The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  I was in the pub first. It didn't seem to them to be all that long since I had left. To me it did, so that I was reluctant to go in, and then hurt at how little fuss was made of me. The deaths of our friends were in the smoke-soured air, of course; they were still being talked about with original shock, and with the occasional hilarity that came with shock and brought a tear to the eye that the indulgent reminiscences failed to raise. From time to time someone would have the muffled excitement of breaking the news to a new arrival who hadn't heard. I noticed how the story was changing as each teller patched it together.

  I bought lagers for my old chums Danny and Simon, who must have known me well, we had drunk so much together and talked so much, up and down the scale between murky confession and the permitted embellishments of tales of conquest, the two of them drily puncturing my more preposterous flights; but I had an eerie sense of having broken with them, of looking in with envy on their steady and self-sufficient affair. The utterly unchanged bar, some of the men I had slept with at one time or another, even Dawn himself, existed in earlier, closed-down precincts of my life. When Simon asked me some perfectly straightforward question, I felt it had been run through a scrambler. What was the scene like in Belgium? You mean the scene . . . in Belgium . . . ? I couldn't think of anything to say.

  Willie and Alison had given up expecting me by the time I made it out to their house. She appeared in her dressing-gown, holding the baby, little Ralphie, whom she had just fed into fat-faced sleep. Willie was hurrying about in his socks, holding chewed toys, a stained cot-blanket. I felt I was interrupting something arduous and intimate.

  "What sort of time do you call this?" he demanded cheerfully, and gave me a sympathetic kiss on the cheek. Actually it was only half past nine, a time at which I normally comforted myself with the certainty of hours of drink to come; but when you entered the lives of young parents you were in another time-zone, pale faces came to meet you in the half-light, abstracted with fatigue. "It's like some awful kind of training," Willie said, "where they wake you up at odd hours of the night, and you have to put an engine together, or defuse a bomb."

  "I didn't know they did that."

  "Don't they? I thought they did . . . " He yawned like a dog, with a whine too.

  Alison had gone upstairs and didn't re-emerge. I imagined she'd just fallen asleep where she was. Willie looked mildly bemused by the silence, the social call from the outside world. He was piecing together what it was one did. I said, "Would you rather I went?"

  He was dismayed. "My dear Edward!" Slightly ponderous now. He frowned and smiled, and I realised he looked so much balder because he'd done the sensible thing and cut it all off short. Last time I'd seen him there had been fatally middle-aged wisps. His features were so good that he looked even more handsome without hair than with it. As he wandered round through the debris of plastic bricks and scribbled scrap-paper I couldn't help thinking back through his shapeless casual clothes to the naked prefect he had been, his magically unblemished skin, the blue veins that ran over his upper arms, the idle beauty of his big cock and balls. Not for the first time I thought what an excellent homosexual he would have made. "Would you like a drink?"

  "Mmm. Perhaps the merest rumour of Scotch. The merest hearsay . . . "

  "I'll bring the bottle."

  I swept the rubbish from an armchair and sat down and still got a piece of Lego up the bum. Why did they do it? Why did this dully charming man, who was already working absurdly to support two children, who got up at six each day to commute to town and was sometimes not home till nine, then go inanely on and sire a third? It must be instinct, nothing rational could explain it — instinct or inattention or else what Edie called polyfilla-progenitiveness: having more children to stop up the gaps in a marriage. I was at the age when I couldn't ignore it; my straight friends married and bred, sometimes remarried and bred again, or just bred regardless. I saw them losing the gift of speech, so used to being interrupted by the demands of the young that they began to interrupt themselves, or to prefer the kind of fretful drivel they had become accustomed to. I saw the huge, humiliating vehicles these studs of the GTi were forced to buy: like streamlined dormobiles, with tiers of baby seats and stacks of the grey plastic crap which seemed inseparable from modern infancy. I saw their doped surrender to domestic muddle, not enough letters on the fridge door to spell anything properly, the chairs covered in yoghurt.

  "This is all very sad," said Willie, with a stern smile. Neither of us knew yet just how seriously the other was taking it, whether we would shortly be telling slightly derisory stories in an air of accomplished melancholy or if one of us would be comforting the other as he sobbed out his bitter regrets and griefs. The thought of a scene of unguarded emotion with Willie, whatever its cause, had a certain appeal.

