‘Mm?’
‘I meant to say I like your tie, by the way . . .’
Peter was holding him at arm’s length with a serene, almost humorous, almost smug look, Paul felt, as if he were measuring him on some scale of previous kisses and conquests. ‘Oh, my dear,’ he murmured, with a sort of swallowed laugh, that suggested some shyness after all. They held each other, cheek to cheek, Peter’s evening stubble a further part of the dreadful strangeness of being with a man. Paul wasn’t sure if he had fluffed it hopelessly, like his frightened scuttle behind the pampas grass when he’d first arrived; or if this could be taken as a natural amorous pause in which his own confusion would be smoothly concealed and forgiven. He knew he had already been found wanting. And quite quickly he thought, well, it was a sort of triumph just to have kissed another man. ‘I suppose we should go back,’ he said.
Peter merely sighed at this, and slid his hands tighter round Paul’s waist. ‘You see, I rather thought we might stay out here a bit longer. We’ve both earned it, don’t you think?’ Paul found himself laughing, curving to him, suddenly gripping him hard so as to keep him with him and somehow immobilize him at the same time.
Drink and kissing seemed to move to their own clock. When the two of them got back to the house the crowds were already thinning, though a few of the oldsters had settled in, in new arrangements of the crowded chairs in the drawing-room. Paul felt that he and Peter must be bringing a gleam of the unspeakable with them out of the night beyond the french windows, though everyone amiably pretended not to notice. Drink seemed to have captivated them all, reducing some to silent smiles, others to excitable gabble. John Keeping, very drunk, was raptly explaining the virtues of the port he was drinking to a man three times his age. Even Mr Keeping, with the globe of a brandy glass in his hand, looked unselfconsciously happy; then when he saw Paul he glanced awkwardly away. There had been another change of music, it was some old dance number that sounded to Paul like a scene from a wartime movie, and on the clear square of floor beside the piano, barely moving but with a captivated look of their own, Mrs Jacobs was dancing with the farmer man, who turned out to be Mark Gibbons, the marvellous painter she’d mentioned, who’d lived in Wantage. Another couple Paul didn’t know revolved at twice the speed beyond them. Paul smiled at them mildly and benevolently, from beyond the enormous dark distance he had just travelled, which made everything else appear charming but weirdly beside the point. ‘I think I’ve got to go,’ Peter said to Julian, resting his hand on his shoulder, and Paul painfully half-believed the story even though he knew they were meeting up again by the car.
Outside the loo he was waylaid by Jenny. ‘Do you want to come to the Corn Hall with us?’ she said.
Julian looked surprised, then deliciously shifty. ‘Yeah, do you think we can . . . yeah, come with us, that would be good, actually . . . Do you want to ask Dad?’ he said to Paul.
‘Um . . . I think probably not,’ said Paul, pleased that his tone of voice got a laugh. He ought to thank Mr Keeping for the evening before he left – the gratitude suddenly keen and guilty, and haunted by a new suspicion that perhaps he hadn’t been meant to stay for the whole party, and had made a large and unmentionable mistake.
‘I mean it goes on till midnight, what is it now?’
Paul couldn’t tell them that he had promised to go with Peter and sit – where? – he pictured a shadowy lay-by where he’d seen courting couples in cars. It was a further shock when Peter said, ‘Oh, why not? – just for half an hour – I feel like dancing’ – just as if their own plans didn’t matter at all.
‘OK . . .’ said Julian – a slight sense inexpressible in the air that though he needed them as a cover he wasn’t completely thrilled at the idea of dancing at the Corn Hall with them.
‘Is your brother coming?’
‘God, don’t tell him,’ said Jenny.
‘I love dancing,’ said Peter.
‘Mm, me too,’ said Jenny, and to Paul’s confusion the two of them started rolling their hips and twitching their shoulders at each other. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said.
In the hall Mrs Keeping was standing in rapid, muttered conversation with another woman. ‘He really can’t,’ she was saying, as Paul hung guiltily back. Out on the drive, at the edge of the spread of light from the front door, Uncle Wilfrid was standing, arms folded tightly but face turned up to admire the heavens as if the rest of him were not knotted up with tension and rejection. ‘I’ve got Jenny in the box-room, Mother in the spare room, both the boys home . . . he should have said he was coming.’
