Out of Bounds

by Mike Seabrook

  Graham had stayed away from London for three months from that day, and Tyldesley had moved on to lusher pastures. When they met in pubs from time to time he often caught Tyldesley watching him with a curiously speculative look, as if he still puzzled over why the passionate sexual partner of the past few weeks — they had both been too honest, and had too much respect for the language, to think of themselves as lovers — had dropped like a stone out of sight overnight.

  “Come on, then, Graham. Out with it. What’s troubling you? I could make a fair guess, mind you, but best to get it from the horse’s mouth.”

  “What would you guess, Reggie?”

  “It’s happened, would be my guess”, said the old man, looking at him with his usual disconcerting intelligence. He waited, but Graham sat silent, waiting for him to elaborate. “You’ve finally met the boy, haven’t you? The boy who has started feelings you couldn’t sublimate, or bury under work. You’ve fallen in love with one of your pimply, unwashed little charges, haven’t you?”

  “He’s not pimply or unwashed”, Graham burst out in a sudden rush of passion. He was aware, in a detached sort of way, even as he was blurting it out, of how absurd he sounded; but he was as powerless to halt the flow as Canute with the tide. “He’s the most fastidious boy in the school”, he heard himself saying, and he heard his voice rising with every word, yet still he rushed on. “I’ve never met a boy as clean, and I shouldn’t think he’s ever nourished a pimple in his…”

  He broke off, suddenly feeling ridiculous, as the old man leaned back in his armchair and laughed until he choked. “My,

  my, Graham, you’ve got it badly, my boy. By God, how the mighty have fallen…” He coughed, an old man’s cough, racking himself back and forwards in the chair until the paroxysm had soothed itself away. Then he spoke again. “Graham, Graham, you mustn’t mind me making fun of you, in my mild way”, he said gently. “It was the thing we liked best about each other once — or had you forgotten?”

  Graham stared at him in silence for some seconds, thinking of the old man’s unnumbered kindnesses, and suddenly felt small and mean, as well as ridiculous. He smiled, a little sheepishly. “Reggie, I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I know it’s trite to say such a thing, especially to a cliche-hound like you, but really, I…” And he found that for a moment he had nothing intelligent to say, so he relapsed into silence.

  “I do understand, you know”, said Westwood, still gentle. “It was bound to happen sooner or later, Graham, my dear. The only problem is how to deal with it. Tell me all about it. And fetch some more whisky before you start”, he added, picking up the empty decanter from beside his chair and thrusting it at Graham.

  Graham left the room silently, returning with a bottle of Tullamore Dew. He decanted all forty ounces into Westwood’s enormous Waterford decanter, and replaced it beside the old man’s chair after pouring for them both. “I’ll start with this evening, and work backwards”, he began, sitting down again.

  * * *

  “Cheer up, Graham, for lord’s sake”, Andrew Tyldesley had said. “You look as if you’ve tossed for your breakfast and lost.” Graham smiled at him, and found it hard work. He tried to pull himself together and take some sort of interest in the conversation that had been eddying about him as he stood at the bar, and that was harder still. Five seconds after making the effort he had slipped into a brown study once more. He leaned against the bar, sipping absently at his pint of lager from time to time, not noticing the puzzled, suspicious glances that his friends were shooting his way every now and then. He normally loathed the deafening disco music that thundered unceasingly in the bar they met in every week or so; but this evening he simply allowed it to flow over him in tidal waves of meaningless sound, and found it, in a perverse way, rather soothing. It made it very easy for him to recreate his pleasant daydream.

  Like a great many homosexual schoolmasters, Graham kept his professional and private lives rigorously separate. It was not in his nature to indulge in self-deception, and he had long ago accepted candidly that one of the dominant reasons for his choice of profession had been that he was fond of boys. He accepted that, and regarded it as a qualification for his work rather than an impediment to it. As a very young trainee teacher he had subjected himself to a self-examination that verged on the ruthless, to establish whether or not he was entering the profession in order to gratify sexual hungerings for young boys, and had satisfied himself that that had nothing to do with it. He was not attracted to young children, or even very fond of them, preferring the company of older boys, on the point of maturing into young men; and his liking for them, he felt reasonably sure, was predominantly a matter of liking to watch growing minds maturing and putting on their strength.

