He lived in a tall council block near Latimer Road, in a ninth-floor flat that he shared with a mild-mannered white boy called Perry. The rooms were small, and they both kept their bikes on the balcony outside the living-room window. There was an old pub umbrella out there too, London Pride, loosely furled and propped up, and two picnic chairs like Esme’s along with other things scavenged locally and lugged home. The balcony gave you a weirdly dissociated view across West London, other council blocks, church spires, long streets of red-brick housing far below – all cut off beyond a deep dual carriageway, whose night-time sigh became a darker sound as dawn broke and the city came back to life. If you took the stairs you looked out the other way, at the wreckage, like the path of a hurricane, of streets being cleared to build a new estate.
There were two bedrooms, with the beds head to head on either side of a thin wall. Hector had made his room his own with pot-plants that he tended scientifically, and a large red and brown batik hanging with a radial pattern, which covered the wall above the low wood-framed bed. There was a stale smell of joss-sticks, revived each day, no bulb in the fitting overhead, and at night-time thick red candles the main source of light. It was all very different from the stuffy comfort at Claudia’s, with the dinners and the whiskies she gave out gratis, from old bourgeois habit and a need for company. I hardly felt the loss because of the intensity of Hector, the austere and principled way he ran his life, the rationing of sex. Sometimes, after two or three tantalizing days without, my thoughts flitted down from the tower through the night-time streets to the big squashy bed half a mile away, where perhaps even now Chris was being seen to by someone else – he was wounded, shaken by the break-up and on his dignity, but he was skittish and insatiable too. I put him over my knee and it all started up again, the hot-faced possession of our nights together; I turned away carefully to keep my excitement from Hector as he lay beside me, apparently asleep. He could fall asleep in seconds, as if acting. I was the one then to blow out the candle – the red tip of the wick on the dark and for five or six seconds as it cooled the fading pink glow of the molten cup of wax. Already as I slid down and shrugged the bedcover round me the thin curtains glimmered like the dawn, and the mild glare of the West London night took over the room.
Hector and Perry had nothing in common, and got on well enough, each being self-contained, but friendly and funny if the mood was right. Often Perry was in bed when we got in from work, and we took off our shoes in the cupboard-sized hallway and did what we had to do in whispers. On a hot night, Hector would roll a spliff and take it out onto the balcony, where he seemed to commune for ten minutes with the lights of the city, the traffic far below and the dimly visible stars. Then he came in, sleepy and smiling, cleaned his teeth and got ready and slipped into bed. He was at his most amorous after a smoke, and backed up against me with possessive grunts and purrs. He never said he wanted it, or acknowledged on any later occasion that it had happened. In bed he shushed me, whispered ‘Go on’ or ‘It’s time’ or ‘What’s the problem?’ – this with a kiss and a sly grin. We were quiet as could be not to wake up Perry, and that was a trick in itself, sometimes bungled in performance, when the bed-frame rode against the wall. Perry himself the next morning made his breakfast and went off to work in White City with no hint or protest or smothered smirk that he’d been woken in his bed beneath his Blondie poster by our outrageous coupling, feet away. He was a context, and also an excuse, for Hector, for the private life, unseen, undiscussed; no one else was ever asked back.
We were both broke, but I saw at once he was serious about money in a way that I realized at the same time I had never been. It was a part of his larger air of caution, and forethought. He had the very small Terra wage each Friday, and his dad gave him twenty pounds a month, to see him through, he said, until he was settled – we looked round the room at the batik hanging and the spider-plant, uncertain how we’d know when that was. ‘It’s all right for you,’ he said, and when I said I’d got nothing he said, ‘Yeah, well,’ and of course he was right in a way. On Sundays if we weren’t on tour he went to see his parents, who lived in Beckenham, forty minutes by train from Victoria. He was touchy and deflecting about them, and I was cautious but curious, as I generally was about my friends’ families. I knew at least that Hector had been born in Liberia, and I suspected his family had once had money; now it seemed they ran a hardware store – but I didn’t press Hector about them, perhaps out of some fellow-feeling about fathers.
It was one Sunday evening, about nine o’clock, when Hector came back to the flat. Perry was watching TV in the living room and I was in bed with my clothes on, for warmth, learning a long verse speech from Andromaque – Ray had decided it was time a French classic was given the once-over. ‘Hi, honey,’ I said, ‘how was it, how were they?’ with a carefree tone, and perhaps just a hint of the hurt I was starting to feel at these moments when he got back from the family I was never asked to meet.
‘They’re well,’ he said, ‘they’re well,’ and came over and kissed me, and bustled round in a preoccupied way.
‘I’ll tidy that up later,’ I said.
