The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  Cherif was crouching barefoot in the armchair, with his overcoat on, drawn tent-like round his knees.

  "Baby, you're not even dressed," I said.

  "I've been waiting for you, so that we can go out and get lunch."

  "Half past five's a bit late for lunch," I said. "Look, I've got all the washing done, and free! Washed, dried and ironed." I unzipped the bag and tilted it towards him: buttoned shirts, folded pants, rolled socks all neatly compacted. I recalled Lilli Vivier's slightly flushed and compromised look as she gave it back to me. Had there been something shameful? I lifted out a shirt of Cherif’s that had PARIS written all over it, and was presumably not intended for Parisians themselves. Did Lilli think that was mine? I supposed after the Orst tie debacle anything was possible. I handed it to him and he took it with a moment's admiration, then scrumpled it up and hurled it into the corner.

  "Oh."

  "Edward . . ."

  "You prefer them unironed. I'll remember that in future."

  He looked at me miserably, and I felt my face tighten under his reproach. "Why do you keep going away from your Cherif?"

  It was a courtly phrase of his—I thought I heard it plaintively rehearsed all afternoon.

  "I never said I'd be back for lunch," I brought out. "I had a great many things to do."

  He jumped up and came over to stare at the washing. "I suppose did Luc's mother do this for you."

  "Is that what it is?" I said, with a little fake anger. "I've already told you Luc's over, I'm over Luc." What was it they said about love being proved by its constant renewal? I swallowed desolately at the sudden thought of him. "No, it was Marcel's father's housekeeper who did it for me—for us. I've been at the Museum. You know I have a lot of work to do there." I knew too that Cherif never asked about that inaccessible realm, which wounded him by absorbing me so much. I reached into his open coat and stroked his stomach. "You must have other things to do," I said. "I can't spend every moment with you—much as I'd like to" (words hardly voiced). I saw a string of obvious questions coming, the painful catechism of reassurance—we had been through it several times this week, with tears on one occasion and his insistence I was the first person he had really loved. I couldn't bear it—either for itself, or for its perverse requirement that I keep swearing to something I was more and more keen not to mention at all. "Do you want a drink?" I said, and set about unpacking the laundry into the cupboards.

  "We haven't got any," he muttered. "I'd have drunk it if we had."

  I reached to the back of the sock shelf and brought out a hidden quarter of brandy. "There you are."

  He grabbed it and huddled back in the chair, taking nips from the bottle as if he'd just been rescued. It wasn't as if I'd been with another man, or only with dear old Paul, I didn't see why I should have to cajole him back into humour, but his suspicion stuck to me and wakened some vaguer guilt. Still, it seemed I was off the hook. When the questions started they were lugubriously tarty.

  "Edward?"

  "Mm."

  "Do you think I'm too fat?"

  "I don't mind how fat you are. Let me have men about me that are fat. Anyway, I can hardly talk." I went over to the window and looked into the murk below—a gleam on the canal from a light on the bridge, the school weekend-dark.

  "Edward?"

  "I am the only person here . . ."

  "I know, but, Edward? What do you think of my tuyau d'incendie?" (his own vainglorious euphemism).

  "I think it's, um, admirable." I badly wanted to be somewhere else. It would have been a relief to see Matt, to spend a night or two in illusionless infidelity, but there had been no sign of him since my return from England. I wondered how Luc was spending his evening. I realised that since our aborted lesson, the lesson of the cold, I had unconsciously swung round to my old view that Luc and Sibylle were, well, lovers. Perhaps I was just rationalising my sense of rejection—though it wasn't honestly as decisive, as dramatically cogent as rejection: it was the awareness, late in the day, that I had made no impression, that I simply didn't figure with him, that I hadn't yet even become a thing to reject.

  "You should see my brother," Cherif was saying; "he's got a much bigger one."

  "Really, darling, I'm quite satisfied with yours. Anyway you haven't got a brother. You've got four sisters, remember? you send them all your money." It was the old evasive Cherif for a second or two, sexily unreliable, the one I had dumbly exchanged for the plaintive lover, the dopy stay-at-home . . .

  "Just because I haven't told you about my brother, Ahmed, before doesn't mean he doesn't exist," he said, with a certain self-satisfaction. "He is in Rotterdam. I was staying with him when I was there, after you sent me away."

  This was just about possible, I supposed. As for sending him away—there was nothing I could do about the stories he told himself.

  I even went to the Museum on Sunday, not sure I'd be welcome, though there was always work to do. Paul had given me a paper he had written years before on Orst and his English contacts, that might somehow be condensed or reworked for the catalogue—he was vague about it, and seemed to want my advice. I couldn't help worrying, as I walked through the town amid the perfunctory tolling of bells, familiar coded calls to a dozen congregations, whether I was the right person to give such advice, when my only qualifications were literary and when Paul's style was so cautious, so lacking in the scurrying charm of his talk, so unable, as a matter of principle, to take the vulgar advantage of his material that might have made for more than scholarly interest. In the past twenty-four hours his fastidiousness had come to seem more nervously defensive, and so, of course, more revealing, though I couldn't tell yet what it revealed.

