Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Outside the loo he was waylaid by Jenny. ‘Do you want to come to the Corn Hall with us?’ she said.

Julian looked surprised, then deliciously shifty. ‘Yeah, do you think we can… yeah, come with us, that would be good, actually… Do you want to ask Dad?’ he said to Paul.

‘Um… I think probably not ,’ said Paul, pleased that his tone of voice got a laugh. He ought to thank Mr Keeping for the evening before he left – the gratitude suddenly keen and guilty, and haunted by a new suspicion that perhaps he hadn’t been meant to stay for the whole party, and had made a large and unmentionable mistake.

‘I mean it goes on till midnight, what is it now?’

Paul couldn’t tell them that he had promised to go with Peter and sit – where? – he pictured a shadowy lay-by where he’d seen courting couples in cars. It was a further shock when Peter said, ‘Oh, why not? – just for half an hour – I feel like dancing’ – just as if their own plans didn’t matter at all.

‘OK…’ said Julian – a slight sense inexpressible in the air that though he needed them as a cover he wasn’t completely thrilled at the idea of dancing at the Corn Hall with them.

‘Is your brother coming?’

‘God, don’t tell him,’ said Jenny.

‘I love dancing,’ said Peter.

‘Mm, me too,’ said Jenny, and to Paul’s confusion the two of them started rolling their hips and twitching their shoulders at each other. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said.

In the hall Mrs Keeping was standing in rapid, muttered conversation with another woman. ‘He really can’t,’ she was saying, as Paul hung guiltily back. Out on the drive, at the edge of the spread of light from the front door, Uncle Wilfrid was standing, arms folded tightly but face turned up to admire the heavens as if the rest of him were not knotted up with tension and rejection. ‘I’ve got Jenny in the box-room, Mother in the spare room, both the boys home… he should have said he was coming.’

‘I’m sure we could find a corner for him,’ the other woman said.

‘Why can’t he get a taxi back?’

‘It’s a bit late, darling,’ said the woman.

‘Is it?’

‘I don’t suppose he’s got his jim-jams…?’

A sort of desperate solidarity seemed to take over Julian’s face, even if it meant not going to the Corn Hall after all. He slipped out into the drive – ‘Hullo, Uncle Wilfrid…’ taking him aside, a bit further off.

‘You can see the Crab, Julian,’ said Wilfrid.

And a minute later they were all in the Imp, in the sharp little comedy of sudden proximity, everyone being witty, everyone laughing, shifting the books and litter from under their bottoms as the car bounced at getaway speed along Glebe Lane. They could hear the grass in the crown of the road swiftly scouring the underside of the car. Wilfrid was in the front, Paul, Jenny and Julian in a painfully funny squash in the back. Julian’s hot thigh pressed against Paul’s thigh, and Paul found the boy was gripping his hand, he thought just out of general abandon and selfless high spirits. He didn’t dare squeeze it back. They rattled out into Church Lane, down the Market Place into the surprising surviving outside world, which included a police car and two officers standing by it just outside the Bell. Peter was supremely unimpressed, shot past them, pulled up and turned off the lights, the engine, just in front of the Midland Bank. A sense of reckless disorder overcame Paul for a moment. But tomorrow was Sunday…

They clambered out of the car, a small adjustment taking place. Wilfrid said, ‘I haven’t gone dancing since just after the War.’

‘You’ll love it,’ Jenny told him, with a confident nod. She was in effect, in this lopsided group, his partner.

‘Everybody danced with everybody then.’

Peter locked the car, and gave Paul a helpless but happy look, a shrug and a smirking shake of the head.

People were leaving the Corn Hall, the women scantily dressed in the summer night, but clinging to the men. Paul disguised his reawoken tension about seeing Geoff, and chatted pointedly to Jenny as they went into the lobby. As he squinted through the glass doors, the high-raftered hall, under the slow sweep of coloured lights, was thick with the promise of his presence. A boomingly lively song was going on, and Jenny was dancing a bit already – ‘Can we just go in?’

‘Only another twenty minutes, my love,’ said the woman at the door.

‘You’re not charging us, are you?’ Jenny said, defying her to ask her her age.

The woman gazed at her, but the tickets and the cash were all put away, people pushed past, waiting and staggering out past the cloakroom, the lavatories with their stained-glass doors. So in they went.

Paul thanked god for the drink – he strode straight across the hall, round by the stage, smiling into the shadows, as if he lived in places like this – but no, Geoff wasn’t here… he came back to the others with a pang of sadness and relief; then remembered his tie, and pulled it off impatiently. He felt almost as shy about dancing as kissing, but this time it was Jenny who took him in hand – their little group started bopping together, Paul smiling at all of them with mixed-up eagerness and anxiety, Wilfrid studying Jenny but not quite getting her rhythm as she rocked in her jutting-out frock and waved her hands in front of her, perhaps waiting for someone to take them, while Julian lit and voraciously smoked a cigarette. Beyond him, peeping mischievously at Paul through the patterned light, Peter did his own dance, a kind of loose-limbed twist. Around them other couples made way, looked at them with slight puzzlement, made remarks, surely… Surely people in the town knew Jenny, Julian certainly got frowns and smiles of surprise. Paul followed two couples jiving rapturously together, with sober precision despite the abandon of their faces, back and forth in front of the stage.

A big red-faced woman in a spangled frock picked up Wilfrid… did she know him? – no, it seemed not, but he was ready for her, a gentleman, truly sober, and with a certain serious determination to do well. Paul watched them move off, with a smile covering his faint sense of shock, and Jenny leant in towards Paul and nodded, ‘A friend of yours.’

Paul’s hand on her shoulder for a second, prickly fabric, warm skin, strangeness of a girl – ‘Mm?’

‘Young Paul?’

He hunched into himself as he turned and there was Geoff, reaching out to him but rearing back in broad astonishment; then his face very close, Geoff’s hot boozy breath as if he was about to kiss him too, careless and friendly, ‘What are you doing here!’ – and showing Sandra, who shook hands and was inaudibly introduced, looking only half-amused, but Paul was a colleague, perhaps he’d mentioned him. She crossed her arms under her bosom and then looked aside, at others making for the door. ‘Christ, is old Keeping here too?’ – Geoff big with his own joke. ‘Just young Keeping,’ said Paul, nodding at Julian, but he didn’t seem to get it, stood nodding as the lights came teasingly hiding and colouring the contours of his tight pale slacks and the deep V of his open-necked shirt, a first heart-stopping glimpse of naked Geoff. He leant in again, his rough sideburn brushed Paul’s cheek for a half-second, ‘Well, we’re off’ – Sandra tugging, smiling but moody, as if to say Paul mustn’t encourage him. ‘See you Monday!’ – and then his arm was round Sandra’s waist as he escorted her in a gallant grown-up way towards the lit square of the exit.

‘Well, he’s rather fab!’ said Jenny.

‘Oh, do you think?’ said Paul and raised an eyebrow, as if to say girls were a push-over, turning to look for him as he went out into the light, and then into the dark, as though he were a real missed opportunity, then grinning gamely at Peter as he swayed and sloped towards them, biting his lower lip, and gripped them both in a loose very drunken embrace and whispered in Paul’s ear, ‘Tell me when you want to go.’