Childish Loves Page 22

  Edleston pretends not to understand the necessity of this, as I have just returned to Cambridge (after a year’s absence) and there is nothing to keep me in London but the pleasure of staring at my book in the shops. I tell him, this is exactly my reason for going. Pretends, I say, for the truth is, we both feel the necessity of it. We cannot go on as we have been going on. No happiness is so perfect that it does not demand more happiness. The weather itself has been as quiet as winter, and as hot as Africa. Not a cloud stirs. What we talk about together, I hardly know – for we never stop talking, and I never think twice what I am saying, before or after, which accounts perhaps for my imperfect recollection. Women sometimes; it is a relief to me to be able to talk to him of women. He has developed a humorous sort of ambition, in this respect, and means to set himself up as a modern beau. I have offered to introduce him to Madame DuReine when he arrives in London, and he is full of curiosity about her. A very childish curiosity, which is not unlike fear. But I have seen him kissing his sister and taking her by the arm affectionately. He need have no doubts of his propensity in that direction.

  What we do not talk about is much clearer to me. One morning, as he did not find me at home, he left a note. We had arranged to go riding together, but the Marquis of Tavistock had come down the night before. I had supped with him at his Tutor’s, which was entirely a Whig party; and having got drunk, fell asleep afterwards on the settee and was later removed to the servant’s bed. I woke up in a very understandable state of confusion and could not find my shoes. When I found them (the Marquis was still asleep, or had gone out; his servant did not answer my call), I wandered across the courtyard, feeling ghostly, and discovered the note from Edleston under the door. What was in it I cannot here repeat. He had been – excessively disappointed by my absence. He had been angry.

  I sat down, a little angry myself, and not very clear–headed, and began to make him a reply, in which the passion of anger eventually gave way to other strong feelings, which I was too ashamed afterwards to look at. But I sent it him regardless. When I saw him again in the afternoon, everything was forgotten or forgiven; at least, no mention was made of the note. But since then we have kept up a kind of correspondence by these means, which is never discussed between us, but contains a great deal of what … we choose to leave unsaid. I find this manner of carrying-on almost unbearable, but every morning or evening, as soon as he is gone, I sit down to write. When I see him again the thought of what he must know makes my head burn.

  *

  It is all over – he is gone; or rather, I have left him. On the last night, we took supper in my rooms with a bottle or two of claret, which we got through quickly enough. Afterwards he lay down on my bed and I read to him from the Hours. There was a great deal of tears on both sides. He declared the Highlander to be his favourite, or next favourite, apart of course from the Cornelian; which showed I think some acuteness on his part. He liked its sentiment and force and felt the verse flowing freely and naturally beneath my pen. He liked the lines Yet the day may arrive when the mountains once more shall rise to my sight in their mantles of snow, which struck him as hopeful in spite of the hopelessness of the rest. ‘Thoughts on a college examination’ pleased him less; he does not admire my ironical vein. It is the face I present to everyone else, which is the very reason he dislikes it.

  Whenever St Bene’t’s tolled the hour, he said he must go, and remained.

  We talked also about his apprenticeship. He did not much relish the thought of living with his sister’s husband, especially as they had a son, who cried at the sight of him; and she was carrying a second and consequently continually out of temper. He had seen them at Easter and was obliged to make himself useful; but he could not help it, he had a horror of small children. Especially boys. The child had entirely destroyed what was left of their former intimacy, after his sister’s marriage. Her colouring was poor; and the weight of her belly made her flat-footed and slow, when she had always been boyish and graceful. They had liked to run races together. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, In October, when you come down – but I don’t know what I could have said, and I did not say it.

  At two or three o’clock, he said he really must go, and I suggested we meet again for a final parting at breakfast. He said he would return after mattins. Then he said he had a sort of confession to make, which accounted partly for his ill-humour. He was always first dissatisfied with everyone else when he had something to be guilty over. He was sitting up in bed with his chin on his elbow; I had pushed the easy-chair to the side of the bed. His head was just above my knee and I sometimes stroked his hair. He confessed to me that he had kissed a girl, the daughter of one of his schoolteachers, a little older than himself. He had not told me before for fear of offending.

