Rough common is a common and also a small town, south of London. The town was nothing much until the 1790s, when its principal inn gained importance as a posthouse on the way to fashionable south-coast resorts. A watercolour by David Cox, done in 1812, shows the white weatherboarded cottages with spindly verandahs that run along the common's edge; and in the brief broad progress of Fore Street, with its pollarded limes and Wednesday market, there is still a hint of the Regency sense that a good time might be had there.
The post-road itself is now swept off into a chasmal by-pass, crossed by high footbridges that lead to new, remote parts of the town. I'd been there at night sometimes with people I'd picked up. The cars thrurnrning past below added a certain desolate glamour to my vertigo. The old part of town is all the quieter, as if its hubbub were subsiding to the wind-gusted calm of the common itself.
The common has always been there, in its modest, unstinting way, rising beyond low railings at the end of Fore Street to rabbit-pitted sandy heights and thicketed folds. At the top it is suddenly steep—a scribble of path, a concrete bench and the blunt monument of a trig-point against the sky. From here, you look over a large pond, sandy-edged but black-hearted, and the beginnings of a wood that runs in a long dense belt to the common's further end. On a clear winter's evening the view from the trig-point takes in surprising distances of sombre downland and the skyward glare of the Kent and Surrey suburbs.
The town stretches out along two sides of the common, westward past the Regency cottages on a socially aspiring curve that takes in the de Souzays' small mansion and other large houses before reaching the leafy dead end of Blewits, home of Sir Perry Dawlish; and eastward, descending past the row of mock-timbered villas where we lived to the crumbling thirties housing-estate, the Flats, with its useful late shop.
I let myself in and shrugged my bag to the floor. In a few minutes I would lose the surprise, the disconcerting and exact sameness of everything in the house I had lived in all my life. My mother was out, it was dusk, and this was the silence that had been around us all the time, and that I had left her to. The rattle of the loose parquet, the jiggle of the door-catches and hesitant tick of the clock were sounds I had always known, echoing from surfaces my father had kept bare and polished for acoustic reasons. My mother had changed almost nothing in seventeen years—a new telly, a new Daihatsu Charade: and there were different library books on the hall table awaiting return, the latest issue of Common Knowledge, the local advertiser, caught in the letter-cage of the front door. I looked into the sitting-room, a smell of polish and lavender, the black mass of the piano, shadows thrown across the wall by the street-lamps and the tall unhusbanded privet hedge rocking in the wind.
I hadn't meant to be back so soon in my room, with its wall of second-hand books, its air of determined privacy and make-believe. I glanced at the squeaky single bed; and there were the forlorn fauna of childhood, the one-eared rabbit and the dropsical trousered bear, passed by but still pathetically alert. I stood by my desk, where I had written a thousand adequate essays, and not a few sonnets, and looked down into the Donningtons' garden. Gerry had a rowing-machine now; the white buttock-scoops of the seat held pools of rain which gleamed in the unshielded light from their kitchen. As always, I opened the window before I lit a cigarette.
It seemed Colin's car had gone out of control on the Brighton road: it was the 6-litre Craxton he'd had done up, he should have known the problem with it in the wet, with just a bit too much speed the tail swings round on a bend, then you're spinning across the lanes; you might be lucky and cartwheel down a high bank and thwack to a halt in earth and grass; or you might catch five or six other cars light ruinous blows and come out shuddering and vomiting with terror but okay; or you might shimmer sideways, seem to hover for half a second alongside the blurred rain-sluicing roof-high tyres of a twelve-wheeled juggernaut, then crumple under and be sliced to death.
Edie had seen it happen, the whole thing in the time it takes to turn up the radio or glance aside at your companion. She was a bit behind Colin and Dawn in her Peugeot; she braked and zipped through on the hard shoulder to avoid the bucking and careering of the lorry, and then ploughed into the bank to dodge the front of the Craxton, with Colin in it, as it shot out from beneath. She sat quivering and weeping, gripping the wheel, and felt the thump in her back as the severed rear end of Colin's car exploded, fifty yards behind.
It was a couple of hours later that she got me on the phone, at the Orst Museum. She described running along to the wreckage, ready to plunge in for Dawn, but the flames took her breath; she ran back for Colin and he was all over the crushed cabin as if he had been detonated; something in the engine was still churning and banging, the radio still going, "The Pavane of the Sons of the Morning from Job": she coughed up the words as if horrified to have known what it was, and having to tell me, and dropped the phone, but I could hear her wailing and gasping.
They had been to Hove to look at a long-case clock that a friend of Edie's father wanted to sell. Edie, as the intermediary, had led them down, Dawn accompanying Colin for the run and a change of scene from the eventless shop. The clock was a good one, and Colin brought it back in the car—You just could with the passenger seat folded forward and the whole thing wrapped in blankets. Dawn had had to sit in the back. Colin knew the way home, and when they hit the motorway he overtook and powered ahead. Edie, slightly oppressed by this male challenge, had done her best to keep up. She thought they were doing about 85 when the spin happened.
Dawn's real name—unreal, it seemed to me, when I read the newspaper report—was Ralph, which was romantic and adventurous and didn't suit him, but which he managed to accommodate by the age of fifteen to his strain of boisterous schoolboy shyness. Then he took part in the school reading competition, judged as a rule by a stone-deaf old actor, a pupil of the school during the Great War, well-known for his portrayals of clergymen. Each aspirant would take the rostrum, like a witness, announce his name and his selected extract, and then deliver it in a sufficiently loud and commanding manner to get through to the judge. Ralph, flushed and nervous, appeared at the lectern and immediately began a rather sensitive account of the Gordon Bottomley passage he had chosen from Poets of our Time; it was not until he had confided three or four lines of it that the old actor cheerily called out "Name?" and Ralph, humiliated, bellowed "Dawn . . . " adding a "by Bottomley" that was lost under a roar of laughter.
The first day people tried out Bottomley, which seemed apt, as Ralph was a sturdily bottomry boy; but it was Dawn that stuck. After initial petulance he let it happen and blossomed into it, like a drag-name, much as he came to understand that his bottom wasn't a laughable encumbrance but a majestic asset. He never used the name himself, and up to the end would say on the phone "Oh, it's . . . er . . . Ralph here", with a hesitation like someone you might not remember, someone you had swopped numbers with in a club. And his dim manly father, though he accepted its currency, only ever said it by accident, choosing generally to speak of Ralph-ie, as a kind of token cissification. But his mother, a cheery, cynical woman who had worked at the BBC, took to it straight away, as if it explained things.
I went up over the common with my mother next morning. It was grey and blowy and our macs were stippled once or twice with flung raindrops, threats of a storm we saw stagger aside and discharge in a slanting fume a mile away. She had the disconcerting habit of talking indignantly about something other than the obvious subject of concern: in this case my elder brother and whether she could afford to visit him in Melbourne. She felt very keenly that Charlie's wife had stolen him away from her, that she had set out deliberately to break the mother's bond with her son . . . They were married within a year of my father's death, so grief and joy were followed again by grief when Lisanne ("Always a calculating cow," said Edie) abruptly cancelled visits, in due course kept the children from their grandma and finally persuaded Charlie (who was an electronics boffin) to go for a job almost as far away as it was possible to go. My mother pined for him and the two little girls terribly; they were twelve and fourteen now, they wouldn't recognise her, she said. Charlie promised they would fly her out for a lovely long visit. Then Lisanne had written to say they couldn't afford it this year, Charlie wasn't doing so well . . . "Charlie's so weak," my mother said, and gripped my forearm as we started on the steep top path to the trig-point. She seemed somehow grateful that I at least would not get married, and so would spare her this particular pain. I remembered how at five or six I had said that I only wanted to marry her.
We reached the top and turned briskly to look in each direction, as was the habit, saying "Yes. . . Yes,. . . Yes" as we checked off the different views. The church-tower was clad in grey polythene. The nearby belt of trees, referred to as Condom Copse in a recent letter to the Knowledge, was almost leafless, its secret underwoods laid bare. "Fall, Winter, fall," I said flatly, not really wanting my mother to hear.
"You won't have any hills like this where you are," she said.
"No," I said, and breathed in heartily.
"You've made some friends, though?"—as if the two might be obscurely related.
"Masses!" The thought of them was too agitating, a flare that made me clench my face for a second. "Paul Echevin, who I work for at the Museum some days, is frightfully nice, he's rather taken care of me and had me round for meals." For a moment I just wanted to tell her I was in love with Luc, give her the whole stupid thing and watch her grasp it. There had been spells of candour before, and she rose to them pluckily; but I knew she would rather not know.
"The loop?" I nodded. This was the basic family walk, followed times out of number, that avoided the far end of the common, and brought one gently down through patches of alder and thorn towards Blewits, before turning back sharply and running home parallel with the road.
I said, "I rang Dawn's parents this morning."
"I ought to. I don't really know them."
"She seemed quite calm." She had spoken in a slow, drugged, but practical way. They thought he died instantly, but then with the fire . . . well, what was left of him? "She didn't say so, but I got the feeling she wasn't sorry he'd gone like this, rather than . . . in a few months' time perhaps. And then he came on, I've never known how to cope with him at the best of times, he actually said, 'Well, no one can say he died of AIDS, Edward.' I suppose it will strike them in a day or two, some griefs are too big to take in all at once."
"Poor things." I knew my mother had a sick worry about me not being careful—not having been careful. One of my candid moments had been when I told her my negative test-result.
"She asked me to choose something to read at the funeral. It's rather difficult . . . not 'Dawn' by Gordon Bottomley, anyway, I think."
After a pause, she said, "I love the end of Gray's 'Elegy', I remember I read that a lot after your father died. It reminds me of all our walks. Or you could do a bit out of Lycidas."
"That might be too moving. I've got to get through it."
"And what's happening about his friend from the antique shop?"
"She didn't say. She may not know. People are often rather miffed if there's another death at the same time—it's as though it's been done deliberately, to steal their thunder."
"Who wants thunder?" my mother said.
I wasn't in the same house as Dawn; I was in Raleigh, which had a strong tradition of smokers, beauties and abstract expressionists, while he was hidden away in Drake, a dour, disciplined house that smashed everyone at rowing and rugby sevens. The school wasn't old or great, which perhaps explained why it had chosen such creakily historic house-names—Sidney, Frobisher: portraits of these ruff-necked adventurers hung in the stale air of the dining-hall. There was something touchingly childish about it.
He had arrived a year before me, but I was streamed straight into 4A, whilst he, who had spent a year in the Remove, trundled up into 4B or C: so we didn't meet. I knew his parents lived near the school then and he cycled in on his sports-bike each day. I was a weekly boarder: every Monday morning and Friday evening I made the twenty-minute stopping-train journey out and back to Rough Common's tiny rustic station, a kind of cottage orne with an acre of commuter car-park. I can't remember much about him then. The only image is the end of a Colts match against Lancing, dutifully clapping the teams in, an air of madness and gloom, the clatter of boot-studs on the path, and Dawn in the midst of them, socks down, heavy thighs slashed with mud, sweat in his black hair and blue eyes, the nice heft of him—we crowded them consolingly and for some reason I patted his hot damp back as he passed.
My great friend was Lawrence Graves. We went through school in tandem and both wrote a lot, though he always assumed, with his combination of names, that it was he who was destined to be a major literary figure whilst I would fill some ancillary role: in one of his fantasies I edited his poetical remains after his mysterious early death. He had the Lawrence-Graves Letters out of the school library on permanent loan. (There wasn't much demand for it.)
Graves pleased me at the start, and even slightly unnerved me, by knowing about my father. He had heard him give a recital of popular Schubert songs in St Leonards and let it be known that though he had certain reservations it hadn't by any means been a washout. He already had autographs of Ronald Dowd and Elly Ameling, so one knew that his standards were high. Later my father sang the Evangelist when the school Choral Society put on a St Matthew Passion: he was in beautiful voice then, and sounded like a great singer against the scrawny background of child violinists and choristers uneasy in dynamics below mezzo-forte. I sat at the side of the hall in my own vortex of anxiety and pride, sometimes mouthing the words as if he might forget them. Occasionally, when he rose for his next oration and stood waiting, his eyes would sweep over me without apparent recognition: I told myself that he saw me all right, that he was bound by the exalted protocols of art, which dictated the ritual stance and the glazed formality of tails, black cummerbund and patent-leather shoes—the extinct indoors garb I would sometimes pick up for him from the cleaners or menders. The concert lights glowed on his oiled black hair and black-framed spectacles.
I felt this event should make me too a figure of some consequence, and Graves hung back afterwards to get an autograph; but even so there was something risible about my father's fame. He had appeared on one or two uncool telly programmes, supporting a talentless "star" through various sickly ballads; and his record of seasonal music reached No 3 in the album charts in the lead-up to Christmas '71. For a moment there was talk of his having his own show, and our house was in the grip of misery for a fortnight. But the screen-tests didn't go well, he was too shy and serious; he came home hopping with shame and relief. I fantasised about his having a success that transformed our rather careful lives, but I loved him best for what he loved best, the patience-shredding hours by the piano, my mother stoutly accompanying, as he worked and worked on a song or a recitative. None of this meant much to my schoolfriends stuck in Mudd and Slade. After the Matthew Passion one of them gave a strangulated parody of my father's performance, not from malice but it brought tears to my eyes. A doubt had been entered, that could never wholly be expelled, that he was a figure of fun.
Of course he didn't always have the alien rectitude of the concert platform. He loved getting out of his frac. At home he was a quiet ironist, closer with my brother Charlie than with me, though I was the one who inherited his habit of sitting and gazing into the middle distance. A tiny bedroom had become his office and often you would pass the door and see him leaning at the window, watching the wind over the common. hundreds of hours I sat pretending to read, but sharing music with him, anything recorded by Beecham, whilst he read the score or peered into infinity through the blank above the picture-rail. When I first brought Graves home he won my father's heart by his morbidly detailed knowledge of Delius, but then risked losing it by conducting when a record was on. I had to take him for a walk to the trig-point to explain my father's conviction that if Sir Thomas had already conducted it there was no need for anyone else to.
In our second year at school Graves and I shared a study-bedroom. He was too camp and snobbish to be popular, but I had fallen swiftly under his influence and he had correspondingly formed a keen dependence on me. No one else made any claim on us, and though part of me longed to be billeted with one of the fabulous Raleigh rebels, I consigned that plan to my thriving fantasy folder, and settled in with Graves and his record collection instead. He was tall and heavy-boned, with wavy brown hair and a long intelligent face made thuggish by adolescence. He loathed what he called the "plebeian" use of Christian names, and we addressed each other as Graves and Manners from the start, and till the end.
Graves was going to be a great conductor as well as a great writer, and the double demands of his destiny were enacted daily in the narrow space of our study, when he would leap from his desk, pen in hand, to "bring them through" an especially devilish test of ensemble or stab out the climactic chords of whatever record was on. The walls were soon spattered with ink. He was working on a play, "Noble to Myself", in which all the characters had titles, and I would be required to take three or four parts in read-throughs, improvising ever more clipped and drawling accents.
His parents lived in Somerset, and seemed for all practical purposes to be a good deal more remote than that. Often he came home with me for weekends, though my mother didn't warm to him or his nocturnal habits, and my brother mocked him behind his back; my father, who found the thought of his visits oppressive, was irresistibly caught up in talk about music and would sit up with him after the rest of us had gone to bed, listening to Bax or Busoni "quietly". My father's memorabilia included an inscribed photograph of Beecham, and one of his batons, which Graves used to eye yearningly as he sat on his hands on the sofa. Sometimes, in conversation, my father would illustrate a point or remind us of a song by singing a few bars; it was lovely, but we all found it embarrassing.
