The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "No, no." He sighed and looked down. "We've all been, you know, arguing. Sibylle and Patrick are my dear friends but this is the first time we have been together all week. We went out for our dinner, and it was terrible, and then we had to have a drink, to show we didn't just want to go home, though I think we all did!"

  "Oh. What were you arguing about?" I was looking at his down-turned head, but also at the veins standing out on his long hands loosely cupped between his thighs; I didn't care what they'd been arguing about, I felt a ridiculous contentment at having him to myself, amazement that we hadn't done this long before.

  "It's very difficult to explain, I feel very embarrassed." He took a slurp from his fresh drink. "Well, it's, of course, all to do with love."

  "Mmm."

  "And as we all know by now, the course of true love never did run straight."

  "Exactly."

  "You're much older than me, maybe you can tell me what to do," he said. I studied my thumbs responsibly, wounded, honoured, and when I looked up he was smiling, not quite at me but over my shoulder. "Hi," he said. There was a quick bloom of scented body-lotion, a hand squeezing the back of my neck. Matt was back.

  He ducked vaguely for a kiss and his gelled hair was cold on my cheek. "Hi," he said quietly, nodding slyly at Luc. "I didn't know I'd see you two in here."

  "Well, here we are," I said, with a self-satisfaction that made Matt smile. "As it happens, we were just having a terrifically private talk."

  "Oh, it's not important—" said Luc, who was gazing happily at Matt as if he were his special hero. And he did look glamorous, in his crook's suit and cashmere overcoat, and with his sapphire stud.

  "No problem. I'll see you soon," he said, moving on down the bar, patting Luc on the shoulder as he went, as though he were a promising pupil of his, not mine. I followed him with my eyes and he turned smiling and made a fisting gesture—I shook my head slightly to say it was not alas like that. He started talking to one of the leather-men. As far as I could see he had something for him in his pocket.

  "I think that guy Matt must be gay," said Luc.

  "You're absolutely right," I sighed, as though reluctantly admitting to some long-held secret. And I sensed further questions coming, the boy must be a bit drunk, but still he held back at the edge of this new terrain. I felt that for once I had aroused his curiosity: he was about to be interested in me and my friends. I glanced sideways across low tables where men were gossiping, some with their arms round each other, or snogging in the shadows. How was Luc with all this? A qualm of propriety came and went. They must be sick with envy seeing me with him, my face lit up by his aureole of young heat. "Let's get back to solving your problems," I said, so pleased to be invited in that I ignored how those problems might tangle with my own.

  I saw the pain alter his face, saw him weigh the difficulty of telling against the relief of it. He gazed at me abstractedly. Was I his buddy or his moral tutor? "I think maybe you won't know what I'm talking about," he said. "You're a very sensible, correct-minded kind of person. I think you are always in control of your own feelings, and maybe you don't have all so strong feelings about other people."

  Try me.

  "It's that very bad thing, where you are in love with somebody and think about them all the time but they are also your dear friend and you see them all the time too. But they are not in love with you. And every time you see them you feel more in love."

  "That is a bad sort of situation."

  "Sometimes I wanted to tell you in the lesson, but it is better to talk about books and current affairs."

  "Is that why you were so keen to go to Los Angeles in our last session? Well, you had a cold too."

  He slapped his hand on the counter. "I had a cold because I was out all night, standing in the rain under a certain person's window like a bloody idiot."

  "Your mother said you got it from her." It was too touching to think of him—the romantic semaphore of young love, the old courtly gestures, dreading to bring things to the point. I pictured us backing into each other, like rival serenaders in a comic opera.

  "My mother's like that, she always takes the blame." He smiled at me steadily: he seemed to find comfort in me. And my eyes were revelling gently over him. "The thing is, Edward, I fear I must certainly go to the gentlemen's."

  I hadn't a clue what he was talking about—it must be something like the dogs, or the wall. But he stood up and looked about and I understood and told him. I watched him wandering to the far end of the room, pushing his hair back, sweetly self-conscious under twenty pairs of eyes. I was blasted with lust. I thought why don't you just go on me, hose me down, unbutton my fly, slip your dick in and piss my pants. . . why don't You? I saw a voracious dark kid I had come across before" get up and follow him in. I wondered what Luc would think when he heard the clink of his foreskin-rings against the urinal's china cup.

