‘Well, it was only for one term, you know.’
‘He didn’t want to go back, then?’
‘He could have gone back, of course, after the War. But, you know, Norma, he was twenty-three or something, youngest ever squadron leader, DFC – he just couldn’t see himself getting back into student life.’
‘I should think you were jolly glad, too.’ The repeated click of a lighter, and in a few seconds cigarette smoke in the ozone. ‘No, Cliff was saying he’d had a very good war.’
‘Yes, he did. He loved it all really, that was the thing.’
Norma said nothing about Clifford’s war. ‘You took a while to get round to starting a family, though, Connie.’
‘I suppose we did, we both had so much energy – you know what it’s like—’
‘Well . . .’
‘And there was the business to set up – that was all-consuming for five years. And anyway we wanted our fun.’ He felt the pause here, she must have looked round. ‘Not that it wasn’t fun having Jonathan . . . David always wanted a boy.’
‘Oh, did he? You never wanted another?’
‘I wouldn’t have minded, but he wasn’t keen – strictly between you and me.’
‘Of course . . .’ Two busy puffs and a sigh as she screwed the barely smoked cigarette into the sand beside the others. ‘I expect David’s very busy with work all the time, anyway, Cliff is. It’s nine o’clock sometimes before he gets in.’
His mother said quite humorously, ‘Yes, I don’t always feel I have his undivided attention.’
‘Well, this is it,’ said Norma, perhaps not sure how vexed she was.
‘He’s on the Council now, too, of course. And he’s taken on the RAF benevolent thing, which he feels very strongly about.’
‘Oh, well . . .’
‘But Cliff must have a lot of dinners and so on.’
‘Oh, dinners, meetings . . . Dinners he can take me to, not always of course, and there’s the Masonic. But I go with him if I can – well, it saves me having to cook!’
It was hard to picture Norma cooking – sausages on sticks seemed about it. Connie said, ‘And Drum has his sports things too, some evenings, and most weekends.’
‘Ah . . . yes,’ said Norma. Here she was unable to compete.
Johnny ran off down the beach, the tide some way out now, and their little encampment stuck where no one would choose to be. He looked about as he jogged and slowed, made detours round rocks where there was a possible boy to see, a taut contour, a heart-racing moment of nakedness, went within a foot of near-naked couples, in the borderless democracy of the shore. What he hoped to see was Bastien coming back over the rocks from Crab Beach, and telling him nothing had happened. He hopped up on to a long concrete casing like a walkway exposed by the tide – there was a boy about his own age playing by himself just below on the other side. He looked out and there Bastien was – Johnny waved and shouted, and thought he saw the upward nod, his sign of greeting and dismissal. The boy, in red swimming trunks and with a child’s spade, digging for something in the saturated sand, looked up too, turned and peered at Johnny.
‘Is that your friend, then?’
Johnny still saw the merit in saying yes.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Bastien – he’s French.’
‘Oh, yes? . . . I’ve got a French friend,’ said the boy, as if he knew both the pleasures and the problems of having one. He stared at Bastien approaching, small against sea, sand and rocks but unique and magnetic. ‘They’re very smooth, aren’t they.’
‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ said Johnny, and blushed annoyingly.
The boy clambered up on two rocks and stood beside him, looked at him cautiously. He said, ‘Is it your dad’s got the Jensen C-V8?’
‘What, the Mark III, you mean?’ said Johnny.
‘Is it? I didn’t know it was the Mark III.’
‘Yeah,’ said Johnny. ‘We had the Mark II before.’
The boy looked at him, hesitated. ‘Is it made of fibreglass?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Johnny, frowning out his own faint unease at the fact. ‘The doors have aluminium skins, of course.’
‘Oh, right . . .’ He stared down the beach at the collapsing waves, in the strange gravity of these facts. ‘I should think it could take off,’ he said.
Johnny tutted. ‘Not with that engine – it weighs a ton.’ He heard his father, in his brusque defence of the car against any sidling suggestion it was lightweight, and not what it seemed.
‘I suppose so,’ said his friend. ‘How fast does it go, then?’
‘Hundred and thirty-six?’
