Five

For many years this house, now much altered, would have been the most feared in the whole village, as it was the home of Marshall Howe, its self-appointed sexton during the period of plague. Just as in London the old women ‘searchers of the dead’, whose job it was to examine bodies for signs of the pestilence, were regarded by their fellow citizens with a mixture of revulsion and gratitude, so Howe appears to have been viewed as a necessary evil by the inhabitants of Eyam.

And whatever the subsequent reverence shown to the plague dead, precious little was possible at the time. Once again, as in London where the usual funeral procedures were collapsing under sheer weight of numbers, so Eyam, with its average annual death rate of five or six, was suddenly faced with a monthly toll many times higher. Resources were dreadfully overstretched. And although, unlike the metropolis, there were no painful processions to burial pits through deserted streets in the middle of the night, preceded by the awesomely familiar cry of ‘Bring out your dead’, the village churchyard was soon choked; and it was decided that corpses should be consigned to their own gardens or even neighbouring fields.

To a devoutly superstitious people, that must in itself have been deeply distressing, but the manner of their interment lacked all dignity. The customary offices were suspended. Since the two priests were fully occupied in treating the sick and relieving the dying, the actual laying to rest had to be left to family and friends. But as putrefaction and its attendant pollution were believed to set in very rapidly, obsequies were kept to a minimum and bodies quite literally dragged to their graves with sheets or other cloths tied round their armpits or ankles and then dumped unceremoniously in the ground. And when no family or friends remained to accompany them, there was always Marshall Howe… at a price.

Howe was a lead-miner who, having recovered from a mild dose of plague at an early stage of the epidemic, took advantage of his escape to feather his own nest. For he was one man who acted not so much out of community spirit or Christian charity but with an eye to the main chance; compensating himself extremely liberally for the disagreeability of his task by plundering the possessions of the dead.

But despite his justified confidence in his own immunity, his wife and son proved less hardy; and in August 1666, in quick succession, they died. I’d like to be able to report that Howe subsequently repented and abandoned his cavalier attitude to both the funeral rites and property rights of others, in order to treat them with respect; however, that would be one legend for which there’s not the least foundation. And it’s said that for a long time afterwards, parents who wished to pacify their children would do so with the threat that Marshall Howe was coming. Which I suppose, like the familiar nursery rhyme ‘Ring a ring o’ roses’, shows how easy it is for the original pain to be assimilated and the memory muffled in a form of words.

And now to resume our death toll: October 1665 had added twenty-three to the six from September; although with the onset of autumn the villagers had reason to believe that the worst was past. Ironically, 1665 had enjoyed one of the finest summers on record – in his diary Samuel Pepys constantly confided his concern with the heat – but the warm thatches, together with the rudimentary sanitation, would have provided ideal conditions for the black rats which carried the plague germs to thrive. And yet, before we continue to plot their putrid progress, let’s retrace a few steps to the house of a young girl who contracted the infection with extreme severity but, by means of a highly unorthodox remedy, recovered and survived.

 

Shall we play my favourite parlour game: if you were a book, what kind would you be? And how about me? Up until last month I’d have confidently said a concordance, but now it would have to be a medical dictionary. I’m a world authority on every symptom known to man – and then some… On Sunday Adrian was taken into hospital.

It was as sudden as a suicide. My day began as usual with the bleep of his pill dispenser… He left his door open on an unexpressed understanding; which meant I could hear every snort and sneeze and hack of phlegm. He claimed that he swallowed the pills in his sleep. Whilst the bleeps piercingly punctuated my insomnia. And I felt as though I were being paged by death.

It was six o’clock. My eyes smarted resentfully as my mind went through its dawn readjustment, only to be plunged back into night-time confusion by a dense shadow creeping across the floor. It was Adrian crawling into our room with sweat-streaked hair and a torrential fever. We hauled him back to bed. I changed his sheets and towels whilst Mark took his temperature and persuaded him to drink. He complained that his skin felt as though it were being slowly peeled from his chest, like a rabbit flayed by a poacher. Meanwhile his cough had become a croak, and he cawed like a raven… no, anything but a raven: a rook, a frog…

The doctor arranged for his immediate admission to hospital. He was registered and settled, whilst Mark and I tramped the endless corridors past anaesthetised patients on trolleys parked wheel-deep in rubbish, before ending up in the smoke-filled, slop-festering canteen. I dulled every emotion but disgust with endless cups of coffee, until the sharp bleep of his pill dispenser in my pocket prompted a further rude awakening. I fumbled with it furtively. Mark said nothing; his thoughts were eloquent enough.

