The business of not being able to take up the scholarship, of hearing he was not going to have to sit Common Entrance after all but could drift through the rest of the school year, represented a dramatic slackening of pressure. Eustace still practised his cello but the edge of obsession had gone. It was a little like waking from a long sleep, and he found he emerged out of step with his contemporaries. He was not developing at the speed of Vernon and the others, which didn’t bother him especially as, from what he could tell, puberty was a messy business and, in any case, inevitable as a speeding car. But he disliked feeling childish and he realized that all the shutting himself away for the hours of practice his cello demanded had left him outside the circles of the boyish norm and in danger of being left behind, the irritating child who couldn’t keep up.
Without warning, Mr Payton, A2’s form master, announced one morning that he was suspending their usual classes for the next two periods in order to give them a special course he called How To Succeed as a Teenager . During this he expected them all to take notes.
‘I don’t expect all of this to make sense entirely to you now,’ he told them. ‘But if you note it down, you’ll find it better imprints on your memories and then, when occasion arises at your big school, as it surely will for you all in the next few years, you’ll be more likely to remember what I’m telling you and benefit from it.’
The solemnity and anticipation were rather thrilling. Eustace exchanged a glance with his desk partner, Snell Major, a nice enough boy, though with no sense of humour. They each turned to a fresh page and gravely wrote How to Succeed as a Teenager . Eustace underlined the title in a different colour then paid close attention.
Mr Payton began with an excruciating talk on bodily change. It was hard to imagine he had ever been young. It was a talk that would have been more useful, arguably, a year before, which was when most of Eustace’s contemporaries began to gain dramatically in height, to sprout hair in places formerly smooth and to smell strongly, often of the deodorant they were ostentatiously using to counteract their own odours.
‘You won’t all develop at the same rate,’ he said. ‘Some of you – Higgs for instance – have probably already finished growing. Others may have yet to start. Entirely to be expected. You’ll all get there in the end. And you won’t all develop in the same ways. Some men are hairy everywhere – arms, chest, even back – some hardly at all beyond their groins.’
There was a chortle at groins , of course.
‘You’re laughing because you’re embarrassed,’ he told them. ‘All perfectly normal. So, while you’re laughing, here are some pictures to give you an idea of the variety to expect.’
He opened his briefcase and took out a handful of colour photographs of completely naked men – blond, dark, hairy, smooth – which had been carefully cut from porn magazines and mounted, perhaps by Miss Packard, the broad-hipped school secretary, on to tidy pieces of white card and sealed under layers of sticky-backed plastic. He handed them to Higgs, the head of school, who sat in the desk nearest the door (six foot two, already quite hairy), and gestured for him to pass them around. Eustace’s desk was in the farthest corner from Higgs, so he swiftly calculated that the pictures would reach him last and then stay on his desk.
‘What about girls?’ some idiot asked.
‘Yes, sir?’ Higgs asked, magnificently innocent. He had already passed the pictures on and the images travelled fairly swiftly, as though nobody liked to be seen to retain them for longer than anyone else. Eustace found their progress so distracting that he had difficulty taking in what Mr Payton was saying.
‘How many of you have sisters?’ Mr Payton asked and almost everyone but Eustace seemed to put up a hand. ‘So you’ll know that girls develop in much the same way, although your sisters may have been modest and done their best to hide it from you. At around the age of twelve they grow in height, they develop breasts and hips, with much the same variation in speed and size as the development among boys. And they grow pubic hair, of course. They also begin to have their menses , a Latin word meaning . . . ?’
‘Months,’ everyone called out with a kind of groan and one of the class swots added, ‘From mensis , month, third declension, sir.’
‘From which we derive which English verb?’
‘Menstruate?’ somebody suggested and there was a laugh.
Suddenly the photographs arrived, all together, on Eustace’s desk. He had seen fully naked men before, sometimes caught windblown glimpses on the beach or dunes when they performed that comically modest dance to replace trunks with pants beneath a clutched towel, but his father had always been almost obsessively secretive about his body. Apart from the deep disappointment of the few men he’d glimpsed over other boys’ shoulders in Health and Efficiency , he had never before been given them to gaze upon, under instruction even, except in art lessons and it was difficult to relate the saints and soldiers of Renaissance paintings to the hairy, sweating reality.
There were four photographs, and he took care to look at each in turn and not to linger unduly over any, although he was utterly fascinated. There was a Swedish-looking blond man, with very blue eyes and almost white eyebrows, posing with a striped beach ball under one arm. His body was almost hairless, like an overgrown boy’s and had a pronounced scar where his appendix had been removed. There was a redhead with flaming tufts in armpits and groin and a rueful expression. There was a brown-haired model, locks to his shoulders, girlish as any Renaissance saint, whose genitals seemed curiously undeveloped beneath their tidy little thatch.
Lastly there was a black-haired man with a drooping cowboy moustache and an unbuttoned checked shirt. His big legs were as thickly haired as his chest. His cock stood to attention unlike the other men’s and he gazed at the camera unsmilingly in a kind of challenge. Eustace stacked the pictures on the corner of his desk, with the black-haired man on top, then realized he was staring so flipped the stack over so the pictures were hidden and was startled in the process by his neighbour passing him the female equivalents he had not even noticed Mr Payton put into circulation, and had to fumble for all eight pictures on the floor. He looked dutifully at the naked ladies but as briefly as possible as he sensed he had an angry blush.
‘Good,’ said Mr Payton. ‘Now that I’ve got all your attention, we need to talk about self-abuse.’ Eustace had never heard this term before and had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Contrary to what you may have read or heard, it will not make you blind or mad or give you hairy palms.’
A burst of nervous laughter here and Bailey, who was excitable, howled like a wolf.
‘It’s not a patch on the real thing but you’re all several years off being legally old enough to enjoy that. And it’s kinder on your sheets and pyjamas than wet dreams. But practice moderation. Don’t get obsessed with it.’
Self-Abuse , Eustace wrote on his otherwise blank page. Don’t get obsessed with it.
‘You have already covered human reproduction in your biology classes. What you won’t have covered is the law, and the law is very clear about this. Sex under the age of sixteen is illegal and you need to be eighteen before you can marry without your parents’ consent. However, I’m not naïve. Your bodies are already awash with sex hormones and so are those of the girls you’re likely to meet in the next few years. Just remember you only have to do it once to get a girl pregnant. So don’t go all the way, however much she might lead you on.’
Eustace thought about obediently writing down this last command but nobody else was doing so and it frankly seemed a bit silly.
Then, to electric effect, Mr Payton added, ‘There is a world of pleasure you can give one another with hands and mouths.’ He said it quite drily, as they had heard him describe the formation and application of gerunds or summarize the different meanings of ut paired with subjunctive or indicative verbs. He was not a teacher even remotely associated with pleasure and Mrs Payton, a wintry fellow-classicist, appeared to have adopted disappointment long since as her default emotion, and yet something in his words had the salt savour of experience. A world of pleasure . Hands and mouths .
Mr Payton continued to lecture them, and Eustace continued to take notes, on contraception, on tobacco, on alcohol, on hormones and their effect on temper and energy levels, on the importance in one’s teenage years of avoiding too much free time as apparently it was during idleness that one might fall prey to the many things that would make a teenager fail. It was a double period and a great deal of territory was covered but, like a wasp to spilled syrup, Eustace’s mind kept returning to mouths, hands, a world of pleasure .