The Man Who Rode Ampersand Read online

  Yet I knew in my mind that Dan and my father set out at half past ten sharp most days, as regular as a postman on his rounds. To start with, they walked briskly, looking neither to right nor to left, no dawdling here in the dry country. There was nothing to see but the occasional twitch of a curtain and a bleared face peering out to see what sort of a day it was or an old woman twirling a mop in a bucket on the doorstep. At best a dog-lover, with curlers veiled, letting her pooch sidle up to a lamp-post, might stir a wordless grimace from Dan and my father, hatred of dogs being one of their few common passions.

  Inertia blanketed this dormitory of solitary bourgeois transients: middle-aged women separated from their husbands and behind with the rent, artistic Australians having difficulty with residence permits, thirty-five-year-old public-school men between jobs—will go anywhere, do anything legal—single ladies attending classes in bookbinding, widows come to London to die interestingly, and all sorts of people recovering, convalescing, undergoing treatment, in analysis, taking up theosophy, into encounter groups, taking things easy for a bit, making fresh starts or old endings. Morning rarely lightened the windows of their dusty basements (or garden flats, as the letting agents liked to call them, though no flowers could have bloomed there since the time when my father’s great-grandmother was said to have skated on the Pimlico marshes) and even when a ray of light did manage to straggle through they were not there to greet it. Some had already left in the dark for the travel agencies, photographer’s studios and interior decorating shops where they watched the day slip by in a gentle procession of snacks—coffee-and-biscuits, yoghurt-and-salad, tea-and-biscuits and a quick one round the corner on the way home. Others were still savouring their power-assisted sleep, the last traces of mogadon, kif and highland cream sweetly flavouring their dreams of past extravagance and future sobriety. Today they would sand the floor, visit their trustees, get the place really cleaned up, start their exercises, but for the moment they would have one last lie-in.

  Dan and my father would stride undeviatingly along this familiar path until the first signs of life broke in. At the main road, choice reared its head, the day began to define itself.

  On that January morning, a small boy was pulling back the iron grille in front of the Prince of Wales. ‘No, I think not. Too many pansies in the Prince these days and it’s too dark.’ My father liked a light pub where he could see what he was drinking. Across the other side of the road, the doors were already open at the Duke of Connaught. ‘Too draughty.’ Further on, the Duke of Teck, rarely favoured with custom: ‘I don’t much care for the publican. I left my umbrella there once, he pretended he’d never seen it.’ The whole line of minor royalty rejected with the solemnity of a sovereign choosing a son-in-law, only after having passed the town hall did my father announce his final destination, like a ship’s captain who may not break the seal on his orders until he is on the high seas.

  ‘I think,’ he said reflectively, ‘that we had better go to the library first. I must look something up.’ My father was fond of the library but at the back of his mind there seemed to be a slight feeling that the place needed cheering up. There was something about the manner of his entry which suggested not so much the seeker after knowledge as the well-known entertainer making a Christmas visit to the chronic ward. Without ever raising his voice above the appropriate level or banging books about, he contrived somehow to disturb almost everyone in the building. ‘Good morning,’ he whispered to the attendant pushing a trolley of books along the passage. ‘Hello, sor,’ the attendant replied, startled by this approach. ‘And what part of Ireland do you come from?’ ‘Clonmel, sor, County Tipperary.’ ‘Clonmel—I coursed a dog there once, during the war, against a priest.’ ‘Now that’s a shame, the bishops won’t let their priests run the dogs now. It was the betting that was giving them a terrible name.’

  My father nodded vigorously, delighted to have marked up his first Irishman of the day. He was always quick to seize on a brogue. Sometimes even a vaguely Irish aspect—a hint of jug-ears, a reddish cheek, a button nose—would be enough to lure him across a bar or over to the other side of the street. Occasionally, he got the brush-off from an indignant Welshman, but more often the timeless warmth of camaraderie was established as quickly as lighting a gas fire. It was the timelessness rather than the camaraderie that spoke to his depths. He was at his best with surly hall-porters from County Monaghan or Fermanagh, holding their reluctant attention with stories of fishing on Lough Erne.

