Authors: Barbara Vine
It was quite short. He read it once, then again, scarcely able to believe the words on the paper.
J
OHN WENT
to work, cycling through the teeming rain. He had the fifth form for his first class that day and was teaching them geology, volcanoes and igneous rocks. John never had difficulties with keeping discipline, largely because his pupils liked and respected him, though he was aware that some of them were noticing that his mind was not on the lesson. Still, he could be confident that they would never treat him as this same group of adolescents had treated poor Mr. Carrington, all twenty-seven of them climbing out the window and sitting on the flat roof of the science lab before the teacher came into the classroom. After John had let them finish the hour by reading contemporary accounts of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and was gathering up his books, a boy called Walter King came up to him and asked if he wasn’t feeling well. This was so kind and so obviously sincerely meant, that John felt tears come into his eyes as he thanked Walter for his thoughtfulness but said he was quite well, just a little tired.
The day seemed long, but not one that he wanted terminated by going home. He felt like that passage in the New Testament about the foxes having their holes and the birds of the air their nests but the Son of Man with nowhere to lay his head. He was very conscious of Bertie’s letter in his pocket, as if this single sheet of lined paper and flimsy envelope were made of lead and weighing
him down. When school was over, he encountered Elspeth Dean in the staff cloakroom, not someone he specially wanted to avoid, but, along with the rest of the world at present, someone he was indifferent to. She was putting on her coat as he was putting on his. She came up to him and said how much she had enjoyed a recent visit to see his sister and would he ask Maud if he and she would come to tea with her in Ashburton. John said he was sure this could be arranged, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice. Elspeth was a perfectly pleasant woman and he liked her, but at that moment he wanted no one, only to be alone. Once he was on his bicycle, he made his way not to the road for Dartcombe but to Ashburton’s little park, where, forbidden by a byelaw to cycle, he pushed his bike along a path that branched off the main ride, found himself a seat, and sat down to read Bertie’s letter for the third time.
Dear John,
It is a long time since I have herd from you. I don’t know what I have done rong. As you must know its hard making ends meet. This place is cold and offen I do not have enuf to eat. When you sent me a £ note if not very offen things was better. I had best come to the point quick. I kept all the letters you sent me and if the polis was to see them you know what will happen. You are rich with a gentmans work. You can send me £2 per week and not miss same. Just do it and we can be frends agen.
Hoping to stay youre frend,
B.
Blackmail, it was called, and Bertie was doing it. This was his usual way of ending a letter, with the initial
B
instead of his name. Steeped in bitterness, John asked himself if Bertie had done
this with his eye always on the main chance of extorting money with menaces someday to come. That too was why he had never described reflecting on the pleasures of their lovemaking, while John, the loving innocent, had poured out his heart on paper as, when they met, he had poured out his body.
All these things were suddenly clear to him. He had never before thought about them, while always knowing that his love for Bertie was greater than Bertie’s love for him. Things would be less bad, he thought, if with Bertie’s words and his threats John’s love for him had been extinguished. But this hadn’t happened. Just as Bertie’s illiteracy had never made John despise him, so this criminal betrayal had no effect on his passion and his longing. He still knew that if the man who had been his lover were suddenly to appear in the darkening park and come walking towards him along this path, smiling, merry, with his head a little on one side as he often held it, John would spring up, his heart brimming with joy, and take Bertie in his arms. Always looking about him at first, of course, to be sure they were not observed.
The time hadn’t yet come for him to decide what to do. It was too soon. First he had to take in exactly what the menace of the letter was. Bertie, whom he felt he was closer to than to anyone else he had ever known, had threatened, in what he now saw as plain words, to show John’s letters to the police, knowing that every line made clear that John had repeatedly committed a serious and universally loathed criminal offence. Buggery, sodomy, he wasn’t sure of the wording of the law, knowing only that it carried a long prison sentence for the convicted man. Spelt out as his “crime” would be, his parents would know, his sisters would know, he would lose his job and probably his home. Yet, strangely enough or perhaps not strangely at all considering his love for Bertie, all these consequences shrank to mild hardships when compared with his lover’s betrayal, when set beside what Bertie,
the object of John’s absolute devotion, had already done to him with apparent ease, almost with indifference.
