I panicked again under the huge sweep of sky that opened up. The city was suddenly behind us; I looked back, and above the warehouses and estates the cluster of extravagant towers rose into view again; they became the city; then they dwindled and were blurred in haze. We were leaving fast, the engine was shouting, the wind tore over the windshield and whipped the hair about on top of my head. I wanted to be back where we'd come from, late in bed or strolling out for a pre-pre-lunch beer. We overtook lorries and family cars with luggage on the roof, new from the ferry. Here was all the rest of the world, and my old world too, the Brits still cautious on the blind side of the road, looming ahead and then for a few seconds alongside, the roped tarpaulins jabbering loose, the drivers anxiously alert to the flashy blast of the jeep. But I was a Continental by now, and looked on them with pity and dismay as they fell behind.
There was a certain brown obscurity in the sky ahead, like rain falling out to sea. Matt was wearing bottle-green dark glasses and frowned as he drove. A few miles later it lifted and dissolved; and the further we went the more radiant and old-masterly the air became, so that the whole mad, worrying escapade began already to feel out of time, steeped in a dream-ether of its own. When we crossed into France, and Matt turned off and pulled over in a country road to check the map, my goose-flesh smoothed and the October sun was almost hot on my forearms. We went on the last four miles more stealthily, my left hand tucked for childish comfort under Matt's thigh. Then we dropped to a wide view of current-silvered sea, with several big ships standing off; and a sharp turn of the road presented us all at once with a straggle of houses, a massive, squat church with a spire, and the sign—St Ernest-aux-Sablonnières.
We dawdled along the street, me slunk down in my seat with one of Matt's baseball caps not disguising me much, dreading to be seen or for us even to be noticed, and the jeep farting uproariously at each touch on the accelerator. There was a grocer's, a bar, a novelty shop, a few old stone houses and at either end new brick ones with steel security blinds and unmade gardens just as the builders might have left them. Between them you saw the sea, and other houses lower down, and when we turned and came back we took a narrow lane to the left and emerged on a sand-blown track that I knew was where we had to be.
A string of modest villas, bungalows with lawns running down to the dunes. An air of mild neglect—scabbing stucco, rusted house names, woody buddleia breaking through the garden fences. An air of between-the-wars, of chic whiteness and empty space and cocktails on the glassy-screened terraces with sunset views across the Channel. And of being in a place now forlornly unchic, a little colony half-abandoned to encroachments of sand and wiry grass.
We pottered along past the ten or twelve houses to the end of the road, where there was a small concrete car-park looking out over the sands like a gun-emplacement. A few new vehicles were waiting there beside a derelict and plundered Ami, and down the beach a few figures could be seen. Were the Three amongst them, intimately corralled in one of those striped wind-breaks, or careering down to the shock of the sea? We turned again, and drove back, and it was only going this way that I caught sight of KYF, tucked in a rose-tangled carport, the carport of. . . Les Goélands. I was now virtually on the floor of Matt's jeep and urged him to go on. He pulled up in the next entrance-way and asked me just what it was I wanted to do and why we were here. He wasn't angry but he was used to getting results; he wasn't imaginative; he wasn't shocked by the whims and oddities of others—the odder the better, as I was coming to realise—but he needed an objective. It was hard to explain that I just wanted to be here, just wanted to see the house.
"So we're going to spy on them."
"Well, how can we? If I go on the beach I'll be recognised."
Matt disregarded this. "But you want to see him stripped out. You want to know what's going on with Les Trois"—he took on my term without a flutter—"and whether your kid's fucking with the girl or the boy. Or both."
"Or neither." It was not unhumbling to have it so spelt out.
"You must remember I've never seen any of these guys. They'd better be good."
I sat feeling wretched for a while, bruised by my alliance with someone so alien and unsuitable as Matt. Then he turned off the engine and jumped out.
