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Conventions, other people’s opinions, the law, all appear laughable in the face of your desire, your drive to reach your love. It’s a blissful state. It’s fleeting, though, this feeling. Soon you realize that you’re walking in the rain, getting soaked, when you should be at your desk.
This passage is excerpted from Patrick’s diary entry from October 3, 1957, in Part II of the novel. Here, he reflects on the giddy drive he feels to see Tom, and he leaves the museum in the middle of the day to walk around the city looking for him. Even in this happy moment of early love, Patrick recognizes that convention, societal expectations, and the law are only temporarily held at bay by romantic euphoria. While in this moment Patrick feels free from any obligation to fulfill the role expected of men in this time and place, he knows the feeling will not last. The rain that soaks through his clothes represents the dreary realities of the society he has temporarily escaped, forcing him to return to work and to the conformity the museum demands. There, he must hide not only his attraction to other men but also the joy and expansiveness of falling in love.
I could not be the one to touch him first. We were finally married, but I had no right, I felt, to make any demands. As far as I knew, physical demands could not be made by wives. Women who pleaded for sexual contact were abhorrent, unnatural.
This moment of reflection by Marion occurs in Part III of the novel, on Marion and Tom’s wedding night. As Marion lies in the hotel bed next to Tom, she finds herself helpless to initiate the sexual contact she has desired for so long. Throughout the novel, Marion is frustrated with the social expectation that women should be passive recipients of sexual attention. Beginning in her teenage years, Marion feels a passionate physical attraction toward Tom. However, according to convention, she must remain passive, waiting for him to decide that he finds her attractive, to make the first move, and to move their relationship forward. At every stage of their relationship, Marion has been forced to wait and hope rather than act. Her wedding is the culmination of years of effort on her part, yet even then, she fears that making her desire explicit would be considered unnatural. In this way, social expectations constrain her behavior even in the most private domestic moments.
"Are you saying it’s just a financial arrangement? Nothing more?"
"Of course not. But to outside eyes it could be. And this way it’s clearer, isn’t it? Anything else is . . . it’s bloody impossible. You know that."
This exchange is part of a conversation between Patrick and Charlie that takes place in Part II, excerpted from Patrick’s November 4, 1957, diary entry. Visiting Charlie in London, Patrick finds his friend Charlie living with his lover Jim and is struck by their easy intimacy in the privacy of a shared home. However, when Patrick tells Charlie about Tom, Charlie urges him to be careful. This advice angers Patrick, who sees it as hypocritical. In Charlie and Jim, Patrick believes he has found a model of gay transcendence over the limitations imposed by a homophobic society. However, Charlie’s explanation—that he and Jim are only able to live together under the cover of an employer-employee arrangement—demonstrates that they, too, are subject to those limitations. In order to pass social muster, their relationship must pose as a convenient economic arrangement between a rich man and his domestic servant. Without this cover Charlie and Jim could not live together any more than Patrick and Tom could openly love each other.
