The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  When we left the dining-room, in order to be shown M. Orst's library, we were witness to a most surprising ritual, in which after every meal not only the various dishes and plates but also the table and chairs, and in fact the whole furniture of the room, were removed from it by the servants, leaving it as an unsullied temple of his vision.

  The study of the Villa Hermes is a charming room, in which M. Orst conducts his business with those connoisseurs who follow and collect his work, and which contains the large cabinet in which he keeps his prints. We remarked that the drawers of this cabinet were somewhat cryptically labelled with Hebrew hieroglyphs; and it was with some humour that M. Orst, noticing our eyes upon it, declared "that no one would ever know what lay in there", and that many a rich collector had offered him a fortune for a chance to choose some item from among its contents. He did, however, throw open a further door into his "dark room", most magnificently equipped for the treatment of photographic plates, and which seemed to us indeed to be the dark crucible of his art.

  I turned to the photograph at the head of the article: it was grey on grey, the windows pewtery and opaque, the dead light of certain spring days. The young trees in the garden in front were orderly, suburban. "Une petite forteresse de reve", one old acquaintance had called it; another saw it as a crystallisation of Orst's cold, loyal nature, his "British" reserve and desire not to be too intimately known. For some reason I found myself thinking of it on the morning of his death: I imagined Paul running, cycling, to the house and hearing the news, a doctor making a brief last visit; and then the servants who communicated by gesture, stunned into natural silence, closing curtains and shutters, while the telephone rang, and the tables and chairs were left in the dining-room all day.

  2

  Under Woods

  Chapter 14

  Rough common is a common and also a small town, south of London. The town was nothing much until the 1790s, when its principal inn gained importance as a posthouse on the way to fashionable south-coast resorts. A watercolour by David Cox, done in 1812, shows the white weatherboarded cottages with spindly verandahs that run along the common's edge; and in the brief broad progress of Fore Street, with its pollarded limes and Wednesday market, there is still a hint of the Regency sense that a good time might be had there.

  The post-road itself is now swept off into a chasmal by-pass, crossed by high footbridges that lead to new, remote parts of the town. I'd been there at night sometimes with people I'd picked up. The cars thrurnrning past below added a certain desolate glamour to my vertigo. The old part of town is all the quieter, as if its hubbub were subsiding to the wind-gusted calm of the common itself.

  The common has always been there, in its modest, unstinting way, rising beyond low railings at the end of Fore Street to rabbit-pitted sandy heights and thicketed folds. At the top it is suddenly steep—a scribble of path, a concrete bench and the blunt monument of a trig-point against the sky. From here, you look over a large pond, sandy-edged but black-hearted, and the beginnings of a wood that runs in a long dense belt to the common's further end. On a clear winter's evening the view from the trig-point takes in surprising distances of sombre downland and the skyward glare of the Kent and Surrey suburbs.

  The town stretches out along two sides of the common, westward past the Regency cottages on a socially aspiring curve that takes in the de Souzays' small mansion and other large houses before reaching the leafy dead end of Blewits, home of Sir Perry Dawlish; and eastward, descending past the row of mock-timbered villas where we lived to the crumbling thirties housing-estate, the Flats, with its useful late shop.

  I let myself in and shrugged my bag to the floor. In a few minutes I would lose the surprise, the disconcerting and exact sameness of everything in the house I had lived in all my life. My mother was out, it was dusk, and this was the silence that had been around us all the time, and that I had left her to. The rattle of the loose parquet, the jiggle of the door-catches and hesitant tick of the clock were sounds I had always known, echoing from surfaces my father had kept bare and polished for acoustic reasons. My mother had changed almost nothing in seventeen years—a new telly, a new Daihatsu Charade: and there were different library books on the hall table awaiting return, the latest issue of Common Knowledge, the local advertiser, caught in the letter-cage of the front door. I looked into the sitting-room, a smell of polish and lavender, the black mass of the piano, shadows thrown across the wall by the street-lamps and the tall unhusbanded privet hedge rocking in the wind.

  I hadn't meant to be back so soon in my room, with its wall of second-hand books, its air of determined privacy and make-believe. I glanced at the squeaky single bed; and there were the forlorn fauna of childhood, the one-eared rabbit and the dropsical trousered bear, passed by but still pathetically alert. I stood by my desk, where I had written a thousand adequate essays, and not a few sonnets, and looked down into the Donningtons' garden. Gerry had a rowing-machine now; the white buttock-scoops of the seat held pools of rain which gleamed in the unshielded light from their kitchen. As always, I opened the window before I lit a cigarette.

  It seemed Colin's car had gone out of control on the Brighton road: it was the 6-litre Craxton he'd had done up, he should have known the problem with it in the wet, with just a bit too much speed the tail swings round on a bend, then you're spinning across the lanes; you might be lucky and cartwheel down a high bank and thwack to a halt in earth and grass; or you might catch five or six other cars light ruinous blows and come out shuddering and vomiting with terror but okay; or you might shimmer sideways, seem to hover for half a second alongside the blurred rain-sluicing roof-high tyres of a twelve-wheeled juggernaut, then crumple under and be sliced to death.

