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And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.
-'Diffugere Nives'
Claret moves through his gullet as if there’s no tomorrow. Anthony is watching him with calm eyes.
“There is no need to do this,” Anthony says.
“Every need.” Guy smiles at the windows, which are thrown open. The outside air smells of grass and light: the room, of wine.
Anger unsettles Anthony Blunt; always has done. He doesn’t want to believe in Guy’s bright-faced rage, nor in wrongdoing.
Guy says softly, “Drowning would be all right.”
The words are like table sugar dissolved in his mouth. He would rather talk to Anthony than look at him.
A few weeks after his father died, there was an early snowfall. In those days he woke every morning about five o'clock, usually passing the time before the bells began in unrepentant onanism. But that day he put on his shoes, slid through the room of sleeping boys, went downstairs, and got out of an unlatched window. He knelt in the snow: he lowered himself into it so that he was lying face-down. The sweetness of the cold gave way to pain, of course, but he’s never forgotten it. How it crept through his pyjamas, and then his skin, the fat and muscle of his body. It was more real than self-abuse, and less real; it made him not so much happy as understandably sad.
He drains his glass and smiles. He doesn't need to see Anthony to know that he is being watched.
Anthony says, “If you want me to be sorry – I suppose I am.”
Julian’s delicious: like a boy in a painting. A Grecian boy, with an unflawed brow bound by green leaves. A huge light gaze; lashes like feathers. His flocks gather about him and scatter, in the lit picture of Anthony’s mind’s eye. They’re more important than Guy’s sorrow but Anthony is nonetheless capable of saying what he thinks is best.
“Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,” Guy says. He fills the glass again neatly. “Liar.”
“Guy – ”
“His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge.” He waves one hand. “And on the edge, like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.”
“Shut up, please,” Anthony walks to the window and looks out into the court. Some of the boys passing below seem to be no more than children.
“Who hath reft, quoth he, my dearest pledge?” Guy’s voice tightens into unfamiliar dryness, as though he’s not had a drink in days.
Anthony is disgusted and moved. “I wonder if he buggered Edward King,” he says quietly.
Guy laughs for a moment. “I’ve heard,” he says, “That the king – ”
“Really? I was labouring under the misapprehension that Charles was pious and uxorious. Chaste and uxorious. Happy and glorious – ”
“I was going to say the king-to-be. Put me in a room with Edward for half an hour, and – ”
“You do think a lot of yourself.”
“I used to.”
Anthony looks over his shoulder at this unwonted quietness: Guy is grinning falsely. He looks like a disconsolate, too-old boy.
The bells for evensong begin. The room feels interrupted and unsettled, still warm with daylight. Guy puts down his glass. He takes off his cuff-links and begins to unfasten his tie.
“I’m going to London,” he says.
“You can’t go now.”
Guy shrugs. His fingers work at the buttons of his shirt: one, two, three. A triangle of warmed white skin lies between the linen edges.
“Please don’t,” Anthony says. Don’t go or stay. Don’t take anything off: and don’t be so slow in disrobing.
There are many footsteps outside, undergraduates passing and laughing. Guy comes to the window and looks down for a second or two.
He says, “Two massy keys – ”
Things have come to a pretty pass, Anthony thinks, when you can’t tell if he’s mocking or maudlin. He looks at Guy’s thick hair, and his pale ears. Now he wants to be disgusted but can’t find the right note.
Guy takes Anthony’s hand and moves it under the flap of his shirt. His skin’s damp; soft and firm at once.
It undoes Anthony: but not into remorse, only hunger.
“If you want to,” Guy says. “It might be nice.” He catches his bottom lip in his teeth. “All the little emptiness of love.”
“Shame you were only, what, four?” Anthony says unkindly. "Missed your chance."
“Three. Damned bad luck. Fucking mosquitoes.” He unfastens another button. “I’d fuck Milton, you know. But he’d enjoy it more than I would. Have you got any whisky in here? I wouldn’t mind that.”
“I can scarcely tell which is your first choice and which your second.”
“Julian was my first,” Guy says. “Julian was. For Christ’s sake; I don’t let everyone bugger me, you know. Aren’t you massy tonight?”
“You’re sweating.”
“It’s summer. Julian sweats.”
Anthony knows that: he has kissed a lonely bead of sweat hanging on Julian’s temple. The slow pealing of bells is thinning into echoes now – and the sky outside, past the buildings, over the river, is a drained pink, soaked with fumes from the halls of the colleges, from sitting-rooms and common rooms; underneath port and tobacco and meat are the stocks, the water, and mounds of cut grass stripped from the lawns.
“You don’t love him,” Guy says. His love might be three-parts a joke by now, but it’s more than Anthony feels.
“Not exactly, no. Not love.”
Guy thinks, you love me. This is the way that you love, Anthony. He is still holding Anthony’s hand against his skin.
“I think it would be a good idea,” he says.
“Oh – as an idea, yes,” Anthony says. As if he were conducting an experiment in a well-lit laboratory, he bends his head and for a moment they kiss. To Guy’s surprise, the temperature of Anthony’s face appears higher than his own. So much for cold fishes.
Guy takes his face away. He says, “I think he will see reason. Don’t you?”
“Perhaps. I’ve never heard you call it reason before, though.”
“I have to keep myself from despairing. When you go bald, he’ll see reason; and that may be rather soon.”
Anthony is impervious to remarks of that nature. He says, “I begin to feel a little sorry, if you’re despairing.”
“I said, didn’t I? Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave. One of her books. And that line’s the herald of death. Poor Milton; what a fate.”
“I don’t think it’s quite fair to blame Mrs Woolf.”
“I do. They’re all blinded, aren’t they? They don’t see. Even he doesn’t.”
“You're saying that because you want – ”
“No. Because I've read all their books, and for about fifteen consoling, desolate minutes I rather believed them. Then I saw sense. Of course he's not like the rest of them; except for his taste. Which at times is unfortunate.”
“There’s some whisky in the cabinet,” Anthony says, decisively taking his hand back, stepping away into the room. “If you really want it.” Kim Philby would say, but haven’t you drunk enough? He’s not known Guy for long.
Guy turns his back on the window and the light surrounds him. Anthony sees only the shape of his body: small and a bit insolent.
“Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,” Guy says. For the first time he sounds completely bitter. “Diana steads him nothing, he must stay. I did want him, you know.”
“Nobody belongs to you. No more than a servant would. Guy, come – ”
“Thank you: no. The moment, I suspect, has passed.”
“A drink.”
“If you like. An unexpressive nuptial draught.”
“Or you could leave. Go to London.” He would prefer to avoid pitying Guy, if he can.
Feast then thy heart, Guy thinks. But even that’s a hell of a lot to ask. Julian’s blind to him and Anthony too tired for a fuck. There’s no silence in the whole college, and nowhere cold enough inside the thick stone walls. You can buy wine: snow is a rarer commodity, and love would see you in the Marshalsea or before a Proctorial court – or dead in France, bloated and sick, that's about the right price. Feast then thy fucking heart.
Dead in the bed, or without reason: an unlucky mosquito bite; a storm. For what thy heart has had, the fingers of no heir will ever hold. If Guy touches a hundred boys, or a thousand, and never Julian? Holds, buggers; somewhat and sometimes, loves. He might as well have lost his hands to frostbite: or his lips, his lips.