The Marble Quilt by David Leavitt Page B

lorded over her estranged husband, as for years he had lorded over her his self-proclaimed spiritual and poetic superiority. (No one admired Bosie’s poetry more than he did; by the same token, he admired no one else’s poetry—with the possible exception of Shakespeare’s—more than his own.)
    In Brighton, though, the tables were turned. Now it was Bosie who, as a consequence of his poverty, had to apply to Olive for money. She made him an allowance that she was not above occasionally threatening to suspend. No doubt the disparity in their circumstances—which, by keeping Bosie’s income low, she could be certain to maintain—pleased his wife. In her will she left to her husband an opal necklace (rather ironic, considering his dislike of opals), all the money in her bank account, and an allowance of £500 per annum. (All this, however, went into receivership, as Bosie had never discharged an earlier bankruptcy.) To their son, Raymond, she left her flat at Viceroy Lodge, which did not prevent Bosie from moving in almost instantly upon her death. For a few months he lived there quite happily, until Raymond, who had for many years been an inmate at St. Andrew’s Hospital, decided that he wanted to give “life outside” a try, and evicted his father. At the time Raymond was in his early forties—the same age that Bosie was when he took on Robbie Ross in court. In 1926 Raymond had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and admitted to an asylum for “electroconvulsive therapy and narcosis.” (Not incidentally, that same year he had fallen in love with a grocer’s daughter named Gladys Lacey, but his parents and grandparents had disapproved of the match, and kept him from marrying her.)
    Let us now say that the morning of which I am writing—the morning when Bosie takes a walk along the beach—is the same morning on which Raymond is scheduled to arrive in Hove and displace his father. It is still early; Raymond’s train won’t pull in for hours. As Bosie strolls up and down the beach, I imagine that he is trying to suppress the rather petulant displeasure that Raymond’s decision to come to Hove has provoked in him. After all, as he well knows, his son’s release from the hospital where he has been living, on and off, for twenty years is—has to be looked at as—a good thing. It means that Raymond is getting well, with which Bosie has no argument. And yet must his getting well require turning his father onto the street? On the surface, at least, Raymond has been nothing but cordial to Bosie, has even vowed to give him an extra £300 per year as soon as Olive’s will has gone through probate. Even so, it
does
seem hard. (All right. Let’s just say it.) Bosie’s weeks at Viceroy Lodge, under the capable management of Olive’s maid Eileen, have been happy ones. There he has entertained, among others, his old friend Lord Tredegar and his wife, Olga, the former Princess Dolgorouki, as well as several members of the younger literary generation (by younger I mean those in their fifties), invited for elaborate teas featuring toast, scones, cream cakes, jam puffs, tarts, and other schoolboyish treats with which their middle-aged stomachs proved unable to cope. The juvenile character of these gatherings, though bewildering to Bosie’s guests (after all, he was now in his seventies), delighted the host, who still looks upon his childhood years as the best of his life. His old friend Wellington, for instance, he often thinks about these nights, as he thinks about Alfred, the schoolboy he seduced away from Robbie Ross, and the boy at Oxford who blackmailed him, and the rent boys with whom, sometimes in Oscar’s company and sometimes out of it, he was able to revive, for a moment, a lost dream of laddish camaraderie:
tremendous friends
. This is something he’srealized only lately: when he was a wicked young man, what he was