Dangerous Pleasures

by Patrick Gale

  Between them Harry clasped his hands tightly together and recited the Lord’s Prayer slightly too loud. He had a summer cold and had just started confirmation classes. Elsa looked first at him then at Colin, smiling mischievously over their son’s head.

  This, of course, had been her idea. She had often said that she thought Harry should follow in his father’s footsteps and he had only recently seen that she meant it seriously. He had promised himself that no child of his would be sent away to boarding school but already Elsa had persuaded him to parcel Harry off to an eminently respectable prep school in the South Downs where, apparently, the small boy thrived on pre-breakfast Latin. Enjoying lazy Saturday mornings in bed at an age when most of his contemporaries were woken at nine o’clock sharp and dragged off to fly kites and throw rugger balls, Colin was coming to understand the terms of the similar betrayal his parents had practised on him at the same age. Public school, however, was different. He had always sworn he would draw the line there, that Harry would attend an excellent day school, with girls in every year, not just the sixth form. Somewhere he could drop Latin for Spanish or Italian. And yet here he was attending an old boys’ day for the first time since leaving the place eighteen years ago with a view to casing the joint, as Elsa put it, for Harry.

  ‘If he doesn’t like it, mind you,’ he had stipulated, ‘if he has the slightest reservation —’

  ‘Then he doesn’t have to go,’ Elsa broke in, reassuring him with a soft touch on the back of his fist.

  And Harry adored her. Colin remembered loathing his mother at that age, never forgiving her for sending him away. Yet Harry still seemed to drink Elsa in with his eyes. She handled him so well, Colin reflected. She knew when to be sweet, when to be boyishly joshing, when to be sexy. And she was sexy with him. Colin had watched the care with which she chose clothes for the boy’s Sundays out of school. She tended to wear firmer bras for him and clinging cashmere.

  ‘Little boys like tits, silly,’ she explained. ‘Haven’t you noticed? All the popular boys have mums who are a bit, well…’ and she smoothed down her jersey in explanation, smiling to herself.

  ‘Well?’ she asked as they left the chapel and headed out into a flagstoned quadrangle where swallows swooped through the sunshine in search of flies. ‘Are the happy memories flooding back?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Thank God most of my teachers seem to have left.’

  ‘Probably dead,’ Harry piped up.

  ‘Thank you, Harry,’ Colin told him.

  ‘What about friends? Surely you recognize somebody?’

  ‘No,’ Colin said, faintly relieved. ‘Not yet. Let’s go and find some lunch.’

  ‘Sherry with the housemaster first,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Oh fuck.’

  ‘Harry!’ Elsa seemed genuinely surprised but could not help smile at the evident pride on Harry’s face at having produced an adult expletive in adult company. ‘Darling!’ she added and chuckled, patting his shoulder.

  They drifted with the noisy crowd out of the quadrangle and Harry expressed a wish to piss.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ Elsa said, arranging herself on a bench below a towering horse chestnut. ‘Don’t be long. I’m thirsty.’

  Following a line of instinctive memory, Colin led his son along a corridor, across another quadrangle and into a dingy, green-tiled lavatory where they peed side by side at a urinal and then, only because each had the other with them, laboriously washed their hands.

  The old swathes of graffiti had been painted over and the roller towels had been replaced with hot air hand driers but the room retained an inexpungable dankness and a threatening quality. For the first time that day, Colin was assailed by memories, none of them sunny ones. He flinched instinctively when three tall boys burst noisily in through the swing door. He panicked that Harry was taking so long over drying his hands, then remembered that he was forty-one and these hulking bullies had become children. The boys fell respectfully silent and went seriously about their business as he shepherded Harry back into the sunlight.

  ‘How do people know if it’s a ladies or a gents?’ Harry asked. ‘There’s no sign on the door.’

  ‘There aren’t any ladies,’ Colin told him. ‘And when there are I suppose they just hold on until they find somewhere safe.’

  Elsa came smiling from beneath the tree to meet them.

  ‘I just met Keith Bedford,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He’s a newscaster,’ Harry explained patiently.

  ‘You never told me he was here with you,’ she went on.

  ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘Well he said he was.’

  ‘Must be younger than me, then. You never remember the younger ones because they were so unimportant. They didn’t count.’

  ‘You boys are so hard and peculiar.’

  Elsa took his arm as they cut back across the first quadrangle and headed out onto a broad stone path that lay along one side of a huge lawn studded with old plane trees and bounded by a high flint wall. Colin was surprised that Harry forsook his habitual place on Elsa’s other side and came to walk beside his father, touched perhaps by the exclusive maleness of the place. Again she caught Colin’s eye and gave him a discreet smile. At such times, when some parents would be saddened at their impotence in the face of nature, she seemed soothed, taking little reminders of biological determination as signs of a covenant that, having produced a perfectly adjusted male, she could soon relinquish all responsibility for him. Colin sighed.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d forgotten it was so beautiful. It’s idyllic, really. Do you like it, Harry?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Harry. ‘It’s very big. Isn’t there a playground?’

  ‘All this,’ Colin said gesturing at the trees tall as cathedrals, the old wrought iron benches, the distant cloisters. ‘This is the playground.’

  With perfect timing, a troop of boys in military uniform jogged out from behind the rifle range and went puffing pinkly by, in tight formation. Harry turned to stare openly.

  ‘Would I have to do that?’ he asked.

  ‘Only if you wanted to. Well, actually, everyone has to do it for a year then you can give it up and do social work instead if you prefer.’

  ‘Social work?’

  ‘Doing gardening for old ladies, clearing weeds from the river, helping out at a school for the handicapped, that sort of thing. There was even a group that helped build houses on a sort of estate for the unfortunate somewhere.’

  ‘You’re joking, of course,’ Elsa said.

  ‘God’s own truth.’

  They walked on past the art gallery, the theatre workshop, the music school, the serried tablets to the loyal fallen in the War, Cloisters and the house famous for having produced a prominent fascist, two trade union leaders and at least three Russian spies amongst its boys.

  ‘Those were just the ones that got caught,’ chuckled Elsa. ‘Perhaps Harry could be a spy? His languages are getting so good.’

  ‘There it is,’ said Colin and pointed.

  They were out on a public street now, but every plot of land and building in sight was still school property. Up ahead loomed Colin’s old house. It was a towering red brick affair with turrets, curious flint teeth around each window and such a mess of fire escapes and extensions added on that it was hard to tell which was the front and which the back. A bevy of well-upholstered female servants, fraudulently got up in black and white for the occasion instead of their usual nylon housecoats, were variously directing guests to the cloakrooms, handing them sherry or waving them on out to join the crowd in the garden where their sisters circulated with trays of canapes.

  ‘Look, darling. That was Daddy’s house. You could go there.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Harry, singularly unimpressed.

  ‘It’s no beauty,’ Colin confessed. ‘If you want to live in the really old bit by the chapel as well as having your lessons there, you’ll have to go in
for the scholarship exam.’

  ‘You must be joking,’ said Harry and Colin abandoned the briefly dangled possibility of annual holidays somewhere hot which a scholarship would have afforded them. Elsa demonstrated her frightening ability to read his mind.

  ‘We can start borrowing mummy’s cottage in Devon,’ she said with a quick smile into the air before her. ‘Oh look, Harry, they’ve put out a trampoline in the garden. Do you want to have a go?’

  At last, just when he was congratulating himself on their absence, Colin began to meet contemporaries from his days at the school. They were none of them friends — sex, geography, money and, in one case, death, had dismantled all his schoolboy friendships. The thickening silhouettes before him were merely those of old acquaintance. In every case he found himself remembering not only a name but a nickname and at least one cruel fact to which they would be vulnerable; an armoury of psychological stings — flat feet, ginger pubic hair, a tendency to stutter, dead fathers, alcoholic mothers — which he reached for out of a long dormant instinct to wound before he was wounded. They stood around on the lawn holding their careers against each other’s to compare them for size, inspecting one another’s wives and mustering a chortling bonhomie which in seven out of eight cases Colin estimated to be entirely phoney. Acute discomfort drove them all to assume the speech patterns of men twenty years their senior, of their fathers, in fact.

