'Like sex?'
David gave the boy another look. 'Like sex, or like any thing else. You see, Sanders, when he wasn't simply showing off to you all, wanted to find some sort of happiness - and sense of security, maybe - with the film actress; Mrs. Jones, though of course I don't know her, may be looking for her happiness by caring about birds and other wild life. When people pray thoroughly, as you put it, it's because they're looking for just the same security, and happiness, and sense of belonging with God. At your age you can't possibly know where you'll most happily belong in the end. Some people spend their whole lives without discovering what they can really love, or where they'll best belong. Certainly I don't know yet.'
'One's age!' Tony said with astonishing irony. He was running his finger back and forth along the dashboard. 'I understand a bit better, though. But what's the difference between those two words. I mean homosexual and pederast?'
'Well, the first is a very general term; and the second is a specific or particular term.'
'For a man who loves a boy?'
'Yes.'
'What's the specific term for a boy who loves a man?' Tony had been addressing David directly; now he seemed to have discovered some new interest in the dashboard, and was tracing the grain of the walnut with his fingernail.
'I don't know that there is one. Perhaps people don't take you seriously enough to invent a special word.'
'They take us seriously enough if we miss practice,' Tony said with some heat.
David was perplexed by his own clumsiness. 'Do you often take words down from sermons?'
'Yes - interesting ones. I wasn't sure whether I'd got these right though because Hamley was making such a noise unwrapping fruit drops.'
'What! Quite openly?'
'Oh no. He pulls his hands out of his sleeves and just sits there without any arms. Then he unwraps sweets. Or plays with himself, I think. Only he doesn't eat sweets so much now because once the prayers finished too soon, and when we stood up for the anthem, and Sir Bull raised his baton and everyone was quiet, Hamley suddenly choked. A sweet came whirring out of his mouth and we could hear it bouncing down the nave like a marble. We didn't giggle, because we never do,' Tony went on, 'but you know how the Master sits in that box thing quite near us and his eyes are always open as if he's stuffed? Well, he shut them, and sort of sank into the box. There was an awful row. So Hamley doesn't eat sweets quite so often. He still does something with his hands though, because often when we stand up Hamley hasn't any arms and has to share my book. It makes the choir look pretty sloppy if you ask me, but no one's been able to cure him.'
The car ran on across the Gloucestershire Cotswolds through a changing pattern of sheep, forests and sunshine. David threaded his way into the centre of Cheltenham, and found a place to park in the Esplanade.
Tony stripped off the frog-flippers and pulled on his own socks. He carefully knotted the Cherry Blossom shoes and combed his hair in the driving mirror. Then he cocked his head on one side and grinned deplorably. 'Oh!' He collected himself. 'The elm seeds!' He made to feel in his pocket with a frown.
'Come on, ass!' said David. 'And just see you behave, because I'm feeling nervous.'
They paused beside the car, and David laid his hand on the boy's shoulder. 'It's a new suit you really want, isn't it?' Tony's face filled with pleasure and confusion. They crossed the road and walked past a jaded row of Regency houses. David pushed open the shop door, hoping this wasn't going to be like taking a normal child to a sweetmeat emporium. Until the end of the month he had only thirty pounds in the world. All of it was in his wallet. His grandmother's capital of three hundred pounds was melting now without pain.
They found themselves in a hall given over to fluffy baby-wear, and cots with suck-proof knobs, and bunnies painted on their hygienic formica. There were eiderdowns for similarly miniature persons, which a placard claimed to be Tubable.
They passed through Junior Miss and plain Girls, while Tony looked at his toes. At last they arrived unmolested at what appeared to be the appropriate place. Tony started fingering a wax boy who sat dejected on a tuck-box in the middle of the room. The initials of the new boy were apparently B.H-B. The tuck-box said so. Benjamin Hawker-Brash or whatever looked very unhappy.
A round man advanced on them.
'Good afternoon' David said. 'I want a couple of flannel suits for this boy.'
'All-wool,' Tony interposed. He had looked at David in amazement for a moment.
'Certainly, sir!' The man rubbed his hands together. He rocked back on his heels considering, and looked Tony up and down. 'Now, sir!' He swung on David again. 'Will it be with knickers? Or the long-trouser suit?'
