Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
‘I think I must have been a great innocent at school,’ said Willie, with a certain self-satisfaction.
‘We went out at night a lot of course. We used to meet up by the river.’ For an instant only I seemed to smell the damp mud and half-see the river moving in the dark, conspiratorial or perhaps indifferent. ‘You remember those trees down behind the CCF sheds. I don’t know what kind they were, their crowns were much paler than the rest, they seemed to gleam in the dark.’ The dense twiggy mass around the trunk, like some involuntary eruption of secondary life, the leaves dusty and sticky, dropping on to the verandah of the army hut, which by a trick of memory appeared with taped-over windows, as if in wartime. The leaves would be falling even now, the life of the school must still be going blindly on: perhaps kids were huddling at this moment in the smokers’ riverside bivouac beyond, or snogging intently in the dubbin-scented hut, unbuttoning each other in the glow of SM McGregor’s breathy gas-fire. This was an aspect of the corps that Willie, who had been big in the army cadets, was unaware of; and maybe the hut seemed a glamorous rendezvous to me because I had opted out, and spent those long parade-ground afternoons in the alternative vacancy, the smoky idleness, of ‘community service’.
‘Do you like being out at night?’ I asked, not because I wanted to know, but so as to license what I wanted to say about myself.
‘I haven’t really done it much. Except you know … in the car.’
‘It may be too late for you now. You need to do it when you’re a lad and you feel like part of a secret society, and an old, country thing, standing still and seeing night-sighted animals busying about.’
‘Not being night-sighted oneself …’
‘After a while you are. I can’t remember the individual nights, isn’t it awful, that whole phase of my life has somehow rendered down to a few scenes – being out under the trees, lying in each other’s arms looking at the stars, our naked legs in night breezes and moonlight, seeing a fox trotting round and round on the path by the gym, trying to levitate on the cricket pitch: you remember the levitation craze, I think I did actually levitate … and of course all the things we did to each other, well, it was levitation in a way, I don’t need to tell you what love’s like, but perhaps that’s why it’s all a mood or just an impression of blackness. I was too pressed up against him to see.’
‘You seem to have seen a lot,’ said Willie kindly, perhaps touched by my moist-eyed, slightly fanatical manner. ‘Um, have another drink,’ and he leant across with the bottle and I let him pour as if unaware that I had to say when. The lovely confidence of that tarnished gold liquid in my grasp, the sense of being provided for, of knowing one could come through. I plucked off my glasses to rub my eyes and saw the lamp-lit room and my friend’s pale face in an intimate crepuscular blur, like a little etching by Edgard Orst. And I felt the spirit of the time that I had summoned up pouring past me like a night-wind through woods around a lonely shack or long-abandoned Nissen hut where two boys squat and banter over a ten-minute fire of twigs and rubbish. My heart was thumping with the certainty that when I put my glasses on again Dawn himself would be leaning forward from the sofa, his teenage eyes and mouth unveiled by love.
‘Of course, we had to get away from Lawrence Graves.’
‘Christ, I’d quite forgotten …’
‘Old Graves was mortally put out by the whole business. I tried to make him feel wanted, and I used to have Dawn round for Bruckner and Mahler sessions in our study, but Graves got into absolute paroxysms of irritation if we even smiled at each other. He’d be conducting away and though the music was all part of it, Dawn and I could almost forget it was going on somehow, we were so full of our own latest memories and plans, and he would catch us smiling at each other … I think he wanted to kind of hijack our affair, take it over or blow it up.’
‘He was in love with you himself, presumably.’
‘Of course,’ I said impatiently, covering the fact that I had never quite realised that. ‘Of course. And it’s true that Dawn was never exactly brilliant or enthralling company unless you saw the point of him. I remember coming in one day and finding he’d been waiting for me for hours. Graves was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him as if he was trying to mesmerise him or get him to reveal some potent but unguessable quality he had. He was really trying to get down there with him. I said later how poetic a picture it had been – poetic was one of our permitted terms of acclaim – and he turned quite nasty. “Poetic!” he said. “He talked prose to me all afternoon!”’
Willie didn’t smile. ‘I feel rather sorry for Graves, being left all alone at nights, being told to turn his music down by Head of House W. Turlough, whilst his best friend, actually probably his only friend, was running round naked on the cricket pitch with someone who was clearly more attractive than he was. If I’d realised at the time I’d have been nicer to him.’ I gave a humorous snarl at this attempt at a joke. ‘What became of Graves, by the way?’
