I went out to the station to greet Edie and had to wait half an hour, pacing the platform systematically and then sitting with a coffee and a cigarette in the nearly empty refreshment hall. It was one of those vacant interludes, when pleasant boredom mixes with anticipation, and six or seven minutes of anonymous sex in the mopped and deserted Gents is what you would like best—You come just as the tannoy chimes and the fast train is competently announced. But there was nothing doing this morning: a few stout minor businessmen in belted macs, an elderly lady with a cart of luggage and a look of foreboding. I was tense but weightless, oddly comforted by the unknown plans and problems of the others. The long hand on a digitless clock-face clunked from minute to minute as the trim red second hand busied round. I gazed through the enormous windows, back towards the city—nearby a little guard-tower with a pointed roof and drooping chequered flag, and beyond it an impression of walls and spires like a city in a book of hours, only blurred and brightened by the gold of horse-chestnuts turning and the paling yellow of limes. It was a good moment for my old friend to see the place.
In fact when she arrived she found everything wonderful: the clean, late train, the absence of people, the sleek inter-war grandeur of the station with its fawn marble and redundant spaciousness, all seemed hilarious and entrancing to her. We had a fierce hug and I was carried along for a while on the surge of confidence that came from being with a real old friend, whose friendship outlasted and diminished my other frets and misguided wanderings. I balanced up her several bags like an experienced bellhop, and we set off into town on foot. She was travelling with a hat-box.
"I want you to see it this way, as if you were an old pilgrim, or you couldn't afford the tram."
"Heavenly."
I led her over a bridge, through an escutcheoned gateway and into the first little square; silent houses and a statue of a nineteenth-century man with swooping moustaches—she ran forward to read his name.
"I've no idea," I said.
"But darling, I thought you'd know everything by now."
"Sorry. I do know one or two things, but . . . not that."
"I see." She walked round the statue on its high plinth as if my ignorance made it more interesting or problematic. The nice thing about the man was his thoughtful, almost unhappy expression, as if he felt himself unsuited to the eminent perpetuity of statuedom. He might, have been a good doctor or a minor devotional poet. Edie imitated his posture, mocking it gently, and caught the eye of a young boy who came trotting past and stopped in surprise to see a man with a hat-box and a striking dark girl in black rights and tunic and slouch-cap, like a Stuart page-boy in mourning, standing stock-still; while to me it had an older resonance, the busy longueurs of photo-sessions when Edie was still at fashion-school, when we would go on to the common with a suitcase and umbrellas and sheets of tinfoil and one or two of her inventive friends and create our gleaming static happenings, which patient passers-by would stop and puzzle over.
I was bursting with things to say to her; she was an indulgent listener, not like rivalrous old men friends who fought you for the conversational advantage. But I wanted to let the city enfold her first. As we walked on I would point out a church or house or a glimpse into a courtyard, but we hardly spoke. I felt the place was mine, I was proud of it, and of more or less knowing my way through it; and I knew the quality of Edie's different silences, from the violent to the serene, and that we were together in this one—as I hadn't been together with anyone since I came here.
We were at a famously pretty point, with a view of the Belfry beyond a canal, leaves fluttering on to the water, a long quay to the left with three receding bridges stepping from the empty sunshine into the narrow lanes of the middle of town.
"It is absolute bliss," Edie said. "You're so lucky, and so right to have come. I couldn't see why before, to be honest I thought it was quite potty, but you're absolutely right."
I swallowed the blunt admission. "Voilà."
"I must say it is rather peculiarly quiet." She looked at her watch. "I mean we've seen three people in the past twenty minutes, and now there's nobody in sight at all. That sort of might get to one."
"Yes, things have been a fraction on the dull side since about 1510. But we do what we can to make our own entertainment."
"So one rather gathered from your letter."
She was not ungrand, Edie. My mother often said she came from "a very good family", which was her way of glossing over Edie's more gavroche and boozy qualities and suggesting I was lucky to be friends with a de Souzay at all. The de Souzays were great liberal philanthropists, though not, by and large, as keen as this one was to get in a pub and talk, at some length, about men and what they liked to do. She had an emphatic contralto speaking-voice, and a certain hauteur—undercut by a vulgar laugh that could set other people going in a cinema or cafe.
She always used the same scent, a beautiful fragrance that was abbeys, aunts, tapestried country houses, dulled petals in china bowls before it was . . . whatever it was, the discreet phial put up by some Mayfair herbalist for powdered dowagers in black court shoes. It didn't go particularly with what she tended to wear—often made by herself and usually sexy, theatrical and vaguely disconcerting: she was my earliest experience of glamour, of bold exposure matched with dazzling concealment. Fifteen years ago I had seen her squeeze up her bust like a soubrette in a Restoration comedy, and watched with awe as her face, with its long nose and downed upper lip, was painted and dusted into a challenging and ironic mask. Even then she wore her mysterious perfume, so that to breathe it again now in my rooms was to go back through half a lifetime passed alongside her. It overwhelmed the yellow roses I had bought and stuck in a jug in the middle of the table.
"I love it, dear," said Edie, opening the cupboards into which I'd tidied things away. "You could have a great romance in here." She went to the long back window and gazed down into the secret garden.
I felt buoyantly rich with the money I'd been given by Matt, and loved being able to make Edie completely my guest. She kept offering to pay for things, as she had often had to in the past, and I would sternly but suavely refuse her. I took her out straight away for lunch at a gloomy and highly praised restaurant in the main square, where we drank three bottles of Chablis and ate mussels and turbot and apple pancakes. The subject of Luc was palpable just beyond us. I felt more reckless and confessional as I drank, but I kept clear of it till coffee: I thought it would take my appetite away and then the meal would be a waste of money. I asked her about things back home with the feeling I'd been away for five months, not five weeks.