  I caught the barman's eye and ordered another drink. I seemed to be virtually sober, I was drinking without noticing at least, it was rather like those trick-glasses where you tilt them to your lips and the liquid disappears. Did the boy want one too, he asked, perhaps impressed after all that I'd fought off the minders and rescued the star. I said yes, they were only light little beers, it would keep him a few moments longer before he shook hands and left for home.

  Matt came up and said quickly, "I don't know what you've done to Cherif. He's over at my place. I found him standing at the bus-stop crying like a baby."

  "Oh fuck, thank you, it's just . . . as you can see . . ."

  "No thanks required. I think he's hot, as you may remember."

  "Yeah, he's not so delectable when he's all snotty-nosed. But have him, do what you want with him!"

  "He's in a serious way about you, you know." I grimaced impatiently. "Anyway, we'll compare notes tomorrow night." And he gave his casual stare, with its usual assurance that the world of fantasy need not stay fantasy for long.

  I watched Luc's return, he was utterly beautiful, but I didn't feel annihilated by his beauty: he was coming to me, smiling from a distance like a friend who seeks you out where traders gather, on the Caspian shore—I had segued into a forgotten line of Violet Riviere's, from Poets of our Time. He hopped on to the stool with a clear sense of reaching home in a risky game of touch. At the same moment a startling black object obtruded between us and was clonked on to the bar.

  "Hello, dear," said Gerard in his weary, what-a-fascinating-life-I-lead way. "I haven't seen you for ages."

  "No, actually I'm just . . ."

  "Do you want a drink?" It was rare for him to offer—I assumed he'd seen my full glass. Where Matt's haunting scent had been there was the smell of someone busy all day in baggy woollies and a hopeless sort of anorak. I was bewildered to think how I'd wanted to sleep with him. "The animals are going very well," he said.

  "Oh good, look actually you're just really sort of crushing in between me and my friend's knees here. We're having a rather important conversation."

  Gerard stood back and looked at Luc with the brief cynical calculation I remembered before when he asked about other people's sex-lives. It struck me he probably didn't have one of his own.

  "Okay, this is Luc, this is Gerard." I noticed Luc took his cue from me, and merely nodded. And then, my incurable weak politeness: "Gerard plays in the Ghezellen van der whatsit. They're all going to dress up as animals."

  "Oh!" I watched him ponder this, then reach out and touch the bombard case. "And what is this, please?"

  "It's his bombard. Now if you don't mind . . ." But Gerard was already pushing back the clasps and revealing the instrument, broken in three and secure in its velveteen hollows. "Splendid, thanks very much," I said.

  Luc was perversely intrigued. "Is it a kind of oboe?"

  "Yes, it's actually a bass shawm, which is an early kind of oboe. It's modelled on a fifteenth-century one which you can see in the Town Museum."

  "So you had it made."

  "That's right." Luc dawdl
ed his fingers along the thick dark stem, around the flared bell and over the set of reeds, which were long and curved and bleached like an old pipe. "You look as if you enjoy instruments," said Gerard fatuously.

  "I used to play the oboe," said Luc. "In the school orchestra. But I gave it up."

  "I can't bear it when people give up instruments," I muttered, mortified that he had never told me. "I mean what's the fucking point of learning them, it's all such a waste."

  Poor Luc was quite abashed at this and mumbled sorry: since he wasn't at school any more . . . Gerard seemed to sense some advantage and pressed on with an account of the Happy Entry of Philip the Good in 1440. I had a nightmarish feeling that he was going to deliver the whole lecture on ceremonial antiphons that I had had a couple of months before. But Luc broke in childishly with "Does it make a lot of noise?"

  "As a matter of fact", said Gerard, "it's the loudest instrument there has ever been. It used to be used for raising alarms." He gave his hooting laugh, took out two of the sections and looked mischievously around the bar.