  ‘You called that man old chap,’ Elsa said, appalled, as they were herded in through an entrance hall as drab as Colin remembered, to the sludge green dining room where a fork luncheon awaited them. ‘You never talk like that.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. It just slipped out. I think it’s infectious.’

  ‘The housemaster’s a darling.’

  ‘Really? We haven’t spoken.’

  ‘Oh really, Colin, that’s what we’re here for. Go and introduce yourself. He’s the one by the fireplace with the toddler on his hip and the smile.’

  ‘But he looks about twenty-five.’

  ‘He is. Much healthier than the crusty types you had in your day. And the wife’s no battleaxe either.’

  Colin did as he was told and spoke with the housemaster who was, indeed, a darling. There was something of Peter Pan about him and Colin realized that this was why he was good at his job. A part of his development seemed to have been arrested. He had failed to acquire the calloused outer layer that marked every other man in the room. He spoke to boys with the authority of a gentle older brother and to fathers with the cheerful respectfulness of their ideal son. He was enthusiastic about everything from crab vol-au-vents to the school viol consort. His irony was confected from natural wit rather than harsh experience. He was entirely unsuited to life in an adult community. Colin was surprised, after introducing Harry then having a chat that seemed to be about nothing of any consequence, to hear the man say, ‘Well we’d be delighted to have him in the house, provided he passes the exams, of course…’

  ‘Oh,’ Colin said. ‘Well, then. Thanks very much. I’ll tell Elsa the good news.’

  They shook hands and Harry’s small fate was sealed. Colin glanced out of the window and saw his son sitting on a low wall crumbily munching a meringue and watching some comparatively huge boys kick a football about a caged-in yard. He was disturbed at how the boy was finding his place as swiftly and naturally as a newly weaned addition to some fiercely hierarchical animal society.

  Elsa was one of those rare women with a genuine interest in cricket. She came from a long line of cricketers and, being an only child, had received the full benefit of her father’s instruction. She liked knowledge, particularly when it had so little practical application. It pleased Colin to watch her sweep aside the patronage of cricketing men with the breadth of her understanding, not least because he had not a sporting bone in his body. When he took her a cup of coffee, he found her arguing a fine point of test match history with a tall, mop-headed youth who wore the kind of cricketing jersey only permitted to members of the school’s first team; a deity, in schoolboy terms, yet she was winning the argument.

  ‘But then,’ she sighed, gently tapping the youth’s broad chest with one long finger, having pressed home her triumphant point, ‘I can see you’re an expert. What do I know? I’ve never even played the game.’

  The youth flushed as Elsa turned to Colin. ‘Coffee. How lovely. Darling, this is Hargraves.’

  Hargraves offered Colin a hand. ‘How do you do, sir.’

  ‘Marvellous to be called sir,’ Elsa said. ‘Madam always sounds supercilious and shopkeepery.’

  ‘He’s offered Harry a place,’ Colin told her. ‘Subject to exams, of course.’

  ‘But of course he did.’

  ‘I thought I’d take a look round. See how things have changed. Want to come?’

  Elsa wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Changing rooms and things? Do we have to? I was going to catch the start of the match. Hargraves can show me the way.’

  ‘Of course I can,’ said Hargraves.

  Glad to have a chance to explore on his own, Colin took a second coffee and wandered off. The house was on its best behaviour, the presence of parents neutering its habitual rowdiness but here and there its true nature pierced the skin of decorum with a reassuringly rude noise. Colin inspected the changing room, rank with sweat and sweet shampoo, the pitifully stocked library, the day room, and a new study block, where, from the momentarily hostile glances, he sensed he had interrupted something and retreated. Here and there, boys unhampered by family were engaged in small acts of vandalism or self-improvement. One little older than Harry pored over a surprisingly undistinguished newspaper, frowning at a pouting model’s breasts as though checking through a page of algebraic calculations. Uncertain of what he was looking for — some confirmation perhaps that these familiar scenes were not so irrelevant as they now felt — Colin walked back to the staircase and made for the dormitories. Here, too, little had changed. There were still no radiators or curtains but the old, thin mattresses which dipped in the middle had been replaced. He sat on a bed and was happy to find that it still betrayed the slightest movement with a creak. He walked to one of the big windows, merciless in cold weather, and saw a crowd of visitors trailing over the athletics track below towards the cricket fields nearer the river. A woman turned and called out. It was Elsa. He saw Harry sprinting to catch up with her. The boy looked up to chatter to her as they walked. If he liked the place, did Colin have the right to deprive him of the experience?