"Everything's pretty much as you left it," she said. "I was at the Common last weekend—just seeing Ma and Pa, but I popped into the George for a glass of Guinness and to pick up the gossip. One hears your old friend Willie Turlough has had yet another baby."
"To think I could have been his baby," I said, as though envisaging some wild new form of surrogacy. "Still, he's bald now, isn't he?"
"It's a glorious great pate, by all accounts. Not that he could ever be less than humblingly handsome . . . " She leant forward and pushed a hand through my thick mop.
"Anything else?"
"I went into Dawn's shop, it's all outrageously expensive. He said no one had even rung the bell—You know they've got a buzzer now for security—for two days. I bought a pair of old china candlesticks for about the price of a world cruise, it was sort of a mixture of charity and madness, like so much of one's existence."
"Are you pleased with them?"
"Not at all. I'm just longing for someone to get married so that I can pass them on."
I twiddled the stem of my wine-glass. "I never long for that," I said. "And what of Dawn himself?"
"Well, I was amazed to see him looking so fit. Colin took him to Algeria, which was apparently somewhat hairy with the riots, but did mean he got nice and brown; and he's put on a bit of weight. The AZT seems to have made him rather hilarious."
"I so want him to be all right," I said—it seemed still worth saying.
"I'm afraid I didn't see your ma," said Edie after a pause. "I don't suppose she'd expect me to call if you weren't there."
"I had a ten-page letter yesterday. She's fine. At least if there isn't an upset in the later pages. I've never quite finished reading one of her letters before the next one arrives."
We were late, perhaps loud with drink (one never knew), and the sole survivors of lunchtime. The waiter who was left to us gave only a curt nod when we asked for a second pot of coffee. "So what about this breaking heart of yours?" said Edie. "Or am I exaggerating?"
"God, I wish you were," I gasped, tears suddenly in my eyes.
"Darling. Perhaps it will be all right."
"Of course it may be all right..." I lit a cigarette, it was from a packet left behind in the bar, an American brand, thin and sweet—the shock of finding what other people buy and like.
"Have you actually . . . made a move?"
I shook my head. "There are the most tremendous bars and forces in the air. Sometimes I'm only eighteen inches away from him, our feet are virtually touching as we sit at the table for the lessons, I can smell the milky coffee on his breath. And yet I'm completely immobilised."
"Well, you could hardly start groping him in a lesson." Then, "How's it going to end?"
"That—that's too logical and impossible a question. How it is is all that counts." Edie said nothing. "I'm so empty and aching for him, he affects everything I do and think, and it's very hard to believe that maybe he doesn't even know. It really makes me feel quite mad at times. When I go round for the lessons, you know how it is, at first I feel absolutely mad simply being with him, then after a few minutes I kind of subdue my passion with words, things get normalised, their banality somehow shows through for a while—of course there are spurts of hot heart-burn—and then as the end approaches it becomes unbearable again. I feel my face is stiff with all the pain he doesn't even know he's inflicted: it's just that basic biological thing, you can't stand being separated, and for minutes after he's said goodbye your heart is thumping and thumping and you feel full of despair and shock as if you'd just witnessed some great accident. And you have to have a drink." I took a deep pull on the cigarette and stubbed the whole thing out. "Ah, coffee."
The waiter set down the copper pot, and busied and obstructed us removing the ashtray and at last empty glasses. "Which way do you think his thoughts turn?" Edie asked.
"Anights? Well, it's hard . . . Did I mention the Three? They enhance each other's mystique no end. They're all beautiful and well off and give the impression of being crazy about each other."
"You know what they say . . . 'Un trio n'excite pas de soupçons'."
"Well, my soupçons have never been more excites in their lives." I hesitated, and then drew out the wallet of pictures from my inside pocket. "I can show you."
"Oh."
I shuffled through the prints and laid out half a dozen in front of her. She seemed deliberately to take a detached line. "So this dark one is Patrick? He looks a real little thug, I must say. Quite nice though."
"He doesn't look a thug. He's got a gigantic cock."
"Sibylle is lovely, I agree. beautiful eyes, and mouth; and colouring."
"Yes."
"She looks very sophisticated and irresistible."
"Quite. Thank you."
"And this must be him." I looked away and then back to the upside-down image and waited for her reaction. It was the faun-like picture of Luc on the beach.
"Don't you think it's very ancient Greece that one?"
"Mm. Where was it taken?"
"It's at a place just over the French border where the Three are always going. I followed them down there with my friend Matt and we kind of spied on them."
"I see, you took this."
"No, no—no. I stole the negatives and had them printed."
Edie raised an eyebrow and I wondered again, as I had in dense hours of meditating on that picture, just who had taken it and at which of his friends that complex gaze of Luc's had been directed.
"That must have been rather difficult."
"Terribly easy. I've stolen lots of things. I'm wearing a pair of his pants at the moment, and one of his vests and one of his socks." I stuck out my feet beyond the tablecloth and she looked with concern at my one blue and one green ankle. "The blue one's Luc's."
"Darling—I mean . . . You do seem to have gone completement bonkers."
I tolerated this remark, I wasn't sure if it contained a hint of congratulation. I drank a cup of coffee in quick insistent sips, and Edie kept looking at the photos. "Are the others any good?" she said.
"There are some others I wasn't going to bore you with."
"Bore? I love other people's photographs. They're the only ones that aren't disappointing."
