Loving Monsters (29 page)

– So what was it? What is it? I’ve read a lot but the books don’t know. With the modern passion for medical categories into which everything must be squeezed it would doubtless be referred to as a sexual dysfunction. I think by now you’ll have to agree that I’m neither bashful nor inhibited about sex, so I can at least give the point due consideration and say truthfully that it doesn’t feel like a sexual matter so much as, well, a poetic one. Besides, I’m not sexually dysfunctional. I’ve never had any problems on that score with either gender. No, it isn’t a dysfunction in the sense that a fetish would be, without which one might be impotent. I’ll certainly allow that it involves the erotic; but the erotic is another category that has been debased and shrunk to become a shorthand for genital sex, whereas genital sex is only a single aspect of the erotic. The erotic thrives on subtleties, on matters of poetry and the imagination, but we’re living at the wrong time for those to be understood. A tabloid stupidity has overtaken our culture and we no longer understand anything about human behaviour that can’t be compressed into a headline. I don’t believe the twentieth century, and still less the twenty-first, ever will understand such things. The more they use quasi-medical notions of pathology to pry into the way we function, the more closed to them does the human heart become. Meanwhile we do our real living in entirely other directions. –

And all this time there has been a bee flying around us, settling on the edges of saucers and cups, pulsing her abdomen in the sun. It is odd because there is no sugar on the table. It is as though she alone has misread the dance of a returning worker up in one
of the hives (with a proprietorial silliness bordering on the superstitious I automatically take her for one of my own bees). Here she is, the dunce of the hive, expecting to find a rich source of nectar and finding instead an old man breaking a lifetime’s silence to tell a rather less old man about a love as powerful and insubstantial as a sunbeam.

Would you ever think now of meeting him?

– Of course I’ve
thought
about it. Thousands of times. But it’s too late. It always was. What can be said on the brink of annihilation? Could I stand there and say to this old farmer, having first taken him out of his wife’s earshot, ‘I have loved you more than my life for most of my life’? He would think I was mad, and so I should be. Or else we would lapse into an updated version of that ghastly farewell on the
Kenya,
every detail of which is burnt into me by the glare of an Egyptian sun. No. I have only one thing to say to Philip, and it cannot be said now any more than it could then. These useless loves must go in silence to the grave. It’s the only proper place for them. –

The bee has finally left, but I notice she first bequeathed us a tiny dab of clear golden excrement on the rim of a cup. This pinprick glints in the sun like one of those flakes of jewel set in the mechanism of an old-fashioned watch. I find myself troubled by what Jayjay has told me, touched, distressed on more than just his behalf, as though what he has exposed is a part of the hidden works of any human soul. So it comes as a shock suddenly to hear my own voice. I am as appalled by its hard-nosed tone as I am by the actual words it speaks.

I’m sorry, Jayjay: I still can’t quite buy that account of your father’s role in your Suez caper. I don’t know why, but it isn’t right yet. I can’t make the dynamics of your blasted family jell at all (and then, with one of those leaps when the voice crashes on even as the lagging brain cringes to hear it): it was to do with your
mother,
wasn’t it? Your mother, Jayjay. Exhibit B?

There is a long, long silence. I am horrified at my ill-mannered temerity. When I dare glance at him he is weeping, silently, very
dignified, staring up at the mountain and letting the tears run down ignored. Eventually he gives a brisk dab.

‘This’ll never do‚’ he says in a way that makes it clear he is no longer in narrative mode. Automatically I put down my notebook. ‘Come on, I think we need some more coffee. I’m not running away, James‚’ he smiles a little abstractedly. ‘I’ll come back to it. But just at this moment coffee is what I need most.’

*

– It would be too absurd for a man of my age to weep for something that happened in his teens, don’t you think? I admit I was dreadfully upset and messed about at the time but that’s all long in the past. When I started on this curious project with you I really had no intention of getting into any of the story about Philip, so I also hoped I might slip by without mentioning my mother except as a bland childhood presence. You can pick me up for disingenuity, certainly, as well as for being a lousy tactician. I reasoned that in telling my life story with, shall we say, enough picaresque detail I should not find myself obliged to trespass into areas I have never mentioned to another soul, living or dead. I’m still unsure whether doing so is down to some secret desire on my part to unburden myself or to your technique for interrogation that shocks one into confidences.

