The Sparsholt Affair

6

The Jensen crept forward with a crackling sound over the small rough stones of the drive: the beauty of its slowness was its mighty potential for speed. At the gateway the tail-lights flashed red for two seconds, and then, with a turn so fast that a short spray of stones leapt out across the road, it powered out of sight up the hill to the left. Three whooping growls were heard as it climbed through the gears, but at the fourth the sound was lost in the deep lane. They had gone. The mid-morning sun beat down on the lawn; it was wholly still, until, for a moment, a breeze off the sea shook the pampas grass and opened the Daily Mail on the patio table.

‘So it’s just us!’ said Connie. In the general relief there was a small unplaceable cause for worry – perhaps about what they would tell the two men they had done when they got back.

Norma sat down again at the table and lit a cigarette. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Let’s go to the beach, Mum,’ Johnny said.

Norma blew out a slow stream of smoke. ‘Oh, I don’t know about the beach,’ she said; though she liked to be coaxed into agreement with any plan. Small reminders of her goodness in yielding spiced up the day. She was wearing her white bell-bottoms and the floppy straw hat with a blue ribbon. ‘Look at me!’ she said.

‘Mum, we’ve been here four days and we haven’t even been to the beach yet’ – to Johnny it was a long-imagined scene. ‘In fact Bastien was complaining about it.’

‘Well, if Bastien wants to’ – with a weary laugh at what things had come to. ‘You’d better get the Zulus.’

Norma stared at her, ignorant of Zulus, and Johnny said, ‘I’ll get them!’

‘You don’t mind, Norma? And see if Bastien’s up, while you’re about it . . .’ But here he was, scuff and flap of his flip-flops, blinking as he stepped out through the French windows, voice still throaty from sleep, and it seemed with a small worry of his own.

‘Your husbands have both gone?’ He smiled and spread his hands with bleary chivalry towards the women, as if faced with a double duty in the men’s absence.

‘Yes, it’s just us,’ said Johnny.

‘But where are they?’ said Bastien.

The women ignored this question, but Johnny said, ‘They’ve gone to Truro in the Jensen. Truro’ – and he thought perhaps he shouldn’t say this again – ‘is the county town of Cornwall, I told you . . . with the cathedral.’

‘I think Cliff just wanted a go in David’s car,’ Norma said.

Connie gave a dry laugh at this childishness, said, ‘Your car’s just as good, Norma,’ but added an adult note, ‘They’re going to have lunch with Leslie Stevens.’

‘Oh, Leslie Stevens, well . . .’ said Norma.

‘Well, they’re cooking something up.’

‘We’re going to the beach,’ said Johnny, laying his hand on Bastien’s strong shoulder.

‘Is there some coffee?’ said Bastien, looking seductively past him at his mother.

‘I’ll make you some,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave in ten minutes.’ From her mouth such orders were wonderfully lacking in authority. Norma had to totter down to ‘Greylags’ to change and fetch her bathing suit; Bastien cajoled his way into bacon and eggs, then went to the lavatory for fifteen minutes; and it was nearly lunchtime when they set off down the hill, crossed the big road and picked their way down through the ginnels and steep stairways between cottages to the high sea front, and its dizzy gap from which a further steep stair, mere stone blocks jutting from the harbour wall, with a frayed rope passing between rings as a rail, descended to the bright underworld of the beach.

The choice of a spot to lay out their towels was a tug of small calculations – there were strips of fine sand between diagonal ridges of rock, exposed now by the outgoing tide, some further away from the big outlet pipe and slimy cascade across the beach below it, but too close for Johnny’s mother’s liking to a noisy family with transistor and dog driving people away, and a sun-browned blond son or son-in-law in green trunks drawing Johnny in furtive abstraction towards them. Further along, but right up at the rocks at the top of the beach, was a woman with two daughters, and Bastien, still partly in role as the senior male, made a firm move towards them. Norma stood in ladylike patience until the decision had been made. Johnny watched the blond man amble down into the water and with a quick unflustered gesture fall forward into a lazy crawl. Connie, free of the men, seemed more open than usual to the charm of having no plan, and almost no will. They settled in a minute at a place a few yards above the tideline, the sand smooth and warm in front of them but still damp to the digging toes.

