The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "Don't you think he ought to get help?" I suggested.

  "I'm the one who needs help, ducky. The fact is, if I may digress, that when he grew his beard I thought 'Oh, no', but then he couldn't play tennis any more, which was very hard for him, he had to have something to do. And after a while I got used to it, it even came to represent, ghastly though it was in itself, a kind of scratchy comfort and security. But now . . . I keep wanting to run up behind him and just chop it off! Never grow a beard, darling. There's a lot more to a beard than meets the eye."

  As she talked I was increasingly drawn under by a current of recollection that her presence, and the lines from Gray, had obscurely triggered—the desert air of that summer of 1976, in which she and Geoffrey had somehow played a part, a memory of sexual loneliness, which would later pull so much I did into its own fierce patterns.

  I remembered the day after that first time with Dawn, coming downstairs with a kind of wary astonishment, feeling I'd been given access to a world that lay just on the other side of the parquet, the fridge, the radio, the piano declaiming in the sitting-room. I looked covertly at my family, wondering if they too were inhabitants of this thrilling dimension. Perhaps Charlie was; but his accounts of life with Lisanne seemed oddly to leave out any mention of it. I felt both irritable and supremely tolerant at the same time, sulkily looking over my mother's shopping-list, but then when I got outside, dancing to the baker's like a character in a musical comedy.

  It wouldn't have been an early start. Throughout my adolescent holidays I got up wastefully late, as though to make up for the austerity of school mornings, the wintry dressing in the dark. Sometimes it would be 11.30 or 12 before I came down for a cup of coffee and was warned off spoiling my lunch. They were hours of luxurious tedium in the half-light of the bedroom, reading for a bit, dozing in and out of songs coming from downstairs, Schone Mullerin all that summer, my father flagging and dissatisfied. I evolved fantastic sexual situations around boys at school, dropping off in the middle of them, then waking and putting them through some further fabulous depravity. My mother's weary, unwitting half-joke, "Are you getting up?", would be shouted from the hall, and I would reply with my comprehensive euphemism, "I'm just having a think."

  Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined. It had been awkward, a bit scary, my legs were stung by nettles, we'd only kissed a lot, really, then quickly stroked each other off, but it was wholly different from the heartless occasional jerk-offs at school with someone who called you a queer afterwards. Next day my head was full of the heat of it, the lovely certainty we did it for each other. When we met tonight, it would be a step further into the dreamy underwoods of love. By the time I went out for my walk after supper I was prospecting far into the future. I had coached Dawn to some surprising exam results, he had moulded me into a runner and swimmer who commanded respect. I wrote long letters to an imaginary friend abroad, dotingly detailing Dawn's sweetness and beauty. For all our open-air beginnings I had him closeted with me in des Esseintes-like privacy, in a sealed world of silk and fur and absolute indulgence.

  But Dawn didn't come. I sat on the bench reading Tennyson, but not taking it in, looking up every few seconds for a bike or just for him in dark running gear. It was breezier than last night, the wood was stirring in tumultuous slow-motion, the pond broken and bickering. I waited through a muffled sunset till the wind had blown off the cannon-smoke of low cloud and opened up a sky of densening stars. Of course we hadn't said we'd meet. I walked nervously under the wood's edge for a minute, and looked out the way I thought he would come, for a light swivelling over grass and bushes. But there were only the lights of planes, high up, climbing out of Gatwick, the intermittent yawn of their engines, and when they'd gone just the gusting of the trees. I was shivery in a T-shirt, and jogged home for warmth, working out a story about how I'd come back safely along the road.

  Next day I was desolate, and even coaxed out a few tears in my room, which I found impressive and almost cheering. I knew I had to ring Dawn, and got up suspiciously early to do so, hanging about in the hall with a book, until I thought the coast was clear, and then swiftly dissimulating my intention when my mother or Charlie came heedlessly through. I was more and more nervous the more I deferred. I didn't know their routines or anything about them; the phonebook gave me their address and I worked up an image of 12 Sands Road—by the sound of it pleasant enough—as a household severely unwelcoming to phone-calls of any kind, much less those from boys who wanted to fuck their son. I imagined Dawn denying all knowledge of me, hanging up on me, or just giving me some casual putdown. I had actually started dialling when my mother looked out from the kitchen and said, "Can't it keep till cheap time, love?" And I accepted her objection with only a show of reluctance.