He'd been dead so long now that he moved in my mind like a figure from another age, a life in evening dress. Even at the time, when we heard him on the wireless, singing in the Daily Service or in a request for Three-Way Family Favourites, I remember the feeling that his voice was being brought to us from the beyond, from a cavernous other world screened by the tarred muslin of the speakers. We had been early possessors of a stereogram, a monstrous and luxurious teak coffer with discreet lights and grilles and a lid it was impossible to drop: some cushioning mechanism arrested its fall and brought it noiselessly to rest. It had good bass sound, which my father used to turn up to cover the hiss and crackle the machine exposed on his treasured old records. There it still silently stood, at the beginning of November 1991. And there was Beecham's baton on a stand like a pen-rest; and the ugly canterbury stuffed with music, Bach cantatas, Victorian parlour-songs that were enjoying a kitsch revival when he died; and the shine of the parquet around the subfusc bulk of the sofa and chairs and under the black promontory of the piano. Nothing had been altered, nothing renewed. I felt the sense of return oddly exaggerated, as if my childhood went back further than it did.
I sat about my room in my vest and pants, smoked a last cigarette and flicked the stub into the Donningtons' bushes—lilacs that would crowd over the fence in early summer and waft up to my window. Something awful had happened last week: I'd left the dining-room in the middle of Luc's lesson and gone upstairs for a pee, as I always did now, I'd become a reckless addict of the laundry-basket. I had the negatives on me and planned to run on up the further flight to Luc's bedroom, return them to the wallet in the desk and be back at the bathroom again in fifteen or twenty seconds. It was a simple but bold idea, and as the time came on to put it into practice I was less and less able to concentrate on the passage from Milton we were talking about. "A herd of Beeves," said Luc. "I'm not so sure what is a herd of Beeves."
"I'll explain it in a minute," I said, springing up with the look of comic distraction that signified "Need to go", and slipping out of the room. I had a feeling there must be a downstairs loo, and I didn't want to give anyone time enough to tell me about it. Up I went, in swift strides, past the bathroom and then on to the further flight, keeping to the inner edges of the talky old treads. The door of Luc's room was ajar, I slid round it and was halfway to the desk before I fully understood that I wasn't alone, that Patrick Dhondt was sprawled on the bed in his black school breeches, reading a book.
"How ridiculous!" I said. "I was looking for the bathroom." I felt myself going as red as I have ever been, disastrously compromised. He looked at me with faint surprise. "Hel-lo!" I exclaimed. "How are you?"
"Very good," he said, and then smiled. He was unquestionably in possession of the room, of the bed. I backed towards the door, and he looked down to his book, in part to hide a flush and grin of his own. "It's downstairs," he said.
I got hot thinking about it now—one of those torturing moments you masochistically recall from time to time for the rest of your life. I unzipped the side-pocket of my bag, took the photographs out and climbed into bed. Why hadn't he been in school? Why did I have to be the bore who took Luc from him for an hour? What had they said to each other afterwards, when Luc jogged back upstairs and ragged on the bed with him? Or had they just dismissed me from their minds, leant close together and solemnly begun to kiss? Luc's hand . . . I choked the vision off, and sorted out all the pictures that had Patrick in: I didn't want to see him, or the girl. Two snaps of Mrs Altidore at work on a tapestry and smiling dimly had struck me none the less as having some subtly accusing quality, and had already been eliminated. I tightened a magic circle round the young man.
The picture in which he appeared like a faun of the dunes disappointed me now. I looked at the others that I'd tended to neglect, even the silly shots with the soles of two feet gigantic in the foreground and the supine body unfocused beyond had some information value. could one read the soles of the feet as one could a palm? Was that dirt-filled crack the line of destiny, that callused declivity the line of love? He had long prehensile toes, I remembered from the Baths—and he had told me he ran very fast over short distances. I couldn't quite imagine it; whenever I saw him he was moving with the confident slowness of the beautiful. Even his jogging was somehow in slow motion.
Here was a glancing shot under his chin, with the tiny nicks of inexpert shaving; an armpit, with sandy sun-bleached hairs; the broad nipples needing to be twisted and hurt. Here was the white watch-stripe on the tanned arm, the circle of the absent dial off-centre, sloped to the wrist-bone: time was away and somewhere else . . . Here he loomed in a kisser's blurred close-up, his molten trumpeter's lip. Behind him, in the clear irrelevance of a background, was the house next door, a slat of a sun-blind kinked down for a hidden eye.
I lay in the dark and jerked off glumly. I thought, here is the room I left Dawn to come back to on all those nights, hot-mouthed, clumsy with disguised fatigue but high and alight with love. I could melt still at the memory of his back, when I pulled his shirt over his head, and pressed kisses on his shoulderblades and neck. No one ever looked nicer from behind. His back was the tapered shield, the figure of my love for him, too simple, too confounding to be put into words. I knew there had been a good deal of boredom and pretence, he hadn't perhaps been interesting to me in himself, and yet I also knew he was the motor of my grandest feelings and most darting thoughts, the ground bass to those first intense improvisations. At moments I felt lonely with him; at others, never so excitedly at peace. And what had there been since then? Nothing quite the same. Everything in some way melancholy, frantic or foredoomed.
The first person I was in love with was called Mark Lyle. I was ten, and a day-boy at a pious little prep-school I could walk to on the edge of town. Mark Lyle was perhaps three years older—too old to be a friend to kids like me but equally too young to be acknowledged by my sixteen-year-old brother and his set. He occupied a fascinating limbo, his voice had broken, in my eyes he was a man already, but clearly not a man in the full, self-important way that Charlie was. When he left my school, his parents couldn't afford to send him on to Stonewell, and in my imagination he became a kind of outlaw figure, whom one might expect to find living under canvas in a dell of the common. In fact his father was an epileptic who had lost his job, but to me it seemed that some dark, perhaps ancestral secret had exerted its pull. Ancestry was much in my mind at the time; I was at work on my first book, "The Manners Family of Kent", fed with boastful anecdotes by my great-aunt Tina and rather more disillusioned sidelights from my Uncle Wilfred, sometimes quite hard to understand; I described how the glory of a family grew, until it was crowned with genuis like my father's, who sang on the wireless and was certain of a knighthood. Seen in this perspective Mark Lyle's family clearly suffered from some critical defect. It even seemed possible that Mark Lyle was a drop-out, something of which there was a lot of talk at the time.
One or two of the older boys heard from him after he'd moved to the comprehensive, and bragged discreetly about the contact. Occasionally I would see him myself in the town and watch him with the considerate pretence of indifference that one accords to the truly famous. I was anxious about his new friends, giants of fourteen or fifteen with fluffy upper lips, waiting at the bus-stop with ties undone and shirts bagging out and a No 6 on the go; like them Mark Lyle was growing his hair in thick dirty bunches swept behind the ears, and this seemed to me both wrong and beautiful.
Late one afternoon I saw him walking past our house, and ran out and followed him. I had shorts and sandals on—one didn't go into long trousers till the Sixth Form—and he had his black blazer hooked on a finger over his shoulder. I wasn't close to him, but still as I walked along I found myself in a heady slip-stream of Old Spice. He must have been drenched in it, perhaps he was addicted to it in some way: I knew one of the prefects at school was a keen user, too, and had heard him drop thought-provoking hints about its potency.
I trailed Mark Lyle down the hill, having to stop and dawdle from time to time to prevent myself from excitedly catching up with him. He was clearly in no hurry to get home, wherever that might be. I wanted him to do something definite—meet a friend, enter a shop or a house—so that I would have something on him, and could go back home and ponder it in the context of my other, patchy, research.
I'd imagined he would turn left into one of the residential roads lined with flowering cherries where some of my schoolfriends lived, but he ambled odorously on until we had come in view of the Flats and I began to get worried. The front range of the Flats was built above a row of shops—a ladies' hairdressers, a newsagent, the dry-cleaners where I took my father's tails, the Indian grocers that stayed open till 8 o'clock—and overlooked a broad oily forecourt, where residents worked sporadically on cars with long-expired tax-discs. But beyond that, it was unknown territory to me. The Sharps and Flats my father called the place, as if we lived in the cloudless naturals of Life. I don't think I was actually forbidden to pass through into the grassy courtyard or even to enter its long white buildings with corroding metal windows. It must have been a self-imposed prohibition, a social fear that was activated again when I understood that Mark Lyle's parents had now been reduced to a council flat.
That summer holidays I got serious about Mark Lyle. In my fantasy he became my protector, and introduced me into the thieves' kitchen of the Flats as someone to be respected or they'd have to answer to him. At the same time I was to have a redemptive effect on him, leading him back to the life from which fate had deflected him. I would often ask insouciant questions about him, and my brother would say, "What are you always going on about Mark Lyle for, stupid?" and my mother would say, "That poor family, I don't know . . . " She was inclined to charity work, but they seemed not quite to qualify. I imagined going down there with her, taking blankets, and meals under tinfoil.
A lot of the day I was out on the common. It was harmless and healthy, and though I'd overheard remarks about leathery old Colonel Palgrave who sunbathed in the long grass by the woods with nothing on, I never had a sense of danger. Sometimes I tagged along unwelcomely with Charlie and his friends as they stumbled round complaining and calling things bummers; often I played out complex romantic games on my own, or dared myself to clamber up trees, giving instructions to an imaginary person following me. Once or twice I stumped around on the edge of a group that included Mark Lyle, ready to drift off if they got threatening. We had a huge, friendly dog at that time, who ran away if I didn't keep him on a lead, but who was a good way of meeting people. I was embarrassed to tell boys from the Flats he was called Sibelius, and pretended his name was Bach, which led to one or two jokes but by no means eased the problems of discipline. I became increasingly excited when I saw Mark Lyle, and my early troubles of manhood about that time took him as their object and even as their cause.
One day he was up by the pond with some other boys and a couple of girls. They were trying to fly a kite in the intermittent breeze, but after a few dips and a few spoolings-out of the thread it would smack to earth. Then the thread got snagged in a sapling pine, and the others suddenly lost interest in the whole idea of kite-flying and sloped off. With heart thumping, and not knowing what to say, I came forward and started to disentangle the cotton line from the little tree. Mark Lyle looked at me and didn't say anything either. We worked it clumsily free, managing to ravel up the rest ofit in a series ofloops that tugged into knots as we tried to pull them straight. Still not speaking except in grunts of concentration and annoyance we bundled the whole lot up and went off to the bench to work on it.
"This is a fucking game," said Mark Lyle after a bit. It was fantastic to be spoken to like that. I perched there in the swirl of his swearword and his Old Spice, looking into a new life of almost frightening pleasure. I glanced at him shyly; his shirt was half-unbuttoned and I could see a brown nipple as he leant forward. Sometimes our hands touched as we rolled the cleared thread on to the plastic reel.
"That Dave Dobbs is a fucking cunt," he said.
"He is a fucking cunt," I agreed, and Mark Lyle gave a big bright laugh. He had a wide sun-tanned face and a large mouth with one or two spots by it that he should have left alone. When we'd more or less finished, he patted his thigh and asked me if I wanted a cigarette. I blushed and said no.
"Mind if I do?" he said, with surely unnecessary courtesy. Actually I was terribly worried about him meeting an early death from lung-cancer; but I was overcome by the glamour and intimacy of the occasion. I watched him raptly as he smoked an Embassy to the filter. Each frown, each wincing inhalation, the way he balanced the smoke between his open lips and then as it escaped drew it back up his nose, the two or three different fingerings he essayed, all were written on my mind like a first exercise in sexual attraction. I thought Mark Lyle was the most handsome man I'd ever seen.
Later that summer I saw him again. The friendship I had envisaged had not blossomed. Indeed he'd vanished altogether for about three weeks, leaving me full of forlorn agitation. Then one evening I was rambling homewards from the Blewits side of the common through the long dry grass when I saw his unmistakable mane of fair hair. He was sitting on a bench with his back to me, and I dithered for several minutes just a few yards behind him. He wasn't aware there was anyone there. Occasionally he lifted what looked like a beer-can to his lips. I looped round and came back in front, pretending to notice him at the last moment. Following our convention I said nothing, but sat down beside him and waited.
He can only have been fourteen, but he was managing to grow real sideburns, a more gingery colour than the rest of his hair. He was wearing a Cream on Tour T-shirt, and tight high-waisted shiny brown trousers with generous flares. You could see the stub of his cock very clearly.
"I wondered if you'd been flying that kite again?" I said at length. "I should think it's a jolly good one."
Mark Lyle tilted the last of the beer into his mouth, swirled it round and swallowed it, then belched so that I could smell it. He seemed to have forgotten about the Old Spice. "I'm fucking pissed, man," he said, and dropping the can on the ground stamped on it violently two or three times. Again the conflict of excitement and distress. In a way this was the opportunity I needed to put my redemptive impulse into operation, but when it came to it I wasn't at all sure of myself.
It was one of my mother's phrases I used: "There can't be any need for that."
He looked ahead and laughed mirthlessly. "Yeah, fuck off now, there's a good little fucker."
Tears came to my eyes; I wanted to blurt out, "No, no, I love you, I love you, I didn't mean that, don't say that." But he got up and stumbled away. I couldn't watch him. I sat picking at the edge of the bench with a thumbnail. I let ten minutes go past, calming myself only to be shot through again with the awful words of rejection. I tried to sound out the note of merely friendly exasperation in them, but it was soured every time by the fierceness of the rest. No one should be spoken to like that, I thought. Then I leapt up and ran the last few hundred yards to home.
Edie had gone to stay at her parents' flat in London: she needed to be looked after. I spoke to her father on the phone and he said she was sleeping, she'd been given some mild sedative. They would all come back to Rough Common for the funeral. It wasn't every day you saw two of your friends killed. "No, indeed," I said.
I drifted through town. There weren't many people about, and the side-streets had the watchful echo I'd grown used to in a bigger, older city. But in Fore Street the market stalls were up, fruit and veg, cheap skirts and blouses, huge slabs of chocolate under plastic sheets. I looked at a rampart of fraudulently flawless produce (they always served you the sad stuff from behind): red peppers, red apples, pouchy tangerines with dark green leaves, dense purple globes of cabbage, a pyre of parsnips, trimmed, stowed end to end—I thought, Dawn will never see anything like that again. "Yes, sir," the stallholder called confidently, but I found I was crying and turned away with a half-spoken rebuke to myself.
I walked on, past the George IV: I didn't want to meet people there. Past Levertons the jewellers, with their arcane boast "Belcher and Curb Chains 'Our Forte' "; past the rain-warped barrowloads of books outside Digby's Second-hand and Antiquarian: the stock looked unchanged since my school holidays, just more spotted and bleached. On the corner was "Colin Maylord—Antiques"—an original shop-front, the door set back in a welcoming embrasure. The sign said "Open", but it was wrong. I peered in, shading my eyes against the reflections in the glass. Normally spotlights drew richer gleams from the mahogany and old oak and heightened the sense of historic abundance receding unaffordably into the tapestried depths of the shop. But today the tallboys and chairs, the card-tables and clocks and dressers laden with Coalport huddled in the natural gloom, too much furniture, cluttered together as if somebody were moving house. I looked abstractedly at the figurines of musicians in the window, their price-tags demurely averted.
