The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  Marcel was easily bored and easily scared, but he took to the long tedium of the stake-out better than I did. He said it reminded him of a scene in a film where Eddie Murphy was being watched in a hotel by two incompetent cops in a car; he had it on video and gave me verbatim, twice, the sequence where Murphy, who in fact has come and gone as he pleases, surprises his guards with a tray of coffee and rous. I winced to think how far away the morning was. I falled to rise to his little performance, too taken up with my own memories of waiting and watching, the involuntary predator.

  "I'm sorry about Luc bullying you," I said, almost taking responsibility for him, swallowing at the memory of his softly interrogative kisses, seeing in the blurred glass a weird and displaced image of his naked body rinsed with my sweat.

  "It doesn't matter," Marcel said, sounding weary of indignities. "I don't suppose he could help it."

  I gave a snuffly little laugh. "Well, anyone can help builying, surely?"

  Marcel nodded from side to side, as if weighing up long experience. An approaching car washed us with light, like a couple in front of a television, then left us in shadow. "He was, you know, very mad. A lot of people at school were not friends of his. Then Dr Boesmans used to come and see him."

  "Oh yes. You mean my landlord in St Alban Street?" Marcel nodded. "And what did Dr Boesmans say?"

  "I don't know. It's confidential. He used to see some of the boys in the sick-room after school—if they had problems. . ."—and he tapped his temple with his forefinger.

  "You mean he's a psychiatrist. I thought he was just . . . an ordinary doctor."

  "He's a very famous psychiatrist," Marcel said quietly.

  I felt a futile retrospective tenderness for Luc, having his boyhood troubles sorted out by this famous old man. And then I saw, with a bleak little sinking of the heart, what the scrap of paper in his pocket had been. It wasn't my address he was remembering, but Dr Boesmans'. It was just the sort of thing his mother would keep from me: she must have sent him to him again. That was why he had faltered for a moment when he saw where I lived, the escapade was shadowed for him by meetings of another kind.

  "How do you know this?" I said.

  He rubbed his side-window and peered out. His answer was reluctant. "Sibylle told me." Well, she would know. "But she says Luc's mother is mad herself, and so does my father."

  "She's not mad," I said sternly, "she's just very unhappy, and anxious about bringing up her son by herself now Luc's father's run away."

  "His father is a mauvais sujet," said Marcel,

  "I suppose that's what Sibylle says too," and I laughed.

  He didn't deny it. I thought of Maurice that evening at dinner at Paul's, the sense he had given that Luc was as mauvais a sujet as his father. It seemed the masters and the boys mistrusted him, shunned him, for being a bit mental.

  Later on it cleared and there were stars. It felt like midnight but it was only 8.30. Cars came and went from the forecourt opposite, my heart raced whenever figures appeared in the glass hallway or we heard the dim boom of the heavily sprung front door. I felt our secrecy leach from us as the roadway dried; people walked past and noticed that our head-rest silhouettes shielded two real watchful heads. Luc might already have glanced down from an unlit window and seen his mother's car and wondered what posse had come to claim him back. I was full of envy of the town and its ordinary evening. An Alsatian came alongside, followed by a man in a leather jacket: they crossed in front of the car, went past the flats and slipped through a gap in the fence, the man swinging the leather-handled chain suggestively/threateningly. The dog barked as it ran off over the dark waste ground.

  It was Marcel's idea that we take it in turns to watch while the other slept, with him to sleep first. He bared his wrist and swivelled and counter-rotated various rings of his shockproof chronometer: they seemed to indicate that it was time to eat, so I sent him off with a few francs and he came back with a cardboard tray of chips, some coffee biscuits and a sickening lilac pop. There was an intent little feast in the car while I smoked a cigarette outside and wandered to the wasteland for a pee, thinking my way casually but grossly through a fantasy about the man with the dog.

  It was getting cold so we plundered and distributed the rugs and cushions; Marcel lifted a lever and pressed back in his seat till it was fully reclined. For the first time I felt a kind of comfort in having him there: I thought he didn't know what was going on, his attention faltered; but he'd be useful with Sibylle—I'd have to make use of him if the moment came. His breathing slowed as he slept and sounded like widely spaced snorts of vexation.

