I was dawdling alongside parked cars that the street-lamps filled with shadow, though sometimes there was a box or a child's shoe cross-lit all night in the back of a shooting-brake. How sombre and secure those welled interiors looked, with only a pane of glass to keep everything else out. Of course I'd always wanted a car, but never a car that I could afford—I scorned the prospect of days in the drive, daubing at the rust on a Maxi or an 1100. I wanted a Jensen CV8, or a love-hunting Giulietta like Paul's. And here was the Fratry of St Caspianus, half-derelict, still sheltering some unimaginable obscurity of devotion. And then a sound you often heard at Matt's, the two-note blast of a juggernaut's horn, echoing from a narrow street like the Last Trump in an unknown Requiem.
The back of the house was dark, the jeep standing in the yard, loosely swathed in a nylon tarpaulin that rustled and lifted and sank in a stirring of breeze as if someone was there. I let myself in to the glass porch, which still held a dim vegetative smell from the withered azaleas and sprawling rubber-plants, and then into the flat, with its own bouquet of cologne-smothered squalor. So he'd brought Luc here. I lit a cigarette and hung around by the bed, disordering it further with a fastidious toe. For a second or more at a time I let myself imagine them. I seemed to have forgotten that I had slept here since, unknowing, hoping to forget.
The jeep was a raucous starter—and after that it took a while to figure out the lights and the dip-switch. Getting into reverse proved tricky too. But then I was out of the gate, sitting high up, ready for off, hearing in the growl of the exhaust a tremor of that first outing to the sea; I went jerkily round the block, getting used to being in control, quite hoping I'd pass Matt walking home, then relieved I hadn't. I came up to a red light behind a little Fiat with three lads across the back, two more in front, joking and rowdy, off to a good time; my beam stroked the clean backs of their necks. I revved forlornly, and one of them turned, took in the flashy chrome and zipped-up rally lamps, and grinned—while the driver, scenting a challenge, revved as well, and when the light changed shot forward with a squeal. I let them go.
Out of town the night was windy and glossy, the lights of farms and isolated houses burned clear across the fields, or bare treetops dipped and splintered them. For a while the road followed the high embankment of the sea-canal, the water black and barely visible below. There was no shipping in it, only the archaic hulk of a dredger, its platform lit and deserted. I rested my free hand on the seat beside me, as if on the thigh of an invisible passenger. The jeep's hood gibbered at its fastenings.
Luc was waiting at Ostend, staring out to sea through salt-stippled glass. He looked hollow-cheeked, eyes narrowed in hurt and defiance; I felt he had been robbed of his beauty, and that I would hardly have singled him out from the other kids around him. He had become a victim, to be stared at and pitied, to provoke pity for his family and friends—and just at the moment when his future was clearing like hills in the first light, to be ready for him when he woke. I stood in front of him and repeated his name, though I knew he couldn't see me, or recall the night he had taken my life in his arms. He gazed past me, as if in a truer kinship with the shiftless sea. A few late walkers passed us, and saw me vigilant in my huge unhappy overcoat; they didn't know if it was the charts of tides and sunsets I was studying, or the named photos of the disappeared.
A Note on the Author
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the novels The Swimming-Pool Library, The Spell, and The Line of Beauty. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Line of Beauty won the Man Booker Prize for fiction and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in London.
By the Same Author
The Swimming-Pool Library
The Spell
The Line of Beauty
TRANSLATION
Racine: Bajazet
Praise for Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star
"The Folding Star moves beyond provincial gay territory to the full-fledged European novel."—New Yorker
"Splendidly evokes the airless, achy melancholy set off by unrequited love in a story as laden with emotion as it is shaped by artistry . . . In beautifully shaped prose, it describes both joyless sex and tender longing. This admixture left me awed."—Newsday
"His fluid prose, with its dense accruing of detail and richly allusive quality, is that of an early modern writer. Hollinghurst is closer to Mann or Nabokov than to his contemporaries . . . The Folding Star examines the universal tragedy of human desire, never satisfied, only extinguished by death."—Boston Globe
"Splendid . . . Alan Hollinghurst is a writer of unusual talent and—with just two novels to his name—of striking achievement." —Washington Post Book World
"As richly imagined and densely textured as The Swimming-Pool Library . . . The sheer beauty of Hollinghurst's writing and the rare sophistication of his imagination raise this disturbing creation to stellar heights."—Out magazine
"Hollinghurst's language is a delight . . . As vital as it is unruly, The Folding Star shines bright."—Chicago Tribune
Copyright © 1994 by Alan Hollinghurst
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"There's Nothing Like Marriage for People" by Ira Gershwin and Arthur Schwartz, © 1959, 1993 by Ira Gershwin Music and Arthur Schwartz Music. All rights on behalf of Ira Gershwin Music administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
First published in the United States in hardcover by Pantheon in 1994
First published in the United States in paperback by Vintage in 1995
This Bloomsbury paperback edition published in 2005
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The Folding Star Page 47