The entrance-way we were in was overhung with sprawling trees; the gate, meshed against dogs, sagged under a heavy chain. Inside, clumps of cupressus had been allowed to grow and grow, and obscured the house; their young tops swayed in the breeze. I watched Matt leaning at the gate, his polo-shirt hanging out. Then he scrambled over smartly, showing a white quarter of naked back, and disappeared down the driveway. I stayed where I was, at last confident of disaster.
This was an older house than the others, maybe the first that had been built out on the dunes below the village. It was shuttered and weather boarded, and at the bottom of the neglected garden another gate under a rustic arch gave on to the beach. Matt had moved the car to the park, where it looked fractionally less conspicuous and almost sensible—a fun-truck, a beach-buggy high on testosterone. Anyone who saw it there would know at once that it belonged to some sporty young fools miles down the beach with a ghetto-blaster and a badminton set. And here we were, stalking through the prickly shrubbery, peering into the back garden of Les Goelands. There seemed to be a whitewashed wall in the way, and nearer the house a dark shed with a tarred roof. You just couldn't see in, and you couldn't hear anything, either.
I gave Matt as accurate a description as I could of the little group. "They're all beautiful," I said. "Sibylle is small and self-contained, with glossy reddish-brown hair, and Patrick is stocky and square-faced and unhurried, with short dark hair that sprouts out at different angles; and Luc . . . well, I've told you all about Luc."
"You certainly have," said Matt, with a stylish little sarcasm he didn't normally rise to.
I sat at the end of the garden whilst he cruised off down the beach in his black swimming-shorts and a singlet. It was like teaching, in a way, knowing how to catch his imagination, to set him tasks he might take to for the pleasure of them. Now he was my eyes, he had to find and recount for me, and my mind's eye followed him over the loose horizon of the sandhills and into the field of play I absurdly couldn't enter. I kicked around in a low-walled patio overgrown with grass and bindweed, with built-in benches warped by sun, and the black griddle of a barbecue that might have been used quite recently: maybe parties stole in from the beach—there were beer-bottles tumbled in a corner and holding their slant few inches of rain. I smoked a cigarette and fizzed the stub into one of them. It was very still, with the lull and whisper of the sea nearby but out of view, and hot sunshine that was a miracle in which the Three uncannily took part: they had known of it in advance, and known, almost without thinking, what to do. I unbuttoned my shirt and lay on one of the benches, breathing the seedy vanilla smell of a bush on which half a dozen late bees still dropped and toppled.
Later I walked round the house, and peered in at a couple of places where the shutters were broken, but my own head cut out the light I needed to see by. Upstairs at the back was an old-fashioned sunroom, with a view that must clear the dunes through wide salt-bleared windows, at each of which a pale Venetian blind was lowered and closed. On the hard standing below, a small sailing-boat lay upside-down on bricks; I twisted my head to read the blistered freehand lettering: L'Allegro, and wondered idly if its sister-vessel was laid up next door. Perhaps Luc was half-heartedly caulking it right now.
My heart raced when I heard footsteps coming up behind: it was Matt, hair still wet from swimming (though quilled and looped a bit by the breeze), and sand drying in the dark hairs on his calves.
"You've been ages," I said. "couldn't you find them? Perhaps they're all in the house."
"No, I found them." He half-turned from me, pushed down his waistband and pissed fiercely into the bushes; then stood for a while slapping his dick in his palm as a doctor smacks a vein he wants to rise; then with a snarl of regret stuffed the stiff thing back so that it jutted awkwardly and then slowly slumped.
I was hungry to know what had happened, and also just plain hungry. It was high lunchtime. "Shall we go up to that bar and get something to eat?"
"Yeah, you go," he said. "I had a beer and a sandwich on the beach."
"Oh. Well, thanks for bringing me some."
He strolled off a pace or two and stood with hands on hips looking up at the house. "I'll tell you something," he said. "That boy is wild."
