Guy
He had met Helen at his London publishing house, a four-storey terrace in Bloomsbury whose once-grand rooms had been cut into small, high-ceilinged offices filled, stacked, encrusted with books and piles of ribbon-tied manuscripts. The sort of place where it was possible from time to time to glimpse a giant of literature slipping in to discuss proofs or to wheedle for an advance. There himself to go through the contract for Magazine Husbands. Helen was amongst the group of editors and subs who invited him to join them for a drink at the close of business. They went home together that night, that’s how immediate it was; he, the young talent, tall, frail, hollow-chested, smoking furiously, she, at twenty-four, also an ex-pat, precise, pretty, embarrassed that her smile displayed too much of her top teeth and gums, articulate, very much of her time, which is to say pushing the boundaries of what was possible for a woman in England in 1972. She told him later that she hadn’t thought she’d ever sleep with an Australian man again. She’d thought, these were her words, this was the way she spoke, this was why he fell in love with her, she thought she was beyond Australian men with their attitude to alcohol, their incomprehensible embrace of the ordinary in the face of the marvellous.
He’d been in the city for almost two years by then, scraping by on the royalties from The Brother and occasional commissions for book reviews, living on the third floor of a shared house in Hammersmith; not a whit less unhappy or isolated than he’d been when he quit university and took up residence in a converted shed on a farm owned by a group of early hippies out at Mangrove Mountain, where his first novel had come into being. He’d flown to London on the back of it, to construct a reputation in a place where it mattered. Disappointed in, amongst other things, the English girls, so sexy with their proper speech, their buttoned-up clothes, but failing always to deliver on the promise of their inflections, as if it was all veneer, that when those clothes came off they were exactly what you saw and nothing more, vulnerable, naked girls, who didn’t know quite what to do. Probably it was his own fault; he wasn’t naive about that. He didn’t know any better himself. Helen was different: We’re here to enjoy each other, she said, the word ‘here’ in this context meaning our very presence on earth. What happens in this bed, between us, she said, this is the important thing. With her he’d been prepared to allow for such a possibility without the customary aftermath of guilt and self-loathing, to enter into a space of joy with a lover as if, and here was the crux of it, as if it were a God-given right. The first time she took him in her mouth, in that pale room with its view over the street, wan winter sunlight plotting soft geometric patterns on the walls, she sliding down his belly to address his cock, doing it so delicately, so caringly, as if she loved it, his thing, the actual physical manifestation of it in her hand both so impossibly sexual and deeply disturbing at the same instant – her eyes on his, her lips and hands on him – he burst into tears, involuntarily, his body shaking, his cock shrivelling so that she stopped and asked what she’d done wrong, what was the matter, Wasn’t I doing it right? And he’d had to pull himself together and say, No, no, it’s not you, you’re doing it perfectly, it’s just no-one’s done that before, nobody has ever said I love you in that way, in the deepest part of me.
Of course he’d written about it. He wrote about everything. His life and everyone he met had no function other than to be transformed into story. In went his childhood on the farm in western New South Wales; his taciturn father and long-suffering mother; in went, too, the hippies with their grandiose illusions about what they were doing on the land; in went the grievous years in the embrace of those oxymoronic sadists, the Christian Brothers, a time during which his misery achieved such heights he’d come to believe himself being tested by Jesus Himself, that He had chosen him, Guy, to take on His role in this time, that the pain was merely training for greater tests ahead.
No attempt to hide any of it.
The Brother charted the dissolution of a soldier returned from the Second World War, and, through him, his young wife; the two of them in their tiny slab-sided house amid the wheat fields of the Mallee in western Victoria. Along the way it illustrated how neatly the boys brought up by the Brothers fitted the fighting force required to defend Australia against the Japanese, but equally how poorly they’d been modelled for coming back into civilian life; noting the curious way that in the face of repression and unalloyed violence some children turn on themselves, making themselves the problem, while others will take it as a sign that they are marked out as chosen. Guy’s characters were damaged people placed in a damaged landscape; both described with painful clarity; the paucity of the world beyond the walls of the little worker’s cottage emphasising the claustrophobia within it; the words they said to each other as sparse as the treeless fields. The reviewers hailed him as ‘a new voice’.
