Praise for Easter

‘Arditti’s masterpiece and one of the first important English novels of the century’ – Literary Review

‘A technically impressive, emotionally moving and deeply disturbing chronicle of death and resurrection. A profoundly passionate and religious novel’ – Independent on Sunday

‘Bleakly comic dissection of sex and death at the heart of the Church of England’ – The Sunday Times

‘A narrative that is shocking as well as amusing from a novelist whose work continues to entertain and impress. Easter should be essential reading’ – Express

‘A portrait of the modern Church of England, with all its complexities, which explores big philosophical questions about the nature of faith, Church and God and the meaning of suffering’ – Independent

‘A very bold book. It is a wonderfully funny read and has thought-provoking passages which should challenge a lot of certainties’ – Sara Maitland, Daily Mail

‘Arditti’s dialogue and imagery are memorable and his eye for the quirks of Anglo-Catholicism recalls Barbara Pym at her best’ – Daily Telegraph

‘A curious and interesting mixture of comic fantasy and serious intent. Arditti is thrilled by the possibility of the intellect, by the opportunities for goodness that exist in everyday life, and excited by the possible freedoms that are enjoyed by the boldest of hearts’ – The Times

‘Easter is a masterpiece’ – Time Out

THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD

Michael Arditti

For the Lemonia Three:
Amanda Craig, Liz Jensen and Marika Cobbold

Table of Contents

Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph

1: CLEMENT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

2: SUSANNAH
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

3: MARTA
1
2
3
4
5
6

4: CLEMENT
1
2
3
4
5
6
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright

‘The best is the enemy of the good.’

Voltaire

‘Everyone wants to change humanity, but no one wants to change himself.’ 

Leo Tolstoy

‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’

Pascal

‘De t’ings dat yo’ li’ble

To read in de Bible – 

It ain’t necessarily so.’

Ira Gershwin

CLEMENT

1

Clement wondered whether, as a Muslim, Rafik would object to removing his pants. His willingness to work in a bar proved that he was not devout, but nudity might be a taboo too far.

‘I have no shame for my body,’ Rafik said. ‘When Mike speaks to me for your painting, I know what I have to expect.’ The reply, while solving the immediate problem, roused Clement’s suspicions of his boyfriend, who did not usually take such interest in his models, especially when they were sitting for the figure of Christ. No sooner had he announced that he was looking for someone new, however, than Mike had suggested Rafik. At first he had been dubious. His best models were actors or dancers who were trained to submit to a stranger’s gaze. He knew in the instant one entered the studio whether he or she would inspire him: whether they possessed that indispensable quality, not beauty so much as poise, stillness, a way of carrying themselves. Which, in Rafik’s case, was straight from the doorway on to his pad.

He liked to work from life, preferring the stimulus of a model to a photograph or his own creative memory. Unlike his former teacher who had described his subject as the celebration of the female form, he painted both male and female nudes. He was reluctant to idealise the object of his desires. His concern was with the transcendent, the art behind the artist. At the heart of his creed was the word made flesh; at the heart of his credo was the word made flesh made colour; and, although wary of the presumption, he thought of it as a sacramental act.

‘I hope you won’t be cold. I’ve turned up the heating.’

‘There is winter in Algeria too.’

‘Well then… if you’d like to take off your clothes behind the screen.’ Clement, for whom nudity was an artistic statement but stripping an erotic routine, was eager to show Rafik that he recognised the distinction. Rafik gave him a blank look, on to which he projected all his own inhibitions, as he stood in the centre of the room and shrugged off his shirt.

Clement explained that he wanted to do a few sketches to assess his suitability. He made very specific demands of his models. Should Rafik fail to meet them, it would be no reflection on his body but simply that its proportions were wrong for the picture. Rafik smiled faintly and stepped out of his pants.

Unnerved, Clement described his intentions, considering it both courteous and prudent to keep his models informed. His May Day Crucifixion, a radical reinterpretation of the traditional image, had been compromised by a model whose grin looked more like a rush of masochistic pleasure than a smile of solidarity with a suffering world. The new work was to be a Harrowing of Hell, the apocryphal story of Christ’s rescue of Adam, a theme which, while popular in Orthodox art, was relatively rare in the West. He had been invited by the Dean and Chapter of Roxborough Cathedral to submit a design for the great East window. It was set above a dull sixteenth-century altarpiece of the Crucifixion, which it would need at once to complement and transform. The obvious subject would have been a Resurrection, but he had opted for a Harrowing of Hell: not the Hell that the Church taught so much as the Hell that it had created. To which end, it was to be overseen by three clerics: an Anglican bishop; a Catholic cardinal and a Presbyterian minister. He had yet to discuss them in detail with the Dean.

