Stephen watched until he saw the man preparing to resign his assignment and throw them angrily out of the car. “Cash in advance?” he said sweetly. The driver halted half-way through his sideways turn in readiness for reaching across Stephen, opening the passenger door and shoving him out of it, and eyed Stephen suspiciously. “Eh?” he grunted.
“I said, if you’re worried about whether I’m good for the fare or not, would it ease your mind if I offered you it in advance?” said Stephen negligently, affecting not to have seen what had gone before.
“I… oh,” said the man, nonplussed. “Well, if you’ve got the fare… I s’pose I can take you, if you like. You see my point aview, though? It’s not usual for young lads to have that kinda money… Let’s see it,” he added, with a return to the suspicious edge in his voice of a minute before.
“It’s quite usual for me, I assure you,” Stephen murmured, and he pulled out a thick wad of notes. The driver’s eyes widened. They widened still further when Stephen casually peeled off a fifty pound note from one end of the wad and a twenty from the middle and held them out to him.
Eventually they explained briefly, and after a momentary contracting of his brows the man joined in the laugh against himself. He also pocketed the seventy pounds, radioed a message with the change of desination, and set off. After the first awkwardness they got on very pleasantly.
Tom was opening the Crown when they got there, so they strolled in and bought the still somewhat disbelieving cab driver a drink. When he’d gone, wondering what kind of a world it was coming to when schoolboys could own large and fancy pubs, they talked briefly to Tom, then got Richard’s mother’s car out and made their getaway before anyone had arrived for an early drink. They were back at Richard’s home shortly after mid-day.
“I’ve got to pop into town for a few minutes,” announced Stephen when they got there. aCan you be ready to come in and meet me in about an hour, say?”
Richard looked at him in surprise. “Can’t I come with you, then?” he asked.
“Nope,” said Stephen. “Got something to do first. Just be ready for my phone call, okay?” He persisted in being mysterious about it, and eventually he escaped, leaving Richard consumed with curiosity, and put another of his telephone calls into effect.
* * *
Richard picked up the telephone before the first ring had stopped echoing in the room, and twenty minutes later he walked through the doors of a large pub near the town centre. Stephen was waiting with a drink set up for him on the bar. “Drink it quick,” he said, and Richard, his curiosity intensifying, obeyed readily.
When they had finished their drinks Stephen led the way from the pub to a large and flashy car showroom, containing a lot of plump and gleaming BMWs. “Ta-raa!” he yelled cheerfully, gesturing to a Series 3 in smart dark blue. “Help yourself.”
When Richard had got over it, he went into raptures, barely managing to restrain himself from falling on Stephen there and then. “But can we just take it away?” he said in wonder.
“Course we can,” said Stephen. “I paid for it with a banker’s draft. That’s what I phoned the bank about this morning. I just went down there to pick it up. It looks like a cheque,” he added, “only it can’t bounce, cos it’s the bank themselves writing the cheque. And I got the garage to put number plates on it. All you’ve got to do is get yourself insured. The chap here says you can do that in five minutes at the AA. You’ll also want a green card, for abroad. Shall we go?”
Richard hadn’t got his driving licence with him, which was not surprising since Stephen had given him no idea of what he was up to. So they had to waste a few agonising minutes finding a taxi to take them home and wait while Richard dashed in and grabbed his licence. “Bring your chequebook, too,” murmured Stephen as Richard was getting out of the cab. Richard paused to glance at him in some surprise; but he was too excited and in too much of a hurry to waste any time wondering why Stephen should have said what he had.
A minute later the taxi was whizzing them back into the town centre again, this time to the local AA office. When they had got rid of it Stephen explained. “I didn’t like the idea of you having to look as if you were getting the money for the insurance off me,” he said, a little bashfully. “And in any case,” he went on, more sure of himself, “I didn’t want you to have to keep on looking to me for money. It’s not right. So I… er… I paid something into your account. You know, so you don’t have to worry about… things…” He blushed, and tailed off.
Richard stopped in mid-stride. “How much?” he asked bluntly.
“I… er… well… Five thousand,” said Stephen. It sounded like a confession.
