Chapter 7 See The Pyramids Along the Nile #2
He imagined what he’d do if that was his baby.
The mere hypothetical made him hot with anger.
Then again, he’d never let the situation arise in the first place.
The only woman he ever planned to impregnate was his virginal wife, on their wedding night.
In his romantic imaginings, the act of congress with his lovely bride—whoever she was—would be incomparable to the handful of demoralizing liaisons that were the sum total of his amorous experience.
On his fourteenth birthday, his father had sent him to a local woman with a half crown in his hand.
Lily, she called herself. Her ground-floor rooms, on one of the streets behind St. George’s Brewery on Commercial Road, smelled of cats and bodies, overlaid by a good deal of cheap scent.
He didn’t understand how anyone found eroticism in such a setting, or with such a person.
Lily, raw-boned and coarse-skinned, seemed so old.
Looking back now, she was probably no more than forty.
As soon as he handed her the coin, she hitched up her skirts and spread her skinny thighs.
She didn’t even put her cigarette down. Not feeling he had any choice, Jimmy climbed on and attempted one blind thrust before falling out limply, at which point Lily pushed him off and told him to go home.
When he asked for some change—he’d been there less than five minutes—she laughed like she’d never heard anything so funny.
More recently, he’d visited another professional, albeit a younger, cleaner girl who worked out of a white-painted Soho flat and made him have a wash first. Still, he was consumed by regret after.
He felt impossibly sullied. He wished he could forget the feel of her insides, like being gripped by hot jelly.
Why did his body respond while his soul recoiled?
He’d hated the metallic tackiness of her freckled skin, the penny-colored stubble in her armpits, her breathily fake moans.
It was absurd of her to feign enjoyment.
It stood to reason that if a girl liked it, she’d be doing it for free.
Like George. He remembered his aunt Marlene talking to Mum about the girls back in Cork who were sent away to the laundries when they couldn’t behave themselves, when they’d disgraced their families.
His mother had expressed sympathy with the fallen women, saying it was cruel, that babies should always stay with their mothers.
No, said Marlene, what was cruel was subjecting a child to illegitimacy and hellfire rather than keeping your legs closed.
His mother was too kind, thought Jimmy. At least, she was to other people. Not so much to him.
After dropping off the corrected page proofs, they got back in the car and headed for home.
It was getting dark and Robbie was glad.
The night felt like a shield. He couldn’t stop thinking about George’s words.
At Cambridge, he’d known some unashamed pansies, men who seemed to enjoy playing up their femininity, as though they were daring the world to object.
There was something heroic in their defiance.
But Robbie had nothing in common with them, so he couldn’t understand what George had perceived.
He uneasily recalled that one of his hut-mates at Aldershot, an unassuming dark-haired fellow from Eton, had made a pass at him.
At least, it had seemed very much like a pass.
But because Robbie wasn’t certain, he’d decided not to report it and ruin the boy’s life.
It had never occurred to him that he hadn’t been chosen at random, or merely from the convenience of nearness.
Now he wondered. Had he revealed himself, however unwittingly, as somehow aberrant or corruptible?
He almost wished he could ask the fellow, but there was no possibility of that.
He’d been blown to pieces at El Alamein.
“Here,” said Jimmy, “have some.” He handed Robbie a silver hip flask.
Cautiously, Robbie unscrewed the lid and sniffed the contents. It made his eyes water.
“Go on,” said Jimmy, “it’ll put hairs on your chest.”
Robbie took a swig, and fire whirled over the back of his tongue and down his throat. He coughed, then swallowed down a jet of bile. “What is that? Paint stripper?”
Jimmy laughed. “Russian vodka. A hundred percent proof.”
“I’m not much of a drinker,” said Robbie, handing back the flask.
“All right, if you say so.” Jimmy took a sip himself. “Have one more. Then you’ll start to enjoy it. It’s like smoking. Remember your first fag? I nearly threw up. Didn’t have another one again for years.”
I’m not a child, thought Robbie. I’m nearly thirty-three, with an estranged wife and near-sole responsibility for an esteemed literary journal.
Nevertheless, he drank some more and cheer began mounting irresistibly in his chest. They were driving through Piccadilly, and the illuminated advertising signs danced across his vision, magically picturesque.
