Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘But what about Cecil?’ said Paul, hanging back on the third or fourth stair, with a regretful look.

‘Do you want to see him first? Okay, just a quick peek’ – Peter smiling narrowly at him and wondering if perhaps Cecil wasn’t a codeword after all. He led him back down, and off through the arch into the glazed cloister that ran along the side of the house. Work had already been put up here for the art exhibition. He bumped into Paul, as he halted politely to look at the watercolour sunsets pinned to boards. Here and there there was a sign of talent, something hopeful among the childish splodge. Art, which required technique as well as vision, was the subject Peter found most frustrating to teach; he wasn’t much good at it himself. He taught them perspective, in a strict way, which was something they might be grateful for. He wanted the warmth of Paul’s body, he leant on him and laid a hand along his shoulder, peering at a blotchy jam-jar of poppies by Priestman, which was thought to show promise. On what Neil McAll called ‘the sex front’ Peter’s time at Corley had been a desert, apart from a drunken night in London at half-term; it was shamingly clear that the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys had more fun than he did. Well, that was the age he’d started himself – he’d been at it ever since. He squeezed the back of Paul’s neck, a claim and a promise. Again it seemed strange that he fancied him as much as he did; and the mystery of it, which he had no desire to solve, only made the whole episode more compelling. In the chapel he was certainly going to kiss him, and get inside his clothes in one way or another; barring of course some possible rectitude of Paul’s about places of worship. ‘Come on,’ he said, taking his arm. But then as he turned the iron ring and eased open the chapel door, he heard the flagging wail of the harmonium. ‘Oh, Christ…’

Dusk came early to the chapel, and in the gloom a little tin lamp lit up the anxious features of a boy, in such an odd way Peter couldn’t see at first who it was. ‘Ah, Donaldson…’ – the sound faltered and broke off with a squeak.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘That’s all right… Carry on.’ The boy, not bad at the piano, had been given permission to explore this more troublesome instrument. ‘Don’t mind us!’ But he had lost confidence for a moment, he was all arms and legs with the treadles and the knee-flaps and pinning down the music. He picked a respectfully nasal stop, and began again on ‘All is safely gathered in.’

Paul had already gone towards the tomb, which seemed to float forward among the dark pews. Peter reached behind the door to click the stiff old switches, but no light came on. Donaldson glanced at him, and said, ‘I think the fuse must have gone, sir.’ Well, so much the better, it would be a twilit visit. The vivid glass by Clayton & Bell had closed down, in the sad way of church windows when the light is going, into sombre neutrality; the colours had become a dignified secret. This seemed somehow religious, a renewable mystery. Peter crossed himself as he approached, and frowned because he wasn’t sure what he meant by it, or even if he wanted Paul to see. It was certainly an unusual setting for a first date, and very different from others he had had, which had tended to be in pubs.

To fit in the whole school they had a line of chairs in the space on either side of Cecil. It was evident that the tomb, which the school was more or less proud of, was also a bit of a nuisance. The boys fixed pretend cigarettes between the poet’s marble lips, and one particularly stupid child long ago had carved his initials on the side of the chest. Peter moved chairs out of the way, with a foul scraping noise. Paul went up close, followed the inscription round, ‘ CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC…’ Peter saw it freshly himself, second-rate art but a wonderful thing to have in the house; he felt happy and forgiving, having someone to show it to, someone who actually liked Valance, and perhaps hadn’t noticed he was second-rate too. The tomb made some grander case for Cecil, in the face of any such levelling quibble. ‘What do you think?’

It was still hard to tell if Paul’s solemn, self-conscious look expressed emotion or mere beetling politeness. He came back close to Peter to speak, as if the chapel imposed a certain discretion. ‘Funny, it doesn’t say he was a poet.’

‘No… no, that’s true,’ said Peter, moved himself and aroused by their repeated touching; ‘though the Horace, I suppose…’

‘Mm?’

He touched the plaited Gothic letters. ‘Tomorrow we shall set forth upon the boundless sea’ – trying not to sound too like a teacher as he translated.

‘Oh, yes…’

Getting into his stride, Donaldson pulled out something bigger, the Bourdon stop perhaps, for the next verse of the hymn, its loud plonking drone giving them a kind of cover. ‘Have you seen the Shelley Memorial in Oxford?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Surely the only portrait of a poet to show his cock,’ said Peter, and glanced over at Donaldson’s mirror to see if he’d been heard.

‘Mm, I expect it is,’ murmured Paul, but seemed too startled to catch his eye. He went up to look at the poet’s head, with Peter close behind him, blandly pretending to share his curiosity. Again he put his arm lightly across Paul’s shoulders, where his red sweater was slung round – ‘Handsome fellow,’ he said, ‘don’t you think?’ – and then with tense luxuriance let his hand drift slowly downwards, just the thin shirt here between his fingers and the warm hard curve of his spine – ‘I mean, not that he really looked like that’ – to that magical spot called the sacral chakra, which an Indian boy at Magdalen had told him one night was the pressure-point of all desires. So he pressed on it, tenderly, with a little questioning and promising movement of his middle finger, and felt Paul gasp and curl his back against him as if in some trap where the effort to escape only caught you the more tightly.

‘Fell at Maricourt,’ said Paul, now leaning forward as though he was going to kiss Cecil.

‘Well, quite,’ said Peter. He was entranced by his secret mischief, the ache of expectation like vertigo in his thighs and his chest. Paul half-turned towards him, flushed and shifty, worried perhaps by his own arousal. There was a comically disconcerting suggestion that Cecil himself had something to do with it. Now they had to be careful. As if archly colluding, Donaldson engaged the octave coupler for a further verse. Peter half expected to see his smirk in the mirror, but the boy was responding too hard to the querulous demands of his own instrument. Under the piping blare (‘free from sorrow, free from sin’) Peter said humorously and straightforwardly, ‘I really think we’d better go up to my room, don’t you.’

‘Oh… oh all right.’ Paul seemed to think ahead, as if at an unexpected change of plan.

Peter took him up the nearest back-stairs, and the first-floor corridor brought them past the laundry-room – at some point he wanted to take Paul up through the skylight there and on to the roof, which was for good reason the most out-of-bounds thing in the whole school. But he saw at once that the door was open – Matron was fossicking round in there, just her large white rump showing now to the passer-by. ‘Well, if you come again,’ he murmured; and saw Paul himself uncertain of such a prospect, eagerness struggling with some entrenched habit of disappointment. They went on, climbed the grand stairs to the second floor, there was the creak of the floorboard that Paul was hearing for the first time, and then they were in Peter’s room, with the door snapped shut between them and the world. He pulled Paul towards him and kissed him, and the door he was leaning on rattled in its lock at the sudden impact of their two bodies.