After lunch we were allowed to visit him. We took our life in our hands and the arthritic lift to the fifth floor. An Irish sister stoutly held it shut as it strained to disgorge its disparate passengers. The implications of our ascent were painfully marked: from the maternity clinic on the first floor to the AIDS patients tucked away at the top. And I felt much as I had when as a boy I’d tried to escape my aunt by climbing the turrets at Edensor… out of sight, out of mind.

Adrian was propped up in bed at what appeared an acutely uncomfortable angle. And whilst his cough had stuttered to a halt, his colour had completely drained. I was shocked to find two tubes stuck to his bruised and bandaged left wrist. But he told me not to worry; it looked far worse than it was… although it felt far worse than it looked. They’d had to take blood from an artery to test the gases… In my ignorance I’d have supposed an artery easier to locate than a vein; and yet it turned out to be quite the opposite – and infinitely more painful. He added that what we could see was nothing; he had bruises all the colours of the rainbow: Richard of York gave battle in vain.

My heart missed a beat, and I was convinced he was raving and that the virus had started to worm its way into his mind. Until I recognised the mnemonic; even though my own childhood seemed just a distant memory and his a cruel mockery. I was about to respond when Mark bluntly interjected that no friend of his would ever be battling in vain. And he squeezed his hand so tightly that I grimaced. But Adrian seemed equally insensible both to reassurance and pain.

He groaned that his body felt like a piece of rotten fruit consumed by maggots. And despite Mark’s exhortation, it can’t have been easy to retain much self-respect, let alone fraternal solidarity, as he lay in a pile of pink plastic plumbing with a stark Danger Warning stuck to the door. Besides, his nurses’ green cotton tunics and trousers were a permanent reminder that he wasn’t as other patients, as well as introducing sinister intimations of the martial arts. He lived in constant fear of being asphyxiated by antiseptic. Even his tea tasted of TCP.

And in his enforced idleness his thoughts have turned to prayer. Last week he asked if I believed that in spite of everything, God still loved him: an extraordinary shift for one whose usual practice was to make ribald puns about the Virgin on the Rocks… And I realised how little I knew him and how much more I longed to. Which wasn’t sick-bed sentimentality, let alone hindsight – of course not. Why should it be? He isn’t dead… And I just stopped short of saying that to my mind the issue was whether, in view of everything, we should still love God. He was carrying enough lumber without the added burden of my despair.

I used to hold that there was nothing as cruel as destroying someone’s faith; but I know now it’s to destroy his illusions. After all, I’ve been stripped of every last one of mine… For Our Father has truly excelled himself. It’s hard enough that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children and each generation bears the brunt of the one before. But when the sins of the brothers are visited on the brothers, and the lovers’ on the lovers, and when those sins are no longer sins at all but loves, then there’s nothing and nowhere left to turn.

Although since I’d managed to restrain myself, I failed to see why Mark couldn’t do the same. Despite insisting that the worst effect of the virus was secrecy, he flatly opposed telling Adrian’s sister… It made no sense. And yet when I questioned him he scornfully called me ‘little boy’, which had once been a term of endearment, and asked what I could possibly know of such people, with their twee tea-cosiness and garden-gnome gentility, before promptly proceeding to enlighten me.

He comes from a long line of strict Pentecostalists, and as a child in Bolton suffered from a heavy dose of North Country Churchianity. His parents hymned the ‘Lord of the Dance’ at every opportunity, but they never attended a single performance of his. They viewed his choice of career with open antagonism, and his burgeoning sexuality confirmed all their worst fears. When he first confided in them, they claimed he was sick: sick, sick, sick… And where is he now? Propped up on a pile of hospital pillows. Is it any wonder he refuses to fight?

I’m finally coming round to your way of thinking: that our childhood experiences have scarred us for life. The myth of the Fall was all very well when Adam was the only boy in the world and Eve was the only girl. But the rest of us have fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts. And they bear us and raise us and shape us and shame us. And Adrian’s rejected him so emphatically that neither his father nor his sister even informed him of his mother’s death. He might never have known if their next-but-one neighbour hadn’t felt it her duty to ring him. Although Mark remained convinced that it was more from the hope of a scandal than friendly concern.