  Edie had seen it happen, the whole thing in the time it takes to turn up the radio or glance aside at your companion. She was a bit behind Colin and Dawn in her Peugeot; she braked and zipped through on the hard shoulder to avoid the bucking and careering of the lorry, and then ploughed into the bank to dodge the front of the Craxton, with Colin in it, as it shot out from beneath. She sat quivering and weeping, gripping the wheel, and felt the thump in her back as the severed rear end of Colin's car exploded, fifty yards behind.

  It was a couple of hours later that she got me on the phone, at the Orst Museum. She described running along to the wreckage, ready to plunge in for Dawn, but the flames took her breath; she ran back for Colin and he was all over the crushed cabin as if he had been detonated; something in the engine was still churning and banging, the radio still going, "The Pavane of the Sons of the Morning from Job": she coughed up the words as if horrified to have known what it was, and having to tell me, and dropped the phone, but I could hear her wailing and gasping.

  They had been to Hove to look at a long-case clock that a friend of Edie's father wanted to sell. Edie, as the intermediary, had led them down, Dawn accompanying Colin for the run and a change of scene from the eventless shop. The clock was a good one, and Colin brought it back in the car—You just could with the passenger seat folded forward and the whole thing wrapped in blankets. Dawn had had to sit in the back. Colin knew the way home, and when they hit the motorway he overtook and powered ahead. Edie, slightly oppressed by this male challenge, had done her best to keep up. She thought they were doing about 85 when the spin happened.

  Dawn's real name—unreal, it seemed to me, when I read the newspaper report—was Ralph, which was romantic and adventurous and didn't suit him, but which he managed to accommodate by the age of fifteen to his strain of boisterous schoolboy shyness. Then he took part in the school reading competition, judged as a rule by a stone-deaf old actor, a pupil of the school during the Great War, well-known for his portrayals of clergymen. Each aspirant would take the rostrum, like a witness, announce his name and his selected extract, and then deliver it in a sufficiently loud and commanding manner to get through to the judge. Ralph, flushed and nervous, appeared at the lectern and immediately began a rather sensitive account of the Gordon Bot
tomley passage he had chosen from Poets of our Time; it was not until he had confided three or four lines of it that the old actor cheerily called out "Name?" and Ralph, humiliated, bellowed "Dawn . . . " adding a "by Bottomley" that was lost under a roar of laughter.

  The first day people tried out Bottomley, which seemed apt, as Ralph was a sturdily bottomry boy; but it was Dawn that stuck. After initial petulance he let it happen and blossomed into it, like a drag-name, much as he came to understand that his bottom wasn't a laughable encumbrance but a majestic asset. He never used the name himself, and up to the end would say on the phone "Oh, it's . . . er . . . Ralph here", with a hesitation like someone you might not remember, someone you had swopped numbers with in a club. And his dim manly father, though he accepted its currency, only ever said it by accident, choosing generally to speak of Ralph-ie, as a kind of token cissification. But his mother, a cheery, cynical woman who had worked at the BBC, took to it straight away, as if it explained things.

  I went up over the common with my mother next morning. It was grey and blowy and our macs were stippled once or twice with flung raindrops, threats of a storm we saw stagger aside and discharge in a slanting fume a mile away. She had the disconcerting habit of talking indignantly about something other than the obvious subject of concern: in this case my elder brother and whether she could afford to visit him in Melbourne. She felt very keenly that Charlie's wife had stolen him away from her, that she had set out deliberately to break the mother's bond with her son . . . They were married within a year of my father's death, so grief and joy were followed again by grief when Lisanne ("Always a calculating cow," said Edie) abruptly cancelled visits, in due course kept the children from their grandma and finally persuaded Charlie (who was an electronics boffin) to go for a job almost as far away as it was possible to go. My mother pined for him and the two little girls terribly; they were twelve and fourteen now, they wouldn't recognise her, she said. Charlie promised they would fly her out for a lovely long visit. Then Lisanne had written to say they couldn't afford it this year, Charlie wasn't doing so well . . . "Charlie's so weak," my mother said, and gripped my forearm as we started on the steep top path to the trig-point. She seemed somehow grateful that I at least would not get married, and so would spare her this particular pain. I remembered how at five or six I had said that I only wanted to marry her.

  We reached the top and turned briskly to look in each direction, as was the habit, saying "Yes. . . Yes,. . . Yes" as we checked off the different views. The church-tower was clad in grey polythene. The nearby belt of trees, referred to as Condom Copse in a recent letter to the Knowledge, was almost leafless, its secret underwoods laid bare. "Fall, Winter, fall," I said flatly, not really wanting my mother to hear.

  "You won't have any hills like this where you are," she said.

  "No," I said, and breathed in heartily.

  "You've made some friends, though?"—as if the two might be obscurely related.

  "Masses!" The thought of them was too agitating, a flare that made me clench my face for a second. "Paul Echevin, who I work for at the Museum some days, is frightfully nice, he's rather taken care of me and had me round for meals." For a moment I just wanted to tell her I was in love with Luc, give her the whole stupid thing and watch her grasp it. There had been spells of candour before, and she rose to them pluckily; but I knew she would rather not know.