Gazing at the taut perfection of Rafik’s body, the slight frame, satiny olive skin with the thin line of hair running from the cleft of his chest to his pubis, and the disturbing trace of a bruise on his upper thigh, he knew that he had found his model. He picked up his pencil and began to sketch. The question, as ever, was how to put God in the picture. He envied Buddhists, who could express their faith in the abstract and call it Meditation. His was a harder task. As a Christian, he lived in a material world which was also a world of spirit and symbol. As an artist, it was his constant endeavour to recreate the reality that would allow the spirit and symbol to breathe. He had begun to feel, however, that the attempt was doomed. How could people who knew only the bare bones of the Christian story respond to his iconography: the juxtaposition of a clothed Adam, whose body filled him with shame, and a naked Christ, who was literally shameless; let alone his use of the same model for both? Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat had baffled a public unable to make the link between Christ and a barnyard animal. The confusion would be all the greater in an age when The Light of the World was nothing but waves and particles and the Agnus Dei no more than the Sunday roast.

‘Am I right in thinking that Adam is a prophet in Islam?’

‘He is the first prophet.’

‘Was he created out of mud?’

‘The Quran says to us that Allah makes Adam out of dust from many lands. This is why the children from Adam are so different as many lands: white, red, black and yellow.’

‘That’s very beautiful.’

‘In the story, yes.’

‘All religions are beautiful in the story, as you say. It’s when they’re put into practice that they grow ugly.’ Clement felt a pang at the thought of his father, who had come to the opposite conclusion.

‘It also says to us that Allah makes woman out of bone from man.’

‘That’s the same for us.’

‘The Prophet says that man must be gentle with woman because this bone is very easy to break. But I do not see this to happen today. A friend of me is taking bus in Annaba when she is meeting some holy men. They see that she is wearing paint on lips. “What is this?” they ask friend. “It is nothing,” she say. She puts tongue very fast on lips. “Look, it is gone now.” “You must take it off with this,” they say and they give her cloth.’ He grabbed a rag from the bench. ‘Like this. “It is gone,” she say, but they are angry. When she will not hold cloth, they hold it themselves. Inside is blade from razor and they cut off her lips… Sorry, sorry. You do not wish for your Adam to cry.’

‘It’s Christ,’ Clement said, feeling his own eyelids sting. ‘He’s the naked one. And I do wish it. And He’d cry too.’

After drawing for an hour, he asked Rafik to dress. He confirmed that he wanted to work with him, explaining that he had to present the finished sketches to the Dean and Chapter in early March. So he would need him for occasional sessions over the next six weeks, and then, provided that the design was accepted, every morning for a month. Rafik assured him that he could meet the schedule.

‘I must not be at bar until afternoon. In my land I work to become guide for tour people. Rich people who give Rafik big thanks. Here I must wash up dirty glasses. But I am not dead. This is good, no?’

‘This is very good, Rafik.’

‘When I think of my home and my mother and sisters and I have tears, I think Rafik is in England and I am not dead. This is good.’ Clement was struck that he mentioned only female relatives. ‘Now we have meeting today and this is good too, no?’

Rafik stepped forward and Clement thought that he was about to kiss him. A tingle of excitement vied with alarm at the breach of his professional code, and he drew sharply away. Rafik seemed not to notice, prowling around the cluttered studio, exuding a proprietorial air which Clement found strangely endearing, examining CDs and journals, picking up paint-smattered pots and flicking brushes over the down on his arm.

‘Is there a number where I can reach you?’ Clement asked. ‘In case I need to rearrange sessions.’ Or add more, he thought, on seeing the model so in his element.

‘It is best you must ring me in the bar. They are very good persons. They know everything. I live with this man, Desmond. He is kind man. He loves Rafik very much. He loves Rafik too much. You understand, yes?’

‘I think so,’ Clement said in increasing bafflement.

‘If he knows that I come here – even with my clothes – he kills me. I do not lie. And I think he kills you too.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. He is very strong man.’ Rafik’s smile was so sunny that Clement attributed the threat to linguistic confusion. Any attempt to find out more was forestalled by Rafik’s unlicensed rummaging through a stack of near-finished canvases.

‘Why must these be here?’

‘I still have some work to do on them.’

‘So many? It takes how long to make a painting?’