  ‘Why should I mind it,’ I said.

  He had kissed her for the first time on midsummer’s night, and a few times since; but on my return from Southwell, he had purposely avoided her. But then a few days ago he had kissed her again. He told himself, there was nothing he need be ashamed of, he had done me no harm, and after all, I had spent the better part of the year consorting with every variety of womankind, to use my own phrase for it, but then, in spite of everything, he felt ashamed. After a minute, for I had said nothing to break the silence, he broke it himself by asking, ‘Do you mean to get married?’ It was a strange turn his thoughts had taken.

  ‘I suppose we all marry in the end,’ I said.

  ‘It seems an odd sort of life,’ he said. ‘To spend it among women.’

  ‘I believe in most marriages a husband and wife are very seldom together.’

  ‘Then why marry at all?’ he asked.

  ‘To be apart from them.’

  He could not deny there was something pleasant in it, he continued. The girl in question was slight and pretty – quite unlike her father. Her face was very warm, but then, they had been dancing, in the heat of the May-pole fire. Afterwards, he meant the next day, they were very strange with each other; and indeed they had been strange enough before. It was all very strange. He could not get used to it. It seemed not at all natural. A few days ago he had kissed her again, perhaps I could recall his reason for it; she, not at all willingly at first, for he had come across her in the Priory gardens, on her way to her father. He took advantage of the coincidence and darkness (it was almost ten o’clock), and she resisted him a little, but as he was angry he did not much mind. And soon she did not mind it either. They parted at last rather suddenly when Mrs Carmichael appeared in the kitchen door with a bucket in hand. And he had not seen her since; but he had begun to think about her, thinking of me as well, and whether I liked to amuse myself in this manner with women.

  ‘One can’t be always among women,’ I said.

  He looked up at me (for he was still in the bed beside me), but something about the whole business disgusted me, his innocence and his air of innocence, and after a long embrace, which was tender enough in its way, I sent him to bed. In the morning he came again, as he had promised to do, both of us a little head-achey and yellow-eyed; and we had a second parting, a breakfast-parting, which is always at least nine tenths an affair of the stomach, and not of the heart. But after all I may see him again in London.

  3

  Among the most vivid memories of my childhood: arriving late at night in Austin, at the end of another summer, after a long flight, after one of our years abroad. A wall of evening heat meets you outside the airport. Dozy and underslept, confused by jet lag, a little sick from the plane. You squeeze at last into the car among the boxes, suitcases, bags and other children. Fall asleep again on the short journey, and then emerge into wakefulness and the deep almost oppressive familiarity of home: the hedgerow running along the front porch; the broad southern house, white and ghostly in the street-lamp light; the cool tiled steps leading up to the front door. The noise of crickets, not the nostalgia conjured by that phrase, but the real insistent sound of something too loud and too near and everywhere i
nvisible. The slash of a sprinkler cutting through it, silent then suddenly flicking its tail against the grass. The voice of your mother: ‘Do you want to eat something? Let’s get you into pajamas. You can watch TV while I make the beds.’ The creak and smell of the house.

  We returned to Boston on the first wet day of the New Year. When we got out of the cab, the rain was cold enough you could see it falling through the air in stretching lines. There wasn’t anywhere to pull over. Twenty inches of snow had fallen in our absence, and since everyone shoveled it off the sidewalks, the curbs were guarded by five-foot piles of ice. The only way through was along the sides of parked cars. I carried our bags up the front steps, slick in the half-thaw, then came back down for my daughter. Caroline had found a blanket to wrap her in; she wasn’t wearing much, she’d been sick on the plane. But she was awake now and watching her breath in the air.

  ‘Daddy, I’m cold,’ she said. ‘Why am I cold?’

  ‘Because it’s winter and partly because you’re tired. But you keep me warm.’