Now the two baskets, carried by Johnny and his mother, were set down and emptied – towels and sun cream, a book, lemon squash, and the swimming things, glimpses of furled linings and straps. ‘Do you want a Zulu, Mrs Haxby?’ said Johnny.

‘I’ll just sit here for a bit, thank you,’ said Norma.

‘Bas?’

Bastien smiled at him narrowly as he took it in both hands. No one knew why they were called this, it was some very obscure connexion with the film, which Johnny had seen three times at the Ritz. Mrs Sparsholt’s Zulus were made for modesty, old bath towels sewn together and worn like a poncho with a hole for the head. Inside them you could change in and out of your swimsuit on the beach; and after a swim dry and warm yourself. Bastien unrolled it and stretched it out under his chin like a shapeless frock. ‘What is this bloody thing?’

‘Oh dear,’ said Norma.

‘It’s to change your clothes in,’ said Connie firmly, ‘or under.’

Bastien shook his head – ‘I don’t need,’ and rolled it up again loosely.

‘He can just use a towel,’ said Johnny, in a reasonable tone; but in a moment Bastien had tugged off his shirt and was unbuttoning his jeans. They all looked or didn’t look. He had his trunks on already, thin blue and white stripes, he stepped out of the jeans and folded them and put them safe in the basket.

‘Voilà, Madame!’ he said, and looked down at himself, pleased as he had been last year, on the burning French beach, by his own sleek elegance and indecency. Johnny had a breathless intimation of the warmth and tightness of the swimming trunks worn under clothes, the lucky loop of the drawstring now tucked inside. Getting changed himself, he found his pleasure in the Zulus drain away, he felt prudishly British beside the French boy’s simplicity.

Next it was his mother’s turn to cover herself in the long towelling smock. Johnny noted, while not quite looking at her, the little active bulges, the intuited moments of release from bra and so forth as she got undressed. The never-seen nakedness of his parents was never more present to him than when they were hopping and wriggling in their Zulus. When she emerged, in her black one-piece, she seemed confident but self-conscious – or maybe Johnny’s self-consciousness leaked into her: she looked oddly at him for a second, stooped for her red bathing cap, put her hair up in a few quick tucks under its snappy rim, and walked down, lively, heavy-footed, to the lifting and tumbling water’s edge. Bastien watched her going in, something awestruck for a second in his impudence. Then Johnny ran down and joined her, the cold grip of the water shocked him in a way she hadn’t hinted at, in her quick duck and rise, the steady breaststroke that took her out, red head bobbing. He wanted to swim with Bastien, tangle with him in the waves, in the element where he was superior; but he knew, he’d known from the moment they left the house, that Bastien was not going to put himself at that disadvantage. He pushed out fast, then lay back in the water, the shore as if seen by periscope, with the background restored, white-painted houses lined above the sea wall. He waved, as though Bastien might have missed him: ‘Come in!’ Bastien was being talked to by Norma, who had laid down her hat – she must have asked him something, he stared at her, then came over, reluctant, with no escape, to help her with her Zulu: he dropped it over her head like a cloth on a parrot’s cage. She struggled out, fussing about her hair. Bastien turned away from her, with his fastidious smirk, and it struck Johnny, as he swivelled and swam on again, that probably no one much cared about Norma undressing, however she did it.