‘I’m sure we could find a corner for him,’ the other woman said.
‘Why can’t he get a taxi back?’
‘It’s a bit late, darling,’ said the woman.
‘Is it?’
‘I don’t suppose he’s got his jim-jams . . . ?’
A sort of desperate solidarity seemed to take over Julian’s face, even if it meant not going to the Corn Hall after all. He slipped out into the drive – ‘Hullo, Uncle Wilfrid . . .’ taking him aside, a bit further off.
‘You can see the Crab, Julian,’ said Wilfrid.
And a minute later they were all in the Imp, in the sharp little comedy of sudden proximity, everyone being witty, everyone laughing, shifting the books and litter from under their bottoms as the car bounced at getaway speed along Glebe Lane. They could hear the grass in the crown of the road swiftly scouring the underside of the car. Wilfrid was in the front, Paul, Jenny and Julian in a painfully funny squash in the back. Julian’s hot thigh pressed against Paul’s thigh, and Paul found the boy was gripping his hand, he thought just out of general abandon and selfless high spirits. He didn’t dare squeeze it back. They rattled out into Church Lane, down the Market Place into the surprising surviving outside world, which included a police car and two officers standing by it just outside the Bell. Peter was supremely unimpressed, shot past them, pulled up and turned off the lights, the engine, just in front of the Midland Bank. A sense of reckless disorder overcame Paul for a moment. But tomorrow was Sunday . . .
They clambered out of the car, a small adjustment taking place. Wilfrid said, ‘I haven’t gone dancing since just after the War.’
‘You’ll love it,’ Jenny told him, with a confident nod. She was in effect, in this lopsided group, his partner.
‘Everybody danced with everybody then.’
Peter locked the car, and gave Paul a helpless but happy look, a shrug and a smirking shake of the head.
People were leaving the Corn Hall, the women scantily dressed in the summer night, but clinging to the men. Paul disguised his reawoken tension about seeing Geoff, and chatted pointedly to Jenny as they went into the lobby. As he squinted through the glass doors, the high-raftered hall, under the slow sweep of coloured lights, was thick with the promise of his presence. A boomingly lively song was going on, and Jenny was dancing a bit already – ‘Can we just go in?’
‘Only another twenty minutes, my love,’ said the woman at the door.
‘You’re not charging us, are you?’ Jenny said, defying her to ask her her age.
The woman gazed at her, but the tickets and the cash were all put away, people pushed past, waiting and staggering out past the cloakroom, the lavatories with their stained-glass doors. So in they went.
Paul thanked god for the drink – he strode straight across the hall, round by the stage, smiling into the shadows, as if he lived in places like this – but no, Geoff wasn’t here . . . he came back to the others with a pang of sadness and relief; then remembered his tie, and pulled it off impatiently. He felt almost as shy about dancing as kissing, but this time it was Jenny who took him in hand – their little group started bopping together, Paul smiling at all of them with mixed-up eagerness and anxiety, Wilfrid studying Jenny but not quite getting her rhythm as she rocked in her jutting-out frock and waved her hands in front of her, perhaps waiting for someone to take them, while Julian lit and voraciously smoked a cigarette. Beyond him, p
eeping mischievously at Paul through the patterned light, Peter did his own dance, a kind of loose-limbed twist. Around them other couples made way, looked at them with slight puzzlement, made remarks, surely . . . Surely people in the town knew Jenny, Julian certainly got frowns and smiles of surprise. Paul followed two couples jiving rapturously together, with sober precision despite the abandon of their faces, back and forth in front of the stage.
A big red-faced woman in a spangled frock picked up Wilfrid . . . did she know him? – no, it seemed not, but he was ready for her, a gentleman, truly sober, and with a certain serious determination to do well. Paul watched them move off, with a smile covering his faint sense of shock, and Jenny leant in towards Paul and nodded, ‘A friend of yours.’
Paul’s hand on her shoulder for a second, prickly fabric, warm skin, strangeness of a girl – ‘Mm?’
‘Young Paul?’