  I carried her one-armed against my side and held on to the banister. During the night, the temperature dropped and, before the skies cleared, another few inches of snow fell. Caroline slept through the early morning light reflected off it, but my daughter and I couldn’t. I dressed her quietly and took her outside and let her sit on the porch while I shoveled the pavement clear. The snow lay gently unevenly and sparkled whitely. The noise of iron on brick rang out loudly into the dawn. Meanwhile I talked, continuously explaining, ‘It’s easier to shovel before everyone steps on it, because snow is softer than ice. The reason snow is white and water is not’ etc. – to keep her interested, and she from time to time said, ‘Tell me again.’ Caroline woke up from the cold of an empty bed and came out at last in her slippers, bathrobe and overcoat and warmed herself against our daughter, sitting down beside her on the top of the steps. By this point the sun had risen over the rooftops and the sunshine was brilliant enough she could only squint down at me, sleepily, quizzically.

  *

  One of the things we had planned to do during our year in Boston, besides visiting Walden and Cape Cod, seeing the whales in the harbor, going to a ballgame and the Symphony Hall, was conceive again. We wanted another kid; that much we could agree on. What we disagreed about was when to start ‘trying’ – maybe the strangest of all the strange euphemisms for sex. Caroline felt strongly that we should have the second child at home, in London, with all her family near. I didn’t disagree in principle, but babies don’t always come when wished for, and I figured we might as well ‘try’ as soon as we got to America in September. But my fellowship was a ten-month fellowship, and Caroline worried that if she got pregnant too soon, she might have to give birth in Boston – either because it hadn’t finished yet or because by the time it had she’d be too pregnant to fly.

  This struck me as a totally unreasonable anxiety. It had nothing to do with her perfectly understandable preference for being near her mother at a difficult time. Her mother could easily fly out to Boston, if it came to that. Besides, the university health plan was likely to provide her with much better care than the NHS. Her objection to giving birth in America seemed to me more symbolic than practical – a rejection not only of my own childhood and former way of life but of the shadow of a possibility that our children might share in it. The idea that having a baby in America and spending a few extra months in Boston before flying back was so terrible a fate we had to eliminate even the faintest possibility of it struck me as frankly insulting. Insulting to her as well – to all of us, as a family. As if I were always plotting to lure her to the States, because I was so unhappy in England; as if she made me so unhappy. This was pure craziness, but calling it craziness only made Caroline dig her heels in more. Pretty soon we started repeating ourselves. I said, it’s just a practical question or should be, and she said, it might be practical for you.

  The truth is, she was probably right and maybe I even knew it at the time. Somehow I had got it into my head that having a kid in Boston might make a difference to us, to Caroline as well; and that this small difference could lead to greater changes. Even though I had never lived in Boston before that year and realized fairly early on that I wouldn’t be any happier in Boston than I was anywhere else. Somehow I had got it into my head that whatever was going wrong in my life could be attributed to the distance I had traveled from home. For all I know, this is a common delusion. We think the problem with adulthood is that we betrayed our childhoods to reach it; and having children, and giving them the childhoods we grew up with, seems like the only way of making amends.

  In theory at least, neither of us won the argument. Conception is always a strange business; for us it was a little stranger, that’s all. Sometimes Caroline gave in to me and sometimes I gave in to her. More often, we didn’t bother to fight it out. But by the time we landed in Boston, one week into the New Year, it was pretty clear that Caroline had won in practice. She wasn’t pregnant and even if she got pregnant immediately she still had plenty of time to move back to London in the summer. This thought occurred to me for the first time on the seven-hour flight from Heathrow to Logan, and when I saw her looking down at me from the front stoop, on that snowy morning in January, and warming herself against our daughter – I wondered if it had occurred to her, too.

  *

  I began the New Year, as I often do, full of ambitious resolutions. One of these was to invite Henry Jeffries to lunch. I hoped to plant an excerpt from Peter’s unpublished novel in the New Yorker; Jeffries was my only connection at the magazine. So alongside an invitation to lunch I sent him the three long chapters from Peter’s unfinished manuscript – explaining my purpose, that I was writing a kind of biography about him, to fill in the gaps between these Byronic interludes. Could he give me his opinion of their quality? I was too close to judge.