I didn't know Colin well, hadn't much liked him, couldn't see why Dawn should have liked him—loved him—either. He popped into the back bar of the George sometimes, forty-fiveish, lean, straight-looking, in honey-coloured cords with turn-ups, suede brogues, striped shirts. He was plausible, unamusing, a genuine connoisseur of English furniture. Dawn more than hinted that he was no thrill in bed, but had the sweetest nature; he was certainly an angel to him in his first big scare, when he thought he was going to die. But he was not a terminus I could ever have predicted to the line of lovers in which I was the first and over which I kept a futile, regretful watch.
Dawn was at ease in the shop. The last time I talked to him he was pottering around there, and we sat among the merchandise, me in a snug little Windsor chair with a £700 price-tag, him in the carver of an eight-piece Regency dining suite which crowded vacantly behind him and was marked at six thousand. At one point I watched him nearly persuade an American couple to buy a commode, and smiled at the dumb camp with which he pulled out the drawer with the china po still in situ. Later we stood in front of a time-foxed mirror, and I hugged him loosely, beefily, from behind. He was thin, seemed breakable, like something priceless he was selling. The mirror was meant for a mantelpiece, we should have been toasting ourselves at a big log fire. Our talk had been blandly constructive, but it faltered rather as we held each other's gaze in the spotted depths where everything was reversed. I thought, he is looking at his death. He slipped free and started talking antiques.
He knew a lot by now; and if the journey of his heart was inscrutable to me I could follow the steps of his career more confidently. Perhaps it had all been a slow winding down towards this precious shop, its still, polish-scented air, caught in the tradeless doldrums of a deep recession. But for a long time it had seemed a different progress.
He didn't work hard enough for his degree at Dorset; he got muddled up doing French and Film Theory and Vernacular Handcrafts and came out with a Third that caused considerable tension at home. His father was a workaholic insurance-broker who stubbornly thought Dawn should be the same. Instead he took a menial job with the Acomat Carpet-Cleaning Co. For a year or more that great rear presented in bedrooms and sitting-rooms in the Croydon area as Dawn moved around on hands and knees, applying his Deep Foam Cleanser to the wine and cigarette damage of innumerable teenagers' parties. Once or twice he found himself removing stains of which he was himself the author. In time a friend of Edie's gave him a call and he was magicked up to London to be a picture-researcher on The World of Chandeliers. I didn't see much of him then, though I knew from Edie about the editor of the magazine, and the affair he had had with him.
When the affair was over, so was the job. Dawn was on the loose then for about a year. I had a sense of his giddy footing and fucking around, of the various older, richer men who needed to look after him. It was 1983. When we met again he was different, flamboyant, high on sexual deceit. Then it started to go adrift—a lover of his died with incomprehensible swiftness. Suddenly he didn't have any money.
For a while he was the young man who holds up the clocks and vases on the plinth at Christie's as the lot-numbers are announced. He wore the porters' maroon apron with a certain flair, as if it might catch on; but would blush terrifically with a hundred or more covetous pairs of eyes on him or at least on what he held in his hands. One such pair of eyes belonged to a sexy Italian dealer with shops in Bath and Tunbridge Wells who picked him up at a sale of antique chronometers and fucked him within five minutes in the customers' loo. That relationship lasted for five years, with Dawn in the end running the Tunbridge Wells establishment. To me he was still a boy, but he must have had a business nous I didn't quite like to think of his acquiring. Then very quietly he made the transition to Colin. It almost looked as if he had been passed over, in exchange perhaps for a lovely bureau that hadn't been tampered with. But Colin knew he was ill. He fell in love with him and he had the kind of love Dawn needed just then. You wouldn't have known it as you sat bored rigid by him in the pub and smiling wanly at his pleasantries, but Colin found himself in giving and sheltering and taking care.
In my third year at Stonewell Dawn started to appear on the little train. His family had moved to a village a couple of stops further down the line from Rough Common. He would put his bike in the guard's van, or sometimes just stand with it across the end of the carriage; he was fiercely attached to it. When we arrived at the school he would slip past the straggle of boys on foot with a quick ratcheting of the gears, head lowered, buttocks hoisted on the narrow perch of the seat. One Friday evening he took an empty place by me as we clattered through the leafy sprawl of suburbs homewards and we talked briefly of the merits of the different French masters. He was rather put out to learn that I and Van Oss, a tall pretty boy in the Lower Sixth, also had Dutch lessons from one of the French masters' wives. He couldn't see the point of that. Squashed up by him on the dusty moquette I got a bone-hard erection, though I'm not sure I put it down specifically to him. Any physical contact at that time was arousing, there was nothing you could do about it. But that may have been the moment when it began.
Graves and I had stuck together; indeed, Graves and Manners had become an established schooltime partnership, like a famous textbook or a make of biscuits. Being nicer, weaker and more sociable than Graves, I was aware of an occasional disadvantage in the coupling. I'd have to disown him sometimes for the sake of the late-night hash and rock parties in one of the Raleigh rebels' studies; and the return engagements tended to be flops, with Graves coming back unexpectedly, full of sarcasm and envy, and making us listen to Vaughan Williams. Even so, he was my habit, and he couldn't be broken.
We egged each other on into a language world of our own. It was Graves who located and nourished my vein of pedantry, and together, like mad academicians, we established a complex of unwritten rules and forfeits, making even our Latinist house-master uneasy about entering our study. The discovery of French Classical drama was a major step: after a term with our A-level texts we were recycling alexandrines and spoke with a marked sense of the caesura. Graves was very taken with the précieux, plonkingly translated into English: anyone who offended him was said to have "soiled his glory", and it was rare for him to refer to his feet as anything but his "poor sufferers". This fitted well with our pained avoidance of monosyllables and abhorrence of abbreviations. In a school where a typical notice might read "All RHJ report to BOC at 3 for TP" we held out for old-fashioned queenery and unnecessary effort. One year for the whole of Lent there were fines for using the first person singular: at weekends I would run up on to the common shouting "I, I, I, I, I" like a madman with a terrible stammer.
And we wrote. Graves had abandoned his plans for the stage and was at work on an experimental novel, a completely new tack, the characters not only having no titles, but also no names: the men were identified by numbers, and the women by the various voiceless additional characters on the typewriter, such as # and [. He typed it at immense speed, with music on in the background, the carriage-return bell sometimes fitting in felicitously. I remained loyal to poetry, and alternated masked vers libre fantasies about the prefects with Wordsworthian sonnet-sequences on the seasons, the months, the w e e k s . . . I even started a sequence on the days of the year, each poem to be written on the day in question, but had dried up by early February. "The Months" was printed in the school magazine, and received Graves's most particular criticism. Aunt Tina read it there and worked up a mood of acclamation at home, suggesting, for some reason that seemed cogent at the time, that I should go and see Perry Dawlish, who was a friend of hers, and find out what he had to say.
Dawlish would have been about seventy then, and was considered locally to be a famous author. If ever he showed up at a fete or sale of work he would be photographed for the Knowledge; and his rare appearances on TV programmes about writers of the twenties and thirties were also flagged in the local press: " 'I knew Merrifield well', Sir Perry says, and goes on to recall his three marriages and his lively sense of humour, which he claims some people could find disconcerting!" Dawlish was a baronet, but this didn't discourage a general supposition that he had been knighted for his services to literature.
He had had poems published in the London Mercury when he was only fifteen (my own age at this first meeting) and Squire had included his work as a brilliant new star in his Selections from Modern Poets a few years later. He had written novels, too, which had a reputation for candour; and slender appreciations of Tennyson and Patmore. All that local people would have seen of his work was the Memoirs, remaindered inexhaustibly in Digby's window, and the thin bookmaking ideas he had taken up more recently—the text to some pictures of Royal London, an anthology of "The Kentish Muse". I knew little of this at the time, of course: to me he was the spruce aquiline old gent I saw hurrying through the town, looking up with embarrassed good humour through bushy eyebrows and smiling at strangers as if they had recognised him. Once or twice he had come into a shop at the same time as me, and I was aware of an unconscious heightening of tone, a kind of feudal relish on the part of the traders that I found silly but moving. Sometimes I passed him on the common. He had a neurotic papillon spaniel that aroused Sibelius's interest and would hurtle down the leaf-strewn slopes so that it and the whirled-up leaves seemed one. He would say "Good morning" or "Good afternoon", but I never for a moment thought he knew who I was.
Much of his mystique for me came from his house. Blewits was named from the lilac-gilled mushrooms that grew in profusion in its dank spinney, and which he gave almost at random to people from the town. When I was a little boy my mother received a basket of them, and I remembered her anxiously pondering if they were edible, the gift of a good or bad spirit, and then hastily putting them in the bin. Gigantic beech-trees whelmed above the house on the common side and roared thrillingly on windy nights. In winter you could look down through them at the steep red roofs and shingled gables, the air full of rooks and bonfire smoke. In summer everything was hidden; the drive twisted through laurels and rhododendrons, the light was speckled and private. To visit the house was to have the magic access of a dream fused with the proud ordeal of winning a prize.
It was late May and the mossy outbuildings were roofed with fallen horse-chestnut flowers. I thought they would be fun to explore, those sheds with small cobwebbed windows and sometimes a chimney: more fun than talking to Sir Perry Dawlish. "Good afternoon, Sir Perry," I kept rehearsing, on my aunt's anxious prompting. "No more cake, thank you, Sir Perry." I had a high regard for "The Months" but even so was not fully convinced that this famous old writer, who had actually known Gordon Bottomley, would want to spend much time on them.
The house was very gloomy inside. I was aware that it was a romantic kind of Victorian house, which accounted for the dark oak and stained glass of the hall. At first I could hardly see and was impressed by the confidence with which Dawlish moved around. He had the busy air of someone unused to dealing with children but determined to make a go of it. His voice was high and enthusiastic, with the lost vowel-sounds of an earlier age.
We sat in a big muddly room at the back, a sitting-room-cum library that merged into a conservatory with doors open on to a derelict-looking garden. Again I had the sense of his being utterly, blindly at home here, whilst I was stepping cautiously between stacks of books, parchment-shaded standard lamps, little cluttered desks with only an inch or two left to write on. He sank on to the end of a sofa that was slumped and shaped to his person, and gestured me to a hard button-backed chair that resembled a corseted lady. "It's very kind of you to ask to see me, Sir Perry," I said. "My Auntie Tina sends you her . . . best regards" (I couldn't quite come out with "love"). "How is the dear woman?" he said, with a shrewd, humorous look that suggested we both thought she was a bit of a fool.
"Very well, thank you." (This was far from being the case, I recalled at once: in fact she'd just had a cancer of the throat diagnosed.)
"What a gifted family you are. Novels and belles-lettres: that's your aunt. Lovely singing: that's your father. And now poetry too. You must feel you live on Mount Parnassus." I looked away, abashed by the tribute, and running my eye along the bookshelf beside me: George Merrifield's Love and Earth, Ochre by Violet Riviere, Robert Nichols's Amelia, More Verses by Wayland Strong. The dust lay thick along their tops, like blue-grey felt, but still . . . real books, by real poets. I knew Merrifield's sonnet on "Cider" from Poets of Our Time; indeed Graves claimed I had cribbed from it in my own "Autumn"; but to see the full majestic volume of the man's work was to come a step nearer to the fountainhead. I noticed a thin book of V. L. Edminson's and thought perhaps Sir Perry could clear up a bitter dispute between Graves and me as to V. L. Edminson's sex . . . "Do you walk on the common?" he asked.
"Oh yes, sir, we're always going up there. I particularly like it at sunset. It can be quite glorious then."
"Glorious—can't it. I don't know what I'd do without the old common. Paulette loves a run-around on the tops. My dear little dog," he explained. I decided against owning up to the bullying Sibelius. "So many different aspects to it, don't you find, the steep bits, the flat bits, the woody bits, the open bits. . . There's a bit for every mood out there! At this time of year the hazelwood is too lovely."
"Lovely," I agreed, not actually sure which the hazelwood was, but caught up in the nervous enthusiasm.
"Don't you think? I wander up there and sort out my ideas, as I call them. I dare say you do the same. Work out a poem in your head, then scamper back and write it down?"
This was exactly what I did, and I felt privileged to know that Dawlish did too. At the same time I was fractionally put out to think that the nature-mysticism I had evolved around the common's numinous gullies and heights was not my private cult, and had other, older adepts. "I feel as if I'm in direct contact with the Muse up there," I said. And when I sat in my special tree and waited for the folding star I did, I did . . .
"Direct contact, absolute 'hot-line', I quite agree."
I didn't think I could better that. "Have you been writing a great deal, Sir Perry?" I was making it sound as if a new book from him was what I wanted most—we all did.
"Well, d'you know, I have? I've got a new selection out next week; and I have enough poems already for two more books after that."
"That's wonderful," I said, imagining retailing these potent, probably confidential, pieces of knowledge to Graves and one or two others.
"Well"; he shrugged and burbled something about tempus something, which I took with a sympathetic smile. "Things start coming back to you at my age. I've been writing a lot about dead friends—and about my brother Tristram, he would have been a great poet, of course." He gazed at the floor. should I ask about Tristram? "We all jolly well had to be writers, and thank the Lord we all started young. I don't know if you know, but well, Tennyson . . . " And off he went into an account of the Dawlishes, the bishops, the generals, the poets, Swinburne, Henry James, Robert Bridges (his godfather), young T. S. Eliot, that certainly put the Manners Family of Kent in its place, and held me enthralled in the musty gloom. Even so, after twenty minutes, I felt my concentration ebbing, my features locked in a kind of sneer of astonishment, my poems in their plastic folder still clutched in my lap, like the programme to a different concert. I felt painfully ignorant of Swinburne and Henry James; we didn't do T. S. Eliot till next year. I was flattered but also somehow hurt that he had misjudged me and poured this well-rehearsed torrent of stuff over me.
Later we went into the kitchen together, as if not quite sure what we'd find there, and managed to make a pot of tea. Again it seemed an honour to be doing these homely things with a great man, and so soon after meeting him: it would have been less impressive if he had had the servants I'd expected. There was no suggestion of cake.
At last he made me hand over "The Months" and leaving me to browse went off to a chair at the brighter end of the room. I got out the Merrifield volume, which bore the inscription "To Perry Dawlish from 'the Old Rogue'—George Merrifield, May Day 1928: knowing that he will go far . . . " I turned to the list of contents, hoping to find "Cider", which I knew by heart anyway (it was the unobvious rhyme of oozing with refusing in the sestet that I had stolen); but it wasn't in Love and Earth, which was perhaps an earlier collection. I realised for the first time just how large Merrifield's output was.
I was awed by the book and its associations, and wondered why its author was known as the Old Rogue. I imagined him like Toad of Toad Hall, with goggles and a cigar, motoring recklessly from one Sussex alehouse to another. I kept peeping towards the window, trying to read Dawlish's reactions. He was in profile, and partly canopied by a broad-leaved plant that sprawled across the glass above him. He seemed to be paying each sonnet the very closest attention. Or had he perhaps fallen into a quiet doze? It occurred to me that he might have died. No—another page was shuffled under. I wondered which month he'd reached. I was aware that some months were stronger than others, which was why the sequence began with September, like a school year. I thought it unlikely that he would be very critical of them, but I would have to be sensible and take his criticism with eagerness and resolution when it came.
One time I glanced up and found he was looking at me and slowly nodding, pausing to find the most tactful opening. "Marvellous," he said. "Simply marvellous, you've really got it. Really. I do congratulate you. You understand the sonnet, as few nowadays do. And every one of them has some memorable effect. 'When all is frozen to the rover's call' is a splendid line." And he said it again, to bring out what he heard as the "wintry echo" of all and call. I thought it was the best line of the lot myself, and saw it gaining something like proverbial status with Dawlish's endorsement. "There's absolutely no doubt about it, Edward," he said, with those gestures of regret that sometimes heighten the effect of praise; "You are a writer. A born writer, I would say. I see a very bright future for you indeed."
