London Triptych (5 page)

1954

I am a man
of few friends. Until recently, I worked as a commercial artist for a moderately successful advertising company. I left six months ago, to become an artist. Or at least, to find out if I am one, if I can become one, if I have anything to say. I remember sitting in my father’s library as a small boy and poring over volumes of Hellenic statuary. Their eroticism was potent to me. I had seen men naked at swim, and relished the furtive sight, but the poetry of the marble was electric. I first masturbated over a photograph of a sculpture of Hercules and Antaeus. Looking at art has always, for me, been a source of profound pleasure. Now, of course, you can buy these wonderful
Physique
magazines full of delightful photographs of young men, but I still prefer the paintings and sketches that first awakened lust within me.

One day, when I was about five, I took a sheet of paper and a pencil and I tried copying a sketch by Leonardo. I produced an appalling scribble, of course. But I started again, and over time, over many weeks, something emerged. I did it till I could copy images without looking at the original, by simply concentrating on a point of light that seemed to shine like a star on the tip of the pencil, a spark created by its contact with the paper. I began to spend all my free time sketching, or looking at art books from the library—and, when I was old enough, visiting galleries and museums. It felt like living in another world, looking at art, and it still does, sometimes, though I have stopped going quite so often, as I travel to the West End far less frequently now that I don’t work there.

But the life that art creates is not the same as the life that creates art. As I continued to draw more and more, I began to see the world around me in a completely different way. Home for the summer holidays, I would go for a walk in the streets where we lived and see billowing sheets of bright light hanging out like God’s laundry from the sky. There would be colours that danced in the treetops like angels on fire. Above my head, a cupola of birds flocked across my field of vision like a veil and was gone. Rainbows snaked their way out of houses and chased each other down the road like otters playing in the shallows of a sunlit stream.

I am still not sure if such a confession makes me an artist or a madman, or whether this question itself might indeed be the answer I seek. How can you ask other people if they see the world the way you do? For how can you risk their saying no? We all accept without question—on faith—that the way we see the world is the way it is, the way other people see it, a truth or a fact that need not be corroborated. As Pascal said of religious faith, “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”

My parents died in quick succession last year. My mother was one of those women who should never really have had a family but, given the limited social horizons for single women at the time, undoubtedly felt it her duty to marry and breed. I didn’t perceive bitterness so much, because she did, after all, achieve a great deal with her public life, but I experienced her distance and exhaustion a great deal of the time. She was, for the first part of her career, a Justice of the Peace, later to become Mayoress of the Borough of Camden. We lived on Camden Road, in the house in which I was born and raised. She did, to her credit, refuse to hand me over to a nanny, and insisted on balancing her busy public life with her duties as a mother—when I was home from boarding school, that is. Many a time I would see her clambering out of the Rolls-Royce that had driven her to and from some council meeting, laden down with shopping she had stopped off to buy, having made the chauffeur wait outside the local grocer’s. It never occurred to her that the neighbours might view this as an act of ostentation, as showing off. It only struck me when I was much older and I overheard some gossip in the very shop at which she would stop in her “fancy mayoress’s car.” She was completely indifferent to the trappings of social status, a true socialist at heart. On her return from a dinner party at Buckingham Palace her only comment was, “The food does come up cold on those gold plates.” She was, by any standards, a remarkable woman, and it is one of my deepest regrets that I never really knew her. She came from a family of staunch republicans. I remember one Christmas party when Uncle Bruno spat into the fire while declaiming against the King. Since he had just taken a swig of the whisky he’d been supping for hours, the flames flared up in a sudden heated rush, lifting the row of Christmas cards that hung on a string above, like laundry in a swift breeze. My mother had an unshakeable and stoic work ethic and, while she accepted my artistic bent, she nevertheless insisted it be channelled into a professional capacity. Not for her son the bohemian life of the artist: I would have a trade and graft for a living.

