The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "I want you to see it this way, as if you were an old pilgrim, or you couldn't afford the tram."

  "Heavenly."

  I led her over a bridge, through an escutcheoned gateway and into the first little square; silent houses and a statue of a nineteenth-century man with swooping moustaches—she ran forward to read his name.

  "I've no idea," I said.

  "But darling, I thought you'd know everything by now."

  "Sorry. I do know one or two things, but . . . not that."

  "I see." She walked round the statue on its high plinth as if my ignorance made it more interesting or problematic. The nice thing about the man was his thoughtful, almost unhappy expression, as if he felt himself unsuited to the eminent perpetuity of statuedom. He might, have been a good doctor or a minor devotional poet. Edie imitated his posture, mocking it gently, and caught the eye of a young boy who came trotting past and stopped in surprise to see a man with a hat-box and a striking dark girl in black rights and tunic and slouch-cap, like a Stuart page-boy in mourning, standing stock-still; while to me it had an older resonance, the busy longueurs of photo-sessions when Edie was still at fashion-school, when we would go on to the common with a suitcase and umbrellas and sheets of tinfoil and one or two of her inventive friends and create our gleaming static happenings, which patient passers-by would stop and puzzle over.

  I was bursting with things to say to her; she was an indulgent listener, not like rivalrous old men friends who fought you for the conversational advantage. But I wanted to let the city enfold her first. As we walked on I would point out a church or house or a glimpse into a courtyard, but we hardly spoke. I felt the place was mine, I was proud of it, and of more or less knowing my way through it; and I knew the quality of Edie's different silences, from the violent to the serene, and that we were together in this one—as I hadn't been together with anyone since I came here.

  We were at a famously pretty point, with a view of the Belfry beyond a canal, leaves fluttering on to the water, a long quay to the left with three receding bridges stepping from the empty sunshine into the narrow lanes of the middle of town.

  "It is absolute bliss," Edie said. "You're so lucky, and so right to have come. I couldn't see why before, to be honest I thought it was quite potty, but you're absolutely right."

  I swallowed the blunt admission. "Voilà."

  "I must say it is rather peculiarly quiet." She looked at her watch. "I mean we've seen three people in the past twenty minutes, and now there's nobody in sight at all. That sort of might get to one."

  "Yes, things have been a fraction on the dull side since about 1510. But we do what we can to make our own entertainment."

  "So one rather gathered from your letter."

  She was not ungrand, Edie. My mother often said she came from "a very good family", which was her way of glossing over Edie's more gavroche and boozy qualities and suggesting I was lucky to be friends with a de Souzay at all. The de Souzays were great liberal philanthropists, though not, by and large, as keen as this one was to get in a pub and talk, at some length, about men and what they liked to do. She had an emphatic contralto speaking-voice, and a certain hauteur—undercut by a vulgar laugh that could set other people going in a cinema or cafe.

  She always used the same scent, a beautiful fragrance that was abbeys, aunts, tapestried country houses, dulled petals in china bowls before it was . . . whatever it was, the discreet phial put up by some Mayfair herbalist for powdered dowagers in black court shoes. It didn't go particularly with what she tended to wear—often made by herself and usually sexy, theatrical and vaguely disconcerting: she was my earliest experience of glamour, of bold exposure matched with dazzling concealment. Fifteen years ago I had seen her squeeze up her bust like a soubrette in a Restoration comedy, and watched with awe as her face, with its long nose and downed upper lip, was painted and dusted into a challenging and ironic mask. Even then she wore her mysterious perfume, so that to breathe it again now in my rooms was to go back through half a lifetime passed alongside her. It overwhelmed the yellow roses I had bought and stuck in a jug in the middle of the table.

  "I love it, dear," said Edie, opening the cupboards into which I'd tidied things away. "You could have a great romance in here." She went to the long back window and gazed down into the secret garden.

