Category Archives: David

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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The Boy from Thamesmead

*David remembered exactly what he was doing in the month Joshua was born.

It was October 1986, and David had just started writing for Blitz. In the same week, he also began writing for Look-In, the children’s magazine built around ITV’s seemingly endless supply of kids’ programmes. The contrast could hardly have been greater.

Blitz was all style, fashion and culture. Look-In required David to find words that might appeal to schoolchildren without making him sound like an adult trying desperately to appeal to schoolchildren. Yet, strangely enough, his best work turned out to be for the latter.

His editor praised him for bringing to life such characters as T-Bag, Super Gran and the cast of Jossy’s Giants. At twenty-two, David decided it was probably best not to put this particular achievement on his rapidly evolving CV.

His ambition was to write for The Face. That never came to fruition, but not for want of trying.

That summer, David had met Nick Kamen, whom he regarded as the most beautiful man in the world. With a confidence that now seemed almost incomprehensible, Kamen had agreed to be interviewed. There was no fee involved. They met twice in Hyde Park, where David discovered that he was a pleasant young man and, more importantly, precisely the sort of person David hoped might one day make excellent boyfriend material.

There was, however, one small problem.

Kamen was completely straight.

He also giggled whenever David flirted with him.

They recorded several hours of material, which inexplicably disappeared over the years. Kamen had dutifully talked about boxer shorts, Levi 501s and Madonna for what was probably the thousandth time, but had also opened up about his interests and ambitions.

Somewhere in a box in the attic at Cleaver Square there was, David was fairly sure, a typed manuscript of the interview, flatly rejected by The Face and, as far as he could remember, everybody else who had subsequently seen it.

There was also a chance that the box contained the fading photographs of the stunt David and his drunken friends had pulled that same year.

They had gone into a late-night launderette on Paddington Street, stripped down to their boxer shorts and attempted to recreate Kamen’s famous advert. They photographed one another with a Polaroid 600 and had the pictures developed at SupaSnaps.

The results had been less than inspiring.

Skinny white bodies. Boxers far too baggy. Not a hint of the effortless eroticism that had made Kamen famous.

Bloody hell, David thought. If Kamen had lived, he’d be sixty-four now.

Meanwhile, nine months earlier, Terry and Brenda Turner had suffered the consequences of a shag.

Joshua Turner was born.

His name had all the makings of an artist.

All of this came to light when David broached the subject of Joshua’s upcoming fortieth birthday.

David had decided to take Joshua away for his October birthday week.

They hadn’t been abroad together for a while.

When they had first met, David had spoiled Joshua with trips all over Europe. He hadn’t expected a relationship with a young man in his twenties to last, and this was his attempt to keep him for as long as possible. The boy from Thamesmead had suddenly stepped into a world that wasn’t meant for him, but he had taken to it with gusto.

Except the relationship had lasted.

Sixteen years, to be precise.

Eventually, the novelty of city breaks wore off.

In recent years, with a solid income from his artwork, Joshua had taken to travelling alone. A few days here, a few days there.

At first, David had been suspicious of these random jaunts.

There had been a photograph of Joshua on Instagram. He was leaning against a balcony rail, his back to the camera. David had immediately wanted to know who had taken it.

“A friend from Barcelona,” Joshua had said, irritated by the question.

David had been forced to accept that Joshua was entitled to live his own life.

But the fortieth birthday meant that they would travel together again.

“I’d like to go to Italy,” Joshua decided.

That got David thinking.

“Verona?”

“Absolutely not,” Joshua retorted.

“Why not?”

Joshua had looked at David with a raised eyebrow.

“If you’re suggesting that we’re going to meet up with Miles, then the answer is definitely no.”

“He’ll have left Verona by October,” David reasoned.

“No.”

Joshua had realised a long time ago that David was secretly in love with Miles.

The feeling was not reciprocated. David held no attraction for Miles whatsoever.

If only I was thirty years younger, David mused.

Joshua, however, still regarded Miles as a threat, and their friendship was cool at best.

“I’m thinking Rome or Venice. Or both.”

David began working on a plan, but Joshua had known him long enough to spot it.

“And if Miles comes anywhere near us, I shall be on the first plane home.”

David had to admit defeat.

He changed the subject.

“You do realise that it will also be your father’s seventieth birthday while we’re away?”

“That’s tough luck.”

“But won’t you be expected to see him?”

“No.”

It hadn’t been the easiest time when Joshua’s parents discovered that he was gay. After weeks of arguments, they had eventually accepted that nothing they did was going to change anything.

That fragile peace came to an end when they discovered that Joshua was moving in with David, a man twice his age.

Joshua’s father tracked David down and accosted him in the street. He had accused David of many things, but one word had hit home.

Paedophile.

David hadn’t spoken to Joshua’s parents since.

Of course, the relationship wasn’t meant to last. David’s friends had told him so. Somehow, much to their amazement, and occasionally his, it had held together.

David had struck gold.

Joshua was polite and never caused a problem. Unlike most men his age, he turned out to be a homebody, shunning wild nights out in favour of spending time at home with David.

David encouraged him to leave his job serving on the tills at Morrisons and rather enjoyed the idea of looking after Joshua financially. But it had been a strain when the family fortune nosedived and David’s income from writing dipped.

Back then, David had rented rooms in Paddington, or the edges of Tyburnia, as he liked to call it.

And then Uncle William left Cleaver Square to him.

They moved to Kennington and couldn’t quite believe the number of rooms that were suddenly available to them. Joshua insisted that they should each have a room for their work: David for his writing, Joshua for his art.

David soon realised that his young lover had talent. Sketching, photography, creating monstrosities out of almost nothing. He paid for Joshua to study at art school, which widened his horizons considerably.

Joshua was intent on becoming famous and used David’s connections to climb the social ladder.

And David watched as the passive young man he had first met turned into someone with an unwavering focus.

The boy from Thamesmead was no more.

The journey had been fun, and the two of them loved each other immensely.

But they no longer had sex.

David couldn’t remember the last time they had been intimate. He could, however, remember the last time Joshua had rejected his advances.

He had said he was tired and wanted to sleep.

David had heard that excuse before.

That was six years ago, and he vowed never to embarrass himself like that again.

For a while, David had thought it was because of his age. He compared them to Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, perhaps even Andy Warhol and Jed Johnson.

Eventually, David realised that Joshua would have to satisfy his own urges, which explained his suspicions about the brief excursions abroad.

David told himself that he no longer cared.

That was far from the truth.

His sex drive hadn’t waned. The opportunities had.

Joshua, to borrow the words of Boy George, gave the distinct impression that he would rather have a cup of tea.

Oh, to be young again, thought David.

And then he wondered whether it was youth he really missed.

Or simply being wanted. 

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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A Better Story

Murder had played an unexpectedly large part in David’s life. Not because he had murdered anyone—he hadn’t even come close—but because he enjoyed telling people about the occasions when he had very nearly been murdered himself. As the years passed the stories acquired new details, sharper dialogue, darker motives. Each retelling nudged them a little further from the truth until even David struggled to remember where fact ended and invention began. He had discovered that almost any story improved if murder was lurking just off the page.

The first attempt on David’s life, if it could be called that, happened when he was fifteen and at Harrow.

By then his sexual inclinations were no secret. They had earned him plenty of abuse, but they also gave him a certain currency. Hormonal boys were inventive when privacy was scarce, and David, more curious than ashamed, was often willing to oblige. It was a contradiction he understood only years later: the same boys who mocked him in daylight often sought him out after lights-out.

For a long time he toyed with writing a novel set during those years. The Edwardian public-school romances had always struck him as curiously bloodless, as though adolescence consisted entirely of cricket, Latin and noble sacrifice. His version would be rather different. His boys listened to the Boomtown Rats and John Peel on Radio 1, smoked where they shouldn’t, and discovered one another in darkened dormitories after the masters had gone to bed. It would have been a scandalous book, especially as David himself had been expelled only weeks later. Better, perhaps, that it remained unwritten.

Harrow still clung to customs that belonged to another century. Boys leaving the school grounds were expected to wear full uniform and touch their hats to passing adults. David found the ritual faintly ridiculous. Rules, after all, acquired their greatest attraction once they were forbidden.

He waited until the evening bill had been taken and supper was over. After lock-up, when nobody was supposed to leave the building, he slipped into civvies, climbed the wall at the edge of the grounds and disappeared into the darkness beyond. October had stripped the evenings of warmth, and beneath the heavy oaks and sycamores that crowned the hill he could move almost unseen.

The escapade itself was childish. Getting back in was the dangerous part. It depended on the loyalty of the other boys, who envied his nocturnal excursions even if they had little interest in accompanying him. Nobody informed. To dob in another boy was to spoil the game for everyone. If he had been caught, the punishment would probably have been a few strokes of the cane—a prospect David found less alarming than he cared to admit.

When he finally crept back into his room, there were always faces waiting in the darkness.

“Well?”

The truth was usually disappointing. Harrow on the Hill was remarkably uneventful after dark, looking much like any other sleepy English suburb. But that hardly mattered. David had already begun to understand that the adventure itself was never as satisfying as the story told afterwards.

David often visited the washrooms at the underground station on College Road. Someone had told him it was where people like him eventually ended up. He rarely found anyone of interest. This time there was an older boy, probably in his late teens, pretending to take a piss. David fancied him immediately: tall, fair-haired, slim, with the easy build of someone who played sport. He knew at once why the boy was there.

David felt the familiar surge of excitement. He busied himself by tucking his shirt into his trousers for the third time, then crouched to retie a shoelace that didn’t need tying. The older boy glanced around before slipping into one of the cubicles. David followed without hesitation.

The cubicle wasn’t what he’d imagined. It reeked of piss and shit, and the floor was ankle-deep in sodden toilet paper. It was enough to puncture the fantasy.

“How old are you?” the boy asked, pinning David against the back of the door.

“Eighteen,” David lied.

The boy thrust his tongue into David’s mouth. His breath tasted of cheap fags and Mars Bars.

David had waited a long time for this moment.

Then something gave way inside him.

He opened his eyes and found himself staring at the graffiti on the wall. Names. Telephone numbers. Obscenities. He suddenly didn’t want the boy touching him. He shoved him backwards. For a split second he thought the boy might hit him. Instead, David fumbled with the lock, yanked the door open and bolted from the cubicle. Seconds later he was out of the station and running.

He ran most of the way back to school, stopping only once to make sure he wasn’t being followed. The street behind him was empty. He realised he had been frightened. More than that, he was furious with himself for making such a fool of himself.

He scrambled over the school wall, knowing that once he was inside he would be safe. But in his haste he mistimed the drop on the other side and crashed into a stack of bricks piled beneath it. Pain shot through his knee. When he looked down he saw that his jeans had ripped. He touched the tear and his hand came away covered in blood.

“Shit.”