  This flagrant defiance of the temporal imperative, this spitting in the face of the business of the day was in striking contrast to my father’s lightning speed of attack. In any public place, I had only to fall behind him for a second to buy a ticket, lock a car door or get rid of a coat and by the time I caught him up, he had already established his audience’s native region and was well launched on some anecdote which was apposite only in the geographical sense.

  The library attendant, though still friendly, was looking increasingly uncomfortable as if under examination and liable at any moment to be called upon to give the crucial answer which would decide his fate. For the time being, he cautiously mumbled, ‘Well now, is that so?’—a response which, like any reaction short of outright rudeness, my father took for shy encouragement. With his experienced sense of the rhythm of these things, Dan gently led my father on down the passage, giving him time to take his leave of the attendant with the grace and affection suitable to the hour’s good talk he would have liked.

  Already, inside the reading-room, the girls in thick skirts behind the desk were looking up uneasily, aware that they were next in line. They appeared almost to feel that their unwavering attention to duty, admirable from one point of view, was also narrow, spinsterish. There was more to life than moving little cards from one file to another. My father’s manner, though neither breezy nor falsely intimate, gave unsettling hints of this wider world. Dan, already a little impatient as he himself later admitted, made the atmosphere worse by shifting his weight from one leg to another. A book on sauces? A life of Marshal Macmahon? A guide to the Upper Rhine? While my father listed his requests, the girls became still more agitated. As if to answer their fears that he might ramble on all night, he explained, rather slowly in the manner of a lecturer to a foreign audience, the reason linking these requests. He wanted to find out the origin of mayonnaise.

  Some held that the sauce was German in origin, deriving from the town of Mainz—or Mayence as the French called it—and was first used, oddly enough, as an accompaniment to sauerkraut. Another school of thought maintained that it was first made in the Mayenne region of western France to coat the lobsters from the Bay of St-Malo. My father himself had inclined to the theory that it was so named in honour of Marshal Macmahon, the hero of the Crimea, but Sir Harold Nicolson, who had once written on the subject, had produced evidence that the term went back to Port-Mahon, the capital of Minorca captured by the Duc de Richelieu in 1756. One of the girls, desperately catching at the name, looked up a biography of Cardinal Richelieu and gave my father the shelf number.

  As he roamed along the shelves, occasionally turning to whisper to Dan, readers started to shift in their seats. The light from the high windows glinted on upswung pairs of spectacles. Even the old men who had just come in to keep warm, accustomed in the manner of professional egotists to provoke disturbance rather than to acknowledge it, recognized a superior performer in my father and screeched their chairs through a quarter-turn in salute. Their greatcoats, ancient, overlarge, thick-collared, were thrown around their scrawny necks like robes. They looked as if they had been parachuted into their chairs, catapulted into alien thrones by fate, exemplars of that class which has greatness thrust upon it. The whites of their eyes, red-veined Italian marble, twisted up from their newspapers to follow my father’s ramblings round the reading-room, like a chorus of baroque saints rapt in a vision of the infinite. My father did not himself look too far removed from the old men, apart from his garish overcoat a
nd the gleaming, buckled shoes he affected for his small feet. The same red-veined marble in red sockets, the same silver stubble outlining his chin, like the silhouette of a moonlit field of corn, the chin itself defiantly thrust up, the same impatient, compressed lips—he shared the marks of the lost tribe.

  For a few moments the whole library was a flutter of apprehensive little movements. Then all at once my father, no dedicated browser still less a taker of notes, had had enough. The discovery of some curious not necessarily relevant detail had quenched his thirst for information. He abruptly abandoned the comprehensive research programme he had planned during the walk and made for the door, to be dragged back to the desk by Dan in response to the muffled appeals of the girls to be allowed to enter the books he had under his arm. At this point, my father’s good humour suddenly broke. He gave a brief imitation of art ordinary citizen driven to distraction by red tape. How, he implied, could sensible men get on with their work if they were to be continually harassed by pettifogging bureaucrats? Then with a magnificent effort he rallied himself, thanked each of the girls in turn for her help and departed in a blaze of bonhomie, pausing on the way out only to greet the Irish attendant, his nerve now fully recovered from their first meeting. ‘That’s a fine boy you have there, sor.’ My father smiled and shrugged his shoulders without committing himself.

