On Loving Josiah (25 page)

Josiah felt strangely unsettled at this piece of information. If he had ever felt this particular feeling before, he would have recognized it as sexual jealousy.

‘What was she like?’ asked Josiah, biting his lip and sounding cool.

‘She was from Bengal. She was very beautiful. Kind, honest, close to her family.’

‘So why did you leave her?’

‘Marriage is a strange business, Jo. You marry because you want to be really close to someone. I imagine more often than not that
closeness
never really materializes. You just fall back into the old habits you had when you were single, and I would spend more and more time with my long-dead authors and she with her parents.’

‘Was she sexy?’

Thomas was faintly surprised at the question but answered him. ‘I certainly thought so. There was a sultry look about her. She had thick black hair, these soulful brown eyes…’

‘But why did you marry her if she didn’t like books?’

‘Funnily enough, she was the librarian in our faculty library. Our
eyes met over piles of books. She would find books for me, reserve them for me, and lend them to me, all with that sultry look of hers. There was a time when I thought she was perfect.’

‘Did you have good sex with her?’

‘You don’t ask someone that question, Jo. It’s one of the few
forbidden
questions.’

‘But I don’t know anything about sex. I don’t know what to expect.’

‘Don’t you talk about it at school?’

‘Not really,’ said Josiah. ‘Not properly. They all talk about who they fancy and who they’ve shagged. But we don’t get details.’

‘What about biology lessons?’

‘Of course I know
technically
what happens. I just thought you could tell me something else.’ Josiah looked so pleadingly up at Thomas that he did his best to answer him.

‘Sex is a way of connecting with someone else. I would
actually
say it’s one of many ways – just communicating honestly with someone is a way of connecting with them, or listening to a piece of music together, that sort of thing. But sex has the potential to be really high up on the list. Or I’ve always thought it has, but if I’m to be totally honest with you, I’ve almost always been disappointed. Sex is not much good if you just
do
it to someone else. It might be physically satisfying but otherwise it’s dead.’

For some reason, this wasn’t the answer Josiah was wanting, and he tried to get the conversation back on track.

‘Have you ever had sex with a man?’ he asked.

‘You don’t ask that question either.’

‘But I can ask you, can’t I?’

‘As it so happens, I haven’t had sex with a man.’

‘Why not? If it’s not much good with a woman?’

‘Because I’m not gay.’

‘I think you are.’

‘Well, Josiah, I hate to disappoint you.’

‘Why did you show me that poem, then?’

‘Which poem was that?’ asked Thomas, knowing full well.

‘About Corydon and Alexis. That one.’

‘There are several poems, many poems, celebrating the love between men.’

‘But more which are not,’ insisted Josiah, correctly as it so
happened
. Then suddenly Josiah leant forward and kissed Thomas, slowly, lingeringly, wetly, on his cheek.

Thomas closed his eyes to relive it, and said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that. You mustn’t play dangerously.’

And Josiah understood that if he were to get to Siena, if he were to spend a month with his lover in peace, he had to abide by the rules which separated May from August.

In fact, there were a good number of things which Josiah
understood
more clearly than Thomas. To begin with, that it didn’t matter how many referees Thomas gave Angela Day, or how capable a pupil he was, or how educational the proposed tour might be, there was not a chance in hell that permission would be given. So Josiah simply disposed of Thomas’ carefully crafted letter, and equally simply nicked some headed notepaper from Angela’s office – in fact, so easy was it that despite finding his passport in an unlocked tin he decided to leave it there until he needed it.

Josiah wrote Ms Day’s reply in an ICT class:

Dear Dr Marius,

I see no problem regarding Josiah’s holiday in Italy for the month of August. I have written the dates in the diary. Please contact me if I can be of any assistance.

Yours sincerely,

Angela Day

The presentation of this sealed letter! Josiah gave it to him
nervously
, as though he had no idea of its contents and its verdict, and said, ‘Fingers crossed’. The envelope was typed, addressed to Dr Thomas Marius, Corpus Christi College; and then, in the right hand corner were scribbled the words ‘By Hand’.

‘It looks promising,’ said Thomas, as he opened it. ‘She would have sent it by post if she hadn’t trusted you.’

‘There you are!’ said Thomas happily. ‘What did I tell you? It always pays to be above board.’

And in their relief and delight they allowed themselves a good, solid hug.

In the weeks that followed, even though Thomas could still not give Josiah the attention he wanted, he began lending him his books, not just the Classics – Loeb editions of Lucretius’
De Rerum Natura,
Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, Catullus, of course; but a couple of volumes of poetry, too, Wordsworth and Philip Larkin. Josiah took down from his shelf a copy of Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress,
Thomas’ fifth form prize from his grammar school back in 1976, and immediately opened it and read out loud, ‘As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted upon a certain place…’ And Thomas
interrupted
him, to tell him about the Slough of Despond and the Valley of Humiliation and the town of Vanity-Fair, which was lighter than Vanity.

‘Take these books home with you,’ he insisted, and Josiah, arms piled high, took the books back to his room, and reverently placed them on his chest of drawers. His favourite book to read in bed was
Pilgrim’s Progress,
because it was the largest and the heaviest book and he liked the weight of it.

Josiah also began to commit himself more to his life at school; suddenly he was getting ‘A’s in his GCSE coursework, and his
teachers
noticed his ‘complete change in attitude’. A couple of evenings a week he even helped the care staff prepare the evening meal, and 
he resisted the advances of two girls who told him they wanted to sleep with him.

