His door at the top of the stairs had a frosted-glass pane like a detective’s office and a glow late at night that felt like a welcome and sometimes, if you were creeping about, a warning. You knocked, and you waited for his slow-voiced ‘Come in’, which conveyed both the depth of his concentration and a reasonable interest in why you were disturbing it. Then there was the little shift of values, of atmospheric pressure, as you stepped into a master’s space.
The study held a peculiar surplus of chairs for play-readings and the Record Club evenings; there was a gas fire, and a gas ring on the hearth in front of it, and above the mantelpiece a John Piper print in blue, white and black of King’s College, Cambridge, seen from Trinity College, which was where Mr Hudson had been. It was almost an aerial view, roofs, chimneys and pinnacles, with scribbles that looked like TV antennas but can’t have been. In the bookcase were books signed by writers he knew – some of them, such as Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, had been his friends at Cambridge. We only ever had glimpses through the door of the room beyond, the wardrobe and the bed.
Now the pinky-yellow glow of the gas fire was reflected in the glass front of the bookcase. The chairs had been stacked and pushed back when the Record Club left, but the small red light of the stereogram burned on, and the speakers gave a crackle once or twice to ask us to use it or turn it off. It was our quiet routine – the others gone, the eight or nine coffee mugs stacked on the tray, and a new sweetly sedative drink being made, the milk no more than whispering when it rose in the pan on the hearth. It wasn’t precisely an Ovaltini, Mr Hudson liked cocoa, and with an added shot (for me just a drop) of Bell’s whisky – quick illegality we shouldered and shared, the slim half-bottle back in the desk drawer, nothing needing to be said. Mr Hudson’s black BA gown and fur-trimmed hood hung on the back of the door and half covered the frosted-glass pane, but the door itself was never locked: any boy, any fellow master could tap and come in. I wondered from time to time if the bedroom door had a lock.
‘I have a feeling you liked the Sixth, David?’ – jacket off now, and first names.
I nodded, narrowed my eyes as I thought back to it. ‘Mmm, very much, sir. I found it quite moving, in fact. In a very different way from the Fifth – as you said.’
‘That big E-major tune at the end of the first movement.’
‘I know, sir . . .’
He sat down opposite me. ‘We must listen to it again, of course that theme’s been there all the time, half-hidden, hurried along, so that you can’t see its potential. And then . . .’ – he sang it to me in his unembarrassed baritone, though the fact of being sung to brought the blood to my face, and I grinned as I looked at him.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Great tunes, sparingly used: that’s the secret.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Not like that Shostakovich symphony last week: commonplace tunes repeated hundreds of times.’
‘Perhaps not hundreds, sir,’ I said. I’d been knocked out by the ruthless repetitions of the Shostakovich, but Mr Hudson liked to challenge my reactions.
‘Now I’m just going to try something else on you’ – crossing to the low teak cupboard under the record deck, and squatting down with his back to me. I played the game, closed my eyes when he stood up, and I knew he was tilting the sleeve to slide out the record, the rustle of cellophane, the tap as the disc met the mat, and the click as the lifted arm set the turntable going round. A crisp crackle, a piano, right beside me – he turned it down at once, it was quiet time, night time: again we acknowledged the rule as we broke it. He put the sleeve out of view.
He sat down again in his desk chair, moved some papers, slurped his cocoa – he wasn’t precious, he liked attention but not reverence, and anyway he’d heard this music lots of times before: a deep scratch butted in, across four or five turns of the record, then wandered off. I stared at the pink glowing pipes of the gas fire, which made their own little sucking and fluttering noise. The piece seemed simple and songlike, but the modulations in it made you wonder, and an agitated figure broke in higher up and then, like the scratch on the record, disappeared and left you with the song in a further change of mood, which didn’t quite replace the first one but seemed to cast the shadow of experience over it – what, I couldn’t say, but I felt it. I had no idea what we were listening to or how long it was going on – there was a very quiet passage when the agitated figure came back, but subdued and dreamlike, a trance of sadness and beauty, and soon after that the piece ended without any fuss. I glanced at Mr Hudson, but he was staring at the fire too, and then he jumped up and said, ‘Shall we hear it again?’
Going back to my study-bedroom warm and swimming in the night-lit corridors from the mere drop of whisky in my system. Footsteps ahead, unavoidable. ‘Good evening, Win’ – it was Hoppy, on a malign late-night trawl.
‘I’ve been seeing Mr Hudson, sir – Record Club business.’
‘Ah – I thought the Record Club packed up at eight.’
‘It does, sir, but I’m the secretary – Mr Hudson likes to try out some other records with me, before the next meeting.’
He looked at me, in all his mastered ambiguity, the frozen fraction of a smile that might usher in relief at a cleared-up misunderstanding, but might just as well be a sarcasm shaping, or a wigging you were stupid to think you could ever have avoided. The superior air of the Upper Sixth, our unwritten freedom from most school rules, was a challenge to him too. It meant acting like a friend towards boys he had bullied for years, a humorous disowning of his natural cruelty. And then music, besides, he had a philistine suspicion of. ‘You seem very cheerful, Win!’
