The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  I drifted through town. There weren't many people about, and the side-streets had the watchful echo I'd grown used to in a bigger, older city. But in Fore Street the market stalls were up, fruit and veg, cheap skirts and blouses, huge slabs of chocolate under plastic sheets. I looked at a rampart of fraudulently flawless produce (they always served you the sad stuff from behind): red peppers, red apples, pouchy tangerines with dark green leaves, dense purple globes of cabbage, a pyre of parsnips, trimmed, stowed end to end—I thought, Dawn will never see anything like that again. "Yes, sir," the stallholder called confidently, but I found I was crying and turned away with a half-spoken rebuke to myself.

  I walked on, past the George IV: I didn't want to meet people there. Past Levertons the jewellers, with their arcane boast "Belcher and Curb Chains 'Our Forte' "; past the rain-warped barrowloads of books outside Digby's Second-hand and Antiquarian: the stock looked unchanged since my school holidays, just more spotted and bleached. On the corner was "Colin Maylord—Antiques"—an original shop-front, the door set back in a welcoming embrasure. The sign said "Open", but it was wrong. I peered in, shading my eyes against the reflections in the glass. Normally spotlights drew richer gleams from the mahogany and old oak and heightened the sense of historic abundance receding unaffordably into the tapestried depths of the shop. But today the tallboys and chairs, the card-tables and clocks and dressers laden with Coalport huddled in the natural gloom, too much furniture, cluttered together as if somebody were moving house. I looked abstractedly at the figurines of musicians in the window, their price-tags demurely averted.

  I didn't know Colin well, hadn't much liked him, couldn't see why Dawn should have liked him—loved him—either. He popped into the back bar of the George sometimes, forty-fiveish, lean, straight-looking, in honey-coloured cords with turn-ups, suede brogues, striped shirts. He was plausible, unamusing, a genuine connoisseur of English furniture. Dawn more than hinted that he was no thrill in bed, but had the sweetest nature; he was certainly an angel to him in his first big scare, when he thought he was going to die. But he was not a terminus I could ever have predicted to the line of lovers in which I was the first and over which I kept a futile, regretful watch.

  Dawn was at ease in the shop. The last time I talked to him he was pottering around there, and we sat among the merchandise, me in a snug little Windsor chair with a £700 price-tag, him in the carver of an eight-piece Regency dining suite which crowded vacantly behind him and was marked at six thousand. At one point I watched him nearly persuade an American couple to buy a commode, and smiled at the dumb camp with which he pulled out the drawer with the china po still in situ. Later we stood in front of a time-foxed mirror, and I hugged him loosely, beefily, from behind. He was thin, seemed breakable, like something priceless he was selling. The mirror was meant for a mantelpiece, we should have been toasting ourselves at a big log fire. Our talk had been blandly constructive, but it faltered rather as we held each other's gaze in the spotted depths where everything was reversed. I thought, he is looking at his death. He slipped free and started talking antiques.

  He knew a lot by now; and if the journey of his heart was inscrutable to me I could follow the steps of his career more confidently. Perhaps it had all been a slow winding down towards this precious shop, its still, polish-scented air, caught in the tradeless doldrums of a deep recession. But for a long time it had seemed a different progress.

  He didn't work hard enough for his degree at Dorset; he got muddled up doing French and Film Theory and Vernacular Handcrafts and came out with a Third that caused considerable tension at home. His father was a workaholic insurance-broker who stubbornly thought Dawn should be the same. Instead he took a menial job with the Acomat Carpet-Cleaning Co. For a year or more that great rear presented in bedrooms and sitting-rooms in the Croydon area as Dawn moved around on hands and knees, applying his Deep Foam Cleanser to the wine and cigarette damage of innumerable teenagers' parties. Once or twice he found himself removing stains of which he was himself the author. In time a friend of Edie's gave him a call and he was magicked up to London to be a picture-researcher on The World of Chandeliers. I didn't see much of him then, though I knew from Edie about the editor of the magazine, and the affair he had had with him.

