Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
‘What colour is this pond? Stevens?’
‘Grey, sir.’
‘No. Van Damme?’
‘Lead-coloured, sir.’
‘Correct. And what are these trees? Stevens?’
‘Are they Douglas firs, sir?’
‘Firs will do, thank you, Stevens.’
The faint terror of being back in school, but now as a forgetful grown-up among teenagers primed like guns, overcame me, and I slipped back downstairs, leaving the ponds for another day.
Paul Echevin was coming up, but something made me shrink and look down as we passed, as though I might go unseen in the oaky half-darkness; a second later I hated having flunked the meeting I had already pictured to myself with pleasure, even excitement. ‘Edward!’ He had turned with a hand on the banister.
‘Oh, hello …’ I wasn’t sure what to call him.
‘You didn’t tell me you were coming in.’
‘I didn’t know,’ I said, with sudden force on the final word which surprised both of us and made him pause a moment. ‘I didn’t know,’ I repeated more sensibly.
‘Tell me if you’re coming again – don’t pay.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’
He started up the stairs again. ‘Are you running off now? Have you seen it all?’
‘I have to. It’s Marcel’s lesson in half an hour.’ I smiled and shrugged to suggest that that was life, but that it wasn’t a burden.
‘Ah yes. Well, come and see us again, won’t you? Perhaps you’ll join us for supper tomorrow. We’ll have a couple of people in, but nothing formal. I’m a bit worried about you,’ he said, nodding, whimsical but clairvoyant. ‘I think we need to feed you up.’
I’d just turned into my street when there was an annoying pip-pip-pip on a horn, and a kind of jeep, metallic blue, with yards of chrome trim, triple exhausts and gigantic tyres, pulled up just past me. It reminded me of the uncomplaining toys which tumble over and right themselves all day long in trays outside Oxford Street gift shops. I looked in and Matt was leaning across, trying to open the passenger door. Our relations had been cool and abstracted on the night of the Hermitage, so I knew he must be stopping to show off his ridiculous vehicle.
‘Hey, Ed!’ he said. ‘Jump in, let’s go for a ride.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a lesson.’ The mistaken diminutive rattled me. My mother had insisted on the full Edward all my life, and so had I – though my uncle Wilfred was allowed the deviation of Ned. Yet there was a pleasure to be had from answering to it – a hasty, holiday intimacy. Ed was someone it might be a relief to be for a day, under a sunny sky. I felt a frisson of recall, just half a second of access to a keen, lost mood – a childhood summer at Kinchin Cove, my brother nagging me to put down my book and play rounders, a beach bully shouting, ‘What’s his name? All right, Ed, you’re over there, Ed …’
‘Is he the cute one? We could take him for a ride too.’
‘He isn’t, I’m afraid. Not this one. He’s a fat little fellow with asthma.’ I leaned in at the open door. Matt’s right hand lay on the passenger seat still, its veins sexily fat and blue over the delicate bones, the nails shockingly bitten. I imagined it moving up my thigh as I sat beside him and we burned out of town.
‘Where is it you live?’
‘Just there. The white house on the corner.’
‘It looks very grand.’
‘Yes, doesn’t it?’ We gazed at it as if I was the lucky owner of the whole thing.
‘And who’s that?’
The wicket at the side had opened and an incredibly pretty boy with curly dark hair came out, checking his fly and looking pleased with himself.
‘Oh, that,’ I said wonderingly. Matt and I watched him go past on the other side of the street apparently quite unaware of our scorching attention.
‘Another of your cast-offs, don’t tell me.’ He had turned and was craning through the polythene rear window of the hood to catch every last possible second of the sight of the young man. Then he swung back with a grin of lust.
‘How did you get on the other night?’
‘Okay, thanks.’
‘You made out?’
‘Yep. I got lost for a few hours, but I made out in the end.’ He was nodding and staring: I was clearly meant to ask him the same question.
‘How about you? Did you find your builder?’
‘The fucker wasn’t there. Or if he was he found someone else first. No, I ended up with your friend, the Frenchman, the Moroccan.’ Matt looked at me narrowly, like a sadistic child, knowing his words would have some effect but unsure what. ‘Ed, you ought to look after that man. He told me that he loves you, and he is
wild.
We fucked each other every which way.’
‘Yes, Cherif’s good,’ I said, swallowing the passing heartburn of his remark. ‘But he’s not really in love with me. And you forget that I
am
in love with someone else.’
