Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

‘All the fighting,’ ventured Sinner. When Pearl or Erskine had tried to instruct him he’d been bored and irritable, but as Evelyn talked on he found himself thinking back to all the times that he had sat and listened as Anna gave him a lesson: knitting, hopscotch, cracking eggs without getting your fingers gooey. He was never a good pupil, and he had nothing to teach her in return; she did like him to tell her stories, but he never had many that she was old enough to hear.

‘Very good try, but, no, it’s not as simple as that — wars are as unequivocal as mountains. Very tonal. It’s about the horror of peacetime! All capitalism’s lies and illusions and hypocrisies and suppressions and denials and analgesics. People are afraid of dissonant music because they recognise in it, deep in it, the truth about their own condition. It’s not that they don’t understand it — they understand it much too well. Dissonant music is honest, whereas tonal music buys a sort of silly superficial unity at the price of annihilating all resistance. When you understand that, you realise that consonance is a great deal uglier than dissonance because consonance is the sound of bloodless tyranny.’

Sinner looked at her blankly. She smiled.

‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I just never have anyone to talk about it with, now that Alistair Thurlow’s gone abroad.’ Sinner remembered the similar admission that Philip Erskine had made to him a few weeks ago. ‘I found out there’s a man called Ronald Slater at the BBC who’s “sympathetic to modern music”, so I made up a parcel of a few scores and sent them down there. I thought he might at least write me a letter. But I just got them sent back to me about six months later with a printed card that said they were “unsuitable”. It was obvious they hadn’t even been opened. Made me feel rather pathetic. It’ll be easier when I’m in London all the time. I can meet the right people.’

‘How long until then?’

‘Morton and I are getting married in the spring.’

‘Your brother seems to think that bloke is a bit of a cunt.’

‘Yes, well, Morton did bully Philip terribly at Cambridge. But I was a perfect little bitch myself when I was at school. He’s not so bad, really.’

‘He’s not so bad?’

‘No. I was very impressed with him at dinner tonight.’ She shut the lid of the piano and then opened it again. ‘You mean to say, why am I getting married if that’s the best I can find to say about him?’

Sinner shrugged.

‘When I’m in London I always stay with Caroline who is my best friend from school,’ said Evelyn. ‘Her parents live in Kensington. But now she’s getting married to an absolutely lovely Scottish chap and they’re off to Edinburgh, so I will have nowhere to stay unless I stay with my brother, and now that he’s got you I would feel terrible about putting a damper on … you know. So I shall be trapped down here all the time. And I can’t write anything here. I can practise, but I can’t compose. I need to be in town. I need the noise and the grime and the maze. London’s so inscrutable, and there’s something so erotic about the inscrutable, isn’t there? I’m useless in the country. If I marry Morton I shall be able to live in London for the rest of my life, and Father won’t be able to threaten me about his will — and what’s more, Morton does always seem to have the most interesting people coming to dinner, despite being a stuck-up fascist. I know he’ll let me do whatever I like, and I can have a lot of glorious affairs and so on. And he’s handsome, although not nearly as handsome as you, in your odd way. The alternative is to sit here in Claramore going mad until I meet some jowly squire’s son at a hunt ball and end up living somewhere just like this, married to someone just like Father, or, worse, just like Philip. I know one is supposed to marry for love, but that’s not a very realistic proposition when you’re. …’ She realised she was about to cry, and she couldn’t stop herself. After a time she looked up at Sinner, hoping he might try to comfort her, but he didn’t move. She sniffed. ‘Aren’t you going to say something, at least? A friend of Caroline’s once told me that homosexuals make the most wonderful confidants but I’m not finding you very wonderful.’

‘Sorry,’ said Sinner.

And then Evelyn reached for his hand and hauled him up towards her, clamping her mouth over his.

Sinner was surprised, but he thought he might as well do what she wanted — he still felt an unusual fondness for this demanding girl. He could taste the wine on her breath and feel her tears on his cheeks. Like rotten fruit, women’s bodies were too soft, yielded too easily.

‘Please …,’ she said, looking into his eyes, and lifted the hem of her dress. He got the sense that she hadn’t known that she wanted this even one minute earlier but now that she did know she couldn’t wait even one minute longer.

She was too low on the piano stool, so he picked her up and moved her awkwardly on to the piano itself, her arms wrapped around his neck. As he undid his flies, she pushed her knickers down to her ankles and spread her trembling knees, still kissing him as if she were trying to steal a piece of chewing gum out of his mouth.

(At that moment Leonard Bruiseland was walking past the drawing room. He wondered who was so thoughtless as to practise the piano after most of the house was already in bed, and then realised from the ugly, thudding chords that it could only be Evelyn Erskine. He was about to go in and reproach her, but then reasoned brightly that at least if she was playing the piano she couldn’t be off fornicating.)

Abruptly Sinner entered her, and she gasped and bit into his lip. The angles were wrong and he had to stand on awkward tiptoes, feeling a bit as if he were doing some special exercise in Frink’s gym, sharply aware of the moon-drowning purplish night sky outside the drawing room windows and of the piano’s cold rosewood against the skin of his forearms. ‘Are you going to …? You know that you mustn’t. … Not now,’ Evelyn murmured uncertainly, but Sinner knew he was in no danger of that, so he kept going — trying to be gentle, but thinking about some of his favourite boys from the Caravan to keep himself hard — until Evelyn had what she wrongly took to be an orgasm and went slack in his arms. She winced again as he withdrew and a trickle of blood chased him down her thigh. He helped her down to the carpet, where she lay on her side, panting; he sat beside her. The whole thing had only lasted three or four minutes.

‘Have you ever been with a woman before?’ she said after a long time.

‘Yeah.’

‘How many times?’

‘A few times.’

‘Do you hate it?’

‘No.’

‘Good. You know, it’s lucky you are how you are, most of the time. Imagine if you made it your business to go after people’s wives. Think of the jealous husbands. Legions of them. You’d have been shot dead a dozen times by now.’ She stroked his hand. ‘Well, that’s that. Now at least I have a proper secret from my dear fiancé. He’ll never have the whole of me. And even if I don’t have all those glorious affairs, I can say I was deflowered on a piano in a country house by a foul-mouthed Jewish boxer. How fantastic. And all my babies will be Jewish according to that German oaf.’ She laughed, but he didn’t laugh with her, so she looked up at him and said, ‘Oh, come on, doesn’t it get dull being so surly and serious all the time? Never even smiling? I bet you wish you could. I bet you would if you knew no one would see. I mean, I know I do a good job of being blithe and ironical and all that, but it doesn’t mean I’m utterly without. …’ When he still didn’t reply, she scowled. ‘For Christ’s sake, say something to me. Instead of just grunting and shrugging all the time. Say something you mean. Once. Please. Or can’t you?’