If so, she certainly achieved her aim. Having been excluded from the cortège, he pointedly stood at the back of the hall along with the undertakers, one of whom had a thick gravy stain on his suit. The humiliation of that stain remained his abiding memory of his mother’s funeral – along with the warmth of his subsequent welcome home. It was then that he chipped his two front teeth. Only it wasn’t in a kiss, passionate or otherwise, but rather that, after the tea and the tears and the treacle cake and the still more treacly memories, he felt impelled to fill in the other side of the picture. At which his father, who considered the slightest hint of dissent a slight to his wife’s memory, grabbed him without warning and flung him so hard against the dining-room table that he cracked his jaw on the rosewood veneer. Nobody helped him up.

So he picked himself up and he picked up the pieces – of his self-respect as well as his teeth. And he even cracked a joke as he wondered whether, if he put them under his pillow, the tooth fairy might visit him at midnight. Then he left the house, never to return in his father’s lifetime, or for that matter even for his death. And his sister had been happy to preserve the gulf… He was Adrian’s family, Mark declared; and he painted a picture of him when he still had perfect teeth: a brilliant smile along with a biting wit.

I was afraid I might cry… I’m afraid I still might. I should make the most of my opportunity. I can never cry in the flat. To Mark, tears are no longer a release but a sign of condescension. And he checks me for the slightest hint of that as intently as he does himself for any symptom of disease… I took him in my arms. In principle nothing’s changed; we still sleep together, euphemistically as well as practically… though so temperately that even the blankets barely move, let alone the earth. He seems to cling to me more for the reassurance of my presence than anything more intimate. I’ve almost become his comforter: a role that comes far too close for my own. And I know he needs my love just as I need his acknowledgement that I still love him. But if we made it hard for each other before, we make it almost impossible now.

I was determined not to be deterred by his diagnosis. The night that he told me we went to bed early, and he seemed to be challenging me by the speed with which he threw off his clothes. Whilst I continued to fold mine as methodically as always; to show too much enthusiasm appeared almost as cruel as to recoil. But although I was well aware that our love-making held no risk, the knowledge in my head failed to carry my body’s conviction. And we both quite lost heart.

We lay one on each edge of the futon, which had come to seem as cramped as a coffin; and I’d never before felt so conscious of how close we were to the floor. I reached out for his hand and I brushed his leg. The next moment he was all over me. He pulled at me roughly as if he no longer cared to prove his love but simply his virility. He was hurting me; although I was reluctant to protest. He wrenched me up and down; but my fears had become impotence. I focused all my strength of mind and force of will on my penis. I implored it to go through the motions: just once, if never again. How often in the past had it declared its independence; and yet now it slumped cruelly inert.

I recalled my aunt as we stood in the tailor’s fitting room and she despaired of my ever measuring up to my own father, let alone hers. Why won’t you grow? she asked me, as if I were stunting myself out of spite; whilst the tailor looked away and his acned assistant sniggered. Why won’t you grow? I asked myself as I shrank to the size of a pre-pubescent child. But it was no use; he’d taken his hand off me and was concentrating all his efforts on himself.

I fell back in dismay. I was afraid I was about to hyperventilate; but I knew that whatever else, I could never again plead ill health. So I reached towards him as he arched his back against me; and I begged him not to turn away. I longed to make love to him… in the way that he’d always wanted. I needed to feel him inside me, body and soul.

He suspected my motives; I strove to reassure him. He smiled at me and teasingly tousled my hair. And I saw that even if I couldn’t give him back his peace of mind, I could at least help to give him back his body. He leaned across to his jeans and pulled out a packet of condoms. I could feel every muscle in my body tense as I watched him pull one on. For some reason I imagined a surgeon slipping on a gown before an operation. And I yearned for a local anaesthetic or, better still, a shot of laughing gas.

I lay back and I could feel him on top of me: his lips… his hips. And I was stung by the impersonality of his sex. I wasn’t a lover to be awakened by his passion, but the object of an exercise to be penetrated and possessed. And instead of making myself hard I tried to force myself softer: an invitation, not a rejection; but it was one which he proved unable to accept. And whether from the new image of himself or the unexpectedness of mine, he slid away before he could settle inside me: leaving me high and dry and empty and cold.

We never spoke a word of it the next morning but stared blankly at each other as if we’d simply shared the same bad dream. We cuddled loosely, kissed briefly, and for the first time his breath smelt stale.

We’ve made love every night since then, but more out of desperation than desire; and from the same fear that impelled my aunt always to dress for dinner: lest the least lapse should herald the beginning of the end… Although when I say we make love, in effect we barely make contact, but simply clutch at each other’s loneliness and feed on our mutual grief.