He took to wearing full linen suits, stripey sailor tops and I—God help me—knotted my paisley scarves as the weather took a colder turn and I bought a long dark coat.
Our department was in a building cobbled together in 1966 but it had a grassy quad crisscrossed by paving stones and here we could meet in the lowering gloom and hold conversations about nothing, before saying ta-ra till tomorrow morning.
Well, if not nothing, at least about homoeroticism in Henry V. Remember: ‘A little touch of Harry in the night?’ Harry’s erotic largesse, dispensing himself, his body, about the sleeping troops the night before battle. Oh, that was the kind of thing to be made a meal of, here in Cult Stud. We were Cult Studs all right. I lent him my video of My Own Private Idaho; he was extremely keen on the homoerotic motif. It was the mortar which held Western culture’s tenets in place; even in a fractured modernity. Rome was built solely from men rubbing each other up the wrong way. He evinced a keen, theoretical interest; steam blowing out over his coat collar as we stood in the quad. Gave me a kind of mock punch before running off to fetch the Child from the creche. He carried a daft little suitcase about with him. Once, giving me a lift back one frozen night, he went to a car that looked only a little like his and, mistaking it, tried to force the lock. For hapless things like these I can feel a quirk of fondness; other times ineptness in someone with whom I’ve had odd, difficult scenes just makes me impatient and sick.
* * *
Another American woman! At the meal with Julian and Elsa. She was another writer, who lived near Washington in an entirely green farmhouse with a mother who thought she was Miss Lavish from A Room with a View and who, upon reading one of my letters to her daughter, Teri, had declared: ‘He is one of us.’ Things had looked promising for me and Teri, then; almost coaxed into a full-time heterosexuality by the promise of being one of the people who live in a green house in Washington and who understand each other. At weak moments the promise of being understood is enough to tempt me to anything.
So we’d fucked and had a few nice talks, meals, awkward scenes. The marrieds invited us to coo over their house in the terrace by the park. A piano of blond wood dominated their dining room. There were shelves of bright new hardbacks; Elsa talked of A.S. Byatt, Alan Hollinghurst, how she loved gay fiction and thought she might really adore being a gay man. The Child woke once upstairs as wine was mulling on the open fire and was brought down in a blanket, fierce, warm as cheese on toast, to be inspected. My heart went out, as it always does, to kids, babies, anyone without an ounce of guile.
I sat across from Teri. She was chewing on fat and bones; we ate pheasant, plucked fresh from the market. Her eyes wide with disgust at its gaminess. ‘It was,’ she told me the following week, ‘the worst thing I have tasted in all my life.’ To me it looked a little raw; those pink, streaming ends of bones. But what did I know? At least one and a half class distinctions away from an understanding of poultry, our birds were always banged in the slammer for four hours a time; we were terrified of salmonella. With knowledge and class comes an insouciant carelessness. That night we sucked slivers of steamed courgette dipped in sour cream and Teri bad fallen quiet, grimacing.
I stood in the road with Julian, right up on the hill above the town. A fag outside since they, too, were conscious of health, looked at the real smoke coming from his chimney; that inscrutable, solid blue. ‘Signifying everything I protect,’ he said, with a rare flash of earnestness. The arc lamps of the cathedral distorted the plumes’ shapes weirdly; they made an umbrella. He gave me his scarf and leather driving gloves since it had begun to snow and I had a fair way to walk home. And he told me he never drank much because of his mother’s problems with it. His father owned a company in America and lived there now. I heard Julian phone him for free from the room where we worked. He often phoned his wife, too, while she wrote her novels in exercise books at home. And they talked baby talk for minutes on end. The first time I heard it I went scarlet; a problem I never had with eavesdropping usually. Hearing him babytalk was worse than nudging his foot under the desk with my own, accidentally, as we worked; breaking the braced weight of our tension clean across and patching it with an embarrassed smile. We watched the smoke go up a bit longer and then I had to get home. We didn’t hug good night; we never did. I walked down the middle of the road, as advised, to the bottom