  Such mistaken guesses at his relationship with Dan were not surprising. To hit upon the truth would have been far from easy. Certainly it was made no easier when Dan, asked what he did, said in his reluctant whine, ‘I’m a dancer.’ In fact though he did get occasional work, dancing was neither a vocation to him nor did it provide a steady income. The practising in dusty rehearsal rooms till muscles throbbed with exhaustion, the austere abnegation of the grosser world—Dan’s life did not accommodate itself to these narrow intensities. He had undoubted talent, had once even auditioned for the Royal Ballet, but recoiled from the necessary effort. These days he was more often to be seen backing some middle-aged singer on a television variety show. While the raddled thrush was belting out ‘I could go on singing’ or ‘What the world needs now is love, sweet love’, Dan and his blank-faced accomplices would be shadow-pedalling or skating from side to side, arms flailing as if they had hit a patch of black ice. It was upsetting to catch Dan’s eye during these numbers, for he glared at the camera with a demoniac melancholy as if defying the viewer to be distracted by such gimcrack frivolity from the contemplation of mortality. Suddenly the world seemed a sadder place. You felt that something appalling had just happened in the studio and that at any moment the singer might break off in mid-song to inform the audience that she was sorry but she just couldn’t carry on in the circumstances and she knew they would all show their respect by filing out quietly to collect their refunds at the box-office.

  At teatime once, watching Playpen with the children of some friends, I was startled to see a giant toy kangaroo hop on to the screen with Dan’s face peering grimly from its pouch. The kangaroo came to a halt, bouncing up and down in time to the music. Dan then clambered out of the pouch, revealing himself to be clad in beige leotards and sporting a droopy tail, a rather sketchy salute to macropodomorphism, and began to hop along behind the kangaroo, singing with bleak finality:

  ‘Bouncy-bouncy whee

  Just in time for tea

  I’m a kangaroo

  Don’t you wish you were too?’

  These sombre cameos cannot have taken up much of Dan’s time. He was always around. Sometimes, on the bus home from work, I would see him leaning against a belisha beacon in the Tottenham Court Road, being talked at by men in heavy coats while his gaze travelled slowly up and down the wide pavement. From the lighted top deck of the bus, I could not see his face in the gathering dark. Another time, he was serving behind the bar in a strange, cold pub in Camden Town. I called in for some cigarettes. He greeted me without being either friendly or unfriendly. We did not have much to say to each other.

  ‘What does Dan do?’ I asked Pip Parrott, war hero, antique dealer and last of the Bright Young Things. He answered, off-hand: ‘Well, I hear he plays the Lady Bountiful.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Oh, he takes soup to the cottagers.’ Again meeting with incomprehension, Pip continued rather irritably, ‘Cottages equals public loos, cottagers frequenters of same. Sorry to use homintern jargon.’ ‘How do you know which ones to . . . where to go?’ ‘Same way as other tramps and vagabonds. The word gets round, and then there are . . . certain signs.’

  We sat in Mossy’s dark, crowded house in which it seemed always afternoon and where Mossy herself played hostess to ageing lotus-eaters and offered sanctuary to menopausal dropouts. Pip Parrott crouched on one of the dwarf sofas, his great green head sprouting out of a tangle of limbs like a cabbage gone to seed. He talked in burbling rushes, which were punctuated by occasional throat-clearings followed by one or two words given funereal emphasis. He hit ‘certain signs’ like a cathedral organist pulling out the big stops for the ‘Dead March’ in Saul. This melodramatic delivery usually derived its absurdity from being out of all proportion to the mundane topic, giving tragic intensity to the difficulty of getting his newspapers delivered or the untidy habits of his lodger, a shadowy figure whose role in Pip’s life was, perhaps intentionally, never made clear. Yet here his manner seemed no more than the matter demanded, just as the most exaggerated adult narration cannot spoil the surrealism of a fairy story.