Richard stood, half-way across the pavement towards the steps up to the AA office doors, staring at him, speechless. He forgot his excitement and his hurry. For the moment he even forgot the beautiful dark blue BMW waiting for him. He, too, blushed scarlet for a moment. The look he gave Stephen in that moment repaid the money many times over. Stephen’s doubts dissolved into nothing on the spot. “I… I didn’t quite know how to ask you to take some,” he said, gently nudging Richard out of the way of hurrying shoppers. “So I thought the easiest way would be to just… well, you know… sort of, pay it in. You don’t mind?”
Richard gave him a long stare, half of it a kind of exasperation, as if to say ‘Whatever am I going to do about you?’, and the other half an affection too deep to be expressed. Touched beyond his power of speech for the moment, he simply slipped a hand under Stephen’s elbow and squeezed it hard. “I’ll try to find some way of saying thank you in a bit, love,” he murmured. “Right now, I can’t think of anything to say at all.”
“Never mind that,” said Stephen uncomfortably. Unaccountably, he remembered a pulp western he had read once, in which the chief character, who would rather have faced a man with a gun than be thanked for anything, simply said ‘shucks’ and changed the subject whenever anyone tried to thank him for his heroic services. He decided to try it himself. “Shucks,” he said. “Let’s get your insurance.”
Richard stared at him, his expression changing rapidly. “Shucks?” he repeated, unable to believe his ears. “Shucks?” he cried again, and the word dissolved into a yell of laughter. Which was all to the good, because it made Stephen grin, too, and broke the tension of the moment. They laughed at each other for a long, magical moment, enjoying it. Then they remembered their business, and scampered up the steps into the office.
They spent a few minutes there, and returned to the showroom at a canter. There they had to pass a further few minutes with the very surprised and even more delighted salesman, with Richard hopping up and down impatiently, until at last the salesman, grinning broadly at their excitement and at the thought of his own commission, took them back into the showroom. He rumbled the heavy glass street doors open while the boys bounced up and down in the car, intoxicated by the leathery smell of the upholstery and the gleaming, impressive instrument panel. Then he strolled over and leaned in the side window to give Richard a quick run through the controls. Richard listened carefully, suppressing his eagerness, and at last they were ready to go.
* * *
When Richard had got used to the controls of his new car, and spent a couple of days driving it about in the hope of seeing people he knew, they set off on their holiday. For the first leg they drove gently across France. Although they had made no particular plan, and though they zig-zagged erratically hither and thither, stopping at wayside inns that took their fancy, their path continually led them roughly in the direction of Alsace, and neither of them even pretended it was a coincidence when, on the fifth afternoon, they pulled up beside the auberge in Saint-Hippolyte where Stephen had worked, and Richard had come to put him back together again. It seemed to have happened a lifetime ago.
There was a series of rapturous reunions in the auberge, where they took a room on an open-ended let. The owner of the auberge offered Stephen his old job back, declaring that he had been the best s
erveur he had ever employed, and Stephen did open the bar up one morning, and served behind it for a couple of hours, to the noisy delight of all his old regulars. At one point he happened to catch Richard’s eye while this was going on. Both faces became grim and set for a moment, as the identical thought crossed their minds. Everyone at the auberge knew they were sharing their room there, just as everyone there had known how Stephen and Graham had stood.
But the moment passed, and the clouds passed from both their faces as they realised simultaneously that there was no reason why they should go back to the Crown until it suited them, or ever if they didn’t want to. It was as if a monstrous black cloud had moved on and uncovered the sun again.
They spent almost a fortnight in Saint-Hippolyte in the end, blissfully happy. Autumn was well advanced by now, and they spent several bright, chill mornings with the landlord, tramping in the dense forests in the nearby Vosges, prospecting for wild mushrooms, and later enjoyed vast platefuls of their treasures, fried with garlic. Richard made a vast fuss of Nicole, taking her dancing, which Stephen detested and he rather liked, and, in the end, breaking her heart for a while. When the time came for them to move on he went to the same florist’s shop as he had visited once before and for the second time presented her and the landlady with vast bouquets of flowers; and when they drove off, with the entire crowd of staff and regulars coming out into the street to wave them off, she stood sadly beside the matronly landlady and for second time muttered moodily, “Jesus, what a pity.”
