The headmaster sighed. “Well, you’re not headmaster, and I am”, he said, “and I took — I take — the view that much though it’s to be deplored that, as you say, the man lacked the moral fibre to give his name, the allegation is serious, and demands some investigation. If we were to do nothing at all, well, he could take his complaint to the newspapers next, and think what that could do to the school’s name.”
“I’m wondering what it would do to the school’s precious name if I talked to the local rag and told them that I was being investigated on the strength of this anonymous piece of garbage.”
“Steady on, Graham”, soothed the headmaster. “I didn’t say you were being investigated. As far as the anonymity is concerned, I urged the caller most emphatically to give me his name. He refused. I couldn’t do any more than that, now could I?”
“You could have done a bit less, though”, said Graham savagely. “Like, for instance, you could have told him if he couldn’t pluck up the grain of moral courage needed to provide his name he could go to hell, and then you could have treated it with the contempt and indifference it deserved, instead of raking me in here and giving every indication of taking the thing seriously.”
“Graham”, said the headmaster, doing his best to pacify him. “I haven’t said for a moment that I’m taking what’s been alleged seriously. I’m going through the motions, man, can’t you see that? I don’t put an ounce of faith in this slur, and I’d have hoped you’d have sufficient faith in me to take that for granted. I received the complaint, and I felt bound to follow it up. But it’s a formality, nothing more. I put the allegation to you, as a matter of form, and I hope, and expect, to hear you tell me it’s lies. That’s all. Then I can say with a clear conscience that I’ve made all appropriate enquiries, found nothing to support the allegation, which, I can honestly say, is in my opinion a calumny of the foulest kind, and the matter is closed. That’s what I mean when I say it needs investigation. I don’t actually believe this…this piece of poison, not for a moment”
He watched anxiously as Graham sat thinking about it. “Well, I don’t feel inclined to co-operate”, Graham said at length. “That sort of sophistry may let you wriggle off the hook and comfort yourself that your duty’s done and your conscience clear, but I’m disinclined to collaborate in sweeping it out of sight under the carpet. No. I’ll take you at your word instead. You said you wanted my side of this affair. Well, you can have it.
“The specific complaint this piece of dirt has raked up came in two parts, I think? One, I’m homosexual, and two, I’m up to mischief with a boy. Right?” He sat upright on his chair, staring angrily at his chief, who slowly and reluctantly nodded his head.
“Well, here’s my side of the matter, as you asked. Part one is true. Part two is false. Satisfied?” He sat back and glared truculently across the desk.
The headmaster’s face sagged a little, and he said nothing for some time while he collected his thoughts and sought for the best way to respond to this unexpected frankness. The rumours and gossip that formed the staple conversational diet of the common room always penetrated to his study sooner or later, either on the ordinary grapevine or via the sycophants forming a minority of any staff, so he was well aware of the suggestions that flew about from time to time that this or that master was an active homosexual. He was aware that Graham had been the object of such tittle-tattle in the past, and he knew, of course, that his staff was bound, in the nature of things, to include a number of homosexuals, many of them repressing or sublimating their sexuality but some of them continuing to enjoy an active sexual life. But he was used to the subject being treated with a decent decorum. Plain speaking such as Graham’s blunt statement was not customary. Nor was it welcome. However, he was stuck with it, and now he had to respond to Graham’s forcing play.
“Just so there can be no possible mistake”, he said at last, “I’d like you to spell it out for me, please, Graham. Tell me exactly what is true and what is false. I don’t want there to be any possibility of the slightest misunderstanding about this if it should ever, ah, surface later.”
“Happy to oblige”, said Graham, still fuming with sternly controlled rage. “Part one of your smutty little complaint is true. I am homosexual. Part two is false. I’m not engaged in a sexual affair with a boy.” He went on to give a rapid resume of the incident at the cricket club, and his answer to the unsubstantiated reports there. “That’s the lot”, he concluded. “I don’t know how it got out: I suppose someone blabbed — to his wife maybe, or some friend. But you’ve heard the lot. I am what I say I am, and I wouldn’t dream of getting involved with boys, any more than ninety-nine per cent of heterosexual masters would get involved with schoolgirls. Whether the boys came from this school or anywhere else is quite beside the point.”