I gave her the packet. "There are those rather odd ones, where they're acting or something. That one where Patrick has a sheet over his head, and Luc's waving a poker round like a sword. Most peculiar," I said, drily and enviously.
Edie frowned over the print. "It isn't that peculiar. They're only larking about. Just because you can only imagine them gazing into each other's eyes and having sex all day long, you seem to have forgotten that they're only kids, who still do childish, rather kooky kind of things, and like dressing up and being silly. You may not have heard about it, it's called fantasy."
"You haven't even met them." She held my hand across the table. "You haven't said what you think of Luc."
"Well, he's lovely, darling. . . Odd-lovely, wouldn't you say? His upper lip is very large and over-luscious."
"When you see the point of him it's the upper lip you love most of all. You go from disliking it to accepting it to . . . adoring it."
"The other thing I think", said Edie, "is that he's too young for you."
"Well, of course he's too young for me," I said in sudden miserable annoyance. "Still, it happens, it happens."
Edie was a hit in the Cassette and shook hands with people and made funny conversation, much of which was over their heads. She wore black shoes and tights, a thick short bunched red skirt that stuck out, a black leather jacket and her hair pulled up inside her black cap: she looked like an interesting young man during that brief phase when skirts for men were considered a possibility. She wasn't a fag-hag (if anything, she claimed, it was I who was a hag-fag), but an emotional aloofness, the afterspace of several short, obscurely unhappy affairs, made her at home among gay men; they wete abruptly intimate yet made no deep demands on her, and she followed their doings with close attention and a kind of caustic merriment, as at some gratifying old melodrama. She would go into the George IV at lunchtime, but never at night, when she thought the boys should be left to make their own mischief, which she could hear about next day. She was kind, too, when she needed to be: she had looked after friends of ours who were dying. Dawn was one of them.
She and Gerard took to each other and had a long lively talk, while I sat it out on a bar-stool and made occasional interjections implying a closer relationship with Gerard than was really the case. I suppose their witty chat, with Edie like a louche minor royal showing a radiant fullness of interest in her interlocutor's stories, stirred some clumsy jealousy—and I remembered Gerard's old ambiguity, the early marriage, and didn't quite trust him. I bought us all another drink and he dropped the subject of Burgundian court music like a flash and said, "How's it going with Matt, then?"
"Fine!" I said.
Gerard looked around the room and said, "Yes, a lot of people were quite surprised when you went off with him."
"Too hot for me, you mean?"
"Well . . . And then he's not very interested in the things you like."
"I'm sorry", I said, "but we seem to have quite enough in common to be getting on with. Perhaps you believe in the narcissist theory of gay attraction; I've always loved it with people who are different from me." I was sounding cross and turned cosy for a moment. "He's been away for a couple of weeks, should be back tomorrow." I looked down. "I've missed him a lot actually."
"I hear he likes pretty kinky sex."
I said, "Yup", and Edie said,
"Is this the person you've been working for?"
"No, no," I said, with the warm mendacity of tone I knew she would understand—in fact she had named it the Manners Disclaimer years before.
"You wouldn't want to work for Matt," Gerard explained to Edie: "he does very shady dealing, and is often in the jug." We laughed, and he added, with a spoiler's relish, "As Edward will tell you, Matt isn't even his real name. He's really called Wim Vermeulen." After a moment of narrow-eyed scepticism, I nodded and sighed in confirmation. "He changed it recently when he came out of prison. Apparently he thought he looked like Matt Dillon."
"I think he looks just like him," I said.
Later on Edie and I slumped together on the banquette in the corner and half-watched some stubbly frenching going on across the room. "Is this Matt really a crook, as your musical friend says? It does seem rather odd if he's changed his name."
"Gerard's just madly jealous of us," I said as I realised the symmetry of the thing. "actually he is a crook, yes. And I'd more or less come to the conclusion that he'd been inside. though I confess the Vermeulen thing is a surprise. I thought he was someone else he knew; letters come for him. I'd even started getting a wee bit jealous."
"Do be careful."
"It's nothing serious, what I do isn't. He has a lot of business with computers which as you can imagine I have nothing to do with. And then this other stuff. . . it's rather shaming really. He's a sort of fetish merchant. Well, he sells porn videos, very cheaply, by mail—he buys them and copies them, which I suppose is illegal. And he also sells people's clothes, which must be illegal too, and is much more profitable."
"Why's that illegal?"
"He steals them first. There are guys out there—in here, for all I know—who are prepared to spend a fortune on, say, a sixth-former's Y-fronts or a really sweaty kind of yucky jock-strap."
"I hope you didn't spend a fortune on your one blue sock."
"No, no, I helped myself to that. The thing about Matt's items is that they're a con. Actually he does sometimes genuinely work to a commission; but as a rule he just passes things off as, say, the young postman's rather heavily soiled smalls, or the lycra shorts of the national schools squash champion, who just happens to come from our very own St Narcissus. He goes to the Town Baths when they are in for their swimming-lessons and helps himself to a handful of the dirtier pieces."
Edie had the open-minded expression of someone on holiday good-naturedly learning the rules of a foreign national game.
"So the soiling is the important part really?"
"Oh, absolutely. And pubes. They up the price phenomenally. And there you do have to be a bit careful."
"It seems to be very school-oriented."
"Yes, it does at the moment—it may just be the rush of the rentree that's got so many of the perves on edge. There are older people too who have their following—some of them soil professionally; the cynical foul, I suppose you might call it."
"It's all a revelation to me."
"Isn't it? It's a kind of alchemy really. You take something of only slight practical value, but give it a magically arousing association, even if of a kind most people would consider revolting, and you're minting gold." And I had a hard-on myself at the grip of Luc's tight little knickers and feeling the hard-ons he must have had pushing against the very cotton that now constrained mine and his balls thoughtlessly snuggled there all day long.
