The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  I was awed by the book and its associations, and wondered why its author was known as the Old Rogue. I imagined him like Toad of Toad Hall, with goggles and a cigar, motoring recklessly from one Sussex alehouse to another. I kept peeping towards the window, trying to read Dawlish's reactions. He was in profile, and partly canopied by a broad-leaved plant that sprawled across the glass above him. He seemed to be paying each sonnet the very closest attention. Or had he perhaps fallen into a quiet doze? It occurred to me that he might have died. No—another page was shuffled under. I wondered which month he'd reached. I was aware that some months were stronger than others, which was why the sequence began with September, like a school year. I thought it unlikely that he would be very critical of them, but I would have to be sensible and take his criticism with eagerness and resolution when it came.

  One time I glanced up and found he was looking at me and slowly nodding, pausing to find the most tactful opening. "Marvellous," he said. "Simply marvellous, you've really got it. Really. I do congratulate you. You understand the sonnet, as few nowadays do. And every one of them has some memorable effect. 'When all is frozen to the rover's call' is a splendid line." And he said it again, to bring out what he heard as the "wintry echo" of all and call. I thought it was the best line of the lot myself, and saw it gaining something like proverbial status with Dawlish's endorsement. "There's absolutely no doubt about it, Edward," he said, with those gestures of regret that sometimes heighten the effect of praise; "You are a writer. A born writer, I would say. I see a very bright future for you indeed."

  Hunting moodily through my books for something to read at Dawn's funeral I came across Poems Old and New by Peregrine Dawlish, with an inscription to me, and beside it the copy of Merrifield's Love and Earth that I had felt bold enough to ask to borrow that day eighteen years ago, and had never returned. I felt dully guilty about it, but it was too late now. Flicking through the Dawlish I remembered that he had been a good Georgian poet with a tight lyric grace; it was later that he mistook his gifts, made painful attempts to get modern, shrilly took on free verse and low-life subjects and made a fool of himself. You could see why Squire might have praised him at fifteen: I suppose he used the same words as Dawlish had solemnly addressed to me. Looking back, I thought I could make out the suspect emotion of that afternoon, the old man's vicarious excitement in acclaiming talent he had only imagined, the tone of foolish self-congratulation. But at the time, it was so much what I wanted to hear that I took a nearly erotic pleasure in it. When, after a moment's hesitation, he lent me the Merrifield, and capped it with Poems Old and New, with the further wingbeat of wonder at finding what Perry was short for, I felt as if I'd been received into a succession. There was something about the light that day, the penumbra beyond which he sat in the leafy window, that fixed what he said in amber. I could still hear his hollow augury now; like the words of a fairground palmist, hard entirely to discount.

  Early that summer holidays I wandered up on to the common after supper. Charlie was just home from Cambridge with a Third that no one quite knew what to say about. His line was that he was a maverick genius, that exams weren't where he shone. There was a sort of smothered row (we never had any other kind) about his waist-length hair and its probable impact on anyone who might interview him for a job. He had a girlfriend at last, whom he deferred to on everything: "Lisanne says you shouldn't boil vegetables", "Lisanne thinks Schubert's really boring". After a couple of days Lisanne had become an invisible antagonist in our house, the subject of Charlie's veneration and everyone else's keenest loathing. We almost longed for her to come and stay, so that we could answer her back in person.

  Charlie let me know that it was what he called "the full scene", and came into my room unnecessarily to extol the virtues of Lisanne's breasts and the miracle of the pill. I didn't care about them, but being made to think of them only worsened my holiday blues, the sense of being sundered from the boys I felt and thought so much about. It was hot and tedious at home; my father was out of sorts and depressed and seemed withdrawn from us in a new and unaccountable way; the few friends who lived in the town had been whizzed off to Skye or Montpellier or Corfu with their families. I went up the hill a lot, semi-spying on sunbathers semi-hidden in the long grass, and thinking of Mawson and Turlough and El-Barrawi transforming whatever holiday thing they were doing just by being their enviable selves.

