221D or THE VOCAL VIOLIN

Part 4 – Third Movement

Whatever misgivings I may have about facing Holmes the next day, they're not realised. I don't set eyes on him all day. The heat has not lessened and I spend most of the day sprawling languidly in my armchair reading, or sitting listlessly at the desk, chin in hand, trying to write. Linking words into sentences usually helps me sort out my thoughts. Holmes has often slipped me sarcastic comments about my "poetry" in narrating his cases. Today there's no poetry to be had, only the prosaic scrape of the pen. The words refuse to flow, from my brain and from the pen. At every second word the metal nib catches in the damp paper and needs to be cleaned – an apt metaphor for my mind, I think grimly. All day my thoughts have run in circles, grating to a halt at the image of Holmes from last night: playing shirtless, unfastening my dressing-gown, kneeling between my thighs.

Heat rises to my face and I throw the pen aside to lean my head in my hands.

Poetry! If my stories are a little embellished, it's only a drop of oil to ease the friction, a few grains of sugar added to the occasionally bitter draught that is Holmes' genius. Several times Lestrade has asked me, only half jokingly, how I can abide a man like Holmes, but the truth is I no longer know how to exist without him.

It's possible that physical attraction preceded love, but it's the age-old question of the chicken and the egg. When it comes to Holmes I'm unable to separate love from desire. They're as inextricably entwined as the acanthuses of a William Morris design.

When I leave our rooms my hair is damp before I've even crossed Marylebone Road. Sweat trickles down my spine.

The sky over London is opaque and dirty and the entire city is screaming for rain, for a good thunderstorm to break up the heat. I walk, and sweat, and swear between my teeth, and walk some more before I go home and collapse into as cold a bath as can be contrived.

xxx

When Holmes is still absent the following day I begin to worry. It's not his first sudden disappearance by far, but I know in my bones that this time he is not on a case. I knock on his door but there's no reply. When I open it a fraction and peer inside, the room is empty. Sheaves and stacks of paper cover every surface, clothes are strewn and draped everywhere, all of it pervaded by the stale, acrid smell of old tobacco. I step inside and look around, reaching out to run my fingers down a linen shirt hanging off the bedpost, touching it because it has touched his skin.

For the life of me I can't wish our encounter undone. I only wish it different, less like a casual, mindless act performed in a dark alley. If it is ever repeated, and I hope to God it will be, then I want us to be in full recognition of it, of each other, of us in relation to the other.

xxx

I've finished my lonely dinner and sit reading when hurried footsteps come up the stairs. A moment later the door is flung open and Holmes enters in a flurry of energy, swinging his violin-case and crossing the room in a flash to place the case on the window-seat.

"Holmes!" I exclaim, springing up from my armchair and knocking the book to the floor. "Where on earth have you been?"

"In church," he replies, infuriatingly.

"In – ?"

He bends over the violin-case and I can't see his face. "To be more precise, St. James church, where I happen to know the choirmaster, who kindly allows me to use the premises when the need arises. The vaulted ceiling offers excellent acoustics and, being a church, the place has the added advantage of being cool." At last he turns to meet my eyes, violin in hand. "My dear friend, please do me the favour of listening to the third movement of The Unnamed. I've just finished it."

He has the complex expression of someone trying to repress a jumble of emotions. I can see that he is pleased, exhilarated and very nervous, and much as I'd like to shake him, I take a deep breath and decide to set my irritation aside. His excitement is contagious. I pick up my book and place it on the side table, signalling my undivided attention.

"I'd be honoured," I reply.

A thrill, not entirely from pleasure, runs through me like a shudder. After the second movement I have no idea what to expect.

There's a quiet radiance around him, a bloom on his skin. The dark, electric glow of the night when he played me the second movement has been replaced by a softness, a paler light.

"Listen," he says, his eyes intense.

I sit back in the armchair as Holmes fine-tunes the violin and lifts it into position.

I only need to hear the first few bars to know that the third movement is quite astounding. The instrument sings on a clear, sweet note tonight, touched by melancholy. Again, there is a theme, a phrase played in its entirety at first and then broken up in pieces to be repeated, interrupted and paraphrased. The movement is adorned with two-point throughout, giving it a dark undercurrent; it's dotted with rough cadences, sweetly aching glissandi and the occasional short sequence of pure despair, clean and sharp.

