Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Promises made on the last day of school are not always promises kept. Britten went up to Oxford only once, the following November on a half holiday. He ate plover's eggs and drank champagne in Pears' small set at Keble (which seemed grand enough by far) and listened in overawed silence to the small circle of friends that Pears had managed to gather around him even in those dark days. Almost all of them were Quakers. The time of conscription was coming near and all their talk was of the No-Conscription Fellowship and what might be done. Through the window, the gaudily-banded brickwork of Keble Chapel seemed to stand disapproving watch.

When Pears escorted Britten back to the railway station he murmured words of apology, saying that he hoped the conversation had not been dull. He had meant to offer better entertainment. Britten said that he quite understood. Pears said that he had meant to have Britten stay for the night. Perhaps another time. Again, politely, Britten said that he quite understood. The gap had grown up between them again.

Before the end of his first year Pears left Oxford, conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps. They corresponded for a time but, perhaps inevitably, their letters trailed to a halt, trapped between the chaos of war and the unreal calm of school. After too long Britten posted a tardy letter but Pears had moved--or been moved--and left no forwarding address.

In due course Britten became one of the senior boys at Hunstanton, a member of the sixth with all its privileges, and like all schoolboys felt it sadly diminished from the Olympian days of Pears and of Burra. He never again met anyone who might compare. And once again, by younger boys this time, he was called 'pi' and a prig.

As if in the twinkling of an eye it was 1918. The war that had been meant to be over by Christmas was finally drawing to a close as yet another year of school started. It began to look as if the rising generation of boys, of whom Britten was one, might not be called upon to fight. For the first time in nearly five years one heard talk of Oxford and Cambridge, of possibilities other than war. One might think that relief would have hung over Hunstanton school but instead there was a note of emptiness. Every schoolboy is convinced that he will never live up to his elders and for them this was no revelation, merely a final and awful confirmation of the bitter truth. One which was understood not merely by them but by parents, masters and the wider world. They knew that they could never live up to the virtues of those who had died. Now they could not even imitate them.

That autumn Britten's path lay not towards the trenches nor to Oxbridge, but to the Royal College of Music. All his solitary work had prepared him well, and he dreamt of going to a place where finally he might be understood by more than a few loyal friends. He was spared from the bitter choice that Pears had made years earlier, and he felt a coward for daring to be grateful of it.

And then in November the Armistice came. London rang out suddenly with bells, so loud and strong that Britten pushed back from the piano in his bedsit room and went out to walk through the streets. Kensington Road was thronged with people pressing forwards to join the cheering thousands in front of Buckingham Palace. It felt odd now to be joined with the crowds from whom he had for so many years been parted. And yet he was still somehow recognised as a man apart. That afternoon, while Britten was sitting on the edge of the fountain in Trafalgar Square taking in the revelry that surrounded him, a young sailor home on leave made a proposition to him in terms so much blunter than had ever been used at Hunstanton. Britten had hurriedly to turn away to hide the blush that came to his face.

Late at night he stumbled dizzy and footsore back to his South Kensington boarding house. On the hall table with the rest of the post he found a copy of the Hunstanton Magazine. He did not read it until breakfast the next morning. Bright sun fell across the dingy lace tablecloth as he read, disbelieving, that Peter Burra had been killed only two weeks ago in an aeroplane smash-up near Honfleur.

All of that poetry had gone forever from the world. One expected to see all the colour drain from things; it was unjust that the carnations in a vase on the table continued just as red as they had ever been.

For the first time since he had left school, he took the train back to Hunstanton. As he walked through the gate he could hear boys playing and shouting. He found it hard to believe that it had been only months since he had been one of them. The rolls of the dead were so long that it was hard to believe there were any boys yet left alive to play.

The delicate stone tracery of the chapel arched serenely into the air, touched only by the ravages of centuries. Around its base gathered the mourners. There was the headmaster in his academic gown, beginning to be grey and stooped and wearied by loss. And there was Imo at his elbow. Imogen Holst was now a young woman of twenty, too mature nowadays to watch schoolboys at play on the tennis courts. She had been engaged to a young master who had fought and fallen at Passchendaele. Though her eyes were as blue as they ever had been, the bloom on her cheeks had faded. In dress and manner she seemed to have become another of the many women doomed by the war to live as spinsters. Her words of welcome when she saw Britten were almost embarrassingly warm.

He disentangled himself as soon as was polite. Inside the chapel he slid into a back pew, bending over the order of service so that he would not have to see anyone else that might know him. It was only out of duty that he had come. He did not see what good he would do to Burra, who was already in the ground in some foreign field, alone and forever far from his friends. During the years of war, Britten's faith had fallen still further away, dying back to the ground as the friends of his youth were scattered to the winds. He had not been into a church since that last chapel service of school. If the shade of the old Bishop had returned at that moment, he would not have recognised the small boy who had so earnestly repeated his catechism at confirmation.