  "I wondered if Mirabelle might be here," I said.

  "No, she's been wonderful with the baby, much more than with the other two"—as if that was the only reason for her coming round.

  "Here's a good long life to Ralphie number two," I said, chinning my glass. "A new Dawn, you might say." Perhaps there were unhappy implications to this.

  "He was the first of our schoolfriends to go—that's why I chose his name." This wasn't true, or it depended what you meant by friends; our old boys' magazine now had two epochs to its obituary page—the steady professional deaths of the pre-war generations, and the cluster of pinched-off careers, nothing much to say about them yet, dead at twenty-four or twenty-nine, or thirty-three, no causes given, where before it had been climbing accidents.

  "It was a very sweet idea. I'm so confused by the shock of this death, having started in a way to prepare for a different one. But if he'd gone as it were knowingly, he'd have been very touched at what you've done. He rather loved you, you know."

  "Well, I rather loved him," said Willie smugly. "In my way—of course, not like you did." I looked at him with a sceptical little smile, so that he went on, "Even I could see that he was jolly handsome."

  Well, yes, he was quite handsome—dark curls, blue eyes—but that wasn't the point of Dawn, it wasn't why men wanted him. Willie reminded me of people without a sense of humour, who laugh at the wrong moment, or for too long. There was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum's violet end.

  "I was trying to tell Alison about you two at school, and how scandalous you were. She wasn't very impressed. She said she thought that was what all public schoolboys did—you know she can be a bit left-wing."

  "We're all a bit left-wing, dear."

  "Mmm."

  "I hope she doesn't think you ever carried on like that. She must know you were the great untouchable."

  Willie looked into his glass and shook the ice around in it. "I didn't really want to be untouchable, you know. But I just wasn't into it. I tried quite hard sometimes; everyone would be mooning about one of the new boys—don't you think he's a perfect orchid, isn't he just like a dark little kitten—and I'd search my heart, but all I could ever see was a rather anxious little chap who'd had his cricketbat stolen, or whatever."

  "You are aware that virtually the entire school had a crush on you?"

  "Well, I don't know about that. It could be quite lonely at times, and I felt a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. In the dorm I pulled the sheets over my head or pretended to sleep if ever naked figures went scampering past. I did feel I was missing out."

  "I don't think you missed out on much. I don't remember much of all that. They might have wanted to do things, but you know they were all too bourgeois and inhibited. I used to long to be at some great ancient school, with a real rigour of vice."

  "Well, you and Ralphie did okay."

  "That wasn't vice, darling, it was love."

  I saw Willie's almost instant mastering of the surprise of being called darling, watched him as he sprawled a fraction
more unguardedly on the sofa, as if to deny the intrusive intimacy of my tone and absorb the jolt of grief that must account for it. Perhaps at that moment I saw how isolated I felt in losing Dawn, though he hadn't been mine for . . . sixteen years.

  "It's brought so much back," I said. I went on about that summer, the horrible empty weeks which had just begun to haunt me with their apparent denial of what had come before and of the promise they had seemed to give of what was to follow. I jumped and told him about how good at drawing Dawn was: there was something sexily luxurious about the patient sittings, when the boy who had had me for real an hour before would perch across the room and stroke my outline on to paper, and I felt as if it was me who was drawing him, studying his absorbing gaze, his tongue on his lip where mine liked to be, or wetting his thumb to blur the charcoal with it.

  "Were you ever caught?"

  "I don't think we ever actually were. There were several occasions of absolutely split-second escapes, you know, when you leap into a deeply studious pose with your pubes trapped in your zip. Everyone knew we did it a lot, of course, and mocked at us out of envy, but though that wasn't a secret, the sex itself was, somehow. But it's like that, isn't it, it's amazing what you can manage, what you can fit in in the unsuspected intervals of the day."

  "I think I must have been a great innocent at school," said Willie, with a certain self-satisfaction.

