So Jago was in the happy position of being able to despise and patronize the weakness of his peers – although, by then, his experience had taught him to do so with considerable subtlety. Jago could now despise and patronize in a manner which charmed and menaced in just such proportions as to make him terrifically popular.
Jago was much sought after and much admired. There was status to be gained from proximity to him. He was tall, strong, handsome, highly intelligent and commanding. His academic work was consistently way out in front. He always excelled at games. More than anyone, he was in a position to pick and choose his company. And it wasn’t long before, to the surprise of all and the disappointment of many, Jago made his choice. He chose Peter Rusconi. Weedy little Ruskie, with his funny accent and his froggy mother.
Jago, of course, had no idea what had drawn him towards Peter, other than the pleasure it gave him to confound the expectations of more credible contenders. He could not possibly have understood the nature of his own blurred yearning; his wish to reach out and touch something smaller and paler and softer than himself; some comforting, shadowy memory of little Victor – that more reticent and less viable half of himself. Victor, his womb companion, the occupant of his cradle; the owner of the other heartbeat that had drummed alongside his own in a time before either of their eyes had let in light. Victor, who had been both victim and victorious.
* * *
Now that he was friends with Rutherford and sat beside him in the French class, Peter took note of something that could not but intrigue him. It was apparent that Jago never strove towards a protective mediocrity. He had no need of it. Jago was permitted always to speak his French lines with a proficiency and panache that never got him teased, only admired. Or, conversely, when Jago chose to play entertainer, as he did, occasionally, in the presence of a student teacher, or a temporary member of staff, then he would translate in off-the-cuff, dead-pan franglais which always brought the house down. If a sentence requiring translation asked, for example, whether Pierre would go jogging at a quarter to six, then Jago had only to render it as, ‘Is it that Pierre goes to make the jogging at six hours less the quarter?’ for him to reap quite unwarranted explosions of mirth.
Or if one were walking through the school grounds with Jago, boys would call to him from ten and twenty metres off. ‘Hello, Rutherford’, ‘Hi, Rutherford’, ‘See you in Science, Rutherford’. It carried on well into their teens, when first names had, once again, become acceptable currency. ‘Hello, Jago’, ‘Hi there, Jay-Jay’, ‘How’s it going, Jay-Jay?’, ‘Jaggs, hi’. Peter occasionally felt himself to be invisible alongside his friend. It was a feeling he had experienced, from time to time, with his half-sisters.
There was, of course, his appearance to explain it – his size and his fine blond hair; his pale, translucent skin; his feathery blond eyelashes and pale blue eyes – but the thing went further than that. And then there were those occasional, weird moments – there had been that moment, the previous Christmas, as he posed with his sisters for a photograph. He had happened on some impulse to glance down at Lydia’s feet and, in doing so, had noticed that his own feet beside hers were raised two centimetres off the ground.
For fear of ever having this happen to him again, Peter had gone about with stones in his pockets and had urged himself to cultivate an interest in geology. He had never really engaged much with rocks and stones, even though he knew about them in relation to his own name. ‘Thou art Pierre. And upon this pierre I will build my church,’ as the old man, his dear step-grandfather, was all too fond of remarking. He knew that his name meant ‘stone’. He had no interest in stone. Stone bronze stone steel. Those were things for Jago and Roland. He was far more attracted to the sky.
It was not long into the friendship before Jago came to spend all his holidays at Peter’s house. Jago’s father was often preoccupied during vacations and he travelled a lot in Europe and the Far East, gathering items for his business. The flat in London was no fun for a child, left alone with an agency minder and the wherewithal to buy fast foods. Peter’s father, on the other hand, had recently become the headmaster of a public school. His holidays conveniently coincided with those of the boys and he lived, with his wife and his family, within the beautiful grounds of the school.
