The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  At Stonewell each year we had a field-day when the boys were divided into squads and despatched on surreal errands to test their initiative: bring back a letter signed by a bishop, or souvenirs from six Cinque Ports, present a baby to a master in disguise on Beachy Head. A kind of home-sickness coloured the early phase of the day. Hitch-hiking was forbidden, and whilst a few such as Dawn slipped away by bike, the rest of us amassed in sprawling bands at bus-stops and the local station, as if reluctant to separate, hoping feebly to tag along with our rivals, or to absorb the good luck, the slightly manic confidence of the two or three who were already making with maps, cameras and phone-calls to high-placed relations. But when we were an hour or two away from school, forlornly tramping up to the gates of top-security dockyards or trespassing through woodland in search of sham ruins, anxiety gave way to a guilty suspicion that none of it mattered, a muddled sense of futile freedom.

  The days always took place in a perspective of failure, we never expected to get an interview with a submarine captain, and we were often stranded as evening fell at some inconvenient spot requiring to be rescued by the harassed masters in their station-wagons. Getting home turned out to be the real test of initiative, and we failed it. We waited at a shelterless bus-stop just like this, as the rain came on, playing basic games of chance with tossed coins. I remembered that once I was with a couple of others, including the palely introverted German boy Peter Rott (Tommy as he was known) who grew his nails into buckled claws and disguised the length of his hair by not rinsing out the shampoo: as the rain fell on his matted pine-scented head he began to bubble gently, and suds ran down his face like sleepy tears.

  My father didn't have a few more months, he had just over a year; he died in that month of shadowed insouciance that precedes the arrival of the A-level results. I was relieved that it wasn't in term, that I hadn't been called out of school to be told, that it hadn't messed up my exams; but later on I mildly regretted the loss of the acclaim and respect that should have been due to me. By the following term, when I abruptly began to grieve, it no longer merited my schoolfriends' puzzled consideration.

  His ashes were strewn on the common, because he had loved it, but the idea seemed so gruesome to me that I stayed alone in the house while my mother and Charlie and my Uncle Wilfred set off up the hill, uncertain whether they were a procession or if they should go a bit faster, like a family out for a walk. They had chosen an ordinary workday morning, quite early, when no one much would be around to wonder what they were doing, or have to avert their eyes in sudden understanding and dismay. I hadn't wanted to see the urn—more like my mother's rosewood sewing-box than the samovar I had imagined—and found it hard to accept that my father, the same size, more or less, as I was when he died, could have been reduced to this neatly portable and disposable quantity.

  I sat in a kind of frozen observance of my own in the sitting-room, with the silent monument of the piano, the massed records and the unsinging sheet-music—my mother had left a Bach aria open on the music-stand. From beyond, Sir Thomas Beecham peered out over his signature with a look of testy merriment that I thought inappropriate. I thought how much people know when they die: that canterbury full of music, not just known but gone into in some adult never-satisfied way that I couldn't understand. I had always been too easy and ignorant a judge, and said it was lovely the first time, and also the second quite different time, and soon lost patience as he kept working it towards some future state I couldn't envisage and which now would never be.

  His going was so slow, and so unprecedented in my experience, that I found it hard to bear in mind or even to believe in. He was quieter than usual, hating to make a fuss, but sometimes coldly demanding. He was glad that I was getting on with things, racing out after minimal bursts of revision to meet my friend on the common, showing the stifled high spirits of a boy with a secret happiness; his occasional words of reproach rankled with me for days, since I knew I was spending less of my time with him than before; an unadmitted fear of illness kept me away. "Let's have some music tonight," he would say, and catch my hesitation, my momentary reordering of my plans.

  A large oval mirror hung by two chains above our fireplace. There was something aloof about it—it was never one of those mirrors that embrace a room and give it back to itself with a hint of strangeness and enhanced worth. Though I had become rather vain of late and conceited about my inky quiff, I tended not to consult it; but when we had a record on and I was sprawled on the sofa opposite, my eyes would dwell on the slipped horizon of the wall behind me reflected in its high ellipse—a sun-yellow wall like an empty beach reaching up to the sky of shadowed white ceiling, a birdless distance that took on splendour or desolation according to the music and the varying light of the months.

