The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  The final room was the grandest and most ruinous. Here the floor had dropped, and with it a pair of pillars which leaned apart, showing iron spindles which ran up through their wooden cores. It was all trumpery, up to the café-rococo of the ceiling, where a naked woman hovered in the blue. Perhaps she really was Aurora, faded and leprous, with a chalky beard where the plaster was rifted with damp. One eye was lost, the other large and inviting. The chains of a massive lamp descended from her feet—it hung in a dangerous canopy above the great slate slab of a billiard-table. Marcel was astonished by the table—the vanished baize, the few rotted strings of the pockets; he pushed the tabs back and forth on the Scoreboard's rusty rails.

  "We'd better look out the back," I said, and he swallowed with fright and swung the light about again, over the pillars and the sylph of the cold ceiling. Since I was in charge I was resolute—it happened like that; and he came along trustingly. I was talking to Paul in my head and didn't get the feeling he minded what we were doing. It wasn't like the time I had followed Matt into the Rostands', though that distant episode seemed to haunt this one, rather as one place in a dream becomes another.

  We had nothing to fear beyond birds and rats along the kitchen corridor. In a dank larder the shelves of a dresser were piled with straw and shit like some old colombier; the boards had been ripped from the windows, brambles quested in. The kitchen range held a nest that took me back for a second to the drawings of a childhood nature-book—auburn fieldmice perched on ears of wheat. There were bottles and cans and cigarette-butts of temporary residents, as there must once have been cases of champagne empties and the ash of gaming parties that went on till dawn. KRIS was commemorated here too, with the same phallic totem; I wondered if he was the object of fantasy or the boastful vandal-artist himself. We went down a passage where the paint on the wainscot had shrunk and cracked like the glaze on an old dinner-service: at the end a door with a splintered upper panel swung open on to a descending stair and a shallow cellar full of water.

  We came back through a side-door into the entrance-hall. It was time for the echoing room—I knew what it must be, the rotunda of the tower. I took charge of the torch at last—just borrowed it a moment and swivelled the beam up the dark walls. The stairs rose from here and were glimpsed again higher up, pausing at an opening with a balcony. The light swept over a cupola and down, and there on the other side the faces were waiting.

  The artist had painted another balcony for them, cunningly shadowed, and the revellers lounged along it, some gazing upwards, as it might be at stars or fireworks, others leaning on the rail to peer down at new arrivals, whose imagined lanterns charmed and dazzled them. Some of the men had high white collars, buttonholes, cigarettes, the blank sheen of a monocle—supercilious but impassive under the torch's challenge. The women had fans and mantillas or cloaks and tricorn hats; one raised a gloved arm and opened her mouth to sing. Two or three children were dressed as playing-cards, like the gardeners in Alice in Wonderland, and pointed gleefully through the wrought-iron banisters.

  Theo Altidore stood in the middle, hand on hip, turbaned and robed in red, a scimitar in his belt. I couldn't tell if his rajah's moustaches were real or part of the costume. He was stout and high-coloured, with the irritable glare of the determined pleasure-seeker, handsome, young still, but already the man he would become. The brilliant picture, untouched by smoke or rain, could only show, like the Pavillion itself, how far he had wandered from Guillaume's austere refinement. He reminded me of bankers at Glyndebourne pretending to be aesthetes (betrayed by drink) or Toiler spreads on charity balls—the Duke of Somewhere, a frightful old monster, got up as a sheik or an Indian prince, never anything less than his own status. And it was notable how Theo had chosen the glamour of another empire than the one that was to ruin him. I could see why he'd frightened little Luc with his sword and his stare and his party of idlers.

  But then the whole place spoke of adult pleasures and delusions—it was mad to think that Luc would ever have wanted to come here. His mother and I revealed some romantic failing of our own, poetic suppositions that had nothing to do with the boy's troubles and discoveries, the hidden upheavals of love. I was such a bad teacher. I stood for a while at the open front door, feeling tired and dirty. It wasn't just that I hadn't found Luc there in person. He wasn't there in other ways I'd hoped for: I'd dreamt of the house as a means of possessing him, of entering his past at a deep and early level, but the jumpy ten minutes inside gave me nothing but a lonely shell. I started to snivel pathetically and turned away in case Marcel should see me. Then I heard the dull report of a car on the cattle-grid.