'Shorts.' Tony interrupted dully He seemed to have taken a dislike to the man, who now advanced on him with a tape measure. He got down on one knee, but Tony inelegantly took a step backwards. 'I'm size eight,' he said quickly. David was startled and a little embarrassed by the boy's coquettish behaviour. He had an uneasy feeling that this was Mr. Neal Frazer himself. The man now conducted them to a cubicle and discreetly withdrew.
'I hope you've got clean underpants on?' David asked when they were alone.
Tony looked up surprised. 'I don't wear pants in summer.'
'I see.' David wondered whether he should call loudly for pants, but decided against it. Mr. Neal Frazer might feel disposed to throw them out.
Tony changed into the first suit. David had to confess that the effect was resplendent. The boy put his belt round the shorts without threading it through the loops.
'Why not wear it now?' David suggested.
'Have to anyway,' Tony said, peering down at his stomach. 'The buttons are too stiff.'
David smiled. 'Well, I hope the legs are liftable.'
Tony pulled experimentally at one of the legs of the shorts.
'All right!' David said quickly. 'We'd better see if they've got an identical blue belt to complete the mint tuck-box boy effect.'
Mr. Neal Frazer produced the belt. 'Stockings? Anything like that?'
'We have our own socks, thank you,' said Tony.
Oh yes.' David remembered. 'One pair of white cricket shorts; same size, the woollier the better.'
Tony had begun threading the new belt into his shorts, and acknowledged this with an extravagant movement of his hips. Mr. Neal Frazer bundled up the parcel and David paid up fifteen pounds odd.
As they stepped into the afternoon sunshine David lagged behind. The boy undoubtedly had an uncanny sense for sartorial complement to his own beauty. Tony perched on the pavement's edge. His head was cocked on one side, and he looked down the street into Brize Norton's freshening wind — a golden calf arrayed in soft silver. They began walking together along the Esplanade beneath the lime trees, and David had the sense of a transparent bubble that enclosed only themselves wherever they went. There was no relevant world outside.
Suddenly he thought of the French surrealist film where a boy loves and eventually masters a wild stallion in the Camargue: how he mounts it beneath the thunder, and it carries him out, galloping faster and faster, irresistibly into the sea. David stepped hastily back into the sunlit bubble beneath the sober Cheltenham limes.
'Thank you for the clothes.' Tony said. 'They're really too big just to say thank you for, though.'
'The spectacle's its own reward.'
'How do I look?' Tony stopped suddenly.
'To me? The way Van Gogh's yellow chair looked to Van Gogh, I suppose. I wish I was a painter, not a photographer.'
'You're a composer,' Tony said.
Cheltenham being synonymous with cash, County, colonels and horsy kids, the Cavendish House menu read:
Teddy Bear Tea for Children
Honey sandwiches
1 Chocolate biscuit
Teddy Bear Ice-Cream
Orange Squash
Or,
Glass of Milk
Tony didn't think much of this. Instead he opted to eat Ma a la carte, with the proviso that a Te
ddy Bear Ice-Cream be transferred from the table d'hote. David settled for the same.
Some sort of fashion parade was conducting itself informally amongst the tables. Models churned slowly about the room like restless autumn leaves. Tony, with one paper napkin tucked under his chin and another in his belt, had reached the Teddy Bear Ice stage, and fed steadily on. David leant back and lit a cigarette. The school lunch had not altogether agreed with him. Meanwhile his own Teddy Bear Ice was long since sunk drunkenly on its stomach, and now, with its forepaws melted, was breasting the pool of its own substance.
Tony looked up. 'Don't you want that?'
.Don't think so.'
Tony reached across, exchanged plates, and got his head down again.
The waitress had been disposed to regard Tony indulgently. David decided that if she called him 'dear' he would scream once, shrilly, and then break something. It's odd, he reflected; all the women I come across are intrusive and motherly, Mrs. Kanter, Gloria, Ricks, and now this. By the way; he said aloud, 'what happened to the letter we wrote that French boy?'
