‘Why not Norwegian?’ I asked. ‘Why not?’
He sniffed. ‘Indeed, I suppose, why not? Why English? Why Latin? Why any tongue?’
Across the square, shaded by pungent fig trees, stood two young Italian women. Each was raven-haired, full-lipped, dark-eyed. They were rapt with the knowledge of their own beauty. ‘Do you think those two lovelies care that you learned German?’ Lavelle asked me. ‘Do you think they care about fucking Diderot?’ I looked at the young women. They briefly looked at us and then turned away. ‘They couldn’t give a fuck about the Enlightenment,’ he whispered. ‘Why, Voltaire himself would burn every book in his library to have the chance to put his thin, jabby little cock inside those beauties.’ He made his first two fingers into a sharp little point, and jabbed it in the air three times, before loudly squelching with his lips. Voltaire had ejaculated disappointingly all over the main square of Aosta. I gasped, and then I laughed, and I saw that it pleased him that he had made me laugh.
We peeled away, deeper into the town. ‘So, why are you here, in Italy, if not for culture?’
Lavelle raised an eyebrow as we walked.
‘Firstly, my parents forced me to come. They thought it would do me good, stop me inseminating their maids.’
‘Really?’ I said, and he squawked.
‘Of course not!’ he laughed. ‘I don’t have a quiverful of country bastards.’
‘Then why did you say so?’ I asked.
He glanced at me as though I were a particularly slow child. ‘For. Ironic. Effect.’ The slowness of his words drew me in. For. Ironic. Effect. ‘I have come to Italy for Beauty,’ Lavelle continued. ‘The pursuit of Beauty.’ He looked back at me. ‘But I have decided to find Beauty where I choose. I do not need a guidebook written by John Locke to tell me what to think.’
‘My mother is a great admirer of Mister Locke.’
Lavelle gazed at me, quite openly, as if this was quite the most stupid thing he had ever heard. ‘Of course she is.’ Then with his finger and thumb, he caught my cheek, not tenderly but with a flick. ‘It is adorable that you do not understand the rules of English cruelty.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
He sighed mock-unhappily, mock-sympathetically.
‘What do you mean what do I mean? Do you think the Duke of Fitzroy or the Marchioness of Shuttlecock give a damn about John Locke? They don’t have a clue who John Locke was. They barely know who Sir Isaac Newton was. They don’t even know how to wipe their own arses let alone the first bloody thing about Pico della Mirandola.’
He stopped, and smiled beautifully, and then began to recite from what I recognised as the Oration on the Dignity of Man: ‘Let some holy ambition invade our souls, so that, dissatisfied with mediocrity, we shall eagerly desire the highest things and shall toil with all our strength to obtain them, since we may if we wish.’ He spoke graciously and elegantly, and it surprised me, how cultivated and perfect his recitation was. He grinned and slapped my arm: ‘What a load of bollocks!’ He laughed and strode off into the sunlight. He stopped and turned back to me: ‘Well, are you coming, or not?’
Turning to me as we walked, he asked: ‘Did you make good society in Paris?’
‘Yes, we were known.’
It was a very elegant thing to say that one was ‘known’. Yet upon hearing the word, Lavelle almost clucked with derision: ‘Oh, my God, and by whom were you knoooown in Paaaaris?’ I spouted surnames – Ansons, Russells, Herveys – and Lavelle sniffed: ‘My God, the whole thing sounds truly horrible.’
‘Sir Gideon Hervey …’
Lavelle groaned. ‘Appalling!’
‘Do you know him?’ I asked, realising that there was a game afoot but not yet understanding its rules. Lavelle came to a sudden dead stop. I almost banged into him again.
‘I do not need to, Benjamin. May I call you Benjamin?’ He did not give me a chance to say yes or no. ‘Just putting together those three words – Sir, Gideon and Hervey – tells me everything I need to know about him. He sounds awful.’ He paused spectacularly well. ‘Was he awful?’
‘Well—’
‘Come on, you can tell me.’
His eyes were alive, swimming with mischief. ‘Yes,’ I confessed. ‘He was absolutely awful.’
Lavelle grinned. He began to address an audience of no one but me, declaiming as an actor, outwards, into the mid distance:
‘Hear me, hear me, ladies and gentlemen! Sir Gideon Hervey, the cousin of His Grace the Earl of Arsehole, pronounced Uzzell, is absolutely awful. He is bloody appalling. He is a piece of filth that any truly clever man –’ did he mean me? ‘– would wipe from his heel as though he had stepped into a fresh cow pat.’ Then Lavelle smacked his lips as if blowing me a kiss, though he was not. ‘Do you like to drink beer?’
That night, I drank it until my blood was the colour of amber. I drank until I was drunk, in a way I had not done before. He told me how he had been brought up in Ireland and how his family were ashamed of his pleasure-seeking. ‘I think with my member, and not my head,’ he joked, but everything he said was so hard-tuned, clearly designed to provoke, that I did not know what to believe. I told him about my upbringing, about my mother’s devotion to learning, her faith in advancement, our seclusion from the world. ‘You were locked in a room full of books when you should have been out running in the open air, when you should have been with your friends, when you should have been feeling alive. Did you feel alive, growing up?’ he asked. His question was very serious.
‘I didn’t think about it at the time.’ I was surprised that I felt emotional. ‘But I didn’t.’ Maybe it was the beer talking.
Afterwards, the two of us walked back in the direction of my lodgings. As we walked, I watched the moon, yellow against the dark blue Alpine night. Snow-caps were tinged a luminous violet, Aosta’s empty streets were given a thin wash of silver-white. ‘And what does your family do?’ he asked, that most English of questions. I told him about the shipping company. When I was done, he rolled his eyes and cried: ‘But you are trade, so you must see that all those lords and ladies in Paris would have regarded you with the utmost contempt?’ He said the terrible word ‘utmost’ as if it were a joke.
I took a breath. ‘But now you know I am trade, will you still be my friend?’ I went for arch amusement, but hearing my own voice slurring against the cooling night air, I knew that for the first time in my life – the first time – I wanted a person, an actual person outside my family, to be my friend.
‘Indubitably!’ he cried, and then he sniffed and pulled his coat straight. A smile cracked across his face. The moonlight shone all across his beauty, like it was honoured to cover him, and both he and the moonlight knew it. Abruptly he turned and began to walk, hard to the right, away from where I was going. I took two steps after him and called:
‘Will I see you again?’
He swung around, without stopping, and was wearing the most glorious, the happiest, grin.
‘You shall see me every day from now, Tradesman Bowen.’ He winked at me. ‘I have come to save you!’