As a result, the children had all the access they could wish for to tennis courts, swimming pools and cricket nets. In the holidays, the school and its marvellous facilities belonged almost exclusively to Jago and Peter. They could hang upside-down on the wall bars of the gym, and borrow books from the school library. They could improvise dramas from the imposing heights of a real stage in a theatre complete with orchestra pit. They could bang the kettle-drums in the music rooms and write on all the blackboards. They were allowed to do almost anything, it seemed, so long as they were not destructive and left things as they had found them.
Since there were already three children in the family, one more didn’t make that much difference. Besides, both Peter’s parents were fond of Jago. For Jago the house was redolent of all the homey images he knew only from books and the television. He loved the simple ritual of sitting down to family meals, which Gentille brought from the Aga to the kitchen table. Pyrex dishes with pommes dauphinoise and pots of carrot soup sprinkled with chopped coriander.
He liked the jostling of the two little sisters who made eyes at him and teased him and fought each other for the privilege of sitting next to him. He particularly liked and respected Peter’s step-father, who, in turn, found him congenial. Jago, inevitably, was Roland’s sort of man, he was physical and brave and sporty. He was well-coordinated and manifestly talented with any sort of ball. He was interested in maths. Jago shared Roland’s enthusiasm for pushing out in canoes and investigating underground limestone caverns. Peter saw this and understood completely. He did not consider it at all unfair that Roland should find Jago admirable. Peter admired Jago too much himself for that.
And so the friendship went on. It worked well until the boys were twelve. It survived uneasily through the following school year and some way into the long holidays. It came to pieces at the end of the summer. That was the summer during which the boys had met Pam and Christina.
Adolescence had begun to accentuate their differences. Jago’s voice had already deepened and he began to chat up girls. Not as he had always chatted with Peter’s younger sisters, but in a special sort of voice that Peter noticed and found disconcerting. He noticed, too, that intermittently Jago was to be found in a huddled foursome with Marty and Pongo and Stet – three awesomely streetwise characters already oozing testosterone and biceps, who had appeared with the move to Roland’s public school. Their names were Martin Hanbury-Wells, Ned Portius and Stetson Gregory. Their discourse always died when Peter approached, and he began to sense the unmistakable politics of exclusion.
Furthermore, Jago’s domicile, the ugly flat in London, with its vulgar, fur-clad bed, had suddenly ceased to be a thing to be eschewed in favour of weekends at Peter’s place. It became a feather in Jago’s cap. A flat in central London, with a well-stocked booze cupboard and a frequently absent single parent, gave scope for adolescent revels and made Jago the envy of his peers.
* * *
A group of social activists began to gather around Jago of which Peter was not, and could not be, a part. There was no way – even for Jago – that Peter could chat up women, and, in any case, Jago never asked him. Once or twice he had approached Jago out of old habit, only to catch the tail-end of some exploit which had reputedly been enacted by one of the elect on the circular king-size bed. All Jago’s body language towards Peter on such occasions said, ‘Not in front of the children.’ Peter understood that he was damaging to Jago’s street-cred and he tried not to embarrass him. For Peter, adolescence had as yet done little, other than to increase the frequency with which he felt his feet take leave of the floor.
Jago, meanwhile, was too high on success to notice Peter’s wretchedness. He was himself a victim, since h
is hormones told him to chase after women and his instincts told him to lead the pack. His senses dominated his life, which became a tightrope of excitement and danger. All through that first summer term, and in homage to Jago, ‘the group’ – Jago’s group – proved their worth by knocking off bottles of hard liquor from the local off-licence and drinking it until they threw up. School life became a matter of hiding one’s cigarettes from the masters and endeavouring to ensure that one did not reek of Dubonnet.
Home weekends and holidays were given over to groping young women in dark, smoke-filled rooms. The women wore heavy make-up and short black skirts with black tights. Their faces were made up white. Some of them pierced their nostrils and poured chlorinated lav cleaner over their heads of razored hair. The style was modified prostitute. As the boldest and wittiest of them had recently bragged to Jago, ‘Even a prostitute mistook me for a prostitute.’ They were all of them the daughters of affluent London professionals and they all attended expensive private schools. Their names were abbreviated versions of those appearing regularly in the Times Births and Marriages columns. They were Tori and Toni and Suki and Tatti and Chessi. They kept their dope in elegant little silver boxes and for all of them social success meant visibly scoring with Jago.