  I had a vivid image of these ‘cottages’: thatched, round and comfortable as cottage loaves, nestling, almost beckoning, in the midst of the alien urban forest like the witch’s cottage in Hansel and Gretel, their walls daubed with rough signs by past visitors, crow’s feet perhaps, broad arrows, phallic symbols, all the arcana of the queer world. Even the verbal graffiti, being couched in the language of the underworld, would be cabbalistic, inaccessible to outsiders. This fabulous kingdom had the thick outlines and primary colours of a child’s picture. Its tales of beating up and rough trade were as remote from my demure reality as so many dragons breathing fire or Red Queens shouting, ‘Off with his head!’ There was even something miraculous in the way the silken thread of deviance wound its way through the labyrinth of straight society almost unnoticed by the local residents. The talk of fairies and faggots and bent and straight seemed to belong in a medieval romance.

  Here, wishes were magically made reality just by going underground, down the little steps leading to the cottage. Here be giants and sailors and blond-rinsed nancy boys and monsters in macs. Here too were transformations like in a pantomime—a thin man in jeans with a waving palm tree embroidered on his left buttock locking himself into the little cell and coming out dressed as a Roman Catholic priest: ‘Just getting back into harness, officer.’ A world of sidelong glances and lightning changes, of tremblings soon done with and quizzical goodbyes.

  In retrospect, Dan seemed to me too fastidious to knock about in these promiscuous haunts. Puzzled, I later asked Mossy whether Pip’s imputation was likely to be true. ‘Of course not, my dear,’ she said. ‘The old thing’s just eaten up with jealousy. Dan would never need to go out and forage like that.’

  Reluctant, however, to miss a chance of prolonging such an interesting controversy, she in turn asked Dan who said, ‘No, never’, which ended the matter, for we knew by experience that he always spoke the truth. At the time though, Pip’s claim had a certain seamy force which deterred me from rejecting it entirely.

  ‘As they say, he’s a good boy, goes and sees his mother every Sunday,’ Pip went on, grinning at me now. Again the image of the nursery, the loyal pilgrimage to lay flowers on the grave of his childhood. I pictured Dan sitting bolt upright on the top deck of a bus, holding a carefully chosen seasonal bunch—snowdrops and chionodoxa at this time of year—or perhaps chocolates, she might have a sweet tooth. ‘You know mother?’ I had not had the pleasure. ‘In Camden High Street, the Mother Redcap, all the faggots go there on Sunday morning. Does a roaring trade in every sense of the word. Every pou
f in town yelling his head off. Drag shows, unisex strip, go-go boys, all the fun of the fair, if you like that kind of thing.’ Again a transformation scene. The lights went down on that strange, deserted bar and with a clash of cymbals, a glare of strobe lights, hey presto! fairyland.

  There was something uneasy, defensive about Pip’s manner as if I had accidentally pushed open the door of his bedroom before he had time to smooth the rumpled blankets. My casual question about Dan had caught him unawares. He had answered as a fellow member of a hidden world, which was not how he wished to appear, at least not exclusively. Pip did not intend that outsiders should gather the impression that he assessed or talked of young men from this aspect first or only; he found the notion of homosexual solidarity callow and paranoid, the mirror image in fact of that narrow world which the deviant had so thankfully fled. But it was worse still that it should be Dan about whom he was bitching as it were fraternally, for he had as little to do with Dan as possible, dismissing him as ‘another of Mossy’s waifs and strays’. He would like to have spoken of him with the asexual detachment which befitted their differences of class, intellect and above all age. ‘A rather slow young man . . . on the dull side . . . doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself’—I had heard Pip use such dignified phrases on other occasions; they would have suited his self-image better than the insider’s sly tit-bits he had been unable to resist serving me.