  The mauve Mini was coming over the field, bouncing and struggling on the rutted track. That terrifying little car. I waited for it shiftily, trying to make out if it contained one, two, or even three people—perhaps they'd all come to tell me the game was over, they would get out and lean on the open car door and marvel at my folly. It buzzed on to the mossy flagstones and stopped dead in front of the statue. There was only Sibylle inside—she sat for a while glaring out. It was clear to me she'd been sent by Luc to deliver some ultimatum and was working herself up to it and concentrating her anger at me and my blind interventions. Then she spotted Marcel, who was standing away to my right, frowning, head on one side in one of his gawky "grown-up" attitudes.

  She got out and hurried over to him, kissed him on both cheeks. "Mm, you need to shave," she said. Marcel giggled and fell silent; they stood blinking at one another, as if each trying to formulate an explanation of how they came to be here.

  "There's an amazing billiard-table inside," said Marcel.

  "Is there?" She smiled encouragingly and sauntered towards me, unnervingly calm, like a trained nurse approaching a violent patient. I came down the steps apologetically. Then we too looked at each other.

  "That's a very nice jacket," she said. I nodded and rubbed the cloth of the lapel between forefinger and thumb. "I hope it kept you warm out in the car all night."

  "Yes, thank you"—foolish, not wanting to add being cold to my other weaknesses. "Yes, it is a warm one, isn't it? I've worn it myself a few times, when Luc thought I might be getting chilly—it was like an overcoat on me." I saw her shrugging it on, his arm brusquely round her shoulder to shiver her. She looked down, piqued, as if she thought I too might offer it up. His other clothes went without comment, they were perhaps anonymous enough not to speak clearly of their owner. And that of course was all I longed to do, to speak of him but not to give him away, not to seem to share him with her, to be proud in defeat. I started obliquely:

  "You must have left very early."

  But she was on her own fuse. She looked at me blankly. "You'll never have him," she said.

  "Then you don't know . . . " I didn't say that, but a kind of stifled smugness like heartburn must have crossed my features and shielded me from her brutality. "All I want to have", I said, "is the chance to talk to him and help him if I can. His mother's dreadfully worried, she wants—well, she wants to do what's best for him."

  She gaped at me as if I were a total idiot: I had never imagined such disrespect, but I was too raw for the usual prickle and bluster at the outrages of the young. "His mother."

  "So why don't you just tell me where he is? No one's trying to come between you. He thinks of me as a friend."

  "How on earth would you know what he thinks. You haven't got a clue what goes on inside his head. He thinks of me as his best friend."

  "Yes," I said disarmingly, "he told me he did."

  She wandered off in a circle, hands in pockets, pink-cheeked with anger and cold. Marcel leant against the Renault and scuffed the ground—he hadn't known what a terror she was.

  "So where is he?" I said.

  "He's not in the house," she replied, slyly neutral.

  "I know that."

  She paused and scanned the decrepit elevation. "I'd wondered too."

  I glinted at her as if detecting a trick. "You're not going to pretend yo
u don't know where he is, it's too tedious."

  "I haven't any idea," she said sotto voce.

  "But you've run away together." She raised an eyebrow. "Or do you mean he's run away from you as well?"

  "We didn't run away together," she said after a moment. "He ran away, as you call it, and phoned me to tell me. I asked him to meet me at a friend's apartment, not to do anything stupid or get arrested. I borrowed our friend Patrick's car and went there. That was where you spent last night. At 3 o'clock this morning he rang again and said he couldn't come to meet me. He was—on the coast. I drove off to another rendezvous and waited there, for hours, but he didn't turn up. He wasn't trying to trick me, I think he just couldn't manage it." I had to stop myself grinning as I heard her tight-lipped itinerary of failure. "I thought he might have come here."

  "There's no one here," I said, more gently.

  "Then I don't know where he is," she threw off, and hit her fist against the top of her thigh and crumpled into tears.