As he said it he was hardly conscious that he was lying. He no longer thought of Stephen as a boy; he no longer thought of him as a pupil, but as his friend, companion, solace in time of trouble and, with increasing certainty, as his lover. The truthful part of his mind did persist, annoyingly, in jeering “You’re lying!” at him, but it was a faint voice, and more or less submerged under louder and more strident inner voices, haranguing his conscience like a couple of menacing dock orators looming over his shoulders at an old-style strike meeting.
There was a galloping sense of injustice, that a man of eighteen years, in every other sense an adult, with the right to join the armed forces and kill people, should be denied the right to spend a night in the bed of his own choice. The constant awareness of this gathered strength by the moment until it threatened to stifle him under its choking shrouds of outraged feelings. In the face of an injustice so monstrous his conscience had no difficulty in absolving him from any residual compunction about lying. Then there was a powerful realization that however little he liked having to lie, the consequences of the truth’s coming out would be a catastrophe of the most shattering kind, for himself and for his young lover. Thus principle coalesced with necessity, and he lied without shame or regret.
“Well?” he demanded belligerently, breaking the painful silence. “You’ve had the awful truth. Yes, I’m homosexual. No, I’m not interfering with little boys, or any other sort of boys. Now what?”
The headmaster still sat in thought. Eventually his face cleared. “To tell you the truth, Graham, I’m rather relieved that you had the courage to come clean. I wasn’t really surprised to hear you admit your homosexuality. You know as well as I do what the grapevine in this place is like. As for your denial of involvement with boys, of course I’m very glad to hear it, and I accept it without question or reservation. I never had the slightest fear that you could be engaged in anything so improper — not to mention dangerous to yourself.”
“I don’t accept the term ‘admit’, Headmaster”, said Graham, somewhat disarmed by the headmaster’s conciliatory words and tone. “You admit to wrongdoing, to fault or to error. As far as I’m concerned my sexual orientation is none of those. But I repeat, what now?”
“Well, your sexual preference is, of course, your own affair”, said the headmaster, mildly. “We’re not quite barbarians here, as I should rather have liked to hope you would know without my needing to tell you so. Since I’ve accepted your word as to your involvement — I beg your pardon”, he corrected himself hastily, seeing storm warnings being hoisted fast in Graham’s face, “I mean, of course, your non-involvement — with boys from this school, that’s an end of the matter. As far as I’m concerned the matter ends here. I see no reason to bother the school governors with it, and I give you my personal word that I shall not mention it again. Satisfied?” He was unable to resist a mild-and-bitter imitation of Graham’s sarcastic little jibe earlier on.
Graham sat and cogitated, feeling a little as if he had trodden where the last stair ought to be and found it wasn’t there. He decided that the headmaster’s reaction was sufficiently handsome to deserve payment in kind. “Er, yes, Headmaster”, he said slowly.
“Yes, I am satisfied. Rather surprised, to be honest, but satisfied. I had the feeling from the way we started that this was going to be a witch-hunt. I’m sorry I was so aggressive. But I suppose you can imagine how it feels to be the victim of anonymous trouble-makers like this.”
The headmaster spent several more minutes soothing him and assuring him that his position was secure, and that Stephen would not be dragged into the matter. “If you assure me that no boy of this school is involved in anything of the kind our anonymous friend alleges”, he said, “your word is quite enough. The last thing the boy needs in his A-level year is to have his concentration wrecked by becoming embroiled in squalid and baseless accusations. No, let’s let the matter rest between us here. I’m only sorry, more sorry than I can say, that I was forced to take it this far. Will you have a glass of sherry and agree to forget all about it?” He said it so graciously that Graham’s anger and resentment evaporated. He gave the headmaster a faintly apologetic smile and accepted. Then he went away and tried to concentrate on inspiring thirteen-year-olds with a love of the French language as the worrying began.
