The tower bells freshly rung, it was now ten past eleven. The rain, hooded, mercurial, lips tight about its design, poured on. And though the human realm around Cadence and Louis was near deserted, behind the two-storey house, those plants in the University Botanic Garden, with their microscopic cells swelling in an embarrassed, almost juvenile secrecy, began to smell—
The veil of the night is threatening to end my authorial voyeurism here, reader, but I won't allow it. Now, from that smell alone, arborescent cuddling with floral, heady over earthy—let me make my imagination inhale so my eyes turn olfactory, and with them, yours.
The scene you're breathing in happens around four o'clock in a 1920s afternoon, in the very same city just across Merton Field. The Waste Land was still fresh from the press, recited by Etonians in 'rough tweeds and brogues' as part of their daily wear. Two young men, one a commoner, the other a younger son of a marchioness, led the following conversation:
Sebastian: 'I must go to the Botanical Gardens.'
Charles: 'I've never been to the Botanical Gardens.'
Sebastian: 'Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There's a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don't know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens.'
They did end up going to the Botanical Gardens as Sebastian suggested; but what exactly happened there, Evelyn Waugh didn't disclose to us in the book—in plain words, that is. In subtext it was all spelt out:
(From the page before, Anthony to Charles) 'I think it's perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do you lurk?'
'Discover' is the word he used. Do you smell it, reader? The inchoate desire, burgeoning that afternoon between Sebastian and Charles, who are soon to be anointed among the most famous queer couples in English fiction—is, first and foremost, scientific. It was as simple and devious as one botanist plucking a new specimen from the crowd, to be planted among a collection, which already had 'more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed'. Greedy much.
This, reader, is what I'm trying to tell you about my brother Louis. Living like an idyllic type though he is, the nature he chose to be surrounded with—listed de jure as the university's property, displayed de facto for his upstairs view—was not an innocent, unsystematic plot of daffodils and roses, but built with a purpose. That's what the Botanic Garden is about, really, when you think about it, with its glasshouses and Catalogus Plantarum. To collect. To possess. All in the name of science, or back when science was still an inferior form of art, 'for the glorification of the works of God'.
You think I'm just harping on and showing off. But I bid you: bear this in mind as you read on.
'I have to lock up first. Go on upstairs now. It's the door on the left.' Louis said in his average volume, and with a worryingly antequated key, fumbled for the front door's hole in the poorly lit foyer. When he turned briefly and saw Cadence's gingerly footsteps, he advised again, 'No need to keep quiet. There's no one else in the house.'
They were indeed alone, in a 3000 square feet space that felt cardiographic despite its inorganic stucco walls. The downstairs, unoccupied except for some leftover wine crates, was divided in the middle by a set of bifurcated staircase that flew into the two atria above. The flat to the left belonged to my brother. The one on the right was kept by the Music Faculty to accommodate a certain professor M, who taught 19th century music history only on Wednesdays, for which he commuted between Oxford and Hong Kong every week, an impossible arrangement that finally ended a year after my brother's death. (Still, for three whole years, the poor man. Surely no one else could've managed that long.)
Thus Louis's door was kept unlocked. Cadence gave it a small nudge and let it drift open, then half-knelt on the coconut fibre doormat to take off his shoes. Even before he stepped in, with his senses close to the floor, he recognised the flat's interior. A moist medley of herbal fragrances, blended with young wool and old pages. A clock ticking. The oak parquet blotched a faint orange by the streetlamps outside.
YOU ARE READING
Refrain
FantasyCadence, a no-name classical violinist, with Asian parents and an Oxford degree, is fleeing from the stage: he broke the bow at his London concert, and with it, his music career. To escape embarrassment, he hops on a train. But thanks to a strange...
