‘Well, then . . . ! I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘Top to bottom.’
‘Of course.’
And with that she withdrew. Peter closed the door firmly, gave Paul a queasy grin and poured out two glasses of gin and vermouth. ‘Sorry about that. Have a drink . . . chin chin.’ They clinked their glasses, and Peter watched over his own raised rim as Paul sipped, with a little grimace, a swallowed urge to cough, and then put the glass down on the desk. He said, ‘God, you look so sexy,’ exciting himself more by his own choked sound. Paul gasped, and picked up his drink, and said something inaudible, which Peter felt sure must be along the same lines.
He thought the Park would offer more shelter than a room with a chair jammed under the door-handle, but as soon as they got outside he was aware of the unusual hum and crepitation of activity, a mower running, voices not far off. Still, the school seemed more delightfully surreal after a large gin drunk in two minutes. The evening had a lift and a stride to it. He remembered summer evenings at his own prep-school, and the haunting mystery, lit only by glimpses, of what the masters did after the boys were tucked up in bed. He wondered now if any of them had done what he was about to do. Paul seemed changed by the gin too, loosened up and at once a little wary of what he might say and do as a result. Peter asked him on a hunch if he were an only child, and Paul said, ‘Yes – I am,’ with a narrow smile, that seemed both to question the question and show exactly the only child’s sly self-reliance. ‘What about you?’
‘I’ve got a sister.’
‘I can’t imagine having a sister.’
‘And what about the rest of your family?’ – it was first-date talk, and Peter felt already he might not remember the answer. He wanted to get Paul into the Out-of-Bounds Woods. He took him quickly past the bleak little fishpond, and on towards the stone gate.
‘Well, there’s my mum.’
‘And what does she do?’
‘I’m afraid she doesn’t do anything really.’
‘No, nor does mine, but I thought I should ask.’
Paul paused, and then said quietly, ‘She got polio when I was eight.’
‘Oh, god, I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah . . . it’s been quite difficult actually.’ Something flavourless in his words, from embarrassment perhaps and repetition.
‘Where does she have it?’
‘Her . . . left leg is quite bad. She wears a caliper . . . you know. Though she often uses a wheelchair when she goes out.’
‘And what about your father?’
‘He was killed in the War, in fact,’ said Paul, with a strange, almost apologetic look. ‘He was a fighter pilot – but he went missing.’
‘My god,’ said Peter, with genuine sympathy, and seeing in a blundering way that all these things might help to explain Paul’s oddity and inhibition. ‘It must have been right at the end of the War.’
‘Well, that’s right.’
‘I mean, when were you born?’
‘March ’44.’
‘So you don’t remember him at all . . .’ Paul pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘God, I’m really sorry. So you have to support your mother?’
‘Well, more or less,’ said Paul, again with his air of hesitant acceptance, and familiarity with the fumbling sympathy of others when told the news.
‘But she gets an Air Force pension presumably?’ Peter’s Aunt Gwen did, so he knew about these things.
Paul seemed slightly irritated by this. ‘Yes, she does,’ he said; but then, more warmly, ‘No, that’s really important, obviously.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ said Peter quietly. He was naturally troubled, and half wished he hadn’t asked. He saw the flickering energy of the evening going out in sexless supportiveness; and some more shadowy sense of Paul having too many problems not to be a problem in himself.
‘It’s sort of why I didn’t apply to university,’ Paul said, with a shrug at this awkward conclusion.