* * *
That day was a Friday, but he had decided to give the club a miss, and Stephen arrived at the flat fairly early, soon after nine-thirty, playful, affectionate and randy as usual. Graham hadn’t the heart to deflate him by imparting the decision he had come to, with a reluctance beyond description, during the course of the day. He had cast about for any excuse by which he might escape the necessity to reach the conclusion he had, but there was none. He took Stephen off to the bedroom almost before he had got through the door, and was especially attentive and gentle with him, spinning out every small act of love and desire to the utmost and savouring it like a last meal before a fast. His own desire was running high, with the desperation of last things, and they made love several times before he summoned up all his nerve and prepared to tell the boy the news.
He propped himself up on one elbow, pushed the covers down and looked appreciatively, and sadly, along Stephen’s slim, firm body. He had become familiar with every muscle and how it moved under the silky skin. He ran a fingernail down the boy’s broad, hairless chest, down the pale-gold stomach, and traced patterns along the inside of his thigh. For a moment he toyed with the smooth, heavy penis, with its glistening tip peeping through the red creases of the foreskin. Then he pulled himself together and concentrated on looking closely at Stephen’s regular, triangular face, with its fair skin, its shaggy mop of dusty-blond hair and the two large grey eyes, which were at the moment looking up at him, placid and faintly creased with humour at the corners. He stroked the soft, downy cheek — Stephen could still go three days without shaving and feel as smooth as a child — and the wide, expressive mouth. The knowledge that he would in all probability never see that body naked again, or see the relaxed expression of lust sated in those eyes, made him ache with sorrow and self-pity, and he groaned involuntarily.
“What’s up?” asked Stephen, instantly alert as he always was to any change in Graham’s mood. His grey eyes focussed and gazed steadily up into Graham’s blue ones, and concern etched its way across his face.
“I… I’ve got some bad news for you, Stephen”, he said very slowly and quietly, awash with misery. “Bad for both of us. The worst news I could have, I suppose, really, health apart.” He closed his eyes as the despair rose blackly up in his throat and temporarily sealed it shut. Stephen went rigid. “You’d better tell me”, he said, also speaking quietly but with a hard edge in it that brought Graham out of his wallowing. Stephen’s voice had sounded so utterly un-boyish, so controlled and adult, that he made an instant decision and acted on it.
He told the boy plainly, without any preamble or attempt to soften it, of the interview with the headmaster that morning, and what had precipitated it. It took very few minutes.
“Okay”, said Stephen. “What decision did you make?”
His directness demanded the same in response, so once more Graham gave it to him without frills. “We can’t see each other any more like… like this”, he said. “At school, at the cricket — I’ll still be able to pick you up and drive you to and from the games. But no more meetings here; and most of all, no more of this. No more sex. It’s simply too risky. You can bet your life they’ll keep watch after this, for a while, at least. Besides, I don’t much like the fear of breaking my word to the headmaster. It was all right lying to him about what had gone before, but I don’t like the idea of going back on what I told him today.”
Stephen’s first reaction was one of bewilderment, mixed with terrible hurt. He thought at first that he was in some way to blame for the sudden, overwhelming collapse of his new world. He argued and pleaded, begged and cajoled, to no avail. After a long period of non-stop argument, he fell silent from mere exhaustion. When he had recovered they were both too overwrought to be capable of further toing and froing, and by some shared instinct they found respite in caresses, ending in a hard, almost brutal love-making. Then it began again. Stephen’s hurt, puzzled inability to understand why risks that had been acceptable up to then were unacceptable from that night could not be easily explained, and the effort of trying to explain it left Graham drained and defeated.