‘It all depends. I’ve been working on that one for four years.’

‘Four years?’ Clement caught the mixture of envy and awe in the voice of a man who was paid by the hour.

‘I know I only have five more minutes work to do on it. The trouble is I’m not sure which five.’

Fearing that Rafik would regard him as a dilettante, he prised the picture gently from him and placed it back against the wall.

‘Each painting you make comes from the Bible, yes?’

‘Not each, but a lot of them.’

‘But Mike, he say you are his lover. This can never be so in my religion.’

‘It’s not always easy in mine. I never planned to specialise. It just came about.’ Lazy journalists liked to suggest that, as a bishop’s son, he had entered the family business. Nothing could have been further from the truth. His father had never sought to influence any of his children. It was pure coincidence that the son of the Anglican Church’s most notorious recent iconoclast was one of its foremost iconographers. At first, he had played down his faith. Art schools might encourage their students to find their own paths, but those leading to Canterbury or Rome were deemed to be off limits. So strict was the prohibition that, years later, when a friend recalled his struggle to come out as gay, Clement swore that it was nothing to coming out as a Christian at the Slade.

True to tradition, he had been liberated by Paris, where he spent three years after graduation. In his case, however, he was inspired less by the vie de bohème, in which he had already dipped a toe in mid-eighties London, than by encounters with the Gothic, above all the medieval painting and sculpture in the Musée Cluny. He filled sketchbooks with transcriptions of his favourite pieces, insisting that he was simply studying their techniques in the way that Delacroix and Picasso had studied the Old Masters. His tutor, however, had known otherwise. Aware of his weekly attendance at Mass as well as his passion for Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, he claimed that there was a vital element missing from Clement’s work and that he would never fulfil his promise until he acknowledged it. Clement was furious, accusing him of wanting to banish him to an artistic backwater. He returned to England, intent on critical acceptance and convinced that he had the perfect subject matter in his sexuality.

Depictions of carnal excess, whether on paper or in mixed media, brought him no more satisfaction than the activities themselves. Then a family friend introduced him to her aunt, who planned to publish her own translation of the Book of Ruth and was looking for an illustrator. Although initially nonplussed, since the friend had failed to warn him that her aunt was a paraplegic who spoke through a voice synthesizer, he came to find her a great inspiration, as uncompromising in her art as in her person. He spent three months making forty lithographs, of which she rejected twenty, and then a further year painting a series of oils based on the prints. The subsequent show in the cloisters of St Mary Abbots changed his life. Not only was it enthusiastically reviewed and sold out within days of opening, but he was taken on by the Albemarle Gallery which had represented him ever since. While he continued to paint both portraits and landscapes, it was his religious work for which he remained best known and of which he was most proud.

He gave Rafik twenty pounds, overruling his protests that ‘I come here for nothing. This is to see if we are good, no?’, and arranged for him to return the following morning. After showing him out, he made a desultory attempt to clear up, leaving the half-full mugs to fester in the sink with a nonchalance that he would never have shown at home. He double-locked the studio and walked down the corridor, lingering at the doorways of the various painters, potters, sculptors, jewellers and woodcarvers with whom he shared the restored Victorian complex. He longed for someone to come out and chat but respected their work far too much to disturb them. He made his way outside and, wincing at the nip in the winter air, went to unlock his bicycle, from which, for the second time in as many weeks, thieves had removed the lights. He gazed at the denuded frame in silent fury. What was worse, he knew better than to hope for sympathy from Mike who, after the previous theft, had claimed that leaving an expensive bike on the street in Kilburn was asking for trouble.

A brush with the north London school run increased his frustration. Belsize Road was icy and he wove a tentative path through the line of hatchbacks, frenziedly pinging his bell as a distracted mother pulled out in front of him without indicating. He felt doubly vulnerable, knowing that a cyclist occupied as small a place in her mind as in her mirror. With a sigh of relief he turned off the main road and entered the park, which brought a measure of protection. Yet, no matter how stressful the journey, he had long dismissed any thought of working at home. He had no desire to convert the conservatory into a studio and so taint his art with domesticity. Travelling to work put him on an equal footing with Mike and his daily struggle to educate the young. He had known from the start that his best strategy with a boyfriend whose puritan conscience was the sole remnant of a nonconformist childhood was to treat his vocation as a job.

