Chapter 32: Simon - The Golden Hours

PART FIVE: SPRING 1965

Simon was in the smallest, most snug (still not at all snug) of the glasshouses, laughing. He had managed to get the old heating system to work, after a fashion, clankily, and by positioning an old wicker sofa on top of the ancient pipe along the back (he’d had to remove a couple of cross bars, and the sofa would certainly never move again) he had created a rather comfortable haven for himself as well as a good spot for germinating Rachel’s confetti plants. He’d padded the seat with a couple of dog blankets and some cushions Polly was throwing out anyway, and could now lounge there whenever he felt like it, with a cup of tea, and the radio, admiring the view down the Walled Garden and perhaps smoking a little of the grass that his new friend Denny was more than happy to slip him.

He’d met Denny in the pub – not The Butcher’s, but the one in the village, where Simon had been going for years, and where the Yanks didn’t usually come. Denny was about thirty, slender, with a face that could best be described as humorous and a voice like warm honey. He was talking about apples with Jenny, the barmaid, whose voice suggested an adenoidal Norfolk chicken. She was trying to tell Denny the names of the apples grown locally; Denny was trying to tell her what they grew in Kentucky. Golden Noble and Norfolk Royal were comprehensible, but they were having particular trouble with Norfolk Beefing, and when Simon chipped in with Adam’s Pearmain it didn’t help. Then Denny started describing the Kentucky Limbertwig (mild, sweet and stripy), and Simon ordered pints of Jenny’s dad’s cider all round, even though only halves were to be served to ladies or strangers, there being no way of knowing how they’d react. ‘Go on, Jenny,’ Simon said. ‘Get us the good stuff.’ The good stuff was almost green, and cloudy, and would take off the skin of your mouth and the top of your head simultaneously. By the end of the evening Simon and Denny had arranged to meet the following week to look at a ’55 Coupe de Ville. And of course, they then had to meet again, after Simon had reported back on it to Gerald and Polly, to agree the deal and arrange delivery. And then there was the delivery itself, which for various reasons took place at The Butcher’s.

They got there a bit late. The noise spilled out onto the grey street as they pushed open the door, and inside the place was packed shoulder to shoulder. A trad jazz band was in full rampaging flow: rackety upright piano, lazy bass, someone on a washboard, and a white-faced woman dressed in black, her hair pulled back tight, growling out a lively version of ‘Kansas City’ which had everybody clapping, shouting and singing along. Denny pushed them through to the bar: ‘Evening, Ada!’ he yelled to the barmaid in a pretty good Norfolk accent, and she responded in cod-Kentucky – ‘Aw, Denny, ma darlin’!’ – while eyeing up Simon. It was so noisy that he couldn’t take in much beyond raucous jollity. He was happy Denny had brought him to a sociable place.

They found a bit of wall to lean against. The press of bodies was delightful to Simon. Most of the drinkers were quite young, a lot of them clearly Yanks, but he thought he recognised Gables’ cousin who worked on the market, though the man turned his head away when he noticed Simon looking. He tried to have a yelled conversation with Denny, but soon had to subside into a friendly silence, enjoying the music and the rather intoxicating touch of Denny’s leg against his in the press. At the same time, though, he felt something off-kilter about the crowd, something inside out, unsettling. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Then, looking at two girls giggling together, it hit him. There were very few women, and the men were not being sexual with the ones there were: not dancing with them, nor flirting, not pressurising or bossing them or staring down their fronts. And the women were not being sexual with the men: not batting eyelashes at them, not walking on eggshells or giving tight, bored little smiles. And people were – what was it? Relaxed?

Denny watched him, curiously and idly, and Simon turned his head. Denny’s eyes look different, Simon thought. As if they were open now, where previously they had been veiled. Denny gave him a little half-smile, and Simon froze.

Denny leaned in, and spoke a little sideways, his voice cutting under the music. ‘Did I misread you?’ he murmured, right into Simon’s ear. There was confidence in it, and courtesy too. And just a touch of nervousness. Simon closed his eyes. Oh!

‘No,’ he said. His mouth was suddenly dry. ‘You read me right.’

They were quiet again. The music washed and strutted around them.

