Matt lived in a servant's flat draughtily tacked on to a large shabby house on the western side of the town. If you got to bed late there you only slept for an hour or two before container lorries bound for the port rumbled past the end of the street, making the windows rattle and the bed-springs distantly vibrate. You woke and found you needed a pee, and groped in the half-light from outside into the small cold bathroom, the floor a tangle of dirty underwear, the glass shelf cluttered with Matt's creams and conditioners, pep-pills and prophylactics. You stumbled on something as you made your way back and for a second or two Matt's snoring stopped; then you slid apologetically under the bedclothes and the snoring started again, and you lay there with just a shiver of longing to be back home. Then the alarm-clock started beeping, it was seven already, and Matt rolled over behind you and pushed his hard cock between your legs.
I had been amazed on my first visit at the chaos in which he lived, the chairloads of clothes, the tumbled boots and kicked-off loafers, the old socks and pulp novels mixed up in the bedding. Dirty plates and glasses were rigorously taken to the grim little kitchen but, once there, amassed in the sink until a particular item was needed, when it would be gingerly extracted and run for a moment under the flaring and popping hot-water geyser. Much of the remaining space between, under and on top of bed, wardrobe, chairs, table and TV was taken up with Matt's computer stuff: the stacked boxes of components, disks, spare keyboards—as well as other electrical goods, video games and hundreds of blank tapes. Yet out of this unconscious shambles he emerged each day, each night, clean, beautiful, sweet-smelling, and giving off an air of masculine order.
The house he was at the back of belonged to an elderly and reclusive woman, deaf and cat-loving. Matt, it appeared, was not allowed to use her front door or to go into her part of the building at all; so access to his rooms was through the back yard and a glassed-in porch full of half-dead plants. It was odd that we both lived hidden away behind old people whom we never saw; comforting too, as if it allowed us to be children again, free and disadvantaged. Matt in fact had no respect for the rules, and my first time at his place he worried me by swaggering down the hall and into his landlady's kitchen to find some brandy I had said I felt like at two or three in the morning. The cats gathered round him discriminatingly, as if they knew him well or expected him to feed them.
I was astonished, once I had sobered up, to find that I was Matt's lover: I thought it might have come about through something Cherif had said to him, an inadvertent testimonial. When I looked at myself in Matt's bathroom mirror I seemed to be greeting with new respect an acquaintance I had long thought unlikely to succeed. But then it was an odd sort of success: lover, perhaps, was hardly the word for my role. Matt was like someone beautiful I might have met on the common and counted myself lucky to have ten minutes with under the trees. There was no sentiment to it, beyond the minimal trust of two people pleasuring themselves together; when my instincts homed sleepily towards love I felt him hold me off, cold-eyed, as if my sheltering embrace had been a threat or lapse of form. For all his trickiness, there was no romantic con. I wasn't even sure he had much grasp of friendship. He seemed able to sustain that pure detachment of sex from feeling that normally crumbles with the loss of anonymity or the chance of a second meeting. It threw me back to my great sex-period, the days of saving up for Croy's. And half the time I saw it suited me; with Matt I did the dozen things I couldn't do with Luc.
I stayed at Matt's for most of that week, partly because of the Spanish girls—not so much their noise as my fear that they might make a noise, intrude some unwanted disturbance on the nervy, luxurious disquiet which was mine already and which kept me pacing about, drinking and after a while smoking, reading a paragraph a dozen absent times, gazing from the window when the day waned as if trying to decipher some truth, or rather some hope, from the trees and clouds and time-blackened brick. In the little lost garden below the first leaves were turning. At Matt's there were no such distractions. I would be there as a rule only after the Cassette had shut, drunk and demanding, and each visit described a slowing arc from fucky oblivion to parched and anxious waking, stumbling dressing and going home. It was the hours of half-sleep that were the longest, and through which the green figures of the alarm-clock, between tiny spasms of dreaming, kept their steadiest vigil. Time was tearing along, but it would never be morning.
Cherif had gone off somewhere—to Rotterdam so Ivo, the camp and caring barman, said, though Cherif in his blunt, hurt way had said nothing to Matt or me. I should perhaps have been worried, but his absence seemed to offer one of those undeserved respites from guilt and obligation. Then I noticed that it left me feeling lonely; Matt was lean and fit and fierce, I liked the gymnastic sex that had me sweat-soaked and out of breath; but when I woke to his rattling snores I began to think back tenderly to Cherif’s comfortable hug. I was writing a long and often interrupted letter to Edie, saying how Cherif had said he loved me and how I missed his dusty clothes and serious kissing.
I was too self-absorbed to realise at first just how criminal Matt was. The little raid on the pantry should perhaps have alerted me; and later in the week, when he went in to find an electric fire to allay the new coolness of the nights, his landlady's back could be seen through the kitchen door as she washed up and dotingly harangued her cats. He was in love with his own boldness; when he came back with the fire I could see his cock was half-hard in his jeans—and in his face I saw bravado suppressed by the con-artist's cynical and touchy blankness. Then one evening when I came round I found him folding dirty underpants in tissue-paper and putting them in a batch of Jiffy bags with address-labels printed in capital letters. I made no comment on this and played up my latest Luc news in a show of blind infatuation which easily screened the fact that I had noticed. Not that Matt hid what he was doing: he was a competent operator. The whole thing stirred long-forgotten anxieties, uptight disapproval fighting with randy, craven admiration.
