The Stranger's Child Part 24

The Professor seemed to muse a little longer, and said with regret, 'It's hard to say, when you remember them being written. They're probably not much cop, are they?'

Peter glanced rather sweetly at Paul, and at his tender question, but seemed unwilling to disagree with the Sawles; so Paul kept silent about how much they had always meant to him.

'I don't mean to say, incidentally,' said Sawle, in his way of not letting others drive him off-course, 'that Louisa wasn't heart-broken by Cecil's death I'm sure she was. But she made the most of it . . . you know. They did, those women. The memorial volumes, the stained-gla.s.s windows. Cecil indeed got a marble tomb by some Italian sculptor.'

'Well, I know . . .' said Peter.

'Of course you know all about it.'

'What's that?' said Paul.

'Oh, at school,' said Peter: 'Cecil Valance is buried in the chapel.'

'Really?' said Paul, and gasped, the whole subject like a dream taking substance in the candle-lit bell of the beech-tree.

'You must come and see him,' said Peter, 'if you like the poems; he's rather splendid.'

'Thank you,' said Paul, 'I'd like to very much,' his pop-eyed look of earnest grat.i.tude covering his surprise as Peter's hand, stroking the napkin in his lap, wandered as if unawares on to Paul's thigh, and lay there lightly for several seconds.

On the way in after supper Paul stuck with the Sawles for a moment, but they latched on to others with sudden warmth and relief, and so he slipped off. They'd been polite, even kind to him, but he knew it was really Peter they were interested in. In the deepening shadows between pools of candlelight, the guests, gathering up bags and gla.s.ses, conversations stretching and breaking, in an amiable jostle as they bunched in through the french windows, seemed to Paul like a flickering frieze, unknowable faces all bending willingly to something perhaps none of them individually would have chosen to do. He was drunk, and he bunched in too, the drink making him less conspicuous. Everyone was friendlier and noisier. The drawing-room appeared blocked with rows of chairs. The connecting doors into the dining-room had been flung open, and the piano turned round. Mr Keeping stood to one side with his mocking smile, asking people to go to the front, to fill up the rows. Paul b.u.t.toned his jacket and smiled politely at him as he squeezed past. The effects of the drink, free and easy outside, felt a bit more critical in the glare of the crowded room. Could people tell how drunk he was? Before anything happened he would need the lavatory; where there was a queue, of course; some of the old ladies took two minutes, nearly three minutes. He smiled at the woman in front of him and she smiled back tightly and looked away, as though they were both after the same bargain. Then he was alone in the hall with the colourful chaos of presents and cards, most of them unopened, piled on the table and under it. Books obviously, and loosely swathed plants, and soft things it was difficult to wrap neatly. His jiggling desperation grew painful with the knowledge he hadn't bought Mrs Jacobs a present or even a card himself. When the woman at last emerged and hurried into the drawing-room Paul heard a loud rapping, a hush, a scatter of applause, and then Mrs Keeping starting to talk. Well he couldn't not go. Better to miss the concert altogether. All he really wanted was to see Peter play, to watch him, with the beautiful and alarming new certainty that he was about to . . . he looked in the mirror, hardly knowing, now it came to it, what it was they might be going to do.

He finished as fast as he could, and listened awful to pull the great clanking flush during Mrs Keeping's opening bars. But no, they were still laughing. They must all be as drunk as he was by now. He hung about in the shadow of the door from the hall, there were two empty seats, but in the middle of rows, there was a burst of laughter which he thought for a mad second was aimed at him, and he slipped in pink-faced at the side of the room and stood against the wall, behind a row of dining chairs. Here he could see everything but so too could everyone see him. There were two or three others standing, and at the back of the room the french windows were still open, with further guests gathered outside in what already looked like darkness. Mrs Keeping was erect in front of the piano, hands clasped, in the posture of a child reciting. He didn't take in what she was saying. Peter was at the end of the front row, smiling at his hands, or at the floor; Mrs Jacobs in the middle of the row, the place of honour, sipping at her drink and blinking up at her daughter with delighted reproach as the surprise got under way. Paul smiled anxiously himself, and when everyone laughed he laughed too. 'Now mother is awfully fond of music,' Mrs Keeping said, 'so we thought we'd better humour her by playing some.' Laughter again he looked at Mrs Jacobs, enjoying the collective sense of treasuring and teasing her; a woman just behind her exclaimed, 'Dear Daphne,' and people laughed at that too. Mrs Keeping pulled her black wrap around her upper arms and pushed back her shoulders 'So, to start with, her favourite composer.'