"I suppose you haven't met any of your customers."
"It's all done by registered mail. They write of course, these great fantasies about porn-stars—some are illiterate, some are obviously the work of leading academics, they're rather like Henry James, they put all the rude words in inverted commas; some are always bragging about the size of their own equipment, which I don't believe. And then there's the phone. It's all new to me but I find I make quite a good phone-fraud: I work them up in a slightly grudging way, as though I might not let them have what they want so badly. As an opportunity for speaking stilted English to foreigners it beats conversation-classes any day, and the pay is far better." I glanced to my left and saw Frits, heavily alone with his book.
"Don't look now," I said, "but I'm quite keen to avoid that person standing reading."
Edie looked at once, and just happened to catch his eye as he was turning the page.
"Well, I hope you're a Somerset Maugham fan," I said, as he came gratefully over and offered us another drink.
Much later, in bed, an almost pre-adolescent clean cosiness except we must still have smelt of beer and smoke, Edie like one of the von Trapp children in pyjamas that looked to have been made out of old curtains, and me in brand new boxer-shorts, still with a lot of dress in them.
The lamp was out and only a ghost of light showed her form between me and the window. The Spanish girls were at rest, only sometimes the loose purr of a car over the cobbles rose across the intervening houses; and at one o'clock Edie said she would be disturbed by the hours sounding from St Narcissus, which I no longer noticed.
"I rather like Frits," she said drowsily. "It ought to be the Flemish for chips."
"I rather like him, too. I like the way he's genuinely surprised if you find him attractive. You have to egg him on a bit. And of course he is an absolutely stupefying bore. You have to keep reminding him that what you want's his dick and not his view of hugh Walpole's Rogue Herries novels."
"Well, I don't want his dick. I thought he was sweet and rather thoughtful, unlike some of the others you introduced me to."
I sighed. "You'll probably hate Matt, if you meet him. He isn't sweet at all. He's a great connoisseur of other people's foibles."
"Thank heavens I don't have any," said Edie, snuffling and shouldering into her pillow.
There had only once been trouble between us. I had been silly about a blond with very good manners called Robin Stannard, who was perfectly friendly and pretended not to be aware of the mawkish strength of my feelings about him. Edie had been my confidante in the whole non-affair, and strengthened me in my fantasy until I found out that she had suddenly got off with him herself: I greeted him with yearning bonhomie and smelt her perfume on him. It was a betrayal so stunning that by the time I had adjusted to it their little fling was already over; and after a few days Edie was coming round, too shamed to be able quite to apologise. It was ten years ago, but it pressed round me tonight with something of its original force, and kept me awake long after she was unmistakably asleep.
Next day was Saturday, autumnal and clear. I had offered Edie a round of essential sightseeing, the Memlings, St John's, maybe even the Orst Museum if we had the stamina. She got up early and did some alarming exercises, but I had woken resistant already to the plans I'd made, the shine had gone off them, I almost let it be seen that I was longing to spend the day, waste the day, in some other fashion. "I don't know," I said, "what would you like to do?" I was on the edge of that bad territory of scuffed-over promises.
Edie loved climbing things—castles, cathedrals, follies with a view of five counties, the wind-shaken iron lookout towers left in public parks from forgotten expositions. It was partly the fact that I didn't, that after counting fifty steps in a dark spiral staircase I began to feel more than merely breathless, felt threatened and starved, that had kept me from paying my few francs to climb the Belfry. I'd even felt a mild panic yesterday when I'd seen Edie set eyes on it, and inwardly mumbled some childish magic to prevent her from asking me to go up. But there was no avoiding it. This morning in the square she craned up at its pinnacled top until she almost fell over backwards. The sky was azure and endless, it was an obvious day for the ascent.
"We must do it," she said, and didn't see at first my misery at hearing what I most dreaded proposed by a friend with brutal high spirits. Then she was telling me not to come, she'd wave from the top, I could wait "like a grown-up" at the cafe across the square. I stood back and wincingly scanned the exterior. I admired it of course in a picturesque way, but to the prospective climber its odd construction, like three tall church towers stacked in narrowing sequence, heightened the sense of the ordeal by dividing it into three phases. In each the stairs would doubtless be narrower, the sense of entrapment tighter, the occasional glimpses from tiny windows the more terrifyingly remote from earth. The topmost part was an airy octagon in which the bells could be seen hanging over nothing.
The first phase wasn't actually too bad. The stairs were broad and well lit. It took a while for the tower to disengage itself from the great squat gothic hall which it surmounted. At the top we stepped into a gloomy chamber that housed a museum of local history, and out of sheer relief I looked minutely at the decrepit noseless or fingerless manikins in historic costume and the scale-model of the town at the time of Charles the Bold, with its fallen-over toy soldiers and web of canals covered in dust.
The second section was more testing. Edie kept saying how incredibly brave she thought I was being and why didn't I go down; and I don't know what perverse machismo pushed me on, like someone just behind me with their fist pressed into the small of my back. "I wouldn't tell anybody back home," she said.
"I want you to tell everyone back home that I did it," I panted, recoiling from an arrow-slit image of old roofs far below and a horizon of ploughed land.
In the bottom of the third part was the carilloniste's office, deserted at the moment: we looked in through the roped-off doorway at the keyboard and the framed photographs of various celebrities who, amazingly in some cases, had climbed this far and shaken the caruloniste's hand: King Leopold II, Montserrat Caballe, a man in furs and regalia who looked like Eric Sykes. It was cosily appointed—one half-expected to see a gas-ring and kettle. Then the real horror began.
