THREE

‘Steady, boys, steady!’

1

At five o’clock, when they were all getting their things, Miss Cobb, the Manager’s secretary, made a rare appearance in the staff-room. ‘Oh, Mr Bryant,’ she said, ‘with Miss Carter away, I wonder if you would walk with Mr Keeping.’

‘Oh,’ said Paul, glancing round at the others, ‘I don’t know…’ In his mind he was already halfway home, in the high summer evening.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Heather Jones.

‘Mr Keeping did ask for Mr Bryant,’ said Miss Cobb. ‘He likes to get to know the new staff.’

‘Well, of course I will, in that case,’ said Paul, blushing, with no idea, really, what he was being asked.

‘I’ll tell Mr Keeping. In five minutes, in the Public Space? Thank you so much…’ – and Miss Cobb withdrew, with her sad flinch of a smile.

In a week he had got to know all their names, which were still coloured and almost physical for him, made distinct by their newness and the need to tell them apart. Heather Jones and Hannah Gearing; Jack Reeves, the chief cashier; Geoff Viner, the second cashier, a bit of a looker; Susie Carter, a good-natured chatterbox, who was off today, attending a funeral in Newbury. Her empty chair and shrouded typewriter had quietened the office behind him. He slid his thermos into his briefcase and said quietly to Heather, ‘What does Susie do with Mr Keeping exactly?’

Heather seemed to think for a moment. ‘Oh she just walks home with him.’

Hannah, with her more maternal note, said, ‘Mr Keeping likes someone to keep him company. Normally Susie goes because she lives up past the church. It’s a nice little walk, really – it’ll only take you five minutes.’

‘Just don’t say, “How are you, Keeping?” ’ said June Underwood.

‘I won’t,’ said Paul, to whom the whole business sounded odd and euphemistic. From what he had seen of him, Mr Keeping was a cool and formal sort of man, with a sarcastic streak, but he’d noticed the staff took a strangely protective attitude to him. If they’d ever thought it odd for a middle-aged man to need walking home, they treated it now as the normal thing. He said, ‘Isn’t the Manager meant to live over the bank?’ He’d seen upstairs, where the sitting-room of the bank house was lined with filing-cabinets and the bedrooms were stacked with old desks and junk.

‘Well, this one doesn’t,’ said Jack Reeves, who’d just got his pipe going, the coarse dry smoke like a sign of his authority.

Geoff Viner, taming his hair with a comb and the flat of his hand, said, ‘I assume you don’t know Mrs Keeping.’

‘Oh, you know her, Geoffrey, do you!’ said June, and a bit of a laugh went round the room.

Jack Reeves said, ‘I assure you Mrs Keeping has no intention of living over the shop.’

‘I’d hardly call the Midland Bank a shop,’ said Heather.

‘Her words, not mine,’ said Jack.

‘Well, she’s got the boys to think of too,’ said Hannah. ‘They need a proper garden to run around in.’

‘What children have they got?’ said Paul.

‘Well, I say boys… John’s at college, isn’t he.’

‘John, the elder boy, is at Durham University’ – Jack Reeves frowned over his pipe, out of his greater intimacy with the Manager. ‘Julian is in the Sixth Form at Oundle School, and doing very well, I believe.’ He sucked and nodded and gazed over their heads. ‘They talk of Oxford’ – and he went out, leaving them half a roomful of smoke.

In the Gents Paul washed the money smell, copper and nickel and grubby paper, from his hands. The geyser rumbled. Grey-black suds speckled the basin. He was bothered about the imminent walk, but it was an opportunity, as his mother would say, and it looked a little easier if the Keepings had sons, one of them about Paul’s own age. John and Julian: he saw them, seductive images spun from nothing; already they were showing him around their large garden. He smiled narrowly at himself in the mirror, turning a little to left and right: he had a long nose, the ‘Bryant nose’, his mother said, disclaiming it; his hair was cut horribly short for the new job, and the strip light, which spared nothing, brought out its odd coppery sheen and the stipple of spots across his forehead. Then he started grinning, to see what that looked like, but immediately Geoff came in behind him and went to the urinal; it was a double one, on a raised step, and Paul looked furtively at Geoff’s back in the mirror.

‘No, the thing about the boss, young Paul,’ Geoff said, with a quick glance over his shoulder, ‘is he had a very bad war.’

‘Oh, did he, right…’ said Paul, busying himself with the taps and then with the damp curtain of roller towel.

‘Prisoner of war,’ said Geoff. ‘He never talks about it, so for god’s sake don’t mention it.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t, would I,’ said Paul, ‘obviously.’

Geoff finished, jiggled, zipped up his wonderfully tight fly, and came over to the basins, where he looked at himself in the mirror with no sign of the dissatisfaction Paul had felt. He jutted his jaw, and turned his head both ways with a stroking hand. His roundish, full-lipped face was sharpened up by a pair of handsome sideburns, shaved forward at the bottom into dark points. ‘Sorry to say,’ he said, ‘he’s a bit of a nervous wreck. Pathetic, really. He ought to have a much bigger branch than this. Brilliant brain, they say, but can’t take the strain. Feels he can’t go anywhere alone. There’s a word for it…’

‘Yes. Agoraphobia?’

‘That’s it. Hence the girls walking him home.’ He ran the hot tap and the geyser flared up again. ‘At least he says that’s the reason…’ Paul found he was looking at him in the mirror, one eyebrow raised, and he sniggered and coloured and looked down. He wasn’t nearly ready to joke about the other staff. He knew he had picked up on certain atmospheres between them, thought he glimpsed little histories; but any sort of sexual joke seemed to threaten him with exposure too. He knew he couldn’t bring them off. Geoff came up close to him to use the towel; he had a sharp five o’clock smell, smoke, bri-nylon and faded aftershave. ‘Well, mustn’t keep My Fair Lady waiting,’ he said. He was walking out with a girl from the National Provincial, the rival bank across the square, a fact which the girls at the Midland seemed to think a bit off.

When Paul got back into the Public Space Mr Keeping was just coming out of the Manager’s office. He held a light raincoat folded over his arm, and carried a dark brown trilby. Paul scanned him nervously for signs of his weakness, his wartime trauma. The dominant impression, of course, was his baldness, the great square blank of brow the home and symbol of that brilliant brain. Below it his features seemed rather small and provisional. He had dry, oddly rimless lips, and his smiles drew the corners of his mouth down with a confusing suggestion of distaste. When they were outside he stayed on the step to hear the successive muffled shocks of the door being locked and bolted from within. Then he settled his hat, with a forward tilt, low on his brows. At once he had a charming and even mischievous look. His guarded grey eyes, in the shadow of the brim, now seemed almost playful. And with a little bow, a little questioning hesitation – it was almost as though he expected Paul to take his arm – they set off up the broad slope of the marketplace, Paul instead earnestly gripping his briefcase, while Mr Keeping, with his raincoat over his arm, had the air of a mildly curious visitor to the town.

Paul wished Geoff hadn’t told him about Mr Keeping’s mental problems – and felt anxiously uncertain whether Mr Keeping himself would expect him to know about them. Smiling vaguely, he took in nothing of the shops and people he was staring at with such apparent alertness. His sense of the walk as an opportunity to get in the Manager’s good books was undermined by his fear that he’d been singled out for some kind of correction or discomfiting pep-talk. He saw Hannah Gearing across the square climbing into the Shrivenham bus as if leaving him to his fate. ‘And how is your mother?’ said Mr Keeping.

‘All right, thank you, sir,’ said Paul. ‘She manages pretty well.’

‘I hope she can manage without you for the week.’

‘Well, my aunt lives quite near us. It’s not really a problem.’ He was relieved but a little disconcerted by these kind questions. ‘We’re fairly used to it.’

‘Terrible thing,’ said Mr Keeping, raising his hat to an approaching lady with a murmur and his unsettling smile, as if to say he remembered exactly the size of her overdraft.

They went up into the quieter reaches of Church Walk, with its fanlights and front railings and lace curtains. A week ago Paul had known almost no one in the town, and now he had been put into an odd grim privileged relation with hundreds of them, over the counter, through the little mahogany doorway of his ‘position’. He was their servant and also an adjudicator, a strange young man granted intimate knowledge of at least one aspect of their lives, which was how much money they had, or didn’t have, and how much they wanted. He spoke to them courteously, amid tacit understandings, muted embarrassments: the loan, the ‘arrangement’. Now he glanced at Church Walk, grey veils of the curtains, glints of polished tables, porcelain, clocks, with a sense of arrangements reaching rooms-deep, years-deep into the shadows. Mr Keeping said nothing else, and seemed satisfied by silence.

Opposite the church they turned into an unmade road, Glebe Lane, with larger houses on one side and a view over a hedge into fields on the other. Long brambly strands of dog-roses swayed in the breeze along the top of the hedge. The lane had its own atmosphere, exclusive and a little neglected. It was odd to find yourself here two minutes from the centre of town. Grass and daisies grew patchily along the ridge of the road. Paul glanced through gateways at squareish villas set back behind gravel sweeps in broad gardens; between one or two of them humbler modern houses had been awkwardly inserted – ‘The Orchard’, ‘The Cottage’. ‘This is a private road, you see, Paul,’ said Mr Keeping, reverting to his ironical tone: ‘hence the countless potholes and unchecked vegetation. I advise you never to bring a motor-car along here.’ Paul felt he could pretty safely promise that. ‘Here we are…’ and they turned into the driveway of the penultimate house: the lane was sloping down already and narrowing, as if to lose itself in the approaching fields.

The house was another wide grey villa, with bay-windowed rooms either side of the front door, and its Victorian name, ‘Carraveen’, in stucco above it. The front door was wide open, as though the house had surrendered itself to the sunny day. A pale blue Morris Oxford stood in the drive with its windows down, and in its shadow a fat little Jack Russell lay on the gravel alternately panting and thinking. Paul squatted down to talk to the dog, which let him scratch it behind the ears but never really got interested. Mr Keeping had gone into the house, and it seemed so unlikely that he had simply forgotten him that Paul stood and waited with a consciously unassuming expression. He saw the drive had an In and an Out, not marked as such, but the fact sank down in him to some buried childhood idea of grandeur.

There was a thick flower-border, colourful but weedy and overgrown, around the edge of the drive, and over the top of it he looked into the garden beside the house, which stretched away through mysterious shadows of two or three large trees to a bright mown lawn that must run across the back. The whole place, at this indefinable time of day – late afternoon, late June, work over but hours of sunlight still ahead – made a peculiar impression on him. The time, like the light, seemed somehow viscous. He studied the name ‘Carraveen’, a bit like caravan, a bit like carrageen, the stuff his mother used to set a blancmange, but clearly romantic too, Scottish perhaps, some now completely forgotten home or holiday place that someone had loved long ago. He felt seduced, and delicately stifled, by something he couldn’t yet explain. Through the left-hand bay-window he could see a grand piano in what appeared to be a dining-room, though the table in the centre was covered with books. The church clock struck the quarter-hour, and the silence afterwards seemed discreetly enhanced. Really all you could hear was the birds.

He heard a voice and looked again through the shadows to the bright back lawn, where he saw a woman in a wide straw hat with a red flower on the brim talking to someone out of view as she moved slowly towards the house. She was a largeish figure, in a shapeless blue dress, and carrying a large tapestry bag. Could this be the disdainful Mrs Keeping, mother of Julian and John? Surely too old. Mr Keeping’s own mother perhaps, a friend or relative who was visiting. She stopped for a moment, as if stumped by what she’d just been told, and gazed at the ground, and then unseeingly along the side of the house, where she did in fact see Paul. She said something to the person – now Paul heard another woman’s voice – and when she looked back he raised his head with a slight smile and then waved weakly, unsure if he wanted to announce himself or efface himself. There was another exchange, she nodded distantly, not exactly at Paul, and then strolled on out of view behind the house.

Paul went to the front door to call goodbye. He felt he’d been placed now as a low-level intruder, a peerer through other people’s windows. A middle-aged woman with a wide pale face and black hair that was swept up and set in a stiff, broad helmet was coming towards him. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said, ‘I’m Paul Bryant – from the bank…’

She gave him a practical look. ‘Did you want to see my husband?’

‘Well, actually I’ve just walked here with him,’ said Paul.

‘Oh…’ she said, with an air of momentary concession. She had strongly drawn black eyebrows which made her look hard to please. ‘Was there something else?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Paul; and feeling he shouldn’t be put in the wrong, ‘He just left me here.’

‘Ah…!’ said Mrs Keeping, and half-turning she called out, ‘Leslie!’ Mr Keeping appeared at the end of the hall. ‘This young man doesn’t know if he’s been dismissed or not’ – and she stared rather drolly at Paul, as if to say the joke was on everyone but her.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Keeping. ‘This is Paul Bryant. He’s just joined us from Wantage.’

‘From Wantage…!’ said Mrs Keeping, as if this were droller still.

‘We all have to come from somewhere, you know,’ said Mr Keeping.

Paul had grown up in the mild but untested belief that Wantage was a fine little town. ‘Well, sir, it was good enough for King Alfred,’ he said.

Mrs Keeping half-allowed the protest, and the joke. ‘Mmm, you’re going back a bit,’ she said. Though something else had occurred to her. She set her head on one side and frowned at his shoulders, his posture. ‘How strong are you?’ she said.

‘Well, reasonably,’ said Paul, confused by the scrutiny. ‘Yes, I suppose…’

‘Then I think I can use you. Come through,’ a tiny glow of cajolement now in her tone.

‘Paul may have other plans, darling,’ said Mr Keeping, but in easy surrender to his wife.

‘I shan’t need him for long.’

‘I’ve certainly got a couple of minutes,’ said Paul.

They went down the hall and into the room at the end. ‘I don’t want my husband risking his back,’ said Mrs Keeping. The sitting-room was densely furnished, large easy-chairs and sofas arm to arm on a thick gold carpet, nests of tables, standard-lamps, and a pair of surprising Victorian portraits, very large in the room, a woman in red and a man in black, looking out over the stereogram and the teak TV cabinet that flanked the fireplace. On top of the TV were several framed photos, in which Paul made out two boys, surely Julian and John, in yachting gear. They stepped out through the open french windows on to a wide patio. ‘This is Mr Bryant,’ said Mrs Keeping. ‘You can leave your briefcase there.’

‘Oh… right…’ said Paul, nodding at the two females who were sitting in deckchairs. They were identified as ‘My mother, Mrs Jacobs’ – this was the old lady in the straw hat, whom he’d already seen – and ‘Jenny Ralph… my niece, yes, my half-brother’s daughter!’ as if she’d just worked it out for the first time. Paul himself only pretended to do so, nodded again and murmured hello as he sidled past. Jenny Ralph was a frowning dark-haired girl a bit younger than he was, with a book and a notepad on her knee – he felt himself sidestepping some sulky challenge she seemed to throw out.

The problem was a stone trough on the far side of the lawn, which had somehow slipped or been pushed off one of the two squat blocks it sat on, earth strewn on the grass and a clump of disoriented wallflowers, orangey-black, leaning out and up. ‘I jolly well hope you can shift it,’ said Mrs Keeping, with a return of her unjolly tone, almost as though Paul had pushed it over himself. ‘I don’t want it falling on Roger,’ she said.

Paul stooped down and gave the trough a preliminary heave. The only effect of this was to rock it very slightly on the skewed axis of the other block. ‘You don’t want to bring the whole thing down,’ said Mrs Keeping. She stood several yards away, perhaps to be clear of any such accident.

‘No…’ said Paul; and then, ‘It’s quite heavy actually, isn’t it.’

‘You’d stand a better chance with your jacket off.’

Paul obeyed, and seeing that Mrs Keeping showed no intention of taking the jacket from him hung it on a lichenous garden seat nearby. Without the jacket he felt even less able, his skinny frame more exposed. ‘Right!’ he said, and laughed rather fatuously. His hostess, as he tried to think of her, gave him a provisional sort of smile. He worked his hands in under the near corner of the trough, where it lay on the grass, but after a couple of hefts in the shuddering manner of a caber-tosser he could only raise it an inch and let it down again heavily just where it had been. He shook his head, and glanced across at the figures on the patio thirty yards off. Mr Keeping had joined his mother-in-law and niece, and they were gazing generally in his direction as they talked but, perhaps from politeness, not showing any detailed interest. He felt simultaneously important and completely insignificant.

‘You’re going to have to empty it, you know,’ said Mrs Keeping, as though Paul had been actively refusing to do this.

He saw a certain stoical humour was going to be necessary – a smiling surrender of his time and plans. ‘Have you got a spade, please?’ he said.

‘You’ll need something to put the soil on, of course. And do be careful with my wallflowers, won’t you,’ she said, with a hint of graciousness now they’d come to such niceties. ‘Do you know, I’m going to get that girl involved.’

‘Oh, I think I can manage…’ said Paul.

‘It will do her absolutely no harm,’ said Mrs Keeping. ‘She’s going up to Oxford next term and she does nothing but sit and read. Her parents are in Malaya, which is why she’s stuck with us’ – with a fairly clear suggestion she felt they were stuck with her. She moved off across the lawn, chin raised already, calling out.

Jenny Ralph took Paul off to the far side of the garden, and through a rustic arch into the sunless corner that sheltered the compost-heap and a cobweb-windowed shed. At first she treated him with the nervous snootiness of a child to an unknown servant. ‘You should find whatever you need in there,’ she said, watching him edge in among the clutter of the shed. The mower blocked the way, its bin caked at the rim with dung-like clots of dried grass. He reached over for a spade and kicked a loosely propped stack of canes that spilled and clattered ungraspably in every direction. There was a stifling smell of creosote and two-stroke fuel. ‘It’s rather hell in there,’ said Jenny from outside. She had a notably posh voice, but casual where her aunt was crisp. The accent was more striking, more revealing, in a young person. She sounded mildly fed up with it, but with no real intention of abandoning it.

‘No, it’s fine,’ Paul called back. He covered the awkwardness he felt with a girl in a brisk bit of business, passing out the spade, some old plastic sacks – he must be five or six years older than her, but the advantage felt frail. Her poor skin and the oily shine of her dark curly hair were signs of the troubles he’d hardly emerged from himself. The fact that she wasn’t especially pretty, though in some ways a relief, seemed also to put some subtly chivalrous pressure on him. He emerged, a trowel in his raised hand, just a little satirical.

‘I don’t suppose you want to be doing this for a minute,’ Jenny said, with a slyly commiserating smile. ‘I’m afraid they’re always getting people involved.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Paul.

‘You know it’s a test. Aunt Corinna’s always testing people, she can’t help it. I’ve seen it masses of times. I don’t just mean on the piano, either.’

‘Oh, have you?’ said Paul, amused by her frankness, which seemed original and upper-class too. He looked out nervously as they came on to the lawn. Aunt Corinna was in the far corner, inspecting a sagging trellis and, quite possibly, lining up further tasks or tests for him. Beside her a large weeping beech-tree spread awkwardly but romantically, a table sheltered under its skirts.

‘You know she should have been a concert pianist. That’s what everyone says, at least; I don’t know if it’s actually true. I mean anyone can say they should have been something. Anyway now she teaches the piano. She gets fantastic results, of course, though you can see the children are simply terrified of her. Julian says she’s a sadist,’ she said, a touch self-consciously.

‘Oh…!’ said Paul, with a frown and disparaging laugh and then, from the mention of anything taboo, a sure-fire, searching blush. Sometimes they ebbed unnoticed, sometimes kept coming, self-compounding. He stooped and half-hid himself spreading the plastic sacks on the grass. ‘So Julian’s her younger son,’ he said, still with his back to her.

‘Oh, John wouldn’t say that, he’s far too square.’

‘So Julian isn’t square…?’

‘What’s Julian? Julian’s sort of… elliptical.’ They both laughed. ‘Have I embarrassed you?’ said Jenny.

‘Not at all,’ said Paul, recovering. ‘The whole of your family’s new to me, you see. I’m from Wantage.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Jenny – as if this was in fact a bit of a drawback. ‘Well, they’re rather a nightmare to sort out… the old lady you met over there is my grandmother.’

‘You mean Mrs Jacobs?’

‘Yes, she married again when my father was quite small. She’s been married three times.’

‘Goodness.’

‘I know… She’s about to be seventy, and we’re going to have a huge enormous party.’

Paul started gingerly unearthing the plants from the trough – they trembled under this further assault on their dignity. He stood them, in their trailing tangle of earth and roots, on the old Fisons sack. Soft clots of some kind of manure, loosely forked into the soil, were still slightly slimy. ‘I hope I’m doing this right,’ he said.

‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Jenny, who like the others was watching but not exactly paying attention.

‘So your aunt said you’re going up to Oxford.’ He tried to disguise his envy, if that’s what it was, in a genial avuncular tone.

‘Did she. Yes, I am.’

‘What are you going to study?’

‘I’m reading French at St Anne’s.’ She made it sound beautifully exclusive, the rich simplicity of the proper nouns. He had taken his mother all round Oxford, gaping at the colleges, as a kind of masochistic treat for both of them before he went off to Loughborough to train for the bank; but they hadn’t bothered with the women’s colleges. ‘Julian’s applying to Univ this year.’