The boy seemed to make some calculation of his own. ‘You’ve never had it that fast,’ he said, as Bastien came up, and rather than joining them looped further up the beach, past where the mother and two girls were still sprawled, all three it seemed sound asleep. Johnny’s new friend stood assessing him as he passed, then ran off without a word the other way.
Johnny homed in on his mother and Norma just as Bastien strolled up, gave them all a more friendly nod, kicked off his flip-flops and flung himself down on the towel he had left an hour before, the corners now curled up by the wind and the edges strewn with sand. Norma looked at him, from under the wide brim of her hat. ‘So where have you been, young man?’
He rolled over, glanced up at her, sand on his bottom, hair stiff and quilled from the sea and the breeze, something sly in response to her boring adult tone. ‘I’ve been walking, on the coast.’
‘How far did you go?’ said Johnny pleasantly, siding with him but dreading his idea of what he had got up to even more, now he was back and lying there in all his glorious capacity.
‘Not so far,’ said Bastien. ‘No, it was nice,’ and when Norma turned to find her bag he winked at him – Johnny gasped, and looked away, pierced by the thought, the muddled impossible image, of Bastien seducing the topless women on Crab Beach.
‘You need some protection from the sun, Monsieur,’ said Connie.
He smiled and cringed – ‘I don’t have . . . Madame.’
Norma, in her strictness, with its shy shade of experiment, childless woman among teenage boys, said, ‘What do you need?’
‘I think you have . . .’ he said, and watched as Connie dug in the baby-basket, and held out the plastic bottle with a palm tree on it.
‘I have some,’ said Norma, peering down through her sunglasses into the bag where her own more expensive creams were carried.
Now Bastien was helpless, grinning at Connie – ‘Madame, can you put it on to me? I can’t reach . . .’ and he flopped back, face down, lifting his buttocks just once, to make himself comfortable.
‘Well, I can . . .’ said Johnny, sitting forward, heart in mouth.
‘Oh, I’ll do it,’ said Norma, ‘for heaven’s sake.’
And now Bastien lay on his back and slept, or seemed to, in a sated surrender to the heat. It was as though he had given himself to Johnny to look at, there was trust of a kind in the complete indifference of sleep; and also a kind of contempt, since looking, it seemed, was all Johnny was left with. Of course they slept together each night, one above the other, in their squeaking bunks, ‘more fun for you both’ as his mother had said . . . Norma wandered down to the sea, stopping here and there and staring blankly at the family with the dog; she didn’t really go in, just stood, smart and solitary, where the waves could swill over her feet, and back again, sucking the sand out from under them. It seemed his mother too was asleep now, under her floppy hat, The Red and the Green sloped sideways, her hand over the page. Johnny looked at Bastien for spells of five seconds, then ten seconds, together. The dip of his smooth stomach, the hidden navel like an orifice, not a button, the thin gap under his taut waistband narrowed with each slow breath . . . Because of the sea and the sand Johnny hadn’t brought his sketchbook, but what he saw was indelibly drawn on his mind.
‘What about lunch?’ said Norma. It was another experiment of their husba
ndless day that mealtimes were so neglected. Now it was after two. Johnny’s mother must have seen there was no point in resistance.
‘I’ll make us all something when we go up.’
And a few minutes later the women were tented and changing. Bastien showed no sign of moving, and the possibility of a short sunny nearly naked time alone with him took possession of Johnny. ‘We’ll come up in a bit, then,’ he said.
‘It’ll just be salad,’ said his mother. ‘Take your time.’ She stepped free of the Zulu, the damp heap of her things. Norma too emerged, in her white shorts, and started to pull up and shake the towels, Bastien wincing and shrinking from the blown sand.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘we will bring everything back for you.’
Norma smiled narrowly at this unforeseen offer. ‘Oh . . . well, if you like, Bastien.’
‘Yes, yes, we’ll bring them, Mum,’ said Johnny, the tone of cheerful drudgery.
‘Yes, Jonathan will carry them,’ said Bastien, and smiled at him as he got to his feet. He was already a few yards down the beach when he said, ‘I race with you,’ and jogged down towards the water, turning to a sprint when Johnny came up fast beside him, shouldering him, all the force of longed-for contact in the riding of arm against arm. They went into the sea together, went under – it was as if all Bastien’s meanness, the awful act he had put on for the past week, was banished in a glittering splash.
