by Mark de Rond
One third of a bottle of claret from Berry Bros. & Rudd on St James’, the smell burnt coffee and farty pong of the Epoisses de Bourgogne were all that was left of the night. Virtually all guests had absconded by nine with their gift bags and mini prints, leaving behind sour glasses and chairs aslant. Red walls, a pollard oak table, Georgian fireplace and Regency chandelier helped frame a view of the Queen’s Chapel outside. Further down our table where the big portraits hung, someone in pinstripe said something to someone in electric blue that got a big laugh, and it occurred to me then that she and I might never have met had it not been for this occasion. I told her that I’d gone to see the Birth of Venus six times in the Uffizi – and only because I was keen to find out if she’d ever been told how much of a likeness there was between her and Botticelli’s model – and said how I’d left with a tote bag.
‘It is a strange story,’ she said.
‘True stories are often that.’
‘Strange?’
‘Not what you’d expect.’
‘Yours wasn’t.’
‘Wasn’t strange?’
‘No, it was. I was thinking of mine — ’
How had I not noticed her moving with the other guests as they admired photographs of 1960s Liverpool and London’s East End. Of thugs from the Seven Sisters Road posing in a bombed-out house in Finsbury Park. Of police carrying an Aldermaston woman as if carrying a sack of sand. Of how black-and-white pictures suit the suffering. So wrapped up were we in each other that we’d made ourselves unavailable to others over dinner. I discovered that she wasn’t a gallerist like me, and nor did I think her an artist, but she knew her painters, and I soon learned that her relationship to beauty is one of necessity: she cannot imagine a world without it.
We talked about the figurative art of Jenna Gribbon and Anna Weyant, and how Anna rose to prominence after Larry Gagosian signed her up; and she said how strange it was to think of Anna and Larry – and here she couldn’t make herself to say it and so I said it for her – ‘fucking’, which got her to laugh hard into her glass; ‘yes!!’ and I was struck by how a simple obscenity offered such wonderful release. We agreed that their relationship couldn’t possibly last seeing how he has five decades on her, and then I said what I thought we were both thinking: how unnatural that kind of relationship is.
At that she looked a little wounded. I asked what was the matter.
‘You won’t have known him’, she said, ‘but there was this beautiful boy who went missing ten years ago today.’
‘Friend?’
‘Kind of — such a horrid affair.’
‘Aren’t they always — ’
‘Yes. Of course. But I meant the circumstances of it — ’
‘They’d been home schooled, the boy and his sister, by tutors chosen by Mum, which of course meant they were well ahead of their years in maths, physics, chemistry, history, French, English, you name it, and Mum being more liberally minded than Dad insisted that the syllabus include Whitman, Baldwin, Proust, Capote and Wilde, and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath — you can see where this is going can’t you — before assigning them Ginsberg and Kerouac and into their teens Tropic of Cancer and American Psycho and Lolita. Dad hated the idea of it.’
‘He hadn’t been consulted?’
‘Not really. Theirs was cold marriage and they preferred not to spend more time in each other’s company than necessary. But Dad never forgave Mum for turning his boy into a poofter when he should have been normal, which did of course make him the perfect playmate for his sister, and that I think troubled Dad most of all.
‘Home schooling meant that they spent every day together and so it was just as well that they loved each other’s company. She knew everything there was to know about him – she knew he preferred boys long before he knew this himself – and he knew more about her than brothers do, or should in any case, about sisters.’
I noticed that the people down our table had stood up and prepared to leave. The one in blue held onto the back his chair with the left hand while facing the pinstripe who was holding a business card, and this made me wonder how long it’d been since I last used one of those. And that then made me think of American Psycho and how it taught us to compete with card stock and font, and watched the pinstripe poke him in the chest, not unkindly, before gently patting him on the shoulder.
She seemed not to have noticed my sideward glance down the room and, as it happens, wasn’t looking at me at all but at her glass.
‘Care for some more — ?’
‘They bathed together as children and used to make each other laugh by plunging their faces into the soapy water and then look at themselves in the bathroom mirror before the bubbles disappeared; and this ruckus would carry on until Mum yelled for them to put a stop to it and to get into pyjamas at once and join her for dinner downstairs. Dad tended to eat by himself or at his club, and because he didn’t think he could ever leave the office before his boss did, would be home late and leave early, and so we didn’t see all that much of him.
‘We — ?’
‘They — ’
‘And then one day and without any explanation Mum told them to bathe separately – she first and leaving the water for him, he next – until the new became routine and Mum let them run their own baths; and with Mum elsewhere in the house, she would tell her brother to join her in the tub so they could continue where they left off.
‘Over the years they saw each other change, discreetly at first but then too boldly to go unnoticed, and so they began to compare notes on how different their bodies were becoming and – and I know it must sound strange me telling you but at the time it felt so casual and in many ways so beautiful – how she stood up and told him to tell her what he saw and then ordered him to show her his, and so she got to know not just his body but her own too, and all of this was done with incredible generosity and no self-consciousness and with no one to tell them otherwise; and so long as they didn’t hurt each other, things seemed right, or at least not wrong, and they said all the time anyways how they much they loved each other.
‘Mum never knew any of this, or if she did, she kept it to herself; and nor did Dad, though I am sure he had his suspicions; which is why, when the twins turned fourteen, he decided they would become boarders. They were horrified at the idea of a separation, but Dad wouldn’t budge.