  The corollary of this, he had recognized equally early and with equal candour, was that he was attracted to young men, and attracted powerfully at that. He had expected that to be a serious problem, and had made his tentative entry into teaching with an unbreakable resolution already forged in his mind, that the day he saw that he would not be able to resist the older boys in his charge, that day would also be his last as a teacher. From that resolution he had never seen it necessary to deviate. But, oddly, the problem it was intended to forestall had never arisen. He had been teaching for seven years, and throughout that time he had seen many boys every working day whom he found attractive. Some of them were beautiful, some plain, most in between. He acknowledged privately a particular weakness for shy, vulnerable boys, the ones who blushed and were given to seeking solace in their own company. He was also, as he had once put it to himself in one of his self-analytical moods, a sucker for intelligence. There had, inevitably, been occasional opportunities.

  But Graham had been lucky, in one way in particular: he was a born teacher, and had revealed himself as such, to his superiors and more importantly to himself, from his first tremulous step into a classroom. Where others more confident as well as less endured torment as they laboured in the black arts of commanding obedience and inspiring respect, Graham had his first unruly class of guinea pigs quelled and silent within one minute of that first step into the room; in five they were eating out of his hand, and in ten they were hanging on his words, eager for more of whatever he had within him to give them. It had gone on from there.

  Among the results of this, apart from a rapid, almost meteoric rise to better and better posts, came blessed reassurance for his inner, worried self: he discovered early that he was going to have no trouble controlling his feelings for the boys. He responded to them as they did to whatever it was in him; they came to him readily in times of trouble, knowing by some sure instinct that they could trust him to take them and their troubles seriously, that he would not laugh at them or lie to them. A few — a very few — of the ones with the most sensitive antennae of all saw deep into him and knew him for what he was, and the first few times he was confronted by such a boy he trembled; but they responded as readily as the majority, and that reassured him more than anything else, he thought. But in the main, it was the relentless demands of the work that saw him through the pain of attraction. The demands on his time, his emotions and his resource were endless, and he was freer than most to let them flow out. The boys became a huge, diffused family, with wounds that needed his special gifts to be healed, crises and panics to be smoothed over, and a thousand small problems to be negotiated round every day. In the simplest terms, he realized after a few months, he could keep too busy to have time for perilous emotional attachments. He acknowledged the truth gratefully, and hurled himself into work with a strongly reinforced will.

  And so, having served his apprenticeship as a teacher, he thought he could properly feel comfortable and reassured about the wisdom of a man of his sexuality entering work that left him surrounded by attractive boys in all stages of sexual maturity.

  And yet he knew, all the time, that one day the supreme test would come.

  Falling in love with one of the boys he dismissed as no
t hazardous at all — it had happened once or twice, and control came so easily and automatically that he hardly even felt its application. The crunch would come one day, he knew, when he fell in love with a boy and the boy was of a sexual make-up to match, and returned the feeling. He had rarely, in all his years of teaching, been able to contemplate that vertiginous prospect for long at a stretch, and the reason was quite simply that he had no idea at all how he would deal with it. It had, of course, entered his mind at times; but when it had he had dismissed it as fast as he could; and the only method of dealing with such a situation that had occurred to him so far had been to hope for the best.

  And now, he reflected, as he ignored his offended friends in the gay pub in London, now it’s happened. And that’s what I’m doing, isn’t it? Hoping for the best. But am I? Or is what I’m hoping for the worst? What do “best” and “worst” mean in a situation like this? The questions milled around in his mind as Tyldesley jogged his elbow in vain to ask him what he was drinking; and no answers came in their wake, only more questions.

