I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every drifting cloud that went

With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain,

Within another ring,

And was wondering if the man had done

A great or little thing,

When a voice behind me whispered low,

"That fellow's got to swing."

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal… To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

…

September 1920

There were footsteps in the corridor, resolving and dissolving as they approached and passed by without halt or hesitation. A door slammed with a metallic clank; someone, somewhere, was shouting. Mathias sat on his bed and stared at the wall, tracing with his eyes the tributaries and deltas of the rivers of cracks that spilled across it. It was Sunday, and the prisoners had no work on Sunday. This fact, both an observance of the Lord's Day and a small concession to mercy, brought him neither pleasure nor relief. He would have preferred to pick oakum until his fingers bled. He would have preferred almost anything to this dreary greyness, and this silence. He thrived on contact with people; here, alone, he was withering like a plant locked in a cupboard. For the second time in his life, he had been photographed, forced to clutch the board on which were scrawled his name, number and crime. Two photographs, two labels. Private Mathias Køhler, British soldier. Mathias Køhler, no. 25371, attempted buggery.

There were footsteps again, pausing in front of his cell, and then, before he had time to respond, a tremendous rattling of keys and bolts. Conditioned to be nervous of such things, he jumped to his feet.

The door swung open to reveal the coarse, humourless features of one of the guards. "Visitor for you, Køhler," he said. "A friend, or so he said." He gave a cruel smile, and Mathias felt his face burn with humiliation. The nature of his crime was common knowledge in the prison.

"Did he leave a name?" he asked.

The guard shrugged. "All I know is someone's there. Whether you want to see him or not, he certainly wants to see you."

It was with great apprehension that Mathias allowed himself to be led down the corridor, which was built of lead-grey stone and striped with thick reinforcing bands of dark, coppery metal. High above him, two metal staircases twisted like serpentine skeletons, leading up to more cells. It was an awful place to be, a painful and abrupt shrinking of his world to cell, dining hall, workroom and exercise yard, the only part of the prison that was open to the air. For a week now, the sky had been an opaque mass of clouds, and when he looked up, it was just like being contained under yet another roof. A week. He had been here for just over a week, and already the confinement was making him go mad again.

After a minute or two, they came to the door that led to the visiting room. It was miserably austere, with windows separating the prisoners from their visitors. There were all sorts there – some wives quietly weeping, couples having screaming arguments through the glass, children in their Sunday best with their hands pressed up to the panes. All were anxious, glancing up at the clock to see when the allotted hour for visits – two until three in the afternoon – would be over for another week. Mathias anxiously scanned the room to see who had come for him, and he would have been lying if he had said that he did not feel a guilty stab of disappointment on seeing that his visitor was not Lukas but Gilbert. Lukas would have been far more difficult to talk to, yes, but at least he had some understanding of the circumstances that might lead to the arrest of a sinner such as him. Gilbert would need things explained to him, and once that had happened, he would feel – justifiably – that he had been lied to. What was more – and here was that awful, illogical magnetism again – he wanted to see Lukas again, and tell him the last few drops of truth that still remained to him. He wanted to tell him the truth of all his infidelities and that, despite his efforts to forget, he had never quite been able to stop loving him. But that was irrelevant. Gilbert was here, and Mathias knew that, really, he should be thankful that anyone had come to see him at all.

"Well." said Gilbert plainly as Mathias sat down opposite him, on the other side of the window. There was a small hole to talk into, but they both had to stoop uncomfortably to reach it.

"Well." Mathias replied, lost for words.

"I never knew you were queer." Gilbert said after a silence that seemed to last forever.

Mathias shrugged. "I don't make a show of it." he replied.

"You could have told me, you know." Gilbert said, looking a little put out.

Mathias gave an exasperated sigh. "Gil," he replied patiently. "I just got arrested for propositioning someone who was openly flirting with me – forgive me if I'm a little slow to trust when it comes to these things."

Chastened, Gilbert let his gaze drop. "I saw you in the paper," he mumbled. "The local one. That's how I knew you were here."

Ah, Mathias thought grimly. The humiliation, crushing and total. Put a man's secrets on parade. Brand the pages with the capital letters of his shame. It was lasciviousness thinly and inadequately disguised as journalism; prurience unconvincingly masquerading as moral horror.

"Always knew I'd be famous." he said flatly.

Gilbert looked up at him again. "It said you were in for 'attempted buggery'," he said. "What did you do to him?"