He limped back to Bradbys and slipped in through a fire door he had wedged open earlier. The room he shared with Gilles was on the top floor, and by the time he reached it his knee was throbbing.

As expected, Gilles was in bed reading a paperback by the light of a torch. David was still out of breath. When Gilles shone the torch at him, it was obvious he’d been crying.

“What on earth has happened?” Gilles demanded.

“Somebody tried to murder me,” David said.

He hadn’t meant to lie. It was simply that the story sounded better than the truth.

So he told Gilles about the man who had lured him back to a room near the station and held a Swiss Army knife to his throat. During the struggle, the blade had caught David’s knee before he somehow managed to break free.

“You mustn’t tell anyone,” he said.

The following morning David visited Matron to have the wound dressed. He explained that he had fallen while running down the stairs. She listened patiently, although the look on her face suggested she had heard rather better lies from schoolboys over the years.

After that, the story escaped him.

By the end of breakfast David was the talk of the school. Gilles had never been capable of keeping a secret. Boys stopped David in corridors and on staircases, eager to hear about his brush with death.

“It was nothing,” David said with studied modesty. “The man told me he was going to kill me, but I fought him off and got away. Just don’t tell anyone.”

Over the following days the tale grew with each retelling. The knife became longer. The struggle more violent. The escape more miraculous. Every version won him a little more admiration, especially from boys who had barely noticed him before.

By an extraordinary coincidence, events beyond the school gates began to lend David’s invention an air of credibility.

One evening he returned to his room to find Gilles waving a copy of Harrow Midweek.

“Listen to this,” he shouted excitedly.

He read aloud.

“We are aware of certain incidents in the Harrow area. People have been threatened—one involving a knife—and several have been assaulted. In June and August, the ‘Gay Ripper’ stabbed two men to death in their homes in Enfield and Kingston.”

Gilles lowered the newspaper and stared at David.

“That might have been you.”

David merely shrugged, although not without a flicker of guilt.

It never occurred to him that a story of this magnitude might eventually reach the masters. Had anyone believed it, the police would almost certainly have been called, leaving David with some awkward explanations to make.

But there were signs that the staff had already decided exactly what it was: another elaborate schoolboy fantasy.

One afternoon David was crossing the quad when his English master, Mr Potts—a bearded man known to generations of boys as Caractacus Potts—called him over.

“I hear you’ve been making up stories, David.”

He paused just long enough for David to wonder whether he was in trouble.

“Very entertaining,” Mr Potts said with a smile. “Perhaps you should think about writing a book.”

Decades later, David would tell the story again. The knife had become sharper, the struggle longer, and the escape even narrower. He had long since forgotten where the truth ended and the story began. But whenever he reached the part about the Swiss Army knife, people always leaned forward. And that, he decided, was what really mattered. 

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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The Boy in the Pink Socks

David decided to spend the afternoon on his own. Moments like this had become rare.

He had spent the morning writing, but his concentration had deserted him. Leaving Joshua creating something unidentifiable in the studio, he wandered towards Little Portugal and ended up nursing a cappuccino outside Starbucks.

Portuguese families had first settled around Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before rising rents gradually pushed many south of the Thames. The neighbourhood around South Lambeth Road eventually became known as Little Portugal, although, today, there seemed remarkably few Portuguese about.

Places like this had always fed David’s imagination.

He would settle into his chair and watch the procession of strangers pass by; ordinary people following lives known only to themselves. He would invent those lives as they walked.

His attention always drifted towards solitary young men moving with effortless confidence. Summer had finally arrived and they appeared in shorts, T-shirts and trainers, a backpack slung casually over one shoulder. David had never quite lost his fascination with male legs.

Not long ago he had stumbled across an idea for a book.

It would require an entirely different kind of research.

He imagined choosing a young man at random. There was only one rule: he had to be someone David found beautiful enough to want to sleep with. Realistically, he thought, the feeling would almost certainly not be mutual. Most would be straight, but that hardly mattered. David would give each one a name, follow discreetly behind and see where life carried him. Every journey would become a chapter. Every stranger, a story.

So far, the idea had remained just that.

When he mentioned it to Joshua, he had received a look of genuine concern.

“You do realise you’re describing stalking?”

David had laughed, but the accusation lingered.

Even so, the idea continued to delight him.

When a handsome young man with thick dark curls appeared at the end of the street, David briefly wondered whether today might finally be the day.

Instead, his attention shifted to the table beside him.

An older man and a much younger one had just sat down together.

A couple? Father and son?

Before David could decide, a woman appeared carrying coffees.

Mother.

The younger man was exceptionally handsome. Tallish, blond, wearing a designer top, blue shorts and unexpectedly bright pink socks. The socks made David smile. Stretching his legs in front of him, the young man absent-mindedly stroked the smooth skin of one shin before rubbing the back of his knee as though it had begun to ache.

David found himself listening.

Only the boy’s voice carried.

It was unmistakably Home Counties.

“She’s strange,” he said. “And she walks funny too.”

His parents laughed. His mother replied too quietly for David to catch.

“I know what you’re saying,” the boy answered, “but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

David suspected she was trying to engineer a romance.

The father smiled with quiet satisfaction.

David recognised the expression immediately.

It was the face of a man who knew exactly how handsome his son was.

The longer David looked at him, the more he could imagine the father at the same age. Once equally beautiful. Once perhaps exactly the kind of man David might have taken home without a second thought.

The mother passed over a muffin.

The boy demolished it without the slightest concern for calories. Crumbs scattered down the front of his T-shirt before he brushed them away.

“We obviously flirt with each other,” he said, “but what’s the point of flirting with someone who doesn’t want you?”

My God.

How could anybody not want you?

He was exactly the kind of boy David loved to be seen beside. Someone impossibly attractive who might patiently sit in a garden listening to his stories while pretending to prune roses.

Then again, David suspected the illusion would disappear the moment he started talking about girlfriends.

Once upon a time, David had been that boy.

Only now did he realise how fortunate he had been.

At the time, he never knew.

His mother resumed talking while the boy scrolled through his phone, somehow managing to follow both conversations at once.

“It’ll take a month or so to grow,” he said, barely looking up.

Life would be much easier if parents never got in the way.

The father, who had spoken hardly at all, glanced towards David.

David instinctively lowered his eyes to his own phone.

The screen was still open on an interview with a twenty-something influencer from New York.

“The guys I fuck outside my relationship don’t look anything like my boyfriend. They’re all, like, fifty-five with massive tits. Why would I eat what I can get at home?”

David smiled despite himself.

Why don’t I ever meet people like that?

The thought faded almost as quickly as it arrived.

Another, quieter one took its place.

He was growing old.

Not suddenly.

Not dramatically.

Simply, unmistakably.

He imagined himself in ten years time.

An old man sitting alone on a bench. Shoulders rounded beneath the weight of time. Hands resting on his knees, or wrapped around the handle of a walking stick. A faded wool jacket buttoned to the neck. A flat cap pulled low across his brow. Scuffed trainers tied with thick laces.

Watching the world continue without ever asking him to join in.

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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The 19.24 from Penzance

London. Summertime. The sun blazed and the city baked.

For weeks David had been bracing himself for the Wilhelm von Gloeden exhibition at the McDonald Gallery. He had written notes for the sixty photographs on display, along with an agonisingly long biography of the German photographer for the catalogue.

Now it was opening night. His work was done, and as he strolled along the Strand he felt an unfamiliar sense of relief. All that remained was to survive the evening. He hated social gatherings and would much rather have been sharing a quiet drink with Joshua.

Joshua, however, thrived on occasions like this. He would work the room, dropping discreet hints that he was an emerging force in the contemporary art world, and leave with a pocketful of phone numbers and invitations. David, inevitably, would be expected to accompany him.

His own intention was to remain firmly in the background.

He had already instructed the exhibition’s curator, an American called Nathaniel Wilson, not to mention his presence. David wrote under a pen name and was determined to keep his identity hidden. He had even insisted that his name be removed from all the exhibition material.

Joshua had also insisted on bringing Freddie.

As they approached the gallery, Freddie stopped in his tracks.

“They’ve shot the elephant,” he announced solemnly, “and now there’s a dead elephant in the road.”

Freddie claimed to see the dead.

“Fuck me,” David muttered. “That’s all we need.”

The McDonald Gallery was new. Its owner had installed enormous glass windows and joked that they allowed those without invitations to see exactly what they were missing. David hoped they wouldn’t see too much. Von Gloeden’s photographs were bound to provoke controversy.

His heart sank when he spotted Pamela Hutchinson standing just inside the entrance.

He had warned Nathaniel not to invite her. The warning had been ignored.

David slipped past her and leaned towards Nathaniel.

“She’s a fucking do-gooder,” he whispered.

Nathaniel merely smiled. The New Yorker possessed an enviable ability to brush off negativity. David, by contrast, briefly entertained the idea of punching Pamela in the face before remembering that doing so would rather compromise his anonymity.

They had arrived fashionably late. The gallery was already crowded with people balancing glasses of expensive wine and conducting earnest conversations. The art had become secondary.

David excused himself and wandered over to the photographs he had spent weeks studying. They felt strangely familiar now, almost as though they belonged to him.

His favourite hung at the end of the room: Peppino Scavo, photographed in 1901, reclining nude beside the sea with his eyes closed, serene and oblivious to the camera preserving him for posterity.

“Beautiful,” said a voice behind him.

Another lecherous queen, David thought.

Even so, he found himself agreeing. He had expressed the same opinion countless times while preparing the catalogue notes, but always in private. Hearing someone else voice it left him oddly possessive of the exhibition.

“I’ve been told the notes were written by a famous author,” the man continued. “Any idea who? Hollingworth, perhaps. They have his style. If not him, I’d put money on Tóibín.”

David sighed inwardly.

If the man had done his homework, he would already have known exactly who had written them.

David checked his watch. Daniel should have arrived by now.

They had met on a nudist beach in Cornwall, where an awkward conversation about the paintings of Henry Scott Tuke had somehow blossomed into a friendship. David still winced at the memory of telling Daniel that he looked as though he had stepped out of one of Tuke’s canvases.

Their conversation had eventually turned to the von Gloeden exhibition, and David had invited him to London. The invitation had naturally included a bed at Cleaver Square. To David’s delight, Daniel had accepted and should have been on the 19.24 from Penzance. The 19.24 from Penzance, he thought. It sounded like the title of a crime novel.

His attention was drawn to Nathaniel and Joshua, who were talking to a tall young man with his back to him. There was something oddly familiar about him.

David threaded his way through the crowd.

“Owen,” he said, breaking into a smile.

The young man turned immediately.

“I was just chatting to my new neighbour,” Owen said, “and now the other one’s arrived. How are you, David?”

“New neighbour?”

“My grandmother left me her house, so I’ve decided to move in. At least for the time being.”