Hunting moodily through my books for something to read at Dawn's funeral I came across Poems Old and New by Peregrine Dawlish, with an inscription to me, and beside it the copy of Merrifield's Love and Earth that I had felt bold enough to ask to borrow that day eighteen years ago, and had never returned. I felt dully guilty about it, but it was too late now. Flicking through the Dawlish I remembered that he had been a good Georgian poet with a tight lyric grace; it was later that he mistook his gifts, made painful attempts to get modern, shrilly took on free verse and low-life subjects and made a fool of himself. You could see why Squire might have praised him at fifteen: I suppose he used the same words as Dawlish had solemnly addressed to me. Looking back, I thought I could make out the suspect emotion of that afternoon, the old man's vicarious excitement in acclaiming talent he had only imagined, the tone of foolish self-congratulation. But at the time, it was so much what I wanted to hear that I took a nearly erotic pleasure in it. When, after a moment's hesitation, he lent me the Merrifield, and capped it with Poems Old and New, with the further wingbeat of wonder at finding what Perry was short for, I felt as if I'd been received into a succession. There was something about the light that day, the penumbra beyond which he sat in the leafy window, that fixed what he said in amber. I could still hear his hollow augury now; like the words of a fairground palmist, hard entirely to discount.
Early that summer holidays I wandered up on to the common after supper. Charlie was just home from Cambridge with a Third that no one quite knew what to say about. His line was that he was a maverick genius, that exams weren't where he shone. There was a sort of smothered row (we never had any other kind) about his waist-length hair and its probable impact on anyone who might interview him for a job. He had a girlfriend at last, whom he deferred to on everything: "Lisanne says you shouldn't boil vegetables", "Lisanne thinks Schubert's really boring". After a couple of days Lisanne had become an invisible antagonist in our house, the subject of Charlie's veneration and everyone else's keenest loathing. We almost longed for her to come and stay, so that we could answer her back in person.
Charlie let me know that it was what he called "the full scene", and came into my room unnecessarily to extol the virtues of Lisanne's breasts and the miracle of the pill. I didn't care about them, but being made to think of them only worsened my holiday blues, the sense of being sundered from the boys I felt and thought so much about. It was hot and tedious at home; my father was out of sorts and depressed and seemed withdrawn from us in a new and unaccountable way; the few friends who lived in the town had been whizzed off to Skye or Montpellier or Corfu with their families. I went up the hill a lot, semi-spying on sunbathers semi-hidden in the long grass, and thinking of Mawson and Turlough and El-Barrawi transforming whatever holiday thing they were doing just by being their enviable selves.
My favourite time was soon after sunset, when I liked to catch the first sight of the evening star, suddenly bright, high in the west above the darkening outlines of the copses. It was a solitary ritual, wound up incoherently with bits of poetry said over and over like spells: sunset and evening star, the star that bids the shepherd fold, her fond yellow hornlight wound to the w e s t . . . It intensified and calmed my yearnings at the same time, like a song. In one poem I'd seen that first star referred to as the folding star, and the words haunted me with their suggestion of an embrace and at the same time a soundless implosion, of something ancient but evanescent; I looked up to it in a mood of desolate solitude burning into cold calm. I lingered, testing out the ache of it: I had to be back before it was truly dark, but in high summer that could be very late. I became a connoisseur of the last lonely gradings of blue into black.
This evening was windless, with high grand cloud that the afterglow made into dream-towers of pink. A hawk went over in the dusk as I climbed to the top, then there was a nagging squeak—I thought of a small night animal, but it was only a boy on a bike, braking and juddering around the steep rutted paths. Well, others could share the twilight too. There would sometimes be a couple with a dog, relishing the cool, or kids from the Flats, not quite ready to go in. Charlie said the queers went up by the wood at night, and I imagined them with a mixture of distrust and fascination. I leant on the trig-point, and saw the bike approaching again. What an effort to have walked it all the way up here, even if he came by the gentler climb from the other side. I was aware of the wheels wobbling by me, the squeak of the brake again, a plimsolled foot scraping for balance. It was Dawn. He fell against me, hand round my throat to keep him steady, so that I choked for a second, like in a fight. He let the bike slither under him across the path and hopped free of it while a wheel still lazily spun. Then there was a second embrace, an arm round my shoulder in apology and surprise.
It seemed we were being matey: Dawn's arm stayed heavily where it was, his fingers absent-mindedly doodling on my collarbone. We gazed out at the glimmering pinky-mauve crag of cloud that stood motionless to the west. He was very warm from exercise, and lightly sweaty in a tracksuit—not the sleazy multi-coloured modern kind but the soft old navy-blue kind that was like a rugged form of undress, like slumberwear worn out of doors. I always felt disadvantaged in sports gear, and envied boys like Dawn who came to life in it. I was analysing the slight discomfort in our stance, a hollowness in my stomach, an ache down my thighs like I got on a high building. I raised my arm and rested it on his back.
"I should have known I'd meet you up here," he said, with a hint of routine school jeering, and a hint of flattery too, as if I figured in his thoughts, a poetic type from the Lower Sixth who might be worth wary emulation.
"I'm always up here," I said, to counter any suggestion it was his place, not mine.
"Yeah, I come over on my bike sometimes, since we moved. We should arrange to meet up."
I loved the idea of that, perhaps we both had these great vacancies—these grandes vacances—to fill. On the other hand what would we talk about . . . We hardly knew each other; he was already coloured in my mind by being in Drake, with their drab plum strip. He was handsome, he'd been a rather hopeless Orsino last term, but his strong physique and violet tights had given the role another kind of interest. He turned towards me and jutted his chest out, with a body-builder's deep breath, and hooked up his other arm. "Feel that," he said, nodding at it. The light was failing, there was a moment's uncertainty. "Go on."
I ran my hand over the gathered biceps, then played down my approval—actually, I wasn't interested in muscles, except as part of the knot of manhood and the tightening hold it had on me. He rocked his bosom against mine, as if he had a girl's big tits. I could feel his hard nipples through our two layers of cotton. It was the sort of dumb sport you imagined them passing the time with in Drake. I was dying for him.
He reached down quickly and grabbed at my stiff cock. "What do we have here?" he asked facetiously as I ducked backwards with a giggled gasp of protest. But his hand was still on my shoulder. "Oh, come on," he said in American, and pulled me slowly back towards him. "I saw you getting a root that time on the train."
"When?" I said.
"I had one, too." This was too much what I wanted. I thought, I am in a higher form than this person, I'm writing a lot of sonnets, I can speak Dutch, in fact I'm going to write a sonnet-sequence in Dutch. He took my hand gently and rubbed it against his tracksuit, where his cock was a hard ridge held sideways in tight underwear. Why was I ashamed to be seduced by him? "Let's do this," he whispered, right up against me, the first time I'd ever heard anyone breathe my own thoughts like that. There were voices close by, and I broke away.
An oldish couple who might have been standing in the gloom for ages. I sort of recognised them. They admired the sublimity of the sky, some stratospheric wind just teasing the top of the cloud over into an anvil point, the lower parts darkening through lilac to powerless storm-grey. Oh, why didn't they just fuck off? The man, in a cap, half-stumbled on Dawn's prostrate bike. "That must be the Ashringford road," the wife said, gesturing at distant lights. I looked at Dawn, and found he was looking steadily at me. This was the real thing, we were going to do it. Our expectant silence must have been palpable to the others; as they disappeared down the steep path I heard the wife's crisp "I don't know", and wondered what the murmured question had been.
We stepped back together and he kissed me with closed lips, as if shyly soliciting an answer in his turn. It was the gentlest thing I'd ever known from another boy, blasphemous and unhidden. I reached down again and rubbed him through his pants and he just let me. "We'd better go under the trees," he said, and went to pick up his bike. "Don't want to lose that." I thought to myself, "But that's where the queers go", imagining some nice distinction between what they did there and whatever we were going to do.
I felt the minute of physical separation keenly, skirting the pond, Dawn walking the bike between us, the proficient idling of its wheels; I wanted things to start again, and then, as we stepped under the nighttime of the wood's edge, was quite afraid, too. This was the "dim woods" of poetry for real. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet. The forest's ferny floor. I'd threaded the paths there often by day, but now it was mazily different, the underbrush of August was thick and tangled across.
Dawn had stopped to lodge his bike against a tree, and whispered loudly, "Hey, Manners. . . don't go too far." Perhaps I was trying to lead the way, as if I often did this. I came back towards him and we bumped into each other. I just couldn't see at first, and then began to make out tree-trunks and bushes against the relative brightness of the open common beyond. We hugged for a kind of confirmation, and I passed my hand shyly over his face (he kissed it!) and through his short curls. My mouth was open and sour with need when his lips nudged over it and his fat shocking tongue pressed in.
When we came out of the wood I knew I was late, and must hurry down. The towering anvil of cloud had become a ruffled palm-tree of darkness against the other darkness of the sky. I longed to be alone, longed for it to happen again. Dawn sat astride his bike and leant on my shoulder to steady himself. It was a firm, slightly painful grip, through which all his weight and balance seemed to communicate themselves, as if we were an acrobatic act. Then he circled swiftly across the turf. I ran up to the trig-point and watched the rushing field of his front light and the red glow of his back light as he jolted and swung down the hillside and was suddenly out of view.
Geoffrey and Mirabelle Turlough were great friends of my parents, though I was never quite sure why. Geoffrey was a wiry man with a depressing grey beard and no sense of fun, whilst Mirabelle could have represented fun in a pageant and was huge and outgoing, with short dark hair and glasses on a chain. He was in charge of the local planning office, but had been a fine amateur tennis-player just after the war: one could picture him doing months of practice serves. They had met at the Tennis Club where Mirabelle often umpired the ladies' matches. Later a shoulder injury had forced him to give up, but Mirabelle, who was no player, retained a passionate interest in the game, one that he seemed rather to resent. In my teens he was always in grey flannels, jacket and tie, when she would be wearing white daps and sports shirts with pockets right out on the end of her breasts; she would often be tugging the shirt down over her hips in a jolly, let's-give-it-a-go sort of way. Each year at the end ofJune she would appear on the television in uniform, glaring down the tramlines and howling "Fault" whenever possible. "She shouts so loud", my father once said, "you hardly need a telly to pick it up." Even so, those two weekends late in the summer term were always spent with the curtains drawn and the tennis on, not from any particular interest of ours in the sport, but rather from the hope of seeing our friend crouched behind the muscled legs of the receiver. The next week the Turloughs would come to supper, and Mirabelle would reveal the best of the scandals she had picked up about the players—particularly sexual ones of a kind that were never talked of at home, and which all of us, including Geoffrey, took rather stiffly.
I knew from early on that Mirabelle was somehow in tune with sex in a way that I couldn't believe my parents were. On the other hand she seemed to have no real rapport with her husband, whereas my mother and father were clearly linked by some deep if reticent bond. Geoffrey was a decent, disappointed man, who would ask you about your O levels, whilst Mirabelle called you darling and winkingly cross-questioned you on your non-existent girlfriends. They seemed to embody some mysterious thing—perhaps a flaw, perhaps a principle—about matrimony and the unimagined later centuries of adult lives. She was always pumping me for information on their heavenly son Willie, who was in the year above me at Stonewell and fancied by absolutely everybody; and it was a disturbing moment when I overheard her saying to my mother how easily she could fall in love with the boy, and my mother replying, "He's too young for you, dear!" Alas, Willie took after his father in conscientious dullness, and was aloof to all pashes and advances. Later, when it became clear to my mother that I was gay, it was Mirabelle who helped her come to grips with it, and spoke of it as an enviable state of being, the opportunities . . . She brought it up all the time, with slightly wearying good-heartedness.
After my father died, she kept close to my mother, and developed the habit of dropping round for coffee three or four mornings a week. For years she was associated in my mind with our neighbourly sitcom doorchime, which didn't so much ring as brightly announce impending good-fellowship with its halting ditone. Once it had been an incongruous interruption of my father's practising. But later, when nobody else much came, the words Mirabelle and doorbell became almost synonymous with each other.
I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, looking at Gray's "Elegy" in The Golden Treasury: I was amazed to find how little of it I remembered. I didn't see it as especially appropriate for my dead friend, who blushed, but not unseen, and wasted none of his sweetness. I thought she must just like its tone of maxim-studded consolation. "It's the end," she said, and pointed to the verse beginning "One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill". Then the bell ding-donged. "Ten fifty-five," she said, with irony but no resentment.
Mirabelle was sixty-four now, a year older than my mother; but whereas my mother never aged in my eyes, and remained at an ideal forty of competence and prettiness, her friend struck me, after a couple of months' absence, as abruptly an old woman. The hugeness had become wheeziness and powdered underchins, and the odd compromise of her marriage, it turned out, was under unexpected strain.
At first she was all cheer, subsiding on to a startled kitchen chair, and examining me closely. "It's lovely to see you, darling, but he's looking a bit pale, a bit black under the eyes, isn't he, Peg? I expect it's the late nights out there."
"I think he has lost weight," my mother answered obliquely.
"I expect you've got one of those lovely Dutch boys, haven't you, with blond hair, grey eyes—very friendly."
"I'm not actually in Holland," I said, shying away from the complicated truth.
"He's here for the funeral—you know . . . " said my mother.
"Darling, it's too unbearable. Poor you, poor them, oh dear . . . You know Willie's had a third, a little boy: they couldn't decide what to call the little chap, they've just called him Number Three or something silly like Marmaduke, which I thought was in danger of sticking. Anyway, now they're going to name him in memory of your friend."
"What, Dawn . . . ? I'm not sure that's . . ."
"No, Ralph, silly."
"I think Ralph Turlough would be a very good name," I said, though feeling that Willie had somehow managed to miss the point.
"I'm sure they'd love to see you." She hesitated, and took the coffee my mother was passing her. "I've been taking refuge there myself, of late. Well, I can help with the baby." And then the story came out—how Geoffrey, within weeks of his recent retirement, had gone into a resolute depression, had claimed that their life together was pointless, that he had never loved her, never even liked her much, and that he knew all about her affairs with numerous other men, including, one rather gathered, my own father. "And I never!" she said, in Dandy Nichols cockney. "I never!" My mother smiled confidently. "Do you know what he said to me today?" she went on. "He came into the kitchen and said, 'Good morning, evening and night, and now I don't think I need speak to you for the rest of the day.' And he just sits there, you know, with his fingers in his beard."
"Don't you think he ought to get help?" I suggested.
"I'm the one who needs help, ducky. The fact is, if I may digress, that when he grew his beard I thought 'Oh, no', but then he couldn't play tennis any more, which was very hard for him, he had to have something to do. And after a while I got used to it, it even came to represent, ghastly though it was in itself, a kind of scratchy comfort and security. But now . . . I keep wanting to run up behind him and just chop it off! Never grow a beard, darling. There's a lot more to a beard than meets the eye."
As she talked I was increasingly drawn under by a current of recollection that her presence, and the lines from Gray, had obscurely triggered—the desert air of that summer of 1976, in which she and Geoffrey had somehow played a part, a memory of sexual loneliness, which would later pull so much I did into its own fierce patterns.