The lilies in Thomas’ garden grew strong and tall; and there was a moment at the end of May when Josiah picked his father a great bunch of them, and yes, there was a response when he thrust them into his arms, but there might have been a happier one. Gibson was near to tears and hugged his son, promptly squashing the flowers which were still between them, and on seeing the lilies’ demise he completely broke down, as though what he had just witnessed was the most dreadful metaphor. Josiah just laughed, a hysterical, nervous laugh, but that didn’t do much for their relationship either. Josiah yearned for something real, something to hold onto. He began to feel thwarted. And then, one day, he dared to ask him the question which had been preying on his mind. ‘What happened to my mother? Can you remember?’

The great human bulk which was Gibson lurched forward and held onto his son’s shoulders. It occurred to Josiah that all his life he had needed his father’s weight to steady him, but that now he had found it, it could only topple him. Gibson said nothing, of course. He was as mute as all his social workers had been over the years on the subject. To all intents and purposes, his mother simply didn’t exist. She had less substance than the air.

By the middle of June, however, Thomas’s term was over, and he could devote himself once more to his young pupil. They immersed themselves in the works of Virgil, Ovid and Pliny, paying particular attention to their descriptions of rural life. Together they read one of Pliny’s letters about the beauty of a Tuscan landscape, and ‘some enormous amphitheatre that could only be the work of Nature, the broad plain ringed by mountains, their summits topped by ancient groves’; they dwelt on the pleasure that was to be August, and even learnt a little Italian.

So good was Josiah at living dangerously that he didn’t even bother to retrieve his passport till the morning of his departure. The only precaution he had taken was to duplicate the office key when it had been left in the door while Angela had been writing up case notes: a dash to and from Cherry Hinton High Street to the key-cutter had taken him a mere twenty minutes. So Josiah now had in his
possession
two keys. The power of it! And at 5 a.m. on the first of August he used the first to let himself into the office and the second to let himself out of the back door. It amused him to write Angela a note explaining he’d be away for a month and leaving it on her desk, locking the office door behind him. What a conundrum that’ll be for her! O, the power of it!

He was at Thomas’ house at 5.15; at the station a half an hour later after a sleepy cup of tea and a taxi ride; at Stansted airport by 6.30. They barely said a word to each other, just half-smiled from time to time. The plane left at 8.15: Josiah took the window seat. They touched down in Florence two-and-a-half hours later. They were free.

Freedom is a heady business, and the heat disoriented them even further. Dear Thomas, the responsible one, tried not to not succumb to it: he was all maps and taxis and logistics. They were waiting in the taxi queue; Thomas was sweating, remembering that he still hasn’t warned the Scroppos about Josiah. In his head: a hundred ways of explaining the boy away, the pupil who wants to see Siena, the nephew whose parents are abroad, or perhaps the nephew who wants to see Siena. Tell the truth, goddammit! Have you done
anything
wrong? Will you do anything you regret?

Thomas turned to Josiah. He was intending to say, ‘You keep the place in the queue while I phone the Scroppos to tell them we’ve landed.’ But his eyes were closed, and there was a half-smile upon
his lips, as innocent as a babe’s. The boy so pure and pale and calm that Thomas was held there for an instant – there was too much beauty here to interrupt it – too much beauty! Then a certain
sickness
forced him to action, and he shook him quite violently by the arm, and said, ‘I’m going to that phone booth over there.’

He got through to Signor Scroppo, and told him he was in the taxi queue and should be with them by lunchtime. There was more he had to tell him, of course, but Signor Scroppo was so pleased to hear from him that he never stopped talking, they’d been painting the walls of the chapel, the weather has been excellent… then the phone went dead, and Thomas had no more change.

The taxi queue moved quickly; the roads were fast. The smiling boy was soon asleep. But his neck was lolling onto one side, and Thomas was anxious that when he woke up his neck would be stiff – oh, he reasoned this and that, and the long and the short of it was that Thomas offered the sleeping head his shoulder, and the sleeping head accepted it, and he slyly stroked the head’s hair, or ‘slyly’ was how it felt to poor Thomas, and when the head suddenly lurched away from him, he guiltily pulled his hand away.

The Scroppos’ farmhouse was at the end of a long drive, with an orchard of pears to the left and the right of it, and even as they drove up women and children were gathering them in baskets. The house itself was made of warm Tuscan stone, with fig trees growing up it and small slits for windows, as though no-one in the Scroppo family had seen fit to modernise it in four hundred years. Thomas paid the taxi driver and waited nervously by the front door. No-one answered the dong of the old iron bell. Josiah stood with his face skywards, lit up by the sun.

‘Come on, let’s go in, they’re expecting us.’

The room was awesome in its simplicity. It made Thomas forget, even, to call out and declare his presence. A large table stood on an old brick floor, and from the ceiling were hanging plaits of garlic and
onions. But the room was dark and dour and serious. Josiah
instinctively
sought out Thomas’ hand, which Thomas pushed away when Signora Scroppo bounded in like an overweight Labrador with a tail that won’t stop wagging.

‘Mr Thomas, my English friend! Welcome again!’ She planted warm kisses on both of Thomas’ cheeks, and Thomas managed to return them, feeling like an Englishman.

‘This is my nephew, Josiah,’ said Thomas, and almost
immediately
the signora’s tail stopped wagging and there were certainly no spare kisses for him.

‘Now you make me worried, Mr Thomas. You see, they are
carrying
a bed over the hills even now, three, four, kilometres,
allora
, you know how far away is the chapel. But the bed is small. We thought you were coming alone.’

‘I was!’ exclaimed Thomas. ‘But at the last moment I persuaded Josiah to come with me. His parents both work, you know, and it’s not much fun being home alone in the holidays.’

Ah, those lies, they came quite tripping off his tongue! Where was the honourable gentleman now?