Rereading the letter wasn’t necessary. He knew the hateful words by heart. He folded it again, replaced it in its envelope, and walked back out of the park to begin the ride home. It was dark now and he disliked cycling in the dark with only the feeble lamp on his handlebars to light his way and alert any other traffic that he was there. But there was little of that. On his outward and homeward journeys he might meet or pass one car. More frequent were the horse-drawn farm carts, but it was too late for them. He was alone in the dark, silent lanes, the birds long gone to roost, the cattle gone from the fields for the night. John thought, if only one big car—maybe that Imber car—would come too fast round that bend in the road and crash into him almost before its driver saw him. Such a welcome end to his trouble that would be.
A lamp was on in the little hall of No. 2 Bury Row, the front door was open, and Maud was standing there waiting for him. “You’re so late, I thought something had happened to you.”
“What could have happened to me?” he asked, though he had been imagining only ten minutes before just what could have.
He was afraid she might ask him about Bertie’s letter but apparently she had had one herself by the same post. Sybil had written that their father had had an
apoplexy,
the word people once used for what was now usually called a stroke. John Goodwin was at home, confined to bed, his face twisted and his voice hoarse but otherwise unimpaired. Would Maud please tell John, as he might like to come home and see his father?
She handed him Sybil’s letter. “They don’t want me, you see.”
They sat down to their much-delayed “tea,” sausages and mash, which was John’s and Hope’s favourite. John knew it was his duty to go to Bristol, little as he wanted to. He realised now that he had lost almost all affection for his parents. They seemed as far
from him now, as remote, as that newly discovered planet called Pluto. Maud and Hope were much closer, little as he enjoyed the child’s name for him, wincing each time she addressed him as Daddy. They were Mummy and Daddy, the loving couple with their seven-year-old daughter, the lie he had to live every day and increasingly hated.
“I’ll go to Bristol,” he said to Maud as she served their second course, tinned peaches and condensed milk. “But I have to go to London first. Please don’t make your usual comments on a situation you don’t understand. I shall go on Saturday, and the following week when it’s half term, I’ll go and see Father.”
She said nothing, perhaps afraid that she too might be expected to pay a visit to her parents. In silence she carried the dishes they had used out to the kitchen. John noticed for the first time what most men might not have noticed—was it because he was an “invert”?—that she was wearing a new, smart jumper and new shoes with high heels. Clothes which no one would see but the other women meeting their children from school and which cost money they couldn’t afford. He had almost given up hoping she would meet a man who might give her his name and a home. As for him, he planned next day to draw out of his post office savings account everything he had in it. Exactly why he couldn’t have said.
H
AVING SENT
a letter to Bertie saying that he would come up on Saturday, John decided to take the first London train. No reply had come, but he was used to that. Bertie only wrote when he wanted something, not when someone else did. The only letter on the doormat was addressed to him in Ethel’s writing. She had not been in touch for perhaps two years, but she was evidently quite excited by no fewer than three pieces of news she had to impart: that their father was “doing well,” that their grandmother
Halliwell had died aged eighty-eight, and that Ethel was expecting another child that, simpering, she described as “maybe a sister for Tony.”
Maud resented Ethel’s writing to John and not to her. What harm had she ever done to Ethel? Maud felt like writing to her sister and telling her that she would be less keen on writing to their brother, making him into a kind of substitute head of the family while their father was ill, if she knew the kind of things he got up to with a man friend of his. Of course she didn’t do that, more because she always remained a little afraid of John than through a softening of her attitude towards him. As angry people sometimes do, she took her resentment out on the person she lived with, and the evening before he left for London, she was sullen with him, replying to the things he said in monosyllables, and finally, as they parted for the night at the top of the stairs, asking him why he bothered to come back if life with Bertie was so attractive to him.