It was fun swimming with his mother, little bits of talk if they were close, ‘Hello!’ like delighted friends, then unannounced races to and fro, and companionable circlings, in breaststroke, round a moored dinghy, My Boy Lollipop, or the two red marker buoys. He was a stronger swimmer now than last year, and his mother acknowledged this, with a hint of distance in her laugh. They were different in the water, daily habits dissolved, his mother all features with her thick hair sleeked away, and the chill of the sea not to be ignored. He felt it once or twice, with the pitch of a small unexpected wave in his face, her look, entirely used to him but not quite sure what she was seeing. He loved his father not being here, but he wished his father could see him, hanging for a moment on an upstretched arm from the gunwale of the dinghy, with an easy new sense of his own strength. ‘Oh, he’s off,’ said his mother, and Johnny swung about almost reluctantly to see the shore, further off now, church and trees in the picture above the town roofs, and Bastien a hundred yards away from Norma, walking calmly towards the far rocky corner that led round, at low tide, to Crab Beach.

When they came out, and ran up the sand, and stood dripping and drying themselves in front of Norma, the indescribable alertness to change, to his own unmannerly growth, seemed to glow off them both, as the breeze ran across them and the force of the sun took over from the cold of the sea. He was nearly as tall as his mother now, in a year she would look up to him, as she did to her husband. She had sturdy legs, scratched around the ankles from walking in sandals, her large breasts were squashed together by the black bathing suit, her high cleavage goosefleshed under droplets of water. He knew she was forty-four, an age not mentioned, far ahead in the dense tangled stasis of adult life, whose language he still hardly understood, though he was learning to hear new tones in it, hardness and significant silence.

No point in following Bastien to Crab Beach, the rumour of topless women . . . he hoped it wasn’t true . . . but ached at the thought of him there with them, while he was left behind here, with his mother and her friend. He squatted down by her while she rubbed sun cream on his back, feeling her take stock again, unseen, of the new size of him. He thought about how Bastien had changed in a year, the hair on his legs, the shadowed upper lip and chin, and how when he himself went off next month to boarding school he would surprise his mother each time he came home. ‘Don’t go too far,’ she said, as he walked off, not knowing really where to go. His mother and Norma settled down, saying nothing; he went where they couldn’t see him, past the family with the dog and the striped canvas windbreak, the young man was changing, Johnny a second too late as he pulled up his pants with a snap and stood wringing the wet from the tiny green trunks. Johnny could be so absorbed in looking he forgot he was visible, and being looked at. ‘All right?’ said the man – a clench of shame for Johnny, but it was just pleasantness, unsuspecting. The dog ran over, and Johnny scratched its head with sudden rough energy and relief.

Talk had started up when he drifted back behind his mother and Norma – he went perching and shifting over the ridge of rocks, little creatures in the trapped weedy pools hiding from his shadow. His mother had her book from the library, The Red and the Green, and Norma, excluded, made conversation in idle, vaguely nettled resistance to it. The niceness of his mother glowed through, her book turned face down, answering, hitching one thing of no great interest to another, and keeping it going. He knew very well she didn’t care much for Norma Haxby, and not at all for Clifford – it was a keen little glimpse into the marital machinery to overhear her talking for her husband. ‘I’ve brought the Mail,’ she said, ‘if you want it,’ and reached over to the basket; Norma took it, but perhaps couldn’t read it in her sunglasses. He was aware of her turning her head and watching him, and wondering perhaps where the other boy was. He hopped down to a place where he could make drawings in the firm wet sand. He could only just hear them through the general noise of the beach and the gulls, and they spoke now with confidential flatness. His mother looked up over her book, ‘I hope they’re getting on all right. I think Bastien’s rather bored.’

‘It’s that age, I expect, isn’t it,’ said Norma vaguely.

‘He only seems interested in girls.’

‘How old is he?’

‘He’s fifteen.’

Norma peered out to sea. ‘He could pass for older, couldn’t he.’

‘Mm, I know what you mean.’

‘Good-looking . . .’ said Norma.

His mother peered humorously down the beach. ‘Lazy puppy. I wish he had some other things to wear.’

‘Well,’ said Norma, ‘I suppose they grow out of things, at that age.’

‘Actually, I don’t care, but he’ll need something smarter for dinner at the Boat Club.’