He meant the house next door, which had belonged to the Countess until her death a few months earlier.

David and Joshua had known Owen since he was a child and had always been the only neighbours to visit the family regularly. David was fond of the handsome young man, though he also knew about his unpredictable temper.

Approach with caution, he reminded himself.

“That’s wonderful,” David said. “But what brings you here?”

“A friend of a friend,” Owen shrugged. “I’m not convinced it’s really my sort of thing.”

Nathaniel’s eyes had already settled on Owen’s outfit.

“What a fantastic look,” he purred, admiring the suit worn over a plain white T-shirt. “You put the rest of us to shame. Come on, let me show you around. I’ll explain von Gloeden to you.”

He took Owen gently by the arm.

Owen glanced back at David as though asking to be rescued.

“There’s only one reason he wants to show him round,” Joshua murmured. “And I think we can all guess whose knickers he’d like to get into tonight.”

“Nathaniel can be remarkably shallow,” David replied.

At that moment Freddie appeared clutching a full bottle of wine. David glanced at the label—Domaine William Fèvre Chablis Grand Cru Les Clos—and suspected it cost more than he cared to imagine. Freddie had abandoned his crystal glass altogether and was drinking straight from the bottle.

“You’ll never guess who I’ve just seen,” he announced.

His voice had already risen several decibels.

“Please don’t get drunk,” Joshua sighed.

“Who’s drunk?” Freddie protested. “I’ve just seen Charles Dickens in the toilet.”

Several heads turned in their direction.

“Freddie, I would gladly kick you in the balls if it weren’t for the fact that you’re annoyingly handsome.”

David knew exactly how the evening would end. Before the exhibition was over, Freddie would have found someone willing to take a chance on him. The only uncertainty was whether he would sabotage his own good fortune by telling his latest conquest that Charles Dickens was standing behind them.

Only then did David notice Daniel.

The young man stood in the middle of the gallery, rucksack slung over one shoulder, quietly taking everything in.

David resisted the temptation to call across the room, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on. It was a dreadful cliché, but also true. The last time they had met, Daniel had been sitting naked on Sunny Cove, hugging his knees against the sea breeze.

He realised there was one question he had never asked.

What had brought Daniel to a nudist beach in the first place?

Fully dressed, he looked broader than David remembered. His mousey hair had grown a little longer and a small stud glinted in one ear. Dressed like one of the skateboarders David often watched in Kennington Park, he looked entirely out of place among London’s art crowd.

Joshua, of course, had seen through everything.

On the drive back from Cornwall he had suggested, with infuriating accuracy, that David had taken a shine to him. Ever since, David had made a point of sounding carefully indifferent whenever Daniel’s name arose.

The irony was impossible to ignore.

Twenty years earlier David had written a novel about an older man who convinced himself that a much younger one was secretly in love with him. At the time he had never understood where the idea had come from.

Now, with some alarm, he recognised it.

He had become the man he’d invented.

At last Daniel spotted them and waved.

David pretended not to notice. Better to let Joshua take the lead.

“We’re glad you could make it,” Joshua said warmly.

“How are film studies?” David asked.

“They’re good. We’ve broken up for the summer now.”

“And who,” purred a familiar voice, “is this delightful creature?”

Nathaniel had evidently given up on Owen and returned with a new target.

Joshua made the introductions.

“So you’ve travelled all this way to see our exhibition,” Nathaniel said. “Tell me, are you familiar with von Gloeden?”

“Not at all.”

“Excellent. By the end of the evening you’ll be an authority. I trust you won’t be rushing straight back to Cornwall?”

“Daniel’s staying with us,” Joshua replied.

“And after that,” Daniel added, “I’m spending a few days in Henley-on-Thames with my girlfriend.”

The word landed like a punch.

David hoped his face betrayed nothing.

“We can all mourn the fantasy of what might have been,” Nathaniel laughed.

Joshua looked positively delighted.

When Nathaniel whisked Daniel away to deposit his rucksack in the cloakroom, Joshua turned to David.

“Feeling a bit bummed?”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Oh, get over it, David.”

As if matters weren’t bad enough, Pamela Hutchinson appeared.

“There you are,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you. No more hiding behind emails. At last I get to meet the writer in person.” She glanced around the gallery. “I notice your name is nowhere to be seen.”

“I’d rather the attention stayed on the photographs.”

“Or have you finally decided von Gloeden’s work really is pederastic?”

Fucking do-gooder, David thought.

Before he could reply, someone burst into song on the far side of the room.

“La da dee, la dee da…”

Pamela raised an eyebrow.

“I’d say somebody’s had rather too much to drink.”

Freddie.

Joshua hurried off to rescue the evening, eventually managing to shepherd him outside before he serenaded the entire gallery.

“If you’ll excuse me,” David said.

He escaped into the crowd, drifting through a succession of forgettable conversations before finding Daniel standing in front of another photograph. A glass of champagne rested in one hand, a smoked salmon blini in the other.

“Are these originals?” Daniel asked.

“Hardly. They’re modern prints. Even so, they’ll sell for a small fortune.”

“Do people really buy them?”

“More people than you’d imagine.”

Daniel smiled.

“And do you still think I stepped out of one of his photographs… the way you said I stepped out of that painter’s?”

“Tuke,” David reminded him.

The same mischievous smile.

David’s thoughts began to race.

Create some distance. Leave space. Find something else to occupy your mind. Half a loaf was better than none.

“You still haven’t answered.”

“What would you like me to say?”

“Nathaniel thinks I’d make a good male nude. Apparently he knows people in the film industry.”

David had encountered men like Nathaniel all his life. Charming. Persuasive. Always on the lookout for the next beautiful distraction.

But nobody could steal what had never belonged to you.

“Be careful of Nathaniel Wilson,” David said. “Men like him can be very persuasive. Stay close to Joshua and me instead. We’ll make sure you survive the evening. Besides…” He smiled. “What would your girlfriend have to say?”

He felt quietly pleased with himself.

The point had been made.

But Daniel was no longer the shy young man David had met on the beach. Somewhere over the past few weeks he had realised the effect he had on people and was perfectly content to let them compete for his attention.

“That’s funny,” Daniel said, grinning.

“That’s exactly what Nathaniel said about you.”

Daniel wasn’t choosing sides.

He seemed perfectly happy to sit on the fence and watch everyone else do the choosing.

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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Artwork by Xristo Rodríguez

The Painter of Boys – Part 2

Henry had spent the morning sketching on the beach while his model sat naked upon a rock, gazing out to sea. He tried to capture the figure before him: broad, well-defined shoulders flowing into a powerful back that narrowed elegantly at the waist; sculpted arms, the muscles cleanly delineated beneath pale skin; strong, athletic legs whose proportions conveyed both grace and strength. The healthy glow of youth accentuated every subtle interplay of light and shadow across his form. Yet Henry knew that no matter how many times he put pencil to paper, he could never truly recreate the beauty before him. Johnny had cost half a crown, and he had earned it by remaining perfectly still for the better part of the morning.

It was shortly before midday when they heard the shots—two sharp reports that reverberated around the cove, causing Henry to drop his pencil and Johnny to start. Both looked about for the source of the disturbance, but nobody was in sight.

“It came from down there,” Johnny shouted, pointing towards the caves.

Before Henry could react, the boy was already running along Newporth Beach, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was still naked.

“Be careful, Johnny!” Henry called, hurrying after him.

The body lay in the first cave. By the time Henry arrived, Johnny was standing over the motionless figure.

“Is he dead?” Henry asked.

“As dead as he’ll ever be,” Johnny replied. “There’s a gun on the floor, but no blood.”

Henry picked it up—a six-chambered revolver—before kneeling beside the corpse and turning it onto its back.

“Two shots to the mouth,” he murmured.

The strangest thought crossed his mind: the seed of a painting. The naked youth standing over a dead man. Absurd, he told himself.

“I’m afraid I know who this is,” Henry said at last, a note of sadness in his voice. “Harry Tilly, of Boslowick.”

He rose and turned to Johnny.

“Run along and find the policeman. Tell him to come here at once. But get dressed first, or the scandal will be greater than it already is.”

*****

David pieced the story together in his head as he followed Joshua down the steep track—or what passed for one—towards Sunny Cove. He had recently come across a newspaper article from 1894 describing how the artist Henry Scott Tuke and one of his models had discovered the body of a Falmouth solicitor in a cave on Newporth Beach. Most of David’s ideas grew from forgotten histories, but only now had it occurred to him that the incident might provide the foundation for a novel.

Brambles, nettles and dense undergrowth crowded the route, obscuring their footing. Before long, the path dissolved into a treacherous slope of loose slate, fractured rock and powdery earth. One careless step could send them tumbling onto the beach below, though ropes had been fixed to the cliffside to assist those bold enough to attempt the final descent.

‘Tuke’s House’ had once stood on the clifftop, but it had vanished long ago. Seventy years earlier, thousands of tons of rock and soil had collapsed into the sea near Pennance Cottage, forcing its occupants to abandon it. The empty building soon became a playground for local children, who tore up floorboards and left a trail of destruction until the structure was deemed unsafe. Its owner, Mrs Trench Fox, eventually ordered it demolished. Tuke had been dead for twenty-five years, and few mourned the loss.

Most of Tuke’s male nudes had been painted on the beaches below—Tuke’s Beach, Sunny Cove and Newporth Beach—names familiar only to locals. To outsiders fortunate enough to find them, they appeared to be a single uninterrupted stretch of coastline.

David and Joshua had discovered Sunny Cove the previous year. On that occasion, the weather had been cool and overcast, and they had the beach entirely to themselves. Few people ventured here; only those who knew where to find it. Together they had wandered along the narrow stretch of pebbles, exploring the rocky ledges and platforms while imagining the summers when Tuke and his models had spent long, sunlit days on the shore.

This time, however, the weather was glorious, and the beach no longer felt as though it belonged exclusively to them.

“Shit,” muttered David. “There are people here.”

“And an eyeful of old man penis,” Joshua added.

It was true. Half a dozen men were sunbathing completely naked.

“I didn’t realise it was a nudist beach,” David said.

“Not just a nudist beach,” Joshua replied in a low voice, “but probably a good place for blokes to go cruising.”

David slipped on his sunglasses and pretended to check his phone, giving himself an excuse to study their fellow beachgoers.

“My God,” he said. “The place is full of gay grandads.”

It was not entirely unfair. Most of the men were well past their prime, their sun-darkened skin weathered like old leather.

“The truth is, they’re probably younger than you are,” Joshua replied with a mischievous grin.

“Maybe, but at least I haven’t lost my looks. And I still have a decent figure.”

David felt obliged to maintain the fiction that he remained an Adonis, though deep down he knew the evidence was becoming less convincing with every passing year.

As they spread out their towels, he became acutely aware that the other men were watching them too. The object of their attention was clearly Joshua, who had already stripped down to his underwear.