– My stupid tears just now were not brought on by what my mother did sixty years ago, although my reluctance to talk about her at all is a measure of the antipathy I once felt. It’s an antipathy that has long become fossilised, so that not speaking about her is purely a matter of habit rather than of ever-present trauma. No, I was startled into tears by hearing myself disclose secrets, which suddenly meant having to acknowledge a lifetime moulded by those secrets. I feel as though I’ve committed treason and deserve to be shot. It’s an uncanny thing hearing myself explain to a perfect summer’s day how I come to have lived the life I have, and why it has led so inexorably here to this terrace in Italy with you and a coffeepot. One rarely has to account for such things out loud. Still, it’s curious it should be so affecting because I’m sure
most people do have moments when they look at their lives objectively, as though they were actually a third party, and are incredulous at what they see. But I suppose making it public is another matter.

– Well, my mother. It was that filthy religion of hers that did for her. We went through all sorts of hell the more she became fixated on heaven. I suppose these days it would be labelled a mania or something, and never mind what I said earlier about pseudo-clinical categories. To be blunt, the poor woman went quite off her head. When it’s a matter of mental illness the phrase ‘she suffered from’ is significantly inaccurate because it involves her family and friends, too. We all suffered, believe me. The worst of being a child when your mother goes off her chump is that there is never a moment when you can tell yourself, ‘It’s all right, she’s mad. She didn’t mean that. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’ Quite the reverse: children will accept all manner of extraordinary behaviour as the norm simply because it happens at home. It takes a long time to come out from under the ether, to acquire distance and realise that none of your friends’ mothers quote the Bible from memory at mealtimes for half an hour at a stretch. Nor do they accost complete strangers in the Co-op and inform them that God is watching their every move and has big plans for Eltham. Perhaps we were more tolerant of eccentricity in those days. Or it may be that people tended not to interfere if someone was a pillar of the community, a nicely spoken lady who could still zip through the daily crossword and add up bills in her head at lightning speed. It was years before they finally saw fit to cart her off to Colney Hatch, which I think is now called Friern Barnet or something. And that was because she tried to drown a baby at its christening. Yes, I agree it’s funny, and the incident did rather excite attention. It happened during the war, when thankfully I was in Egypt. There were newspaper stories that she’d torn the baby from the vicar’s arms and held it face down in the font, screaming about how it was a child of Satan. They saved the baby but my mother took a good deal of subduing, possibly because
people seem generally reluctant to rough-house in church. They carted her off to the bin where she died in 1949, wholly demented. Or dementedly holy, depending on one’s viewpoint. Perhaps the saddest aspect of it all was that her beliefs never even gave her the happiness they promised and to which she was surely entitled. My lasting memory of our household is that it was not one which had been made privy to Good News. Indeed, poor Dad never recovered.

– Well, you can imagine the scandal in a place like Eltham. It even got into some of the Fleet Street papers. If you’re sufficiently zealous I’m sure you could dig it out of the archives and check it: I may have the odd detail wrong. Possibly, seeing how low-church my mother had sunk by then, it wasn’t a font christening at all but one of those baptisms with total immersion. I suppose that would provide a better opportunity for drowning babies. But when I read the accounts the thing that leaped off the page at me, other than the fact that my own mother had star billing in a humiliating story, was that the baby’s name was the same as mine. It was about to be christened Raymond. It took me straight back to the events that had led to my hurried departure for Suez.

– To put it briefly, my mother had found out about me and Philip, and by the most improper means. Foolishly, I was keeping a diary in which I was confiding my adolescent anguish. I’m afraid I’d even called it ‘Liber Amoris’ in imitation of Hazlitt’s equally frantic and vulnerable account. You can imagine the sort of things I wrote in it. Awful poems, declarations, blacknesses, with occasional ecstatic triumphs: ‘Spoke to him today! When I gave him TS’s notice about the Junior Colts XV our hands met …!’ The whole thing was ridiculous and extravagant and gusty. Of course it was. I was a teenager, after all, and besotted beyond reason. My mother must have been snooping in my room one day when I was at school and found the diary. It was inexcusable that she read it, but then I was stupid to have associated religious people with moral scruple. She went quite cuckoo. She tore straight down to
Mottingham and confronted me at the school gates, waving it and shouting Leviticus in my face. I managed to get her away before she could storm in to demand that the headmaster uncover the identity of the boy with whom her son was having this filthy alliance, this bestial coupling, this … and so on and so forth, most of it at the top of her voice, to the edification of my schoolmates and the local citizens. Thank goodness I had never named Philip in the diary: I referred to him only as ‘IB’, after Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved. A childish but effective code.