‘They’re quite relaxed, aren’t they?’

‘They may be, but Drum isn’t. He won’t take him there in those trousers.’

‘Ah, I see . . .’

‘He’s very proper, is Drum!’

‘Oh, well so’s Cliff,’ said Norma.

Johnny had made a face, like a great luscious boy doll, huge eyes and lips: sand was a tricky medium. He erased the whole thing in a stamping dance, smoothed it again with a stick of driftwood. Then he lay down on his front and closed his eyes. The talk ambled on, his mother’s reasonable tone each time Norma brought her out of her book.

‘I say, Cliff was quite surprised about David being at Oxford University.’

‘Well, it was only for one term, you know.’

‘He didn’t want to go back, then?’

‘He could have gone back, of course, after the War. But, you know, Norma, he was twenty-three or something, youngest ever squadron leader, DFC – he just couldn’t see himself getting back into student life.’

‘I should think you were jolly glad, too.’ The repeated click of a lighter, and in a few seconds cigarette smoke in the ozone. ‘No, Cliff was saying he’d had a very good war.’

‘Yes, he did. He loved it all really, that was the thing.’

Norma said nothing about Clifford’s war. ‘You took a while to get round to starting a family, though, Connie.’

‘I suppose we did, we both had so much energy – you know what it’s like—’

‘Well . . .’

‘And there was the business to set up – that was all-consuming for five years. And anyway we wanted our fun.’ He felt the pause here, she must have looked round. ‘Not that it wasn’t fun having Jonathan . . . David always wanted a boy.’

‘Oh, did he? You never wanted another?’

‘I wouldn’t have minded, but he wasn’t keen – strictly between you and me.’

‘Of course . . .’ Two busy puffs and a sigh as she screwed the barely smoked cigarette into the sand beside the others. ‘I expect David’s very busy with work all the time, anyway, Cliff is. It’s nine o’clock sometimes before he gets in.’

His mother said quite humorously, ‘Yes, I don’t always feel I have his undivided attention.’

‘Well, this is it,’ said Norma, perhaps not sure how vexed she was.

‘He’s on the Council now, too, of course. And he’s taken on the RAF benevolent thing, which he feels very strongly about.’

‘Oh, well . . .’

‘But Cliff must have a lot of dinners and so on.’

‘Oh, dinners, meetings . . . Dinners he can take me to, not always of course, and there’s the Masonic. But I go with him if I can – well, it saves me having to cook!’

It was hard to picture Norma cooking – sausages on sticks seemed about it. Connie said, ‘And Drum has his sports things too, some evenings, and most weekends.’

‘Ah . . . yes,’ said Norma. Here she was unable to compete.

Johnny ran off down the beach, the tide some way out now, and their little encampment stuck where no one would choose to be. He looked about as he jogged and slowed, made detours round rocks where there was a possible boy to see, a taut contour, a heart-racing moment of nakedness, went within a foot of near-naked couples, in the borderless democracy of the shore. What he hoped to see was Bastien coming back over the rocks from Crab Beach, and telling him nothing had happened. He hopped up on to a long concrete casing like a walkway exposed by the tide – there was a boy about his own age playing by himself just below on the other side. He looked out and there Bastien was – Johnny waved and shouted, and thought he saw the upward nod, his sign of greeting and dismissal. The boy, in red swimming trunks and with a child’s spade, digging for something in the saturated sand, looked up too, turned and peered at Johnny.

‘Is that your friend, then?’

Johnny still saw the merit in saying yes.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Bastien – he’s French.’

‘Oh, yes? . . . I’ve got a French friend,’ said the boy, as if he knew both the pleasures and the problems of having one. He stared at Bastien approaching, small against sea, sand and rocks but unique and magnetic. ‘They’re very smooth, aren’t they.’

‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ said Johnny, and blushed annoyingly.

The boy clambered up on two rocks and stood beside him, looked at him cautiously. He said, ‘Is it your dad’s got the Jensen C-V8?’