‘Back home,’ Denny said, after a while, during a quieter number, ‘you should know, I’m a long-haired layabout. I like apple trees and I like music, I love my mamma and I love to cook. I don’t love airplanes and I don’t always fit in, and I don’t have this haircut, that’s for sure. Mostly I like to play my music on the porch in the evening sun after a good day’s work, and, no, I ain’t much good at it.’

‘Why are you telling me this now?’ Simon said, his head dropping in a laugh.

‘Come outside a minute,’ said Denny.

In the Coupe de Ville, parked up round the corner in Mariners Lane, Simon watched as Denny rolled a cigarette. The tobacco was odd-looking, dry and green with little seeds in it.

‘You’re so old,’ said Denny, as he passed the roll-up across. ‘And yet soooo innocent.’

‘I’m not that innocent,’ Simon said.

‘Don’t let it go out,’ Denny said, eyeing it, as the seeds popped and sparked.

‘It won’t,’ Simon replied.

It wasn’t that he needed anything. He still loved Polly most; was grateful and contented in his life at Fakenham. The place was a lot more settled than it had been. The staff (the help? The people who worked there? Nobody had worked out a satisfactory way to refer to them since they stopped being ‘the servants’) were mostly village dwellers now, not live-in – apart from the dear old Tonbridges and Eileen. Basically, Simon organised everything heavy duty and what happened out of doors; Polly did light duty, garden design and indoors. Jemima had taken charge of Accounts. Polly and Gerald were happy: the income, from the rents, the weddings and soon – Simon hoped – the entry to the grounds and gardens, was steady. He was officially employed now, wages and all – after some arguments in which everybody tried to be more generous than the next person. He found Gerald companionable and the children amusing, and liked working with Aunt Rachel, who nobody had ever thought of paying. His dad was a dear old stick; though sometimes he called Simon Edward, which Simon found incredibly sad. It was a nice way to live. But he did remember what it had been like to have a sex life. Indeed, a romantic life.

The family could and would never know about Denny. What he and Simon were doing was illegal. Mortifyingly, embarrassingly, humiliatingly and dangerously illegal. They frequented a low dive and indulged louche pleasures in a relationship that was against the law. Imagine telling Aunt Rachel about that! No.

And there was something charming about the fact that the anxiety-inducing development of a sex life came accompanied not just by the delight of Denny’s personality, but also by this soothing, burden-lifting, head-releasing thing which once you’d got the hang of it – hold it when you inhale, don’t have a coughing fit – well, what did it do? It took the edge off things. It softened the mood; soothed the nerves, made music even lovelier, and smoothed out his shyness, so that it became possible for him to take the Coupe de Ville into the woods, night after night, with Denny.

Lounging and smoking on the hood – hood! – of the Cadillac, he’d asked about Kentucky.

‘We got a big falls up to Cumberland where we get moonbows,’ Denny said. ‘Full moon shines through the spray and it lights up like a rainbow in the night. It’s the prettiest thing you ever saw.’ Simon smiled. ‘And we got big rivers, and smoky mountains. Bluegrass music – I’ll play you some.’

‘Do you have a record player?’ Simon enquired, and Denny laughed and said, ‘Play you some on my banjo, dolt.’ Then he glanced at him, and burst into a verse of ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ – ‘That’s the Elvis Presley version,’ he said, ‘not the Bill Monroe, he did it in waltz time.’

‘Do you miss it?’ Simon said.

Denny smiled and observed that Simon had never been in the military, had he? Had he ever been to the South? To the United States?

‘I haven’t been anywhere,’ Simon confessed. ‘School, university, London.’

‘There’s a lot of things you don’t want to be in Kentucky,’ Denny said, and he left it there. Simon resolved to pick it up later. There would be a later. ‘What else do you have?’ he asked.

‘Did I ever tell you,’ Denny said, ‘about the Bath County Meat Shower of 1876?’

‘No,’ said Simon. ‘Tell me.’

