wrong connotations, with their overtones of a temporary madness that’s soon outgrown. The whole notion of ‘first love’ contains a suggestion of child’s play;
but what if first love turns out to be last love, too? What if it energises a lifetime? Berlioz was twelve when he was
foudroyé
by the eighteen-year-old Estelle. He was a famous man of forty-five and she an unknown widow of fifty-one when he tracked her down, wrote her a respectful letter and finally met her again briefly. And he, too, could never write her full name. I don’t think this rare and inexplicable kind of passion can be patronised as ‘calf love’. Whatever else it is, it is neither trivial nor something out of which one grows. It is more like a miraculous sustaining wound that never heals. Philip is my phantom limb, cut off in adolescence but still occasionally paining me and giving me the exquisite illusion of being there. –

(This image jolts me. It is the very one I sometimes use to myself when describing the absent country in my life.)

– Do you know, to this day I catch myself speaking to him, so much a part of me has he become? On a morning like this I might get out of bed and stand at the bedroom window and watch the olives emerge from the early shadows like a secret and say quietly to them, ‘Oh, Philip …’ Something between a sigh and a prayer and a fond remonstration. I know it’s ridiculous. And times without number over the years when I’ve suddenly found two minutes’ respite in an aircraft washroom or some horrid lavatory in a bar in a ramshackle tropical town I’ve stared at the wall while peeing and said, ‘What
am
I doing here, Philip? It’s you who did this to me. It’s all because of you I roam and roam. Guiltless you may be, but I blame you all the same, and love you all the same. And shall do always because it’s too late to change now, too late to break out of this fond servitude even if I knew how, which I never did discover. Well, damn you, my dear.’ –

Jayjay is still staring up at Sant’ Egidio (which is Italian for St Giles), but that is not what he sees. At last he blows his nose and tucks his handkerchief back into its customary place in his cuff.

– Well. There is little we can do to protect ourselves from our own tenderness. Mine has been a blighted life, wouldn’t you say? A wasted span? How
NOT
to spend fourscore years? But the truth
is I’ve flourished, in my fashion. Having your heart irreparably broken would require your long-term connivance. It’s far more painless simply to give the thing away, as I did. Expect no returns and you’ll not be disappointed. –

Yet this is said without bitterness and indeed almost tenderly, as though he recognises that with so strong a thread running through it his life cannot have been altogether thrown away; that no matter how heretical and inconvenient the thread, it draws a whole together. This constant inventing and re-inventing of someone who scarcely was, this living a life for a figure who is omnipresent yet never there, strikes me as containing the essential pathos of religious faith. Yet by being a solo effort Jayjay’s is surely a more pure act of the imagination and, in its way, quite grand.

No others, then?

– Oh, lots of affairs. All those women in Egypt, and I nearly married at least twice. But … there was always the
but.
In the last resort they never felt like the real thing. Imagine, lying around in some tumbled pit of sheets with a girl I was sure I loved, yet always with that inner conviction that this wasn’t it. Not the genuine article. Can you explain it? Arrested development, whatever that might mean? Some perverse urge to remain true to a former version of myself, no matter how much it might blight me? –

And what became of Philip?

– For a long time I didn’t want to know. I was sure he’d been killed in the war. But many years ago I had some discreet snooping done because by then I wanted proof that this mythical creature who ruled my life really did have an objective existence. And he had. Royal Navy during the war, convoy protection; sunk outside Murmansk but by a miracle plucked out of the water in under a minute and thawed out. Survived war; became a farmer in South Africa; married an English girl from Devon out there; two kids; etcetera. I learned all that twenty years ago. He may be dead now for all I know. But I was glad to have found out about him. I could say that because of him my own life has been eccentric, adventurous, interesting and so on. And I could say that despite
me his has probably been quite a bit less so once the war was over. I was pleased his life appeared to be so normal. It’s all very well but most people don’t actually want adventure and eccentricity: they want an ordinary family life and a secure living. So I’m happy for him. I suppose he may have turned into a bald, leathery old
Kaffir
-beater
but for me he will always be the boy I first knew with fine blond hair and those still unshaven sideburns that come to silky wicks.