Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

What he’d forgotten was that Paul would immediately start talking – his mouth two inches from Peter’s cheek, about how nice this first kiss had been, and how he liked Peter’s tie, and he’d been thinking all week… his colour at the happy end of the spectrum of embarrassment, his head hot and glowing, and the string of words, half-candid, half-senseless, a jerking safety-line… so Peter kissed him again, a long almost motionless kiss to calm him and shut him up and then, perhaps, to break him down. Focused as he was, he took in the familiar creak and rustle, way off behind him, through a mere thickness of oak, and then the short groan, like a polite but determined cough, of the floorboard just outside the door. There was a sharp knock, which they both felt. They froze for one second, Peter letting Paul slide out of his arms, then quickly buttoning his jacket, while still leaning heavily against the door. The handle turned, and the door budged slightly. None of the rooms at Corley had a key. He saw Paul had picked up a book, with a horrified pretence of calm, like a schoolboy about to be caught. Peter called, ‘Sorry, Matron!’ in a hollow voice, and with a funny impromptu kick at the door spun round and snatched it wide open.

Matron was holding a stack of folded sheets, with the grey starchy gleam of all the laundry at Corley. She peered into the room. ‘Oh, you’ve got a visitor,’ she said, apology and disapproval struggling uncertainly. There was her slight wheeze, having toiled up from the laundry-room, and the almost subliminal whistle of the clean sheets against her white-coated bosom. Peter smiled and stared. ‘I’m giving out clean sheets tonight, because of Open Day,’ Matron said. There was quite a charge of antagonism, a combative resistance to Peter’s charm, and, to be fair, his mockery.

‘I hope my room’s not going to be open too, Matron,’ he said. She grappled off the top sheet. ‘Here, let me…’ Really he should introduce Paul, but he preferred to excite her suspicion.

‘We all need to get ahead,’ she said, with a tight smile.

‘Oh, absolutely.’ It wasn’t clear if she expected him to change the bed right now. She looked narrowly towards it.

‘Well, then…! I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘Top to bottom.’

‘Of course.’

And with that she withdrew. Peter closed the door firmly, gave Paul a queasy grin and poured out two glasses of gin and vermouth. ‘Sorry about that. Have a drink… chin chin.’ They clinked their glasses, and Peter watched over his own raised rim as Paul sipped, with a little grimace, a swallowed urge to cough, and then put the glass down on the desk. He said, ‘God, you look so sexy,’ exciting himself more by his own choked sound. Paul gasped, and picked up his drink, and said something inaudible, which Peter felt sure must be along the same lines.

He thought the Park would offer more shelter than a room with a chair jammed under the door-handle, but as soon as they got outside he was aware of the unusual hum and crepitation of activity, a mower running, voices not far off. Still, the school seemed more delightfully surreal after a large gin drunk in two minutes. The evening had a lift and a stride to it. He remembered summer evenings at his own prep-school, and the haunting mystery, lit only by glimpses, of what the masters did after the boys were tucked up in bed. He wondered now if any of them had done what he was about to do. Paul seemed changed by the gin too, loosened up and at once a little wary of what he might say and do as a result. Peter asked him on a hunch if he were an only child, and Paul said, ‘Yes – I am,’ with a narrow smile, that seemed both to question the question and show exactly the only child’s sly self-reliance. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ve got a sister.’

‘I can’t imagine having a sister.’

‘And what about the rest of your family?’ – it was first-date talk, and Peter felt already he might not remember the answer. He wanted to get Paul into the Out-of-Bounds Woods. He took him quickly past the bleak little fishpond, and on towards the stone gate.

‘Well, there’s my mum.’

‘And what does she do?’

‘I’m afraid she doesn’t do anything really.’

‘No, nor does mine, but I thought I should ask.’

Paul paused, and then said quietly, ‘She got polio when I was eight.’

‘Oh, god, I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah… it’s been quite difficult actually.’ Something flavourless in his words, from embarrassment perhaps and repetition.

‘Where does she have it?’

‘Her… left leg is quite bad. She wears a caliper… you know. Though she often uses a wheelchair when she goes out.’

‘And what about your father?’

‘He was killed in the War, in fact,’ said Paul, with a strange, almost apologetic look. ‘He was a fighter pilot – but he went missing.’

‘My god,’ said Peter, with genuine sympathy, and seeing in a blundering way that all these things might help to explain Paul’s oddity and inhibition. ‘It must have been right at the end of the War.’

‘Well, that’s right.’

‘I mean, when were you born?’

‘March ’44.’

‘So you don’t remember him at all…’ Paul pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘God, I’m really sorry. So you have to support your mother?’

‘Well, more or less,’ said Paul, again with his air of hesitant acceptance, and familiarity with the fumbling sympathy of others when told the news.

‘But she gets an Air Force pension presumably?’ Peter’s Aunt Gwen did, so he knew about these things.

Paul seemed slightly irritated by this. ‘Yes, she does,’ he said; but then, more warmly, ‘No, that’s really important, obviously.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ said Peter quietly. He was naturally troubled, and half wished he hadn’t asked. He saw the flickering energy of the evening going out in sexless supportiveness; and some more shadowy sense of Paul having too many problems not to be a problem in himself.

‘It’s sort of why I didn’t apply to university,’ Paul said, with a shrug at this awkward conclusion.

‘Mm, you see I didn’t realize…’ said Peter, and left it at that. He thought, in a momentary montage, of what he had done at university, and tried to blink away the further faint sense of pity and disappointment that seemed to hover between him and this possible new boyfriend. He glanced at him walking along beside him, in his neat brown shoes, quite a springy step, hands awkwardly in his jeans pockets then out of them again, and his agonized look at saying anything at all personal about himself. Well, best to see these problems clearly from the start; a more experienced lover would conceal them till the honeymoon was over. They went past the Ionic temple, where the boys’ pets hopped and fluttered in their cages, and Brookings and Pearson in their dungarees were mawkishly grooming their rabbits. They went past the fenced square of the boys’ gardens, a place, as everyone said, like a graveyard, with its two dozen flowered plots. Again there were a few of the senior boys, let out in this magic hour after prep, on their knees with trowels, or watering their pansies and nasturtiums. Peter thought he saw from Paul’s smile that he was slightly frightened of the boys. In the far corner, looking vulnerable in the open air, was the fairy construction of Dupont’s garden, a miniature alp of balanced rocks with a gap at the top through which water could be poured from a can down a twisting cascade and into the wilderness of heathers and mosses below. Equally vulnerable was its aching claim on First Prize in the competition, to be judged by Craven’s mother, who was very much a salvia and marigold kind of woman. ‘They’re like graves, aren’t they!’ said Paul, and Peter touched him again forgivingly in the small of the back and they went on.