The exigencies of the school timetable meant that he cooked during term-time while Mike took charge in the holidays and at weekends. For all his grumbles about vegetarian cuisine, he was happy to abandon the easel for the gentler demands of the Aga. This evening, he was keen to prepare something special, both to thank Mike for introducing him to Rafik and to atone for his rashness over the bike. So, discarding the overripe avocado, he set about making a broccoli and stilton soup. He was so preoccupied that his first hint of Mike’s arrival was a gentle warmth on the nape of his neck. His body flooded with happiness and he swung round to return the kiss. He felt Mike’s grip tighten in a bid for reassurance more urgent than the usual six o’clock confirmation that there was life after school. He squeezed his waist and waited for him to speak.

‘Do we have any wine left over from yesterday?’

‘There’s half a bottle of the Sauvignon in the fridge.’

Mike poured two glasses, downing the first and handing the second to Clement, who took the rush for a refill as his cue.

‘Rough day?’

‘No more than normal. But there’s a limit to what flesh and blood can stand. Snotty-nosed youths sticking out their scraggy chests, waggling their pimply bums and shouting “I bet you’d like some of this, sir.” Why? “Because you’re a pouf, a fudge-packer, an arse-bandit.” I only wish the rest of their vocabulary was as rich.’

With the soup simmering, the flan baking and the salad waiting to be dressed, Clement led Mike up to the sitting room. Knocking a pile of papers off an armchair, he told him to lean back while he bent over him, rubbing his temples and kneading his neck.

‘I could get used to this.’

‘Be my guest. But, seriously, can’t you teach them to value diversity?’

‘For the moment I can’t teach them anything not on the curriculum.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

‘Some of my Year Nines were making fun of “poufs getting married”. I explained that I regard marriage as a reactionary and oppressive institution but that gay people have as much right to be miserable in it as anyone else.’ Clement was glad that Mike could not see his grin. His own view, born of respect for Church liturgy rather than its doctrine, was that the marriage service was unique to a bride and groom and that same-sex couples should be given a service of blessing but, when he had put it to Mike that on balance he would rather be blessed than married, he had been surprised by his violent rejection of any hint of settling for second best. ‘A couple of the Muslim girls told their parents. The parents complained to Derek that I was preaching immorality.’

‘Don’t tell me! Six of the best in the Headmaster’s study?’

‘Something like that. Derek’s running scared. After the business in the Jewish cemetery last autumn, his one concern is that no one should rock the boat. He warned me that I’m not their head of year and I don’t teach RE and insisted that from now on I stick to history. So I asked him to define what he meant by education. He said much the same as I meant by marriage. Equal rights to the misery at the end.’

Mike’s spirits revived during dinner and Clement looked forward to a quiet evening at home, reading or watching a DVD. Their tastes, in many respects at variance, converged in a love of film noir. Mike, however, reminded him that he was going out for a drink with Jonty Hargreaves. Clement tried hard not to feel aggrieved. Of all their separate friends, Jonty was the one he was happiest not to appropriate. A fifty-three-year-old music journalist, he was among four Manchester University graduates with whom Mike had founded a commune in the late seventies. Although it lasted a mere eight years and comprised no more than ten members overall, it had achieved legendary status, not least for its bed rota which, in a bid to remove any taint of monogamy, set out the sleeping arrangements for the week ahead. Even desire was to be collective.

The bed rota collapsed long before the commune although, much to Clement’s chagrin, he was to find that it had left an indelible mark on Mike who, on the pretext of being progressive, divorced his emotional from his sexual needs with the skill of a Victorian magnate.

‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ he said, with an apology for the cliché rather than the conduct.

‘No, but you can put him in a muzzle,’ Clement replied.

Mike insisted that Clement’s longing for exclusive bonds was simply a hang-up from childhood and that he had a right, indeed he sometimes made it sound like an obligation, to enjoy a similar freedom. Clement resented Mike’s need to sleep with other men and blamed himself for his lack of libido, even if he ascribed much of it to his medication. As he watched Mike put on a leather jacket that was far too young for him, he reflected that perfect coupledom was to be found only in the womb.

‘Are you going somewhere special?’

‘It’s up to Jonty. Just a club. A few beers and we’ll see.’

‘So you may not be coming home?’

‘If not, I promise I’ll give you a ring.’

Then, with a kiss so tender that it might have been a prelude to their making love, Mike went out. All at once Clement was overwhelmed by lassitude. Unable to decide if it were the result of Mike’s departure, the stress of a new commission or toxicity in his bloodstream, he abandoned his book, went up to the bedroom and counted out his pills.