Those first two books came easily. It was only later that he realised what gifts they’d been and why other writers complained so bitterly about the work. In those years the torment had been elsewhere and the writing had been the special place, the one where all other feelings were subordinate to the process, where for hours at a time he could escape. Away from his desk he’d suffered from a sense of dislocation, a loathing for everyone and their noisome striving after the false gods of the appearances. It might be that he had escaped the Brothers, but the language of the church remained his own, he was rooted in its structures, not simply because he had been brought up to it but also because of the beauty of its cadences, its ecclesiastical sonorities.
Helen changed everything. Bathed in her love, emboldened by his own passion, he’d been free, at least for a time, from the overwhelming need to repel or destroy anyone who came near. For a few days during that London winter he even felt something so extraordinary, so unparalleled, inconsistent and transient, as simple happiness. Walking through St James’s Park, passing under the bare branches of the tall limes, he thought himself, for the first time he could recall, both happy and simultaneously aware of it. Until then there had only been the idea of happiness, most often seen through a veil of sorrow; happiness, by definition, could only exist as a kind of retrospective pleasure, as a nostalgic re-imagining of what had occurred. This, he had believed, was the correct way to look at it: people who were happy in the moment were shallow, lacking in seriousness and the capacity for deeper feeling. Truth and beauty could only be mediated through pain. Yet there he was, this woman on his arm, the sloping light cutting through the trees, and it was so simple, so banal and yet more real than anything he’d ever imagined.
Aldous had been in almost constant contact since the public meeting. Guy had made the mistake of confessing the doubts which had come to plague him. Now Bain was calling every other day, urging him to commit.
‘Don’t take it to heart,’ he said. ‘Town Hall meetings are the hardest thing you can do, especially in your home town. And you did well. Down here in Canberra it’s different, you’ll see, there’s a level of separation between decisions and individual consequence.’
‘Isn’t that what everyone complains about?’ he said.
‘Undoubtedly. But nothing would get done if it was all personal, would it? It’s why we have different levels of government, and a Senate. Well, not in Queensland of course, but that’s an aberration. Queensland’s always an aberration. You can’t let emotion rule how you act. We all have doubts, Guy, it’s the nature of the beast. But rest assured, we need your sort on the team. We want you on board.’
To reinforce this he arranged a brief ‘hello’ with the Opposition Leader at a house in Brisbane. Picked him up from the New Farm apartment and delivered him in his com-car to this great spreading Queenslander stepped onto a hill in Hamilton. Security men waiting on the street to meet them, entering Bain’s credentials on an iPad. No mention of whose house it was. Some friend of the Party’s. An assistant appeared to guide them into a glass-sided lift that raised them to a beautifully restored, painting-rich lobby, and from there to the much landscaped backyard with its swimming pool, its cut sandstone blocks and exquisite hardwood lattices, succulents in tall square pots. Views towards the port and the new high-rise apartments along the river. Lonergan over by the rail in a pale blue polo shirt and shortish shorts, pacing, talking on a mobile, waving them to sit beneath the wide white sail, another one of these small men of extraordinary force, begging the question of correlations between ambition and height; never mind Caesar’s concerns about thin men, if it’s ambition you’re hoping to avoid you’d be more advised to surround yourself with tall blokes. Lonergan, all wiry intensity, even at a distance a burning ego in boat shoes. A former lawyer of course, as they all seemed to be.
They sat on strikingly uncomfortable wooden chairs, long cold drinks gathering dew on the timber. Not a woman in sight, although officially there was a wife, somewhere. What Lamprey imagined, predictably – it was the pool that provoked it, but also the man’s tough-guy demeanour, the hair on his arms and legs and in the V-neck of his shirt – were night-time scenes of drunken revelry, a sixties porn party.