Ahead of him in the chapel there was another bowed head, a man sitting by himself near the front. Something about the sight caught Britten unawares. His light brown hair was carefully slicked down. His pale neck was graceful yet muscular. His coat was dark, slightly threadbare like everything else in wartime. There was nothing unusual about him, no reason why Britten's eye should have been so caught.

It was only when the man got to his feet and went to the pulpit to give the second reading that Britten realised why he had seemed so familiar: it was Peter Pears.

"Oh death where is thy sting?" He phrased and measured the words as gracefully as if they had been song. "O grave where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

It was torment to sit and to listen to Pears reading those familiar lines. When he came to their end, Pears closed the Bible so hard that the clap of it echoed against the stone.

They met outside the chapel, where the wind was blowing the last of the leaves from the trees, sending them whirling and skirling around the headstones. Pears was pulling the collar of his coat more closely around him.

"Britten," he said, raising his eyes. "I knew you would come."

"Pears."

They shook hands like grown men. They gazed at one another, solemn and serious and strange, brimming over with all the things they might say. None of them could be put into words.

Pears was the taller of them still. What odd things one noticed. He seemed far older, weary, and yet there was a softness in his eyes as he stood there with the wind ruffling his hair.

"It's so good to see your face, B," he said finally, "I can't tell you. To see someone that one remembers so… so fondly, I mean."

"I must have changed terribly," said Britten.

"Not at all, my boy. You're just as you were."

Together they strolled away from the chapel and down the path towards the river, through the bare trunks and faded foliage of another year. Everything was brown and tattered and torn, fluttering feebly in the wind. If Britten had not changed terribly, then everything else must have changed around him. He could not help but remember how Pears and Burra had walked down these very paths years ago, when June was at its height and the world was young.

"It seems so strange," he said, "to think that it's all gone by."

Together they stood quietly and watched the river flow to the sea.

A week later they met for tea at the Lyons Corner House near Leicester Square. Pears was living in Marylebone now, tutoring boys in Latin while he looked around for something more remunerative. And Britten was not far away in South Kensington. They were both citizens of that great city, swept together again like jetsam. It seemed so strange to be talking amidst the ferns and china and scrollwork of the tea rooms, equally remote from their school and from the horrors of wartime. As if they had been friends forever. As if no one had died. Britten supposed that this must be what being grown-up felt like, brushing aside the loss of innocence as if it never had gone.

As he sipped at his tea Britten found himself talking on about the Royal College of Music, his studies in composition, all that he had done since leaving school. It was probably the most that he had said to Pears at any one time. He felt just ancient. What silliness.

"You must think me a terrible bore," he said finally. Pears' eyes were upon him.

"Not at all. I love to hear you talk."

"Do you?"

"Of course!" Pears took another sip of Earl Grey. "You never did at school, you know. Hours on end you would sit there gazing at me with those great eyes of yours. Just like you're doing now."

Britten coloured and looked away. All of a sudden the venue seemed very public. Next to them in the tearoom there was a gay crowd of young men all bumping knees together at a table far too small for their number. They were laughing so loudly that Britten felt quite sober and dull in comparison. But perhaps not quite dull enough.

"Would you like to come back to my rooms?" he offered, his heart in his throat.

Not half an hour later they were back at the boarding house on Cromwell Road, shaking off the rain as they trooped up the worn front stairs. Britten's room was so small that he had to step back in order that his guest could get far enough into the room to close the door behind him. In that confined space Pears was broad-shouldered and awkward as he shrugged off his coat.

Pears looked around at the room. Narrow bed, narrow desk and an upright piano--that was all its furnishing and to Britten it suddenly seemed inadequate.

"You can sit on the piano bench," Britten offered. "There was a desk chair but it took up too much room so I chucked it."

"That wallpaper looks as if it would sap the will to live," said Pears idly, taking a seat. "Had you thought of changing it?"

"I can't say that I notice."

"No, my dear B, you wouldn't."

Now that he thought about it the sprigged floral pattern did seem rather dingy and peeling. I've missed you so, he started to say, but the words stuck in his throat.

Just like old times he served Pears with tea, Earl Grey in chipped cups that spoke just as eloquently of student digs. They had lived better at Hunstanton and knew that he could not furnish his small room half as well as Pears would do. It would never quite be a home.

"Rimbaud?" Pears was saying in a tone of surprise. He picked up the volume that had been resting on top of the piano next to Britten's copy of David Blaize. "Oh, I say, it's Les Illuminaggers."

