Moab is my Washpot

4

The beginning of my second year at Uppingham saw me no more clued up about this whole business of sex than I ever had been: I probably had a clearer idea of the terms and their meanings: cunnilingus, urinobibe, Fallopian tubes, epididymus, snatch, pussy, tit, jizz and clit, I knew the words all right. But then I knew what a diminished seventh was, but it didn’t mean I could play or sing. I knew what a googly was and I still couldn’t bowl a cricket ball without causing twenty-one boys to collapse in a heap of laughter. Knowledge is not always power.

The erotic in life did not occupy me or engage my attention much because I was still neither physically developed nor sexually aware enough to have that need to ‘get my bloody rocks off’ that seemed so to exercise the other boys, passing their Penthouses, sniggers, phwors and Kleenex boxes from study to study. Games and how to avoid them, that was still what mattered most to me. Sweets and where to get them from, that too. Sex, that could take a powder.

And then…

And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again.

The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.

This is where language is so far behind music. The chord that Max Steiner brings in when Bogart catches sight of Bergman in his bar in Casablanca, how can I bring that into a book of black ink marks on white paper? The swell and surge of the Liebestod from Tristan, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor – even Alfred Brendel can’t conjure that up from this keyboard, this alphanumeric piano beneath my fingers. Maybe, because sometimes pop music can hit the mark as well as anything, I could write you out a playlist. We would start with the Monkees:

Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer

Naaah… it’s no use.

There’s nothing for it but old words and cold print.

Besides, you’ve been there yourself. You’ve been in love. Why am I getting so hysterical? Just about every film, every book, every poem, every song is a love story. This is not a genre with which you are unfamiliar even if by some fluke (whether a cursed fluke or a blessed one I would be the last to be able to decide) you have never been there yourself.

It was the first morning of the winter term, the beginning of my second year at Uppingham. After breakfast, as was usual, I went to my study, now newly shared with Jo Wood, and collected the textbooks and blocks I would need for the morning’s teaching. A block was a pad of paper, special Uppingham-sized paper, shorter and squarer than A₄, which could only be bought from the official school bookshop: essays, notes and everything else had to be written on paper from a block.

The routine at a school with boarding-houses goes like this, you see. The Morning Fag awakens you. You breakfast in your House, you walk into school for chapel and morning lessons and you don’t return to the House until lunchtime. All the form-rooms, science labs and sports halls, the Chapel, Hall and Library, they are grouped around the main school. Ekker (eugh!), then back to the House for showers (don’t get me started…) followed by afternoon lessons in school and another (sometimes the last of the day) return to the House for supper. After supper there’s a little free time before a bell will go, summoning you, if you are a junior, to hall where you do your prep (which means homework), supervised and kept silent by the praepostor on duty. If you’re a senior, your prep is done in the privacy of your study.

Then there’s some more free time in which, unless through some infraction of the rules you’ve been gated (no doubt they now use the Americanism ‘grounded’, as in ‘your ass is grounded, Mister’), you can go down to the Art School or the Thring Centre (named after the side-whiskers and containing electric typewriters, design studios, pottery shops and so forth: it has since been replaced by a splendid complex called, rather wetly in my opinion, The Leonardo Centre, designed by Old Uppinghamian architect Piers Gough and containing a TV studio, computers and all manner of larky toys) or you can see a play, listen to a concert, attend a lecture, go to play rehearsals, turn up for choir practice, or band practice or orchestra practice, or a meeting of the chess club, bridge club, judo club, poetry reading group, entomological society or whatever gathering of like minds suits your taste. Then it’s back to the House in time for evening prayers, which are taken by the housemaster or the House Tutor, a master who hasn’t got his own House yet and acts as a sort of locum to the housemaster proper from time to time. Then, essentially, it’s cocoa, buns, biscuits and bed – the whole cycle to repeat itself the following day. On Saturdays, evening prayers take the form of a more informal compline. On Sundays, there are no games and no lessons, just two compulsory hours in your study that go under the strange name of Sunday Qs, short for Sunday Questions and designed, no doubt, to inculcate religiosity, healthiness and inward spiritual cleanliness. Dotted throughout the day in House there is a series of call-overs, what they called appel in prisoner-of-war films. A list of all the boys in order of seniority downwards will be read out by the

House-captain, and each boy has to call ‘Here’ at the sound of his name. One thinks of Rowan Atkinson’s inspired Schoolmaster sketch, or that creepy play by Giles Cooper which was turned into a film with David Hemmings, the title of which came from the last three names of the roll… Unman, Wittering and Zigo.

