Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/761818.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Historical_RPF, Bloomsbury_Group_RPF
  Relationship:
      Lytton_Strachey/Various
  Character:
      Lytton_Strachey, John_Maynard_Keynes, Arthur_Hobhouse, Bernard
      Swithinbank, Dan_Macmillan
  Additional Tags:
      Edwardian_Period, Banter, Frenemies, Jealousy, Masturbation, Rivalry,
      Multiple_Pairings, Multiple_Partners, imaginary_sex, Hate_Sex, Lovers_to
      Friends, Cambridge, Oxford, Lytton_does_Cambridge, Basically_just_a
      really_self-indulgent_trip_down_Lytton_Strachey_Lane, Not_Romance
  Series:
      Part 2 of Unreal_Cities
  Collections:
      The_Antidiogenes_Club_Book
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-04-15 Words: 20446
****** The Obvious and Proper Sense ******
by breathedout
Summary
     Cambridge, 1905. We’re still talking, you’ll be surprised to hear,
     about love and sodomy.
Notes
     Massive historical notes at the end of this massively silly story.
     While this is probably better-supported with factual evidence than,
     say, my undergraduate honors thesis, there are a few logistical
     things that I just let slide out of deference to the fact that it’s
     filthy porn (a decision I feel Lytton Strachey would back 100%).
     Expect wit and absurdity, not realism or romance.
     Also: in 1905 the ages of the five main players here range from 19
     (Hobhouse) to 25 (Strachey). There’s therefore no actual underage sex
     that takes place, even by modern standards. But there are extensive
     references to underage sex that may or may not have happened in the
     past. Proceed accordingly.
     My immense gratitude to the Antidiogenes crowd for the continuous
     encouragement, to Orla for the brit-pick, and to greywash for not
     just a bang-up beta job but also for picking me up when I was down
     about this story, chivvying me when I was lazy, bribing me with
     alcohol and lesbian pornography, and being possibly the one other
     person in the world with the patience for rendering Lytton Strachey's
     sexual fantasies into stream-of-consciousness narration. I feel lucky
     to know her, every day.
 
***** December 1904 *****
Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf
 Trinity College, Cambridge
I can get advice from no one, but feel half sure that it would be best not to
come up next term. Hobhouse I think could be easily elected [to the Apostles],
and to do what I should like to do—to get him, if only in some small way for
myself—would I’m afraid need a desperate struggle. […] Keynes is the best
person to talk to, for he at least has brains, and I now believe is as kind as
his curious construction allows him to be. 
 
===============================================================================
 
‘Keynes!’ Strachey shouted. Keynes kept right on, down the walk; Strachey
cursed, and followed.
‘I—good God, Keynes, I made your—apologies to—Hobby and it was damned awkward,
the least you can do is—delay a bloody—Keynes!’ he called again, stopping dead.
‘Maynard!’  
Keynes drew up at last. Just under the archway that gave onto Trinity Lane he
stood shaking, hands clenched at his sides. Strachey would have thought
shoulders heaving as well, if he himself hadn’t been coughing nearly hard
enough to expel his own lungs through his throat. Keynes didn’t turn round.
‘Keynes,’ Strachey panted, drawing up behind the man. ‘Keynes, what on earth
were you thinking? Running out on us right in the midst of my explanations to
poor Hobby about the election. Some conversation society he’ll think the
Apostles, if we persist in running about like chickens with our—good Lord,’ he
finished, abruptly, because Keynes had turned about, eyes bulging, frog face
contorted in misery. 
‘I couldn’t,’ Keynes said, and cleared his throat. Despite his expression he
seemed to be attempting a tone appropriate to the delivery of a calculus
proof. 
Strachey wheezed at him in frustration. Hands on his knees, cold air in his
seizing lungs.
‘I couldn’t,’ Keynes repeated. ‘You must see, I had to leave, Lytton. If I’d
stayed a moment longer I’d have kissed him, it would never have done.’
‘You’d have—!’ Strachey said, and then coughed, and gasped laughing, and
coughed again, having forgotten all about his incipient asthma attack in the
shock of the moment. 
When he had his breath back he straightened up, dignified. ‘You had to leave?’
he said. ‘You’d have kissed—Hobby?’ 
‘It can hardly come as a surprise,’ Keynes said, stiffly. He dragged his feet
in the gravel under the arch. Quite the picture of amphibious dejection,
thought Strachey, rolling his eyes now that he could breathe again. He himself
strolled along, nonchalant, cane in hand.
‘Well,’ Strachey said. ‘I suppose he’s nice enough looking. If that’s your kind
of game. I, of course, hadn’t really thought, but then—’ 
‘You—hadn’t really thought.’ Keynes’s voice was blank. He was backed deep into
the shadows of the arch now, so that Strachey was caught off guard when his own
swinging carefree foot connected with Keynes’s shin. Keynes just grunted. He
didn’t move from his place. Strachey hopped backward, surprised.  
‘Well,’ Strachey repeated, stopped now on the gravel in the dark, at a loss. ‘I
take, I suppose, an interest in the boy. It’d be quite a feather in our cap,
wouldn’t it, to put up the winning man for the Apostles? I mean to say, nobody
is working harder to secure his election than I. He’s brighter than Sheppard
gives him credit for. Has moments of real prescience, even, and, it’s
only—what?’ because Keynes had grabbed his wrist in the dark.
‘Don’t,’ Keynes said.
There was an unaccustomed bite to the word. Strachey thought he could feel, on
his face, in the dark, the warm mist of Keynes’s breath.
‘Pardon?’ 
‘Don’t,’ Keynes repeated. ‘Don’t say prescient, you always say prescient about
people you’re trying to seduce.’
‘Good lord. What an accusation.’
‘Oh you know it’s true, Lytton,’ Keynes sighed. ‘Do you need me to cite
examples?’ His fingers still dug into Strachey’s wrist, so that Strachey was
dragged forward a step when Keynes slumped back against the stone wall. Even
now—when Strachey’s eyes, flicking aside, could make out the dim shapes of the
Great Court on one side and the clattering intermittent traffic of Trinity Lane
on the other—even now, Keynes was an undistinguished shadow. Invisible his
bugging eyes; his ribbiting mouth in the night. 
‘I—honestly don’t,’ Strachey murmured. 
The dark blur made a broken noise against the wall. Strachey leaned toward it,
despite himself. It was disturbing, he thought: Maynard Keynes, gasping against
a wall.
‘I hadn’t thought of him that way. Really, Maynard.’ There was surprise in his
voice. He was something akin to sincere. ‘My interest is—he’s a bright boy, I
don’t—'
‘He’s a young Apollo,’ Keynes said, with a hitch in his voice. Strachey
couldn’t be sure, but he thought, from the echo, that Keynes might be tipping
his head back, hitting the back of it on the stone as punctuation. Keynes’s
fingers still circled Strachey’s wrist, gripping tight.
‘He’s a fair enough young specimen, I grant you,’ Strachey said, ‘but I don’t—’
‘He’s the apogee of a thousand bloody years of thoroughbred horseflesh,’ Keynes
said, skull against the stone again so that Strachey reached forward with his
other hand to cushion the back of it. ‘Christ, he’s lovely, Lytton, how could
you not?’
‘I,’ said Strachey, mind full of Keynes’s ragged breath in the dark, warm on
his cheek. One could almost forget the man was ugly. Strachey’s own voice went
strange in his ears.  ‘I hadn’t—Maynard.’
‘Lytton,’ Keynes panted. Close, Christ, warm and close and solid against
Strachey’s chest and Strachey swayed into him in the dark. ‘He’s so—so
beautiful,’ Keynes was saying, sounding like a different man, ‘and you had
him—had him in your rooms, you’re going to—going to—’ 
Time stretched, breath held. Then the moment snapped. 
Strachey stepped back, decisive, heels crunching on the gravel drive. He
breathed deep. Gave a quick, sharp nod.
‘I assure you, Maynard,’ he said, steady on again and relieved with it, ‘the
idea had simply not occurred. I’ve no interest whatever in the pup. Convince
Moore to elect him to the Apostles, and I’ll listen to him discourse on Cicero
in raptures, and want for nothing.’
Keynes groaned again, against the wall. 
‘I’m not entirely convinced,’ came Keynes’s voice, muffled as if through his
rubbing hands, ‘that Hobby even knows who Cicero was.’
Strachey laughed out. Coughed. The air was really quite cold.
‘Then we’ll educate him, shan't we?’ he said, and stepped back another foot
back, and turned, walking away. ‘Hie you to the pub, Maynard,’ he called over
his shoulder. ‘And then skive off your economics lecture tomorrow and sleep it
off. Do you a world of good.’
Keynes grunted. Strachey walked on, swinging his walking-stick, considering
Arthur Hobhouse and his attainment or lack thereof to Apollonian proportions.
Strachey really hadn’t thought about the question, before.  
Not much.
He almost missed the sound of Keynes’s feet twisting on the gravel, and his
reedy voice, more amused now, in its customary fastidious way, calling out:
‘You do realise I’m deliveringthat lecture, don’t you, Lytton.’
Strachey smiled to himself, turning the corner back toward his rooms. 
‘Nonetheless, Maynard,’ he said. He waved his walking-stick in Keynes’s general
direction. ‘Nonetheless.’
 
===============================================================================
 
***** February 1905
 *****
Trinity College, Cambridge
Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf 
The grave crisis is with Keynes. I saw him this afternoon, and told him
nothing. I fear he may have guessed, and it would be wretched if he thought I
was deceiving him. But why should I have told him? It was in the nature of a
confidential communication—what passed between Hobby and me. […] But here am I,
who eagerly sucked in Keynes’s own revelations, remaining mum when my turn
arrives.
 
