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London - 1954
When the first telegram from my daughter arrived, I was alarmed. My ex-wife reassured me, “Oh, no darling, she just wants your permission to marry someone unsuitable. You won’t give it to her, will you?” We had been separated too many years for me to easily unravel the ambiguity behind her tone. Did she want me to play the ogre father, greeting the prospective bridegroom with implied threats of violence, or was I to be the indulgent papa, giving in to his impetuous daughter, absolving her mother of the disaster that would follow.
“If you say he’s unsuitable, then I have no reason to doubt your judgment. After all, you do get married more often than I do.” The pettiness of my own words surprised me. Perhaps I envied Celia’s boundless optimism, her ability to reach out for love when offered, her refusal to relinquish the fading garlands of summer. Our conversations were halting and limited; my own heart had dwelled too long in winter, our languages, which had never been close, were now irretrievably separated, diverging in isolation.
The last time I saw Caroline, she was still schoolgirl clumsy. Her complexion was stained brown by the sun, all of those hours spent on health and sports, but she had some of my father’s dreaminess, and perhaps a touch of his malice. At least, she resembled my father more than she did anyone else, so it seemed that Celia had been honest about some things. Even if she hadn’t, our past had already become a polite, shared fiction.
The past six months had changed Caroline; she no longer resembled the schoolgirl I remembered. Instead, it could have been Celia, crossing the floor, arms extended in welcome, stylish heels clicking on the tiled floor. For a moment I am taken back to that day with Celia, the day I discovered the cracks in her brittle purity.
“Daddy.” I stood as she approached the table. She kissed me affectionately on the cheek before settling into her chair. “Ronnie will be here at any moment. I do think you’ll love him; everyone does. Mummy doesn’t like that he’s American, but that can’t be helped.”
I had grown out of my habit of searching my daughter’s face for traces of my own; abandoning such narcissism is the sign of the wise father.
“When you were my age, you ran off to Paris to become an artist and drink absinthe and make love to girls in cafés. I only want to marry and move to California. It's quite respectable. Ronnie says they don’t go in much for absinthe there.”
“How unfortunate for California.” It was Anthony Blanche, holding a deeply embarrassed American by the elbow. “I found this lost lamb wandering the lobby. An unfortunate tourist who doesn’t know the restaurant from the g-g-grill.” There was more affection than mockery in his tone, and I had the feeling the stammer was simply there to add a note of nostalgia.
Caroline scrambled to rescue her fiancé from Anthony’s clutches.
“My dears, I have no desire to intrude on a family party.”
“Please stay.” My daughter signaled to the waiter to bring another chair.
“Perhaps this meeting was fortuitous. I have been meaning to look you up. As one grows older, one feels a desire to reminisce about the old days, to drink port in front of the fire and dream about the champagne of one’s youth. But, we will save that for some other time; we would not want to bore these delightful children.”
Athens – 1934
Kurt is in one of his moods, so I leave him to his book and head for the café.
“Where are you going?”
“Out,” I say, but I say it nicely. Kurt can’t help it, he really can’t.
A bell tinkles as I push open the door. One of the reasons we chose our flat was its proximity to this café. And, of course, there were some financial concerns. Kurt wanted to live in one of the newly built modern buildings, but I did not leave England behind just to move into the Greek version of St. John’s Wood. This place is very unlike England. Summers are not drowsy and still; they are hot and sharp, giving the decaying buildings and monuments a bright, clean edge. Exposed stones bake in the sun, and I feel as if I have finally escaped from the humid, mouldering trap into which I was born.
“White, please.”
The owner’s wife is in today. I love the simplicity here. There is red wine, or white. There is ouzo for the occasional tourist. Simple choices in this city which sits under simple, cloudless skies.
The owner’s wife pours a glass for me, and leaves the bottle. She can’t be much older than thirty, but her face is heavily lined. There is so much kindness in her eyes, it makes me love this place even more than I already do.
“Have you eaten today?” She puts out a small plate of olives and thinly sliced meats.
I don’t really have a problem with alcohol, not like some people think I do. I can let the glass sit untouched while I chat with the owner’s wife. I can prolong the moment before I allow the wine to slide down my throat and warm my bones. I sink my teeth into each olive, scraping the flesh from the stone. The owner’s wife tells me that her husband is a good-for-nothing and until he stops being such a good-for-nothing, there will be no more children. I’m sure you are a wonderful mother.
Not like my mother. My mother was the kind Freud liked to write about. When you think about it, it really is quite odd that the unhappy childhoods of a few Germans should be made to stand for all of human experience. Living with Kurt, I have learned that Germans aren’t really typical of anything, except themselves.
My mother was a vampire. She would draw unwary young men into her sky-coloured parlour and devour their hearts, sucking out the blood and replacing it with straw and dead leaves. It’s the only explanation that makes any kind of sense. It wasn’t really her fault, was it?
I think this wine is a Riesling. Unexpected sweetness.
A drunken milord in a musical comedy. I simply must have a top hat. She brings me another bottle.
When my allowance arrives, I will buy a proper hat. Something suitable for this weather. So hot.
I don’t think I ever thanked him properly for sorting out my allowance. I will do that now.
The owner’s wife finds me a pen, and tears a page out of her account book for paper. Someone has spilled a drink, which soaks the edges of the paper before I can even begin.
Dear Charles,
Do you think it is ever possible for someone to stop being a good-for-nothing? I do not, but my hostess is quite the optimist. She is making great plans for the future. Babies, etc., but I must content myself with oranges from Catalonia. The most extraordinary thing has happened here in Athens; Kurt has taken to reading. Real books, not just pornography rescued from the hospital’s rubbish bins. He is halfway through The Magic Mountain. He thinks it's about wizards. I may take him to the Kaisariani Monastery as a reward; however, he does not like buildings as much as you do. Tell me, Charles, when you fell in love, was it with my family, or with the house? Either way, you are…
I put down the pen. There is little point in continuing; the rest of the paper is soggy and the lines I wrote are already illegible. “You are a spy and a fool,” I tell him.
