The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  Cherif came in about five and I was lifted by his reckless grin and ignorant confidence. We kissed and his jerkin was cold and slippery. When he came back from the loo I watched him approaching down the length of the bar—his cock looked lovely and lively the way he had it, middle and leg inclined to leg, I thought, transporting him for a second to the alien field of cricket. He sat down as it nudged into a major hard-on—a fact not wasted on the bar's arch-bore Harold, whose window franchise we had strayed into. He leant between us in a jet of pipe-smoke and said, "You're very lucky to have this young man, you know"—a remark which seemed both insulting and in some ways unquestionably true.

  "Did your lesson go well?" asked Cherif, almost with a note of mature concern for his trampled rival.

  "He was ill," I said, "terrible cold, we didn't have the lesson."

  "Oh. So what did you do all day?"

  Cruel question. "Well, I had Marcel Echevin in the afternoon. We did cloze tests. It was fun," I said bleakly.

  "What's that?"

  "It's when you miss out words from a passage and he has to provide them to show he's understood it."

  Cherif looked alarmed by this. He ran his hand up my thigh, and gave me a fluttered kiss as if to blink away all this stuff he didn't know or care about anyway. I went on, "I might say, 'Cherif Bakhtar comes from Paris—he is a .' And he will say . . ."

  " 'He is a very sexy man'."

  "No. 'A Parisian' is what he will say. It has to follow from what I said; actually that does kind of follow, I agree."

  "And I will say, 'Mr Manners comes from England', and he will say 'He is a very, very sexy man'. "

  I suppose there was a sort of wretched charm in this squashed joke. "I don't think he would say that, you know. He's in love with a beautiful girl called Sibylle. Unfortunately for him Sibylle is the girlfriend of Luc." I ran the name in quietly as a test for both of us—he gave a sweet cooing laugh he had, whilst I heard a drumming protest from my heart at the syllable, and the pain of his coldness, and the force of this supposition about the girl. Otherwise—I went on to myself, while Cherif had started talking again—why did he pretend she was not at St Ernest all those futile weeks ago? Hadn't he told me, even earlier still, that she was his closest friend, and set my prospects sickeningly askew? Why did nothing lead anywhere but to the stale air of this bar and the blond shallows of the glass?

  " . . . and it was really cold," Cherif was saying, "and it started to rain, and I didn't have anything."

  He slumped into an indefinably fictional posture—I'd seen it before, where he acted out his own neediness, made a quite possibly unconscious bid for sympathy.

  "You ought to have a proper coat," I said—like my firmly benevolent mother again. "That skimpy little jacket's useless." I was kind of fond of it, a street-market bargain of years back, fashionable only in a time-locked Third World way, the gingery surface coming off in patches, like cracked veneer.

  He shrugged. "Okay, but I haven't got the money."

  "Don't be ridiculous. You must earn good money, doing all that heavy work, whatever it is."

  "You don't understand," he said. "I have my mother and four sisters in St-Denis and I send it all to them." He made a new gesture he had at his disposal, parting his moustache with thumb and forefinger and sweeping his palm across his mouth in a way suggestive of secrecy or an only partial truth. It may sound odd but I liked the hint of pretence, it was a relief from his coltish openheartedness, even if I was the one to be exploited.

  "All right, I'll get you a coat," I said, knocking back the rest of my drink and handing him the empty glass.

  Alejo's shop was still open, though you wouldn't have known it from the shady discretion of the front, which gave it the air of a sex-shop or a turf-accountant. Cherif followed me hesitantly into the spotlit hallway, puzzled as I had been by the chic absence of stock. One could have, it seemed, a hanky, or a rubberised vest, or a single green shoe. Alejo himself was loitering at the counter, languidly folding a shirt. He looked captivating in racing silks and olive velvet breeches.

  "Hola, Alejo!" I called out gittishly, but it was enough to make him look and remember me.

  "Hello," he said, trotting forwards and kissing me Spanish-style on both cheeks.