There. If you require any more information and believe in Buddhism, I suggest you live your life wickedly and get reborn as a middle-class English boy in the mid-1950s: you’ll get the experience firsthand.

So, back to Day Two, Term Four.

I had stuffed what I needed for morning lessons into my briefcase and Jo Wood and I walked together out of our study and down the corridor that led to the path that led to the road that led to School.

Four Houses were up at our end of town, Brooklands and Highfield were two. Brooklands was further away from the centre of Uppingham, so far away indeed, that it had its own swimming-pool. Opposite my House, Fircroft, was the Middle, that huge playing field I told you about, and perched next to it was Highfield, so named because it was on top of a hill and by a field. The fourth House was a little further down the hill, towards the town and school, and we will call this House Redwood’s.

Redwood’s doesn’t exist.

There is no House between Highfields and the bottom of the hill.

I want nothing I write in this book to cause anyone needless pain, shame or embarrassment. Everything I write will be true according to the light of my own memory, but the truth will be told with tact and with due recognition of fiction’s often greater capacity to convey reality than can any bald recitation of fact. Some names and the setting, styling and structure of some scenes must be fictionalised. I do not believe you will always be able to tell which scenes and which settings, nor would I want you to try. You have stayed with me thus far and must trust me when I say that although there is rearrangement, there is no exaggeration or sensationalisation. If anything the contrary might be the case, for certain scenes and events of my school life, however heavily disguised, would enable any school contemporary of mine instantly to ascribe names and identities, and that would be grossly unfair. Two people, if they read this book, will recognise themselves but see that they have been well enough disguised for no one else to know but themselves who they really are.

Enough already, Stephen – cut to the chase.

It is a clear mid-September day, the kind of day that contains in exactly equal proportion a mix of summer and of autumn, the leaves are not yet in their October reds, golds and yellows, but their greenness is becoming just a little shagged by now, not as brightly, squeakily sappily green as it was in midsummer. To make up for it the light has lost its August haze and has a great softness, the rotten marshy smells of late summer have been dispelled too and there is a nutty, barky freshness in the air.

Naturally, academic hours are the same throughout the whole school, so as we Fircroftians walk out on to the road, we join a stream of Brooklanders walking towards school, and a crowd of boys from Highfield cross the road towards us, for there is no pavement on their side; as we move down the hill, boys from

Redwood’s will cross over too, so that the observer looking down the dip of the London road from the centre of Uppingham at the right time will see a third of the school swarming towards him, two hundred boys dressed in identical black jackets, black trousers, black ties, black waistcoats, black shoes and white shirts, lugging their briefcases and if, poor sods they are slated for PE that morning, their duffle bags as well. Pollies will bicycle alongside whistling or twang-humming Claptonian guitar-licks, their boaters tipped at what they hope is an angle that says, ‘Boaters are fucking square, man. I wear mine, like ironically … ‘Yes, but you still wear it. You don’t have to, you know.

I once got out my old Stouts Hill boater and wore it to school. This enraged a School Pig I encountered on the way.

‘And just what the fuck do you think you’re doing wearing a boater?’

‘But this isn’t a boater, Merrick, it’s a sun-hat. I am highly susceptible to excess heat.’

‘You’ll be highly susceptible to a kick up the arse if you don’t take it off.’

This morning though, I’m thinking of nothing in particular. Still settling back into the rhythm and enjoying the fact that there is a whole crop of new boys who are now the lowest of the low. Indeed, I have to train one of them for the fag test.

I will be taking my 0 levels this year. Fourteen seems a young age for them, but in those days, if they reckoned you could do them, you did them. I would take my A levels two years later and leave school at sixteen, then university at seventeen, that was my future, all charted out before me. That was how things were done then. If they felt you needed an extra year to cope with 0 levels, you were put into a form called the Remove. At prep school there had been a Remove and a Shell. I had been in Shell and I never understood quite what it meant.

I know, I’ll look it up in the OED.

Well, bless my soul. Does one live and learn, or what?

15. The apsidal end of the schoolroom at Westminster School, so called from its conch-like shape. Hence, the name of the form (intermediate between the fifth and sixth) which originally tenanted the shell at Westminster School, and transf. of forms (intermediate between forms designated by numbers) in other public schools; see quots.