“Such unkind words for an old friend.”
I thought I had left Anthony Blanche in Tangiers, but perhaps I was wrong. Or, perhaps I am still in Tangiers and Athens has all been a dream. That seems likely, far more likely than Kurt reading books.
Poor Anthony Blanche. Kurt did behave so badly there. I want to tell Anthony Blanche about how Kurt has been improving himself. Or will improve himself. If we are visiting Anthony Blanche, then Athens must still be in our future.
“Your friend was always a brute; now he has become a bore. I had to tell him my opinion of The Man Without Qualities before he would tell me where you were. Even those with a p-p-professional interest in books do not discuss them before breakfast.”
“Oh dear. That does sound awkward. Why did you need to ask about me? I’m always here.” There are stages to drunkenness. I am in the stage of grand gestures. I stretch out my arms to encompass the café. Here. I am here.
Anthony Blanche pulls out his silver and gold cigarette case, but he doesn’t offer me one. I have my revenge; I order another bottle and do not offer him any. Bluish smoke halos his face.
“I was writing to him,” I say. I start to fold the paper, but then I remember something else. I write down a few more lines. “Give this to him when you see him. I know you see him. He told me about how you tried to poison him against me. He tells me…” Charles must have told me something else, something important. I smooth out the paper and write my question.
I was hot; now I am cold. Oxford is always cold, even in the deepest summer. It is a place of high walls, barriers meant to keep us separate and alone. Even together, we are alone. I press my body against his, but the terrible solitude grows.
“My dear Sebastian, I do think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
I blink. If Anthony Blanche is here, this must be Oxford. “Silly Anthony. Help me get back to Charles’ room. I may have had too much to drink tonight.”
London – 1954
I stared at the once familiar handwriting. “Why didn’t you give me this,” I wanted to know. Sebastian’s handwriting, his once fanciful style reduced buried under anger and grief.
“Would it have made a difference?”
I couldn’t answer him. We make our choices based on fragments, assembling the unearthed tiles into the image we believe exists, the eikon in which we want to believe. The Sebastian with the green grass of summer clinging to his hair and shoulders, and Sebastian with a scraggly beard in an old church, they were the same. They were always the same, different parts of the portrait, and perhaps he was right to doubt in my ability to love them both. My love for him was adolescent, more of a reaction to the world than a love for him alone. These, his last words to me, said how different his love was from mine, and even if they were an incomplete truth, my guilt would remain.
“Don't think you can make it right,” Anthony said. "There's nothing to make right."
Los Angeles - 1960
The streets around the cathedral were almost empty; in the darkness their unfamiliarity was obscured as they appeared to be closer to the anonymous streets of a deserted backlot rather than a functioning part of an actual city. The cathedral’s baroque exterior, a defiant imitation of earlier, grander buildings, seemed to be waiting for the actors and the cameras to arrive. I spent my days showing others how to reproduce Ryder's Country Seats and Village and Provincial Architecture in plaster and plywood, but I never watched the finished product.
I knew he would be here. This was not the church he usually attended. That featureless suburban building would not provide the comfort he needed, the comfort I was unable to provide, whenever the wind carried news of the world he had left behind.
“I wanted to go to confession.” The solitary figure in the back row did not move. In the dim light, the altar was barely visible. He did not turn as I sat next to him; his eyes were fixed on the saints floating above us. “There was no one there, so I went over to the rectory. Too late for confessions, but they said I could sit here for a while. Such a shame—I did have so much say.” I didn’t reply; when he was in this mood, there was nothing to do but wait.
“How was your dinner?”
“Good. Anthony doesn’t change much, of course. However, I don’t know if it is age, or just the presence of film people, but his appearance was almost unremarkable.”
Sebastian laughed. “Poor Anthony Blanche. He must hate that. What did you talk about?”
“Business, mostly. He didn’t exactly say so, but I think he saw the contracts Interastral was giving its writers last year. He was disappointed you weren’t there.”
“Really?”
Anthony had neither been disappointed nor surprised. “He was in such a temper when I called at your house. Not even the offer of a cup of tea; that quite goes against the mores of the English colony, doesn’t it? Still, I suppose it is flattering. He does not feel the need to exert his charm on my behalf.”
Anthony’s voice, which could turn heads at the Savoy Grill, blended in with the flat tones of the Americans around us. “My dear Charles, do you know why I kept that letter from you? I knew this would happen. This.” The contempt in his voice, only partly leavened by pity, took in not just the restaurant’s leather booths filled with the eagerly self-promoting, but also the sun-bleached city, the ocean, the entire continent. “I knew you would go running. And it would absolutely be your ruin.”
“I don’t feel particularly ruined.”
“But you are, my dear. You are. The last time I saw you, the Artist was already on his deathbed, now, well, it is too late even for the priest.”
“Some things are more important than Art,” I said.
I don’t think he believed me; but it was something I needed to be true.
“Did he ask if I’d been drinking? It’s what everyone wants to know.”
“No.”
Sebastian rested his head on my shoulder. I knew he had not been drinking, but I did not know how long this period of sobriety would last.
“Let’s go home,” he said.
I wrapped my arm around him as he again mumbled into my shoulder. “Home.” We would return to the place we called home, with its Spanish tiles and oranges ripening next to the front door, but it wasn’t the home either of us wanted. I still longed for that other England, my lost city, with its brief summers under the flowering chestnuts, while Sebastian still searched for a place where he could be happy, free from both time and memory.
“Yes,” I said. “Let's go home.”