After that they ambled, insofar as the BMW was capable of ambling and Richard was capable of letting it, through a large corner of the Black Forest, then down through Basel and on a winding trail through rural Switzerland and into Austria. They listened to Mozart at Salzburg and to Schubert and Strauss in Vienna. They wandered down through the great Italian lakes, then across into the Aosta valley and through the Mont Blanc tunnel, then wandered back through Geneva into France, roared down the Autoroute du Soleil, where Richard at last let his already beloved car have its head, and ended up meandering down through Spain.
* * *
“Christ, this beer’s cold,” said Stephen, sitting in shorts, shirt and sunglasses beneath an umbrella in Malaga. “I could have a tooth out and not feel a thing.” Richard nodded happily, and smiled for a reply. There was a silence while they sipped the liquid nitrogen beer, and they both knew that they were both thinking the same thing. Eventually it was Stephen who put it into words. “Time to go home?” he said, looking at Richard and raising his eyebrows.
“I think so,” said Richard.
They left the same afternoon.
* * *
When they got back to England they spent a further few days pottering. They took Richard’s parents out for a lavish dinner. The cricket season had ended while they were away, but they went to the pavilion most nights for a drink, and one night ended up going with half the club for a drunken late-night supper at a local Indian restaurant, where Stephen had his first vindaloo and burnt the roof of his mouth off. “Be the other end tomorrow mornin, our kid,” said Bill comfortingly. “Gandhi’s revenge, mate. Put a bog roll in the fridge tonight, if I were you.”
But throughout these first few days they both knew that they must sooner or later go down to Sussex and see how things had developed in the pub. When they did, it seemed that things had managed, if anything, to get worse.
Tom gave them a grin when they strolled in, brown and cheerful. But it didn’t stay on his face long, and he lost no time in drawing them into a corner of the bar and confiding his anxieties.
“It’s not looking very good, lads,” he said.
“You’d better tell us the lot,” said Stephen gravely. “We’ve been thinking about the situation here, and what we ought to do about it. What’s been happening?”
Boiled down to essentials, Pat Gibson had been allowed back as Stephen had asked, and had immediately begun fomenting open revolt among those of the local regulars who were sympathetic to his views. These now included a very substantial majority of the entire local clientele. His trouble-making had received boosts of various kinds. There had been another of the “routine” police visits. On one occasion half a dozen members of the gang of bikers had trooped in, terrifying Gibson and his supporters, though they did nothing more than line up along the bar, drink several huge drinks very quickly and troop out again. “Did they push Gibson about, by any stroke of good fortune?” asked Stephen, glowering darkly. “Or make him arm-wrestle?” added Richard, bringing an explosive guffaw simultaneously from all three of them.
“No, they didn’t,” said Tom, laughing regretfully as he imagined the scene. “Pity.”
But the biggest cause of resentment was the increasing influx of gay people, most of them in pairs but, increasingly also, in groups and parties, from along the coast and, in a new development, from elsewhere as well. “We’re getting a lot of enquiries about holidays,” said Tom. “Firm bookings, too. A hell of a lot.”
“Well, bloody hell,” said Stephen, raising his eyebrows. “There’s nothing wrong with that, surely?”
“From gay groups,” said Tom. “Most of them quite open about it. Gay travel agencies, gay counselling groups, a couple of university gay societies — I even had an enquiry from Gay Mensa, asking if we could accommodate their annual convention and dinner. Honestly, Steve, it’s been gay this and gay that, the phone’s hardly stopped ringing with em.”
“I take it you’ve been taking the bookings,” said Stephen, assailed by a sudden spasm of doubt.
“Oh, yes,” said Tom. “Course I have. You’ve made a mint out of em while you’ve been away. But it’s all adding to the anti faction’s case. That’s the trouble. They can say quite categorically, now, that you’ve turned this place into an acknowledged gay pub, and nobody could dispute it. They could produce enough evidence any night of the week.”