‘Mm, so you might be there together.’

‘Which would be rather fab,’ said Jenny.

When he’d dug out all the earth he rocked the trough with both hands and it moved more readily. Still, he laughed at the second looming failure. ‘Here goes,’ he said, and squatted down again. Over the lawn he saw Mrs Keeping bearing down, with her keen sense of timing. With a violent force that in the moment itself seemed almost comical he heaved up the great stone object and with a stifled shout he lodged it on its other block, on the edge of it at least, but the job was done. ‘Aha!’ said Mrs Keeping, ‘we’re getting there at last,’ and as he held it steady and smiled almost devotedly up at her he felt it turn under his hand; if he hadn’t jumped back in the second it slipped and fell it would have crushed his foot – the block underneath had lurched over, and now the trough itself, massive and unmoving, lay sideways on the grass. ‘Oh god, are you all right?’ said Jenny, gripping his arm with a welcome note of hysteria. Mrs Keeping herself made a kind of panting noise. ‘Now we’re jiggered,’ she said. ‘Oh look,’ said Jenny, ‘your hand’s bleeding.’ How it had happened he didn’t know, and it was only now she said it that it began to hurt, a dull deep pang in the ball of the thumb and needle-like stinging of the grazed flesh. He supposed the pain had been held in check by the knowledge, so far his alone, that the trough had cracked in two.

Ten minutes later he found himself – clown, hero, victim, he couldn’t tell which – in a low garden chair with a large gin-and-tonic in his right hand. His left hand was impressively bandaged, the fingers hard to move in their tight sheath. Mrs Keeping, with a smirk of remorse, had bandaged it herself, the remorse turning steadily more aggressive as the long strip of stuff was bound tighter and tighter. Now the family glanced at his hand with concern and regret and a touch of self-satisfaction. Paul, tongue-tied, reached out to scratch Roger the Jack Russell, who had come round to the back of the house and was sitting panting in one of the broad purple cushions of aubrietia which spread over the flagstones. Mr Keeping was in the drawing-room, fixing drinks for the others; he called out through the french windows, ‘Your usual, darling?’

‘Absolutely!’ said Mrs Keeping, with a tight little laugh and shake of the head, as if to say she’d earned it. She perched on the wooden bench, and tore at the cellophane on a packet of Kensitas.

‘And what about Daphne?’

‘Gin and It!’ shouted Mrs Jacobs, as if taking part in a game.

‘Large one?’

‘Vast!’

Paul and Jenny laughed at this, but Mrs Keeping gave a barely amused grunt. Mrs Jacobs was sitting facing Paul, and between them was a low metal-framed table with a mosaic top. Over the rim of the table he had, if he wanted it, a direct view into the beige-coloured mysteries of her underwear. In her shapeless sundress and wide floppy hat she had an air of collapse, but her expression was friendly and alert, if ready, with age and perhaps a degree of deafness, to let one or two things slip past her. She wore large glasses with clear lower rims and tops like tawny eyebrows. When her drink was set in front of her on the mosaic table, she gave it a keen but illusionless smile, as if to say she knew what would become of it. Her smile showed surprisingly brown teeth – a smoker’s smile that went with the smoky catch in her voice. ‘Well, cheers!’

‘Cheerio…’ Mr Keeping sat down, still in his bank manager’s suit, which made his own large g-and-t look slightly surreal.

‘Cheers,’ said Jenny.

‘What are you drinking, child?’ said Mrs Jacobs.

‘Oh, cider, Granny…’

‘I didn’t know you liked cider.’

‘Well, I don’t particularly, but I’m not allowed spirits yet, and one has to get drunk on something, doesn’t one.’

‘I suppose one does…’ said Mrs Jacobs, as if weighing up a completely new theory.

‘Paul’s just started at the bank this week, Daphne,’ said Mr Keeping. ‘He’s joined us from Wantage.’

‘Oh, I love Wantage,’ said Mrs Jacobs; and after a moment, ‘In fact I once ran away to Wantage.’

‘Oh, Mother, really,’ said Mrs Keeping.

‘Just for a night or two, when your father was being especially beastly.’ Paul had never heard anyone speak like this, and couldn’t say at first if it was real or theatrical, truly sophisticated or simply embarrassing. He glanced at Mrs Keeping, who was smiling tightly and batting her eyelids with contained impatience. ‘I took you and Wilfie under my wing and drove like hell to Wantage. We stayed with Mark for a day or two. Mark Gibbons, you know,’ she said to Paul, ‘the marvellous painter. We stayed with him till the heat died down.’

‘Anyway,’ muttered Mrs Keeping, drawing on her cigarette.

‘We did, darling. You’re probably too young to remember.’ She sounded slightly wounded, but used to being so.

‘You didn’t know how to drive, Mother,’ Mrs Keeping went on brightly, but unable to stop herself.

‘Of course I could drive…’

Mrs Keeping blew out smoke with a hard humorous expression. ‘We needn’t bore Mr Bryant with our family nonsense,’ she said.

Paul, in the first nice giddiness of a very strong gin-and-tonic, smiled, ducked his head, showed he didn’t mind the mild bewilderment at unexplained names and facts. As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time. ‘No, no,’ he said, and grinned at Mr Keeping, who surveyed the whole scene with quizzical composure. The evening had swollen to a shape entirely unimagined an hour before.

‘You see, I think our family is jolly interesting,’ said Mrs Jacobs. ‘I think you underestimate its interest. You should take more pride in it.’ She reached down beside her chair and brought up her bag, the large tapestry bag with wooden jaws that Paul had seen earlier. She started going through it.

Mrs Keeping sighed and was more conciliatory. ‘Well, I am proud of one or two of them, Mother, you know that very well. Cecil’s not exactly my cup of tea, but my father, for all his… oddities, has moments of genius.’

‘Well, he’s certainly very clever,’ said Mrs Jacobs, brows lightly furrowed over her bag. Paul had the impression of a small-scale chaos of papers, powder compacts, glasses cases, pills. She stopped for a moment and looked up at him, her hand in the bag marking her place. ‘Jenny’s grandfather was a marvellous painter, too. You may have heard of him, Revel Ralph? No… he was, well, he was very different from Mark Gibbons. I suppose you’d say more decorative.’

‘I think Mark’s a bit over the hill, Granny,’ said Jenny.

‘Well, possibly, my dear, since he’s almost as old as me.’ Paul knew how old this was, of course, but didn’t know if it was a secret. ‘You probably think Revel’s hopelessly old hat too.’

Jenny made a moue and raised her eyebrows as if to say she could reach her own negative judgements. ‘No, I like Grandpa’s things. I find them rather piquant, actually. Particularly the late ones.’ Again Paul was amused and impressed by the confidence of her views. She spoke with a small frown as if she was at Oxford already. He said, ‘Is he… not still alive?’

‘He was killed in the War,’ said Mrs Keeping, with a quick shake of the head, stubbing out her cigarette.

‘Well, he was extraordinarily brave,’ said Mrs Jacobs. ‘He had two tanks blown up under him, and he was running to reach a third one when a shell got him.’ Her cigarette was in one hand, her lighter in the other, but she went on, before anyone else could, ‘He was a hero, actually. He got a posthumous gong, you know…’

‘What became of that, Granny?’ said Jenny in a more docile tone.

‘Oh, I have it,’ said Mrs Jacobs, quickly puffing, ‘of course I have it.’ Paul wasn’t clear whom her indignation was aimed at. She gave him a look as if they were united against the others. ‘You know, people think he was flighty and gay and what-have-you, but in fact he could be quite fearless.’

‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘I’m sure…’ slightly mesmerized by her and already an admirer of this man he had never heard of a minute ago.

At the gate Paul turned and waved his bandaged hand but Jenny, who’d been told to see him out, had already vanished from the front step. Still, the small muscular contractions of pleasure and politeness remained almost unconsciously on his face as he swung and scuffed along the lane. He smiled at the view over the hedge, at the other front gardens, at the approaching Rover and then its driver, squinting in a rictus of his own against the evening sun, and making Paul feel again like an intruder, or now perhaps an absconder. The sun was still hot on his back. Among the trees the church clock chimed the quarter-hour once more – he checked his watch: 7.15 of course; the hour just gone had taken about twenty minutes, and some compensating sense made him wonder if it shouldn’t in fact be 8.15. Here he was in Church Walk. Here was the marketplace. He had never really touched spirits before, and the second gin-and-tonic, as wildly drinkable as the first, had brought him to a state of grinning elation just touched by notes of worry and confusion. He’d been talking and telling himself not to talk, things he normally avoided saying, about his father’s plane being shot down, and his mother’s illness, and even his exploits at school, things that must have made him sound childish and simple. But no one had seemed to mind. Now he wondered if Mr Keeping, who said very little, hadn’t thought him a fool – it was actually rather creepy of him to get Paul drunk and just sit there watching, with his unnerving smile. He imagined some sarcasm about it, in the office tomorrow. On the other hand, he felt he’d been quite a success with old Daphne Jacobs, who seemed grateful for a new listener, and he’d laughed and winced sympathetically at her stories without necessarily following them. He often found, when he concentrated really hard on what someone was saying, that nothing much went in. The intoxication was partly that of being in the home of people who knew writers, in this case quite famous ones. He was barely aware of Dudley Valance, but he quoted whole verses of Cecil Valance’s to the old lady, who smiled indulgently and then began to look slightly impatient. She had a soft uncanny light about her, somehow, from having been his lover – it turned out ‘Two Acres’ had been written specifically for her. She told Paul about it quite frankly, over the second Gin and It (whatever It was), and Jenny had said, ‘I think Uncle Cecil’s poems are awfully imperialist, Granny,’ which she pretended not to hear. In Vale Street he looked through the windows of the International Stores, closed and shadowy. Something shockingly sad caught at him – he was free, buoyant and squiffy, twenty-three years old, and he was entirely alone, with hours still before sunset and no one to share them with.

The way to his digs took him out of the town, past the closed and overgrown yards of the old goods station, past the new secondary modern school, hard and transparent in the evening sun. Then he crossed into Marlborough Gardens, which was a loop, or noose, with one exit on to the main road. From the pavement he saw people eating in kitchens, or finished already and out in the garden, mowing and watering. The houses were a strange economy that there wasn’t a word for, built in threes, two semis with the central house in common, like segments of a terrace. Mrs Marsh at least had an end house, with a view behind on to a field of barley. Her husband was a coach-driver, with odd hours, taking a party up to London, or sometimes away overnight on a run to Bournemouth or the Isle of Wight. Now she was in the front room with the curtains pulled against the sun and the box blaring – it was the start of Z-Cars. She had a pleasant way of not bothering her lodger – she turned her head and nodded; in the kitchen there was a ham salad for him under a cloth, and a redirected letter with a note saying ‘This came for you, Mrs Marsh’. Paul went upstairs two at a time, used the bathroom, which was where he felt most a stranger, among the couple’s shaving-soap and flannels, Mrs Marsh’s other things in the cabinet. The bathroom had a frosted glass panel in the door, which showed if it was occupied at night, and made going to the lavatory especially seem audible and almost visible and even vaguely culpable. Paul’s designated bath nights were Tuesday and Thursday: so tonight! Saturdays the bank worked through till one, then he would be off on the bus to Wantage, and his first week of work here would be over.

After his supper he went back upstairs and got down his diary from the top of the wardrobe. He had hardly made his mark on the room – his slippers and dressing-gown, a few books he’d stuffed into his bag. He had the new Angus Wilson out of the library, and was getting through it in his own way, with a restless eye running ahead for the appearances of Marcus, the queer son, whose antics he pondered as if for portents or advice. He didn’t want to read this at home and risk his mother asking questions. Also the latest Penguin Modern Poets, The Mersey Sound, which he didn’t really think was poetry at all; and Poems of To-day, in fact published over fifty years ago, and full of things that he loved and knew by heart, such as Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’ and Valance’s ‘Soldiers Dreaming’. The room had a hard square armchair in prickly moquette and up against the window a ladies’ dressing-table with three mirrors and a stool, which was where Paul sat each night to do his writing. Whenever he looked up he saw himself, the Bryant nose in triumphant triplicate, his two profiles playing hide and seek with each other. He’d been keeping his diary since he left school, a top-secret record, and the volumes themselves, black quarto notebooks, were growing harder to hide as they amassed. At home he had a box under the bed in which old school projects and browning newsprint concealed a lower layer of private things, frail mementoes of boys at school, three issues of Manifique!, with muscle-men in posing pouches, sometimes clearly drawn on afterwards, and then the diaries themselves, in which Paul let himself go in a way that these publications weren’t allowed to.

Now he leant forward, like a schoolboy shielding his work, and wrote: ‘June 29th 1967: hot and sunny all day.’As he wrote he pressed very hard with his biro into the page, so that the paper itself seemed to spread and rise in a curl at the margins. When closed, the book showed exactly how much of it had been used up. The written pages, their edges crinkly and darkened, were a pleasing proof of industry, the rest of the book, clean, trim and dense, a pleasing challenge. This week had been rich in material, and he had summed up the girls at work and given Geoff Viner a franker appraisal than was possible in the bank itself. Now he had his chat with Geoff in the toilets to write up, and the whole unexpected adventure at ‘Carraveen’. ‘It turns out Mrs J was married to Dudley Valance, C’s brother. But she also had big affair with Cecil V before WW1, said he was her first love, he was madly attractive but bad with women. I said what did she mean. She said, “He didn’t really understand women, you know, but he was completely irresistible to them. Of course he was only 25 when he was killed.” ’ At the foot of the page, where the edge of his writing hand had rested, the greasy paper resisted the ink, and he had to go over some of the words twice: ‘completely irresistible’, he wrote again, ‘only 25’ – the effect bold and clumsy, like the writing of someone who was still drunk or slightly mad.

2

Peter Rowe came out of his room on the top floor, crossed the landing, and looked over the banister into the great square stairwell. Below him he could hear and then for a moment see a small boy hurrying downwards, saw a raised arm struggling into a jacket. ‘Don’t run!’ Peter shouted, with such abrupt and godlike effect that the boy looked up in horror, lost his footing, and slid down bump bump bump on the hard oak treads into the hall. ‘Now you know why,’ Peter said, more quietly, and went back into his room.

He had the first period free, then it was the Fifth Form for singing. He filled his kettle at the basin, vaguely rinsed a mug for his Nescafé: the granules started melting and fizzing on the wet bottom. Then he lit himself a cigarette, first of the day, and squinting in the smoke tugged his bed up fairly straight and covered its irregularities with his rug. Along the corridor, he knew, Matron would be going from dorm to dorm, head down, breathing through her mouth. Wherever she found a bed improperly made, its corners loose, its top sheet less than taut, she stooped and tossed it, like a bull, made a total mess of it, and wrote the offending boy’s name on a card. The card was then pinned on the board by the staff-room, and in break the delinquents would have to pant upstairs and set about making the whole thing again from scratch, square and smooth and tight as a strait-jacket. Peter felt a twinge of guilty relief at his exemption from this regime.

He started on his weekly letter to his parents, a practice he did keep up as strictly as the boys. ‘Dearest Mum and Dad,’ he wrote, ‘What a beautiful week it has been. I’m glad, because it’s the semi-final of the garden competition on Sunday. The HM is to be the judge, and as he knows nothing at all about gardens it’s hard to know what he’ll be looking for, colour or “concept”. The boy Dupont whom I’ve told you about has built a rockery with a waterfall, but the HM, who has very plain tastes, may find this too “fiddly”. Besides that, things are building up nicely to Open Day. Colonel Sprague is very involved with organizing it all. He is true to type and rather a monster. I call him the Infolonel Colonel.’ Peter smoked for a bit, and drank his coffee. He thought he probably couldn’t divert his parents with the Headmaster’s latest obsession, the spread of supposedly sexy books among the higher forms. It was on the agenda for next week’s staff-meeting. Already this term the HM had confiscated Peyton Place and The Carpetbaggers, both on hearsay rather than any knowledge of their contents, which was doubtless why the boys themselves slogged through them. Dr No, found in Walters’s tuck-box, had been passed to Peter, as being possibly ‘more broad-minded’, for a judgement. He’d read it last night at a sitting and found three sentences in it unexpectedly arousing; of course he’d seen the film, which was much more exciting: on the page the plot looked slight and awkward, the whole thing explained by the villain himself in an enormous monologue. He noted a sort of tight-lipped sadism in the accounts of James Bond’s body and the injuries inflicted on it, but as in a movie the wounds all healed by the scene after next. The boys, of course, in the first derangement of puberty, could be ‘turned on’ by just about anything. Peter knew he had been so himself, and so saw the present purge as inherently futile. He stubbed out his cigarette, and told his parents instead about the First XI match against Beasleys.

At 9.35, with the recurrent momentary dread and resolve that come with living by a timetable, Peter opened his door again and went out on to the landing. In the glance he gave back into his room he saw it as a stranger might, as an appalling mess. He went down one circuit of the main staircase, and set off along the broad first-floor corridor. The classrooms at Corley Court occupied six rooms on the ground floor, but the room with the piano was isolated, with the sick-bay, in the rambling far end of the floor above. Boys with temperatures or infectious diseases were harassed through the wall by ragged bursts of folksong or the torturous practice of scales. He passed the Headmaster’s sitting-room, which must once have been a principal bedroom of the house: its high Gothic oriel looked out down the axis of the formal gardens, which now survived only in photographs but had once been a dazzling floral maze. A melancholy fishpond at the centre of the lawn was all that was left.

Peter had got the Corley job in the middle of the year, after the clouded departure of a man called Holdsworth, and took to the house from the start, in part out of natural sympathy for something so widely abused. ‘A Victorian monstrosity’ was the smug routine phrase. He had heard a boy in the First Form opine that Corley Court was ‘a Victorian monstrosity, and one of the very worst’, with just the same humourless laugh the boy’s father must have used when describing the place. In fact, the house was perfect for a boarding-school – secluded, labyrinthine, faintly menacing, with its own tree-lined park now mown and marked out in pitches. No one, it was felt, could want to live in such a place, but as an institution of learning it was pretty much ideal. Peter had started to research its history. Last year he had signed a petition to save St Pancras Station, and at Corley too he loved the polychrome brick and the fierce Gothic detail which were such an amusing challenge to more gracious notions of the English country house – though the rooms inside, which had been altered between the wars, were disappointingly bright and inoffensive. Only the chapel, the library and the great oak staircase, with its shield-bearing wyverns on the newels, had completely escaped the hygienic clean-up of the 1920s. The library was useful as it was, and the chapel, a real High Victorian gem, was also the site of the school’s strangest feature, the white marble tomb of the poet Cecil Valance.

Peter went into the sun-baked music-room and flung open the window; there was a pleasant sally of cool morning air over the sill. With a few kicks and long-armed tweaks he straightened the two rows of wooden chairs on the brown linoleum. The room’s single adornment, above the blocked-off fireplace, was an oleograph of Brahms, ‘Presented by his Family in Memory of N. E. Harding 1938-53’; Peter sometimes tried to imagine the family deciding on this particular gift.

He set the Acorn Songbook on the stand of the upright piano and went quickly through today’s songs. Most of the boys couldn’t read music, so it was a matter of drumming and coaxing the tune into them by remorseless repetition. They paid no more attention to the words than they did with hymns. The words were a given: high-flown, old-fashioned, accepted with a childish mixture of respect and complete indifference. Now the bell rang, the whole school held its breath, and then let go in a babble and clatter that rose dimly upstairs from the floor below. Again the momentary and instantly mastered sense of dread. He started playing ‘Für Elise’, waiting for the noise beyond to particularize in the slap of sandals and knock at the door. He always let them catch him in mid-performance, and when he’d shouted ‘Come in!’ he carried on playing, imposing a nice uncertainty on the class as to whether or not they could talk.

The piano was at right angles to the rows of boys, so he glanced at them along his left shoulder as he played. One day he meant to stun them with the Liszt Sonata, but for now he kept prudently to this simple piece, which some of the boys themselves played with Mrs Keeping; he was nearer their level than he intended to admit. ‘Good morning,’ he murmured, concentrating rather hard on the second section; one or two replied. The different forms had quite distinct atmospheres. He liked the Fifth Form, for their humour and ingenuity, and because it was clear that they liked him; sometimes the humour had to be kept in check. He stood up and looked at them, his frown as he went along the rows stirring odd gleams and doubts in their attentive faces. He was firm in suppressing any hint of favouritism, though he saw the flame of it rise expectantly in Dupont and Milsom 1.

‘Well, my little song-birds,’ said Peter, ‘I hope you’re all in the mood to make a din.’

‘Yes, sir,’ came a dutiful chorus.

‘I asked you a question,’ said Peter.

‘Yes, sir!’ came a lustier sound, breaking into giggles. Peter gazed round the room in deep abstraction, at last noticing the boys and raising his eyebrows in mild anxiety:

‘I’m sorry… did you say something?’

