The Seahorse

by Anthony Masters

  All the time he was talking Casey still looked at him and he looked back at his son. Despite the fact that it seemed he was talking about him as if he were not there, they remained indisputably intimate.

  ‘I’m a representative of a shipping agent and I’ve got to go abroad. I can’t take him and as I’ve got to leave him behind I want to make sure he’s in safe hands. My sister will be in touch with you, but I’m afraid that for at least part of the school holidays he’ll have to stay here.’

  Paul had had a sudden extraordinary realisation and he wondered if Storm had been struck by it. He had glanced briefly at him but his face was impassive. Somehow, for no adequate reason, Paul knew that Casey’s father was walking out on his son–and Casey knew. The shock of this left him almost trembling and he lit a cigarette to hide his feelings from them. He was convinced that he was right. He couldn’t understand the reason for it–how could he have ever walked out on Stephen?–but he knew that the man was going and, once again, he had the further disturbing conviction that his son knew. Paul wondered if he should not voice his suspicions to Storm–after all they could hardly be expected to take the boy on these grounds. But something stopped him–and this was the same mysterious conviction that Storm, too, knew and realised the situation.

  ‘I should be away for about six months–you have my sister’s telephone number and address–I’m only sorry that you haven’t met her but she’s not very strong. That’s why he can only go back there for part of the holidays–she just can’t cope for the whole time.’

  For the entirety of this speech he had held his son’s eyes, never leaving them for one moment. Paul had the uneasy feeling that, almost telepathically, he was pleading for his freedom which Casey was desperately trying to deny him. The atmosphere of the room was charged with the sensation of the most tremendous struggle between the two, to which both he and Storm were an unwilling audience. Quirkily, Paul thought of the open door of a cage–the man was half in and half out, terrified that it would be closed before he could escape, whilst Casey, content to remain ensnared, demanded his return. Silently, they fought it out. Locked in this private torment they strained for release. What on earth prompted him to leave Casey like this? he wondered. There must be some very valid reason. He felt a sadist watching their unspoken frenzy but there was nothing he could do. He glanced at Storm and wondered what he was thinking.

  Suddenly, too suddenly, the man rose.

  ‘I’ve got to go–I’ll write to him, of course, and he has my address–I’m going away tomorrow so I shan’t be able to see him again until I get back.’

  His voice was flat and dull and Storm replied abruptly:

  ‘Look–I didn’t realise you were leaving so soon. There are various details to be settled yet. You should see Matron, and I assume you would like to see round the school. After all, we’ve only corresponded and it does seem a bit–’

  ‘I’m sorry–I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Oh–’ Storm sounded suddenly tired. ‘Well–look, how would it be if Mr. Latimer and I disappeared for a few moments and left you both together–I’m sure you would like a–’

  ‘I’m sorry–there’s no time–I’ve got to go now.’

  ‘Well–very well then.’ Storm sounded both puzzled and slightly offended.

  Casey’s father’s face had lost its flush and was as pale as his son’s. He rose to his feet and brushed some crumbs off his lap.

  ‘My coat–I think it–er–it’s in the hall, isn’t it?’ They all moved into the hall, Casey following last of all. His face was expressionless.

  Paul felt suddenly angry–it was so obviously cruel–and what proof had they that the boy was not simply being left with them for ever? As if sensitive to this thought the man turned, his beaky nose already looking cold as he hunched himself in his coat.

  ‘My sister will be here tomorrow afternoon to settle the other various details and I’ll drop you a line, Headmaster, in a few days.’

  Paul opened the front door slowly, torn between not wanting to prolong the agony and yet not anxious to bring forward the actual parting. Storm hesitantly made the final decision by putting out his hand and saying:

  ‘Well, sir–I hope to be hearing from you soon.’

