Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Cecil stifled his usual yelp of a laugh and patted George’s side and held his forearm in a tight grip, to keep him at a distance but not to let him go. He seemed to be listening, his head raised and eyes warily sliding, his posture self-conscious. They heard the dogs barking and bothering each other, close by. For a second or two the blue of the woman’s blouse could be seen among the leaves, and the man called out ‘Mary! Mary!’, which George thought was the woman’s name but then she called it too. There was something unaccountably funny about a dog called Mary, perhaps it was after the Queen, and he giggled to himself as he stood, with his arm burning from Cecil’s grip; though that was nothing to the tantalized ache in the back of his thighs and the thick of his chest at Cecil’s muscular closeness, his shushing lips, the blatant evidence of his arousal. George was breathing half-forgetfully, in sighs, while his heart raced. They heard the dogs yelping again, a bit further off, and the notes, though not the words, of the couple talking, the strange flat tone of marriage. Cecil took a few cautious steps across the leafy floor, still gripping George at arm’s length, peering round. They were very close to the wood’s edge – below the green translucent fringe of beech leaves you could see the open field. Still, Cecil was being a little absurd – if Mary’s owners thought of them at all it would be their silence that puzzled them, their abrupt disappearance that seemed queer.

‘Let’s go a bit further,’ said Cecil. George sighed and followed behind him, rubbing his wrist with an air of grievance. He saw that this little mime of prudence, air of woodcraft, had just been Cecil’s way of getting on top and taking control of a scene which George for once had planned. Well, they were dreams as much as plans, memories mixed up with wild ideas for things they’d not yet done, perhaps could never do. Cecil, under other circumstances, was bold to the point of recklessness. George let him go ahead, pushing springy branches aside, barely bothering to hold them back for his friend, as if he could look after himself. It was all so new, the pleasure flecked with its opposite, with little hurts and contradictions that came to seem as much a part of love as the clear gaze of acceptance. He watched Cecil’s back, the loose grey linen jacket, dark curls twisting out under the brim of his cap, with a momentary sense of following a stranger. He couldn’t think what to say, his yearning coloured with apprehension, since Cecil was demanding and at times almost violent. Now they’d emerged by the huge fallen oak that George could have led him to by a much quicker path. It had come down in the storms several winters ago and he had watched it sink over time on the shattered branches beneath it, like a great gnarled monster protractedly lying down, bedding down in its own rot and wreckage. Cecil stopped and shrugged with pleasure, slipped off his jacket and hung it on the upraised claw above him. Then he turned and reached out his hands impatiently.

‘That was very good,’ muttered Cecil, already standing up – then walking off for a few paces as he roughly straightened his clothes. He stood looking over the low dense screen of brambles, smiled mildly at a squirrel, cricked his neck both sides, ran a hand through his hair. He had a way of distancing himself at once, and seemed almost to counter the bleak little minute of irrational sadness by pretending that nothing had happened. His words might have followed a merely adequate meal, his thoughts already on something more important. He squared his shoulders, smiled and snuffled. The squirrel twitched its brown tail, scrabbled up its branch, watched him again. Perhaps it had watched his whole performance. It seemed to be applauding, with its tiny hands. George, still lying in the leaves, watched them both. He was amazed each time by Cecil’s detachment, unsure if it was a virtue or a lack. Perhaps Cecil thought it rather poor form of George to be so shaken by the experience. The tender comedy of George’s recovery, the invalidish wince and protesting groan at his ravishment, were ignored. Once in college he had been back at his desk within a minute, with a paper to finish, and seemed almost vexed when he turned a while later to find George still lying there, as he was now, spent but tender, and longing for the patient touch and simple smile of shared knowledge.

‘Funny little creature,’ said Cecil whimsically.

‘Oh… thank you,’ said George.

‘Not you,’ said Cecil, raising his chin and mimicking the rodent’s spasms of nibbling.

George gave a rueful laugh, and sat forward with his hands round his knees. He wanted Cecil to know how he felt, but he feared that what he felt was wrong; and even so, to tell him would be to praise him, since he had produced this wild effect in him. ‘Help me up, sir,’ he said.

Cecil came back and took his raised hands and pulled him up. And he wasn’t so distant – they kissed, for a second or two, long enough for reassurance but not to get anything started again.

The streams ran down at two or three places in the woods, threading and pooling and dropping again, among the huge roots of the oaks. They were hardly noisy, you came on them by surprise, just when you heard their busy trickling. They brought down leaves that caught and gathered on twigs and roots to make little grey-gold dams, with clear pools behind them. At a low point, by the wood’s edge, two streams ran into one behind the dike of a fallen tree, silted and half-submerged, and made a bigger pond; in high summer it could be too shallow for bathing, but the recent rains had filled it up again.

‘The lowest pond is deeper than it looks,’ said George.

‘Aha…’ said Cecil.

‘If you want to have a dip…?’ He felt he shouldn’t show how much he wanted him naked again, and then he would get it. The weekend so far had been hobbled and hampered by dropped trousers and half-unbuttoned shirts.

‘You go first, and report on conditions,’ Cecil said.

George gave him a sideways smile, ready but a little disappointed. ‘All right,’ he said; and he started to unlace his shoes.

‘Do it slowly,’ said Cecil. ‘And keep looking at me.’ He went over to the great oak above the pond, scanning its twisted and bulbous trunk for footholds, then in five seconds scrambled up to the low landing where it divided, and eased himself out on his bottom a short way along a broad almost horizontal branch. He sat there, suddenly owning the wood as much as George had believed himself to do. ‘I can see you,’ he said.

‘And I can see you,’ said George, unbuttoning the top of his shirt and then pulling it over his head.

‘I said slowly,’ said Cecil.

George was slower, accordingly, when it came to his trousers. He found a certain shyness clouding his desire to please. Cecil maintained a provoking half-smile, arousal masked in amusement. ‘You’re like some shy sylvan creature,’ he said, ‘unused to the prying eyes of men. Perhaps you’re a hamadryad.’

‘Hamadryads are female,’ said George, ‘which I think you can see I’m not.’

‘I still can’t really see. You look a bit like a hamadryad to me. I expect you live in this oak tree I’m sitting in.’

George folded his trousers loosely and laid them on an old stump; but he turned away to slip off his white drawers, and saw with a twinge of regret that they were stained with mud from the tussle ten minutes earlier. ‘Oh, you are shy,’ said Cecil, almost crossly. George glanced over his shoulder, and forgot his anxiety about the mud in the larger strangeness of his nakedness, in the dappled woods, where any other walker could see him, and with Cecil, in his shirt and trousers and shoes, watching him steadily. He stepped down carefully across the dead leaves and oak mast towards the loose ellipse of water. The day was warm, but in and out of the patchy sunlight he shivered at the air on his back. He saw he was excited by the part he was playing, the new little scene of obedience, in which none the less his own worth and beauty were enhanced. It was something to know you were what Cecil wanted more than anything. He crouched down, still with his back to him, and peered into the water, which was brownish, loamy, stirred gently and continuously by the little rill that fell into it. Sunlight sparkled on the far side, twenty feet away. He slid a leg through the cold surface, and at once, when he felt the gripping chill of the water, flung himself in too. He circled and steadied and gasped out, ‘It’s delicious!’