  A sort of eternity opened up, like double physics on a school-day afternoon, the palate dry, the hands smelling of rubber and copper . . . My head lolled in yawn after yawn. Events were dull and rhythmless—a cat's finical patience along the forecourt's low wall, the passing of long-distance lorries, tared and flagged, that shook the car with their bluster. I tried to remember the whole of poems I'd once learned by heart, to keep awake, but memory was tarnished, words were spotted over, image blurred into image and poet into poet. When they faltered I left them and went drowsily towards the mirage they had conjured up, of summer dusks, funny old anecdotes, old embarrassments that still made me burn, boys' cocks and kisses under elms that had died with my boyhood's end. And then the poems had their various occasions and points of view, which like the advice of well-meaning friends seemed hardly to take the measure of my own mood and problems. It was all so far from last night. I lived back through that with thumping heart and closed eyes. "This man is quickened so with grief, He wanders god-like or like thief, Upstairs and down—round and round—something like that—below, above, Without relief seeking lost love." God-like or like thief: I saw what it meant for the first time in the twenty years I'd known the poem. But then lost love . . . Had I lost it? Had I ever had it? Or hadn't I cleverly maximised the trouble by losing something that had never been mine? I looked at the ugly shuttered building with a moan of pure need—and a wild, small-hours certainty of being punished and forbidden.

  I went down by the waters, and a bird

  Sang with your voice in all the unknown tones

  Of all that self of you I have not heard,

  So that my being felt you to the bones.

  When Marcel's alarm went off I woke with the same metallic fear and sense of being far from home. He roused himself so slowly that it seemed pointless to expect him to sit alertly until 6 o'clock. Still, he snapped his seat upright and sat pawing his head, as if expecting to play his part. Perhaps he wouldn't feel as lonely and foolish as me.

  I settled back, pulling the musty multi-coloured crochet of the shawls around me, already fetishising them as remote kin of Luc's own bedspread, familiar, unnoticed trappings that he sprawled and stirred amongst, thinking of elsewhere. I dreamt we were at Mr Croy's. Luc was lying naked on the table, surrounded by five or six men, some in naval uniform, a couple in cheap suits with their huge cocks jutting sideways and already seeping into the taut cloth. I was somehow amongst them but also outside and above their casually concentrated circle, as if I were writing the story of the dream and setting them in motion. I seemed to catch and share the haunting, forgotten dynamic of group sex, jealous and democratic at once. And Luc was ready for the ritual, lifting his head slightly, moistening his dry upper lip with a nervous tongue-tip. But to my bafflement all the men did was inspect him, closely but politely, as if they might have him but hadn't decided, and didn't want to mark him and be obliged to pay. Or almost like doctors, whose interest was scientific and excited by other invisible symptoms. I saw them push his legs apart, run their hands lightly, testingly up and down his thighs, and over his chest and stomach. One of them weighed his balls noncommittally in the palm of his hand, while another slipped back his foreskin and pinched open the little goldfish mouth of his swollen cock-head. They turned him over and one of them pressed his cheeks apart while the rest appraised his other hidden orifice; I saw it clench and gap
e with anticipation and delay.

  I was in the bathroom, confused by the back corridors of Mr Croy's, the pantries and stairways overhung by dripping cisterns. I knew I wanted to get back to the main room—I had left it with the repressed anxiety with which one leaves luggage briefly unattended or asks a stranger to keep one's place in a long and hungry queue. I trotted round in confusion, sometimes hearing a shout or a slap from behind locked doors, through walls. I caught just a glimpse of Mr Croy himself, in a curtained back parlour—gross, brilliantined, with a gin and tonic, listening to "Beggars in Spats". A sense of misery and wasted money began to weigh in my chest.