‘YES! SIR!’ they shouted, the laughter at this awful old gag contained by an undeniable excitement. The sense of being free to give a wildly corny performance was one of the pleasures of teaching in a prep-school. A great innocence was there to be tapped, even in the surlier and spottier boys, the nocturnal students of Peyton Place. Peter glanced past them, through the open window, at the wide hazy vista of fields and woods. It would be horribly shaming if Chris or Charlie or any of his London friends saw him carrying on like this, but the fact was the boys loved it.

‘Let’s have that in scales,’ he said, going over and striking the A below middle C, and in his large unembarrassed baritone, crescendo: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Sir!’ So the boys sang it, climbing inexorably through the keys, in rapid repeated climaxes of assent that soon became mere yapping syllables.

Peter started them off with ‘The Saucy Arethusa’, ‘page 37 as you must surely know by now…’ and as they were still finding the place he launched out with enormous relish on the first verse: ‘Come all ye jolly sailors bold, Whose hearts are cast in honour’s mould, While English glory I unfold’ – head shaking with the jolliness and boldness, chin tucked in for the gravelly descent on ‘English glory’, the risk of comedy brazened out: ‘Hurrah for the Arethusa!’ He felt he could sing to them all day. A hand was up, the feeble Peebles, as Colonel Sprague called him, had no book. ‘Well, share with Ackerley, use your nous,’ and then they were off. There was something Peter was expecting to happen, and he thought he would listen out for it and wait. For the moment he corrected nothing, the thing was to get them moving: ‘Not a sheet or a tack or a brace did she slack…’ They had sung the song every week this term and could belt it out with their strange uncaring glee; it was he himself, frowning over the piano, who sometimes forgot where they were and joined in furiously with the wrong words. ‘And now we’ve driven the foe ashore, Never to fight with Britons more’ – a reckless boast, overtaken in a moment by an immense bass crack in the air above the roof of the house, far away and right on top of them, so that the room shook and the piano itself gave out a faint jangling thrum. They broke off raggedly, then rushed to the window, but the plane was so far beyond them and moving so fast that they saw nothing. The great scientific fact seemed all the more eloquent and exemplary for that. On the back-drive below, the Headmaster too was standing and gazing at the sky over the tree-tops, his upper lip raised rodent-like as he squinted into the blue. ‘Come on, back to your places,’ said Peter carryingly, before the HM himself could do so; but in fact in the presence, or rather the immediate absence, of this sublime phenomenon, a minute’s mutual wonder seemed to be allowed.

‘Did you see it, sir?’ Brookings called down. But the Headmaster shook his head, with a shifty smile, almost as if he’d missed it with his gun. Peter leant out above the three boys who were jammed in the open casement. Though he thought the HM was a fool, he didn’t want to be shown up by him, and the HM found fault in the most unaccountable things. He picked up fag-ends, he brooded ingeniously on things he had misheard. Peter was a young master, far closer in age to the boys than the HM was to him. There was sometimes an imputation in the older man’s tone that Peter himself must be kept in check. Now he said,

‘They’d let me know this might happen,’ something slightly absurd in half-shouting this at a first-floor window.

‘Had they, sir?’

‘Oh, yes: I’m in touch with the Commander at the Base. He keeps me in the picture.’

‘What was it, sir?’ said Brookings.

The Headmaster peered again at the sky, with a genially proprietary air. ‘Well, back to your lessons, come on!’ and nodding uncertainly at Peter he trudged on down the drive towards the garages.

‘Anyone know what it was?’ said Peter, as they took their places again; with their Airfix and their Biggles and their War Picture Libraries they lived a constant battle in the air.

‘Was it a Hustler, sir?’ said Sloane.

‘Why would a Hustler make that noise?’ said Peter, pretty sure he knew, but taking a donnish tone.

‘Sonic boom, sir!’ said several of the boys.

‘So when we speak of a Hustler, what do we mean?’ said Peter.

‘It’s a B-58 bomber, sir,’ said Sloane, and someone else made a stupid booming noise. ‘They can do Mach 2, and of course they carry a nuclear weapon, sir.’

‘I hope they don’t bomb us, sir,’ said Peebles, with that utter feebleness that only provoked the others.

‘I don’t think we’d know much about it, if they did,’ said Peter.

‘The Americans don’t just go round bombing people, you idiot,’ said Milsom 1, to Peebles, not to Peter, though there was a slight sense of things getting out of hand.

‘Right, where were we?’ said Peter, and with a sudden intense boredom, that seemed the natural counterpart of his desire to be thorough and exciting: ‘OK, I’ve had enough of the ruddy Arethusa, let’s do something else. “Cherry Ripe”, perhaps?’

‘Oh, no, sir…!’ There were sickened protests.

‘Fine, fine… Fine, what about “Hearts of Oak”.’

‘Mm, all right, sir,’ said Sloane, who was still exhilarated by the magic eruption of the sonic boom, and seemed to have promoted himself to class leader, or bargainer.

‘ “Hearts of Oak” is a fine old song,’ said Peter. ‘Come, cheer up, my lads, ’tis to glory we steer!’ And a minute later he had them all at it.

Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men,

We always are ready – Steady, boys, steady!

and he joined them to stiffen up the sinew: ‘We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again!’ There was undoubtedly something wrong, but he got them into the next verse and shouting ‘Keep going!’ he left the piano and walked along just in front of the front row and then behind the back row, pausing and leaning in as if to share a confidence with each child. There was a standard place for giggles in this song, as reliable as some old music-hall gag, and Peter hardened his face against it:

But should their flat bottoms in darkness get o’er

Still Britons they’ll find to receive them on shore.

‘Yes, thank you very much, Prowse 2,’ said Peter. ‘Sing on, sing on!’ As a master, one could make the boys laugh, but one couldn’t be made to laugh by them – in class it meant a notable loss of authority, and out of class it was oddly too intimate. Even so, the sheer idiocy of their jokes could be hard to resist.

‘Aha!’ he said, ‘yes, I thought as much.’ He sounded much more bad-tempered than he really meant. Poor Dupont coloured up and dried up too, but Peter had got the proof he needed. The singing trailed off at the promise of an incident, less exciting than a sonic boom but with a human interest that had them all peering round in happy relief that someone else was in trouble. It had happened before – in the first week of term red-headed Macpherson had been sent out smirking and shrugging into his new freedom. ‘Just give me the first verse,’ said Peter. Dupont stared at him with a mixture of anxiety and indignation he hadn’t seen before; cleared his throat; and then started singing, very quietly, ‘Come, cheer up, my lads…’ in a voice that wouldn’t obey him. There were sniggers from along the row, and Peter supported him, nodding firmly, holding his eye – ‘’Tis to glory we steer, To add something more to this wonderful year…’ – Dupont burning red and looking away as the tune cracked and lurched out of control – ‘Ah well – I’m sorry,’ said Peter, and pursed his lips in friendly regret. In the front row Morgan-Williams uttered a croaky warble. Peter ignored the laughter that followed. ‘It will happen to you too,’ he said, ‘we’ll all enjoy laughing at you then.’ He went back to the piano. But he sensed something more was in the air. When he sat down, and turned to look at them, Dupont was still hovering at the end of the row. Peter smiled at him, to say goodbye, a little flash of favouritism after all – in a way it was cause for congratulation, like being confirmed. He would soon settle down, in the Sixth Form next term, long trousers, a teenage voice, he could hear him already. Milsom 1 was looking with furrowed interest at his friend. Sloane said, ‘You’re meant to go, Dupe.’ Dupont’s mortification made Peter himself feel uncomfortable. This clever and unusual child felt for the first time like a figure of fun, perhaps, or of superstition, sent out awkwardly into the future on the other boys’ behalf. ‘You can go and read in the library, if you like,’ said Peter, which properly was a Sixth Form privilege. Still, there was a crackle of mockery as Dupont went smiling through his blushes to the door.

3

Paul leant forward, raised the brass bolt, and opened the little doors of his position. In less than a minute the bank itself would open; through the frosted glass in the lower half of the windows the grey shapes of three or four waiting customers could be seen outside, blurred and overlapping. But for now the Public Space was deserted, its dark linoleum unscuffed, the ashtrays sparkling, the ink-wells full, The Times and the Financial Times untouched on the table. There was something beautiful in the sheer old-fashioned dullness of the place. On the notice-board above the table were advertisements for 5% Defence Bonds and Premium Savings Bonds, and under a bold sans-serif heading a statement on ‘BANK RAIDS’ which lent the Public Space its one note of possible excitement.

Already he and Geoff had emptied the Night Deposit Safe, and spent a friendly ten minutes checking the contents of the locked leather wallets. As the bank closed at three, most shopkeepers dropped off their takings later, in the swivelling chute of the safe. Counting and entering the paid-in cash and cheques was the first task of the day. Geoff counted money with eye-puzzling speed, the rubber thimble on his right forefinger pulsing over the notes. Paul was lightly distracted by the sense of competition, as well as by Geoff’s sleepy but determined morning presence, hair still damp, aftershave new and sharp. He sighed and started on a batch again. Mrs Marsh had reduced his military bandage to a neat pad at the base of his thumb, but he still felt clumsy and went cautiously. Ten-shilling notes were the dirtiest and most torn, and had sometimes to be set aside. Ten-pound notes he always took more slowly, out of respect. Susie had asked him about his bandage, and the story of last night had come out and given him a first enjoyable taste of being a character, with comical adventures. He heard her say, ‘Did you hear what happened to young Paul?’

There were three positions on the counter – Jack nearest the door from the street, Geoff in the centre, and Paul waiting to be discovered at the far end, closest to the Manager’s office. Geoff was informally keeping an eye on Paul, and Paul even more informally, in fact quite furtively, was keeping an eye on Geoff. It was absurd to have a thing about Geoff, but there he was all day long, on view, in his tight-fitting suit and zip-up ankle-boots with built-up heels hooked over the bar of his stool. Mr Keeping made sardonic allusions to Geoff’s boots, but didn’t actually ban them. Among the girls, too, at their desks and typewriters behind them, Geoff’s looks were a bit of a joke, one of those jokes that of course allowed them to be talked about. Paul felt no such freedom. When they ribbed Geoff about Sandra, the girl he was seeing from the National Provincial, it was Paul who blushed and felt his pulse quicken at the curiosity in the air. He imagined being kissed by Geoff, suddenly but inevitably, in the staff-room Gents, and then Geoff – ‘Opening!’ said Hannah, as the front door was unlocked, and with a flutter of nerves Paul sat back on his stool and squared his hands on the counter in front of him.

His first customer was a farmer paying in cheques and drawing a large cash sum for his men’s wages – Fridays were heavily to do with paying wages and banking the week’s takings, alarming queues building up while he tallied fifty or sixty cheques. Hundreds of pounds could pass through his window at a time. He felt the farmer, George Hethersedge, was treating him as a bit of a fool for never having seen him before. He seemed to suggest he would look back on this moment of ignorance with rueful embarrassment. Paul had a rough sense, as he counted the notes and totted up the cheques on his adding-machine, that the name Hethersedge had implications, a weight and a place in the light and shade of local opinion. Like many of these quick-set local names, it also had a terrifying overdraft attached to it. He saw how strange it was, in normal social terms, for him to know this. This slight social awkwardness seemed to lie at the heart of their professional relations.

Quite hidden by Mr Hethersedge was a little old lady, Miss M. A. Lane, whose hand trembled and who seemed distraught by the business of cashing a cheque for £2. She peeped at Paul through the scrap of coarse veil on the front of her hat. He liked old people, and enjoyed her anxious respect and even slight fear of him as a quick-witted official. Then there was Tommy Hobday, the chemist from next door, who was in and out all the time and knew his name; and then the little shock of contact and novelty began to dull, and his own fear, of error or exposure, subsided slowly into the routine of a very busy day. Inside the front door was a shallow lobby with a further glass door that had a tightly sprung closer – the snap and swallow of the closer announced the incessant unrhythmical coming and going of the customers.

Just before lunch Paul heard a voice in the Public Space, and sensed a small commotion with it – now Miss Cobb had appeared and was speaking in a strange delighted tone like someone at a party: then the voice again, sharply gracious, Mrs Keeping, of course, ‘No, no, no, absolutely,’ pretending not to demand attention, people glancing round. Paul’s customer went, leaving him with a clear view of her, in a pale blue frock with a white handbag and looking quite like someone at a party herself. She had picked up the Financial Times and was scanning the headlines, her hard black eyebrows raised. Paul watched her nervously, from his ambiguous position, both invisible and on show. She looked up over the page, ran her eye abstractedly across the room, but gave no sign at all of seeing him. He let the smile fade from his face as if preoccupied by something else, his heart quickening for a minute in a muddle of protest and shame. When the lobby door opened she turned slightly and nodded. In a moment Paul saw Mrs Jacobs, with her heavy tread and humorous questing look, come into view, peer across at him and then approach, ‘Now then…’ dumping her tapestry bag on the counter between them.

‘Good morning, madam,’ Paul said almost humorously, unsure if he should use her name.

‘Good morning,’ said Mrs Jacobs, genial, rummaging, perhaps herself unaware who he was. Out on to the counter came glasses case, head-scarf, twenty Peter Stuyvesants, a paper bag from Hobday’s with the rattle of tablets, an orange paperback upside-down, a novel… Paul couldn’t quite see… at last a cheque-book. Then the changing of the glasses, the puzzled reach for the pen. She wrote her cheque in a raffish, off-hand way, keeping up a vague air of absurdity, as if money were an amusing mystery to her. Paul smiled patiently back, scanned and stamped the cheque, which was for £25, and asked her how she would like it. It was only then, with a brief stare, that she took in who he was. ‘Oh, you’re you!’ she said, in a jolly tone but none the less placing him, as the funny little man of the night before, whose name she had probably forgotten. Paul smiled as he leant over the cash drawer by his left knee, freed a bundle of clean green oners from its paper wrapper. Rather lovely, it seemed to him, the fine mechanical sameness of the Queen’s face under his counting fingers. He counted them out again for her, at a pace she could follow – ‘There you are, Mrs Jacobs.’

‘And your hand, yes,’ she said, confirming it was him. Paul raised it to show the dressing, and wiggled his fingers to show it was working.

‘Good for you,’ said Mrs Jacobs, finding her purse, and cramming the notes into it – again as if she found money somewhat unmanageable. ‘It’s our young man,’ she murmured to her daughter as she rejoined her; but she herself was now murmuring to Mr Keeping, who had emerged from his office, with his trilby in his hand and his raincoat over his arm, despite the cloudless splendour of the sky as seen through the clear upper halves of the bank windows. Paul supposed they were going to walk him home.

Today he had a late lunch-break, which he preferred – he had the staff-room to himself and read his Angus Wilson over his sandwich without anyone asking questions; and when he got back, it was only an hour to closing time. In the afternoons he felt more confined, on his high stool, swivelling fractionally between the deep cash drawer by his left knee and the wooden bowls of pins, paper-clips and rubber-bands on the counter to the right. Where he’d felt purposeful and efficient in the morning he now felt stiff and disenchanted. The cash drawer boxed him in. His knees were raised, the balls of his feet taut against the metal foot-rest, his thighs spread as he leant forwards; he jiggled his knees for relief from the numbness in his upper thighs and buttocks. The low curved back to the stool nodded forward if it wasn’t leant on; though it turned upwards nicely when he pressed and arched against it. He got a faint tingling, an odd compound of numbness and arousal, in the hidden zone between the legs. Queues formed in front of him, with their shuffle of private faces – vacant, amiable, accusing, resigned – glimpsed only by him, and half the time he had a half-erection, seen by no one, caused by no one, under the counter.

Just before closing he came back to his seat from the chief clerk’s desk, and found that he had no customers – he glanced out, saw Heather cross the Public Space to stand by the door, and sensed already the little shift of perspective that would come about when she locked it shut, and the team were left alone again. Perhaps it was just a new boy’s self-consciousness, but he felt a mood of solidarity settled on the staff when the public had gone. They barely showed it, of course – ‘No, you’re just in time!’ said Heather, with a grudging laugh, and Paul saw a large young man scoot in past her, smiling keenly, though in fact it was 3.28, he was within his rights, and the smile expressed confidence more than apology. He was feeling in his breast pocket, his smile now slightly mischievous as he homed in on Geoff’s position, where a customer was already waiting. Paul had an impression of quirky liveliness and scruffiness, such as you didn’t see much in a town like this, something artistic and a little preoccupied, more like a person from London or it could be Oxford, only fifteen miles away. He could well be an Oxford type, with his pale linen jacket curling at the lapels and his blue knitted tie. A pen had made a red ink stain, not far from his heart. His dark curly hair half-covered his ears, there was something witty and attractive in his expression, though he wasn’t exactly handsome. Paul leant forward and for a few expanded, trance-like seconds watched him gazing at Geoff, over the shoulder of the man in front of him. His head was on one side, with the vacantly calculating frown of impatience, the tip of his tongue on his lower lip; and then, just for a moment, his face stiffened, his eyes widened as if to fill themselves with Geoff, and then narrowed into a slow blink of amused indulgence; and of course Paul knew, and his heart thumped with feelings he couldn’t disentangle, of curiosity, envy and alarm. ‘Can I help you?’ he said, and his own voice sounded loud and almost mocking.

The man looked at him without moving his head, and then with a widening smile, as if he knew he’d been caught out. He came over. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘you’re new!’

‘Yes, I’m the new boy,’ said Paul, pleasantly, and feeling a bit silly.

The man looked at him appreciatively as he felt in his breast pocket. ‘Well, me too,’ he said, his voice quick and deep, with a curl of humour in it.

‘Oh, yes?’ said Paul, wary of being too familiar, but laughing a little.

‘Well, new master, but it’s much the same. Now I’ve got to pay this in for the Colonel.’ He had a paying-in book, the slip all made out, and a cheque for £94: Corley Court School, General Account. Paul saw, in the moment he stamped it, an image of the school, teeming and condensed, wealthy and famous, he was sure, though he had never heard of it.

‘Where is it, actually?’ he said.

‘What, Corley?’ – the man said the word as one might London, perhaps, or Dijon, with cultured certainty and polite surprise. ‘It’s out on the Oxford road, about three miles away. It’s a prep-a-ra-turry school,’ he said, in a Noël Coward voice.

‘The bank is about to close, ladies and gentlemen!’ announced Heather.

‘Look, you’d better give me some money,’ said the man. ‘Don’t they have drinking-up time in here?’

‘Afraid not,’ said Paul, with a nod and a smile, in the way one always conceded a customer might have a point; but with some further concession of this one’s charm. The man looked at him acutely for a moment before getting out his pen; he had one of those thick biros with four different colours, red, green, black and blue. He wrote a cheque for £5, in neat but imaginative writing, having chosen the green ink. His name was P. D. Rowe. Peter Rowe in the signature.

‘End of the month,’ he said, ‘we’re paid today.’

‘How would you like it?’

‘Oh, god… four pound notes and a pound in silver. Yes,’ said Peter Rowe, as he watched, nodding his head, ‘time to go really wild this weekend.’

Paul tittered without looking at him, and then said, ‘Where can you go wild round here, I wonder?’ very quietly, as he really didn’t want Susie to hear him.

‘Hmm, yes, I take your point,’ said Peter Rowe. Paul felt oddly conscious of at last having a personal conversation, as the other cashiers did with the customers they knew, and though he didn’t know Peter Rowe at all, he was very interested in the answer. ‘I always think there must be something going on, don’t you?’ He received the money and slid the coins into a D-shaped leather purse he had. ‘Though in a little place like this, it may take some finding.’ He smiled, with a flicker of eyebrows.

Paul heard himself saying, ‘Well, let me know!’ Whatever this going wild entailed had only the vaguest form in his head, and his excitement was mixed with a feeling he was out of his depth.

‘Okay, I will,’ said Peter Rowe. As he crossed the Public Space he glanced in at Geoff again with another little flicker of comic surmise, which Paul felt in a horrified rush of understanding was meant as a sign to him too, and then looked back with a flash of a grin as he went out through the door.

On the way home Paul thought about Peter Rowe and wondered if he’d see him again straight away in the town. But most of the shops were shut and the pubs not yet open and a mood of premature vacancy had settled on the sun-raked length of Vale Street. He felt weary but restless, shut out from the normal play of a Friday night. All down the street, house-doors were protected by striped awnings, or stood open behind bead curtains to let in the air. He caught radio talk, music, a man raising his voice as he went into another room. The drapers and outfitters had covered their shop-windows with cellophane to keep the goods from bleaching in the sun. It was the sugary gold of the cellophane on a bottle of Lucozade, and changed all the clothes inside into unappealing greens and greys. On the tiny stage of Mews’ window a woman stepped forward, through the amber light, in a cotton frock, her blank face and pointed fingers raised in genteel animation; while a man stood dependably, in flannels and a cravat, with an endlessly patient smile. They had been like that all week, flies buzzing and dying at their feet, and would surely remain there till the season changed, when one day the peg-board screen behind would shift, and a living arm come groping through. Paul went on, glancing unhappily at his strolling reflection. In the chemists’ window there were those enormous tear-shaped bottles of murky liquid, blue, green or yellow, which must have some ancient symbolic function. Dim sediment gathered in them. He wondered what happened at a wild weekend – he saw Peter dancing to ‘Twist and Shout’ with a roomful of friends from Oxford. Perhaps he was going to Oxford for the party; a preparatory school was hardly the place for a rave-up. He didn’t fancy Peter, he felt slightly threatened by him, and saw their friendship stirring suspicions in the bank. Already he seemed to be a week or two ahead.