‘Actually, I just thought I’d show you this,’ he said, and came back and sat down on the bed beside me, and teased a small photograph out of his wallet. I took it with a half-smile, a feeling of guesswork, ready to be surprised. It was a group photo – a white couple, whom I felt I half recognized, on the back lawn of a whitewashed semi-detached house, and in front of them four children, two black boys and two white girls, sitting cross-legged on the grass like a team. The seconds went past as I worked out the larger boy was Hector, perhaps fifteen years old. ‘And aren’t these your old friends,’ I said, ‘who came to the show in Greenwich? They were a bit shocked by it. Patrick, was it?’
‘Yeah, Patrick and Amanda,’ he said.
‘And these girls are their children, by the look of it.’
‘Yeah, well . . .’
‘You look so sweet, and very serious. When was this taken? Sort of eight or nine years ago—’
‘David, they’re my mum and dad.’
‘Ah . . .’ I said, and focused on them, not knowing what to say, my own foolishness, the further little hurt of being kept in the dark, was as nothing to my rush of love for Hector. I put my hand on his thigh and gripped his hand, too overcome to say the thing I at once almost selfishly wanted to say, that I’d felt from the start we had something deeper in common.
‘Yeah, well,’ said Hector again. ‘There it is.’
Something cautioned me not to ask questions. ‘Well, thank you,’ I said, and flung my arms round him, still holding the photo so that I saw it, over his shoulder, the man I was holding as he had been eight or nine years ago, in the safety of his family.
I decided early on I wanted Hector to meet Nick and Jenny, who said it should be soon, for their own reasons – Jenny was eight months pregnant with their second child. They were back, Nick was teaching Politics at Sussex now, and the meeting in my head was a proof of my doing well too, of being over him, though my need to stage the scene at all perhaps implied otherwise. I wasn’t sure what to tell Hector, though he’d spoken of a crush of his own, on a schoolmaster, and on other boys, never admitted or acted on. So I half explained, out of tenderness to all concerned and a feeling it could never really be made sense of. We were drying after a bath when I suggested the meeting. ‘Yeah . . .’ Hector said, with a shrug and a shake of the head. He was shy about being shown off, and awkward, I felt, about being embraced by my old friends as half of a new happy couple. ‘Yeah, I can’t go next Monday, though.’
‘Oh, OK,’ I said, ‘why not?’
‘I’ve got my art night.’
‘Can I come?’ I said. ‘I love art.’
‘I don’t think that would work,’ he said, with a rough little laugh.
‘What is it, then?’ I said.
‘It’s just at Molleson’s, I’ve been doing it for the last couple of years – on and off, you know.’
‘I know Molleson’s. I had a friend who went there. It’s a great school.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Hector. He was full of quietly nursed ambitions, he took nothing for granted and often almost secretly was seriously at work on something.
He unscrewed the brown jar and rubbed a pinch of cocoa butter between his palms, started massaging it into his warm dry skin. ‘What course are you doing?’ I said.
‘I’m not studying there, David,’ he said, and impatience with me seemed to mix with embarrassment in his face.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I see, you’re modelling?’
‘I am.’
‘What sort of thing?’ I said. I was thrown, just a little, by the news, and again by not having known.
‘Just standard art-school stuff . . . you know.’
‘I’ve never been in an art class,’ I said. ‘Do you mean you pose naked?’
‘Drawing from the live model, is how it’s described.’
‘So you stand there just like you are now.’
‘I do.’
‘Except without a hard-on, I imagine.’
Hector suppressed a smile. ‘The chances of getting a hard-on in those conditions are next to zero, my friend. It’s more like a medical.’
I took hold of his hard-on to stop him from getting away. ‘So you never fancy someone in the class?’
He sighed. ‘You don’t even look at the class when they’re working. You have to look at the floor, or the corner of the room or something. You certainly don’t think about sex, or your jealous little boyfriend hanging on to your dick, or anything like that.’
‘What do you think about, then?’
‘As a matter of fact, my love, I think about Hotspur . . . Thersites . . . the Jook of Clerrunts’ – he took on his thespian tone.
‘How do you mean, think about them?’
‘Just old parts, parts I’m playing now, parts I’d like to play, once I’ve moved on from Ray’s.’
‘You learn parts you haven’t even been cast in?’
‘It fills the time,’ he said. ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind . . .’ I pecked him on the cheek and let him go, but I was dazed by this vision of unnecessary readiness, a refusal to be sidelined, I supposed, by all those lazy chancers who strolled into the best jobs. It was ambitious, and exemplary, but pitiful too, since no one in the big world that he dreamed of was going to offer him more than the mauvais rôles.
Hector asked me to the Molleson’s end-of-term party in such a mumbled, offhand way I couldn’t tell if he hoped for a refusal or was shyly longing for me to come – I thought it best to accept. We made love quickly and fiercely before leaving the flat, and set off to the Tube in a flush of private confidence just touched, as we bought our tickets and climbed up the stairs to the platform, by a lonelier feeling.