He hunched into himself as he turned and there was Geoff, reaching out to him but rearing back in broad astonishment; then his face very close, Geoff’s hot boozy breath as if he was about to kiss him too, careless and friendly, ‘What are you doing here!’ – and showing Sandra, who shook hands and was inaudibly introduced, looking only half-amused, but Paul was a colleague, perhaps he’d mentioned him. She crossed her arms under her bosom and then looked aside, at others making for the door. ‘Christ, is old Keeping here too?’ – Geoff big with his own joke. ‘Just young Keeping,’ said Paul, nodding at Julian, but he didn’t seem to get it, stood nodding as the lights came teasingly hiding and colouring the contours of his tight pale slacks and the deep V of his open-necked shirt, a first heart-stopping glimpse of naked Geoff. He leant in again, his rough sideburn brushed Paul’s cheek for a half-second, ‘Well, we’re off’ – Sandra tugging, smiling but moody, as if to say Paul mustn’t encourage him. ‘See you Monday!’ – and then his arm was round Sandra’s waist as he escorted her in a gallant grown-up way towards the lit square of the exit.
‘Well, he’s rather fab!’ said Jenny.
‘Oh, do you think?’ said Paul and raised an eyebrow, as if to say girls were a push-over, turning to look for him as he went out into the light, and then into the dark, as though he were a real missed opportunity, then grinning gamely at Peter as he swayed and sloped towards them, biting his lower lip, and gripped them both in a loose very drunken embrace and whispered in Paul’s ear, ‘Tell me when you want to go.’
‘A mad one and a slow one,’ announced the lead guitarist of the Locomotives, the words heavy and resonant in the high roof of the hall. ‘Then it’s goodnight.’
‘Let’s stay a bit longer,’ said Paul, ‘now we’re here.’
The final dance, the watch showing five past twelve, and the two policemen standing genially by the open door in the bright light there, talking to the woman that took the coats. They looked in, across the floor, now sparsely occupied by the dancers who felt the lonely space expanding about them, the night air flowing in, Jenny and Julian locked together in a stiff experimental way, his chin heavy on her shoulder, Paul and Peter now leaning by the wall, swaying in time but a few feet apart, their faces in fixed smiles of uncertain pleasure, and out in the middle, Wilfrid and his new friend, who’d adjusted herself imaginatively to her partner’s rhythms and was making up a kind of military twostep with him to the tune of ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’.
6
Peter roared along Oxford Street, so very different from its famous namesake, the few shops here with their blinds down in the early torpor of the summer evening, and just before he came into the square he wondered with disconcerting coolness if he did fancy Paul, and what he would feel when he saw him again. He wasn’t exactly sure what he looked like. In the days since he’d kissed him at the Keepings’ party his face had become a blur of glimpses, pallor and blushes, eyes . . . grey, surely, hair with red in it under the light, a strange little person to be so excited by, young for his age, slight but hard and smooth under his shirt, in fact rather fierce, though extremely drunk of course on that occasion – well, there he was, standing by the market-hall, oh yes, that’s right . . . Peter thought it would be all right. He saw him in strange close focus against the insubstantial background, the person waiting who is also the person you are waiting for. Peter was a little late – in the four or five seconds as the car slowed and neared he saw Paul glance at the watch on his inside wrist, and then up at the Midland Bank opposite, as if he was keen to get away from it, then saw him take in the car and with a little shiver pretend he hadn’t, and then, as Peter came alongside, his jump of surprise. He’d changed after work into clean snug jeans, a red pullover slung round his shoulders; the attempt to look nice was more touching than sexy. Peter stopped and jumped out, grinning – he wanted to kiss him at once, but of course all that would have to keep. ‘Your Imp awaits!’ he said, and tugged open the passenger door, which made a terrible squawking sound. He saw perhaps he could have tidied the car up a bit more; he shifted a pile of papers off the floor, half-obstructed Paul with his tidying hands as he got in. Paul was one of those lean young men with a bum as fetchingly round and hard as a cyclist’s. Peter got in himself, and when he put the car in gear he let his hand rest on Paul’s knee for two seconds, and felt it shiver with tension and the instant desire to disguise it. ‘Ready for Cecil?’ he said, since this was the pretext for the visit. It seemed Cecil had already become their codeword.