  From 5 o'clock on I was locked in a parched rehearsal of my opening remarks, which involved an optional parent-charming paragraph (always say who you are and apologise for troubling them) that snagged on the question of how I should refer to him. Then I had to say "Hi! Dawn? It's Edward . . . Yeah, g r e a t . . . " and hope to catch the warmth in his reply and if at all possible lead him on to propose a meeting himself. By six these simple phrases had become a kind of hysterical gibberish in my mind, as though they'd been passed round the room in a game of Chinese whispers. I went to the phone, but thank god someone rang up for my father just at that moment, and I put it off till 6.30.

  After supper I said, "I'll just make that call now, Mum", and went and did it so quickly that the adrenalin only caught up with me at the moment someone answered: a girl, rather sultry and bored. He must have sisters. They were all out, she said. Or put it another way, she was there all by herself. She almost sounded as if she'd like me to come round and fuck her instead. She said she'd tell Ralphie that I'd rung, and repeated my number sluttishly wrongly before she got it right. Then I set out into the high-summer wastes of longing. Dawn never rang back. I missed him on the customed hill, all right. I missed him everywhere. Some days it was as if nothing had ever happened; on others I felt ruined, I'd been given a sip of some marvellous elixir and then had it snatched away. I knew it was absurd to fall in love after ten minutes' breathless smooching, but that only added an element of hysterical determination to my passion. Everyone noticed I was moping, but there were larger glooms about the house that rendered mine unimportant. My great-aunt Tina was very ill; Charlie kept deferring his visit to Lisanne's parents (who weren't at all sure it was a good idea) and tinkered pointlessly with circuitry in his room; and though nothing was said to me, it was obvious my father was doing less work and that there was a new caution about money. He had begun to cancel engagements. He was pale and withdrawn. I would ask him if he was okay, and he would push out his chest as if about to sing and say, "I'll be all right—a bit out of sorts." But our fortnight at Kinchin Cove was off that year; and the trading-in of our rusting Humber Snipe, a suffocating monster which, if never entirely new in our experience, had been a sign of prosperity six years before, was again deferred: it began to resemble one of the broken-voiced old hulks on the forecourt at the Flats. I had always been thrilled by cars and was deflated and embarrassed. I was told that my school-fees cost more than a car, and knew that I wasn't allowed to complain.

  After the first week, I took to ringing Dawn's number two or three times a day from a phone-box in town, though there was never any reply. They must have gone on holiday: he was somewhere different entirely, showing off on a beach, chasing his sisters, picking them up and spanking them, being clumsily macho for their protesting fun.

  I felt trapped in the house, but didn't want to miss a phone-call if it came. We had a smart, trilling phone but it was on a party-line, and I imagined Dawn baffled and kept at bay by the engaged tone as our talkative neighbours (whom we knew only from the inane fragments of chat that obstructed us when we tried to ring out) were maundering on. I began to hallucinate the cheep of the phone in the routin
e undertones and overtones of the house—in the burble and chink of the fridge, inside the dreary howl of the hoover, in the tinkling drops of a filling cistern. Perhaps I was going mad with desolation. I lay on the floor a lot, gazing across the landing to where the sunlight slanted along the carpet of the front bedroom, showing up various boxes that had been stowed away beneath the bed. Once when everyone was out, I went into the sitting-room and stormed up and down on the piano, which I had refused to learn, with clumsy ferocity—Sibelius standing thoughtfully beside me, as if ready to turn the page. Those were rare moments of faute de mieux togetherness with the dog, which otherwise owed all its loyalty to my parents, and still if I took him for a walk would run away.