  Thinking he should join them, he left his coffee cup on a chest of drawers and started back along the dormitory corridor. He passed an open door and looked in just long enough to recognize the face of a large man peering up at the beams. He moved swiftly on, halted when he heard people on the stairs and doubled back to dart into the linen room. He sat on a bench where he would not be visible from the door. He needed to recover. His heart pounded as though he had just run up the stairs. Sweat beaded on his forehead and he swept it away with a handkerchief. It was him, unmistakably him. The black hair had grown grizzled, the rangy frame become slightly leaner but the thick eyebrows and large, once-broken nose had been instantly recognizable. Colin touched the handkerchief to his upper lip recalling how the man’s eyes dropped to meet his for a fraction of a second before Colin hurried on.

  The day room was where all but the eldest boys spent their free time and evenings. It was high-ceilinged and L-shaped. Around the walls huddled wooden cubicles. Each boy had a cubicle. It comprised a desk, a cupboard, a bench and an electric light, all of them ancient. This cramped territory — sizes varied and the less cramped ones were highly sought after — was the only space in the entire school wherein one could be moderately private. The new boy had to make a mental adjustment in which the cluster of rooms, garden, pets and family he called home was compressed into a space a Victorian street urchin would have scorned. Here his individuality could be expressed in postcards, ornaments, toys, a choice of curtain and cushion cov
er, a store of food and even a corrugated plastic roof. Here, too, he would learn his first brutal lessons in the danger of expressing individuality of the wrong sort.

  Colin and, crucially, Colin’s mother, had been drilled in these matters by an older cousin. The cousin was still at the school but would be prevented, on his honour, from coming to Colin’s assistance or in any way singling him out, once Colin joined him there. Colin had been scrupulous. His curtain and cushion were of a wholly unremarkable green fabric. He had no photographs of his parents but, at his sudden insistence, had brought along one of his older sister looking sulky in a bathing costume. This he pinned up alongside a calendar with a different dog breed pictured every month. He brought no toys, nothing whatever of especial monetary or sentimental value beyond a tinny transistor radio. Yet somehow, obscurely, he was found wanting.

  At first insignificant violence was offered him, daring him to react and so give an excuse for fiercer reprisals. Boys would trip him from behind — ankle-walking it was called — as he passed along the corridor from the dining room. He was flicked with wet towel-corners when queuing for a washbasin. They made small verbal attacks, too, mocking, relying on the support of those around them.

  ‘Hey!’ they would call. ‘Hey, you!’

  ‘Yes?’ he would ask, turning.

  ‘Nothing,’ came the smirking reply. ‘Nothing.’

  And by common consent, Nothing, then Nuts became his nickname, until long after anyone could remember the reason why.

  ‘Above all you must learn not to react,’ his cousin had insisted. Everyone, it seemed, went through a period of being picked upon but the brief spell of initiation could be prolonged into indefinite persecution if the would-be initiate gave the wrong sort of encouragement. So Colin met whips, trippings and mockery with polite equanimity, if not quite gratitude.

  He wrote home saying how much he was enjoying himself, and there were things to enjoy. He enjoyed singing, with no great finesse, in the school choral society. He took up pottery and made an ashtray for his father. He won a small measure of popularity among his immediate peers as cox of the first year rowing team — even if this did mean being tossed into freezing river water whenever they lost a race. But as well as being designed to transfer all one’s respect from the adults – who vanished from view and consequently power soon after six o’clock — to the prefects, the school’s social system induced a tantalizing sense that there were unspeakably grown-up pleasures to be tasted, if only one could chance on some secret password.