Mathias shrugged, remembering his last and fatal drunkenness. A blade of fury whipped through his mind. "Nothing," he replied, his voice rough with anger. "I asked him, that's all. Never even touched him. He touched me, as it happens. That's why I asked him. That's why I'm in here," He paused as something occurred to him. "Sorry about the wedding, by the way." he added in a softer voice.

Gilbert managed a half-smile. "Never mind all that," he said. "We'll toast you," He leaned back in his chair. "Now I see why you didn't want to get married."

"Might not have been such a bad idea after all." Mathias replied, trying not to think about what he would be missing. He was guilty, and would be found to be so when he was tried, and his sentence stretched before him, unremittingly bleak.

"I'll be back when I can," Gilbert said, changing the subject with a conscious effort to be cheerful. "Anything you want me to bring you?"

Mathias shook his head. "Just pass on a message," he said. "To Lukas."

Gilbert frowned, confused. "Who?"

"Mr Bondevik," Mathias explained. "Up at Lille Skarstind. Tell him I'm here. He'll come if you tell him that."

Gilbert's frown deepened. "Do you know him?" he asked, beginning to guess.

"Carnally," Mathias replied. "Once, and too early, and for too short a time, but there it is."

And Gilbert, in whose changing expression Mathias could see the battle between public morals and private friendship, nodded wordlessly and then, in a voice whose weakness could not be denied, promised that he would do as he had been asked.

…

The days passed. Mathias drifted from cell to dining hall to workroom, head down, staying out of trouble. Each day the prisoners had an hour outdoors, traipsing around the exercise yard in enforced silence. They were caged, subdued; some of them could not even bring themselves to raise their eyes from the ground. At night, he lay awake and thought of the war, or of Lukas, or of nothing at all. If he was lucky, he slept; if not, there were hours to while away in regrets until morning came and the whole wretched routine began again.

He could, he supposed, have asked Gilbert to bring him his books, but he no longer wanted to read them. The poetry no longer brought him anything but pain; the spell that Dorian Gray had cast over him had been broken; the book held no more pleasure for him. It was useless now – there was only so much one could say about moral degradation, only so many times beauty could be revealed to be an illusion, only so nay times one could witness Dorian recoiling in horror from his own sins.

He had owned the book for eight years, from his slow discovery of who he was all through his mad summer's infatuation with Lukas. In the trenches, he had reread the scenes of glittering beauty and allowed himself to be transported; in the hospital, his abdomen tight and aching with stitches, he had found comfortingly familiar amusement in Sir Henry's amoral aphorisms. Later, and indeed until recently, he had seen in Dorian's anguish echoes of himself and, like him, had tried to distract himself form the thoughts and memories that he could not discuss even with those who shared them. The ink of the book flowed in his blood; there were long passages burnt, indelibly, into the fibres of his brain – the beauty of them, the suffering, the shame!

But no longer. There was nothing more that the book could give him. There was nothing that literature in general, despite all its incomparable richness, could offer him, and that was a sentiment shared by many young men who saw in the neat plots and reliable characters of novels nothing to reflect the chaos. There were new books, in which there was no God and no hope and the narrative was splintered and disordered, for not even time was immune to clamour and confusion of a world after war. People no longer sought comfort from books – in this cynical age, they wanted the truth.

And so he had nothing to read, and read nothing. Instead, he spent all that week charting the passage of time on the slow, heavy clocks that marked off with dragging ticks the sentence that awaited him. But that week, for once, he was not thinking of release, but rather of whether, come two o'clock on Sunday afternoon, there would be a knock on his cell door.

Mathias had once, at the age of seven or eight, been involved in a fight with three or four other boys. The cause of the dispute had long ago vanished from his memory; the result had been his three remaining milk teeth being knocked loose and him being summoned to explain himself to see the stern matron. She had asked which of them had started it, and he could still remember the cruel smile on the face of one of the other boys as he had – truthfully – denounced him. His anger at being caught had been almost eclipsed by the power that, in that moment, his opponent had exercised over him. From that moment on, Mathias had vowed always to tell his own truth. He knew that, in the trial, every sordid detail of his lifestyle would be raised as evidence against him, and he did not wish for anyone to have the power that that boy had had over him ever again. There would be nothing on show that he had not confessed to himself and, since he had no desire to burden Gilbert, who was so bravely trying to build a life on the murky foundations of the past, with the shameful truth of his promiscuity, the only confidant left to him was Lukas.

