William Boyd - The New Confessions

I sat down beside her, panting slightly.

“You look hot,” she said.

“I think I’m going to have a dip. Coming?”

“No fear!” she laughed. “Brave you. Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

We had brought swimming costumes as more of a gesture than indication of serious intent. Faye halfheartedly tried to dissuade me, but I snatched up my costume (Peter’s) and went farther down the bank, away from the girls. Behind a clump of hawthorn I slipped off my clothes and pulled on the costume. It was a little large; the shoulder straps kept slipping off. I thought about diving, but I did not want to distract the girls from their duck feeding, so I waded in. The water was icy — it seemed to drive the breath from my body. Here the Cherwell flowed torpidly; there was barely a perceptible current. I sank beneath the brown water up to my chin and felt the cold band my skull like steel. Out in midstream I looked over to Faye. She was watching. I waved.

“What’s it like?”

“Freezing!”

“Told you!”

I felt my throat contract in shocking anticipation of what I was about to do. I gave it no thought; there was only one path I could take. I swam to the side and hauled myself out. Behind the hawthorn I stripped off my costume. I looked down at myself. The black hair on my chest and stomach was slicked into a flat wet pelt. I could hardly see my cock and balls, so shrunken were they from the cold. My head was entirely empty of thoughts. I was a creature of guts and glands.

I heard a bird call, the distant quack of ducks, Gilda and Alceste’s thin cries of pleasure. I massaged myself back into some approximation of virility, feeling the warm blood surge. I still kept all thought at bay. I had to show her I was no longer a boy.

“Aunt Faye? Could you bring me a towel, please?”

Through the screen of leaves I saw her get to her feet, take a towel from a canvas bag and saunter over, smiling. I held the sodden costume in front of me. She came round the bush. Her face instantly tightened with surprise. She offered me the towel.

“There you are.”

As I took it I let the swimming costume drop. Just for an instant there was nothing there. She saw. I wrapped the towel around me.

“Faye, I—”

She slapped my face. Once, very hard, jerking my head round.

“Foolish … stupid …” she said in a clenched trembling voice, and walked away.

I tasted the vomit in my throat. Game pie, cider cup. I actually retched once or twice. I threw away the towel and dressed, hauling my clothes over my damp body. I tried desperately to draw up from my numb shocked brain something that would stand as a plausible explanation. I walked over, toweling my hair to hide my face. The cheek she had slapped felt pulsing and scorched. I was shivering, but not from the cold.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I … I just wasn’t thinking. It was a terrible mistake. You see, at school we … It just fell from my fingers. I was cold. It was a mistake, Aunt Faye. Honest, I swear.”

She would not look up from her book.

“Very well. Let us never talk about it again, John. It’s forgotten. Nothing.”

But it was not forgotten. How could it be? Thank God for the girls. They allowed us a formal passage of communication; we could busy ourselves with them and their demands. Faye very quickly seemed as normal as ever, and so did I, I suppose, in an attempt to sustain the credibility of the excuse. But the incident stood between us like a wall. What was worse, she contrived never to be alone with me again. I never had the opportunity to elaborate on that first feeble explanation. I could not apologize, could not explain.

Why did you do it? I hear you ask. What in heaven’s name did you think would happen? I know, I know. It makes no sense. I put the ghastly blunder down to that dangerous flaw in my nature and my naïveté. All I wanted, desperately, was to make love to her and my time was running out. But I cannot condemn myself utterly. I may have been a fool, but at least I was an honest one. I think I can safely say that this unhappy combination has held true for the rest of my life.

I think now I would have survived the shame and indignity if I had had enough time to reimpose the original basis of my relationship with her. After all, I was flesh and blood, her dead sister’s son, and she was genuinely fond of me. I am sure that if only for her own peace of mind she would have come to accept my explanation uncritically. People do make mistakes. And adolescents are notoriously and spontaneously fallible when it comes to affairs of the heart. Perhaps — even — she might have allowed herself a quiet smile of pleasure, of female pride, at her nephew’s evident infatuation. Perhaps she might even — in a private moment — have tried to recall the incident itself. My muscled, slim, glossy-haired body, dark glistening loins, the pale pendulous dripping genitals … But I needed time. I needed days at least to engineer such a rapprochement, but that was exactly what I did not have. Donald Verulam was coming.

* * *

That evening Peter Hobhouse talked to me again about enlisting (Peter was a genuine bore of the first water — a good-natured one, granted, but a bore for all that, with, astonishingly for a nineteen-year-old, all the cataleptic powers of a whiskered clubman). I must confess my enthusiasm for the idea was now firmly on the wane. I was instead formulating vague notions about returning to Edinburgh. What with my embarrassment vis-à-vis Faye, the revelations about Donald Verulam and his impending arrival, Charlbury suddenly seemed a less welcome haven. I had an unfamiliar desire to get back home — home to Oonagh. But I half-listened to what Peter had to say. He seemed to have a dogged urge to get out to France — it was not so much fervent as dutiful; and besides, all his friends were going too and it would be a shame to miss out. He said that, really, one had to have a commission, but that meant going to the Officer Training Corps if you were chosen. What he and his companions had done was to volunteer as private soldiers in one of the public school battalions. Basic training was shorter; you reached France more quickly and were almost guaranteed promotion to subaltern within months. The casualty rates being what they were, the public school battalions were constantly being drawn on to provide new officers for other regiments. His own case was typical. He had been promoted after two weeks and was now off to join the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment as a second lieutenant.

I asked some polite questions. Where should one go to enlist? Marlborough, he said, or Windsor. Ask for the 13th (PS) Service Battalion of the South Oxfordshire Light Infantry, and mention Colonel O’Dell. He had been Peter’s headmaster. Fine, I said, perhaps next year. In truth I had little desire to go to war. In 1914 it had seemed much more attractive; I thought it might be “fun” or “exciting,” but I was no zealot. Several senior boys I had known vaguely at the Academy had been killed; Minto’s melancholy skepticism too had got through to me and moreover nothing or no one in my upbringing had fostered an active sense of patriotism or selfless duty. To be honest, I wanted to live for myself, not die for my country. If I could go to war and subject myself to powerful new experiences and survive, unmaimed, then I was all for it. But I had no desire to risk my neck or any other part of my anatomy.

After dinner Faye left Peter and me with the port. Peter offered me a cigar, which I accepted. We puffed away, Peter’s weak eyes watering rather, and talked in a rather self-consciously manly fashion. Peter told a bad joke about an English curate who went to Paris and tried to shit standing up in a pissoir .

“I’m thinking about growing a moustache,” Peter said. “What do you think?”