  She'd taken on such power as my rival that it was perplexing, somehow shaming, to see her tremble and cry. But it was Marcel's moment. She turned away from me with a wail as someone utterly unfitted to comfort her, and hid her sobbing face in her young friend's arms. He patted her back and nestled his chin into her hair like a boy getting his first slow dance, anxious, radiant.

  I backed off, happy to be an adult, far from wanting to intrude. My thoughts were all on Luc and our meeting at the coast—I thought we could take up where we'd left off, I was catching my breath imagining it. What an unexpected sight the two of them were, hugging under the weedy stone giant, like a gorgonised reveller, and beyond them the brown and damson of the winter woods.

  After a minute or two in the car Marcel began to sing, without realising, it seemed, looking out of the window, gently nodding his head. It was "See Me Tonight", but done in a light boy-baritone that made the song freshly amorous. I came in on the second chorus—it was stuck in my brain and had only to be activated, as if by a hypnotist's codeword. We went on for a while in hesitant boisterous unison, both of us high on relief and altered prospects. There wasn't much to "See Me Tonight" and after a couple of high-spirited run-throughs we petered out. Marcel looked quite surprised that it had happened. "Do you know, um, 'Heartbreak Hotel'?" he said; and I started it off. We swooshed along the empty road, bawling, "I'm all so lonely, baby, so sad and lonely, baby" like schoolboys on a coach-trip.

  Apparently his mother used to start sing-songs in the car and his father and he had sometimes remembered the practice since—they sang the same old Flemish folksongs as they had ten years and more ago. With us it had been hymns, all the way to Cornwall in the Humber's leathery heat, my father putting them deliberately to the wrong tune. I always chose grand Chestertonian ones, "Take not thy thunder from us", "Smite us and save us all", whilst Charlie reluctantly nominated the Geography Hymn. Sometimes we boosted the sunshine mood with "Summer Holiday" or "The sun has got his hat on"—a phrase that always troubled me with its counter-suggestion of cloud. Most difficult and lesson-like were rounds, in which you couldn't merge in the general din but came in alone and on time, although Charlie dragged and forgot and sang flat. "White sand and grey sand. White sand and grey sand. Who'll buy my white sand? Who'll buy my grey sand?" The words were always drivel but you had to pipe them out and hold your own amongst the unfriendly circling of the others.

  The hotel was stifling and deserted, but the sea had a grim beauty, seen from the window, while the hard valanced beds seemed to promise a cloudy luxury. I lay down while Marcel was in the bathroom, hearing only the hiss of the shower and the creak of the pipes. It was a lull in the chase, like one of the puzzling calm intermittences in love itself. I was still unused to hotels, I wanted to stay here for days, for months, perhaps, forgotten by the staff—they would wake us in spring with coffee, and newspapers like April Fool editions, full of just-possible absurdities.

  I dreamt that Gordon Bottomley was staying at the same hotel. I was filled with emotion, and took Luc to see him in his room. The poet was vigorous and well-preserved, and busily at work on a verse play which he had started in the 1930s and which was now over a thousand pages long. He threw open a wicker hamper in which the curling bundles of manuscript were carried from place to place. He said how much this work had cost him, what he had given up, of ordinary pleasures and griefs, in order to find time to get it right. I spoke to him about a poem of his that my father had sung in a setting by Finzi, but when he asked me what it was called my mind went blank: I said I thought it was called "Mud" and he said "Oh yes", though neither of us was convinced. Luc was polite but indifferent and after a while drifted off into the adjacent room—I saw him through the open door, masturbating calmly and talking to someone else out of view.

  Marcel and I patrolled separately through the day, among the beach shelters, the steamed-up cafes, the meagre amusements of the resort. Sometimes my beat would cross his and I would buy him a snack, some local speciality—a helping of chips or a hake sandwich. His attitude had improved dramatically. He might genuinely have come here for a holiday. Mrs Altidore had backed our hotel booking with her Master Card and the cashier advanced us a clip of thousand-franc notes. Marcel spent much of his time in a cacophonous games arcade, claiming that Luc would be drawn to it. I watched him as he went on further chases, through landscapes that opened up at sick-making speed, violet, rose, lime-green, where loss was met by derisive klaxons and victory by urgent trills. Other, rougher boys began to cluster behind him, sullenly impressed by his nerve and his quick hand. It wasn't Luc's sort of place at all. I saw him kicking along the beach, sunk beautifully in himself, hurling bits of driftwood back, watching the waves' sloping approach—like something felt along the heart . . .

