Paris
To begin in Paris was to begin at the end. Paris had been his parents’ last jumping-off point. From here they could only land in England. England and stability and permanence after five years of traipsing—his father’s word, the old man loved collecting anglicisms … as a boy Troy could not be lost or bewildered, he was always “a dog at a fair”—traipsing around Europe in the last days of the ancien régime (how many ancien régimes could one continent have?) in the Edwardian haze. Along the way they had picked up a son (Vienna) and twin daughters (Paris).
Paris held more than enough to occupy the next generation. They shopped, they climbed the Eiffel Tower, they shopped, they drifted aimlessly around the Left Bank, they shopped, they paid lip service to the Louvre, and they shopped … while the previous generation made a pilgrimage. To Père Lachaise Cemetery … in search of Oscar Wilde.
All the way up the cobbled lane from the metro station, past seemingly countless tombs standing like abandoned sentry boxes, Rod complained about his feet.
“Suffer for your art,” Troy said.
“What art?”
“This.”
They had arrived at a vast monument in the Egyptian style, carved by Epstein, a god of some sort, floating or perhaps gliding … cock and balls flying free.
Rod looked baffled.
“Can you see any relevance to this?” he asked.
“Quite a lot, actually,” Troy replied. “He did write Salome.”
“Is that the best you can come up with?”
“And—”
“I thought Salome was Jewish not Egyptian. You know, Herods and things, not Pharaohs and things.”
“And … as I was saying … it may well reflect his rather odd way of spending his nights.”
“Good bloody grief.”
“OK. I give up. It has heaps of classical allusion, it has a knob, it has bollocks. What more would Oscar ask?”
“Don’t make me regret this any more than I already do, Freddie.”
“There’s nothing to regret.”
“I know you’ve got lots of friends who are … er …”
“Queer. The word you cannot utter is queer.”
“Alright … queer it is. No more euphemisms.”
“Queer is a euphemism.”
“If you say so. You have friends who are queer.”
“And some of my best friends are Jews.”
“Now you’re just taking the piss—stop it. All I meant was—”
“I know what you meant.”
“I meant I just don’t get it.”
“What’s to get?”
“The thing. The whole thing. The queer thing.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it does. For one thing, there’s a Commons vote on Homosexual Law Reform not long after we get back.”
“Well then, you know how to vote, don’t you.”
“I do?”
“Vote for Oscar. It’s fifty years too late, but vote for every queer who’s ever been sent down for hanky-panky in a public lavatory.”
Slowly descending the hill, after several silent minutes, Rod said, “If I could only understand why it has to be in public lavatories.”
Troy said nothing.
“Disgusting places at the best of times.”
Troy said nothing.
“Y’know … I’ve got my doubts about my PPS, Iain Stuart-Bell. Before the war we’d have just thought him a bit effeminate … now I have to ask myself if he might be one of those.”
Troy had met Iain many times. He didn’t have doubts. He was sure.
“Why don’t you try asking him,” he said.
“Because,” Rod replied, “I’d rather not know.”