1736 Gend. Mag. VI. 679/2 Near these (forms] ye shell’s high concave walls appear.

1750 Chesterfield Lett. ccxxviii, Observe., what the best scholars in the Form immediately above you do, and so on, till you get into the shell yourself.

1825 Southey Life amp; Corr. (1849) I. 151 He was floated up to the Shell, beyond which the tide carried no one.

1857 Hughes Tom Brown i. v, The lower fifth, shell, and all the junior forms in order [at Rugby].

1877 W. P. Lennox Celebr. I have known I. 43 The noise grew louder and louder, until the birch was safely deposited in a small room behind the shell, as the upper end of the room was called from its shape [Westminster].

1884 Forshall Westm. Sch. 3 The Headmaster faced all the boys excepting the tenants of the Shell.

1903 Blackw. Mag. June 7 42/2 The third shell, a form within measurable distance of the lowest in the school [Harrow].

Well, there you go then.

There was no shell at Uppingham so far as I remember.

Actually, I am feeling rather pleased with myself as I walk along with Jo Wood this morning because the new form I have been put in this year is Upper IVA. This is more luck than a reflection of any academic brilliance from me during my first year: the school alternated annually between awarding the A status to the top English set and the top Maths set – all part of that good all-round chap ‘philosophy’. This year it is the turn of English, so I find myself in Upper IVA and all the brilliant mathematicians have to put up with the indignity of being grouped in Upper IVB.

You can be in the top form of your year, but be in lower sets according to subject. So I was in the top sets for English, History, French, Latin and so on, but in the bottom for Physics, Maths and Chemistry. Geography I had given up in favour of German.

My form-master and English teacher I find to be an:excellently civilised man called J. B. Stokes, housemaster of Meadhurst, given to a most peculiar use of what, if I have parsed this correctly, is an imperative interrogative form of a future conditional tense. In other words instead of saying ‘Shut up’ he would say, ‘You’ll be shutting up?’, ‘You’ll be sitting down?’

It is too early in the season to shuffle leaves along the pavement as we walk down the hill, but Jo and I have our heads bowed down towards the pavement none the less. As a child one gets to know every crack in every paving stone on every section of one’s walk to school. Are we looking down because we don’t want to see or because we don’t want to be seen?

I don’t know what it is that makes me look up. A vague awareness I suppose that the boys from Redwood’s opposite are crossing the road from their House to join the pavement, a little good-natured jostling might result, and the thick black line of boys will have swollen to its maximum size before the left turn, up the Chocolate Block, along the Magic Carpet and towards the Chapel, whose bell even now is ringing us to morning prayers.

His head isn’t even turned towards me but I know.

How is that possible? How can it be that just the gait of him, the stand of him, the shape and turn away of him, can be enough for me to know and to know at once?

Looking at it coolly one can say that anyone might be drawn to such a fine head of fair hair, seen from behind. One might say that anyone could see that this was a classy, peachy and supreme pair of buttocks confronting us.

One might add too, in cynical tones, ‘You say “you knew”, but just suppose he had turned his head and revealed the face of a pig with a harelip, a twisted nose and a squint, would you now be writing this?’

Did I really, really know?

Yes, reader, I did. I swear I did.

The moment I lifted my head from the pavement and glanced across the road I saw, amongst the Redwood’s boys crossing, one of their number looking the other way, as if to check that there was no traffic coming. And at that moment, before his face came into view, it happened. The world changed.

If he had turned out to be ugly, I think my heart would have sunk, but still the world would have been different, because that thing that stirred and roared in me would have been awakened anyway and nothing could ever have put it back to sleep.

As it is, he was not ugly.

He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

I stopped dead so suddenly that a boy behind walked straight into me.

‘Watch where you’re going, you dozy tosser…

‘Sorry.’

Jo turned patiently and gave me the sour, constipated look that was peculiarly his own and had caused his nickname to be ‘Woodeeeeee’ pronounced in the tones of one who groans on the lavatory, clutching the seat as he strains violently to disgorge a turd the size of Manchester.

‘What have you forgotten?’ he said.

He must have assumed that I had stopped because I had suddenly realised that I had left a vital textbook behind in the study. I knew from the heat in my cheeks that my face had turned the fieriest red imaginable. I somehow found the presence of mind to mumble, ‘Laces,’ and stoop to fiddle with my shoes. When I stood, the redness in my face, I hoped, might seem to be the result of my head having hung upside-down while I was lacing, a strategy that every human being uses to cover a blush and which fools no one.

