July 1927, Davenport House, London
Her legs were up in the air, stockingless, and her skirt sunk down to her waist. Her shins were covered in soft blonde hair and her toenails needed cutting. One of them (on her big toe) was ingrown and the flesh around it looked pink and tender. He could see the scar on the bony ridge of her foot from when they’d been playing out in his mother’s garden as children and she’d put a garden fork through it. Her scream! At first he’d laughed, thinking she was messing about. And then all the blood. He’d vomited – it had bubbled up yellow and milky, spilling onto his pullover.
‘How long have I got to stay like this?’ she asked, planting her feet against the wall and padding them so they made soft slapping sounds.
‘Longer the better, I suppose,’ he said.
‘What do you think about when you – you know,’ she said.
He looked at her blankly.
‘You know. When you’re producing the stuff.’
‘Ah. I think of your toenails.’
She reached out to slap him, just missing. ‘Seriously, Meow, what do you think about?’
Meow – his new nickname.
Sobriety had undeniably turned him into a sourpuss. He moped around all day, glugging back-to-back cups of strong tea and trying to occupy his mind with books (he was on D. H. Lawrence at the moment and it was rotten rubbish). The nights were the hardest. Bettina and Étienne continued to drink, and why shouldn’t they? He’d sit with a script on his lap, moodily watching them larking around at the piano, singing songs with the lyrics dirtied up – he so used to enjoy a brandy while going over new scripts, the ritual of it, the crisp paper in his hands, the fire crackling, the brandy warming his belly. When Bettina troubled herself to speak to him he gave caustic replies. ‘Meow,’ Bettina said one time. She giggled to herself. ‘You know, I think I shall start to call you Bartholomeow. Meow for short.’ Bart fixed her with a filthy look. Returned to his script. Bastards. Fucking nitwits and bastards.
‘I don’t think about anything,’ he said now. ‘I have a few pictures that I like to look at.’ He had a whole book – wellworn, of course – full of photographs of various men sodomising each other. He kept it inside the locked wooden box alongside all his letters and drawings from Étienne.
‘Oooh. Nudey piccies? Can you show them to me?’
‘Never in a million years.’
‘Do they depict buggery?’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘Does it hurt? Buggery?’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘It must get awfully messy. Have you ever had an accident? You know—’
‘Why do you assume that I’m the buggeree?’
Étienne came into the room barefoot, wearing Bettina’s red satin dressing gown. ‘Pourquoi?’ he said, gesturing at her legs.
‘Keeps the little swimmers in the pool,’ she said. Then:
‘Etts? Are you the buggerer or the buggeree?’
‘Don’t tell her,’ said Bart.
Étienne smiled at him, dimples like speech marks. ‘Buggerer.’
‘Lies!’ said Bart.
‘We’re going to have to behave ourselves once the little one comes along,’ said Bettina, reaching for her cigarettes on the bedside table, her legs swaying heavily in the air. ‘No more cursing, no more naughty talk. You two will have to keep your hands to yourselves.’
‘That’s if he even sticks around,’ said Bart.
Étienne was in the midst of an existential crisis. That’s what he called it anyway. He didn’t understand what his place could be within the forthcoming family. ‘Who am I to this child? Why is the French artist tagging along always with this young couple? What does this French artist have to do with booties and cribs?’ And of course, he missed his garret. He missed Paris. His whoring too, probably. He had his own studio here, in the unused conservatory, but found it too sterile. ‘Stop being such a cliché,’ Bart would say to him. ‘If you’re truly an artist it doesn’t matter where you go to create art. You are in love with a romantic fallacy.’
‘I am in love with you, that is the problem,’ he’d shoot back.
Étienne stayed in one of the guest bedrooms two doors down from Bart’s and Bettina’s quarters (they had their own bedrooms, connected by a door). Bart and Étienne were constantly in and out of each other’s beds. Some nights, usually after smoking hashish, Étienne grew paranoid, cocking his head at imagined footsteps outside the door. He was convinced that Humphrey the butler was spying on them. ‘He thinks that we are living together as a ménage à trois, he is trying to catch us out.’ He talked of installing trip wires outside his door. He hated all this sneaking around. He hated the way Humphrey looked at him. He hated Humphrey. He hated himself for hating Humphrey – he’d of course entered Bart’s household bloated with ideals: he would befriend the servants and show them many kindnesses and treat them as equals, blah blah blah, but what the little twerp didn’t anticipate was that the servants didn’t want to be his friend. ‘They are people who want my money,’ Bart told him, ‘and I am a person who wants their service. It’s a simple transaction. We could all die tomorrow, me, you and Betts, and they wouldn’t shed a single tear.’