He looked at me sceptically, and revved the rough-throated engine a couple of times. ‘What are you doing this evening?’
I thought of one or two lies (going to a dance in a barracks, supper with Luc at a country hotel). ‘Oh, the usual,’ I said. ‘Chasing oblivion at the Cassette.’
‘Have you been to the Town Baths yet?’
‘Do you mean a swimming-pool or something else?’
‘Yes, the swimming-baths. The Town Baths. Why don’t you come with me for some hard exercise before your drinking begins?’
I didn’t want to get more involved with Matt; I bridled, as I often did these days with beautiful men (‘Don’t bother about
me
’) – and I was a clumsy, nervous swimmer. But the thought of a distraction from Luc, an hour or two saved from a night that would otherwise be rushed and lost in drink, made a sudden appeal. And perhaps I did quite like the idea of being stripped out with Matt and the ten minutes afterwards in the showers, chatting like straight boys and sharing his shampoo. I said I’d come, and took directions to the place without being able to concentrate on what I was being told. Matt gave me a wink, I slammed his door; and it was only as I watched him fight his throttle and catapult through the empty street on some imaginary challenge that I doubted if I had any trunks with me. Then Marcel appeared, slightly anxious, but with a new comic silly-old-me look to him that was far from welcome.
I made every effort, through the hour that followed, to be helpful to the boy: I was becoming a friend of the family, which entailed certain obscure but real duties; and I had started to see how Marcel himself played a part in Luc’s world and must be courted for access and information. I was quite alarmed at the thought of what he could tell me, the dreams he could unwittingly nurture or destroy. I’d lost the courage I had in questioning Luc, and paced the lesson carefully, making sure of each hesitant step, taking nothing for granted. The time was horribly elastic. While we toiled through basic irregular verbs, while I sat and waited for answers and gazed past him to the trees and church tower outside, the minutes and seconds seemed actually to slow. I had the sense that movement would be laborious or impossible, and that my voice would emerge in an ogreish growl, fractured into its separate vibrations. But when he lost me, when my mind ran over the whole story of Luc so far, when I thought jealously of Matt with Cherif, time looked dramatically condensed, it was all happening, fierce, bright and purposeful, like the top line in some great canon, whilst in the depths the basses pondered on the subject in inexorable slow-motion.
Suddenly, at last, St Narcissus was announcing the hour, its elderly clatter unleashing the rumpus at the school as lessons broke up and masters, half-relieved themselves, shouted their last instructions over the rising din. Marcel unthinkingly shut his notebook, in which he had been writing out the verb ‘to forget’, and beamed cheekily. He was still conditioned by the rules and stimuli of the school he had escaped; and seeing this I went to the window and questioned him amiably, as he packed up his satchel, about his time there and his friends.
‘Do you still have some pals at school? You know, friends.’
‘I have one or two.’ And how unreal it must seem to be kept from them and their routines and gossip by this square of garden and this dull canal. It was as if one of the classrooms had floated off in a dream and perched nearby, filling its solitary pupil with a mood of privilege and anxiety.
‘I should have asked you before if you knew my other boy, Luc Altidore?’
He mumbled, ‘No, I don’t really know him.’
‘Of course, he would be older than you.’ I turned and looked at him encouragingly. He was ready to go now and clearly waiting out of politeness, remembering perhaps that I was to come to dinner again, that he could never get away from me. ‘You must miss it all, Marcel, don’t you?’ I urged. ‘The companionship especially.’
‘It is a very clever school, but I am not so very clever.’ He shook his head, to say it was touch and go whether he was happier then or now; and I understood that he had not been happy either at school or out of it. I had known him from the first as a boy set apart by his illness, but I had at least imagined a hobby – in the simplest terms, stamps or model kits – and a friend or two he shared it with. But I could see that Luc himself would not be such a friend.
‘And what do you know about Luc’s girlfriend?’ I boomed roguishly, appallingly, and blushed as I did so. Marcel shook his head and took on a dogged look, as if the lesson and its catechism were starting up all over again. ‘What’s she called?’ I hammed on – ‘Sibylle something?’
Marcel looked down and fiddled with his satchel-buckle. He was flushing more richly than I was. ‘She is not his girlfriend,’ he said. ‘They are just friends.’
‘Not his girlfriend,’ I echoed quietly. ‘No, I suppose he is a little young to have …’ And what did Marcel know about girlfriends? ‘Well, I’ll see you on Wednesday. No, tomorrow night. That will be nice.’