The stair was not much wider than a person, and very steep and dark. I became hilarious, shouting snatches of poetry, which Edie took as a good sign until I was groping and gripping at her heels, the calves of her trousers. I longed to turn back, but wouldn't have dared go down by myself. Then voices were heard ahead of us, whirling footsteps, numbers shouted out, eighty-three, eighty-four, high-pitched taunts and boasts. What sounded like thirty, forty children were going to come past us. Before I saw them I pictured them as red and black apprentice devils, capering gleefully with their forks over rooftops, clouds. When they came there was just squeezing darkness, airless bombardment. I lost my grip on Edie, my outstretched hand grasped at cold black stone, children's knees, knapsacks; someone trod on my fingers; I clung to the notional central pillar, the inner tapering edge of the steps wasn't wide enough, I saw myself being dislodged by the heedless barging onrush of youngsters and dropping into a black funnel.
"There, that wasn't too bad, was it?" said Edie as she hurried up the last few stairs into the sunlight.
"Edie . . . Edie . . ."
She turned and ducked my head like a baptism under the low lintel. A doorway for dwarfs, for god's sake . . .
In front of me lay the rinsed expanse of the leads. I was unhappily aware of Edie springing across it and snorting in one view after another through the generous loopholes in the parapet. "It's glorious!" she shouted, jamming down her hat against a surprisingly tough little wind, undiscernible at ground level, sent to bother those who dared the heights. I thought if I could gain the central flagpole and hang on to it, I might be able to cope. I ran to it as if expecting sniper fire, my legs like rope. Clasping it behind me in both hands I stood and considered my position. It was hard to believe I wasn't play-acting, no one could be so silly about heights; yet my knees were fidgeting with fear and I couldn't breathe deeply for the black knot in my chest.
"You must tell me what everything is," called Edie.
Slowly, holding me like a difficult drunk, she brought me towards the parapet. I wanted to do it, but had already the sense of scrabbling for existence on the edge of a cliff. I couldn't have done it with anyone but her. Well, Luc, perhaps could have beckoned me on. The long hexagonal apertures opened at diaphragm height and one could grip the stone on either side. I did give her a perfunctory pointer to the Cathedral and St John's; and there was the lantern of St Narcissus, of course, the school with its two hidden courtyards beyond, and that must be the steep old roof of my own room, with the front dormer just visible: Edie looked along my trembling finger to find it. If I tilted my view too steeply down I panicked and drew back. "Gosh, look at the docks," I said. The sea-canal was bright and empty, and in the distance were raised cranes and beyond them the glimmering line of the coast. I saw the derelict industrial suburbs, roads swinging out across the flat farmlands, and far-off masses of poplar and beech.
On the other side there were the shadows of cities towards the horizon, there was the station, and the modest outskirts of the town, and then a beautiful golden wood. It took me a moment to recognise it as the Hermitage. Seeing it all at a glance inside its high wall I could hardly believe how I had wandered in it that night for so long. There was the tea-house; and that long break in the trees must hide the endless, misty pond. And where was the clearing with the yew-niches? Somewhere there, among the autumn magnificence.
I wanted to look for Luc's house, but it was too close: I felt faint as I traced the far end of Long Street and had to step back and sit down. I lay out flat for a while and closed my eyes while Edie bounded about. As well as the animal fear I felt a kind of humiliation at seeing the quaint labyrinth of the city contracted below me, and my futile little circuits laid bare. When I opened my eyes it was worse—swinging blue vacancy, the tip of the flagpole with its oxidised lightning-spike. It was like being on top of a mast. Then, with annihilating loudness, eleven o'clock began to strike.
"Now you must do something for me," I said. I was stamping and lurching about on the lovely flat ground, giddy like someone who has just been robbed of his autonomy on a scary ride at a fair. Surely passers-by could tell that I had left their dimension for a while and had come back to it with a vow never to leave it again. The warmth! The sensible calm! We went into the Golden Calf and had a settling gin.
We didn't get to Orst that day, but we did a very quick tour of the Town Museum: Edie had an intense, photographic way of looking at pictures, unlike my lazy day-dreaming habit. I showed her the spot in front of the Bosch where I had met Cherif, and I was lyrical about him: so sexy, so ready . . . And where was he now? Rotterdam, was it still? "He's probably being ready and sexy down there too," said Edie, sceptically but not unkindly.
We drifted out and round the corner, among a thin crowd, and there in the narrow back lane was the animal market again. I told Edie she must see it, perhaps in turn not noticing her reluctance, but after a few yards of terrified mice in wheels and tethered hawks hopping and snapping at their leg-chains she turned away tense with anger and distress. "I'm sorry, darling, I c a n ' t . . . I don't know how you can."
"No, let's go somewhere else."
I took her arm and we went to the lane's end, and left into the square by the theatre. "This is where I fell in love with Luc," I said, doggily marking each place with an amorous association.
"It's like a bloody Jubilee Walkway," said Edie. "Except you've only been here five minutes."
"Sorry to be a love-bore. You just happen to have caught me on my last mad fling before old age sets in."
"Hmm." She swung away to take in the buildings. "Are you treating me to the theatre tonight?"
"Well, we could. It does take up a lot of valuable drinking-time."
"I have a hip-flask."
"And I don't know if you'll like it. There's an opera season—Saint-Saens's Henry VIII and Gretry's La Siffleuse."
"The second one would be lovely. It sounds like something for Sir Perry." This was a reference to our local old man of letters back home, Sir Perry Dawlish, known, up to a point, for a monograph on "Whistling in Literature".
