"I’ve seen him three times these last few nights, and each time he was dead.”
Doctors Wear Scarlet (1960) by Simon Raven
“Ah,” I said. “You’ll forgive me asking, Piers, but just why should it be so imperative for him to see you at all?”
He stretched himself full length on the rug, raising his head and laughing straight into my eyes.
“I thought we’d get on to that sooner or later,” he said, relaxing once more, “so I’d better make the position entirely plain. During my first year, Anthony, I went to Richard for supervisions. As you well know, we took a liking to one another, began to go for walks and have meals and so on, and by this time last year we were very firm friends indeed. Now, I know what a lot of people started thinking about this, and I know it looked jolly awkward when he stopped seeing much of Penelope. But whatever anybody may have thought or said, we were, as they say in the papers, just very good friends and nothing more.”
“I always knew it,” I said.
“Did you now, Anthony? Well, here is something which perhaps you didn’t know. It is true that neither Richard nor I am queer. But there’s an important difference. I have slept with a lot of people, even while I was still at school, and in no sense whatever can I be called a virgin. Richard, on the other hand, is a virgin all ways round. He’s never slept with anyone at all.”
“I knew that too,” I said.
“Let me finish, Anthony. When I discovered this, I was surprised – and rather shocked. It seemed positively…immoral that someone should have reached the age of twenty-six and still not have slept with anyone. And later on I began to feel downright sorry for him. So I thought to myself that I might not be queer, but if, if, Anthony, Richard were to show the slightest sign of wanting me, then such was my affection for him, such was the loyalty I owed him as my friend, I would do anything he asked me and be proud to. And so time went on, and he said nothing, and I began to realise that it wasn’t a boy he wanted in any case. But even then, I thought I might be able to help him. And one evening, when we were talking about some girl I’d been seeing and he seemed rather upset about it, I said to him, ‘Look, Richard, you’ve no call to worry about this. Girls come and girls go, and very nice too, but if ever you want me,’ I said, ‘in any way whatever, then tell me so and I’ll be happy, happy, Richard, to do anything you ask’.”
He paused for a moment and reached out for his cup.
“And then…?” I prompted him.
“Well, then he looked a bit dazed for a time. But he soon recovered; he smiled and took hold of my arm and said he appreciated my concern, but that wasn’t what he wanted from me. But he still went on being edgy and tiresome, so I wondered whether he might not have been offended by what I’d said. So I asked him straight out, and he said no, that wasn’t it, it was something quite different and nothing that need trouble me. However, I kept on at him and wouldn’t leave it alone, so finally he told me what it was. He sat up very straight, Anthony, and his face was like stone, and his voice was so cold it might have been coming from the other side of the universe. Have you any idea what he said?”
“None.”
“He said…he said he thought he was impotent. I shall never forget it as long as I live. Him sitting so straight and that terrible cold voice. ‘I think I’m impotent, Piers,’ he said. Well, I pulled myself together as best I could and asked him how he could possibly know if he hadn’t tried. He said he didn’t know but he was pretty sure and this was one of the reasons he hadn’t tried. I said no one could be sure until they’d tried and that the longer he put it off the worse his doubts would become. He said it was hardly even a question of doubt… And so we went on, round and round in a silly and vicious circle, until he got up and said we were never to speak of this again and marched straight out of the room.”
For a while we were both silent. Piers lay flat on his back looking straight up at the ceiling, his right hand cushioning his head, his left arm stretched out for his fingers to fiddle with his teaspoon. Then I said: “Did he seem to have any idea why he should be impotent?”
“There was just one brief hint. He broke away from it almost immediately. But I think he blames Walter Goodrich.”
“Blames Walter Goodrich?”
“Not so much Walter himself as what he stands for. He gabbled something about a wrong way of life, about schools and institutions which first castrated you and then sucked your blood. It was very quick and difficult to hear, and he stopped almost at once. Then he said, ‘Need alien gods’ – something like that – and started to laugh rather hysterically. After that he went absolutely silent for about five minutes, until he suddenly said we weren’t to discuss this again and went out like I told you.”