‘The day came that he was to go up to St Jude’s, a school with historic links to the military. There was a girls’ school across the road from it, St Mary’s, but Dad was adamant that the two shouldn’t spend any more time in each other’s company and so she was sent to Switzerland instead. She left a day before he did, and so they spent the weekend beforehand helping each other sort essentials from nice-to-haves and speculating about whether they’d have roommates, and what they might be like if so. Knowing they’d be in school uniform until the Christmas holidays, they took their time picking out traveling clothes so that he ended up in something of hers, and she of his, and so when Dad drove him to St Jude’s two days later, he won’t have hidden his contempt for his boy.
‘Mum sent him a letter every Friday with a round-up of the week while he and his sister communicated more frequently. He told her he made a new friend, an Indian boy on scholarship, who he said he liked very much because he was gentle and gifted and so unlike the other boys. Then there were those who were well off – I mean they weren’t themselves of course but came from money – and they were mostly horrid. He told her how they called each other bitches and pansies, and said ‘fuck’ a lot, and that it took him a while to get over how awkward it felt using that word but that he was now able to put it anywhere in a sentence. He also wrote about how they would joke about St Mary’s being a ‘Virgin megastore’ and how they wanted to show these girls a good time, and how when girls say No it meant Yes and Yes meant Anal and how easy it was to roofie them.’
She told me she couldn’t believe how girls from across the road seemed to go along with any of it, though her fury felt forced.
‘He said how he worried he was so far behind in the race for experience that if he ever did it with a girl that she would know how to do it because she’d done it so many times already and that she would tell everyone about how clumsy he’d been; and he said that girls were meaner than boys that way because they were really specific when talking about boys’ penises and how they didn’t know what they were doing while boys just told each other whether she was a good or bad lay. And he wrote of how during a party one of the girls had taken him by the hand and behind the school and how she undid his trousers, and he hadn’t been able to get hard because he was so nervous, and how she told everyone afterwards and how ashamed he felt.
‘He told his sister how self-conscious he’d become about how he sat and walked and lowered the pitch of his voice to make it less girly and how because someone made fun of him trying, he now avoided talking altogether.
‘Anyone suspected of being gay was in for a hard time, as were those on scholarship, and the only way to escape from persistent harrying was to prove how much of a man you were. And the only way to do this was to bed a girl good, and for the girl to tell everyone you did it right.
‘Thing is, I’m sure he could have had his choice of girls – he was handsome in a Rupert Brooke sort of way – but he knew by now that he preferred boys and, in any event, would have been far too shy to ask a girl out.
‘Rumours had begun to circulate that the Indian boy was gay, and he was bullied mercilessly for it. The brother wrote of it to his sister saying how the senior boys cornered him in the showers and forced him to pleasure himself to a photo of a naked man as they stood there jeering, and how he refused to take showers from then on until he smelled so bad that their prefect marched him into the bathroom and wouldn’t let him out until he’d cleaned himself up. The brother pleaded with his friend to tell his housemaster of the abuse, which he did, and his housemaster told the prefect, who told others, and so he discovered that the only thing worse than being queer was being a snitch. And then one night while he was sleeping a few of the seniors went into his room, and as two of them pinned the boy to the bed, a third sodomised him with a plunger. You can imagine how guilty the brother felt for not standing up for his friend, and he said he wasn’t at all surprised when the boy didn’t return after the holidays.’
She said she didn’t really know what to tell her brother except to blend in as best he could and to work a little harder at sports. She knew he’d make for an easy target. She also knew that blending in meant suppressing all that made him the lovely boy he was.
‘When she saw him again over Easter, he was skinnier and withdrawn and she worried for him. Mum wondered if both might be allowed to go to the local grammar instead, but Dad wouldn’t have it. Then, when his sister got him to talk at last, she discovered that the abuse had already begun, and how worried sick he was about going back up. She loved her brother very much and wanted to help.’
At this she paused. Leaning forward, she looked at me and then away. I never once thought the story untrue, but her excitement in the telling of it felt ever so slightly out of sync with the gravity of the subject.
‘So, what did she do?’ I asked.
She dipped her index finger in the candle wax and held it there for a long while.
‘They never spoke about it afterwards,’ she said. ‘He left for St Jude’s at sunrise. She hoped he might think no more of it seeing how playful they’d been growing up. But because they were no longer children, or because he was so vulnerable, or because she had enjoyed it while he wasn’t able to, and she had come, and because he knew she had, they each knew something significant had happened.’
I couldn’t let go off what she told me when walking home, and it was only because a shopkeeper winged about something or other as he put the garbage outside that I looked sideways and saw her asleep in the entrance to a Ladbrokes. She wouldn’t have known how arresting an image she struck as the refracted yellow light of the shop next door illuminated her pulled-up knees and a holdall on which she rested her head. At her feet was a handmade cardboard sign that said, ‘I’m not homeless. This is my home,’ and I straightaway thought of photographs of the down-and-outs in Spitalfields who, like her, had been filthy beyond recognition.
I retrieved my smartphone. Would she mind if I took her picture, I said. She opened her eyes and didn’t say yes but then she didn’t say no and so I took a few snaps, working the scene from various angles. I left a coin in a paper cup by her side.