“Henry Scott Tuke had an endless supply of beautiful young models,” David grumbled. “I get naked old men with tiny dicks.”

He found himself wondering whether Joshua intended to go completely nude. Even in a pair of Calvin Kleins, Joshua was striking: handsome, slim, and blessed with long, elegant legs. More importantly, he knew it. David had no doubt that Joshua would make the most of every advantage nature had given him.

Joshua made his way into the sea, wincing as the sharp pebbles bit into his feet. It was, he seemed to think, a small price to pay for the opportunity to perform before an audience.

David heard footsteps crunching across the shingle. One of the men—a naked, pot-bellied figure—waded into the water a short distance from Joshua. David watched with growing irritation as the pair splashed through the waves, as though participating in some obscure mating ritual.

Joshua had always been attracted to older men; after all, that was how he and David had ended up together. Lately, however, David found that fact increasingly difficult to ignore. He searched for the correct term. Chronophilia? Gerontophilia? When he had been Joshua’s age, older men had held no appeal for him—certainly not men old enough to be his father. In that respect, at least, he had remained remarkably consistent. He still preferred younger men, although the age gap widened with every passing year.

Joshua eventually returned to his side.

“That guy’s dick is too shrivelled to appeal to anybody,” David muttered.

“It’s because it’s cold,” Joshua replied, shivering. He glanced around as though only just noticing the older man who had joined him in the sea. “Hmm,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder what he’ll say about me when I get naked.”

“I think not,” David said sharply, unhappy with the direction of the conversation.

“I think you should take off your clothes,” Joshua suggested.

“I think not,” David repeated.

He pulled a book on Italian cinema from his rucksack and opened it. Beside him, Joshua stretched out and closed his eyes.

*****

The young man wore shorts and a T-shirt and appeared to be in his early twenties. Handsome, though not in a conventional way, David thought. Perhaps interesting was the better word. There was something about him — something difficult to define — that immediately drew David’s attention. He chose a spot near David and Joshua.

David found himself reading the same sentence of his book again and again, unable to concentrate as the young man began removing his clothes. If there is a God, he prayed silently, let him strip naked. It seemed, for once, that God was listening, because that was exactly what he did. Joshua, meanwhile, appeared to have fallen asleep.

The young man settled onto his towel, drawing his knees to his chest.

“Hi,” he said to David.

David returned an awkward nod, reluctant to speak too loudly and wake Joshua.

“I’m Daniel,” the young man continued.

Joshua raised a hand in a vague gesture of acknowledgment, waving at nobody in particular. He seemed to have little interest in the newcomer, but made it clear that he was aware of his presence.

David searched for something clever to say — something that might break the ice, but nothing that might reveal too much of his interest.

“It’s a lovely day,” was all he managed.

The brief exchange gave David an opportunity to study Daniel more closely. He was slender, his pale body possessing a quiet, unassuming beauty that held David’s attention.

“Are you on holiday?” Daniel asked.

“Yes,” David replied. “And you?”

“I’m a student. Film studies at Falmouth University. I noticed you’re reading a book about Italian cinema, so I guess you’re interested in films too. What do you do?”

It was the question David always dreaded. He preferred people not knowing who he was. Though, he admitted to himself, there was a part of him that wondered whether Daniel might be impressed to discover he was speaking to a famous author.

“I’m a chef,” David lied.

Joshua let out a small laugh.

“Do you mind if I join you both?”

David, naturally, raised no objection and gestured for him to move closer. He watched as Daniel spread his towel beside them. At that precise moment, Joshua removed his Calvin Kleins and stretched himself fully beneath the sun.

David felt decidedly overdressed and, despite himself, slightly guilty; everyone else on the beach was naked except him. Daniel looked along the shoreline, his gaze taking in the scattered sunbathers before briefly settling on Joshua.

“Arthur’s Beach,” he remarked. “Why is it called Arthur’s Beach?”

The words Arthur’s Beach had been painted in yellow on a prominent rock overlooking the shore.

Joshua spoke for the first time.

“Because,” he said wearily, “many years ago, a local man named Arthur used to greet people by asking, ‘Had a good afternoon on Arthur’s Beach?’ before wandering off again.”

The story was true, and the name had endured so completely that it now appeared in naturist guides and travel forums alike.

“Looking at you sitting here, Daniel,” David interjected, “you could have stepped out of one of Tuke’s paintings.”

The expression on Daniel’s face made it clear that he had no idea what David was talking about.

“Henry Scott Tuke? The painter? Famous for his young men on the beaches of Cornwall?”

Still no reaction.

David searched his phone for some of Tuke’s most famous paintings and handed it to Daniel. He studied the images carefully, but his expression revealed nothing.

“Most of them were painted here,” David said. “On this very beach.”

Daniel raised an eyebrow, and David found himself charmed by his innocence — not an innocence of youth, but of someone who had simply never encountered this small corner of artistic history.

“The interesting thing about Tuke’s male nudes is that they are remarkably tasteful. Not once does he reveal any genitalia.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, David’s eyes drifted instinctively towards Daniel’s body. He immediately looked away, a flush rising to his face, as though he had inadvertently betrayed his own curiosity.

“I think I may have seen some of these paintings before,” Daniel conceded.

David detected a flicker of mischief in his eyes.

“Tuke was a gentleman,” David continued, eager to defend the long-dead artist while also diverting attention from his own embarrassment. “His models wrote about his kindness and his integrity.”

“The figures look quite young.”

“Yes,” David admitted, with a trace of uncertainty.

“We can guess,” Daniel said.

“But it is difficult to prove. We’ll never know the exact ages of all his models.”

David waited for Joshua to come to his rescue, to offer some reassuring observation that might settle the discussion. Nothing came. Instead, Daniel’s expression shifted into something approaching a smirk, and David realised he was being gently provoked.

“Well, if you really think I could have stepped out of one of Tuke’s paintings, then I’m flattered if you think I look young enough.”

Joshua opened his eyes and turned towards them.

“There seems to be an element of flirting taking place here,” he observed with a playful smile.

“Not at all,” David replied too quickly.

“Take your clothes off, David. Stop spoiling the party.”

David stared at Joshua in disbelief. Then he looked at Daniel, who merely shrugged, as though to say, Why not?

But Joshua knew David would never undress—not anymore, and certainly not in front of Daniel. Instead, David steered the conversation elsewhere.

“There’s another Tuke painting you might find interesting.” He searched for it on his phone. “It’s called A Cadet on Newporth Beach, near Falmouth, with Another Boy in the Sea. You’ll notice that the cadet is fully clothed.”

He showed the image to Daniel.

“Do you know who the cadet is? It’s T. E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia — and it was painted here as well.”

“Yes, fully clothed,” Daniel agreed. “But probably in the process of getting undressed.”

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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Morning Splendour, 1922 – Henry Scott Tuke

The Painter of Boys – Part 1

David and Joshua left London behind and headed south-west. It was something they did every year before the tourist masses descended upon Cornwall. They hired a car and stayed in a holiday cottage on the edge of Bodmin Moor. It formed part of a working farm and had once belonged to the Lanhydrock estate and, like so many great houses with dwindling fortunes, it had been sold off more than a century earlier. Now it belonged to a farming couple who had converted the redundant outbuildings into holiday accommodation.

David always wrote well in the Cornish countryside, where the only sounds came from sheep, cattle, and the wind crossing the moor. While Joshua slept until lunchtime, David sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and worked. Several of his novels had been conceived there, and he could easily write chapters at a stretch while new ideas arrived effortlessly. The spell would only be broken when Joshua eventually emerged, bleary-eyed and searching for his first caffeine fix of the day.

Joshua wandered into the room wearing only his underwear, his hair tousled and dark stubble shadowing his chin. This was David’s favourite version of him: unguarded, still carrying traces of boyishness, utterly unconcerned with how he looked.

“What are we doing today?” Joshua asked, as though David possessed the answer to everything.

But the plan had already been decided the night before: they were going to Falmouth.

Only in recent years had they fallen in love with the town. They had visited once before and been underwhelmed, but David’s growing fascination with Henry Scott Tuke had drawn them back, and gradually Falmouth had worked its charm upon them.

The story of Henry Scott Tuke fascinated David. For years he had encountered the paintings without consciously realising it. He had always been drawn to those bright, sunlit depictions of naked young men on beaches and boats. He had first noticed one in an art gallery and then began spotting others across the country. Tuke’s work seemed to exist everywhere now — reproduced on book covers, sold as canvas prints online, endlessly circulating through the internet. In death, he had become far more famous than he had ever been in life.

Once, David and Joshua had been fortunate enough to view The Tuke Collection in the archives of Falmouth Art Gallery. Together they examined more than two hundred canvases rarely seen by the public. That had been the moment Joshua fell in love with the paintings too.

Since then, David had tried to learn everything he could about Tuke and had managed to acquire almost every book written about him. He dreamed of owning an original Tuke painting one day, though even with his generous income he knew such a thing would forever remain beyond his reach.

It was nearly two in the afternoon by the time they arrived in Falmouth. After a brief visit to the art gallery, they were delighted to discover that one of Tuke’s paintings was on display: Study of Boys Bathing — two naked young men playing beside a dog.

“It’s a sign,” Joshua remarked, and David was inclined to agree.

But the real purpose of their visit was the grave.

Henry Scott Tuke lay buried in the oldest and highest part of Falmouth Cemetery. The cemetery had been laid out in the 1850s with sweeping views towards Swanpool Beach, where Tuke had lived. Now the place had become overgrown, its once-open vistas obscured by trees and tangled greenery.

David liked graveyards. They offered solitude and a place for reflection.

The early morning rain had given way to sunshine by the time they arrived. They passed a workman digging out an old grave who glanced at them with mild suspicion; few people carried flowers among these neglected plots anymore. These were the forgotten dead. Joshua had picked the wildflowers himself from a lane beside the farm that morning.

Tuke’s grave stood beneath the shadow of sycamore trees in a quiet corner of the cemetery. Joshua laid the flowers upon the flat stone and stepped back while David retrieved a folded piece of paper from his pocket. He began to read aloud. Nearby, the workman paused in his digging to listen to whatever strange ritual these two visitors were performing.

“Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig my grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live, and gladly die
And I lay me down with a will.

This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter, home from the hill.”

The lines came from Requiem, the famous short poem written by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson in 1880, and later used as his own epitaph.

If the dead were capable of hearing, then the words might have carried a certain familiarity. The same poem had been recited by Geoffrey Harrington Sainsbury, one of Tuke’s nephews, during the funeral in March 1929 — the same year David’s father had been born. The mourners had stood beside the open grave, lined with flowers and evergreen branches, while a cold easterly wind swept across the hillside.

David and Joshua knew their little performance beneath the spring sunshine might appear faintly ridiculous to anyone watching, yet somehow it felt like the only fitting tribute they could offer the artist.