‘What, the Mark III, you mean?’ said Johnny.

‘Is it? I didn’t know it was the Mark III.’

‘Yeah,’ said Johnny. ‘We had the Mark II before.’

The boy looked at him, hesitated. ‘Is it made of fibreglass?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Johnny, frowning out his own faint unease at the fact. ‘The doors have aluminium skins, of course.’

‘Oh, right . . .’ He stared down the beach at the collapsing waves, in the strange gravity of these facts. ‘I should think it could take off,’ he said.

Johnny tutted. ‘Not with that engine – it weighs a ton.’ He heard his father, in his brusque defence of the car against any sidling suggestion it was lightweight, and not what it seemed.

‘I suppose so,’ said his friend. ‘How fast does it go, then?’

‘Hundred and thirty-six?’

The boy seemed to make some calculation of his own. ‘You’ve never had it that fast,’ he said, as Bastien came up, and rather than joining them looped further up the beach, past where the mother and two girls were still sprawled, all three it seemed sound asleep. Johnny’s new friend stood assessing him as he passed, then ran off without a word the other way.

Johnny homed in on his mother and Norma just as Bastien strolled up, gave them all a more friendly nod, kicked off his flip-flops and flung himself down on the towel he had left an hour before, the corners now curled up by the wind and the edges strewn with sand. Norma looked at him, from under the wide brim of her hat. ‘So where have you been, young man?’

He rolled over, glanced up at her, sand on his bottom, hair stiff and quilled from the sea and the breeze, something sly in response to her boring adult tone. ‘I’ve been walking, on the coast.’

‘How far did you go?’ said Johnny pleasantly, siding with him but dreading his idea of what he had got up to even more, now he was back and lying there in all his glorious capacity.

‘Not so far,’ said Bastien. ‘No, it was nice,’ and when Norma turned to find her bag he winked at him – Johnny gasped, and looked away, pierced by the thought, the muddled impossible image, of Bastien seducing the topless women on Crab Beach.

‘You need some protection from the sun, Monsieur,’ said Connie.

He smiled and cringed – ‘I don’t have . . . Madame.’

Norma, in her strictness, with its shy shade of experiment, childless woman among teenage boys, said, ‘What do you need?’

‘I think you have . . .’ he said, and watched as Connie dug in the baby-basket, and held out the plastic bottle with a palm tree on it.

‘I have some,’ said Norma, peering down through her sunglasses into the bag where her own more expensive creams were carried.

Now Bastien was helpless, grinning at Connie – ‘Madame, can you put it on to me? I can’t reach . . .’ and he flopped back, face down, lifting his buttocks just once, to make himself comfortable.

‘Well, I can . . .’ said Johnny, sitting forward, heart in mouth.

‘Oh, I’ll do it,’ said Norma, ‘for heaven’s sake.’

And now Bastien lay on his back and slept, or seemed to, in a sated surrender to the heat. It was as though he had given himself to Johnny to look at, there was trust of a kind in the complete indifference of sleep; and also a kind of contempt, since looking, it seemed, was all Johnny was left with. Of course they slept together each night, one above the other, in their squeaking bunks, ‘more fun for you both’ as his mother had said . . . Norma wandered down to the sea, stopping here and there and staring blankly at the family with the dog; she didn’t really go in, just stood, smart and solitary, where the waves could swill over her feet, and back again, sucking the sand out from under them. It seemed his mother too was asleep now, under her floppy hat, The Red and the Green sloped sideways, her hand over the page. Johnny looked at Bastien for spells of five seconds, then ten seconds, together. The dip of his smooth stomach, the hidden navel like an orifice, not a button, the thin gap under his taut waistband narrowed with each slow breath . . . Because of the sea and the sand Johnny hadn’t brought his sketchbook, but what he saw was indelibly drawn on his mind.

‘What about lunch?’ said Norma. It was another experiment of their husbandless day that mealtimes were so neglected. Now it was after two. Johnny’s mother must have seen there was no point in resistance.

