by Patrick Gale
And alongside these two strands of his education, he was pursuing a third, thanks to the contents of Louis’ shelves of paperbacks in the basement. He did indeed read the Penguin translations of Genet and of Cocteau, of Mann’s Death in Venice and Tonio Kröger and Forster’s recently published Maurice , which were all, more or less, very depressing. But alongside them, at Louis’ urging, he read the more recent Americans, not just the hypnotically strange Myra Breckinridge and Myron and the inspiring Giovanni’s Room but The Lord Won’t Mind , One for the Gods , and Forth Into Light . It amused him that the titles of these last might have adorned the Christian books his mother now read. There was also Forgetting Elena , a waspish satire set somewhere called Fire Island, which he felt compelled to read several times, convinced he had yet to wring all the meaning from its strange overlapping of gay beach house with oriental court ritual. The men in all these seemed to be uniformly handsome, virile, rich and expensively educated but they came to believe in their right to happiness and the stories ended with them neither punished, unhappily married nor dead. The novels had about them a strain of self-mythologizing breathlessness, full of precious feminine references which confused him.
‘Fret not, Man-Cub,’ Louis told him. ‘It’s called camp. Time enough for that when you finally get the hell out of Weston-super-Mare.’
So Eustace read on, devouring The Persian Boy , The Front Runner and a memoir called The Best Little Boy in the World . And the books taught him things by inference, such as that, though Louis apparently remained single, his late-night trips out in his leather jacket were not for fresh air and that gay, lesbian and bisexual people were all around, frequently disguised as high-achieving straight ones.
He continued to exchange occasional letters with Naomi, though she was not an assiduous correspondent and, once they had established that they had both booked to return to Ancrum in the Easter holidays, the need to stay in touch felt less urgent. He did not like to let slip too much detail of what he was learning and practising, alerted by Carla to the not so covert competition for Jean’s attention and long-term favour.
He also watched Carla fall in love. She did so slowly and very discreetly. At first she just mentioned a friend who taught German at the university. Then they all began to meet. Margit arrived a couple of times as he was leaving on a Saturday morning – a short, owlish woman with a radiant smile – then she was there at supper on Friday evenings; not always, but often enough for it to become unremarkable. And when she was there, there was delicious black rye bread at breakfast, which she baked herself.
Sensing his mother’s new disapproval of Carla must be linked to her having finally understood Carla’s true nature, he was careful never to go into any detail about what happened at Clifton, whom he met or whatever. The one thing he did let slip was that Ebrahim had moved to America, so that it was now just Louis and Carla living there. He knew this was cowardly and wilfully misleading. He said nothing of Margit and her homemade bread and radical politics, knowing his mother had yet to forgive the Germans for the war and not wishing to goad her. Interestingly he found he told Vernon equally little. His trips to Clifton were precious territory he did not wish to pollute with the curiosity of friends.
He was always extremely careful with the books he borrowed each week. He transported them into the house in his cello case – which nobody but he ever opened – only read the books in his bedroom and, when not reading them, hid them deep under his mattress, not just pushed under near the edge, in the way he used to hide Vernon’s magazine, but lifting the mattress right up so as to hide the books at its very middle, where even somebody changing the sheets would be unlikely to stumble on them.
He had read his way through most of the ‘good’ books. Responsible Louis always asked to see what he was borrowing or what he had borrowed and they would have a short discussion, like a little tutorial, when a book came back. In his head Eustace liked to think he went to Carla for cello lessons and to Louis for gay ones. But Louis had recently gone on a visit to Gouda to see his mother, who was unwell, and Eustace had taken advantage of his absence to borrow two publications he had often looked at in bed of a Friday night but was fairly sure Louis would not willingly have let him take back with him to Weston. The first was a novel, though one glance told you it was not a book one read for the quality of its prose. It was called Chains and its tawdry yellow cover featured a naked man wearing only leather riding boots, with his clenched buttocks to the viewer, ankles clasped by a second naked man over whose back and buttocks he trailed a thin chain from his fist, promising pain. This was by someone described as the Author of the Leatherman’s Handbook .