The knock came. Same time, same guard, same announcement.

"Visitor for you, Køhler." he said.

"Same as last time?" Mathias asked, his mind oddly calm. At the edges raged doubt and the residual anger that he knew would never leave him, but at the centre was the brightness of peace, like a Turner painting.

"Different."

"Give a name?"

"Only yours."

Mathias knew then, as he had not quite hoped, that it was Lukas. If it was not Gilbert, then it could not be anyone but Lukas. There was simply no one else in all four corners of the globe who cared enough to see him.

…

They did not speak straightaway. Silently, as if wary of overstepping some boundary, Lukas watched as Mathias sat down in across from him, and Mathias could hardly bear to meet his eyes. He could not have said which of them was more ashamed of himself, and nor could he have said which of them had more reason to be so.

"Your friend told me you were here." Lukas said eventually, his eyes on where his hands were folded nervously in his lap.

"I wanted to you to know," Mathias admitted. "I couldn't think of anyone else who'd care."

"He told me the reason," Lukas continued. "He said I was the type who'd understand."

"I'm sorry." Mathias said weakly. Excuses frothed up in his mind. He could have twisted the knife; he could have said that only soldiers could understand. Instead, he let the words stand naked and inadequate. He remembered Lukas's own apology and wondered which of them had done the worse thing.

"Tell me truthfully," Lukas said. "How many others?"

Mathias could see that he was hurt, and wondered for a moment if he should lie, then imagined Lukas in the public gallery as all the details of his sordid promiscuity were declaimed and recorded. Tell your own truth, he said to himself.

"Hundreds," he said, hating himself. "I don't know how many. Too many, I suppose. I'm sorry. But I only propositioned this one, I swear."

"Ah." was all Lukas said, as if Mathias had just explained something mildly confusing to him. He was composed; Mathias searched his face for an echo of his thoughts and found nothing. He was afraid, Mathias thought, of complaining; he knew that his ignoble wartime activities could be used against him at any time.

"I regret it now." Mathias mumbled.

Lukas cast a glance out of the window at the thick wall that encircled the prisoners' world. "I suppose you must." he remarked, and Mathias caught a glimpse of a sardonic wit that he had, perhaps, honed with his schoolfriends so many years before.

Mathias made a gesture that encompassed the whole room. "This isn't the reason." he told him. Lukas nodded, acknowledging that something had been said. The ghost of a feeling rippled across his face – sorrow, disappointment.

"I could have got married, you know," Lukas said after a while. "A second daughter, maybe, with a bit of money. It might have solved a few problems."

"But you didn't." Mathias finished for him.

"I was waiting."

"For me?"

"For you." Lukas confirmed.

"Even when you thought I was dead?" Mathias was flooded with abject shame. His one-nighters swarmed around him – the gleam of dark hair under an electric light; an archipelago of birthmarks stamped on a shoulder; a blunt white scar across a hand. And Lukas stood away from them, apart from them – someone better, in spite of everything; the one person to whom, for better or worse, he had returned again and again.

"Even then," Lukas replied emphatically. "Because I decided that if I could not have you, I would have no one else."

"So you loved me?"

"I did."

"And now?"

"Yes."

It was enough; it was confirmation. Mathias felt the memories of his affairs crowd closer – the heavy taste of wine, the dark sweetness of pomade. Their hands clung to him, each one claiming him. He imagined what it would be like to make a life with Lukas – if it would be possible, with all that they knew about each other. He could picture the nightmares, the sudden flares of anger and endless evenings spent confessing all his stories and Lukas nodding and smiling sympathetically in the thin, strained way of the alienated listener. Could they do it? Could they ever have done it? He knew that there were marriages beginning to collapse because the wives could not understand what their husbands had gone through. Why would he and Lukas be any different? And what about Emil? Would he come to live with them, or would he choose or be forced to remain where he was, locked in the secrecy of his own madness?

It was a while before either of them said anything. The minutes ticked by, spilling, flooding past before Mathias could even mark their passing. Someone shouted, then lowered their voice again, the sound becoming lost in the babble of conversation, harmony ducking below melody. He looked at Lukas and could not bear not to touch him; the glass, at that moment, was the worst torment of his incarceration. How beautiful it would be to have him in his arms again – a simple, chaste embrace. Could he forgive him? He must, for his own fragile sanity. But what about Emil? Emil, who had lost his mind and his beauty and the prospect of a future – what about him? Perhaps, if Mathias were to forgive Lukas, Emil would see it as a betrayal. Perhaps it was.