===============================================================================
 
‘Lytton?’ came a voice, a rap on the door. 
Strachey made a vague noise of permission in the back of his throat, one hand
clutching his brandy glass and his eyes vague on the letter in his hand, before
he remembered just what it was he was reading. 
‘Oh!’ he said. There was shuffling by the door; the knob rattled.
‘Er, um!’ he called out, shifting in his seat. 
Bother. 
His brain back-pedalled a few frantic seconds, then gave it up as a bad job.
Surely every undergraduate had old love-letters under the mattress. This was
Cambridge, after all; these were his own rooms. 
And then, after all, it turned out only to be Keynes.
‘You all right?’ said Keynes, just inside the doorway. 
‘Mmmm,’ Strachey said. Rubbed his eyes with one hand, gestured with the other,
preoccupied. ‘Mmm, quite all right. Finish off the brandy. Pippa’s sent another
up just yesterday which looks to be of superior vintage.’
‘I heard a rumour,’ said Keynes, righting a snifter and emptying the decanter,
‘that Hobby might be by.’
‘Insufficient attraction on my own, am I?’ Strachey murmured. Still sneaking
glances at the old letter in his hand. ‘You missed him by an hour, Maynard.
Here we were, from six to nine, and I swear we did nothing whatsoever but talk
about you.’
‘About me? I don’t believe you for a moment.’ But his frog lips were wet with
pleasure. Strachey didn’t have the heart to take it back.
‘Well,’ he said instead, looking down at his empty glass. ‘Believe what you
will, and open the new bottle. We’ll—we’ll toast Apollo until his chariot gilds
the heavens, shall we?’ 
Keynes chuckled and nodded, in his maiden-auntish way. He retrieved the bottle
from the sideboard so that Strachey didn’t have to get up; though he did sit
up, a bit, in his chair. Folded Sheppard’s letter; put it on the side table and
gave it a little pat.
‘I need this tonight,’ Strachey said. ‘You know, when Hobby left I was feeling
. . . oh! Awash on a sea of discontent, Maynard.’ 
‘Not you, surely,’ said Keynes. Lamplight through the honeyed splash of brandy
in his glass. 
‘Yes, yes,’ Strachey said. ‘It’s just—he’s so young, isn’t he? And so pleasant;
Christ, I was never so pleasant, was I, Maynard? No, I see your look and I
quite agree; I think I can’t have been. But I took down Sheppard’s old letters,
just to be sure, since I recall feeling—at the time, you understand—as if he
were the last word in worldly sophistication. And I but a country mouse,
nibbling the crumbs from his table.’
‘Is that what they call it?’ Keynes said. 
Strachey laughed, unplanned, loud in the quiet room. He felt it shake off the
last of his melancholy; and so he rose, and crossed to crack the casement on
Nevile’s Court. Down below, two undergraduates called out to each other from
amongst the stone and ivy.
‘Imagine my shock,’ said Strachey, turning back about with the cold air at his
back, ‘to find, if these letters can be believed, that he really was properly
in love with me back then, just as he should have been. To discover a thing
like that, after all this time? After, oh, sitting in Classics lectures, and
wondering if he ever thought about other people in order to get erections?
Christ. The whole affair strikes me as ludicrous, now. Best to abjure love
completely. I’m so far out of it I declare I never want to be in again.’
‘Are you,’ murmured Keynes. ‘You’d best shut the window, Lytton.’ 
Strachey downed his brandy. He turned. He shut the window. 
‘Are you really in love with Hobby, though, Maynard? I mean to say. Really in
love?’
Keynes crossed one ankle over his wool-clad knee and Strachey felt, just for a
moment, like a labrador frolicking at the man’s feet. Pestering him. It was
unbecoming. He sat back in his own chair, and cleared his throat.
‘What have you got against Hobhouse?’ Keynes said at last.  
‘No, oh no, nothing at all!’ Strachey said. Collegiate, his back straight. ‘No,
you misunderstand me, Maynard. Aren’t I lobbying harder than anyone to make him
an Apostle?’ 
‘Do you think I’m too good for him?’ mused Keynes, under his breath. ‘Or that
he’s too good for me?’
‘I,’ said Strachey. 
Keynes just looked at him. Down the end of the corridor, Symington in his rugby
boots crashed up the stairs. 
‘Not the latter,’ Strachey said, at last. He blew out his cheeks, and downed
his brandy.
‘Why, Lytton.’ 
‘No, no, it’s only—I don’t—.’
He felt ridiculous. Deflated. But Keynes was looking at him with soft-bright
eyes.
‘The time for such scruples is past, don’t you think, Lytton?’ he said at last.
‘We two should’ve known each other at Eton. That was the age for maundering
about lost loves and worthiness.’ 
Strachey sighed, then chuckled. He pushed himself up out of his chair, and
crossed to the sideboard for the bottle. 
‘Had I not been rotting away at Leamington, perhaps we would have done,’ he
said. ‘But anyway I can’t see you devoting much thought to your young school-
friends at Eton. Golden boy Keynes, top of his class? Winner of every prize in
the College? Did you, what? Why are you laughing? Have wet-dreams about Jeremy
Bentham?’
‘Lytton!’ Keynes choked. He’d pulled his knees up into his chest. He could
barely keep his glass steady from laughing. ‘On your honour never to suggest
such a thing again.' 
‘No, honestly! I’m simply perishing of curiosity, Maynard. My so-called chums
threatened me so often with a buggering, I’d forgotten there were boys less
disgracefully lax about following through.’
‘Mmm,’ said Keynes. ‘If any man were wasted on absence from Eton, it’s you,
Lytton. I look like a toad, and even I had Dan Macmillan squirming about on my
mattress on a regular basis.’
‘You don’t look like a toad,’ lied Strachey. ‘And did you really?’ 
‘I did. It was all rather thrilling at first.’
‘At first?’ Strachey said. He sank back into his armchair, entranced, bottle on
the floor. ‘And what then? The Duke of Albany arrived to sweep you off your
feet?’
‘Oh, Macmillan had no conversation,’ Keynes said, then smiled at the face
Strachey pulled. ‘Not in the way you’re thinking. He wasn’t slow-witted, he
could speak quite well, actually. He just refused to do so with me. Every other
night he’d come back to my rooms with me and let me strip him out of his
breeches and his sailor suit and bend him over my little bed and just sink in
up to my—’
‘Christ, Maynard.’ Strachey swallowed wrong; it burned, but he didn’t cough.
His eyes watered.
‘But the whole time,’ went on Keynes, laughing a little, ‘he wouldn’t say a
word. It unnerved me. I mean to say. Was he even enjoying himself? I’d have
called the whole thing off, you know, if I hadn’t been sixteen at the time and
ready to copulate with any—well. I wasn’t particular.’
‘This went on until you came up to Cambridge, then?’ 
‘Oh Lord, no. No, we were found out by one of the Maths tutors, and he—’
Strachey really did choke on his brandy, then. Keynes looked mildly concerned.
‘Oh!’ Keynes said, after a minute. ‘Oh no, I see your confusion. No, he didn’t
catch us in flagrante; just coming up the stairs to my room at a mildly
scandalous hour. We could’ve been, I don’t know, sneaking fags in the
courtyard, or wine under our coats. But in any case, Macmillan would scarcely
look at me after that.’
‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Strachey. ‘Probably wracked by guilt.’
‘Well if he was,’ Keynes said, stretching a bit in his chair, ‘I’d never know,
as he wouldn’t say two words to me together. To this day I’ve no notion what
motivated him. At times I still think about it. When I’ve nothing else on my
mind.’
‘Not too frequently, then,’ Strachey said. 
Keynes chuckled, and drained his glass, and said, ‘Not too frequently. No.’
‘Then that was the extent of your,’ said Strachey, waving his glass in Keynes’s
direction, ‘your schoolboy hijinx, was it, Maynard?’
‘Well,’ said Keynes, and was quiet, which would never stand.
‘It wasn’t!’ Strachey crowed. ‘It wasn’t in the least!’ 
He staggered to his feet and over to Keynes’s chair; refilled Keynes’s glass
from the bottle. Keynes was chewing on his own lip. Unmoving. Strachey stood
between his legs, hands full, staring down.
‘No,’ Keynes said, at last. He looked up, into Strachey’s face. ‘It wasn’t.
There was also—you’ll be disappointed, Lytton, it’s not what you’re thinking.
But there was also—Bernard Swithinbank.’
Strachey snorted. 
‘Goodness,’ he said. ‘The lad’s name alone makes up the story’s beginning and
middle.’
That seemed to jolt Keynes out of his momentary melancholy. His look turned to
a scowl. Strachey grinned. 
‘You,’ Keynes said, waving a not-quite-steady finger up at him, ‘you are called
Giles—’
‘All right, that’s enough,’ Strachey laughed, twisting away from Keynes’s
poking hand.
‘Giles—Lytton—Strachey,’ Keynes went on. ‘And you call your sister Pippa;
you’ve not a leg to stand on.’
‘Are you drunk on a glass and a half of brandy?’ Strachey gasped, gleeful.
Keynes’s prodding fingers had closed over his ribs, and he’d trapped them
against his inner arm. 
‘Must be,’ Keynes giggled. He rested his forehead against Strachey’s belly. He
giggled again, and again, hand on Strachey’s waist with Strachey’s elbow
brushing his knuckles. And then, of all things: ‘Winthrop,’ he said. 
‘Are you going to be ill?’ Strachey asked. It was unexpected, to say the least.
Keynes only laughed harder. 
‘Honestly,’ Strachey said. ‘It’s not as if I’d mind, but this dressing gown is
new.’ 
Keynes was making wet gasping noises, as if he were crying from mirth, but he
tried to get himself in hand. He took deep breaths, turning his head to the
side, cheek to Strachey’s navel. 
‘Winthrop,’ Keynes choked out at last, drawing back a fraction. His gaze
flicked up to meet Strachey’s, his voice still quavering on a laughing note.
Strachey felt a grin of his own try to join it. ‘Bernard—,’ said Keynes, and
Strachey said ‘No!’ and Keynes said ‘Winthrop—,’ and then Keynes was laughing
again, too hard to speak, so Strachey said ‘Bernard Winthrop Swithinbank?’
putting on disbelief for effect, and Keynes nodded and nodded his laughing
head, shoulders shaking, rubbing his face into Strachey’s belly.
Strachey found himself half-looking for a place to set down the brandy. When
pressed, he had to admit an urge to bury his hands in Keynes’s hair. He gripped
the bottle tighter. There was nothing incriminating, after all, about feeling
fond.
Against his belly the convulsions lessened. He felt the rise and fall of
Keynes’s shoulders as his breathing smoothed. Keynes looked up into Strachey’s
face. 
‘So,’ Strachey murmured. Keynes’s eyes were dark. ‘This Bernard Swithinbank.
Did you make him kneel on the cobblestones in his choirboy robes and suck you
off against the whitewashed traces of Our Lady?’
‘Hmm,’ Keynes said. ‘No.’ He pulled back a little, enough to take up his glass
and sip, thoughtful, though still one hand lingered at Strachey’s waist. 
‘It was,’ he went on, ‘almost—almost devoid of lust. At least for my part. But
in a way I think there was more to it than there had been with Macmillan. I
knew, at least, that he wanted me, Lytton, he wanted my—my words, my mind. He
was so obviously infatuated, and it was a new experience for me. Intoxicating.
We read Bernard de Cluny together, “Jerusalem the Golden” for just hours, hours
at a time. Language, and ideas, and—,’ and Keynes’s hand slid down, down to
Strachey’s hip, ‘—and it seemed as if we made of my narrow little bed an entire
world, somehow. We would turn the lights out and just,’ and his breath caught,
‘talk, and kiss and—and kiss and kiss until I could scarcely see.’ 
Keynes laughed, a little shaky. His fingers dug into Strachey’s hip, hard
against the satin. Strachey’s tongue was thick in his mouth. He heard Keynes
breathe in, long and slow. He felt him spread his hand wider so that his thumb
pressed into the hollow between hipbone and belly. Strachey exhaled, sharp,
with a little lost noise. He shut tight his eyes, and felt something slip from
him, something hard, and brittle, and—and the next moment Keynes was cursing
and jumping up, pushing Strachey back, stumbling, away from the chair. 
It had, after all, been the brandy bottle. It was lying in shards on the
hardwoods. Liquid tunnelled into all their crevices. 
‘Bugger,’ Strachey said. 
‘Don’t move!’ Keynes called. He was rooting around in the sideboard for a rag.
‘You’re not wearing any shoes.’
‘I had—I’m not completely useless, you know,’ Strachey grumbled. But he stayed
put. The pieces of glass really had ended up all about his feet. 
Keynes came back with flannels; picked his way over the mess. He began, first
of all, by stemming the spread of brandy near the area rug, which Strachey had
to admit that he probably would not have thought to do. Not that he said as
much aloud.
‘We never did anything, besides,’ Keynes said, gathering up the glass shards
from around Strachey’s feet. 
Strachey had—no idea, to what this comment referred. For a wild moment he
thought it must be to the habitual cleaning up of broken brandy bottles from
around the hearth-rugs of friends and acquaintances. From what he knew of the
Keyneses, this seemed a preposterous claim. 
The confusion must have shown on his face. Keynes looked up and smiled, and
said ‘Swithinbank and I, Lytton. Do try to keep up.’
‘Ah,’ Strachey said. He cleared his throat. Keynes tapped on his right foot,
and he lifted it carefully; Keynes rested it on his own kneeling thigh. 
‘Ah,’ Strachey said again, at a loss. ‘Yes. You and, er. Bernard Swithinbank,
Esquire, of the scintillating conversation.’
Keynes nested the small glass shards inside the larger ones, and soaked three
rags sopping up the brandy. Then he lifted Strachey’s foot from off his own
thigh, thumb against his arch, and replaced it on the floor.
‘Don’t disparage it until you’ve met him. Left foot, now.’ 
Strachey, skeptical of Swithinbank’s personal attractions, snorted; but lifted
his left foot regardless. Then he gave a little squeal; Keynes’s fingers had
tickled.
‘What are you implying about the merits of my conversation?’ Strachey said.
‘I’m wounded, Maynard, deeply wounded. Until I’ve the temerity to fly in the
face of convention and grow a beard, my conversation is my leading asset. I
shudder to think it’s not up to Swithinbankian standards.’
Keynes chuckled. He massaged Strachey’s heel a bit in apology, as he lowered
his left foot back to the floor. 
‘Now stand there,’ he said, straightening up, ‘and tell me where you keep your
socks.’
‘Oh really Maynard, I’m not a child.’ 
‘Socks, Lytton.’
Strachey scowled, but the soles of his feet were tingling, and Keynes’s look
was fierce. ‘Second drawer on the right,’ he sighed. Then he looked down at his
own hand to discover, in surprise, that all this time he’d managed to keep hold
of his glass. Improbably, it was still half-full of the last of the brandy.
Strachey sipped in a dignified fashion, as Keynes located a pair of trouser
socks and brought them over to him, along with his brogues. Strachey gestured
helplessly with the glass, so Keynes wedged the whole lot under Strachey’s left
arm, then took the glass from his right, threw it down his throat in one huge
swallow, and set it safely on the mantel. Strachey couldn’t help but be
impressed.
‘Dangerous style of living, throwing brandy bottles about,’ Strachey remarked,
slipping his right foot into sock and then into brogue. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if
I catch an earful from Bakersfield on the next floor down.’
‘My heart is all a-flutter for you, Lytton.’
‘Not to worry, I’ve plenty of practice appeasing him.’
‘I probably oughtn’t to ask.’
‘No,’ said Strachey, slipping into his second brogue and feeling suddenly at
liberty in the world. ‘You probably wouldn’t like it, Maynard. There are
sometimes ladies involved, or if not exactly ladies, at least—’ 
‘You and Hobby didn’t really talk about me tonight,’ Keynes said. ‘Did you,
Lytton?' 
‘Er,’ Strachey said. After the brandy he somehow didn’t have it in him for
prevarication. ‘Not . . . per se. No.’
Keynes nodded. Breathed in, and out. Crossed to the sideboard and poured out
two shots of gin, and drank them both, one after the other. Then he turned
about, to look Strachey in the face.
‘Well. It was kind of you, anyway,’ he said. ‘Telling me you had.’
And Strachey watched, at a loss, as Keynes moved near-steadily from the
sideboard, to the bed, to the chair, gathering up his coat and hat. He stood at
the hearth and opened his mouth to object, to invite Keynes back in, to create
some brilliant fiction transforming Hobby and their sordid, trivial little
flirtation, but by that time Keynes, weaving gently, was already out the door.
 
===============================================================================
 
Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf
Trinity College, Cambridge
And then, when their talk was ending, Keynes would lie down on the bed, and
embrace [Swithinbank] and kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him, again and
again; and so they would part at last. I don’t know—the image of our ugly
Keynes makes all this rather ridiculous—and rather pathetic too. The vision of
the dark room and the white bed and the curious ecstasy there I find
attractive—soothing in a strange way. 
These last three pages are I suppose unparalleled in the annals of known
correspondence. How many persons do they put under criminal imputations? What
scandals! What disclosures! And yet Heaven knows there’s nothing abnormal in
the whole account. It’s only that I happen, for the first time, very likely, in
the world’s history to give the account. And aren’t you touched by it? Poor
little Swithinbank could never quite believe that he wasn’t doing something
wrong when he let himself be kissed. The brutes! The devils! To such a length
have they carried their abominable perversions of things! They were the best
moments of his life.
 