Lonergan coming straight to the point, ‘Aldous, here, speaks highly of you,’ he said.
‘Aldous is too kind,’ Guy replied.
‘Kindness be damned,’ Lonergan said. ‘What we’re after is results and Aldous thinks you can deliver. The Senate’s the thing. We need to stop these micro-parties messing with our agenda. We have the policies – reform the public’s hungry for. But if I can’t get the Senate I’ll be just as fucked as the last lot. I need candidates who can own the debate. That’s why he’s got me talking to you.’
All his life Guy had been writing about status and power in one or another of their manifestations, be it between men and women, adults and children or the behaviour of politicians. Here, now, directly across the table from him, for the first time, was the real thing. He couldn’t have been more surprised. He wanted to be cynical and superior, to take notes and avoid being seduced, but his defences were no match for the strength of the man. Mayska had been a piece of work, radiating self-confidence, accustomed to command, but his power, undeniable and fearsome though it was, somehow remained vested in what he had surrounded himself by, in his accumulated wealth. Here, in Lonergan, was, at last, the pure essence of the thing, an individual who wasn’t interested in anything as petty as who might like or dislike him, only in his personal agenda and how others might serve its aims. A man gathering it all towards him, raw, coarse, deeply attractive. He’d never encountered such singularity; it was exhilarating and, simultaneously, chilling. The way the man’s attention swung onto him with such ferocity, pinning him to the hardwood chair, focusing for a moment before turning to the next thing.
On television and radio his force was diminished. Lonergan had a tendency to pause after a question, as if he was giving the answer due thought, or perhaps, more unkindly, winding through the recently stored talking points for the appropriate sound bite. He had a weakness for agricultural metaphors: pruning to increase growth, the cut worm forgives the plough; or, a favourite: one year of seeding, seven years of grief, as if the country was a garden and he, already, its keeper. In person there was none of this. He was quicker, more relaxed, humorous, well informed.
‘Aldous tells me you think we should be doing more about climate change,’ he said.
Lamprey glancing at Bain.
‘No point in throwing daggers at him,’ Lonergan said with a flicker of a smile. ‘It’s my job to know what people think. It’s his job to tell me.’
Guy tried to brush it off. ‘My remarks were taken out of context. Aldous and I were talking with a mutual friend … I suggested he was ignoring the dangers we face.’
‘And yet our mutual friend is, as I understand it, working hard on just this problem. Not because he’s an altruist. Out of his own interest.’ Sitting back in his chair, legs spread. ‘The other side like to present us as denialists,’ he said. ‘They call us ignorant. But they’re the ones who’ve got the wrong end of the stick. This whole thing isn’t about climate. It’s about energy. About who has it and who hasn’t. I’m a realist. At the same time it’s more about politics than science. What the other side seem unable to recognise is that, right this minute, we are engaged in a race. It’s a race between being destroyed by the unexpected consequences of our technologies and our capacity to invent new ones that’ll let us create and distribute energy world-wide without killing us all. One will come out of the other. If we win. But the driving force has to be the market. The market is what has got us this far. Not top-down regulation. You can’t regulate us out of where we are. We have to stay the course. Push through.’ Speaking in short sentences but without pause. No requirement to think about it, all that already done. The real Lonergan revealed.
‘What if the market doesn’t deliver?’ Guy asked.
‘We’re fucked then, aren’t we?’ Lonergan said, laughing dismally. ‘But seriously, do you think you can put the genie back in the bottle? That you can stop people reaching out for energy now they’ve seen what it can do? All those billions in Africa and India? In fucking China? Really? Just because you put up a moral argument? No fucking way. Try it and we’ll have global war like nothing we’ve ever seen. Have a look at the environment after that …
‘Listen, we might have war anyway, but if we let the market run its course we’ll at least have a chance.’
