I watched Luc’s return, he was utterly beautiful, but I didn’t feel annihilated by his beauty: he was coming to me, smiling from a distance like a friend who seeks you out where traders gather, on the Caspian shore – I had segued into a forgotten line of Violet Rivière’s, from Poets of Our Time. He hopped on to the stool with a clear sense of reaching home in a risky game of touch. At the same moment a startling black object obtruded between us and was clonked on to the bar.
‘Hello, dear,’ said Gerard in his weary, what-a-fascinating-life-I-lead way. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages.’
‘No, actually I’m just …’
‘Do you want a drink?’ It was rare for him to offer – I assumed he’d seen my full glass. Where Matt’s haunting scent had been there was the smell of someone busy all day in baggy woollies and a hopeless sort of anorak. I was bewildered to think how I’d wanted to sleep with him. ‘The animals are going very well,’ he said.
‘Oh good, look actually you’re just really sort of crushing in between me and my friend’s knees here. We’re having a rather important conversation.’
Gerard stood back and looked at Luc with the brief cynical calculation I remembered before when he asked about other people’s sex-lives. It struck me he probably didn’t have one of his own.
‘Okay, this is Luc, this is Gerard.’ I noticed Luc took his cue from me, and merely nodded. And then, my incurable weak politeness: ‘Gerard plays in the Ghezellen van der whatsit. They’re all going to dress up as animals.’
‘Oh!’ I watched him ponder this, then reach out and touch the bombard case. ‘And what is this, please?’
‘It’s his bombard. Now if you don’t mind …’ But Gerard was already pushing back the clasps and revealing the instrument, broken in three and secure in its velveteen hollows. ‘Splendid, thanks very much,’ I said.
Luc was perversely intrigued. ‘Is it a kind of oboe?’
‘Yes, it’s actually a bass shawm, which is an early kind of oboe. It’s modelled on a fifteenth-century one which you can see in the Town Museum.’
‘So you had it made.’
‘That’s right.’ Luc dawdled his fingers along the thick dark stem, around the flared bell and over the set of reeds, which were long and curved and bleached like an old pipe. ‘You look as if you enjoy instruments,’ said Gerard fatuously.
‘I used to play the oboe,’ said Luc. ‘In the school orchestra. But I gave it up.’
‘I can’t bear it when people give up instruments,’ I muttered, mortified that he had never told me. ‘I mean what’s the fucking point of learning them, it’s all such a waste’
Poor Luc was quite abashed at this and mumbled sorry: since he wasn’t at school any more … Gerard seemed to sense some advantage and pressed on with an account of the Happy Entry of Philip the Good in 1440. I had a nightmarish feeling that he was going to deliver the whole lecture on ceremonial antiphons that I had had a couple of months before. But Luc broke in childishly with ‘Does it make a lot of noise?’
‘As a matter of fact’, said Gerard, ‘it’s the loudest instrument there has ever been. It used to be used for raising alarms.’ He gave his hooting laugh, took out two of the sections and looked mischievously around the bar.
‘I absolutely forbid you to play that thing in here,’ I said. And fortunately the juke-box was activated at that moment, the Beach Boys came spinning through, and Gerard having got his drink and said how Luc was welcome to try his bombard some time, moved off. I thought I’d rather hurt him with my brusqueness.
I heaved a big sigh and Luc started working on his backlog of drinks. ‘So,’ I said, resuming a conversation that he seemed quite prepared to let drop, ‘do you still want to leave the country?’ It was mad of me to persist, I was grasping for evidence that could only upset me, but to be in his confidence was itself like love and I was thirsty for more.
‘Well, of course, I still do want to go to Dorset. But not maybe so far as LA! It would be nice not to be always in this town, where I have lived all my life and where my family have lived since the thirteenth century – but –’ There was bragging in his complaint, and I felt the crisis was probably over. ‘You know how it is, sometimes, things get worse and worse, and then you attain a point when you think, I just want to get out of here and start all over again from scratch bottom.’
I laughed and puzzled him for a second. ‘I do know what you mean. Maybe that’s why I’m here and not in England.’
