September 1925, Longworth House, Brighton
‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’
‘Stop fidgeting, will you?’ said Lucille, her long nails grazing his Adam’s apple as she scrabbled with the tie. ‘I can’t do it if you don’t keep still.’
He grimaced. Her perfume was a warcry of rosehip and citrus. ‘I’m dying of nerves, Mother.’ They were in the drawing room. Lucille’s domestic staff were at the church, along with everyone else, dismissed early not for their sake, but hers; in the next hour, he would belong to another woman and she clearly wanted to savour the dwindling moments of possession. She’d been fussing with the tie for the last five minutes, determined to get it ‘ship-shape’.
‘Nerves are a good sign.’ She tugged at the fabric. ‘You know, your father always insisted I do this for him. He’d let the valet do it first – now what was his name? For the love of God, will you keep still? Anyway, your father’d let him do it first, then he’d come to me and say it wasn’t done properly, which was never true, and I’d undo it and start over. I think it had something to do with intimacy. You know he was very guarded and cool with people.’
Cold, Bart thought. Freezing cold.
‘So, me fiddling around near his throat – well, it’s the most vulnerable spot on a person, the throat. Next to the guts.’
‘He wanted you to mother him,’ said Bart.
Lucille rolled her eyes. ‘There, done.’ She pulled away from him, smiling. ‘A very fine figure you cut, I must say.’ Her mouth started to crumple and she jerked her head, sniffing. ‘I’ll hold it in. Save it for the vows.’ She took her cigarettes from her purse and lit one. ‘You know, I might be a little jealous of you. You’re getting to spend the rest of your life with someone you actually like. You can laugh with each other. Your father didn’t have much of a sense of humour.’
‘He didn’t have one at all,’ said Bart. He couldn’t remember his father ever laughing, which was shocking, if you stopped to think about it. How could someone never laugh and still call themselves a human being? Even lawyers laughed. His father had been missing something very vital – a soul, perhaps. But the funny thing was, the man had felt a great kindness towards animals and even refused to eat meat. Hunting he looked down upon with an indignant, hot-eared fury. He had over ten dogs and he fussed over them incessantly. When they died he wrapped them in blankets and carried them through to the garden and personally buried them, rain, shine, day, night, his face blanched and grim, his eyes belonging to a medieval martyr. Haunted – that’s how he looked. Bart had a very vivid memory of watching his father through his bedroom window dig a grave late at night, plunging the shovel in the earth and digging it out in a perfect metronomic rhythm, pausing sometimes to wipe the sweat from his forehead with a black – yes, black – handkerchief while his mother stood by holding a lantern, clearly bored witless; shuffling from one leg to the other to keep warm and glancing up at Bart in the window every so often. Father gently dropped the blanketed lump into the hole, stood stiffly for a minute, silently mouthing a prayer, and then shovelled the earth back in. He didn’t cry but he exhibited the characteristics of great suffering. Bart and his mother hated those fucking dogs.
Lucille stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘I’m going to tell you something now that will make you horribly uncomfortable.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Shush. Your father isn’t around to impart any advice, so it falls to me. Son, if you want to have a successful marriage you must remember something that very few men do: pleasure is a two-way street.’ She held her hands up. ‘That is all I will say.’
‘Thanks for that,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve thought to provide any diagrams depicting particular techniques?’
‘Cut the sass.’
‘I hear everyone’s raving about the clitoris these days. Might you have a photograph you can—’
‘Oh shut up, you horrible child,’ she said, boxing his shoulder. ‘I’d better re-join the other clucking hens. See you at the church.’ Another kiss, a lingering hug, another wet-eyed smile, and she wafted out.
