In their room, Lee lay face down on the carpet in front of the fire, perhaps asleep. The walls round him were painted a very dark green and from this background emerged all the dreary paraphernalia of romanticism, landscapes of forests, jungles and ruins inhabited by gorillas, trees with breasts, winged men with pig faces and women whose heads were skulls. An enormous bedstead of dull since rarely polished brass, spread with figured Indian cotton, occupied the centre of the room which was large and high but so full of bulky furniture in dark woods (chairs, sofas, bookcases, sideboards, a round mahogany table covered with a fringed, red plush cloth, a screen covered with time-browned scraps) that one had to move around the room very carefully for fear of tripping over things. Heavy velvet curtains hung at the windows and puffed blue dust at a touch; a light powder of dust covered everything. On the mantelpiece stood the skull of a horse amongst a clutter of small objects such as clockwork toys, stones of many shapes and various bottles and jars.
All this heterogeneous collection seemed to throb with a mute, inscrutable, symbolic life; everything Annabel gathered around her evoked correspondences in her mind so all these were the palpable evidence of her own secrets and the room expressed a hermetic spiritual avarice. In her way, she was a miser. In this oppressive room, Lee was as out of place as a goatherd’s son trapped in a witch’s house for he always took about with him a peasant or rustic breath of open air. He lay on the carpet and traced the threadbare warp with his finger. She moved almost silently but he heard her come in and raised his head. His eyes were of the clearest, most beautiful, most intense blue though always rimmed with reddish inflammation. He put out his hand and caught hold of one of her naked feet, which were both caked with damp earth from the hillside.
‘Trampling in graves again,’ he said for he took her other-worldliness lightly. ‘Oh, my duck, you’ll catch your death.’
The local evening newspaper drifted apart leaf from leaf in the draught caused by Annabel’s entrance. Lee trapped the paper and pointed out a blurred photograph.
‘Joanne. Joanne Davis. She’s in my form at school. I teach her. Sweet Jesus, can you credit it?’
He was a schoolteacher for a living and worked in a comprehensive school. His pupil was a buxom blonde who wore a bikini with a sash over her bosom identifying her as the winner of a minor beauty contest. She revealed her teeth in a smile as brilliantly artificial as those of acrobats.
‘She has no academic bent,’ said Lee. ‘Sixteen, she is. I’m an old man to her. I’m Mr Collins and sometimes even “sir”.’
He was twenty-four, old enough for this to sadden him, but Annabel indifferently stirred the paper with her toes. She was so full of the terror of the park she could barely think of anything else and she rehearsed the simple sentence carefully before she asked him if supper was ready so that no tremor in her voice should betray her agitation. He nodded and abandoned the attempt to chat with her; they did not speak to one another, much. She evaded his hands and padded out into the kitchen to inspect the food he had prepared in case it contained snakes and spiders while Lee rose and found her antique lace tablecloth in the drawer of an enormous sideboard which was decorated with small, carved lions’ heads with brass rings in their noses. He did not hear her return but saw her suddenly materialize in the dusty surface of the sideboard mirror, which was subtly warped, so her face looked as if it were reflected in water. All was as it should be in the kitchen and she gave him a smile of such unexpected sweetness that he turned, put his arms around her and hid his face in her hair, for he was having an affair with another woman, as was only to be expected.
‘What did you do today, love?’
‘I drew the model,’ she said indifferently.
Her apparent indifference to the world outside her own immediate perceptions had ceased to hurt Lee but never failed to bewilder him for he always tried to be as happy as he could, himself. They had lived together for three years but still, when he was with Annabel, Lee was like a lone explorer in an unknown country without a map to guide him. Genuine explorers rarely smile for what they have undergone wipes the smiles from their faces for good; Lee was not yet quite ready to join that select and aristocratic company but he was already very much changed from what he had been and his marvellous smile was a far less frequent event than in the days before he met her, for until then he had been perfectly free.