We ambled past the side of the theatre, drawn by the noise of a piano and a woman's voice. From an open rehearsal-room window a melancholy soprano came floating down: "Dans cette brumeuse Angleterre je meurs sous un pale soleil . . . " We listened until a stamp and a cry of "Shit!" precipitated a bad-tempered reprise.
"It must be poor dear Catherine of Aragon," said Edie solicitously. "One knows how she feels."
"Have you been writing anything?" she asked, much later on, in the Cassette. This was a reference to our local young man of letters, Edward Manners, groomed early for a career in print, and already considered by most to be a lost cause.
"What a very insensitive question."
"Sorry, darling. Do you want another beer?"
"After that I certainly do." And it had caused me a genuine twinge of bleak unease.
Left alone, I gazed down the busy bar and thought how attractive and interesting everyone looked: it was the onset of any thing-will-do time—often of course (one tended to forget) a mutual compromise. There was a parting of the crowd and a couple shunted through: I dwelt on them for a second or two before I placed them. In front was the shatteringly pretty lad I suspected of servicing the Spanish girls, and propelling him with a hand on his neck was the assistant from the camp clothes-shop—I'd seen him here before—the one who had sold me my bad-taste Orst tie. "He's not queer, he's not queer," he kept saying excitedly.
They shouldered into the bar just by where Edie was standing, so I slouched over. Shop was still sheltering Shattering with an arm round his back as if otherwise he might panic and run off, or else be pinched and spoiled by the inflamed clientele. I said to Edie, "This boy works in a fashion shop in town, you ought to meet him", and then told the boy how he had once fooled me into buying some deviant swimwear. Never having worked in a clothes shop, I imagined the staff must fondly remember everyone who went in. "You were wearing jodhpurs," I said, to seal it in his mind. He stuck a hand in his fine dark hair, widened his large dark eyes and then dubiously exclaimed, "Of course!" He was slight, mobile, playing on looking so young, unfairly eclipsed by the beauty of his friend.
Edie passed me my glass and stood looking politely at the boys, who had half-turned away to catch the barman's eye and obviously thought our conversation was over. "I'm Edward, by the way," I said. The shop-boy looked back uncertainly. "Edward. Me Edward." I stuck out a hand.
"Alejo," he said; and then compelled by Spanish courtesy: "This is my cousin Agustin, from Bilbao. He's not queer."
"And this is my friend Edie from England. She's not queer either."
Agustin looked terrifically cheered at this, and shook hands fervently with both of us. I held his gaze until his grin faded, he looked down and I let go of the fingers I was still absent-mindedly clutching. I felt almost sorry for him having to carry the responsibility for such deranging beauty through life. His short dark curly hair, his quick dark eyes, the slightly everted lips and the little lines made by his smiles, the small ears, the unblemished fineness of his skin set off at the neck by the upturned collar of pale old denim, all made one long to kiss him and fuck him. I was hollowed out with envy of the Spanish girls having him on the other side of my wall.
I got Alejo talking with Edie. She said something about an embroidered black waistcoat he was wearing, and I saw her finger the work on it. He brought to mind her camp young friends of 1980 or so, her fellow-students at the Central School of Fashion, when she was my entree to London, to the West End, and we would all go drinking together in Soho, which waited on the other side of Oxford Street like a barrio of risky enticements. It was dear old New Romanticism then, the boys were growing pony-tails, dressing in braid and buckles, voluminous pants and sleeves; they were crazy about girls, they thought it was fabulous what you could do with them and a few yards of taffeta and ribbon.
I was making reassuring conversation with Agustin. So, how long had he been over here? Nearly a month. And what was he doing? He was employed by a Spanish wine-warehouse. . . they had an outlet in Obrecht Street . . . I should come to a tasting. I'd absolutely love that, I said. I noticed a certain self-consciousness in his answers, caused by our physical closeness in the crush of the bar, and by a drunken extravagance of my own that I was barely aware of, and by the way he found me watching his face and the beautiful opening of his mouth. What a piece of luck that his cousin should also be living in the city! Yes it was. Were they close? Well, Alejo's branch of the family still lived in Trujillo, which was very remote (a sweet misunderstanding of the question, this, that had me puzzled how Alejo had made the journey from remote Trujillo to a postmodern northern boutique). I said, "I wonder if you know some other Spanish people in the town, who live on St Alban Street?"
He seemed startled by this, as though I were in possession of classified information. "That's remarkable indeed," he said. "At present my sisters are living in that very street. I have been staying there sometimes; it is better when my cousin has his boyfriends and lovers in his room: he doesn't want me to be there." (Now that was hard to believe.) "So I go to my sisters and sleep on the floor, oh dear"—and he made a mime of rubbing his shoulder and stretching his back. His sisters . . . the floor . . .
"I wonder in my turn", he said, "if you know an Englishman who lives on that street, who is my sisters' next neighbour . . ."
"Oh," I said.
"A very mysterious man. They say they have never seen him but they hear him late in the night, swearing and singing and banging the doors or something. He is always very drunk and though it is disturbing for them they are frightened to speak to him."
"Have you heard him yourself?" I asked, hoping I could discount this as scandalous hearsay.
"Oh yes, I have . . . " and then I watched it dawn on him with a lovely blush and a kind of setting of the face against his mistake. He took a long draught of beer, and with the oddly magnified attention I was paying him I saw his open lips very clearly through the glass and his teeth refracted through the pale beer, which slid into his mouth in three deep swallows.
"I often am very drunk," I admitted, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder and shaking him matily. I glanced aside to Edie,
who was sculpting around herself for Alejo's benefit some imaginary bustier, and who topped it off with a sceptical coup d'
il in my direction. "And to be absolutely honest, your sisters can make quite a lot of noise themselves." Oh, the ghastly give-and-take of life.