  It was about that time that music, which had always been around me, and was identified, through the scent of polish in the sitting-room, with the very air I breathed, gained a new and independent grip on me; I suppose it was love that made me see a Mozart concerto or a lyrical and exultant Schumann symphony not simply as a wonder in itself but as a kind of explanation of life. Like love it seemed to admit me to a new dimension of luminous purpose: music raised my expectations to an ideal level that other friends found comic or unbelievable if they weren't initiates themselves. At school we were played some bits of Janacek, which were the most convulsively life-like music I had ever heard. I gathered up the scraps of Supraphon record-sleeve information, cryptically condensed and obscured by translation, that were all that could be found out by an English boy, and was amazed by the lateness of his flowering and the fact that this bristling old gent should be the one to confirm everything I felt at seventeen about life and sex and being out at night with winds and stars.

  And what were my father's thoughts as he sat limply in his armchair, head back, eyes on a different distance, later on sometimes slipping into noiseless defenceless sleep? He was only fifty-five, only lately robbed by chemicals of the thick black hair we had always had in common; he hadn't reached his late phase yet. He started singing as a young man in the Navy: I imagined his mess-mates gathered round him or lying solemn in their bunks as he crooned some old salt-water ballad and their ship slid on through the moonlit toy sea of a British war-film. He must imagine those days too, I thought, rather than look forward to the final sudden crisis; but I knew he would never say. There was a beautiful accidental integrity about the galaxy of thoughts inside that listening head. Almost everything he knew and felt had never been spoken, never sung, never known to another soul.

  The ritual events of the summer unfolded, both more intense and more trivial than usual. The May Day bank holiday fair came to the sloping football-pitch by the Flats, and gave me its annual, slightly threatening surprise as I strolled over the common on Friday after school and saw the caravans and dogs among the new greenery below and heard the mingled roar of generators and jangle of carousel-music. I saw Dawn there later in the company of three of his sporting friends from Drake, leaving a fortune-teller's booth with grinning faces, leaning superbly in at a shooting gallery, then wandering on, the others lighting up, watching shaken kids unloading from an aerial whirligig, Dawn secretly following the acrobatics of a teenage fair-boy swinging from pole to pole on a kind of switchback roundabout. I half-hid from them, paralysed with possessiveness, and dully tensed against the sarcasms that would break out when Dawn and I came together. We had a rather unhappy notoriety by then—ours wasn't a classic prefect-fag tendresse: our terms were worryingly for real, they sounded a deeper note than was tolerated in their lumbering, not unloving, locker-rbom camp.

  Then it was Wimbledon again, watched in illicit paragraphs of two or three hours amid the final exam preparations, sometimes with Ogg's Seventeenth-Century Europe numbly open on my knee. Mirabelle was in electrifying form in an early women's heat I saw and seemed to call "Fault" obliviously at every first service. One of the men players from Eastern Europe evidently had an enormous penis, which I never heard the comm
entators refer to. I imagined Mirabelle would have some tales to tell about him.

  I loved the dream acoustics of Wimbledon, the curtains drawn but the windows open behind them, occasional noises of traffic, distant shouts from the sunny common or close-up chatter of people walking past, louder and more unguarded than we were, as if they had leant right in to the lulled half-light of the room to say "Yeah, well see what she says" or "No you fucking don't!"; then, recessed within this, the hushed, attentive sound-world of the court, whose irregular pock-pocks and applause and torpid rallies of commentary themselves gave way from time to time to a further unseen dimension, disconnected applallse from another court, the sonic wallow of a plane distancing in slow gusts above, that a minute or two later would pass high over our house as well and drown out the television as it passed. The whole experience was one of oddly compelling languor, an English limbo of light and shade, near and far, subtly muddled and displaced. My father seemed satisfied with it, as if his family could share for a while his own powerless and agitated calm.

