Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 13
The ceiling frieze, a painted plaster bas-relief, features imaginary portraits of all the twenty murderous lovers named in the eleventh chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray; their eyes are inlaid with all twenty-seven semi-precious stones listed in the same chapter. In the centre of the room are seven chairs, each carved from different wood. The seventh chair, the one by the window, is always kept empty; on the back of this chair is painted, in a vermilion gothic script, the famous quotation from Hebrews, Chapter thirteen: Entertaining Angels Unawares. The chairs surround a unique table whose top is carved from a single slice of ebony, so polished that in its surface can be seen reflected every detail of the vaulted and frescoed ceiling. The dinner guests were thus afforded the satisfying sensation of touching the table’s smooth, warm wood and seeming to touch the flesh of the ceilings painted figures at the same time. On the ceiling is depicted an Allegory of Love Assaulting Mars, copied from Veronese; lying on his back on a bed of orange satin, his beard, naked chest and raised knees painted in expert foreshortening, Mars is shown with his white and muscular stomach straddled by a cheeky infant boy. His arms are raised in a gesture which can be interpreted as either a welcoming embrace or a half-hearted attempt to ward off the stinging slaps which the Cupid is delivering with his bow and arrow. From the centre of the ceiling hangs a recreation of the Pompeian lamp described by John Addington Symonds in his poem ‘Midnight at Baiae’ with the lascivious glare of a single bare bulb replacing the guttering, oil-fed flames of the original. On our left, the small stained-glass window, the only one that the artist ever designed, depicts the loves of David and Jonathan, Absalom and Saul, John and Christ, and the love of Eli for the Infant Samuel.
This room was designed by the second Duke, and was kept always for his exclusive use, in particular for his notorious all-male dinner parties, It is said to have been the scene of scandalous orgies. If, as you leave, you look beneath the beaten copper hood of the fireplace, you will see on the right the concealed figure of a naked and blindfolded boy, so placed that he is being scorched by the flames, but is unable to escape.
The original furnishing of the room included a set of seven Italian majolica plates depicting lost illustrations of Aretino’s famous ‘Positions’; these are now in a private collection in Paris. We will now proceed to the Green or ‘Summer’ Drawing Room. Please do not touch the dining room table as the surface marks very easily. Thank you.
If, that summer, O dreamed of the kind of place they might one day live in, Boy was happy to hear it, but he himself had no real need to dream. Though sometimes troubled, he was in a state of grace; he was O’s dog, his young prince, his slave and his Boy. He would go to sleep with O’s penis in his mouth if he could.
When I dream of a place where I might one day live, I also dream about some kind of a palace. I would live at one end of this great empty building and there would be a man living at the other. Between us there would be miles of derelict corridor and acres of grand, high-ceilinged, abandoned rooms, so many of them that I get lost, so many that I am always finding new rooms … and in these rooms I wander, and sometimes I meet strangers, and sometimes him, and then I make love to him in silence in the deserted ballroom with swallows coming in through the glassless windows and frescoed giants watching us from the ceiling, and we’d watch ourselves in the clouded mirrors. And then I’d return to my own rooms. At other times he would drive straight to where I lived, to the one lighted window in that whole ruined palace, and he’d stay for dinner and then he’d stay for days.
And on one of these nights when O was raving, or talking anyway, in his sleep, maybe on a night when they were at the theatre, as that woman sang or seemed to sing to them, a hand came down on the face of Mr (I’ll keep his name private), aged eighteen, who was at the time just travelling home on the bus with a man who he’d just met and who he was really looking forward to going to bed with (they had left The Bar at half-past nine, so eager for each other were they). But although he was looking forward so much to seeing this man without anything on, he was also tired, for it was Saturday and he had worked all day; and in a moment of forgetfulness he had let his head fall and rest upon the other man’s shoulder. And so even though it was only just days after another man we knew had been hurt (we all said, Oh no, not again), the knife came down again, or rather not a knife this time, but a hand, and then spittle, and then a loud laugh.
I don’t think that Boy knew that any of this was happening, not really. Despite all his nights staring out of the window, he was still in some ways very ignorant of life in the city.
And also in that same week there was this attack too, though people in The Bar couldn’t see why I was so furious about it, they said, yes, but what has that got to do –
Bobby Sillock, aged forty, a power station worker from South Stifford, near Grays, Essex, was killed after telling five men to stop abusing the staff of The Night Palace Indian Restaurant with racial insults. The probable murder weapon, thrown from a car after the attack, has been recovered and is being examined by forensic scientists.
– but Mother knew why I was upset by that story. Mother dedicated her song that night to Bobby Sillock, even though she could see that half the boys had no idea who she was talking about, they probably thought that he was some dead writer or other whose obscure anniversary she was commemorating. You have to remember how strange it was for us, how unlikely we found it, even though it kept on happening, and right close to us and even to people we knew. One of the things about The Bar was that you felt so safe there, so strong, and it was difficult to talk about being frightened when you were in The Bar. You felt so strong there sometimes that you felt that not only could you take care of yourself but you could also take care of someone else if you had to.