A shot of pain and acclamation went through me. "Well, I told You," I pointed out. "I told you he was a golden dream made solid flesh."
"No, not the golden dream one," he said. "Well, he's okay, he's a bit skinny, a bit weird . . . those lips? No, the other kid, Patrick." Matt looked at me and shook his head. "I'll tell you something, that boy has got a whopper. A total fucking monster between his legs."
"How do you know?"
"Man, you only have to be a hundred yards away to see that. He's running round in these little swimming-things, he's got this big fat strong arse sticking out the back and this unbelievable package out front. The whole beach was just, like, fixated on it." Matt gripped himself between the legs and shivered.
"I'm glad you've enjoyed yourself," I said tartly but truthfully too. The lesson was working. "I'd like to see him myself. What was Luc wearing?"
"What? Oh, sort of trousers, like sailing trousers, long trousers but short."
"He wasn't swimming in long trousers?"
"He was reading a book."
Oh, my obedient Luc, taking my instructions so simply to heart.
"Are they still out there?"
"Yes, they'll be there for a bit. Then they're probably going to take a boat out this afternoon. They've got this nice little dinghy."
"Mm. I shouldn't let your imagination run away with you."
Matt came back to me, put his arms round my shoulders and kissed me on the nose. "That's what they said they were going to do, anyway."
"You mean you actually overheard them talking."
"Ed!" He shook me. "I've just spent the last half hour with them. We've been playing frisbee together—well, the girl and Big Boy and me. The professor was studying . . . And then they very nicely shared their light lunch with me."
I backed away. "How can you do this?" I said, amazed and angry and eaten out with jealousy.
He sauntered along the side of the house, and I watched him stoop at the back door and rattle the handle. He walked haltingly round, bare feet on pine-needled gravel. When he'd done his circuit, he said softly, "We'd better stay here tonight", and sent me away down the garden again, so that I shouldn't see what he was going to do. I began to feel that he could do anything he wanted, just by not caring about it.
When I stepped into that house and the back door scraped shut and a family of mice whizzed and froze over the kitchen floor, it was with a whisper of reluctance that could hardly be heard. Matt beckoned me through a shadowy doorway and we were in limbo; the quick adrenalin of the crime was calmed by the still, stale air; the twirling shafts of light from the cracked shutters only stroked our legs as we passed and left me with a feeling of mysterious safety, hushed and remote as the sound of the sea.
In the entrance hall the two oars and paddles of L'Allegro were propped in a corner and a 1987 calendar with an image of the Virgin and the compliments of a Citroen garage in Dunkerque was pinned up above a telephone—which Matt lifted, listened to and laid on the table-top, as if we had no wish to be disturbed.
The owners were called Rostand, rather impressively, but the cold, intrusive shock of seeing their name on a spew of dead mail, a gardening catalogue for each year, seasonal circulars from St Ernest, was allayed by the long passage of time, almost as if they had given up any rights in the property by leaving it alone so long. I envied them their holiday home and remembered how possessive I had felt of the bungalow we took each year at Kinchin Cove; how I liked the second-best, third-best furniture, the formica-topped table, the patched armchairs, the shell-covered lamp just like the Rostands had, and how I hated the last day, the bed-stripping, the tidying-away, the final retreat to the back door, wiping the floor as we went and effacing the last footprint of our presence.
Matt had gone on upstairs and I followed in a dream; though most of the house was in a twilight murk there was a brightness at the end of the landing, where a door was open on to the sunroom, and Matt called softly, "Ed!" The closed blinds were luminous with the sun outside and the air held a dry old smell of warmed woodstain, like the inside of a cigar-box. Matt was kneeling on the low windowsill and as I came up beside him he tweaked down a slat of the blind and I glanced through with the sudden vertigo of a crane-shot in a film, clear over the tangle of the shrubbery to the long white stoa of Les Goélands and the white steps and the rectangle of sloping lawn. He took his finger away as if to say, it's there but you can't have it yet. "So what's my reward?" he said, standing up.