  Sometimes a postcard came from holidaying friends and I examined the grim communality of the beaches with burning interest. That lad in black trunks, half a centimetre high in the middle distance at Rapallo or Cagnes-sur-Mer, looked pretty hot. It was so sexy there. Here there were only some beery lads on the grass, or old gents with their shirts off sitting on benches, listening to the cricket on tiny trannies. In town I found things taking on an absurd sexual significance: I tramped round and round on imaginary errands so as to see a butcher's boy with a spot-crossed full-mouthed face joking in the doorway with his workless mates. I knew where in Digby's the second-hand manuals of photography and volumes of obsolete sexology were shelved. Even the square-jawed beige mannequins in an outfitters' window, with a generalised mound between the legs, possessed a certain power of suggestion, as did the surreal cross-sections used to display underwear, as if the erogenous zones had been cast life-size in milk chocolate. Being in love seemed to license and heighten random desire all around; I felt guiltily untouched by the conventional wisdom of never looking at another man.

  It was into this dispirited household that I remember Geoffrey and Mirabelle coming, quite often, as if determined to brighten us up. There was a sense of an impromptu party being stirred into reluctant life; they would arrive with a half-bottle of Beefeater or a batch of meringues in a tin. The idea of Geoffrey brightening anyone up had something incongruous about it that added to the forced sense of fun. He made a genuine effort, he smiled a lot in a rather loopy way, he even once told a long humorous anecdote, followed by an expectant silence in which Mirabelle quietly provided the proper punch-line and pointed out an error earlier in the story which altered the meaning of the whole thing. It was Mirabelle really who made the going.

  As well as her line-judge's shout, she had a lovely liquid singing voice, which I imagined being refined to its bright clarity in the great stills of her bosom. She was always rather shy of using it in my father's presence, and made pointless remarks about how she couldn't sing at all, but then would break into a phrase or two from Cole Porter inadvertently, out of pure tunefulness, when carrying out the plates or pouring a drink. What sometimes happened was a duet with my father, which seemed less presumptuous on her part, though he would much rather have just listened to her or better still had no singing: "I will if Lewis will too," she would say, which may have been the basis for Geoffrey's festering jealousy all these years later.

  My father had a great aversion to character-acting in songs, any rolling of the eyes, putting hands on hips or wringing out of humour. He tended to sing like a sentinel, sworn to some higher purpose. Mirabelle, however, was much given to caperings and routines which spoke of a thwarted desire for the stage and could be rather overwhelming in the confines of the sitting-room. She knew several of the drunk songs from operettas and fin de siecle musicals and sometimes did "Ah, quel diner", from La Perichole, in a recklessly "French" manner. But her party piece was a song "I'm just a wee bit boozy", from a forgotten show called Her Cousin from Kansas, in which each verse was slightly more slurred than the one before; at the end she would pretend to stumble against the piano or even fall to the floor. My mother, who accompanied, always had a look of forlorn sobriety after this number.

  On one of these sad restless evenings that they came ding-donging into with such puzzling gaiety my mother muttered to me not to go out after supper. I was immediately certain that this was the night when Dawn would come back. I saw him, bronzed, heavy with sperm, roaming the common into the small hours, maybe meeting someone else . . . But Charlie had boorishly slipped the net and gone down to the pub, and I was being relied on to keep up some sense of occasion. The Turloughs had brought a bottle of cherry brandy and I drank several little glasses of it and felt annoyingly careless and witty.

  We went into the sitting-room, and I sat by the door, so as to get to the phone first when it rang. It was extraordinary the certainty I felt, one of those baseless whims, a slight chemical thing perhaps, that changes your whole attitude. Geoffrey, as a rule needlessly discreet, gave a detailed account of the machinations behind the current bypass proposals. Then my father went to put a record on the stereogram. I knew that he hated background music, and that this was a ploy to prevent anyone from singing. But the moment he lifted the magic lid Mirabelle exclaimed, "Oh Lewis, my love, why don't you sing to us? I can't bear a record on, when you don't know whether to talk or listen to it."

  "I really won't tonight," he said firmly but with a smile. And then what could he do but add, "But if you'd like to . . ." I think she agreed less out of high spirits than from a sense of duty.