I was up quickly though and immediately I started to walk forwards. I had to see that face again.

He had just reached the pavement and gave now the smallest, quickest of glances back up the hill, in our direction. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I saw that he was even more beautiful than I had supposed. Even more beautiful than I had ever imagined it was possible to imagine imagining beauty. Beautiful in a way that made me realise that I had never even known before what beautiful really meant: not in people, nature, taste or sound.

There are many in Norfolk for whom ‘big city’ means Norwich.

‘I been to Norwich once and I didn’t like it,’ they say. ‘Swaffham’s big enough for me.’ They can only guess at what London, Los Angeles or Manhattan might be like.

I realised at this moment that I had only ever experienced the townships of ‘charming’, ‘pretty’, ‘attractive’, ‘comely’, ‘sweet’, ‘delicious’, ‘handsome’ and ‘cute’ and now I had finally penetrated the city limits of Beautiful. I was instantly aware of Beauty and the whole Greek and Keatsian fuss about it made sense.

Just as when an artist shows you a new view of something – as Matisse for example might show you a quality in an apple that you had never noticed before and from then on you are able to see that same quality in every apple you encounter – so I would from this second onwards be able forever to see beauty, real beauty, in familiar things all around me. Before this moment I may have thought a particular sunrise or hillside was stunning or attractive but after this moment I would be able to see beauty there. Absolute beauty.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ said Jo, panting to keep up with me as I strode forwards.

This apparition was now perhaps three ranks forward of me. I could see that he was shorter than average. He wore the same uniform as everyone else, but it was transformed, as even the air around him was transformed.

‘Don’t want to be late, do we?’ I said.

‘You’re off your fucking trolley,’ grunted Jo.

If I could just hear the voice, maybe draw alongside and steal a look at the profile…

Then I saw Maudsley just ahead of me, a Fircroft sixth former and a rugger colour, nudge his neighbour and I heard him say in a voice too loud to be borne:

‘D’you see that one, then? Fer-uck me! Herwow!’ He shook his right hand backwards and forwards as if it had just been burned. ‘I mean get the buns on it…

My heart sank and the blood hammered in my ears. ‘Now what?’ Jo was as patient as a man can get, but even he had limits. I had almost stopped again.

‘Nothing, sorry… nothing. Sorry, I just… nothing.’

It was unbearable, unbearable to think of a great ape like Maudsley even so much as looking. I knew at once, in an instant churn of misery that there would be others, others smitten by this thing, this vision, this impossibility. They would be cruder, they would be more obvious, their motives would be baser and, of course, of double-course they would be more attractive. They would be so much more attractive, so much more co-ordinated, so much more graceful, so much more seductive in their status and appeal. They would take my holy flame and extinguish it with thick thudding yellow wads of filthy spunk, snuff it to a hissing nothing in a hairy slimeball of lust. It was too terrible. They were looking at Sex. I knew they were, while I – I was looking at Beauty.

‘Now calm down, Stephen,’ you are saying. ‘We know you’re a poof. We know too, because let’s face it you’ve rubbed our bloody noses in it enough times, that you don’t deny sex, or the sex-drive in you. Don’t kid us that this “holy flame” of yours was some kind of pure abstracted love with no erotic overtones.’

I am telling you the feelings that ran through me and, painfully predictable and mimsy and effete and bloodless as they may seem, those were my feelings, arrived at in my head in less time than it takes for light to travel a yard. But I tell you another thing too with my hand on my heart and my fingers uncrossed. Although I was to develop, like every male, into an enthusiastic, ardent and committed masturbator, he was never once, nor ever has been, the subject of a masturbatory fantasy. Many times I tried to cast him in some scene I was directing for the erotic XXXX cinema in my head, but it always happened that some part of me banished him from the set, or else the very sight of him on screen m the coarse porn flick running in my mind had the effect of a gallon of cold water. Sex was to enter our lives, but he was never wank fodder, never.

Jo Wood, a man of instinct and sense, knew that something was wrong and knew that it was something inward and strange, so he didn’t call me on the oddity of my behaviour as we walked along, boys now four deep between me and the revelation.

