So how could Eddy, who could not sort his own, have made anything at all of the jumble of mixed motives and crossed purposes, ordinary and routine as heavy traffic, or seen design in their snarl of wills, feelings, and intentions, asynchronous and asyndeton as timber soaking in a logjam?
4
Well, Colin Bible had seen enough. He’d a feeling he’d disgraced himself. He’d been had. But was in no position to cast aspersions. The guy was as good as his word (though, just as well, not that great in bed). The repair manuals were waiting for him in an outsized manila envelope when he checked his and Bale’s box the next day. There were even some blueprints Matthew had been able to lay his hands on, even a few diagrams of what Colin supposed — he was no mechanical illiterate, after all; he was a nurse, could make a certain sense of x-rays and cardiograms, plug in I.V.’s and administer shots, and just generally knew his way around the human body (oh, yes, he thought, remembering and flushing), which was as complicated as any piece of just machinery — were schemata for wiring, for fire alarm systems, burglar.
But, he saw, the Empire was finished, over, dead. The future, certainly the present, was with the superpowers and the go-getter Nips. They had the nuclears and lasers, they had the highest tech and the microchips and the animatronics. One day soon there wouldn’t be an up-to-date, decent, self-respecting tourist attraction left anywhere between America and the U.S.S.R. Everything else was just scenery — yes, and they had the wilderness areas, the deepest canyons and longest rivers; they had the sunsets; they had the climates — and thrill rides. There’d be nowhere else a dying kid could go.
But his real gloom, his real patriotism, he reserved for Colin back in Blighty in his obsolete waxworks. (We have the wax.) Poor Colin, Colin thought, and could not have said which one of them he had in mind.
No, by disgrace he meant he’d allowed his desperation to show and knew that, in his position, Mary Cottle would not have permitted herself the luxury. He admired the woman, and if he tried to snitch on her that time she’d become separated from the group, that had only been duty. The desperation was something else. Everyone’s desperate, he knew, Mary Cottle included. It was giving oneself permission to reveal it that was off. Like the poet said, most blokes lead lives of quiet desperation, but the poet was wrong. Most blokes shouted it from the rooftops, they shouted and shouted it till the rafters rang. He yearned for the days of his former silence, for the old-time, stiff-upper-lip qualities that made him British and had kept him in the closet. He wanted his quiet desperation back. (It was too late, of course. If they hadn’t maintained such a sterile field in this place — you could practically operate here — his name would be spray-painted all over the lavs by now.) It had been Mary Cottle’s room they’d used, Mary Cottle’s bed — his nursing skills had come in handy when he remade it; Matthew marveled at his hospital corners — and the least he owed her was his silence. He hadn’t told Gale it was not his room. He didn’t know what she was up to in hiring a hall — he’d cut Nedra off when she offered her theories after telling him of its existence — but desperation was bound to be in it. He’d leave her to Heaven. She could be one of the blokes to lead the quiet desperation life. While he, now he was in it, would have to continue to make his unseemly noises.
So the first chance he had he took his manuals and sought Gale out.
“What do you mean?” Gale said. “You’ve got William Henry Harrison there. You’ve got Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Van Buren. Warren Harding, James Knox Polk. You’ve got Republicans and Democrats. I gave you a Whig! I made up a nice assortment.”
“A lovely assortment.”
“I picked it out myself,” Matthew said.
Fags, Colin thought, and had a vagrant image of Matthew Gale’s toes curled in his shoes, smitten, shy and sly beneath the shoelace line. The penny-loafer line, he corrected, and realized Gale was in love, and wondered again if he were holding out on him.
“Matthew?” Colin said.
“What?”
“Are you holding out on me?”
“Holding out? Did I last night?”
“I’m not talking about last night.”
“Whatever are you talking about?”
Fags, he thought. High-minded fag-aristocrat syntax-flourish. “I’m talking about the manuals. Really, Matthew! ‘The Lowdown on Central Heating in the Magic Kingdom!’ ‘Secrets of Mickey Mouse’s Loo Revealed!‘”
“Do you know what would happen if they found out I was giving this stuff away?”
“Trading it,” Colin Bible said.
“Oh,” Matthew Gale said, “we’re KGB, are we? We’re CIA, we’re MI-Five.”
“No, Matthew,” he said, “we’re only a nurse in love.”
“You going to turn state’s evidence?” Matthew wondered gloomily.
“Who, me? What believes in all that allegiance and loyalty? No fear.”
“What are you talking about now?”
“The brotherhood. That old spirit of freemasonry among all the kinds and conditions of homohood,” he said wearily, deciding, Nah, he doesn’t have the goods. “Hey, Matthew?”
“What?”
“You were right. I’d never been blown till I’d been blown by a Gale,” Colin told him kindly as he moved off.
Because everything has a reasonable explanation. Because Colin Bible had seen enough and was ready to try a different tack.