I went down and nosed and kissed his balls through the sleek black nothing of his swimming-shorts, and lifted them on my tongue and let them drop. I glanced up and he was sighing into the distance as if he could still see Patrick—I knew it was hardly me he wanted. He pushed the shorts down to the top of his thighs and waited with hands clasped on top of his head whilst I tugged his balls free with my lips and tongue and little careful cat-nips of the teeth. The gauzy inner slip of the trunks was damp and still held grains of sand; he tasted salty between the legs.
He shuffled backwards as I helped him from the fleeting encumbrance of the shorts, and spread himself on the mouse-pillaged cushions of a wicker sun-bed. I came after on my knees and licked and pulled and sucked on his balls whilst he stroked himself off and ploughed my hair back over and over with his other hand. Sometimes, my hair tumbled forward and was trapped and yanked in the steady piston of his fist. "That hurt!" I felt like saying, but he was choking both balls into my mouth to swallow on as he came, and I only produced an ill-mannered grunt.
While he was out at the shop, I drifted through the house, only half-curious about the Rostands and barely conscious that I was doing wrong. At the other end of the landing was a door with a boyish notice, "Julien, Privé, Danger de Mort", and as I opened it I saw for a fraction of a second a fat little boy with glasses earnestly coming to terms with The Police or Duran Duran. But as my eyes adjusted to the gloom there was nothing but a bare mattress, and a child's deal desk on which lay some Astérix books and a die-cast Ferrari Testa Rossa and a long-since shrivelled inflatable globe. I felt Julien must be a bit younger than Patrick. Had they known each other, played with the boat each long summer, been transformed one after the other by puberty, Julien anxious and awestruck by his Belgian friend? Maybe Luc had known him too, and maybe that earlier, simpler threesome had come up to his room to fight and boast and hold the stilted talk of adolescence.
We camped out at the house, eating floury apples and pate and olives from ajar. Matt escaped a couple more times and swam again in the late afternoon when even he admitted that the sea was hurtingly cold. I liked having the house to myself and lay about in the diffused light of the sunroom, blindfolded with daydreams and drifting into sleep. I made a slight adjustment to the angle of the slats and from time to time looked through. Once the long windows on to the porch were open, and towels and trunks had appeared on the line: I had missed their return. Later the doors were closed and lights reached out across the lawn; but we were at too obtuse an angle to be able to see in. Later still, at one or two, I went out along the beach myself and loitered by the white palings of their fence. There were no lights now, but a hazy half-moon picked up the glimmer of the dunes, the small vanishing lines of the wave-crests, and, when I turned, the white villa itself and the hanging towels and the dim, sea-bleached hydrangeas. Here was the gate, jammed open in the sand, and then the stunted thorns, clipped by the wind into arrows pointing at the darkened windows. Why not step in? Suddenly I knew the house would not be locked, and that I could ghost through it and hover over each sleeping face, him with her or him. But I didn't, I wouldn't. I kicked and stumbled back through the dunes, my heart spurting with longing. I had left a candle burning in the kitchen and shielded it upstairs with its dumbshow of shadows and startlements to where Matt was already snoring and striking a sympathetic echo from the old cupboards and bare floors. I hovered over him for a minute, his arms pinned in a camphory cocoon of blankets, his beautiful, cynical face agape and faintly senile. Then I stole across the landing and lay down fully clothed in Julien's room. For a long time I watched the candle burning, the flame tugged away by a harmless draught. When I blew it out and saw the thin-walled cup of wax at the tip cool into darkness I thought how for centuries the world had fallen asleep with that sweet singed smell in its nostrils.