This freedom had been the result of an unusual combination of circumstances. Neither he nor his brother carried through life the name he had been born with. Lee had undergone three changes of forename, from Michael to Leon to his own choice of diminutive borrowed from some now forgotten Saturday-morning cinema Western, Lee, and he arrogantly retained the last name into adult life for he was not ashamed of his romanticism. The aunt who cared for both of the boys changed his name to Leon, for Trotsky. She was a remarkable woman, a canteen cook and shop steward who worked her fingers to the bone to support the two boys and inculcated in them a sense of pride and a certain critical severity which, in adulthood, they both expressed sufficiently in their separate ways, though neither in a way of which their aunt would have approved.
Buzz, however, had renamed himself. At four years old, he selected this mysterious monosyllable from the credits of a television cartoon film and after that he insisted it was his own name and his only name; he refused to answer to any other and so he soon acquired it permanently. He said he liked the word because it hung in the air for a long time after him but Lee guessed he liked the persistent irritation of the sound. Their aunt changed their original surname to her own by deed poll after their mother, her sister, forfeited her social personality in such a spectacular manner that she became a legend in the neighbourhood where they lived.
On Empire Day at the primary school which Lee attended when he was a small child, there was an annual festival with a display of flags, patriotic tableaux and country dancing. This celebration reached its climax when a selection of infants filed on to the playground in their best clothes with, attached by string, a card bearing a single letter around each neck so that, assembled in a line, they spelled out in total the motto of the school, a Kantian imperative: DO RIGHT BECAUSE IT IS RIGHT. Upon a blowing day in June, in his sixth year, Lee carried the letter S when his mother, naked and painted all over with cabbalistic signs, burst into the crowded playground and fell writhing and weeping on the asphalt before him.
When Lee attained the age of reason and acquired his aunt’s pride, he was glad his mother had gone mad in style. There could be no mistaking her intention nor could her behaviour be explained in any other terms than the onset of a spectacular psychosis in the grand, traditional style of the old-fashioned Bedlamite. She progressed to unreason via no neurotic back alleyway nor let any slow night of silence and darkness descend upon her; she chose the high road, operatically stripping off her clothes and screaming to the morning: ‘I am the whore of Babylon.’ His aunt took him to visit her in hospital from time to time but she was beyond recall and failed to recognize them as if they had been, at the best of times, chance and unmemorable acquaintances. So, soon after they went to live with their aunt, she saw the logic of the child when the younger brother insisted on changing his name. She changed Michael’s for him as well and blotted out the family name with her own.
In the street where the brothers lived with their aunt during their childhood, it always seemed to be Sunday afternoon. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find such streets, though they used to exist in large numbers in all our great cities – those quiet terraces of artisans’ dwellings where the sunlight falls on cracked paving stones and smoky brick with a peculiar sweetness and the winds seem never chill nor boisterous. In summer, they hang protectors of faded canvas over the front doors to prevent the sun from peeling off still more of paint blistered already by suns of many summers and old men sit outside in shirtsleeves on kitchen chairs, as if put out to air upon the pavement. On the low window ledges, one might find, here, a pie set out to cool or a jelly to
set, there, a dreaming cat; the windows themselves are hung with half-curtains of coarse lace or display dusty, unlifelike plants in green glazed pots and plaster Alsatian dogs, though now and then one catches glimpses of those tiny, brown front rooms flickering in the light of coal fires – rooms which, in winter, seem to promise all the warmth in the world. A gentle, respectable serenity pervades these scenes of urban pastorale. In such a street, behind scalloped lace, their aunt ferociously refused to submit to cancer in the style of a revolutionary, in a room full of yellowing pamphlets. It took her a whole, stifling, oppressive summer to die but all the time she died magnificently. That autumn, Lee went away to university and Buzz left London with him. The following year, the GLC pulled their old street down so all they had left was a few memories.
The brothers lived together in the university town. Lee was like a ploughboy and Buzz like a nightbird; Lee was sentimental while Buzz was malign; Lee’s sensuality was equalled only by Buzz’s perversity but they stayed together because they were alone in a world with which both felt themselves subtly at variance. Both walked warily, with the marvellous, collected walk of gunfighters of the Old West, and they were quick to take offence. They had the air of visitors who do not intend to stay long. Their mother’s madness, their orphaned state, their aunt’s politics and their arbitrary identity formed in both a savage detachment for they found such detachment necessary to maintain their precarious autonomy. From earliest childhood, they were accustomed to fighting, though Lee was better at it.