– Life at home became impossible. Dad tried to act as a mediator but you could tell he just wanted to run off to the office where nobody shouted passages from the Old Testament and everything happened quietly and purposefully. He did make an awkward attempt at father-and-son intimacy, trying to convey that he’d heard these things,
harrumph!,
happened, and, er, they didn’t strike him as all that terrible since they mostly blew over as soon as a chap got out into the world, you know, girlfriends, decent job, plenty to do. I’m afraid we’ve got to face it, old man, your mother’s a bit, er, hah, unwell at present. I’m wondering … I’m wondering if it really
mightn’t
be better, all things considered, and seeing that you’ve got the School Cert. to worry about, if …? ‘You mean, Dad, you’d like me to move out? To go? Leave home?’

– He blustered, but that was indeed what he meant. Talk about injustice.
I
wasn’t the one rampaging around shouting imprecations. It obviously never occurred to him that it was his wife who ought to be removed for a while. It’s true I could see he was miserable about sending me away but he evidently felt that once I was out of the house my mother would calm down and could eventually be talked around, enough at least so that I could come home again. You’ve got to remember that in those days psychiatric help was pretty crude. It was mainly straitjackets or great draughts of that horrible-tasting stuff that used to stink the house out, paraldehyde. My father wanted peace at all costs, and the price of peace was having his son leave the house. I don’t think I ever
quite forgave him. At the same time my mother informed me in a conversational aside that a seraph she knew had told her I was a child of Satan. So I went and stayed a couple of months with some cousins over in Hither Green. I could easily commute to school from there, it was only two stations away. But it was the beginning of the end of Eltham for me. –

A child of Satan?

– That’s what she said. She also called me the Devil’s Officer, I remember. I think she was confused to the point where extreme religiosity and her work in the Censorship in the First World War had become entwined. I believe she thought I had been recruited by the Devil and that my wretched diary contained his coded instructions for infiltrating the Earth with his shock troops. Sort of fifth-columnists. And since this ‘IB’ was clearly someone I knew at school, she would occasionally show up there even after I’d been exiled to Hither Green, earnestly warning anyone who would listen that Eltham College was the lair of the Great Beast. I’m glad to say this tended to make people laugh uncontrollably but the police were sometimes called to have her removed. If it made my position at school pretty vile so it did for a wretch named Irwin Bretton on account of his initials. The ribbing he got was doubly unjust since he was a famously dim piggy boy whose only known interest was in making cranes out of Meccano. He had quite a bad time of it without, I suspect, ever fully twigging the nature of the accusations. Just as well, probably. The teachers were sympathetic enough and so were my friends, but some of the other boys … Well, you know how children are.

– But why
me
? Why would my mother take against her own son unless she already had some long-standing grievance or dislike of me? Surely even the violent antipathies of the insane generally have particular roots, whether imaginary or real? It’s true we’d never been close, she and I. I was certainly more so to my father, though as must be clear to you by now we were in no sense a close family. I sometimes wonder if it didn’t date right back to my infancy when her brother was killed in the war. Apparently that
was when she started becoming fiercely religious. I tried to think of a specific heinous act I had committed but could only come up with the usual childhood misdemeanours that had caused a bit of a scene at the time. I even wondered whether I was perhaps not my father’s child at all, and ‘Satan’ just a lunatic’s pseudonym for someone she’d met at a bus stop. Had she enjoyed a hasty dalliance even as she was engaged to my father, for which she later experienced guilt? And was that why she never really showed me much maternal affection? I shan’t ever know and it hardly matters now. The poor woman simply got barmier and barmier. Thanks to paraldehyde she flew off the handle a bit less and instead would hold long, earnest conversations with people like Elijah while she did the crossword. In fact I believe Elijah told her the answers. It sounds fanny here on a summer’s day but at the time it was miserably frightening and upsetting. I felt I’d been betrayed by both parents while my love for Philip had been exposed and defiled. When I realised Philip’s identity was still a secret that aspect of the thing seemed less melodramatically bad; and as for defilement, I converted that adroitly into a soothing feeling of private martyrdom. This was a love for which I’d been publicly mocked, reviled, made to suffer, yet with Christlike fortitude I’d borne it all … You can imagine. The net effect, of course, was to add still further to the sacred status Philip held for me. I must say it became nearly impossible to resist telling him what I was going through on his account and that the least he could do was take me in his arms and let me cry on his shirtfront. But resist it I did, thank goodness. As for the
trahison
des
parents
,
by the time I read the reports of my mother and the christening it was nearly ten years since I had seen either of them and that whole overwrought era had receded and become a good deal blunted. By then what I actually felt was
sorrow
.
For my mother, for my father, for us as a not very successful family unit. From time to time I can feel it even now.