For a while the friendship with Peter maintained itself in spite of these preoccupying diversions. It sustained itself uneasily through a technique of rigorous occupational segregation. Jago still visited Peter’s house where he swam and hiked and messed about much as he had always done. Both the boys enjoyed it, especially Jago, to whom it gave respite and relief from the pressures of his more competitive social life, but it was destined not to last. The problem was to be that final week of the forthcoming summer holiday.
Jago and Peter had always gone boating together in the last week of the summer. Boating and camping. When they were younger, Peter’s step-father had accompanied them, but, for years now, they had managed it on their own. This week had always been nothing short of idyllic. They had paddled downstream and pitched camp at night on river-banks. They had made cooking fires over which they had singed sausages and heated packet soup or spaghetti hoops. They had fished and set rabbit traps and messed about in the water. Then, after seven days, Roland had come to collect them.
This summer, as the holidays drew to a close, Jago was seriously torn.
‘About the trip,’ he said. ‘How about if Stet comes too?’
Peter hated the idea. ‘All right, then,’ he said.
‘Just the three of us,’ Jago said, knowing full well that Stet had already asked Pongo and that Pongo knew these women who were hatching to camp a few yards downstream with a ghetto-blaster and a stack of cassettes and two massive coolbags filled with Stella Artois.
In the event the women cried off, but Stet and Pongo and Marty needed no back-up to prove themselves effective saboteurs. Having no outdoor equipment of their own, they colonized Peter’s three-man tent and slept every day until noon. They smoked through the night and burnt cigarette holes in the floor and threw their empty beer cans into the river. Since such money as they had brought along with them had quickly been spent on alcohol and cigarettes, they were wholly parasitical on Peter’s food supplies and blamed him when these ran out.
Finally, bored rigid without their urban props, they commandeered the remains of Peter’s money while Jago was taking a swim. Then, hailing Jago from the shore to clothe himself and join them on a foray into the village, the four of them set out to fill their stomachs at the local doner kebab van, after which they spent the balance in the pub before returning at some point around midnight.
Peter was already asleep when Pongo and Stet conceived the idea of setting the tent alight with him still inside it. But, since the exercise proved to be rather more difficult than they had anticipated, Peter awoke, not to find himself surrounded by flames and noxious fumes, but to the smell of sulphur and the sound of the clumsy drunken duo singeing their fingers on ignited matches which they were dropping frequently, amid loud expletives and guffaws.
Jago had taken no part in this scheme, just as he had taken no part in the commandeering of Peter’s money. But, though he was considerably less affected by the evening’s drinking spree than the others, he had certainly imbibed enough to take a fairly sanguine view. He had seated himself at a little distance and had begun to take off his shoes.
Peter was both angered and wounded by his friend’s neutrality. He felt that matters had come to a head and he got up and confronted him.
‘You’ve got to choose,’ Peter said. ‘Jago, you’ve got to choose. It’s either them or it’s me.’ Anger and sleep and fear and hurt had caused his still unbroken voice to rise and rise in the night air.
‘ “You’ve got to choose, Jago”,’ Pongo parodied in a pantomime treble. ‘ “Jago, please choose me”.’
Jago laughed. Given an ultimatum like that, he really had no alternative. In truth, he had made his choice already.
The pain of severance was terrible for Peter and difficult to assuage. It signified another landmark in the taking leave of childhood. It felt, once again, like a limb lopped off. Naturally, it was also painful for Jago, though he had been the one who had made the choice; the one who had brought down the axe.