‘He was never interested in girls,’ he said quickly in Flemish, as if the idea were too serious or shocking to manage in this difficult other language. I let the lapse pass, and hid away the longed-for but doubtful information to look at later.
A moment after the door had closed I felt quite humiliated to be acting the role of the buffoon, agonised into farce. I went to the front window and watched Marcel emerge into the yard below and break into a heavy run as if, sedentary and breathless though the boy was, he could hardly wait to reach the gate and be free of me. I knew instinctively the freedom that he wanted – not freedom to do some challenging thing, but to do almost nothing, to wander homewards through the mild afternoon … I stayed with my forehead to the windowpane and within ten seconds there was the slap of the wicket again, and back came the curly-haired boy Matt and I had seen earlier. He had been to the big supermarket and swung a carrier with a loaf and a bunch of flowers sticking out of it. He disappeared into the Spanish girls’ staircase and something told me that in the bulky lower part of the bag were cheesy nibbles, Cokes and Sprites and a beer or two for the boys. The girls were out now, as far as I could tell, but when they got back they were going to have a party! For a moment my gloom swallowed up my envy.
I opened the hanging cupboard and got into it, tussling lightly with my raincoat and leather jacket and jangling the unused hangers on the rail. I had a fatalistic need to know what I was in for, what crass intrusions of noise I was going to tolerate; as well as a complete curiosity about the boy, who seemed to me unswervingly beautiful and sexy just then in contrast to the shrouded and ambiguous merits of Luc, who was never interested in girls. But after ten minutes with my ear pressed receptively to the wooden partition, I had picked up nothing beyond the snap of a ring-top can, a few words, halfsaid, half-sung, and a smug reverberant burp. At last I thought I heard a gently rhythmic noise, and had him frowningly exploring himself, until I realised it was the shushing of the pulse in my ear. I edged back into the room and shut the door.
My route to the Town Baths was vague enough in my mind to take in the street where Luc lived without forcing, but when I came past the house I looked down nervously, and only glanced for a second searchingly into the ground-floor windows. Evening was coming on, and I could see nothing in the front rooms beyond the heavy swags of Mrs Altidore’s curtains. And on the first floor, something else, the gleam of a disc, like a lens, suspended just inside the glass and catching the light with a flash of animation. Better not to see him just now. The sudden ebbing of anxiety; and then the wallow as a questing wave of apprehension pushed into the inlet of my heart: perhaps that was what Wordsworth meant in a passage I would be teaching Luc much later on when he spoke of sensations felt
along
the heart – as if the heart were a sea-beach on which feeling rhythmically broke. I recognised a deep-suppressed cold fear of water and the schooltime echo of our high-raftered swimming-baths.
I would have missed the place if I hadn’t seen a brisk little family with rolled towels under their arms turn off just ahead of me into a covered alleyway thronged with locked bikes. At the end a guichet and an inexorable turnstile gave admission to a further, darker passage, a region of brown paint and damp-eaten plaster.
I hadn’t found any swimming-trunks, and so brought an old pair of army surplus shorts with button fly and turn-ups that some fantasy of summer had made me pack in England: they were my mowing the lawn shorts, my lying on the mown lawn with the Sunday papers shorts. They looked hopeless among the kids’ darting Speedos and the trim corsetting of the dads. I stepped out gingerly through the lukewarm footbath on to the white noisy poolside.
Part of the misery of swimming was that you couldn’t do it in glasses; the surrender to cold water followed immediately on the surrender to a world of vague distances and confused identities, and as I stood squinting down the lanes in the dim hope of picking out Matt’s dark head I had a moment’s foretaste of the fears of the old, as you see them smiling anxiously against imagined threats and half-heard ridicule. Then I jumped in like a child, straight off the side and holding my nose.
With my first kick from the edge the pockets of my shorts filled heavily with water. After two or three more cautious strokes they were dragging at my hips and I had to dart a hand down to tug them back … I felt with my feet and could just stand tiptoe. Not daring to haul myself out in a rash denuding surge at the side, I hopped and then toilingly strolled towards the shallow end, startled by the shout of a strong swimmer swimming laps, a wordless bark was all he had time for as his head plunged in again and I sprawled backwards to get out of his way, knocking into a stout woman with a stately, slow-moving head held high and a kick under-water like a mule.