  For a week I heard nothing, and I thought of Peter and his letters, to publishers, editors, and agents, and the waiting around he must have gone through before he realized there’d be no reply. The calculations he must have made: about the postal service, and the time it takes to read two hundred pages; the time it takes to respond to them; the time it takes to get a second opinion or convene an editorial meeting; the time it takes for a manuscript to disappear irrevocably under the weight of subsequent manuscripts. Of course, sometimes he probably did get an answer and quickly enough, but it’s the silence that stretches your nerves, more than disappointment. Then Jeffries emailed me, in his characteristic way – as if the condescension were all on my side. What a lovely idea, etc., and thank you very much for ‘the pages. While you’re at it why don’t you send me the biographical bits. Have you been to Sandrines? It’s a typically Harvard sort of place, not very expensive, though it looks it; near my office and rather better than the sandwich shops. I didn’t spend seven years in higher education to eat sandwiches when I grew up.’ So we had a date, two weeks off, and for two weeks I enjoyed the feeling of belonging to a ‘world’ that included Harvard University, the New Yorker, and lunch at Sandrines.

  Meanwhile I got back to work, in the stacks of the Widener – the library on Harvard Yard that sits behind pillars on top of those famous steps. The steps themselves are as tall as a house and as wide as a tennis court, but the stacks are less impressive: windowless institutional corridors, one after another, lit by hanging bulbs. The books lined up like prisoners; there’s nothing to sit on but those rolling stools. I spent a week in front of the shelf of Byron biographies, looking into the facts of his relationship with Edleston. Wearing hat and gloves (which made a nuisance of page-turning), since the stacks are unheated. Books don’t need much warmth, but I could see my breath rising under the electric lights.

  There aren’t many facts. Edleston was a choirboy in the Trinity chapel, though whether Byron met him there or in Bankes’s rooms is unclear. Bankes’s Sunday afternoons at home were not only the stuff of college legend but facts of college life. ‘It was constantly asked, �
��What the devil does Mr Bankes do with those singing boys?”’ Peter puts these words into the mouth of the ‘old Fellow’ who lives across the hall from the young lord. He also lifts more or less verbatim one of the few descriptions we have of Edleston, from a letter Byron wrote to Elizabeth Pigot on the 5th of July, 1807 – ‘with a bottle of Claret in my Head, & tears in my eyes, for I have just parted from “my Cornelian” who spent the evening with me.’ This is the scene Peter’s chapter ends on, but he places Byron’s description of the boy much earlier in the episode: ‘his voice first attracted my notice, his countenance fixed it, & his manners attached me to him for ever.’ A few months later Edleston followed Byron to London to take up his position as a clerk in a ‘mercantile house.’ But they never lived together, as they frequently talked of doing. It isn’t quite clear why not.

  Did they ever sleep together? Byron later referred to their affair as ‘a violent, though pure love and passion.’ He talks about a ‘friendship’ that gave him just ‘as much trouble as love.’ In the poems he wrote to Edleston, and sometimes read to him, their kisses were always ‘chaste.’ His friend Hobhouse, however, continued to worry about the relationship, and Peter in his story foists those worries on to Long. Byron, after he left Cambridge and before he embarked with Hobhouse on their tour of the Continent, refers cryptically to his reasons for going. ‘If the consequences of my leaving England were ten times as ruinous as you describe,’ he writes to his financial adviser, John Hanson, ‘I have no alternative, there are circumstances which render it absolutely indispensable, and quit the country I must immediately.’ Most of his biographers attribute his hurry to a fear of being caught up in a sexual scandal – the kind of scandal that drove him out of England for good after the breakdown of his marriage in 1816. And Edleston is the likeliest culprit. There’s an entry in Hobhouse’s diary from the 6th of June, 1810, shortly before his solitary return to England, which reads (or may read; there’s some dispute over the orthography): ‘tales spread – the Edleston accused of indecency.’ Hobhouse disapproved of ‘the Edleston.’ He disapproved generally on their tour of what Byron got up to with the natives, which is one of the reasons he went home early.