Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Where is it, actually?’ he said.

‘What, Corley?’ – the man said the word as one might London, perhaps, or Dijon, with cultured certainty and polite surprise. ‘It’s out on the Oxford road, about three miles away. It’s a prep-a-ra-turry school,’ he said, in a Noël Coward voice.

‘The bank is about to close, ladies and gentlemen!’ announced Heather.

‘Look, you’d better give me some money,’ said the man. ‘Don’t they have drinking-up time in here?’

‘Afraid not,’ said Paul, with a nod and a smile, in the way one always conceded a customer might have a point; but with some further concession of this one’s charm. The man looked at him acutely for a moment before getting out his pen; he had one of those thick biros with four different colours, red, green, black and blue. He wrote a cheque for £5, in neat but imaginative writing, having chosen the green ink. His name was P. D. Rowe. Peter Rowe in the signature.

‘End of the month,’ he said, ‘we’re paid today.’

‘How would you like it?’

‘Oh, god… four pound notes and a pound in silver. Yes,’ said Peter Rowe, as he watched, nodding his head, ‘time to go really wild this weekend.’

Paul tittered without looking at him, and then said, ‘Where can you go wild round here, I wonder?’ very quietly, as he really didn’t want Susie to hear him.

‘Hmm, yes, I take your point,’ said Peter Rowe. Paul felt oddly conscious of at last having a personal conversation, as the other cashiers did with the customers they knew, and though he didn’t know Peter Rowe at all, he was very interested in the answer. ‘I always think there must be something going on, don’t you?’ He received the money and slid the coins into a D-shaped leather purse he had. ‘Though in a little place like this, it may take some finding.’ He smiled, with a flicker of eyebrows.

Paul heard himself saying, ‘Well, let me know!’ Whatever this going wild entailed had only the vaguest form in his head, and his excitement was mixed with a feeling he was out of his depth.

‘Okay, I will,’ said Peter Rowe. As he crossed the Public Space he glanced in at Geoff again with another little flicker of comic surmise, which Paul felt in a horrified rush of understanding was meant as a sign to him too, and then looked back with a flash of a grin as he went out through the door.

On the way home Paul thought about Peter Rowe and wondered if he’d see him again straight away in the town. But most of the shops were shut and the pubs not yet open and a mood of premature vacancy had settled on the sun-raked length of Vale Street. He felt weary but restless, shut out from the normal play of a Friday night. All down the street, house-doors were protected by striped awnings, or stood open behind bead curtains to let in the air. He caught radio talk, music, a man raising his voice as he went into another room. The drapers and outfitters had covered their shop-windows with cellophane to keep the goods from bleaching in the sun. It was the sugary gold of the cellophane on a bottle of Lucozade, and changed all the clothes inside into unappealing greens and greys. On the tiny stage of Mews’ window a woman stepped forward, through the amber light, in a cotton frock, her blank face and pointed fingers raised in genteel animation; while a man stood dependably, in flannels and a cravat, with an endlessly patient smile. They had been like that all week, flies buzzing and dying at their feet, and would surely remain there till the season changed, when one day the peg-board screen behind would shift, and a living arm come groping through. Paul went on, glancing unhappily at his strolling reflection. In the chemists’ window there were those enormous tear-shaped bottles of murky liquid, blue, green or yellow, which must have some ancient symbolic function. Dim sediment gathered in them. He wondered what happened at a wild weekend – he saw Peter dancing to ‘Twist and Shout’ with a roomful of friends from Oxford. Perhaps he was going to Oxford for the party; a preparatory school was hardly the place for a rave-up. He didn’t fancy Peter, he felt slightly threatened by him, and saw their friendship stirring suspicions in the bank. Already he seemed to be a week or two ahead.