  There was to be no holiday, of course, for the second year running, and I felt ashamed by this further evidence of the decline of the Manners family. The previous Christmas I had secured a distracted agreement that Dawn could come to Kinchin Cove with us and looked forward to it blindly in the teeth of all the warning signs. My mother rather liked Dawn, who helped with the washing-up, shared in her gentle mockery of my sixth-form posiness, and had a reliable second-row-forward straightness about him; she couldn't make out why we were such inseparable friends, and there was something sweet about her frequently exaggerating his good points, as if these must explain it: "Ralph's got bottom," she said to me one Sunday morning over pastry-dough and apple-peel. But by the early summer, brittle and hollow-eyed with her own anxieties, she had forgotten her promise. I made a scene about it, half-aware how I was disgracing myself, arguing really I suppose against something else.

  I told Dawn it was off and took him some photographs of the cottage from an earlier summer, the beach and rocks just below, the shallow river that ran out over the sand, the loafing figures of Charlie and his genuinely unsuitable friend Gary Quine, who got wrecked in the Wreckers, called my parents by their Christian names and gave me, when I was twelve, my first awed lesson in the use of a rubber johnny. Dawn wasn't much bothered about the place I loved and wanted to bring him to as a new brother, who could teach me to dive. He slipped an arm round my neck, gave me a long hard-working kiss and said why didn't we go off together, camping—we could go to France. He'd already opted out of his own family's trip to Spain. I knew with a sudden grave certainty far bleaker than that of my father's death that I would never go to Kinchin Cove again.

  We went to look at tents, quite unaware of their cost and complexity and scaling our plans down from "The Sultan" through "The Marquess" and "The Cavalier" until we ended up with a titchy dun-coloured thing called "The Pilgrim". "I think you'll be rather on top of each other in this one," said the sales assistant.

  The plan that we have a trial night on the common came from my Uncle Wilfred, who had supervised innumerable camps for the de Souzay Trust and stressed the importance for both of us of knowing how to pitch and strike. It was a wildly exciting idea, clouded at first by the fear that he was going to come up and instruct us himself. But no. He would be sitting with my mother, as he did increasingly in my father's last months; she was the only woman-friend Wilfred had and the evenings, kindly meant, were a strain for both of them. "Your uncle's more of a man's man" was all my mother ever said about him. Cues for anecdotes about their shared childhood produced only grouchy vaguenesses; when she was fourteen he had gone to war and in a sense the rest of his life had taken place under military camouflage; all we saw was an impatient self-discipline and a sardonic tendency that never quite rose to humour and was especially disconcerting in these visits intended to comfort and distract. At the time I knew nothing of his constant sexual appetite, and it is possible she didn't either: like so many siblings they had nothing useful in common and their attempts at sharing things were marked by childish awkwardness and dogged cross-purposes.

  Wilfred checked the kit for us. "Done it a thousand times with the Susies," he said, peering shrewdly at Dawn, who was bending to unbuckle his rucksack and looking somewhat resentful of the old boy's drill. I thought he might be critical of The Pilgrim: he declared it ambiguously to be "a tight little tent". "Having a cook-up?" he said. I told him we were just taking scotch eggs and a bar of chocolate, which he clearly thought feeble to the point of effeminacy, but my mother snapped that there was nothing else. I ran upstairs to say goodbye to my father, who was lying on his bed fully clothed. I asked him how he was feeling and he said, "Not very good, old boy", which was the most he ever did say, and left me habitually at a loss how to answer him. On the turn of the stairs corning down I heard my mother saying hurriedly to Wilfred, ". . .a week or two, perhaps, they say, probably no more"—so that I went into shocked slow-motion, my hand to my mouth, and after ten seconds jogged down in a forced briskness of concealment.