We swarmed left and along the Chocolate Block, up the steps – I could see a grace in the upstride of his right leg that was entirely new to me, and I saw too Maudsley once more nudging his neighbour and heard the Kenneth Connor, under-the-breath ‘Phwoo-oo-oor…‘ that accompanied the nudge. We passed the old Victorian study block to our right and the library to our left and filed along the shining cobbles of the Magic Carpet that wound like a brown river through a field of dirty-pink asphalt until it reached the colonnade. The chapel bell tolled louder and louder in my head until I thought it might explode.

I had to see where he would leave his briefcase. That much I had to see.

The main entrance to the chapel was like a sort of miniature of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC: Edward Thring sat sternly in a stern throne, his monstrous paternalist whiskers sternly set in white marble, not a boy that walked by him but the Reverend Edward stared through his soul and despised what he saw. We passed that entrance and headed for the colonnade. The colonnade was open on two sides and, on its two closed sides, notices, posters and announcements fluttered from green baize, attached by brass drawing pins. Headman’s noticeboard was first, white gnomic memoranda, then came others, Gestetnered Roneo-ed or hand-written, with their announcements of Corps Field Days (‘the u/mentioned will muster at 1525 hrs…‘) special matches of ‘Second Fifteen Possibles v. Third Fifteen Probables’ (per-lease…), calls for volunteers to join a new Speleological Club that was being founded, ‘Apply Andrews, J. G. (M)’ and other such dribbling toss that Fry, S. J. (F) found insupportably dull. The purpose of the colonnade that day, so far as I was concerned, was to leave my briefcase there before entering chapel and to see where he left his.

It was a remarkable sight, on those days when one was late for chapel, to see the colonnade empty of humans, but with six hundred briefcases and a hundred duffle bags dumped at the feet of its columns or leaning against the base of its inner walls.

You could tell he was a new boy. Just the way he checked others to see how they left their briefcases, as a shy girl at a disco might check how the other girls are dancing. He found a spot to leave his, brand new it was and of deep tan leather. I suddenly hated mine, which was black. I had thought black was cool, but now I knew I had to get a brown briefcase. I would make a point of wanting one for Christmas.

‘But darling, yours is almost brand new! And it cost the earth!’

I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. For the moment, I must put my hideous black next to his glorious tan. Some boys had their initials classily branded into the leather or trashily attached with gold stick-on letters. He was standing by his as I approached, but facing the other way and scanning the crowd of boys approaching from other directions. Good God, would he always face the other way? I plonked my briefcase down by his with a loud but cheerful sigh, a sigh that seemed to say,

‘Heigh ho. Here we go. Another term. Tch! Blimey!’

He turned.

He turned towards me.

‘Excuse me…

A voice that… it was unbroken, but it had a huskiness to it that stopped it from piping in a childish squeak. If he sang, he would sing alto.

‘Help at all?’ I found myself saying in the most cheerful, friendly, charming, relaxed and relaxing way those words have ever been said.

And for the first time I looked into his eyes. They were blue, not light blue, but a darker blue. Not so dark as sapphire blue, not so bright as china blue. They were romantically blue. Lyrically blue. They swam and I swam in them.

‘I was wondering…‘ he said, ‘which is West Block?’

This was, of course, his first day. His first day, and the first day of my life too.

‘Look behind you,’ I said, finding time to marvel at the calm in my voice and the strength and the confidence that it carried. ‘Think Colditz. Think Lubyanka. Behold, West Block. Got a lesson there have you? First after chapel?’

I watched how the hair at the back of his head fell and, as it stopped before reaching the collar, how it turned fractionally inwards and upwards in a way that made me think for an instant of a medieval boy king. Under it, a vee of lighter hairs herring-boned up the hollow of his nape.

‘Oh Christ help me,’ I croaked inwardly. ‘Christ Jesus help me.’

He turned back and looked up at me once more. Yes, he was shorter than average, shorter, but not delicate. ‘And that’s the door you go in, is it?’ Such a delicious caramel huskiness rising from the throat.

Let me not faint, I pleaded. Following the direction in which he pointed I nodded. Simply the act of his raising his arm caused something trapped within me to leap and pummel against the inside of my chest and beg to be let out.

‘Who’ve you got?’ I asked.

‘Finch. J S. Finch, is it?’

‘Aiee! French or German?’

‘French.’

‘Ah, I have him for German. Good luck, that’s all I can say…'

‘What’s he like?’ I followed across his eyes the passage of a small cloud of doubt or fear and noted with joyness of joy that a smile from me at once dispelled it.