  I felt buoyantly rich with the money I'd been given by Matt, and loved being able to make Edie completely my guest. She kept offering to pay for things, as she had often had to in the past, and I would sternly but suavely refuse her. I took her out straight away for lunch at a gloomy and highly praised restaurant in the main square, where we drank three bottles of Chablis and ate mussels and turbot and apple pancakes. The subject of Luc was palpable just beyond us. I felt more reckless and confessional as I drank, but I kept clear of it till coffee: I thought it would take my appetite away and then the meal would be a waste of money. I asked her about things back home with the feeling I'd been away for five months, not five weeks.

  "Everything's pretty much as you left it," she said. "I was at the Common last weekend—just seeing Ma and Pa, but I popped into the George for a glass of Guinness and to pick up the gossip. One hears your old friend Willie Turlough has had yet another baby."

  "To think I could have been his baby," I said, as though envisaging some wild new form of surrogacy. "Still, he's bald now, isn't he?"

  "It's a glorious great pate, by all accounts. Not that he could ever be less than humblingly handsome . . . " She leant forward and pushed a hand through my thick mop.

  "Anything else?"

  "I went into Dawn's shop, it's all outrageously expensive. He said no one had even rung the bell—You know they've got a buzzer now for security—for two days. I bought a pair of old china candlesticks for about the price of a world cruise, it was sort of a mixture of charity and madness, like so much of one's existence."

  "Are you pleased with them?"

  "Not at all. I'm just longing for someone to get married so that I can pass them on."

  I twiddled the stem of my wine-glass. "I never long for that," I said. "And what of Dawn himself?"

  "Well, I was amazed to see him looking so fit. Colin took him to Algeria, which was apparently somewhat hairy with the riots, but did mean he got nice and brown; and he's put on a bit of weight. The AZT seems to have made him rather hilarious."

  "I so want him to be all right," I said—it seemed still worth saying.

  "I'm afraid I didn't see your ma," said Edie after a pause. "I don't suppose she'd expect me to call if you weren't there."

  "I had a ten-page letter yesterday. She's fine. At least if there isn't an upset in the later pages. I've never quite finished reading one of her letters before the next one arrives."

  We were late, perhaps loud with drink (one never knew), and the sole survivors of lunchtime. The waiter who was left to us gave only a curt nod when we asked for a second pot of coffee. "So what about this breaking heart of yours?" said Edie. "Or am I exaggerating?"

  "God, I wish you were," I gasped, tears suddenly in my eyes.

  "Darling. Perhaps it will be all right."

  "Of course it may be all right..." I lit a cigarette, it was from a packet left behind in the bar, an American brand, thin and sweet—the shock of finding what other people buy and like.

  "Have you actually . . . made a move?"

  I shook my head. "There are the most tremendous bars and forces in the air. Sometimes I'm only eighteen inches away from him, our feet are virtually touching as we sit at the table for the lessons, I can smell the milky coffee on his breath. And yet I'm completely immobilised."

  "Well, you could hardly start groping him in a lesson." Then, "How's it going to end?"

  "That—that's too logical and impossible a question. How it is is all that counts." Edie said nothing. "I'm so empty and aching for him, he affects everything I do and think, and it's very hard to believe that maybe he doesn't even know. It really makes me feel quite mad at times. When I go
round for the lessons, you know how it is, at first I feel absolutely mad simply being with him, then after a few minutes I kind of subdue my passion with words, things get normalised, their banality somehow shows through for a while—of course there are spurts of hot heart-burn—and then as the end approaches it becomes unbearable again. I feel my face is stiff with all the pain he doesn't even know he's inflicted: it's just that basic biological thing, you can't stand being separated, and for minutes after he's said goodbye your heart is thumping and thumping and you feel full of despair and shock as if you'd just witnessed some great accident. And you have to have a drink." I took a deep pull on the cigarette and stubbed the whole thing out. "Ah, coffee."

  The waiter set down the copper pot, and busied and obstructed us removing the ashtray and at last empty glasses. "Which way do you think his thoughts turn?" Edie asked.