After supper he went up to write his diary, but felt oddly reluctant to describe his own mood. He lay on the bed, staring. He wrote, ‘Mrs Keeping came into the bank before lunch, but she totally ignored me, it was quite emb. Mr K v cool too, and only said he hoped my hand was all right. Also Mrs Jacobs took ages to realize who I was, though then she was reasonably friendly. She drew out £25. I don’t think she could remember my name, she referred to me as “our young man”.’ Something about the clashing curtains and the carpet, both nice enough in themselves, made Paul feel acutely lonely, the three mirrors of the dressing-table blocking the evening sun. The bulb in the ceiling light glowed in weak competition with it. There was the matching suite, dressing-table, wardrobe, bed with quilted headboard, and then nothing that went with anything else. They had the air of things not wanted elsewhere in the house, the scratchy armchair, the wrought-iron lamp, the souvenir ashtrays, the brown wool rug made by Mr Marsh himself, at what must have been a low moment. Paul started on a sentence about Peter Rowe coming into the bank, but a superstitious impulse made him cross it out after three or four words. He blocked out the words with his biro till the place shone.

He put the diary away and felt on the top of the wardrobe for the copy of Films and Filming that he’d hidden there. There was a still on the cover from the new film Privilege, starring Jean Shrimpton and Paul Jones. They seemed to be in bed together. Jean Shrimpton’s pale profile hovered over Paul Jones, whose eyes were closed, and his lips, and teeth, slightly parted. At first Paul had thought she must be watching him sleep, too entranced by his pretty face to want to wake him. Then he’d guessed, with a strange prickly rush, that they must be making love, and that the pop-star’s open mouth wasn’t snoring but gasping in surrender. Though actually you couldn’t be sure. There was a suggestion of his naked shoulder and chest, and thus of other things you might get to see if you went to the film. It wouldn’t come here, of course, he’d have to go into Swindon or Oxford on the bus. In the angle between the two faces there was a disconcerting limb, perhaps Jean’s right arm crooked back insect-like as she crouched over him, or maybe Paul Jones’s own left elbow, oddly twisted. He saw for the first time it could be his left wrist, much closer, the hand hidden in Jean’s hair. In the grey and white close-up Paul Jones’s puppyish neck looked fleshy and pitted. Also he had no ear-lobes, a weird thing you couldn’t entirely overlook once you’d noticed it. Paul Bryant wasn’t sure about Paul Jones. His mother had fancied him quite openly once, on Top of the Pops, and you couldn’t very easily share a fantasy with your mother. His own desire, in its way very modest, was simply to kiss Paul Jones.

He sat propped up on the bed to look through the small ads for the third or fourth time. It was like a mild hallucination, or one of those drawings in the paper containing ten hidden objects: it made him shiver to see the concealed invitations. He went systematically through Services, domestic work sought by ‘refined young men’ in ‘private flats and houses’, or by ‘masculine’ odd-job men, ‘anything considered’. He wasn’t seeking Services himself, but he was keenly preoccupied by their being offered. There were various masseurs. Someone called Mr Young, a ‘manipulative therapist’, could visit between 10.45 and 3 in north-west London only. Paul felt he would be rather intimidated by Mr Young, even if he managed to be in the area at the specified time. His eye worked through the tiny type of ‘For Sale and Wanted’, the ads all looking alike, so that you could lose one and find it again with a slightly magical sense of significance. Mainly it was magazines and films. There were hysterical pleas: ‘Stills, Photos, Articles, Magazines, ANYTHING dealing with Cliff Richard’. An unnamed ‘studio’ offered ‘physique and glamour movies’ for ‘artists, students and connoisseurs’, someone else sold ‘50-foot action films’, however long that was. Paul imagined the reel going round on a projector… he didn’t think you could get much action into fifty feet, it would surely be over in no time. Anyway, he didn’t have a projector; and couldn’t see himself getting one on his present salary. Not that there would really be room in here… and then he’d need a screen as well… Quite a few people were fans of something called ‘tapespond-ing’, where it seemed you recorded a message and sent it through the post, which might be romantic, but then he didn’t have a tape-recorder either, and even if he did Mrs Marsh would think he’d gone mad, talking away for hours on end in his room. He wasn’t a very confident talker, and couldn’t imagine how he’d fill up a tape.

The Personals were the climax of his solitary ritual, the words themselves bulging and bending with outrageous meaning: ‘Undisciplined bachelor (32) would like to meet strong-minded person with modern outlook.’ ‘Motorcyclist, ex-Navy, seeks another for riding weekends.’ It was 6d a word, but some people went on as garrulously as any tapesponder: ‘Motorcyclist, 30, but still a novice, seeks further instruction and would also particularly like to contact a qualified watersports trainer. North London/Hertfordshire area preferred.’ Paul read all this with a beating pulse, smiling narrowly, in a sustained state of fascinated shock. Only one man seemed to have completely missed the point, and asked to meet a girl with an interest in gardening. Otherwise it was a world of ‘bachelors’, many of them with ‘flats’, and most of those flats in London. ‘Central London flat, large and comfortable. Young bachelor needed to share with another. No restrictions.’ Paul looked up at the floral curtains and the evening sky above the mirror. ‘Energetic bachelor (26), own flat, seeks others, similar interests’ – he hadn’t said what his interests were, it must be taken as read. ‘Interests cinema, theatre, etc’, said some, or just ‘interests varied’. ‘Interests universal’, said ‘bachelor, late forties’, leaving nothing, or was it everything, to chance.

Paul closed his eyes in a heavy-hearted dream of bachelor flats, his gaze slowly making out, among the pools of lamplight, the shared sofa, the muddled slippers, the advanced pictures, opening the door on to the bathroom, where he himself was shaving as Peter Rowe, now looking oddly like Geoff Viner, lolled in the bath, reading, smoking and washing his hair all at the same time, then opening, through a sort of purple vapour, the door of the bedroom, on to a shadowy scene more thrilling and scandalous than anything described in Films and Filming – in fact a scene that, as far as he knew, had never been described at all.

4

Peter sat in the Museum, writing up the labels with his four-coloured biro. ‘Whose is the sword, again?’

‘Oh, the sword, sir? Brookson’s, sir,’ said Milsom 1, coming over and watching intently for a moment.

‘He claims it was his grandfather’s, sir,’ said Dupont.

‘Admiral’s Dress Sword,’ Peter wrote, in black, and then, flicking to red, ‘Lent by Giles Brookson, Form 4’. He felt the boys themselves ought really to do the labels, but they had a thing about his handwriting. Already he saw his Greek e, his looped d, his big scrolly B, seeping through the school, infecting the print-like hand they had hitherto based on the Headmaster’s. It was funny, and flattering in a way, but of course habitual; ten years before, he had copied those Bs from a favourite master of his own. ‘Voilà!’

‘Merci, monsieur!’ said Milsom, and took the card over to the display cabinet, where the more precious and dangerous exhibits were to be housed. There was a lovely set of Indian clay figures in the dress of different ranks and trades – military piper, water-seller, chokidar – very trustingly lent by Newman’s aunt. The shelf above was home to a hand-grenade, it was assumed unarmed, a flintlock pistol, Brookson’s grandfather’s sword, and a Gurkha kukri knife, which Dupont had taken down and was working on now with a wad of Duraglit. He and Milsom were talking about their favourite words.

‘I think I’d have to say,’ said Milsom, ‘that my favourite word is glorious.’

‘Not gorgeous?’ said Dupont.

‘No, no, I far prefer glorious.’

‘Ah well…’ said Dupont.

‘All right, what’s yours? And don’t don’t don’t say, you know… sort of pig, or and… or, you know…’

Dupont merely raised an eyebrow at this. ‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘my favourite word would have to be Churrigueresque.’ Milsom gasped and shook his head and Dupont glanced at Peter for a second to judge the effect of his announcement. ‘But on the other hand,’ he went on airily, ‘perhaps it’s just something very simple like lithe.’

‘Lithe?’

‘Lithe,’ said Dupont, waving the kukri sinuously in the air. ‘Just one little syllable, but you’ll find it takes as long to say it as glorious, which has three. Lithe… lithe…’

‘For god’s sake be careful with that weapon, won’t you. It’s designed for chopping chaps’ heads off.’

‘I am being careful, sir,’ said Dupont, wounded into a blush. Since his removal from the music-room he’d been slightly wary of Peter, and seemed not to trust his own voice, with its weird octave leaps in the middle of a word. In a minute Peter came and looked over his shoulder at the wide blade: it was the angle in the middle that made the back of his thighs prickle.

‘It’s a vicious-looking thing, Nigel…’

‘Indeed it is, sir!’ said Dupont, with a grateful glance. Strictly speaking, only prefects were addressed by their first names. He turned the kukri over, one side gleaming steel, the other a still dimly shiny blue-black. His fingers themselves were black from the wadding. ‘It’s perfectly balanced, you see, sir.’ He held it tremblingly upright, one stained finger in the notch at the foot of the blade. It swung there, like a parrot on a perch.

There were a number of pictures to be hung, and Peter asked the boys where they should go. It was their Museum – surely Dupont’s idea, but loyally co-authored with Milsom 1; Peebles and one or two others were involved but had melted away once the hard work of cleaning out the stable and whitewashing the walls had begun. It was clear they just wanted to play with the exhibits. ‘Let’s hang the Headmaster’s mother,’ said Peter, and saw the boys giggle and look at each other. He held up a gloomy canvas in a shiny gilt frame. ‘Very generous of the Headmaster to lend this, I feel, don’t you?’ They all gazed at it in the state of comic uncertainty that Peter liked to create. A round-faced woman in a grey dress peered out as if in suppressed anxiety at having produced the Headmaster. ‘Where shall we put the late Mrs Watson?’ Horses had clearly been thought to need little light – just the half-door at the front, and one small window high up at the back. The overhead bulb in a tin shade left the upper walls in shadow. ‘Right up at the top, perhaps…?’

‘Does that mean she’s dead, sir?’ said Milsom.

‘Alas, yes,’ said Peter, with a certain firmness. There were some things they shouldn’t be encouraged to joke about – though her death was surely the reason she’d been unhooked at last from the Headmaster’s sitting-room wall.

‘We do need more lights, sir,’ said Dupont. He had ideas of using the Victorian oil-lamp lent by Hethersedge, but this was a hazard even Peter had drawn the line at.

‘I know we do – I’ll have a word with Mr Sands about it.’

‘I feel we should put her in a prominent position, sir,’ said Milsom.

Peter smiled down at him, with a moment’s conjecture about what lay ahead in life for such a respectful boy. ‘I feel you’re right,’ he said, and climbed up to fix the old girl on the wall above the weapons cabinet. It was a central spot, though it turned out the edge of the lampshade threw everything above her chin into deep shadow. ‘Ah, well,’ said Peter, rather imposing on the boys his own belief that it didn’t matter. They went to get on with their work, glancing up at her doubtfully from time to time.

Peter opened a cardboard box and picked out the framed photograph of Cecil Valance, huffed and then spat discreetly on the glass, and gave it a vigorous wipe with his handkerchief. Inside, between the glass and the mount, were many tiny black specks of harvesters, which had got in there and died perhaps decades ago. ‘Where shall we hang our handsome poet?’ he said. ‘Our very own bard…’

‘Oh, sir…’ said Milsom; and Dupont dropped the kukri and came over.

‘Shall we put him here, sir, right above the desk?’ he said.

‘We could, couldn’t we?’ The desk itself was an exhibit – part of a jumble of Victorian furniture and household objects, clothes-baskets, clothes-horses, coal-scuttles, that had been roughly stacked and locked away in the adjacent stable at some unknown date. It was immensely heavy, with two rows of Gothic pigeon-holes, and oak battlements, now rather gap-toothed, running along the top.

‘Do you think Cecil Valance might actually have written his poetry at this desk, sir?’ said Milsom.

‘I bet he did, sir,’ said Dupont.

‘Well, I suppose it’s possible…’ said Peter. ‘The early ones, perhaps – as you know, he wrote the later ones in France.’

‘In the trenches, sir, of course.’

‘That’s right. Though the handy thing about poems is you can write them wherever you happen to be.’ Peter had been doing some of Valance’s work with the Fifth Form – not just the famous anthology pieces but other things from the Collected Poems that he’d found in the library, with the Stokes memoir. The boys had been tickled to read poems about their own school, and young enough not to see without prompting how bad most of them were.

Dupont was looking closely at the photograph. ‘Can we say when it was taken, sir?’

‘Tricky, isn’t it?’ There was just the gilt stamp of Elliott and Fry, Baker Street, on the blue-grey mount. Little evidence in the clothes – dark striped suit, wing-collar, soft silk tie with a gemmed tie-pin. He was in half-profile, looking down to the left. Dark wavy hair oiled back but springing up at the brow in a temperamental crest. Eyes of uncertain colour, large and slightly bulbous. Peter had called him handsome, not quite knowing what he meant. If you thought of Rupert Brooke, say, then Valance looked beady and hawkish; if you thought of Sean Connery or Elvis, he looked inbred, antique, a glinting specimen of a breed you rarely saw today. ‘He died very young, so he’s probably’ – Peter didn’t say ‘about my age’ – ‘in his early twenties.’ Strange to think, if he’d lived, he’d have been the same age as Peter’s grandfather, who still played a round of golf a week, and loved jazz, if not quite ‘Jailhouse Rock’.

‘Was he ever married, sir?’ asked Milsom earnestly.

‘I don’t believe he was,’ said Peter, ‘no…’ And climbing on to the desk he asked the boys to pass him the hammer, and drove a nail into the whitewashed wall.

At the staff-meeting in the Headmaster’s sitting-room, the talk this week was all about Open Day. ‘So we’ll have the First XI against Templers, starting at 1.30. What’s the lookout there?’

‘A walkover, Headmaster,’ said Neil McAll.

The Headmaster smiled at him keenly for a moment, almost enviously. ‘Well done.’

‘Well, Templers are a pretty feeble side,’ said McAll drily, but not refusing the praise. ‘And I’d like to take a couple of extra nets this week, after prep…? Just to knock them into shape.’ The Headmaster seemed ready to grant him anything. Peter glanced at McAll across the table, with uncertain feelings. Black-haired, blue-eyed, dressed in sports kit at improbable times of day, he was adored by many of the boys, and instinctively avoided by others. He breathed competition. In his two years at Corley Court, he was credited with dragging the school up from its long-term resting-place at the bottom of the Kennet League.

‘Clean whites, of course, Matron?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Matron; ‘though by tenth week…’

‘Well, see what you can do, will you.’

‘I’m bringing the seniors’ bath night forward to Thursday,’ said Matron, with an air of great strategy.

‘Mm? Oh, I see, quite right,’ said the HM, frowning over a slight blush. He consulted his list. ‘Any other activities…? Now, I see I have the Museum.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Peter, surprised at how nervous the HM made him, the whole half-watchful, half-indifferent gathering of the staff. He looked across at John Dawes, the most avuncular of the masters, flicking his lighter for the third or fourth time over the bowl of his pipe; and Mike Rawlins beside him, deep in the systematic doodle with which each week he obliterated the roneoed order of business. They’d been sitting at these meetings for twenty years. ‘Yes, I think we’ll have something to show by Open Day. They’ve got some interesting things together, as well as some rather silly things. It won’t be, you know, the Ashmolean…’ – Peter grinned and looked down.

‘No, well,’ said the Headmaster, who resented his Oxford allusions.

‘I’m assuming the place is locked securely at night?’ said Colonel Sprague. ‘As I understand it, it contains various items lent by parents?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Peter. ‘Dupont is officially the curator, and he gets the key off me.’

‘We don’t want any trouble of that kind,’ said the Colonel.

‘I must try to get down and see it,’ said Dorothy Dawes, as if it would require a certain amount of planning. She taught the ‘Babies’ in the First Form, and seemed set apart from the rest of the school in a nest of knitting-wool and gummed paper. She was always equipped with two treats, Polos and Rolos, which she handed out liberally to reward and console. It wasn’t clear to Peter if the Daweses had had children of their own.

‘I’ve lent them a couple of things myself,’ said the Headmaster. ‘A portrait and a set of antlers. Just to get them started.’

‘No, much appreciated,’ said Peter solemnly. ‘And we’ve also got a few interesting items from the Valances’ days.’

‘Ah, yes…’ said the Headmaster, a wary look coming over him. ‘Now this leads me to a somewhat delicate matter, which I must ask you to keep very much to yourselves.’ Peter assumed they’d got to the sex part, and was suddenly doubting the witty remarks he’d been planning to make about Dr No and Ursula Andress’s bust. ‘Well, you know already, John, and… It’s to do with Mrs Keeping.’

There was obviously something thrilling about this, since Mrs Keeping was such a hard nut and not at all popular with the other staff; a ripely responsible look settled over them.

‘I’ve had a few, shall we say, comments before, but now Mrs Garfitt has written to complain. She claims Mrs Keeping has been hitting young Garfitt with a book, I’m not quite clear where, and also -’ the Headmaster peered at his notes, ‘ “flicking his ears as a punishment for playing wrong notes”.’

‘God, is that all,’ murmured John Dawes, and Matron gave a short illusionless laugh. ‘Not that it will do any good.’

‘I’ve told Mrs Garfitt that judicious corporal punishment is one of the things that keep a school like Corley Court ticking over. But I’m not quite happy about it, all the same.’

‘The trouble is she doesn’t consider herself to be a schoolteacher,’ said Mike Rawlins, without losing the track of his doodle.

‘No, well, she has no qualifications,’ said Dorothy, with a slightly shifty look.

‘Ah, well…’ said Mike, now with a very heavy face. As far as Peter could make out only he and the Headmaster could boast university degrees, the others having various antique diplomas and in one case a medal. Neil McAll was the most exotic, with his Dip. Phys. Ed. (Kuala Lumpur), on the strength of which he taught History and French.

‘Well, she is the daughter of Captain Sir Dudley Valance, Bart,’ said Colonel Sprague, humorously but with feeling. Sprague himself, though only the bursar, showed a keen consciousness of long-erased ranks and sometimes assumed quite imaginary superiority over Captain Dawes and of course over Mike and the HM, who had both been in the RAF.

‘Well, that can’t have made for an easy upbringing,’ said Mike.

‘Corley Court was her childhood home.’

‘I don’t know…’ said the Headmaster, with a deplorably tactical air of vagueness, his eye wandering round the table, ‘but I was wondering if you might not best be able to have a word with her about all this… um, Peter.’

Peter coloured and blinked, and said at once, ‘With respect, Headmaster, I don’t think I can start disciplining other members of staff, especially if they’re twice my age.’

‘Poor Peter!’ said Dorothy, rustling protectively. ‘He’s only just got here.’

‘No, no, not disciplining… obviously!’ said the HM, flushing too. ‘I was thinking more of a… a subtle chat, a roundabout sort of conversation, that might be more effective than a dressing-down from me. I believe you play duets with her, or…?’

‘Well…’ said Peter, almost guiltily startled that the Headmaster should know this. ‘Not really. We’re practising a couple of four-hand pieces we’re going to play for her mother’s seventieth birthday next week. I really don’t know her at all well.’

‘So it’s Lady Valance’s seventieth?’ said Colonel Sprague. ‘Pehaps the school should offer some form of congratulations.’

‘No, no, she’s not Lady Valance any more,’ said Peter quite sharply.

‘The present Lady Valance is about twenty-five, from the look of her,’ said Mike.

‘She was a model, wasn’t she,’ said Matron.

The fact was that Corinna Keeping frightened Peter, but he did feel he’d got somewhere with her. Some snobbish thing in her had picked him out, and believed it could impress him if not seduce him. He’d been to Oxford, loved music, had read her father’s books. Of course she played ten times as well as he did, but she never showed any desire to flick his ears. In fact she gave him cigarettes, and gossiped with him caustically about the running of the school. He probably was in a position to talk to her, but didn’t want to forgo her favour by doing so. He thought there would be interesting people at the party, and she had mentioned her clever son Julian, who had ‘gone off the rails’ in the Sixth Form at Oundle, and whom she too thought Peter might usefully have a chat with. ‘You probably are on the best footing with her,’ said John Dawes, with his air of drowsy impartiality. And Peter found himself saying,

‘Well, I’ll have a subtle chat, if you like.’

‘It would be best,’ said the Headmaster, stern now he’d won his point.

‘Though it may be far too subtle to do the trick,’ Peter said.

After this the talk moved to particular boys who were cause for comment of some kind, which passed Peter by as he dwelt regretfully on what he’d just agreed to. He started on a doodle of his own, in green ink, putting a pediment and pillars around the word Museum. It could be an Ashmolean after all. He wondered if Julian Keeping was attractive, and if there was anything queer about his going off the rails. In a public school the queer ones didn’t generally need to rebel, they fitted in beautifully; especially, of course, if they were beautiful themselves. He was surrounding the words Open Day in red stars when he heard the Headmaster say, ‘Now, Other Business, um, yes, now, Peter, all this pornography and what have you.’ In his slight confusion, Peter carried on doodling as he smiled and said,

‘I haven’t much to report, Headmaster.’ When he looked up he saw the strange preoccupied look around the table, a long slip of John Dawes’s pipe-smoke hanging and slowly dissolving between them.

