While England Sleeps Read Free Page A

said, then, with extreme slowness, shut the door behind himself.
    I flung myself onto the bed. Poor Rupert! Most of my friends had no patience for him; for them, he was merely an example of the deadening self-indulgence into which the bourgeoisie was irrevocably descending. Rupert and his kind, according to my friends, were dead branches on a living tree that must be pruned for the sake of the tree.
    I understood this point of view. Still, there was something so sad and ineffectual about Rupert, locked up in his palace with all his precious objects to protect and no occupation and that beastly mother summoning him to her sickbed every half minute, that I couldn’t help but feel a kind of pity for him. I doubted he had ever had sex with anyone, male or female. He loved to hear my recitations of erotic philandering and yet would never himself have dared venture even to the pubs I sometimes frequented, with their cargo of friendly police and guardsmen. Instead, ludicrously, he seemed to have attached all his erotic feelings to me, lingering at my door or staring longingly into my averted eyes, hoping against hope, I supposed, that I would invite him in for seduction. What a laughable thought—I, who had no aptitude for seduction! He would be a cold and anguished lover, I suspected. I could not imagine him naked; he dressed and held himself in such a way as to discourage contemplation of his body, even, perhaps, to deny the existence of a body at all. And yet, somewhere under there, there had to be nakedness.
    We ate a quiet, congenial dinner that night, during which most of the conversation focused on Digby Grafton’s wedding, to which Rupert—but not I—had been invited. Afterwards, pleading fatigue, I excused myself and took to my room.
    At half past twelve—I was already in bed—the door creaked open. “Brian, I’m dreadfully sorry to wake you, but I’ve just had the most frightful row with Mother. Might I sit down?”
    “Of course, Rupert,” I said.
    He tiptoed in, perched on the edge of the bed, then began his tearful litany of regrets—how Mother was always chastising him and telling him what a failure he was; her agony and pain, which justified everything; his loneliness and need for love. I knew what he wanted, yet somehow could not bring myself to give it to him—I drew back from his white, fleshy forearms, the soft black hairs on his wrists. So I consoled him as best I could, explaining that certainly Mother didn’t mean it, that she loved him desperately and it was only the pain speaking, and eventually, feeling ashamed and realizing he could get no more from me, he apologized for the interruption and bade me good night.
    It was difficult for me to go back to sleep after that. Digby haunted my thoughts: his beautiful dark skin and wheat-colored hair. Digby naked by the lake, shaking water from his body, the drops hanging like beads of glass from the hair on his chest and legs and around his long, disinterested cock, which of course was normal and rose only for girls. My obsession with that cock, my longing to draw back its helmet of foreskin and lick the treacly fluid dripping from the head, kept me thrashing, so much so that I had to wank off four times before I was finally able to get to sleep.
    The next morning I woke late, cross and with a sore throat. Rupert was in the sitting room, endlessly turning an irreplaceable silver spoon in an irreplaceable china cup presumably filled with the rarest and most perishable of teas. He informed me in curt tones that he had invited a guest to dinner, a “charming lady” who took great pleasure in meeting “artistic young people” and in whose good graces it was imperative that he should establish himself. “And it would probably be a good idea not to bring up politics, Brian. Lady Abernathy is—well, rather unmodern in her ideas. We wouldn’t want to shock her.”
    I stared out the window. Rain thudded against the glass, so much rain that I wondered for a