I woke in horror and disbelief at having overslept and missed the beginning of an important exam. Half an hour late already, and none of my clothes ironed, nothing remembered, all movement slowed and spasmodic . . . Then I woke again and groaned at the vestigial gleam of my father's watch-dial—"illuminous" I had called it as a child, taking it from his wrist and hanging it on a lamp to recharge its brilliance. Five and twenty (as he always quaintly turned it and as I sometimes affected to do), five and twenty past four: the worst wastes of the night at last admitting the possibility of dawn. There was some noise in the room, intermittent rustles and distant scratches, the same as always, or perhaps with a squeak of caution at the slumbering Gulliver in their midst. I decided I didn't mind, worried briefly and blankly about my life and everything I was doing, and then I found it was quarter to eight and the window-square was illuminous with excluded sunshine.
Businesslike Matt was already up and out and I had the holiday impulse to catch the best of the day as well. Then I ran the scene of a chance meeting through my mind and paled with sickly embarrassment. I kept a regular check from the sunroom, but the tenants of Les Goelands were clearly making the most of their unhindered, unsuspecting Sunday morning. A bell from St Ernest rang demandingly and then stopped and still they slept on, or woke perhaps with drowsy smiles and gummy kisses and hotly did again what they had done before they slept. It wasn't till after ten that a window opened, and Patrick came on to the porch with a mug of coffee and stood scratching the back of his head and looking unexpectantly at the sea.
I tried to make out this famous dick, but he was wearing baggy old cords as he had been the first time I saw him, and a sweatshirt with writing on, not tucked in. I didn't really care; it was Luc's cock I cared about and endlessly imagined. In my fantasies it changed, sometimes modest and strong, sometimes lolloping and heavy-headed, its only constants an easy foreskin, a certain presence, and a heather-honey beauty to it. He stepped out from the house behind Patrick and stood for a moment with an arm round his shoulder.
I recoiled from the window as if from the flash of an explosion, and then came timidly back. Surely I couldn't be seen, they would never notice the adjustment of the blind, it was the last thing on earth they would expect. I felt the need and the humiliation at once, and it took a while to learn the voyeur's confidence of being unseen. A hundred metres apart, Luc had told me the houses were, which only went to show how little he cared for accuracy, or how little he had ever noticed, or imagined that his pointless answer to a pointless question would ever be checked and charged as it was now, that it would be the distance between him and me. He was twenty, thirty yards away. He had vanished. When he came back it was with Sibylle, and a plate of white bread rolls and a pot of jam. The three sat barefoot side by side on the steps and I could hear their voices, though not what they said. Sibylle competently sliced the rolls in half, daubed them with jam, and passed them along to the boys, who hunkered forward to avoid the crumbs. I hadn't seen Luc eating before. When he had finished, Patrick looked him in the face and said something and Luc's tongue came out and licked up an apricot stain.
Then there was a little spat, Luc nudged Patrick like a naughty child at table, and almost pushed him off the edge of the step into a japonica bush. Both boys stood up grinning and shielding their faces with their hands and Luc capered backwards down the lawn. I had the strongest sense of his just having got out of bed and pulled on that thin blue jersey with perhaps nothing beneath, and those old red calf-length ducks. I watched him ankle-rocking until he saw that the game was over and dawdled back to the house. They all went inside, leaving the plate and a coffee-mug on the steps. Oh, they were only kids, they were only camping out: if Patrick's parents had been there, they would have had a table, a tray, napkins, a cafetière. It touched me terribly the way they just roosted in the place and did without the adult protocols.
Time passed. The sun climbed and cleared. Flies buzzed between the blinds and the glass. And still the window on our neighbours' porch stood open, the cup and plate sat on the steps, yesterday's towels swung slightly on the line. It was like a memory game. I felt challenged to find something that had changed. I thought Patrick's black trunks perhaps had been taken in. When Matt came back I snogged with him fretfully for a minute downstairs. Where were they, he wanted to know; what was going on? He'd been for a long run down the shore, families were out, there was a small crowd round a van selling frankfurters and frites, beach-balls were a-bounce, and still their little fucking snot-nosed lords and ladyships declined to come out and play. He was cheerily angry, like someone covering up a mischief of his own. I picked up a wodge of Paris Matches and took them upstairs to thumb through, nervously waiting for a possible appointment. We played a desultory game of following the fortunes of actors and models, seen together in a night-club in my copy, married in the later issue Matt was already throwing aside, agreeing a separation in a special exclusive two or three months after that. And who were they with now? Matt lost interest quite quickly and went prowling around.