“I suspect,” David said, “that not many people make pilgrimages like we do.”

At the back of his mind lingered the forthcoming exhibition of photographs by Wilhelm von Gloeden that he had agreed to help curate. Von Gloeden’s use of adolescent models had already provoked criticism in some circles. David realised some people might now interpret Tuke’s paintings in a similar way, yet he remained convinced that the work was unique — unlike anything else in British art.

“The problem,” he told Joshua, “is that people now see this work as intensely sexual. Tuke’s contemporaries saw something very different. To them, the naked young male body represented innocence — a celebration of youth and vitality. Lithe bodies in sunlight. Escapism. Pastoral beauty.”

Joshua had heard variations of this argument many times before.

“Look at it another way,” he replied. “The male nude has existed in European art since the Renaissance. All Tuke really did was revive that classical tradition.”

“The Victorians had no problem with it,” David said. “They regarded his paintings as healthy and life-affirming. But after his death the work fell out of fashion because his style suddenly seemed too traditional.”

David blamed the First World War. Afterwards, Tuke’s paintings must have appeared hopelessly rose-tinted — relics of a gentler and more innocent world.

“Do you think Tuke was gay?” Joshua asked.

“Without question,” David replied. “But you have to admire him for one thing: there was never a stain against his character. He had homosexual friends, some of whom were publicly disgraced, but nothing ever attached itself to him. Lucky old bastard — spending his life surrounded by beautiful young men.” He paused, glancing back towards the grave. “Did he sleep with his models? Did the paintings satisfy certain urges? We’ll never know. And we have his sister to thank for that.”

“What do you mean?”

“One of life’s great frustrations. If Tuke’s diaries had survived, they might have revealed everything. They would have made extraordinary reading.”

“What happened to them?”

“His sister commissioned a biography and handed over twelve volumes of diaries to the writer. Apparently the finished manuscript shocked her so badly that she refused to publish it. Imagine if it had survived somewhere — forgotten in an attic or archive.” David shook his head. “Instead, she burned almost all the diaries and wrote a sanitised version herself.”

Joshua listened while taking photographs of the grave and the wildflowers with his phone, already preparing the image he would upload to social media later.

“You know,” David continued, “I’d love to write a modern biography of Tuke. But I suspect everything we know about him has already been written. Unless…”

Joshua glanced up.

“Unless I could discover something entirely new. The more I think about it, the real story isn’t Tuke himself — it’s the boys he painted. Imagine being able to trace them. To discover what became of them after the sunlight and the boats and the summers were over.”

August Blue , 1893-1894 – Henry Scott Tuke

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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The Slow Invisibility of David

There was a conversation David once had with his mother when he was about fourteen. He’d complained about Bank Holidays—that there were too many of them. As mothers do, she agreed. Whatever had prompted the outburst had long since slipped from memory. He was a schoolboy and should have welcomed the extra day off, but Bank Holidays irritated him. They still did.

In truth, they had little relevance to his life. A Monday would be no different from any other. What he preferred were the ordinary ones, when he could go about his business while everyone else worked. Not so the May Day Bank Holiday. If the weather held, the parks would be crowded, and the small café he visited each afternoon would be overrun with snotty-nosed kids.

That, at least, was still to come. For now, David was spending Sunday evening with Joshua and his friends at the King’s Arms, despairing of the whole scene. Bank Holidays drew out all the idiots who would otherwise be glued to whatever rubbish Netflix was serving. A day off work gave them licence to get drunk and be insufferable.

There were advantages, he had to admit. The students were out—released from lectures, granted a day to sleep off the previous night. David liked students. He liked young men who still had their lives ahead of them, who could do things they were too young to regret in the morning.

Joshua noticed his look of desperation.

“At what point does a chicken hawk become a pervert?”

“When he turns sixty-three,” David replied. Only the week before, he had celebrated his sixty-second birthday, and in his mind the label did not yet apply.

Still, he felt uneasy. The handsome boys no longer paid him any attention. They were absorbed in their girlfriends—or boyfriends—and David had become just another older man, regarded, if at all, with a kind of pity.

“Do you see it, Joshua? Do you see that I’m slowly becoming invisible?”

“I fail to see why you’d be interested in anyone else when you should be perfectly happy with me.”

David chose his words carefully. “That I can’t deny. But there is such a thing as window-shopping.”

Joshua turned back to his friends and drifted into a conversation about Madonna and Rosalía. David was tempted to tell them that Madonna belonged to him—that he had grown up with her music, that she was older than he was—but the argument would have been futile. Madonna had long since transcended age.

Once, David had appeared on a television programme with her, shortly after she released her first album—around 1983. He had been introduced as an exciting young writer. She had liked his spiky hair and remarked that he was handsome. For a fleeting moment, he had wondered if she might be coming on to him, though that would have led nowhere. If only, he found himself thinking now.

Joshua’s friends accepted David as his partner, but they had no idea who he really was. It had always been his rule: tell no one he was a successful author. He preferred to be taken for the stereotype—a ‘sugar daddy’ with too much time and nothing to do. Had he told them the story about Madonna, they would have smiled politely and dismissed it as the invention of a fanciful old man. And David, in turn, would have felt guilt at not having anticipated this phase of life—the gradual slowing, the dimming, the uneasy business of growing old.

But David wasn’t that old.

It was a conversation he returned to often with Joshua—usually at Joshua’s instigation, lamenting that he would turn forty in October. David could never quite accept the premise. If anyone had the right to complain, it was surely him. He was still good-looking, his hair thick and intact, though he had to admit he’d filled out around the waist.

The trouble was that David still thought like an eighteen-year-old, without quite acknowledging that age catches up with everyone. While his contemporaries were beginning to slow down, even contemplating retirement, he resisted the idea that anything essential should change simply because the years had passed.

There was also the matter of money.

The royalties from his novels had dwindled, and without a pension sufficient to sustain him, he found himself uneasy about the future. Joshua’s artwork, by contrast, was gaining attention; David suspected he was now earning more than he did. And yet it was still David who provided the house, who carried the financial weight of their life together. Would Joshua care for him when he grew old? An outsider might have answered yes without hesitation, but David was less certain. The age gap unsettled him. Once Joshua was secure, it seemed entirely possible he might choose someone younger, someone more in step with his own life.

Had David voiced these fears, he would have discovered that Joshua had no such intentions. He felt a genuine loyalty, even a debt, and was entirely content in the relationship. The thought of leaving had never crossed his mind. But the unease remained, quietly lodged in David, impervious to reason.

David, too, had grown bored with writing novels. It was becoming harder to find original ideas, and harder still to bring them to a satisfying close. Where once he might have produced two books a year, the pace had slowed; he was fortunate now if he managed one every couple of years. Research, he found, gave him more pleasure than the writing itself. He could spend weeks preparing—filling notebooks with observations and plans—only to discover, when the time came, that the inspiration to shape them had quietly deserted him.

At times he compared himself to Arthur Rimbaud, who abandoned poetry at twenty in favour of a life of action, travel, and trade—if selling coffee and firearms could be called that. Rimbaud had turned away from literature altogether, declaring a need to be “absolutely modern”: action instead of words. After his turbulent and violent affair with Paul Verlaine—an episode that ended with a gunshot wound and a prison sentence—he had likely grown weary of Parisian literary life and the weight of his own notoriety. David sensed a kinship there—though Joshua, at least, had not shot him in the hand—and conveniently overlooked the fact that Rimbaud had been forty-two years younger when he walked away.

It was not lost on him that Rimbaud’s true fame had come only after his death. During his brief career he had been known, certainly—an “enfant terrible” in certain Parisian circles—but his legend was constructed later, through publication and the romantic myth of his life. David found something both comforting and unsettling in that thought.

Whenever he considered Rimbaud, he also thought of Leonardo DiCaprio, who had played him so strikingly on screen. David’s own life had, at moments, been just as scandalous—perhaps more so—but he could not imagine anyone wanting to turn it into a film. And if they did, who, exactly, would be cast to preserve him in youth?

His publisher had offered another, more immediate concern. It had been framed as a warning: reputation alone would not be enough, nor would it guarantee a living. There were new forces at work now. AI was coming, the publisher had said, and for writers it would prove not just a novelty, but a threat.

After a life shaped by “what ifs,” he found himself waiting for the great comeback—if it ever came at all.

He became aware, with a faint jolt, that he had drifted out of Joshua’s conversation with his friends and no longer had any idea what they were talking about. He sat with his drink, half-listening, when a young couple approached, each carrying a glass.

“Do you mind if we sit here?”

David didn’t and shifted to make room. The boy caught his attention immediately—shortish, slim, almost theatrically handsome, with dark hair that fell into something wild and a small cross hanging from one ear. The girl was taller, darker, her face sharply drawn. She might have been strikingly glamorous, if not for the absence of make-up and the careless way she wore her hair. There was something unkempt about them both, a deliberate kind of disarray—grungy, even—which David found compelling.

He felt himself wavering between Joshua and his friends and these new arrivals, uncertain where to place his attention. Had he been honest, he might have admitted to a quiet jealousy—of their youth, their ease, the sense of life still gathering around them.

I’ll write a play, he thought suddenly. I’ll leave London, go somewhere warm, somewhere bright. The idea amused him even as it formed. There was something faintly ridiculous in it—but then, he had always had a weakness for the dramatic.

The young man nodded to David, then lapsed into silence. Neither of them seemed inclined to speak, and the quiet between them grew dense. Had it not been for David’s interest in the boy, he might have left—retreated to the safer promise of a comfortable bed and a good book.

The pub had filled quickly; the bar was now three deep with people waiting to be served. David was nearing the end of his drink and had no desire to join them. Again, the thought of an early night presented itself as the sensible option. But the couple intrigued him—especially the boy, and the curious fact that neither of them seemed to speak to the other. Joshua is right, he thought; I am turning into a pervert.

His days, lately, had been taken up with preparations for the Wilhelm von Gloeden exhibition, and with the uneasy awareness that the photographer was now widely regarded as reprehensible. He thought, too, of Baron Corvo, that notorious writer who had made little effort to disguise his vices. Would he be judged in the same way, after his death? The idea unsettled him, though he could not quite say why—he had done nothing, after all, that he considered wrong.

“Do you fancy my boyfriend, or something?”

David started; he hadn’t realised the girl was speaking to him. He looked at her, puzzled.

“You’ve been sitting there staring at him ever since we sat down.”

“I was thinking, that’s all.”

“Jess,” the boy said quietly, “don’t make a scene.”

Fucking kids, David thought—always on the brink of an argument. And yet, perversely, he liked the boy more for it.

“Well, stop staring at him,” she said.

The boy rose, lifting his empty glass. “I’m going to the bar. Same again, Jess?”

She nodded. David braced himself at the prospect of being left alone with her, but the boy had barely taken a few steps before turning back.