And it was strange for us because at the same time as all this was happening we knew that in other countries it was not like this at all; some people I knew in The Bar used to go on holiday once or twice every year and when they came back they used to say they never knew how we could all stand it. I remember seeing a television programme at this time about another country where men could simply walk down the street holding hands. And this did not, they said on the programme, indicate an especial courage, or an especial pride; men will do it who have only known each other for a short while or indeed have only just met – and it does not occur on particular days of the year, but irregularly, frequently, without carnival being declared and without heads turning. It does not occur on particular streets, but almost everywhere (I can’t quite believe that bit).
Boy saw this programme too; Mother recommended that he watch it. He remembered quite vividly the camera framing two hands clasped across a white plastic cafe table top, a circular table top, in the sun. And in a dream these two hands reappeared, still clasped, but holding each other by the wrists as if in a tug of war or an oath, and they were severed just below the elbow. The two stumps were bleeding, so that when the table tipped, as it did in this dream, and the two clasped hands slid off it and onto the cobbles of the street, they left two clear pools and trails of blood on the table; a child’s drawing of two red flowers on a white ground. And in the dream this picture was pinned up on a kitchen wall, as children’s first drawings are pinned up by proud parents. The thing about these drawings is that you can’t tell exactly what they’re supposed to be drawings of, unless the child explains, or the parent explains, or unless the teacher has written a title across the bottom of the picture in emphatically legible handwriting. And in Boy’s dream this picture was entitled, not, TWO RED FLOWERS, BUT DON’T EVER LEAVE ME.
Engagement
They courted all that summer, and at the end of that summer, at midnight on its longest and hottest night, their courtship came to an end, or rather that phase of it came to a fitting climax. On the night of the worst (or the best, you might say, if you like to see the lightning coming down over this city as I do) the worst thunderstorm for twenty years, on a night when everyone else had responded to the thick heat by taking everything off that they reasonably could, O and Boy appeared at The Bar in the most elaborate costumes in which we had yet seen them.
Of course, we had already seen them make several significant entrances, ones which had turned heads and caused comment; had already noted the several changes of costume which had marked the early stages of this affair – the way O had apparently reduced his wardrobe to just the one, stern outfit, a uniform really, which made him seem even stronger, more serious and more grave than we already thought him with that cropped black hair; and the way Boy now usually wore just a plain white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the top of his arms, matching O’s, whereas before he and O had got serious it had been a different style of T-shirt every night, as if he had been trying to get something right. As if he had been trying to find his character. And of course the particular (and popular) drama of O and Boy’s affair aside, we were no strangers to these dramatic techniques, especially the techniques of costume drama. I mean, dramas happened all the time in The Bar: fights, kisses, seductions, all the things you usually have to go out to a theatre and pay to see. And not only were our embraces, dances and kisses rehearsed, performed repeatedly and always in public, each touch and gesture reviewed as soon as it was made (was this move to be considered an innovation, or a critical reworking of a classic theme?), but we all too often made a point of talking as if we were in some show, so that if someone had suddenly to leave a conversation in order to follow a handsome stranger who had just passed, he would simply announce, ‘Excuse me, I’m on’; if the stranger who had passed had passed with a definite look of invitation, the announcement would be, ‘Excuse me, I think this is my number.’ If, later in the evening, two lovers who had spent the evening drinking and flirting apart had met up and had begun to argue because one of them wanted to wait just another ten minutes in case the man who had just turned his back turned again with a smile, the row would invariably end with the line, ‘Honey, this is your five minute call…’, meaning, Listen you, you get any drunker and I’m hauling you out of here anyway. And I remember that our favourite pick-up line that summer was always, Buddy, will you take me home? done just as she’d done it in the show (which we’d all seen twice) and the answer was always, or rather we always hoped it would be, Sure I will… Everyone talked as if we were rehearsing some half-remembered but classic screenplay; as if we all knew what we should really say next. We could accept the most outrageous and unconvincing performances provided that they accorded with the strict and publicly acknowledged rules of the genre. Whatever its apparent improbabilities, we still believed in the basic realism of the scene. We believed in theatre. And of course in The Bar we had coloured lights and mirrors every night anyway, and there was always at least someone in full make-up, even if it wasn’t costume night (Oh, those nights, the ‘At Marble Arch I met a Serviceman’ party, ‘Night in Old Cairo’, nights to remember, ‘White Nights on the Nevsky Prospect’, nights when you walked home with diamante ground into the soles of your boots, mornings when you woke late and found sequins glued to the skin of your stomach with sweat.) And we were used to people, regular customers, making their entrance in a conspicuously new outfit; when it happened someone who had seen them at the door would simply murmur, Places please, and we would behave as if the party concerned had always dressed like that, had always looked like that for as long as we’d all known him. We had seen men arrive in our midst quiet and bitter in their office clothes, only to reappear two years later with muscles and an easy laugh and a boyfriend – and then reappear again, through the same door, with the same partner, but both of them older now, their make-up and hair considerably re-done, in suits again, with ties, not laughing so much now or kissing so much but still together and still coming out to The Bar sometimes. Sometimes these changes of costume would take years; sometimes the man who you thought was in character when soberly dressed, apparently for a minor part, the man you were sure would always dress like that, would change in the course of a single, riotous evening. Perhaps he became an animal, sweating and shirtless, down on his knees before a less than perfect stranger; perhaps a chorus girl, sweating in borrowed earrings and somebody else’s wig, crying at the top of his voice, ‘Confused? You won’t be!’