2

Clement kissed Carla warmly on both cheeks and led her into the sitting room. Her wan look was a particular worry in view of their prospective collaboration. Ever since his first stained-glass window for the lady chapel in St George’s, Chichester, she had been his fabricator. Although the purist in him believed that he should effect every aspect of the design in person, the realist knew that, even had he possessed the skill, he lacked the patience. He was heartened by the fact that Matisse and Chagall had left the making of their windows to others. Besides he felt responsible for Carla, whose abilities were undervalued. He used to joke that, if he took the Bible literally, he would be duty-bound to marry his dead brother’s wife. As it was, he just gave her work.

‘I’ve left Peter,’ she exclaimed as soon as she sat down.

‘What?’

‘You never liked him.’

‘I wasn’t living with him.’

‘You warned me against him.’ It was true that he had mistrusted Peter ever since learning that he wrote his name in all his books the weekend before Carla moved in, but then he would not have welcomed anyone whom she had chosen to replace Mark.

‘I suppose there was a touch of brother’s keeper. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t want you to become the Widow at Windsor. You were so young when he died.’

‘So was he.’

They paused to reflect on the man whose death had been the defining tragedy of both their lives. It was Clement who had brought Carla into the family. He had met her at the Slade and been entranced by her gentleness, her grace, her humour and her talent. She was exactly the sort of woman he would have fallen for had he been Mark, as was confirmed by their instant rapport when he introduced them. Even so he was taken aback by their whirlwind romance and fearful of his own exclusion. In the event, their growing attachment both cemented his friendship with Carla and deepened his bond with Mark.

For all that Mark, who posed as a philistine, claimed to find their artistic alliance a threat, he was grateful for it the following year when he went off to India, entrusting his new wife to Clement’s care. ‘I know about all you arty types. I don’t want some long-haired minimalist sneaking round the moment my back’s turned to borrow a bowl of turps.’

Mark was one of a team of agronomists working for the Indian government on a project to produce high-yield wheat. They thought they had found the holy grail, a grain that would enable the country to be not only self-sufficient but to export a surplus. What they failed to take into account was how the irrigation needs of the new crop would foster inequalities between farmers in the valleys with access to water and those on the hillsides whose land was arid. The traditional structure of village life was destroyed in a single generation. Families who had collaborated happily for years turned to sabotage and murder. Mark was caught in the middle of one such feud and died after drinking water from a contaminated well. Although the inquest concluded that his death was accidental, Clement was convinced of a cover-up. While he inveighed against God and man, Carla was more resigned, taking comfort from the Buddhist teachings which had sustained her ever since.

‘I’m not young now though,’ she said, breaking the silence.

‘Come on. You were forty last year.’

‘Not if I want to have children.’

‘I see.’

‘It may sound trite but, ever since my birthday, I’ve been deafened by a non-stop ticking.’

‘What does Peter say? Oh, I suppose you’ve already answered that question.’

‘I’ve barely begun. You know of course that Mark and I had planned to start a family?’

‘I presumed so, yes. Though he never said anything. I suppose he was afraid of tempting fate.’

‘For years I felt that, if I couldn’t have children with Mark, then I didn’t want them at all. I think the fact that Peter had two of his own was a part… a large part of the attraction. I’d have a family, and an easily manageable one, without betraying Mark.’

‘But it wasn’t enough?’

‘Nowhere near. Every time I took the pill, I used to think what if just for tonight I forgot. Of course I never did. But when I finally acknowledged what was missing from my life and talked it over with Peter, he said it was impossible. He’d had a vasectomy.’

‘Without telling you?’

‘Without trusting me.’

Suddenly, his pettiness over the books paled into insignificance. Clement pressed Carla’s hand in support, letting it drop when she pulled him so close that their noses brushed.

‘I was out of my mind. With grief, with rage, with everything. I’ve left him, but that only solves half the problem. And then I realised that the solution was here all along. It’s you, Clement. Don’t you see? I want to have a child with you.’ He recoiled as, for one ghastly moment, he thought that she wanted him to lead her straight up to the bedroom. Then he realised his mistake and began to laugh. A whole new world was opening up before him. Every nerve in his body thrilled as if he were deep at work on a painting. He felt dizzy and grabbed at a chair, sitting on the arm in a bid to look casual. ‘I know it’s a shock,’ she said, ‘but it makes perfect sense. This way I won’t be betraying Mark but honouring him. My baby will have his genes just as if he’d fathered him himself.’

‘So what does that make me? The father or the uncle?’

‘Maybe a bit of both?’