‘I’ll make us all something when we go up.’

And a few minutes later the women were tented and changing. Bastien showed no sign of moving, and the possibility of a short sunny nearly naked time alone with him took possession of Johnny. ‘We’ll come up in a bit, then,’ he said.

‘It’ll just be salad,’ said his mother. ‘Take your time.’ She stepped free of the Zulu, the damp heap of her things. Norma too emerged, in her white shorts, and started to pull up and shake the towels, Bastien wincing and shrinking from the blown sand.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘we will bring everything back for you.’

Norma smiled narrowly at this unforeseen offer. ‘Oh . . . well, if you like, Bastien.’

‘Yes, yes, we’ll bring them, Mum,’ said Johnny, the tone of cheerful drudgery.

‘Yes, Jonathan will carry them,’ said Bastien, and smiled at him as he got to his feet. He was already a few yards down the beach when he said, ‘I race with you,’ and jogged down towards the water, turning to a sprint when Johnny came up fast beside him, shouldering him, all the force of longed-for contact in the riding of arm against arm. They went into the sea together, went under – it was as if all Bastien’s meanness, the awful act he had put on for the past week, was banished in a glittering splash.

Larking in the water, dragging each other down, just the edge of panic once from Bastien, he disguised it in two seconds, jeered at Johnny as he pulled himself to him, an arm round his neck, and Johnny, in a dream, without thinking or asking raised his legs and circled Bastien’s waist with them. They laughed, steadied, gasped in each other’s faces, Bastien stared at him as if thinking how to phrase something or more probably planning his next attack, jutted his lips forward, and kissed Johnny on the mouth. It was very quick, and then he’d fallen back, catching Johnny out in the instant of surrender. ‘Salope!’ he said, and laying the flat of his hand on top of his head, pushed him under.

It took them a minute to feel the heat, when they came out and ran up the beach with the water all over them still. With a touch of clowning Bastien picked up a Zulu, and slipped it over his head; Johnny did the same, and they stood pulling the towelling round them from inside, to get roughly dry. Then Johnny realized Bastien was untying his trunks and with two stooping twists pushing them down: they appeared round his ankles, and he stepped out of them. Johnny did the same as calmly as he could, picked them up, and wrung them out, and took them up to the baskets, thrilled by his own hidden nakedness. When he turned back, he found Bastien had sat down on a towel, was huddled up but with his knees apart under the Zulu.

It was something Johnny had done, last year, with the secret daring that seemed nothing when the impulse was so strong. He thought at first Bastien was pretending, as he sat down facing him, and then he knew, with a piercing sense of a last and only chance and at the same time of cruel exclusion, that it was for real. ‘I race with you!’ he said. It was a jolt, a sudden opening, and Johnny was doing it too, with quite new feelings of not wanting to race, of wanting it to go on for a long time, to be saved and postponed into something different and better. If it was a race it would soon be over, Bastien could come unbelievably fast, forty seconds from starting last year, when they’d tried it, but in bed then, together. He stared at him avidly, saying nothing. He was part of the game but the game kept them apart, each of them focused on his own desires, though Johnny’s, he knew, burned in his face: he doubted how long he could look at Bastien and think of him in that way. Bastien smiled at him, was he mocking him or saying that of course he loved him? He had the intense private look of the approaching climax, it seemed terribly obvious, but no one was watching, and his eyes twitched away beyond Johnny’s shoulder in a last hungry stare at the two girls up by the wall.