  My favourite time was soon after sunset, when I liked to catch the first sight of the evening star, suddenly bright, high in the west above the darkening outlines of the copses. It was a solitary ritual, wound up incoherently with bits of poetry said over and over like spells: sunset and evening star, the star that bids the shepherd fold, her fond yellow hornlight wound to the w e s t . . . It intensified and calmed my yearnings at the same time, like a song. In one poem I'd seen that first star referred to as the folding star, and the words haunted me with their suggestion of an embrace and at the same time a soundless implosion, of something ancient but evanescent; I looked up to it in a mood of desolate solitude burning into cold calm. I lingered, testing out the ache of it: I had to be back before it was truly dark, but in high summer that could be very late. I became a connoisseur of the last lonely gradings of blue into black.

  This evening was windless, with high grand cloud that the afterglow made into dream-towers of pink. A hawk went over in the dusk as I climbed to the top, then there was a nagging squeak—I thought of a small night animal, but it was only a boy on a bike, braking and juddering around the steep rutted paths. Well, others could share the twilight too. There would sometimes be a couple with a dog, relishing the cool, or kids from the Flats, not quite ready to go in. Charlie said the queers went up by the wood at night, and I imagined them with a mixture of distrust and fascination. I leant on the trig-point, and saw the bike approaching again. What an effort to have walked it all the way up here, even if he came by the gentler climb from the other side. I was aware of the wheels wobbling by me, the squeak of the brake again, a plimsolled foot scraping for balance. It was Dawn. He fell against me, hand round my throat to keep him steady, so that I choked for a second, like in a fight. He let the bike slither under him across the path and hopped free of it while a wheel still lazily spun. Then there was a second embrace, an arm round my shoulder in apology and surprise.

  It seemed we were being matey: Dawn's arm stayed heavily where it was, his fingers absent-mindedly doodling on my collarbone. We gazed out at the glimmering pinky-mauve crag of cloud that stood motionless to the west. He was very warm from exercise, and lightly sweaty in a tracksuit—not the sleazy multi-coloured modern kind but the soft old navy-blue kind that was like a rugged form of undress, like slumberwear worn out of doors. I always felt disadvantaged in sports gear, and envied boys like Dawn who came to life in it. I was analysing the slight discomfort in our stance, a hollowness in my stomach, an ache down my thighs like I got on a high building. I raised my arm and rested it on his back.

  "I should have known I'd meet you up here," he said, with a hint of routine school jeering, and a hint of flattery too, as if I figured in his thoughts, a poetic type from the Lower Sixth who might be worth wary emulation.

  "I'm always up here," I said, to counter any suggestion it was his place, not mine.

  "Yeah, I come over on my bike sometimes, since we moved. We should arrange to meet up."

  I loved the idea of that, perhaps we both had these great vacancies—these grandes vacances—to fill. On the other hand what would we talk about . . . We hardly knew each other; he was already coloured in my mind by being in Drake, with their drab plum strip. He was handsome, he'd been a rather hopeless Orsino last term, but his strong physique and violet tights had given the role another kind of interest. He turned towards me and jutted his chest out, with a body-builder's deep breath, and hooked up his other arm. "Feel that," he said, nodding at it. The light was failing, there was a moment's uncertainty. "Go on."

  I ran my hand over the gathered biceps, then play
ed down my approval—actually, I wasn't interested in muscles, except as part of the knot of manhood and the tightening hold it had on me. He rocked his bosom against mine, as if he had a girl's big tits. I could feel his hard nipples through our two layers of cotton. It was the sort of dumb sport you imagined them passing the time with in Drake. I was dying for him.

  He reached down quickly and grabbed at my stiff cock. "What do we have here?" he asked facetiously as I ducked backwards with a giggled gasp of protest. But his hand was still on my shoulder. "Oh, come on," he said in American, and pulled me slowly back towards him. "I saw you getting a root that time on the train."

  "When?" I said.