‘Half a bushel of meat scraps fell from the empty open blue sky onto my Great-Great-Great-Grandma Crouch making soap at her farm at Olympia Springs. Nobody knew why. Said it was bear, mutton, beef, frogspawn, nostoc, lung, horse, human . . . Reporters came and scientists studied it; it was sent pickled in alcohol up and down the country. One guy from New York paid an Irishman to eat it; he tried and tried but couldn’t bring himself to. Someone said it fell from the picnic box of a passing balloon, but there was no balloon.’

‘So what was it?’

‘Nobody knows.’

‘What d’you think?’

‘Buzzards throw up, you know. When they’re threatened, or feel too heavy for a flight. Maybe a bunch of buzzards threw up on my great-great-great-grandma.’

Simon thought of his grandmother, the Duchy: her delicate strength, her parochialism. The world was so big.

‘And what else?’ Simon asked.

‘Puking buzzard meat showers not enough for you?’ Denny said. ‘Well, OK. How about . . . blue people?’

Simon laughed.

‘Come on, you never heard about the Blue people of Troublesome Creek?’

Simon said that was funny but he wasn’t in fact born yesterday.

‘It’s true fact!’ Denny protested. ‘There was a blue Frenchman, Martin Fugate, back in the 1800s, had a load of blue children. Everybody was marrying their kin in those days – I am myself kin to myself,’ he said, with a straight look. ‘I’m my own cousin in two lines. Anyway, so there was a load of blue people up there, doctors went up and found ’em and studied ’em. It’s called methemoglobinemia; it concerns the blood’s capacity to oxygenate. Their blood’s the colour of chocolate, I’m told. My own Great-Great-Aunt Luna was bluer than the moon, and I’m lucky not to be blue myself, only somebody way back found their way down from the hills and married out of the gene pool, so I turned out’ – he looked at his arm in the moonlight, and laughed – ‘like this,’ he said.

Simon gave a disbelieving grunt.

‘Hundred per cent true,’ Denny said. ‘How can you doubt my blood and heritage?’

‘Here, blue blood means you’re grand,’ said Simon.

‘Grand like good? Or like swanky? Lords and ladies? You got blue blood?’

‘Not very blue,’ he said. Denny hadn’t seen the house. Would he ever? Simon ran his finger down Denny’s forearm; the veins, the muscles. It hadn’t taken them any time at all to be physically relaxed together. Of course, the grass helped. He took a drag.

It lets me love him, he thought.

Do I love him?

There was no answer to that, really. He’d never actually had the capacity to think about love in terms of himself. Love was for other people. For those who found things easier. When he read the paper, for example, which wasn’t often, he saw that there were men in London campaigning for homosexuality not to be illegal. God, such unwieldy words! For something which could be so straightforward. But how bloody undignified. Please, Parliament, may we be not illegal? Nobody else has to ask the great favour of their love life not being illegal. Nobody else has to listen to their own father humphing about how dreadful that would be, how it was a threat to the traditional family. Every time Hugh came up with this opinion – which nobody asked him for, he was just an old chap grumbling at the paper and nobody was listening – Simon squashed the desire to say, Well, Dad, you’re heterosexual and your traditional family produced me, so where does that leave us?

Anyway, London was a long way from Norfolk. God, wasn’t it just. Forty years behind, he sometimes thought. If it weren’t for the air bases, you could imagine the war had never happened, out here.

No, Simon thought. He would never be taking Denny, or anybody else, by the hand and bringing him to Hugh, to the bosom of his family, and saying, proudly, tenderly, confident in their warm response, ‘Dad, Polly, Jemima, I want you to meet my –’ God, even language failed them. And that was a pretty neat way of telling an entire tranche of people that they themselves were wrong. And even if the powers-that-be did get around to allowing people like him to express their feelings, so long as they were consenting, over twenty-one and in private, what did that mean in reality? It wouldn’t change parents, women, straight people, who would still and always find it at best shocking and immoral and at worst – oh God, he really didn’t need to think about that. His kind of love would still, literally, have to be behind closed doors. No holding hands, no hug at the station, no excited kiss just for the joy of it. No lounging against each other on the family sofa after Sunday lunch, the way they were lounging now in the chill of the Norfolk night. No walking into the Wigmore Hall or even a jazz club with his arm round his beloved’s shoulder – even though half the chaps at the Wigmore would be queer too. It all had to be so sneaky! And when it wasn’t, in the queer places, it could get rather terribly performative. He didn’t want to watch chaps snogging and camping it up in pubs any more than he wanted to watch chaps and girls getting off together. Decorum within liberty, he thought, noticing wryly how English he was being.