The more he thought, the more intrigued he was by her proposal, which felt at once perverse and rich in possibilities.

‘It’s true that when we were kids, no one could tell us apart. If we’d had less indulgent parents, we’d have had the perfect opportunity for revenge. At prep school we played practical jokes to amuse our friends. Then in our teens something changed. I don’t just mean that he broke his nose – the kink was barely perceptible – or cut off his fringe. The difference in our desires affected everything about us, from the way we moved to the way we talked, making it impossible for anyone ever to confuse us again.’

‘I used to wonder why I wasn’t attracted to you. You were so brilliant and kind and obviously good-looking and already a part of my world. I supposed it was just that you and Mark had a different energy. Yin and yang.’

‘Two sides of the same coin.’

Even after eighteen years he felt Mark’s death like a gnawing pain. He had never been as close to anyone as he had to him, his other self in both flesh and spirit. For all his resistance to Freud, he held it to be the key to his personality. While other men might seek to re-establish the primal relationship with their mother, he sought to do so with his twin, yearning to return to the embryonic embrace.

As a boy, his favourite reading had been stories of twins. He was horrified by the bloody dissension of Romulus and Remus but inspired by the mutual devotion of Castor and Pollux. Later, when he came to study Shakespeare, he felt a special affinity for The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. One of his happiest memories of school was of an all-male production of Twelfth Night in which he played Viola and a diffident Mark, Sebastian. So whenever anyone suggested that their relationship must have been tricky, he would instantly set them straight. ‘Everyone should be a twin,’ he insisted, ‘it keeps you from becoming self-obsessed and drives you to define your own identity.’

Even so, he could not help wondering if the need to measure himself against Mark had hampered him. Consciously or not, they had defined themselves by their differences: straight, gay; scientist, artist; Buddhist, Christian. Now he had an opportunity to blur the boundaries, to live something of Mark’s life without giving up any of his own. He would be a father, a role for which he had long since ruled himself out. Yet it was as absurd to think that his sexuality denied him the chance of children as for men of past generations to think that it denied them the chance of love. Nevertheless, it was impossible to ignore the implications of Carla’s request. If, in effect, he was interchangeable with his brother, a mere source of genetic material, what did that say about his essential nature? Was he a purposeful being with a soul breathed into him by God or just a random combination of proteins and cells?

The weight of both his religious belief and artistic practice had led him to proclaim his autonomy. He was as perturbed by the thought that behaviour might be determined by genes as a Victorian cleric by the claim that humans were descended from monkeys. Yet what if the distinctions between Mark and himself had been superficial, or even illusory? What if the desire to prove their uniqueness had blinded them to their uniformity? For the greater part of human history, people believed that their fates were shaped by inexorable forces, first by many gods and then by one. It was only for a few brief centuries that, whether god-fearing or not, they supposed that they had free will. Current thinking simply redressed the anomaly. People once again believed that they were powerless, controlled by their own DNA.

‘You look so solemn, Clem. You’re making me tense.’

‘I’m sorry. There’s just so much to think about.’

‘I know I’m in no position to make demands, but please don’t take too long.’

‘I hear you: the ticking.’

‘Talk to Mike. It concerns him too. You’ll have to decide how big a part you – both of you – want to play in the child’s life.’

‘Are you planning on just the one or…?’

‘Let’s take it a step at a time, shall we? You never know; I might have twins.’

‘Really?’

‘Aren’t they’re supposed to run in families?’

‘Twins would be good.’

Mike’s arrival prevented further discussion. He flung his arms around Carla, with whom he had always felt more at ease than with any of Clement’s blood relatives. Seizing his chance, Clement escaped to the bathroom where he doused his face in cold water, but it failed to provide the necessary clarity. He resolved to dismiss the matter from his mind until Carla went home and he could talk it over with Mike. There were so many people to consider, not just the living but the dead. He gazed intently at the mirror in the hope of seeing past himself to Mark but, try as he might, he was unable to bridge the gap between his forty-two-year-old reflection and his twenty-four-year-old twin. Certain features remained constant: the deep brown eyes, high cheekbones and full lips that they inherited from their mother. It was impossible, however, to picture Mark in spectacles, let alone wearing his hair swept back behind his ears and down to his shoulders. As if to punish himself for the betrayal, he twisted a hank around his fingers and tugged.

He composed himself and went back downstairs, where they ate a subdued dinner.

‘Are you and Carla up to something?’ Mike asked after her early departure. ‘She was giving you pregnant looks all through the meal.’ Clement laughed nervously. ‘I’m sorry. Is it a private joke or can anyone join in?’