  "I had one, too." This was too much what I wanted. I thought, I am in a higher form than this person, I'm writing a lot of sonnets, I can speak Dutch, in fact I'm going to write a sonnet-sequence in Dutch. He took my hand gently and rubbed it against his tracksuit, where his cock was a hard ridge held sideways in tight underwear. Why was I ashamed to be seduced by him? "Let's do this," he whispered, right up against me, the first time I'd ever heard anyone breathe my own thoughts like that. There were voices close by, and I broke away.

  An oldish couple who might have been standing in the gloom for ages. I sort of recognised them. They admired the sublimity of the sky, some stratospheric wind just teasing the top of the cloud over into an anvil point, the lower parts darkening through lilac to powerless storm-grey. Oh, why didn't they just fuck off? The man, in a cap, half-stumbled on Dawn's prostrate bike. "That must be the Ashringford road," the wife said, gesturing at distant lights. I looked at Dawn, and found he was looking steadily at me. This was the real thing, we were going to do it. Our expectant silence must have been palpable to the others; as they disappeared down the steep path I heard the wife's crisp "I don't know", and wondered what the murmured question had been.

  We stepped back together and he kissed me with closed lips, as if shyly soliciting an answer in his turn. It was the gentlest thing I'd ever known from another boy, blasphemous and unhidden. I reached down again and rubbed him through his pants and he just let me. "We'd better go under the trees," he said, and went to pick up his bike. "Don't want to lose that." I thought to myself, "But that's where the queers go", imagining some nice distinction between what they did there and whatever we were going to do.

  I felt the minute of physical separation keenly, skirting the pond, Dawn walking the bike between us, the proficient idling of its wheels; I wanted things to start again, and then, as we stepped under the nighttime of the wood's edge, was quite afraid, too. This was the "dim woods" of poetry for real. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet. The forest's ferny floor. I'd threaded the paths there often by day, but now it was mazily different, the underbrush of August was thick and tangled across.

  Dawn had stopped to lodge his bike against a tree, and whispered loudly, "Hey, Manners. . . don't go too far." Perhaps I was trying to lead the way, as if I often did this. I came back towards him and we bumped into each other. I just couldn't see at first, and then began to make out tree-trunks and bushes against the relative brightness of the open common beyond. We hugged for a kind of confirmation, and I passed my hand shyly over his face (he kissed it!) and through his short curls. My mouth was open and sour with need when his lips nudged over it and his fat shocking tongue pressed in.

  When we came out of the wood I knew I was late, and must hurry down. The towering anvil of cloud had become a ruffled palm-tree of darkness against the other darkness of the sky. I longed to be alone, longed for it to happen again. Dawn sat astride his bike and leant on my shoulder to steady himself. It was a firm, slightly painful grip, through which all his weight and balance seemed to communicate themselves, as if we were an acrobatic act. Then he circled swiftly across the turf. I ran up to the trig-point and watched the rushing field of his front light and the red glow of his back light as he jolted and swung down the hillside and was suddenly out of view.

  Geoffrey and Mirabelle Turlough were great friends of my parents, though I was never quite sure why. Geoffrey was a wiry man with a depressing grey beard and no sense of fun, whilst Mirabelle could have represented fun in a pageant and was huge and outgoing, with short dark hair and glasses on a chain. He was in charge of the local planning office, but had been a fine amateur tennis-player just after the war: one could picture him doing months of practice serves. They had met at the Tennis Club where Mirabelle often umpired the ladies' matches. Later a shoulder injury had forced him to give up, but Mirabelle, who was no player, retained a passionate interest in the game, one that he seemed rather to resent. In my teens he was always in grey flannels, jacket and tie, when she would be wearing white daps and sports shirts with pockets right out on the end of her breasts; she would often be tugging the shirt down over her hips in a jolly, let's-give-it-a-go sort of way. Each year at the end ofJune she would appear on the television in uniform, glaring down the tramlines and howling "Fault" whenever possible. "She shouts so loud", my father once said, "you hardly need a telly to pick it up." Even so, those two weekends late in the summer term were always spent with the curtains drawn and the tennis on, not from any particular interest of ours in the sport, but rather from the hope of seeing our friend crouched behind the muscled legs of the receiver. The next week the Turloughs would come to supper, and Mirabelle would reveal the best of the scandals she had picked up about the players—particularly sexual ones of a kind that were never talked of at home, and which all of us, including Geoffrey, took rather stiffly.