Tony tugged home some stray dribbles of Bear with his tongue. 'Oh, it went off. He wrote back and said please would I send him a "tin-can of the English beer". '
'Incorrigible.'
'Shall we?'
'No. I won't voluntarily direct a Frenchman on the road to alcoholism. Besides, your respective English and French masters might begin to suspect Rogers. No, hell, why not? Let's see. I suggest Bartram's Black Export. It's horrible.'
The fashion parade continued to eddy about them. A woman moved her bottom around for David's inspection.
'Have you got Bartram's Black Export?' he asked the waitress.
'I don't know, I'm sure. 'There's Christian Nithsdale's Paris Sack Line soon. This is very nice too.' She indicated the bottom.
'It's horrible,' said Tony, who wasn't to be put off from ordering the beer.
'My bill,' David said quickly.
Tony sat down in the car, after carefully dusting the seat. The frog-flippers were forgotten in the contemplation of his new splendour. David bad contrived to buy a barbecued chicken, tomatoes, tinned mangoes, a. bottle of Moselle, fresh cherries grown suspiciously large beneath the shadow of Harwell, and even a can of Bartram's Black Export. Now, as they sat in the car, David found two double cherries and hung them over the boy's ears. Tony turned to face him and lowered his eyelids. David produced the slim bottle of Moselle.
'I make you Sir Tony Cherry of Sandelwood with this sweet white wine.'
With elaborately feigned delicacy, Tony removed the cherries and ate them.
The car climbed up out of Cheltenham on to the high, exposed ridge of the Cotswolds between Andoversford and Northleach. At perhaps a thousand feet above the deserted road an American B.47 was circling. It banked languidly through the nearer segment of its arc, while the late afternoon sun glinted along its slim, silverfish belly.
'It's waiting to land,' Tony said.
David pulled up the car in a lay-by.
'What are you going to do?'
'Signal.' David unclipped the spotlight and clamped it to its bracket on the windscreen. 'D'you know morse?'
'A bit.' Tony was doubtful.
'Never mind. Just shade this thing with your flippers.'
Tony got the grotesque rubber feet, and held them as a mask to the lamp which David directed towards the sky.
'Now!' He began flashing the spot; spelling out the coded letters for the boy: 'G.o. H.o.m.e.' He paused; then repeated the message.
The bomber continued to circle for some time. Then it banked away, and was lost over the western horizon.
'It has gone home Tony exclaimed delightedly. 'Somehow I don't think so, Tony.'
Suddenly the giant bomber appeared from behind a hill, lined up with the long road. It drew steadily nearer, coming straight at them now at scarcely fifty feet. The limp anhedral of the wings with their six engines underslung in pods gave the plane a droop-shouldered look. Only at their tips did the slender wings curve upwards again: flexed like fencing foils they quivered, supporting the weight of the great machine as if on springs.
'They've opened the bomb doors!' Tony yelled above the scream of the jets. He stood up on the seat and gripped the windscreen for a better view. His voice turned to horror. 'They've dropped a bomb!'
It was true. Hurtling down from the 'plane was a small black object. It landed in the road not ten yards from the car, which shuddered as the shadow of the bomber crashed over it like a tidal wave. Gradually the bellowing died away.
Tony stood staring fixedly at the object in the road. Very slowly he unclamped his hands from the windscreen and pressed them over his ears.
'Tony!' David put his arm round the boy and shook him again. 'Tony!' The boy still stared at the package in terror. He didn't seem to hear. David reached up his other hand. Gently he turned the boy's head. Now he was looking into David's eyes; but without seeing them. David lifted him down into his arms. Tony, I'm sorry ...' He couldn't find words.
It was some seconds before Tony stirred; then he smiled. 'A dud.'
David nodded; he was too shaken to speak.
'Shall I fetch it? You don't think it will be radio-active,'
'It won't be radio-active.'