Steering him away from the sink, Clement relayed the gist of Carla’s request.

‘Yes, I can see it must have been awkward. So how did you get out of it?’

‘I didn’t. That is, I’m not sure I want to. I want to discuss it with you.’

‘What’s to discuss? Tell her you’re sorry. End of story.’

‘What’s stopping me having a child?’

‘A little thing called HIV?’

‘You’ve always said it shouldn’t keep me from living a normal life.’

‘Come on, Clem, don’t be obtuse.’

‘You must have heard of sperm-washing.’

‘Yes, for men in committed relationships, not sperm donors. No, don’t interrupt! That’s what you’d be. Plus, it’s not a hundred per cent safe. Think of all the women who abort Down’s syndrome babies, when you might be bringing one into the world with HIV!’

‘Perhaps we should let Carla weigh up the risks?’

‘So why didn’t you?’

Clement said nothing. He sat despondent at the collapse of a dream of which a few hours earlier he had been unaware but which now felt like the one thing in the world that he wanted. He hadn’t told Carla of his diagnosis for the same reason that he hadn’t told any of his family. Before the prospect of treatment, he had been determined not to scare them. Now, thanks to his cocktail of drugs, the revelation was superfluous. He kept in excellent health, although he lived in terror of the side effects: the hollow cheeks and bloated belly that would label him as clearly as the lesions of the previous decade. He knew that his silence was an affront to Mike who, for all his talk of the right to privacy, demanded total candour from anyone remotely in the public eye. But, even if Mike were right in saying that the disclosure would not harm his livelihood, he was less sanguine about the impact on his parents. Mike accused him of arrogance in assuming that they would be so distressed by the news that they would rather be kept in ignorance, but he, never forgetting that they had lost one son, refused to leave them in dread of losing the other.

He feared that Mike’s mission to demystify the virus had led him to underestimate its impact. He spoke of being infected and affected by HIV as though they were the one and the same. He even professed to love Clement more for being positive, citing all the work he had done on himself since his diagnosis. To Clement, however, the virus was the embodiment of his negativity, the death wish that had haunted him ever since losing Mark. And, for all that he dismissed the idea of HIV as a punishment, there was a part of him, however small, however secret, that contrasted his having been infected by one callous lover with Mike’s having remained immune despite an army of partners. Carla’s request had given him a chance to restore the balance. Now that too had been taken away.

Mike subscribed to an ideal of brotherhood rather than fatherhood. It was this that had first brought them together when, in an attempt to recover from Oliver’s betrayal, Clement went on an HIV retreat in the Scottish highlands where Mike was a voluntary facilitator. The moment he entered the house, a run-down Victorian pile owned by a hippy collective, whose every bedroom was named after a type of bean, he had longed to return to London. He was unused to the rigours of a support group and, while his companions listened to each tortuous confession as intently as to a string quartet, he found himself counting the minutes to the break. His one intervention having met with an affronted cry of ‘This is my shit!’, he was doubly amazed when Mike detained him at the end of the session and offered him a massage.

Although his recent split had left him so wary of physical contact that he had even shunned the circle dance, he accepted at once, arranging to meet Mike after dinner in the Aduki Room, and spent the rest of the day in a frenzy of anticipation that was hard to reconcile with the knowledge that Mike had trained in shiatsu expressly to help out on the retreats. To his combined relief and regret, the massage was legitimate. He disgraced himself only once when, with Mike manipulating the base of his spine, he confirmed the claim that it was the seat of suppressed emotion by bursting into tears. He was glad of the chance to turn over, at least until a gentle pressure on his nipples threatened to provoke a more humiliating release. By a supreme effort of will, he was able to contain the stirring under his towel so that it expressed a healthy vigour rather than a blatant need.

That need was satisfied the following night when Mike invited him to leave Lentil for a tent in the glen. Clement had not slept under canvas since he and Mark camped out in Wells on their eleventh birthday, zipping together their sleeping bags in all innocence. With Mike he discovered a new kind of innocence, one that was knowing but not calculated, where passion wiped out the past and rekindled lost pleasures. He had never felt so free from the confines of his body. His consciousness grew so vast and his senses so heightened that he speculated on the nature of the mushrooms in the evening’s soup. But the only magic ingredient was Mike. Their lovemaking was imbued with such meaning that he began to contemplate a future beyond art. Which made his disillusion all the more acute when, after waking him the next morning with a kiss and a bowl of muesli, Mike went rowing on the loch with friends. He told himself that it showed strength – even nobility – of character for Mike to honour his existing commitments, a view he revised when he was abandoned again after dinner. For all Mike’s friendliness over the rest of the week, he was unable to banish the suspicion of having been the dreaded ‘mercy fuck’.