‘Dorothy, I don’t know if you’d rather leave us?’

‘Good heavens, Headmaster’ – Dorothy shook her head, and then as if she’d forgotten something rummaged in her bag for a Polo.

‘I read Dr No, as requested,’ said Peter, pulling the confiscated book from under his papers. On the cover Ursula Andress’s right arm was half-obstructed by her bosom as she reached for the knife at her left hip. The belt seemed a bit kinky, worn with a bikini. On the back there was a quote from Ian Fleming: ‘I write for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, aeroplanes, and beds.’ Neil McAll reached over and turned the book to face him.

‘ “The world’s most beautiful woman”!’ he said. ‘I wonder.’ He angled the book for John Dawes to see. ‘Odd, low-slung chest she’s got.’

Old John, acutely embarrassed, appeared to study it. ‘Mm, has she?’ Peter tried to picture Gina McAll’s bosom; he supposed one judged a film-star and one’s wife by rather different standards.

‘The cover is much the… naughtiest thing about it,’ said Peter, ‘and since many of the boys will have seen the film I can’t think there’s any reason to worry about it. It’s actually not badly written.’ He looked around, frank-faced. ‘There’s a very good description of a diesel engine on page 91.’

‘Hmm…’ The Headmaster gave a wintry smile at this flippancy. ‘Very well. Thank you.’ Again Peter had the suspicion that to the HM he was a figure of advanced worldliness. ‘Since then, a search of the Fourth Form cupboard has produced… this’ – he felt in his jacket pocket, as if for some treasured handbook, and brought out a dog-eared paperback, which was passed round with very natural curiosity. It was Diana Dors’ autobiography, Swingin’ Dors: beneath her equally salient bosom on the cover ran the tag-line I’ve been a naughty girl. Mike had a good look at the photo inside of the Swindon-born actress in a mink bikini. ‘Absolute filth, of course,’ the Headmaster reminded them, ‘though I fear it now pales into insignificance. Matron, I’m sorry to say, has discovered the most revolting publications hidden behind the radiators in the Sixth Form.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Matron, her face rigid. Peter knew that these radiators were boxed in behind thick grilles, but presumably Matron tore those off as readily as she tossed the badly made beds in the air.

The Headmaster had the magazines in a folder behind him, which he pulled on to his lap and went through them under the table, mentioning the titles in a brusque murmur. They were all standard top-shelf fare, though Health and Efficiency was a bit different, having naked men and boys in it too. ‘Of course no one’s owned up to putting them there,’ he said, with a further flinch of disgust. Peter had a pretty good idea who it was, but had no intention of saying. It was all to be expected. ‘I think you were saying you’d heard some pretty putrid things being said, too, Matron?’

‘I have indeed,’ said Matron, but clearly she wasn’t going to elaborate. Whatever it might have been took on a phantom presence in the curious but baffled faces round the table.

Neil McAll said, ‘I know I’ve mentioned this before, but isn’t it time we gave them some sex education, at least in the Fifth and Sixth Form?’

‘Now as you know I’ve talked to the Governors about this, and they don’t think it’s desirable,’ said the Headmaster rather shiftily.

‘The parents don’t want it,’ said Matron, more implacably, ‘and nor do the boys.’ They frowned together like some intensely odd couple, and Peter couldn’t help wondering if either of them was entirely clear about the facts of life themselves. The older boys sometimes pictured them obscenely entwined, but he felt fairly sure that they were both virgins. Their stubbornness on the matter was certainly peculiar, in view of the long tradition of the confidential chat. And so the boys carried on into puberty, in a colourful muddle of hearsay and experiment, fed by the arousing pictures of tribal women in National Geographic and by dimly lubricious novels and artfully touched-up magazines.

After this as it happened Peter had a free period, when he was due to meet Corinna Keeping, an arrangement that now took on a certain charge. He doubted very much he would say anything. There was undeniable intimacy in the four-hand sessions with Corinna. Sharing her piano stool, he had a sense of the complete firmness of her person, her corseted side and hard bust, their hips rolling together as they reached and occasionally crossed on the keyboard. As the secondo player he did all the pedalling, but her legs sometimes jerked against his as if fighting the impulse to pedal herself. The contact was technical, of course, like that in sport, and not to be confused with other kinds of touching. None the less he felt she enjoyed it, she liked the businesslike rigour of its not being sexual as well as the unmentionable fraction by which it was. After a practice, Peter would find her mixed trace of smoke and lily-of-the-valley on his shirt. The meetings had no amorous interest for him at all, but he was naturally flirtatious and without really thinking he found they gave him a pleasant hold on someone generally considered a dragon.

She was waiting in the music-room, having just had Donaldson, who was doing Grade 7, for an hour. ‘Ah, well done, you’ve escaped,’ she said, with a mischievous jet of smoke, stubbing out her cigarette on the side of the tin waste-paper basket. ‘You got away from all those dear old bores.’

Peter merely grinned, took his jacket off and opened a window as if absent-mindedly. Far too soon to mention bullying, and though it had been on the tip of his tongue he saw clearly, now he was in her presence, that she would not be amused by an account of the pornography debate. He said, ‘Well, a lot of fuss about Open Day, as you can imagine.’

‘I suppose I can,’ she said, with a flick of her hard black eyebrows. ‘Of course I’m not asked to these highly important gatherings… I’m rather sorry you have to waste your time with them.’ It was her sly way of reaching to him over the heads of the other staff. Underneath it, he assumed, must lie wounded pride at coming back to teach music in the house she had lived in as a girl. Once he had asked her what the music-room had been in her day: the housekeeper’s bedroom, apparently, and the sick-bay next door the cook’s. ‘Have you looked at the Gerald Berners?’

‘I’ve looked at it long and hard,’ said Peter.

‘Rather dotty, isn’t it,’ said Corinna. ‘Mother will be thrilled, she adored Gerald.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’ve let me off the other two morceaux.’ It was just the simpler middle one they were doing, the so-called ‘Valse sentimentale’.

Corinna steadied the music on the stand. ‘Can you think of any other composers who were peers of the realm?’

‘What about… Lord Kitchener?’ Peter said.

‘Lord Kitchener? Now you’re being silly,’ said Corinna, and coloured slightly, but smiled too.

First of all they played straight through the piece. ‘I should just say,’ said Peter at the end, ‘that I assume it’s meant to sound as though I can’t play to save my life.’

‘Absolutely. You’ve really got it.’ With Corinna there was somehow a risk that one might revert to the age of eleven oneself, and get whacked round the head with a book. They went through it again, much more confidently, then she stood up for another cigarette.

‘Isn’t this main tune oddly familiar?’ Peter said.

‘Is it? I shouldn’t have thought any of Gerald’s stuff was familiar.’

‘No… I mean, I think he’s pinched it. It’s Ravel, isn’t it, it’s definitely French.’

‘Aha…?’

Peter played the tune again, very plainly. ‘God, you’re right,’ said Corinna, ‘it’s the Tombeau de Couperin’ – and sitting back down she shunted him off the stool and played the Ravel, or a bit of it, with her cigarette between her teeth, like a pianist in a speakeasy.

‘There you are!’

‘Naughty old Gerald,’ said Peter, which was a liberty she allowed; though she then said,

‘It might just be naughty old Maurice, of course. You’ll have to check the dates. Anyway, we’d better look at the Mozart for ten minutes, then I must get back, I have to take my husband to the cricket club.’

‘Oh, in Stanford Lane?’ It was a pleasant ten-minute stroll from the bank. ‘I must say you spoil your husband.’

Though not cross, Corinna didn’t look pleased by this. She pushed the Trois Morceaux into her music-case, and then flattened the Mozart sonata on the stand. ‘I suppose you haven’t heard about him?’ she said.

‘Oh, no, I’m sorry… Has something happened?’ Peter saw him being knocked down in the Market Square.

‘Ah, you don’t know.’ She shook her head as if exonerating Peter, but still somewhat nettled. ‘People say it’s agoraphobia, but it’s not actually.’

‘Oh…?’

She sat down again. ‘My husband had a very bad war,’ she said, with her little quiver of irritable tension. ‘It’s something that’s very hard for people to understand.’

‘I’m afraid I only met him for three minutes when I opened my account,’ said Peter. ‘He couldn’t have been nicer – even to someone who had more than forty-five pounds.’

‘He’s a brilliant man,’ said Corinna, ignoring this pleasantry, ‘he should be running a far more important branch, but he finds many things difficult that other people don’t.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I think people need to know that, though of course he loathes having any special exceptions made for him. Probably he’d hate me telling you this. Essentially he cannot tolerate being alone.’

‘Yes, I see.’ Peter glanced at her face, unsure if this explanation marked a new intimacy. She jetted up the last bit of smoke, and stubbed the cigarette out in the bin.

‘He was escaping from a German POW camp when the tunnel collapsed.’ She beamed at the top line of the opening Allegro. ‘No light, no air – can you imagine? He thought he’d die there, but they rescued him just in time.’

‘Goodness,’ said Peter.

‘So that, my dear,’ said Corinna, with a sharp frown, ‘is why I need to take him to the cricket club,’ and she fired off the first bars with a snap of the jaw before he was nearly ready.

5

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this,’ said Jenny Ralph.

‘Oh, I don’t mind, honestly.’

She approached him awkwardly over the gravel in her high heels, her glass held away from her. ‘They’re using you again!’

‘It’s only while people are arriving – I like having something to do.’ Paul stood in the gateway and watched a large black Rover 3-litre coming very slowly along the lane, like a car at a funeral. He said as happily as he could, ‘I’m a bit of an outsider here, anyway.’

‘Well, you needn’t be shy,’ Jenny said. She was wearing a wide-skirted dress like a ballroom-dancer’s and a lot of eyeshadow, and the fact was she did make him feel a bit shy, despite his greater age. He was wearing his work suit, and wished he had something else. ‘And you’ve obviously hit it off with Granny.’

‘Oh… well, she’s interesting, I like her.’

‘Mm, well, she adores you,’ said Jenny, rather tartly.

‘Oh, does she?’

‘ “The bank clerk who quotes darling Cecil!” ’

‘Oh, I see…’ said Paul, laughing as he stepped out from the gate, but wondering again if he was just a figure of fun to them all. He smiled and waved at the car. The visors were down against the lowering sun, and the deafish old couple inside seemed a little bemused. The plan was that they were to go on past the house and leave their cars in the field opposite, walking back across the lane and in through the further entrance to the drive. If they were extremely frail, they could park in the drive proper. It was delicate work deciding if the numerous quite elderly arrivals were frail enough to qualify. In the field itself there was a further just possible hazard from cow-shit, which Paul thought it better not to mention explicitly. ‘Do mind your footing,’ he called out, as the car crept off.

‘No,’ he said, ‘we had to learn “Soldiers Dreaming” by heart.’

‘I beg your pardon…?’

‘The poem by Valance.’

‘Okay…’ said Jenny.

‘ “Some stroll through farms and vales unmarked by war, / Not knowing in their dreams / They are at war for just such tranquil fields, / Such fleet-foot streams.” ’

‘I see…’ said Jenny. ‘By the way, you know there’s a dance at the Corn Hall tonight.’

‘Yes, I know – well, I know someone who’s going.’

‘Oh really… do you want to go later?’

‘Would you be allowed?’ Geoff had been talking about it, he was taking Sandra, and Paul felt suddenly heavy with the idea – then saw in a second that he couldn’t possibly take Jenny.

‘It’s the Locomotives, a group from Swindon… Too thrilling. Actually don’t say anything about it,’ said Jenny, turning round to smile at young John Keeping, who was crossing the drive, also with a tumbler in his hand. He had changed into a dark double-breasted suit, with a red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, and looked immediately like a successful businessman. ‘My grandmother thought you might care for a drop of the fruit-cup,’ he said. He brought a heavy irony to being, for a moment, a waiter.

‘How kind of her,’ said Paul, taking the glass, not sure what fruit-cup was.

Jenny made a sharp little face. ‘I just caught Granny tipping in another half-bottle of gin, so I should be a bit careful, if I were you.’

‘Oh lord, well, watch out,’ said John, with a lazy guffaw.

Paul blushed as he took a sip. ‘Mm, not bad actually,’ he said, trying not to cough as the gin cut through the momentary illusion of something like orange squash. He took another sip.

John looked at him narrowly, then swivelled on his heel to take in the view down the lane, the half-circle of the drive. He said, ‘When my grandfather gets here, do you know? Sir Dudley Valance?’

‘Oh, yes…’ said Paul.

‘Can we save a spot for him by the front door. He won’t appreciate being made to walk.’

‘Right…’

‘He has a war-wound, you know,’ said John, with some satisfaction. ‘Well, here you are,’ he said, nodding at an approaching Austin Princess, and set off back over the gravel to find a drink of his own.

‘He can walk perfectly well,’ said Jenny. ‘It’s just that everyone’s frightened of him.’

‘Why’s that?’ said Paul.

‘Oh…’ – Jenny puffed, and shook her head, as if it was all too tedious to explain to him. ‘Oh, god, it’s Uncle George,’ she said. ‘Here, let me take your drink.’ She put it down on a flat stone by the gate-post and shouted, ‘Hello, Uncle George!’ and with a kind of weary cheerfulness, ‘Aunt Madeleine…’

Paul leaned a hand on the sun-baked edge of the roof and smiled in through the open window. Uncle George, in the passenger seat, was a man in his seventies, perhaps, with a sunburnt pate and neat white beard. Craning past him was a strong-jawed woman with crimped grey hair and oddly gaudy make-up and ear-rings. Uncle George himself wore a deep red shirt with a floral green bow-tie. He squinted up at Paul as if determined to solve a puzzle without help. ‘Now which one are you?’ he said.

‘Um…’ said Paul.

‘He isn’t any of them,’ said Aunt Madeleine sharply, ‘are you?’

‘You’re not one of Corinna’s boys?’

‘No, sir, I’m… I’m just a colleague, a friend – ’

‘You remember Corinna’s boys, surely,’ said Madeleine.

‘Forgive me, I thought you might be Julian.’

‘No,’ said Paul, with a gasp, and a muddled sense of protest at being taken for a schoolboy, however pretty and charming.

‘So who’s he?’ said Paul, once he’d sent them on towards the field.

‘Uncle George? He’s Granny’s brother; well, there were two brothers, in fact, but one was killed in the War – in the First World War, I mean: he was called Uncle Hubert. You should ask her about it, if you’re interested in the First World War. Uncle George and Aunt Madeleine used to be history professors. They wrote quite a well-known book together called An Everyday History of England,’ said Jenny, almost yawning with casual pride.

‘Oh – not G. F. Sawle?’

‘That’s right, yes…’

‘What, G. F. Sawle and Madeleine Sawle! – we had it at school.’

‘There you are then.’

Paul pictured the title-page on which he had boxed the names G. F. SAWLE and MADELEINE SAWLE in a complex Elizabethan doodle. ‘Is everyone in your family a famous writer?’

Jenny giggled. ‘And you know Granny’s writing her memoirs…’

‘Yes, I know, she told me.’

‘She’s been writing them for yonks, actually. We all rather wonder if they’ll ever see the light of day.’

Paul took another swig of fruit-cup, already feeling weirdly giddy in the evening sunshine. He said, ‘I hope you won’t mind me saying but I find your family a bit complicated to work out.’

‘Mm, I did warn you.’

‘I don’t know, for instance, is there a Mr Jacobs?’

‘Dead, I’m afraid. Granny’s always had bad luck, in a way,’ said Jenny, as if she’d been there at the time. ‘First she married Dudley, who was probably very exciting but a bit unhinged by the War and he was beastly to her; so she ran away with… my grandfather – ’ she took a swig of whatever she was drinking -

‘Whatsisname… Ralph…’

‘Revel Ralph, the artist, who everyone thought was queer, you know, but anyway they somehow managed to have… my father… and in due course…’

Really?’ said Paul, as if amused and delighted, moving away, his face burning at this sudden eruption of queer, the word and the fact, and going a few yards down the lane… such a casual eruption, too, as if no one much cared. Everyone thought he was queer. Thank god, here was a car, at least, which he prayed was coming to Carraveen. He looked at it fondly, full of hospitable feelings, ignoring his blush in the fervent hope it would go away. A pea-green Hillman Imp, sounding rough in a low gear, windscreen white with dust, perhaps a farmer’s car, the visor flipped down against the glare full in the driver’s face. Paul watched almost impatiently as it approached, looked with odd camaraderie at the large hands on the wheel, the wrinkled nose, the involuntary grin of the man perhaps barely able to see him waiting, in silhouette, then saw, with a reeling adjustment of memory to the re-encountered fact, that it was Peter Rowe. Something providential in the drink brought him smiling to the open window.

‘Oh, hello,’ said Peter Rowe, ‘it’s you!’

‘Hello!’ said Paul, looking at his actual face, which seemed unaccountably both plainer and more lovable than he’d remembered, while his sense of the evening ahead seemed to shift around and beneath him, like stage scenery. The inside of the car smelt headily of oil and hot plastic. On the passenger seat lay a clutch of sheet music – ‘W. A. Mozart,’ he read, ‘Duetti’. He felt whimsical. ‘You’re not frail or elderly, are you?’ he said.

‘Absolutely not,’ said Peter Rowe, with a warm affronted tone and a sly smile.

‘Then I’m afraid you’ll need to park in the field over there,’ said Paul; and stayed smiling into the car without thinking of what to say next.

Peter Rowe gave the gear-knob a struggling thrust into first. ‘Well, I’ll see you in a minute,’ he said, ‘what fun…!’ Paul felt the hot car slip away under his fingers, which left a long scuffled trace in the dirt on the roof. ‘Watch your footing!’ he called out, over the popping roar of the engine, which for some reason in a Hillman Imp was at the back, where the boot should be; and the word footing, odd from the start, sounded now quite surreal and hilarious to him. He watched the car nose up through the gate and into the field, while the reek of its exhaust sank sweetly into the mild scent of grass.

‘Do you know Peter Rowe?’ said Jenny.

‘Well, I’ve met him,’ said Paul, feeling strangely fortified, so that he could say, ‘I didn’t know he’d be here tonight, though – that’s great.’

‘No, well, he’s going to play duets with Aunt Corinna – it’s a surprise for Granny.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Paul. He thought this was a pretty tame kind of surprise; but then he wasn’t really musical. Music always struck him as a bit of a performance. Still, he started to see the scene, himself watching, admiring, possessive, even slightly resentful of Peter’s confidence and ability. As a contribution to the party it certainly beat telling people where to park.

How do you know him?’ said Jenny, with a mischievous look.

‘Oh, he banks with us. I’ve cashed his cheques.’ Paul was blandness itself, just tinged with pink.

Jenny glanced over her shoulder, where Peter was now crossing the lane to go in by the other gate, with his music in his hand – he brandished it at them in a wave that was cheerful though suddenly not quite enough. Though perhaps he had to get ready, he had to practise. Paul watched him for these few seconds with a half-smile, an air, he hoped, of untroubled interest – a brisk, heavy walk, he found he knew it already. ‘He teaches at Corley Court as well,’ said Jenny; and dropping her voice, ‘We call him Peter Rowe-my-dear.’

‘Oh, yes…?’ said Paul, now a little critical of Jenny.

Again she gave him a droll look. ‘He’s rather full of himself,’ she said, in a plonking voice, so he saw that she was quoting someone – Aunt Corinna, very probably.

As the shadows shifted and lengthened and the church clock struck eight and then a quarter past, Paul’s happy excitement began to dim. In between cars he finished his drink, and the tipsy rush was followed by a less pleasant state of dry-mouthed impatience, as he found himself saying the same thing over and over. Jenny had gone in to find Julian and hadn’t come back – anyway they were only kids, even if Jenny treated Paul as somehow younger than herself. Roger wandered out for a sniff around the verge and pissed concisely at four different spots, but made no further sign of solidarity. The arrivals grew fewer. The dreaded Sir Dudley perhaps wasn’t coming – thus far Paul had let only one small car, which was virtually an invalid carriage, on to the drive itself. He thought of Peter’s smile, and the little throb in his voice as he said ‘Absolutely not!’ – there was a giddy sense of an understanding, like the kick and lift of the booze itself, undamaged, stronger in fact since their first meeting, that made Paul’s heart race again. It was almost as though Peter knew what he’d done in Paul’s daydreams, knew all about the bath and the bachelor flat. And now this vaguely headachy thirst, and a little doubt, like the cooling and quickening of the air, pushing among the hedge-tops in front of him and then leaving off. He could hear the cheery, faintly contentious noise of fifty or sixty people talking, on the big lawn at the back of the house, where tables and chairs had been set out. Peter was in there somewhere, among the family and friends, happily getting drunk, Peter Rowe-my-dear, rather full of himself. Certain things Paul didn’t quite like about him came dully to the light. Did he truly fancy him, now he’d seen him again? Could he really imagine getting undressed with that heavy-footed prep-school master? He thought of Geoff’s tight zip, and then of beautiful Dennis Flowers, at King Alfred’s in Wantage, Captain of Cricket, not a master but a boy. Paul stared in a kind of abstruse distress at the stretch of the lane by the gate, its chalky potholes, the parched grass and tough, half-pretty groundsel, knotty and yellow-flowered, that grew along its crown. Then the church clock struck 8.30, the two bright notes with their unusual interval that seemed to tell him, in their complete indifference, to get in to the house at once.