Why hadn’t he ever noticed them before? He frequently walked through the West End.
But his eyes, he realized, were habitually on the pavement.
When he went to take another sip, Jimmy said, “Easy now, you don’t want to make yourself ill.” But Robbie had never felt better in his life. If this was drunkenness, he wished he hadn’t denied himself all these years.
“D’you want to go to a pub once we get nearer home?” said Jimmy. “I’ll buy you some supper.”
“I,” said Robbie indignantly, “will buy you some supper. You saved my life today, giving me a lift like that.”
“Let’s not go overboard. Mrs. Wilson wouldn’t actually have murdered you for missing the deadline.”
Robbie sighed contentedly. “She might have. You don’t know what she can be like.”
Ah, thought Jimmy, but I do.
Throughout the next day, the evening came back to Robbie in fragments, like a chopped-up film reel.
Sitting in the pub, eating pork pies and crisps.
Ordering more drinks. Telling Jimmy about his hairiest close shaves as a soldier, how he relived them in his nightmares yet still missed the war sometimes.
A drunk woman singing that sad, sad song about her lover seeing the pyramids along the Nile.
Stumbling as he walked home, so that Jimmy laughed and said to hold on to his arm.
Jimmy’s bare torso, dappled with fine, dark hairs, palely beautiful in the dim gaslight.
Holding his own arms up obediently so that Jimmy could lift off his sweater.
Letting himself be kissed, kissing back, becoming no longer himself, but a new, unfamiliar person, one released from any form of reticence or fright.
When he opened his eyes in the morning, Robbie’s mind was momentarily blank, amnesiac, even though he was abruptly alert, in contrast to his usual slow, groggy rise to consciousness.
He was naked, he realized; that was why the sheets enveloped him with such softness.
He stretched, noticing a tenderness in his stomach muscles, his thighs.
It occurred to him to wonder why he didn’t have a hangover—but not having had one before, he wasn’t sure how it was meant to feel.
There was a knock at the door, and he started guiltily.
“Who is it?” he called out, and the reply came: “It’s me. ” It was Jimmy.
He entered. He was dressed and had neatly combed wet hair. “I wanted to see if you were okay,” he said. “After all you had to drink last night.” He sat down at the foot of the bed and smiled.
Robbie sat up, keeping the sheet wrapped around his chest. “I’m surprised I don’t feel worse, actually. It was quite a night, wasn’t it?”
“I’ll say so. We had a grand time. Or I did, at least. I just wanted to make sure you knew that. I’m not sorry, not about any of it.”
“You mean…” Robbie hesitated. He wanted to explain that his memory was hazy, that he needed Jimmy to confirm what had taken place.
But he feared it would be somehow rude, or might come across as though he wished nothing had happened.
To his astonishment, that was the very last thing he wished.
Was he still drunk? Maybe he was still drunk.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” said Jimmy. “Nothing illegal. Not that it would matter if we had, because the only people who could ever know are us. And we’d never tell, would we?” He gazed at Robbie, who gazed back, his skin tingling with the collusion, the peculiar illicit romance of it.
“You believe me, though, that George was wrong, don’t you? I’ve never been queer for anyone else.”
Jimmy smiled, almost shyly, Robbie thought. “Me neither.”
The sound of female voices floated up from below. George and Mina were up, engaged in their usual routine of borrowing makeup and hair ornaments from each other.
Jimmy got up and wedged the chair underneath the door handle. Then he came and took Robbie in his arms.
Later that day, Greta was in the kitchen, sighing and tutting in time to the hissing and puffing of her electric iron.
Back and forth she slid it over a pillow slip, though no creases could be seen by the naked eye.
Greta was a born perfectionist. If you’re going to do a job, then do it properly, was the maxim she lived by.
Washing and ironing all the bed linen was a monthly task to which several afternoons were devoted, in keeping with a complicated work schedule she had devised for herself.
Greta was, to all appearances, indefatigable.
Though she complained about her varicose veins and something she called carpal tunnel syndrome (a made-up condition, assumed Honor), it was clear these complaints were not to be taken seriously.
Rather, they were offered as further evidence of her strength and virtue.
Though I suffer, her ongoing publicity campaign reminded everyone, my conscientiousness never wavers.