Dead Romantic Read online

  But the weather was colder than on the previous occasions when he had dressed up in the costume. He would need an overcoat. That he had not investigated. He couldn’t wear his own; the effect of secrecy would be ruined. He opened the second suitcase.

  There was a duffel-coat in there, familiar, camel-coloured with rough string loops and wooden toggles. It was perfect, again inconspicuous, anonymous. And the hood could be useful, providing additional cover.

  But there were other objects in the case that were more moving. Into it his mother had thrown not just clothes, but also his father’s private possessions, the details, the props by which the son had identified the man. There was the shaving-kit, badger-hair brush and the slim-necked silver safety razor, at the top of which, with a twist of the handle, two doors opened to receive the new blade. There was the ivory-backed hairbrush, the round brown plastic tobacco- pouch, shaped like a discus. And there was the worn blue-plastic-covered spectacle case, which unpopped and clicked open to reveal his father’s glasses, still pinioned at the corner by a bit of fuse-wire in place of a missing screw, the temporary repair that had become permanent.

  He put the glasses to one side and dug deeper into the case. His hand felt a small square envelope whose contents were squashy. He drew it out to reveal the old-fashioned pinkish package of a Durex condom.

  It moved him strangely. First, he found it sexually arousing. But at the same time it bewildered him, with its implications about his parents’ relationship, raising again the incongruous idea of their having had a sex-life, of their making love, of the mystery of his own existence.

  And it made him the more determined to carry through his plan for the day.

  He had to be at Garrettway for a tutorial at ten o’clock that morning, so when he left the house, he wore his ordinary clothes and carried his father’s in a shapeless bag he had kept since school. His plan was to change identity in the gents’ lavatories beneath Brighton Station.

  There was no problem. The large tiled space was empty when he arrived. He put in a coin and entered one of the cubicles. But he felt sweaty and tense, and his fingers fumbled as he struggled with shirt buttons.

  He heard footsteps on the tiled floor, and froze. But there was only the swish of a man peeing and the footsteps receded.

  Forcing calmness on himself, he stripped off and started to put on his father’s clothes. As he did so, as he became engulfed in their familiar smell, his confidence grew. He was doing the right thing. He felt very together, his concentration suddenly good. He remembered to transfer the money from his own jacket to his father’s. He had drawn a hundred pounds out of his Post Office Savings Account. Surely that would be enough, even for a London prostitute. And if the act freed him of the millstone which had been around his neck for years, then it would be cheap at the price.

  Changed, and with his own clothes stowed in the bag, he sat for a moment on the lavatory seat to compose himself. A sudden panic hit him as he thought of his mother. What would she have said if she had known what he was planning?

  Breathing deeply, he mastered the fear. It had to be done.

  He took his father’s spectacle-case out of the overcoat pocket, removed the glasses and put them on. The graffiti-scrawled walls around him blurred, and that restored his confidence. It made him feel that people looking at him would receive the same indefinite impression, as though he had assumed a cloak of invisibility.

  Carefully flushing the lavatory to maintain an alibi for anybody who might be listening (there was no one), he opened the door and walked out.

  He used his normal voice when he bought his ticket, but the man behind the glass did not look at him. Nor did the girl in the bookshop from whom he bought a copy of the Daily Mirror. Nor did anyone else, as he walked through the barrier and caught the next train to Victoria.

  He walked around Soho for a long time, summoning up courage. He went into sex-shops, secure in his bespectacled invisibility, and in dank booths put 50ps in slots to see brief, blurred scenes of intercourse flicker against the white screens on the doors. He went into peep-shows, where further 50ps opened letter-box traps to reveal bored girls fingering their genitals to crackly music. It all had the desired effect, arousing him till he ached for relief. He grew more and more desperate. He had to do it. It would be all right. God, he needed it.

  In his perambulations, he had earmarked the one he was going to. Down a cross-alley off Wardour Street, beside the steel-meshed window of a Topless Bar, was a doorway whose bell-pushes offered ‘Mandy – First Floor’ and ‘Cleo – Second Floor – Walk Up.’ He decided that ‘Mandy’ was going to be the one.

  Just before three o’clock closing-time, he went into a pub and downed two large Scotches. He had eaten no lunch and they made him feel disembodied. But they also had the desired effect of making him care less, of convincing him that what he was about to do did not matter.

  One more visit to a peep-show restored the desperation of lust. Looking neither to left nor right, he strode along to ‘Mandy’s doorway. Without slowing down, he walked in.

  Inside, it was surprisingly quiet. His footsteps sounded heavily on the uncarpeted stairs, but he did not falter. He only stopped when he was on the landing.

  Here, incongruously, he was reminded of the Garrettway School of Languages. The natural proportions of the landing, like those of Garrettway’s hall, had been destroyed by partition walls. The boarded fire-doors were the same. Only the number of bars and padlock-rings showed this to be a venue of a different sort.

  A printed card, reading ‘Mandy’, was drawing-pinned to one of the doors. Too far committed now to stop, he banged against the dark-grey fireproofing.