  Neither Paul nor Storm asked where he was going–in a way both wanted to forestall any further embarrassment. Then Casey’s father turned to his son–once again they looked intently at each other, betraying no emotion at all. Then coldly they shook hands–the man’s hands were rigid and Casey’s smaller hand only trembled slightly as they clasped. Paul turned away as the man suddenly bent and kissed his son on the cheek. He said something which Paul could not catch and didn’t want to hear anyway. Then he nodded briefly at Storm and turned quickly away. He was immediately swallowed up in a wall of darkness, as if he had walked through a screen. Paul felt himself quite unable to speak and Storm looked at him and blurted out, his eyes filled with tears, ‘We mustn’t be sentimental,’ and closed the front door.

  Paul looked at Casey now and tormented himself with the thought of his being hurt, intentionally or unintentionally, by anyone. He felt his cheeks flush, and was glad that the wind and sea made an excuse for the sudden colour. What had happened to Casey was appalling. His father had written several times over the past two years, events which served to further strengthen his son’s reserve of restraint. The arrangement had been for Casey to stay for part of the first holiday, but no one seemed surprised, least of all the child, when this became a part of every holiday. He had taken it all very quietly and had accepted the situation without comment–a fact that consistently surprised Paul, who was inevitably expecting to hear some mention at least of the absent parent. But there was nothing–no bewilderment, no suggestion of unhappiness that could at least allow him to extend some form of sympathy. Casey said nothing–and Paul decided against intruding into the privacy of his loss. Both Storm and Paul entered into a holiday partnership that largely involved the entertainment of Casey. Storm took him out for long rides in the brake over the South Downs, whilst Paul swam and sailed with him in the summer and took him cathedral visiting during the winter.

  There grew up between the two men a kind of indefinable love for the child that, unspoken, even unconscious, was continually growing with each holiday. During termtime, Storm treated Casey almost brusquely, his attitude being that he was simply another boy, subject to occasional individual tutorials as were all the others, but open to neither favour nor too much attention. Yet when the holidays came, Storm opened up considerably and some unexpected chain of memory emerged from his remote childhood–links which grew firmer as he tried to put himself in the heart and mind of an eleven-year-old. He regarded his relationship with Casey during the holidays in an entirely different light–and he decided that, somehow, he would break into the distorted wonderland of Casey’s introversion, and establish a surer form of reality. As in everything, Storm regarded the issue as a challenge and tended to be frustrated over his lack of progress. He spent some time trying to establish his own ideal of Casey’s father, and in his worst moments he was conscious of a growing resentment towards this man who had suddenly come and literally dumped his unwanted son on his doorstep, expecting strangers to become fathers–expecting, with little experience and no knowledge, a stranger to love and care for his son as deeply as he had, before one love was replaced by a second–a new love that was both too strong and too vulnerable to live with another. Yet Storm admired him for his decision. At least he had made one–surely the most difficult that anyone could ever make. He had actually decided who, between his son and his lover, would have to be sent away.

  Paul found himself absurdly jealous of Storm’s interest in Casey, and was sometimes grateful for the cover of termtime when Storm’s scruples forbade special attention. Despite Storm’s warnings Paul had definitely favoured Casey over and above the other boys at Exeter Court and continued to do so.

  The boat was nearing the pier and, once again, the wind dropped
, the sails becoming limp and flaccid, and the noise of the water as it gently slapped the boards was the only sound to be heard amidst the misty grey expanse of leaden sea that gently rose towards a one-toned horizon that fell, like a silver wall, hard across its path.

  The aunt had seemed outwardly kind, but it was obvious that now she was free of one, she was anxious to be equally free of the other. Independence and a new life opened excitingly before her, and the fact that for two weeks of each school holiday in the year she had to look after a reticent eleven-year-old who bestowed on her little more than a dozen words each day, was becoming increasingly difficult for her to bear. After all, she reasoned, directly she had come he had gone with her and left the boy as her own responsibility. All very well for Alec to behave like an inane adolescent and remarry–all very well for her to have to stay behind and look after what was left. Her resentment flared every time she came to the school.