‘Mm, you see I didn’t realize . . .’ said Peter, and left it at that. He thought, in a momentary montage, of what he had done at university, and tried to blink away the further faint sense of pity and disappointment that seemed to hover between him and this possible new boyfriend. He glanced at him walking along beside him, in his neat brown shoes, quite a springy step, hands awkwardly in his jeans pockets then out of them again, and his agonized look at saying anything at all personal about himself. Well, best to see these problems clearly from the start; a more experienced lover would conceal them till the honeymoon was over. They went past the Ionic temple, where the boys’ pets hopped and fluttered in their cages, and Brookings and Pearson in their dungarees were mawkishly grooming their rabbits. They went past the fenced square of the boys’ gardens, a place, as everyone said, like a graveyard, with its two dozen flowered plots. Again there were a few of the senior boys, let out in this magic hour after prep, on their knees with trowels, or watering their pansies and nasturtiums. Peter thought he saw from Paul’s smile that he was slightly frightened of the boys. In the far corner, looking vulnerable in the open air, was the fairy construction of Dupont’s garden, a miniature alp of balanced rocks with a gap at the top through which water could be poured from a can down a twisting cascade and into the wilderness of heathers and mosses below. Equally vulnerable was its aching claim on First Prize in the competition, to be judged by Craven’s mother, who was very much a salvia and marigold kind of woman. ‘They’re like graves, aren’t they!’ said Paul, and Peter touched him again forgivingly in the small of the back and they went on.
In the middle of the High Ground Mike Rawlins was mowing the sacred chain of the cricket pitch, in readiness for Saturday’s trouncing of Templers. Peter waved to him, and before they were near him he took Paul’s arm firmly and turned him round. ‘Now there you are . . .’ There was the house, massive and intense, and the farmlands beyond, flat and painterly in the heavy light, with the con-trails of planes from Brize Norton slowly lifting and dissolving in the clearer air above. Peter said, ‘You must admit.’ He wanted to get something out of Paul, as he might out of some promising but stubborn child. Though it occurred to him that the shyness he was trying to overcome might merely be a dullness he would always have to overlook.
‘Amazing,’ said Paul.
‘It’s all coming back, you know,’ Peter said, with a tight smile and shake of the head.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Victoriana. People are starting to understand it.’ Last year at St Pancras Station he had joined a small rally headed by John Betjeman; he dreamed of getting Betjeman to come and talk to the boys about Corley Court – he pictured his pleasure in the jelly-mould ceiling. ‘That’s my room, of course,’ he said, without pointing, and saw Paul had no idea which one he meant. In one or two other windows strip lights showed against the evening sun, and in the end room on the first floor the curtains were closed, the Babies already in bed, in the barely muted light.
‘Do you think Cecil Valance actually had an affair with Mrs Jacobs?’ said Paul.
‘Oh! Well, I suppose only one person alive knows for sure, and that’s what she says. Of course you never know exactly what people mean by an affair.’
‘No . . .’ said Paul, and sure enough he blushed again.
‘I think Cecil was probably queer, don’t you?’ said Peter, which was a mixture of a hunch and a certain amount of cheerfully wishful thinking, but Paul just gasped and looked away. There was a strange disturbance, almost subliminal at first. Over the rattling roar of the mower a few yards off a larger and darker noise began to drone and wallow, and then, not quite where they were looking, a military aircraft trawling low over the woods, steady, heavy-bellied, throbbing and majestic, and somehow aware, as if its pilot had waved, that its passage overhead was a marvel to the craning and turning figures below. Its four propellers gave it a patient, old-fashioned look, unlike the sleek unanswerable jets they saw long before they heard them. As it passed overhead and then over the house it appeared to rise a li
ttle before homing in through the lower haze towards the aerodrome five miles away. Mike sheltered his eyes with a raised right arm that seemed also to make a friendly claim or greeting. They went over, Peter introduced Paul, and Mike explained, amid the sweet and sharp smells of two-stroke exhaust and cut grass and his own sweat, that it was one of the big Belfast freighters they’d just brought in. ‘Sluggish old bus,’ he said, ‘but it’ll carry anything.’ In upper windows of the school boys who’d been watching stood down and melted away. And then the evening re-established itself, but perceptibly at a later phase, as if the past two minutes had been a tranced half-hour.
Ahead of them the little creosoted cottage of the cricket pavilion waited under the lengthening shadow of the woods, a possible place for a snog, at least, but still too much in Mike’s view. Peter put his arm round Paul’s shoulders, and they strolled on stiffly for a few seconds, Paul again unsure what to do with his hands. ‘No,’ said Peter smoothly, ‘I’d like to write something about old Cecil one day – I don’t think anyone has, since that Stokes memoir, you know.’