  “For Christ’s sake, Graham, what the hell’s the matter with you?” came Tyldesley’s voice, getting through at last. Graham had no idea what he had said, but the querulous tone suggested that he had committed some social gaffe, and he came reluctantly back to the surface of his consciousness, dismissing the daydream to the back of his mind with regret. “Eh?” he said.

  “I’ve been talking to you for the last five minutes”, said Tyldesley crossly. “What’s the matter with you? Are you in love or something asinine like that?” His expression changed to a leer. “Have you been eating of the tree that beareth the fruit which is forbidden, Graham? Is that it? Come on, now, you can tell me. Have you found a succulent little botty in the lower fourth dorm, my dear? Or been playing with a nice smooth little pee-pee behind the bike sheds? Lucky Graham — all those opportunities for real vice. Yum-yum. Come on, now, dear, don’t keep it all to yourself, that would be wickedly selfish. It’s all for one and one for all, isn’t it? Among friends, I mean.”

  He burbled on in the same vein for some time longer, taking a visible pleasure from Graham’s increasingly uncomfortable protests and rising anger.

  * * *

  “He never really forgave me for ditching him like that, you see, Reggie”, said Graham, pouring more of the Tullamore Dew for them both. “And in a way, I suppose I can’t really blame him. I think maybe that’s one reason why I still drop in and say hi to him when I come up to town. I mean, I never offered the slightest explanation, did I? Just dropped out of existence for months on end, after — well, we were an affair, weren’t we, more or less? I know you were right about him. I’d pretty well seen him for what he was myself by the time you did your character assassination number on him. But to be fair to him, he’d never actually done me any harm, had he?”

  “Yes, he had”, grunted Westwood, “and the fact that you’re still talking like that about him is the clearest possible proof that he had. I told you, boy, that’s how people like him operate. He’s as weak as watered-down piss, and he’ll need emotional crutches to walk with as long as he breathes. Human crutches — strong, reliable people, with consciences and integrity. People like you, in short. He needs someone strong and honourable to prop him up. If I hadn’t warned you off the course he’d have had you snared in five more minutes, and you’d have spent the next five years making his decisions for him, acting as his conscience, picking up the pieces after his irresponsibilities and weaknesses, like the man with the bucket and shovel who walks behind the elephant. After the Lord Mayor’s Show… In his case, it could have been you. Think yourself lucky you had me to administer the necessary clip round the ear. He’d have sucked the strength and integrity out of you, spending it as profligately as if it were his own. After five years you’d have been a worn-out husk, and he’d have walked away from you like fleas off a dying rat, because parasites have a use for you only while you’re still full of blood.”

  Graham pondered this for a moment. Then he nodded, and muttered “Ye-es. I see all that. But I still can’t help feeling I treated him a bit roughly — before he’d actually done any of those things…”

  “Do you know the trouble with decent people like you, Graham”, said Westwood. Graham looked at him expectantly.

  “In some ways decency is a get-out”, Westwood continued, not unkindly. “It’s sometimes a bloody good cover-up for indecision, or rather, for wriggling your way out of taking hard decisions. Because you’re decent, you shrink from inflicting hurt — even on parasites and reprobates, such as your friend Tyldesley. So you wrap yourself in your shining white robes of purity and avert your head, saying, “No, I cannot stain my hands with brutal acts. I cannot deal with this cur as he requires to be dealt with. And you go whining and cringing off telling everybody how pure and saintly you are. And there, slinking along a hundred yards in your wake, unseen behind the radiant clouds of glory you’re trailing, safely out of the glorious effulgence left by your passing, creeps a thug with a hatchet, on which the blood still gleams fresh and red. After the Lord Mayor’s Show… comes the shitcart, and after the serene departure of the virtuous… comes the assassin, who makes the world safe for the virtuous to continue to appear in public.”

