A Disturbing Influence (17 page)

Henderson looked at the figure of Christ on the altar. He had hung and suffered there, experienced all the pain and suffering in the world. But what wasn’t done in His name?

For a terrible moment Henderson thought: It could well be that Christ has not saved the world at all, He has merely added to the confusion.

Then he began to pray, his lips moving quickly over the words of long-familiar prayers.

*

‘Hobson says someone’s been having what he calls orgies down at his gravel-pit,’ said Henderson, an hour later, at lunch. ‘It’s absolutely disgraceful. They’ve been burning one of the changing places.’

‘Really?’ said David, looking up from lamb chops and runner beans. ‘Which pool is his?’

‘I really don’t know. The nearest one, I think. Apparently Ponting saw a fire there last night. I must say I think you young people have no idea of how to behave these days.’

‘Teddy boys, I expect,’ said David. He picked up the bone of a chop and nibbled at it.

‘That’s exactly what I said to Hobson,’ said Henderson, happy to agree. ‘He thought it was the Scouts. The Scouts in Cartersfield couldn’t light a fire with matches, let alone by rubbing sticks together. They must have come from Reading. It’s really too bad.’

‘Shocking,’ said David.

T
ELL
her? Of course I couldn’t tell her, I hardly dared to tell myself, I would have told no one, knowing it only as terror,
incommunicable
, secret, a knowledge acquired without the wish to know, with the suddenness, the brutality, of a sheet suddenly pulled back to reveal someone one believed alive not merely dead, but rotting. I couldn’t tell her, and I couldn’t persuade her without telling, it was too incredible, too personal a piece of knowledge. I felt like the secret agent who must travel with all the stolen plans in his head, certain that if he fails the knowledge is lost, yet unlike him, because he has someone to report to, while no one wanted my knowledge, no one wished to share my secret, though possessing it made me vulnerable to every innocent smile, as though I might suddenly be trapped into revealing it. It haunted me all that sunlit summer, hugged me round like a perpetual miasma, odourless to all but me.

They were wrong about him, too, wrong about his thinness, his pallor, making him sound like a skeleton. He was lean,
fine-boned
, hard, and if he was pale, it wasn’t the pallor of sickness, but that of a man who uses his blood, consciously or not, and probably not, which made it worse, for precise services, a man who has nothing to spare for rosy cheeks, for the appearance of health. As I watched him playing tennis with Jane I knew he wasn’t concerned with appearances, with style or manner. Jane was nineteen, her brown hair kept short for tennis, her limbs brown and lithe with
exercise, flowing smoothly out of her white sleeves and white skirt, her style a pleasure to watch, rhythmic, elegant, controlled, flowing like her limbs, a natural but educated style in the tradition of athletic beauty. And he, with no shirt, and shorts like a continental footballer, taking her service with a steady reliability, never
hurrying
, never reaching for what was beyond him, just keeping up with her, apparently containing himself without difficulty, but with no trace of style, no attempt at grace, neither physically economical nor aesthetic, but somehow practical, useful, so that when he returned the ball it not only went in, but was well placed, as though he had schooled himself to play, learning the object to be achieved before the correct means of obtaining it. And I watched him serve, the graceless way he threw the ball up, the wide clumsy swing of the racket, and somehow the moment of contact was right, the ball went precisely where he wanted it to go, just over the net and in, near the line, but good, really quite good, and it shouldn’t have been possible, but it was and he did it, he did it well enough to keep Jane playing, when she could beat me off the court in a matter of minutes, even with my coached swing and style. And something should have told me then that there was something odd about a man who seemed to have taught himself to do something all wrong, and yet did it well, and with no appearance of effort, but I merely noticed it, registered it without surprise as simply a fact, and all I found to surprise me was the way Jane smiled at him as they changed ends, a mysteriously excluding smile, so that I felt I had watched something which wasn’t for public eyes. Though that was natural enough, she was nineteen after all, and however close we were, there must always have been some things that didn’t belong to a sibling love, though I watched the smile with a sudden pang of jealousy, only not jealousy alone, something of nostalgia for the days of childhood when nothing was secret, when neither of us allowed anyone from outside into our private world, when Jane and I played Egyptian kings and queens, because only then could we keep our relation as brother and sister, and that seemed more
important than anything then, meshed as we were in an innocent childish incest of spirit that continued innocent and always would, through adolescence and early adulthood, and keeps so still.