'Aha . . . !' said Mrs Jacobs, with an accepting smile, though perhaps a tiny uncertainty as to who that would turn out to be.

'Chopin?' said one old boy to the woman beside him.

'You'll see soon enough!' said Mrs Keeping. She sat down on the piano stool, and then looked round. 'We can't run to the original, I fear, so this is a paraphrase by Liszt.' There was a murmur of humorous apprehension. 'It's very hard!' She fixed the music on the stand with a furious glare, and then she was off.

She could really play, couldn't she? that was Paul's first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was a noiseless sigh, a wave of collective recognition and relief that almost made the music itself unimportant: they'd got it. He didn't want to show that he hadn't. He had never seen anyone play the piano seriously and at close range, and it locked him into a state of mesmerized embarra.s.sment, made worse by the desire to conceal it. There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of cla.s.sical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had, and there was the sight of Mrs Keeping in action, the plunges and stabs of her bare arms up and down the keyboard. She wasn't a large woman it was only her presence that was crus.h.i.+ng. Her little hands looked brave and comical as they stretched and rumbled and tinkled. She rocked and jumped from one b.u.t.tock to the other, in her stiff red dress, her black wrap slipping it twitched and drooped behind her as she moved, with a worrying life of its own. The riveting, but almost unwatchable, thing was her profile, powdered and severe, shaken by twitches and nods, like tics only just kept under control. He stared, smiling tightly, and covering his mouth and chin pensively with his hand.

Mrs Jacobs looked self-conscious too, but in a happy way, her head on one side. Her own responses were almost a part of the performance. The over-active first section of the music had ended, and now a slow tune came in, with a definite air, even on a first hearing, of being what they were waiting for. Mrs Jacobs raised and then dropped her right hand in greeting to it, and shook her head slowly as it went on. Paul thought she was probably very drunk he felt the glow of his friendly understanding with her, from that first evening; though he somehow saw that to her being drunk had its whole long sentimental history, whereas to him it was a freakish novelty. Somewhere at the back there was a frail bit of humming and a little giggle when someone shushed. Then here came the song again, and as his eyes slid over the heads of the audience to find Peter he found Peter turned sideways and looking back at him, and the rapid pressure on his own heart and the glow of his face were fitted by the music, like a theme tune: they both smiled just in the moment of turning away.

After that Paul looked around casually, to see if anyone had seen; he watched Julian, also standing, on the other side, pink with drink and the comical effort to look sober. Jenny sat just beside him, with a similar frown of critical concentration, pinned in beside a large old man with a farmer's face and a ma.s.s of white hair, and politely ignoring the loud dejected noise of his breathing. Paul turned with a remote smile, as if transported by the music, and found Mr Keeping, standing at the back, pressed against the red velvet curtains, and staring intently at his wife, also with a hint of a smile, his unreadable mask. She was on display, physical and pa.s.sionate, and Paul realized he would never see Mr Keeping himself in quite the same way again. Then his gaze dropped to the woman seated in front of him the clasp of her necklace, the label at the neck of her dress turned out . . . Anne-Marie Paris London he read it upside-down. When she twitched her head at a sudden loud chord the tips of her hair tickled his fingers. She glanced round, apology just ruffled by accusal. A little later she murmured something to her husband, who absorbed it with a quick tutting nod. Paul had a strange and intense apprehension, for three or four seconds that might have been a long tranced minute, of this unknown woman's life, that would never cross with his again, and the hypnotic detail of her label showing, which she herself was unaware of.

The door beside him into the hall was propped open, and now and then he heard a clatter of plates or a forgetful raised voice from the kitchen, where the women from the Bell were was.h.i.+ng up. The front door was open too, and by moments cool air with a distant smell of firs to it ran in and then ebbed away. There was the quiet section, the theme tune again he didn't dare look at Peter and he heard the jingle of something on Roger's collar, unconcernedly out of tune and time, as he nosed round on the edge of the drive. Then there were footsteps on the gravel, stopping uncertainly, but an unselfconscious few words of greeting to the dog, which barked uncertainly itself a couple of times. Paul thought of a policeman, for some reason, and then of Sir Dudley Valance, with his war wound, whom he now seemed to be slightly obsessed by. There was a throat-clearing, a light knock, several people looked round, with the lively interest of an audience in any disturbance . . . Paul made a cringing face and slipped out into the hall.