  "This is my friend Cherif, he's feeling the cold, he wants an overcoat." They shook hands, and Alejo walked round him a couple of times appreciatively before leading him through the mirror that was a swing-door into the busy grotto of the shop. I followed on, warmed by my new role as patron, but also reaching down for a certain prudence, like a parent at a school outfitters. Through the speakers came Doris Day singing "Buttons and Bows".

  "Rudi, can you go on the till," he said to a little blond in braces; "I'll look after this one." Rudi whispered something and glanced across the room as he went out. "Trouble in number three," Alejo explained cryptically, and ran straight on with "Your friend is fabulous"

  "Do you like him?" I said, looking at Cherif as he walked along and shyly felt the sleeves of a rack of coats; maybe we could come to an arrangement.

  "Where did you find him? Are there any more?"

  "There must be some fairly similar. In the Town Museum, actually, looking at a picture of Heaven and Hell."

  "Well, I know which one you got!" I stroked my chin consideringly. "After the coat I'm going to interest him in some other things." And he sprang off to guide him, a hand confidentially round his upper arm, almost resting his cheek on his shoulder.

  I wandered about for a minute, idly flicking through the clothes on the rails. There were a lot of idiosyncratic items of a kind you'd never wear but that a colour-blind trendster might carry off at a party or club; there was plenty of leather, with weirder cuts and zips than my own dear old jacket; and there was a strong vein of Englishry, Tattersall checks and thunder-and-lightning tweeds. I tried one of the jackets on but it made me feel like Jimmy Edwards. A third assistant, who was very nervous but had learnt the basic cant of salesmanship and stuck to it through thick and thin, kept telling me it really suited me.

  I put it back on the rail and in the mirror beside me was my rival. I looked down quickly and then slyly peeped and saw that his smile extended beyond his own admiration of the black denim jacket he was trying and called ironically for my opinion of it too. "Hello there," he said. "We keep on meeting."

  I turned and gave him a black stare that I couldn't keep from weakening into residual good manners. "Yes, don't we just."

  "You remember I ran into you twice. You're English, aren't you? you're usually with that tall, fair Belgian boy. Amazing-looking kid." I felt sick of being complimented on the beauty of my companions. "I can't remember what his name is." He turned sideways to check the cut of the jacket and show me his compact backside—perfectly acceptable in itself but irrevocably horrible by dint of being his.

  "Hans," I said. He raised his chin and frowned in the mirror as if to say he didn't for a moment believe me.

  "We really ought to have a drink some time," he said, with the same menacing naturalness. "You know, two Brits abroad, mutual interests . . ."

  "I'm afraid I don't drink," I said, probably with a trace of beer on my breath. Probably he'd seen me in the bar when I was far gone.

  "Amazing shop this, isn't it? It's like a fairy grotto." He looked at me archly. "What do you do, actually?"

  "I'm a writer." I turned to see how my friends were getting on.

  "I don't do much at the moment," he said. "Well, I work out." He smiled and peeled off the jacket. I thought for a disgusting moment he was going to start working out right there. He pulled a bill-fold from his shirt-pocket and handed me a card. "If you change your mind," he explained confidently. I shook my head but he held it out till I took it, with invisible fumigation tongs, and walked off down the shop with it. To my confusion it didn't say "I am a noxious berk" but "Rodney young—Researcher".

  Cherif had picked a rather New Look full-skirted brown coat with wide shoulders and a tie-belt. It was g
oing to cost me a lot but I was determined to go through with it, without quite understanding why. I supposed it was a substitute for the love I couldn't return, or what's called throwing money at a problem and is always held not to work. He turned up the collar and stepped back to the mirror, to catch the surprise of his metamorphosis. And it was a different Cherif, bourgeois, self-conscious. It seemed to imply that further changes would have to be made: those old jeans, those dusty boots, that cap. Alejo's ideas were even more radical.

  "What about some new undies, to go with it?"

  "I can't afford anything else, I'm afraid."

  Cherif came and hugged me and I sniffed in the expensive and assuaging wool smell. "Thank you, my friend," he said. It struck me that it wasn't a practical coat for going to the docks. I supposed he'd carry on wearing his old what was it?, bolero?, to work and the coat would at once be elevated to luxury evening wear. The whole exercise was a useless indulgence.