  When I got back to the room, they were fucking Luc one after the other, the inside of his thighs was slimed with sperm and spit. A line had formed, and when one had finished he pulled out and stumbled back to the end of the queue, briefly stroked and kissed by his friends as he passed them. I kept trying to join the queue—I explained to them that Luc was my lover, and made extravagant claims about his Wordsworth essay, but they thought that was a bit of a joke and pushed me away. Each time I came back they repulsed me more roughly, till I was thrown to the floor, and then kicked at as I crawled back, gazing up at their sweating naked buttocks and slicked cocks, not hearing their whispered jokes as they jostled and practice-fucked each other and edged forward towards the splayed, stoned, leering boy. "But why?" I kept pleading, sobbing. "He's mine, I'm sharing him with You, because I want you to be my friends." But they sneered and punched me and told me to piss off.

  I woke shaken and convinced. I lay there panting, almost grateful to find myself in a cold, smelly car in the bleak twilight of a foreign roadside. I stretched and looked at my watch's faint hands: 5.45—it made me groan for my big high bed. Above me rose the back of Marcel's seat, and his head hung sideways as he slept, never quite rolling off the edge and waking him. I sat up, hardly surprised, sorry for the kid. Each forceful breath of his misted the windscreen in a circle that shrank and cleared before the next one fleetingly condensed there.

  I slid out and went gaping and stamping down the road. The dream-mood still muddled me and startled me with scree-rattles of panic and pique. Croy's venetian-blinded bathroom, and the men cleaning up as if after cricket or squash, with occasional comically ordinary remarks—"That was a good one this evening", "Yes, he's shaping very well" . . . Of course I knew those days would never come again, it was only in dreams of one kind or another that the party went on—I didn't need so brutal a reminder. It had the vividness of waking experience, and seemed available to memory with none of the usual fade. Beside it, all around it, my real situation, wandering before dawn on the outskirts of a Flemish town, seemed relatively dreamlike, implausible, only to be accounted for by the subtlest symbolic analysis. An old man with a knapsack came past and greeted me humorously and I answered him with tremendous gusto—the day's first phlegmy utterance mad with unadjusted warmth. I strolled across the forecourt of the flats and looked again, more at leisure, at the names on the bells. This time they all seemed brightly familiar, but only because I had looked at them before. I frowned back from the porch to see if Marcel's alarm had rung yet: I wouldn't tease him, I supposed he would absorb the lapse into his general resignation, his history of witnessed failures... I came down the steps with a lurch when I saw the Mini had gone. I ran to the empty space and stared at where an irised patch of oil glinted freshly in a pale oblong of tarmac.

  We had Luc's mother's hand-drawn map and went at a crawl along country lanes, like a couple invited to a party in a remote farmhouse. The distances were meticulously given but hard to judge on the ground: I slowed and craned out through the grey dawn light at several gateways. I was furious to have lost the youngsters and was coldly forgiving to Marcel; at the same time I felt the irrational high spirits that come with a brief reprieve, a beating held off. "That's it," said Marcel, with odd optimism.

  It was a gate into a wood. I pulled over on to the grassy half-circle in front of it and sat looking for a minute—it was clear no one had been here, at least not by car. A heavy chain lay slumped round the central uprights, but when I got out I found that it wasn't locked. In the middle of each gate a roundel like a battered hubcap was fixed to the flaking wrought iron and on it I could just make out in rust-blurred relief the monogram TA. Oh, they left their mark on things. I peered through into a pine avenue, where it was still dark.

  We agreed that they weren't here, but both pandered to the other's half-hidden desire to see the place. Mrs Altidore had had it in mind from the start—Luc had talked of it so much of late, she said; he had got out the original plans and a book in which the architect had bound water-colour imaginings of the decor. There had been something of an argument because Luc wanted to ask his father to do it up and his mother had been against encouraging him in any more extravagance. I uncoiled the chain and bumped and shouldered the gates back. Then I brought the car in, gingerly, along the track, brushed and knocked about the roof and windows by the crowding lower branches. On either side of our headlights the plantation stretched away in exaggerated darkness. I thought Luc would have needed to be quite brave to come here alone.