  Yet clearly something was about to happen. If he suspected that the time had come to tell all about his painter, then I could easily support him in that view. Nowadays the sexual details seemed often to be the whole point of a biography, with the implication that they had been for the subject as well. Paul's book would be arid and out of-date without them, but with them it could be a small sensation, and with no loss of scholarly standing. In fact, since the details were not just details, since he was dealing with a whole career lived in the baleful light of a sexual idea, scholarship really demanded that everything be told . . . This was the sort of argument I was going to have to put to him, that I felt him equipping me and tentatively exhorting me to put.

  I didn't quite see the importance of it—I tried to do justice to Paul's sense of a moral conundrum whilst wondering who in the busy outside world gave a fuck about Edgard Orst anyway. Who were the Orst admirers? I imagined them like the fans of some eccentric minor composer, the Delius-nuts who turned out when my father did A Mass of Life at the Fairfield Hall—snuff-stained old sex-maniacs who sat conducting in their laps and collected bulging leather shopping-bags from the cloak-room afterwards. You couldn't tell from the rare bewintered visitors to the Museum, but the Orstians must be a similarly dodgy lot, joss-scented fantasists, nineties queens in velvet—perhaps still flared—suits. It was fairly clear to me that Paul himself wasn't one of them. He had admitted yesterday that Orst was something of a come-down after Rembrandt, that brilliant though he could be he lacked the range and sympathy of a major artist, that his was a "world of impossibilities". But that only seemed to make his personal loyalty firmer. I thought about what he'd said of their meetings, though in retrospect his words seemed cautious and inconclusive: Orst and his last days remained as yet in the deep shadow of his reticence. I felt sure some primary promise had been made to the blind old man by this clever teenager who came to talk to him or (as Helene had evoked it for me) to go through the print-drawers describing the pictures. Paul had come back to him decades later without much enthusiasm, but it may have seemed like destiny. There was a deep slow tempo to it, the half-hidden line of another life, that demanded respect and acceptance, and could never be changed.

  On reflection I saw that yesterday's lesson had been as much about the pleasure of having a pu
pil as about Orst's techniques and preoccupations. It wasn't that Paul was lonely exactly, but that the painter's secrets were offered, very deftly and instructively, as symbolic of secrets—or not even secrets, discomforts—of his own. There was a sense, as he locked the nude pictures back in the drawer, that something else had been revealed; and he gave me an optimistic smile. I was surprised, slow-witted, had the feeling of some benign plan unfolding in which I played a useful part without knowing quite what it was—the younger person who mysteriously performs what an older one despairs of. Not that I minded—I enjoyed being distracted by the Orst world and its nice problems, it had become a wonderful shadowy refuge from my own. I stepped into the Museum's inner glass lobby with an expectation of comfort and bookish peace..

  Behind the table, with the postcards and cash-box, sat, not the pleasant student of the past few days but the repellently spruce figure of. . .I found I'd completely suppressed his name, for some reason Rex Stout came to mind, in the second or two that I stopped dead, wishing it wasn't true.

  "Hul-lo," he said. I gave a bitter little grunt, and he said, "I suppose I should have known you'd be an art-buff."

  Even in that moment I found myself recalling my spluttering efforts to convey to Edie the intensity of his awfulness, his pseudish self-confidence, his active vanity, his thick-skinned suggestive matiness, his, his . . . and seeing all over again how I had failed. "I'm not an art-buff," I said in an icy mutter; and went on towards the stairs.

  "Even so, it's fifty francs to go in."

  I was just by the desk and looking down at his work, densely written pages of notes that he was going through with a yellow highlighter. It was A levels looming, a hopeless pretence of system . . .

  "I work here." (By which I clearly meant, I work here, arsehole.)

  Any sense of a gaffe was lost in his satisfied twinkle as he absorbed this fact. Ronald something—"researcher". It must be paranoia but I couldn't help feeling that one of the things he was researching was me—not of course for myself but as a figure in the life of a certain tall lean blond young man . . . "I wasn't told about anyone working here." I shrugged. "You mean you're one of the guards?"

  "I work with the Director—I'm his assistant."

  I saw him glimpse the opportunity of delaying me and asking me further questions. "And you say you're not an art-buff!" I sighed sharply. "You've never told me your name, incidentally."

  Was there any way I could refuse it? I could use a false name, I could be Casey Hopper again for a minute . . . "Manners," I said sternly, pleased as I had sometimes been before that it meant something and could sound like a reproof.

  "Well, Manners," he said, " I hope this means we may see more of each other." He took up his highlighting pen and settled forward again with a queeny wobble of the head, as if to imply I had discomposed him unnecessarily. As I started up the stairs he said, without looking round, "The Director's not here today, by the way. As I'm sure you know."

  The office wasn't locked, thank god, and I closed the door behind me as if I had just escaped from something vile in a dream. I was telling myself already that it was absurd to have such a phobia of a person—it was the kind of loathing that could creep into your empty corners, a neurotic preoccupation. I switched on the lamp and sat down and stared across at the place where normally Paul would be sitting. I was remonstrating with him silently, how could he have taken on Ronald Strong, how come he had never mentioned him to me? I felt as if I were the Director of the Museum and Paul had gone over my head in some important decision. I took out "Orst and his English Contacts" again and stared at a paragraph of it for five minutes.