‘I wonder.’ The last time I’d seen him was vividly clear to me, shocking and secret. Or maybe it didn’t matter. Willie ought to know these things. We were both men of the world, of different but adjacent worlds; and we were about the same age now, though Willie seemed to me to have entered the placid, incurious middle phase, the semi-sedation of hetero expectations, whilst I was still running loose, swerving and tripping through the romantic undergrowth outside. He must be thirty-five, I was thirty-three, would be thirty-four in the week after Christmas; but as always I felt that my age was only a term of convenience, an average age, and that one moment I was donnish and past it and the next a bewildered youngster scarcely out of school. I took my glasses off again to spare his embarrassment.
‘Do you know about Mr Croy’s?’ I said.
‘No, is it a prep-school?’
‘Not exactly.’ I gazed at the overlapping aureoles the lamps cast across the ceiling, and saw again the astounding scenes in that house. It was years after school, it was after Cambridge, in my own brief spell as a schoolmaster, on a rainy half-holiday, when I made one of my irregular, urgent visits, and found Graves there, with a crew-cut and ear-rings, and the young assistant from Levertons flushed and greedily at work on him, ribbons of saliva down his chin.
‘Well, the thing about it is …’ I said.
‘What is it, sweetheart?’ Willie asked quietly. I smirked at the new endearment.
‘You see …’
‘Can’t you sleep?’
I looked across with a frown and blush of my own. A little blonde ghost had appeared at the sofa’s end, and Willie’s strong arm opened towards it and brought it noiselessly into his embrace.
‘Sit with us for a while.’ I pushed my glasses on again and saw the child wriggle and shake her head and hide her face in her father’s shirt-front. He rocked her for a bit, resting his chin abstractedly on her curly crown and gazing at the wall. ‘Sorry, Edward, do go on,’ he said, snugly, as if he were rocking himself to sleep. ‘She’ll drop off in a minute or two.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ He didn’t protest, he seemed to find security in the reawakened claims of fatherly duty. I knew he’d prefer it if I went.
Before long the child was asleep, or had wandered at least into the dream thickets on the path towards … I hunched forward and made half-pissed conventional noises about her beauty and temperament.
When he came down again I was waiting in the hall.
‘How’s that drink?’ he said.
‘I’ve finished it.’
‘Gosh.’
‘I’ll get back to my mother’s.’
He stood in his socks in the doorway whilst I turned on the step and looked up at slow-moving cloud and three or four stars.
‘See you tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to read, god knows how I’ll manage.’
‘You’ll do it beautifully. Do you want a taxi?’
‘I’ll walk a bit and perhaps get the little bus if it comes.’
‘I haven’t asked you anything about Belgium and your job and … I don’t even know why you went.’
I grinned at him. ‘Oh, the usual mixture of panic and caprice –’ I couldn’t explain to him why this was a place to get out of. I stepped forward with a shiver and slipped my arms round him and hugged him and after a second or two he gave me a comforting rough rub between the shoulderblades. I kissed him on the cheek and then pushily kissed his mouth, until he shook his head away.
‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. I mean I’m so sorry about everything.’
I waited at the bus-stop at the end of Willie’s silent road, wishing I had never come, and thinking about him with a sullen charge of sexual violence. The night was damp and autumnal, the suburban birch and willow leaves came flitting down on to the tarmac, gathered in puddles or were swept about by the breeze in little dying sallies. I stood reading a notice about August Bank Holiday excursions to Brighton, Eastbourne and Dover. At the top a red bus surged forward in steeply exaggerated perspective and a cheery driver raised his cap – oh, the blind future tense of old announcements! How wrong it was to disclaim our adolescence, to wince at its gaucheries and ignorance, when we would be lucky to recapture its first-hand vividness and certainty. I read the schedule with a quickly gratified eye for misprints, then scuffed around, uncertain whether to start walking. It was the odd economics of time, the way waste demanded more waste, like cruising a boy on the street or just waiting for someone, anyone, up on the common on a summer night, not knowing if further waiting was merely adding to the tally of lost time or if it was the essential prelude to a pleasure that would be all the greater for the falterings of hope that came before it.
