Heartsease and Orchid

“It’s monstrous. It’s low.”

“These things happen everywhere. I’d wager they always have.”

“You could have drowned, you know.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have. I’ve always been a strong swimmer. A ducking is the least I deserve, by most standards, for being such an arrogant swine — and they can’t say I didn’t fight like a tiger all the while.”

The sound of dripping water is dreadfully loud to Judd’s ears — he is as conscious as any other man of with what difficulty privacy can be attained, and how fleeting it can be in a place like this one. At one time it must have been used for bathing — it must have been the parade-ground for generations of grayishly pale Victorian schoolboys in states of agitated nudity, waiting for their turn at a plunge, and it still has the musty smell of old timbers and moldering towels. Bennett and Judd are out of sight, for now, but these places are never really private, never really secret.

If only Guy hadn’t been so ready to mouth off, it would have gone easier — only a soaking and not a pummeling, no gouging fingers and fists. But if he weren’t so quick with words he wouldn’t be Guy. Tommy cannot fault him for his resistance, but it’s hard to summon up the principles to praise him, either. A small trickle of blood has been diluted into a copperish smear on Bennett’s upper lip; underneath Bennett’s fresh shirt — one of Tommy’s own, snatched up in haste — there will be bruises.

His shirt hangs open over the white lines of his body — he wears no undershirt, and the skin of his chest is pebbling in the cool air. Christ, what rot all these schoolboy scuffles are — all day they play at being soldiers and then in their off-hours they throw each other in bodies of water and make a game of five-against-one. Guy might have the bravado to shame a crowd of snotty-nosed annoyances for their sportsmanship, but his athleticism will not save him.

None of his insufferable sweethearts will save him from such treatment. They’re too busy trying to escape it themselves — all the men of the school are, in their cowardly fleeting ways, either they dole out drubbings or they dodge them. Of all the petty humiliations, all the absurd school-day indignities, the informal cruelties rankle him almost as much as those cruelties enshrined in tradition. The improvisational cruelties are the children of the class system; they are student improvisations on the theme set by masters. Small indignities doled out against inferiors — these petty devices chafe him more greatly than all the cuts and swatted hands and copied-out Georgics, all other such punishments so humiliatingly prosaic in their repetition across generations. The self-perpetuating brazenness of it all, of doing it with impunity knowing that there would be no reckoning — that five self-positioned swells might go after another fellow for their own fun, and give him some silly stupid punishment of their own devising for an imagined slight, and that a year or two from now this will be Bennett’s own silly stupid privilege as one ascended to the same species. There must be a reckoning for things that are wrong. It can’t all be senseless.

Judd has an awful image in his mind of some future for Guy: ten years out of school and trapped in an architecture built for smaller-minded men, fellows like his would-be assailants who think the height of humor is holding a man’s head underwater while he struggles. At the mercy of men like that, grown up. Tommy does not want to think of Guy that way, unhappy and ill-fitted in adulthood, but it seems a terrible inevitability. He must press it from his thoughts or he will shudder.

He doesn’t shut his eyes; he looks Guy in the face. “Being a swine will be the end of you one of these days.”

“Shot through the heart by an outraged mother, maybe. I never thought it’d be over sport. Careless talk, impugning the spirit of fair play.”

“It’s all so stupid. Nonsense rules and nonsense games, made up to keep us in our places — fair play.” Judd’s face flares with heat. “What damned good will fair play be against the Fascists? It’s only a game for children.”

“Don’t tell me I’ve spoiled your faith in cricket.”

That much is long gone, lost in the mists of childhood. He’s set that stuff aside for heavier books, with better titles. “Too late for that. Oh, Bennett. It’s not your fault, I’m sick of these things happening in the name of tradition. It’ll only keep happening, and it’s damned character-building, so it’ll never stop. And here we’re more concerned with covering it up before the masters see.”

“Well, it’s over with now, anyway. Thanks for the loan. You’re a brick, Judd.”

Lucky that they’re more or less the same size, or the change of clothes would look clownish. Judd can feel an unpleasant comment rising to his tongue about how well Bennett looks after a good wash, but he swallows it back; his friend’s state of dishevelment is more a protest than a pose, and he’ll let him have it for now. Guy’s hair falls across his forehead in damp scythes; the pilfered towel still hangs over his shoulder like some heroic article, like David with his sling. A bruise is blooming across his face, pebbled with small scratches — like fingernails, Judd thinks, or points of gravel.