“Can I get you a drink, fella?”

The offer caught David off guard. “Yes, thank you,” he said after a moment. “A white rum and tonic, please.”

The boy disappeared into the crowd. For an instant, David felt a childish urge to turn to Jess and stick his tongue out at her—but he resisted it, not least because she seemed almost to tremble with irritation.

“Have you been together long?” he asked.

“Six months,” she replied sharply.

“You make a very nice couple.”

“We are.”

Within seconds, the boy was back, three drinks in hand.

“How did you manage that?” David asked.

“I don’t hang about,” he said with a grin. “Push to the front and shout the loudest.”

“Thank you,” David replied, taking the glass. “What’s your name?”

“Harrison.” He offered his hand as he sat down, and David shook it.

David became aware that Joshua had noticed. He was watching the three of them with a faint, unmistakable suspicion. David found that he rather liked it—a small reassurance that Joshua, too, could feel jealous when something threatened him. He chose to ignore the look, and before long Joshua was drawn back into conversation with his friends. There would be questions later; David would answer them with an air of innocent mystery.

“It’s busy,” Harrison said, by way of small talk, as though waiting for something more to take hold. Jess said nothing, merely sipped her drink. David nodded, the only one to acknowledge him.

Writers, he thought, are curious by nature. They ask questions. He knew it would irritate Jess further, but he had not come this far in life by holding back. A trace of his old arrogance returned.

“Tell me about yourself, Harrison.”

The moment the words were out, he realised he should have said yourselves. But he hadn’t—and, privately, he was glad of it.

“Not much to tell,” Harrison said, though something in his eyes suggested otherwise.

“What do you do?” David pressed.

Harrison hesitated, then gave a small, crooked smile. “Do you really want to know?”

David nodded, leaning forward slightly.

“The truth is…” Harrison paused, as if weighing the effect of it. “I’ve just got out of prison.”

It was the sort of confession that might have unsettled most people. David, however, took it in stride. He felt, instead, a flicker of interest—something sharper, more dangerous. I’ve always liked bad boys, he thought.

“Go on,” he said, unable to hide his curiosity.

Jess shot Harrison a warning look, but he only shrugged.

“It’s a long story,” he said. “Let’s just say drugs and knives were involved.”

“I don’t see you as the criminal type.”

“I’m just me,” he said with a shrug. “Things go wrong sometimes.”

“He’s a dickhead,” Jess cut in.

“What did you do?” David asked, ignoring her.

“I stole some drugs—top-grade ketamine. The blokes I took it from weren’t best pleased. They came after me, so… I stabbed two of them.”

“And you got caught.”

“Wasn’t difficult for the rozzers. CCTV and all that.”

The revelation should have landed like an apocalypse. Harrison was dangerous—there was no denying that—and yet he seemed almost to relish it. Still, there was something disarmingly guileless about him, as if the weight of what he was saying hadn’t quite settled. David found himself imagining Harrison in prison: too striking to go unnoticed. He was tempted—absurdly—to ask what it had been like.

“Forgive me,” David said, “but you seem too polite—too… innocent—for any of that.”

He felt Jess shift sharply beside him.

“For fuck’s sake,” she snapped. “He’s not right in the head. And if I’m not mistaken, you’re doing your best to get into his knickers.”

Harrison tried again to calm her. “Jess, shut up. He’s just being friendly.”

She turned on David. “What are you, then? Queer?”

David didn’t answer. He simply winked.

“It’s time we were going.”

Joshua was standing behind him. Whether he had heard any of it was unclear, though the timing suggested he had. David finished his drink and rose to join him.

“Nice talking to you,” Harrison said, almost apologetically, standing as well. “Sorry about… all that.”

David waved it off. “Think nothing of it. Enjoy the rest of your freedom,” he added, lightly.

Outside, while Joshua disappeared to the toilet, David lingered and realised he had enjoyed the encounter more than he ought to have. Another one bites the dust, he thought.

The door opened, and David hoped that it was Harrison who was coming after him. But things like that didn’t happen anymore. It wasn’t him. 

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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Giacomo crowned with passion-flowers. c.1890-1900. Wilhelm von Gloeden

Art, Innocence, and the Burden of Looking Back

David was in a quandary; the problem was of his own making. It was a friend of Joshua who wanted a name — a name that would read ‘curated by’ and command attention. Of course, David had agreed, but now he had his regrets.

An email from Pamela Hutchinson had been the source of it all. This exhibition is inappropriate and offensive. When David failed to respond, she went to the media, who were only too eager to champion her cause.

“Fucking do-gooder,” he had moaned to Joshua.

But it transpired that she knew far more than he had anticipated.

“The boys he used were underage and exploited by an unscrupulous man.” Those were the words a journalist from The Standard had used over the phone.

“How does anyone know that?”

The exhibition at the McDonald Gallery on Wellington Street was to include sixty photographs taken by the German, Wilhelm von Gloeden. The concept mirrored a similar exhibition mounted by the photographer in the 1890s.

Back then, there had been no objection to von Gloeden’s work.

“The Victorians were either more accepting or considerably more naïve,” David reflected. “His work has been displayed all over the world, and I doubt they faced the kind of problems I’m dealing with now.”

David wasn’t selecting the photographs — that responsibility lay with Nathaniel Wilson, the American who had approached him — but he had agreed to write a critical essay for the catalogue. Yet as the backlash grew, it was David whom people sought out. Mail Online had already published a particularly damning article, one that threatened his reputation as a credible writer.

Joshua had researched von Gloeden and discovered that his notoriety only emerged in the latter part of the last century. Before then, his work had received glowing reviews from newspapers around the world.

“Count von Gloeden is very clever in the way he introduces nude figures of Sicilian boys into his landscapes. It is something quite out of the ordinary, and for those who appreciate artistic work, the figure studies — with their almost classical subjects — will be found of especial interest.”

He read this passage out aloud to David, who noted that it came from a newspaper published in 1909.

“I suppose it’s my fault,” Joshua reasoned. “I must admit, I didn’t realise the subject matter might be considered objectionable now.”

The story of Count Wilhelm von Gloeden had always fascinated David. He had first encountered his work in an old book — The Spell of the Southern Shores; or, From Sea to Sea in Italy — written by Caroline Atwater Mason in 1915. It had been illustrated with landscape images taken by von Gloeden.

Von Gloeden had been born into a well-heeled Prussian family in 1856 and later travelled to Naples, where his cousin, Wilhelm von Plüschow, a photographer who also specialised in pictures of young nude men, encouraged him to take up photography. In his early twenties, suffering from tuberculosis, von Gloeden moved on to Taormina, then a remote village, only accessible by donkey, in Sicily.

He was one of two men credited with turning Taormina into a tourist destination.

The first was Otto Geleng, a Prussian painter who, having fallen ill in Rome, travelled to Taormina in 1863 to convalesce. When three Parisian critics came to visit, the only local inn — the Bellevue — proved inadequate, and Geleng transformed the house in which he was staying into a hotel. It became the Hotel Timeo, still thriving today. When the critics returned to France, the articles they wrote drew the first wave of tourists from Prussia and France, soon followed by visitors from Holland, England, America, Russia, and Poland.

The next was Von Gloeden, a member of the German nobility, who was wealthy, extravagant, sociable — and more than a little eccentric. He kept a large collection of birds — ravens, parrots, nightingales, canaries — and delighted in teaching them to talk and whistle military marches.

He began taking photographs as a hobby, but when his stepfather was accused of treason by Kaiser Wilhelm II and stripped of his possessions, the flow of money to Taormina dried up. Von Gloeden was forced to rely increasingly on photography for his income.

He installed a studio and laboratory in his villa and printed images of local landscapes and architecture as postcards and souvenirs.

The baron also set about persuading shy, nubile young boys to pose in the manner of Greek statues.

“Many of the pictures have a fascinating charm that recalls the odes of Horace and other classical poets of these sunlit lands. All his models seem to the manner born, their graceful lines and quiet, expressive faces harmonising so perfectly with surroundings of luxuriant foliage, abundant flowers, and sunlit glades.”

That, along with their easy smiles, was about all they wore.

David rang Nathaniel, who seemed to be keeping a low profile in New York.

“The problem,” David said, “is that people now see the photographs as child pornography.”

“They’re of their time,” Nathaniel replied. “They belong to a particular moment in photography — when people were still working out how to handle flesh in strong light and shadow. And you must admit, for such an early stage, it’s handled with real skill.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I mean,” Nathaniel went on, “you’re looking at sun-darkened skin under a harsh, blazing light — not the pale tones you’d get in England’s softer sunshine.”

David was none the wiser. It sounded as though Nathaniel was reading from notes laid out in front of him.

“And besides,” Nathaniel continued, “this was when photography was beginning to supplant fine art. Visitors wanted clarity — every detail sharp, everything evenly lit. That was what they valued.”

If David had been hoping for reassurance from Nathaniel, he wasn’t finding it.

“But the nude photographs appear to be of underage boys,” David suggested.

“They’re not underage boys,” Nathaniel replied. “They’re dark-skinned, classically proportioned lads — fine-limbed peasant boys. I’ll grant you, the work does come under scrutiny from time to time, but we are talking about art.”

“If that’s the case,” David said, “then I’ll forward all media enquiries to you.”

He ended the call and turned to find Joshua hovering with fresh information.

“I came across something about a von Gloeden exhibition in Sydney — in the nineties, I think. Detectives were sent in after a complaint, quite high-level, claiming the photographs amounted to child pornography. But in the end, they decided the images were harmless.”

“Exactly,” David said, warming to the argument, finding himself cast as an unlikely devil’s advocate. “Why do people take offence at something so trivial? The models themselves hardly seem troubled by any sense of impropriety.”

“But…” Joshua hesitated, choosing his words carefully, “there’s no getting around the fact that von Gloeden used these photographs of nude boys not just as art, but as a kind of advertisement — for the sort of clientele Taormina began to attract.”

“That’s a bit harsh,” David replied, though he was aware that von Gloeden had been openly homosexual and known for his late-night revelries, both at his villa and in the surrounding meadows. It spoke to von Gloeden’s charm — and his influence — that the people of Taormina tolerated his unconventional behaviour, even when it involved their own sons. The town, after all, had prospered, riding a wave of economic growth driven by the very visitors he helped to draw there.

Joshua continued.

“I don’t think we can deny that von Gloeden was a gentleman who liked young boys and took a great many photographs of them — mostly nude.”

That night, David resolved to look more closely into von Gloeden’s life and work. What he found would help him reach a decision: whether to withdraw from the exhibition or stay and weather the criticism.