He raised his eyebrows and leant forward as if this was especially astonishing, but in fact he was indicating someone hovering behind me, as the hand of another farcical interruption landed firmly on my shoulder.
‘So we meet again.’
The wrong-note matiness of Ronald Strong – it grated on Luc as well, I was glad to see. I turned and smiled at him for five seconds, then said quietly, ‘Piss off.’
He pushed against me, grinning. You’d think I’d just offered him a drink. He nodded at Luc and rocked up and down on the balls of his feet as if warming up for one of his famous work-outs. ‘My name’s Rodney, by the way,’ he said. But Luc, firm, a little frightened by my reaction, glanced away.
‘Well, catch you both later,’ said Rodney, slapping me on the shoulder again and moving confidently off. I saw someone eye him up.
Luc swallowed the rest of his beer, and put down the glass with a hesitation that disguised a tremble. ‘It’s impossible to talk in here’, he said, adding, ‘where you seem to know everybody.’
‘I’m sorry, darling, we’ll talk another time.’ My god, I’d called him darling. I pressed on, ‘Actually, I was going to suggest we might go out for a drive to some nice old place one day – you could show me some of your country.’
‘Instead of a lesson?’
‘If you like.’ I put some detail on it. ‘Matt’s got a sort of jeep, we could go in that.’
‘Will Matt be coming with us?’
‘Oh no, I don’t think so.’
‘Oh.’ Then, ‘Yes, that would be lovely’ – and he gave me a smile that had me gasping and gripping the bar.
Luc’s zip had snagged on a fold of the lining. He tugged the toggle up and down, but it was jammed. ‘What a bloody thing!’ he nattered.
I wanted to help but held myself back. I was afraid to be too close to him now, out in the street; I was getting ready to say goodnight, nervous as hell, wondering if I could kiss him, staring up at the clouded night. Quarter to something chimed from the Belfry’s chilling height. It would be like being up there, when he’d gone – the giddy darkness, my pounding heart.
‘Edward, can you help me?’
‘It should be quite simple,’ I said briskly – crossly he may have thought. He lifted his arms in surrender and I gripped the little tab and yanked it. It gave by one tooth, and was more firmly stuck than before. ‘I can’t quite see,’ I said, ‘come under this lamp. Now …’ We were leaning together to work out the problem, his hair fell forward into my face. ‘Get your head out of the light’ – and he looked aside like someone squeamish about an injection. I grabbed the bottom of the jacket, where the zip was correctly engaged, and tugged it down as I tried to move the zip up: my hand was against his belt, I even brushed the winking tab of his other zip. ‘It’ll have to go down,’ I said, peering into the dim scent of lad and leather, the soft world of quilted jacket linings and hearts beating under wool and silk. The knuckles of my other hand rubbed his stomach, I felt the little dip of his navel through his shirt. He apologised with a giggle that showed it was not a heaven and hell of love and lust for him, and peered down again with a beery breath across my mouth as I concentrated with tongue on lip. But I had coaxed the zip down, one notch, two, three, then it ran like a ladder.
‘So which way are you going?’ I said.
He pulled the zip up to the top with a shiver and a grin of new confidence. ‘Oh, I don’t know’ – looking to left and right. ‘I don’t want to go home too much.’
‘It is quite late, and
you’ve got a lesson in the morning.’
He put his head on one side, with what I realised was a rather drunk bit of foolery. ‘But it’s only with you,’ he cooed. I didn’t know whether to feel slighted or favoured.
‘Your mother will want us both there at ten.’ I found myself obscurely reassured by her presence and requirements. I felt the seconds thudding past. There was only the remote noise of the bar across the street, and the occasional taxi speeding perfect strangers from place to place.
‘For some considerable time I have wanted to see your place of residence.’
He didn’t know what he was doing to me. I said, ‘My dear Luc, you really mustn’t model your speech on that of our new prime minister.’ And he went into a wince-making spiel of what-whats and tally-hos and jolly good shows.
