Джон Бойн - A Ladder to the Sky

‘Charming,’ said Gore, impressed by how the boy held his ground. So many others just gave in instantly, frightened of incurring his tongue. ‘You’ve only been here a few minutes and you’re already insulting me.’

‘I didn’t mean you , of course,’ said Maurice, flushing a little, and Gore realized that, yes, it was possible to discomfit the boy. It didn’t take very much work at all, in fact. ‘It’s just that, when you’re a young writer, it can be hard for one to be taken seriously.’

‘It’s the same for old writers,’ said Gore with a shrug. ‘They think I’ve already said everything I have to say because I’m too old. If only we could all remain middle-aged for ever, then they would carve our every sentence into stone.’

‘I don’t want to wait that long, Gore,’ said Maurice, who, Gore noted, had not been invited to use his given name but was apparently not planning to stand on ceremony.

‘Come with me, Mr Swift,’ said Gore, smiling, and then, perhaps aware that his own teeth did not equal the dazzling brilliance of his young companion’s, stopped. He pointed towards the staircase that led into the villa proper. ‘Let me show you my library. Dash, you stay down here and relax, I insist upon it. Your face is quite flushed and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be calling any ambulances to collect you later.’

Upstairs, Gore led the way through the large, airy rooms into the one he had designated for his books and Maurice entered, looking around with appreciable awe as he moved towards the stacks.

‘It’s like a church,’ he whispered.

‘A cathedral,’ said Gore, who took great pleasure in showing his collection to true aesthetes, and whatever else he might be, it seemed clear from the look on Maurice’s face that he was a believer, a young man who felt more comfortable around books than people.

‘I could live here,’ said Maurice.

‘I’d have to charge you rent.’

‘Oh, you never know,’ replied the boy, turning around and smiling at him. ‘Maybe you’d just take pity on me and make me your ward.’

‘We’re not living in a Victorian novel,’ said Gore. Was it any wonder that Dash was completely under his spell? He had an answer for everything and was willing to flirt to assert his dominance.

‘You know, the last person to set foot in here was Henry Kissinger,’ said Gore, recovering himself slightly as the boy turned away to scan the shelves, hands held behind his back as if he didn’t want to leave finger-marks on anything. His lips moved a little as he read the names of the authors and titles under his breath. ‘He visited just a few weeks ago and stayed the night. I found him in here at five o’clock in the morning, reading Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire . He’d still be here right now if his Secret Service detail hadn’t insisted that it was time to go.’

The boy turned around and smiled but remained silent, his expression asking, Are you trying to impress me with such shameless name-dropping? Gore could name-drop all night, after all, if he had to. He’d known everyone worth knowing and still did. Even now he was almost sixty-five, people came to La Rondinaia on pilgrimages. Politicians, actors, musicians, film-makers, novelists. The Jameses and the Forsters, he called them. The former being his American visitors, the latter being his English. They all romanticized Italy and moved in circles wealthy enough that they could ignore the squalor. They loved the Amalfi Coast for its privacy and it went without saying that they all adored, and feared, Gore.

‘I have something over here that might interest you,’ he said, reminded now by these thoughts of a particular treasure and strolling over to a wall where two piles of books were separated by a small Picasso that took pride of place in the centre. It took him only a moment to find the one he wanted. ‘It’s a first edition. You’ve probably read it.’

‘ Maurice ,’ said Maurice, flipping it from front cover to back and running his finger along the lettering before opening it to the frontispiece. ‘Yes, I’ve read it. I love Forster. It’s signed and dedicated to you,’ he added, a look of wonderment spreading across his face now as he looked up. ‘You met him, then?’

‘Several times,’ replied Gore, retrieving both the book and his authority as he opened the volume at a random page, reading aloud the first lines upon which his eyes fell: ‘ With the crudity of youth he drew his mother apart and said that he should always respect her religious prejudices and those of the girls, but that his own conscience permitted him to attend church no longer. She said it was a great misfortune. Mothers,’ he added. ‘My own mother, Nina, started off as an actress, you know. But then she forswore that career to become an alcoholic, a slut and a certifiable lunatic. I don’t know why she couldn’t have done both. Historically, the two careers have not proved mutually exclusive.’

‘You’ve said that before, haven’t you?’ asked Maurice, smiling. ‘It sounds rehearsed.’

‘No,’ said Gore, shocked by such a brazen remark. Who on earth did this boy think he was?

‘What was he like, anyway?’ asked Maurice.

‘What was who like?’

‘Forster.’

Gore hesitated before answering. He felt a sudden desire to anger-fuck the boy, then toss him over the cliffs into the sea below, to watch as his body bounced off the rocks and his bones smashed into a thousand pieces. ‘Prissy,’ he said finally, somehow managing to quell his growing temper and sense of discombobulation. ‘Mannered. Officious. If the gods had descended from Mount Olympus and used a pitiless blend of blood, bone and skin to craft a creature best suited for spending its days cloistered behind the walls of King’s College, Cambridge, then that creature would surely have gone by the name of Morgan. He could barely function in the real world. I daresay he started to tremble and perspire whenever he popped down to his local supermarket to buy toilet paper. Actually, it’s rather hard to imagine Morgan using toilet paper, isn’t it? One rather suspects that he was too prudish to engage in such a human act as excretion. Where’s Morgan? Oh, he went off to take his morning shit. No, I can’t imagine it at all. Anyway.’

He looked over at Maurice, hoping for a laugh, but the boy simply nodded, which irritated him. He’d thought all of that was rather good and deserved a little more appreciation. It was good form, after all, to laugh at the jokes of one’s betters. The Queen’s eldest boy, that otter-like cuckold breathlessly longing for his own ascension, had come to dinner one evening the previous year and Gore had laughed at all his jokes, despite the fact that the man was about as humorous as a member of the Sonderkommando. He’d barely eaten, he remembered that about him too, pushing a very good piece of fish around his plate as if he were searching for a piece of broccoli under which to hide it.

‘I don’t suppose your parents named you for him, did they?’ he asked, returning the book to its allotted place on the shelf.

‘No,’ replied Maurice, shaking his head. ‘No, they weren’t readers. I doubt they’d ever even heard of Forster.’

‘That’s a Yorkshire tone to your voice, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘But you’re trying to shake it off by doing a poor impression of an announcer from the BBC World Service.’

‘I’m not trying to shake anything off,’ said Maurice. ‘But yes, I’m from Harrogate. Although I’ve spoken this way since I was a child.’

‘You’ve wanted it that long, then?’ said Gore quietly, and the question might have been a rhetorical one.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I wonder what else I can show you that you might appreciate.’