‘Naa, he’s okay. He shouts and he screams and he swears, but he’s okay. You’re in Redwood’s aren’t you?’

‘How do you know that?’ Almost a hint of pertness in the speed and directness of the question. New boys would usually stutter with ers and ums and excuse me s when asking something of an elder. But I liked this freshness. It fell short of cheek. It was just…direct. One human being to another. He wanted to know how I knew, and so he asked.

I jerked my head in the direction of his duffle bag whose regulation navy blue was piped in a dusty, crushed-strawberry red. ‘Your House colours tell the story,’ I said and, shifting my gaze further along, added, ‘see that one? Yellow piping. That’s Fircroft and that’s -‘

A juddering thump on my back. ‘Fry, you spawn of Satan, do you realise we’re in the same Latin set?’

Gunn, from School House: fancied himself an intellectual and a wit. I despised him in that cordial way people will hate those who are too like themselves for comfort.

‘But I thought I was in the top Latin set!’ I exclaimed in mock horror. ‘How come I’ve been demoted to the derr-brains?’

Shit! He will hear that stupid insult and know it for what it is. He will think me arrogant. I half turned, but he had gone. I turned fully round, in time to see the last of him rounding the corner towards the rear entrance to the Chapel.

‘In love are we? Where the hell did that pop up from?’

‘Who?’

‘Oh Jesus, Fry,’ said Gunn grinning with hideous superiority. ‘For such a good liar, you’re a terrible liar.’

In chapel, the boys sat in blocks arranged according to their House. Each term the Houses would move their position within the chapel. Fircroft this term were sitting near the back and Redwood’s were way up at the front. I found a place between Jo and Richard Fawcett and scanned the backs of heads until I found his. He sat between two boys, one brown-haired the other blond like him. Both were taller. Yet I would have known. If I had seen him for the first time just then, twenty rows ahead, his golden head smaller in my field of view than a sixpenny bit, still I would have known.

But what was his name? How was I ever going to find out his name? Suppose his name was somehow wrong? Suppose it was an average name like Richard or Simon or Mark or Robert or Nigel? That would be so dull. Suppose he were a Neil or a Kenneth or a Geoffrey, how could I bear that? Suppose, God help him, he were a Stephen? I always hated my name. Later on I was to be cheered up and resigned to it by James Joyce’s use of it for his hero, and by the thought of Stephen Tennant and Stephen Spender, but at the time I thought it a stupid, styleless name, a name that only a boy could have and rather an uninteresting boy at that.

Then again he might have an obvious name, the sort of name that would make people giggle and think him a tart. He might be a Rupert or a Julian or a Crispin or a Tim or, Lord save us, a Miles, Giles or Piers.

I thought of names that I could tolerate. Ben would be about all right, as would Charles or Thomas or James or William.

Jonathan? Hm… Jonathan would be just about within the bounds. Nathan might be pushing it a bit though. Daniel and Samuel I could cope with and Peter, Christopher and George, but Paul was right out.

Francis was not to be entertained for a second and Frederick was just too silly for words.

Roderick, Alexander or Hugh might pass, if he was Scottish. Donald would be uninteresting, Hamish would be pushing it too far and Ian simply horrid.

David? That would be acceptable, I decided. David I could live with.

There again as Bertie Wooster had pointed out, some pretty rough work is pulled at the font sometimes, maybe his parents had had a rush of blood to the head and chosen Hilary or Vivian or Evelyn?

Maybe there was some rich uncle to please and he had found himself baptised Everett, Warwick, Hadleigh or Poynton?

Then there were the Grahams and Normans and Rodneys. Impossible.

Justin, Damian and Tristram. No! A thousand times, no.

But then again, as the sun streamed in through the window and lit his hair, blinding all other boys from sight, it seemed to me that he could transform any name and make it holy, just as he transformed and sanctified his uniform and his briefcase and duffle bag. Even if he were Dennis or Terry or Neville or Keith, somehow those names would rise above the commonplace. He could probably even do something to Gavin.

The service passed in a blur of such speculation and, after we had sung the school hymn reserved for the first mornings of term -

Rank by rank again we stand

By the four winds gathered hither

– the whole school developing sudden joyful rhotacisms for the first line so that wank by wank again we stood, I shuffled out with the others in prescribed order and, by the time I reached my briefcase, his was gone, gone to face the perils of Finch and French in West Block. When would I see him again? How could I see him again for more than a few fleeting seconds?