John forbore from saying that if he didn’t come back, what were she and Hope going to live on? He wrote to his mother, slept badly, got up at five because his bed and bedroom were so dreary, and, having posted his letter, was on his way to Exeter on the first bus. Alighting at Paddington, he recalled the hours he had spent in the waiting room there, a time made lovely in memory because Bertie had come and sat beside him and changed everything for the better. It was a fine day for November, the fog lifting and a mild sun breaking through. He walked up Bourne Terrace, asking himself what he was going to say to Bertie. What could you say to someone who intended either to impoverish you or else destroy your life by heaping on you the worst disgrace known to society? The law used the expression
gross indecency
. Putting it like that made John wince as he walked and squeezed his eyes shut as if it were Bertie he could see instead of the grim and sordid environs of Paddington station.
The real Bertie was there. John had feared he wouldn’t be and that his whole journey might have been in vain. But his lover opened the front door to him and they went into the living room John had never before been in. A young woman was there, sweeping the floor.
Saying he hadn’t expected John to come, instead of introducing her, Bertie said, “Dot’s living here now. She’s got the first floor back.”
John could tell she was no candidate for his ever-watchful jealousy but just a tenant and occasional cleaner. “God knows this place needs it,” Bertie said. “Cut along now, Dot, there’s a good girl. Chop, chop.”
She scuttled away and Bertie closed the door after her. “Women who look like that,” he said with a laugh, “make me glad I’m queer.”
Plunging into the middle of things, John said, “I can’t give you what you want, Bertie. I’m not the wealthy gentleman you seem to think. I can just about pay the rent and keep my sister and her child and that’s it.”
“Why can’t she work? There’s always one thing a woman can do.”
It took John a moment or two to realise what he meant, an interpretation Bertie underlined by saying, “Every woman’s sitting on a fortune, is what my old dad used to say.”
John should have hit Bertie for that, he thought, for insulting his sister, but to do that he would have had to raise his hand and punch it into Bertie’s jaw, and he knew his hand would have refused to obey his brain’s instruction. He knew now, just from the few words they had exchanged or from Bertie’s coarse talk and repeated laughter, that to tell him of his hurt and the bitter pain the blackmailing letter had brought him would only be to court more mirth or sneering contempt. Yet, as he looked at Bertie’s beautiful face, the honest, dark blue eyes, the gentle, even
sweet expression, and the curving lips he had loved to kiss, he felt the same enduring love for him as he had all those years ago when first they met in the pub in Formosa Street.
“Do you remember the Prince Alfred,” John said, meaning to say something quite different. “Do you, Bertie? And how we sat by Paddington Basin and looked across at that island where Browning sat and wrote his poems?”
“Whoever he may be. What’s the use of talking about that? You’ve come here to tell me you won’t give me the money, and I’m going to tell you that you know what I’ll do if you don’t, savvy?”
For answer, John pulled out of his coat pocket all the money he had withdrawn from his post office savings account and laid it on the dirty, pitted table, the pound notes and the ten-shilling notes, silver and copper coins, covering up the white rings left by hot dishes. As he did, he felt an enormous, almost virtuous sense of self-denial.
“I’ll take back five bob,” he said. “That’ll buy us our dinner. The rest is yours.”
Bertie counted, seeming gratified by the sum. It was forty-two pounds, ten and ninepence, not quite all John had because he had kept back, at No. 2 Bury Row, enough for next week’s housekeeping. “That’ll do for now,” Bertie said.
“It’ll have to do for good.”
Shaking his head, Bertie said, “You can spare a couple of quid a week out of your wages, or salary as you call it. Let’s go. I’m getting thirsty.”
So first it was the pub called the Hero of Maida, both by common, though unspoken, consent avoiding the Prince Alfred, then going on to the enormous Crown, which some called Crocker’s Folly. Today, mild and sunny now the mist was gone, the nearby canal was clear of green weed, its waters unruffled and calm.
They walked along the towing path, watching the boats that were moored and the boats which passed, their hulls stacked with boxes and drums and coalsacks.