He stepped out with a racing heart on to the patio, where the drinks table was. They’d all met him, of course, but none of them knew who he was. He sensed nodding curiosity mixed with something cooler as he edged among these mainly grand and grey-haired people. Some women from the Bell had been brought in as waitresses, in black dresses with white aprons and caps – they ladled him out a fresh beaker of the fruit-cup, and there was something slightly comic about it, with the bits of orange and so on plopping in. ‘Do you want more bits, dear?’ said the woman. ‘No, just drink, please,’ said Paul, and they all laughed.

He saw Peter on the far side of the lawn, talking to a woman in a tight green dress – he was getting her to hold his glass while he fished out cigarettes from his pocket, there was a clumsy bit of business, and then she was raising her face to him, charmed as well as grateful for the light. Paul approached, heard the chuckling run of Peter’s voice, his impatient murmur as he lit his own cigarette, saw their shared smile and toss of the head as they blew out smoke – ‘What? in the second act, you mean,’ Peter said; now he was almost in front of them, with a tense tiny smile, but still eerily unseen, and abruptly not sure of a welcome – in a moment he had sidled off, his smile now wounded and preoccupied, round the edge of the chattering groups, looking round as if searching for someone else, till he found himself stuck, by himself, in a corner beside a high stand of pampas grass. He sipped repeatedly at his drink, which seemed much less toxic than his first helping. He was staggered by his own timidity, but he argued in a minute that his little scamper away had been so quick it could surely be reversed. The conversations close by were a blur of wilful absurdity. ‘I don’t think you ever will, with Geraldine,’ the woman nearest him was saying to a crumpled-looking man whose elbow virtually knocked Paul’s drink. He couldn’t stay here. Through a momentary opening among the shifting and swaying backs of the guests he saw Mrs Jacobs herself, in the middle of the lawn, in a blue dress and a dark-red necklace, her glasses gleaming as she turned, her face somehow spot-lit by the fact of this being her own party. ‘Now, we can’t have this…!’ – Corinna Keeping, in red and black, and all the more alarming in grinning high spirits, had found him out.

She took him, like some bashful hero, though also (she couldn’t help it) like a culprit who’d stupidly thought he could escape her, through the thick of the party to the far side of the lawn. ‘There’s someone who wants to meet you!’ she said, unable fully to conceal her surprise at this, and in a moment she had delivered him to Peter Rowe – ‘And Sue Jacobs – well, you can introduce yourselves,’ though she stood there, with her defiant smile, to make sure they did. They shook hands, and Peter said quietly, ‘At last,’ as he blew out smoke.

‘I didn’t catch your name,’ said Sue Jacobs.

‘Oh, Paul Bryant,’ said Paul, with the queer little effort of clarity and breathless laugh that always came with saying who he was. And Peter nodded, ‘Paul… yes’ – of course, he’d only just found out his name.

‘We’ll have supper in a minute,’ said Corinna, ‘and then bring everyone in for the concert.’ She rested a black-gloved hand on Sue Jacobs’s forearm. ‘Is that all right, love?’

‘Absolutely!’ said Sue, and grinned back, as if trying to match Corinna’s abnormal good humour.

‘Are you playing too?’ said Paul, not able to look at Peter yet.

‘I’m singing,’ said Sue, her smile vanishing as Corinna moved off. ‘I’d hoped for a run-through, but we had a hellish drive down.’ He saw that she was older than he’d thought, perhaps forty, but lean and energetic and somehow competitive.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Mm? – in Blackheath. Right on the other side. We could perfectly well have had the party there, rather than dragging everyone down into darkest Berkshire.’

‘But you couldn’t?’ said Peter.

‘Corinna wanted it here, and what Corinna wants… Sorry, I’m Daphne’s step-daughter,’ she said to Paul. ‘She married my father.’ She made this sound rather a regrettable turn of events.

‘Ah, yes!’ said Paul, laughing nervously, and not sure where Blackheath was – he pictured something like the New Forest. He saw that just behind them in the edge of the flower-bed, the broken trough was sitting, its end apparently cemented back on and hidden by some quickly arranged nasturtiums; on his hand too the graze had scabbed and been picked back to pink. He said to Peter, ‘Jenny says you’re playing tonight.’ It was magical as well as completely straightforward having him just a foot away. He had a commonplace smell of smoke mixed with some unusual aftershave that made Paul confusedly imagine being held by him and kissed on the top of his head.

‘I could have done with a run-through too, god knows,’ Peter said. ‘We bashed through it at school, but she’s ten times as good as me.’

‘I shouldn’t smoke if I’m singing,’ said Sue, opening her little evening bag.

Peter squashed his own cigarette under foot before getting out his lighter for her. ‘I don’t know the Bliss songs,’ he said.

‘I’m only doing the Valance,’ said Sue. ‘Mm, thanks… It’s Five Songs opus something, but we’re just doing the one, thank god.’

‘Aha…! Which poem, I wonder?’

‘I expect you’ll know – it’s about a hammock. He’s supposed to have written it for Daphne… apparently!’

‘I must ask her about Cecil Valance,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve just been doing him with my Fifth Form.’

‘Well, you should. She seems to think he wrote pretty well everything for her.’

‘Do you think she’d come and talk to the boys?’

‘She might, I suppose. I don’t know if she’s ever been back to Corley, has she? It will all be in the famous memoirs, of course.’

‘Oh, is she writing them?’ said Peter, putting his hand on Paul’s arm for a long moment, as if not to lose him, with talk about strangers, and surely conveying something rather more. In fact, Paul said,

‘She’s been writing them for yonks.’

‘Oh, you know about it,’ said Sue.

‘Well, a bit…’ – and then: ‘Isn’t it the poem that starts, “A larch tree at your head, and at your feet / A weeping willow”?’

‘You do know,’ said Sue again, sounding slightly put out.

‘I’d better get you to talk to the Fifth Form!’ said Peter, the hint of mockery in his tone dissolving in his long, brown-eyed gaze, as if he too felt excitements teeming softly around and ahead of them. It was a look of a kind Paul had never had before, and in his happiness and alarm he found he had completely finished his drink.

‘Well, supper, perhaps,’ said Sue, in a way that made Paul think she’d become aware of something.

‘May we join you, sir?’ said Peter.

George Sawle’s sunburnt face settled into a vague smile as he gestured at the chairs. In the shade, or by now the midge-haunted shadow, of the weeping beech, it was the most secluded of the supper-tables. The old boy seemed almost to be hiding. ‘I’m Daphne’s brother,’ he said.

‘Oh, I know who you are,’ said Peter, with his suggestive chuckle, putting down his plate next to him. ‘I’m Peter Rowe. I teach at Corley Court.’

‘Oh, goodness…!’ said old Sawle, in a tone that suggested there was a lot to be said on the subject, if one were ever to get round to it. Paul grinned but didn’t know if it would be right to say what an honour it was to meet him. He’d sometimes seen John Betjeman in Wantage but had never actually met an author before. The Everyday History, with its old-fashioned pictures of strip-farming and horse-drawn transport, had come out some time before the War. It was slightly magical that G. F. Sawle and Madeleine Sawle should even be alive, much less battering round the country in an Austin Princess. Paul sat down next to Peter – it seemed this was what they were doing, it was so absurdly new and easy, and he was trying to keep his head as they sallied around together. This large glass of white wine was clearly going to help. ‘We met earlier – I’m Paul Bryant.’ The chair lurched and sank slightly under him in the rough grass.

‘Yes, indeed…’ said Sawle, nodding and then pulling a little shyly at the longer white tufts of beard under his chin. He quizzed the salmon and new potatoes on their plates through his thick-lensed spectacles.

‘Are you not eating, Professor?’ said Peter.

‘Ah, my wife, I believe…’ said Sawle, and after a moment looked round. ‘Here she comes…!’ There seemed to be some fleeting invitation to find them comical as a couple, in their devotion or their eccentricity.

Paul looked out and saw Madeleine Sawle stepping warily across the patio with a plate in each hand, and then working towards them among the white-clothed tables where other guests were bagging seats and saying, ‘My dear, of course you may…!’ to the people they had just been trying to avoid. The whole social tone was new to him, the top notes of the upper class above a more general mix, with one or two loud local voices, and he was glad to be hidden away here, under the raised flounce of the old beech-tree. He felt the evening’s quickening swell of good luck, and with it the usual suspicion that it was all a mistake – surely any minute Mrs Keeping would send him back to stand by the gate.

‘We’re tucked under this obliging tree, dear, just as you suggested,’ said George Sawle, very clearly, as Madeleine set down the plates with a flicker of a frown, and opened her bag to take out the cutlery she’d transported in it. Paul was struck again by the bold oddity of the red ear-rings flanking her square mannish face. ‘You’ve met, um…’

Paul and Peter introduced themselves – Peter smiled and said ‘Peter Rowe’, warmly and almost forgivingly, as if it were a delightful fact Mrs Sawle might perhaps have been expected to know. ‘I’m Paul Bryant,’ said Paul, and felt he made a slenderer claim. She tilted her head – of course she was rather deaf.

Peter… and Paul,’ she said, with amiable sternness. Paul was pleased at the coupling, though he felt like a school-child under her gaze. He wondered if the Sawles themselves had children. She seemed very much the helpmeet of the Everyday History, something industrious and educational about her. Paul saw them toiling together in an oak-beamed interior, with perhaps a hand-loom of their own in the background. Otherwise he knew nothing about who she was or what she had done. He thought it was a bit odd that the Sawles were hiding away here, and not joining the rest of the family for dinner. ‘Are you old friends?’

‘Oh, we are,’ said Peter, ‘we met about fifteen minutes ago.’

‘Well, a couple of weeks…’ Paul said, laughing, slightly put out.

‘Of Daphne’s, I mean?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry – not yet,’ said Peter, ‘though of course I’m hoping to be.’ He smiled his way broadly through these bits of silliness, and Paul found his admiration for him wrapped up with just a tinge of embarrassment. ‘I like her enormously’ – and at the same moment, as he sat forward to start eating, Paul felt Peter’s knee push roughly against his own and stay there, almost as though he thought it was a strut of the table. His heart was beating as he edged his knee away, just an inch. Peter’s moved with it, he shifted forwards a bit in his chair to keep the contact more easily. His smile showed he was enjoying that as well as everything else. The warmth transfused from leg to leg and quickly travelled on up to lovely but confusing effect – Paul hunched forward himself and spread his napkin in his lap. He felt a hollow ache, a kind of stored and treasured hunger, in his chest and down his thighs. He found his hand was shaking, and he had another big gulp from his glass, smiling thinly as if in a trance of respectful pleasure at the company and the occasion.

‘Oh, Daphne… well, of course,’ Madeleine Sawle was saying, and gave Peter a sparring look as she settled next to her husband, leaving an empty chair between herself and Paul. ‘You’re not in the theatre?’ she said.

‘It sometimes feels like it,’ said Peter, ‘but no, I’m a schoolmaster.’

‘He teaches at Corley, dear,’ said George.

‘Oh, goodness,’ said Mrs Sawle, and tutted as she spread her napkin and checked her husband’s readiness to start eating. ‘I’ve not been to Corley in forty years. I expect it makes a rather better school than it did a private house.’

‘Ghastly pile,’ said the Professor.

‘Ooh…!’ said Peter, flushing slightly in humorous protest, which Sawle didn’t notice.

‘We used to go there, of course,’ said Mrs Sawle, ‘when Daphne was married to Dudley, as I expect you know.’

‘Not a very happy time,’ said the Professor, in a blandly confidential tone.

‘It wasn’t a very happy time,’ said Mrs Sawle, ‘or I fear a very happy marriage,’ and gave a firm smile at her plate.

Peter said, ‘I’ve just been reading the Stokes memoir of Cecil Valance – it strikes me you must have known him, sir.’

‘Oh, I knew Cecil,’ said Sawle.

‘You knew him very well, George,’ said Mrs Sawle. ‘That was the last time we were there, to meet Sebastian Stokes, when he was getting his materials together.’

‘Mm, I remember all too clearly,’ said old Sawle. ‘Dudley got us pie-eyed and we danced all night in the hall.’

Mrs Sawle said, ‘It was on the very eve of the General Strike! I remember we talked of little else.’

‘Do you know this book?’ Peter said, jiggling his knee now and moving his calf too against Paul’s.

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Paul, finding it very hard to concentrate on talking or eating; he felt sure the Sawles must be able to see what was going on; and anyway, he might know ‘Soldiers Dreaming’ by heart, but they came at things from another angle here, out of a world of family gossip and connections. He held his leg firm against Peter’s, which seemed to matter more. He reached out again and drank solemnly from his glass to cover his confusion, thinking at the same time he shouldn’t drink so fast, but feeling too there was something fated and irresistible about it. Across the party, half-hidden by the trailing fronds of the tree above, candles had started to flicker, at each little table, against the half-light. In a minute, young Julian appeared, as if raising a curtain, with a lit white candle in a jar held in front of him. ‘Here you are, Great-Uncle George!’ he said, reaching over Madeleine’s shoulder to put the jar on the table, his own sleek face, brown eyes, glossy fringe, lit up by the quickly settling flame. Paul felt a new pressure of attention in Peter’s knee, as they all gazed up fondly at him. ‘Are you all right out here – you should be in with Gran,’ he said. His voice, at seventeen, still had a boy’s rawness. He stood smiling at them with that cheerful little consciousness of behaving well, to his worthy old relations, and light-heartedly clinging to his decorum after quite a few drinks.

‘Oh, we don’t expect special treatment, you know,’ said George Sawle in a gently ironic voice.

‘I don’t know if it’s just me,’ said Peter smoothly, watching Julian go, ‘but I thought that Stokes thing was almost unreadable.’

Sawle gave a cluck of a laugh. ‘Deplorable publication altogether.’

‘Oh, I’m glad I’m not wrong.’

‘What…!’ – old Sawle looked at Peter with some enviable shared understanding. It was a whole way of talking that had Oxford and Cambridge in it, to Paul’s ears.

‘There hasn’t been a proper Life, has there?’ Peter said.

‘I don’t suppose there’s enough for a full biography,’ Sawle said. ‘To be perfectly honest, I have old Cecil somewhat on my conscience.’

‘Well, you’ve no need to, George,’ said his wife.

Sawle cleared his throat. ‘I’m supposed to have turned in an edition of his letters quite some time ago.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Peter.

‘Well, Louisa asked me originally, oh goodness, some time after the War – his mother.’

‘She must have lived to a great age, then?’ Peter said.

‘Well, she was in her eighties, I suppose,’ said Sawle, with the faint touchiness of someone getting on himself. ‘She was a very difficult woman. She made a sort of cult of Cecil. There was a very awkward occasion when I was asked down, it was rather like when the poems were being done, to talk about it all. She wasn’t living at Corley Court any more by then, she’d moved to a house in Stanford-in-the-Vale. I went for the weekend. “Let’s lay them all out, and decide what ought to go in,” she said. Of course no editor could work under such conditions. I knew I’d have to wait till she was dead.’

‘Wait as long as you like, dear,’ said Mrs Sawle. ‘You expect too much of yourself. And I can’t believe anyone’s crying out for these letters.’

‘Oh, some of them are marvellous – the War letters, love. But Louisa had no idea of course of the sort of thing Cecil wrote in letters to his men friends.’

‘Is there some quite racy stuff?’

Sawle gave a fond apologetic look to his wife, but didn’t exactly answer. ‘I think all sorts of stuff’s going to come out, don’t you. I was talking just now to someone about Strachey.’

‘You must have known him too, I suppose?’ Peter said.

‘Oh, a bit, you know.’

‘Didn’t really care for Strachey, did you, George?’ said Madeleine Sawle, again looking quizzically over her husband’s food.

‘There’s this young chap… Hopkirk.’ Sawle looked at her.

‘Holroyd,’ she said.

‘Who’s about to tell all about old Lytton.’

‘Oh, I can’t wait,’ said Peter.

‘Mark Holroyd,’ said Madeleine firmly.

‘He came to see me. Very young, charming, clever, and extremely tenacious’ – Sawle laughed as though to admit he’d been got the better of. ‘I don’t suppose I helped him much, but it seems he’s got some people to agree to the most amazing revelations.’

‘Quite a tale, by all accounts!’ said Madeleine, with a grim pretence of enthusiasm.

‘I think if people ever do get to learn the real details of what went on among the Bloomsbury Group,’ Sawle said, ‘they’ll be pretty astonished.’

‘We barely knew that world,’ said Madeleine.

‘Well, we were in Birmingham, dear,’ said Sawle.

‘We still are!’ she said.

‘Mm, I was just thinking,’ said Peter, ‘that if this Bill goes through next week it could open the way for a lot more frankness.’

Paul, who hadn’t been able to discuss the Bill with anybody, felt the grip of the crisis again, but less upsettingly than in the drive with Jenny. ‘Yes… indeed,’ he said quite calmly, and looking up in the candlelight he felt (though of course you could never really measure it) he was blushing much less than on that occasion.

‘Oh, Leo Abse’s Bill, you mean,’ said Sawle, in an abstracted tone, and perhaps to avoid the charged phrase ‘Sexual Offences’. He seemed fixed on some distant and subtle calculation. ‘It could certainly change the atmosphere, couldn’t it’ – with a tiny suggestion that prominent and public though it was it had better not be mentioned in front of his wife. He picked up with a little apologetic gasp from where he had been a minute before – ‘No, to go back to Cecil, I came to feel all his rather wilful behaviour was really an attempt to do one of two things – either to appease his mother or to get as far away from her as possible. Going to war was the perfect combination.’

‘Ah, yes…’ Paul glanced at George Sawle almost superstitiously. It wasn’t just that he’d known Lytton Strachey and Cecil Valance, but that he spoke so illusionlessly about them. Cecil loomed in the background for him, less as a poet than as some awkward piece of lumber in the family attic.

‘Dudley was a very different character,’ Sawle went on, ‘but equally under her spell. She appalled them and she fascinated them. He writes very well about her in his autobiography. I don’t know if you’ve read that?’

Paul gazed, hardly bothering to shake his head, and Peter of course said, ‘I certainly have.’

‘Awfully good, isn’t it?’

Paul said, ‘I wondered if he’d be coming tonight, actually,’ with a certain confidence, but Sawle said almost brusquely,

‘I’d be astonished if he did.’

And having said one thing, Paul thought he’d better immediately say the other thing he’d been nursing and rehearsing, ‘I wondered what you thought of Valance’s poetry, actually?’ looking from husband to wife, oracular sources. He felt he must be prepared for a tough answer; but in fact they seemed barely interested.

Madeleine said, ‘I’m honestly not a poetry person.’

The Professor seemed to muse a little longer, and said with regret, ‘It’s hard to say, when you remember them being written. They’re probably not much cop, are they?’

Peter glanced rather sweetly at Paul, and at his tender question, but seemed unwilling to disagree with the Sawles; so Paul kept silent about how much they had always meant to him.

‘I don’t mean to say, incidentally,’ said Sawle, in his way of not letting others drive him off-course, ‘that Louisa wasn’t heart-broken by Cecil’s death – I’m sure she was. But she made the most of it… you know. They did, those women. The memorial volumes, the stained-glass windows. Cecil indeed got a marble tomb by some Italian sculptor.’

‘Well, I know…’ said Peter.

‘Of course you know all about it.’

‘What’s that?’ said Paul.

‘Oh, at school,’ said Peter: ‘Cecil Valance is buried in the chapel.’

‘Really?’ said Paul, and gasped, the whole subject like a dream taking substance in the candle-lit bell of the beech-tree.

‘You must come and see him,’ said Peter, ‘if you like the poems; he’s rather splendid.’

‘Thank you,’ said Paul, ‘I’d like to very much,’ his pop-eyed look of earnest gratitude covering his surprise as Peter’s hand, stroking the napkin in his lap, wandered as if unawares on to Paul’s thigh, and lay there lightly for several seconds.