  The storm had thrown up sand on the esplanade and caked the seaward windows of hotels with salt. Miniature reparations were being made with brooms and ladders. Something in the mood of leisured routine, the morning vacancy of hotels, snagged me with longing. I drifted to the station, asking "Why?" and "Where?" again and again—it was like some endless Lied my father might have sung, "Warum?", "Wohin?", the conventional stanzas shifted into breathtaking depth by the modulations between them. And the station too, with its tiny repertoire of arrivals and departures, was the threshold of everywhere else—Luc himself was perhaps already miles beyond the shining vanishing-point of the rails.

  Even so I was on edge for him. I sat and smoked in a bleak public garden sheltered from the wind but in sound of the sea; the flowerbeds were stripped out for winter, puddles shivered on the concrete paths. No one whatever came into it, which seemed to make it apt and ready for our reunion. There was a yelp from behind me and the slap of feet. I thought, this is it, and turned with a smile I knew would be half a grimace of doubt and fright. A thickset blond was jogging up and for a fraction of a second I tried to commute him into Luc, I wondered what he had done to himself. He glanced back at me as he passed, big features abstracted by the rhythms of running and music: I could hear the tinny racket from his headphones. He ran on round the garden's perimeter, then stopped and rocked on the spot, bending from the waist and doing exercises surely more eye-catching than useful. But what did I know?

  He was a type I often liked, a stone or more over-weight: I guessed his backside looked like mine would have done in tight, sweat-darkened cycling-shorts—he made the whole idea of me by implication rather sexy. He also wore a zipped-up tracksuit top and the stacked rubber running-shoes which since my night with Luc exercised a confusing appeal. His calves were hairy and I thought his arse might be too if I got to lick the thick buried cord behind his balls and stab my tongue a little way into his muscly hole. My fantasy flowed out and caressed him—I felt light-headed with fatigue and with relief at having someone other than Luc in my sights; for a minute or more I was absorbed in this solid substitute, and when he turned to face me, twisting, bobbing, high-stepping like a horse, I carried on looking at him with what must have been an o
ddly simple expression of welcome. He loped back round towards me, his cock and balls compact but emphatic; I was making the best of his rather loose mouth, the coarse hair squashed under the alice-band of his personal stereo. He nodded vaguely, but I saw it was only to the thrust of the music—it seemed he hardly took me in as he thumped past. I turned with a snigger of regret, torn already between dispraising him and a spurt of envy for the runners' world that I had always loved but never entered.

  At dinner we had the restaurant almost to ourselves. Marcel drank a glass of wine and chatted about the day's excitements, how he thought he'd seen Luc several times but in the end it was always another "funny-looking" boy. The months he had spent playing video games in the sanatorium had paid off magnificently this afternoon—he'd emerged as a kind of champion in the amusements arcade: it was altogether one of the best days he'd had for years. But soon my lack of attention made him fall quiet; he looked at me with his head on one side and made sweet little attempts to jolly me along, but I was sinking fast into incommunicable gloom—the first bottle was already empty. He was still aglow with his new role as Sibylle's esquire, sent on to the coast whilst she retreated home. I glanced in a tall mirror and saw us as a headwaiter might, as a boy with an uncle, a godfather perhaps, a bachelor evidently, who lacked an easy way with youngsters, and disheartened the lad when he was meant to be giving him a treat. The age-gap seemed to widen between us; he gripped his cutlery like a child, and piled in the good, overdressed food as if determined to get value from that at least, whilst I was too racked by other hungers to want to eat. Sometimes he pointed his knife at something and I told him what it was called in English, and he repeated the word with a nod. Dismal canned music played, the short tape slurring from incessant repetition, fragments of Mozart and Tchaikovsky swung and sugared—I saw the morning studio, the shirt-sleeved sessioneers, the villainous arranger, the mockery of everything I held dear.