  He leant forward, examining Graham’s face to see what effect his words were having. Seeing the distress clearly imprinted there, he leaned over and patted him gently on the knee. “There, there, Graham, I don’t mean all this personally, against you. All I’m trying to say is that decent, honourable, high-principled folk like you, who acknowledge their responsibilities and shoulder them, ought not to disdain to do unpleasant things. Every benevolent despot needs his thugs and his hatchet men. In your case, you’re a thoroughly principled young man, but you’re a little bit lacking in something. I don’t know whether it’s just worldly savvy, which will come in time, or whether it’s a real weakness in the fabric, which won’t heal. But you’ve got to dredge deep, and find the stomach to take nasty, harsh decisions — like, for instance, the one you ought to have taken for yourself with Tyldesley.”

  “What exactly do you think I ought to have done, Reggie?”

  “Well, you say you’d seen him for what he was yourself. If so, then what you ought to have done was to tell him what you saw him for, and that you were going to ditch him accordingly. Then you should have ditched him. As it was, you needed me to tell you what you already knew, and then you needed me to tell you what to do about it. Well, I did so, because I have the advantage of being at least half a thug myself — no, don’t protest. I know what you think of me, and I’m flattered. But flattery is by definition untruthful, and I never was so pure as you thought me. So I have little difficulty in telling parasites, for example, that they’re parasites. And when I’d done so, you did the easy bit — ditching him. But even that you did the easy, painless way, under an anaesthetic, by simply dropping out of sight—thereby, perforce, depriving us who love you of your pleasant company also. But, Graham, this is all a digression. You were telling me about being in that appalling hole of a pub…”

  “Yes”, said Graham, licking his wounds and feeling rather hurt. “Well, as I said, he’s never really forgiven me for breaking it off with him, even though it was three years ago. He’s never really found anyone else, you know, since then. No-one to look after him, you know, as I might have done…”

  “Proves what I’ve been saying”, said Westwood in a more amiable tone. “Go on.”

  “Well, to be honest, Reggie, I’ve always had a nagging feeling that he’s never really liked me much since then, either. In fact, I’ve had a feeling that he hates me, sometimes. No, that’s too strong. But something, you know? A feeling that he’d…” He groped for the words. “A feeling that he’d like to be avenged on me, I suppose is the best way to describe it. It’s bloody difficult to describe, but that comes as close as I can get to analyzing it. And all the time he was going through that mock-leering and simpering act over the boy I was suppo
sed to be seeing back at school, I had this feeling very strongly — that he was somehow taking his revenge on me. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Of course I do my boy”, said the old man, “and I think your senses were right, just as right as your intellect was wrong about him when you first got friendly with him.”

  “And of course, there was another thing”, continued Graham. “He was getting pretty perilously near to the truth, as well, wasn’t he? I started feeling pretty nervy. I don’t think I see him in quite as hard a light as you do, but even I admit he’s not someone I’d want to know too much about my business, and the idea of his knowing I was besotted with one of the kids in my own sixth form is a pretty scary one, I can tell you…

  “Anyway, the upshot of it was that I made some feeble excuse, and got out. I was getting a headache by then, anyway”, he concluded lamely.

  “And thereby demonstrated my point”, said Westwood. “You didn’t have the headache at the time, any more than you needed to invent it for my benefit, or your own more likely, just now. You hadn’t quite got the stomach to tell him he’s a howling shit and walk out leaving it at that, no, you had to invent a headache to allow you to flounce out on him with a stainless conscience. Didn’t you?” he added, speaking gently once more, to Graham’s relief. “And now”, he went on, “tell me about the boy.”

  * * *

  “Very well”, Westwood said when Graham had completed a thumbnail panegyric of Stephen Hill. “Now tell me the answer to the big question. Is he one of us? Is he of the fraternity? Is he gay?”

  “I don’t know”, said Graham. “Not for absolutely sure. But I think so. I’m almost sure. That time when I first took any real notice of him, the time I told you about, when we were walking round the boundary and I asked him to come to play for my club, I had this strong feeling that there was something else he wanted to talk about But he didn’t at the time, and I didn’t press the matter.”