Father is more difficult to conjure. Like a phantom, he defies contour, wavering between being and becoming. A man in outline only. He was a placid, almost invisible man, who went along with his life without complaint. Mother and he spent little time together. He was a tailor by trade, running the family business as his father had before him, and his grandfather before that. He did very well though he wasn’t quite Savile Row. As a child I was always immaculately dressed in suits that he, or more likely one of his underlings, had made. He was a man devoid of energy, a man from whom all enthusiasm or sign of life had been removed, drained gradually, over years, in slow and steady drips. Nothing seemed to cheer him, nothing ever amused him. I don’t think I ever heard him laugh. He would sit and read the newspaper for hours on end, tutting to himself intermittently like a clock slowly ticking. If he had dreams or interests, I’ve no idea what they were. He had no hobbies that I was aware of, unless you can call criticising everyone and everything you come across a hobby. I suppose it passed the time for him.

I can recall only two occasions when the topic of our conversation was at all intimate, though I use the term with vast reservations, as you shall see. The first time was the occasion on which he imparted to me the facts of life. I was ten or eleven, and it must have been one of the school holidays, during which I would return home to that silent and cheerless place in which my parents lived. On this particular occasion, Father was watching out of the drawing room window, which gave out onto our modest lawn. I was sitting reading, or most probably drawing. He called me over, by name, and I ran to his side, pleased to be receiving his attention. It was rare indeed for him to acknowledge my presence at all. He pointed out of the window and I followed the direction of his finger. On the lawn outside were two of our dogs copulating, though at the time I hardly knew what they were doing, and the scene merely struck me as humorous and shameful. I was immediately disturbed, wanting desperately to laugh, though sensing I shouldn’t. “If you do that to a woman, you’ll get her pregnant and have to marry her. You would do well to remember that,” he said, in a tone that conveyed unequivocally that that was to be his one comment on the subject and the lesson was over. I returned to my chair, not knowing whether I wanted to laugh or to cry. I knew already that I had no desire whatsoever to “do that to a woman,” though I had already begun to fantasise about what it must be like to be a woman succumbing to intercourse.

The second occasion was nearly twenty years later, when I was approaching my thirtieth birthday. I was still living at home and had never once courted a woman. One morning over breakfast, from behind his newspaper, Father said, “Colin, your mother and I think it’s time you were married.”

I dutifully found a woman quiet and compliant enough to be my bride. Joan was one of the secretaries at the commercial agency where I then worked, and we’d been friends, sort of, for two years before I asked her to marry me. We had been to the cinema together, sometimes as much as once a week, and often discussed novels over lunch, exchanging books we’d particularly enjoyed. She was a handsome woman, with large, soft brown eyes and a generous smile, and she smiled often. (She said, “It costs nothing to smile.”) Not overly talkative, but intelligent and well-read, with an irreverent sense of humour I admired. I didn’t know if she had ever considered what we were doing to be some kind of courtship, but I knew that I never had. Until my father suggested I marry, I had regarded it as no more than a simple friendship: we never approached discussing our private lives. But I realized I had never known her to go out with any other man during that period.

She agreed to marry me with a tender glee. In our own way, we were happy. We knew that we enjoyed each other’s company, and she seemed relieved by my reluctance on our nights out to impose upon her any physical contact. Joan herself was fast approaching thirty, and when I think about her now I know that there must have been some unspoken acknowledgement which passed between us, a tacit agreement that our life together was to be little more than a convenience for which we were both truly grateful.

Our marriage had about it the air of two people stranded on a desert island who, just at the point of accepting that they would never be rescued, spot a sail on the horizon. That isn’t to say it was devoid of love. Love and gratitude are not so far apart. It’s hard to underestimate the happiness that someone can bring to you when they do exactly what you need them to do. My parents were content, and pleasing them was really all I cared about in those days.