Lee was an honest orphan; his father had been a railway-man killed in the course of duty but after her husband’s death, the wife had gone on the game and Buzz was fathered by an American serviceman who left behind him nothing but a crude, silver, finger-ring decorated with a skull and crossbones. Buzz created an authentic savage from this shadow. He became convinced the man had been an American Indian and claimed as proof his own straight, coarse, sooty hair, high cheekbones and sallow complexion. Sometimes the tribe he favoured most were the Apaches but, in less aggressive moods, he thought he might be a Mohawk since he had no fear at all of heights and often walked on roofs. Lee went to a grammar school but Buzz went to a secondary modern school. There, with a passionate stubbornness that earned his brother’s unwilling respect, he steadfastly refused to learn anything useful.
He worked sporadically in factories, down at the docks or else serving or washing up in cafés. At the times he was not working, he lived off his brother and sometimes stole. He was taller than Lee and dressed himself in rags. He had neither talents nor aptitudes, only a disconcertingly sharp intelligence and a merciless self-absorption. He had long, thin hands as if expressly formed for picking and stealing and he bit his nails down to the half-moon. He lived at a conscious pitch of melodrama; once, filling out a form for some job or other he never achieved, he wrote down against the space marked: INTERESTS, the two words, sex and death.
‘Don’t let’s exaggerate,’ said Lee gently.
Lee looked like Billy Budd, or a worker hero of the Soviets, or a boy in a book by Jack London. He was of medium height and sturdy build; his eyes were blue and looked like the eyes of a seafarer partly because of the persistent slight reddening of the rims due to a chronic slum-child infection he did not shake off as he grew up. His hair was the colour of hay, his complexion fresh and only the lack of a front tooth took away the suspicion he might be simple-minded for it gave his gapped but dazzling smile a certain ambiguity. Like most people who happen to be born with a degree of physical beauty, he had become self-conscious very young in life and so profoundly aware of the effect of his remarkable appearance on other people that, by the age of twenty, he gave the impression of perfect naturalness, utter spontaneity and entire warmth of heart. ‘Alyosha,’ said Buzz with contemptuous admiration. ‘Bloody Alyosha.’
Buzz’s conversation was composed of unnerving silences interspersed with rare outbursts of intense but often disconnected speech. His huge, heavily lidded eyes (the irises large and dark, the pupils white and gleaming) were as disconcerting in his immobile face as if real eyes had moved within those faces the ancient Egyptians painted on their coffin lids. He had been grievously exposed to his mother’s madness; her persistent delusion that her sallow, dark baby, child of a dark stranger, was touched with the diabolic, had warped his development to a certain extent and, besides, blighted him with a sense he might be cut out for some extraordinary fate though he had no idea what such a fate might be. But Lee bubbled with frank, engaging good humour though an air of alienation surrounded them; both appreciated they were exotics. They got on well together and it never occurred to either they might live apart.
They moved disinterestedly in the floating world centred loosely upon the art school, the university and the second-hand trade and made their impermanent homes in the sloping, terraced hillside where the Irish, the West Indians and the more adventurous of the students lived in old, decaying houses where rents were low. They were curiously self-contained so that people rarely mentioned them separately but always as the Collins brothers, like bandits. They knew of, and encouraged, this practice. But, the winter he was eighteen, Buzz disappeared precipitously to North Africa with a group of acquaintances leaving Lee to continue his studies alone in the flat they occupied at that time. They thought of this flat as another temporary place to stay awhile; in fact, they would find themselves living there for some years. It was to become their home.
This flat comprised two rooms separated by flimsy double doors and a kitchen, partitioned off by hardboard from the room at the front of the house. This front room, Lee’s room, had long windows opening on to a balcony and, at that time, it was quite bare but for an alarm clock on the mantelpiece and a number of books cleverly stacked one on top of the other. He stored a mattress in a built-in cupboard, together with his clothes, and took it out at night to sleep on. It was a large room; the walls and also the floorboards were painted white. The room echoed at the slightest sound or movement and Lee took off his shoes in the house, in the Japanese manner. Besides, he walked very quietly.