He slouched into an armchair, closing his eyes. The window was open and he could hear the birds in his mother’s aviary twittering and singing. She’d had the aviary installed just after his father died – before that it’d been a conservatory and before that, a stable; a horrible, blood-soaked stable where his little sister had met her end. It was a large hexagonal structure, painted white, with a little domed roof. It sat near the edge of the croquet lawn, which had once been a huge kennel for all those stinking hounds his father favoured. Everything had changed after he died – the house quickly brightened and lightened, the raincloud having scudded on. All his stuffed owls and badgers and wall-mounted stag heads (those awful glass eyes following you around!) were donated to a gentlemen’s club in Portslade, along with all the dark, ancient portraits of self-satisfied men in white wigs, and soon sixteen pretty, chirruping birds arrived to fill the new aviary – canaries, lovebirds, finches, lorikeets. ‘I choose life,’ Lucille had told him.
Bart took out and re-read the letter he’d received this morning. ‘Mon petit fleur du mal,’ it began. It was an encouraging letter – Étienne approved of the marriage, telling him of wealthy ‘acquaintances’ (never friends – he was only ‘acquainted’ with the rich) who’d done a similar thing in order to protect their reputations or come into their inheritances or both. ‘For some it has been a disaster because they are strangers, very desperate and hurried. But for others it has yielded harmonious results. It will go well with you, I think, because you are, as you say, like frère et soeur, but you must try not to be an arsehole or she will divorce you.’ He ended the letter with his usual affirmations of love and told him to please come and say hello during his visit (Bart and Bettina were headed to Paris for the first stage of their honeymoon) but not at the expense of his time with his new wife, ‘because you will only ever have one honeymoon, but you will always have me.’ But, he added, ‘if you do decide to come and see me, this is what will be waiting for you:’ and overleaf Étienne had sketched an intricate life-size portrait of his erect penis.
The last time Bart visited Paris had been three months ago. It’d been the usual order of business – frantic lovemaking, constant bickering and too much drinking. It was June and hot enough inside the garret to curdle milk within hours of buying it. They went about naked, Étienne sat on the chair sketching Bart as he prepared a simple dinner – he was trying this new technique of focusing on the light reflected off the body, neglecting all else (‘We are made of light, everything is light’) and the finished paintings were multi-layered blobs of white and silver oil paint exploding out of a shape that might be human. They went out only once, to a restaurant, and halfway through the meal, Bart offered to book a night in the Hôtel Plaza Athénée and Étienne was insulted. ‘Well excuse me,’ said Bart, ‘for wanting to sleep in a bed that isn’t crusted with a thousand layers of jism.’ Étienne slammed his glass on the table and stormed off. Bart apologised later in bed, crawling down to kiss the old stains on the sheets, saying, ‘I think this is my favourite patch, because it has earthy undercurrents of garlic,’ and all was forgiven.
A knock at the door and a voice: ‘Are you decent?’ It was Jonathan, Bettina’s brother.
Bart stuffed the letter back in his pocket. ‘Yes.’
Jonathan came in, looking pale and squiffy and more nervous even than Bart himself. But this was his natural state. He wore his suit well, sharp-shouldered and slender as he was. His thick auburn hair was swept back and he’d shaved off his beard and moustache for the occasion. His throat above the tie was shave-grazed and pink, and this, coupled with the blush-red of his jug-handle ears, provided the only colour to his otherwise pallid demeanour. His prosthetic arm lay next to his body as stiff as a pastry roller, a cream kidskin glove covering the false hand.
Bart had once had a crush on Jonathan. A subconscious sort of crush that he never dared express, even within the secret-safe regions of his own skull. Hero worship, he convinced himself, though Jonathan hadn’t been heroic, was in fact socially awkward and had digestive problems which led to uncontrollable cabbagey flatulence. But he was more kind than most boys his age, once even standing up for Bart against the bullying little cunts they played rugby with, and he had the most rippled, perfect body and powerful, bulging thighs. He was a good swimmer (before the war, obviously) and always at the beach. When no one else was around, he’d take his bathing suit off and swim naked. He had a humongous pair of ginger balls and an impressive fat willy, even at the age of fourteen. Bart had had his first erection watching him backstroke through the waves, his sun-bright cock bobbing around in the creamy sea spray.