He trawled through old newspapers and discovered that attitudes had shifted in the latter part of the twentieth century, and that von Gloeden’s reputation had suffered accordingly. The tone had hardened. One writer dismissed him as “that poor old homosexual, the Baron von Gloeden, who hid lust behind an academic glass.” Another claimed the photographs seemed “designed for a market of privileged oglers,” while a third described him as “an artful dodger whose work slipped past the censors.” Even the more measured critiques carried an edge, suggesting his images gratified “three desires at once: art, classical tranquillity, and the sanctioned glimpse of desirable bodies.” One publication went further still, branding von Gloeden a charlatan.

Von Gloeden’s work seemed almost tame by today’s standards, yet he could not ignore the fact that his steady production of homoerotic images had proved immensely profitable, earning him admiration across Europe.

Most of the photographs, he noted, were sepia-toned, printed on gold-hued salted paper. The boys posed with a certain taste and deliberation: a dark-haired youth stretching eagerly sideways and upwards to peer through a window; a group of boys reclining along the rough parapet of a height overlooking a lake ringed by mountains. Both compositions made full use of their romantic natural settings. The wider body of work followed similar themes, many images featuring boys whose graceful bodies were adorned with wreaths of laurel and flowers, set against pale masonry or slender columns. In some, distant bays appeared through arching boughs heavy with white blossom.

One journal compared von Gloeden’s photographs to the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

But, as he delved deeper, David discovered a great many photographs of completely naked boys that left nothing to the imagination.

He also came across a reference to Pancrazio Buciunì, who had died in 1963, a year before David was born. At fourteen, he had entered von Gloeden’s service and later became one of his most frequent models — known as Il Moro — and, likely, his lover. Von Gloeden had taken more than 7,000 exposures and, upon his death in 1931, left them all to Buciunì. 

In 1936, Buciunì was prosecuted by the Fascists for possession of “pornographic material,” and many of the Baron’s plates were destroyed under court order. Yet he had the foresight to conceal around 1,500 of them beneath the stones of his floor. While von Gloeden’s photographs had already travelled widely across the world, it was largely thanks to Buciunì’s intervention that many of the surviving images — including those now destined for exhibition — had endured at all.

But David’s thoughts kept circling back to the present.

Pamela Hutchinson, who had first raised concerns, spoke for a wider audience — those whose views were shaped by a more modern moral framework.

The ages of the boys had never been definitively established, and David discovered that many may have perished in the 1908 Messina earthquake, though Taormina itself seemed to have escaped the worst of it. In truth, the extent to which minors were depicted erotically might never be fully known.

There was also the question of power: von Gloeden, a wealthy aristocrat, and the impoverished peasant boys who lived at his mercy. In Sicily, young boys commonly went nude at the beach, and across much of the Mediterranean, homosexuality was often regarded as a passing phase in adolescence.

For struggling families, payment in exchange for their sons posing for von Gloeden would have been difficult to refuse. Yet it was equally hard to ignore the likelihood that he exploited these boys, his images serving, in part, the interests of sexual tourism.

David could not deny that, throughout the twentieth century, von Gloeden’s work had frequently been labelled obscene. What unsettled him was the realisation that earlier generations had not seen it that way at all — to them, it had been art: a new form, even, one that threatened to unsettle the dominance of traditional fine art.

Joshua interrupted.

“Have you made a decision yet?”

David toyed with a ruler, buying himself a moment, as though the answer required more thought than it did.

“I have,” he said at last. “For all the criticism, the exhibition matters. I need to write something that acknowledges everything we’ve uncovered — the admirable and the troubling — and accept that some will find it distasteful. There’s a temptation to sanitise the past, to smooth it into something more palatable, but ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear. It happened. The least we can do is face it honestly, from all sides.” He paused, then added, with a faint shrug, “Besides, as they say, even bad publicity has its uses.”

Giacomo garlanded with passion-flowers. c.1890-1900. Wilhelm von Gloeden

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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Peter Snow – Cleaver Square from Kennington Park Road (1988). From the Southwark Art Collection.

The Countess, the Living, and the Dead

There was a video featuring Adam Rickitt, who had been big in Coronation Street, in which he appeared naked. The song had been around when David had been clinging to the frayed edges of his youth. He hadn’t pulled it off. Everything went downhill afterwards. Adam Rickitt went to New Zealand to appear in a soap and was accused of stealing a block of cheese, a bottle of HP Sauce and a jar of coffee from a supermarket. David had moved out of the family home because the banks were knocking at the door.

On Sunday night, they had called at a gay bar, and David saw Adam Rickitt on the screen again. “I would gladly have sniffed his bollocks,” he told Joshua, who turned his nose up. “What the fuck is this shite?”

David recalled dancing to Adam Rickitt at Cruz 101 in Manchester. He was high on ecstasy at the time. But he’d gone to a friend’s flat afterwards and written the best chapter of a book he had never written—longhand, too. Then he had left it behind, where it ended up in a black wheelie bin.

Mancunian days. Every weekend in the North West. But he remembered little. The only memory he retained was of a cute little chicken who had taken his shirt off and started singing, “Sexy… everything about you, so sexy.”

David went home with him. The biggest shithole in Longsight, with every room knee-deep in empty Coke bottles. The bed was hidden behind a mountain of takeaway boxes. It had taught him that all that glittered was definitely not gold.

He related the story to Joshua while walking home in the rain.

“You’re too posh,” Joshua warned him. “Too many frills and high expectations.”

“But I ended up with you,” David replied.

 “Your problem is that you look too much at the past, and forget about the future.”

“But there isn’t much of that left, is there?” 

David was feeling down.

March had been a bad month. April looked bleaker.

“There are too many deaths, Joshua. Once, I went to weddings all the time. Now I go to funerals. I suppose we’re all in the same boat, because everybody dies.”

But Joshua was too young to understand and nudged him on the arm. 

David was referring specifically to their next-door neighbour, who had surrendered to the inevitable. In the square, Dorothy Jerman had been known as the ‘Countess’ and lived alone. Not many had known why she was called the Countess, but there was a suggestion that it was a nickname given to her by a former landlord at the Prince of Wales opposite.

“That’s right,” she once told David. “He was the Brixton Bomber, a former boxer, who took over in the 1960s and upset residents by installing a juke box. It attracted teenagers and the lawyers and solicitors who lived nearby wanted a quiet pub and drove him away. But he was a good chap, and called me the Countess because he wanted to get into my knickers. Little did he know that I never wore any.”

The Countess, a portrait painter, had moved here in the early sixties when Cleaver Square had been different to what it became. She shared it with her kids after a messy divorce and remained after they had grown up and left. By all accounts, she was a ‘rebel’ who famously held wild parties that spilled out into the street. 

David inherited the house next door and on most fine days, the Countess could be found sitting on the front steps, a glass of wine at hand, either reading a paperback or making conversation with anyone who passed. 

And the Countess had loved Joshua from the moment David invited him to move in with him. Two fucking artists, David had mused. Joshua would sit on the steps as she stroked his blond hair and told him stories about her life.

She claimed to have chosen Cleaver Square on the recommendation of a friend, Innes Fripp, a landscape painter and portrait artist who had taught at the nearby City and Guilds of London Art School and once had a studio in the square.

David had looked up the connection and found that it might have been true. He also discovered that the area had once been called Prince’s Square, named after two houses flanking the entrance, built for Joseph Prince by Michael Searles in the 1760s. The name was changed in 1937, a throwback to Mary Cleaver, who had owned the land in the eighteenth century.

“This is where sea captains lived,” the Countess once boasted, “but the square fell on hard times by the end of the nineteenth century and attracted old music-hall stars instead. It fell on evil days—crumbling brick façades hiding three families across three floors. During the war, the council requisitioned many of the houses for bombed-out families. The trees died, and the gardens were razed.

“South of the river was one vast slum when I arrived. When I fled Chelsea’s superficiality, the square was dilapidated, with shabby red-brick houses—homes for dockers and clerks—but every door stood open. Everybody knew everybody else. Materially, they had little, but they shared it when needed. Then the developers came, and with them came the barristers, judges, and MPs. That was when the doors shut. The young people drifted away, saying the square was not worth living in—it was dead. That is how we ended up with John Major.”

The houses went for millions now, but the Countess had not been tempted to sell. She could have died a millionaire, but preferred to live with her memories and pry into the lives of people she did not know… and who might have looked down on her, had it not been for her cheek and charisma.

When David arrived in the square, the Countess welcomed him as somebody who lived on her level. Shortly before he died, David’s uncle, William, had kicked out the previous tenants with a view to selling it. It was vacant when David discovered that the property now belonged to him.

But now the old woman had died.

It was good fortune that the Countess had resolutely refused to lock her front door. Joshua had gone looking for her and found the body slumped in a fireside armchair: a flute of flat champagne beside her and a dog-eared copy of Valley of the Dolls in her lap. He had panicked and gone running round to David, with no idea what to do.

Only the day before, David had made an unnerving discovery. The Countess had told him that he was not an Aries after all, but a Taurus. It had taken sixty-two years to learn the truth. But David, who normally paid little heed to astrology, realised that he preferred being a ram to a bull—it was better for a gay man, he suggested.

“A cusp baby,” the Countess commiserated, “and if it helps, you have adopted elements from each star sign.

“You do love a grand romance—you throw yourself into it, heart first, and breathe your partner in as though they were oxygen. But you bruise easily in love, my dear, and you’re far too quick to feel taken for granted. You’ve a weakness for strays as well—people from all walks, the straighter the better.”

“I do have a weakness for working-class boys,” David agreed. “And Joshua comes from a relatively poor family in Thamesmead.”

“Really?” said the Countess. “I had no idea. He speaks with such charm and dignity—and is incredibly handsome. And Thamesmead is perfectly lovely in the summer.”

“I met him when he was only twenty-one and working at Morrisons. For some reason, I was walking around the lake and came across him standing there, looking at the birds on the water. I found out later that he didn’t know one bird from another—except when we were talking about cocks. He had been cruising for a shag, which he didn’t get, but we talked. I pointed out that Thamesmead had been the setting for A Beautiful Thing, which turned out to be his favourite film. Eighteen years later, here we are.”

The Countess had not finished.

“You may have secret love affairs or fall in love with someone who is quite unavailable to you.”

“That’s not true.” David had been a bit too quick to reply, and the Countess raised her eyes, because she had not, for one minute, believed him.

David was thinking about Miles, his provincial friend, whom he had first met when the boy was eighteen. Putting Joshua aside, he had spent the last eight years trying to seduce Miles, but had failed at every attempt. Unknown to Joshua, David had once fallen in love with Miles. It was never reciprocated, but that feeling never changed. Miles was only interested if you happened to be a good-looking French or Italian boy—certainly not somebody like David.

“Are we referring to Freddie, dear?” the Countess asked.