Britten sat self-consciously down on the bed. It protested loudly with a squeak of worn-out springs, sagging under him so that he had to lean forward to keep his balance. He was so close to Pears that they were almost bumping knees.

"I find things out for myself, you know. I didn't stop reading when you left Hunstanton."

"I should say not! Rather racy, B."

"I don't think so," replied Britten stoutly. Even if he did like Rimbaud, he was still enough of a prig to think 'racy' and 'daring' must be terms of disapprobation. "I think he's ripping."

"So did Verlaine," said Pears with a chuckle. "You must admit it's queer poetry at the very least."

"Perhaps it is. A chap called Lennox gave them to me. He's a student of composition here at the College."

"A particular friend?"

"Not so particular," said Britten dismissively.

Perhaps that wasn't so true. They had been making plans to go to Cornwall in the summer and to share rooms in the coming year so as to get away from the closeness and claustrophobia of boarding houses. And yet Britten was somehow shy of admitting that to Pears. As kind and as good as Lennox was (and with him Wystan and Christopher and the others), Britten did not like to talk of new friends. It seemed disloyal to the old.

"Do read me a bit out of the poems?" Britten asked. "I've been meaning to set them to music only I haven't managed a single note. Perhaps if I heard them in your voice I should be able to write something."

Obediently Pears began to read, a performance just for one.

"Des drôles très solides," he began.

In the years that they had been apart, Britten had forgot the uncertainty of Pears' French accent. Nonetheless he listened with rapt attention. Every small hitch and infelicity of phrasing held a special meaning because it was Pears who brought the words into life.

"Plusieurs ont exploité vos mondes. Sans besoins, et peu pressés de mettre en oeuvre leurs brillantes facultés et leur expérience de vos consciences. Quels hommes mûrs! ...Oh, but my French is damnable."

"It doesn't matter."

"Now, that's damning with faint praise."

Britten had nothing to say to that.

"Burra would have loved these," said Pears quietly, still holding the book open in one hand.

They sat together in silence, listening to the traffic on the Cromwell Road below. Britten could not help remembering the last time he had seen their friend. That sacred trust that he had been given and had never fulfilled.

"Do you know," he offered, "just before he left Hunstanton, Burra told me to look after you. As if I could ever do such a thing."

"He was very wise."

"But I didn't, did I?"

"Didn't you?" Pears echoed, quizzically arching an eyebrow. "In every way that mattered you already had. You stood by me when no one else would. You were more to me than I could ever have said."

"If you had told me so back then, I should scarcely have credited it. You seemed so far above me."

"What about now?" asked Pears, his look all of a sudden becoming very serious.

"What about it?"

Britten glanced at the floor so that he didn't have to meet Pears' eyes. The bed squeaked again. His heart was beating so fast that he could hardly bear it.

"We're not at school anymore," Pears said. "We're both grown men. And, you know, it's still true. It's been years since we've seen each other and yet I can't think of anyone I like so well as you."

"Really?" Britten replied shyly. He crossed his legs, feeling a touch of the coquette coming over him.

"You silly boy. Didn't you ever realise? I fell in love with you from the very first."

"I--I never meant to tempt you," said Britten, and almost meant it.

He was older and wiser now. Only now was he coming to understand the bittersweet, intoxicating tug that he himself had felt all of those years. Just sitting beside Pears was unutterably pleasant. And Pears was not the only one who was tempted.

"Nonsense," said Pears. "You made me good. You made me far better than I might have been. If that's temptation it's the very best sort. There's nothing beastly about it, whatever the moralists will say."

"Isn't there?" asked Britten, holding his breath. "Are you sure?"

"As sure as I am of anything. Think of it, B. Love, real and true love, is the greatest of virtues and the greatest of blessings. How could it ever be beastly?"

Britten sighed longingly. The words could not but work their magic on him: they expressed a sentiment that he wanted so dearly to believe. Other men had said the same thing to him in terms more eloquent and enticing, but he had never hearkened to them. There were none whom he trusted and admired--none whom he loved--as much as Pears.

"I should like to think so," he said, sighing.

"Why don't you try to?" said Pears.

Reaching out across the small gulf that separated them, Pears took Britten's hand in his. The world did not end.

Tentatively Britten squeezed Pears' hand and felt in reply a stronger squeeze. There was nothing of corruption in that touch. Only warmth and strength and a sense of wholeness that Britten had never thought he would find. Love, too.

"When I saw you again in the chapel," Britten confessed, "I felt as if we'd never been apart."

"And I the same. If I had my way, B, I should never be parted from you again."

"Nor I--" Britten stammered. "Nor I, Peter, from you."