'Ah, hullo good evening . . . !' a man peering in, too absorbed in the moment to lower his voice, and giving at once a sense of awkwardness, in his tight brown suit. 'I'm fearfully late but I didn't want to miss it.' A posh, silvery voice, with, not a stammer but pauses between phrases. Paul came out on to the doorstep, and shook his hand firmly and without exactly encouraging him, he thought. Surely this wasn't Sir Dudley. They nodded at each other, as though they were both in a bit of a fix.

'We're just having . . . some music,' said Paul tactfully, with a hesitation of his own.

'Ah!' No, this man was about fifty, but with something boyish in his wide bony face as he turned his head and listened. Paul looked at the tufts of badly cut hair, thick and greying around a sun-blistered bald patch. 'Well, yes indeed,' he said, 'and Senta's . . . Ballad, always her favourite.' They heard the music grow very emphatic and loud, Paul pictured Mrs Keeping shaking herself to pieces, and then at once there was applause. He thought someone else might come out and help.

'Will you . . . ?' he gestured into the hall.

'Yes thank you.' Now they could talk normally. 'h.e.l.lo, Barbara!' said the man. One of the women had come out from the kitchen.

'h.e.l.lo, Wilfrid,' she said. 'You've missed your dinner.'

'That doesn't matter,' said the man, again with his air of monkish simplicity and tiny hesitation.

'We weren't sure we'd be seeing you,' said Barbara, with the same odd lack of respect. 'Mrs K's got a concert on so you'll have to be quiet.'

'I know I know,' said Wilfrid, frowning a little at Barbara's tone.

'Would you like to go in?' said Paul. He watched the man watching the people inside, one or two faces turned, while Mrs Keeping was announcing the next item. His brown suit must once have been someone else's, all three b.u.t.tons done up, the sleeves short, and the trousers too, and a sense of large square objects trapped in tight pockets. Paul wondered if the other guests knew him and a scene was about to occur that he would be blamed for.

'Is she going on long?' said Wilfrid, pleasantly but as if out of earshot. There were one or two more curious glances.

'I don't really know . . .' said Paul, detaching himself.

'Have you had something to eat?' said Barbara, softening a little. 'Or do you want to come into the kitchen?'

'I think perhaps . . .' Wilfrid gazed at her and flinched. 'Is it an awful bore?'

'Ah, that's all right.'

'I got a lift into Stanford, and then the bus, then I walked up.'

'Well, you must be hungry,' said Paul, adopting the condescending tone. He could hear Peter saying something, in his Oxford voice, making them laugh, and he realized that something had happened, and the voice was now a trigger to jolts of excitement and anxiety that ran through him and made him half-unaware of anything else that was going on. The music began. Wilfrid followed Barbara, but turned in the doorway, came back to the hall table, took a small parcel in s.h.i.+ny red paper out of his pocket and added it to the base of the pile. When he had gone, Paul looked at the label: 'Happy Birthday Mummy, Love Wilfrid.'

The little puzzle of this didn't hold him long. He leant in the doorway to listen, or at least to watch Peter play. This must be the Mozart, surely. He thought there was something daft but also impressive and mysterious about big clever Peter stooped over this dainty but tedious piece of music and giving it his fullest attention. The large hands that had recently stroked his knee under the table were now hopping and pecking around on the deep end of the keyboard, in a remarkable show of fake solemnity. Mrs Keeping was having more fun up at the other end, making Peter look like an anxious but courtly attendant; her nods and grimaces now seemed like slightly impatient instructions to him, or tight-lipped confirmation that he had or hadn't got something right. And turning the page was a bit of a worry, with both players busy at once. After a minute Paul noticed that Peter did any pedalling that was called for, and got interested in his legs as much as his hands. Mrs Keeping's legs jumped as she played, and Peter's occasional toeing of a pedal was like a courteous version of the footsie he'd just been playing with him under the table. Paul was warmed by this secret, and admiring of Peter, and jealous that he couldn't play with him himself. At the end he applauded loudly, and made a point of making the very last clap, as they used to at school.