I remembered the day after that first time with Dawn, coming downstairs with a kind of wary astonishment, feeling I'd been given access to a world that lay just on the other side of the parquet, the fridge, the radio, the piano declaiming in the sitting-room. I looked covertly at my family, wondering if they too were inhabitants of this thrilling dimension. Perhaps Charlie was; but his accounts of life with Lisanne seemed oddly to leave out any mention of it. I felt both irritable and supremely tolerant at the same time, sulkily looking over my mother's shopping-list, but then when I got outside, dancing to the baker's like a character in a musical comedy.
It wouldn't have been an early start. Throughout my adolescent holidays I got up wastefully late, as though to make up for the austerity of school mornings, the wintry dressing in the dark. Sometimes it would be 11.30 or 12 before I came down for a cup of coffee and was warned off spoiling my lunch. They were hours of luxurious tedium in the half-light of the bedroom, reading for a bit, dozing in and out of songs coming from downstairs, Schone Mullerin all that summer, my father flagging and dissatisfied. I evolved fantastic sexual situations around boys at school, dropping off in the middle of them, then waking and putting them through some further fabulous depravity. My mother's weary, unwitting half-joke, "Are you getting up?", would be shouted from the hall, and I would reply with my comprehensive euphemism, "I'm just having a think."
Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined. It had been awkward, a bit scary, my legs were stung by nettles, we'd only kissed a lot, really, then quickly stroked each other off, but it was wholly different from the heartless occasional jerk-offs at school with someone who called you a queer afterwards. Next day my head was full of the heat of it, the lovely certainty we did it for each other. When we met tonight, it would be a step further into the dreamy underwoods of love. By the time I went out for my walk after supper I was prospecting far into the future. I had coached Dawn to some surprising exam results, he had moulded me into a runner and swimmer who commanded respect. I wrote long letters to an imaginary friend abroad, dotingly detailing Dawn's sweetness and beauty. For all our open-air beginnings I had him closeted with me in des Esseintes-like privacy, in a sealed world of silk and fur and absolute indulgence.
But Dawn didn't come. I sat on the bench reading Tennyson, but not taking it in, looking up every few seconds for a bike or just for him in dark running gear. It was breezier than last night, the wood was stirring in tumultuous slow-motion, the pond broken and bickering. I waited through a muffled sunset till the wind had blown off the cannon-smoke of low cloud and opened up a sky of densening stars. Of course we hadn't said we'd meet. I walked nervously under the wood's edge for a minute, and looked out the way I thought he would come, for a light swivelling over grass and bushes. But there were only the lights of planes, high up, climbing out of Gatwick, the intermittent yawn of their engines, and when they'd gone just the gusting of the trees. I was shivery in a T-shirt, and jogged home for warmth, working out a story about how I'd come back safely along the road.
Next day I was desolate, and even coaxed out a few tears in my room, which I found impressive and almost cheering. I knew I had to ring Dawn, and got up suspiciously early to do so, hanging about in the hall with a book, until I thought the coast was clear, and then swiftly dissimulating my intention when my mother or Charlie came heedlessly through. I was more and more nervous the more I deferred. I didn't know their routines or anything about them; the phonebook gave me their address and I worked up an image of 12 Sands Road—by the sound of it pleasant enough—as a household severely unwelcoming to phone-calls of any kind, much less those from boys who wanted to fuck their son. I imagined Dawn denying all knowledge of me, hanging up on me, or just giving me some casual putdown. I had actually started dialling when my mother looked out from the kitchen and said, "Can't it keep till cheap time, love?" And I accepted her objection with only a show of reluctance.
From 5 o'clock on I was locked in a parched rehearsal of my opening remarks, which involved an optional parent-charming paragraph (always say who you are and apologise for troubling them) that snagged on the question of how I should refer to him. Then I had to say "Hi! Dawn? It's Edward . . . Yeah, g r e a t . . . " and hope to catch the warmth in his reply and if at all possible lead him on to propose a meeting himself. By six these simple phrases had become a kind of hysterical gibberish in my mind, as though they'd been passed round the room in a game of Chinese whispers. I went to the phone, but thank god someone rang up for my father just at that moment, and I put it off till 6.30.
After supper I said, "I'll just make that call now, Mum", and went and did it so quickly that the adrenalin only caught up with me at the moment someone answered: a girl, rather sultry and bored. He must have sisters. They were all out, she said. Or put it another way, she was there all by herself. She almost sounded as if she'd like me to come round and fuck her instead. She said she'd tell Ralphie that I'd rung, and repeated my number sluttishly wrongly before she got it right. Then I set out into the high-summer wastes of longing. Dawn never rang back. I missed him on the customed hill, all right. I missed him everywhere. Some days it was as if nothing had ever happened; on others I felt ruined, I'd been given a sip of some marvellous elixir and then had it snatched away. I knew it was absurd to fall in love after ten minutes' breathless smooching, but that only added an element of hysterical determination to my passion. Everyone noticed I was moping, but there were larger glooms about the house that rendered mine unimportant. My great-aunt Tina was very ill; Charlie kept deferring his visit to Lisanne's parents (who weren't at all sure it was a good idea) and tinkered pointlessly with circuitry in his room; and though nothing was said to me, it was obvious my father was doing less work and that there was a new caution about money. He had begun to cancel engagements. He was pale and withdrawn. I would ask him if he was okay, and he would push out his chest as if about to sing and say, "I'll be all right—a bit out of sorts." But our fortnight at Kinchin Cove was off that year; and the trading-in of our rusting Humber Snipe, a suffocating monster which, if never entirely new in our experience, had been a sign of prosperity six years before, was again deferred: it began to resemble one of the broken-voiced old hulks on the forecourt at the Flats. I had always been thrilled by cars and was deflated and embarrassed. I was told that my school-fees cost more than a car, and knew that I wasn't allowed to complain.
After the first week, I took to ringing Dawn's number two or three times a day from a phone-box in town, though there was never any reply. They must have gone on holiday: he was somewhere different entirely, showing off on a beach, chasing his sisters, picking them up and spanking them, being clumsily macho for their protesting fun.
I felt trapped in the house, but didn't want to miss a phone-call if it came. We had a smart, trilling phone but it was on a party-line, and I imagined Dawn baffled and kept at bay by the engaged tone as our talkative neighbours (whom we knew only from the inane fragments of chat that obstructed us when we tried to ring out) were maundering on. I began to hallucinate the cheep of the phone in the routine undertones and overtones of the house—in the burble and chink of the fridge, inside the dreary howl of the hoover, in the tinkling drops of a filling cistern. Perhaps I was going mad with desolation. I lay on the floor a lot, gazing across the landing to where the sunlight slanted along the carpet of the front bedroom, showing up various boxes that had been stowed away beneath the bed. Once when everyone was out, I went into the sitting-room and stormed up and down on the piano, which I had refused to learn, with clumsy ferocity—Sibelius standing thoughtfully beside me, as if ready to turn the page. Those were rare moments of faute de mieux togetherness with the dog, which otherwise owed all its loyalty to my parents, and still if I took him for a walk would run away.
Sometimes a postcard came from holidaying friends and I examined the grim communality of the beaches with burning interest. That lad in black trunks, half a centimetre high in the middle distance at Rapallo or Cagnes-sur-Mer, looked pretty hot. It was so sexy there. Here there were only some beery lads on the grass, or old gents with their shirts off sitting on benches, listening to the cricket on tiny trannies. In town I found things taking on an absurd sexual significance: I tramped round and round on imaginary errands so as to see a butcher's boy with a spot-crossed full-mouthed face joking in the doorway with his workless mates. I knew where in Digby's the second-hand manuals of photography and volumes of obsolete sexology were shelved. Even the square-jawed beige mannequins in an outfitters' window, with a generalised mound between the legs, possessed a certain power of suggestion, as did the surreal cross-sections used to display underwear, as if the erogenous zones had been cast life-size in milk chocolate. Being in love seemed to license and heighten random desire all around; I felt guiltily untouched by the conventional wisdom of never looking at another man.
It was into this dispirited household that I remember Geoffrey and Mirabelle coming, quite often, as if determined to brighten us up. There was a sense of an impromptu party being stirred into reluctant life; they would arrive with a half-bottle of Beefeater or a batch of meringues in a tin. The idea of Geoffrey brightening anyone up had something incongruous about it that added to the forced sense of fun. He made a genuine effort, he smiled a lot in a rather loopy way, he even once told a long humorous anecdote, followed by an expectant silence in which Mirabelle quietly provided the proper punch-line and pointed out an error earlier in the story which altered the meaning of the whole thing. It was Mirabelle really who made the going.
As well as her line-judge's shout, she had a lovely liquid singing voice, which I imagined being refined to its bright clarity in the great stills of her bosom. She was always rather shy of using it in my father's presence, and made pointless remarks about how she couldn't sing at all, but then would break into a phrase or two from Cole Porter inadvertently, out of pure tunefulness, when carrying out the plates or pouring a drink. What sometimes happened was a duet with my father, which seemed less presumptuous on her part, though he would much rather have just listened to her or better still had no singing: "I will if Lewis will too," she would say, which may have been the basis for Geoffrey's festering jealousy all these years later.
My father had a great aversion to character-acting in songs, any rolling of the eyes, putting hands on hips or wringing out of humour. He tended to sing like a sentinel, sworn to some higher purpose. Mirabelle, however, was much given to caperings and routines which spoke of a thwarted desire for the stage and could be rather overwhelming in the confines of the sitting-room. She knew several of the drunk songs from operettas and fin de siecle musicals and sometimes did "Ah, quel diner", from La Perichole, in a recklessly "French" manner. But her party piece was a song "I'm just a wee bit boozy", from a forgotten show called Her Cousin from Kansas, in which each verse was slightly more slurred than the one before; at the end she would pretend to stumble against the piano or even fall to the floor. My mother, who accompanied, always had a look of forlorn sobriety after this number.
On one of these sad restless evenings that they came ding-donging into with such puzzling gaiety my mother muttered to me not to go out after supper. I was immediately certain that this was the night when Dawn would come back. I saw him, bronzed, heavy with sperm, roaming the common into the small hours, maybe meeting someone else . . . But Charlie had boorishly slipped the net and gone down to the pub, and I was being relied on to keep up some sense of occasion. The Turloughs had brought a bottle of cherry brandy and I drank several little glasses of it and felt annoyingly careless and witty.
We went into the sitting-room, and I sat by the door, so as to get to the phone first when it rang. It was extraordinary the certainty I felt, one of those baseless whims, a slight chemical thing perhaps, that changes your whole attitude. Geoffrey, as a rule needlessly discreet, gave a detailed account of the machinations behind the current bypass proposals. Then my father went to put a record on the stereogram. I knew that he hated background music, and that this was a ploy to prevent anyone from singing. But the moment he lifted the magic lid Mirabelle exclaimed, "Oh Lewis, my love, why don't you sing to us? I can't bear a record on, when you don't know whether to talk or listen to it."
"I really won't tonight," he said firmly but with a smile. And then what could he do but add, "But if you'd like to . . ." I think she agreed less out of high spirits than from a sense of duty.
"I shan't sing 'I'm just a wee bit boozy'", she said, "because actually I am, and I'll probably get muddled up with the words."
"Ah well," said my father.
"But can you play . . . ?" She had a whisper with my mother and after five seconds' modest thought broke out in a deeper, sexier voice than usual, "A home is not a home without a man—He's the necessary evil in the plan . . .", at which Geoffrey looked quite uncomfortable. My mother accompanied anxiously, making it sound like a metrical psalm. When it was finished I clapped for too long.
"Thank you, darling," said Mirabelle with a bow. She had on black linen bell-bottoms that added a further curve to her outline and low-cut slippers which showed the little pinched cleavages of her toes. "What would you like me to do next?"
There were no immediate requests, and the general answer might well have been "Sit down and shut up". "Beggars in Spats," I called out mischievously. This was a comic number from the Broadway of thirty or forty years ago, a genre utterly antique to me but treasured by all these adults as the glamour music of their youth, and so absorbed by osmosis into my own. It was another of those things that gave me the ghostly sense of having grown up in an earlier age.
She did sing "Beggars in Spats", which was about a couple getting married with only a nickel between them but somehow managing very well; it was a long song, in which everything happened several times over. "And now I've done enough," she said, turning her eyes on my father. "If I really can't persuade Lewis to join me?" He shook his head. "There seems to be a bit of a matrimonial theme. We could round it off with 'There's Nothing Like Marriage for People' . . ."
"I'm just not up to it tonight."
"Oh, go on, Dad!" I said, bounding across to his chair and tugging at his hand. "It's always so funny when you do it in your American accent." And Sibelius, noticing the activity, lurched to his feet and clittered round the parquet giving short affirmative barks. I appealed to my mother, who looked mournfully at my father, not knowing what to hope. Mirabelle doodled the first two lines sweetly, sotto voce, "Imagine living with someone Who's longing to live with you", and winked at me as he got up, with an alarming look of stifled wretchedness, and took his place by the piano. Mirabelle slipped her arm through his and sang the lines again, still very sweetly. ("Oh god, I imagine that every minute of the day," I thought.) "Imagine signing a lease together; And hanging a Matisse together," my father replied, but in stiff English. She took it up, in English too, "Oh what felicity In domesticity!" and he capped it, with a sternness that was comic in itself, "Let no one disparage Marriage!"
It was all very strange. Geoffrey stared at his wife expressionlessly. Was he angry with her for pretending to be getting married to my father? Or was he merely stuffily hiding his admiration and assessing the song as though he had never heard it before? I wondered if I was so self-absorbed that I'd missed out on something important that had been said. The accompaniment was oddly inadvertent. Mirabelle was nursing the thing along by sheer, even exaggerated, force of personality: "Hurry, let's call up the minister!"—head thrown back. A second's delay, "Why be a sinister Old bachelor or spinister . . . " My mother had stopped and I turned to her irritably. Her cheeks were wet with tears, and she was fumbling at her cuff for a handkerchief. Then she jumped up and ran out of the room.
My father called "Peg" and went after her, half-tangled up with the doleful but excited dog. Mirabelle looked horrified at what she had brought about. Geoffrey nodded towards the door, and she drifted into the hall, biting her lower lip. The two of us were left alone. The shock of the first moments was yielding to a childish urge to cry too, the contagion of misery, however little understood. Geoffrey got up, walked to the window, and stood glaring into the dusk and the privet hedge.
"I'm very sorry about your father's bad news," he said, raking and smoothing his beard. "I suppose it's as well to be prepared for the worst. Let's hope they can hold it off for a few more months, eh?"
I did ring Willie Turlough, god knows why—perhaps out of that same sense of desolation that had welled up from the past and seemed to me, as it can in certain lights, to be our real environment. We talked against a background of white noise, he was impossibly distracted; I pictured him holding a wriggling bundle like the baby that turns into a piglet in Alice. What people put themselves through . . . I shouted that I would come round after supper, and had the impression that he agreed.
I was in the pub first. It didn't seem to them to be all that long since I had left. To me it did, so that I was reluctant to go in, and then hurt at how little fuss was made of me. The deaths of our friends were in the smoke-soured air, of course; they were still being talked about with original shock, and with the occasional hilarity that came with shock and brought a tear to the eye that the indulgent reminiscences failed to raise. From time to time someone would have the muffled excitement of breaking the news to a new arrival who hadn't heard. I noticed how the story was changing as each teller patched it together.
I bought lagers for my old chums Danny and Simon, who must have known me well, we had drunk so much together and talked so much, up and down the scale between murky confession and the permitted embellishments of tales of conquest, the two of them drily puncturing my more preposterous flights; but I had an eerie sense of having broken with them, of looking in with envy on their steady and self-sufficient affair. The utterly unchanged bar, some of the men I had slept with at one time or another, even Dawn himself, existed in earlier, closed-down precincts of my life. When Simon asked me some perfectly straightforward question, I felt it had been run through a scrambler. What was the scene like in Belgium? You mean the scene . . . in Belgium . . . ? I couldn't think of anything to say.