  "Anights? Well, it's hard . . . Did I mention the Three? They enhance each other's mystique no end. They're all beautiful and well off and give the impression of being crazy about each other."

  "You know what they say . . . 'Un trio n'excite pas de soupçons'."

  "Well, my soupçons have never been more excites in their lives." I hesitated, and then drew out the wallet of pictures from my inside pocket. "I can show you."

  "Oh."

  I shuffled through the prints and laid out half a dozen in front of her. She seemed deliberately to take a detached line. "So this dark one is Patrick? He looks a real little thug, I must say. Quite nice though."

  "He doesn't look a thug. He's got a gigantic cock."

  "Sibylle is lovely, I agree. beautiful eyes, and mouth; and colouring."

  "Yes."

  "She looks very sophisticated and irresistible."

  "Quite. Thank you."

  "And this must be him." I looked away and then back to the upside-down image and waited for her reaction. It was the faun-like picture of Luc on the beach.

  "Don't you think it's very ancient Greece that one?"

  "Mm. Where was it taken?"

  "It's at a place just over the French border where the Three are always going. I followed them down there with my friend Matt and we kind of spied on them."

  "I see, you took this."

  "No, no—no. I stole the negatives and had them printed."

  Edie raised an eyebrow and I wondered again, as I had in dense hours of meditating on that picture, just who had taken it and at which of his friends that complex gaze of Luc's had been directed.

  "That must have been rather difficult."

  "Terribly easy. I've stolen lots of things. I'm wearing a pair of his pants at the moment, and one of his vests and one of his socks." I stuck out my feet beyond the tablecloth and she looked with concern at my one blue and one green ankle. "The blue one's Luc's."

  "Darling—I mean . . . You do seem to have gone completement bonkers."

  I tolerated this remark, I wasn't sure if it contained a hint of congratulation. I drank a cup of coffee in quick insistent sips, and Edie kept looking at the photos. "Are the others any good?" she said.

  "There are some others I wasn't going to bore you with."

  "Bore? I love other people's photographs. They're the only ones that aren't disappointing."

  I gave her the packet. "There are those rather odd ones, where they're acting or something. That one where Patrick has a sheet over his head, and Luc's waving a poker round like a sword. Most peculiar," I said, drily and enviously.

  Edie frowned over the print. "It isn't that peculiar. They're only larking about. Just because you can only imagine them gazing into each other's eyes and having sex all day long, you seem to have forgotten that they're only kids, who still do childish, rather kooky kind of things, and like dressing up and being silly. You may not have heard about it, it's called fantasy."

  "You haven't even met them." She held my hand across the table. "You haven't said what you think of Luc."

  "Well, he's lovely, darling. . . Odd-lovely, wouldn't you say? His upper lip is very large and over-luscious."

  "When you see the point of him it's the upper lip you love most of all. You go from disliking it to accepting it to . . . adoring it."

  "The other thing I think", said Edie, "is that he's too young for you."

  "Well, of course he's too young for me," I said in sudden miserable annoyance. "Still, it happens, it happens."

  Edie was a hit in the Cassette and shook hands with people and made funny conversation, much of which was over their heads. She wore black shoes and tights, a thick short bunched red skirt that stuck out, a black leather jacket and her hair pulled up inside her black cap: she looked like an interesting young man during that brief phase when skirts for men were considered a possibility. She wasn't a fag-hag (if anything, she claimed, it was I who was a hag-fag), but an emotional aloofness, the afterspace of several short, obscurely unhappy affairs, made her at home among gay men; they wete abruptly intimate yet made no deep demands on her, and she followed their doings with close attention and a kind of caustic merriment, as at some gratifying old melodrama. She would go into the George IV at lunchtime, but never at night, when she thought the boys should be left to make their own mischief, which she could hear about next day. She was kind, too, when she needed to be: she had looked after friends of ours who were dying. Dawn was one of them.