One or two others were hovering, as if hopeful of an introduction to Agustin, whom Alejo had never before been able to persuade to come to this place: they were raising their eyebrows at him over Alejo's head while I clumsily tried to keep him with me. But I had had my turn. Alejo was kissing one of the newcomers and tugging his cousin away to meet him.
After a blurred further hour of drinking and more than my ration of cigarettes, Edie and I found ourselves outside again with the two Spaniards. It was refreshingly cool, though they were wearing less and were less numbed by drink and paced about as we said goodbye. Alejo was going on to the Bar Biff with five or six others. He kissed Agustin with sensible fervour on both cheeks, which seemed to give his friends a licence to do the same; the boy stood there like a reluctant bride as his new acquaintance filed towards him. Then we three were alone—of course it was a night for him to be away from Alejo's. I was their escort . . . We rambled home under brilliant stars. I dimly recall one or two diversions to show them historic things, my voice echoing off the darkened houses, Agustin standing in a street-lamp's soft gleam, shivering and expressionless.
Much later in my room, sitting with Agustin, Edie already in bed, flat out with drink and fatigue. The boy must think we're a couple, or he wouldn't have come up to see, and accepted a cup of whisky. My Uncle Wilfred's motto going through my mind: "You don't want girls around, spoiling everything"—not always true, that. Whole quarter-hours passing in two or three minutes. Agustin is worried about his cousin and the life he is leading—he doesn't disapprove, it's not like that, though if his aunt and uncle in Trujillo knew . . . I tell him it is all fine, I am talking up the overall excellence of Alejo's lifestyle and the things he likes to do, as if I had known the boy and taken an interest in his welfare for years: it seems to make me more trustworthy . . . Agustin is scared by stories he has heard—he speaks superstitiously of drugs, pornographic films, disappearances. Perhaps a friend of Alejo's has been kidnapped. For a while I concentrate on him so hard that I can't take in what he's saying. It's like sometimes you can't understand, when people speak too clearly. I am devastated by his beauty, which seems to me on another plane from when I first saw him.
He tells me 2.30 has just sounded from the church. We are standing at the top of the stairs and I ask him with laborious irony if it is all right to go disturbing his sisters at this hour: it has been very quiet there. He says it is fine, they are both away for the night in Antwerp. "Oh," I say, with a muggy sense of opportunity. I take his left hand between both of mine and stroke the back of it for a moment. I lean into his anxious breath and trace with my fingertips the quick-pulsing blue vein in the miracle of his neck. He pushes me to arm's length, frowns a disappointment that cuts to the heart, and holds out a hand. We shake once, twice, and he springs down the shadowy stairs without a word.
A Sunday morning swim was what Edie always had. She rose from the bed like a zombie at 8.30 and I heard the flush of the loo and the humourless rhythmic grunts that accompanied her exercises. Incredible how she did it. I pulled the duvet over my head, thinking with satisfaction that I was too lazy to become a creature of habit. I didn't seem to have a hangover yet. I wanted to go back into the shallow dreams of old friends, brought to mind by all the nostalgic talk we had been having . . .
She was standing at the bedside with a mug of tea. What a brick. "Time to get out your deviant swimwear," she said. What a fiend. I writhed and kicked and bawled but it was no good. "And shall I give Agustin a knock?"
Agustin!
I lurched into the other room and got into the cupboard. There was the faint sound of a radio-voice, something beginning—oh, I knew it, K361. Had I done anything truly terrible? Surely not, though there was a lingering sense of pain. He'd have to be a bit of a prig to hold it against me. Had I tried to kiss him? Awful guilt-circuit of years ago. The music snapped off and then a door slammed. I went to the front window and looked down into the yard, and saw him go busily out. It was only for a moment of course, but he seemed to have displaced Luc at the summit of my mania.
Edie said, "I thought we'd agreed long ago that you didn't get involved with straight boys and I didn't get involved with queer ones, since it was in either case a recipe for heartbreak?"
"You are right," I said, standing unguarded, paunchy in my boxer-shorts. In a spirit of mortification I went to look for my swimming things.
I did feel a little queasy by the time we reached the Baths, what with the rash drinking and the anticipated misery of swimming, memories of last time, and the sense of hearty purpose in the echoing din after the quiet streets outside. The air in there had the morning-after chlorine smell of nail-varnish remover and stale cigarette-smoke.
The changing-room was busy and there were a lot of dads with their sons and friends' sons, kids screeching about, running into me as I winced and wove through the room. I found a locker and started to undress. I got my new trunks on and they seemed okay, just not very supporting: they had a good sleek feel. They were perhaps rather conspicuous. I was pulling my shirt over my head when I heard a voice I knew and then another. My heart leapt, I had no time to plan an escape: for a second or two I thought I might keep my head hidden in my shirt, and move off somewhere else like a defendant leaving court under a blanket. But I nerved myself, tugged my arms free, and looked. Luc and Patrick were sauntering towards me, and just behind them, smiling to himself, was Matt.
I was so appalled by this grouping, and what it implied, that I simply sat back with a sigh and a smile. The group themselves showed no concern, however: they were relaxed and cheerful. They didn't see themselves as a tribunal for my complex, shaming crime. They had come from the shower—the teenagers in long towels tucked round their waists, Matt naked, but holding his towel and wrung-out shorts in front of him. Luc was the first to notice me, and stepped forward with a big grin and shook my hand as if he was really fond of me, or as if this bleak male place demanded classic camaraderie.