‘Ettie’s not going anywhere,’ said Bettina, now. ‘Who else is going to teach little junior about class oppression?’
‘Exactly,’ said Bart. ‘Who else is going to install an inescapable sense of guilt in our bundle of joy?’
‘Very well, very well,’ said Étienne, tired-smiling. ‘Uncle Ettie will stay.’
And then, quite suddenly, he was gone. Gone. A letter on his pillow: ‘I am sorry. My love for you is unchanged but I cannot do this and I must return to Paris. Tell Bettina I am sorry.’ Bart drove his car to the station, hoping to catch him, to talk him out of it. Étienne was not at the station. Nobody was at the station. Bart cried with his chin on the steering wheel. He cried until his whole body ached. He cried himself raw.
He drove back home, took a bottle of whisky from the drinks cabinet, went upstairs to his bed, pulled the covers over his head and drank the whole bottle from under his blanketed fort. He came to ten hours later. He’d wet the bed and vomited on the pillow. It was caught up in the hair behind his ear. He stripped and put on a pair of pyjama bottoms. He could hear Bettina next door, listening to a Mistinguett record. He shoved the door open, snatched the gramophone needle away with a screech, ripped the record out and snapped it over his knee. ‘No French music in this house ever again!’
Bettina was on the bed, reading a novel. She looked at him, unfazed. ‘You’re going to replace that record,’ she said.
He dropped the pieces on the floor and sank into the armchair with his head in his hands.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Have you and Etts been rowing again?’
He shook his head.
‘Well? What’s the matter?’
‘He’s left me.’
‘What? No. Of course he hasn’t.’
A nod.
‘Really? For sure?’
Another nod.
‘Oh, sweetheart.’ She wrapped him up in her arms. ‘What did he do a silly thing like that for?’ He felt her fingers touch his sick-dampened hair and dart away. But she didn’t let go of him, and that was a great kindness.
He slept in her bed that night (and for many nights after). The next morning he accompanied her to the doctor for a check-up as she hadn’t started her monthlies on schedule, was a whole week late, in fact – which might mean nothing, she explained, because it’d happened before; women’s reproductive organs were wilful and peculiar. He sat on the other side of the white curtain, staring unseeing at a framed painting of a fruit bowl, his stomach gurgling with hunger. He heard Bettina gasp – a lubricated finger rudely poking and sliding. He imagined the doctor pulling out a bunch of flowers with a flourish. Ta-da! The fruit bowl blurred, its red apples and green grapes blobbing and smearing. Nothing would be funny ever again.
The doctor came out from behind the curtain to wash his hands. He sat at his desk, scribbling something onto his notepad. Bettina emerged and he signalled for her to sit with a swish of his pen.
‘Well,’ said the doctor, looking up finally. ‘It looks like congratulations are in order. You’re expecting.’
Bettina clutched his hand.
‘What wonderful news,’ said Bart, knowing that it was indeed wonderful news, in an objective sort of way.
Nothing would be truly wonderful ever again.
The man was neither ugly nor attractive. On a scale of one to ten, with one being hideous and ten being gorgeous, he was a solid five. Not that it mattered – his head might as well be a potato on a stick. He was wearing a peaked cap atop a dandruff-dotted mop of curly brown hair. Tweed waistcoat over a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up. His age – somewhere between thirty and forty. Not that it mattered. He smelled strongly of pipe tobacco and pastry. His hands were clean.
Bart pushed him against the tree and started grappling with his trouser buttons. A long, thin cock bounced out, impossibly smooth, almost virginal-looking, like it’d never been touched, like it’d only just been created, there, in the man’s underpants, seconds ago, by a misguided angel.
Bart dropped to his knees, his shin knocking a gnarled tree root, and took the thing in his mouth. It tasted of mushrooms. The man grabbed his hair, bunching it up in his hands, tugging it. Étienne used to do that. He grabbed the man’s hips and pushed his head forward, relaxing his throat. His eyes started watering – the world became a blur. The man made a sound like a bull ready to charge.
And then.
And then.
Voices. Dry leaves crackling, twigs snapping. A torchlight skimming the ground nearby.
‘Run,’ said the man.
Bart groped for his hat and lurched away with a spool of saliva hanging off his chin.
A man’s yell: ‘Oi! Stop right there!’
But Bart was already running. His shoes landed in earthy dips hidden by a dry leaf carpet, his toes knocked against jutting roots and stones, his shins ripped through snares of low-lying bramble, yet miraculously he was still running, his hat clutched in one hand, the other stretched out ahead to ward off branches. He dodged the thin black trees that rose up suddenly from out of the fuzzy darkness, smacking his elbow or shoulder on them before bouncing away, still miraculously running, roaring bloody drunk, the air cold-burning his throat, mouth fixed in a grimace. The sound of his feet crashing through the undergrowth was the loudest thing in the world. He felt like an animal, a skunk or an otter, a wild, dumb thing.
