“Frequently,” murmured Richard, arousing Stephen expertly with his fingers and slipping his tongue into his mouth.
“Wait, Rich,” said Stephen urgently, fighting down his rapidly rising passion. “Lemme finish… mmm.” He struggled free from Richard for a moment, wanting to say what he had to say. “We’ll take a holiday, Rich. I wonder why I didn’t think of it before. We need a holiday. We owe ourselves one, and we can sure as hell bloody well afford one, so fuck it, let’s go and spend some of our ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile we’ll leave the boozer to its own devices. Now you can do whatever you like to… ooooh, Richard… oh, Christ…”
13
They woke late the next morning, and got under Tom’s feet swiping a breakfast of hastily jammed-together ham sandwiches, lager shandy and pork scratchings from behind the bar.
Then they decided to go off for a stroll. It was a dreary day, overcast and autumnal, not yet raining but with a heavy damp in the air. They wandered without any special aim, and by some instinct their feet led them to the cricket ground, a place they both found restful, and looking particularly peaceful and attractive now that all the surrounding trees were turning copper and gold.
They were on their third leisurely circuit of the boundary, mooching companionably together and saying very little, when a soft voice behind them made them both jump.
They spun round in unison, and found Alfie Brett, the elderly groundsman, striding noiselessly behind them in ancient black wellingtons. One of them, they both noticed simultaneously, had a red and black bicycle-tyre patch on it. They grinned at it involuntarily, and halted to wait for him. He smiled at the boys and caught them up.
“It’s a restful place to come, all right,” he murmured as the three of them ambled on round the boundary. “They all come up here when there’s problems to chew over.”
The boys looked at each other. “How in the world did you know we were talking over problems?” asked Richard.
Alfie laughed softly. “Because I’ve seen the problems, my dear boy,” he said. “Plus your demeanour as you strolled round. It’s where they all come, as I said. At a guess, I’d say you were discussing how to extricate yourselves from the small spot of difficulty you’ve got yourselves into with the pub.”
They exchanged surprised glances once again. “We were, at that,” Stephen grunted, stooping to pick a long stem of grass and chewing it meditatively. “Though how you could possibly know that beats me.” The old man laughed softly, but said nothing. “We… we’re in something of a disagreement about it,” Richard volunteered.
“I thought so,” said Alfie at last. “Would you care to talk about it to someone else? An outsider — a sympathetically disposed outsider, of course — can sometimes throw additional light on a problem. Sometimes he sees something the people involved are too close to the problem to see.”
“I certainly would,” muttered Stephen, spitting out the remains of his grass and picking another one. “Me too,” contributed Richard.
“Well, let’s see,” said Alfie, halting at the rear of the pavilion and lugging a heavy bunch of keys from the pocket of his battered, old-fashioned grey flannel trousers. As he unlocked the rear door it began to rain, heavily and steadily. A vast bank of black cloud rolled nearer from the direction of the sea. “Let’s sit in the clubhouse,” said Alfie, looking up unconcernedly into the rain. “This won’t stop today. Come on, get inside, both of you, or you’ll catch your deaths. We’ll have a brew.”
Then he shuffled the keys again and let them through a further door, into the main room of the pavilion. Inside he set them to opening a couple of the heavy shutters on the windows looking out across the veranda. Then he found yet another key, let himself into the small kitchen where the players’ wives made the teas on match-days, found three huge mugs — the club had no use for cups — and busied himself making the tea.
They shifted a table so they could look out of the windows across the pretty ground, and a few minutes later the fragrance of tea filled the neat little room. “I hope you like lapsang souchong,” said Alfie. “I never drink anything else.”
“Fine,” said Richard.
“Never heard of it,” said Stephen, taking an experimental sip. “Smoky,” he said a second later. “Nice though.” Alfie chuckled.
They sat for a while sipping the tea, and Alfie ambled over to the kettle to make more. When they all had fresh mugs he had folded his lanky frame down onto his seat once more, plunked his elbows on the table, and looked steadily at the boys.