===============================================================================
***** March 1905 *****
‘Farewell, then,’ said Arthur Hobhouse. Strachey, pausing on the path, felt a
surge of annoyance. 
Here it was, he thought, irrelevantly: it was starting to rain. And why, after
all, say farewell when one was only just nineteen, and a simple goodbye would
sit so nicely on one’s lips? 
‘Yes,’ Strachey bit out. (Hobby was looking at him like a spaniel pup.) ‘I’ll
see you later. At the Apostles, no doubt, now that you’re officially elected.’
Hobby beamed. It was all Strachey could do to force his mouth into a smile. 
And yet, when the boy’s golden head had vanished, bobbing beneath the Great
Court galleries, Strachey felt oddly bereft. He walked on, getting nowhere,
slowing his steps over the Bridge of Sighs and doing, fruitlessly, as its name
instructed. 
Hobby was dull, Strachey thought, angrily. He was tedious. He understood, at a
charitable estimation, less than half of Strachey’s references. He said he
preferred to read Aristotle in translation. It took all of Strachey’s
considerable skill just to keep a conversation afloat; and he invariably
longed, when Hobby was speaking, to be somewhere, anywhere, else.
Yet ever since that evening with Keynes, beneath the darkened arches of
Trinity, Strachey hadn’t been able to let him go. It was absurd. He spent half
his time with Hobby, wishing himself away, and the other half away from Hobby,
thinking, compulsively, of where the boy might be going; of what he might be
doing; of whom he might be doing it with. 
Strachey banged the knob of his walking-stick peevishly along the bridge’s
crenellations. He twisted his mouth, looking down.
Below, the River Cam stretched out before him. Great fat raindrops streaked and
stained the old stone; plunked into water and echoed out and out. A harried
pair of punters hunched up their shoulders, making for shore. Unwinding along
his line of sight were nothing but arches ensouled, and twisting, tempting
waterways; and yet somehow the world seemed such a small, such a futile place. 
He wondered, out of habit, if Hobby’s meeting this afternoon at the Kitchen
Office had been a blind. If there were, perhaps, some flirtatious young Girton
undergraduate, waiting to meet him in an out-of-the-way niche of the Great
Court. 
Christ, Strachey thought, bringing his fist down on stone. How was he—how could
he be—in love with Arthur Hobhouse? And how, being in love—being in love, no
less, with a golden-haired youth, a boy with open green eyes and thighs like
slender shaking birches: how, then, could he feel his world contracting around
him? How could it be thus, when bland old Sheppard had once seemed to him the
moon and stars? How could it be thus when Keynes had said—when ugly Keynes had
said that just lying on a dark bed, kissing Bernard Winthrop Swithinbank—who
was bound, Strachey thought spitefully, to be spotty, and spindly, and utterly
lacking in anything resembling wit—when just talking and kissing had made of
Keynes’s narrow Eton bed a whole wide wondering world?
Yet so it seemed, standing in the rain on the Bridge of Sighs, as drops dripped
down his collar-back and the punters splashed beneath him. 
So it seemed. 
He was in love! Strachey thought, pinching himself. In love! He shook out all
his limbs, and stirred his feet to motion. He ought to—to run, or—or float, or
grab some shopkeep by the apron-strings and stuff his pipe with fine tobacco.
He ought to be in ecstasies. He ought—hurrying along the embankment, and back
through Nevile’s Court—he ought to be miserable, compellingly. He was in love!
He had no notion of where his feet were taking him. He ought to be driven on to
relentless motion. He thought of nothing but the boy both day and night. He
ought to be agonised with indecision; or else (drawing up short on the green)
to proclaim his love from the rooftops, to all his friends and acquaintances.
Exhausting notion.
But really, he thought, looking about him and realising vaguely that he was
standing on the lawn of the Old Court: really, he’d come all this way. He was
almost to King’s, now, and wet to the skin. And it was nearly time for tea. 
Ridiculous: being in love at tea-time.
He trailed in the doors of King’s. He trudged up the stairs. Most definitely
not in anything resembling transports. If only he could be angry; really
seething; reallywild with anger: at Hobby, at Keynes. At himself. He remembered
being angry, once, at Sheppard in a snow-storm. He’d never felt so warm. He
thought of it now as he coughed wetly into his wet handkerchief, standing in
the corridor, giving two defeated little knocks before pushing wide the door.
And there was Keynes, sitting at his desk. Finishing a sentence, and placing
his pen at a fussy, careful angle in the stand, and blotting his paper neat
before turning, at last, to regard Strachey where Strachey was dripping on his
entrance rug.
‘Lytton.’ His frog eyes bulged. ‘Good lord.’
‘It’s raining,’ said Strachey, unnecessarily. 
‘I’ve known you two years,’ Keynes tutted, ‘and you’ve had pneumonia thrice.’
‘I’m in love,’ Strachey said. 
Keynes clucked. He sucked in his lips. He went to the wardrobe for a spare
dressing-gown, which he tossed in Strachey’s direction.
‘Well,’ amended Strachey tiredly, grabbing for it and then just holding it,
limply in his hand. ‘A bit in love. Or no, almost in love—that is, I—I think
it’s love, though it might only be despair. And now—’ 
Keynes, in agitated disapproval, watched him be wracked by a coughing fit.  
‘I assume this is about Hobby,’ Keynes said, stiffly, when Strachey had
subsided, and then: ‘Don’t you dare collapse on that chair, you’ll crush the
velvet.’
Strachey tried for a baleful look as he dragged himself down the corridor to
the WC, to peel out of his wet things. 
He latched the door with a click. But Keynes must have followed him to the
threshold, because Strachey heard Keynes’s voice, low and hard by Strachey’s
head, hissing, ‘I knew it, it’ll be just like Holroyd all over again, I bloody
knew you’d be after him as soon as I told you how I felt.’ 
Strachey groaned. His chest hurt, and his feet. Keynes’s fingers drummed a
nervous tattoo on the wood of the WC door.
‘Just what you’re on about, Lytton,’ he said, ‘I’ll never know. I’m not so
dense as to take you seriously when you rabbit on about ‘so far out of love I
never want to be in it’ and such nonsense but I don’t—if it’s not an outright
lie, are you simply a turncoat by nature? What happens, exactly, in your
perverse little schoolgirl mind, that makes my favourites so irresistible to
you?’ 
Strachey’s clothes were a sodden heap of grey on the white. He slumped naked,
back against the door, and listened to Keynes’s voice working itself up into a
spitting temper. 
‘What ever happened,’ Keynes was saying, ‘to “He’s a fair enough young
specimen, I grant you,” and “I’ve no interest whatever”? You swore it up and
down, Lytton, and really, why bother if you were just going to—'
‘Why did you tell me, then?’ Strachey groaned into the empty room. Face in his
hands. ‘It’s not as if I asked.’
The drumming on the door slowed. Stopped.
Keynes didn’t answer.
Strachey waited five seconds, six, and drew a breath—careful, careful, so the
coughing wouldn’t start. He pushed himself off the door, feeling he’d scored a
point in some ill-defined contest, and picked up Keynes’s dressing gown from
off the toilet. He slung it around his shoulders. When he opened the door
again, Keynes had gone.
Not far, though.
‘I suppose you’ll be expecting biscuits or something,’ Keynes fumed, as
Strachey padded back over the threshold and shut the door behind him. ‘Which I
haven’t got. I wasn’t expecting anyone, least of all my self-appointed, I don’t
know, rival apparent, as if I needed the challenge, showing up soaked with—ah,’
he said, emerging from the little kitchen cradling a teapot, two cups dangling
from his fingers. He harrumphed. 'You look a bit drier, anyway.’
Strachey relieved Keynes of the cups. He folded himself into the velvet chair,
and put the cups on the side table, feeling he could sleep for a week. Keynes
lowered himself into the chair opposite. Regarded Strachey over the tops of the
cups and the teapot with a kind of amphibian exasperation. That look, Strachey
thought: it was quite uniquely Keynesian. One could have no doubt, when one
received it, that one was being glared at by Maynard Keynes. 
Strachey wondered idly if he might be going mad. He was so tired. He rested his
chin on his propped-up hands and listened to the clank of china.
‘You really are the most exasperating—,’ Keynes was saying, pouring out the
tea, harrumphing continuously. ‘I mean to say. I suppose one could argue, from
a perspective of political economy, that—’
‘A perspective of what, I beg your pardon?’ said Strachey, but he was too tired
to achieve the proper weight of indignation. His lungs hurt. He thought about
frogs in the pond down the long lawn from Lancaster Gate; about James, catching
them in the Springtimes of their childhood and chasing Lytton back into the
house, waving the things about. Their eyes had bulged out in just the way
Keynes’s were doing, now.
‘—that a bit of self-interested competition in the free market only ever helped
the thing along,’ Keynes was saying, talking over him. ‘But really, Lytton. Who
behaves in this—this impossible manner?’
‘Who falls in love,’ mumbled Strachey, into his tea, ‘from the perspective of
political economy?’
Keynes scowled. Strachey attempted not to cough. 
‘Well,’ Keynes said. ‘I’ll just have to press my suit, to Hobby, before you
move in.’
Strachey nodded, waved a languid hand. He brought it down, drifting through the
cup’s steam, until it rested on the side-table and tapped on the saucer in a
quiet clacking rhythm. A reassuringly domestic sound. Very indoors. Cosy. Dry.
‘What are your plans, in that regard?’ asked Keynes. 
Clickety. Clickety. Clack. He shivered, and coughed. Keynes sighed.
‘Come now, Lytton, it’s a bit late to call a moratorium on—on fraternising with
the enemy, isn’t it? And what do you mean, in any case, “a bit in love”? How
can one be “almost in love”? One is or one isn’t, surely.’
Clickety-clack. Clack. Clack. James had squeezed the frogs’ middles, Strachey
remembered. Their throats had distended. Pippa had cried.
‘It really is a rather strange reaction, you know, Lytton,’ Keynes said.
‘Objectively speaking. Wading through a rainstorm to tell me when you find
we’re “almost in love” with the same boy.' 
Strachey’s thumb, near scalded against hot china, was shocked into stillness.
Somehow he hadn’t. Hadn’t thought. Hobby himself, he realised belatedly, was
studying in the Kitchen Office. Mere yards from the entrance to King’s.
‘Well,' Strachey said at last, clearing his throat with a little laugh, looking
up into Keynes’s black eyes. ‘Give it a bit of time, you know, Maynard. Give it
a bit of time. Being really in love does at least keep one’s energy up, among
other things. And you know I’m incurably lazy.’
Keynes tutted. He refilled Strachey’s tea. On the window-pane and the courtyard
and the River Cam, the rain beat down.
 
===============================================================================
 
Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf
 Trinity College, Cambridge 
I walked out with Hobby on Monday. We got as far as the Observatory, when it
began to rain; we turned back, and, when we parted at the Kitchen Office, I
felt a hideous void. It came upon me suddenly that I was bored with everything,
with every look, with every thought—everything, you know, except him. I went
round to Keynes, seething and wild. I half let him know that I was almost as
much in love with Hobby as he … On Tuesday Keynes burst in, radiant. I wondered
vaguely what was up; he beamed and talked at me from the fireplace in a wild
confused way—for Keynes, and then I realised it. He’d, as he said, ‘proposed.’
And been accepted.
 