Willie and Alison had given up expecting me by the time I made it out to their house. She appeared in her dressing-gown, holding the baby, little Ralphie, whom she had just fed into fat-faced sleep. Willie was hurrying about in his socks, holding chewed toys, a stained cot-blanket. I felt I was interrupting something arduous and intimate.
"What sort of time do you call this?" he demanded cheerfully, and gave me a sympathetic kiss on the cheek. Actually it was only half past nine, a time at which I normally comforted myself with the certainty of hours of drink to come; but when you entered the lives of young parents you were in another time-zone, pale faces came to meet you in the half-light, abstracted with fatigue. "It's like some awful kind of training," Willie said, "where they wake you up at odd hours of the night, and you have to put an engine together, or defuse a bomb."
"I didn't know they did that."
"Don't they? I thought they did . . . " He yawned like a dog, with a whine too.
Alison had gone upstairs and didn't re-emerge. I imagined she'd just fallen asleep where she was. Willie looked mildly bemused by the silence, the social call from the outside world. He was piecing together what it was one did. I said, "Would you rather I went?"
He was dismayed. "My dear Edward!" Slightly ponderous now. He frowned and smiled, and I realised he looked so much balder because he'd done the sensible thing and cut it all off short. Last time I'd seen him there had been fatally middle-aged wisps. His features were so good that he looked even more handsome without hair than with it. As he wandered round through the debris of plastic bricks and scribbled scrap-paper I couldn't help thinking back through his shapeless casual clothes to the naked prefect he had been, his magically unblemished skin, the blue veins that ran over his upper arms, the idle beauty of his big cock and balls. Not for the first time I thought what an excellent homosexual he would have made. "Would you like a drink?"
"Mmm. Perhaps the merest rumour of Scotch. The merest hearsay . . . "
"I'll bring the bottle."
I swept the rubbish from an armchair and sat down and still got a piece of Lego up the bum. Why did they do it? Why did this dully charming man, who was already working absurdly to support two children, who got up at six each day to commute to town and was sometimes not home till nine, then go inanely on and sire a third? It must be instinct, nothing rational could explain it — instinct or inattention or else what Edie called polyfilla-progenitiveness: having more children to stop up the gaps in a marriage. I was at the age when I couldn't ignore it; my straight friends married and bred, sometimes remarried and bred again, or just bred regardless. I saw them losing the gift of speech, so used to being interrupted by the demands of the young that they began to interrupt themselves, or to prefer the kind of fretful drivel they had become accustomed to. I saw the huge, humiliating vehicles these studs of the GTi were forced to buy: like streamlined dormobiles, with tiers of baby seats and stacks of the grey plastic crap which seemed inseparable from modern infancy. I saw their doped surrender to domestic muddle, not enough letters on the fridge door to spell anything properly, the chairs covered in yoghurt.
"This is all very sad," said Willie, with a stern smile. Neither of us knew yet just how seriously the other was taking it, whether we would shortly be telling slightly derisory stories in an air of accomplished melancholy or if one of us would be comforting the other as he sobbed out his bitter regrets and griefs. The thought of a scene of unguarded emotion with Willie, whatever its cause, had a certain appeal.
"I wondered if Mirabelle might be here," I said.
"No, she's been wonderful with the baby, much more than with the other two"—as if that was the only reason for her coming round.
"Here's a good long life to Ralphie number two," I said, chinning my glass. "A new Dawn, you might say." Perhaps there were unhappy implications to this.
"He was the first of our schoolfriends to go—that's why I chose his name." This wasn't true, or it depended what you meant by friends; our old boys' magazine now had two epochs to its obituary page—the steady professional deaths of the pre-war generations, and the cluster of pinched-off careers, nothing much to say about them yet, dead at twenty-four or twenty-nine, or thirty-three, no causes given, where before it had been climbing accidents.
"It was a very sweet idea. I'm so confused by the shock of this death, having started in a way to prepare for a different one. But if he'd gone as it were knowingly, he'd have been very touched at what you've done. He rather loved you, you know."
"Well, I rather loved him," said Willie smugly. "In my way—of course, not like you did." I looked at him with a sceptical little smile, so that he went on, "Even I could see that he was jolly handsome."
Well, yes, he was quite handsome—dark curls, blue eyes—but that wasn't the point of Dawn, it wasn't why men wanted him. Willie reminded me of people without a sense of humour, who laugh at the wrong moment, or for too long. There was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum's violet end.
"I was trying to tell Alison about you two at school, and how scandalous you were. She wasn't very impressed. She said she thought that was what all public schoolboys did—you know she can be a bit left-wing."
"We're all a bit left-wing, dear."
"Mmm."
"I hope she doesn't think you ever carried on like that. She must know you were the great untouchable."
Willie looked into his glass and shook the ice around in it. "I didn't really want to be untouchable, you know. But I just wasn't into it. I tried quite hard sometimes; everyone would be mooning about one of the new boys—don't you think he's a perfect orchid, isn't he just like a dark little kitten—and I'd search my heart, but all I could ever see was a rather anxious little chap who'd had his cricketbat stolen, or whatever."
"You are aware that virtually the entire school had a crush on you?"
"Well, I don't know about that. It could be quite lonely at times, and I felt a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. In the dorm I pulled the sheets over my head or pretended to sleep if ever naked figures went scampering past. I did feel I was missing out."
"I don't think you missed out on much. I don't remember much of all that. They might have wanted to do things, but you know they were all too bourgeois and inhibited. I used to long to be at some great ancient school, with a real rigour of vice."
"Well, you and Ralphie did okay."
"That wasn't vice, darling, it was love."
I saw Willie's almost instant mastering of the surprise of being called darling, watched him as he sprawled a fraction more unguardedly on the sofa, as if to deny the intrusive intimacy of my tone and absorb the jolt of grief that must account for it. Perhaps at that moment I saw how isolated I felt in losing Dawn, though he hadn't been mine for . . . sixteen years.
"It's brought so much back," I said. I went on about that summer, the horrible empty weeks which had just begun to haunt me with their apparent denial of what had come before and of the promise they had seemed to give of what was to follow. I jumped and told him about how good at drawing Dawn was: there was something sexily luxurious about the patient sittings, when the boy who had had me for real an hour before would perch across the room and stroke my outline on to paper, and I felt as if it was me who was drawing him, studying his absorbing gaze, his tongue on his lip where mine liked to be, or wetting his thumb to blur the charcoal with it.
"Were you ever caught?"
"I don't think we ever actually were. There were several occasions of absolutely split-second escapes, you know, when you leap into a deeply studious pose with your pubes trapped in your zip. Everyone knew we did it a lot, of course, and mocked at us out of envy, but though that wasn't a secret, the sex itself was, somehow. But it's like that, isn't it, it's amazing what you can manage, what you can fit in in the unsuspected intervals of the day."
"I think I must have been a great innocent at school," said Willie, with a certain self-satisfaction.
"We went out at night a lot of course. We used to meet up by the river." For an instant only I seemed to smell the damp mud and half-see the river moving in the dark, conspiratorial or perhaps indifferent. "You remember those trees down behind the CCF sheds. I don't know what kind they were, their crowns were much paler than the rest, they seemed to gleam in the dark." The dense twiggy mass around the trunk, like some involuntary eruption of secondary life, the leaves dusty and sticky, dropping on to the verandah of the army hut, which by a trick of memory appeared with taped-over windows, as if in wartime. The leaves would be falling even now, the life of the school must still be going blindly on: perhaps kids were huddling at this moment in the smokers' riverside bivouac beyond, or snogging intently in the dubbin-scented hut, unbuttoning each other in the glow of SM McGregor's breathy gas-fire. This was an aspect of the corps that Willie, who had been big in the army cadets, was unaware of; and maybe the hut seemed a glamorous rendezvous to me because I had opted out, and spent those long parade-ground afternoons in the alternative vacancy, the smoky idleness, of "community service".
"Do you like being out at night?" I asked, not because I wanted to know, but so as to license what I wanted to say about myself.
"I haven't really done it much. Except you know . . . in the car."
"It may be too late for you now. You need to do it when you're a lad and you feel like part of a secret society, and an old, country thing, standing still and seeing night-sighted animals busying about."
"Not being night-sighted oneself. . ."
"After a while you are. I can't remember the individual nights, isn't it awful, that whole phase of my life has somehow rendered down to a few scenes—being out under the trees, lying in each other's arms looking at the stars, our naked legs in night breezes and moonlight, seeing a fox trotting round and round on the path by the gym, trying to levitate on the cricket pitch: you remember the levitation craze, I think I did actually levitate . . . and of course all the things we did to each other, well, it was levitation in a way, I don't need to tell you what love's like, but perhaps that's why it's all a mood or just an impression of blackness. I was too pressed up against him to see."
"You seem to have seen a lot," said Willie kindly, perhaps touched by my moist-eyed, slightly fanatical manner. "Urn, have another drink," and he leant across with the bottle and I let him pour as if unaware that I had to say when. The lovely confidence of that tarnished gold liquid in my grasp, the sense of being provided for, of knowing one could come through. I plucked off my glasses to rub my eyes and saw the lamp-lit room and my friend's pale face in an intimate crepuscular blur, like a little etching by Edgard Orst. And I felt the spirit of the time that I had summoned up pouring past me like a night-wind through woods around a lonely shack or long-abandoned Nissen hut where two boys squat and banter over a ten-minute fire of twigs and rubbish. My heart was thumping with the certainty that when I put my glasses on again Dawn himself would be leaning forward from the sofa, his teenage eyes and mouth unveiled by love.
"Of course, we had to get away from Lawrence Graves."
"Christ, I'd quite forgotten . . ."
"Old Graves was mortally put out by the whole business. I tried to make him feel wanted, and I used to have Dawn round for Bruckner and Mahler sessions in our study, but Graves got into absolute paroxysms of irritation if we even smiled at each other. He'd be conducting away and though the music was all part of it, Dawn and I could almost forget it was going on somehow, we were so full of our own latest memories and plans, and he would catch us smiling at each other . . . I think he wanted to kind of hijack our affair, take it over or blow it up."
"He was in love with you himself, presumably."
"Of course," I said impatiently, covering the fact that I had never quite realised that. "Of course. And it's true that Dawn was never exactly brilliant or enthralling company unless you saw the point of him. I remember coming in one day and finding he'd been waiting for me for hours. Graves was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him as if he was trying to mesmerise him or get him to reveal some potent but unguessable quality he had. He was really trying to get down there with him. I said later how poetic a picture it had been—poetic was one of our permitted terms of acclaim—and he turned quite nasty. 'Poetic!' he said. 'He talked prose to me all afternoon!'"
Willie didn't smile. "I feel rather sorry for Graves, being left all alone at nights, being told to turn his music down by Head of House W. Turlough, whilst his best friend, actually probably his only friend, was running round naked on the cricket pitch with someone who was clearly more attractive than he was. If I'd realised at the time I'd have been nicer to him." I gave a humorous snarl at this attempt at a joke. "What became of Graves, by the way?"
"I wonder." The last time I'd seen him was vividly clear to me, shocking and secret. Or maybe it didn't matter. Willie ought to know these things. We were both men of the world, of different but adjacent worlds; and we were about the same age now, though Willie seemed to me to have entered the placid, incurious middle phase, the semi-sedation of hetero expectations, whilst I was still running loose, swerving and tripping through the romantic undergrowth outside. He must be thirty-five, I was thirty-three, would be thirty-four in the week after Christmas; but as always I felt that my age was only a term of convenience, an average age, and that one moment I was donnish and past it and the next a bewildered youngster scarcely out of school. I took my glasses off again to spare his embarrassment.
"Do you know about Mr Croy's?" I said.
"No, is it a prep-school?"
"Not exactly." I gazed at the overlapping aureoles the lamps cast across the ceiling, and saw again the astounding scenes in that house. It was years after school, it was after Cambridge, in my own brief spell as a schoolmaster, on a rainy half-holiday, when I made one of my irregular, urgent visits, and found Graves there, with a crew-cut and ear-rings, and the young assistant from Levertons flushed and greedily at work on him, ribbons of saliva down his chin.
"Well, the thing about it is . . . " I said.
"What is it, sweetheart?" Willie asked quietly. I smirked at the new endearment.
"You see . . ."
"Can't you sleep?"
I looked across with a frown and blush of my own. A little blonde ghost had appeared at the sofa's end, and Willie's strong arm opened towards it and brought it noiselessly into his embrace.
"Sit with us for a while." I pushed my glasses on again and saw the child wriggle and shake her head and hide her face in her father's shirt-front. He rocked her for a bit, resting his chin abstractedly on her curly crown and gazing at the wall. "Sorry, Edward, do go on," he said, snugly, as if he were rocking himself to sleep. "She'll drop off in a minute or two."
"Oh, it doesn't matter." He didn't protest, he seemed to find security in the reawakened claims of fatherly duty. I knew he'd prefer it if I went.
Before long the child was asleep, or had wandered at least into the dream thickets on the path towards . . . I hunched forward and made half-pissed conventional noises about her beauty and temperament.
When he came down again I was waiting in the hall.
"How's that drink?" he said.
"I've finished it."
"Gosh."
"I'll get back to my mother's."
He stood in his socks in the doorway whilst I turned on the step and looked up at slow-moving cloud and three or four stars.
"See you tomorrow," I said. "I've got to read, god knows how I'll manage."
"You'll do it beautifully. Do you want a taxi?"
"I'll walk a bit and perhaps get the little bus if it comes."
"I haven't asked you anything about Belgium and your job and . . . I don't even know why you went."
I grinned at him. "Oh, the usual mixture of panic and caprice—" I couldn't explain to him why this was a place to get out of. I stepped forward with a shiver and slipped my arms round him and hugged him and after a second or two he gave me a comforting rough rub between the shoulderblades. I kissed him on the cheek and then pushily kissed his mouth, until he shook his head away.
"I can't," he said, "I'm sorry. I mean I'm so sorry about everything."
I waited at the bus-stop at the end of Willie's silent road, wishing I had never come, and thinking about him with a sullen charge of sexual violence. The night was damp and autumnal, the suburban birch and willow leaves came flitting down on to the tarmac, gathered in puddles or were swept about by the breeze in little dying sallies. I stood reading a notice about August Bank Holiday excursions to Brighton, Eastbourne and Dover. At the top a red bus surged forward in steeply exaggerated perspective and a cheery driver raised his cap—oh, the blind future tense of old announcements! How wrong it was to disclaim our adolescence, to wince at its gaucheries and ignorance, when we would be lucky to recapture its first-hand vividness and certainty. I read the schedule with a quickly gratified eye for misprints, then scuffed around, uncertain whether to start walking. It was the odd economics of time, the way waste demanded more waste, like cruising a boy on the street or just waiting for someone, anyone, up on the common on a summer night, not knowing if further waiting was merely adding to the tally of lost time or if it was the essential prelude to a pleasure that would be all the greater for the falterings of hope that came before it.
At Stonewell each year we had a field-day when the boys were divided into squads and despatched on surreal errands to test their initiative: bring back a letter signed by a bishop, or souvenirs from six Cinque Ports, present a baby to a master in disguise on Beachy Head. A kind of home-sickness coloured the early phase of the day. Hitch-hiking was forbidden, and whilst a few such as Dawn slipped away by bike, the rest of us amassed in sprawling bands at bus-stops and the local station, as if reluctant to separate, hoping feebly to tag along with our rivals, or to absorb the good luck, the slightly manic confidence of the two or three who were already making with maps, cameras and phone-calls to high-placed relations. But when we were an hour or two away from school, forlornly tramping up to the gates of top-security dockyards or trespassing through woodland in search of sham ruins, anxiety gave way to a guilty suspicion that none of it mattered, a muddled sense of futile freedom.