And what surprised me most about him that afternoon was neither of those things, but his ease, his lack of interest in Mendleton, with its mellow stone at its most beautiful, his failure to take part in the ordinary social things, like conversation, wandering away from us when he wasn’t playing himself, drinking tea and eating sandwiches without a ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, these minor social acts of gracelessness were all I noted and commented on, to be told by my sister, smiling now like a sibling, making me jealous again for that other, excluding, private, lover’s smile, smiling and saying: Oh but he wasn’t brought up in England, as though that could explain it, make it vanish away, like some problem of logic
untangled
; it merely gave reasons for his gracelessness, it didn’t remove its presence. And I felt offended, for I loved Mendleton with a fierce protective love, the love of a housekeeper for her employer’s
heirlooms
as she shows visitors round at half a crown a head on selected Sundays, perhaps, and like her I was offended by anyone who wouldn’t appreciate, value, enjoy the deep dark avenue of yews, the sunlight on the stone, the deep satisfactions of being surrounded by things older and more enduring than oneself, taking his indifference as an affront to myself, aware of my absurdity, but still passionately affronted.

And still affronted, I proposed a bathe, and they all agreed with an enthusiastic pressing of rackets and seizing of towels, and too late I wished I had slipped off alone to swim by myself, not wanting their enthusiasm, wishing to enjoy the slow spread of evening, the relaxation of day, the gradual running down of bird-song with a private heart. But falsely jolly we climbed into cars (when a walk across the fields would have been both more pleasant and more suitable for a glowing June day, the sun still battling and winning against the onslaught of cocktail-time, bees still hard at work in the limes and sycamores), we lowered hoods and laughed for the air in
our faces, and three minutes later climbed out again, the girls complaining of what messes they looked (as though a breeze on a June day could make any girl look anything but more beautiful still, the weather itself handing out beauty with the anonymous impartiality of a school prize-giver), and I felt a sudden violent urge to dive in with clothes on to get the full beauty of the still lake fresh on my face, I had a brilliant and fleeting idea of what it must be like to be a fish.

Until we were in the hut, changing, four young men with
still-forming
limbs, something of the bloom of boys still on us, except him, he was never, can never have been, a boy, the four of us more gliding in and out of our clothes than changing them, and I turned casually to say something to one of them and saw David standing there, bending to take off his underpants, naked but for the single flimsy cotton object round his ankle, and found I could not speak, could not breathe, even, eyes swimming, not even able to see him any more, though the image was burnt on my mind, suddenly, irrationally, totally afraid, feeling the hut close in on me, its rough wooden sides collapsing against me, caught, choking, blind, and fought against myself, fought to move, to stagger my way out of the hut into the air, the sun, fainting but not allowing myself to faint, pushing my way through air as dense as treacle, fainting at nothing, a man undressing, something I’d seen often enough, too often, at school, in the Army, and never felt anything like this, the constriction, my heart painfully squeezing the blood round my veins, not even aware that I was frightened, aware only that I must get out of the hut or die, not considering what had caused this
unreasoning
terror, this desperate searching for sun and air, this falling gratefully down on the hard nubbins of gravel, this gasping like a fish indeed now, on hard sunbaked earth, feeling certain that my life was over, which in a sense it was, because innocence needs only one awakening, and the world ceases to be a simple place easily divisible into male and female, and becomes a swimming
underwater
world of inexplicable attractions and repulsions, with the
desire to surrender completely all personality and identity to some man or woman or thing who issues the demand to surrender peremptorily and without words, this desire like a shark in that
subaqueous
zone, this loss of innocence dating from that moment, though too innocent then to know it, I lay gasping in the sun, feeling brutally raped, violated, astounded, as the senses began to work again, breath normal, heart smooth, eyes focussed on a small patch of coarse grass on which I saw with a small feeling of normality returned a dragon-fly resting, only to be told by my nose that a dog, too, had rested there, leaving its filth like small yellow pebbles of gravel. And I tried to rise, rising easily, light-headedly, and threw myself into the water and nearly drowned, my muscles folding like flowers beneath my furious will, each pore suddenly in revolt, lapped in the idea of surrender, till I fought myself, and forced
myself
, as I had in the hut, to move, to swim, and if I had known what that folding of limbs had meant, I might not have found the will to fight, but drowned out of sheer knowledge and understanding.