"You're in here because of me, aren't you?" Lukas said.

Mathias struggled to reply. The memory of his drunkenness and the darkness of his thoughts came rushing back to him. He had felt betrayed, that was it. Lukas had fallen ungracefully from the pedestal he had so long occupied in his mind – useless, emasculated, his beauty a cruel joke at his generation's expense. Yes, he had been truly angry then, unable to reconcile what he still felt for Lukas with what he knew about him. He remembered his tired proposition, his feeble summoning-up of energy. He remembered the cold bite of the cuffs around his wrists and the dullness of his mind, the dullness of everything, like the grey of the sea under clouds. Lukas did not understand what bound all other men together, and perhaps that was punishment enough. And yet, Mathias still saw the good in him. Lukas, it was true, had never killed a man. He had never marched for hours, blind with exhaustion, through earth that was moist and thick with blood. He had never cleaned another man's viscera off his bayonet and thrown the handkerchief away as if he had no more than coughed into it. But he regretted it – that was the crux of it. He did not glory in his escape, and he did not believe himself to be right in having not fought. No, what he had failed to do would stay with him all his life, just as what Mathias had done would stay with him. And, Mathias thought, in what strange world was it better to have killed a man than not to have done so? By what twisted moral code was such a thing acceptable?

In the end, he did not answer Lukas directly. "I was so bloody stupid," he said. "I think we both were, in all that we did." It was a relief to speak honestly.

Lukas inclined his head, agreeing. "We were," he replied softly. "Too late now, really, for everything."

Mathias shrugged. "We're still young."

"Are we?"

He shrugged again. "We're alive," he said. "That's enough for me."

"And Emil?"

Mathias paused for a moment. "Emil," he said. "Like so many others, is one of the great tragedies of the war."

A child began to cry; a prisoner's mother, dressed in the resolute grey of an older woman, leaned in to whisper something to her son. The clock ticked; two sisters in their early twenties bade goodbye to their brother and left, their narrow hips shown off by the new style of dress. The fashion was daring and without precedent, belonging to the tabula rasa world of jazz and abstract painting and cryptic poetry.

"Have you read De Profundis?" Lukas asked.

A memory flared – ancient, buried. It came to Mathias with the searing, stinging brightness of the sun that day under the tree. The dull thwack of a cricket ball being thrown and caught; the mist of condensation on the glasses he was carrying; Lukas his cheeks pink with the sun, reading. They'd been eighteen. What had they known at eighteen?

"I never learnt Latin." Mathias said and, seeing Lukas's sorrowful half-smile and the eyes that were suddenly damp with the pain of remembered innocence, knew that he too remembered the old, old words.

"It's in English," Lukas replied, a twist of tearful laughter in his voice. "It's only the title that's in Latin."

"I never get the bloody language right." Mathias said with a shrug, and Lukas smiled, not without sadness, at the memory. Yes, yes, he knew it well. It was one of their few fragments of happiness together from that lost idyll, England's Eden, that was the world before war – before they had done or not done all those things that they now so regretted. Summer 1914, they both knew, and that narrow column of luxurious years that had led up to it, would never again be viewed in isolation – never would people be able to think of tea and cricket and waltzes without the foreshadowing lying thick over the unblemished minds of the young men who had dressed in boater hats and blazers and known nothing of the world.

How they had changed, Mathias thought, since that summer. Emil, for instance – what he wouldn't give to have back that arrogant, chain-smoking boy. How he would cherish that lofty confidence, that intact spirit. Lukas – how he would have loved him to be as sinless as he had first appeared, and to have again the madness of young men's infatuation. As for himself, he wished only for silence and freedom from thought and – achingly – for Lukas.

It was some time before Mathias realised that neither of them was saying anything. Time was relative; as long as one remained unconscious of it, it would flow past, dimming the brightness of memories and silencing the voices of the dead. Or at least he hoped it would, one day.

"I'll bring it to you if you like." said Lukas.

"The book."

Mathias made a non-committal face. "What's it about?"

"It's a letter of sorts," Lukas explained. "Oscar Wilde wrote it when he was in prison. The title means 'from the depths'."

"Just the thing to distract me." Mathias said bitterly. "Who's it written to?"

