the leg of lamb tonight—and I'd better go now or I'll have to eat it cold—I tell them I'm leaving. Yes, leaving. We always have dinner late and then father gets somnolent. This will wake him up."
I, during the above, moved with the slowness of a tired old man to the bed with its harlequin cover and sat on the edge. The tea steamed untasted. "You propose telling them you're going to live with another man?"
"Ah yes, but they're so innocent. They'll think: Well, at least he's not going off to live in sin with a woman. What I'll say is that I'm sick of living at home. I want to come home as late as I please. And if they say young, you're too young, I say: Yes, young, but not so young as some killed at Ypres and on the bloody Somme. This, I'll say, is the new age, the modern world. Two men sharing a flat in Bloomsbury. Though, between you and me, Ken dear, it isn't a flat. It's quite a nice little house full of books and bibelots."
"Who is it? I want to know who it is."
"You've asked that already, in exactly those words. 'A certain monotony of locution.' Who was the beastly reviewer who said that? Ah, the Times Lit Supp, wasn't it, no names no packdrill. Look, a last loving kiss and then I must fly. I'm starving."
And so he left me starving. I lay on the bed and wet the pillow. Then I smoked a cigarette (I had almost written: lighted a cigarette with Ali's Maltese cross present). I had given him no last loving kiss, the little whore. I brooded less on Val's perfidy than on the injustice of the what I would have called had the term been available then Sexual Establishment. Nothing to hold together two male lovers, or female either, no offspring, no sense of the perpetuation of a name and a family face over the centuries. But of course I had nothing to offer a wife or wife surrogate—no house, no income. The great clanking chains of Justice sounded from without, a Piccadilly Line train supplying the basic fantasizable datum. My washed eyes took in my mother's letter, the French scrivener's hand in violet ink on the envelope, the Battle postmark on the decollated head of George V. Home, warmth, the bleeding patients passing from the surgery through the hall, my mild father with blood on his hands, my mother's precise English with the Lille tonalities. I had gone out into the world and the world was making me bleed.
CHAPTER 13
My mother said in her letter that they were managing, but her heart was torn with the tearing of France. They had enough to eat, an advantage of living in a farming district, and Father, rather in the manner of Irish country doctors, was prepared to take his fees occasionally in eggs and butter. Tom, my brother, in the Royal Army Medical Corps at Boyce Barracks, had completed a gas corporal's course, whatever that was. My sister Hortense, named for my mother as I had been named for my father, had had as good a sixteenth birthday party as could be expected in these sugarless times. Father Callaghan of St. Anthony's in St. Leonards had heard from Dublin that his cousin Patrick's appeal had been rejected and that he was to hang for his part in the abortive rising of last Easter. My mother hoped I was happy in London and was herself so happy that I would be coming home for Christmas. If only Tom too could get leave, but that apparently was too much to ask for. All this was written in neat violet-inked French, making the news about Father Callaghan's cousin somewhat remote and literary, and even the butter and eggs seemed to belong to Un Coeur Simple.
I finished the letter, buried my head in the pillow for another passionate cry, this as much to do with lost innocence and the mess of the world as with Val's defection. Then I dried my tears, smoked another Gold Flake, and got up to look at my eyes in the cracked blue mirror of Mrs Pereira. Then I washed them in warm water from the kettle, soaking a tea towel corner
I, during the above, moved with the slowness of a tired old man to the bed with its harlequin cover and sat on the edge. The tea steamed untasted. "You propose telling them you're going to live with another man?"
"Ah yes, but they're so innocent. They'll think: Well, at least he's not going off to live in sin with a woman. What I'll say is that I'm sick of living at home. I want to come home as late as I please. And if they say young, you're too young, I say: Yes, young, but not so young as some killed at Ypres and on the bloody Somme. This, I'll say, is the new age, the modern world. Two men sharing a flat in Bloomsbury. Though, between you and me, Ken dear, it isn't a flat. It's quite a nice little house full of books and bibelots."
"Who is it? I want to know who it is."
"You've asked that already, in exactly those words. 'A certain monotony of locution.' Who was the beastly reviewer who said that? Ah, the Times Lit Supp, wasn't it, no names no packdrill. Look, a last loving kiss and then I must fly. I'm starving."
And so he left me starving. I lay on the bed and wet the pillow. Then I smoked a cigarette (I had almost written: lighted a cigarette with Ali's Maltese cross present). I had given him no last loving kiss, the little whore. I brooded less on Val's perfidy than on the injustice of the what I would have called had the term been available then Sexual Establishment. Nothing to hold together two male lovers, or female either, no offspring, no sense of the perpetuation of a name and a family face over the centuries. But of course I had nothing to offer a wife or wife surrogate—no house, no income. The great clanking chains of Justice sounded from without, a Piccadilly Line train supplying the basic fantasizable datum. My washed eyes took in my mother's letter, the French scrivener's hand in violet ink on the envelope, the Battle postmark on the decollated head of George V. Home, warmth, the bleeding patients passing from the surgery through the hall, my mild father with blood on his hands, my mother's precise English with the Lille tonalities. I had gone out into the world and the world was making me bleed.
CHAPTER 13
My mother said in her letter that they were managing, but her heart was torn with the tearing of France. They had enough to eat, an advantage of living in a farming district, and Father, rather in the manner of Irish country doctors, was prepared to take his fees occasionally in eggs and butter. Tom, my brother, in the Royal Army Medical Corps at Boyce Barracks, had completed a gas corporal's course, whatever that was. My sister Hortense, named for my mother as I had been named for my father, had had as good a sixteenth birthday party as could be expected in these sugarless times. Father Callaghan of St. Anthony's in St. Leonards had heard from Dublin that his cousin Patrick's appeal had been rejected and that he was to hang for his part in the abortive rising of last Easter. My mother hoped I was happy in London and was herself so happy that I would be coming home for Christmas. If only Tom too could get leave, but that apparently was too much to ask for. All this was written in neat violet-inked French, making the news about Father Callaghan's cousin somewhat remote and literary, and even the butter and eggs seemed to belong to Un Coeur Simple.
I finished the letter, buried my head in the pillow for another passionate cry, this as much to do with lost innocence and the mess of the world as with Val's defection. Then I dried my tears, smoked another Gold Flake, and got up to look at my eyes in the cracked blue mirror of Mrs Pereira. Then I washed them in warm water from the kettle, soaking a tea towel corner
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