Guy having little or no sense of the truth of what Lonergan was saying, only that, sitting there, sweltering in his best suit, no arguments rose against it. The man’s certainty, his drive, the quickness of his brain was all-encompassing, seductive.
‘I wouldn’t have taken this as your field of interest, Guy,’ Lonergan said.
‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘I’m a writer. But I’ve been working in the Arts sector for a couple of decades.’
‘That’s good. And are you happy about what we’re doing there?’
Guy gave a self-deprecating smile, allowed himself what he thought was a smidgin of dissent: ‘I’d have to say I’m going to find further cuts to their budget hard to defend.’
Lonergan took a sip from his drink. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘we won’t be giving you Arts, will we?’
Guy nonplussed, stumbling for a comeback.
Lonergan laughed, delighted. ‘Listen, Guy,’ he said. ‘How you sell your ideas is up to you, as long as they tie in with policy. As long as you don’t embarrass me or the Party in the process. But don’t worry we’ll school you, starting immediately. We’ll send you off on a training course. Put you through the ringer. Ask you every type of question you’re ever going to encounter. Beat the life out of you. You’ll have all the help you could need.’
Looking to his left, out at the river. ‘Is there anything else?’ he said. Standing, offering his hand. The meeting over. Ten minutes. ‘Good to have you on board.’
Helen was not amused, even when he made light of his failings in the face of power. Shaking her head in disgust.
‘I don’t understand how you can get involved with these people,’ she said. ‘Apart from any other considerations you’re not cut out for this, Guy, you’re too sensitive. That’s why you write. They’ll eat you alive. They won’t even bother to spit out the bones.’
They were at breakfast, or, rather, she was at breakfast. He’d already been up for several hours. He was talking to Bain on the phone when she emerged from her rooms, her bald head bare, a shawl draped around her shoulders. Carrying her own griefs and concerns. Gliding into the kitchen to consume some herbal concoction.
‘Who was that?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Aldous.’
‘The oleaginous one?’ she said. ‘Is he still at you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there coffee?’
‘I’ll make a fresh pot.’
‘I thought you’d told him no.’
‘Maybe I need to do this,’ he said. ‘Maybe it will be good for me, get me out of this rut.’
He unscrewed the percolator and tapped the used grounds into the bin under the sink. Which was when she said the thing about being eaten alive. As if she could see directly through him, past his self-deprecation to the ambition that had been quickened within. Putting him in his place. A view from a more spiritual plane. One to which her disease gave her special access.
He washed the stainless steel under the tap, flushing out the ashtray smell of old coffee.
‘Unexpected consequences my arse,’ she said. ‘These guys have known what they were doing for decades and have kept doing it, lying to our faces. If you can’t see that there’s no point in arguing with you. I don’t have the energy. It’s your choice.’
Spooning fresh grounds into the little cup. Waiting for it. Whatever it was going to be.
‘But understand this: I won’t be involved. I will not be your political consort. I don’t even know if that’s the right word; is it men who are consorts? Whatever. I don’t want to associate with these men and their self-serving philosophies. It is all men isn’t it? You can make your decisions about your life but not mine. Is that clear?’
‘The coffee’s on,’ he said, turning to go. There being only so much self-contained ethereal sermonising a man can take before lunch.
‘You’re not worried about your past?’ she said to his back, bringing him around. ‘What they might dig up?’
‘I’ve never hidden who I am.’
‘Still.’ That calm stare of hers. ‘It’s one thing to do that as a writer, when you’re in control of the material. It’s another thing when a journalist stirs around in it trying to find scandal.’
‘This isn’t America.’
‘It’s getting more like it every day,’ she said.
‘It’s the least of my worries.’
They’d moved in together, into a one-bedroom basement flat, the ground floor of a terrace in Shepherd’s Bush. She went to work in the mornings, leaving him there, alone, trying to find his way into the new manuscript.