He clasps Judd’s hand in his own to cheer him, thumbing at the hairs on the back of his wrist. Guy smells like pondweed and dark water, like dank growth and rotten wood and dead things. His cheeks are pale, and though he is smiling there is a faint scarlet split down the middle of his bottom lip, a queer detail like the torn petal of a flower. He has a funny fierce face, even now. There is some quality of beauty that transcends sex, an emblem of strength that transcends age and sex. There’s nothing like a girl in that face, perhaps there never was — not even the fullness of that mouth. Its shape is remarkably male. Guy would laugh to hear him say it, and he’d make some lewd remark, but it’s true.

But that’s all that business about the vices of the Greeks again. Tommy had always suspected, even as a really young man, that it was a matter of simple substitution — for lack of members of the opposite sex, a boy might do, and in societies where womanhood was so utterly despised, a boy might be preferred. But Bennett’s strange enthusiasm for his fellow man outstrips that hypothesis, and is more than Tommy can reckon with.

He wants to dab the blood from Guy’s upper lip, but upon a search of his pockets he can’t find a handkerchief. Tommy mutters an apology, caught off-guard, and Guy murmurs something nonspecific and reassuring.

The absurdity of it now imposes itself on him — it’s Bennett who’s battered and half-drowned, it’s Bennett who needs mercy, but he’s petting and soothing him like a spooked horse. It would be boorish to brush him away. Bennett’s inky fingertips trace the metal hinge of his eyeglasses, just out of the corner of his vision. Judd flinches.

“You’ve got your specs on. Must have wanted a better look at me.”

“I will have you know that I was reading a book before you got yourself into trouble. Something edifying.”

“So take them off, you’re going to strain your eyes looking at me. You’re going to be an old man one day, quite blind, still railing at me for my misdeeds.”

Guy slips his glasses off of his nose with strange deftness, and their silvery weight is lifted — his vision is skewed and gauzy now, but Bennett’s face is smoothed and clear like a stone.

They only have so much time. Bennett strokes his hair back behind his ear, and Judd permits it.

“You’re the only one who’s ever touched me, Bennett. Like this, I mean. Not at all self-consciously.”

Guy gives him a tight grin. “There’s ways to remedy that, you know. I’m sure you could find yourself a particular friend if you only tried. The Marx to your Engels.”

“Before I came here it seemed as if I was always being touched — either I was mauled by nurses and aunts, or imposed-upon by bigger boys. And then all at once they sort of left me alone, and I met you.”

“Not in that order, surely.”

Guy has a way of touching him that makes it seem effortless — no bluff swats on the bottom, no carelessly lewd caresses, but all deliberate and all so damned easy. Sprezzatura, like an Italian courtier — imagine Bennett in another time, some deposed favorite of Queen Elizabeth’s holding his insolent head high on the way to the block. Or see the two of them — Judd the heretic and Bennett the outlaw, done up alongside the other men of the school who have gone before in their silly ruffs and coats to die for their idiosyncrasies. Schoolboy mnemonics and dates — when Adam delved and Eve span, wicked royal favorites in absurd hose and pointed shoes, diggers and levellers and cavaliers.

Judd can’t push him away, not now; he can only sink into the touch, letting the shiver of recognition escape him that this is what he’s meant to do all this time, this is the consolation he has to offer. There’s a faint clammy coolness to Guy’s skin that hasn’t gone away — Judd scuffs his hands over him to try and warm him, but Guy laughs and pulls him in closer, against his chest.

He kisses the soft crease at the bottom of his neck, and presses his mouth to Bennett’s collarbone with a sudden burst of fiery passion — this makes Guy laugh, catching him by the elbows, and Judd startles.

He can feel Bennett’s arousal and it shocks him — it is one thing to make a jest of sex and another thing in earnest. Judd stammers despite himself, and jerks his head up sharply.

“I’m sorry — this must be all wrong. I must be making a terrible fool of myself.”

“Not at all.”