===============================================================================
***** June 1905 *****
So saccharine it blistered, thought Strachey, fastening his trouser flies. So
sweet it sickened: the spectacle of them together. Hobby blushing in his mussed
curls, smoothing them down. Keynes’s mouth berry-stained these days, and never
mind the season.
Strachey straightened his tie in the mirror. Stepped back to look. Frowned.
The dinner jacket struck him as a bit musty, now. Odd. It had seemed perfectly
acceptable in the bosom of Trinity. But once transplanted to rarefied Oxford
air…Strachey always forgot how the look of things changed. Even for a house
party week-end at Balliol. Even amongst friends. He felt quite, quite the poor
relation. Quite out of things. Last Thursday he’d come suddenly into his rooms,
and found them sprawled on his own bed, Hobby’s hand down the front of Keynes’s
trousers. 
‘Lytton!’ Keynes had cried, flushed, scrambling to fasten himself back up. ‘We
were absolutely dying to invite you out to the Eagle. Thought we’d wait for
you. Here.’
Hobby, Strachey noticed, had had the grace to look contrite. He’d stood
awkwardly by Strachey’s side table. He’d held his guilty hand out to his side:
careful; apologetic; not touching any of Strachey’s things. Then he'd ruined
the effect by cleaning his fingers with his tongue. 
Keynes, for a moment, had looked almost proud.
It would be for the best, thought Strachey, emptying his pockets onto the rust-
coloured coverlet. For the best, this week-end away. Four days not plagued by
the exhibition they made: Hobby punting Keynes down the Cam; Hobby on Keynes’s
knee in Hobby’s rooms; an envelope wedged in the door of Keynes’s rooms for
days at a time, to warn away all comers. To warn away Strachey: who was,
occasionally, thinking of something entirely unrelated when he passed by; but
whose mind, at the sight of the cream laid paper, would invariably be dragged
back down to the deeps.
He made a face now, at his suit in the mirror. But that was the second supper
gong; it would have to do. The last time some poor bastard had been late, Alys
had spent the entire evening tetchy; and Strachey had spent it thanking his
stars for Bertrand’s claret. Females, Strachey thought, adjusting his tie on
his way down the side stairs. It was best not to cross them. 
And he could only assume there would be simply hordes of them, if hehad been
Alys’s best last-minute option to make up the masculine numbers. He hadn’t even
had a chance to bathe properly, between receiving the telegram in his rooms,
packing his smallest trunk, and passing Keynes’s cream-laid envelope on his way
out to the train station. He wasn’t sure, in fact, following the sounds of
false laughter and a tinkling mediocre piano rendition of ‘Tell Me, Pretty
Maiden,’ who else might be in attendance.
So he was surprised to come around the corner to such a delightful quantity of
black. And many of them—well, thought Strachey. Young.
‘Lytton!’ Alys crowed, swooping down from the sideboard in red velvet, ‘you’ve
arrived, at last!’ just as a young man with a cloud of freckles and a shock of
wavy red hair looked up from the sofa in recognition, and the stocky blond at
the piano, reaching his hand up into the treble over the bare arms of a
laughing brunette in green, flubbed his notes for looking over his shoulder. 
‘Alys,’ Lytton said, kissing her cheek, raising his eyebrows. ‘You’ve no notion
how ecstatic I was to drop everything the moment I got your wire.’
‘Oh Lytton,’ she said, scrunching up her face as if he didn’t mean it. Bertrand
came around her other side, then, followed by a dark, willow-thin young man
with huge brown eyes and tailoring that simply hadto be French. He was, to
perfect the image, carrying an extra glass of claret. 
‘Lytton counts on you thinking he’s joking, Alys,’ Bertrand said, leaning in
and offering a hand. ‘You should either take everything he says utterly
seriously, or discount all of it out of hand.’
Strachey smiled, and shook Bertrand’s hand. He took the extra wine glass from
the dark young man as Bertrand was saying ‘Always much more amusing to opt for
the former, I find,’ and Alys was talking over him saying ‘Well! Now that
you’ve arrived I’ll just go find Prescott and announce supper,’ so that
Strachey had to make a face at the young man over the rim of his glass rather
than introduce himself properly. The young man covered his mouth with his hand,
as if surprised by his own laughter. 
Across the room the pianists were moving on to ‘The Countess of Alagazam.’
Another set of notes was flubbed, and the dark young man looked about, vaguely,
as if he couldn’t quite be bothered to locate the source of all the noise. His
eyes blinked slowly. Sleepily, Strachey thought. Like a cat’s. 
Strachey cleared his throat.
‘Oh!’ the young man said. He looked back around; found Strachey still planted
before him like a tree. ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.’ Strachey smiled.
He wet his lips, transferring his claret to his left hand, when a cacophony of
laughter erupted from the piano end of the room and the young man’s head jerked
away again. The green-clad brunette had somehow fallen off the end of the
bench. A result, apparently, of a practical joke by a braying blonde American
girl in cropped hair and harem pants. 
‘Well,’ said the dark young man, in his slow, careful voice, still looking over
at Green Dress, sprawled on the floor. ‘It wasn’t quite Jerusalem the golden
all jubilant with song, in any case. Was it?’ And he smiled a sleepy grin to go
with his eyes.  
‘I—’ Lytton said, stomach tightening, his hand on the young man’s wrist, ‘we
haven’t been properly—,’ but then Prescott cleared his throat at the top of the
hall, and they all took their places to file into supper.
Which is how Strachey found himself halfway through supper, sandwiched between
the green-clad brunette and her American tormentor, and just across the table
from a very pretty, very vague, very beguiling young scholar whose name it was
becoming increasingly awkward not to have caught. Whose eyes were dark pools
that Strachey—that Strachey couldn’t catch, at the moment; because the young
man had bent his ear to his grey-haired neighbour, and was listening to her go
on about the pinks in her garden.
‘Pardon me,’ said America, at Strachey’s left elbow. He turned to face her
waspish smile. ‘I’m sorry to be a bother,’ she said, nodding across his lap at
Green Dress, ‘but Eleanora has decided to hog the salt.’
‘I beg your—,’ said Strachey, then turned to his right, as a shaker was
deposited with undue force in his bewildered palm.
‘I merely supposed,’ said Eleanora, glaring past Strachey with eyes like the
Aegean, her hand still on the crystal shaker, ‘that Florence was already quite
salty enough, without any help from the rest of us.’ 
His mouth, Strachey realised, was open. He closed it, nonplussed, and looked up
across the table just in time to catch the dark young man looking right at him,
with his knuckles over his smiling mouth and his cat’s eyes curled up at the
corners. The youth flicked his gaze from Florence, to Eleanora. When Strachey
raised his eyebrows, the young man laughed out. Jerusalem the golden after all,
thought Strachey, as he turned to bestow upon Florence the salt, and said
‘Don’t tell me,’ in his best Cambridge manner, ‘but I’ve ever such a sneaking
suspicion that youtwo have met.’
They had indeed. In Rome, it transpired, on holiday: and had apparently spent
the bulk of it thwarting their mothers and eluding their suitors, in order to
gallivant and bicker together in the shade of the Coliseum.   
‘Lytt, it was just smashing,’ Flo told him (for American mores seemed to call
for the abandonment of most of the letters in one’s name, like so many
cumbersome scarves). ‘Oh, all the red roofs! And the blue, blue sky. I’ve never
seen a sky so blue.’
‘Oh heavens, not even in NewYork?’ Nora drawled from Strachey’s other side,
rolling her eyes, draining her glass yet again. ‘I was under the impression
there was nothing one couldn’t see in in New York.’
Flo stuck out her pink little tongue. 
Strachey, very bland, said, ‘The Roman sky is unreasonably blue, I quite agree.
Particularly, I find, with a blue-eyed lover’—at which Nora blanched a little,
and Flo choked on her wine. ‘Difficult to find, though,’ Strachey went on, ‘the
Romans being naturally so dark. I’ve always preferred to locate one ahead of
time, for importation along with my trunks.’
‘I—daresay you have,’ Nora said, oceanic eyes trained on his face, slowly
smiling. Her glass was half-empty again already.
‘Quite right,’ Strachey said. He toasted her; Flo cleared her throat
disapprovingly. The dark young man was nodding to his neighbour, but he glanced
up for a moment as Strachey turned to face Flo; and the grandfatherly man on
Nora’s other side tried for Bertrand’s attention; and and Bertrand signalled to
Alys; and the dinner party wound on all around them. Strachey flashed a smile
across the table.
‘Well, I thought it was just lovely,’ Flo was saying, peevishly, ‘The old
ruins, so romantic, and the little markets and everything, the fresh fish
market in Campo dei F—’
‘Sant’Angelo,’ Nora corrected, ‘you always get it wrong. Fiori for flowers,
it’s not difficult. You bought me violets for my—’
‘—Sant’Angelo, then. Lord, nothing’s ever tasted so good. I could’ve spent a
year if it hadn’t been for Mother. Only, Nora insisted on lugging her paints
with her wherever we went. Hard to make a getaway with an easel and a messy old
palette, when—’
‘I only wanted them,’ Nora interrupted, spluttering, unsteady, ‘because of the
way you—you looked in that orange dress with the—’ 
At which point, mercifully, Alys rose from the table. Nora stopped speaking,
flushed pink all the way up into her masses of hair, and used the table to push
herself up to her feet. Strachey watched Flo crowd up behind her. When they
passed through the door to the sitting room, she bent her platinum head and
whispered in Nora’s ear, her hand on Nora’s green-silk waist. Strachey sighed.
Behind him, Bertrand was fussing about with the cigar-clippers. Strachey turned
about, only to come face-to-face with a quantity of very red hair.
‘Lytton!’ the ginger boomed, grinning.
So Lytton smiled, and said, ‘Beazley, is it? Do I recall our meeting at
Keynes’s rooms? Was it—was it after the exams for Michaelmas term, or—’ but
Beazley was neither looking at him, nor listening—not, at least, in any way
that precluded talking himself, at a rapid pace and a considerable volume. 
‘It was just after the exams!’ he said, ‘For Michaelmas term, what? Fancy, not
having seen either of you in all that time. Tempus fugit and all that, what? I
was just saying to my old—’ 
But Strachey was only half-listening, letting Beazley’s hand on his elbow lead
him on. Instead he craned his head about, with the idea of fleeing in the
direction of the dark young scholar. There was Bertrand, making the rounds with
the box of cigars; and there the pudgy grandfatherly type already dozing on the
settee; and—there, Strachey thought, with a flutter in his chest. There he was,
by the hearth. Deep in seemingly in uproarious conversation with the stocky
blond pianist, quite doubled over with laughter in fact, and—and Strachey had
been so preoccupied with observing him, that he’d neglected to notice Beazley
leading him right to the pair.
‘And the third,’ the blond pianist was choking out, around his tears, ‘when he
took it into his head to, and I quote, perfect the rules of—'
‘—Wall Game!’ the dark scholar cut in, at which they both redoubled their
laugher, the scholar’s hand on the pianist’s shoulder. Eton, thought Strachey:
‘Wall Game’ meant Eton, though annoyingly he still understood too little to be
in on the joke.
He was the only one, however. Even Beazley seemed to be having no trouble
following. Strachey looked at him in consternation. But he was chuckling
outright now, in an irksomely knowing sort of a way, and neither explanations
nor introductions seemed forthcoming.
‘Lord, the effort he put into those new rules,’ the pianist was gasping.
‘’T'would’ve been an entire course-load for anyone else, but of course he went
on to sit the Tomline exam that same third.’
‘And won it,’ Beazley put in. ‘And then gave us all a damned—a damned
statistical presentation on the blasted Wall Game that same—’
‘Yes!’ howled the pianist. ‘Oh Christ, yes, I’d forgotten that bit.’
‘Probably because you were falling-down drunk,’ Beazley pointed out, in a
reasonable tone. 
‘May’ve had something to do with it,’ agreed the pianist. ‘But Lord, I do
remember enjoying myself that night. The charts! So many numbers, I hadn’t seen
so many numbers since I took my Classics specialisation and dropped maths. What
was he arguing again?’ 
‘Oh, something about the scrims,’ said the scholar, waving a hand, ‘and the
loophole by which a single player could hold up the whole game by just sitting
on the ball. Which I always thought,’ he went on, thoughtfully, while the
pianist started giggling uncontrollably again, ‘was rather ironic, considering
that Maynard himself had pulled off that move to great acclaim in the big match
against Oppidan.’
Strachey, choking noisily on his cigar smoke, was too shocked even to enjoy the
sensation of the willowy young scholar patting him on the back. 
‘Maynard Keynes?’ he said, choking and grimacing. Of all the bloody—. But who
else could it be? Who bloody else, thought Strachey, wheezing now with his
hands on his knees, could it possibly be, having sat the Tomline and won it,
and then given a statistical presentation with charts and graphs, on the ideal
rules for Wall Game?
‘Well, yes,’ the scholar was saying, soothingly, still rubbing his back. ‘I
mean. Have you met the man?’ and Strachey started coughing and gasping all over
again.
‘Yes,’ he said at last, grimly, when he was stood up again on his own two feet,
and the scholar had withdrawn his hand. ‘I have indeed.’
‘Well!’ said the pianist, with a gesture as if Strachey, in this case,
undoubtedly knew the matter inside and out. ‘You’ll know how he is about
numbers, then.’ 
Strachey felt his back go wooden.
‘I’m sure,’ Beazley said, looking at him, ‘that Lytton is aware of how Maynard
is with numbers.’
‘Remember the time,’ drawled the scholar, ‘he presented Hurst with, what did he
call it? Some Investigations About the Comparative Lengths of some Long Poems?
Lines, words, statistically significant repetitions, Morris to Milton, all
neatly tabulated. I thought Hurst might cryfrom happiness.’
‘Remember Hurst’s face,’ said the pianist, ‘when Maynard said he wasn’t going
to specialise in maths?’
‘I believe I actually observed the instant when his heart split in two,’ the
scholar said.
‘Banned from sitting for the maths prizes since our third year, and he doesn’t
even go in for it!’ rumbled Beazley, nodding his head. ‘But he still predicted
the results among the rest of us with remarkable accuracy.’
‘Well,’ said the scholar, looking askance at the pianist with a twist to his
lip. ‘There’s also, of course.’ He coughed. ‘His journal.’
The pianist turned bright red, which Strachey found . . . odd. Here, at least,
he felt on even footing: Keynes still kept his horrible, fussy little journal,
and it was, as advertised, predictably full of meaningless figures. Times of
trains; his own temperature at waking, mid-day, and bed; financial incomings;
financial outgoings; precise accounts of minutes spent writing; spent eating;
spent walking; spent teaching. Insufferable. But not, thought Strachey,
actually embarrassing.
‘Times of bowel movements, that kind of thing?’ said Beazley, but the scholar
was shaking his head.
‘No, no,’ he said, in his sleepy, smoke-deepened voice. ‘The other journal.’
‘The other journal?’ said Strachey, surprised out of his silence. Beazley
looked taken aback, while the pianist, apparently, tried to sink through the
floor. 
‘Oh yes,’ smirked the scholar. ‘Has he never showed it to you? What a shame.
Started it with Dan here, I believe.’
The pianist made a noise like a dying bird, not meeting anyone’s eyes. Strachey
felt his eyebrows approaching his hairline. Such a mystery was worth even being
reminded of Keynes at the house where he’d come explicitly to escape the man.
His vague feeling of pity was eclipsed by the wild need to laugh, and he
utterly ignored the tickle at the back of his skull at the name Dan. 
‘Yes indeed,’ the young scholar continued. ‘Encoded, of course, but quite worth
the bother of locating a maths fellow with a modicum of discretion, to decipher
it. A record of all Maynard’s sexual experiments since the age of fifteen.
Vital statistics, of course: dates and times; weights and approximate…lengths,
along with—’
‘No!’ said Beazley, chuckling; but the scholar was still talking.
‘—a personal shorthand of possible acts,’ he was saying, ‘organised by a strict
taxonomy for later tracking over time, and with an in-built notational system
recording who, er . . . performed which role.’ 
Strachey threw his head back; laughed up at the ceiling, exasperated. Christ,he
thought. Maynard.
‘And of course,’ the scholar was continuing, laconic, as ‘Dan’ tried to curl
into a ball of freckled blond misery on the hearth-rug, ‘a short series of
marks for various qualitative aspects of the encounter, both from his own
perspective, and, to the best of his abilities to discern, from that of his
partner.’
‘What?’ said Beazley, ‘does he finish up and ask the fellow to rate it on a
scale of one to ten?’
‘You talk like that’s out of the question,’ murmured Strachey. ‘But how is it,’
he said to the scholar, ‘that you know so much about this—this encoded sex
journal, or what-not? I mean. He hasn’t even shown the thing to me.’
‘Oh, well,’ the scholar said, ‘I helped him develop it.’ 
‘You helped him—pardon?’ Strachey said, just as Beazley, next to him, jumped so
far into the air that he nearly spilled his drink. 
‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry, I think I must be a bit drunk. Lytton,
this is Dan Macmillan,’ gesturing to the flushed and spluttering pianist, ‘and
this—' but the scholar was already holding out his hand. 
Winthrop, Strachey thought hysterically, grasping slim dark fingers in his own,
as the scholar said,
‘Bernard Swithinbank,’ looking right at Strachey with his sleepy cat’s eyes
rimmed round with lashes. ‘So pleased to make your acquaintance.’
 
===============================================================================
 
Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf
 Balliol College, Oxford
I’m drifting off again toward the borderland of frenzy—but how can I describe
what’s certainly happened? After all it comes merely to this—that I have found
Swithinbank charming, and that I’ve hardly dared, for the three hours I’ve been
with him, to open my mouth. I like him so much, I’m attracted so
unmistakably—oh, not in the manner of the flesh. I believe that my soul is
diseased in a curious and distressing way—it has no skin, it’s raw, and every
touch upon it agonises a nerve. […] If you could then see ‘Dan’ Macmillan
grinning and twinkling, and remember, as you looked at him, of the marvellous
prolonged affair with the Etonian Keynes—if you could sweep in a few
insignificant stop-gaps—if you could gather the whole of Swithinbank’s
delightful, delicate, untainted charm, his surprising quickness, his humour,
his kindness—it’s no good, it’s simply ridiculous, and I resign.
 