  "We went out at night a lot of course. We used to meet up by the river." For an instant only I seemed to smell the damp mud and half-see the river moving in the dark, conspiratorial or perhaps indifferent. "You remember those trees down behind the CCF sheds. I don't know what kind they were, their crowns were much paler than the rest, they seemed to gleam in the dark." The dense twiggy mass around the trunk, like some involuntary eruption of secondary life, the leaves dusty and sticky, dropping on to the verandah of the army hut, which by a trick of memory appeared with taped-over windows, as if in wartime. The leaves would be falling even now, the life of the school must still be going blindly on: perhaps kids were huddling at this moment in the smokers' riverside bivouac beyond, or snogging intently in the dubbin-scented hut, unbuttoning each other in the glow of SM McGregor's breathy gas-fire. This was an aspect of the corps that Willie, who had been big in the army cadets, was unaware of; and maybe the hut seemed a glamorous rendezvous to me because I had opted out, and spent those long parade-ground afternoons in the alternative vacancy, the smoky idleness, of "community service".

  "Do you like being out at night?" I asked, not because I wanted to know, but so as to license what I wanted to say about myself.

  "I haven't really done it much. Except you know . . . in the car."

  "It may be too late for you now. You need to do it when you're a lad and you feel like part of a secret society, and an old, country thing, standing still and seeing night-sighted animals busying about."

  "Not being night-sighted oneself. . ."

  "After a while you are. I can't remember the individual nights, isn't it awful, that whole phase of my life has somehow rendered down to a few scenes—being out under the trees, lying in each other's arms looking at the stars, our naked legs in night breezes and moonlight, seeing a fox trotting round and round on the path by the gym, trying to levitate on the cricket pitch: you remember the levitation craze, I think I did actually levitate . . . and of course all the things we did to each other, well, it was levitation in a way, I don't need to tell you what love's like, but perhaps that's why it's all a mood or just an impression of blackness. I was too pressed up against him to see."

  "You seem to have seen a lot," said Willie kindly, perhaps touched by my moist-eyed, slightly fanatical manner. "Urn, have another drink," and he leant across with the bottle and I let him pour as if unaware that I had to say when. The lovely confidence of that tarnished gold liquid in my grasp, the sense of being provided for, of knowing one could come through. I plucked off my glasses to rub my eyes and saw the lamp-lit room and my friend's pale face in an intimate crepuscular blur, like a little etching by Edgard Orst. And I felt the spirit of the time that I had summoned up pouring past me like a night-wind through woods around a lonely shack or long-abandoned Nissen hut where two boys squat and banter over a ten-minute fire of twigs and rubbish. My heart was thumping with the certainty that when I put my glasses on again Dawn himself would be leaning forward from the sofa, his teenage eyes and mouth unveiled by love.

  "Of course, we had to get away from Lawrence Graves."

  "Christ, I'd quite forgotten . . ."

  "Old Graves was mortally put out by the whole business. I tried to make him feel wanted, and I used to have Dawn round for Bruckner and Mahler sessions in our study, but Graves got into absolute paroxysms of irritation if we even smiled at each other. He'd be conducting away and though the music was all part of it, Dawn and I could almost forget it was going on somehow, we were so full of our own latest memories and plans, and he would catch us smiling at each other . . . I think he wanted to kind of hijack our affair, take it over or blow it up."

  "He was in love with you himself, presumably."

  "Of course," I said impatiently, covering the fact that I had never quite realised that. "Of course. And it's true that Dawn was never exactly brilliant or enthralling company unless you saw the point of him. I remember coming in one day and finding he'd been waiting for me for hours. Graves was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him as if he was trying to mesmerise him or get him to reveal some potent but unguessable quality he had. He was really trying to get down there with him. I said later how poetic a picture it had been—poetic was one of our permitted terms of acclaim—and he turned quite nasty. 'Poetic!' he said. 'He talked prose to me all afternoon!'"

  Willie didn't smile. "I feel rather sorry for Graves, being left all alone at nights, being told to turn his music down by Head of House W. Turlough, whilst his best friend, actually probably his only friend, was running round naked on the cricket pitch with someone who was clearly more attractive than he was. If I'd realised at the time I'd have been nicer to him." I gave a humorous snarl at this attempt at a joke. "What became of Graves, by the way?"