‘Mm, I’ve never been to a boarding-school before,’ said Paul, as if this were his main worry.
‘Oh, really?’ said Peter. ‘Well, I hope you’ll like it,’ and they swept off round the square, the car making its unavoidable coarse noise. It was something a bit comic about a rear-engined car, the departing fart, not the advancing roar.
‘So how was your day?’ said Peter, as they went back up Oxford Street. It was three miles to Corley, and he felt Paul’s self-consciousness threatening him too as he smiled ahead over the wheel. It was something he would have to override from the start.
‘Oh, fine,’ said Paul. ‘We’ve got the inspectors in, so everyone’s a bit jumpy.’
‘Oh my dear. Do they ever catch you out?’
‘I don’t think they have yet,’ said Paul, rather circumspectly; and then, ‘Actually I was a bit distracted today because of tonight, you know.’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Peter, pleased by this and glancing at Paul, who was half-turned away from him, as if abashed by his own remark.
‘I’ll be interested to see the tomb.’
‘Oh, well, of course, that too,’ said Peter.
Outside the town a dusty breeze blew off the wheat-fields through the open windows, and mixed with the smell that he knew was slightly sickening of hot plastic and motor oil. In the noisy bluster of air perhaps they didn’t need to say very much; he explained about the imminent Open Day, the cricket match and the new Museum, but without feeling Paul took it in; and then: ‘Well, here we are’ – the line of woods was approaching, and he hoped Paul saw, far back from the main road, the flèche on the chapel sticking up among the trees. Here was the lodge-house, a diminutive foretaste of the mansion itself, a cluster of red gables, with a corner turret and a spirelet of its own. The huge wrought-iron gates stood perpetually open. And what Peter always thought a lovely thing happened. As he slowed and changed down and turned off into the chestnut-shadowed drive they seemed to slip the noose of the world, they entered a peculiar secret – in the rear-view mirror, quickly dwindling, the cars and lorries still rushed past the gateway; in a moment they could no longer be heard. There was a magical mood, made out of privilege and play-acting, laid over some truer childhood memory, the involuntary dread of returning to school – Peter tested and even heightened his own feelings by peeping for them in the face of this new friend he barely knew, and yet suspected he knew better than anyone had before. On their right, through the wide strip of woodland, the playing-fields could be glimpsed, the thatched black shed of the cricket pavilion. ‘These woods are out of bounds, by the way,’
he said. ‘If you spot a boy in there you can give him the hairbrush.’
‘The hairbrush . . .’
‘On the BTM.’
‘Oh,’ said Paul after a moment. ‘Oh, I see. Well, let’s have a look for one later,’ and blushed again at the surprise of what he’d said. Peter laughed and glanced at him, and thought he had never met a grown man so easily and transparently embarrassed by anything remotely risqué. He was a hot little bundle of repressed emotions and ideas – perhaps this was what made the thought of sex with him (which he planned to have in the next hour or two) almost experimentally exciting. Though what colour he would turn then . . . ‘Now, here we are.’ There had been some talk about Corley at Corinna’s party, but Peter hadn’t told him what to expect. He slowed again at the second set of gate-piers, and there suddenly it was. ‘Voilà!’
Some form of stifling good manners, or perhaps mere self-absorption, seemed to keep Paul from seeing the house at all. Peter let his own smile fade as they trundled across the gravel sweep and came to a halt outside the Fourth Form windows, the sashes up and down to let in air, and the curious heads of boys doing prep turning to look out. The indescribable atmosphere of school routine and all the furtive energies beneath it seemed to hang in the air, in the jar and scrape of a chair on the floor, the inaudible question, the raised voice telling them all to get on with their work.
In the front hall Peter said quietly, ‘I’m sure you’re dying for a drink.’ In his room he had plenty of gin and an unopened bottle of Noilly Prat.
‘Oh . . . thank you,’ said Paul, but wandered off round the hall table to gaze with unexpected interest at the Honours Boards. On the two black panels scholarships and exhibitions to obscure public schools were recorded in gold capitals. There were annoying variations in the size and angle of the lettering.