Tony left the car and ran across the road. He came back with the package. It was a heavy oilskin bundle about eighteen inches square. Stamped on it in white stencil were the words Desert Survival Pack. Pinned beneath the legend was a note written with a ball-pen: 'Suit yourself, Mac'
Tony unrolled the bundle, which had pouches like a tool kit. There was one empty, angled pouch that had evidently contained an automatic. Otherwise the kit was apparently complete. There was a remarkable folding fishing rod and an assortment of dry flies; a rubber torch and an ugly knife; morphine, a variety of labelled pills, and some matches in a tin; some condensed bars like squares of plywood; half a pound of chewing gum; and a sheaf of notes on the dietetic values of certain fish and herbs to be found in the Siberian Steppes.
David unwrapped a stick of gum and closed Tony's jaw on it. He pocketed the morphine and pills, and gave the pack back to the boy.
'You might try offering one of those condensed bars to the school cook, raw,' he said. 'But I expect if you boil them gently over a low fire of yak dung they'll turn into Chicken Maryland and Angel Cake.' He picked up a minute brown nugget. 'That one's certainly Cranberry Sauce. I imagine this bigger one's Waffles with Honey.'
Tony smiled his own full smile; moving what he imagined was an American jaw on the gum. He began to extend the telescopic fishing rod.
Chapter 15
'You haven't finished the rock!' Tony had his elbows on the mantelpiece, and was looking indignantly at the thick rod whose pinkness the opaque paper only modified.
David smiled. 'No. I take a mouthful after cleaning my teeth, and then suck it all night. Usually there's some left in the morning.'
'I see.' Tony didn't seem to see. He was looking thoughtfully at the third and index fingers of his right hand,
David arranged the provisions on the desk. Tony had found the Rolleiflex and was following him about the room with the lens like a news-reel man. He turned the camera round, pointing it at himself. David cast a tablecloth into the air like a primitive fishing net. It settled over the table. "Cedarwood, Sandel, and sweet white wine,' he incanted.
Tony grinned. 'Are you going to make me drunk?'
'No. Strictly rationed.'
Tony turned back to the camera. He pressed one of the creases of his shorts with his finger and watched, fascinated, as it sprang into place again.
'Food first,' David said.
Tony tilted his head on one side. It was as if someone had ingeniously grafted tomato skin beneath the golden olive along his cheek-bones. I'd like a camera like that,' he said, sitting down. 'They've got a photographic club at Glenelgin I'd make prints as big as your wall. I know how to make small ones with contact paper and just sunlight.'
/> David was surprised. 'We must do some together. What made you choose Glenelgin? Or was it your aunt's idea?'
'They wear shorts,' Tony considered for a moment. 'But of course they're blue ones.'
'All-wool?'
Tony was evidently troubled. 'I don't know. I only really like grey ones though.'
'And white ones,' David said, trying to humour him. 'Just for the occasional sporting exhibition in Cambridge? Tony produced a rather wan version of his smile.
'You'll get used to them.' David tried to sound reassuring. Tony stood up. 'Maybe. The grey goes best with my skin don't you think?' He folded back one of the legs, where it lay over his thigh. It appeared to have a three-inch hem that could be let down as he grew. David couldn't envisage Tony's growing. He searched his mind for some counter to an exhibition of self love whose morbidity must have appalled him were he not himself involved with the boy, and so an accomplice to every aspect of a libido to which pathetic solicitation such as this evidently contributed a large part. But then perhaps the morbidity did appal him, and the indecision he felt when confronted by it only added to his sense of helplessness.
'You're a bit of a crook. Tony,' he said lamely. He squeezed the boy's leg with dutiful brevity. Tony's mouth assumed an ambiguous attitude, which might have been either the suppression of scorn or a consciousness of modesty.
Tony turned away with one of his slow, gyroscopic movements. He sat down and let his chin sink on to the tablecloth. 'I annoy you, don't I?' he said, staring steadily at David's eyes.
David carved the chicken with a strength and surgical verve that surprised him. 'A bit. But then that's probably inevitable.'
'Hell!' Tony said, springing up again, and looking round the room. 'Protection. Last time I had a new suit like this I spilt coffee all over it. I felt sort of raped because it was spoilt.' He shuddered luxuriously; and suddenly David was angry. He pointed to his chewed silk dressing gown on the back of the door.
'Put that on, Pooh Bear. Then come and eat.' He deposited half the chicken on Tony's plate with a thud.
David drained his wine and got up from the table, 'Right! Photos.'
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