The days always took place in a perspective of failure, we never expected to get an interview with a submarine captain, and we were often stranded as evening fell at some inconvenient spot requiring to be rescued by the harassed masters in their station-wagons. Getting home turned out to be the real test of initiative, and we failed it. We waited at a shelterless bus-stop just like this, as the rain came on, playing basic games of chance with tossed coins. I remembered that once I was with a couple of others, including the palely introverted German boy Peter Rott (Tommy as he was known) who grew his nails into buckled claws and disguised the length of his hair by not rinsing out the shampoo: as the rain fell on his matted pine-scented head he began to bubble gently, and suds ran down his face like sleepy tears.
My father didn't have a few more months, he had just over a year; he died in that month of shadowed insouciance that precedes the arrival of the A-level results. I was relieved that it wasn't in term, that I hadn't been called out of school to be told, that it hadn't messed up my exams; but later on I mildly regretted the loss of the acclaim and respect that should have been due to me. By the following term, when I abruptly began to grieve, it no longer merited my schoolfriends' puzzled consideration.
His ashes were strewn on the common, because he had loved it, but the idea seemed so gruesome to me that I stayed alone in the house while my mother and Charlie and my Uncle Wilfred set off up the hill, uncertain whether they were a procession or if they should go a bit faster, like a family out for a walk. They had chosen an ordinary workday morning, quite early, when no one much would be around to wonder what they were doing, or have to avert their eyes in sudden understanding and dismay. I hadn't wanted to see the urn—more like my mother's rosewood sewing-box than the samovar I had imagined—and found it hard to accept that my father, the same size, more or less, as I was when he died, could have been reduced to this neatly portable and disposable quantity.
I sat in a kind of frozen observance of my own in the sitting-room, with the silent monument of the piano, the massed records and the unsinging sheet-music—my mother had left a Bach aria open on the music-stand. From beyond, Sir Thomas Beecham peered out over his signature with a look of testy merriment that I thought inappropriate. I thought how much people know when they die: that canterbury full of music, not just known but gone into in some adult never-satisfied way that I couldn't understand. I had always been too easy and ignorant a judge, and said it was lovely the first time, and also the second quite different time, and soon lost patience as he kept working it towards some future state I couldn't envisage and which now would never be.
His going was so slow, and so unprecedented in my experience, that I found it hard to bear in mind or even to believe in. He was quieter than usual, hating to make a fuss, but sometimes coldly demanding. He was glad that I was getting on with things, racing out after minimal bursts of revision to meet my friend on the common, showing the stifled high spirits of a boy with a secret happiness; his occasional words of reproach rankled with me for days, since I knew I was spending less of my time with him than before; an unadmitted fear of illness kept me away. "Let's have some music tonight," he would say, and catch my hesitation, my momentary reordering of my plans.
A large oval mirror hung by two chains above our fireplace. There was something aloof about it—it was never one of those mirrors that embrace a room and give it back to itself with a hint of strangeness and enhanced worth. Though I had become rather vain of late and conceited about my inky quiff, I tended not to consult it; but when we had a record on and I was sprawled on the sofa opposite, my eyes would dwell on the slipped horizon of the wall behind me reflected in its high ellipse—a sun-yellow wall like an empty beach reaching up to the sky of shadowed white ceiling, a birdless distance that took on splendour or desolation according to the music and the varying light of the months.
It was about that time that music, which had always been around me, and was identified, through the scent of polish in the sitting-room, with the very air I breathed, gained a new and independent grip on me; I suppose it was love that made me see a Mozart concerto or a lyrical and exultant Schumann symphony not simply as a wonder in itself but as a kind of explanation of life. Like love it seemed to admit me to a new dimension of luminous purpose: music raised my expectations to an ideal level that other friends found comic or unbelievable if they weren't initiates themselves. At school we were played some bits of Janacek, which were the most convulsively life-like music I had ever heard. I gathered up the scraps of Supraphon record-sleeve information, cryptically condensed and obscured by translation, that were all that could be found out by an English boy, and was amazed by the lateness of his flowering and the fact that this bristling old gent should be the one to confirm everything I felt at seventeen about life and sex and being out at night with winds and stars.
And what were my father's thoughts as he sat limply in his armchair, head back, eyes on a different distance, later on sometimes slipping into noiseless defenceless sleep? He was only fifty-five, only lately robbed by chemicals of the thick black hair we had always had in common; he hadn't reached his late phase yet. He started singing as a young man in the Navy: I imagined his mess-mates gathered round him or lying solemn in their bunks as he crooned some old salt-water ballad and their ship slid on through the moonlit toy sea of a British war-film. He must imagine those days too, I thought, rather than look forward to the final sudden crisis; but I knew he would never say. There was a beautiful accidental integrity about the galaxy of thoughts inside that listening head. Almost everything he knew and felt had never been spoken, never sung, never known to another soul.
The ritual events of the summer unfolded, both more intense and more trivial than usual. The May Day bank holiday fair came to the sloping football-pitch by the Flats, and gave me its annual, slightly threatening surprise as I strolled over the common on Friday after school and saw the caravans and dogs among the new greenery below and heard the mingled roar of generators and jangle of carousel-music. I saw Dawn there later in the company of three of his sporting friends from Drake, leaving a fortune-teller's booth with grinning faces, leaning superbly in at a shooting gallery, then wandering on, the others lighting up, watching shaken kids unloading from an aerial whirligig, Dawn secretly following the acrobatics of a teenage fair-boy swinging from pole to pole on a kind of switchback roundabout. I half-hid from them, paralysed with possessiveness, and dully tensed against the sarcasms that would break out when Dawn and I came together. We had a rather unhappy notoriety by then—ours wasn't a classic prefect-fag tendresse: our terms were worryingly for real, they sounded a deeper note than was tolerated in their lumbering, not unloving, locker-rbom camp.
Then it was Wimbledon again, watched in illicit paragraphs of two or three hours amid the final exam preparations, sometimes with Ogg's Seventeenth-Century Europe numbly open on my knee. Mirabelle was in electrifying form in an early women's heat I saw and seemed to call "Fault" obliviously at every first service. One of the men players from Eastern Europe evidently had an enormous penis, which I never heard the commentators refer to. I imagined Mirabelle would have some tales to tell about him.
I loved the dream acoustics of Wimbledon, the curtains drawn but the windows open behind them, occasional noises of traffic, distant shouts from the sunny common or close-up chatter of people walking past, louder and more unguarded than we were, as if they had leant right in to the lulled half-light of the room to say "Yeah, well see what she says" or "No you fucking don't!"; then, recessed within this, the hushed, attentive sound-world of the court, whose irregular pock-pocks and applause and torpid rallies of commentary themselves gave way from time to time to a further unseen dimension, disconnected applallse from another court, the sonic wallow of a plane distancing in slow gusts above, that a minute or two later would pass high over our house as well and drown out the television as it passed. The whole experience was one of oddly compelling languor, an English limbo of light and shade, near and far, subtly muddled and displaced. My father seemed satisfied with it, as if his family could share for a while his own powerless and agitated calm.
There was to be no holiday, of course, for the second year running, and I felt ashamed by this further evidence of the decline of the Manners family. The previous Christmas I had secured a distracted agreement that Dawn could come to Kinchin Cove with us and looked forward to it blindly in the teeth of all the warning signs. My mother rather liked Dawn, who helped with the washing-up, shared in her gentle mockery of my sixth-form posiness, and had a reliable second-row-forward straightness about him; she couldn't make out why we were such inseparable friends, and there was something sweet about her frequently exaggerating his good points, as if these must explain it: "Ralph's got bottom," she said to me one Sunday morning over pastry-dough and apple-peel. But by the early summer, brittle and hollow-eyed with her own anxieties, she had forgotten her promise. I made a scene about it, half-aware how I was disgracing myself, arguing really I suppose against something else.
I told Dawn it was off and took him some photographs of the cottage from an earlier summer, the beach and rocks just below, the shallow river that ran out over the sand, the loafing figures of Charlie and his genuinely unsuitable friend Gary Quine, who got wrecked in the Wreckers, called my parents by their Christian names and gave me, when I was twelve, my first awed lesson in the use of a rubber johnny. Dawn wasn't much bothered about the place I loved and wanted to bring him to as a new brother, who could teach me to dive. He slipped an arm round my neck, gave me a long hard-working kiss and said why didn't we go off together, camping—we could go to France. He'd already opted out of his own family's trip to Spain. I knew with a sudden grave certainty far bleaker than that of my father's death that I would never go to Kinchin Cove again.
We went to look at tents, quite unaware of their cost and complexity and scaling our plans down from "The Sultan" through "The Marquess" and "The Cavalier" until we ended up with a titchy dun-coloured thing called "The Pilgrim". "I think you'll be rather on top of each other in this one," said the sales assistant.
The plan that we have a trial night on the common came from my Uncle Wilfred, who had supervised innumerable camps for the de Souzay Trust and stressed the importance for both of us of knowing how to pitch and strike. It was a wildly exciting idea, clouded at first by the fear that he was going to come up and instruct us himself. But no. He would be sitting with my mother, as he did increasingly in my father's last months; she was the only woman-friend Wilfred had and the evenings, kindly meant, were a strain for both of them. "Your uncle's more of a man's man" was all my mother ever said about him. Cues for anecdotes about their shared childhood produced only grouchy vaguenesses; when she was fourteen he had gone to war and in a sense the rest of his life had taken place under military camouflage; all we saw was an impatient self-discipline and a sardonic tendency that never quite rose to humour and was especially disconcerting in these visits intended to comfort and distract. At the time I knew nothing of his constant sexual appetite, and it is possible she didn't either: like so many siblings they had nothing useful in common and their attempts at sharing things were marked by childish awkwardness and dogged cross-purposes.
Wilfred checked the kit for us. "Done it a thousand times with the Susies," he said, peering shrewdly at Dawn, who was bending to unbuckle his rucksack and looking somewhat resentful of the old boy's drill. I thought he might be critical of The Pilgrim: he declared it ambiguously to be "a tight little tent". "Having a cook-up?" he said. I told him we were just taking scotch eggs and a bar of chocolate, which he clearly thought feeble to the point of effeminacy, but my mother snapped that there was nothing else. I ran upstairs to say goodbye to my father, who was lying on his bed fully clothed. I asked him how he was feeling and he said, "Not very good, old boy", which was the most he ever did say, and left me habitually at a loss how to answer him. On the turn of the stairs corning down I heard my mother saying hurriedly to Wilfred, ". . .a week or two, perhaps, they say, probably no more"—so that I went into shocked slow-motion, my hand to my mouth, and after ten seconds jogged down in a forced briskness of concealment.
We hiked up the familiar paths, Dawn deliberately testing my loyalties with a good imitation of my uncle. Mimicry, like drawing, was one of his gifts, and both were literal and so at times unsettling. I responded with cowardly jabs and pinches, knowing that he would get me back later with some stifling, bare-breasted wrestling hold. It was still quite early and we wandered across the network of summer paths scuffed and scrawled through the dry grass; we didn't want to pitch our tent in the dark but felt self-conscious about doing so whilst walkers and lyrical late kite-fliers were still about. Probably the best place would be on the far side, the way Dawn came from home, where there would be shelter by the copse-like remains of ancient hedgerows. We circled back to the pond and sat on the bench, eating our scotch eggs and watching anglers packing up their gear. The boys among them trudged away with their rods and camp-stools like little old men. Behind them the silhouettes of pines and poplars were reflected and the sunset opened canyons of pink and ultrarnarine in the pond's muddy depths.
"Better look out for the folding star," I said.
"What is this folding star?" said Dawn, with the annoyance of hearing me keep saying it and having pretended before that he understood it.
"Don't you know your Milton?" I said pityingly. "The star that bids the shepherd fold? As when the folding star arising shows His paly circlet? . . . Dear me." I put an arm round his muscly shoulders and squeezed. "It's when you know you've got to put the sheep all safely in the fold." He shrugged himself free.
"What about putting the boys all safely in their tent?" he said.
"Yeah." I couldn't actually see the star in question but maybe it was best to set about it. I was always spoiling things with my quotations—he saw them as a kind of sarcasm against himself.
The Pilgrim took about five minutes to put up. Dawn dived into it as if scoring a try and when I looked in through the flap he seemed to take up all the space. I felt he'd laid a claim to it that I would never be able to challenge. I slid in alongside him, in the mackintosh-scented gloom, shocked by the lumps in the ground. "It's a good job we like each other," I said, slipping a hand between his legs and stroking his balls through the soft cotton of his tracksuit bottoms.
"Just think. Nice. Antibes. Juan-les-Pins"—each name said with savoured French Oral vowels.
"Mm."
He rolled on to me with a fierce grin that faded into a stare, lips parted, holding his breath then sighing it out suddenly over my face with a hint of sausage-meat and hard-boiled egg. He was working his stiff cock against my thigh. I ran my hands over his lightly sweating back and down under the elastic to the damp cleft of his arse—he curved his spine and my middle finger just reached, and drew a gasp from him as it touched his tender muscle. An outlying root of the ancient hedgerow pressed harder and harder into my back as if to register a serious objection.
I struggled out from under him and he took it as a turn in the sex-tussle till I said, "I'm just going outside for a minute."
I peed into the bushes and then strolled a short way across the hillside. In the late dusk the blanched, feathery heath-grasses looked almost luminous against the darkness of the woods. I sat on a round tump, it might have been a tiny tumulus, and looked out at thin cloud and distant lights. I'd never been this far this late, hearing only the rumour of cars on the London road, the patter of leaves like rain that slackens and stops. Tonight was like being given the keys to a bridal suite: we had come up here with an unwitting blessing. My lover and I. I wrapped the word around me like a stole. The wonder of having a lover—I saw us for an exhilarating moment from outside, the amazing thing we had done. Other boys at school had girlfriends, of course, and left you in no doubt about what they did with them; but what tawdry affairs those were—you saw them hanging around the shops at Saturday lunchtime, in a stumbling embrace as if each had to drag the other along. And how confident and independent we were, how we'd struck home to the real thing.
I looked back at the tent, dimly illuminated from within by a torch, and the shadow-play of Dawn on all fours inside, getting it ready for the night. I fell into an awful blank puzzlement at times about why it had to be him; and panic at the thought of hitch-hiking alone with him to Juan-les-Pins—so at his mercy, in those dusty roadside waits, the duty to keep up our spirits, my condescension and his touchiness. It might be very nice to be doing it with another boy, like Turlough or Hall; but they, of course, had shown no interest in seducing me. I saw myself deliberately breaking, no, twisting, my ankle, very badly, just outside Calais and having to come home.
A man was standing about thirty yards away, staring at the tent. I thought he hadn't yet seen me, despite the little eminence I was on: the khaki glow of the canvas and the bobbing rump-shaped shadows thrown across it from inside held his attention entirely. He stepped forward cautiously, stopped—turned his head to catch any sound. I was fascinated by his thinking himself the observer, unguessed in the dark; and chilled by the freedom it gave him, the unhindered time he had to spy on us or to do us worse harm. He saw me, seemed to ponder for a while what to do, then started slowly in my direction. I thought it would be absurd to move away, but stood up, as if I had been spotted in a game of hide and seek, and waited with my heart thumping in my chest. I thought he might be a kind of night-ranger who could tell us to move on, frighteningly without a uniform, so that we wouldn't know whether to obey him or not.