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 embarra.s.sing 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 gla.s.s. 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 uns.h.i.+rkable duty about what he imagined was going to happen next.

A few minutes later they were crossing the garden, b.u.mping 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 ident.i.ty, 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed the weeping beech 'Hmm, not here, I think,' said Peter, with his air, rea.s.suring 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, s.h.i.+t! Oh s.h.i.+t . . .' a sense of the shed like a b.o.o.by-trap. 'Mm, it's rather h.e.l.l 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 gra.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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.

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 s.h.i.+fty. '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 grat.i.tude 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?'

'G.o.d, 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, s.h.i.+fting the books and litter from under their bottoms as the car bounced at getaway speed along Glebe Lane. They could hear the gra.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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-gla.s.s doors. So in they went.

Paul thanked G.o.d 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, p.r.i.c.kly 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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.'

'A mad one and a slow one,' announced the lead guitarist of the Locomotives, the words heavy and resonant in the high roof of the hall. 'Then it's goodnight.'

'Let's stay a bit longer,' said Paul, 'now we're here.'

The final dance, the watch showing five past twelve, and the two policemen standing genially by the open door in the bright light there, talking to the woman that took the coats. They looked in, across the floor, now spa.r.s.ely occupied by the dancers who felt the lonely s.p.a.ce expanding about them, the night air flowing in, Jenny and Julian locked together in a stiff experimental way, his chin heavy on her shoulder, Paul and Peter now leaning by the wall, swaying in time but a few feet apart, their faces in fixed smiles of uncertain pleasure, and out in the middle, Wilfrid and his new friend, who'd adjusted herself imaginatively to her partner's rhythms and was making up a kind of military twostep with him to the tune of 'The Green, Green Gra.s.s of Home'.

6.

Peter roared along Oxford Street, so very different from its famous namesake, the few shops here with their blinds down in the early torpor of the summer evening, and just before he came into the square he wondered with disconcerting coolness if he did fancy Paul, and what he would feel when he saw him again. He wasn't exactly sure what he looked like. In the days since he'd kissed him at the Keepings' party his face had become a blur of glimpses, pallor and blushes, eyes . . . grey, surely, hair with red in it under the light, a strange little person to be so excited by, young for his age, slight but hard and smooth under his s.h.i.+rt, in fact rather fierce, though extremely drunk of course on that occasion well, there he was, standing by the market-hall, oh yes, that's right . . . Peter thought it would be all right. He saw him in strange close focus against the insubstantial background, the person waiting who is also the person you are waiting for. Peter was a little late in the four or five seconds as the car slowed and neared he saw Paul glance at the watch on his inside wrist, and then up at the Midland Bank opposite, as if he was keen to get away from it, then saw him take in the car and with a little s.h.i.+ver pretend he hadn't, and then, as Peter came alongside, his jump of surprise. He'd changed after work into clean snug jeans, a red pullover slung round his shoulders; the attempt to look nice was more touching than s.e.xy. Peter stopped and jumped out, grinning he wanted to kiss him at once, but of course all that would have to keep. 'Your Imp awaits!' he said, and tugged open the pa.s.senger door, which made a terrible squawking sound. He saw perhaps he could have tidied the car up a bit more; he s.h.i.+fted a pile of papers off the floor, half-obstructed Paul with his tidying hands as he got in. Paul was one of those lean young men with a b.u.m as fetchingly round and hard as a cyclist's. Peter got in himself, and when he put the car in gear he let his hand rest on Paul's knee for two seconds, and felt it s.h.i.+ver with tension and the instant desire to disguise it. 'Ready for Cecil?' he said, since this was the pretext for the visit. It seemed Cecil had already become their codeword.

'Mm, I've never been to a boarding-school before,' said Paul, as if this were his main worry.

'Oh, really?' said Peter. 'Well, I hope you'll like it,' and they swept off round the square, the car making its unavoidable coa.r.s.e noise. It was something a bit comic about a rear-engined car, the departing fart, not the advancing roar.

'So how was your day?' said Peter, as they went back up Oxford Street. It was three miles to Corley, and he felt Paul's self-consciousness threatening him too as he smiled ahead over the wheel. It was something he would have to override from the start.