Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

After this there was a very odd piece, which Paul thought from the awful grin on Peter’s face must be someone’s idea of a joke. The time after the concert, and all the momentous things that were waiting to happen then, weighed so heavily on Paul that he couldn’t concentrate. He sensed Peter’s own little knack for being embarrassing and hoped he wasn’t making a fool of himself now. And in a moment it was all over, and they were standing up and bowing, the applause now full of laughter, warm-hearted but with something provisional in it too, so perhaps the joke still needed to be explained to them as well. Peter’s gaze swept across the room and he seemed almost to lick Paul with his conceited smile, nodding, chuckling, tongue on lip.

This still wasn’t the end, of course, and Paul hardly knew if he was happy or relieved when Corinna sat down again at the piano, Peter withdrew to the front row and Sue Jacobs came forward, with a rather furious expression, to sing ‘The Hammock’ by Bliss. It was strange knowing the words so well, and he tried to follow them against what seemed to him the quite pointless interference of the music. The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing the poem, somehow written across the air, was also an escape from watching Sue herself, her bared teeth and humorous roving glare at one person after another in the audience. ‘And every sleeping garden flower, Immortal in this mortal hour.’ All Paul knew about Bliss was that he was the Master of the Queen’s Music, but he found it hard to imagine Her Majesty enjoying this particular offering. At the end Mrs Jacobs got up and kissed them both, and clapped in the air to reignite the general applause. She appeared to be moved, but Paul thought he saw that under the general requirement to be so she was finding it rather a strain.

As people started talking and stood up, Paul caught Peter’s eye and comic grimace, and grinned back as if to say how marvellous he’d been. What he was actually going to say he had no idea – he dodged out to the kitchen to get a glass. When he came back and joined the group round Mrs Jacobs he hardly dared look at him, distracted with nerves and longing and a sense of unshirkable duty about what he imagined was going to happen next.

A few minutes later they were crossing the garden, bumping lightly as they made way for each other between the tables where candles were still burning in jars; some had guttered, there was a veil of mystery, of concealed identity, over the guests who had come back out and were drinking and chatting under the stars. A cake had been cut up and was being taken round, with paper napkins. ‘I thought you were going to talk to the old girl all night,’ said Peter.

‘Sorry!’ – Paul reaching for but not touching his arm.

‘Now let’s see. The garden’s quite big, isn’t it.’

‘Oh, it is,’ said Paul. ‘There’s a part at the back I think we really must explore.’ He felt he’d never been so witty or so terrified.

‘We loved what you played!’ said a woman passing them on her way back to the house.

‘Oh, thank you…!’ – the skein of celebrity made their little sortie more conspicuous and perhaps odd. Away from the lights now, Peter appeared both intimate and alien, a figure sensed by touch more than sight. Someone had put a Glenn Miller record on the stereogram, and the music filtered out among the trees with a tenuous air of romance. They passed the weeping beech – ‘Hmm, not here, I think,’ said Peter, with his air, reassuring and fateful, of having a fairly clear plan.

‘I think this part of the garden is most attractive.’ Paul kept up the game, turning warily in the dark under the rose arch into the unkempt corner where the shed and compost were. He was speaking too as if he knew what he was doing, or was going to do. Surely it was time just to seize Peter but something about the dark kept them apart as naturally as it promised to bring them together.

He half-saw Peter fling open the shed door, with rakish impatience, and heard the clatter of canes, ‘Oh, shit! Oh shit…’ a sense of the shed like a booby-trap. ‘Mm, it’s rather hell in there,’ Paul said, giggling at his own drollery more than he could quite explain. He was drunk, it was one of the hilarious uncorrectable disasters of being drunk. Now Peter was stooping and furiously thrusting and jamming the tumbled canes back in and failing to get the door shut. He shut it; at once it creaked open again. ‘I should leave it,’ said Paul.

He’d brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter’s hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking than the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter’s head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man’s wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him. He twisted his head in Peter’s two-handed grasp, tried to turn it to a humorous wistful nuzzle against his chin, his chest. ‘What an amazing party,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’m so glad Mrs Keeping asked me to help with the parking.’

‘Mm?’

‘I meant to say I like your tie, by the way…’

Peter was holding him at arm’s length with a serene, almost humorous, almost smug look, Paul felt, as if he were measuring him on some scale of previous kisses and conquests. ‘Oh, my dear,’ he murmured, with a sort of swallowed laugh, that suggested some shyness after all. They held each other, cheek to cheek, Peter’s evening stubble a further part of the dreadful strangeness of being with a man. Paul wasn’t sure if he had fluffed it hopelessly, like his frightened scuttle behind the pampas grass when he’d first arrived; or if this could be taken as a natural amorous pause in which his own confusion would be smoothly concealed and forgiven. He knew he had already been found wanting. And quite quickly he thought, well, it was a sort of triumph just to have kissed another man. ‘I suppose we should go back,’ he said.

Peter merely sighed at this, and slid his hands tighter round Paul’s waist. ‘You see, I rather thought we might stay out here a bit longer. We’ve both earned it, don’t you think?’ Paul found himself laughing, curving to him, suddenly gripping him hard so as to keep him with him and somehow immobilize him at the same time.

Drink and kissing seemed to move to their own clock. When the two of them got back to the house the crowds were already thinning, though a few of the oldsters had settled in, in new arrangements of the crowded chairs in the drawing-room. Paul felt that he and Peter must be bringing a gleam of the unspeakable with them out of the night beyond the french windows, though everyone amiably pretended not to notice. Drink seemed to have captivated them all, reducing some to silent smiles, others to excitable gabble. John Keeping, very drunk, was raptly explaining the virtues of the port he was drinking to a man three times his age. Even Mr Keeping, with the globe of a brandy glass in his hand, looked unselfconsciously happy; then when he saw Paul he glanced awkwardly away. There had been another change of music, it was some old dance number that sounded to Paul like a scene from a wartime movie, and on the clear square of floor beside the piano, barely moving but with a captivated look of their own, Mrs Jacobs was dancing with the farmer man, who turned out to be Mark Gibbons, the marvellous painter she’d mentioned, who’d lived in Wantage. Another couple Paul didn’t know revolved at twice the speed beyond them. Paul smiled at them mildly and benevolently, from beyond the enormous dark distance he had just travelled, which made everything else appear charming but weirdly beside the point. ‘I think I’ve got to go,’ Peter said to Julian, resting his hand on his shoulder, and Paul painfully half-believed the story even though he knew they were meeting up again by the car.