The boys looked glumly at each other. “We should’ve stayed in Spain,” said Richard.
“Yes,” agreed Stephen. “But what I don’t understand,” he went on, turning back to Tom, “is, what does all this actually amount to? I mean, you say it’s all adding fuel to their flames, or whatever it was you said, but what can they actually do? Christ, I own the place, don’t I? It’s not as if I’m a tenant of the brewery, to be patted on the head or kicked out on my arse at the whim of the local area manager, is it? I actually own the place outright. Lock, stock and barrel. I mean, surely, if I wanted to keep man-eating crocodiles in the bar and piranha fish in the fucking swimming pool, I could, couldn’t I? I can do what I like. Can’t I?” he ended, a note of doubt suddenly creeping into his voice as he saw Tom’s face darkening.
“In theory, yes, you can,” said Tom. “Unfortunately, in practice there’s one thing they can do. They can object to your licence. That’s not dependent on what type of pub it is at all. All they’ve got to do is claim that you’re allowing all kinds of undesirables, even encouraging them, to come into the village, and ask the local licensing justices not to renew your licence when it comes up for renewal at the next Brewster Sessions next February.”
“Undesirables?” queried Richard and Stephen at the same time.
“What’s desirable and what’s undesirable is a subjective thing,” said Tom neutrally. “Use your imagination. Can you imagine what kind of people the local justices are. Right, well you rate your chances of telling them that gay people in large numbers are perfectly acceptable, ordinary citizens. And even if they were close enough to the twentieth century to accept that little powder keg of an idea, well imagine it now when Gibson and co mention our friendly local team of bikers.”
The boys’ faces had been growing grimmer and grimmer through this recital; but Tom still had further ammunition to discharge. “And, just to round it off, you may get a still better idea of your chances when I tell you that the last time the local law decided to spring one of their little routine visits to see if I still know how to run a pub professionally after only sevente
en years in the trade,” he went on bitterly, “they decided to lie in wait down the lane, according to their amiable little Spanish custom. They caught somebody in their little net, too.”
“Oh, Christ,” groaned Stephen. “Not…”
“Oh, Christ indeed,” said Tom. “One of the local bench of justices. None other. So very soon, Steve, the Lord Chancellor, in person, is going to don his full-bottomed wig and his gold-brocaded robes of office and his knickerbockers and his genuine seventeenth-century button boots, and come down to the village here in a ceremonial motorcade, complete with a fleet of motorcycle outriders with blue lights flashing and klaxons playing the national anthem, and in a public ceremony here, on the green, he will request and require that unfortunate local justice of the peace to bend over before him and drop his trousers. And then the Lord Chancellor is going to take the justice’s official parchment scroll of appointment, stuff it formally up his arse and fucking set light to it, to an accompaniment of a fanfare of trumpets, or maybe Handel’s Firework Music, played by the band of the Royal Marines. And, Steve, among the merry-making hordes of local peasants and yeomanry disporting themselves on the margent green while this quaint old English ceremony is taking place, there will be all that justice’s colleagues — his former colleagues, I should say — and his replacement, all looking on, and all thinking to themselves ‘There but for the grace of God…’
“Those, then, Steve, my friend, are the local justices to whom you — or, as things are arranged at the moment, I — shall have to go in February to plead the cause of why we should continue to have our licence. Work it out for yourself, son,” he finished wearily. “Speaking for myself, I’m making my own arrangements. Fortunately for me, I’m a bloody good publican, and I know a hell of a lot of people in this game, so I’ll find myself a boozer all right. You’ll be all right, because when the licence is gone you’ll have a prime site and a beautiful Grade One listed building to sell to an Arab for his English country retreat. Everyone else will be the losers. But Pat’s not thinking that far ahead. He thinks you’ll have your licence taken away, there will be a suitable interval for the fuss to die down, and then someone respectable will take over and run the pub as it was run before your sudden comet-like appearance on the scene. He’ll be back in his corner with his mates, and everything will be tickety-boo, just like it was before.
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