Jonathan had returned from the war a shivering lettuce of a man, and it was heartbreaking, because he was also a man who insisted on maintaining a cliff-high dignity, hiding his anxiety as it bubbled up lava-like, and affecting a high-chinned, pinch-lipped, bolt-jawed poise. Watching him overcome his jitters was like watching a three-legged ant successfully carry a leaf up an incline – you couldn’t help but root for him. Bettina, in her less self-absorbed moments, worried about him and tried to talk to him, to coax out all his traumas as if they were fleas picked off a dog, easily squashed, but Jonathan was not one to talk about his feelings. Lately, he’d taken to drinking, and though he never allowed himself to get visibly inebriated, he was constantly taking nips from a silver hip flask he kept in his coat pocket. Not that Bart was in a position to judge.
‘Spot of whisky, old chum, old boy?’ said Bart now.
Jonathan nodded thankfully. Bart poured a drink and passed it to him, before realising that he was holding it out towards Jonathan’s prosthetic hand. He let out a shrill giggle and passed it to the other hand, sloshing some of the drink. ‘Bottoms up,’ he said, and they tapped glasses and drank. They stood there a while in aching silence, their eyes on their drinks.
‘So,’ said Bart, finally. ‘Ever plan on walking up the aisle yourself one day?’
‘Well, I’m not exactly a hot prospect at the moment.’
‘You’re rich, aren’t you?’
Jonathan ignored this, furrowing his brow so subtly you could almost miss it.
‘I shall have a word in Bettina’s ear and ask her to aim the bouquet your way.’
A small, tight smile. ‘The motor will be here soon.’ He drained his glass. ‘Thanks for the drink. And – um. Well. Thank you for asking me to be your best man. It was kind of you.’
Bart opened his mouth to protest – what do you mean, kind? It has nothing to do with kindness, you’re a stand-up chap, blah blah blah. What was the point? It was obvious to everyone involved that the only reason he’d asked Jonathan to be his best man was because it would make Bettina happy. Bart patted his arm, thankfully the correct one.
‘Look after my sister, won’t you?’ said Jonathan. ‘She’s not as tough as she makes out.’
‘Oh, I know that. And I will.’
The sound of a car pulling up outside the house and then an insanely loud, jubilant honk of the horn.
Both men turned to look at the whisky decanter, and noticing this, their shared desire, they laughed. They had something in common, after all.
‘Stop the car!’
Bart flung his door open and pushed his head out of it as the car was still moving, his vomit streaking backwards and splattering the flank. Jonathan, in the seat next to him, gripped his shoulder to stop him falling out. As the car lurched to a stop, a pendulum of bile hanging off Bart’s lip violently wobbled and then stretched, landing on the gravel path. He pulled his head back inside and let out a long, wavering groan. Jonathan’s hand still gripped his shoulder.
‘Perhaps you’ve drunk too much?’ he said.
Bart shook his head. ‘Nerves.’
Jonathan offered him a cigarette and he took it with trembling hands. Wedding jitters, him? Really?
Bettina hadn’t needed a year to make up her mind after all. She agreed to the marriage after confessing to making a terrible mistake with Francis; she’d gone all the way with him, desperate to prove that it would be an agreeable act after all, but of course it wasn’t.
‘It was horrible,’ she told him afterwards, her eyes puffy and mascara-streaked. ‘I just lay there like a … like a bloody turkey – don’t you dare laugh – and I felt absolutely nothing, except for pain – of course it hurt, I expected it to hurt, but in that pain-pleasure way that women are always whispering about. And he was just there, looming over me with this awful vapid expression. Don’t laugh!’ Her brows were knitted but there was that spark of mirth in her eyes that never really went away; even in the midst of genuine pain – and it was genuine – Bettina was still trying to be funny. ‘Well, it’s my own fucking fault, isn’t it?’
‘Enough of this nonsense,’ he told her, squeezing her cod of a hand, ‘before you get yourself in real trouble. Marry me.’