I knew the famous street-front of the art school, with its terracotta roundels of Dürer and Reynolds and Landseer perched between the first-floor windows, but I’d never been inside before, into the battered and echoing atmosphere of student life, the mood, mixed up like the chalk dust and turps smells in the air, of pride in the place and fury against it. I drifted into the sculpture room on the ground floor, the welded frames and looming plaster maquettes like scenery for later acts crowded in the wings, but Hector quickly pulled me away and I followed him upstairs, among students running up and down, and smiled through my self-consciousness at being an outsider in a school. The big life-drawing studio was on the top floor, with a sloping skylight half-covered by blinds, and it was here that the party was now beginning.
A grey-haired man in a brown suit and paisley cravat turned round from a group near the drinks table. ‘Ah, Henry!’ he called, ‘so glad you could come,’ and I glanced over my shoulder for someone behind us and then made a grimace at Hector at this stupid little slight, which seemed, in the context, to be part of some larger indignity, though he smiled through it. The man waved his arm to bring us into a group of young students who seemed rather bashful at first in their model’s presence. They shook hands, one girl and then a second stepped up to kiss him on the cheek – I saw there was a fascinating shock for them of intimacy, almost of exposure, in meeting him not as a model but as a fully-clothed person. A girl with dyed red hair, trying her luck with him, plucked at his sweater and said, ‘Hello, Henry, aren’t you boiling in all those clothes!’ and amid the immediate laugh about the situation I made my own quick adjustment, and found some fun in it too – I took it up as a kind of improv. ‘This is my friend David,’ Hector said, and I said very smoothly and earnestly how glad I was Henry had invited me.
The man in the cravat was Mr Trivet, who ran the life class, and who, as we stood drinking and chatting, seemed to feel he had a special claim on Hector – he turned his back on me to talk to him, laid an encouraging hand on his shoulder and left it there. I realized he’d stared at Hec’s naked body for hours at a time, much longer than I ever had, in the supposedly clinical conditions of this very room, the little platform wheeled into the corner now and the chairs and easels stacked away. It had the subtly excluding presence of someone else’s workplace, the trace and echo of unknown routines. It was a room that Hector was accustomed and inured to, and I wasn’t – the skirting boards, the skylight, the suspended heaters were imbued for him with the hours he’d spent here, the runs and ripostes of Hotspur or Vladimir or whoever it was, all the unguessed mental activity through which he escaped from the place but also, to my now vaguely uneasy mind, assumed it as his own.
I felt Mr Trivet must know Hec’s body best of all, because (as I pictured it) he paced round the circle, examined the chest and the thighs and the cock and balls from each student’s angle, leaning in to shape an ankle, or enhance a student’s shading of dark brown skin. And sometimes, I assumed, he got stuck in and drew him too. I soon understood they knew nothing about Hector, so I had a little audience suddenly keen to learn more. I toyed with telling them things, for the cheap amusement of their surprise, and simply from the feeling he didn’t need this veil of protective secrecy. But I said merely that he was a wonderful actor, and that they should all come and see us in a play some time.
‘Do you want to see my best drawing of Henry?’ said the red-haired girl, who clearly had a thing for him.
‘No, no . . .’ I said.
‘I don’t mind,’ she said, and went off to the lockers at the far end of the room. She came back with her large sketch-pad, the worked pages curling at the edges, and looked through it rapidly, ‘Not that one . . . not that one . . .’ but I glimpsed other goes at my boyfriend, from the side, seated and standing, the beauty and evident difficulty of him as a subject. ‘There!’ she said, and displayed it to me, and from where we were standing we could look up at Hector, in a similar stance, across the room, but in his best jeans and black roll-neck sweater.
‘Yes, very good,’ I said, though it was intensely romantic, the figure standing out heroically from the thickly hatched space behind him. ‘Thank you for showing me.’ I didn’t want to hurt the girl’s feelings, though I found she had somehow hurt mine.
‘Would you ever consider modelling?’ said a sweet-looking boy with a wispy blond beard. ‘You’d be an interesting subject – if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘Oh . . . no,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Too shy?’ he said.
‘Mm, not that exactly,’ I said, and seemed to be flirting back.
‘Henry’s a great poser,’ he said, as the girl went off, ‘but his body’s unusual. He’s got really wide shoulders, great physique, by the way, but unusual proportions, if you like. I spent ages the other night working on his bum,’ and I saw this boy was quite a character, after two glasses of wine I couldn’t help it:
‘Mmm, me too!’ I said, and he looked at me narrowly and then laughed.
‘So you’re . . .’ – and he nodded his head between the two of us. ‘Yeah, some of us were wondering . . .’ – and I realized that a further part of Hec’s self-preservation in this room, exposed for whole evenings on the shabby old dais with its stack of boxes and torn Turkey carpet, would be to make an absolute mystery of his own desires, a serious matter, but as private to him as religion. ‘Henry keeps things to himself,’ the blond boy said, and I looked vaguely at Mr Trivet for a second, forgetting who Henry was.