The boys gathered up the things and started back to the house, the mood cool, quiet, souring in the sun on the steep path, the clamber up steps encumbered with the baskets, but with something strange still binding them, the one shared act that neither of them mentioned. The relief of being part of Bastien’s mutiny rather than its target carried him through, and gave a new twist of hope, and anxiety, to the remaining three days. On the final lane climbing out of town – the sunroom windows of ‘The Lookout’ glimpsed above and to the left, over the pampas grass – Bastien seemed uncertain. Was it better to drag behind, with sullen thwacks of his flip-flops, or to stride ahead, competent and careless? The driveway to ‘Greylags’, cut from the shaly bank, climbed sharply on the right to its covered carport, and it must have been because Clifford Haxby’s Daimler was already parked in it that the maroon back end of the Jensen, pulled in behind it, jutted out. Johnny stopped for a second, in surprise and disappointment that they were back, and the unusual freedom of the hours with the women at an end already. It seemed too soon – how far was it to Truro? About fifteen miles, but on twisty roads. He looked at his watch and it was ten past three, on the beach they had forgotten time and now it had caught them out. Bastien came up behind. ‘This is their house?’ he said and of course there was no one else he could be referring to.

‘It’s Dad’s car,’ said Johnny, ‘the Jensen.’

‘Ah,’ said Bastien, and nodded.

‘They’re back already.’

‘Perhaps it was not far?’ said Bastien, going a few steps up the drive as if to check Johnny was right, seeing some interest in the situation when he might have been counted on to shrug and pass by. He stood peering, with his basket, as if delivering something.

‘Come on,’ said Johnny, ‘I’m hungry, let’s have lunch,’ and when Bastien went a bit further, ‘They’re probably still talking business.’

Bastien said, too loud, ‘Have you seen the house?’ He was at the top of the drive. ‘It’s nice.’

‘No,’ said Johnny – he’d wanted to see it, but the Haxbys had put a bad spell on it for him. ‘Come on.’

‘In a minute . . .’ with a flap of his free hand. He put down the basket and went on out of view.

So Bastien was being difficult, again, after all, and he was left at the gateway, scuffing the stones in his plimsolls. ‘I’m going home.’

He went a few steps up the road, hoping Bastien would follow, but when he didn’t he stopped again. Clifford Haxby hated Bastien, and his father would be furious if he caught him creeping about while they were having a meeting. They were friends but it would seem like trespassing.

When he reached the top of the drive, Johnny couldn’t see him. ‘Greylags’ was a bungalow, expensive-looking, clad in reddish wood, and with French windows on to a front lawn. All the windows were closed: they could only just have got back, and there was a feeling almost that no one was in, they had parked the car there and gone away – gone over, it struck him in all its simplicity, to ‘The Lookout’ itself. There was no one here, and he studied the house across its smooth lawn with a gripping impatience, even so, for Bastien to reappear. A car came down the steep lane behind, slowed, but went on, to the left, into the town. A great screaming jabber of seagulls broke out, echoed round from the harbour below, the horn of the ferry sounded distinctly, a man close by behind the fence of the next house spoke, and a woman answered; and still the Haxbys’ house, or the house they were renting, sat closed and unresponsive, while Johnny made up excuses, breezy and hopeless, for standing and staring at it. Here Bastien was now, coming out from round the side of the house, moving quickly but with feet clenched to silence his flip-flops. Had he been seen? He gave Johnny the quick grin of someone who has kept a friend waiting. ‘No one here,’ said Johnny.

Bastien shrugged, and looked vaguely disgusted at the pointlessness of the thing. Then, stumbling, scratching back at one point with his foot to capture his shoe, he started to run down the drive. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Lunch time, I’m hungry.’

‘What, did they see you?’ Johnny said.

‘Nothing to see, my friend,’ said Bastien, ‘nothing to see,’ and reached out to bring him with him, sudden brotherly warmth of his body against him, marching him out under the strength of his arm, Johnny’s hand in a moment round him, the beltless waist of his jeans, nothing on, of course, underneath.

‘Oh, your basket . . .’

He had to break out of Bastien’s embrace to go back for it. He reached the edge of the lawn, snatched up the basket, and in the moment that he turned he saw, or thought he saw (the reflections of sky, cloud and blue in the wide windows), the unfolding ripple, the slow wink of light and shade, of the fine slats of a Venetian blind swivelled upwards and then downwards on their cord and closed.