===============================================================================
 
Strachey felt, the rest of that evening, lost in some delightful opiate haze.
Swithinbank, he thought, and then: Macmillan. So much had happened—so much
could potentially happen—that all he found himself capable of actually doing,
was to make his excuses soon after they rejoined the ladies, and to waft
upstairs—where he wrote a wandering, wild-eyed letter to the spectre of
Leonard, slaving away in some sweltering colonial office halfway across the
world. 
So it wasn’t until the following morning, after breakfast, when Flo and Nora
had slipped away to Christ Church Meadow on a painting expedition with
Strachey's cousin Duncan (quite grown these days) as their conveniently
distractible chaperon, and Alys and Bertrand had taken most of the rest of the
party to an organ recital at St. John’s, that Strachey prepared to go in search
of Swithinbank. In the event he needn’t have bothered, because Swithinbank,
against all odds, came in search of him. 
‘Oh!’ Strachey said, and jumped a foot. He’d come up to change into day
clothes, lost in his own thoughts; turned round and was confronted with the
whole willowy young length of Swithinbank propped against his door jamb. His
face heated. 
‘I thought perhaps I might go for a—,’ Strachey said, just as Swithinbank said
‘I wondered if you fancied a walk—,’ at which they both burst out laughing, and
shook on it. 
Strachey had considered suggesting a discreet indoor location, rather than a
walk. But it was, truly, one of the first glorious Summer days, and the whole
of Oxford was resplendent. They set out to the north, talking vaguely of
joining the others at the recital. As it happened, though, they were deep in
conversation when they reached St. John’s: laughing about Swithinbank’s Eton
days, and just what exactly—for Strachey had never properly understood—was the
appeal of the mysterious ‘Wall Game.’ So they walked right through the strains
of Bach emerging from the chapel doors, and on and on, through the yards and
back-roads, and then, sinking into the soft, sun-warmed grass, across the open
park-land to end up in a shaded alder grove, at some remove from Lady Margaret
Hall. 
They sat together in a little grassy, three-sided outbuilding, away from the
path. It might, once, have been a changing-room for amateur theatricals; ladies
changing garments were afforded remarkable privacy. 
Swithinbank in the dappled light was laughing. Still talking of the depths of
treachery resorted to by lads at Wall Game. His lashes, thought Strachey. (They
hadn’t met a soul, for half an hour together.) His mouth, Strachey thought, and
lost the train of the conversation for seconds at a time; so that when
Swithinbank’s voice rose on a question, Strachey had to blush, and stammer, and
could have asked him to repeat himself, but instead leaned over and kissed his
full and laughing lips. And Swithinbank made the most delicious sound, of
intrigue and of utter satisfaction, and lay back on the grass with Strachey
stretched out above him, kissing the brindled light off his skin.
This was Swithinbank, thought Strachey, tasting his mouth. Keynes’s
Swithinbank. This long, lithe, dappled-dark body melting into his own body was
Swithinbank’s body; these sleepy cinnamon eyes were Swithinbank’s eyes. And oh
he was—was lovely, Strachey thought, fingers hard on Swithinbank’s warm
stomach, Swithinbank groaning softly into his mouth. He was lovely, Christ,
almost a boy still, his narrow hips and his sprinter’s thighs. Not so—not so
different, Strachey thought, from the boy who had lain for hours—Swithinbank’s
hand at his nape—on Keynes’s narrow white Eton bed. Not so different from the
boy who had kissed him and kissed him and—Swithinbank’s tongue in his mouth—and
kissed him and made of Keynes’s bed the—Strachey nudged, nudged his hips into
the boy’s thigh—the honeyed moon, and stars, and the whole glittering world. 
And then? Strachey thought, as Swithinbank sucked, lazy, at his bottom lip in
the speckled light and Strachey’s head began to swim. (Had Keynes’s head begun
to swim?) And then? When had the two of them discussed notation systems, and
qualitative ratings? Was Swithinbank sucking like that on the—oh on the tip of
Keynes’s pleading tongue? Jerusalem the Golden, Keynes had said, but he hadn’t
mentioned anything about . . . anything about—Christ, he thought, Swithinbank’s
hands, sliding under his shirt; his fingers, dancing up Strachey’s belly;
slotting between his ribs, kneading into his skin like he must have done—like
he might have—like he could have—and how had he—how had Keynes, after, noted it
down? Strachey ground his hips down, down into Swithinbank’s. The boy groaned,
and arched up, and Strachey drew back, breathing hard. 
‘This journal,’ he said, panting. 
‘Pardon?’ said the boy.
‘You know,’ Strachey said, taking his hand out of Swithinbank’s hair to gesture
impatiently. ‘The journal, Keynes’s other journal.’
Aghast at himself, he shut his eyes for patience. He opened them again to the
sight of Swithinbank, affronted, looking as if Keynes had grown a second and
highly baffling head. 
‘All right,’ Swithinbank said, ‘yes, Keynes’s second journal, I do follow.’
‘It’s just,’ Strachey said, ‘We’ve known each other two years, now, M—Keynes
and I. At Cambridge, of all places, you know, not even Oxford. We’ve been—well.
Running in the same circles, if you follow me, and what’s more, discussing it.
Why wouldn’t he have shown the bloody thing to me?’
‘I really couldn’t say,’ Swithinbank said, starting to laugh. ‘He and I haven’t
spoken for years.’ 
He was propped up on his elbows in the grass in the shade. Staining his
sleeves, probably. Mussing his exquisite shirt tails. His hair was tousled and
he had a dimple in the right cheek but not the left, and Strachey wanted to
drink him like champagne. It was highly frustrating to be instigating this
horrible conversation. 
‘Oh come now,’ he said, rolling on top of Swithinbank, nuzzling at his shirt
buttons and the warmth of his stomach and and down to his dappled trouser
flies. The boy groaned; hardened against Strachey’s cheek. Strachey opened his
mouth wide over bulging tweed, and breathed out, hot. Swithinbank’s hand was
petting, petting in his hair. 
‘Come on,’ Strachey said again, breathing, nuzzling. Swithinbank’s hips
twitched up. ‘You must have some idea.’ 
‘God, I—,’ Swithinbank said, and stopped. And swallowed. And pressed on
Strachey’s head, speechless. 
Strachey teased open buttons with his hands and his teeth until he was nuzzling
the boy’s cock through just his striped cotton smallclothes; then he looked up
at him, politeness all over his face, awaiting an answer. 
‘He never,’ Swithinbank got out, ‘he never liked to tell boys about it
beforehand, thought it might—Christ,’ he said, drawing it out as Strachey made
his mouth wet and open and took into it a mouthful of striped cloth and warm,
salty flesh. He gathered saliva in the front of his mouth, and soaked skin
through cotton with Swithinbank panting above him; he sucked the warm cloth off
the boy’s erection and moved his tongue to make the fabric tease and fret at
his cockhead. Swithinbank tried—actually tried to thrust into Strachey’s mouth,
despite being fettered, still, by his drawers, helpless; his narrow hips
shifting under Strachey’s hands. Strachey heard himself groan at that; felt his
eyes roll up. He almost lost the thread of—of—. He was aching-hard and rutting
Swithinbank’s calf, sucking him through his smalls though he wanted to
gluthimself and Swithinbank obviously wanted to—wanted to come with his cock
halfway down Strachey’s throat; and Strachey almost missed Swithinbank gritting
out, ‘—thought it might—uh—uh—bias the results, I—oh,’ which sentence reminded
Strachey that he’d had some kind of mad misguided objective. 
He pulled back; stilled his own hips with an effort. Nosed into the slit in
Swithinbank’s drawers, and coaxed his cock out with his tongue. Lapped it base
to tip. Took a calming, steadying breath.
‘And what does “biasing the results” have to do with me?’ he asked, innocent.
Suckling quick and teasing, bitter salt on his tongue, delicious, Lord,
concentrate, and Swithinbank above him struggling to speak. 
‘Maybe he—yes, God, Lytton, please—,’ but Strachey pulled back and looked up
again, expectant. Swithinbank groaned. His cock bobbed slick and leaking,
inches from Strachey’s lips; Strachey was shocked at himself, not to be
currently choking on it. 
‘Maybe,’ Swithinbank managed at last, ‘he fancies adding you to the count.’ 
‘I don’t think that’s very likely!’ Strachey spat, at once, slapping the ground
in frustration. ‘Do you?’ He glared up the length of Swithinbank’s body to
where the boy’s arm was crooked over his eyes like he was in agony.
‘Oh God I don’t know why not,’ Swithinbank said, rolling his head from side to
side on the grass. ‘I can’t think of a bloody thing right now but your m—but
you; I don’t know why Maynard deuced Keynes would be any—God God God yes
Lyttonoh Christ.’ For Strachey had leaned forward at last and stretched his
lips around him, and thrust his mouth down until it was full, and then a little
further.
Swithinbank sounded like he might cry. He was pushing now, light on Strachey’s
head as Strachey drew back, slow, slow, slow, with his tongue pressed up hard
and forward, and then slid back down all at once. Strachey’s arms were under
Swithinbank, urging him deeper, cupping his narrow sprinter’s buttocks in his
palms and Strachey wanted—Strachey wanted to—to strip the boy out of
his—Swithinbank gasping and cursing and leaking in his mouth—strip the boy out
of his—his sailor suit, his—his tweeds, Christ, concentrate, Swithinbank
thrusting up, and up, he wanted to—to bend the boy’s narrow hips over the
narrow white bed, the—the rust-coloured—the narrow white Eton bed and sink into
him up to the—
‘Oh. . . bloody . . .hell,’ Swithinbank groaned above him, sounding older than
Strachey remembered, so that Strachey was half a second late remembering to
swallow.  
Swithinbank’s cock was still pulsing weakly in his mouth, and Swithinbank still
gasping as if he’d run a race, when Strachey remembered that he’d been wrong.
That had been Keynes’s story about Macmillan. Not about Swithinbank, at all. 
‘Christ, c’mere,’ Swithinbank was saying, struggling up onto his elbows, ‘let
me, let me, where did you learn—’ but Strachey was frowning, petulant, sitting
back on his heels. 
‘Keynes told me,’ he said, ‘that there was nothing between the two of you but
the life of the mind and some rather protracted kissing.’ 
Swithinbank, boneless and goofy still, made a noise that was half-groan, half-
laugh, and collapsed backwards onto the grass with his hands over his eyes.
Strachey could feel the pout coalescing on his own features. Swithinbank
laughed, silent, for a long time, scrubbing at his face.
‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘There was certainly never anything like that,’ doing
up his trousers over his ruined drawers, ‘and if you’d get up here I’d be more
than happy to—'
‘It’s just, how exactly,’ Strachey heard himself saying, ‘do the subjects of
medieval French poetry and chaste schoolboy kisses, devolve into a statistical
breakdown of possible sex acts?’
‘I really don’t—’
‘I’m quite serious,’ Strachey went on, with mounting horror at his own
stubbornness. ‘Whose idea was it? His, presumably, but how did he bring the
thing up? I say, Winthrop old boy—’
‘He told you my middle name?’ said Swithinbank, amused, but Strachey ignored
him.
‘—when the cloistered Benedictine brothers had a few moments to themselves,
what do you suppose they got up to in their private—'
‘I’ll show you what they got up to,’ Swithinbank interrupted, pulling Strachey
in by the shirt-front and stopping his mouth with his tongue. Strachey
sputtered; pushed at the boy’s shoulders; but Swithinbank rumbled at the taste
of himself in Strachey’s mouth, and climbed over Strachey’s legs to sit in his
lap and press his palm into Strachey’s flies, and it was really quite—he was
getting hard again, he was—Swithinbank’s arm around his shoulders, holding him
still, holding him quiet while Strachey kissed him and pushed his cock into
Swithinbank’s palm in little—shivery—pushes until Swithinbank drew back to
unbutton his flies, and then—
‘Bernard?’ came a voice, through the trees. ‘Lytton?’ 
They swore together, and jumped apart: Swithinbank tucking in his shirt,
Strachey doing up his trousers. 
‘It’s only Beazley,’ Swithinbank said, probably a little louder than he
intended, because Beazley, already coming around the corner of the shelter,
took one look at them, and burst out laughing.
‘And a good thing, too,’ Beazley said. ‘Good Lord, look at you both.’
‘We’ll—tell anyone who asks, that we went riding and fell off our horses,’ said
Swithinbank.
‘What, both of us?’ Strachey asked, distracted, pulling grass out of his hair.
Beazley laughed again.
‘You won’t need to tell anyone anything,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Bertrand’s the golden boy at Balliol, and you’re his guests. We’ll just—just
take you up the back way, and get you changed. Lytton, Alys wants to consult
on, I don’t know. Something to do with the library.’
So they trailed back through the Park in the golden afternoon, Strachey still
feeling put out not to have got any better answers regarding the journal. He
only realised later, to his horror, while changing for dinner in his room, that
what he ought to be feeling put out about was a missed chance at copulation
with a Dionysian youth.
 
 
 
