The Book And The Brotherhood

trying to buy a Klimt.'

'I imagine you don't want a taxi?'

'No, I'll walk. I love this fog. Goodbye.'

As the front door closed behind Gerard, Jenkin returned lute the aloneness which he valued so much. He leaned against the door with a positive thrill of solitude. He had wanted Gerard to stay. He was now also glad that he had gone. Jenkin had once said, a remark which Gerard remembered, that he would never marry because that would prevent him from being alone at night. Now there was supper to think of, and what was on the radio (he had no television) and Gerard to think of, always an interesting subject. Then supper to be (quickly) prepared and (slowly) eaten. Jenkin believed one should attend carefully to food while eating it. There was di, wine to be finished too. A radio talk (if short), some music (it classical and familiar). Then he might read some Spanish poetry and look at the map and think about his jaunt at Christmas.

He turned off the gas fire in the sitting room and carried the wine bottle and two glasses to the kitchen, returned for the green tumbler and the maple leaves and turned out the light. He put the green tumbler upon the tiled shelf above the sink which he kept clear for such purposes. As he put it down he-said, 'There you are!' Jenkin felt happy; but there was a flaw in his happiness. He felt, he intuited, that his life was about to change in some way he could not yet determine. The thought of this veiled change was alarming, also exciting. Perhaps it was just, though this was much, a feeling that it was time to stop schoolmastering. Would he then be, like Gerard, wondering what to do with his thoughts? No, he could never be like Gerard or have, in that sense, thoughts. He was certainly not going over to God as Gerard had professed to fear. It was as it some large white blankness were opening before him, not a dead soiled white like the Berlin Wall, but a radiant live space like a white cloud, moist and warm. What would he be doing this time next year, he wondered. So it was as close as that, his new and different future? He had said nothing to anybody, not even to Gerard.

Jenkin spread some clean newspaper upon the wooden table and set out a plate, a knife and fork. He poured the remainder of the Beaujolais into his glass and sat down and sipped it. He thought about Gerard walking home alone through the foggy lamplit streets. Then he imagined himself king alone. He too was a walker. Only while Gerard walked wrapped in the great dark cloak of his thoughts, Jenkin walked through a great collection or exhibition of little events

ncounters. Trees, for instance, an immense variety of dogs whose gentle soft friendly eyes met his with intelligence, rubbish tips containing the amazing variety of things which people threw away, some of which Jenkin would take home and cherish, shop windows, cars, things in gutters, people's Flollics, people with sad or happy faces, houses with sad or Aippy faces, windows at dusk where through undrawn curtains one could watch people watching television. Sometimes, sitting at home, Jenkin imagined individual other people, people he had never met, these were always lonely people, a girl a bed-sitter with her cat and her potted plant, an elderly man washing his shirt, a man in a turban walking along a dusty road, a man lost in the snow. Sometimes he dreamed „bout such people or was one himself. Once he thought so Intensely about a tramp at a railway terminus that he actually set off late in the evening and walked to Paddington to see if the tramp was there. The tramp was not there, but a variety of other solitary persons were there, waiting for Jenkin.

Jenkin never imagined stories attached to these people. They were pictures of individuals whose fates were sketched in their faces, their clothes, their momentary ambience, and were in this respect like the real people he met in the street. His giasp of his few friends was in the same way intense and limited. He was intensely aware of the reality of Gerard, of lhincan, of Rose, of Graham Willward (a master at his school), of Marchment (a social worker, formerly an M P, who

bool), of Marchment (a s also knew Crimond); but he did not like to speculate about them beyond the formulation of hypotheses necessary for ordinary life. They were mysterious pictures which he often looked at, mysteries upon which he sometimes meditated. He had little social curiosity and was devoid of gossip, so some people found him dull. He was an only child who had loved his parents and believed in their religion and in their goodness. Later he painlessly shed his Christianity. He could not believe in a supernatural elsewhere or imagine the risen Lord except in anguish. He found equally alien the (as he saw it) quasimystical, pseudo-mystical, Platonic perfectionism which was Gerard's substitute for religious belief. Yet he retained, perhaps after all from the e exam^ples so dear t^o him in childhood, a kind of ^absolutism, not about any special human tack or pilgrimage, but just about jobs to be done among strangell: The simplicity of his life which seemed to some spectators im asceticism, to others naive and childish, or a pose, was for him part of his absolute-, but was also, as he was well aware, a programme for happiness. Jenkin disliked muddles, cupidity, lying, exercises of power, the masses of ordinary sinning, because they involved states of mind which he found uncomfortable, such as envy, resentment, remorse or hate.^,'He's so healthy,' someone had said of Jenkin half scornfully, and Jenkin would have understood the element of criticism involved. He had become too much at case, too much at home in his life. Gerard was not at home, made continually restless Its a glimpsed ideal far far above him; yet at the same time the, glimpse, as the clouds swirled about the ^summit, consoled him, even deceived him, as with a swoop of intellectual love he seemed io be beside it, up there in those pure and radiant ^regions, high above the thing he really was. This Jenkin _saw ill Gerard as the old religious illusion. Gerard was always talking about destroying his ego. Jenkin quite liked his, he needed it, he never worried too much, he hoped to do better, trusting to his general way of life to keep him 'out of trouble'. I'm a slug, he sometimes thought. I move altogether if I move at all, I only stretch myself out a little, a very little.

It was not that Jenkin felt in general that he should set forth somewhere to serve the human race. He knew that by teaching languages and a bit of' history to all sorts of boys he was performing an important service and probably doing what he was best at. Was it not simply self-indulgent romanticism, this idea of carrying his 'simplicity' a little further? He wanted a change. He was having a change, a sabbatical term. He was supposed to be studying something, writing something. Instead he was cherishing this restlessness. He wanted to get away. He wanted to get away to be with the people he often might about. How far away, as far as Paddington, as far as a kitting rroom in Kilburn? Farther than that. As far as

,house or Stepney or Walworth? Farther than that. Yet pot even that far a matter of romanticism, escapism, delusion, dereliction of duty, a dream of feeding on others'

misery and making of it a full self? He wanted, did he, to be right out on the frontiers of human suffering, out on the edge of things to live there, for that to be his home? The heroes of our time are dissidents, protesters, people alone in cells, anonymous helpers, unknown truth-tellers. He knew he would not une _Of these. but he wanted to be somehow near them. -Nothing mattered much except easing pain, except individuals and their histories. But what did that mean for him, with his new secret dreams of setting off for South America or India. Even, his Liberation Theology was romantic, consisting merely of a popular picture of Christ as the Saviour of the poor, of the left-behinds, of the disappeareds. Though sometime he also thought, could not just that be theology after all, not the learned tinkering of' demythologising bishops, but theology broken, smashed by the sudden realisable and realised horror of the world? This could be so even if his own thoughts of departure amounted to no more than the perusal of a holiday brochure, the merest fact that, somehow, he wanted to get away. He wanted, for instance, to get away from Gerard.

Needless to sa^y there were no ordinary or obvious reasons why he should want to get away from Gerard. He had loved Gerard all his adult life. They had never been lovers. Jenkin's sexual aspirations, usually unsuccessful and now in eclipse, were toward the other sex. But a great love involves the whole c person and Jenkin's attachment was perhaps in the true sense Platonic. Gerard was like a perfect older brother, a protector mid a guide, an exemplar, a completely reliable, completely loving, resource, he had been, and had uniquel^y been, for Jenkin, pure ^I gold. Perhaps these were precisely the reasons why he wanted to get up and run? To test himself in a Gerardless world. Reverently to remove something so perfect