She frowned thoughtfully, picking dry skin off her lip. ‘Get on your knees and do it properly. I’m serious.’
‘All right,’ he said, getting down on his knees.
‘I know marriage is a farce and all that,’ she said, ‘but I fear that if we’re too frivolous about it, it’ll be a bad omen.’
‘Right you are,’ he said, pulling off his father’s Eton ring and holding it out to her. ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Will you get a proper ring?’
‘Naturally. I’ll go and buy one tomorrow.’
‘Can I choose it?’
‘Yes. Yes, you can choose it.’
She nodded, brow still tense. ‘All right. Let’s get married.’
Bart drove to Wadley the very next day and asked Montgomery for his daughter’s hand in marriage, telling the man in a proud voice that he had loved her since childhood and had been waiting only for his stage career to take off before proposing so that he’d be in a secure, solid financial position, as befitting a suitor.
‘Stage career?’ Monty sneered. ‘Hobby, you mean.’
Bart opened his mouth, about to inform the git that his income was more than adequate, actually, as well as his prospects, seeing as he’d recently been scouted by a henchman of Universal Studios and might soon be acting in a Hollywood movie alongside none other than Mary Pickford (none of this true). Monty fortunately didn’t give him the chance to speak: ‘I don’t understand why you’d wait for your “career” to take off when you’re set to inherit your father’s estate upon marrying.’
Bart didn’t even bother asking the man how he knew this detail because of course he knew, with his mother constantly dishing out family business to Venetia and Venetia inevitably passing it all on, the pair of them like scuzzy old hags sat open-legged among the sea spray, ripping the spines out of haddocks, gossip gossip, whisper whisper. ‘I wished to make my own money first,’ he told Monty, struggling to keep his tone calm, ‘to prove to myself that I could. I thought you’d appreciate that, being a self-made man.’
Monty smiled with apparent good nature. ‘Oh, but I do. I just wonder if Bettina knows about the provisions of your inheritance.’
Bart looked down at his tea, wishing it were whisky. Monty was a shrewd man. Of course Bart was thinking of his inheritance, he’d be a fool not to, but it wasn’t his sole motive and what’s more, he’d never treated it like some dirty secret. ‘Yes, she knows.’ Through gritted teeth. ‘She’s my closest friend, I tell her everything.’
‘Friend?’ said Monty. ‘That’s a queer way to refer to the woman you wish to marry.’ Monty tilted his head slightly and looked at him – through him. It was the same way he’d always looked at him; a funny look – yes, a queer look – consisting of thoughtful intrigue and cynical amusement. When the little fairy realises what he is I shall be the first to throw him a party, haha.
Bart met his eye unwaveringly. ‘It’s true, though; she is my closest friend. And I happen to be in love with her. I’m a very lucky man. Or I will be if I gain your permission. Do I gain your permission, sir?’
Monty’s mouth collapsed into a slippery grin, his moustache seeming to come alive like a small forest-floor-dwelling animal. ‘You do, Bart. I think it a most agreeable match, actually, with its own peculiar conveniences.’ Another glimmer of some hidden knowledge in his eyes. Such a gloating, omniscient shit – how did Bettina put up with him? Then his face pouched up in thought. ‘I just wonder whether you can …’ He trailed off and was silent for a while, his face still scrunched up with all his droll ponderousness, and then he waved the thought away. ‘Anyway, you have my consent.’
Bart stood up and shook Monty’s hand, making sure to squeeze hard, like a man, a real man. ‘I’d better go and impart the good news to Venny,’ said Monty, his eyebrows going up on ‘good’ like apostrophes, and that was that.