‘You know me, sir!’ I said, riskily taking his tone. He leant in, still smiling, as if to whisper something secret, raised his head, and then stepped back . . . I was slow to understand that he was trying to smell my breath.
‘Music’s not really allowed, of course, is it, after eight thirty. School rules.’
‘Mr Hudson always plays it very quietly, sir.’ It felt funny to be defending one master from another.
‘And what was it tonight?’
‘Oh, Janáček, sir. Yes, On an Overgrown Path.’
Was it impudence, or snobbery, or simple mendacity he searched my face for? The title of the magic little movement, ‘Our Evenings’, I kept to myself, as a private matter. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I know Mr Willis has high hopes of you, this term, Win – well, as do we all. Don’t let us down, will you now. Now go and get some sleep, there’s a good lad.’ And he squeezed my shoulder hard, with a hint of thwarted punishment in the encouraging grip.
Each new piece Mr Hudson played during our evenings was a cause to concentrate, to pick up what the form was, to sense from soon after the start if it was Russian or German or French, and above all to be involved, as I was by the mere invitation, the music beyond me sometimes, at first, but taken in gulps, on trust. We looked at the floor, or the fire, or sat back and floated abstractedly over the black Cambridge rooftops; and from time to time we looked at each other, as if what we were looking at was the music in the space between us, and then again as if asking, ‘How is it for you?’ Never talk while the music played, though a sharp sigh sometimes, a grunt of concession to some powerful effect. Very rarely he stretched out a hand as though to say, ‘Wait for it . . .!’ and fell back, jerking his head at the triumphant return of a theme. Then nothing said afterwards, for a minute, when I felt him waiting, with all his accumulated knowledge of the piece, for the reactions of the teenage boy who’d just heard it for the first time, felt it in shocks and goose-bumps and sometimes mere polite attention which I forced into excitement by an act of faith. ‘Astonishing, isn’t it,’ he would say, and I would say, ‘Mm, yes, sir, extraordinary,’ smiling as I searched back anxiously over the piece and waited for the few deft phrases with which he confirmed what he thought I’d felt, so that I found, when he played it again, that I had – I flowed into it, and it was a masterpiece, of a whole new kind. My reactions then were made fiercer by the need to react, not to let him down, or squander the privilege of these hours. Sometimes, with the coffee earlier, and the drop of whisky, and all Mr Hudson’s interest in me, I was too worked up to take in what I heard – I would roam back to bed with no more than a wild debauched sense of having been given an experience.
His large eyes were suggestively dark, in his pale supple full-lipped face. His wavy brown hair, short and neat, was already brushed with grey above his ears. Edmonds guessed he wouldn’t mind if he asked him how old he was: though he raised his chin, stern for a moment as Hoppy or Crow, who could never be asked such a question: ‘Thirty-six, boy, last March.’ So he was nineteen years older than me, with National Service and a Cambridge degree behind him, then long years of teaching in another school, in the north. Sometimes I stood close by his chair to look at a poem or an art book. He had the explorable somewhat unsociable smell, close to, of a grown-up man who’s been wearing a sports coat and tie all day, and now has taken them off. My eyes slid away from the book or the record sleeve to the back of his neck, or dwelt while he talked on his strong hairless forearm and his wristwatch with its webbed leather strap. He wore grey flannels in school, snug round his seat, loose in the front, nothing clearly suggested, though the question, for me, always lurked.
On the rugger field, in black shorts and a blue jersey, running with the game for an hour and a half, he was a different person. His man’s thighs, hairy on the outside, smoother on the inside where they touched and rubbed, furry at once below the knee, to the top of his thick blue college socks. ‘God’s Grandeur’, and the radical difference of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, went for nothing then, all the delicate questions of the world beyond the sports field were swept away in his running and rallying, the quick backward trot, the hovering and outflanking and hot-breathed authority of the referee. I was Secretary of the Record Club, I was rehearsing Lady Wishfort, I sent him winning glances as we jogged back for a line-out, but he was a stranger to me out there. Once, striding back to the touchline as he pulled off his jersey, he brought his shirt half off as well, the glimpse for five meaningless indelible seconds of his white lower back and grey waistband of his jock-strap. Then he was with us again, whistle shrill in my ear as he ran past.