My news was fairly momentous too. By now I always took in Luc's street in my walks across town and went past the house fast but brazenly, with a look of friendly expectancy that would have appeared slightly potty to another passer-by. I saw how my routes for simple errands were tugged into wide and tiring loops by the pull of that street and that house. The cheery tourist map was traversed by new trails, and a new and unsuspected shrine had been drawn in. A general restlessness kept me on the streets a lot by day, and I began to recognise stall-holders and groups of kids and certain afternoon walkers who kept regular hours. I aimed always to go past the Altidores' in the early evening, when the lights might first come on in the house and Luc be seen at an upstairs window towelling his hair. But so far it had never happened, and I would go on with slackening pulse, through further streets already impregnated with a mood of bafflement and anti-climax.
That Thursday, after my lesson with Marcel, who was making progress and described the plot of Bloodbath 4 with a new determination, I went out, drifted round the shopping-streets, spent a while in the photography section of a bookshop browsing the fashionably retro albums of athletes and swimmers, and then guiltily slipped into the Golden Calf for a bottle of Silence. I felt fizzy and reckless when later on I turned into Long Street just as the lamps twinked on above, pink and mauve and flickering like a favourite vice.
I was still some way from the house, but I had it casually in my sights and knew just how it fitted in the rhythm of frontages opposite, glassier and posher than its immediate neighbours, the house before it having an illuminated cross in an upper window. Luc's front door opened and two figures came out sideways on to the top of the steps and then Luc himself, taller and protective, emerged between them: the Three! I knew Sibylle's smart look at once, and the boy too, of course, snug and strong. She reached up and kissed Luc on the cheek. I saw as if an inch away his flared lips kiss the air beside her as she did so, and he and the boy slid an arm round each other and left them burningly there through a last brief reprise of their talk.
I faltered. could I be seen in the uncertain light? I should go on with a quick wave and greeting, even, ideally, stop and be drawn into a loose embrace of conversation—introductions could be made, fast friendships charmingly inaugurated. But I stopped where I was, twenty yards off, pressed against the wall, watching their joking and agreements in the doorway with the hunger of a ghost: I felt like a nothing, a mere emanation of weathered bricks and mortar. Fatuously, I crouched to re-tie a lace, but looked up helplessly in the youngsters' direction, and saw the guests disengage themselves, come down the steps and turn away with a further sung-out goodbye. They strolled off for a few seconds and Luc called, "Hey, Patrick", and when the boy looked round made a nodding jump, like heading a ball, and they both grinned. Then the boy, Patrick, went out into the road and bent to unlock a car: the Mini, the mauve Mini. I wandered dimly after them as the car pulled out; the engine wasn't firing properly. I tried to remember the number plate: KYF, KYF . . . a Cherif-like syllable. The door had closed behind Luc by the time I came by, and I didn't even glance in at the window, swamped in my renewed sense of failure and imbecility.
There were running footsteps behind me and Luc touched me on the shoulder. He was ravishingly flushed and pushed his hair back and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me.
"Hello, Luc! I was just . . ."
"Edward, what really good luck! I wanted to ask you something and I didn't know how to get into contact with you."
"Oh."
"Then I saw you actually walking past the window at the very moment I was thinking about you!" He was agitated enough not to notice perhaps how oddly I responded. "Don't you think that must be a good sign?"
"I certainly hope so." I wondered if he was going to ask me in, and I glimpsed an evening utterly changed, even if just a drink with him and his mother and high baroque trumpet-blasts of power and lust breaking out soundlessly above us.
"Well, I hope very much you will let me change my lesson tomorrow, because I want to go away out of the town."
"Oh, of course, well, where are you going?"
"I am going to the seaside, I think I have told you about it before, to where my friends have a house."
So that was what the three had been planning . . . And already the old city began to feel irksome and desolate without them, without him, as it might have done centuries before when the court that Gerard had described to me moved on and took its revels with it. "How long will you be gone?"
"Only till Sunday night or Monday. I can see you on Monday, perhaps in the afternoon to be quite definite."
"Yes, okay. As long as you make sure you take some books with you. We've got a lot of books to look at, you know; you can't get too casual about this." I had the astonishing image of him in my mind frowning through smoke and drinking vodka in a cabin on some rusty old tanker, dealing cards to a ring of blond sailors in singlets, who exchanged glances and chatted about him in a language he couldn't understand.
"You bet, Edward. I will be reading The Poets of our Time in each free moment."
"Good."
There was a pause in which we simply looked in each other's eyes and his grin of self-congratulation seeped away and he was shifting and waiting to be dismissed. I had never seen him so childish—it was a sign of trust, maybe, that he wasn't bothering with his usual indifference, though he must have known too that keenness and high spirits won adults' hearts and persuaded them that there was goodness left in the world. Then when he turned and jogged back to the house I thought I had never seen him so manly—so broad and so slimly heavy and incontrovertibly grown. I went on towards Matt's, the street-lights warming and yellowing as the twilight fell.