  She and Gerard took to each other and had a long lively talk, while I sat it out on a bar-stool and made occasional interjections implying a closer relationship with Gerard than was really the case. I suppose their witty chat, with Edie like a louche minor royal showing a radiant fullness of interest in her interlocutor's stories, stirred some clumsy jealousy—and I remembered Gerard's old ambiguity, the early marriage, and didn't quite trust him. I bought us all another drink and he dropped the subject of Burgundian court music like a flash and said, "How's it going with Matt, then?"

  "Fine!" I said.

  Gerard looked around the room and said, "Yes, a lot of people were quite surprised when you went off with him."

  "Too hot for me, you mean?"

  "Well . . . And then he's not very interested in the things you like."

  "I'm sorry", I said, "but we seem to have quite enough in common to be getting on with. Perhaps you believe in the narcissist theory of gay attraction; I've always loved it with people who are different from me." I was sounding cross and turned cosy for a moment. "He's been away for a couple of weeks, should be back tomorrow." I looked down. "I've missed him a lot actually."

  "I hear he likes pretty kinky sex."

  I said, "Yup", and Edie said,

  "Is this the person you've been working for?"

  "No, no," I said, with the warm mendacity of tone I knew she would understand—in fact she had named it the Manners Disclaimer years before.

  "You wouldn't want to work for Matt," Gerard explained to Edie: "he does very shady dealing, and is often in the jug." We laughed, and he added, with a spoiler's relish, "As Edward will tell you, Matt isn't even his real name. He's really called Wim Vermeulen." After a moment of narrow-eyed scepticism, I nodded and sighed in confirmation. "He changed it recently when he came out of prison. Apparently he thought he looked like Matt Dillon."

  "I think he looks just like him," I said.

  Later on Edie and I slumped together on the banquette in the corner and half-watched some stubbly frenching going on across the room. "Is this Matt really a crook, as your musical friend says? It does seem rather odd if he's changed his name."

  "Gerard's just madly jealous of us," I said as I realised the symmetry of the thing. "actually he is a crook, yes. And I'd more or less come to the conclusion that he'd been inside. though I confess the Vermeulen thing is a surprise. I thought he was someone else he knew; letters come for him. I'd even started getting a wee bit jealous."

  "Do be careful."

  "It's nothing serious, what I do isn't. He has a lot of business with computers which as you can imagine I have nothing to do with. And then this other stuff. . . it
's rather shaming really. He's a sort of fetish merchant. Well, he sells porn videos, very cheaply, by mail—he buys them and copies them, which I suppose is illegal. And he also sells people's clothes, which must be illegal too, and is much more profitable."

  "Why's that illegal?"

  "He steals them first. There are guys out there—in here, for all I know—who are prepared to spend a fortune on, say, a sixth-former's Y-fronts or a really sweaty kind of yucky jock-strap."

  "I hope you didn't spend a fortune on your one blue sock."

  "No, no, I helped myself to that. The thing about Matt's items is that they're a con. Actually he does sometimes genuinely work to a commission; but as a rule he just passes things off as, say, the young postman's rather heavily soiled smalls, or the lycra shorts of the national schools squash champion, who just happens to come from our very own St Narcissus. He goes to the Town Baths when they are in for their swimming-lessons and helps himself to a handful of the dirtier pieces."

  Edie had the open-minded expression of someone on holiday good-naturedly learning the rules of a foreign national game.

  "So the soiling is the important part really?"

  "Oh, absolutely. And pubes. They up the price phenomenally. And there you do have to be a bit careful."

  "It seems to be very school-oriented."

  "Yes, it does at the moment—it may just be the rush of the rentree that's got so many of the perves on edge. There are older people too who have their following—some of them soil professionally; the cynical foul, I suppose you might call it."

  "It's all a revelation to me."

  "Isn't it? It's a kind of alchemy really. You take something of only slight practical value, but give it a magically arousing association, even if of a kind most people would consider revolting, and you're minting gold." And I had a hard-on myself at the grip of Luc's tight little knickers and feeling the hard-ons he must have had pushing against the very cotton that now constrained mine and his balls thoughtlessly snuggled there all day long.