Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

After that it was his turn to watch Cecil, a readier and more practised undresser. Cecil’s way was just to be out of his things with a tug and a wiggle and a kick. He pranced down the leafy slope like a satyr, sun-burnt and sinewy, calves and forearms darkly hairy. Then he leapt into the little pond almost on top of George, drowned him for a second or two, their legs tangling violently as George gripped at him, frightened and excited. He wanted to calm Cecil and keep him. They circled each other, spitting out water, laughing, the surface settling and bubbling. Underneath, their feet kicked branches, stirred up leaves and slime. Cecil reached for him, had an arm round his shoulder, then closed with him inexorably underwater.

They lay out to dry for a few last minutes at the edge of the wood, where the sun shone in under the high fringe of leaves. The field beyond had already been ploughed, and the tussocky grass of the headland was faded and trampled. The small stream that trickled down from the pool where they’d swum ran away behind them through a long ditch thick with brambles, its noise hardly louder than the miscellaneous birdsong. George had put his drawers back on, but Cecil spread out still naked, raised on his elbows, frowning lightly at his own body. George loved the confident display, and was vaguely, half-pleasurably, alarmed by it; he thought of the spaniel called Mary, and looked across the curve of the wood’s edge half-expecting to see the blue blouse and hear the dry chatter of the couple on the breeze. He looked back almost shyly at Cecil – he felt he would never stop taking him in. He loved the beautiful rightness of his bearing, that everyone saw, and he loved all the things that fell short of beauty, or redefined it, things generally hidden, the freckled shoulders swollen with muscle, knees knotty with sinew, black body-hair streaked flat, dark blemishes of the summer’s mosquito-bites fading on his arms and neck. Behind him rose the dim pillars and dappled shadow of the woodlands, ‘the Common’, which to George was the magical landscape of his own solitude. This was the man who had entered it, unaware of its secrets: he had quickly surveyed it and possessed it; now here he was, stretched out full length in front of it. Here he was, rolling over with an absent-minded stare and settling on top of him, twitching experimentally as he squashed him, big trickles of cold water running suddenly off his hair into George’s wincing and gasping face.

It was the hat that he saw first, over Cecil’s shoulder, while his friend moved rhythmically on top of him: red and white, distant, but clearly on the move, above the bracken, where the woodland curved out round the far edge of the field. ‘No, no…!’ – he tried to draw up his knees, pushed at Cecil with his fists, tried to twist and topple him.

‘No…?’ said Cecil, sneering and panting in his face.

‘No, don’t, Cess – no! Stop!’ – jerking his head up to see more clearly.

‘Yes…?’ said Cecil, more rakishly now.

‘It’s my sister – coming down the path.’

‘Oh, Christ…’ said Cecil, slumping, then rolling off him pretty smartly. ‘Has she seen us?’

‘I don’t know… I don’t think so.’ George sat up and rolled over at the same time, reaching for his trousers. Cecil’s own clothes were further off, and required a quick soldier-like scramble, white buttocks wriggling through the grass.

‘No harm in a sun-bath, is there?’ he said. ‘Where is she?’ For the moment the red hat had disappeared. He pulled on his silk drawers, and then sat back, insouciant, but flushed and still notably excited.

‘Best get your trousers on,’ said George.

‘Just been having a bathe…’ said Cecil.

‘Even so…’ said George sharply, the sense of a very tricky moment still thick about him.

‘A bit of a rough-house…?’ Cecil smirked at him. ‘And anyway, what was it? – only a bit of Oxford Style, Georgie, hardly the real thing.’

‘Trousers!’ said George.

Cecil tutted, but said, ‘Well, perhaps you’re right. We can’t have your sister exposed to my membrum virile .’

‘I feel a gentleman would have put that the other way round,’ said George.

‘What can you mean?’ said Cecil. ‘I’m a gentleman to the tip of my… toes’ – and he pulled on his trousers crouchingly, peering across the undergrowth. ‘I can’t see the darned girl,’ he said.

‘It was definitely her. She has a hat I would know half a mile off.’

‘What, a sort of sou’wester?’

‘It’s a red straw hat, with a white silk flower on the side.’

‘It sounds frightful.’

‘Well, she likes it. And the main thing is it shows up.’

‘If she does, you mean…’

George was trying and re-trying various phrases in his head – buttoning his shirt he ran through facial expressions suggestive of bafflement and surprise at his sister’s questions. ‘Well, perhaps she didn’t see us…’ he said, after a minute.

Cecil looked at him narrowly. ‘You didn’t invent this sighting of your sister, did you, Georgie, just to put me off a bit of Oxford with you? Because you know that sort of trick never, ever works.’

‘No, my darling Cess, I did not,’ with momentary anger. ‘For heaven’s sake, I’m losing you tomorrow, I want as much of you as… as I can manage.’

‘Well… good,’ said Cecil, faintly abashed, standing up and stretching, then reaching down again to help him up.

When they were back in their shoes and jackets, Cecil said, ‘Allow me,’ and as he kissed him quickly on the lips he snatched off their two hats and switched them round, cocking George’s boater on his own damp curly head, and whisking his green tweed cap on to George’s bigger, rounder bonce – it perched there in a way he clearly found amusing. They scrambled up, past the pond, the little trickling stream, its noise quickly lost. George started talking quite loudly about College matters, virtually nonsense, but as they regained the path they had caught the stride of two friends out walking, with the woods to themselves. When they spotted Daphne, it was clear that in her solitary way she was doing the same, pretending to be merely out for some air, but hoping above all to find them and tag along. She knew enough not to search for them openly. Where the path she had been following crossed their own she turned down demurely towards them, red hat among the bushes, like a girl in a fairytale. George felt furious with her, but felt also the need for exceptional tact. Something in her demeanour told him that she hadn’t seen them in the grass. Cecil called out, ‘Daphne!’ and waved pleasantly. Daphne looked up in surely genuine surprise, waved back, and hurried towards them. ‘What do you think?’ muttered Cecil.

‘I think we’re fine,’ said George. ‘Anyway, she knows nothing about these things.’ His anxiety was not that she’d have known what they were doing, but that in her general astonishing innocence she wouldn’t have had the first idea. He saw her talking to their mother about it, and their mother taking a colder and cannier guess.

‘Miss Sawle…!’ said Cecil, raising his borrowed boater as she approached.

‘Daphne!’ said George and touched the peak of Cecil’s cap, with a facetious smile.

Daphne stopped three yards off and looked at them. ‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘There’s something funny about you.’

‘Oh…’ – the two boys gaped comically at each other, patted themselves, George tense with worry that something else funny might show. Surely Cecil’s whole person glowed with unmentionable lust; but Daphne simply gaped back at him, and then looked away in the warm uncertainty of being teased. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. It was very strange, and in its way reassuring, that she couldn’t work out the obvious thing.