  "I shan't sing 'I'm just a wee bit boozy'", she said, "because actually I am, and I'll probably get muddled up with the words."

  "Ah well," said my father.

  "But can you play . . . ?" She had a whisper with my mother and after five seconds' modest thought broke out in a deeper, sexier voice than usual, "A home is not a home without a man—He's the necessary evil in the plan . . .", at which Geoffrey looked quite uncomfortable. My mother accompanied anxiously, making it sound like a metrical psalm. When it was finished I clapped for too long.

  "Thank you, darling," said Mirabelle with a bow. She had on black linen bell-bottoms that added a further curve to her outline and low-cut slippers which showed the little pinched cleavages of her toes. "What would you like me to do next?"

  There were no immediate requests, and the general answer might well have been "Sit down and shut up". "Beggars in Spats," I called out mischievously. This was a comic number from the Broadway of thirty or forty years ago, a genre utterly antique to me but treasured by all these adults as the glamour music of their youth, and so absorbed by osmosis into my own. It was another of those things that gave me the ghostly sense of having grown up in an earlier age.

  She did sing "Beggars in Spats", which was about a couple getting married with only a nickel between them but somehow managing very well; it was a long song, in which everything happened several times over. "And now I've done enough," she said, turning her eyes on my father. "If I really can't persuade Lewis to join me?" He shook his head. "There seems to be a bit of a matrimonial theme. We could round it off with 'There's Nothing Like Marriage for People' . . ."

  "I'm just not up to it tonight."

  "Oh, go on, Dad!" I said, bounding across to his chair and tugging at his hand. "It's always so funny when you do it in your American accent." And Sibelius, noticing the activity, lurched to his feet and clittered round the parquet giving short affirmative barks. I appealed to my mother, who looked mournfully at my father, not knowing what to hope. Mirabelle doodled the first two lines sweetly, sotto voce, "Imagine living with someone Who's longing to live with you", and winked at me as he got up, with an alarming look of stifled wretchedness, and took his place by the piano. Mirabelle slipped her arm through his and sang the lines again, still very sweetly. ("Oh god, I imagine that every minute of the day," I thought.) "Imagine signing a lease together; And hanging a Matisse together," my father replied, but in stiff English. She took it up, in English too, "Oh what felicity In domesticity!" and he capped it, with a sternness that was comic in itself, "Let no one disparage Marriage!"

  It was all very strange. Geoffrey stared at his wife expressionlessly. Was he angry with her fo
r pretending to be getting married to my father? Or was he merely stuffily hiding his admiration and assessing the song as though he had never heard it before? I wondered if I was so self-absorbed that I'd missed out on something important that had been said. The accompaniment was oddly inadvertent. Mirabelle was nursing the thing along by sheer, even exaggerated, force of personality: "Hurry, let's call up the minister!"—head thrown back. A second's delay, "Why be a sinister Old bachelor or spinister . . . " My mother had stopped and I turned to her irritably. Her cheeks were wet with tears, and she was fumbling at her cuff for a handkerchief. Then she jumped up and ran out of the room.

  My father called "Peg" and went after her, half-tangled up with the doleful but excited dog. Mirabelle looked horrified at what she had brought about. Geoffrey nodded towards the door, and she drifted into the hall, biting her lower lip. The two of us were left alone. The shock of the first moments was yielding to a childish urge to cry too, the contagion of misery, however little understood. Geoffrey got up, walked to the window, and stood glaring into the dusk and the privet hedge.

  "I'm very sorry about your father's bad news," he said, raking and smoothing his beard. "I suppose it's as well to be prepared for the worst. Let's hope they can hold it off for a few more months, eh?"

  I did ring Willie Turlough, god knows why—perhaps out of that same sense of desolation that had welled up from the past and seemed to me, as it can in certain lights, to be our real environment. We talked against a background of white noise, he was impossibly distracted; I pictured him holding a wriggling bundle like the baby that turns into a piglet in Alice. What people put themselves through . . . I shouted that I would come round after supper, and had the impression that he agreed.