  When the affair was over, so was the job. Dawn was on the loose then for about a year. I had a sense of his giddy footing and fucking around, of the various older, richer men who needed to look after him. It was 1983. When we met again he was different, flamboyant, high on sexual deceit. Then it started to go adrift—a lover of his died with incomprehensible swiftness. Suddenly he didn't have any money.

  For a while he was the young man who holds up the clocks and vases on the plinth at Christie's as the lot-numbers are announced. He wore the porters' maroon apron with a certain flair, as if it might catch on; but would blush terrifically with a hundred or more covetous pairs of eyes on him or at least on what he held in his hands. One such pair of eyes belonged to a sexy Italian dealer with shops in Bath and Tunbridge Wells who picked him up at a sale of antique chronometers and fucked him within five minutes in the customers' loo. That relationship lasted for five years, with Dawn in the end running the Tunbridge Wells establishment. To me he was still a boy, but he must have had a business nous I didn't quite like to think of his acquiring. Then very quietly he made the transition to Colin. It almost looked as if he had been passed over, in exchange perhaps for a lovely bureau that hadn't been tampered with. But Colin knew he was ill. He fell in love with him and he had the kind of love Dawn needed just then. You wouldn't have known it as you sat bored rigid by him in the pub and smiling wanly at his pleasantries, but Colin found himself in giving and sheltering and taking care.

  In my third year at Stonewell Dawn started to appear on the little train. His family had moved to a village a couple of stops further down the line from Rough Common. He would put his bike in the guard's van, or sometimes just stand with it across the end of the carriage; he was fiercely attached to it. When we arrived at the school he would slip past the straggle of boys on foot with a quick ratcheting of the gears, head lowered, buttocks hoisted on the narrow perch of the seat. One Friday evening he took an empty place by me as we clattered through the leafy sprawl of suburbs homewards and we talked briefly of the merits of the different French masters. He was rather put out to learn that I and Van Oss, a tall pretty boy in the Lower Sixth, also had Dutch lessons from one of the French masters' wives. He couldn't see the point of that. Squashed up by him on the dusty moquette I got a bone-hard erection, though I'm not sure I put it down specifically to him. Any physical contact at that time was arousing, there was nothing you could do about it. But that may have been the moment when it began.

  Graves and I had stuck together; indeed, Graves and Manners had become an established schooltime partnership, like a famous textbook or a make of biscuits. Being nicer, weaker and more sociable than Graves, I was aware of an occasional disadvantage in the coupling. I'd have to disown him sometimes for the sake of the late-night hash and rock parties in one of the Raleigh rebels' studies; and the return engagements tended to be flops, with Graves coming back unexpectedly, full of sarcasm and envy, and making us listen to Vaughan Williams. Even so, he was my habit, and he couldn't be broken.

  We egged each other on into a language world of our own. It was Graves who located and nourished my vein of pedantry, and together, like mad academicians, we established a complex of unwritten rules and forfeits, making even our Latinist house-master uneasy about entering our study. The discovery of French Classical drama was a major step: after a term with our A-level texts we were recycling alexandrines and spoke with a marked sense of the caesura. Graves was very taken with the précieux, plonkingly translated into English: anyone who offended him was said to have "soiled his glory", and it was rare for him to refer to his feet as anything but his "poor sufferers". This fitted well with our pained avoidance of monosyllables and abhorrence of abbreviations. In a school where a typic
al notice might read "All RHJ report to BOC at 3 for TP" we held out for old-fashioned queenery and unnecessary effort. One year for the whole of Lent there were fines for using the first person singular: at weekends I would run up on to the common shouting "I, I, I, I, I" like a madman with a terrible stammer.

  And we wrote. Graves had abandoned his plans for the stage and was at work on an experimental novel, a completely new tack, the characters not only having no titles, but also no names: the men were identified by numbers, and the women by the various voiceless additional characters on the typewriter, such as # and [. He typed it at immense speed, with music on in the background, the carriage-return bell sometimes fitting in felicitously. I remained loyal to poetry, and alternated masked vers libre fantasies about the prefects with Wordsworthian sonnet-sequences on the seasons, the months, the w e e k s . . . I even started a sequence on the days of the year, each poem to be written on the day in question, but had dried up by early February. "The Months" was printed in the school magazine, and received Graves's most particular criticism. Aunt Tina read it there and worked up a mood of acclamation at home, suggesting, for some reason that seemed cogent at the time, that I should go and see Perry Dawlish, who was a friend of hers, and find out what he had to say.