Alys’s library consulting, as it turned out, occupied most of the afternoon.
Then a debate over the Dreyfus Affair monopolised the supper table and cigars
(and, Strachey suspected, the ladies’ conversation as well, since Flo and Nora
were discussing the newspaper treatment when the men rejoined them after an
interminable hour and a half); and Strachey, eyelids heavy from all the fresh
air and speculation, left Macmillan and Swithinbank still arguing by the hearth
rug and made his way to bed. It was doubly tiresome, he thought, loosening his
tie on the stairs: since, as might be expected, everyone at table had been of
essentially the same opinion. 
The night was cool. Not yet full summer, even at the very end of June. He
spread the cream wool blanket over the coverlet, but his sheets were chill when
he slipped between them. From down the hall came the footfalls and goodnights
of the guests as they straggled up to bed. Strachey pulled the blankets up to
his chin; shivered his sheets warm. 
The rust-coloured coverlet was itchy now against his chin. Insisting, he
thought, on its own existence: since on the grass with Swithinbank he’d seemed
to have such awful trouble keeping it in mind. He pulled it up, over his nose
and mouth and his eyebrows so that his warm breath was trapped with him under
the covers. He shivered and thought of Swithinbank. Swithinbank, close-shaved
in a sailor suit, with gigantic eyes. 
He could’ve had such a thing, Strachey thought. A little white-and-blue sailor
suit. A little blue-and-white cap. A ribbon to dangle in his wide brown
youthful eyes. 
Keynes had said it about Macmillan; had said he’d stripped him out of his
sailor suit and bent him over my—Keynes’s hand on Strachey’s hip—Strachey’s
breath dampening the sheets. But that didn’t mean Swithinbank, too, mightn’t
have been dolled up in boyish estate for a trip or two to the Eton Boat Houses.
Keynes had known Macmillan first; he’d met Swithinbank only later. Perhaps, all
the while Keynes had been buggering little Macmillan in silence, thrusting hard
into him bent over his narrow white bed, perhaps—who knew? Perhaps Swithinbank
and Macmillan had known each other, already. 
Strachey breathed in the warm, close air. The sheets were less frigid, now. His
shoulders relaxed over his head. His cock was filling, slowly; half-hard
between his legs. The cotton was at once smooth and rough.
Perhaps, he thought, they’d actually gone boating together. Macmillan and
Swithinbank, two fourth-year boys in their blue and their white, pulling for
Eton past Windsor Castle in May. Perhaps Swithinbank had sat behind Macmillan
in the scull. Perhaps he’d watched him, pulling the oars with his stocky arms,
yes, stocky even then, muscled under the fat, and freckled in the sun. Perhaps
Swithinbank had watched Macmillan’s hips slide forward, pushing against the
weight of the water on the downstroke. Perhaps he had watched him—Strachey
touched himself, gentle, teasing, took his hand away—fidgeting in his white
trousers on the hard wooden bench, and Swithinbank wouldn’t have known why,
wouldn’t have—Strachey pushed his hips up; he was hard, oh, the sheets pulled
tight—wouldn’t have known his teammate was sore and used and aching because
he’d been—been buggered in silence by—Strachey arched up and sucked in a
lungful of damp air; he wanted to touch, he wanted to touch, but he thought of
a narrow Eton bed and felt suddenly—
—observed. 
Absurd, though. He was covered up: blankets and sheets and rust-coloured
coverlet. Alone in a room at the top of Alys and Bertand’s new house.
Nonetheless. It was almost as if cold eyes were upon him. 
Dark eyes, he thought. Sparkling with a kind of detached amusement, a kind of
interest. Watching as Strachey reduced himself to writhing around in linens,
thinking of sailor suits. He curled up a bit, on his side. 
He’d thought of—tried to think of Keynes, before; Keynes thrusting inside young
Macmillan. And they were Keynes’s eyes, of course, peering through blankets and
coverlet. His best feature, thought Strachey, wryly; his deep black brilliant
eyes. They weren’t cold, though; not really. Not always. Not that night at
Trinity, he remembered. That evening in Strachey’s rooms they had burnt all up
his front; and he had flushed hot; drenched them both in brandy. But it was as
if something—something stood, now, between Strachey and that heat. He breathed
deep, uncoiling his spine. The inside of his skull felt tender.
Down the hall, the grandfather clock struck one. He could almost hear the
scratching of a pen on paper. 
And what if he were here, then? Strachey thought, with a sudden surge of
annoyance. What if Keynes were here, hmm’ing and pursing his lips, and writing
it all down in his little book? Keynes had no prerogative to call Strachey
names. Not when he’d made of deflowering young Macmillan some numerical cypher;
and of kissing Swithinbank an algebraic equation; and of his own
pleasure—Strachey gave a little groan. What had Keynes made, of his own
pleasure? 
Numbers on a page, Strachey supposed. Numbers on a page, distilled from his
stifled moans and his tenderness. And if he were here—looking snidely, perhaps,
at Strachey trailing damp fingertips between his legs to cup his bollocks in
his palm—what of Strachey would be run to ground? Was the calculus unchanging?
Or would Strachey’s numbers be—as his cock hardened again in his gentle shaking
hand—in some ineffable way, unique?
Perhaps they went boating, Keynes might say, in that tone of lofty amusement he
used to his students when they fell short of the mark. Hardly revolutionary, is
it, Lytton? A four, perhaps, for interest. Though the detail of the oar in the
water-weight is rather nice.
No, Strachey thought. He made a huffing noise into the covers. Not ‘rather
nice.’ A six, it would have to be; or a seven-point-nine. He shut his eyes.
Macmillan’s shifting buttocks on the sculling bench faded from view; there was
in his mind’s eye only Keynes, with his pen and and his pinstripes and his
black moleskin. His eyes, as Strachey stroked himself in the silent bed, were
stubbornly cast down.  
Strachey kicked his heel against the mattress. Under the stretched-tight sheets
he was pinned. Alone.
‘Maynard,’ Strachey said, aloud in the empty room. No one, of course, answered.
Down the hall, the grandfather clock struck the quarter-hour. 
He breathed in, and out. And in.
Perhaps, he thought, it had been more than that, between Macmillan and
Swithinbank. For all Strachey knew, Swithinbank had been apprised of all
Keynes’s dabblings with Macmillan. Perhaps at Eton all the boys knew.  
Or perhaps, again, Macmillan had kept it from Swithinbank. Southern tempers,
thought Strachey, thumb teasing now at his cockhead—yes—Southern tempers were
so incendiary. Perhaps Swithinbank, sitting behind Macmillan in the scull, only
suspected. Intrigued by a rumour, perhaps. Tormented by a whisper behind him at
Chapel which he might have only imagined; overheard as the headmaster had
discoursed, from the pulpit, on ‘filth.’ 
Filth, Keynes had said once, at the Apostles. I ask you. The man preached badly
enough for an archdeacon, and never defined his terms.Keynes had rolled his
eyes, Strachey remembered; and Hobby had thrown back his golden head and
laughed.
‘Filth,’ Strachey muttered, aloud, to the carpet and the wallpaper and the
rust-coloured coverlet. Tugging harder on his erection under the sheets.
And what if they’d—what if they’d been on duty, to clean the boats? To re-rack
them after the other students had gone? At Eton? Keynes would say, tutting,
scribbling in his notebook as Strachey thrust, angry, through the tight ring of
his own forefinger and thumb. But Strachey liked the image of Swithinbank,
glowering over the gunwales of the little sculls, the doors open at both ends
of the boat house. He liked—liked the idea of Swithinbank ordering Macmillan
about a bit; liked the idea of Swithinbank, short of breath (Strachey was
panting, now); of Swithinbank watching Macmillan squirm about on the ground,
goose-flesh under rolled-up shirtsleeves. 
They’d—they’d have to be quick, Strachey thought, speeding up his hand a
little. One of their tutors could come by at any moment; Swithinbank would have
to seize his chance. But he’d be watching; and when Macmillan turned his back,
when he reached to hang the oars high-up on their rack on the wall—Marked down
for cliché,Keynes might say; but from this angle Macmillan’s blond head tipped
back and Strachey moaned—Swithinbank would come up behind him. Taller; thinner.
Pin his wrists to the wall, whisper in his ear. 
‘I was watching you,’ he’d say, or something like it. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t
see? Who is he, Dan? Is he a tutor? Does he get you alone in College Library?
In a private room, does he—'
Antiquities room,Keynes had said once, reminiscing at supper, I spent hours,
and now Strachey’s hand clutched, involuntary, at his wet prick, and he thrust,
and—
Swithinbank, pushing Macmillan’s wrists into the wall with one hand while he
groped his arse with the other, almost slapping it, almost—‘Does he get you
alone,’ Swithinbank would say, ‘in the Antiquities room? Does he bugger you up
against the wall next to the—'
If you really wanted filth, of course, Keynes had said, that night at supper,
with Hobby’s mouth claret-stained and giggling into his glass, they had a
Gutenberg Bible—  
‘—to the Gutenberg Bible? Does hemake you recite for him? Chapter and verse and
the Book of Common Prayer as he fills you up, does he bend you over and—’ 
Strachey groaned. He fucked his fist harder and imagined Keynes, at
seventeen—but no, no—. 
He threw the covers off his hot face, and breathed up at the ceiling, aching-
hard and scowling with his hand stilled on his cock.  
He imagined—imagined himself, then. Himself as he was now, as he’d never been.
Lytton Strachey at twenty-six, Eton tutor, out for a stroll. Hearing a rustling
in the boat house. Padding over the soft Spring grass; silent underfoot;
stumbling through the open boat house door and happening upon—
—upon Hobby, drunk and giggling with his arse bared, and Keynes—Oh, nine,
Keynes might say, his eyebrows raised—
—no, upon—
—upon Swithinbank, grinning, pinning Macmillan’s wrists above his head as he
thrust against Macmillan’s arse through both their clothes, desperate—Four—
—no, upon—
—upon Strachey on his knees, back to the boat house wall with Swithinbank’s
cock down his throat and his own cock out of his trousers and Macmillan on his
stomach in his sailor suit on the dirt floor, playing with him, pulling on him
lightly, too lightly—Seven though one can’t happen upon oneself in a boat
house, Lytton—
—no, no, upon—upon—
—upon Keynes, it was Keynes, Strachey thought, gripping himself again,
panting—Keynes on his knees, with his mouth full. Keynes’s back against the
boat house wall with Macmillan’s hand cushioning his head like Strachey’s had
in the alley at King’s, and Macmillan’s cock sliding wet through Keynes's
stretched-wide lips. 
And Macmillan’s fleshy freckled thighs, Strachey thought, turning on his
stomach to rut the mattress, good, yes, Christ, good. Macmillan’s white
breeches around his ankles, his quaking belly under Keynes's fingers and his
hands on Keynes’s head and a desperate, overwhelmed look all over his fair face
as Swithinbank curled over his body and buggered him hard. And Macmillan’s
shaking arms, trying to brace himself against the wall, almost crying with the
effort of stopping Swithinbank choking Keynes.  
Strachey got up on his knees. Spread his legs, gasping into the pillows. The
air was cool on the sweat all down his back and his thighs and the backs of his
bollocks. Swithinbank laughed in Macmillan’s ear; fucked into him hard and
sudden. Macmillan moaned, head lolling back onto Swithinbank’s shoulder.
Strachey had his knees so wide he could fuck into the bed if he
thrust—thrust—and Swithinbank thrust, and Macmillan whinedand Keynes—Keynes
choked and Macmillan startled back to himself to look down in horror. Went to
pull back but he was pinned, and Swithinbank was laughing and Strachey was
close, he was so bloody close, and Keynes reached up to grip Macmillan’s arse
and drag him closer. Strachey felt his eyes roll up in his head and Keynes
said—
An eight, at least, Lytton, in enthusiasm if not in accuracy.
No, Strachey thought, thrusting frantically into the sheets, no, you can’t— 
He was—Macmillan was—Swithinbank was teasing Macmillan, making him reach back
and grope for Swithinbank’s hips, making him say Bernard and please and Christ
give it me, Christ. Strachey panted; rutted; moaned. But Keynes at seventeen
blurred at the edges, choking and blinking, as Macmillan stared down at him,
and Swithinbank laughed. 
Strachey swore; screwed his eyes shut in the empty room. 
Keynes at twenty-two, in his City pinstripes or Strachey’s dressing gown, might
say: But looked at from a perspective of political economy, I suppose this is
merely you, finding your natural equilibrium. 
‘Christ,’ Strachey panted. Incensed. Exhausted. Going soft in his hand.
He kicked off the covers completely, then. The rust-coloured coverlet slipped
off the bed. He kicked his heel against the mattress. He cursed, and swung his
feet onto the floor with wide-open eyes. 
 
 
 
Two in the morning and Strachey still seethed. He was wound tight, wandering
the back paths past Tower House. It was all so preposterous. This was to be a
simple holiday. A sojourn into old-fashioned collegiate respectability, into
Alys’s cook’s vol-au-vent and long fussy supper conversations; an escape from
everything to do with Hobby’s bright curls and Keynes’s wide toad’s smile. With
luck there might have been a promising young Oxford freshman.  
Oh, he thought, to be mildly and divertingly in love with a slender boy of
sixteen! Some boatswain with a Grecian profile and not a word of English! Oh to
be pining gently on a balcony in the south of France, and not (stubbing his toe
on the gravel outside the Chapel) to be traversing Oxford in an insomniac rage
by the light of the moon.
Could it really be this bloody difficult, he thought, going two days together
without turning a corner and coming upon a reminder of one blasted man? Was it
really reasonable that one’s casual friend—hardly more than an acquaintance—a
man of whom one never set out to think, and who resembled, on top of it all, an
amphibian—to think that such a man would prove himself so ubiquitous? Could it
possibly—? But yes, apparently it could: as there, unmistakably, was the stolid
form of Dan Macmillan, looking out at Strachey from the Chapel portal. 
Strachey was so very, very tired. 
Nonetheless. He’d been spotted. 
‘Ahoy, Strachey,’ said Macmillan, in his cheery baritone. Strachey felt like
scratching off his own skin. 
‘Evening, Macmillan,’ he said, instead. ‘Sweet is the night air, and all
that.’ 
Macmillan was leaning back against a flying buttress, pale in the moonlight. He
looked, thought Strachey, like an annoyingly corporeal ghost. Strachey shook
his hand, gritting his teeth.
‘Something in the supper didn’t agree with me, I’m afraid,’ Macmillan said,
sounding awfully cheerful about it. ‘Thought a bit of a constitutional would be
just the thing. And I thought if anything could calm my nerves it would be
revisiting the scene of that service this morning. Really cracking stuff. The
best of the real High Church style, wasn’t it? None of this Continental
emotionalism, just good, solid—’
Strachey nodded; closed his eyes. Loosed his mind on its tether. Macmillan was
prattling on: something about the conversation at supper; how to be honest
Bernard’s points had rather passed him by, but how he was pleased, at any rate,
to be English, as the Royal Army was operating under no such cloud as the Third
Republic had drawn down upon itself. Strachey thought that if he had set out to
conjure an embodiment of the John Bull clerk—complete with his squalid little
ménage in Streatham; his bad cook; his wife with her calling cards, his
respectable copulations—he could not have done better than Dan Macmillan.
Macmillan ought to be in Ceylon, thought Strachey, irrelevantly, in place of
Leonard; and Leonard ought to be here, now, talking Strachey through his
Keynesian predicament. Leonard might be inconveniently impoverished, and
inexplicably enamoured of women; and, true, he knew Keynes as well as the next
man; but at least Strachey’s primary associations with him were ones of
intelligence and friendship, and didn’t involve Leonard being sodomised in
deathly silence in Keynes’s schoolboy bedroom. 
‘—really, the worst and most dangerous excesses of the Papist French,’
Macmillan was saying. ‘I mean to say. This is what comes of—of cloistering
monks, and eating vegetables raw.’
Mon Dieu, thought Strachey.
‘You probably expect a carrot boiled for two hours together,’ he said.
‘I—,’ said Macmillan, but Strachey spoke over him, feeling reckless and wild in
the lee of the Chapel. 
‘It must have bothered you, then,’ he said. ‘To know that Keynes was—was
writing it all down.’
‘I—,’ said Macmillan, again. ‘Pardon?’
‘That he was writing it all down,’ Strachey said. ‘Everything you both got up
to, in his rooms at Eton. Did he keep you appraised of your running tally? So
that you could comport yourself, shall we say, with an eye toward
advancement?’ 
Macmillan was backing toward the Chapel’s outer wall, eyes wide.
‘Ruthless efficiency,’ said Strachey, ‘in the face of a regimented challenge
is, after all, the proper Englishman’s opportunity to shine.’
Macmillan’s pale face just gaped at him. It was delicious, really. The first
proper satisfaction Strachey’d gleaned in months. He moved forward, grinning.
His steps crunched on the gravel.
‘I mean to say,’ he went on. He was less than a foot from Macmillan, now. ‘If
he did, it must have been a rather one-sided conversation. From what he told
me, you couldn’t even talk about it, during. Swithinbank can laugh it off all
he wants, but you must not have liked it.’ 
‘What did he,’ stammered Macmillan. ‘What did he say I—.’ 
He was swallowing convulsively, staring into Strachey’s eyes. Strachey stepped
forward again. Backed Macmillan right up against the flying buttress with his
hands bracketing Macmillan’s head, his heart beating. 
‘Maynard told me,’ Strachey said, ‘that you let him thoroughlydebauch you,’
leaning in to nip at Macmillan’s ear, ‘in his rooms,’ lowering his voice, ‘in
the tattered remnants of your sailor suit.’
Macmillan made a spluttering, indignant noise. He sounded like a City
solicitor, found out for embezzlement. Strachey wanted to just scandalisehim. 
‘He told me you let him bend you over his bed,’ Strachey said, into Macmillan’s
ear. He felt his own cock thickening in his trousers. ‘That you wouldn’t open
your mouth, but you came with him when he called.' 
Macmillan’s breath came hot on Strachey’s neck and his jaw. The moon slipped
for a moment behind a cloud; everything darkened, and Strachey had a brief,
visceral memory of that night at Trinity, Keynes’s strangely panicked pleading
about Hobby. 
‘He said you were shameless,’ Strachey said. ‘Said you squirmed all over his
mattress. And up against the wall in the boat house you would—'
‘Up against the wall?’ Macmillan gasped. ‘In the boat house?’   
Strachey laughed out, right in Macmillan’s ear; Macmillan started. Strachey
slapped the chapel wall with his palm. He wasn’t sure if he was laughing at
Macmillan, or at his own mistake. He leaned in, chuckling, shaking his head.
Their lips almost—almost—almost met. 
‘So the rest of it’s true, then?’ Strachey breathed. ‘All the rest of that
sordid little story? 
Macmillan made a pained noise. Strachey pressed his hips into Macmillan’s hips
as Macmillan breathed fast against his chest. His mind was full of Keynes’s
voice and Keynes’s odd dark eyes.Macmillan’s hands were hovering above
Strachey’s waist, like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to pull him in closer or
push him away. 
‘I didn’t know,’ Macmillan gasped. Strachey laughed again; licked at his ear.
Macmillan nudged his hips into Strachey’s leg; then jerked them back and
groaned. 
‘You didn’t know he was buggering you in his rooms?’ 
‘I didn’t know about the journal,’ said Macmillan, almost yelling. He pushed
Strachey away from him hard enough that he stumbled. ‘I didn’t know about it
until later, until—until Swithinbank told me about it, later on.’
Strachey had caught himself on a retaining wall bordering the Chapel walk; he’d
banged his heel and put out his hand as he stumbled, and now stood half-hunched
over, breathing hard, staring at Macmillan, who squinted studiously into the
dark of the neighbouring trees. 
‘Ah,’ Strachey said. His hand was skinned. Hot anger boiled up in his chest. 
Macmillan didn’t look round. 
‘Pleasant surprise for you then, was it?’ Strachey said.  
Macmillan flinched. 
‘I mean to say,’ Strachey said, speaking fast, too fast, ‘to find that your
stolen moments of pleasure, few and far between though they were, and
undoubtedly plagued by guilt, had become the fodder for some kind of—of
demented experiment, some—some exercisein political economy. That must have
been a—a rude shock, mustn’t it, finding that the person you’d counted a lover,
who’d—who’d seemed so eager, no doubt, to get you alone in his rooms, had in
actuality not a scrap of poetry in his soul; was reducing you to—to numbers,
and charting you against all his other conquests. You must have been rather
uncomfortable, when you heard.’
‘Whereas you,’ Macmillan said, through gritted teeth, meeting Strachey’s eyes
at last, ‘merely accost complete strangers on hallowed ground, and make
assumptions regarding things you know absolutely nothing about.’
They stared daggers at each other, a full minute in the moonlight of St.
John’s. Strachey’s mouth was open, but he didn’t speak. In the end Macmillan
spat on the ground and stormed off, back toward Balliol. Strachey cursed. He
watched him go. He kicked the retaining wall so hard that hours later, as he
toted his trunks into the train station two days early, furious in the rosy
light of dawn, he was limping, still, on his left side.
 