  "The loop?" I nodded. This was the basic family walk, followed times out of number, that avoided the far end of the common, and brought one gently down through patches of alder and thorn towards Blewits, before turning back sharply and running home parallel with the road.

  I said, "I rang Dawn's parents this morning."

  "I ought to. I don't really know them."

  "She seemed quite calm." She had spoken in a slow, drugged, but practical way. They thought he died instantly, but then with the fire . . . well, what was left of him? "She didn't say so, but I got the feeling she wasn't sorry he'd gone like this, rather than . . . in a few months' time perhaps. And then he came on, I've never known how to cope with him at the best of times, he actually said, 'Well, no one can say he died of AIDS, Edward.' I suppose it will strike them in a day or two, some griefs are too big to take in all at once."

  "Poor things." I knew my mother had a sick worry about me not being careful—not having been careful. One of my candid moments had been when I told her my negative test-result.

  "She asked me to choose something to read at the funeral. It's rather difficult . . . not 'Dawn' by Gordon Bottomley, anyway, I think."

  After a pause, she said, "I love the end of Gray's 'Elegy', I remember I read that a lot after your father died. It reminds me of all our walks. Or you could do a bit out of Lycidas."

  "That might be too moving. I've got to get through it."

  "And what's happening about his friend from the antique shop?"

  "She didn't say. She may not know. People are often rather miffed if there's another death at the same time—it's as though it's been done deliberately, to steal their thunder."

  "Who wants thunder?" my mother said.

  I wasn't in the same house as Dawn; I was in Raleigh, which had a strong tradition of smokers, beauties and abstract expressionists, while he was hidden away in Drake, a dour, disciplined house that smashed everyone at rowing and rugby sevens. The school wasn't old or great, which perhaps explained why it had chosen such creakily historic house-names—Sidney, Frobisher: portraits of these ruff-necked adventurers hung in the stale air of the dining-hall. There was something touchingly childish about it.

  He had arrived a year before me, but I was streamed straight into 4A, whilst he, who had spent a year in the Remove, trundled up into 4B or C: so we didn't meet. I knew his parents lived near the school then and he cycled in on his sports-bike each day. I was a weekly boarder: every Monday morning and Friday evening I made the twenty-minute stopping-train journey out and back to Rough Common's tiny rustic station, a kind of cottage orne with an acre of commuter car-park. I can't remember much about him then. The only image is the end of a Colts match against Lancing, dutifully clapping the teams in, an air of madness and gloom, the clatter of boot-studs on the path, and Dawn in the midst of them, socks down, heavy thighs slashed with mud, sweat in his black hair and blue eyes, the nice heft of him—we crowded them consolingly and for some reason I patted his hot damp back as he passed.

  My great friend was Lawrence Graves. We went through school in tandem and both wrote a lot, though he always assumed, with his combination of names, that it was he who was destined to be a major literary figure whilst I would fill some ancillary role: in one of his fantasies I edited his poetical remains after his mysterious early death. He had the Lawrence-Graves Letters out of the school library on permanent loan. (There wasn't much demand for it.)

  Graves pleased me at the start, and even slightly unnerved me, by knowing about my father. He had heard him give a recital of popular Schubert songs in St Leonards and let it be known that though he had certain reservations it hadn't by any means been a washout. He already had autographs of Ronald Dowd and Elly Ameling, so one knew that his standards were high. Later my father sang the Evangelist when the school Choral Society put on a St Matthew Passion: he was in beautiful voice then, and sounded like a great singer against the scrawny background of child violinists and choristers uneasy in dynamics below mezzo-forte. I sat at the side of the hall in my own vortex of anxiety and pride, sometimes mouthing the words as if he might forget them. Occasionally, when he rose for his next oration and stood waiting, his eyes would sweep over me without apparent recognition: I told myself that he saw me all right, that he was bound by the exalted protocols of art, which dictated the ritual stance and the glazed formality of tails, black cummerbund and patent-leather shoes—the extinct indoors garb I would sometimes pick up for him from the cleaners or menders. The concert lights glowed on his oiled black hair and black-framed spectacles.

  I felt this event should make me too a figur
e of some consequence, and Graves hung back afterwards to get an autograph; but even so there was something risible about my father's fame. He had appeared on one or two uncool telly programmes, supporting a talentless "star" through various sickly ballads; and his record of seasonal music reached No 3 in the album charts in the lead-up to Christmas '71. For a moment there was talk of his having his own show, and our house was in the grip of misery for a fortnight. But the screen-tests didn't go well, he was too shy and serious; he came home hopping with shame and relief. I fantasised about his having a success that transformed our rather careful lives, but I loved him best for what he loved best, the patience-shredding hours by the piano, my mother stoutly accompanying, as he worked and worked on a song or a recitative. None of this meant much to my schoolfriends stuck in Mudd and Slade. After the Matthew Passion one of them gave a strangulated parody of my father's performance, not from malice but it brought tears to my eyes. A doubt had been entered, that could never wholly be expelled, that he was a figure of fun.