Stephen meanwhile went from hurt to incomprehension to bitter, savage anger, when he said many things that might have been unforgivable if Graham had not known the love that spawned them, and then back through self-loathing and contrition to simple hurt again. At last, understanding Graham’s point of view and hating it, and, for the moment, hating Graham and himself for allowing themselves to be put upon, he cried out from his pain, “But why, Graham? Why do we have to just put up with it? I don’t give a fuck about my A-levels. Not now. Christ, I only wanted them so badly because I had a fancy to go into the RAF. Well, that idea went out of the bloody window the moment I met you — well, you know what I mean — when I started going with you, like this. Could you see me joining something that would have had me getting carted off to fucking Borneo or somewhere and not seeing you from one year’s end to the next? I gave up the idea of the RAF months ago. To hell with my bloody, fucking, God-damned A-levels…”
Graham thought he had never heard swearing less superfluous, more meant, each profanity precisely enunciated and heartfelt; a desperate attempt to make mere words express the inexpressible. He tried to deploy once more the careful arguments he had prepared, rehearsed and marshalled against this moment, and found them vain and pitifully inadequate. Not that Stephen listened to them anyway. He simply flew from one impassioned argument to another, and Graham was reduced to stone-walling, saying the same things over and over again. They were worldly arguments, and he put them as gently, kindly and regretfully as he was able. He tried to make Stephen see that his education mattered. Stephen dismissed it in a single brief obscenity. He strove desperately to point out that Stephen would be free in a short while, and could then go where he wanted, do as he pleased. Stephen snorted furiously and cried that present satisfaction was worth double measure later, or quadruple or octuple.
Graham decided to let him have his head, and he railed against the hypocrisy of the people who had brought their world crashing about them, not forgetting to point out that it was worldly people, who could go where they wanted and do as they pleased, who had done it. At last, wearied to exhaustion by his outbursts and emotional catastrophe, Stephen produced his highest card, the one Graham found nearest to impossible to defend against, by simply dropping his head on Graham’s chest, weeping piteously and pleading to be allowed to defy the world and the human automata that created conventions. When Stephen begged him not to turn him away he found him hardest to resist. He had half-expected much of what took place, but he had not begun to imagine how hard it would be, and when Stephen begged, so far from finding it contemptible, as he had hoped, he found it unbearably moving, and almost broke down himself.
He pointed out that he had, in effect, given his word to the headmaster that he would not do what he had been do
ing with Stephen for months. This amounted, he argued, to a promise that he would cease to do it now. “Fuck him”, howled Stephen, hysterical with grief and loss. “He extorted that from you. He got it by coercion — blackmail. A promise like that doesn’t count, for Christ’s sake, Graham. It’s not worth the air you used to make it. We could go away together”, he said, rallying and sitting up in bed, eyes gleaming as hope was reborn. You could get another job somewhere, and I could find something…” He trailed into silence as he saw clearly in Graham’s face that it was another nonstarter, and curled up on Graham again, burrowing down into the bed like a little boy determined not to see what he didn’t want to see.
In the end, Graham compromised. He saw that if he offered the boy nothing to hope for they would not resolve anything that night, and he remembered, if Stephen did not, that they both had a life to live, starting on the following day — or rather, he reminded himself after a glance at the clock, later that day. They were both playing for the First XI in the penultimate match of the season, and he shuddered at the prospect of trying to explain a washed-out, tear-stained, semi-hysterical wreck of a boy to the cricket club. If that happened, after what had been happening recently, he thought, he might as well apply to join the French Foreign Legion and be done with it.
So he offered Stephen something to hope for. It was the slenderest reed he could extend, and he privately writhed under a lash of his own making, despising and hating himself for seeking to mislead and deceive the person he loved more than anyone in his life before.
“Look, Stephen”, he said, almost prostrate with weariness. “Will you make a bargain with me? A pact, if you prefer?” Stephen uncurled, scenting concessions, and took notice. Graham saw enviously how instantaneously the vitality flooded back into his young face, for after all the difference in their ages was a mere twelve years. For a moment he felt like an old man. He pulled himself together and pressed on: “you’re due to sit your A-levels in… what?” — he frowned in concentration for a moment, doing sums in his head — “about nine and a half months, right?” Stephen nodded, looking as bright and attentive as if none of the preceding two hours’ emotional switchback:riding had happened, and Graham found himself smiling fondly into his eyes in response, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
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