“I know, of course, what to do—”

And no doubt Guy would gladly show him even if he didn’t. All those mock-seductions, played out in burlesque — teasing him for being cold and indifferent, for thinking he’s too good for a half-hearted frigging under the covers. Not too good, simply too cold — too dull, too sober, full of tedious virtue. Had he never tried it because he knew better, or because he’d feared he might enjoy it?

He flings himself into that touch. It seems like the only thing to do under the circumstances; Guy admonishes him with kisses until all he can do is make small annoyed noises against his mouth.

Bennett allows his inept groping with great grace. Tommy fumbles at his shoulders, his backside, past the waistband of his trousers. It’s a queer thing, discovering one another skin to skin and face to face. If they only had more time, if only they had the leisure to lie together like grown men and women do, oh — he would index Guy and make a record of him, the soft groove in his upper lip and the stubborn press of his jawbone and his disorderly sharp fingernails burying themselves joyfully in Tommy’s wrist.

Guy’s hips press against his own, straddling Tommy’s thigh, and the joining of their bodies makes for hot pinched friction as the two of them work against one another. Tommy gives himself up into a long sustained clinch where their bodies are flush together and uninterrupted — trapped in the closeness of bodies, the lean muscled slimness of Guy’s body and the insistence of his own desire no longer localized but diffuse. It runs through his belly and loins and prick all equally.

He dashes out his climax breathlessly, with Guy’s hands making fists in the back of his shirt. It can’t go on after that — it seems impossible that it does. When the two of them pull apart it’s with faint chagrin, Guy’s hair is all tumbled in front of his eyes and there are pink patches in his cheeks,

Tommy presses the tips of his fingers against his mouth. His breath comes only thinly, but with great force, like a winded runner.

Tommy Judd is frightened of himself, frightened of what has flared up in him, like — like a sleeping animal flushed out of the brambles. Something contrary to his own self-knowledge, contrary to reason — there is no such thing as sin, but there are such things as surprises, great terrible yearnings that open up before him like a chasm crumbling away. Guy can be as suave about the matter as he likes, but he cannot possibly understand the beautiful and terrible shock of it, the sea-change of that love.

Guy exhales. “Oh, this is a rotten business.”

“Come back with me for Easter hols. Judith won’t mind, and there’s always room for some guest or other.” She’s always asking him to call her mother like he used to, but Tommy cannot. She can and must be Judith, now and forever.

“Come and do what?”

“I don’t know — I only want to see you.”

His mother and father have always been an inconvenience, bordering on an embarrassment — flat fanciful Lloyd George-ish people who write poetry and cherish their dogs — but they will love Bennett the moment they see him. The two of them won’t have privacy at the house, either, but they won’t be conducting their business in library corridors and in toilets and in dormitory beds, in secret dark places. He’ll take him bicycling.

The thought of it is frail as a soap-bubble, and as soon as it comes into his mind it collapses flat into a nothing. Awful, girlish, foolish sentiments — he should be helping him, helping him plot some elaborate revenge against the fascist bastards of the upper sixth instead of planning out some preposterous idyll on which they can never embark.

If he touches him now, will that heat that is fading flare again into an open flame? Will it begin again?

Guy makes a face. “I expect the Colonel will have something to say about it. He always does.”

“The Colonel can screw himself. Why should courting your mother mean anything to do with you?” Judd does up the buttons on Guy’s shirt briskly, like a truculent batman.

“Even so, your father won’t mind the pair of us living in very obscure sin under his sacred roof?” Guy teases.

Any other time, it would be one of Bennett’s shocking jokes, but there is a chilling truth to it here and now in a drafty outbuilding that smells of damp.

“I’m sure my parents will allow it. Rejoice in it, even. They’re always wanting me to have blissful golden school days. I can’t stand this damn place except for you, Bennett.”

Bennett tosses his head in annoyance, like a badly-behaved horse, and thrusts his hands into his pockets. “Don’t you ever think of doing something your parents won’t allow? You’re their slave until university, but it doesn’t mean you need to be so damned pliant.”

Judd folds his spectacles and stuffs them away in his jacket. He’ll only roll over on them later, or sit on them, or have them fall out on the walk back.

“You don’t understand it, and I’m glad you don’t understand it. It’s a weakness in me. Come, let’s go out into the sunshine. I’ll read to you from the Daily Worker.”