“Well,” he said after a pause. “At a guess, I’d say you were worrying about how to ease yourselves out of the pub, without abdicating the responsibilities you feel you have for the… not so much the problems as the… changes that have taken place recently. Changes you feel that you yourselves are to some extent responsible for. Or that you, perhaps caused to happen.
“Or rather,” he went on, not giving them a chance to speak, “I’d guess that one of you feels that, and that’s the cause of the discussion.”
They looked at him in some amazement at this apparent feat of mind-reading. He saw their expressions, and chuckled again. “Elementary, my dear Watsons,” he said gently. “No,” he corrected them, “old Alfie’s not a mind-reader or a magician. Just a very great deal older than you two children. Don’t take offence,” he said, seeing Stephen’s brows contract slightly; and he gave them a sudden smile, of peculiar sweetness, grandfatherly but utterly free from patronising, fond and — ‘… serene, that was the word’, Richard said when they talked about it later.
“Don’t forget,” went on Alfie, speaking to them with great gentleness, almost tenderness, “that from where I’m looking most people under thirty-five look like children. I’ve seen it all before. People tend to forget that, partly because the habit of reverence for the old is fast dying — and a good thing too, considering what the old have done over the last few decades — but also because I make a point of never coming the old soldier.” He took a short, blackened pipe from the pocket of his old green fatigue jacket, filled and lit it unhurriedly before going on. “But I think you two could perhaps use a little impartial counsel. It’s available if you want it.” He sat silent, watching them. The fragrance of the tobacco mingled with that of the tea.
“Yes, please,” said Stephen simply. “Tell me,” said Alfie, replying in kind. So they tried to explain, hesitantly, uncertainly, in a series of beginnings without endings, the deeply-buried unease and discontent that was troubling them. After a while Alfie raised a hand, stopping them gently.
“So you, then,” he said, gesturing with the stem of his pipe in Richard’s direction, “are unhappy, because you feel that life has become too complicated of late, and you want to go back to how it was, with just the two of you, comfortable, wanting nothing that you haven’t already got. You have what you really want, and need: each other. And so, sufficient unto the day the joy thereof.
“You, on the other hand,” he said, aiming the pipe at Stephen, “are unhappy because you feel that the changes that have taken place at the Crown have been largely your doing, and you feel responsible for the fact. You feel that whatever you do now, whether you bail out and run for cover, or whether you stay here and… tough it out, I think the expression is, you have some responsibility to leave the pub in as good order as you found it. Not necessarily the same as you found it, but running and in good order. You don’t feel inclined simply to wash your hands of the place and leave it to other people to sort out problems that you feel you yourselves at least partially created.”
They stared at him, wide-eyed. “That’s absolutely it,” cried Stephen after a moment’s pause. “That was exactly how we were arguing it out last night. “But Alfie, which of us is right?”
“Why, both of you,” murmured Alfie gently, puffing contentedly on his ancient, half-burnt-away pipe.
“Both of us?” queried Richard. “How can we both be right?” Alfie unfolded himself and ambled off to the kitchen to make f
resh tea. He came back with it, set it down and got himself and his pipe comfortable once more. Outside the rain came down harder, drumming on the roof and lashing itself from time to time against the windows. “Good for my vegetables,” Alfie murmured. Then he turned back to the two boys, staring at him anxiously across the table as they sipped the scalding, aromatic tea.
“You’re both right,” he said eventually, “because neither of you is wrong. Both points of view are equally tenable, or legitimate, if you like the word better. You” — he gestured at Richard — “are quite right to feel that your first duty is to each other. You” — with a wave at Stephen — “are equally right to feel some responsibility for the waves you have set up in a lot of other people’s lives here. People who didn’t know of your existence until a few months ago. You appeared in their midst, and you suddenly changed them, and things that were familiar to them. People like familiar things. The most elementary form of security is stability. You rocked a lot of people’s boats — not deliberately. In fact I’d guess you did your very utmost to avoid rocking any boats if you could help it. Well, in the end you couldn’t help it, and the boats got rocked in any case.