After supper he went up to write his diary, but felt oddly reluctant to describe his own mood. He lay on the bed, staring. He wrote, ‘Mrs Keeping came into the bank before lunch, but she totally ignored me, it was quite emb. Mr K v cool too, and only said he hoped my hand was all right. Also Mrs Jacobs took ages to realize who I was, though then she was reasonably friendly. She drew out £25. I don’t think she could remember my name, she referred to me as “our young man”.’ Something about the clashing curtains and the carpet, both nice enough in themselves, made Paul feel acutely lonely, the three mirrors of the dressing-table blocking the evening sun. The bulb in the ceiling light glowed in weak competition with it. There was the matching suite, dressing-table, wardrobe, bed with quilted headboard, and then nothing that went with anything else. They had the air of things not wanted elsewhere in the house, the scratchy armchair, the wrought-iron lamp, the souvenir ashtrays, the brown wool rug made by Mr Marsh himself, at what must have been a low moment. Paul started on a sentence about Peter Rowe coming into the bank, but a superstitious impulse made him cross it out after three or four words. He blocked out the words with his biro till the place shone.

He put the diary away and felt on the top of the wardrobe for the copy of Films and Filming that he’d hidden there. There was a still on the cover from the new film Privilege , starring Jean Shrimpton and Paul Jones. They seemed to be in bed together. Jean Shrimpton’s pale profile hovered over Paul Jones, whose eyes were closed, and his lips, and teeth, slightly parted. At first Paul had thought she must be watching him sleep, too entranced by his pretty face to want to wake him. Then he’d guessed, with a strange prickly rush, that they must be making love, and that the pop-star’s open mouth wasn’t snoring but gasping in surrender. Though actually you couldn’t be sure. There was a suggestion of his naked shoulder and chest, and thus of other things you might get to see if you went to the film. It wouldn’t come here, of course, he’d have to go into Swindon or Oxford on the bus. In the angle between the two faces there was a disconcerting limb, perhaps Jean’s right arm crooked back insect-like as she crouched over him, or maybe Paul Jones’s own left elbow, oddly twisted. He saw for the first time it could be his left wrist, much closer, the hand hidden in Jean’s hair. In the grey and white close-up Paul Jones’s puppyish neck looked fleshy and pitted. Also he had no ear-lobes, a weird thing you couldn’t entirely overlook once you’d noticed it. Paul Bryant wasn’t sure about Paul Jones. His mother had fancied him quite openly once, on Top of the Pops , and you couldn’t very easily share a fantasy with your mother. His own desire, in its way very modest, was simply to kiss Paul Jones.

He sat propped up on the bed to look through the small ads for the third or fourth time. It was like a mild hallucination, or one of those drawings in the paper containing ten hidden objects: it made him shiver to see the concealed invitations. He went systematically through Services, domestic work sought by ‘refined young men’ in ‘private flats and houses’, or by ‘masculine’ odd-job men, ‘anything considered’. He wasn’t seeking Services himself, but he was keenly preoccupied by their being offered. There were various masseurs. Someone called Mr Young, a ‘manipulative therapist’, could visit between 10.45 and 3 in north-west London only. Paul felt he would be rather intimidated by Mr Young, even if he managed to be in the area at the specified time. His eye worked through the tiny type of ‘For Sale and Wanted’, the ads all looking alike, so that you could lose one and find it again with a slightly magical sense of significance. Mainly it was magazines and films. There were hysterical pleas: ‘Stills, Photos, Articles, Magazines, ANYTHING dealing with Cliff Richard’. An unnamed ‘studio’ offered ‘physique and glamour movies’ for ‘artists, students and connoisseurs’, someone else sold ‘50-foot action films’, however long that was. Paul imagined the reel going round on a projector… he didn’t think you could get much action into fifty feet, it would surely be over in no time. Anyway, he didn’t have a projector; and couldn’t see himself getting one on his present salary. Not that there would really be room in here… and then he’d need a screen as well… Quite a few people were fans of something called ‘tapespond-ing’, where it seemed you recorded a message and sent it through the post, which might be romantic, but then he didn’t have a tape-recorder either, and even if he did Mrs Marsh would think he’d gone mad, talking away for hours on end in his room. He wasn’t a very confident talker, and couldn’t imagine how he’d fill up a tape.