  "I wonder." The last time I'd seen him was vividly clear to me, shocking and secret. Or maybe it didn't matter. Willie ought to know these things. We were both men of the world, of different but adjacent worlds; and we were about the same age now, though Willie seemed to me to have entered the placid, incurious middle phase, the semi-sedation of hetero expectations, whilst I was still running loose, swerving and tripping through the romantic undergrowth outside. He must be thirty-five, I was thirty-three, would be thirty-four in the week after Christmas; but as always I felt that my age was only a term of convenience, an average age, and that one moment I was donnish and past it and the next a bewildered youngster scarcely out of school. I took my glasses off again to spare his embarrassment.

  "Do you know about Mr Croy's?" I said.

  "No, is it a prep-school?"

  "Not exactly." I gazed at the overlapping aureoles the lamps cast across the ceiling, and saw again the astounding scenes in that house. It was years after school, it was after Cambridge, in my own brief spell as a schoolmaster, on a rainy half-holiday, when I made one of my irregular, urgent visits, and found Graves there, with a crew-cut and ear-rings, and the young assistant from Levertons flushed and greedily at work on him, ribbons of saliva down his chin.

  "Well, the thing about it is . . . " I said.

  "What is it, sweetheart?" Willie asked quietly. I smirked at the new endearment.

  "You see . . ."

  "Can't you sleep?"

  I looked across with a frown and blush of my own. A little blonde ghost had appeared at the sofa's end, and Willie's strong arm opened towards it and brought it noiselessly into his embrace.

  "Sit with us for a while." I pushed my glasses on again and saw the child wriggle and shake her head and hide her face in her father's shirt-front. He rocked her for a bit, resting his chin abstractedly on her
curly crown and gazing at the wall. "Sorry, Edward, do go on," he said, snugly, as if he were rocking himself to sleep. "She'll drop off in a minute or two."

  "Oh, it doesn't matter." He didn't protest, he seemed to find security in the reawakened claims of fatherly duty. I knew he'd prefer it if I went.

  Before long the child was asleep, or had wandered at least into the dream thickets on the path towards . . . I hunched forward and made half-pissed conventional noises about her beauty and temperament.

  When he came down again I was waiting in the hall.

  "How's that drink?" he said.

  "I've finished it."

  "Gosh."

  "I'll get back to my mother's."

  He stood in his socks in the doorway whilst I turned on the step and looked up at slow-moving cloud and three or four stars.

  "See you tomorrow," I said. "I've got to read, god knows how I'll manage."

  "You'll do it beautifully. Do you want a taxi?"

  "I'll walk a bit and perhaps get the little bus if it comes."

  "I haven't asked you anything about Belgium and your job and . . . I don't even know why you went."

  I grinned at him. "Oh, the usual mixture of panic and caprice—" I couldn't explain to him why this was a place to get out of. I stepped forward with a shiver and slipped my arms round him and hugged him and after a second or two he gave me a comforting rough rub between the shoulderblades. I kissed him on the cheek and then pushily kissed his mouth, until he shook his head away.

  "I can't," he said, "I'm sorry. I mean I'm so sorry about everything."

  I waited at the bus-stop at the end of Willie's silent road, wishing I had never come, and thinking about him with a sullen charge of sexual violence. The night was damp and autumnal, the suburban birch and willow leaves came flitting down on to the tarmac, gathered in puddles or were swept about by the breeze in little dying sallies. I stood reading a notice about August Bank Holiday excursions to Brighton, Eastbourne and Dover. At the top a red bus surged forward in steeply exaggerated perspective and a cheery driver raised his cap—oh, the blind future tense of old announcements! How wrong it was to disclaim our adolescence, to wince at its gaucheries and ignorance, when we would be lucky to recapture its first-hand vividness and certainty. I read the schedule with a quickly gratified eye for misprints, then scuffed around, uncertain whether to start walking. It was the odd economics of time, the way waste demanded more waste, like cruising a boy on the street or just waiting for someone, anyone, up on the common on a summer night, not knowing if further waiting was merely adding to the tally of lost time or if it was the essential prelude to a pleasure that would be all the greater for the falterings of hope that came before it.