On the way in after supper Paul stuck with the Sawles for a moment, but they latched on to others with sudden warmth and relief, and so he slipped off. They’d been polite, even kind to him, but he knew it was really Peter they were interested in. In the deepening shadows between pools of candlelight, the guests, gathering up bags and glasses, conversations stretching and breaking, in an amiable jostle as they bunched in through the french windows, seemed to Paul like a flickering frieze, unknowable faces all bending willingly to something perhaps none of them individually would have chosen to do. He was drunk, and he bunched in too, the drink making him less conspicuous. Everyone was friendlier and noisier. The drawing-room appeared blocked with rows of chairs. The connecting doors into the dining-room had been flung open, and the piano turned round. Mr Keeping stood to one side with his mocking smile, asking people to go to the front, to fill up the rows. Paul buttoned his jacket and smiled politely at him as he squeezed past. The effects of the drink, free and easy outside, felt a bit more critical in the glare of the crowded room. Could people tell how drunk he was? Before anything happened he would need the lavatory; where there was a queue, of course; some of the old ladies took two minutes, nearly three minutes. He smiled at the woman in front of him and she smiled back tightly and looked away, as though they were both after the same bargain. Then he was alone in the hall with the colourful chaos of presents and cards, most of them unopened, piled on the table and under it. Books obviously, and loosely swathed plants, and soft things it was difficult to wrap neatly. His jiggling desperation grew painful with the knowledge he hadn’t bought Mrs Jacobs a present or even a card himself. When the woman at last emerged and hurried into the drawing-room Paul heard a loud rapping, a hush, a scatter of applause, and then Mrs Keeping starting to talk. Well he couldn’t not go. Better to miss the concert altogether. All he really wanted was to see Peter play, to watch him, with the beautiful and alarming new certainty that he was about to… he looked in the mirror, hardly knowing, now it came to it, what it was they might be going to do.

He finished as fast as he could, and listened – awful to pull the great clanking flush during Mrs Keeping’s opening bars. But no, they were still laughing. They must all be as drunk as he was by now. He hung about in the shadow of the door from the hall, there were two empty seats, but in the middle of rows, there was a burst of laughter which he thought for a mad second was aimed at him, and he slipped in pink-faced at the side of the room and stood against the wall, behind a row of dining chairs. Here he could see everything – but so too could everyone see him. There were two or three others standing, and at the back of the room the french windows were still open, with further guests gathered outside in what already looked like darkness. Mrs Keeping was erect in front of the piano, hands clasped, in the posture of a child reciting. He didn’t take in what she was saying. Peter was at the end of the front row, smiling at his hands, or at the floor; Mrs Jacobs in the middle of the row, the place of honour, sipping at her drink and blinking up at her daughter with delighted reproach as the surprise got under way. Paul smiled anxiously himself, and when everyone laughed he laughed too. ‘Now mother is awfully fond of music,’ Mrs Keeping said, ‘so we thought we’d better humour her by playing some.’ Laughter again – he looked at Mrs Jacobs, enjoying the collective sense of treasuring and teasing her; a woman just behind her exclaimed, ‘Dear Daphne,’ and people laughed at that too. Mrs Keeping pulled her black wrap around her upper arms and pushed back her shoulders – ‘So, to start with, her favourite composer.’

‘Aha…!’ said Mrs Jacobs, with an accepting smile, though perhaps a tiny uncertainty as to who that would turn out to be.

‘Chopin?’ said one old boy to the woman beside him.

‘You’ll see soon enough!’ said Mrs Keeping. She sat down on the piano stool, and then looked round. ‘We can’t run to the original, I fear, so this is a paraphrase by Liszt.’ There was a murmur of humorous apprehension. ‘It’s very hard!’ She fixed the music on the stand with a furious glare, and then she was off.

She could really play, couldn’t she? – that was Paul’s first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was a noiseless sigh, a wave of collective recognition and relief that almost made the music itself unimportant: they’d got it. He didn’t want to show that he hadn’t. He had never seen anyone play the piano seriously and at close range, and it locked him into a state of mesmerized embarrassment, made worse by the desire to conceal it. There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had, and there was the sight of Mrs Keeping in action, the plunges and stabs of her bare arms up and down the keyboard. She wasn’t a large woman – it was only her presence that was crushing. Her little hands looked brave and comical as they stretched and rumbled and tinkled. She rocked and jumped from one buttock to the other, in her stiff red dress, her black wrap slipping – it twitched and drooped behind her as she moved, with a worrying life of its own. The riveting, but almost unwatchable, thing was her profile, powdered and severe, shaken by twitches and nods, like tics only just kept under control. He stared, smiling tightly, and covering his mouth and chin pensively with his hand.

Mrs Jacobs looked self-conscious too, but in a happy way, her head on one side. Her own responses were almost a part of the performance. The over-active first section of the music had ended, and now a slow tune came in, with a definite air, even on a first hearing, of being what they were waiting for. Mrs Jacobs raised and then dropped her right hand in greeting to it, and shook her head slowly as it went on. Paul thought she was probably very drunk – he felt the glow of his friendly understanding with her, from that first evening; though he somehow saw that to her being drunk had its whole long sentimental history, whereas to him it was a freakish novelty. Somewhere at the back there was a frail bit of humming and a little giggle when someone shushed. Then here came the song again, and as his eyes slid over the heads of the audience to find Peter he found Peter turned sideways and looking back at him, and the rapid pressure on his own heart and the glow of his face were fitted by the music, like a theme tune: they both smiled just in the moment of turning away.

After that Paul looked around casually, to see if anyone had seen; he watched Julian, also standing, on the other side, pink with drink and the comical effort to look sober. Jenny sat just beside him, with a similar frown of critical concentration, pinned in beside a large old man with a farmer’s face and a mass of white hair, and politely ignoring the loud dejected noise of his breathing. Paul turned with a remote smile, as if transported by the music, and found Mr Keeping, standing at the back, pressed against the red velvet curtains, and staring intently at his wife, also with a hint of a smile, his unreadable mask. She was on display, physical and passionate, and Paul realized he would never see Mr Keeping himself in quite the same way again. Then his gaze dropped to the woman seated in front of him – the clasp of her necklace, the label at the neck of her dress turned out… Anne-Marie Paris London – he read it upside-down. When she twitched her head at a sudden loud chord the tips of her hair tickled his fingers. She glanced round, apology just ruffled by accusal. A little later she murmured something to her husband, who absorbed it with a quick tutting nod. Paul had a strange and intense apprehension, for three or four seconds that might have been a long tranced minute, of this unknown woman’s life, that would never cross with his again, and the hypnotic detail of her label showing, which she herself was unaware of.

The door beside him into the hall was propped open, and now and then he heard a clatter of plates or a forgetful raised voice from the kitchen, where the women from the Bell were washing up. The front door was open too, and by moments cool air with a distant smell of firs to it ran in and then ebbed away. There was the quiet section, the theme tune again – he didn’t dare look at Peter – and he heard the jingle of something on Roger’s collar, unconcernedly out of tune and time, as he nosed round on the edge of the drive. Then there were footsteps on the gravel, stopping uncertainly, but an unselfconscious few words of greeting to the dog, which barked uncertainly itself a couple of times. Paul thought of a policeman, for some reason, and then of Sir Dudley Valance, with his war wound, whom he now seemed to be slightly obsessed by. There was a throat-clearing, a light knock, several people looked round, with the lively interest of an audience in any disturbance… Paul made a cringing face and slipped out into the hall.

‘Ah, hullo – good evening…!’ – a man peering in, too absorbed in the moment to lower his voice, and giving at once a sense of awkwardness, in his tight brown suit. ‘I’m fearfully late – but I didn’t want to miss it.’ A posh, silvery voice, with, not a stammer but pauses between phrases. Paul came out on to the doorstep, and shook his hand firmly and without exactly encouraging him, he thought. Surely this wasn’t Sir Dudley. They nodded at each other, as though they were both in a bit of a fix.

‘We’re just having… some music,’ said Paul tactfully, with a hesitation of his own.

‘Ah!’ No, this man was about fifty, but with something boyish in his wide bony face as he turned his head and listened. Paul looked at the tufts of badly cut hair, thick and greying around a sun-blistered bald patch. ‘Well, yes indeed,’ he said, ‘and Senta’s… Ballad, always her favourite.’ They heard the music grow very emphatic and loud, Paul pictured Mrs Keeping shaking herself to pieces, and then at once there was applause. He thought someone else might come out and help.

‘Will you…?’ – he gestured into the hall.

‘Yes – thank you.’ Now they could talk normally. ‘Hello, Barbara!’ said the man. One of the women had come out from the kitchen.

‘Hello, Wilfrid,’ she said. ‘You’ve missed your dinner.’

‘That – doesn’t matter,’ said the man, again with his air of monkish simplicity and tiny hesitation.

‘We weren’t sure we’d be seeing you,’ said Barbara, with the same odd lack of respect. ‘Mrs K’s got a concert on so you’ll have to be quiet.’

‘I know – I know,’ said Wilfrid, frowning a little at Barbara’s tone.

‘Would you like to go in?’ said Paul. He watched the man watching the people inside, one or two faces turned, while Mrs Keeping was announcing the next item. His brown suit must once have been someone else’s, all three buttons done up, the sleeves short, and the trousers too, and a sense of large square objects trapped in tight pockets. Paul wondered if the other guests knew him and a scene was about to occur that he would be blamed for.

‘Is she going on long?’ said Wilfrid, pleasantly but as if out of earshot. There were one or two more curious glances.

‘I don’t really know…’ said Paul, detaching himself.

‘Have you had something to eat?’ said Barbara, softening a little. ‘Or do you want to come into the kitchen?’

‘I think perhaps…’ – Wilfrid gazed at her and flinched. ‘Is it an awful bore?’

‘Ah, that’s all right.’

‘I got a lift into Stanford, and then the bus, then I walked up.’

‘Well, you must be hungry,’ said Paul, adopting the condescending tone. He could hear Peter saying something, in his Oxford voice, making them laugh, and he realized that something had happened, and the voice was now a trigger to jolts of excitement and anxiety that ran through him and made him half-unaware of anything else that was going on. The music began. Wilfrid followed Barbara, but turned in the doorway, came back to the hall table, took a small parcel in shiny red paper out of his pocket and added it to the base of the pile. When he had gone, Paul looked at the label: ‘Happy Birthday Mummy, Love Wilfrid.’

The little puzzle of this didn’t hold him long. He leant in the doorway to listen, or at least to watch Peter play. This must be the Mozart, surely. He thought there was something daft but also impressive and mysterious about big clever Peter stooped over this dainty but tedious piece of music and giving it his fullest attention. The large hands that had recently stroked his knee under the table were now hopping and pecking around on the deep end of the keyboard, in a remarkable show of fake solemnity. Mrs Keeping was having more fun up at the other end, making Peter look like an anxious but courtly attendant; her nods and grimaces now seemed like slightly impatient instructions to him, or tight-lipped confirmation that he had or hadn’t got something right. And turning the page was a bit of a worry, with both players busy at once. After a minute Paul noticed that Peter did any pedalling that was called for, and got interested in his legs as much as his hands. Mrs Keeping’s legs jumped as she played, and Peter’s occasional toeing of a pedal was like a courteous version of the footsie he’d just been playing with him under the table. Paul was warmed by this secret, and admiring of Peter, and jealous that he couldn’t play with him himself. At the end he applauded loudly, and made a point of making the very last clap, as they used to at school.

After this there was a very odd piece, which Paul thought from the awful grin on Peter’s face must be someone’s idea of a joke. The time after the concert, and all the momentous things that were waiting to happen then, weighed so heavily on Paul that he couldn’t concentrate. He sensed Peter’s own little knack for being embarrassing and hoped he wasn’t making a fool of himself now. And in a moment it was all over, and they were standing up and bowing, the applause now full of laughter, warm-hearted but with something provisional in it too, so perhaps the joke still needed to be explained to them as well. Peter’s gaze swept across the room and he seemed almost to lick Paul with his conceited smile, nodding, chuckling, tongue on lip.

This still wasn’t the end, of course, and Paul hardly knew if he was happy or relieved when Corinna sat down again at the piano, Peter withdrew to the front row and Sue Jacobs came forward, with a rather furious expression, to sing ‘The Hammock’ by Bliss. It was strange knowing the words so well, and he tried to follow them against what seemed to him the quite pointless interference of the music. The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing the poem, somehow written across the air, was also an escape from watching Sue herself, her bared teeth and humorous roving glare at one person after another in the audience. ‘And every sleeping garden flower, Immortal in this mortal hour.’ All Paul knew about Bliss was that he was the Master of the Queen’s Music, but he found it hard to imagine Her Majesty enjoying this particular offering. At the end Mrs Jacobs got up and kissed them both, and clapped in the air to reignite the general applause. She appeared to be moved, but Paul thought he saw that under the general requirement to be so she was finding it rather a strain.

As people started talking and stood up, Paul caught Peter’s eye and comic grimace, and grinned back as if to say how marvellous he’d been. What he was actually going to say he had no idea – he dodged out to the kitchen to get a glass. When he came back and joined the group round Mrs Jacobs he hardly dared look at him, distracted with nerves and longing and a sense of unshirkable duty about what he imagined was going to happen next.

A few minutes later they were crossing the garden, bumping lightly as they made way for each other between the tables where candles were still burning in jars; some had guttered, there was a veil of mystery, of concealed identity, over the guests who had come back out and were drinking and chatting under the stars. A cake had been cut up and was being taken round, with paper napkins. ‘I thought you were going to talk to the old girl all night,’ said Peter.

‘Sorry!’ – Paul reaching for but not touching his arm.

‘Now let’s see. The garden’s quite big, isn’t it.’

‘Oh, it is,’ said Paul. ‘There’s a part at the back I think we really must explore.’ He felt he’d never been so witty or so terrified.

‘We loved what you played!’ said a woman passing them on her way back to the house.

‘Oh, thank you…!’ – the skein of celebrity made their little sortie more conspicuous and perhaps odd. Away from the lights now, Peter appeared both intimate and alien, a figure sensed by touch more than sight. Someone had put a Glenn Miller record on the stereogram, and the music filtered out among the trees with a tenuous air of romance. They passed the weeping beech – ‘Hmm, not here, I think,’ said Peter, with his air, reassuring and fateful, of having a fairly clear plan.

‘I think this part of the garden is most attractive.’ Paul kept up the game, turning warily in the dark under the rose arch into the unkempt corner where the shed and compost were. He was speaking too as if he knew what he was doing, or was going to do. Surely it was time just to seize Peter but something about the dark kept them apart as naturally as it promised to bring them together.

He half-saw Peter fling open the shed door, with rakish impatience, and heard the clatter of canes, ‘Oh, shit! Oh shit…’ a sense of the shed like a booby-trap. ‘Mm, it’s rather hell in there,’ Paul said, giggling at his own drollery more than he could quite explain. He was drunk, it was one of the hilarious uncorrectable disasters of being drunk. Now Peter was stooping and furiously thrusting and jamming the tumbled canes back in and failing to get the door shut. He shut it; at once it creaked open again. ‘I should leave it,’ said Paul.

He’d brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter’s hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking than the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter’s head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man’s wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him. He twisted his head in Peter’s two-handed grasp, tried to turn it to a humorous wistful nuzzle against his chin, his chest. ‘What an amazing party,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’m so glad Mrs Keeping asked me to help with the parking.’

‘Mm?’

‘I meant to say I like your tie, by the way…’

Peter was holding him at arm’s length with a serene, almost humorous, almost smug look, Paul felt, as if he were measuring him on some scale of previous kisses and conquests. ‘Oh, my dear,’ he murmured, with a sort of swallowed laugh, that suggested some shyness after all. They held each other, cheek to cheek, Peter’s evening stubble a further part of the dreadful strangeness of being with a man. Paul wasn’t sure if he had fluffed it hopelessly, like his frightened scuttle behind the pampas grass when he’d first arrived; or if this could be taken as a natural amorous pause in which his own confusion would be smoothly concealed and forgiven. He knew he had already been found wanting. And quite quickly he thought, well, it was a sort of triumph just to have kissed another man. ‘I suppose we should go back,’ he said.

Peter merely sighed at this, and slid his hands tighter round Paul’s waist. ‘You see, I rather thought we might stay out here a bit longer. We’ve both earned it, don’t you think?’ Paul found himself laughing, curving to him, suddenly gripping him hard so as to keep him with him and somehow immobilize him at the same time.

Drink and kissing seemed to move to their own clock. When the two of them got back to the house the crowds were already thinning, though a few of the oldsters had settled in, in new arrangements of the crowded chairs in the drawing-room. Paul felt that he and Peter must be bringing a gleam of the unspeakable with them out of the night beyond the french windows, though everyone amiably pretended not to notice. Drink seemed to have captivated them all, reducing some to silent smiles, others to excitable gabble. John Keeping, very drunk, was raptly explaining the virtues of the port he was drinking to a man three times his age. Even Mr Keeping, with the globe of a brandy glass in his hand, looked unselfconsciously happy; then when he saw Paul he glanced awkwardly away. There had been another change of music, it was some old dance number that sounded to Paul like a scene from a wartime movie, and on the clear square of floor beside the piano, barely moving but with a captivated look of their own, Mrs Jacobs was dancing with the farmer man, who turned out to be Mark Gibbons, the marvellous painter she’d mentioned, who’d lived in Wantage. Another couple Paul didn’t know revolved at twice the speed beyond them. Paul smiled at them mildly and benevolently, from beyond the enormous dark distance he had just travelled, which made everything else appear charming but weirdly beside the point. ‘I think I’ve got to go,’ Peter said to Julian, resting his hand on his shoulder, and Paul painfully half-believed the story even though he knew they were meeting up again by the car.

Outside the loo he was waylaid by Jenny. ‘Do you want to come to the Corn Hall with us?’ she said.

Julian looked surprised, then deliciously shifty. ‘Yeah, do you think we can… yeah, come with us, that would be good, actually… Do you want to ask Dad?’ he said to Paul.

‘Um… I think probably not,’ said Paul, pleased that his tone of voice got a laugh. He ought to thank Mr Keeping for the evening before he left – the gratitude suddenly keen and guilty, and haunted by a new suspicion that perhaps he hadn’t been meant to stay for the whole party, and had made a large and unmentionable mistake.

‘I mean it goes on till midnight, what is it now?’

Paul couldn’t tell them that he had promised to go with Peter and sit – where? – he pictured a shadowy lay-by where he’d seen courting couples in cars. It was a further shock when Peter said, ‘Oh, why not? – just for half an hour – I feel like dancing’ – just as if their own plans didn’t matter at all.

‘OK…’ said Julian – a slight sense inexpressible in the air that though he needed them as a cover he wasn’t completely thrilled at the idea of dancing at the Corn Hall with them.

‘Is your brother coming?’

‘God, don’t tell him,’ said Jenny.

‘I love dancing,’ said Peter.

‘Mm, me too,’ said Jenny, and to Paul’s confusion the two of them started rolling their hips and twitching their shoulders at each other. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said.

In the hall Mrs Keeping was standing in rapid, muttered conversation with another woman. ‘He really can’t,’ she was saying, as Paul hung guiltily back. Out on the drive, at the edge of the spread of light from the front door, Uncle Wilfrid was standing, arms folded tightly but face turned up to admire the heavens as if the rest of him were not knotted up with tension and rejection. ‘I’ve got Jenny in the box-room, Mother in the spare room, both the boys home… he should have said he was coming.’

‘I’m sure we could find a corner for him,’ the other woman said.

‘Why can’t he get a taxi back?’

‘It’s a bit late, darling,’ said the woman.

‘Is it?’

‘I don’t suppose he’s got his jim-jams…?’

A sort of desperate solidarity seemed to take over Julian’s face, even if it meant not going to the Corn Hall after all. He slipped out into the drive – ‘Hullo, Uncle Wilfrid…’ taking him aside, a bit further off.

‘You can see the Crab, Julian,’ said Wilfrid.

And a minute later they were all in the Imp, in the sharp little comedy of sudden proximity, everyone being witty, everyone laughing, shifting the books and litter from under their bottoms as the car bounced at getaway speed along Glebe Lane. They could hear the grass in the crown of the road swiftly scouring the underside of the car. Wilfrid was in the front, Paul, Jenny and Julian in a painfully funny squash in the back. Julian’s hot thigh pressed against Paul’s thigh, and Paul found the boy was gripping his hand, he thought just out of general abandon and selfless high spirits. He didn’t dare squeeze it back. They rattled out into Church Lane, down the Market Place into the surprising surviving outside world, which included a police car and two officers standing by it just outside the Bell. Peter was supremely unimpressed, shot past them, pulled up and turned off the lights, the engine, just in front of the Midland Bank. A sense of reckless disorder overcame Paul for a moment. But tomorrow was Sunday…

They clambered out of the car, a small adjustment taking place. Wilfrid said, ‘I haven’t gone dancing since just after the War.’

‘You’ll love it,’ Jenny told him, with a confident nod. She was in effect, in this lopsided group, his partner.

‘Everybody danced with everybody then.’

Peter locked the car, and gave Paul a helpless but happy look, a shrug and a smirking shake of the head.

People were leaving the Corn Hall, the women scantily dressed in the summer night, but clinging to the men. Paul disguised his reawoken tension about seeing Geoff, and chatted pointedly to Jenny as they went into the lobby. As he squinted through the glass doors, the high-raftered hall, under the slow sweep of coloured lights, was thick with the promise of his presence. A boomingly lively song was going on, and Jenny was dancing a bit already – ‘Can we just go in?’

‘Only another twenty minutes, my love,’ said the woman at the door.