When we came to a wide bridge he jumped on to the wall, and walked hastily along its coping, arms stretched for balance. I’d seen younger kids doing it before, here and there, and wondered if I would jump into the icy water to save them if they slipped. The wall was broad enough, but I heard the scrape of his jeans as he set one foot directly in front of the other. How strong and beautiful his white legs were in the glare of an old rococo lamp with wrought-iron shells and other reminders of the not-so-distant sea. I didn’t know, but I thought he’d probably never ‘taken someone home’, the walk wasn’t crowded for him with curious precedents, it wasn’t the mock pick-up it was for me. I leant at the bridge’s apex; there was a hint of mist on the still canal. Then he came trotting back and steadied himself for an instant with a hand on the top of my head.
I was mentally searching my room, noticing things as a newcomer might. It was bleak and barely furnished – a loft, a fashionable space, Luc might think, and feel at home there, unaware of his own clothes lying newly laundered in the cupboards. I felt secure about that, I kept all the Luciana tidied away from Cherif – in fact the past two weeks had turned me into a humourless char, putting everything straight at once where Cherif had made himself at home. I wondered if the room was going to smell.
When we approached the house Luc fell back, as though having second thoughts, or thrown into a reverie by the sight of the white façade. I opened the wicket and looked round and after a moment he jogged up to me with a smile that seemed to deny his hesitation. ‘What a quite obscure place, Edward,’ he exclaimed. There was something camp, mischievous, about him that I hadn’t heard before; I hurried through into the yard with my face fixed and tormented. Of course he’d been drinking. It occurred to me he might be deliberately teasing me and tempting me into some bungled assault – I wasn’t sure I could carry on being pally like this any longer, without at last defying the force around him, like some enchantment in The Magic Flute, that froze my intentions in mid-air and padlocked my tongue. ‘Is that where you live?’ he said, looking up at the square of the Spanish girls’ window. I caught a strand of music and laughter.
He sprang lightly up the stairs behind me and stood with his hands in his jerkin pockets as I groped for the key. I was distinctly paranoid, I thought there was something quite plain clothes about him, almost leaning on me, sceptical, observant. Then I remembered he was only a teenager, and that he never noticed the same things as I did, certainly never noticed me. I flicked on the light and bustled obstructively round the room – just checking.
Luc ambled over to the window and peered into the dark; the room itself seemed to pass him by. I didn’t know what to say, my mouth was dry, my mind milling and jamming as if I had to deliver an important speech without notes. I watched him covertly, thinking he could see my reflection in the glass. But he pressed his hands around his face: his eyes were working on something farther off. ‘It’s my old school,’ he said, in a tone of puzzled recall. ‘Did you know you could see St Narcissus from here, Edward?’
‘Of course. I’m always being interrupted by the bells and boys pissing out of the window.’
‘Oh, you have to do that,’ he said abstractedly, straining to make out the dark gables against the sky. ‘That used to be my classroom. That big window on the second floor.’
But I stayed where I was, in the middle of the room, my hand in my pocket holding my cock, looking at his backside and his broad hunched shoulders. I was haunted by potential moves tonight – it was like trustless stoned nights at Cambridge, when I never knew if I’d just said something or was still planning to say it. I saw a phantom me, in the jerky, melting moves of a time-lapse film, going over to him, slipping an arm round his shoulder, hugging him and kissing him. I saw him turning with a raised hand, it could have been to hit or to … caress.
‘You know, I’m trying to work this out. I’ve looked at this house, well, quite often. I never saw anything, and I used to wonder to myself what it was. You must imagine, in a very boring lesson. Of course, not like nowadays!’ He turned with a grin. ‘It’s all so long ago.’
‘Now, do you want some coffee?’ I said. It was the thing you were always asked back for at university, if not for a smoke. I’d spent a hundred long nights on the edge of sleep, worried and exhausted by coffee. ‘Or a drink?’ I thought he probably shouldn’t have any more.
‘Oh, drink, drink, drink,’ he said, swinging back towards me, knowingly reckless. He picked up Cherif’s cap from the table and perched it on his blond stack, a bit at a loss without a mirror. ‘Not exactly one,’ he tooted.