‘Right . . .’
‘Which is something of a period piece. Unreadable, really. That’s why I was asking George Sawle the other night.’
‘Do you write then?’
‘Well, I’m always writing something or other. And of course I keep a sensational diary.’
‘Oh, so do I,’ said Paul, and Peter saw him tremble and focus, ‘well, sensationally dull.’ There it was, the tiny treasured bit of wit in him. Peter fell on it with a laugh.
Just beyond the whited boundary lay the slipcatch, mown all around, but little used, tall grass growing up through its silvery slats. Peter liked the shape of it, like some archaic boat, and sometimes on evening walks by himself he lay down in it and blew cigarette-smoke at the midges overhead. He imagined lying in it now, with Paul close beside him. It was another of those sites where half-glimpsed fantasies, always in the air, touched down questioningly for a minute, and then flitted on.
Paul had found a cricket ball in the long grass, and stepping back a few yards he threw it swerving through the dip of the slipcatch and up into the air, where no one of course was waiting to receive it – it bounced once and ran off quickly towards the old parked roller, leaving Paul looking both smug and abashed. ‘I can see you’re rather good,’ said Peter drily; and nervous that he might be asked to put the slipcatch to its proper use, and lob a ball to and fro through it with Paul for half an hour, pretending not to care that he could neither catch nor throw, he walked smilingly on. There was something expert and even vicious in the flick of Paul’s arm and the hard momentary trundle of the ball along the curving rails.
It felt sweetly momentous to walk in under the edge of the wood. Here again the evening seemed suddenly advanced. Even the near distances were mysteriously barred and crowded with green, shadows blurred the massive tree-boles while the roof of the wood formed a far-off, slowly stirring dazzle. The horse-chestnuts and limes that made a great undulating wall around the playing-fields were mixed further in with large oaks and sinister clusters of yews. The children climbed and hid in the unchecked brushwood round the base of the limes, and scratched out their tunnels in the rooty soil beneath. Here and there the undergrowth thickened artificially with barricades of dead branches, the camouflaged camps they made, with hidden entrances too small for any master to crawl through. You couldn’t be sure if a rustling noise was a child at his spy-hole or a blackbird among the dead leaves.
Paul’s behaviour was more anxious now, he hung back again, craned round at the trees, found inexplicable interest among the leaves underfoot; his thin stiff smile of admiration was almost comical to see. ‘Come here,’ said Peter, and when Paul came to him, as if good-naturedly leaving something more involving, which still half-held his attention, he locked an arm tight under his elbow, making a quick necessary joke of that too, and marched him briskly along. ‘You’re coming with me!’ he said, and found himself shivering and swallowing with excitement and a kind of latent violence. He really wasn’t waiting for more than a minute longer – it was only the dim consciousness that outside this hot-faced rush of beautiful necessity there might still be boys about, among the trees, in the dugout of a camp, that kept him from seizing him roughly there and then. He saw of course that Paul needed this treatment, needed someone to override him. Still, he had to give in, after a few ducking and face-shielding yards of scrambling through the saplings and thick undergrowth, to Paul’s ‘Um, actually . . . !’, his tug and grimace less scared than indignant.
‘Sorry, my dear, am I hurting you?’ Peter’s grasp became a reasonable stroke, a clumsy holding hands, two fingers plaited for a moment, his endearment gleaming with his humorous annoyance at being checked. He looked around as if thinking of something else; it seemed all right, and then, with a moment’s courteous questioning pause in the air, he kissed him fully but gently on the lips. He made the promise of withdrawing a part of the advance, a tantalizing tremor. And again, as if overcome, Paul yielded; and again, when Peter pulled back and smiled, he started talking. ‘Oh god . . .’ he said, in a sort of tragical quiet voice Peter hadn’t heard before. ‘Oh my god.’
‘Come on then,’ said Peter quietly, and they walked on with a new sense of purpose, surely, towards the massive old wreck of a tree which Peter thought of as a kind of Herne’s Oak. Beyond here was the line, invisible but potent as any prep-school law or prohibition, dividing the In-Bounds from the Out-of-Bounds Woods.