  "I absolutely forbid you to play that thing in here," I said. And fortunately the juke-box was activated at that moment, the Beach Boys came spinning through, and Gerard having got his drink and said how Luc was welcome to try his bombard some time, moved off. I thought I'd rather hurt him with my brusqueness.

  I heaved a big sigh and Luc started working on his backlog ofdrinks. "So," I said, resuming a conversation that he seemed quite prepared to let drop, "do you still want to leave the country?" It was mad of me to persist, I was grasping for evidence that could only upset me, but to be in his confidence was itself like love and I was thirsty for more.

  "Well, of course, I still do want to go to Dorset. But not maybe so far as LA! It would be nice not to be always in this town, where I have lived all my life and where my family have lived since the thirteenth century—but—" There was bragging in his complaint, and I felt the crisis was probably over. "You know how it is, sometimes, things get worse and worse, and then you attain a point when you think, I just want to get out of here and start all over again from scratch bottom."

  I laughed and puzzled him for a second. "I do know what you mean. Maybe that's why I'm here and not in England."

  He raised his eyebrows and leant forward as if this was especially astonishing, but in fact he was indicating someone hovering behind me, as the hand of another farcical interruption landed firmly on my shoulder.

  "So we meet again."

  The wrong-note matiness of Ronald Strong—it grated on Luc as well, I was glad to see. I turned and smiled at him for five seconds, then said quietly, "Piss off."

  He pushed against me, grinning. You'd think I'd just offered him a drink. He nodded at Luc and rocked up and down on the balls of his feet as if warming up for one of his famous work-outs. "My name's Rodney, by the way," he said. But Luc, firm, a little frightened by my reaction, glanced away.

  "Well, catch you both later," said Rodney, slapping me on the shoulder again and moving confidently off. I saw someone eye him up.

  Luc swallowed the rest of his beer, and put down the glass with a hesitation that disguised a tremble. "It's impossible to talk in here", he said, adding, "where you seem to know everybody."

  "I'm sorry, darling, we'll talk another time." My god, I'd called him darling. I pressed on, "Actually, I was going to suggest we might go out for a drive to some nice old place one day—you could show me some of your country."

  "Instead of a lesson?"

  "If you like." I put some detail on it. "Matt's got a sort of jeep, we could go in that."

  "Will Matt be coming with us?"

  "Oh no, I don't think so."

  "Oh." Then, "Yes, that would be lovely"—and he gave me a

  smile that had me gasping and gripping the bar.

  Luc's zip had snagged on a fold of the lining. He tugged the toggle up and down, but it was jammed. "What a bloody thing!" he nattered.

  I wanted to help but held myself back. I was afraid to be too close to him now, out in the street; I was getting ready to say goodnight, nervous as hell, wondering if I could kiss him, staring up at the clouded night. Quarter to something chimed from the Belfry's chilling height. It would be like being up there, when he'd gone—the giddy darkness, my pounding heart.

  "Edward, can you help me?"

  "It should be quite simple," I said briskly—crossly he may have thought. He lifted his arms in surrender and I gripped the little tab and yanked it. It gave by one tooth, and was more firmly stuck than before. "I can't quite see," I said, "come under this lamp. Now . . ." We were leaning together to work out the problem, his hair fell forward into my face. "Get your head out of the light"—and he looked aside like someone squeamish about an injection. I grabbed the bottom of the jacket, where the zip was correctly engaged, and tugged it down as I tried to move the zip up: my hand was against his belt, I even brushed the winking tab of his other zip. "It'll have to go down," I said, peering into the dim scent of lad and leather, the soft world of quilted jacket linings and hearts beating under wool and silk. The knuckles of my other hand rubbed his stomach, I felt the little dip of his navel through his shirt. He apologised with a giggle that showed it was not a heaven and hell of love and lust for him, and peered down again with a beery breath across my mouth as I concentrated with tongue on lip. But I had coaxed the zip down, one notch, two, three, then it ran like a ladder.

  "So which way are you going?" I said.

  He pulled the zip up to the top with a shiver and a grin of new confidence. "Oh, I don't know"—looking to left and right. "I don't want to go home too much."