Lukas sighed, his expression worn out by the misery of the two men he loved. He had another five years of beauty in him, Mathias guessed – seven or eight at most. That was the tragedy of pretty boys – so captivating, yet so ultimately ephemeral, like the trilling of a treble voice, unaccompanied, rising to Heaven by its own strength.

"A lover," Lukas said eventually. "Bosie Douglas. The boy was terribly cruel to him, and the poor man worshipped him until the end. He was the love of his life, and the ruin of him."

"I see." Mathias replied, not knowing what else to say.

"You like Wilde, don't you?" Lukas continued. "Mr Kirkland said once that he thought you must be clever, since you always had your nose in Dorian Gray."

"I've only read three books in my life," Mathias muttered, reddening slightly at Arthur's unmerited compliment. "You know it?"

Lukas nodded. "I've read it twice," he said – softly, tearfully. "It's a beautiful book."

Mathias wanted to ask what, if anything, Lukas saw of himself in Dorian, but that would be painful, and it was coming up to quarter to three, and there were more concrete matters to discuss.

Lukas too seemed to have picked up on the urgency. "When's the trial?" he asked, glancing up at the clock.

"Three weeks from tomorrow." Mathias replied, already terrified. His shabby defence was no excuse. His drunkenness was no excuse – rather, in the eyes of the court, it was further proof of his immorality.

Lukas leaned forward a little. "Have you got a solicitor?" he asked – quietly, as though it were a secret.

Mathias shook his head. "Wouldn't do me any good," he replied. "I'm guilty, Lukas. I did it. I'll get two years, no question."

"I have money," Lukas insisted. "The money I got for my war work. I haven't touched it. It's blood money. I don't want it."

"No!" said Mathias vehemently. "I don't deserve it."

"Why not?"

Mathias sighed, a sound like death, like the end of the world. "I was unfaithful to you," he said. "You waited for me, and I never even sent you a letter."

"I did far, far worse," Lukas replied. "Let me do this for you. If you have a good solicitor, you might be able to get a few months knocked off your sentence."

"No," Mathias repeated. "I'm disgraced enough without lying in court. Give the money to one of those soldiers' charities or something of the sort. Don't waste it on me."

"Are you sure?" Lukas asked, disbelieving. He fiddled with the place on his shirt where a button had fallen off and not been replaced.

"I am." Mathias confirmed.

Morally, he wondered, which one of them would society be quicker to forgive – the faithful war-dodger or the promiscuous ex-soldier? His military service would not count in his defence – of course it would not, when thousands of men had been conscripted. But it was all so terribly unfair. He had spent four years fighting for his country – couldn't they just leave him alone to live as he wanted after that?

"It's better that you don't come to visit me again." Mathias said.

Lukas stiffened, his face tensing up into its old severity. "How so?" he asked, a challenge in his voice.

"Just until the trial, I mean," Mathias explained hastily. "The guards here are rather too observant, and I don't want you being implicated in anything – you know, on account of what I'm in for."

"I understand," Lukas said. "I'll come to the trial."

"I promise you won't hear anything new there," Mathias assured him. "I've told you my truth already. I wanted you to know.

The visiting hour was almost over, and the wardens were beginning to ask the families to leave, some with more kindness than others. There was but one thing left to say.

"Write to me, won't you?" Mathias said. "As if I'm not in prison. As if you'll see me in a day or two. As if I'm about to come home."

"I will." Lukas promised. It was Mathias's own promise, his broken promise, the one that had caused them both so many years of suffering. How he loved Lukas. How, having loved him, could that love ever vanish or diminish? He looked at him and longed, once again, for the glass to disappear. A single kiss from Lukas, and he would have been content to spend twenty years locked away.

"Move along now, lad," came the voice of a guard, tapping Lukas on the shoulder. "Time's up."

Lukas got to his feet, his hands trembling a little as he put on his jacket. It was the one Mathias had seen before, the one with the patched elbow. He beckoned Lukas to the hole in the glass.

"I'll see you at the trial," he said in an undertone – then, after a pause, "My love."

Lukas's cheeks flooded red, but he nodded. "My love." he repeated.

They could have talked for hours. They could have talked for their six lost years, and for the two they were about to lose. But the hour was up, and all Mathias could do was wait for Lukas to pause at the door and raise a single hand to him, a flag of surrender. And then he was gone, and it was time for Mathias to go back to his cell.