And I couldn’t tell that to Jane, I could hardly tell myself for days, weeks, and even after the telling I did not understand, not having yet the pride in masculinity, the sense of it as something almost sacred, because it was mine and mine only, something stolen too easily, by a man as simply as by a woman, something precious and desirable, something like a name or an image regularly dreamed all one’s life, part of one’s most intimate personality, to surrender which would be to call up all the nameless ghosts and spirits of things unmentioned, the whole subaqueous sensual world, where sex is not a means of reproduction or pleasure, but an end in itself, as corrupting and habit-forming as drugs or alcohol, a world underlying all civilizations, ours as much as Rome’s (I then too young to know or to formulate such things, baffled and astounded, merely), a suppressed world met on every corner of every street in the world, offering you not simply an indulgence of the senses, but something more ancient and permanent, something of that dark world where the Adamites practised their unknown and nameless
rites, pagan, chthonic, where the most primitive religions found their power to hold and bind a dark world of sensuality which demands the sacrifice of one’s whole life. But then it was as strange to me, the concept not even formed, as Venus or Mars or the infinitely distant galaxies beyond the possibility of knowledge, but which are imagined by physicists to be there, and I felt about David Mander that his human form was the covering for some alien and hostile spirit that did not wish to communicate or share with us, merely to absorb us, not merge but absorb, like some nightmare vegetable out of science fiction.

And so next day I fled, not knowing why, knowing only I must, fled to that endless perfect puppy world where the summer spread an endless picnic by the perpetual Thames, Oxford, my first summer term, and that mocking June, challenging us to imagine a finer time and place to be alive, when the rain dried out of our minds and we became hard and ripe like apples, hard and ripe and rattling, the trees in full humming bloom, cricket in the Parks, and we rose at six to creep through the milk-misted morning to the river, taking the freshness of the day like a baptism into delight, and somehow not needing to sleep, but keeping an even pace with the sun, luxuriating in the long still evenings and lying down at two or three,
light-hearted
, creeping in over the walls and doors we would creep out over a few hours later, wholly refreshed, at six—fled there, and not knowing why, asserted my masculinity the very night I returned, with a fierceness and lack of triumph that shocked me, finding in the sexual posture not that certainty of identity that I seemed to be seeking, but merely a worn repetition of every male failure to assert its maleness since woman first lay on her back, and instead of the joy I required, commanded almost, discovered a black sleeplessness, that single image seared across the imagined joy: the lean fine body as the hand reached down to lift the cotton garment from the poised ankle. And I rose at six to go swimming, trying to wash away that image in the milk-light of morning, of summer freshness,
diving
again and again into the river, finding only that image again as
I broke the surface of day, the sun steaming the earth, and among the half-dozen friends who dived and broke surface with me I felt his, Mander’s, lean controlled body, like a corpse in the river, waiting to rise again to stink its announcement of death to girls in summer frocks and hats and their elegant punting escorts, lurking in the reeds, omnipresent, fouling the river, the air, the earth, the sunlight, and not understanding why I knew terror, I knew it, and lived with it, day and night, all that long perfect puppy summer. And going home at last, the sun still hard and high, I travelled a growing terror, till told, as casually as though it were the
announcement
of the marriage of a distant cousin, that he was gone.