===============================================================================
***** July 1905 *****
Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf
 69, Lancaster Gate, London
As for Keynes— […] I can’t help recognising that, in the obvious and proper
sense, he is my friend. Yet sometimes, when he says something, the whole thing
seems to vanish into air, and I see him across an infinite gulf of
indifference. That there should be anyone in the world so utterly devoid of
poetry is sufficiently distracting; and, when I reflect that somebody is
Maynard, I can’t be surprised at my cracking jokes on him with the Corporal
about empty biscuit-boxes, and yet. How well I know that he’ld do most things
one could think of for me, and his eyes——!
 
===============================================================================
 
It was rage. Rage, building all through the morning he spent in the chilly
station; all through the hours on the Varsity Line. He never could keep up a
head of steam; he more than half-expected his upset over Keynes’s ludicrousness
to fizzle before the Verney Junction. Instead he grit and ground his teeth
through Bletchley and Millbrook, and by the time he shooed the porter, with his
trunk, out the compartment door ahead of him, and set foot on Cambridge soil,
his hands and his legs were positively shaking with anger.
Keynes, he thought, directing his trunks back to Trinity. Keynes. Bending his
steps down Hills Road, toward King’s. Rage, boiling up under his skin like a
rash. He shut his eyes on disconnected images: Holroyd, looking up at Keynes
like a craven puppy as Strachey watched on; Hobby, with his hand down Keynes’s
trousers on Strachey’s bed; Macmillan, bent in half over Keynes’s bed at Eton;
Swithinbank kissing and kissing Keynes; and Keynes (Strachey growled, low in
his throat, turning into the Crowne Plaza), noting it all down. 
It was a relief, being furious. Being furious as he ought to have been; as he’d
told Leonard he had been—that day in March when he’d gone to confront—to see
Keynes. Furious as he’d tried to be about Hobby. But he was furious now: down
the length of Corn Exchange Street; turning into Parson’s Court.  Furious as he
banged through the doors of King’s, still seething, pounding up the stairs; so
lit up with anger that he didn’t cough, or call out, or knock twice as per
their arrangement, but simply flung wide the door of Keynes’s room and stepped
inside, not caring whom he might see.
Pausing only briefly, when there was nobody about.  
Buoyed along on tidal rage, he yanked shelves off brackets, drawers off
runners. All Keynes’s neatly-ordered shelves, he thought with a sneer; all his
horrible dusted chests with their fastidious compartments. They clattered and
clanged on the hardwoods. Books off the shelves and shaken out, dropped to the
floor with their pages bent and their spines broken. The wardrobe doors banged
back with a crack; he flung jackets and trousers off their hooks.
Socks—kerchiefs—braces went flying. He turned, panting; looked about him with a
kind of savage satisfaction at the mess. Wanted it worse. To think of Keynes so
tidy, so unaffected; doing up his flies on Strachey’s bloody bed. Strachey with
a snarl tore the cushion from the seat of the velvet chair.
But of course, he thought, holding the cushion: there wasn’t a scrap of poetry
in the man. And he strode over the books and braces to the bed. Tore down the
sheets and the coverlet, and lifted up the mattress. The moleskin underneath it
was mockingly pristine. Aligned precisely and obnoxiously with a pencil-stub,
on one side, and a flat tin of petroleum jelly, on the other. Strachey snatched
up the book; dashed the rest of it to the floor. His hands trembled. He thought
of tearing the thing apart.
Instead he placed the velvet cushion into its seat with ostentatious
calm—though there was no one, of course, to see him—and removed his jacket.
Rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and sat himself down amongst the wreckage of
Keynes’s rooms, remembering at the very moment he opened the journal that
Swithinbank had said: Encoded, of course.
Strachey shut his eyes. Shaking with fury. Breathed out, and in. Opened them,
and looked down at the book, and— 
Of course. 
Rows of numbers where he’d have looked for words; neat little columns of
letters where he wanted names, all just sitting there, trembling in his furious
hands. He wanted to bite. He wanted to howl. 
‘Bloody—political—,’ he said to himself, as from the door a surprised voice
said ‘Lytton?’ and he spun up onto his feet. 
‘Lytton,’ Keynes said, again, frozen in the doorway, his tie askew. Circles
under his eyes. ‘I didn’t expect you back from Balliol until Tuesday, and
what—what happened here? Was there a—’
‘I met some old friends of yours,’ said Strachey. His voice trembled. Hateful.
Keynes was prodding a cushion with his toe; stepping over it; latching the
door. Saying, unconcerned:
‘Oh yes? Who—’
‘Yes, Dan Macmillan,’ Strachey went on, a little too fast, holding up the
journal, ‘and Bernard Swithinbank. They had some fascinating mémoires to share,
on the subject of your pastoral school days.’
‘I never claimed my school days were—,’ Keynes started, but Strachey spoke over
him, voice rising:
‘You never exactly volunteeredthe information that you were keeping a—a ledger
of your lovers’ vital statistics, though, did you, Maynard? Cross-referenced to
date and type of encounter? I feel sure I would have remembered—’
‘But Lytton,’ Keynes said, starting to laugh, with the hand over his eyes
inexplicably trembling, ‘why would I have done? Surely you don’t—’
‘Oh yes, why would you have done, indeed. Indeed. It would certainly have
called into question your anecdotes of wide-eyed fumblings on the sylvan green.
You made it out—’
‘—I’m quite sure I never said anything about the sylvan—’
‘You made it out,’ repeated Strachey, moving closer, treading on Keynes’s books
and baubles and cigarette cases, ‘to be all—all tender yearnings, and schoolboy
discovery between you and—and Macmillan, say, and even more so between you
and—’
‘It was like that, I—’
‘—and Swithinbank, good Lord, Maynard, you made that story out to be fit
for—for tea with dowager aunts in the Cotswolds, and all along you were noting
down figures about—about what? How many minutes you’d spent with your tongue
down his throat, and the relative hardness of his erection as compared with
other entrants?’
‘Look, Lytton,’ Keynes started, raising his voice at last, ‘just where do you
get off—,’ but Strachey couldn’t stop now he had Keynes off-kilter. Now he’d
backed him up almost to the dividing wall, both their feet tangled in shirts
and neckties: white cotton and red silk. Strachey hoped viciously that they
destroyed the lot.
‘Do you carry it about with you?’ he went on, crowding up with his chest to
Keynes’s chest. ‘This—this book? Is that why it’s in this absurd cipher? Was it
in the room with us when you told me all about the moon and stars and whatever
tripe you concocted on the subject of Swithinbank? Was it—what? In your pocket?
In your jacket pocket when you were shamming drunk on a glass of brandy and
your—’ 
—your hand on my hip your mouth on my belly your dark eyes your shoulders
shaking your mouth your mouth—
‘But it was adolescent fumbling,’ Keynes was saying, as Strachey shook his head
clear. ‘It was just as I told you, Lytton. Only Swithinbank and I happened to
write some of it down, but I don’t know why you’re—’
‘—And in any case,’ Strachey went on, changing tack at speed as Keynes scowled,
stepping backward over a pile of trousers, ‘this—this thing was certainlyright
here with us, just in the next room when I was telling you my feelings for
Hobby and you—oh,’ Strachey said again, as Keynes choked on nothing and stopped
walking. Strachey almost strode into him.
‘Christ, it’s such rubbish, rubbish to be sodding an economist,’ Strachey said,
furious. The moleskin was pressed between their stomachs. ‘Does Hobby know
about this little side-line of yours, Maynard? Did he think it was all jolly
good fun? Did you deign to tell him about while he was—’
A crack. Sudden, and startling, and his mouth, his whole jaw stung burning with
Keynes’s slap. He was—he was winded, panting. Keynes crowded him back, back
across the room, with his hands hard on Strachey’s shoulders, eyes brilliant-
dark.
‘Let’s pretend, Lytton,’ Keynes gasped, pushing him backward, and Strachey,
snarling, stumbled. ‘Let’s pretend you’re right, about all this, that you’re,’
and he slapped him again, hard across his mouth as Strachey tried to speak,
‘correct about everything, let’s just—let’s just say I have a—a love of figures
in place of a heart, shall we, Lytton? Is that what—’
‘Not too bloody difficult to imagine,’ Strachey got out, twisting his arms up
and over his head to force Keynes’s hands off his shoulders, as Keynes made a
strangled noise and said ‘Christ, what a—what a respite it would be,’ and
Strachey ducked, and turned, and knocked his kneecap hard into the bed-frame,
not realising it was there.
‘God in—,’ Strachey said. He pitched sideways, awkward, onto the bed. He moved
to clutch at his knee, but was knocked back; was flattened on his back on the
mattress: Keynes’s weight had landed hard on his midriff. He wriggled; couldn’t
move. Arms pinioned to sides; hips pinned with knees. He twisted, and cursed. 
‘There are, you know,’ said Keynes, trying for a conversational tone though he
was panting, ‘compensations, Lytton, to being a—’
‘—A cold hearted bastard?’ gritted out Strachey, still squirming. Keynes
laughed; dug a sharp knee into the side of his waist. 
‘If you like,’ he said. ‘Enamoured of—of numbers instead of people, isn’t that
it? But you didn’t hear any complaints, did you, Lytton? From Dan, or Bernard?
You didn’t hear them—’
’Insufferable, self-centred—,’ grunted Strachey, bucking his hips up under
Keynes’s while Keynes held him down, and Keynes was—Christ, Strachey thought.
Sodding bloody bastard was—
‘—because there is something to be said,’ Keynes was saying, in something like
his lecture voice, infuriating, ‘for maintaining a certain degree of—oh—of
distance, Lytton: something of which you seem tragically yet proudly incapable;
but I must say I’ve never collected any data correlating a greater intensity
of—unh—of enjoyment in young men whose lovers, say, moon about under the stars
in raptures of poetic agony—’
‘How convenient,’ Strachey growled, twisting his fettered torso, ‘as you do so
enjoy a lie-in—’
‘—not like the correlation between greater enjoyment,’ Keynes went on, almost
grinding his erection down between Strachey’s thighs now, though the angle was
awkward and the air over-warm and both their trousers thick, ‘and a lover
who—unh—who pays some modicum of bloody attention, Lytton, to what the young
man in question might actually want, at a given—’
‘Careful, Maynard,’ said Strachey digging his elbows in, twisting his
shoulders, ‘an observer might think you’re approaching a moment of—unh—of real
emotion, you wouldn’t want—’ and then Keynes was on him and he couldn’t speak.
He was half-growling, half-shouting. Smothering with Keynes’s tongue in his
mouth and Keynes’s erection digging into his belly and Keynes’s hands pressing
his shoulders to the sheets. Keynes’s teeth were sharp. Quick and biting and
Strachey bit back, snarling. 
‘And you,’ Keynes said, pulling away at last, his cheek and his lip teeth-
bruised. He stretched out over him so he could keep Strachey’s shoulder pinned
with one hand, and reach down with the other. Strachey’s whole body felt tight
with blood; heated and hard and stretched to breaking. He still couldn’t move
his hands.
‘Christ, Lytton,’ said Keynes, ‘you think you’re a challenge? All those letters
you write to Leonard about—,’ and he was sitting on Strachey’s knees, now,
fumbling with Strachey’s trouser flies, ‘—about if only you could be a duchess,
if only you could ride in a carriage in petticoats,’ and he jerked him hard and
fast with his cruel soft scholar’s fingers, ‘petticoats, for Christ’s sake,’ as
Strachey struggled, and groaned.
‘Don’t tell me, Maynard,’ he gritted out, ‘I’ll be treated to a presentation
next, with—charts, and—numerical breakdowns and oh bloody hell—’ 
‘Yes?’ Keynes laughed. ‘Yes?’ He kept-kept touching him. Hard. Brutal. It still
felt like fighting him even moving together, even thrusting into his hands
instead of away. Strachey growled. Keynes dropped his head and bit at
Strachey’s lips, never stopping with his hand; sucked the breath out of
Strachey’s lungs and then pulled back and turned it into words. 
‘You’re so obvious you may as well beg for it, Lytton,’ he said. ‘To be—to be
laced into—Parisian silks, so tight you can’t breathe, and—,’ Strachey’s voice
broke, torn from his throat, ‘—bent over some—some aristocrat’s—,’ Keynes
laughed, ‘—brocade chaise longue and—slapped until you’re red and then
just—buggered blind—’
‘Ung—God,’ Strachey choked. Ready to—to burst from his very skin. ‘Turn me—,’
he said, and:
‘Bloody Christ,’ Keynes spat. He scrambled back, with his dark eyes wild and
luminous and so wide they were ringed with white. He tugged down Strachey’s
trousers and his smalls in the same motion as he bodily lifted him and turned
him on his stomach, bare arse in the air. Strachey’s hands in fists in the
pillows, so tight he might rip the cool cotton to shreds.
‘I—,’ said Keynes, ‘it’s a nightmare in here, what did you do, you bastard—,’
and Strachey gasped out ‘On the floor,’ and a moment later there was shuffling
and shifting and then a smack! to Strachey’s left buttock as Keynes came back
with the tin. 
Strachey snarled. He yanked with his fists at the cotton pillowcase. He rubbed
his face into it, as Keynes shoved angry fingers into him and smacked his arse
again, stinging-hard, on the right.
‘You spent,’ Keynes said, ‘all week-end seducing my old classmates, didn’t you,
Lytton? Just like you seduced Holroyd out from under me, just like you—you,’
and oh—hard, wide, thrust in sudden up to the greasy knuckle as Keynes panted
and humped his clothed erection against Strachey’s smarting arse-cheek.
Strachey ground back into his hand and thought about Keynes coming in his
trousers, pulling on Strachey’s corset-strings. 
‘And then you—oh—fuck, I have to—,’ Keynes was saying, groaning, and Strachey
was groaning too as Keynes sat back, and then again, deeper, into the pillow,
rutting against air as Keynes spanked him again, flat-handed, twice, three
times. 
Then Keynes’s fingers were gone and there was fumbling and cursing behind him
as he spread his knees wider—wider—rubbing off against the sheets like he had
in Alys and Bertrand’s attic bed while Keynes’s voice in his head had said An
eight, at least, Lytton, rutting himself desperate with his mouth open and his
knees spread. A palm smacked down on his backside again—and again—and again—and
he fucked harder into the bed; his whole skin was already tingling-hot and
tight on his bones when Keynes pressed inside, jerky and breathless, and
grunted ‘fucking Christ,’ as Strachey cried out and fucked down hard and came
immediately, helpless, curling into himself on the bed.
He heard himself saying—saying something like ‘oh’ as Keynes stilled,
uncertain. Something, in a voice that sounded drugged and far-away, like—'come
on,’ so that Keynes gave a wild half-laugh and thrust into him where he was
sensitive and shivery.
‘Yes? Come on, then?’ Keynes said. 
‘You can do better than—than that,’ Strachey slurred. ‘I spent the week-
end—seducing your—ungh—'
‘Seducing my friends,’ Keynes agreed, grunting, speeding up his strokes.
‘Listening to them, all about my—' 
‘Harder,’ Strachey moaned, still shivering, wanting him to—
’And then you came back here and just—just ruined my bloody rooms,’ Keynes
jerked out, thrusting harder, but frustrated, uncoordinated, desperate,
‘Snooping in my things, I ought to—fuck, I’m—damn it.’ His hands were slipping
on Strachey’s waist; his voice sounded—sounded panicked, Strachey thought.
Sounded wrong.
‘I ought to—,’ Keynes was panting, ‘I ought to, I—can’t, I—,’ so Strachey, with
a twist in his gut and odd, unwelcome tears starting in his eyes, reached back
with a hand that was painfully soft, and touched Keynes’s thigh with fumbling
fingers. 
‘Oh.’ Keynes’s voice broke in his throat. Strachey didn’t move his hand. Keynes
pressed his thigh into it, pressed his cock deeper into Strachey’s body.
‘Lytton Christ Christ God,’ Keynes whispered. Strachey didn’t move his hand.
Keynes made a pleading, heart-rent little noise, plastered against Strachey’s
back, and Strachey held his breath while Keynes’s came fast on his nape, and
didn’t move his hand, and Keynes thrust—and thrust—and stilled, pulsing,
whining a very little in his ear.
‘Bloody hell,’ murmured Strachey, breathing at last, disoriented. ‘Bloody . . .
hell,’ while against his back Keynes, limp and wrung-out, panted into his ear
‘Hobby broke things off with me, this morning.’
‘Bloody—,’ said Strachey, ‘—pardon?’ 
‘Hobby,’ Keynes repeated. He pulled out and rolled off him to stare up at the
ceiling, arm bent over his eyes. Strachey turned and propped himself on an
elbow.
‘Broke things—,’ Strachey said. 
Keynes nodded. ‘Told me just now. Out on—on Midsummer Common. He’s attracted a
young lady, apparently. From Girton.’ 
‘I—,’ said Strachey, horror-struck, mouth agape. ‘And you—you let me go on and
on?’
The bottom half of Keynes’s face betrayed a grimace. Strachey turned away from
it to the window, squinting into the sun as the last twenty minutes played
themselves back like a slow, horrifying moving picture.
‘All that business about—about the sylvan green, when you’d actually beenout—’
‘Well,’ said Keynes into his own elbow. ‘In point of fact, I’m not sure how
sylvan it turned out to be.’
‘Christ in heaven, Maynard,’ Strachey said, ‘and the bit about—’
‘Personally,’ said Keynes, ‘I quite liked the bit about whether Hobby agreed it
was rubbish, sodding an economist.’
Strachey groaned; Keynes snorted. Strachey hid his face in his hands in the
shaft of early afternoon sunlight, and Keynes’s snorts turned to chuckles, and
suddenly Strachey, too, was laughing uncontrollably into his palms. 
'Lord,’ Keynes said, as Strachey laughed.
‘Oh God. God. Was there ever such a disaster.’
‘Well,’ said Keynes. ‘And what about, you know. The rest of your—,’ lapsing
into chuckles himself, ‘week-end? The parts that didn’t involve—,’
‘The progressive seduction and abuse of all your former school chums?’ Strachey
said, and Keynes laughed out. ‘It was quite a full schedule, Maynard; I was—,’
as Keynes bit him lightly on the shoulder, ‘—only there for two days.’
‘Surely,’ said Keynes, into Strachey’s skin, ‘Dan and Bernard weren’t the only
people present. What of Alys, and Bertrand, and—,’
‘Oh, you—you want to hear about my advice to Alys, do you? On the organisation
of her personal library? Or—’
‘Fair point,’ said Keynes, ‘not particularly,’ as Strachey said:
‘The incipient sapphic idyll of an English rose and an American harpy? Or—,’
‘Oh Christ, no,’ Keynes groaned, rubbing at his face. ‘That sounds entirely too
many females for my liking. Was it ghastly, then? Were you adrift in a sea of
beads and velvet?’
‘Oh,’ said Strachey, ‘it could have been worse.’ He stretched over Keynes’s
body to the side-table for Keynes’s cigarette case and lighter. He lit them two
at once, still propped up over Keynes’s stomach, and wiggled one in between
Keynes’s lips. Keynes, inhaling, made a deep and grateful noise.
‘Beazley was there,’ said Strachey. He leaned back on his pillows again.
Breathed deep of tobacco smoke. ‘Jolly and bullish as always. And Bertrand, of
course. Oh, and a painter fellow. Cousin of mine, actually, though I haven't
seen him in years.’
‘Young?’ 
‘Mmm,’ Strachey agreed. ‘Quite good-looking, though he was off to the fields
more often than not. Grant, I believe. Duncan Grant.’
‘You should introduce me,’ Keynes said. ‘Now Hobby’s thrown me over, and you’ve
ruined all my old flames for other men.’ 
Strachey groaned. ‘More like frightened them off any whiff of Cambridge,’ he
said. ‘Lord, Maynard, I acted abominably.’
‘No doubt,’ said Keynes. His left hand traced absently the veins on the back of
Strachey’s right wrist. ‘No doubt you did.’
They lay in silence for a minute, then two. In the early afternoon light the
smoke curled up in tendrils. King’s, off-season and at one in the afternoon,
was uncommonly quiet. Strachey supposed everyone was at dinner. What a strange
thought.
‘Only one in the afternoon,’ said Keynes, stubbing out his cigarette at last,
and rousing himself to a sitting position. ‘I must say, I’ve been quite
efficient today. Two letters written this morning, breakfasted with Moore,
jilted by my lover, had a row with and fucked my—.’ He tugged at his own hair,
not meeting Strachey’s eyes.
‘Friend,’ said Strachey. 
Around his wrist Keynes’s fingers tightened, then released. 
‘Yes,’ Strachey went on, yawning and stretching. ‘Good show, Maynard. Excellent
reading material in all your various journals, today.’
Keynes chuckled. 
‘Heaven protect us,’ he said, ‘from what the evening might hold.’
 