His other unauthorized loan was a copy of a lurid, if monochrome little magazine from America called Physique Pictorial . It was a few years old, so Louis was obviously keeping it because he had enjoyed it. It had photographs of naked men just standing around and doing nothing, as crudely invitational as the women in Vernon’s magazine. The cover, graphically betraying the nature of the publication, displayed the first of several Tom of Finland drawings. In this an extremely well-endowed man leaned proudly back against a fence outside a barn, wearing an odd combination of baseball cap and, yet again, black leather riding boots. On a bench set at a convenient height, sprawled an even bigger, equally thick-lipped man, bare-chested above his bulging jeans, his muscular top covered in an unbuttoned leather jacket, just like Louis’, and with a jaunty leather cap to match. And he was making a gasping, close examination of the standing man’s thickening cock. It was preposterous, the set-up and clothes as ludicrously impractical as anything spotted in Mayfair, but Eustace’s response to it was instantaneous, as though the pictures had pressed a button in his head. They were insistent. They said Look. This is who you are. This is what you want. This. Look!
He had yet to read Chains because he kept turning back to the magazine. His desires, he supposed, were in their infancy and, like an infant, they were still responding primarily to pictures.
He planned to keep both publications well concealed and to slip them back into Louis’ bookshelves the following Friday. In the meanwhile he found himself thinking about his room in his absence and counting off the hours until he could be back there, as though he had a secret lover hidden there, not an old black and white magazine. He looked around in classes and wondered how many of the other boys poring over their textbooks were feeling the same about the busty pouters under their mattresses and at the backs of their big brother’s underwear drawers.
He had bunked off games as usual – a cross-country run that day as the playing fields were still waterlogged from an overnight downpour. It had turned into one of those crisp spring days when it felt miraculous that the town was not yet overrun with visitors. Unusually his mother was not in the day room with one of her friends when he came home but sitting on the garden bench in the sun. For the first time since her accident she looked like her old self. She had put on lipstick and a dress that showed off her figure. She had a cardigan draped over her shoulders in an old way of hers he liked to think made her look French.
‘Hello,’ she called out. ‘You’re early.’
‘It was only games,’ he said. He sat beside her and dropped his rucksack on the gravel.
‘Let’s both bunk off,’ she said. ‘Drive somewhere nice as it’s sunny.’
‘Really? Are you up to it?’
‘I’m driving myself quite a lot now. Come on. Just us.’
He laughed. ‘Come on, then.’
She already had the car keys to hand so he threw his bag on to the back seat and they sped off. She wound down the front windows and drove them swiftly inland to Wells and a tea shop, one that was comically unchanged though they had not visited in years. She made him order a slice of gâteau though she only wanted a toasted teacake.
‘Your new hair looks good,’ he said. ‘Have you had it trimmed again?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I decided not to grow it back. It was only that length out of habit and like this it’s so e
asy to look after. Like an old French woman’s, only I shan’t be dyeing it those lurid colours they like there. Is this dress too young?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I like it.’
All her scars had gone. Despite her new piety she must have been obsessive in her use of creams. The dress revealed a bit of cleavage, just enough, and he saw she was wearing the old amber beads that were her sole wearable inheritance from Granny and had taken off the crucifix she had been wearing night and day since she had been given it in hospital.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Tell me everything. How’s school?’
‘OK,’ he said, picking at stray crumbs. ‘I quite like it, actually. Though you wouldn’t like the girls Vernon and I go around with now.’
‘Are they a bit rough around the edges?’
‘They’re a bit . . . local,’ he said and she laughed, as he knew she would.
‘And you’ve paid for the Easter course yourself?’
He nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘That’s so grown-up. You know . . . if Jean Curlew.’
‘Curwen.’
‘Yes. If she does offer you a place, I’m sure we can find money to pay for it.’
‘There are scholarships, Carla says. If parents can’t pay.’
‘Yes. Well. One way or another.’ She waved at the waitress and made an elegant, ladylike we’d-like-our-bill-please gesture. ‘And otherwise . . . how are things?’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘OK.’
‘You’re not to worry about your father.’