Bettina still had her doubts. She came to his place (he was renting a flat in Bedford Square now) and paced around, the ever-present cigarette trailing urgent wisps of smoke, seeking reassurance that they were doing the right thing. But then. Aha. But then – Bettina met a woman called Gertrude at one of Cousin Tuna’s big dinners, and a stinker of a crush was born. Bettina met Gertrude regularly for lunch or shopping – just friends, Gertrude being a notorious cock-hungry tart. But nursing this crush prompted her to reflect on her predilection. ‘I’ve never felt about a man the way I feel about Trude,’ she told Bart. ‘And in my heart of hearts, I know I never will.’
Took her long enough.
Jonathan touched his arm and he opened his eyes. ‘I’ve got something for nerves, if you like,’ he said, glancing out of the window at the chauffeur, who was still wiping sick off the car. ‘Willy!’ he called, and the chauffeur’s head popped into view.
‘Sir?’
‘I wish to talk to the groom in private. If you’ll be so good as to go over there and have a cigarette.’ Willy touched his cap and walked off towards a grassy clearing full of crumbling sheep turds. Jonathan went in his pocket and brought out a small vial filled with white powder. He held it out between thumb and finger and looked at Bart inquisitively. ‘You know what this is?’
‘I believe I do,’ said Bart.
‘Well?’
‘I wouldn’t normally but it does seem that my situation calls for a little something.’
‘Hold out your hand.’
Bart held out his hand, palm up.
‘The other way.’
Jonathan prised the vial’s tiny cork out with his teeth and tapped some out onto the back of Bart’s hand. ‘Have you done this before?’ The cork was still between his teeth and the words came out garbled. Ha you done is ahore?
‘No.’ Bart pressed a finger to one nostril and snorted up the powder with the other. It shot up like hot sand.
‘Don’t tell Bettina,’ said Jonathan, tipping some out onto his knee and then bending his head down while simultaneously bringing his knee to his face and snorting it up. He blinked, sniffing, and then licked his finger and wiped away the chalky residue from his black trousers.
Bart climbed out of the car and stretched his arms out, loosening the muscles in his neck and shoulders. Beautiful day. Really beautiful day. Good omen. He sniffed a few times and then crouched down to look in the car’s side mirror. He ran a finger over his moustache; a perfectly trim pencil moustache, newly grown, that Bettina would no doubt want to laugh at as she walked down the aisle towards him.
Imagine there really was a God?
He frowned into the mirror – a stern, paternal glare. ‘For perverting the holy sanctity of marriage,’ he told himself, ‘thou shalt burn forever in the fiery pits of hell.’
He widened his eyes. The stuff was dripping down the back of his throat like bitter phlegm. He licked his finger and smoothed down his eyebrows. He had very pleasing eyebrows. And eyebrows mattered. He stuck out his tongue and went cross-eyed. ‘I choose hell,’ he said. And laughed.
Jonathan fumbled the ring out of his pocket, dropped it, picked it up, dropped it again. It skittered across the stone tiles, coming to rest by Bettina’s pearl-white slipper. He bent down to pick it up, sniffing and bird-like, and bashed his head into Bettina’s knee, causing her to cry out and stumble backwards into their father’s arms. Jonathan gasped out an apology, sweat beading his nose, ears practically throbbing, and retrieved the ring. Bettina gave him a tight-lipped smile and the priest looked on with tranquil bloodshot eyes. Bart curled his lips in to suppress a laugh. How memorable this would be! Only dull people were satisfied with perfection.
Bart took the ring from the poor wretch and turned to face Bettina. Her lips were painted a vibrant, shocking red and she had a red rose clipped just below the neckline of her dress.
‘With this ring I thee wed …’
As he echoed the priest’s words in his clear, trained voice, Bettina stared up into his face, her gaze zipping from his eyes to his moustache and back again. She was dying to laugh too, he could tell.
Bart peeled the silk glove from her left hand, upsetting the coil of pearls which clattered around her wrist, and, with an air of great ceremony, he slipped the ring on her now-nude finger.
‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’ said the priest.
A great roar of cheering and applause. Bettina, dazed and grinning, wrapped an arm around his neck and pressed her cheek to his. ‘Your finest performance yet,’ she whispered.