  Alejo bobbed back with some slithery packets of underpants. "You can have one of these with the compliments of the house," he said quickly—obviously an offer to be kept from the management and the one or two other customers moodily riffling the shirt-shelves.

  "Which would you like, darling?"

  "He'd better try them on," said Alejo demurely.

  Cherif was helped from his coat and sent into a curtained cubicle, wondering if he was being made a fool of.

  Alejo drew me aside. "Whatever did you do to my poor cousin from Bilbao?" he said.

  "Oh dear . . . " I laughed guiltily. "Agustin. Well, I think I . . . " I didn't quite know what I'd done, of course. "What did he say?"

  "He was too shocked to say anything," said Alejo solemnly.

  "I certainly didn't do what I wanted to," I said. "I guess I just fell madly in love with him for two or three hours."

  "He breaks everyone's heart," Alejo confirmed. "And you know he is still a virgen—his parents are very strict and religious. All my queer friends are crazy about him, they keep sending him flowers and asking him to imaginary parties."

  "I haven't seen him around lately, you know he sometimes stays next door to me."

  "Oh, he's moved from there! He couldn't stay next to you!" I was aghast. "Only joking"—he laid a hand on mine—"he has a room of his own, I'll tell you where."

  "There's not much point, is there?"

  "None at all," he said complacently.

  "You're clearly a very attractive family," I pressed on.

  "Come with me," he said, and led me through a door into the shop's back room—bare bulbs, a sink, a white work-table, clothes pinned and chalked for alteration. I wondered if I was about to go down on him. "Look at this," he said.

  Mounted on a ledge at the side was a small black-and-white TV set, a security monitor for the shop. It showed the central area in an odd convex perspective, a customer passing beneath looming with enormous cranium and dwindling curved body ending in tiny shoes. It made me instantly suspicious, the distortion seemed to challenge you to notice the thief s shifty recce or his smooth concealment of some small pricey item. The lack of sound enhanced the sense of stealth.

  Alejo turned a knob and the scene changed to the front vestibule, if anything even more sinister for its emptiness. In the bottom corner little Rudi was lolling at the desk, staring at nothing, unaware he was being spied on. He looked at his watch.

  "Now let's see what's up in number three," said Alejo and switched again. We had a steep-down view on to the row of changing-cubicles. "It's amazing what you catch on this camera—I don't mean sex, just the things people do." I knew uneasily that he must be right—those crises of contemplation, envisaging the changed future some garment seems for a moment to guarantee. Over to the left the naked upper part of my rival could be seen, pale and powerful, clouding his underarms with talc.

  "What the hell's he doing?" I demanded.

  "You have to do that for the rubber vests, you know, or you never get them off." Alejo kept watching professionally, like a policeman waiting for a hesitation to turn into a crime. "We've had a lot of trouble with him."

  "I'm not surprised."

  "He's weird, he keeps trying things on but he never buys."

  "Why don't you ban him?" I said, though my indignation was sapped by the view of the cubicle immediately below. It was clear that Cherif could not be less interested in the chi-chi underwear he was being tricked into trying; he hadn't even opened the packets. I was pleased and somewhat possessive. My friend was simply sitting on the narrow bench and turning a piece of paper over in his hands. Then I knew, despite the plunging perspective, that the paper was a letter I had written to him, in our very first week, full of unguarded declarations, and marked by me in various shamefully personal ways. The two of us frowned into the little screen as he tilted his head back and ran the letter contentedly under his nose.

  Chapter 16

  Later that week we put the triptych together. Paul was jumpy and hard to please, and when he asked me to do things for him I got in the way. The facilities of the Museum were so cramped, he needed to close the first-floor gallery to assemble his new acquisition, and brusquely dismissed a polite young student who was already in it copying, as well as the woman who came in to do the typing. On the threshold of his fulfilment we all seemed potential obstacles, who needed to be thrust unsentimentally aside.

  We were waiting for an overnight courier from Munich, bringing the central section, the townscape. I knew these were special art-transport experts, but I couldn't banish the image of a lad on a mud-streaked motorcycle, with the canvas strapped on the back. At the same time the loaned wing from Switzerland was being flown to our little airport, the whole thing being destined to converge in a nerve-racking climax just before lunch. As Helene was abroad on her honeymoon I opted to get out of the way and sat at the front desk, with my chair tipped back against the dim warmth of a radiator.