  Simultaneous with his knocking, he heard the click of a latch turning. The door, still secured by a chain, opened about six inches, and through the space a wrinkled face under dyed red hair peered.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mandy?’ he asked, shocked by the thought that this might be what was on offer.

  ‘The young lady’s busy at the moment,’ said the maid. ‘Could you come back in ten minutes?’

  The door re-closed, and the latch snapped home.

  For a moment he stood on the landing, breathless. Then the clash of reality against his fantasy hit him.

  He ran down the stairs, hailed the first empty cab he saw, and told the driver to take him to Victoria.

  In the train back to Brighton, he sat mesmerised, careless whether anyone penetrated his disguise. He felt soiled, disgusting, as his mind pitilessly kept superimposing the wizened face with its dyed red locks over the pure image of Madeleine.

  Chapter 8

  ‘“The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind”,’ Madeleine quoted, using her fine reading voice for Paul’s benefit. ‘That’s how Childe Harold is described, and it was inevitable, given the kind of reputation the poet had, that Childe Harold should have been identified with Byron.’

  Paul nodded. He sat in his usual posture of tutorial discomfort, a copy of Byron’s Complete Works prudently open on his lap. After the turmoil of the last few days, he felt calmer. He was with Madeleine, and he knew that there could never be any other woman for him. He felt half-drugged, as ever, in her presence.

  ‘It’s very difficult for us now to imagine the impact of this poem when it first came out. People in 1812 were just not prepared for a character like Childe Harold. He was a new kind of hero, the first anti-hero, if you like. The first two Cantos made Byron famous overnight.’

  ‘What – just a poem?’

  ‘Ah, you say just a poem, but you have to remember there wasn’t any television in those days, no radio, no pop records. What Byron offered was all those things rolled into one. Something very new, a bit naughty, a bit shocking, but, above all, profoundly exciting. You can see that, can’t you?’

  Paul let out a grunt which he hoped implied that he could see it, but in fact, though almost everything else was capable of driving him into a frenzy of excitement, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage�
� left him cold. The memories of the books and videos he had seen excited him; at that moment the sight through thin wool of the depression of her brassière strap in Madeleine’s rounded shoulder excited him almost unbearably; but Byron didn’t seem to have the same magic.

  ‘You have read it, haven’t you?’ asked the owner of the brassière strap. ‘The first two Cantos, anyway?’

  ‘Oh yes. Most of it. Well, some of it.’

  ‘Even from just a bit of it you must have seen what an original character Byron had created. Here you have a man who has tried everything, indulged himself in every sensual exprience, a man who has “felt the fulness of satiety” . . . you do understand what ‘satiety’ means, do you Paul?’

  ‘Well, yes. More or less, I think. Not exactly,’ he admitted.

  ‘It means sort of fulness . . . overfulness, if you like. It means that Childe Harold had tried everything and still not found what it was that would satisfy him, and so he set off on this pilgrimage in search of new experience. He wanted anything new, anything that would stimulate him. To put it in modern terms, he was “living for kicks”.’

  She was rather taken aback by the blank expression that greeted this phrase. ‘I’m sorry. That’s probably a very sixties thing to say. What I mean was that Childe Harold was prepared to immerse himself in any experience, to live for the senses, to do anything, regardless of common sense or danger, even if it was self-destructive, so long as he thought it might revive his jaded palate. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. You mean – like glue-sniffing?’

  ‘Glue-sniffing?’

  ‘Well, people who sniff glue just do it for a fix, you know, indulging the senses. And nowadays I suppose Childe Harold would be into glue-sniffing, wouldn’t he?’

  An expression not unlike a wince traversed Madeleine’s forehead. ‘All right. If you like. But the interesting thing about Childe Harold is that, even as he courts new experience, he knows that it’s not going to satisfy him. But he has to go on, desperately searching for different sensations.’ She reassumed the voice that had passed Grade Six Elocution with Merit.

  ‘With pleasure drugg’d he almost long’d for woe,

  And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below.’

  Now, that means that he would be prepared even to go down to hell to get some sort of excitement. It was an amazingly self-destructive impulse.’

  ‘They say glue-sniffing’s like that, too. People who do it don’t really want to go on living.’

  The perfect brow wrinkled again. ‘Yes, but the thing about Childe Harold – or Byron as we see him through Childe Harold – is that he knows it’s all a deception, he knows that no sensation is going to free him of his own innate melancholy. There’s a good quote on that.’

  She reached for some papers on the table by her side. Paul was painfully aware of the outlined curve of her breast. The hand of his imagination sidled under the back of her pullover, neatly unsnapped the clasp of her brassiere then slipped round the front to cradle the sagging warmth. He adjusted the position of Byron’s Complete Works.

  ‘It’s somewhere . . . oh yes, here we are. Listen – this is what Byron wrote: “Why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure – worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious, does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow – a fear of what is to come – a doubt of what is – a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future?” You see, he was recognising the Pain that is at the centre of Pleasure, the closeness of the two things. However deeply he threw himself into experience, he could never lose himself.’

