While England Sleeps by David Leavitt

Author:David Leavitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

At the flat, breath whistled, sweet as ever, through sleeping Edward’s slightly parted teeth.

Chapter Eight

The world was ending, but in London women gossiped and argued over the price of mutton, men drank ale and wanked each other in public lavatories before going home to eat the mutton their wives had argued over. Meanwhile, across a sliver of water, much of Madrid had been destroyed; in Seville, Quiepo di Lieno filled the radio waves with his private hatred; in Irún, Republican refugees, defeated, scuttled across the water to France. As for the Republican side—our side—it was becoming each day more crippled by its own internal warfare. We were losing. Death upon death, and still Anthony Eden preached “non-intervention.” The fool! Couldn’t he see he was playing into Hitler’s hands? (Then again, Lady Abernathy hadn’t seen; many in England didn’t see, for which they would one day suffer.)

Chaos reigned in the little theater of my private life as well, but I pretended everything was fine. Who was it said the denial of corruption signals the deepest corruption? It’s true. Only in the journal did I dare report the truth, with the result that what was once a source of pleasure became bitter medicine. I dreaded touching the pen to those pages where conscience obligated me, for once, to speak things as they were.

The irony was that in spite of all the lying I did, I never became proficient at it. I was an inept liar. Then again, I suspect there is rarely such a thing as a good liar; there are just people who want, and people who do not want, to believe.

That I managed to pull it off as long as I did, in retrospect, astonishes me.

Most nights I still spent with Edward; we talked and read and made love. Other nights I dined with Philippa, either at her flat or at a restaurant, before or after a concert; or we lingered at a club she belonged to near Oxford Circus; or we took long walks along the Embankment, or on Hampstead Heath. We had begun to have a reputation as a couple; indeed, Emma Leland commented on how good we looked together—“both of you so literary, like the young Woolfs!”

We spent a lot of time laughing at Emma Leland.

One evening Anne Cheney rang to invite me to a dinner party she was planning to host. “And bring that lovely Philippa,” she added.

It was eight o’clock, and Edward and I were reading on the sofa, and even though he had his eyes in his book, I knew he was listening—fiercely.

I slipped up only once: I said, “I’ll check with her and let you know.”

“Who was that?” Edward asked afterwards.

“That was Anne Cheney. George Cheney’s sister. She’s invited me to supper next week.”

“Ah.” A beat of silence. “And who is it you’re supposed to check with?”

“Caroline.”

“I see.”

He went back to his Communist Manifesto, I to my novel.

Then, a few minutes later: “Couldn’t she have called Caroline herself?”

“What?”

“Anne Cheney. Couldn’t she have called Caroline and asked her directly?”

“She didn’t know the number,” I said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.