Larking in the water, dragging each other down, just the edge of panic once from Bastien, he disguised it in two seconds, jeered at Johnny as he pulled himself to him, an arm round his neck, and Johnny, in a dream, without thinking or asking raised his legs and circled Bastien’s waist with them. They laughed, steadied, gasped in each other’s faces, Bastien stared at him as if thinking how to phrase something or more probably planning his next attack, jutted his lips forward, and kissed Johnny on the mouth. It was very quick, and then he’d fallen back, catching Johnny out in the instant of surrender. ‘Salope!’ he said, and laying the flat of his hand on top of his head, pushed him under.
It took them a minute to feel the heat, when they came out and ran up the beach with the water all over them still. With a touch of clowning Bastien picked up a Zulu, and slipped it over his head; Johnny did the same, and they stood pulling the towelling round them from inside, to get roughly dry. Then Johnny realized Bastien was untying his trunks and with two stooping twists pushing them down: they appeared round his ankles, and he stepped out of them. Johnny did the same as calmly as he could, picked them up, and wrung them out, and took them up to the baskets, thrilled by his own hidden nakedness. When he turned back, he found Bastien had sat down on a towel, was huddled up but with his knees apart under the Zulu.
It was something Johnny had done, last year, with the secret daring that seemed nothing when the impulse was so strong. He thought at first Bastien was pretending, as he sat down facing him, and then he knew, with a piercing sense of a last and only chance and at the same time of cruel exclusion, that it was for real. ‘I race with you!’ he said. It was a jolt, a sudden opening, and Johnny was doing it too, with quite new feelings of not wanting to race, of wanting it to go on for a long time, to be saved and postponed into something different and better. If it was a race it would soon be over, Bastien could come unbelievably fast, forty seconds from starting last year, when they’d tried it, but in bed then, together. He stared at him avidly, saying nothing. He was part of the game but the game kept them apart, each of them focused on his own desires, though Johnny’s, he knew, burned in his face: he doubted how long he could look at Bastien and think of him in that way. Bastien smiled at him, was he mocking him or saying that of course he loved him? He had the intense private look of the approaching climax, it seemed terribly obvious, but no one was watching, and his eyes twitched away beyond Johnny’s shoulder in a last hungry stare at the two girls up by the wall.
The boys gathered up the things and started back to the house, the mood cool, quiet, souring in the sun on the steep path, the clamber up steps encumbered with the baskets, but with something strange still binding them, the one shared act that neither of them mentioned. The relief of being part of Bastien’s mutiny rather than its target carried him through, and gave a new twist of hope, and anxiety, to the remaining three days. On the final lane climbing out of town – the sunroom windows of ‘The Lookout’ glimpsed above and to the left, over the pampas grass – Bastien seemed uncertain. Was it better to drag behind, with sullen thwacks of his flip-flops, or to stride ahead, competent and careless? The driveway to ‘Greylags’, cut from the shaly bank, climbed sharply on the right to its covered carport, and it must have been because Clifford Haxby’s Daimler was already parked in it that the maroon back end of the Jensen, pulled in behind it, jutted out. Johnny stopped for a second, in surprise and disappointment that they were back, and the unusual freedom of the hours with the women at an end already. It seemed too soon – how far was it to Truro? About fifteen miles, but on twisty roads. He looked at his watch and it was ten past three, on the beach they had forgotten time and now it had caught them out. Bastien came up behind. ‘This is their house?’ he said and of course there was no one else he could be referring to.
‘It’s Dad’s car,’ said Johnny, ‘the Jensen.’
‘Ah,’ said Bastien, and nodded.
‘They’re back already.’
‘Perhaps it was not far?’ said Bastien, going a few steps up the drive as if to check Johnny was right, seeing some interest in the situation when he might have been counted on to shrug and pass by. He stood peering, with his basket, as if delivering something.
‘Come on,’ said Johnny, ‘I’m hungry, let’s have lunch,’ and when Bastien went a bit further, ‘They’re probably still talking business.’