He stopped again a few feet away, slightly stooping forward to mime his curiosity. "Hi," he said, tentatively. A loud owl-call came from the wood, and then another, further off. I couldn't tell if they were real or people signalling—I knew real ones always sounded like imitations. He turned his head towards them and the faint cloud-gleam showed steel-rimmed spectacles, a white square face with swept-back dark hair. "Someone's making a night of it," he said. The voice was troublingly cultured, with a hint of drinkblur—he wasn't aware of the long pause that followed as I worked out how I could escape him in the dark. I'd played and stood about all over here, but the dimensions and positions were vague at this moment. "Looks rather tempting, don't you think?"
He felt slowly, amusedly, in his breast pockets, and brought out cigarettes and a lighter. "Do you smoke?"
"No"—it was a little anxious collgh. "No," I said again.
When the lighter flared I saw him lit up for several seconds; black leather jacket, grey jeans a bit tight around the midriff, the ghoulish chiaroscuro of the face above the flustered flame, wishful dark eyes lifting to make out what they could of me. The image floated on the moment's blackness that followed, suspended in the dry warmth of French tobacco smoke.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Eighteen," I said, adding on a year as if I had been challenged in a pub. And then, with a tenuous politeness I thought would protect me, "How old are you?"
"Thirty." He exhaled ponderingly. "Three."
Even more than I'd expected. I felt it like a sinister disgrace, being out in the night with this person, the menacing vagueness of his intentions, the seedy self-confidence of the queers out in their secret element. I'd better walk off quietly towards the tent.
"Why don't you come over here?" he said, with a new intimacy and tenseness. He swung his cigarette arm out in a casual shrug of possibility, but stayed where he was, as though not to waste the effort if I wasn't interested. "Well—suit yourself. I'd like it, if you'd like it." I couldn't associate the voice with anything to do with desire. It was like being propositioned by an announcer on Radio 3.
"No, thank you," I muttered offendedly. And then to my great surprise: "My father's very ill, actually."
He took this in with another glowing pull on his Gitane. "Shit."
"He's only got a couple of weeks left to live," I explained carefully, though it was myself I was explaining to.
He threw his cigarette away into the dry grass and I watched anxiously in case a fire began to crackle round it—there hadn't been rain for over a month. I wanted to criticise him bitterly for that. "Hey, hey, hey," he whispered heedlessly as he came up close. My face was stiff, I wasn't actually crying, just breathing out through my mouth in brusque sighs. When he put an arm around me I was hugged into leather and smoke and beer—it was horrible but remotely consoling, the firm clutch of another world that could take me if I let it. He stood and rocked me as if I were crying—I felt pinched and self-conscious not being able to, the vessel of tears sealed up tight inside. I slid my arm woodenly across the stranger's back. I thought, if my father could see me now . . .
"Edward, Edward?"—a low querying call. Dawn's unmistakable form, the swish of the grasses in his hesitant approach. The stranger smudged a kiss by my ear at the moment I broke away.
"No . . . no . . . " I was saying, almost under my breath, as I hit at his arm and half-stumbled in my desire to get free.
"Edward . . . ?" both of them said.
Dawn was triggered into the sudden belligerence I found both unnecessary and exciting. "Fuck off," he said to the man, with a short, spittly chuckle.
"Okay, okay," backing off a pace or two. "The kid's upset, okay?" A wariness to his tone, as though he'd heard this before. He began to walk away and called back, "He just wants looking after."
"Fucking queers," said Dawn with another incredulous laugh. And then peevishly to me, "He can fucking look after himself."
I couldn't answer that. I felt lost and utterly unknown. "It doesn't matter," I said. "He didn't do anything." I turned back towards the tent. If only we were in our respective homes, if we'd just put the tent up one morning in the garden to see how it was done. I hated the tent, and the hours to come, with Dawn squashing me and nowhere to escape to but the night and its predators. I wouldn't say anything about it now, but I felt I could reasonably get up at first light, under the pretext of writing a poem.
When I looked back I could just make out Dawn running very fast across the slope, the retreating stranger peeping round at the last moment as he brought him down with a quick easy tackle, got up and jogged back. Beyond them both, on the crest of the hill, figures were moving among the trees.
I hadn't been in All Saints for years and had forgotten what a reassuringly unsacred building it was; the old village church had been replaced in the late eighteenth century by a broad stuccoed box with an organ gallery and white box pews and a huge east window of clear glass, with trees and the vicar's upstairs windows visible as one sat and listened to him or thought about lunch. Only the old grey west tower had been kept from the earlier building, and that was under wraps again, being gently cleaned by weeks of running water. I arrived early and found the vicar negotiating with the masons about sheltering the mourners from the incessant cold downward flow. Then we went inside and pulled the chains that kindled primitive overhead heaters: I paced around through their warping blast, getting the feel of the place, more distracted by nerves than grief. I remembered the nausea that preceded class when I was a schoolteacher; even a personal tutorial could approach with a certain chill tread. "Oh darling!" I gasped, and loitered, fiddling with a pew-door's loose brass catch, lost in a gripping daydream of love for Luc.
"Everything all right?" murmured the vicar, resting a hand on my shoulder and swishing his alien skirts against my legs.
It was wonderful who came—our old friends, school contemporaries I hadn't seen for a decade, unfamiliar queens from London in oddly cut, somehow cheerful suits, antiques young men and other frauds, a tall deaf man whom nobody knew, who was Colin Maylord's father, a lad fresh off a motor-bike (oh Ralphie!) climbing in leathers and pony-tail into a pew beside startled country aunts and uncles, Gerald and Anne de Souzay, grandly self-effacing, with Edie's unhappy young brother Pip. I went to greet them, like an usher at a wedding, wondering if perhaps Edie wasn't coming. I was apprehensive about seeing her, after what she had been through, and about seeing her grieving, which I knew might be more harrowing than the grief I felt myself. But she had stopped outside to talk to Danny and Simon, and came in just behind them looking pale and composed, with the ghostly beauty people sometimes have when they are ill. She wore a magnificent black hat, with a tumbled pomp of sooty plumes about the brim. We embraced but said nothing, and she slipped in beside her immaculate mother.
I took a place at a pew's end and waited through that grim interval before the entry of the family and the bearers with their shocking burden of proof. The organist was wittering on through his formless and infinitely extendable introit, music that had never been written down, mere sour doodlings to fill the time, varied now and then by a yawning change of registration like a false alert. The occasional chink of a chisel or half-sung call came from the workmen outside. A sliver of a last night's dream came back to me and melted away as I tried to grasp it. Matt in the bar teasing me and mocking me with the story of how he'd seduced Luc the afternoon I'd left town—how easy it had been for him, the boy almost bawling for it, four, five times, how he was having him again tonight . . . I started thinking forward impatiently to my return flight tomorrow, wishing away the unrepeatable hours.
A prospect of the backs of heads, the part of yourself you didn't know about, which always came as a surprise in a clothes-shop or a barber's glancing hand-mirror, the part so trustingly turned to a lover. There were heads here I'd sat behind in school: Tony Barnett who used to stow his hair into his turned-up collar with the aid of grease and paper-clips, a big director of commercials these days with a shiny bald patch like a tonsure; Hilary Smythe (poor fellow), teenage cottager you saw hanging on the railings by the traffic lights in town, along with the drunks in torn tweed jackets, looking drably smart now, with a grey moustache; beside him that broadnecked figure like a boisterous but not ill-natured dog, actually called Boxer, captain of rugby, mopping at his eyes with a red handkerchief; in front of him the forgotten Sindon twins, Doug and Greg, or was it Greg and Doug, completely unchanged, brilliant swimmers interested in nothing else—I suddenly remembered their address, like a far-off holiday, and their bathroom with its smell of chlorine and drying towels—they were here in padded silvery suits; I wanted to lick the identical blond ferns in the hollows of their necks.
I couldn't listen to much of the service before I was on; we sang a hymn with the wrong tune, so that nobody did more than
mumble till the last verse. I tried to sing, but was voiceless with tears, glancing forward to the awful box, which held what
was left of my friend for the little while before we burnt him again. I kept trying to name people, not to fidget as the time
raced closer. Suddenly the vicar announced my reading, before the Gospel, much earlier than I expected. I looked stupidly
about, hoping that no one might have noticed. The audience settled back, some blowing their noses. There was a thin wail
from Dawn's mother in the front row, I knew how she must long for it to be over, but must want it done properly. So I went
up and read.
One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,
Along the heath, and near his fav'rite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne . . .
My father brought me through it, reminded me how to clear my head and strike out with that impalpable falsity that actors need. As I looked down through the grey November light at wretched faces, I remembered him describing an audience and its expectations, the control of yourself you needed to control them. They wanted something from me that it was surprisingly in my power to give. "Speak out," he said. It was rather like on certain still nights, I had never told anyone, but I felt him stooping out of the dark continuum he was banished to and pressing about me with advice too stern to be strictly followed.
Back in my seat I was quietly elated, almost expecting congratulations, and took a moment or two to adjust to the heavyheartedness around me. I'd shared a sympathetic smile with one of Dawn's sisters—all three were in the front row with their parents, two of them married to men who sat between them with the diplomatic dry-eyed look of outsiders. It was odd the role these women played in my sense of Dawn, odd that in my keenest memory of him I was absent and they were there—their family holiday, when he was just sixteen.
It is some banal Mediterranean resort, the sand shuffled and rubbishy at the end of the day, the sea still and salivary, the four children tearing about, Ralph muscly in tight little trunks, his shoulders pink from the sun, lightly terrorising the girls, whom he keeps on kissing and pinching, picking up and throwing into the water. He is full of unfocused energy which finds issue all day long in teasing and chasing, broken by spells of lordly basking, when they rub creams into him and, hoping for a truce, bring him drinks. He is all potential. His sturdy little cock gets hard as he nestles in the sand, and he likes to surprise the girls with the jut of it; they are censorious about it, as they are about his four chest hairs, and as he is about their breasts. What a busty little group they are. The day cools and the girls trail in while he has a last swim—a long fast lap of crawl. Then I see him wait out there, treading slowly, breathing sharply, looking back at the land where the first lights have appeared. He kicks his legs apart and feels the cool water touch his grateful sphincter. No one ever knew, no one ever will know, so I have him thinking of me, back at Rough Common, thinking of him, waiting for him, reaching down, as I imagine him doing, to feel the quick undertow of possibility.
The cars bearing the family nudged their stately way out across the abashed, resentful traffic for the drive northwards to the crematorium. The rest of us gathered loosely on the gravel, I ran over to Edie and we clutched each other in a brief agony of sobbing and stifled shouts. The de Souzays were to give a reception later and she said to come with them now. I clambered into the back of their long senatorial Daimler and into the hushed, complex atmosphere of this other family. We crept forward giving sympathetic smirks to the people who hardly heard the car. Gerald lowered the window and called out, "Come to us at one, you know where it is", though the Sindon boys looked a bit at a loss. The lad with the motor-bike seemed to have made friends. Others straggled along the road into the centre of town, advised of the fire and mulled wine at the George IV. Out ahead of them was a brisk stooped figure in a dark grey coat and trilby, flicking his walking-stick forward at each stride.
"Can we fit him in?" murmured Anne, and her husband slowed as she lowered her window in turn. "Can't we give you a lift, Perry?" she called out. But he kept on walking, merely raising his hat and hooting back, "I'm fine, thank you!"
"See you later, then."
"He's nearly ninety, you know," she said as we moved on.
"How very sweet of him to have turned out."
I glanced back at him, wondering if he'd remembered our meeting as he heard me read, now that I was fatter and older and never wrote poems. He still looked about him in the same way, as if anticipating greetings, still had that air of redundant youthfulness. There was something moving and irrelevant in his having come, as though Georgian England must be represented at these end-of-century exequies.
Later, much later. Five and twenty to midnight the greeny-white figures dimly showed. The day doused in drink and almost out. I rambled home from someone's house, alone but charged up by intense communings with virtual strangers, the compulsive unity that follows a funeral and its unambiguous end. The night was damp and still, the street-lamps hazed among the nearly bare trees, a moment I recognised when no one was about except barmen from pubs walking their Alsatians, taxis bringing passengers from the last train and leaving their perfume of burnt fuel.
I turned into Fore Street and saw an unusual phenomenon: across the far end a great roll of pearly fog that gave the lamps at the common's edge the air of a promenade at a melancholy lakeside resort. Fog had become so rare in my adult years that I looked on it as something miraculous, lucent but opaque, unaccountable in where it lay. I walked towards it slowly, down the middle of the road, and when I got to the low fence, stepped over and into its drizzly embrace.
To my slight surprise, it was almost dark inside the fog, but I soon hit the path, and the land was so familiar . . . I turned up my coat collar and found it misted with little drops. I was exhausted but hated the idea of going back to my room with my thoughts. The path steepened, and then suddenly the fog ended. I came up out of it into a different night of glittering air and a strong enough moon to throw long shadows in front of trees and bushes. I loped on up to the top with a shiver of exhilaration.
The fog circled the hill, and lay thick away to the east—the Flats were submerged, beyond them only the leafless crowns of the tallest trees showed vaguely in its surface. To the south other hills rose out of the pale floe like inaccessible friends, who none the less shared the sense of occasion, the hour or two of local sublimity. I pictured the silent foreign streets I was going back to, under the same moonlight. It came to me that it must be tomorrow—no, later today—that Helene was to be married. Surely she couldn't sleep. I wandered along the ridge almost expecting to be able to see the city's towers.
When I got to the bench I found I wasn't alone. It gave me a moment's gooseflesh, as if the person sitting there had abruptly materialised. I wondered if I'd been talking to myself aloud. He turned his head a fraction, but not so as to look right at me, and the moon glinted on round glasses. He was a black kid—by the generous extension I gave to that term year by year—perhaps in his early twenties; he was perched on the bench's back with his feet on the seat; I made out a woolly hat rolled down and a puffy waistcoat over other dark clothes. We stayed as we were for a while, sharing the unusual view and its mood of stillness and oblivion.
"Amazing night, isn't it?" I said lightly, just for form.
"Yeah," he said; and hopped down from the bench as though about to clear off, because I'd spoilt it for him. "Nippy."
Was it? I'd drunk too much to notice—but, yes, our breath made smoke. He'd probably been up here for ages, too; thinking something through. It took me a while to realise he was holding out a hand towards me.
"Feel that," he said indignantly.
I clutched it, it was cold and felt chapped; held it for a queer moment longer, only now seeing the point, and he squeezed my fingers back. He let out a sigh and pulled himself towards me in a kind of dance-step, and then we were hugging—he smelt nice, some ordinary girl's fragrance. We kissed sulkily, with a minor clash of spectacles.
I decided I was into this, and fumbled around his waist; his intake of breath as my own wintry hands touched his skin. The bubbled waistcoat made him look bigger than he was, but he had a round, hairyish backside and when I groped through the tangle of undone shirt-front and lolling belt-buckle I felt the start of something beautiful in his rough crotch-hair and had to tug it out, thickening and obstructing itself, from its prison down a tight jean-leg. I could barely make it out in the night between us, while he pressed against me, rubbing at my fly, kissing me with surprising fervour all over my face, his tongue slipping over my glasses and smearing the lenses. He was all stoked up, in a way I couldn't quite match but marvelled at, and at the chance that brought me here on this November night, which was otherwise a cold prospect for both of us.