  We came out into a wide tussocky field, the drive remembered and rutted by farm machinery, and juddered over a dully chiming cattle-grid. In front there was a high silhouette, a bulk of grey, that I steered towards, the car's underside slithering over long grass. Then there was a paved court stacked with farmer's hurdles and fueldrums and a mossy, moping statue peering down: it could have been anyone, a shepherd, a prophet, even Aurora herself. Beyond it a few steps rose to a padlocked steel door. This was better, it was adventure in a recognisable form—we clambered out and sniffed the air.

  On the far side of the little château stretched a ravaged lawn, marked out by the bloated thriving forms of what must once have been pyramids of yew. From the slippery elevation of the terrace I could see a pond, a lake, beyond it, choked with reeds and fallen branches. The light rose steadily, there were bars of orange above the tops of the firs, a blackbird started up, clear and unconcerned. It was just the time to see the place, not the kind of dawn Luc's grandfather had named the house for or would ever have witnessed there, cold skies above a drenched wilderness; though there were hints of classic pleasures, a cloud on the lake just big enough to clothe a god in a fresco stooping on a sex-quest. I'd lost Marcel; I wandered down towards the water, reluctantly moved by the relics of all this fake galanterie, my mind vaguely in summer, though a cold gust insisted it was December and made me twitch up Luc's jacket-collar. I turned back and saw the tiny top windows of the tower colour in the early sun, as though lanterns burnt in them.

  The main part of the Pavillon de l'Aurore was a French-looking villa with long windows boarded up and stucco that gaped here and there on to cheap red brick. One end of it had sunk and opened a wandering crack in the upstairs wall; above it the roof was hidden under a canopy of rusting corrugated iron that the wind had loosened and buckled—from time to time it gave a squawk.

  Marcel was quite excited. "I think he could be here," he said. He'd been exploring the garages and the kitchen-yard—apparently a window had been forced, but he wouldn't be able to get through it without a leg-up and a push from me. He took me round to show me and I peered in at a derelict pantry, the door at the back half-open on to pale gloom. Well, it could have been Luc, but I played down the likelihood. "Thieves always break in at the remotest part of a house," I said, alarmed for a moment that Marcel might dare me to go in. I poked at the mossy sill as if I knew what to look for. "It's probably not that recent." He leant in and called "Luc", then jumped back when there was a distant scuffling and the creak of a pigeon's wings.

  I laughed nervously and Marcel gripped my arm. "I do have the keys to the front door," I said, and he gazed at me as if I might unlock his first grown-up experience; he was shrinking from it already. I thought how later I would tell Luc about this—then remembered that he might actually be here, might have heard the car ticking over and
taken it for steady rain on the laurels, might have heard our voices beyond shuttered windows, might be roused from shivering runaway sleep by the key in the lock and the scrape of the heavy door.

  The air inside seemed to wake reluctantly, to turn and eddy in the light and draught after years of accumulated stillness. Dust climbed and spun on the edge of the bright threshold; the hall smelt musty but obscurely alive, as if animals tunnelled and marked their territories in it. I groped and found a stiff old metal light-switch and forced it till it gave out a dead click.

  Marcel said there was a torch in the car and ran out to get it whilst I stepped timidly into the near-darkness, following the wall around with a squeamish hand. I came to an opening, the moulded edge of an archway, and registered as a blind person might an impending change of scale; I slid my feet forward over the gritty flags, thinking there might be a step; when I coughed the echo climbed and dropped through a hidden vastness, like a chapel. Too scared to go on, I slunk back into what seemed the dazzle of the hall, the spotlight of the winter morning through the open door, along which Marcel stepped like a comedian. "Come on, there's nothing to be scared of," I said—then he switched on his own strong beam.

  Away to the right a succession of rooms opened out. We went through them as if Marcel were my guide to an ancient tomb, I was itching to seize the lamp off him. He played it about solemnly but without interest over bare walls, high coved ceilings, the battened-up embrasures of the windows. The place had been abandoned but wasn't quite empty—in one room there was a trio of get ballroom chairs, in another the bench-seat of an old car where vagrants might have drunk and slept. High up on the walls ran the brass rods for hanging tapestries, bare plaster below them never meant to be seen. The torch came back and steadied on scrawled lettering: KRIS and a spouting cock and balls.