 
 
**** Notes ****
   1. First things first: the letter fragments are all real, from actual
      letters written by Lytton Strachey. You can see that a) most of the
      events here more or less happened as written, and b) the Keynes/Strachey
      sexual tension and rivalry pretty much writes itself. Bless the
      Bloomsburies for being such gossips. I would never dare to put such a
      crazy coincidence as “Character gets told about previous sexual partners
      of a love interest and then COINCIDENTALLY ends up at the same house
      party as both men,” but as you can see, it really did happen just that
      way. It’s less of a coincidence when you consider how inbred the upper-
      class social circles were in 1905 England, but it’s still pretty wacky.
   2. The summary text is from a letter by Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-
      West, written on 18 February 1927.
   3. The chronology of the letter-snippets parallels exactly, for the most
      part, the chronology of the events in the story. The one exception is the
      final snippet, which was actually written in December 1905, about six
      months after the story’s final scene. I like it too much as a précis of
      Strachey’s attitude vis-à-vis Keynes, to resist using it as a final
      chapter heading. To make the flow smoother for the reader, I took the
      precise dates off the letters, but they are, in order, for all you
      librarians and research-hounds out there: 2 December 1904, 15 February
      1905, 28 February 1905, 8 March 1905, 13 June 1905, 5 December 1905.
   4. The Cambridge Apostles were (and are) a semi-secret intellectual
      ‘conversation society.’ They were founded in 1820, but became famous
      around the time of the Bloomsbury Group’s rise to prominence, because so
      many of its members had belonged. Arthur Hobhouse wasn’t the first mutual
      crush of Strachey’s and Keynes’s whose membership they tried to finagle,
      but he was the first one elected. Strachey’s editor Paul Levy describes
      Hobhouse as ‘a Trinity undergraduate whose curly yellow hair seemed to
      some of his contemporaries the brightest thing about him.”
   5. Jeremy Bentham was a nineteenth-century philosopher, who founded the
      doctrine of utilitarianism. He also looked like Benjamin Franklin.
   6. Descriptions of Keynes’s Etonian sexual hijinx with Swithinbank and
      Macmillan are taken with only the lightest embroidery from Lytton
      Strachey’s letter to Leonard Woolf of 28 February 1905, as partially
      quoted here. That letter is marginally less dirty than my version.
      Marginally.
   7. The Duke of Albany (and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) was, at the time, the 21-
      year-old Leopold Charles Edward George Albert, grandson of Victoria and
      Albert and relatively_dashing. He had yet to be deprived of his British
      peerages or to join the Nazi party, both of which happened later in his
      life.
   8. The Bernard de Cluny poem ‘Jerusalem_the_Golden’ is what Swithinbank
      quotes in Part 4. Cluny was a favourite of Keynes’s during his later
      years at Eton.
   9. It’s very difficult to tell, from Strachey’s letters, exactly where at
      Balliol this infamous week-end house-party of June 1905 took place.
      However, a short while later Strachey was back in Oxford, and wrote Woolf
      that he had lunched in the home of Bertrand and Alys Russell, who were
      casual friends of the Stracheys. (Yes, the famous philosopher Bertrand
      Russell.) It’s perfectly possible that the house-party could have been at
      their place as well, so lacking any confirmation, and needing a name for
      my host and hostess, I stuck it there.
  10. Thanks to Songster’s_Miscellany for helping me out with some popular
      period duets: ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden’ was from the hit musical
      Florodora.
  11. The Dreyfus Affair was a French political scandal that spanned over a
      decade, and hinged on the conviction of a French Jewish soldier on false
      charges, by the French army. It became a cause célèbre in France, with
      the more progressive Dreyfusards squaring off against the more
      conservative anti-Dreyfusards, and famous folks like Émile Zola writing
      impassioned pleas (J’accuse). By 1905 it had become fairly clear that
      Dreyfus was guilty of no wrong-doing; and in left-leaning, academic
      circles like those at the Russells’, sentiments were likely to have been
      uniformly Dreyfusard by this time. Which is not to say, given my
      experience of left-leaning academic dinner conversation, that universal
      agreement would necessarily preclude debate.
  12. Pretty much everything about Keynes at Eton referenced in the after-
      dinner-smoking conversation is true, and taken from Chapter 4 of Robert
      Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed (1883-1920). Keynes did
      give a presentation on perfecting the rules of the Eton-specific sport
      ‘Wall Game’ the same third (term) that he sat and won the prestigious
      Tomline exam; he did compile a report called Some Investigations About
      the Comparative Lengths of some Long Poems, which was much as described;
      he was banned from competing for maths prizes after his third year; his
      maths tutor was named Hurst. The encoded sex journal is also, believe it
      or not, historical, as is the primary, non-encoded journal for everything
      but sex, whose contents were also much as described here. The only
      liberty I’ve taken is that I don’t know when Keynes started keeping his
      secondary, coded journal, though it sounds like it was in full swing by
      some point during his Cambridge years, as it includes fuck-tallies for
      Hobby, Lytton, and Duncan Grant. I think it’s not at all a stretch to
      imagine that he might have started it at Eton while experimenting
      sexually with Dilly Knox (his first liaison, before Macmillan, and quite
      a piece of work in his own right), or that he started it in the aftermath
      of his breakup with Knox, while he was involved with Macmillan.
  13. Historical: this same week-end party marked one of Strachey’s first adult
      meetings with his cousin, the painter Duncan Grant (cast here as Flo and
      Nora’s painting buddy), who would go on to become one of the serious
      loves of both Strachey’s and Keynes’s lives. However, also historical:
      Strachey’s letters indicate that he was, at first, more interested in
      Swithinbank, with whom he corresponded briefly prior to beginning a
      correspondence with Grant. Also historical: his interest in Swithinbank
      lasted about as long as Keynes’s affair with Hobby. You can’t make this
      shit up, my friends.
  14. As a side note, Dan Macmillan is the same 'Macmillan' of Macmillan
      Publishers. He went on to publish all Keynes's major works, although not
      Strachey's.
  15. The Reverend Edmond Warre, headmaster at Eton while Keynes, Macmillan,
      and Swithinbank were all students there, did indeed enjoy discoursing
      from the pulpit on the dangers of ‘filth,’ without ever defining what he
      meant by that term. He is described by Skidelsky as ‘immensely muscular
      and immensely Christian. Keynes’s remembered quip about preaching badly
      enough to be an archdeacon, is lightly adapted from a letter home,
      written on 12 November 1899.
  16. The non-standard abbreviation 'he'ld' rather than 'he'd' is as written by
      Lytton Strachey. He was quirky like that.
  17. In a twist that’s hardly surprising at this late date, Strachey actually
      did write letters to Leonard Woolf about being a widow, and wearing silk
      petticoats. See, for example, January 4 1906: ‘One feels, whenever one
      sinks into the cushions of the vast armchairs, that one ought to be
      dressed in silk skirts, and be a widow. Isn’t it scandalous that if one
      wants to be one, one shouldn’t be able? I pray God to make me a rich
      widow!—With all his omnipotence what can God do?’
 
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