It was voices that alerted me, and I sidled back to the window with abrupt and gloomy excitement. Another fight was going on, with Patrick asking Luc a question, accusing him of something but embarrassed already by possibly being wrong; Luc shook his head in a mime of disbelief and backed away—then turned, slung out a hip and pushed his trousers down to show a strip of blue undershorts. Such a saucy, commonplace little mime it was: I didn't like it. Patrick went back into the house, and Luc hung about for a couple of minutes by himself. I felt he was self-conscious, as if distantly aware of being looked at. I began to pick up on the odd tempo of the voyeur's day, the scattered sightings, the extended lulls, the great patient investment of time, the eerie, more than social intimacy with figures utterly detached and unconscious of you; they were the twitching puppets of their own routines and whims, immune to your muttered urgings, your baffled telepathy, your shielded stare. I'd known it before, once or twice—and half-ashamed—watching a boy next door waste a day, his expanses of day-dreaming, his occasional inscrutable actions. I remembered the texture of the thinnish, slow time in which he existed, the one-sock-on, one-sock- off doldrums of a morning alone. I hated the Donningtons—not for any particular reason, just in that keen, general way one hates one's neighbours, with their boat and their extension—and as I trained the binocs on young Gerry, whose round face was being brusquely thumbed, pinched and generally rethought by the gods of puberty, I felt I was taking a secret revenge. I shut myself in the bathroom and watched and watched. It was like a corrupt privilege granted in a dream or in an ancient public school.
"Let's have a look." Matt came up beside me, bored, rather brutal. I was still peering at the empty lawn.
"There's nothing to see at the moment."
A flesh-mantled finger with a tiny oblong of lost nail pushed down the blind-slat, and the leathered cylinders of a massive pair of field-glasses slid into position.
"Man, you can see everything with these." How did he do it? I was ineffectual again, a mere blundering inner man, protected and outwitted by my cold-hearted friend. Another blunt finger rocked the milled focus-wheel. "Incredible. You can count the blades of grass," he said. "If you want to."
"Let's have a look."
His whole identity was obscured by the glasses, and his grin might only have been the sneer of a face screwed up against the sun. "You could count the pubes on his balls."
"He doesn't have pubes on his balls. Now can I have a look, please?"
"Yeah . . . Yeah . . ."—a concentrating tongue peeped and havered. "Oh boy. Here comes Big Boy. Just look at that . . . Looks like they're going boating again." I squinted through, somehow convinced that without the binoculars I wouldn't be able to see a thing, though there of course Sibylle and Patrick were, encumbered with paddles and a bailer and boxy pink life-jackets.
"Now where's your little friend, I wonder? He'll probably stay indoors to do his reading, and you won't see him at all, which will be your fault." I gave Matt a blow in the ribs—just like the boys fighting, I saw—and he cackled and said, "No, hold on, who do we have here?" And Luc was back again, awkward on the steps, as if unable to give help when it was expected of him. "If I was young . . . Luc," said Matt, "I'd be getting a bit jealous of Big Boy and the girl." When I got the glasses at last though, and caught the pair as they scuffed out on to the beach, there was an angry firmness about them. They looked unlikely to enjoy themselves. I took off my specs and twiddled the focus to my shorter sight. The lenses were powerful, ocean-sweepers proved perhaps in some war-time conning-tower, treasured later for their ability to capture shorebirds' markings and charming movements. The heavy casing was chipped, the leather was frayed and in the paint the name DHONDT was roughly scratched.