“What you have to realise is that you can help very few things that happen in this life. Change happens, all the time. To try to resist it is as futile an occupation as trying to resist the tide.” He fell silent for a while, and sat gazing out of the window, puffing clouds of blue smoke from the little pipe, an old man at peace with himself and his small world, watching the rain saturating the cricket field that was his own particular love and pride. Neither of them would have dreamed of interrupting.
At length he resumed. “There’s an expression you’ll have heard,” he said. “It’s become a cliché of our time. ‘You can’t turn the clock back’ — that or some variant on it. The fact that it’s usually uttered by consummately silly asses — journalists and so forth — doesn’t make it a scrap less true. That’s the point about clichés, isn’t it? That though they may be parrotted by fools, they’re still only clichés because they’re true? Well, this one is as true as any. You can’t turn back the clock, or the roll of events that have happened. So what else can you do but accept them? You can’t alter the fact that the village pub here, which used to be a fairly typical Sussex pub, is now identified as a gay pub. You can’t alter the fact that it may become a staging post for motorbike lads. What you can do is to accept that if you hadn’t started these balls rolling, someone else very probably would have done so, this year, next year, sometime, never. So, accept that it was, in fact, yourselves, and then bail out if you wish. It won’t make any difference, to anything. I can tell you what will happen, if you like; or I can leave you in the dark, if that’s what you’d rather. But in either case, your knowing won’t make the slightest difference.”
“What’ll happen, Alfie?” asked Stephen in the end. “If we clear out and leave this place in peace?”
The old man sat smoking and gazing placidly out at the rain, now steady and torrential, for some time. “It’ll be a compromise,” he said. “It always is, in the end. In real life, that is. Some people, politicians for instance, whose sense of their own importance is so overweening that they actually believe in their own ability to change things, affect to despise compromise. But they’re wrong, and their foolish ideas are always buried deep under layers of compromise within a snap of the fingers of their departure.
“So, if you boys leave us here, within a few days things will have gone back some way towards how they were before you had ever been seen in this village. But they won’t be all the way back to how they were before, because that would be contrary to the laws of the real world, and therefore impossible. And a good thing, too. It was high time someone began the process of dragging this village into the twentieth century. You were appointed to that task.
“I’m a fatalist. I believe everything that happens happens for a reason, according to some ordained plan. I think that’s what believing in God means. So I think it was your appointed task to jolt this village out of its complacency, its comfortable, right-wing self-righteousness, with all the nasty little faces of racialism, homophobia and the rest of it. It hasn’t been at all easy to be gay in a place like this all these years, believe me.”
He stared out of the windows for another interval, then turned in his seat and gave them the same affectionate smile. The boys, for their part, sat goggling at him as if the lean, stringy old man had suddenly become radioactive and started glowing in the dim light.
“You mean… you’re… like us?” asked Stephen cautiously.
The old man gave him a slow, sad smile. “Yes, indeed,” he said.
“But what did you do?” asked Richard, trying to imagine living in a community as small and as tight as the village.
“As I said, it was never easy,” said Alfie. “Not that I’ve been celibate. Don’t get me wrong. But it was always difficult. It was illegal to attempt to put my sexuality into effect, remember, until I was old enough to be your father. I was on the edge of middle age before they even found a comparatively neutral word for us.” He saw the incomprehension on their faces, and chuckled. “You boys bandy the word ‘gay’ about,” he said, “and think nothing of it. Try to imagine, if you will — if you can — a time when there was no such word. ‘Gay’ came over from America in the nineteen-fifties. Before that they used to have all kinds of words for us, but none of them was pleasant, almost all were downright insulting. Gussies, they used to call us, and nancies, nancy-boys, fairies, lilies. Then poof and poofter came on the scene, and I’m not sure I didn’t find those the most offensive of the lot.