  Dawlish would have been about seventy then, and was considered locally to be a famous author. If ever he showed up at a fete or sale of work he would be photographed for the Knowledge; and his rare appearances on TV programmes about writers of the twenties and thirties were also flagged in the local press: " 'I knew Merrifield well', Sir Perry says, and goes on to recall his three marriages and his lively sense of humour, which he claims some people could find disconcerting!" Dawlish was a baronet, but this didn't discourage a general supposition that he had been knighted for his services to literature.

  He had had poems published in the London Mercury when he was only fifteen (my own age at this first meeting) and Squire had included his work as a brilliant new star in his Selections from Modern Poets a few years later. He had written novels, too, which had a reputation for candour; and slender appreciations of Tennyson and Patmore. All that local people would have seen of his work was the Memoirs, remaindered inexhaustibly in Digby's window, and the thin bookmaking ideas he had taken up more recently—the text to some pictures of Royal London, an anthology of "The Kentish Muse". I knew little of this at the time, of course: to me he was the spruce aquiline old gent I saw hurrying through the town, looking up with embarrassed good humour through bushy eyebrows and smiling at strangers as if they had recognised him. Once or twice he had come into a shop at the same time as me, and I was aware of an unconscious heightening of tone, a kind of feudal relish on the part of the traders that I found silly but moving. Sometimes I passed him on the common. He had a neurotic papillon spaniel that aroused Sibelius's interest and would hurtle down the leaf-strewn slopes so that it and the whirled-up leaves seemed one. He would say "Good morning" or "Good afternoon", but I never for a moment thought he knew who I was.

  Much of his mystique for me came from his house. Blewits was named from the lilac-gilled mushrooms that grew in profusion in its dank spinney, and which he gave almost at random to people from the town. When I was a little boy my mother received a basket of them, and I remembered her anxiously pondering if they were edible, the gift of a good or bad spirit, and then hastily putting them in the bin. Gigantic beech-trees whelmed above the house on the common side and roared thrillingly on windy nights. In winter you could look down through them at the steep red roofs and shingled gables, the air full of rooks and bonfire smoke. In summer everything was hidden; the drive twisted through laurels and rhododendrons, the light was speckled and private. To visit the house was to have the magic access of a dream fused with the proud ordeal of winning a prize.

  It was late May and the mossy outbuildings were roofed with fallen horse-chestnut flowers. I thought they would be fun to explore, those sheds with small cobwebbed windows and sometimes a chimney: more fun than talking to Sir Perry Dawlish. "Good afternoon, Sir Perry," I kept rehearsing, on my aunt's anxious prompting. "No more cake, thank you, Sir Perry." I had a high regard for "The Months" but even so was not fully convinced that this famous old writer, who had actually known Gordon Bottomley, would want to spend much time on them.

  The house was very gloomy inside. I was aware that it was a romantic kind of Victorian house, which accounted for the dark oak and stained glass of the hall. At first I could hardly see and was impressed by the confidence with which Dawlish moved around. He had the busy air of someone unused to dealing with children but determined to make a go of it. His voice was high and enthusiastic, with the lost vowel-sounds of an earlier age.

  We sat in a big muddly room at the back, a sitting-room-cum library that merged into a conservatory with doors open on to a derelict-looking garden. Again I had the sense of his being utterly, blindly at home here, whilst I was stepping cautiously between stacks of books, parchment-shaded standard lamps, little cluttered desks with only an inch or two left to write on. He sank on to the end of a sofa that was slumped and shaped to his person, and gestured me to a hard button-backed chair that resembled a corseted lady. "It's very kind of you to ask to see me, Sir Perry," I said. "My Auntie Tina sends you her . . . best regards" (I couldn't quite come out with "love"). "How is the dear woman?" he said, with a shrewd, humorous look that suggested we both thought she was a bit of a fool.

  "Very well, thank you." (This was far from being the case, I recalled at once: in fact she'd just had a cancer of the throat diagnosed.)