  She fixed the violet-blue eyes on Paul. He removed his imagination’s hands (both of them got in on the act now) from inside her pullover, blushed and looked away. ‘You do see what I’m getting at, don’t you, Paul?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Suddenly he felt flooded with despair. ‘What he was saying was it’s no good trying to do anything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, whatever you do, whatever you want, it’s not worth bothering, because if you ever got it – which you probably won’t – then you’re only going to be disappointed or hurt.’

  Madeleine spoke very softly. ‘Have you found that, Paul – that everything you want either disappoints you or hurts you?’

  He gave a little nod without looking at her. ‘Pretty much,’ he mumbled.

  Madeleine looked at the troubled curve of his head and felt a sudden sense of strength. The poor boy was suffering, and she could help him. She, Madeleine Severn, with all her wealth of maturity, with all her knowledge of life and love, could share some of it with him. She could advise him, just as she had advised her niece, Laura. She could make up for the deficiencies in Paul’s parents, just as she had compensated for Aggie’s. She could be not just a teacher, but also a friend, expanding her educational role to incorporate the pastoral.

  She leant forward towards the boy. ‘Listen; Paul, you mustn’t think of life like that. Not at your age. For you life should be opening up, it should be an exciting birthday present of opportunities and experiences to be sampled and relished. When you are a bit older. . .’ She sighed. ‘When you have lived a little more, when you have experienced real disappointment and real hurt, then perhaps you have an excuse for cynicism.’ She let a little pause linger wistfully in the air. ‘But even those of us who have had our share of suffering have to try not to let cynicism triumph. Even if you have known sadness, you must never believe that all experience will be sad. There are always new things to see, new people to meet, and everything and everyone has something to offer you. You must be open to experience. Remember that bit of Keats I read you – “let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive. . . That’s how we all must be in life, ready for anything, hungry for experience.’

  Paul dared to look at her. Her face seemed very close. Her perfume surrounded and embalmed him; her eyes seemed to stare into his soul.

  ‘I’m hungry for experience,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Good. That’s right. At your age you’ve got to want life. Even at my age’, she added with a little laugh, ‘you’ve got to want life. Even if there has been . . . much sadness in your life, one still must not be frightened. You must challenge life, see what you want and go out and get it. You may be disappointed and hurt, as you say – yes, that’s a risk we all run – but you can be wonderfully surprised by joy. And when that happens, suddenly everything else seems all right. You take my word for it. I know.’

  Their faces were still very close. Paul was becoming obsessed with the wetness of her lips. Byron’s Complete Works stirred uneasily on his lap.

  ‘What is the matter?’ asked Madeleine intimately. ‘Is it a girl?’

  He nodded slowly, still the same distance away from her. ‘What – you’ve fallen for someone who doesn’t feel the same way about you?’

  He nodded again. Their eyes remained locked.

  ‘How do you know she doesn’t?’

  ‘Well, it just, you know, seems unlikely. I mean, I doubt if she’s ever thought of me in that way. You know, she sort of seems . . . above me.’

  Madeleine emitted one of her silvery laughs. Its breeze was warm on Paul’s face. ‘Oh, you silly boy. So many men seem to think like that, seem to put women on a pedestal, as if they were much more different than they really are. It’s strange . . . men are always supposed to be the tough, uncaring sex, and yet, in my experience, I have found them often to be far too sensitive, far too cautious, far less practical than a woman would be in the same circumstances. A lot of men are very soppy, terrible romantics. What you have to remember, Paul. . .’ As she spoke, she reached out and took his bruised and swollen hand. Hers was warm and infinitely soft; his own felt to him as wet and twitchy as a landed fish, ‘is that women feel for men very much the same as men feel for women. They want love, they feel desire. You mustn’t be afraid of them. You say this one you’ve fallen for is too far above you. Well, t
hat’s silly. And it’s undervaluing yourself. What do you think’s so terrible about you? Be a bit confident. You’re an attractive young man. I’m sure there are lots of girls who’d love to go out with you. But you must stop thinking of them as goddesses or idols. They’re just girls. . . You haven’t got any sisters, have you?’ she asked suddenly.

  He shook his head minimally, unwilling to make any move that might break the spell between them. ‘Only child,’ he murmured.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Madeleine. ‘I’m told that nothing so de-mystifies girls for a boy as to have a few sisters. But there were girls at your school and at Sixth Form College, weren’t there?’

  A tiny nod.

  ‘And I’m sure you didn’t think all of them were “above” you. Did you? No, of course not. Well, that’s the attitude you must develop towards this one you’re in love with now. Treat her like a human being. Talk to her. Tell her what you feel. You’ve got nothing to lose. The worst she can say is that she doesn’t feel the same for you. And who knows – you might get a lovely surprise. You might discover that she’s been feeling exactly the same for you ever since she met you and she hasn’t had the nerve to put it into words either.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  Madeleine gave a little smile and showed her perfect teeth. ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’

  Paul couldn’t believe the way things were turning out. His clammy hand was still lightly held in hers. Her lips were only six inches away from his. ‘I suppose it is,’ he replied slowly.

  Madeleine gave his hand a little shake of encouragement. ‘Go on. It’s easy. You just have to look her in the eyes and say, “Sharon, I love you.” ’

  ‘Sharon?’ He repeated the name in disbelief.