And so you see The Bar always felt a bit like a theatre. I mean, nobody really arrived until it was dark, and nothing really happened until the lights had been dimmed and the music struck up. But still, the entrance they made and the way O and Boy were dressed that night did indeed make it a night to remember. And of course, that was the whole idea.
Two weeks previously, as The Bar was closing, after an evening in which these two had been playing The Couple even more conspicuously than usual, exchanging such kisses that even we had to avert our eyes and talk of something else, Mother had been heard to invite O and Boy up to her room above The Bar after closing time. Nobody went up there uninvited, and few received an invitation.
They climbed the steep wooden nineteenth-century staircase – Boy I expect had no idea the building was so old. The stairs were so narrow that the flowered wallpaper was scarred and scratched all the way up; scratched and worn by the white sequins and crystal beading of Mother’s frock, for it was down these stairs that she squeezed herself in that same frock every night that The Bar opened, every night for years now, down those stairs that she came unseen from her upper room, her hair and her face perfect, her mind composed for her entrance, her smile ready for her Boys.
The door was heavy (O knocked three times and Boy heard the wood ring solidly) and Boy saw that the room was small and ordinary (except for the red ceiling), and dark, with floral wallpaper, a single bed, several full-length mirrors, shelves of books (some in a glass-fronted case) and some old Turkish rugs. One wall was taken up entirely with a huge wardrobe, another with a dressing table, a huge ugly reproduction French piece with an oval mirror, bowed legs and gilt handles on the drawers. This was covered in papers, ledgers, cosmetics, glass scent bottles, two cut-glass candlesticks with unlit candles, and a heap of costume jewellery. The whole room smelt, but not of scent, for none of the bottles had been left unstoppered; a vase of dark purple night-scented stock stood on top of the wardrobe (next to a small bronze statuette) and Mother was drinking from her Waterford tumbler of neat gin, which was placed, with her cigarettes, on a small table next to her highbacked chair. This she had moved away from her bureau to the centre of the room.
When Boy entered the room for this, the first, time, he saw behind Mother’s head one of the framed photographs, all of women, of which there were so many that they almost covered the walls. It was a copy of the famous van Vechten portrait of Bessie Smith in the ostrich and marabou hat. At the time, Boy thought that this was rather an error of taste, since cheap reproductions of this photograph were at that time available as part of a popular series marketed under the title ‘Black and White’. Boy had doubtless expected Mother’s room to be decorated with something stranger or at least more expensive.
Madame (in this scene she did look more like a Madame than a Mother) was sitting straight-backed in her chair; this was to be a formal audience. She indicated they should stand before her on the dull red Turkey rugs. She addressed them both, but seemed to be speaking mostly to O, as if Boy was expected to just listen and not be directly addressed even though he was being discussed; it was into O’s eyes that she stared as she spoke, with that permanent half smile of hers that went so well with her phrasing, and he was half smiling too, as if they understood each other or had already discussed this matter and were now restaging their discussion, presumably for Boy’s benefit.
‘Boys,’ Madame said, ‘it is time that you took these painful amateur scenes to their logical conclusion. I think it is time that you decided to go professional, as it were; it is time for you to take the six steps up onto that stage of ours and publicly declare yourselves to be a double act. After all, Older, the fact that you, after all these years, should be finally, as they say, settling down, is already common knowledge, not to say a considerable public scandal. What’s the secret? Is he spectacularly (she separated each syllable of the word, staring right into O’s eyes, and O smiled) spec-tac-ular-ly good in bed? – No, please don’t answer that.’
There was of course no question of speaking while Madame was speaking. She indicated two typewritten foolscap playscripts lying on the dressing table.
‘I have decided to produce your debut personally. We will rehearse in The Bar during the day, Gary will play for you. It’s all arranged; the premiere will be in one week’s time and the invitations are already at the printers. Have you any questions?’