Back home he responded by turning the retreat into a dinner-party anecdote, accentuating the absurdity of the rooms which now became Baked, Broad and Butter, of the heterosexual woman so desperate to identify with the victims that she had had affairs with two haemophiliacs, and of the mountainous lesbian cook who had sworn never again to be a sex object for men. The tactic worked until he received a phone call from Mike who, as facilitator, had access not only to his address, date of birth and next of kin, but also to his hopes for the week. He presumed that a stray glance at ‘to restore my faith in my fellow man after a bitter break-up’ must have pricked his conscience, since he invited him to dinner in Brixton on any Thursday before Christmas. The memory of their night under the stars was potent enough to dispel his doubts. Displaying a dignified reserve, he accepted for a date three weeks later. When the time came, he was so anxious to remain in control that he masturbated an hour before he left the house.

His pre-emptive strike failed, however, when they rounded off the surprisingly tasty shepherdess’s pie and brown rice pudding by going up to Mike’s room for some green tea. After slumping on a beanbag, he agreed that he would be more comfortable on the bed. He sat on edge, on the edge, as determined to keep his feet on the floor as a thirties film star, but no sooner had Mike placed his hand on his thigh than he advanced the action by several decades. As tongues darted, fingers stroked and bodies deliquesced, he realised that their rapport in the tent had been no accident. Finally, their passion sated with a frequency he had hitherto ascribed to barroom myth, he laid his head on Mike’s slick chest and challenged him to defend his capriciousness on the retreat. Mike demurred, insisting that he was a free agent and that Clement must take responsibility for his own emotions. Although stung by his defiance, Clement was soothed by his tone, detecting a conflict between words and feelings. Over time, he found that Mike was content to put his feelings first.

He, in turn, was completely besotted. He loved Mike’s looks: the rugged, open face and square jaw; the sea-green eyes and brilliant smile; the pepper-and-salt hair – cayenne pepper in line with his Celtic roots. He loved his powerful frame, solid without an ounce of fat, that put all the pumped-up musclemen to shame, and the riot of freckles on his arms, chest and back which, with uncharacteristic coyness, he refused to let Clement paint. He loved his passion for teaching, which he sustained in the face of interfering politicians and a politicking headmaster, of obstructive parents and destructive pupils, even the one who, high on his grandmother’s anti-Alzheimer’s pills, had plunged a knife into his thigh, leaving a jagged scar. He loved his social commitment and his willingness to make fun of it, as when he hung a Meat is Murder poster alongside one urging Eat the Rich.

‘Does that include me?’ Clement asked.

‘You’re the dish of the day,’ Mike said, before taking a bite out of what, in deference to Clement’s father, he described as the parson’s son’s nose.

For three years they commuted between Regent’s Park and Brixton. Clement longed for Mike to move in, but he was loath to force the issue since he knew that what was for him the clearing of a few shelves and the emptying of the odd cupboard was for Mike a seismic shift. Events conspired in his favour when the Brixton household plunged into schism and Mike was voted out. Clement repeated his offer, presenting it as a practical solution to the problem. Mike was not fooled, but he agreed to a six-month trial, which had so far been extended by eight years. Clement had never been happier and yet, faced with the reality of his infection, he wondered if happiness was just another word for self-delusion.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s madness even to think of it. Me, a father! But for a moment it seemed to be something I could do: for Carla; for my parents; for Mark.’

‘Haven’t you done enough for him already?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I don’t need to spell it out.’

‘Please do. I can be very slow.’

‘You shouldn’t spend the rest of your life feeling guilty. Mark died. It was a tragedy. You lived. That’s the way things are.’

The flaw in Mike’s argument, which Clement was quick to point out, was that he had felt the need to prove himself – to justify his existence – even when Mark was alive. He admitted, however, that the need had grown more urgent since his death. He had been determined to convince everyone, starting with himself, that it was not the better twin who had died. Mark had been so decent and frank, so healthy in every respect, engaging fully with the world rather than keeping it behind a shield of canvas. For all his parents’ even-handedness, they must have realised that, had Mark been the one to survive, they would have had grandchildren. All he could give them were pictures which, however much they brightened their walls, would never touch their hearts.