Maybe you are not aware how difficult it was for there to be any real social congress between boys of different years in the same House. For there to be friendships between boys in different Houses… well, he might as well have lived on the moon.

I looked towards the West Block and Finch’s formroom with a sigh, picked up my horrid, horrid black briefcase and headed for double English.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

They undo us for their sport.

Thus I oh-so wittily misquoted that morning. Stokes was gracious enough to smile, merely pointing out that I had played merry hell with Shakespeare’s scansion. I replied tartly that ‘to the gods’ was bad scansion already, delivering eleven syllables and mucking up an iamb. I offered the opinion that Shakespeare had been too cowardly to write the metrically perfect:

As flies to wanton boys are we to God;

He kills us for his sport.

– to which Stokes correctly replied that to singularise God, aside from courting disaster from the censor, destroying the pagan atmosphere of the play and the whole line of Gloucester’s thought, would also weaken the image by mismatching with the plural ‘boys’ – or would I have Shakespeare ruin the rhythm again with

As flies to a wanton boy are we to God

– is that what I wanted? Besides, it was perfectly possible for an actor to say ‘to the’ as if the words had but one syllable.

I conceded that maybe old Shakespeare had known what he was up to after all, and on we moved, leaving me to my thoughts.

Where would he go for morning break? The Upper Buttery or the Lower? Would someone have told him about Lanchberrys’ exceedingly fine cream slices?

I made my way there, scanning every fair-haired head as I went.

Fate can be kind to lovers, in her cruel, careless way. As far as the gods are concerned we are indeed as flies to wanton boys. They put us under a magnifying glass, laugh if the sun focuses its rays through the lens and burns us up with a pop; they stamp on us, squash us, swat us and collect us together in jars to be fed to favoured reptiles.

I saw him moving down the steps towards the entrance to the Lower Buttery. He was talking to a boy from his House. A boy I knew! Nick Osborne was in my German set, a creep I had always thought, but suddenly I decided that he was my best friend.

I forced my way down, not caring whom I pushed aside, not hearing the oaths, not feeling the kicks and thumps that came in riposte.

‘Osborne!’ I called.

He turned. They both turned. ‘Oh Fry,’ said Osborne. ‘My brother,’ he added, lazily flapping a hand towards the divinity.

His brother. His brother! His-brother-his-brother-his-brother.

‘Hello,’ I said, with just such a casual but polite air as one might employ when being introduced to the insignificant little brother of any friend. ‘Oh,’ I went on, ‘weren’t you the one who had Finch this morning?’

He nodded with a shy smile. He seemed pleased that I could have remembered him out of so many.

‘Oh, Finch,’ said Nick. ‘I was telling Matthew not to mind him.’

Matthew then.

Matthew Osborne. Matthew Osborne. M.O. Mine Own, My Only, Miraculous One, Magical Object.

Matthew. Of course it was Matthew, I knew that. What else could it have been? Ridiculous to have speculated on the possibility of any other name. Matthew. It had always been Matthew.

‘Anyway,’ Nick went on. ‘This is the Lower Buttery. We have to stay this side. Only fifth and sixth formers go behind that screen. See you, Fry,’ he threw over his shoulder, leading his brother through the crowd.

Such progress so fast.

Nick Osborne’s brother.

Now. Regroup. Think. Think, man, think.

What do we like about Nick Osborne?

Not much. He’s clever. We concede that. But he’s sporty. Very, very, sporty. We don’t like sportiness.

What were his hobbies? How was I going to get him to be a friend? I could be as close to Nick as I liked, he was in the same year, besides he was not especially attractive, no one would talk.

Hang on. How could they possibly be brothers?

Nick was nearly as tall as me: he had to shave once a week. He was dark-haired, greasy haired. Not ugly, not ugly at all, but surely not of the same parentage?

No, there was something, a look, a cast of expression, a slight downward dip of the head when it turned. They both had that. Nick’s eyes were blue too, but without any lapis lazuli depths. Just blue eyes.

There was a German lesson that afternoon, I would make sure I sat next to Nick and start to cultivate him. Back at Fircroft after lunch I went to my study and sat alone to think about things. I was magnificently, triumphantly off games for at least a week with asthma: my doctor at home had come up trumps with an unequivocal note after a bad attack in late August just after my fourteenth birthday.

I took a block from my desk and started to write down what I knew.