"What extremely good luck, Edward!" he said.
"Yes, amazing." He was a hundred times more wonderful than Agustin. The pictures of him were rubbish. Despite my looming humiliation I was thinking that he wasn't wearing any clothes, only that towel, and that he was about to take it off I stood up and felt the warmth coming off his chest and face, and saw that his arms, even so, had gooseflesh.
"This is my friend Patrick, by the way, who, whom I have told you about."
Meeting them both was like meeting filmstars, their aura and beauty put weights on your tongue. Patrick shook my hand too and nodded and said he was pleased to meet me; he spoke English easily, though without Luc's tendency to parody an English accent.
Matt had been observing this and I shot him a warning glance over Patrick's shoulder. Perhaps if he didn't acknowledge me the day could be saved; each of them was busy at his locker. I wanted to be out of there and hidden in the water: at the same time I longed to dawdle and see Luc naked—I had to see that. Matt came across and said, "Hello, my friend", and swiped a hand across my shoulder and down my upper arm in a laid-back greeting.
"Hi," I said huskily.
"Crazy swimming-trunks," he said, and then under his breath, "Your own?"—and winked as he turned away.
Luc noticed and said, "Does Edward know Matt?" in a tone of surely affected bemusement.
"Yeah, these are the guys I was telling you about," said Matt. "The ones I met down on the beach that weekend."
"Oh . . . I . . ."
"Yeah, he's the guy I was telling You about," said Luc tediously. "I said there was this young man on the beach at my friend Patrick's house and . . . You know, the house next door?"
"How extraordinary," I said. "Do you mean you were both at this tiny place no one's ever heard of at the same time? you see I've forgotten the name again."
It all depended on Matt's next sentence; I don't know why I thought I would be let down except for my jealousy of his friendship with the lads and my hang-over paranoia and the heresy of last night. I was holding on to a look of distracted marvelment. "Yeah, that time we broke into the old house."
Patrick looked up with triumph, even admiration: "So you did break into the house?" and Luc frowned at me.
"You mean you both?"
I would have blustered and given myself away if Matt hadn't ended his game and said, "Not him, no—I was with an old friend of mine."
"We never saw him," said Luc coolly. "Or her."
"Perhaps you snore a lot?" suggested Patrick. I thought hollowly of the other losses, and how stupid Matt was to rely this much on his glamour and his lies. The boys seemed so innocent in his company, unsuspecting, flattered by the attention of this lean swimmer ten years older than them with his casual sharp knowledge of what was what. That was how con-men worked. The boys didn't see the stiff-up hard-on he flashed at me as he turned and pulled his jeans over his naked arse—how he was turned on by danger and deceit. I watched Luc absorbing the fact that a man might not wear underpants, and thought aloofly of the things I'd eased up that same backside.
Patrick pursued Matt with a few more questions, slipping out of his towel and drying his arse so that his cock swung back and forth. It was a sumptuous monster, with a lazy confidence of mastery about it, a veined softness and sheeny bloom that suggested astounding powers of extension and engorgement: in fact the whole genital ensemble was just about the most breath-taking I had ever seen. But it wasn't the right moment for me. I was utterly on edge for Luc (I spotted his smiling glance at it). He was taking an age piling his folded clothes on the bench in front of his locker, which was just too far off for me to keep up easy chat from in front of mine. I was spinning the thing out in the most dreamy way, whilst vainly trying to hold my stomach in—I only had my glasses, watch and socks left to take off. I affected a concern with the state of my toes, and peered between them as though for signs of athlete's foot. I made a clumsily cheery interruption to what seemed to have become an absorbing conversation between Matt and Patrick about football, I hadn't been able to pay attention. I remembered Edie, several determined laps into her routine. And would Luc never drop his towel? What was he so shy of? I thought of perhaps setting fire to it, or asking to borrow it.
The moment came when I had to take off my glasses, the last thing I put into my locker. Now I would need to get really close to him if the vision when it came was not to be a mere blur of pink and gold. Then:
"Hi!"
It was a voice I knew, and I prickled with displeasure even before I figured who it was: the pushy little Englishman who had detained Luc in the street on the very morning after the St Ernest escapade. I reached for my glasses again. Yes, it was him, fit and compact, dripping from the pool.
"Oh, hi!"—Luc's indiscriminate pleasantness, like a dog; it seemed to rob our lovely earlier greeting of half its value.
"I saw you in there," said the man, nodding and making little muscle-shifting hunches. "You're pretty good." Luc smiled and vaguely shook his head. "But you're not getting those turns quite sharp enough." He put a hand on the boy's shoulder as if to say that it was only a small thing, he'd help him get it right if he liked; then glanced down at me, taking in the fact that I was here, on the scene, again; and dropped his arm in a gesture of temporary concession. "Well, better take a shower!" What a world of exclamations he lived in. I looked at him coldly as he retreated.
"I think you've got an admirer there," I said, shamed and somehow treacherous. At which Luc frowned. And then the bastard was back:
"Oh, I found the Fratry, by the way." He smiled as if this really was their own private success. "Absolutely fascinating!" And Luc now not knowing how to react, whilst his admirer, my hateful and forward rival, gave a little wave and darted off.
"When is it we meet again?" I boomed out wretchedly. But somehow Luc failed to hear. He strode away from his empty locker with all his clothes in his arms, entered one of the four changing-cubicles preserved, I had imagined, for the clinically insecure or for those who perhaps for some religious reason . . . and bolted the half-door. Ten seconds later, like the rape of Danae, there was a scattering of coins from an upturned pocket and a smothered "Fuck". A few centimes came spinning towards me across the damp tiled floor.