  Paul tacked in towards the pier and its adjoining landing-stage. Gradually he nursed the boat towards the fenders and threw a rope around a rotting timber post. Then it began to rain and as they jumped out on to the jetty Paul said:

  ‘You’re going to be late, my son, run like hell–and you might just make it.’

  ‘Thanks for the trip–do you think I’m useful?’

  ‘Come and crew for me again, will you?’

  Casey smiled, suddenly, and began to run along the planks towards the beach and the school.

  Slowly Paul followed, turning back towards the sea when he reached the turnstile. During the Christmas and Easter holidays he had taken Casey around some of the more outstanding churches and cathedrals in the South. Occasionally Storm had come, but Paul had not enjoyed the outing so much with three of them–he wanted to be alone with Casey–he wanted the boy to ask him all the questions and be able to rely on him alone for the answers. Meg had never wanted to come. Out of a sense of duty he had asked her, but immediately she assumed some involved business that prevented her from joining them. Paul was relieved and looked forward to the days he spent with Casey with tremendous anticipation. It was something that Paul had always wanted to do–to plan a holiday spent on these lines–to drive miles to some cathedral, abbey or church, lunch in a solid pub in some antique surrounding, and drive back in the early evening, stopping to have a cream tea served by aristocratically tweeded women on the way home.

  Paul loved the monastic atmosphere of the cathedral towns, with the brooding hulk of the edifice surrounded by crouched buildings that seemed to bustle forwards in a communal supplication and occasional pale imitation of the flaunting spires, speeding buttresses and gargoyle mockery of the shrine. Although he appreciated that it was only pure theatre that recalled religion to him for perhaps half an hour, the visible impression of sanctuary appealed not only aesthetically but salved his bad conscience within the shored-up walls of a half-rekindled faith. This superficial comfort, the fact that Casey was a party to it, the facile unction that watered his guilt, combined to give him a new sense of opportunity and he came away supercharged with a new energy that flickered slowly out on the way home. Given an asthma pump filled with holy vapour or an inhalant mixture of incense, candle grease and dust from the altar cloth, Paul would be able to steal back into his mental wash house out of which he might emerge temporarily salved. The power of prayer or worship was to him a possible, but unreleased charge of religious gunpowder that could if experienced blast him out of retrospect into virgin normality. Unfortunately, like a Salvationist hymn, theatre over-rode true invocation and became mere balsam.

  Whilst Paul and Casey sailed, Adrian plotted and Alexander coerced, Meg had risen to her usual morning routine. It was on days of early morning sunshine like this that she was glad they had come to the frustrating, amateur hierarchy of Exeter Court. It was worth it, with the whole day in front of her and enough time for things to happen in. Happenings–unpremeditated events–were her hope; thought and calculation were depressing factors that brought nothing but a deepening of some kind of dull despair.

  As she washed she remembered something that she hardly ever considered now–something that was now right out of her reach. Their bedroom faced over the gently curving bay and she could see a group of boys on the beach, jumping up and down in face of some excitement that was screened from her. She noticed, as she thought of Paul’s body, the long ripples on the sand and beyond them, tiny spurts of foam on the sea line that licked unambitiously at the sloping beach.