He came out of the trees and saw the wooden sign with opening and closing times on it (a lavender handkerchief wrapped around the post). Beyond this – the gate. He ran for it, not daring to glance behind, a nerve-tickle between his shoulder blades. He reached the gate and threw his hat over. He could hear feet pounding turf close behind. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. He launched himself up the gate using the bars as footholds, his body no longer his body, his thoughts flying bat-like out of his skull, and as he swung his leg over the top, he finally dared to look at the approaching man.
The man. Not a copper or a park warden. Mushroom Cock.
As he dropped down the outer side of the gate the man started climbing, slowly, confidently, and was soon dropping down beside him, one hand on his cap to keep it on. Bart started jogging towards his car. The man followed.
‘It’s all right, I knocked him out,’ said the man in a northern accent, running to keep up with him. ‘Look.’ He held out his hand. His knuckle was grazed and bloody. A tiny scrap of skin was sticking up.
‘Who was he?’
‘The parky.’
Bart stuffed his hands in his pockets and sped up.
‘Close call though, weren’t it?’
Bart nodded curtly. He glanced around; the street was empty. He reached his car and opened the door.
The man grabbed his arm. ‘Give us a lift home, eh?’
Bart ripped his arm away and got in the car, slamming the door. The man thumped the window with his palm. Bart started the engine and drove away, glancing at the rear-view mirror – the man was in the road, shouting and waving his cap around. Lunatic. Fucking lunatic. He drove in a frenzy, going around corners too fast and almost crashing into a hedgerow. He didn’t have his lights on. He’d forgotten to put his lights on. He parked up in a lay-by, closed his eyes and waited until his breathing was back to normal.
I’m an arse, he thought, driving away. He drove past St James’s Theatre, seeing the large Major Barbara poster with his face all over it. He pointed at it. ‘You, sir, are an arse.’
Humphrey came rushing to meet him in the hall. He had shoe polish on his hands. ‘Good evening, sir. It’s quite late.’ Humphrey had watery eyes, perpetually so, which glistened like raw egg whites. Bart and Bettina called him The Crying Butler behind his back and concocted stories about his life which accounted for such emotional fragility, the latest of which was that he was a virgin with a romantic history of unrequited love and brutal rejections, and all he wanted was someone to hold him.
‘Are you my father now?’
‘No, sir, I was merely making an observation.’
‘Please don’t.’ Bart headed up the stairs. He paused halfway up and looked around to find Humphrey still there, an imposing, neat figure in the large hall, those wet wobbly eyes turned up to him. ‘Humphrey?’
‘Sir?’
‘I want you to do something for me.’
‘Sir?’
‘I want you to start calling me Arse. That is my new name from now on. Arse.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Humphrey.
‘That was an order.’
‘There is nothing in my contract that stipulates that I must lower myself to such base terms. You’re drunk. Sir.’
Bart waved his hand. ‘Fine. You’re fired.’
He tripped up the last step and landed with the whisky bottle between his body and the carpet runner.
Bettina was in her bed, reading a novel by lamplight.
‘Your arse of a husband is home,’ he said, bowing deeply.
She lowered her book. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I’ve been taking the night air, darling.’ He shrugged off his coat and flopped onto the bed bellyfirst. ‘Don’t mind me. I’ll be asleep shortly.’
She pulled his shoes off. ‘Roll over,’ she said, pushing at his waist. He rolled onto his back. She undid his belt and his buttons and pulled down his trousers. ‘There’s mud on the knees.’
‘I was praying. In the garden.’
‘Oh?’ She pulled his socks off and started unbuttoning his shirt. ‘What were you praying for?’
‘For a fixed heart.’
‘Oh, Bart.’ She climbed onto the bed next to him and struggled with his shirt sleeves, rolling him this way and that. ‘I don’t think God listens to the prayers of drunks.’
Bart lifted his arm as she pulled his shirt. ‘Or homosexuals.’
He was down to his underpants and vest. She made him move up the bed till his head was on a pillow. ‘Turn onto your side. I’m going to get you a sick bowl.’ She pulled the bottle out of his hand. ‘This is going in the bin. Don’t you dare get another.’
He called her just as she was nearly out of the door.
‘What?’
He raised his head off the pillow and tried to focus on her face. ‘While you’re down there, tell Humphrey he’s not really fired, will you? Tell him I’m sorry.’
‘What have you done, Meow?’
He dropped his head back onto the pillow. ‘Nothing. Nothing. Was just being a bit of an arse.’