At that time, his room was always extraordinarily tidy, white as a tent and just as easy to dismantle but this was not ascetic barrenness. Because of its whiteness and uninterrupted space, the room was peculiarly sensitive to the time of day, to changes in the weather and to the seasons of the year. It changed continually and without any volition on Lee’s part at all. There was nothing inside it to cast shadows but the movements of Lee himself and his brother, though the branches of the trees in the square outside shivered across this radiant interior in a variety of shadow shapes and, at night, the lights of the city played mysteriously across the endless walls. When he opened the window the winds rushed through.
Furnished entirely by light and shade, the characteristics of the room were anonymity and impermanence. There were no curtains at the windows for the room was so indestructibly private there was no need to hide anything, so little did it reveal. In this way, Lee expressed a desire for freedom; in the last years of his adolescence, freedom was his grand passion and a principal condition of freedom, it seemed to him, was lack of possessions. He also remained cool and detached in his dealings with women for freedom from responsibilities was another prerequisite of this state. So his sentimentality found expression in the pursuit of a metaphysical concept of liberty. When he was thirteen and Buzz eleven, he persuaded his brother to run away with him to Cuba to fight for Castro. Buzz stole a Spanish phrase-book from W. H. Smith’s and they got as far as Southampton before the police found them. Their aunt was furious but gratified. The act was principally the expression of a sentimentality so pure it became his greatest virtue, in one sense, since his sentimentality often, when he grew up, made him act against his desires.
Buzz sent Lee some hash wrapped up in a djellabah from Marrakesh, for a Christmas present, and the brothers did not see one another for six months. During this time, Lee met the woman who later became his wife; on New Year’s morning, he woke up on
a strange floor to find an unknown young girl in his arms. She opened her eyes and some kind of hunger, some kind of despair in her narrow face caught at Lee’s very tender heart. The room was full of darkness, silence and stale air. On a sofa, a young man and a girl twined together under a Paisley shawl; he murmured in his sleep and then a mouse rattled across the floor. Lee’s unexpected visitor turned her head sharply at the noise, shivered and wept. He took her home with him and gave her some breakfast. When she told him her name was Annabel he knew at once she was middle-class and, by her nervous manner, he guessed she was a virgin.
Annabel ate a little, drank her tea and covered her face with her hands so he could not watch her any more. Her movements were spiky, angular and graceful; how was he to know, since he was so young, that he would become a Spartan boy and she the fox under his jacket, eating his heart out. The Japanese peasantry had an awed respect for foxes, who, they believed, could enter a person’s body either through the breast or else the space between the flesh of a finger and any one fingernail. When the fox was inside, it would harangue its host until he lost his reason but Lee felt no need to beware of her. He smiled at her, leaned across the table and drew her hands away from her face, a pale face, mostly eyes. When he found out how friendless she was, he took her to live with him.
She sat in his white, empty room all day gazing at the wall. At intervals, he fed her and caressed her. Then, one morning while he was at a lecture, she took her pastel crayons and drew a tree on the section of the wall at which she habitually stared. She drew with such conviction she must have been sketching the tree in her mind for a long time for it was a flourishing and complicated tree covered with flowers and many coloured birds. At that, Lee judged the time had come. As he guessed, she was a virgin. He fetched a towel to wipe away the blood. She asked, would it be any better when she was used to it? He replied, ‘Yes, love, of course, love,’ though the sight of her curiously pointed teeth disturbed him and when she asked in a voice of pure curiosity: ‘Why should you want to do this to me?’ he was bereft of an answer. All at once his strong and graceful young body seemed to him a fragile and unnecessary appurtenance; her eyes reflected him in strange contours and he could not tell whether she saw him as he thought he was or not or what it was she saw in him, with her huge eyes which too much weeping seemed to have given the shape of tears laid on their sides. He realized he could supply her only with a physiological answer while she would never be satisfied with less than an existential one and he became melancholy but she was full of questions and soon drew his hand to the region of her fresh wound although it was not passion which moved her but, perhaps, curiosity. This happened on a very cold day towards the end of January, when snow was falling outside.