“If he’s prepared to tell you all this,” I said slowly, “it’s not surprising he wants to see you again. But whether you find the money or not, Piers, there are going to be complications. For one thing, Richard’s days in Greece are numbered.”
“What can you mean?”
And then, as clearly as I could, I told Piers Clarence the lot. If anyone had a right to know, he did. Tyrrel could like it or lump it, I thought. Because if there was one person, except possibly for Penelope, who could help Richard, it was going to be Piers Clarence.
“So,” he said when I’d finished, “he doesn’t seem to have found it.”
“Found what?”
“What he hoped – I hoped – he would. It looks as if he found something though. Not the right something.”
“Be plain, Piers.”
“He went to Greece,” said Piers wearily, “to get away from Penelope and Walter and, most of all perhaps, from Walter’s schemes. He liked Walter’s schemes and he detested Walter’s schemes, and he couldn’t make up his mind which he did most, so he went away.”
“So I surmised.”
“But he also went because he thought that Greece might have something to offer him – something Walter and Penelope and this place couldn’t give him, but which you gave him for a time, and then the Army gave him, and I gave him most recently of all. Only since none of us had given him enough of it, he wanted more. And he thought he might find it in Greece. The only trouble was that there were two things he was after, one of them the wrong one, and if he found that first, he’ll have stuck with it.”
“One of these things being love? Or sex? His manhood?”
“Not exactly,” said Piers. “One of these things, the right one, is abundance of life. This includes love and sex, his manhood if you like, but it also means truth and liberty, with a strong flavour of adventure and even heroism. You’ll have noticed something heroic about him?”
“Certainly.”
“But the other of these things,” Piers went on, “is something that he himself doesn’t know about, because it’s something that no one could admit to himself and it is, in any case, quite easy to confuse and even equate with heroism and liberty – and still more easy to confuse with love.”
“And what might that be?”
“He is looking for hatred,” said Piers calmly, “because he is, by nature, a great hater. You don’t need me to tell you that he can be, for example, very cruel. Now we know that love and hate, and sex and hate, are very much interwoven. As for liberty – well, it implies hatred of tyranny; and heroism necessarily permits one to hate one’s adversary. In Richard’s case there are plenty of targets – this impotence, real or imagined; Walter (whom he sees as the symbol and cause of it), all of what he calls ‘the wrong way of life’… So you see, Anthony, it is quite easy for Richard to confuse the good side of his quest with the bad one: to pursue hatred with ferocity while thinking all the time that he is only looking for abundance and love. And from what you say, it is beginning to seem all too likely that he is doing exactly that.”
Piers spoke with such confidence, his thesis was so consistent with all I knew of Richard, that I found myself accepting it immediately and without any critical effort, accepting it as something I must always, in a manner, have known for myself. Time and circumstance might give cause for revision, I reflected; but even this, in the face of Piers’ cool authority, seemed only the most remote of possibilities.
“Leaving us with the nice little question,” I said at last, “of what we ought to do about it.”
“Perhaps Inspector Tyrrel will tell you,” he said mockingly: “you seem to think highly of him.”
“I do. And so will you when you meet him.”
“I? Meet Tyrrel?”
“Soon,” I said.
“And meanwhile?”
“Stay in Cambridge,” I said, “and amuse yourself. And don’t leave Cambridge till I tell you. We may want you in a hurry.”
“How very bossing you are, Anthony. My poor mother expects me home in four days’ time. And as I hope to spend most of the summer away–”
“–Never mind your mother, Piers. Do as I say.”
I rose to go.
“If you say so, Major Seymour,” he said, crossing his legs and looking down with pleasure along the silken length of his pyjamas. “But there’s just one thing more you ought to know before you leave.”
“And that is?”
“Why do you suppose, Anthony, that I’ve chosen this particular time to tell you about Richard being impotent? When I’ve known for more than a year?”
“Because I asked you what held you both so close.”
“Not a bit of it, my sweet. I told you because it no longer matters – to Richard or to anyone else. Because he’s going to die, Anthony. I’ve seen him three times these last few nights, and each time he was dead.”