When the tempo increases towards the conclusion, the melodic phrase from the opening sequence returns, transposed almost to viola register, making the voice of the violin simultaneously pleading and demanding.

I listen like I have never listened in my life. I hear affection and uncertainty, hope and fear, joy and pain, and above all love – overwhelming, all-consuming love, coloured and tinged by those other emotions but persisting through them all, strengthened by them; a love so deep it can only be expressed like this, wordlessly.

When the last lingering note dies away there are tears on my face and I clasp my hands tightly in my lap to stop them shaking. Holmes is breathing fast; beads of sweat are forming along his hairline and sliding down his temples. His hair curls uproariously.

We look at each other in the silence that resounds in the room. Then I rise and go up to him, take the violin and bow and place them on top of the piano, and cup my hands around his face with tenderness. At first I don't know how to speak. My eyes wander over the sharp features that I love, the arcs of his eyebrows, the acquiline nose and high cheekbones, the fine-lipped mouth.

Holmes has used his music to speak to me but I need words, as I always have. But just now I don't trust my own. Looking into the grey eyes, brushing my thumbs across his cheekbones, I quote softly:

"Once I caught him when he was open like Silenus' statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike – so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing – that I no longer had a choice: I just had to do whatever he told me."

I have rarely seen Sherlock Holmes blush, and it's beautiful to watch colour rise to the fine, pale skin. The tiniest of smiles appears on his lips as he breathes: "Poetry, Watson."

There is no longer any doubt or fear: Holmes, for all his disdainful comments about the softer passions, is in love. He is open like Silenus' statues and I can only open my own soul to receive the beauty.

When I feel his hands on my waist I close my eyes and kiss him.

xxx

Much later, we lie entangled in Holmes' bed, sated and drowsy. Every area where skin meets skin is slick with sweat and the sheets are damp and creased.

"We're not criminals yet," Holmes mumbles with his lips against the sprawling scar on my shoulder.

"Aren't we?"

"Well, yes, I suppose. Gross indecency. But we have yet to commit the worst crime."

Physically exhausted though I am, I reply: "I'm looking forward to breaking that law," and mean it.

Holmes laughs and runs his thumb along my jaw.

The love that dare not speak its name. All spring I've suspected that Holmes has followed the Crown vs Wilde trial as closely as I have. Neither of us has mentioned it. Now that we're free to discuss every aspect of it openly, we have nothing more to say. At least for the present.

We lie in drowsy silence, listening to the sounds of voices, hooves and wheels from the street. Holmes' chest rises and falls in a calm, soft rhythm against my side, his arm heavy across my abdomen. Unsure whether he's awake, I kiss his dishevelled hair and quote in a half-whisper: "This person is so peculiar, and so is the way he talks, that however hard you look you'll never find anyone close to him either from the present or the past. "

I don't continue the quote to its end with Sileni and satyrs, but I think of my fevered fantasies about Holmes in my own bed only a few nights ago. Life is a strange experience.

"Mmmm?" Holmes' mouth is pressed to my neck and his voice vibrates down my body.

I recall an item on a list I made during our earliest friendship, when I was still trying to catalogue and categorise the strange, fascinating creature that was Holmes: Knowledge of literature. – Nil.

"It's from The Symposium," I explain, smiling to myself. "Alcibiades on Socrates. Easily adaptable to Watson on Holmes."

His reply is a sleepy promise: "I will never speak against poetry again."

I laugh. "I'll hold you to it."

My fingers are slowly stroking his upper arm. Skin and muscle, tendon and bone. Poetry comes in many shapes.

xxx

In the early hours the thunderstorm breaks. By morning the rain has washed away the heat, bringing with it a more enjoyable climate.

~THE END~

Author's Notes:

"But once I caught him when he was open like Silenus' statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike - so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing - that I no longer had a choice: I just had to do whatever he told me."

Plato, The Symposium, 216e-217a

Translation A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff

"But this person is so peculiar, and so is the way he talks, that however hard you look you'll never find anyone close to him either from the present or the past. The best you can do is what I did, in fact, when I compared him, and his way of talking, not with human beings but with Sileni and satyrs."

Plato, The Symposium, 221d-e

Translation Christopher Gill