  The truth was I felt a real anxiety about being in the place by myself—not a day I normally came in, Paul "away" but perhaps about to return, no arrangement having been made. And it wasn't as if this was an ordinary office, it was almost part of his house, he might come through the little passage in his dressing-gown, in unsuspecting possession of his morning, to find me there: not exactly an intruder, so surprise and displeasure would be mastered but revealed in later mortifying hints. I'd got the terms of our friendship wrong, it seemed, perhaps it would be better if I didn't come in any more. As it happened, another young Englishman, Rex Stout, was interested in Orst, really very keen, he could be a great help, a trained researcher . . . I got up and looked out of the window. Of course I had no intention, no desire, to go through Paul's desk, but I began to feel a queer conviction of petty criminality. I left everything just as I'd found it, and went out very quietly on to the stairs.

  The door of the first-floor gallery was closed, but not locked, and I slipped in. A table had been set up where work on the triptych could take place, and some temporary rearrangements had been made. The pictures themselves were still there, the two new parts hooked up in an approximate line with the "Mirror" picture. I stood and tried to focus my attention on them. It was the middle panel that we had not covered in our little seminar—taken straight from a photograph, Paul had said, but was the subject of special importance? An empty street, a bridge, a gothic oriel, a density of old roofs beyond, the tower of St John's evidently, with the black flecks of the jackdaws circling; it was the odd quarter-hour of evening when you find you can't see properly any longer, the details fog, you strain to read grey against charcoal. Or maybe it was just the dirt, which from the side you saw on the surface—it might have been swabbed with muddy water. Maybe it was a bright spring morning, waiting to dazzle, full of things to be done, unaware of the tragedy welling at the day's end.

  I looked at the familiar panel of Jane. Real shadow here, it was a dream of beauty, glimmering silk, folded angels, throughs of velvety dusk. Then I pictured her splayed successor, the plunge from reverence to cruelty. I assumed that, after once being robbed of what he loved, Orst had needed to chain his girl down (Marthe she was called), to insist on his power while he could, with a kind of futile force—it was like watching the anger of bereavement hugely delayed. I met the face in the dark oval of the mirror, and caught my breath as much at my own stupidity as at the halting gaze of chrysanthemum eyes.

  Chapter 17

  A suntanned blond dawdled past, looking down at me coyly, noncommittally, seeing if the memory hook caught in the murky pond. "Hi," I said.

  "Oh hi!" He dropped on to the banquette beside me. I felt him briefly adjusting to the gloom that I gave off and my lowered stare across a clutter of empty glasses. "How are you?" he said brightly.

  "How are you, Ty? you're looking very brown."

  "Mm—I've been in London."

  "Oh . . . " (And what sort of name was Ty, anyway? It sounded like an actor in one of Matt's films. "And then at last Casey submits to Ty's throbbing fuck-pole . . . " And there it still evidently, self-importantly, was.) "How is the old dump?"

  I saw him wince to have the city of his dreams mocked. I knew to him it was size and grandeur and fashion-shoots and nights at Heaven; it wasn't crap and decay, the maze trodden by the wispy-bearded youngsters who slept in doorways when you glamorously left Heaven at two or three. "Oh, it was great. I did a lot of work, you know, modelling? Everything from anoraks right down to jockey-shorts!"

  "And who was all this for?"

  "That was for C & A," he said negligently. "Soon I shall be on all the bus-stops."

  "And do you show off your dick in the C & A brushed-cotton slacks?"

  "No, you are not allowed to," he giggled. "They make you put it out of the way." So living models had to aspire, as one had sometimes surmised, to the generalised sexlessness of the old chocolate mannequins. He took the opportunity to change gear, I remembered it all now, up to the sing-song fifth of his fantasies and achievements, he set the cruise control button, he might go on for hours. "I met this really sexy man in the Bloomsbury area, he is in the fashion business—well, he makes window displays, you know, they call them charm pads, and—"

  "Charm pads!"

  "Yes, you know, charm pads for the jewellery and rings. What you call the charms. Well,
he is an older man, but still very sporting and fit. He has a huge apartment with the most fantastic curtains . . ."

  What was an older man, I wondered? I was looking at Ty close to, and in a better light than when we had first met: he might be my age or more, to judge from the little creases around his eyes when he beamed at his own anecdotes, though in composure, and in a general innocent vanity, he was amazingly fresh and young. I began to admit to myself how like Luc he was, the high cheek-bones, the rather small, guarded, grey eyes, the thick fair hair. I hadn't realised before—of course, I hadn't even met Luc yet that night at the Bar Biff: I was looking at anyone in that first week as though they might be my friend and my future. I wondered if Ty had been an abortive first attempt, a dry-run, at Luc, who was made to the same formula, but was the real brute thing.

  " . . . anyway, he said, 'Why don't you come to my house, which is in the country, because we have a lot of things in common to discuss, and maybe, who knows, we can work something out.' So I said—"