“All the same, we managed. I used to catch a train to London. Or, very often I used to ride my bike into Brighton, and we used to hold clandestine meetings — in pubs, occasionally, but they were nothing at all like gay pubs nowadays, open dancing, kissing and camping it up. It was all dreadfully hole and corner, with everyone in constant dread of the police. Sometimes we used to meet at someone’s home. Sometimes it would be outdoors: in a bus station, the library, anywhere. It really was very unpleasant and difficult. But it was all we had. And in some ways it was more fun, I think. There was the constant sense of being in a battle — a battle for one’s very survival as a person. But I think we’d have exchanged our circumstances for yours, given an offer.” He chuckled again. “The irony is that now everything’s happened as it has in this village, I’m a good way past the age when I might have wanted to do anything about it. All the same, I can derive a certain perverse pleasure from seeing the village shaken up and forced to face such things. It never wanted to, and it doesn’t want to now. But you’ve forced the issue, and I’m enjoying the spectacle. No one has ever known about me here.”
The boys stared at each other, wondering what to say. Richard, with his natural grace, found the right words. “I think, Alfie,” he said diffidently, “you’ve just made it all worth while. For me, at least. I’m glad now that things have turned out as they have.”
Alfie turned to look at him, and once again the slow, serene smile illuminated his face. It made him look much younger, and both boys saw a glimpse of the handsome, clean-chiselled face he must have had when he was a young man. Then he laughed. “There was another thing we used to do back in the days when I was not much older than you are now,” he said, chuckling and gazing into space as he remembered.
And then he told them. They looked at each other, seeing the identical reaction in each other’s face. “Oh, yes!” crowed Richard. “It’s a great idea.”
“That we’ve got to do,” said Stephen at the same moment. “How do we go about it, Alfie?” he asked. Alfie, laughing, made a few suggestions. “I rather thought you might see it like that,” he said. “As a challenge, I mean.” They fell to excited discussion of the possibilities, and Alfie made more tea.
It was a good deal later in the afternoon when the rain eased off sufficiently for them to make their way back to the pub at a brisk trot. The sky was alrea
dy almost black with heavy banks of rain-clouds, and evening was drawing in. When they got there Stephen went straight to the telephone and rang the Elderton Park clubhouse. In answer to his enquiry the steward told him that Bill had been in and left, so Stephen rang him at home.
“Weather’s all right there,” he reported to Richard when he finished talking to Bill. They got drinks, and settled in their usual corner of the bar, chatting inconsequentially to Tom. There was no one else in the bar yet. After a while Stephen got up. “Just got another call to make,” he said off-handedly, and left the other two chatting.
When he returned to the others he was bubbling over with ill-suppressed excitement. “Got a little something fixed up for tomorrow,” he said. “Liven this place up a bit.” Richard looked at him in surprise. “Tomorrow?” he said. “We’ll be back home tomorrow, won’t we? For the match,” he added.
Stephen stared blankly at him for a moment. “We’ll go tomorrow morning,” he said, still quivering with internal excitement. “This is one of my best ideas yet.” He refused to go into details, saying in answer to all Richard’s efforts to prise it out of him, “You’ll just have to wait and see.” Then he turned to Tom. “We’ll be away for a while, Tom. There’s no cricket here this week, and we’re going off on a bit of a holiday.”
“Oh,” said Tom neutrally. “Righto.” He thought about it for a moment. “Might not be a bad thing,” he said eventually. “Let things calm down a bit, get back to normal, if you see what I mean…” He tailed off as it occurred to him how his words must have sounded. But the boys grinned at him, understanding. They both liked Tom, and were sympathetic to his awkward, and sometimes very difficult, position between the two factions in the pub.
“There’s one other thing, Tom,” said Stephen casually. “Something you could do for us, if you will.” Tom raised his eyebrows. “Yes,” said Stephen. “I could do it myself, but it would be a lot easier for you, if you’d be willing to do it as a favour for me.”
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