No children, of course. We tried sexual intercourse only once, on our wedding night, but a barely veiled disgust on Joan’s part and a distinct lack of enthusiasm on mine left us reluctant to try again. It was a massive relief for both of us, I think, to discover that life was much easier that way. I’m fairly certain that Joan herself had certain lesbian tendencies. Over the years of our marriage there were one or two very close friendships with women. She would see an awful lot of one particular woman for a while and then it would end abruptly, without much explanation. I, for my part, masturbated occasionally, swiftly and guiltily, as if undergoing an unpleasant though necessary bodily function. Visions of men fuelled these sessions, images I had taken in the street and preserved like photographs in my memory: a coal delivery man stripped to the waist, blackened and shining in the sunlight; a bus conductor’s handsome smile; the bulge in the trousers of our office boy; the outline of a cock in the swimming trunks of a bather down by the Serpentine; the tanned and dark-haired forearms of a road-sweeper. I would roam the city, picking up these faces and crotches and limbs and storing them like treasure. Then I would spread them out before my mind’s eye, imagining all the terrible things I longed to do with these men. I was always assaulted afterward by a horrible sense of shame. I thought myself a monster and yet could not do otherwise. It was my nature, that much I accepted. I had to learn to rise above it, that was all; had to discipline myself to channel my desires into these harmless pursuits. I had read too many newspaper accounts of men whose lives had been ruined by this inclination ever to risk being foolish enough to act upon my desires, to solicit from another man the acts to which I gave my imagination free rein in order that I might quench its appetite. I even prided myself on my restraint, like a fool who thinks himself virtuous for permanent fasting. Permanent fasting brings only death. I suppose I let my desire die.

Joan was killed in June 1944, in an air raid. While I was posted to Hampshire, she had stayed in London, working as a secretary for British Intelligence. From her letters it was clear she loved the work. In losing her I lost the best friend I ever had. She and I would spend our evenings basking in the glow of each other’s company, listening to the radio or reading. It was the closest I ever came to finding whatever it is I am looking for. She had few friends; I had none apart from her. After her death I became extremely lonely extremely quickly. I tried to make friends at work, but found it impossible. It was too late: I had been cast, or had cast myself, in the role of someone friendless and unapproachable and, once a role has been cast, it’s difficult to play another part.

I wish I’d been able to tell Joan that I loved her. But it was just something that we never said. Silly, really, but even during the brief period we were apart, once I had been conscripted and was working in Hampshire, the almost daily letters we exchanged were always signed off with “Yours,” or “Sincerely yours.” There was always this peculiar formality that kept our emotions in check. Or maybe it was just me, and she simply conformed to what she perceived to be my wishes.

I know my coldness all too well. I can sense it with Gore. I can feel myself stiffen in his presence, policing my every word and every gesture lest I give myself away. The result is a standoffishness I cannot seem to shake off. It’s as if there’s a glass wall between us, constructed by myself. I noticed it this morning when he was over here. He was joking about my not having any friends, and never going out, and said he would take me out if I liked. I paused, unsure what to say, and I could tell from the expression on his face that he was slightly insulted. He snapped, “Don’t do me any favours!” and went into a bit of a sulk. I said that I’d love to go out with him but the damage was done: he had retreated, and my loneliness had scored another victory. After he left, I took a stroll down by the river, watching the boats going by, each one representing a world that was going on without me. I have always felt that life was something other people do. I noticed, for the first time, as I strolled along the towpath, solitary men loitering. Since meeting Gore, I see the world differently, see it full of sexual possibility. I considered trying to engage one of the men in conversation, to see where it would lead, but lacked the courage.

As I turned to return home, a pea-souper was gathering and descending, as thick and grey and heavy as my heart. I never used to mind spending so much time alone, but now, since Gore, I dread the long, empty hours between his visits. Especially at night, I find myself feeling increasingly restless. I pour myself a gin and tonic and listen to the radio, or read a book, but I can’t shake off this feeling that time is running out and I haven’t done anything with my life. This rage and frustration mounts, and it doesn’t go away until I have drunk enough gin to send me to sleep. Often I nod off in my chair, waking in the early hours cramped and aching, making my way upstairs and falling onto the bed still fully dressed. This is my life now.