Half an hour raced and drifted by before Luc appeared again. Then things began to unfold with a canny momentum of their own. He came on to the porch and I had the field-glasses on him: he was starlingly clean and close, palpable but also stylised in the flowing depthless picture-plane. When I shifted my position the picture twitched uncaringly to various greenery, a nodding sapling's top, and I had to run the glasses down and across in a worried blur to find him strolling over the lawn, just beneath me it seemed, like a figure in the flattened foreground of a Japanese print. I didn't dare open the blinds further, and the picture was hazily occluded above and below by the unfocused slats. They gave an edge of mystery to the brilliant image they framed.
He spread out a pale blue towel with tattered edges, an old towel kept for the beach, for tar and sun-oil. Then he paced around it in a territorial sort of way, and looked out towards the dunes. I thought for a while he might be going on to the beach instead and that I would lose my almost supernatural vantage-point. But he resolved on privacy and I saw at once his shy, clever dignity—it made me love him even more. He tugged off his jersey and lay down, reaching out for a cloth bag: I watched him take out some lotion and read the bottle before deciding he wasn't likely to get burnt; the sun was bright, though, and he put on visor sunglasses, their arms linked behind by a short embroidered band. Then he rolled on to his front and opened a book, he was looking away from me and I refined the focus over his shoulder and made out a typical page of Poets of our Time: he must have folded a pencil in as a marker, and he was soon underlining words and scoring the margin and then for about five minutes he worked on a dense, formal doodle—I think it was on a Roy Campbell page. The thing about our Time was that it was really our Fathers' Time. I wondered at my own impulse to keep him back with me in a shared childhood of unfashionable lyrics and discredited rhetoric. I studied his naked brown back more closely than I had ever studied anything—the wide plates of his shoulderblades, the slight boyish dip between as he leant on his elbows, traces of pink scratches on the shoulders, the shaped, backswept golden hair stacked in the embroidered sling of the shades-band.
When I put down the binoculars to take off my trousers I was confused to find myself indoors, in another house, and not kneeling just behind his open legs ready to fuck him or tickle his feet. I came back to my vigil to find him standing up and looking around, and I thought perhaps he was giving up already. Matt was quite wrong to say he was skinny; he was lean but no more skinny than Matt was, and his chest was surprisingly big, with wide milky nipples. I knelt there teasing the air with my tongue and teeth, and working my jaw in imaginary kisses.
He was taking his trousers off.
I can't go on about the next hour. Luc on the grass in his shallow blue shorts, rather discreet; the tan-lines of the summer, of his red ducks and of longer shorts than these, marking comical sexy stages up his long legs to the whiteness I just glimpsed where the hem rode high by a finger's breadth on the rise of his buttocks. Already the little creases and blue nodes of veins on his inner thighs. Nothing about his cock, but a couple of seconds' vision of crinkled scrotum (I may have imagined that). The discarding of Poets of our Time and the getting on of a yellow Walkman. Its not being Schubert. The scary challenge of a look my way, half-sitting up as if alerted by a noise or the glint of the lens, then lying back again, fingers in his waistband. My envy of his hands as they cupped his head, or flicked at an insect or a tickling grass, the light scratches with the back of a thumbnail. My envy of a long-toed, dirty-soled foot rubbed against the opposite calf, then sliding slowly down till it lay by the other and tick-tocked to the beat of the music.
He had to move as the sun swung round and the shadow of our house advanced across the lawn; the steep roof and the lower sunroom took an ominous form, like the blind head and paws of the Sphinx, I thought. Twice he picked up the towel and resettled himself further away, frowning, the subject of an experiment in light he seemed not to have grasped. Twice Matt brought me off. I needed both hands to hold the heavy glasses without shaking. I was rather tied up, head and hands in one place, heart and mind out there where my pupil lay and day-dreamed and shifted from the advance of the cool tide of shadow.