He was Matthew. He was Matthew Osborne. He was at Redwood’s, like his brother.

Matthew Osborne (R).

I would find out his middle initials later. Osborne, M. J.? No, his brother was Osborne N. C. R., so Matthew would probably have two middle names as well. Osborne, M. P. A.? Matthew Peter Alexander, for example? It was possible. Osborne, M. St J. G.? Matthew St John George. That was just as possible.

The most important thing to sort out was the why. Why did he do what he did to me? I wrote that down.

And the what.

What was it that he did to me? I wrote that down too.

And the how.

How did he do what he did for me? I started to write that down until I realised it was very nearly a song-lyric. Gerry and The Pacemakers? Freddie and The Dreamers? Something like that. Not very dignified. ‘How do you do what yah do for me… Banal. Won’t do, won’t do at all. I crossed it out. Crossed it all out, screwed up the paper, ripped it into tiny shreds and started again.

In The Liar I compressed the whole thing jokily, like this.

He had fallen in love with Hugo Alexander Timothy Cartwright the moment he laid eyes on him when, as one of a string of five new arrivals, the boy had trickled into evening hall the first night of Adrian’s second year.

Heydon-Bayley nudged him.

‘What do you reckon, Healey? Lush or what?’

For once Adrian had remained silent. Something was terribly wrong.

It had taken him two painful terms to identify the symptoms. He looked them up in all the major textbooks. There was no doubt about it. All the authorities concurred: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Ovid, Keats, Georgette Heyer, Milton, they were of one opinion. It was love. The Big One.

Cartwright of the sapphire eyes and golden hair, Cartwright of the Limbs and Lips: he was Petrarch’s Laura, Milton’s Lycidas, Catullus’s Lesbia, Tennyson’s Hallam, Shakespeare’s fair boy and dark lady, the moon’s Endymion. Cartwright was Garbo’s salary, the National Gallery, he was cellophane: he was the tender trap, the blank unholy surprise of it all and the bright golden haze on the meadow: he was honey-honey, sugar-sugar, chirpy chirpy cheep-cheep and his baby-love: the voice of the turtle could be heard in the land, there were angels dining at the Ritz and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.

Adrian had managed to coax Cartwright into an amusing half-hour in the House lays two terms previously, but he had never doubted he could get the trousers down: that wasn’t it. He wanted something more from him than the few spasms of pleasure the limited activities of rubbing and licking and heaving and pushing could offer.

He wasn’t sure what the thing was that he yearned for, but one thing he did know. It was less acceptable to love, to ache for eternal companionship, than it was to bounce and slurp and gasp behind the fives courts. Love was Adrian’s guilty secret, sex his public pride.

All very well for me to write that nearly twenty years later, but even as I was writing it in the year 1990, seven years ago, I felt a twinge of guilt that I could be so cavalier, so casually sophisticated and so knowing about my former self and the acuteness of my feeling and the depth of my confusion.

‘It had taken him two painful terms’ – well, I suppose those seven words have the virtues of honesty and brevity. No pleonasm there. There is a hoary old chestnut in the film business. What is the most expensive stage direction you can write in the fewest number of words? So far as I know the winner, which was written into a genuine script, is still this:

The fleets meet.

‘Two painful terms’ is probably my equivalent in the field of emotional budgeting.

It took my mind, which is painfully slow when it comes to the acknowledgement of interior truths or to the achievement of any self-perception, a long time to realise what I sensed in an instant.

I was in love. Very well. I could use that word. It had been translated and I understood it. All those dreary romantic plots made sense now. Those interminable screen looks between men and women shot in soft focus to the accompaniment of high strings, they had a meaning. That I could grasp.

So I wrote it down that first afternoon.

I love Matthew Osborne

I instinctively knew this meant that everything was changed. It was not the same thing at all to write

I love Matthew Osborne

as it was to write

I love Paris

or

I love pizza

So I had to add

Everything is different

Even so, despite my knowing that ‘everything was different’ I did not realise that everything - each thing that existed – was - truly, really, positively, actually was – different - not the same, other, ineradicably altered.

After all, my timetable looked the same: still German at four and Maths at four-fifty, still CCF on Fridays, still Saturday compline and Sunday Qs. The study that Jo and I planned that evening to set about decorating, that looked the same. The quad outside appeared to be the same quad. The records on my shelf were the same records.

I screwed the piece of paper up once more and stared out of the window.