  "What a gifted family you are. Novels and belles-lettres: that's your aunt. Lovely singing: that's your father. And now poetry too. You must feel you live on Mount Parnassus." I looked away, abashed by the tribute, and running my eye along the bookshelf beside me: George Merrifield's Love and Earth, Ochre by Violet Riviere, Robert Nichols's Amelia, More Verses by Wayland Strong. The dust lay thick along their tops, like blue-grey felt, but still . . . real books, by real poets. I knew Merrifield's sonnet on "Cider" from Poets of Our Time; indeed Graves claimed I had cribbed from it in my own "Autumn"; but to see the full majestic volume of the man's work was to come a step nearer to the fountainhead. I noticed a thin book of V. L. Edminson's and thought perhaps Sir Perry could clear up a bitter dispute between Graves and me as to V. L. Edminson's sex . . . "Do you walk on the common?" he asked.

  "Oh yes, sir, we're always going up there. I particularly like it at sunset. It can be quite glorious then."

  "Glorious—can't it. I don't know what I'd do without the old common. Paulette loves a run-around on the tops. My dear little dog," he explained. I decided against owning up to the bullying Sibelius. "So many different aspects to it, don't you find, the steep bits, the flat bits, the woody bits, the open bits. . . There's a bit for every mood out there! At this time of year the hazelwood is too lovely."

  "Lovely," I agreed, not actually sure which the hazelwood was, but caught up in the nervous enthusiasm.

  "Don't you think? I wander up there and sort out my ideas, as I call them. I dare say you do the same. Work out a poem in your head, then scamper back and write it down?"

  This was exactly what I did, and I felt privileged to know that Dawlish did too. At the same time I was fractionally put out to think that the nature-mysticism I had evolved around the common's numinous gullies and heights was not my private cult, and had other, older adepts. "I feel as if I'm in direct contact with the Muse up there," I said. And when I sat in my special tree and waited for the folding star I did, I did . . .

  "Direct contact, absolute 'hot-line', I quite agree."

  I didn't think I could better that. "Have you been writing a great deal, Sir Perry?" I was making it sound as if a new book from him was what I wanted most—we all did.

  "Well, d'you know, I have? I've got a new selection out next week; and I have enough poems already for two more books after that."

  "That's wonderful," I said, imagining retailing these potent, probably
confidential, pieces of knowledge to Graves and one or two others.

  "Well"; he shrugged and burbled something about tempus something, which I took with a sympathetic smile. "Things start coming back to you at my age. I've been writing a lot about dead friends—and about my brother Tristram, he would have been a great poet, of course." He gazed at the floor. should I ask about Tristram? "We all jolly well had to be writers, and thank the Lord we all started young. I don't know if you know, but well, Tennyson . . . " And off he went into an account of the Dawlishes, the bishops, the generals, the poets, Swinburne, Henry James, Robert Bridges (his godfather), young T. S. Eliot, that certainly put the Manners Family of Kent in its place, and held me enthralled in the musty gloom. Even so, after twenty minutes, I felt my concentration ebbing, my features locked in a kind of sneer of astonishment, my poems in their plastic folder still clutched in my lap, like the programme to a different concert. I felt painfully ignorant of Swinburne and Henry James; we didn't do T. S. Eliot till next year. I was flattered but also somehow hurt that he had misjudged me and poured this well-rehearsed torrent of stuff over me.

  Later we went into the kitchen together, as if not quite sure what we'd find there, and managed to make a pot of tea. Again it seemed an honour to be doing these homely things with a great man, and so soon after meeting him: it would have been less impressive if he had had the servants I'd expected. There was no suggestion of cake.

  At last he made me hand over "The Months" and leaving me to browse went off to a chair at the brighter end of the room. I got out the Merrifield volume, which bore the inscription "To Perry Dawlish from 'the Old Rogue'—George Merrifield, May Day 1928: knowing that he will go far . . . " I turned to the list of contents, hoping to find "Cider", which I knew by heart anyway (it was the unobvious rhyme of oozing with refusing in the sestet that I had stolen); but it wasn't in Love and Earth, which was perhaps an earlier collection. I realised for the first time just how large Merrifield's output was.