All through the editing process of Magazine Husbands he’d been desperate to start the new work, but now that he had the time and space the ideas refused to animate, the characters remained trite, the sentences fell dead on the page. Frustrated that something which had been so simple was now so hard he took to waiting for her return, pacing the small flat, looking out through rain-spotted windows at the drab back garden. Desperate for release. When she did arrive, he found fault. Her constant cleaning and tidying was symptomatic of a bourgeois sensibility; her chatter about her days, evidence of a scattered mind; her deliberations over clothes, a demonstration of shallowness. He made the mistake of reading to her whatever it was he’d bashed out so torturously during the day. She, in turn, was foolish enough to make comments about it, as if, because she’d studied English Literature, or was some junior assistant editor at a publishing house, she had the right or ability or qualifications to comment sensibly on what he’d produced.
The only thing he wanted from her was total immersion in the physical, he in her body, she in his. He could hardly wait for her to be in the door before he began to undress her. The difficulty was that his former patterns had begun to reassert themselves. When the immediate passion was spent it was replaced by that familiar sense of disgust; at himself, at her, at the act. He’d allowed himself to believe that she had banished whatever forces had previously given rise to this pathology, but in the small dark flat, the more he became accustomed to her, cognisant of her cycles, the intimate physicality of another, the less he could bear to be in the same room, never mind bed, once they were done. He made an excuse to get up, to get a cigarette, say he had to write something, go elsewhere. Her parts, so stimulating to him when he was aroused, now repulsed him; their wetness, their scent, their cloying femininity. He shut himself in the bathroom and washed himself in the sink, covering the sound with the noise of the flushing toilet.
Husbands was well received. Foreign rights were sold, both in America and for translation. There was talk of a film. Requests to speak at festivals arrived, taking the heat out of the struggle with the new book. An invitation to Venice. He found a way to go by himself, but clumsily, managing to tell Helen about it only a few days before he was to depart, making it sound as if it had slipped his mind, as if the journey would be a nuisance, something that cut into his work schedule, making out he hadn’t known how much she would want to go with him to that fabled city, excusing himself with a lame story about thinking she wouldn’t be able to take time off. Resentful of being put in that position. As if Helen was the problem.
The city was packed. It was spring holidays and barely possible to move in the alleyways. To get on the Vaporetto one had to push, like Japanese in their subways. In an attempt to foster fellow-feeling the writers were housed together in a pension hidden within the labyrinth of the Dorsoduro. The place was less than Guy had hoped for – the room grubby, the shower and toilet down a hallway, the former a pathetic dribble, the latter a smelly latrine whose floor sloped – the whole building sinking into a canal.
Dinner that night was in the courtyard, at one long table, all the significant literary figures gathered at the opposite end. He wondered if their rooms were better than his own. Nobody, it seemed, aware of who he was, or particularly interested in finding out. The abundant wine leading to the kind of raucousness only writers are capable of. Exhausted after the broken night on the train he went up to his room, only to discover it overlooked the restaurant. He lay on the sagging bed, tormented by drunken renditions of funiculi, funicula rising from below, wronged at every turn.
Hardly had he slept than he was awake again, grey light seeping in the window. Unwilling to be insulted further he dressed and went out, finding the city transformed; the Fondamente all but deserted, Giudecca lying mistily across oily water, a tug-boat passing in the channel. No sign, yet, of the sun. Bent old women in grey sack dresses, characters out of Brueghel, swept the squares with brooms made from bound twigs, gathering litter into carts. Discarded gondolas held conference in narrow canals, tied up to heavy rings rusted into the stone. When the sun did rise it came from behind San Giorgio, announcing its arrival with a great orange glow across a watery sky, the colours picked up by the troubled surface of the lagoon.
In the Piazza San Marco he was, mysteriously, extraordinarily, alone, just him, the pigeons, the stacks of café chairs tied up along the cloisters and a young man in a leather bomber jacket looking up at the griffin perched atop a single tall pillar near the ferry dock. He was an American from the haircut, all but shaved around the neck and sides but long on the top, a blond lock fallen across his forehead.