‘Of course I worry. He cries all the time.’
‘Not all the time.’
‘Most of the time. When he’s not asleep or so full of Valium he can’t speak.’
‘Thank you.’ She handed the waitress back the bill saucer with money on it and stood. ‘We’re all praying for him. He still hasn’t got over nearly losing me.’
Really? He thought. Really? But he merely shrugged because he was enjoying the sensation of having her full attention for a change. And perhaps that letter of hers had been only a mad impulse, no sooner penned than burnt.
She drove back by a slightly different route that took them into a secluded valley through freshly ploughed fields where last night’s rain still lay in the furrows. There was a cluster of fine old buildings up ahead with a high wall around the garden to their rear, and an orchard.
‘Oh look,’ she said sharply.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘Lovely old house.’
‘It’s Grace Manor,’ she said. ‘Let me show you.’
‘But isn’t it a retreat? I’m sure they don’t want—’ he started but she had turned up the drive and swung in under a gatehouse and into a gravelled quadrangle marked out by tightly clipped bay trees in pots. ‘We shouldn’t just show up here,’ he said.
‘It’s fine,’ she said, patting his forearm. ‘They’re friends. We can say we were just passing. I wanted to show you the garden. Even at this time of year it’ll be—’
‘Do we have to?’
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Just quickly.’
And she was out of the car so that he felt he had to follow her because since giving up her second walking stick she could be wobbly.
‘Shouldn’t you lock it?’ he asked, glancing back. A woman in a pink fisherman’s smock with a wooden crucifix pinned to it was standing near the car. She said nothing but smiled and raised a hand. He flapped a hand in response and hurried after his mother.
It was all very beautiful and astonishingly quiet: one of those rare country spots where there seemed to be no twentieth-century noise. Not even a tractor could be heard, simply the bleating of sheep. The stone was the local limestone, the sort that looked as though it had warm sun on it even on a dull day.
‘It’s Tudor,’ she said. ‘Well, the oldest parts are. It was rather fancifully extended by a history-minded vicar, I think. Oh look. Agnes, hello.’
Agnes was a smiling, rustling sort of woman, quite a bit older than his mother. She reached out a hand to shake his and he saw she had strong, tennis player’s arms.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You must be Eustace. We heard all about you when your mother was with us.’
‘Agnes is a nurse,’ his mother said, with a glance at Agnes’ little navy leather shoulder bag. ‘In case anyone has a turn or something.’
‘Well,’ Agnes said. ‘It’s quite a drive along those back lanes to the nearest hospital. Have you been inside the walled garden yet, Eustace? The spring bulbs are just getting going and it’s so pretty.’
‘We were just going there,’ his mother said.
‘You’re sure we’re not disturbing anything?’ Eustace asked Agnes.
‘Heavens no,’ she told him. ‘I’ll just pop inside and tell Father Tony you’re both here.’
‘Father Tony?’ Eustace asked, but she was gone.
‘He works here sometimes,’ his mother said. ‘I’m sure I told you. Now just look at this,’ and she led the way through a little wrought iron gate that opened with a well-oiled silence on to a garden in another, smaller quadrangle where a chapel formed one side and a modern limestone crucifix loomed in a corner. The crucifix spoiled it all rather, making him think of how some people’s gardens ended up with little pet cemeteries in one corner.
His mother’s chatter was sounding nervous now. ‘Of course it was late summer when I was here, autumn really, but there were still lots of roses. You’ll just have to imagine those. But just look at all those narcissi out already. I always prefer the white ones. Those yellow and orange trumpets your father insists on planting are so very, well . . .’
‘What a lovely surprise, young man.’
Father Tony was as handsome as Eustace remembered and had somehow maintained a tan through the winter. Perhaps he went skiing. Agnes was rustling in his wake as he shook Eustace’s hand warmly and kissed his mother’s cheek.
‘Hello,’ Eustace said, disturbed at how the priest was still holding his hand.
‘You’ve not seen the chapel yet, I think.’
‘Well we should probably be getting home,’ Eustace told him.
‘Oh, but you must see in here first. It’s pretty special.’