Bastien said, too loud, ‘Have you seen the house?’ He was at the top of the drive. ‘It’s nice.’
‘No,’ said Johnny – he’d wanted to see it, but the Haxbys had put a bad spell on it for him. ‘Come on.’
‘In a minute . . .’ with a flap of his free hand. He put down the basket and went on out of view.
So Bastien was being difficult, again, after all, and he was left at the gateway, scuffing the stones in his plimsolls. ‘I’m going home.’
He went a few steps up the road, hoping Bastien would follow, but when he didn’t he stopped again. Clifford Haxby hated Bastien, and his father would be furious if he caught him creeping about while they were having a meeting. They were friends but it would seem like trespassing.
When he reached the top of the drive, Johnny couldn’t see him. ‘Greylags’ was a bungalow, expensive-looking, clad in reddish wood, and with French windows on to a front lawn. All the windows were closed: they could only just have got back, and there was a feeling almost that no one was in, they had parked the car there and gone away – gone over, it struck him in all its simplicity, to ‘The Lookout’ itself. There was no one here, and he studied the house across its smooth lawn with a gripping impatience, even so, for Bastien to reappear. A car came down the steep lane behind, slowed, but went on, to the left, into the town. A great screaming jabber of seagulls broke out, echoed round from the harbour below, the horn of the ferry sounded distinctly, a man close by behind the fence of the next house spoke, and a woman answered; and still the Haxbys’ house, or the house they were renting, sat closed and unresponsive, while Johnny made up excuses, breezy and hopeless, for standing and staring at it. Here Bastien was now, coming out from round the side of the house, moving quickly but with feet clenched to silence his flip-flops. Had he been seen? He gave Johnny the quick grin of someone who has kept a friend waiting. ‘No one here,’ said Johnny.
Bastien shrugged, and looked vaguely disgusted at the pointlessness of the thing. Then, stumbling, scratching back at one point with his foot to capture his shoe, he started to run down the drive. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Lunch time, I’m hungry.’
‘What, did they see you?’ Johnny said.
‘Nothing to se
e, my friend,’ said Bastien, ‘nothing to see,’ and reached out to bring him with him, sudden brotherly warmth of his body against him, marching him out under the strength of his arm, Johnny’s hand in a moment round him, the beltless waist of his jeans, nothing on, of course, underneath.
‘Oh, your basket . . .’
He had to break out of Bastien’s embrace to go back for it. He reached the edge of the lawn, snatched up the basket, and in the moment that he turned he saw, or thought he saw (the reflections of sky, cloud and blue in the wide windows), the unfolding ripple, the slow wink of light and shade, of the fine slats of a Venetian blind swivelled upwards and then downwards on their cord and closed.
THREE
Small Oils
1
‘Hello. You’re new!’
Johnny gave a cautious smile. ‘Am I?’
‘And what have you got for us there?’
‘Well, it’s for Mr Dax, in fact.’ He showed the flat brown-paper parcel, with its pasted label, Evert Dax Esq., Cranley Gardens. ‘It’s a picture.’
‘Of course I thought it must be.’ The man peered at it teasingly, his lean, humorous head on one side. He wore a bow tie, a brown velvet jacket and flared tweed trousers surprising on a man of sixty. The woman with him, who was younger, red ruffles at her bosom under a red coat, said defiantly,
‘Well, we’re going to take the lift.’ They crossed the hall to where the cage of a lift ran up in the narrow embrace of the stairs. ‘I’m Clover, by the way.’
‘Oh, Johnny,’ said Johnny, ‘Johnny Sparsholt.’
She half-turned and looked at him for a moment more closely. ‘Oh, yes. And do you know my husband.’
‘Freddie Green, hello,’ said the man, ‘hello.’ He smiled again, and Johnny wondered if he did in some sense know him – he seemed to expect him to. ‘It may not be working, love.’
Clover pressed a worn brass button; there was a sequence of pneumatic clacks, and after a longish pause, in which they all peered upwards, the hanging loop of cable dropped slowly into view, and then the tiny cabin itself, a cage within a cage. ‘I’m not going to ask you what the picture is,’ said Freddie, as the lift came to rest. He pulled back the folding grille, and let Clover, who was rather larger than him, go in first.