Copies of The Times were placed in the Library after breakfast each day, and Mr Hudson left his Guardian beside it after tea, with the crossword filled in and two or three articles marked for us with a dilating green asterisk. One autumn night in Current Affairs we discussed the Bill going through Parliament – six blazered Upper-Sixers around the gas fire, with responsible frowns and unruly blushes at the idea of two men who were that way inclined doing just what they liked with each other. A national opinion poll showed that 63% of respondents thought homosexual acts between adults over twenty-one should be legal; while 93% thought homosexuals needed medical or psychiatric treatment. ‘So a large number of those who think it’s all right for men to make love to each other also think such men need help – in order, presumably, to stop wanting to make love to each other.’ He looked around. ‘Yes . . . Donaldson?’ And while Donaldson spoke in his stammering irrelevant way about Ancient Greece and relations between boys and older men, it was the words ‘make love’ that floated in the lamplit room and made the grim ‘homosexual acts’ into something quite normal and beautiful and a hint, so it seemed to me, as I looked at him and looked away, of Mr Hudson’s own experience. He allowed Donaldson’s point, he never put us down, but said, ‘What about today? And indeed tomorrow?’ Payne said, ‘I have to admit, sir, it gives me a degree of unease,’ Morton-Stuart took it impressively as a human-rights issue, and I said, with instant disloyalty of pronouns, that I thought they were doing no harm – and especially if they were in love with each other . . . ‘Ah, yes,’ Mr Hudson said. What he himself knew or deduced of our desires it was hard to tell: he was ironical, and contrary, as his role required. But I doubt if our 4:3 vote in favour of the Bill’s proposals was an accurate index of our truest thoughts and feelings.
I mimicked most of the teachers but never him. It was part of his subtlety to speak like a sensible person, with none of the comical rhetoric of masters who’d been there for years, and had ended up mimicking themselves. I could turn for a minute at a time into Hoppy, or Charlie, or Mr Halls, and I knew the effect was heightened by my being the wrong colour, my face took the hint of my voice, seemed to soften and reshape itself into these middle-aged white Englishmen. I never did this in the mirror, it would have made me self-conscious, and I knew I could do it by instinct. I also seemed good because others were so off and approximate you wondered if they heard or noticed anything exactly. If they were school jokers, like Crowhurst or Vote, they already had credit. When Kim Wynans did Charlie, whose mouth clenched sideways when he tried to say an r, he gave him a lisp instead, and got a laugh. As for Smith’s shot at Mr Hudson, it was embarrassingly bad. A breathy smile, a rapid blinking, ‘Is not this poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley most moving, Smith? Does it not give you the most ginormous erection?’ – Smith’s own slight lisp made the words even sillier. ‘He doesn’t sound like that at all,’ I said. ‘How does he sound, then, Winny?’ said Smith, trapping me more cleverly than he knew. I turned away with a withering shake of the head. ‘Well, Winny’s very close to Mr Hudson, of course,’ said Browne. ‘Well . . .’ I said, secretly excited. ‘What do you two talk about, I wonder?’ ‘Nothing you’d understand, Browne,’ I said. ‘I might do,’ said Browne. ‘Well if you must know,’ I said, ‘we talk about Vaughan Williams.’ He turned very solemn at this. ‘Gosh, I never heard it called that before,’ he said, and flickered his tongue between his lips. ‘Oh, fuck off, Browne,’ I said, blushing and squashing a grin as I left the room. The taxonomy of love is so crude – nothing ever ‘happened’, as they say, between us, he never kissed me or touched my face, never uttered any formula of liking, much less of loving, me. When he wrote to me, twice in the long summer holidays before the final term, he signed off ‘GRH’, as if putting up a notice.
The first letter arrived in the depths of August, brought up with the post by Mavis when she came in for work. She had no interest in a letter from Norway mixed in with bills and a postcard from Auntie Susan in Clevedon, and I put it in my pocket as if absent-mindedly and took it upstairs to the bathroom. I opened it, not knowing what to expect, though my eyes ran ahead of me for something that wasn’t there. He was on holiday with his mother, ‘cruising the fjords’, he said, with dry observations about the ‘monotonous drama’ of the views, the ‘sad lack of culture, which Mama I suspect finds something of a relief’. He seemed almost to be counting on a shared view of his mother, and his relations with her, that hadn’t in fact been established. I felt thrown by this, but excited too. It was a new kind of closeness. At the end he gave in and wrote quite poetically about the sheer cliffs and bridal-veil waterfalls, and I could tell he was having a good time.
After lunch Mum said, ‘Who was your letter from with the unusual stamp, dear?’ as if that were the interest.
‘Oh, it was just from Mr Hudson.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘It’s very nice of him to take the trouble to write to you.’
‘Yes, I know. He’s on holiday with his mother,’ I said, and felt I was trying to cover up for something that in fact was quite lacking from what he had written. It was the feelings around the letter, his presence in his handwriting, that carried the charge; and though it was largely descriptions of scenery and the varieties of fish that he and his mother had eaten I felt a twinge of betrayal as I passed it to Mum to read.
‘I wonder if he writes to many of the boys,’ she said a minute later, handing it back, relieved but still puzzled.
‘I think he just wants to keep in touch with the ones in the Upper Sixth next term,’ I said cleverly, grateful now for the ‘GRH’.
‘Well, he’s got nice handwriting,’ she said, and we both gazed rather fatuously at my name and address, our address, on the flimsy grey envelope. ‘And,’ she said, with a look of finding a cause for worry after all, ‘he tells you to keep up with your reading!’
‘Yes, all right, Mum,’ I said, and I went up to my room with a feeling something novel had almost been said.
The second letter came a few days before the start of term, and was brief and impersonal. The Oxbridge boys had an essay to hand in for General Studies when we got back to school, and he reminded us of this, in a friendly but businesslike way. Again, I needed to get on with it.