At Stonewell each year we had a field-day when the boys were divided into squads and despatched on surreal errands to test their initiative: bring back a letter signed by a bishop, or souvenirs from six Cinque Ports, present a baby to a master in disguise on Beachy Head. A kind of home-sickness coloured the early phase of the day. Hitch-hiking was forbidden, and whilst a few such as Dawn slipped away by bike, the rest of us amassed in sprawling bands at bus-stops and the local station, as if reluctant to separate, hoping feebly to tag along with our rivals, or to absorb the good luck, the slightly manic confidence of the two or three who were already making with maps, cameras and phone-calls to high-placed relations. But when we were an hour or two away from school, forlornly tramping up to the gates of top-security dockyards or trespassing through woodland in search of sham ruins, anxiety gave way to a guilty suspicion that none of it mattered, a muddled sense of futile freedom.
The days always took place in a perspective of failure, we never expected to get an interview with a submarine captain, and we were often stranded as evening fell at some inconvenient spot requiring to be rescued by the harassed masters in their station-wagons. Getting home turned out to be the real test of initiative, and we failed it. We waited at a shelterless bus-stop just like this, as the rain came on, playing basic games of chance with tossed coins. I remembered that once I was with a couple of others, including the palely introverted German boy Peter Rott (Tommy as he was known) who grew his nails into buckled claws and disguised the length of his hair by not rinsing out the shampoo: as the rain fell on his matted pine-scented head he began to bubble gently, and suds ran down his face like sleepy tears.
My father didn’t have a few more months, he had just over a year; he died in that month of shadowed insouciance that precedes the arrival of the A-level results. I was relieved that it wasn’t in term, that I hadn’t been called out of school to be told, that it hadn’t messed up my exams; but later on I mildly regretted the loss of the acclaim and respect that should have been due to me. By the following term, when I abruptly began to grieve, it no longer merited my schoolfriends’ puzzled consideration.
His ashes were strewn on the common, because he had loved it, but the idea seemed so gruesome to me that I stayed alone in the house while my mother and Charlie and my Uncle Wilfred set off up the hill, uncertain whether they were a procession or if they should go a bit faster, like a family out for a walk. They had chosen an ordinary workday morning, quite early, when no one much would be around to wonder what they were doing, or have to avert their eyes in sudden understanding and dismay. I hadn’t wanted to see the urn – more like my mother’s rosewood sewing-box than the samovar I had imagined – and found it hard to accept that my father, the same size, more or less, as I was when he died, could have been reduced to this neatly portable and disposable quantity.
I sat in a kind of frozen observance of my own in the sitting-room, with the silent monument of the piano, the massed records and the unsinging sheet-music – my mother had left a Bach aria open on the music-stand. From beyond, Sir Thomas Beecham peered out over his signature with a look of testy merriment that I thought inappropriate. I thought how much people know when they die: that canterbury full of music, not just known but gone into in some adult never-satisfied way that I couldn’t understand. I had always been too easy and ignorant a judge, and said it was lovely the first time, and also the second quite different time, and soon lost patience as he kept working it towards some future state I couldn’t envisage and which now would never be.
His going was so slow, and so unprecedented in my experience, that I found it hard to bear in mind or even to believe in. He was quieter than usual, hating to make a fuss, but sometimes coldly demanding. He was glad that I was getting on with things, racing out after minimal bursts of revision to meet my friend on the common, showing the stifled high spirits of a boy with a secret happiness; his occasional words of reproach rankled with me for days, since I knew I was spending less of my time with him than before; an unadmitted fear of illness kept me away. ‘Let’s have some music tonight,’ he would say, and catch my hesitation, my momentary reordering of my plans.
A large oval mirror hung by two chains above our fireplace. There was something aloof about it – it was never one of those mirrors that embrace a room and give it back to itself with a hint of strangeness and enhanced worth. Though I had become rather vain of late and conceited about my inky quiff, I tended not to consult it; but when we had a record on and I was sprawled on the sofa opposite, my eyes would dwell on the slipped horizon of the wall behind me reflected in its high ellipse – a sun-yellow wall like an empty beach reaching up to the sky of shadowed white ceiling, a birdless distance that took on splendour or desolation according to the music and the varying light of the months.