So what do I want?

That was slightly too sad a question.

To get married and have children – the thought rushed into his mind and straight out again. For God’s sake, Simon. Don’t make yourself ridiculous.

But to live with someone you love? Who loves you? To spend all night together, to wake up and say good morning, to make breakfast for them. To talk about your day. Don’t forget your umbrella.

Sure, Simon! On a farm in Kentucky with your apple boy. Or here in the heart of your exceptionally old-fashioned family. Polly probably doesn’t even know what being a queer is. He turned to Denny and kissed him and kissed him, and drew him back inside, onto the leather banquette of the car, out of the cold and the falling mist.

Taking a little toke in the glasshouse on his wicker sofa, listening to Miles and Coltrane on his battery radio, the intoxicating fumes melted into the indisputable reality that Simon would never be able to have what he wanted. He was happy in this moment. In this moment, he was as happy as he’d ever been, and that was all he needed.

He wasn’t undisciplined, though, with the happy-making grass. He could imagine how delightful it might be to live one’s life in that fragrant haze, but he noticed the sort of filter it set up around him, as if a pane of glass separated him from the world. If I lived a painful life, he thought, emotionally, that might be quite a temptation. Denny had told him that there were quite a few guys in the military who used drugs for that. And that out in Vietnam, where Denny was very grateful not to be, pretty much everybody was off their head as much as they could be, or so he’d been told. But Simon didn’t want or need a veil between himself and the world. Part of his purpose at Fakenham, he knew, was to be open and understanding, and for that he had to be aware. Polly needed to be able to moan to him; Gerald needed another chap of his own age to go to the pub with from time to time, to escape all those women. Simon tried to model himself on Archie, in that department. Everybody trusted Archie. And now as Dad was ageing before their eyes . . . well, he might not be an earl or head of a household or husband and father or even in proper employment, but he could carry his share. I can, he thought now, inhaling, exhaling. I do. I’m pretty sure I do.

* * *

And so the winter passed.

* * *

As spring’s flush of green crept across the Norfolk flats, and the wide skies stayed light that bit longer at the edges of the days, Hugh began to come out again on his slow, unsteady peregrinations around the gardens and the yards. He liked to be next to a wall: a stick is one thing, he’d say, but a wall is always reliable. Often Jemima would come with him, so trim and neat she could almost be a nurse, but more often, with mild and courteous impatience, Hugh would brush her attentions off. Simon, from his nest in the glasshouse where he had just rolled up, through the cracked and clouded old window, noticed his father coming down the cindered path, stopping for breath. Simon’s own heart clutched to see his father like that, his good arm against the wall holding him up, and his head hanging a little forward.

Hugh straightened, and continued his slow progress. Simon jumped up and went to the door of the glasshouse. ‘Dad!’ he called. ‘Come over here!’

It was only just after lunch, but Hugh was amused to accept a small Scotch from the bottle Simon kept by the boiler, safe from Gables’ prying eyes and thirsty habits. They sat side by side on the ragged blanket stinking of Jack Russell, and drank together. It felt companionable. Hugh was pale. Simon knew better than to ask him how he was.

‘Smoke?’ he said. Hugh shook his head no – the doctors were against it and he tried to do at least one or two of the things they insisted on. But a daredevil whim flared up in Simon – why not? Why bloody not? – and he said, ‘No, do. It’s a new kind of tobacco. You might like it.’ And he lit up, and passed the joint to his dad.

Hugh took his drag, coughed, snorted, laughed and looked at his son. ‘Simon,’ he said. ‘If somebody is telling you this is a new kind of tobacco, and you’re believing them, you’re being quite naive. This is kif. Cannabis. Whatever they’re calling it these days.’

Simon could not think of a single thing to say.

‘You youngsters didn’t invent it, you know,’ Hugh said. ‘I had it in Morocco, a long time ago. Nineteen twenty.’