  I was reading the text of an article Orst had contributed to The Studio about his childhood summers in the Ardennes. He described the days of preparation, the tremors of anticipation that ran through their well-ordered household as the morning of departure approached. Then it was the train to Brussels, the "stupendous and terrifying impression" of the capital after the empty thoroughfares and grass-grown quays from which they had come; a second train to Namur, and after a long wait, "when it seemed that for all our efforts we might never arrive", on to St Hilaire,

  where the great towers of the basilica, glimpsed from a distance through the forest as we approached, gave the first assurances that our pilgrimage was ending and that we should shortly be traversing the blessed domain of Givrecourt. On descending from the train we were welcomed by my grandfather's coachman and conveyed to the house in a great black carriage which quite resembled, to the imagination of my sister and me, a stage-coach of the last century, sent to bear us off into the regions of romance.

  The manor of Givrecourt is a low old house, from the time of Charles V, with tall old trees about it, a mighty bam and stables and a hamlet of ancient cottages. It lies in a safe declivity among the pine woods and oak forests, the bleak sandy heaths and upland bogs of that high country so astonishing to a child reared on the level Flemish plain, with only the theatre of the skies and the plains of the sea itself for contrast. In Flanders, for those with an eye for landscape, there is extent without contour; a design ruled by the single and inflexible horizontal, which cuts the picture in two and advances indefinitely before and all around, and is not without its force and grandeur. But here the straight line was everywhere turned awry—in the quaint old work in stone and plaster and the time-worn floors of the manor-house itself, in the gnarled and ancient giants of the Forest of St Hilaire, whose boughs dropped wearily to earth and then rose up again in fantastic forms, in the rocky outcrops above, which reared against the sunset like wind-bitten visages of heathen gods.

  I have been at Givrecourt since then in other seasons: when the woods were full of snow, or in the autumn twilight—lovelie
st and most tragic of times. Among the pictures I have lately exhibited in London were a number of studies of a pond there among the pines, done on a spring morning or in the winter dusk; as well as others of the village people as the evening finds them, the forester in the lane, the gamekeeper ready with his bag and gun. They were said by some to lack the merits that they discerned in my work before, and by some to show a wish on my part to leave behind the legendary subjects that are for several of us the highest calling. But to me they are merely further expressions of an idea that lies beyond legend, and to which legend offers the most inexhaustible and luminous forms. I mean of course the little door each picture opens upon mystery, upon the unknown and the unknowable. To the admirer of my mysteries, the silent pond and lanes of Givrecourt may serve as thresholds to the ineffable as surely as my Medusa and my Percival. And if it be objected that my gamekeeper and my sacristan have voices of their own and call out to us in tones that break that subtle harmony, I can say only that they are also the voices of my childhood, and that the imponderable harmonies of childhood linger beneath all that I attempt to do.

  The article was dated October 1898. I knew that a year later he would have met Jane Byron, and that she would be dead.

  The three pieces of "Autrefois" didn't fit. Paul had leant them against the wall, side by side, like some classic puzzle, simple in its elements but requiring genius IQ to solve. The left-hand part was the one the Museum had already, the candle-lit image of the woman whose face was seen only in the mirror. It appeared on postcards and posters and I thought of it as an icon in itself. It had its original frame of dull gilt wood. The right-hand wing, the seascape, had been reframed and stood several inches higher, its intense dusk colours heightened by a broad surround of silvery pearwood. The larger middle panel, the deserted town, which had undergone so many vicissitudes, should have had a huge recessed frame, into which the hinged wings could be folded, and a broad plinth. Paul showed me the murky old studio photograph, in which the triptych could be made out, its doors open as if on an altar, and for the first time I caught the shock of its arrangement, the figure of the virgin displaced from the centre, the gothic townscape, such as often clustered behind a Flemish nativity, unpeopled and sepulchral, and where at the edge the donors might have knelt only the grey sea and violet sky.