The camp was abandoned next morning. Though Stet and Pongo and Marty had barely noticed, it was glaringly apparent both to Jago and to Peter that the thing had become dangerously redolent of Lord of the Flies.
Christina had been reading Lord of the Flies some two months earlier. She had been lounging in a swimsuit on a small wooden pier built out into the waters of Lake Sanopee in New Hampshire. She was in the company of her recently widowed paternal grandmother.
‘This is crap,’ she said. ‘Have you ever tried to read this, Grandma Anj?’
Grandma Angie smiled at her. ‘Your grandpa liked it a lot,’ she said. ‘Me, I couldn’t get along with all those little hobbits and elves.’
‘That’s Lord of the Rings,’ Christina said. ‘This one’s about a bunch of boys that hunt and fish and have cookouts and then they go to war with each other.’
‘Same thing,’ Grandma Angie said. ‘For myself, Chrissie, I like to read a book that provides a little female company.’
Christina laughed. ‘These kids,’ she said. ‘They’re English schoolboys, right? They dress up and they start doing all this ritual sacrifice and stuff. Well, I just can’t get myself to believe those kids would behave like that.’
That was the summer before she chose to attend Roland’s boarding school in England.
Part Two
Leaning Forward
The Fat Priest, the Nice Young Man and the Beautiful Dark Boy
During Christina’s thirteenth year, Joe’s father died. He was known to the girls as Grandpa Bernardo and his mistress was one of the many people who turned up at the funeral. She was quite a shock for everyone except for Grandma Angie who had been aware of her existence for almost twenty years. The mistress was a good deal younger than Grandma Angie and she looked very pretty in her size ten, black crêpe sheath dress and her small, black, pillbox hat which was veiled with black tulle and daintily trellis-patterned with a host of tiny black beads. Her grief, like Grandma Angie’s, was patently genuine, and it was difficult not to notice that, of the two bereaved women, she made much the more picturesque widow.
Afterwards, alone with his wife and his mother, Joe had declared himself outraged. He had fumed and stormed and advocated the stripping of any assets that had accrued to the mistress over the past two decades and any that might possibly accrue to her in the future. Pam and Christina had heard it all through the wall, though every now and again their father lowered his voice in a spirit of pas devant les enfants. Alice said straight out that secrecy was idiotic and that the girls were not babies any longer, in case he had not noticed. Certainly, neither girl was a baby and both were using tampons.
Grandma Angie made soothing noises while Alice grasped the issue more contentiously.
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br /> ‘You’ve got to respect your father’s wishes,’ she said. ‘All this fuss and bother. What’s the point? We all know the man was an absolute sweetie. I know he was always lovely to me.’
This was true. He had always been lovely to her. He had never forgotten that, because of her, he and Grandma Angie had at last acquired two grandchildren. He had determinedly considered her every action as evidence of peculiar ability and peculiar virtue. He had showered her with tokens of his affection and had fallen upon her with praise. Once he had come upon her as she was guiding Pam through her piano practice. ‘A perfect wife, a perfect mother and a musician,’ he said.
‘Well,’ Alice said, made weary now by her husband’s judgmental wrath in the aftermath of the funeral, ‘what I say is hats off to Bernardo for “keeping” the woman. Most kept women nowadays are required to keep themselves.’
‘Alice,’ Joe said stiffly, ‘your terminology is insensitive.’
‘Oh, excuse me,’ Alice said. ‘Dear, dear. Mr Purity himself. And I don’t suppose the tiniest little transgression has ever crossed your mind?’
The pause that followed this throwaway taunt was just a little too long for comfort.
‘I don’t stoop to answer such a question,’ he said.
‘Well, I wonder why not,’ Alice said.
They had got to England late that summer. Weeks later than usual. They had been pampering Grandma Angie. And then, having been no more than three days at Granny P’s, Christina’s father had telephoned from his hotel room in Russell Square, to announce a wholly unscheduled meeting with his wife and daughters on a railway station platform somewhere in Worcestershire.
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