‘Good Lord,’ said Simon. Then, ‘Where was Mum?’ He absolutely could not imagine his sweet proper lady of a mother in some Moroccan dope den, in the twenties.

‘Oh, Sybil was with me,’ Hugh said, and gave his son a glance. ‘She might have had the same idea as you.’ He took a long and practised drag, held it a moment, glanced at the roach like any youngster, and breathed out with a sigh. ‘Bloody nice, actually. Thank you.’

Simon could only laugh. ‘Did it help?’

‘It did! Sybil wouldn’t try it, of course. Too racy for her. Never knew where to get it again, after we came back.’

The pipes clanked. A little squirrel skittered up the ash tree outside, scattering raindrops.

‘Mmm,’ said Simon, just as his father too opened his mouth.

‘I’m worried about Sybil,’ Hugh said, and Simon didn’t correct him. Why bother? ‘With the surgery.’

Simon was confused now. It was many, many years since Sybil had had surgery. And died. And Jemima wasn’t ill, was she?

‘She feels I should have it,’ Hugh said, ‘if I’m not too decrepit. The heart surgery, I mean. I’m not letting them into my skull no matter how keen they are to fossick about in there for bits of ordnance . . .’

Simon, who had had no idea there was any plan for his father to have surgery of any kind, resolved to pay more attention next time the women were talking as if he wasn’t there.

‘So I’m going to,’ Hugh said.

The silence sat.

‘But I am going to die,’ Hugh said, ‘at some stage. It’s a miracle I’ve lasted this long. Forgive me being rather brutally clear. We were under-informed, when your grandparents died, and I don’t want to put you in the same position. I don’t have much to leave anybody. We’re rather living off the money from the house. Can’t sponge off Gerald, he’s frightfully generous after all.’ He must have noticed Simon’s flinch. ‘Oh, I don’t mean you, old chap. You more than pull your weight. They’d be lost without you.’

Simon glowed. It still meant the world.

‘But I want to be able to make sure she’s all right. She doesn’t want to think about it . . . she’s so much younger than me . . .’ He drifted to a stop, and Simon had a sudden strong glimpse of a life beyond what he took for granted. He’d been assuming, he realised like a shift under his feet, that things would just amble along. ‘What I’m saying,’ Hugh continued, ‘is that there won’t be much money, and I need to leave it to her. Of course, as my oldest son –’ he said, but drew to a halt. Then, ‘And there’s Wills, he seems to be doing well, but . . . Polly is all right, but Laura needs seeing through school and something to keep her going before she marries . . .’

Simon let him talk. It was their longest conversation in years.

‘I’m not saying I’m leaving you nothing; just don’t get your hopes up. Don’t rely on it,’ Hugh said finally. The joint was finished, and he rolled his shoulders. ‘It really does . . . relieve things,’ he said. ‘Pity it’s illegal. I suppose they can’t have everybody high all the time.’

Simon resolved to get his father high as often as he possibly could. ‘Drop by any time you like,’ he said. ‘I usually have one out here before dinner.’

‘So you have a supply?’ Hugh asked.

‘Seems I do,’ Simon said, thinking suddenly and hungrily of Denny.

‘It is an agreeable alternative to a glass of sherry,’ said Hugh.

They walked in together, and for the first time in ages Simon drifted to the piano. After a little of the Mozart he’d been playing all his life, he moved into ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B’. Polly grinned at him as she passed by on her way to the kitchen, and did a little dance over by the window, swinging her hips and raising her arms, her head falling gracefully forward. He blew her a kiss, and segued into ‘Kansas City’, indulging a little dream of playing at The Jolly Butcher’s, with Denny on the banjo, singing.

Simon had wondered, before he’d ever been with a man, about whether men lay in each other’s arms like men and women do in paintings and films. It was so clear, with men and women, who did what. Everybody knew. But if two men did it, how did they decide who lay in whose arms? Whose head went on whose chest or shoulder? Whose arm around the shoulder and whose around the waist when they walked in the park on a Sunday afternoon? Well, that would never happen. But lying about, in a car, or a clearing, or a barn, he discovered that they took turns.