  I knew from early on that Mirabelle was somehow in tune with sex in a way that I couldn't believe my parents were. On the other hand she seemed to have no real rapport with her husband, whereas my mother and father were clearly linked by some deep if reticent bond. Geoffrey was a decent, disappointed man, who would ask you about your O levels, whilst Mirabelle called you darling and winkingly cross-questioned you on your non-existent girlfriends. They seemed to embody some mysterious thing—perhaps a flaw, perhaps a principle—about matrimony and the unimagined later centuries of adult lives. She was always pumping me for information on their heavenly son Willie, who was in the year above me at Stonewell and fancied by absolutely everybody; and it was a disturbing moment when I overheard her saying to my mother how easily she could fall in love with the boy, and my mother replying, "He's too young for you, dear!" Alas, Willie took after his father in conscientious dullness, and was aloof to all pashes and advances. Later, when it became clear to my mother that I was gay, it was Mirabelle who helped her come to grips with it, and spoke of it as an enviable state of being, the opportunities . . . She brought it up all the time, with slightly wearying good-heartedness.

  After my father died, she kept close to my mother, and developed the habit of dropping round for coffee three or four mornings a week. For years she was associated in my mind with our neighbourly sitcom doorchime, which didn't so much ring as brightly announce impending good-fellowship with its halting ditone. Once it had been an incongruous interruption of my father's practising. But later, when nobody else much came, the words Mirabelle and doorbell became almost synonymous with each other.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, looking at Gray's "Elegy" in The Golden Treasury: I was amazed to find how little of it I remembered. I didn't see it as especially appropriate for my dead friend, who blushed, but not unseen, and wasted none of his sweetness. I thought she must just like its tone of maxim-studded consolation. "It's the end," she said, and pointed to the verse beginning "One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill". Then the bell ding-donged. "Ten fifty-five," she said, with irony but no resentment.

  Mirabelle was sixty-four now, a year older than my mother; but whereas my mother never aged in my eyes, and remained at an ideal forty of competence and prettiness, her friend struck me, after a couple of months' absence, as abruptly an old woman. The hugeness had become wheeziness and powdered underchins, and the odd compromise of her marriage, it turned out, was under unexpected strain.
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  At first she was all cheer, subsiding on to a startled kitchen chair, and examining me closely. "It's lovely to see you, darling, but he's looking a bit pale, a bit black under the eyes, isn't he, Peg? I expect it's the late nights out there."

  "I think he has lost weight," my mother answered obliquely.

  "I expect you've got one of those lovely Dutch boys, haven't you, with blond hair, grey eyes—very friendly."

  "I'm not actually in Holland," I said, shying away from the complicated truth.

  "He's here for the funeral—you know . . . " said my mother.

  "Darling, it's too unbearable. Poor you, poor them, oh dear . . . You know Willie's had a third, a little boy: they couldn't decide what to call the little chap, they've just called him Number Three or something silly like Marmaduke, which I thought was in danger of sticking. Anyway, now they're going to name him in memory of your friend."

  "What, Dawn . . . ? I'm not sure that's . . ."

  "No, Ralph, silly."

  "I think Ralph Turlough would be a very good name," I said, though feeling that Willie had somehow managed to miss the point.

  "I'm sure they'd love to see you." She hesitated, and took the coffee my mother was passing her. "I've been taking refuge there myself, of late. Well, I can help with the baby." And then the story came out—how Geoffrey, within weeks of his recent retirement, had gone into a resolute depression, had claimed that their life together was pointless, that he had never loved her, never even liked her much, and that he knew all about her affairs with numerous other men, including, one rather gathered, my own father. "And I never!" she said, in Dandy Nichols cockney. "I never!" My mother smiled confidently. "Do you know what he said to me today?" she went on. "He came into the kitchen and said, 'Good morning, evening and night, and now I don't think I need speak to you for the rest of the day.' And he just sits there, you know, with his fingers in his beard."