  They had first met at a teachers’ training college in the Midlands ten years ago, when Meg was twenty-four. The college was in the centre of a huge urban sprawl, surrounded on all sides by the atrocities of seemingly endless light engineering works. At night, with the exception of a couple of Wimpy bars, three cinemas and a ten pin bowling alley the town emptied, closed, locked and barred itself against all forms of vitality. The pubs were either resounding in horse brasses and subdued lounges or balefully squalid, apparently populated with chronic asthmatics or silent slow drinkers who shared the management’s antipathy to strangers. It was an extraordinary town–hardworking, material, and almost prudish in its own vacuum of hard-won misery. On the outskirts a new red-brick university clamoured for recognition whilst the Guardian raved about its stylish surfaces of concrete, its harmonious blending with the landscape, the refectories and lecture halls that pleased the eye in the stark splendour of their simplicity and the shiny metallic sculpture that cluttered the split-level cloister. The training college, a few doors away from this disarrayed muddle of controversy, was much deprecated, yet laid down certain basic teaching ethics that had been invaluable to them both. They found their own set in the college which had to suffice after hours as well as within. Out of this void they fell into a habitual relationship that produced a routine of undemanding, unsensual familiarity. Meg had taken a long time to fall in love with Paul, but when she did she was desperate for his reciprocation. It came slowly, the anticipation was endless and they were married a year after leaving the college. By then both were teaching in the same town–Paul in a secondary modern and Meg in a girls’ school nearby. Their sex life was engineered cautiously and immaturely. Paul took her to bed savagely the first night and she became terrified of his dogged perseverance against her own combination of frigidity and fear.

  ‘Why the hell can’t you relax?’

  ‘Because I’m frightened of it.’

  They had endless conversations on the subject of her own fear. The pressure of his penis on her like an inquiring animal enveloped her in a feeling of an intense desire to withdraw–the touch of it made her flinch and grow rigid. In the first six months of their marriage she still resented this intrusion on her virginity–still resented the fact that she was sharing a bed with someone who demanded something else which seemed unfair–because anyway the mere task of routine living taxed her to the full. A growing horror that he would find her hopelessly unattractive goaded her into torturous intimacies that brought her close to vomiting. She began to doubt the fact that she wanted him at all, wondering if she was quite sexless. She had no desire for any physical contact with anyone.

  She was not a lesbian–in fact she felt absolutely neuter. During the day Meg began to feel more and more tired and began to dread the nights with Paul. Directly she got into bed she would lie stiff and unresponsive, hoping against hope that he would be too tired to make love to her. But he never was and every night she continued to frustrate him until he would begin to masturbate.

  Suddenly he was ill and he slept in a camp bed. Meg was alone–gloriously–luxuriously alone. She revelled in it. For the first four nights she relaxed and awoke refreshed and happy. She began to make plans–to look forward to some drastic improvement that she herself would make when Paul recovered. But he had chicken pox and it would be ages before he could sleep with her–glorious loneliness stretched before her. She turned to and fro in the large bed, happily realising that no demands would be made of her for at least another ten days. Wonderful to be hap
pily free of his continual desire. But she loved him–loved him intensely with everything but her body.

  Halfway through Paul’s illness, Meg’s feelings indefinably changed. Quite when it came about or what exactly caused it she couldn’t say–but definitely something happened–something that for the next three days she refused to admit to herself. She lay awake and watched him on the camp bed, sleeping nasally, his body inert and his lips emitting sleep sounds that were suddenly unbearably familiar. Light had crept into the room and lit his features as he turned over. The blankets, tumbled and too large for the inadequate bed, had been thrown back a little to reveal his chest, and she noticed that the moonlight pencilled the hairs on it, ciphering each one individually until they disappeared into a dark blur under his arms. His hair was thrown forward over his forehead and one finger plucked untidily at the sheet. The over-deep furrows on his face, sharpened by the pale glare, made a strange contrast with his young, fresh features. Once again he moved, slowly and clumsily, the same movement he made when he was astride her and she was recoiling–lazy, subdued yet intent–lying on her, hard and unyielding. Yet, as the normally rejected thoughts filtered automatically through her mind something continued to introduce them–to recall them–until the heavy sensation of his body filled her imagination with an appalling intoxication that, try as she could, she could not drive away. Restlessly, Meg tried to regain her serenity–her natural intractability. But only one thing continued to dominate her senses–the feeling of Paul lying hard on her–pressing down on her–pinning her to a surface on which neither she nor it could yield. She was immediately frantic with an impossible excitement that she desperately tried to reject. But the incredulous desire swept over her until she stopped fighting and relaxed into a sensation that she could not, until later, gauge as desire.