He did not respond for some time. After a while he said, looking away, “All my life I thought I would be alone, but now that is no longer true. I have Snow. As long as she is with me, there is little I fear.”
I sipped some water before resuming the climb. “How lucky for you.”
“Peter,” Johnny called after me, “I have never told anyone about this part of my life, no one except you.” The tawny, waist-high grass shimmered silkily in the breeze. In the golden sunlight he looked as if he were being washed by the waves of a fawn-coloured sea. “What I said earlier was wrong. I do have someone to talk to now.” His face was suffused with an unspoilt innocence that I had never seen in all my Occidental years. It was an expression I knew to be impossible to describe to those who had never travelled in these tropical climes; it spoke of instinctive trust, communicated by an intimacy that we in the cold West lost many years ago. I found myself curiously unable to respond. I began to say something, but stopped; my voice sounded stiff, cold, and mannered compared with his. The sun bore strongly on my forearms and knees. Beyond the shade of my Panama the landscape seemed tenuous, trembling in the afternoon heat.
Many times I have analysed that strange moment, carefully un-weaving the richly twisted strands of emotion that ran through my nerves as I stood watching Johnny, poor wonderful Johnny, standing on the slope of that hill. As the fabric of that memory comes apart in my hands, I see that the answer is really very simple. For those few brief seconds, I found myself looking into the face of a friend, the first and only one I would ever have, the only one I would ever love. For it is true, isn’t it: greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. That is what I was taught at school. I always laughed at what seemed to me a perverse linking of love, friendship, and sacrifice — never would it apply to me, I thought. And yet it did, for a few fleeting moments, at least. Looking at Johnny then, I truly believed I would die for him. Now, in the cold light of old age, I can see I was merely fooling myself: I was never as noble as that.
THERE IS A PAINTING ENTITLED Francesca da Rimini, which depicts the final moments of the eponymous heroine’s life as she lies dying in the arms of her lover Paolo. Like so many French paintings of the nineteenth century, it is voluptuous and exciting — the tragedy of the lovers’ story is somewhat lost in the sinuous display of brightly lit flesh against a darkened background. But make no mistake: Francesca’s is a sorry tale indeed. She was forced to marry the hideous Gianciotto Malatesta, but fell in love with his beautiful younger brother Paolo. One day, as the lovers lay together covertly reading Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, they were discovered by Gianciotto, who exacted terrible revenge by stabbing them both to death. Their wounds are clearly seen in the painting, thin dark cuts on otherwise unblemished alabaster skin. They are both naked, entwined in a white sheet; she clings weakly to him, her cheek pressed tenderly to his smooth, flat chest. After death they were condemned to wander the stormy darkness of Hell’s Second Circle together with all the other souls of the lustful. How wretched and unfair it is that the price of love is eternal damnation.
This is what I found myself saying to an assembled audience at Johnny’s house the first time I was properly invited there. The occasion was the Autumn Festival, and T. K. Soong had thrown an “open house,” which in theory meant that anyone in the Valley could turn up unannounced — although the guests seemed too well mannered and nicely spoken to qualify as true Valley plebeians. Everything I said seemed to be greeted with smiling Oriental inscrutability, and my stories became increasingly desperate as I scratched around for conversation. To compound my discomfort, there were three other English people in attendance. One of them was a weak-chinned, pink-cheeked schoolmaster type with slowly thickening jowls, who might as a child have been considered cherubic. His name was Frederick Honey.
“What a silly story,” he said prissily. “I don’t believe any of it.”
“It isn’t a question of believing,” I said. “Why can’t you just accept it as a beautiful, tragic story of an ill-fated love affair?”
“Well, what’s the moral of the story? Every story has to have a moral,” he said, as if irritated by my lack of logic.
I remained civil, albeit with great difficulty. “I don’t know. What’s the moral of Romeo and Juliet?”