‘You’re Guy Lamprey, aren’t you?’ he said, extending a hand. ‘Edward Greave. We’re both of us staying in the same dump, I think.’ Smiling broadly, as if it was impossible anyone could take anything other than pleasure in their meeting. Something familiar about him that Guy couldn’t locate. He was, he explained, an historian, from a mid-western university, in Europe on a Guggenheim, doing research for a book on the mercantile practices of the sixteenth-century city states. He spoke educated Eastern American English, a pleasant accent in itself, redolent of the promise of that country, punctuating his sentences with an occasional toss of the head, a slightly disconcerting tic, akin to the sort of movement you’d make as a way of giving directions. He was to spend the day visiting significant buildings.
‘You should come along,’ he said.
Guy had never been anywhere. He’d made it to Sydney from western New South Wales and had caught a plane from there to London where he’d found a sad little room to inhabit. A journey large enough in itself. An exploration of the bookshops, libraries and museums of that city had been all he’d managed until he met Helen. With her he’d visited Paris for a weekend, been to Bath and Edinburgh.
‘I love your work, by the way,’ Edward said. ‘I’ve not read your latest but the first one was terrific. Bracing.’
He was a natural guide, enthusiastic, informed, fluent in Italian, granted entrance through dark-timbered gates to courtyards and villas, the ancient homes of the Medici. In the late afternoon they caught the ferry to Cannaregio to visit a church where they might hear monks perform a piece by Palestrina, not a composer Guy was familiar with. The church had been built by some Doge or other in penance for escaping the plague, or being immensely wealthy, or something else entirely – by that time he wasn’t paying attention. He harboured a barely contained horror of churches, no matter the sect, having in fact sworn to himself that once free from the Christian Brothers he would never again darken their doors, naive enough in his youth to believe it might be so easy to shuck off their yoke.
The building’s interior was much as he’d expected, fairly grim, although in this case even more so from being constructed of a dark stone that absorbed what small light entered through a bank of high windows. He was, however, unprepared for the beauty of the music; a single voice announcing its beginning, picked up by others, built upon, giving rise to harmonic resonances which filled the whole church, transforming it into another instrument, playing its different parts; the sound separating and coming back together, adding to itself, reverberating, carrying the notes forward and up in a series of ever-expanding steps. Caught by the purity of the moment he thought of Helen for the first time that day, alone in their flat in London, and was pierced by a deep sense of regret that she couldn’t be there with him to hear this.
Edward proposed sharing a room. Anything, he said, would be better than where they were staying. When Guy agreed he found an attic overlooking the Fondamente itself. Sleep, however, was not to be, at least that first night. When they were at last inside, the door closed behind them, Ed produced a brass snuff box containing a nut of dark hashish.
‘The very best Turkish gold,’ he said. ‘Purchased from a man I know in Florence.’
Guy was a very occasional smoker, nervous of the places his mind went under the influence of this drug, both the intensity of feeling and the inane self-analysis that it provoked, the interminable circular thought about thought, but succumbed, if only to please Edward, who’d sought so hard to please him. He took a long pull and held the musty smoke in his lungs, feeling the drug’s warm glow spread through his body, expanding out into the pores of his skin, as if awareness of the moment could be a force in itself, one with the capacity to dissolve etheric barriers which, all unbeknownst to himself, he had been hungering to traverse. Ed taking the joint back and drawing on it himself, his dark glasses gone, those clear eyes – a little close together, as if he were staring intensely into the distance – focused now on Guy; here, at last, the resemblance. Edward had the same pale skin, the same high forehead and the ever-so-slightly lopsided mouth as the boy, Simpson, for whom he’d nurtured a terrible crush that first term at boarding school in Sydney, when he was all of twelve. Could it really be so, that all attraction was based on barely remembered affinities from childhood? Wondering this as Edward leant forward to take his, Guy’s, face in his hands and kiss him full on the mouth, kissing Guy, and Guy letting him, Guy responding as if such a thing were the natural corollary of this man’s company, of being there in Venice with all its libertine history spooling behind him, as if, when Ed slipped down the length of his body, undoing his belt and the button at the top of his trousers, it was a natural extension of the day.