  We hiked up the familiar paths, Dawn deliberately testing my loyalties with a good imitation of my uncle. Mimicry, like drawing, was one of his gifts, and both were literal and so at times unsettling. I responded with cowardly jabs and pinches, knowing that he would get me back later with some stifling, bare-breasted wrestling hold. It was still quite early and we wandered across the network of summer paths scuffed and scrawled through the dry grass; we didn't want to pitch our tent in the dark but felt self-conscious about doing so whilst walkers and lyrical late kite-fliers were still about. Probably the best place would be on the far side, the way Dawn came from home, where there would be shelter by the copse-like remains of ancient hedgerows. We circled back to the pond and sat on the bench, eating our scotch eggs and watching anglers packing up their gear. The boys among them trudged away with their rods and camp-stools like little old men. Behind them the silhouettes of pines and poplars were reflected and the sunset opened canyons of pink and ultrarnarine in the pond's muddy depths.

  "Better look out for the folding star," I said.

  "What is this folding star?" said Dawn, with the annoyance of hearing me keep saying it and having pretended before that he understood it.

  "Don't you know your Milton?" I said pityingly. "The star that bids the shepherd fold? As when the folding star arising shows His paly circlet? . . . Dear me." I put an arm round his muscly shoulders and squeezed. "It's when you know you've got to put the sheep all safely in the fold." He shrugged himself free.

  "What about putting the boys all safely in their tent?" he said.

  "Yeah." I couldn't actually see the star in question but maybe it was best to set about it. I was always spoiling things with my quotations—he saw them as a kind of sarcasm against himself.

  The Pilgrim took about five minutes to put up. Dawn dived into it as if scoring a try and when I looked in through the flap he seemed to take up all the space. I felt he'd laid a claim to it that I would never be able to challenge. I slid in alongside him, in the mackintosh-scented gloom, shocked by the lumps in the ground. "It's a good job we like each other," I said, slipping a hand between his legs and stroking his balls through the soft cotton of his tracksuit bottoms.

  "Just think. Nice. Antibes. Juan-les-Pins"—each name said with savoured French Oral vowels.

  "Mm."

  He rolled on to me with a fierce grin that faded into a stare, lips parted, holding his breath then sighing it out suddenly over my face with a hint of sausage-meat and hard-boiled egg. He was working his stiff cock against my thigh. I ran my hands over his lightly sweating back and down under the elastic to the damp cleft of his arse—he curved his spine and my middle finger just reached, and drew a gasp from him as it touched his tender muscle. An outlying root of the ancient hedgerow pressed harder and harder into my back as if to register a serious objection.

  I struggled out from under him and he took it as a turn in the sex-tussle till I
said, "I'm just going outside for a minute."

  I peed into the bushes and then strolled a short way across the hillside. In the late dusk the blanched, feathery heath-grasses looked almost luminous against the darkness of the woods. I sat on a round tump, it might have been a tiny tumulus, and looked out at thin cloud and distant lights. I'd never been this far this late, hearing only the rumour of cars on the London road, the patter of leaves like rain that slackens and stops. Tonight was like being given the keys to a bridal suite: we had come up here with an unwitting blessing. My lover and I. I wrapped the word around me like a stole. The wonder of having a lover—I saw us for an exhilarating moment from outside, the amazing thing we had done. Other boys at school had girlfriends, of course, and left you in no doubt about what they did with them; but what tawdry affairs those were—you saw them hanging around the shops at Saturday lunchtime, in a stumbling embrace as if each had to drag the other along. And how confident and independent we were, how we'd struck home to the real thing.

  I looked back at the tent, dimly illuminated from within by a torch, and the shadow-play of Dawn on all fours inside, getting it ready for the night. I fell into an awful blank puzzlement at times about why it had to be him; and panic at the thought of hitch-hiking alone with him to Juan-les-Pins—so at his mercy, in those dusty roadside waits, the duty to keep up our spirits, my condescension and his touchiness. It might be very nice to be doing it with another boy, like Turlough or Hall; but they, of course, had shown no interest in seducing me. I saw myself deliberately breaking, no, twisting, my ankle, very badly, just outside Calais and having to come home.