When we suddenly learn that some unobtrusive fellow is a chess champion or great tennis player, the man is physically transformed for us. So it was with Tom. In the instant, Scarlett-Taylor was a different being. And in the instant too, deep in his mind, Tom made an important and necessary decision. He was interested enough in singing to recognize an exceptional voice and to covet it. There was a quick tiny fierce impulse of pure envy, a sense of passionate rivalry for the world. But almost in the same moment of recognition, making one of those moves of genuine sympathy by which we defend our egoism, Tom embraced his rival and drew him in to himself, making that superb voice his own possession. He would be endlessly proud of Scarlett-Taylor and take what he later called ‘Emma’s secret weapon’ as a credit to himself. Ownership would preclude envy; this remarkable sound and its owner were now his. Thus Tom easily enlarged his ego or (according to one’s point of view) broke its barriers so as to unite himself with another in joint proprietorship of the world: a movement of salvation which for him was easy, for others (George, for instance) very hard.
The immediate problem, however, was to stop Emma from singing. Tom’s untrained voice had been loud. Emma’s trained voice was resonant, piercing and so extremely strange, almost an uncanny sound. Windows opened in the Horse Guards Hotel. Several people crossed the road from the Old Admiralty Building. Others, leaving the Whitehall Theatre, stopped amazed, gazed about bewildered. Roisterers in Trafalgar Square approached like rats after a piper. A policeman appeared. Tom bundled Emma, still singing, into a taxi, where the Irish boy promptly fell asleep. Tom laughed quietly, profoundly, with tears of pure pleasure in his eyes, all the way back to the digs.
Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor as he was ‘in himself’ was not soon known to Tom, though they became friends, and doubtless never entirely known (but then who is ever entirely known?). Some general account must, however, be briefly given of him who is Horatio to our Hamlet, or (for they often exchanged roles) Hamlet to our Horatio.
Scarlett-Taylor was born in County Wicklow, between the mountains and the sea. His father’s ancestors had been landowners in the west of Ireland, but his father and grandfather, proceeding from English public schools to Trinity College, Dublin, were Dublin lawyers. His mother (nee Gordon) came from Ulster, the County Down, where her ancestors had been sheep fanners, her father a doctor. She had been sent to a ‘finishing school’ in Switzerland and then to Trinity, where she met Emma’s father. Both sides of the family were Protestants and horsemen. Emma was an only child. His father died when he was twelve, and his mother went to live in Brussels, near her sister who had married a Belgian architect. Emma began his growing-up in Dublin in a Georgian house near Merrion Square with a semi-circular fanlight and a shiny black door with a brass dolphin knocker, and continued it in Brussels in a big dark flat in a gloomy respectable street not far from the Avenue Louise, with pollarded plane trees and tall thin peaky houses made of pale yellow brick. His handsome sweet witty mother grew older. The Belgian architect and his wife were no more. Emma, vaguely destined for Trinity, declined to return to his native land. He liked Brussels, not the old grand parts, not the shiny new parts, but the melancholy bourgeois streets, still so quiet and full of a not inaccessible past, where suddenly on a corner there would be found a little bar with red check table-cloths and aspidistras and a black cat. He liked London too, and foresaw his future as a Londoner. He hated, with all his heart and soul, Ireland, the Irish, and himself.
Dr Johnson said that when a man says his heart bleeds for his country he experiences no uncomfortable sensation. With Emma it was otherwise. It had mattered little to him as a child that his great-grandfather’s house had been burnt by ‘the rebels’. He had admired the men of 1916 and the fight for Ireland’s freedom. Ireland, indeed, had made him a historian. His father never talked politics, lived in a narrow company of old friends, seemed more at home with his books. Sometimes it seemed as if his father had had a piece of his past removed; like losing a lung or a kidney, one had to ‘take things quietly’. He easily forgave Emma’s indifference to horses, he wished he had been a scholar, he wanted Emma to be one. He died before the resumption of the ‘troubles’.
Emma had been brought up as a vague Anglican. Both his parents were vague Anglicans, occasional church-goers, whose sacred text was Cranmer’s Prayer Book. Emma’s mother taught him to pray, then left him alone with God. Emma and God parted company, but he felt an attachment to the Church. He went to an English public school where he sang in the choir and obtained his nickname. He had never been anti-Catholic. He envied the ritual, he loved the Latin mass, he approved of the full churches. Religion was history, and history taught tolerance. Then the shooting started. Emma watched the slaughter taking place in the gratuitous untimely cause of a ‘United Ireland’. He saw with unutterable grief the emergence of Protestant murderers, as vile as their foes. He felt guilt and misery and rage. The little town near his mother’s family house was blown apart by a bomb placed in the sad little main street with its white houses and its six pubs. Protestants and Catholics died together. He visited Belfast and saw the handsome city wrecked, its public buildings destroyed, its abandoned streets turned into bricked-up tombs. As it seemed to him nobody cared much, not even the decent English taxpayers who paid the bill, not even the Protestants in the South. So long as the bombs stayed in Ulster, there was even a mild satisfaction in hearing about them. For the first occasion in his own lifetime Emma had a close-up view of human wickedness; and in his very private confused self-rage he rejected his Irishness, he tore it to shreds in sick futile anger, sometimes scarcely knowing what it was he detested most in the stew of hatred for which he so despised himself. He never mentioned Irish matters to his mother, and she never spoke of Ireland either. When their native land was named by others he saw on her face the same frozen look which he felt on his own. He had no country. He envied Tom who had no sense of nationality and did not seem to need one. (That, presumably, was the essence of being English.) Yet when in his mind Emma tried to resolve himself into being English, it was impossible, he was utterly utterly not English. When people said (for his voice, damnably, betrayed him), ‘You’re Irish?’, and he replied, ‘Anglo- Irish’, and they said, ‘Oh, so you’re not real Irish,’ Emma Scarlett-Taylor smiled faintly and said nothing. He felt equally bitter and even more taciturn over another problem to do with his sense of identity. He was not sure whether or not he was homosexual. Perhaps this did not matter too much, however, since after a few unpleasant little adventures he had decided to give up sex.