Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

In the middle of the High Ground Mike Rawlins was mowing the sacred chain of the cricket pitch, in readiness for Saturday’s trouncing of Templers. Peter waved to him, and before they were near him he took Paul’s arm firmly and turned him round. ‘Now there you are…’ There was the house, massive and intense, and the farmlands beyond, flat and painterly in the heavy light, with the con-trails of planes from Brize Norton slowly lifting and dissolving in the clearer air above. Peter said, ‘You must admit.’ He wanted to get something out of Paul, as he might out of some promising but stubborn child. Though it occurred to him that the shyness he was trying to overcome might merely be a dullness he would always have to overlook.

‘Amazing,’ said Paul.

‘It’s all coming back, you know,’ Peter said, with a tight smile and shake of the head.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Victoriana. People are starting to understand it.’ Last year at St Pancras Station he had joined a small rally headed by John Betjeman; he dreamed of getting Betjeman to come and talk to the boys about Corley Court – he pictured his pleasure in the jelly-mould ceiling. ‘That’s my room, of course,’ he said, without pointing, and saw Paul had no idea which one he meant. In one or two other windows strip lights showed against the evening sun, and in the end room on the first floor the curtains were closed, the Babies already in bed, in the barely muted light.

‘Do you think Cecil Valance actually had an affair with Mrs Jacobs?’ said Paul.

‘Oh! Well, I suppose only one person alive knows for sure, and that’s what she says. Of course you never know exactly what people mean by an affair.’

‘No…’ said Paul, and sure enough he blushed again.

‘I think Cecil was probably queer, don’t you?’ said Peter, which was a mixture of a hunch and a certain amount of cheerfully wishful thinking, but Paul just gasped and looked away. There was a strange disturbance, almost subliminal at first. Over the rattling roar of the mower a few yards off a larger and darker noise began to drone and wallow, and then, not quite where they were looking, a military aircraft trawling low over the woods, steady, heavy-bellied, throbbing and majestic, and somehow aware, as if its pilot had waved, that its passage overhead was a marvel to the craning and turning figures below. Its four propellers gave it a patient, old-fashioned look, unlike the sleek unanswerable jets they saw long before they heard them. As it passed overhead and then over the house it appeared to rise a little before homing in through the lower haze towards the aerodrome five miles away. Mike sheltered his eyes with a raised right arm that seemed also to make a friendly claim or greeting. They went over, Peter introduced Paul, and Mike explained, amid the sweet and sharp smells of two-stroke exhaust and cut grass and his own sweat, that it was one of the big Belfast freighters they’d just brought in. ‘Sluggish old bus,’ he said, ‘but it’ll carry anything.’ In upper windows of the school boys who’d been watching stood down and melted away. And then the evening re-established itself, but perceptibly at a later phase, as if the past two minutes had been a tranced half-hour.

Ahead of them the little creosoted cottage of the cricket pavilion waited under the lengthening shadow of the woods, a possible place for a snog, at least, but still too much in Mike’s view. Peter put his arm round Paul’s shoulders, and they strolled on stiffly for a few seconds, Paul again unsure what to do with his hands. ‘No,’ said Peter smoothly, ‘I’d like to write something about old Cecil one day – I don’t think anyone has, since that Stokes memoir, you know.’

‘Right…’

‘Which is something of a period piece. Unreadable, really. That’s why I was asking George Sawle the other night.’

‘Do you write then?’

‘Well, I’m always writing something or other. And of course I keep a sensational diary.’

‘Oh, so do I,’ said Paul, and Peter saw him tremble and focus, ‘well, sensationally dull.’ There it was, the tiny treasured bit of wit in him. Peter fell on it with a laugh.

Just beyond the whited boundary lay the slipcatch, mown all around, but little used, tall grass growing up through its silvery slats. Peter liked the shape of it, like some archaic boat, and sometimes on evening walks by himself he lay down in it and blew cigarette-smoke at the midges overhead. He imagined lying in it now, with Paul close beside him. It was another of those sites where half-glimpsed fantasies, always in the air, touched down questioningly for a minute, and then flitted on.

Paul had found a cricket ball in the long grass, and stepping back a few yards he threw it swerving through the dip of the slipcatch and up into the air, where no one of course was waiting to receive it – it bounced once and ran off quickly towards the old parked roller, leaving Paul looking both smug and abashed. ‘I can see you’re rather good,’ said Peter drily; and nervous that he might be asked to put the slipcatch to its proper use, and lob a ball to and fro through it with Paul for half an hour, pretending not to care that he could neither catch nor throw, he walked smilingly on. There was something expert and even vicious in the flick of Paul’s arm and the hard momentary trundle of the ball along the curving rails.

It felt sweetly momentous to walk in under the edge of the wood. Here again the evening seemed suddenly advanced. Even the near distances were mysteriously barred and crowded with green, shadows blurred the massive tree-boles while the roof of the wood formed a far-off, slowly stirring dazzle. The horse-chestnuts and limes that made a great undulating wall around the playing-fields were mixed further in with large oaks and sinister clusters of yews. The children climbed and hid in the unchecked brushwood round the base of the limes, and scratched out their tunnels in the rooty soil beneath. Here and there the undergrowth thickened artificially with barricades of dead branches, the camouflaged camps they made, with hidden entrances too small for any master to crawl through. You couldn’t be sure if a rustling noise was a child at his spy-hole or a blackbird among the dead leaves.

Paul’s behaviour was more anxious now, he hung back again, craned round at the trees, found inexplicable interest among the leaves underfoot; his thin stiff smile of admiration was almost comical to see. ‘Come here,’ said Peter, and when Paul came to him, as if good-naturedly leaving something more involving, which still half-held his attention, he locked an arm tight under his elbow, making a quick necessary joke of that too, and marched him briskly along. ‘You’re coming with me!’ he said, and found himself shivering and swallowing with excitement and a kind of latent violence. He really wasn’t waiting for more than a minute longer – it was only the dim consciousness that outside this hot-faced rush of beautiful necessity there might still be boys about, among the trees, in the dugout of a camp, that kept him from seizing him roughly there and then. He saw of course that Paul needed this treatment, needed someone to override him. Still, he had to give in, after a few ducking and face-shielding yards of scrambling through the saplings and thick undergrowth, to Paul’s ‘Um, actually…!’, his tug and grimace less scared than indignant.

‘Sorry, my dear, am I hurting you?’ Peter’s grasp became a reasonable stroke, a clumsy holding hands, two fingers plaited for a moment, his endearment gleaming with his humorous annoyance at being checked. He looked around as if thinking of something else; it seemed all right, and then, with a moment’s courteous questioning pause in the air, he kissed him fully but gently on the lips. He made the promise of withdrawing a part of the advance, a tantalizing tremor. And again, as if overcome, Paul yielded; and again, when Peter pulled back and smiled, he started talking. ‘Oh god…’ he said, in a sort of tragical quiet voice Peter hadn’t heard before. ‘Oh my god.’