And he dropped Eustace’s hand only to envelop his shoulders in an arm.
He had no smell at all. Eustace found himself thinking of the peel-off faces in Mission Impossible .
‘I swear you’ve grown since last year,’ Father Tony told him. ‘This way.’ And he steered Eustace through the doorway to the chapel.
‘I shouldn’t have drunk so much tea,’ his mother called out. ‘I’ll just nip to the . . .’ and she slipped from their side.
‘It’s through the gate and first on the left,’ Agnes called after her. ‘But you’ll remember the way.’
The chapel was fine. It had a roof like an upturned boat and stained glass that looked older than anything in Weston. It was very plainly furnished, with pale oak benches and an oak table for an altar. A glass crucifix glowed in the fading light thanks to some ingeniously concealed lighting. Father Tony kept his arm over Eustace’s shoulder and Eustace had a ghastly feeling he might be about to suggest that they pray together.
‘See,’ he said. ‘I told you it was special.’
And for a second Eustace registered the faintly comical fact that he had a mouth not unlike a Tom of Finland policeman. He wondered just how thoroughly Father Tony would lose his cool if he kissed him on the mouth, tongues and all. Then the sound of a car’s ignition firing made him flinch out of the priest’s grip.
‘Mum?’ he called, and ran out to the garden in time to see her car swing around the outer quadrangle and drive out beneath the arch. She had left behind the tartan suitcase and a plastic carrier bag. He sprinted across to the little iron gate but it was locked now.
‘Don’t leave me!’ he shouted, ‘Mum!’ reflecting as he did so that he never called her that, never really called her anything, so had no name to call out in such a crisis. He shook the gate but it held fast, then a wasp stun
g one of his shoulders. He slapped a hand to kill it but Father Tony caught his wrist in a fierce grip midstrike and he saw it wasn’t a wasp but Agnes delivering a swift injection through his shirtsleeve.
She looked flustered and pink in the face from hurrying and opening her little medical bag at the same time, but she still managed a kind smile.
‘Just to relax you,’ she said. ‘It’s quite safe. Mum signed a consent form. I am qualified to do this.’
His knees began to weaken and he slumped on to a bench against the wall, feeling as though all his strings had been cut. The sun had dipped behind the buildings and the shadows seemed to spread across the paths and bushes. He saw Father Tony cast a worried look at his colleague, saw her mouthing It’s fine back at him. Somebody unlocked the iron gate. The woman in the pink smock. She was carrying the suitcase and handed Father Tony the plastic bag through which he glimpsed the cover of Physique Pictorial .
‘We helped your mother,’ Father Tony was telling him. ‘And now she wants us to help you.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Two days later. Three. Four. He did what he should have done the first night had he not been so groggy. He slipped down to the chapel, to which, being in one of the inner rooms, he could enjoy access day or night, and used a teaspoon he had slipped up his sleeve at supper to jemmy open the little offerings box. Notes in there were no use to him and he left them, but he scrabbled up the one tenpence piece and thrust it safely to the bottom of his jeans pocket. Perhaps there was a God after all. Then he padded swiftly back to his room, knotted together his sheets and the ugly orange curtains as tightly as he could, tied one end to the bracket that supported the sink in the landing loo, dropped the rest through the window, squeezed through the gap, scraping and cutting his belly in the process and lowered himself as far down as he could before taking a deep breath and letting himself drop to the field below.
There was only a sliver of moon still up but the cold night was cloudless. There were sheep down there and he dreaded they’d start bleating at his sudden arrival among them but happily they were huddling at the far end beneath some old apple trees. He ran as fast as he could across one field, across another then on to the lane and back up the side of the valley down which he remembered his mother driving. He ran until a stitch and breathlessness stopped him then walked, breath whistling out of him, terrified he was making far too much noise, ready to leap into the hedge and hide if there were shouts or torches behind him, or headlamps. He had no coat – that had been taken from him with his shoes – but he could not have said if he was shivering from cold or adrenalin. It was more sport than he felt he had performed in his life to date. By the time he finally saw the yellowed light in a distant call box his slippers and socks were wet through from dew.