If it hadn’t been for the hash he’d never have allowed it, but what the drug gave him was simply licence to do what he wanted to do anyway. He’d never thought himself capable of such acts, of holding another man’s cock in his hands, so different from his own and yet so much the same, so fascinating and erotic, this uncircumcised, squat thing, nestled in its small blond forest; Edward almost hairless on his body except there, very neat, as if he’d been modelled on Greek statues, his beauty encouraging Guy to an anthropological curiosity, noting that far from being repelled he was aroused. Strange revelations indeed. If self-knowledge was the goal then clearly he had been blind to avenues of learning about his own appetites.
Later, lying together on one of the single beds, he admitted that he’d never done this before, even during those years at boarding school when he had craved human contact. ‘I was too fucked up for that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t even touch myself without Jesus having something to say about it.’
‘Well then, we have a bit to make up for, don’t we?’ Ed said.
Away from London Guy could see that his frustration with Helen had been as much a reaction to his struggle with the novel as with her. Edward presented the perfect resolution to that problem. He allowed Guy to see a man as a woman might, however briefly. Helen would, he thought, understand this, if not forgive it. Edward would be the model for Sheldon, his protagonist in the new work, not Edward the person, but Edward’s physical manifestation, standing at the tiny sink, shaving, the ends of the small hotel towel barely meeting across his thigh, emphasising the beginnings of a portliness that would no doubt come upon him in middle age; or, again, as he sat naked in the armchair reading, his legs splayed, his cock and balls resting at their apex, such a small part of the whole and yet so significant. It was not that he’d discovered (so late) that he was homosexual, a suggestion as ludicrous as insisting, now, that he was rigorously heterosexual, it was more that he was, that they were – that man in his armchair casually adjusting his tackle – animals, more polymorphically perverse than he’d previously understood, subject first and foremost to their bodies, regardless of how much they might like to see themselves otherwise. Even more interesting was the man’s self-satisfaction, his ease with his body and the pleasure it gave him.
They went to each other’s sessions. Edward was a skilled performer, bringing history to life, seducing audiences with story. After one of his talks Guy went to congratulate him. Ed, radiant with attention, made to take his hand. For one awful moment Guy thought he might try to kiss him. He pulled away sharply, couldn’t help himself, never mind the look of dismay on Ed’s face. The shame about what they were doing together might have been subsumed, even absent, in the privacy of their room, but it was intolerable to consider in public.
He made a call to Helen on the hotel’s phone, sequestered in its own small box in the lobby. Connection gained through various operators in Italy and London, a process not without its own complications. It had been four days. Helen pleased to hear from him. Embarrassingly so. He had not been certain she would be.
She was alone in the flat. She said she had tried to call the hotel a couple of times. He had to explain why he wasn’t there. She wanted him to give an account of everything, who he’d spoken to, how he was being received at the festival.
‘I was so worried,’ she said. ‘The way you left … I thought you might go there and find some other woman. I’ve hardly slept.’
‘You poor darling.’
‘You haven’t met another woman, have you?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t mind my asking, do you? I’m sorry. I’m stupid. It’s just I love you so much and I couldn’t bear it.’
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘I love you too.’
He looked at the old bakelite device on its pegboard, surrounded by scratched numbers and business cards advertising restaurants, tours, nightclubs. He was not often forced to lie, hadn’t had much use for the skill since leaving school and home. He could see no advantage, however, in even beginning to explain what had happened. It wasn’t of any significance, was little more than research; at worst, a passing indulgence.