Peter dropped Paul in Marlborough Gardens, watched from behind the wheel as he let himself in, with a quick turn of the head in the lighted doorway but no wave. At a bedroom window a light already showed through unlined pink curtains; in a minute the bathroom light went on. He had a sense of the private but simple life of the household marked out in lights, and Paul reabsorbed into its routines, which both were and weren’t his own; relieved to be back, in a way, but glowing and inattentive surely with new knowledge. Peter wrestled the car into gear and made off with his usual air of helpless indiscretion round the loop of the Gardens.
He wondered if Paul might be too strange for him after all. It might be hard work having such a silent boyfriend, his reserve seemed like a judgement on you. Still, certainly worth holding on to him in the present dearth of opportunity. Someone else might not see the point of him at all – someone who hadn’t touched his hot sleek skin, felt his hesitations and his burning little stabs at letting go. He had a charming, slightly tapering cock, hard as a hat-peg, which he had clearly been astonished, and almost appalled, to see in the hands of someone other than himself, and then in the mouth. He had panted and giggled at the shock. And then quickly, afterwards, he started to fret – he let Peter hold him, and hold his hand, but he had a troubled look, as if he felt he had let himself down. They almost rushed, then, to get him back home; they parted with only a ‘See you soon’ and the darting, deniable kiss on the cheek in the insecure shadow of the car. Yet all these little awkwardnesses raised the game for Peter, and excited him more. It wasn’t at all like other affairs he had had, but he felt the same disorienting rush of insight, the roll and lift of some larger conveyance than a rattling Hillman Imp. On the main road back to Corley, with the windows down, a new smell blew in, the moist sweet night smell off the fields and trees, all the more mysterious when the nights were so short. The sun would be up a little after four: and find them both waking to their separate sense of how things had changed. Peter saw his thoughts drifting during lessons, and Paul with the paying-in books, preoccupied by his sensations, perched on his swivel stool in a distracting new awareness of being thought about and wanted.
He slowed and indicated to the empty road, and turned in through the gates to the heavier occluded darkness of the Park. The lights of home . . . the mile of scented darkness . . . The woods had grown up a lot, clearly, since Cecil’s day: now the lights of the school were hidden. That mile, too, was a purely poetical distance – or a social one, perhaps, designed to impress.
It was one of Cecil’s many invitations to admire him, though not, presumably, to turn up at Corley Court in person. He appeared to the reader on fast-moving horse-back, this latter-day world of cheap cars and jet-planes superbly unimagined.
Between the White Horse downs and Radcot Bridge
Nothing but corn and copse and shadowed grazing,
Grey village spires and sleeping thatch, and stems
Of moon-faced mayweed under poplars gazing
Upon their moon-cast shadows in the Thames.
It was one of his better pre-war poems, though with that tendency to sonorous padding that spoiled almost everything he wrote if judged by the sternest standard.
Peter parked on the front gravel and made a poor attempt to shut the car door quietly. The moon was up, among streaky clouds, and before going in he walked round in front of the house, across the lawn by the fishpond, and back up the rise towards the gate into the High Ground. He seemed to stride through the complex calm of sexual gratification, borne along by running and looping images of what had happened – he saw himself enhancing it, warming it by little touches, then felt the countervailing cool of something like unease, the cool of loneliness. If Paul were with him still, they would make it better, do it over again. No doubt it was painful for anyone who was courting, but for two men . . . He stopped in front of the Ionic temple and peered into the deep shadow, oddly wary of the warm life caged invisibly there. Perhaps disturbed by him, a rabbit or hamster rustled and scratched, a budgie hopped and fluttered and tinkled its bell. He went on and stood by the gate, looking back, the moonlight and its shadows making the house insubstantial, for all its pinnacled bulk, as if half in ruin. The dorms were all dark but the light of the Headmaster’s television flickered inside the oriel window. The moon gleamed sharply on the pointed vane of the chapel roof, and on the dial of the stopped clock in the central gable, under the pale stone banner of the Valance motto, ‘Seize the Day’.
The Stranger's Child Page 35