  "It is quite late, and you've got a lesson in the morning."

  He put his head on one side, with what I realised was a rather drunk bit of foolery. "But it's only with you," he cooed. I didn't know whether to feel slighted or favoured.

  "Your mother will want us both there at ten." I found myself obscurely reassured by her presence and requirements. I felt the seconds thudding past. There was only the remote noise of the bar across the street, and the occasional taxi speeding perfect strangers from place to place.

  "For some considerable time I have wanted to see your place of residence."

  He didn't know what he was doing to me. I said, "My dear Luc, you really mustn't model your speech on that of our new prime minister." And he went into a wince-making spiel of what-whats and tally-hos and jolly good shows.

  When we came to a wide bridge he jumped on to the wall, and walked hastily along its coping, arms stretched for balance. I'd seen younger kids doing it before, here and there, and wondered if I would jump into the icy water to save them if they slipped. The wall was broad enough, but I heard the scrape of his jeans as he set one foot directly in front of the other. How strong and beautiful his white legs were in the glare of an old rococo lamp with wrought-iron shells and other reminders of the not-so-distant sea. I didn't know, but I thought he'd probably never "taken someone home", the walk wasn't crowded for him with curious precedents, it wasn't the mock pick-up it was for me. I leant at the bridge's apex; there was a hint of mist on the still canal. Then he came trotting back and steadied himself for an instant with a hand on the top of my head.

  I was mentally searching my room, noticing things as a newcomer might. It was bleak and barely furnished—a loft, a fashionable space, Luc might think, and feel at home there, unaware of his own clothes lying newly laundered in the cupboards. I felt secure about that, I kept all the Luciana tidied away from Cherif—in fact the past two weeks had turned me into a humourless char, putting everything straight at once where Cherif had made himself at home. I wondered if the room was going to smell.

  When we approached the house Luc fell back, as though having second thoughts, or thrown into a reverie by the sight of the white façade. I opened the wicket and looked round and after a moment he jogged up to me with a smile that seemed to deny his hesitation. "What a quite obscure place, Edward," he exclaimed. There was somethin
g camp, mischievous, about him that I hadn't heard before; I hurried through into the yard with my face fixed and tormented. Of course he'd been drinking. It occurred to me he might be deliberately teasing me and tempting me into some bungled assault—I wasn't sure I could carry on being pally like this any longer, without at last defying the force around him, like some enchantment in The Magic Flute, that froze my intentions in mid-air and padlocked my tongue. "Is that where you live?" he said, looking up at the square of the Spanish girls' window. I caught a strand of music and laughter.

  He sprang lightly up the stairs behind me and stood with his hands in his jerkin pockets as I groped for the key. I was distinctly paranoid, I thought there was something quite plain clothes about him, almost leaning on me, sceptical, observant. Then I remembered he was only a teenager, and that he never noticed the same things as I did, certainly never noticed me. I flicked on the light and bustled obstructively round the room—just checking. Luc ambled over to the window and peered into the dark; the room itself seemed to pass him by. I didn't know what to say, my mouth was dry, my mind milling and jamming as if I had to deliver an important speech without notes. I watched him covertly, thinking he could see my reflection in the glass. But he pressed his hands around his face: his eyes were working on something farther off. "It's my old school," he said, in a tone of puzzled recall. "Did you know you could see St Narcissus from here, Edward?"

  "Of course. I'm always being interrupted by the bells and boys pissing out of the window."

  "Oh, you have to do that," he said abstractedly, straining to make out the dark gables against the sky. "That used to be my classroom. That big window on the second floor."

  But I stayed where I was, in the middle of the room, my hand in my pocket holding my cock, looking at his backside and his broad hunched shoulders. I was haunted by potential moves tonight—it was like trustless stoned nights at Cambridge, when I never knew if I'd just said something or was still planning to say it. I saw a phantom me, in the jerky, melting moves of a time-lapse film, going over to him, slipping an arm round his shoulder, hugging him and kissing him. I saw him turning with a raised hand, it could have been to hit or to . . . caress.