Freddie lived in Hammersmith and was the same age as Miles, but his eccentricities annoyed David—not least his tendency to point out dead people whom he claimed to see at the most inappropriate times. Once, David had slept with him, and Freddie had told him that there was an old woman sitting knitting at the bottom of the bed. He had also ingratiated himself with the Countess because he claimed that a family friend had used his name for a character in The Archers. That had gone down extremely well, because she listened to the programme without fail.

“The last time that I saw Freddie,” she laughed, “he suggested that there was the presence of two dead women—Christine and Hannah—who once ran a brothel here. I talk to them all the time now, and suggest that far worse things have happened in my time.”

“It is definitely not Freddie,” said David, “and I would appreciate it if you did not repeat that to Joshua.”

“Because Venus represents attraction, and the twelfth house is associated with the feet,” she said, “your feet may be especially attractive—and have erogenous zones!”

He had turned his nose up.

David and Joshua headed home and passed the Countess’s house, which stood in darkness.

“I wonder what will happen to the house,” Joshua speculated.

“Well,” said David, “she must have had a will, and I suppose everything will go to her family.”

They were both aware that the Countess had fallen out with her three children, and only one of her grandsons, Owen, ever visited her. The two of them had known him as a young teenager and knew that he did much of the maintenance work around the house, though there were difficulties the Countess had often fretted over.

“If Owen gets everything,” Joshua mused, “it could prove interesting.”

David thought that Owen had grown into a striking young man, but conveniently overlooked that he suffered from a severe case of ADHD, which made him prone to violent bouts of temper.

“He would most likely sell it and become fabulously wealthy,” he suggested.

David knew that the Countess was of sound mind and that she had deliberately led her family to believe that she suffered from delusions—among them that she saw thousands of long-tailed birds clinging to a tree in her back garden, that the other trees were covered in hundreds of cats, and that dead dogs with fiery eyes lived beneath the bushes.

“At least it stops them visiting a crazy woman,” she had laughed.

“Whoever it is left to will find it contested,” David added, “because they will say that the Countess was of unsound mind when she made it.”

“Maybe she was deranged,” Joshua decided. “She often claimed that all sorts of famous people visited her at one time or another. She once told me a magnificent story about Vivienne Westwood, David Bowie, and Marc Bolan coming to tea—and that they ended up bouncing along the street on great big orange balls.”

Space hoppers,” David implied. “I had one when I was a small child in the 1970s. Did you know that Russell Harty was also a personal friend of the Countess?”

David knew that Joshua would not know who Russell Harty was.

“What was he famous for?”

“Sexual escapades with much younger men,” David replied, “and for hosting chat shows on television.”

David had met him once, when he had still been young enough to turn heads in the street. Harty had just returned from Paris, where he had lunched with Nureyev and Charlotte Rampling at the British Embassy. He made small talk, and David was disappointed that this brief encounter on Greek Street had not led to anything more. Still, it had been enough for him to brag about at Comptons.

A few months later, Harty was dead, having suffered liver failure—a result of hepatitis.

“The Countess knew everyone, or said she did. And now there’s no one left to confirm it.”

“That’s the problem,” said Joshua. “Did these encounters actually happen? Was she connected, or just a brilliant bullshitter? I often wonder the same about some of your stories.”

That last comment hurt David.

“Everything I tell you is true.”

“But nothing ever seems to happen to me. The Countess knew famous people. And you’ve done things—wild things—that make my existence seem ordinary.”

“The older you get, what once seemed ordinary suddenly becomes fascinating. We all look back and realise that we did something special.”

The funeral was due to take place the following Friday. The cortège would leave Cleaver Square at lunchtime and travel to Lambeth Crematorium, where a short service would take place before she was handed over to the devil.

Joshua unlocked the door and turned to David. “Do you think we’ll see anybody famous at the funeral?”

“Probably not,” David replied.

The David Problem: Notes from a Life

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The Boys of Harrow… and Rockley Beach

David had been researching his new novel: a story set in nineteenth-century Woolwich, where two families are pitched against one another. The plot was already mapped out, but he now wanted to weave in an episode he had discovered in an old newspaper.

In 1850, thirty-three boys were expelled from the Carshalton and Woolwich Military Academies for what the paper called “grossly immoral practices.” The report described their behaviour as being of “a distressing and disgusting nature.” Their humiliation was made public: they were marched through the streets and deposited on the doorsteps of their families.

David decided that the youngest son of the genteel Morgan family would be one of these unfortunate boys.

But the discovery distracted him. As he continued searching, he found other accounts of young men disgraced and dismissed from the armed forces.

In 1976, several young airmen in the Royal Air Force were reportedly paid to perform sex acts at parties hosted by executives from influential companies. The story surfaced soon after eighteen soldiers were dismissed for posing for suggestive photographs in a gay magazine.

A decade later, two sailors were discovered together in a cabin aboard HMS Torbay. The ensuing investigation implicated three more men, including an officer, for homosexual acts.

David knew from experience that when boys were thrown together, it was almost inevitable that those inclined that way would find one another. The thought brought back pleasant memories of his schooldays at Harrow in the 1970s—before he was expelled, that is.

When he was fifteen, David had been caught in flagrante delicto with another boy. Peter had been a year older and known to most as ‘cock of the school’. David had been afraid of Peter because he strutted around as if he owned the place. He was the toughest boy—and the most arrogant—and Peter had often been at the end of his cruel jibes. 

One sunny evening David had found a spot under a tree to read his well-thumbed copy of The Passing of the Modern Age. He had been disturbed by a group of older boys on their way to rugby practice. They hadn’t noticed him in the shadows and passed by without comment. David watched them go and marvelled that boys’ legs could be extremely attractive.

He had just tackled the crisis of individualism when someone came out of the bushes. Peter had split from the group and doubled back. David, in awe of the older boy, feared the worst and put his book down.

“Come with me,” said Peter.

David did as he was told and followed Peter through the bushes towards the tractor shed. There was no doubt that Peter was going to inflict some kind of schoolboy torture on him. He expected to see other boys waiting to witness his humiliation.

But there was nobody around.

Inside the shed, Peter forced David up against the back wheel of the groundsman’s Massey Ferguson. He stuck his bubble-gum tongue inside David’s mouth and started kissing him. David had not resisted. 

“Let me make love to you,” Peter had instructed and began tugging at David’s trousers. He stuffed the trailing end of David’s school tie into his mouth to stop him making any noise and bent him over the wheel of the tractor. That, as David reflected later, had been the most exciting thing that had ever happened.

They returned to the tractor shed often after that—until the day the groundsman, having left his house key in the tractor, came back for it. He found them both naked and reported them to the headmaster. They were expelled from the school and never saw each other again.

That first encounter with Peter never left his thoughts. All these years later, he accepted that their relationship had been purely physical—there had been no love between them. What remained was the memory of contact, and the illicit thrill of something strictly forbidden. The excitement, as someone had once put it, lay in the chase.

But David’s thoughts also drifted to Nigel—or Nige, as he preferred to be called—a young sailor he had met in the late eighties.

David had been twenty-five, holidaying with friends in Barbados. It was a hot July, and most days were spent lounging on the crowded stretch of Rockley Beach. Fifteen years later, he returned to the same place and found it completely deserted.

He could still remember the book he’d been reading—Koko, a horror-mystery by Peter Straub—pristine when he bought it at the airport, dog-eared within days. He had set it down in the sand, closed his eyes, and listened to the conversations drifting around him.

Vendors moved along the beach, trying to persuade holidaymakers that the unlabelled bottles of pure aloe vera they carried were the secret to a perfect tan. David had bought one, of course, only to discover it did nothing except increase the risk of sunburn. 

David had drifted off for a few minutes, and when he woke he found himself surrounded by young men in tight bathing costumes. “Sailors from a British warship,” his friend Debbie smirked. They were gathered in small clusters, towels spread out on the sand, cans of beer passed easily between them.

The one he later learned was called Nige lay stretched out nearest to him. David found himself drawn to the pale, slender body—the long legs, the flat stomach, and the way his shorts seemed to accentuate what lay beneath—of the nineteen-year-old.

They fell into conversation, and David learned that Nige was an able seaman aboard HMS Intrepid. A bit rough and ready, he thought—the Yorkshire accent lending him an air of unpolished charm—but friendly. More than anything, David found him most handsome.

It was David who suggested a beer at an open-air bar at the far end of the beach. They talked and drank bottles of Banks—“pee beer,” as the young Black barmaid jokingly called it—until they noticed the beach had emptied and a magnificent sunset had taken hold in the west. In Barbados, the day did not fade so much as vanish; the sun slipped cleanly into the sea, and night arrived almost at once. Then the tree frogs began to make themselves heard.

David never quite reflected on what followed.

Nige, in T-shirt and shorts, remarked with easy indifference that he felt hot and sticky, and wished he were back aboard ship for a shower. David—less innocently—suggested he come back to his room instead, where he could use his. The young seaman accepted without hesitation, and the two of them crossed the road together.

A few words might have applied; aroused, horny, frisky, and most definitely ‘in the mood’. Nige took his shower and invited David to join him, which was all that he had hoped for. And then they had indulged in hours of drunken sex, only halted by Nige’s necessity to get back to ship before curfew.

David stood naked in the doorway as Nige left. At that exact moment, Anderson—a good-looking, God-fearing porter—passed by, his glance lingering just long enough for curiosity to harden into suspicion, and then into something closer to disgust.

Still, David and Nige agreed to meet again the following day.

Only years later, after some research, did David grasp how serious the consequences might have been had they been reported. Nige—young, impulsive—would likely never have considered that homosexuality was an offence in the armed forces, one that could have led to immediate dismissal. David, meanwhile, would have risked falling foul of the island’s colonial laws, under which homosexuality was illegal. A conviction might have meant life imprisonment in Glendairy Prison, notorious for its brutality, overcrowding, and inhumane conditions—grimly known as a “house of horrors” before it was destroyed by fire during a riot in 2007.

Ignorance had allowed David to preserve certain memories, untouched and untroubled.

But he sometimes wondered what had become of Nige, who would now be fifty-six and long since retired—no doubt altered by time: the silky crew cut gone, the firmness of youth softened into weight, skin loosening, and body hair in unwelcome places. Had they passed each other in the street, he might not have given him a second glance—and Nige, he suspected, would have done the same.

Things had changed.

Homosexuality was legalised in the British armed forces at the turn of the millennium. But Barbados had been slower to catch up. The island had enacted its Sexual Offences Act in 1992, which carried a grim warning: “Any person who commits buggery is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for life.” Even worse, the law specified that the offence applied “whether natural or unnatural, involving the use of the genital organs for the purpose of arousing or gratifying sexual desire.”

Homosexuality had gone entirely underground, though David took some comfort in the fact that prosecutions had been relatively few. It was not until 2022 that the law was finally repealed, and same-sex relationships legally recognised, when the Sexual Offences Act was declared unconstitutional.

David finally admitted the truth: he had let himself grow lazy. His novel would never be finished if he continued to daydream.