‘Nor one.’ I went for the secret brandy, and was quite relieved to see most of it had gone. I was full of troubling punctilio, I thought I might be struck off for getting a pupil drunk. I remembered why Luc was here and not in the darkened school across the canal: the night on the ship, whisky and cards and who knew what else – we’d never talked about it. It came up in my dreams, a low scene lit like a Caravaggio by a single bolt of life-changing light. And did they fuck you? I needed the brandy. I was queasy from the sea-heave of lust.
I busied myself self-consciously with the tumblers, switched on the blow-heater – not that I felt cold. Luc dropped into the big armchair and sprawled, pulling the printed cotton throw off the bursting plush of the back and tipping Cherif’s cap forward over his eyes. For the first time since St Ernest I had a sense of his balls, held and slumped astride the seam of his jeans. I saw my phantom self kneeling and licking at the stretched cloth till it was soaked.
‘Who was that very boring and awful old guy at the bar?’ he said, taking an eager drink, his eyes rounding at the burn of it.
‘Which particular boring and awful … as we left, you mean?’ It had been Harold, pushing in critically amid spouts of pipe-smoke, seeing me snatching this delicious kid away when only the other day he had been envying me Cherif. I settled on the desk-chair opposite and started to tell Luc his story; it presented itself as a subject. Harold lived with Andy, a Filipino boy, a boy in his early forties, that is, whom you hardly ever saw. It was a sad affair – Harold had rescued him from service in Brussels, where he worked without a visa for a sadistic businessman. He was trapped all day in a big apartment-block with alarms. The only times he went out were to drive the businessman in his Mercedes, sometimes to pick him up late at night, when the businessman would abuse him or be sick in the car. He forced himself on Andy and made him cry and spanked him for hours until he bled.
I thought, why am I telling Luc this? But I’d never seen him pay such attention. Forget Wordsworth and the stolen boat. He swallowed more brandy. I went on to how Harold used to work in security on the building; he used to see Andy in the underground car-park vacking the sick out of the Merc. He took a shine to him. After a while Andy confided in him, and somehow they started to have an affair – they used the flat, it was all very easy. Harold was by all accounts a monstrous bore even then, but his kindness was a new thing for little Andy. Then one day the businessman found them together. It turned out he’d known about it for a long time. According to Harold he’d been videoing them at it for months. But he’d started to get jealous. He immediately arranged for Harold to be moved elsewhere, b
ut that very night Harold and Andy eloped.
‘My god!’ laughed Luc, with the rough cold-end catch in his voice.
‘The awful thing is that the whole situation has kind of reproduced itself. Andy stays at home while Harold goes out and smokes his pipe and eyes up young men. He says it’s because Andy’s still afraid to be caught, that the businessman is still after him. But that was years ago. I gather the truth is that Andy’s kept home by force, he has to do the housework in the nude, he’s actually tied up naked while Harold’s out and about. But he’s still devoted to Harold because he rescued him, and looks after him.’ I was inventing rather freely in the latter part of this.
‘Maybe it’s time someone rescued him again,’ said Luc carelessly.
‘I don’t think it’s very likely.’ I remembered the one time I’d seen him – sallow and queeny, with a wandering rear-end. ‘Harold’s at that time of life when he’s terrified of not being young – he hasn’t noticed young people don’t have cravats or tuck their shirts into their underpants, he’s always very pushy about not being pushed out.’
Luc was quite amused by this, he liked to show himself unshocked, and not being young was a lifetime away. He smiled self-confidently, sexily from under Cherif’s tweedy peak. I blinked away the hint of parody. I thought I’d give him a minute or two and then firmly throw him out, with a quick cheek-kiss at the top of the stairs. Then I’d go into the bedroom and in some way break down. Already I felt an agony of regret rising inside me.
‘I’m afraid it’s gentlemen’s again,’ he said, groping for the floor with his drink and surging out of the chair. I showed him where and he went in and slammed the door as if I might want to help. I came back into the room so as not to torture myself with hearing.
When he reappeared he had the stricken jokey look of someone battling with tension or the unsaid. He didn’t meet my eye. I thought of the unfinished confessions of earlier, and how I didn’t want to know more. He threw off the cap with a breathy laugh, wandered to where I was standing and put his arms round me in a loose hug.