‘You’re not charging us, are you?’ Jenny said, defying her to ask her her age.

The woman gazed at her, but the tickets and the cash were all put away, people pushed past, waiting and staggering out past the cloakroom, the lavatories with their stained-glass doors. So in they went.

Paul thanked god for the drink – he strode straight across the hall, round by the stage, smiling into the shadows, as if he lived in places like this – but no, Geoff wasn’t here… he came back to the others with a pang of sadness and relief; then remembered his tie, and pulled it off impatiently. He felt almost as shy about dancing as kissing, but this time it was Jenny who took him in hand – their little group started bopping together, Paul smiling at all of them with mixed-up eagerness and anxiety, Wilfrid studying Jenny but not quite getting her rhythm as she rocked in her jutting-out frock and waved her hands in front of her, perhaps waiting for someone to take them, while Julian lit and voraciously smoked a cigarette. Beyond him, peeping mischievously at Paul through the patterned light, Peter did his own dance, a kind of loose-limbed twist. Around them other couples made way, looked at them with slight puzzlement, made remarks, surely… Surely people in the town knew Jenny, Julian certainly got frowns and smiles of surprise. Paul followed two couples jiving rapturously together, with sober precision despite the abandon of their faces, back and forth in front of the stage.

A big red-faced woman in a spangled frock picked up Wilfrid… did she know him? – no, it seemed not, but he was ready for her, a gentleman, truly sober, and with a certain serious determination to do well. Paul watched them move off, with a smile covering his faint sense of shock, and Jenny leant in towards Paul and nodded, ‘A friend of yours.’

Paul’s hand on her shoulder for a second, prickly fabric, warm skin, strangeness of a girl – ‘Mm?’

‘Young Paul?’

He hunched into himself as he turned and there was Geoff, reaching out to him but rearing back in broad astonishment; then his face very close, Geoff’s hot boozy breath as if he was about to kiss him too, careless and friendly, ‘What are you doing here!’ – and showing Sandra, who shook hands and was inaudibly introduced, looking only half-amused, but Paul was a colleague, perhaps he’d mentioned him. She crossed her arms under her bosom and then looked aside, at others making for the door. ‘Christ, is old Keeping here too?’ – Geoff big with his own joke. ‘Just young Keeping,’ said Paul, nodding at Julian, but he didn’t seem to get it, stood nodding as the lights came teasingly hiding and colouring the contours of his tight pale slacks and the deep V of his open-necked shirt, a first heart-stopping glimpse of naked Geoff. He leant in again, his rough sideburn brushed Paul’s cheek for a half-second, ‘Well, we’re off’ – Sandra tugging, smiling but moody, as if to say Paul mustn’t encourage him. ‘See you Monday!’ – and then his arm was round Sandra’s waist as he escorted her in a gallant grown-up way towards the lit square of the exit.

‘Well, he’s rather fab!’ said Jenny.

‘Oh, do you think?’ said Paul and raised an eyebrow, as if to say girls were a push-over, turning to look for him as he went out into the light, and then into the dark, as though he were a real missed opportunity, then grinning gamely at Peter as he swayed and sloped towards them, biting his lower lip, and gripped them both in a loose very drunken embrace and whispered in Paul’s ear, ‘Tell me when you want to go.’

‘A mad one and a slow one,’ announced the lead guitarist of the Locomotives, the words heavy and resonant in the high roof of the hall. ‘Then it’s goodnight.’

‘Let’s stay a bit longer,’ said Paul, ‘now we’re here.’

The final dance, the watch showing five past twelve, and the two policemen standing genially by the open door in the bright light there, talking to the woman that took the coats. They looked in, across the floor, now sparsely occupied by the dancers who felt the lonely space expanding about them, the night air flowing in, Jenny and Julian locked together in a stiff experimental way, his chin heavy on her shoulder, Paul and Peter now leaning by the wall, swaying in time but a few feet apart, their faces in fixed smiles of uncertain pleasure, and out in the middle, Wilfrid and his new friend, who’d adjusted herself imaginatively to her partner’s rhythms and was making up a kind of military twostep with him to the tune of ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’.

6

Peter roared along Oxford Street, so very different from its famous namesake, the few shops here with their blinds down in the early torpor of the summer evening, and just before he came into the square he wondered with disconcerting coolness if he did fancy Paul, and what he would feel when he saw him again. He wasn’t exactly sure what he looked like. In the days since he’d kissed him at the Keepings’ party his face had become a blur of glimpses, pallor and blushes, eyes… grey, surely, hair with red in it under the light, a strange little person to be so excited by, young for his age, slight but hard and smooth under his shirt, in fact rather fierce, though extremely drunk of course on that occasion – well, there he was, standing by the market-hall, oh yes, that’s right… Peter thought it would be all right. He saw him in strange close focus against the insubstantial background, the person waiting who is also the person you are waiting for. Peter was a little late – in the four or five seconds as the car slowed and neared he saw Paul glance at the watch on his inside wrist, and then up at the Midland Bank opposite, as if he was keen to get away from it, then saw him take in the car and with a little shiver pretend he hadn’t, and then, as Peter came alongside, his jump of surprise. He’d changed after work into clean snug jeans, a red pullover slung round his shoulders; the attempt to look nice was more touching than sexy. Peter stopped and jumped out, grinning – he wanted to kiss him at once, but of course all that would have to keep. ‘Your Imp awaits!’ he said, and tugged open the passenger door, which made a terrible squawking sound. He saw perhaps he could have tidied the car up a bit more; he shifted a pile of papers off the floor, half-obstructed Paul with his tidying hands as he got in. Paul was one of those lean young men with a bum as fetchingly round and hard as a cyclist’s. Peter got in himself, and when he put the car in gear he let his hand rest on Paul’s knee for two seconds, and felt it shiver with tension and the instant desire to disguise it. ‘Ready for Cecil?’ he said, since this was the pretext for the visit. It seemed Cecil had already become their codeword.

‘Mm, I’ve never been to a boarding-school before,’ said Paul, as if this were his main worry.

‘Oh, really?’ said Peter. ‘Well, I hope you’ll like it,’ and they swept off round the square, the car making its unavoidable coarse noise. It was something a bit comic about a rear-engined car, the departing fart, not the advancing roar.

‘So how was your day?’ said Peter, as they went back up Oxford Street. It was three miles to Corley, and he felt Paul’s self-consciousness threatening him too as he smiled ahead over the wheel. It was something he would have to override from the start.

‘Oh, fine,’ said Paul. ‘We’ve got the inspectors in, so everyone’s a bit jumpy.’

‘Oh my dear. Do they ever catch you out?’

‘I don’t think they have yet,’ said Paul, rather circumspectly; and then, ‘Actually I was a bit distracted today because of tonight, you know.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Peter, pleased by this and glancing at Paul, who was half-turned away from him, as if abashed by his own remark.

‘I’ll be interested to see the tomb.’

‘Oh, well, of course, that too,’ said Peter.

Outside the town a dusty breeze blew off the wheat-fields through the open windows, and mixed with the smell that he knew was slightly sickening of hot plastic and motor oil. In the noisy bluster of air perhaps they didn’t need to say very much; he explained about the imminent Open Day, the cricket match and the new Museum, but without feeling Paul took it in; and then: ‘Well, here we are’ – the line of woods was approaching, and he hoped Paul saw, far back from the main road, the flèche on the chapel sticking up among the trees. Here was the lodge-house, a diminutive foretaste of the mansion itself, a cluster of red gables, with a corner turret and a spirelet of its own. The huge wrought-iron gates stood perpetually open. And what Peter always thought a lovely thing happened. As he slowed and changed down and turned off into the chestnut-shadowed drive they seemed to slip the noose of the world, they entered a peculiar secret – in the rear-view mirror, quickly dwindling, the cars and lorries still rushed past the gateway; in a moment they could no longer be heard. There was a magical mood, made out of privilege and play-acting, laid over some truer childhood memory, the involuntary dread of returning to school – Peter tested and even heightened his own feelings by peeping for them in the face of this new friend he barely knew, and yet suspected he knew better than anyone had before. On their right, through the wide strip of woodland, the playing-fields could be glimpsed, the thatched black shed of the cricket pavilion. ‘These woods are out of bounds, by the way,’ he said. ‘If you spot a boy in there you can give him the hairbrush.’

‘The hairbrush…’

‘On the BTM.’

‘Oh,’ said Paul after a moment. ‘Oh, I see. Well, let’s have a look for one later,’ and blushed again at the surprise of what he’d said. Peter laughed and glanced at him, and thought he had never met a grown man so easily and transparently embarrassed by anything remotely risqué. He was a hot little bundle of repressed emotions and ideas – perhaps this was what made the thought of sex with him (which he planned to have in the next hour or two) almost experimentally exciting. Though what colour he would turn then… ‘Now, here we are.’ There had been some talk about Corley at Corinna’s party, but Peter hadn’t told him what to expect. He slowed again at the second set of gate-piers, and there suddenly it was. ‘Voilà!’

Some form of stifling good manners, or perhaps mere self-absorption, seemed to keep Paul from seeing the house at all. Peter let his own smile fade as they trundled across the gravel sweep and came to a halt outside the Fourth Form windows, the sashes up and down to let in air, and the curious heads of boys doing prep turning to look out. The indescribable atmosphere of school routine and all the furtive energies beneath it seemed to hang in the air, in the jar and scrape of a chair on the floor, the inaudible question, the raised voice telling them all to get on with their work.

In the front hall Peter said quietly, ‘I’m sure you’re dying for a drink.’ In his room he had plenty of gin and an unopened bottle of Noilly Prat.

‘Oh… thank you,’ said Paul, but wandered off round the hall table to gaze with unexpected interest at the Honours Boards. On the two black panels scholarships and exhibitions to obscure public schools were recorded in gold capitals. There were annoying variations in the size and angle of the lettering.

‘You notice D. L. Kitson?’

‘Oh, yes…?’

‘Donald Kitson… No? Anyway, he’s an actor. The school’s main claim to fame.’ There were squeaky footsteps behind them, on the polished oak of the stairs, the Headmaster’s crepe soles. He came towards them with his usual air of having leapt to a conclusion – this time, perhaps, a favourable one.

‘Ah, Peter, good. Praising our famous men.’ He must have seen the car return, the stranger come in.

‘Headmaster, this is my friend Paul Bryant – Paul…’ – and he rather mumbled the HM’s name, as if it were either confidential or unnecessary. He had the keenest sense yet of breaking the rules.

‘Well, welcome to Corley Court,’ said the Headmaster, standing with them to look at the Honours Boards. ‘I rather fear after this term we’re going to be in need of a new board.’ It was in fact notable that the frequency had picked up, after a hopeless five years, 1959 to ’64, in which there were no honours at all. ‘Peter’s working wonders with the Sixth Form,’ the Headmaster said, almost as if speaking to a parent. It was possible of course that he’d seen him in the bank, and was trying to place him.

‘Is it all right if I show Paul round a bit, Headmaster?’

The HM seemed to welcome the idea. ‘Keep out of prep, if you can. You’ll want to see the chapel. And the library. Actually,’ he said, with a glance at the window, practical and proprietary, as if regretting he couldn’t join them, ‘it’s not a bad evening for a hike round the Park.’

‘There’s a thought,’ said Peter, with a deadpan stare at Paul.

‘Get out on the Upper Tads! Get into the woods! What…!’

‘Well, we could…’ The old fool seemed to be chasing them into each other’s arms.

‘Now, I’m just going to check on the repairs,’ he said, moving away towards the door of the Fifth Form.

‘Well, I rather want Paul to see that too, if that’s all right,’ said Peter.

‘Most unfortunate, just before our Open Day,’ the HM continued in a confidential tone to Paul. He opened the left half of the double door and peered in in his brusquely suspicious way. ‘Well, they’ve made some progress’ – allowing Paul and Peter to follow him into the room, where instead of the bowed heads of boys doing prep they found the tables pushed back against the walls, sacks of rubble, and at the far end, above an improvised scaffold of ladders and planks, a large ragged hole in the ceiling. There was a smell of damp, and a layer of gritty dust over every surface. During Musical Appreciation on Tuesday evening, Matron’s bath had overflowed, the water finding its way down through the old ceiling beneath, where it must have built up for a while above the suspended 1920s ceiling before dripping, and pouring, and then crashing down excitingly in a mass of plaster on to a desk that the boys had only just vacated. The programme was still on the blackboard, in Peter’s famous handwriting, Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra and the William Tell overture, which had barely hit its stride when the first warm splat of water hit Phillipson’s neck.

‘Have you had a chance to admire the original ceiling, Headmaster?’ said Peter, unsure if he meant to amuse him or annoy him.

‘My whole concern,’ said the Headmaster, with that snuffling frankness that was his nearest shot at humour, ‘has been to get the thing patched up by Saturday!’

Peter scrunched his way among the herded chairs, Paul following, perhaps unsure of the seriousness of the event, peering around with a half-smile in the little primitive shock of being back in a classroom. ‘Matron must be mortified,’ Peter said, attributing finer feelings to her than she had given vent to at the time. He climbed up one of the A-shaped ladders supporting the platform Mr Sands and his son had been working from. ‘I’ve taken some photographs for the archives, by the way, Headmaster,’ he said, looking down with a precarious sense of advantage. The archives were a purely imaginary resource that the HM none the less wouldn’t want to deny. He and Paul gazed up at him with the usual mingled concern and impatience of the earthbound. ‘It’ll be wonderful if we can open up the whole thing.’

‘I advise you to make the most of it now,’ said the Headmaster. ‘It’s the last chance you’ll ever get.’ And again he glanced with a rough suspicion of humour at Paul.

‘Perhaps we could open it all up during the long vac?’

The Headmaster grunted, drawn against his will into a slightly undignified game. ‘When Sir Dudley Valance covered it up he knew exactly what he was doing.’

But Peter got Paul to climb up too, the planks jumping and yielding under their joint weight, and gripped his arm with insouciant firmness as they raised their heads and peered into the shadowy space between one ceiling and another. Their shoulders blocked most of the light through the hole, and towards the far end of the room this unexpected attic stretched away into complete darkness. It was perhaps two foot six high, the old dry timber smell confused with the rich smell of recent damp. ‘It’s hard to see,’ said Peter. ‘Hold on…’ and moving slowly he felt for his lighter in his jacket pocket, brought it up to head height and thumbed the flint. ‘Ruddy thing…’ Then he got it going and as he swept his arm in a slow arc they saw festive gleams and quickly swallowing shadows flow in and out of the little gilded domelets overhead. Between these there was shallow coffering, painted crimson and gold, and where the water had come through, bare laths and hanging fragments of horse-hair plaster. It seemed far from the architecture of everyday life, it was like finding a ruined pleasure palace, or burial chamber long since pillaged. Where the ceiling joined the nearest wall you could make out an ornate cornice, two gilded capitals and the murky apex of a large mirror.

‘Don’t set the place on fire, will you,’ said the Headmaster.

‘I promise not to,’ Peter said.

‘Fire and flood in one week…’ the Headmaster complained.

Peter winked at Paul by lighter-light, gazed slyly at his prim little mouth, slightly open as he peered upwards. ‘I’ve worked out this used to be the dining-room, you see,’ he said, the sound echoing secretively in the space. Then stooping down, ‘I was talking to the former Lady Valance about it the other night, Headmaster, she said it was her favourite room at Corley, with these absolutely marvellous jelly-mould domes.’

‘I’m not happy about you being up there,’ said the Headmaster.

‘I’m sure she’d love to come and see it again.’

‘Now, now, come on down.’

‘We’re coming,’ said Peter, squeezing Paul’s shoulder, and snapped the lighter shut. He wasn’t sure Paul was any more interested than the Headmaster himself. But the vision of the lost decoration, a glimpse of an uncharted further dimension of the house he was living in, was so stirring to him that it hardly mattered. It was a dream, a craze, put aside now almost ruefully in favour of his other craze, his bank-clerk friend.

‘Well, good to have met you,’ said the Headmaster as they went back into the hall. ‘And do bear in mind, if you want us to have your boy, put him down early: a number of OCs have been putting their boys down at birth – which is really the best advertisement a school can have.’

‘Oh… well, um… putting them down?’ said Paul – but the HM turned, and with a glance at his watch crossed to the huge hall table, an indestructible relic of the Valance days, snatched up the handbell which stood on it and rang it with implacable violence for ten seconds, as if repudiating by his stern management all the nonsense Peter had just been talking. And at once another old noise, high-pitched, echoing, with just a tinge of sadness for the lost silence, rose to life in the rooms beyond. Paul shivered, perhaps surprised by memory, and Peter pressed his hand in the small of his back as they moved towards the main stairs. Almost instantaneously, doors opened, and boys appeared in the hall. ‘Steady!’ the Headmaster shouted wearily. ‘Don’t run,’ and the boys curbed themselves and looked curiously at Paul as they went past. There was a strange atmosphere whenever someone from the outside world appeared in school, and Peter knew it would be talked about. He didn’t normally mind the lack of privacy, but for a moment it felt like being back at school himself. ‘Let’s get upstairs and have a drink,’ he murmured, with a pleasant but unencouraging nod to Milsom 1 as he filed past, clutching his Bible.

‘But what about Cecil?’ said Paul, hanging back on the third or fourth stair, with a regretful look.

‘Do you want to see him first? Okay, just a quick peek’ – Peter smiling narrowly at him and wondering if perhaps Cecil wasn’t a codeword after all. He led him back down, and off through the arch into the glazed cloister that ran along the side of the house. Work had already been put up here for the art exhibition. He bumped into Paul, as he halted politely to look at the watercolour sunsets pinned to boards. Here and there there was a sign of talent, something hopeful among the childish splodge. Art, which required technique as well as vision, was the subject Peter found most frustrating to teach; he wasn’t much good at it himself. He taught them perspective, in a strict way, which was something they might be grateful for. He wanted the warmth of Paul’s body, he leant on him and laid a hand along his shoulder, peering at a blotchy jam-jar of poppies by Priestman, which was thought to show promise. On what Neil McAll called ‘the sex front’ Peter’s time at Corley had been a desert, apart from a drunken night in London at half-term; it was shamingly clear that the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys had more fun than he did. Well, that was the age he’d started himself – he’d been at it ever since. He squeezed the back of Paul’s neck, a claim and a promise. Again it seemed strange that he fancied him as much as he did; and the mystery of it, which he had no desire to solve, only made the whole episode more compelling. In the chapel he was certainly going to kiss him, and get inside his clothes in one way or another; barring of course some possible rectitude of Paul’s about places of worship. ‘Come on,’ he said, taking his arm. But then as he turned the iron ring and eased open the chapel door, he heard the flagging wail of the harmonium. ‘Oh, Christ…’

Dusk came early to the chapel, and in the gloom a little tin lamp lit up the anxious features of a boy, in such an odd way Peter couldn’t see at first who it was. ‘Ah, Donaldson…’ – the sound faltered and broke off with a squeak.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘That’s all right… Carry on.’ The boy, not bad at the piano, had been given permission to explore this more troublesome instrument. ‘Don’t mind us!’ But he had lost confidence for a moment, he was all arms and legs with the treadles and the knee-flaps and pinning down the music. He picked a respectfully nasal stop, and began again on ‘All is safely gathered in.’

Paul had already gone towards the tomb, which seemed to float forward among the dark pews. Peter reached behind the door to click the stiff old switches, but no light came on. Donaldson glanced at him, and said, ‘I think the fuse must have gone, sir.’ Well, so much the better, it would be a twilit visit. The vivid glass by Clayton & Bell had closed down, in the sad way of church windows when the light is going, into sombre neutrality; the colours had become a dignified secret. This seemed somehow religious, a renewable mystery. Peter crossed himself as he approached, and frowned because he wasn’t sure what he meant by it, or even if he wanted Paul to see. It was certainly an unusual setting for a first date, and very different from others he had had, which had tended to be in pubs.

To fit in the whole school they had a line of chairs in the space on either side of Cecil. It was evident that the tomb, which the school was more or less proud of, was also a bit of a nuisance. The boys fixed pretend cigarettes between the poet’s marble lips, and one particularly stupid child long ago had carved his initials on the side of the chest. Peter moved chairs out of the way, with a foul scraping noise. Paul went up close, followed the inscription round, ‘CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC…’ Peter saw it freshly himself, second-rate art but a wonderful thing to have in the house; he felt happy and forgiving, having someone to show it to, someone who actually liked Valance, and perhaps hadn’t noticed he was second-rate too. The tomb made some grander case for Cecil, in the face of any such levelling quibble. ‘What do you think?’

It was still hard to tell if Paul’s solemn, self-conscious look expressed emotion or mere beetling politeness. He came back close to Peter to speak, as if the chapel imposed a certain discretion. ‘Funny, it doesn’t say he was a poet.’

‘No… no, that’s true,’ said Peter, moved himself and aroused by their repeated touching; ‘though the Horace, I suppose…’

‘Mm?’

He touched the plaited Gothic letters. ‘Tomorrow we shall set forth upon the boundless sea’ – trying not to sound too like a teacher as he translated.

‘Oh, yes…’

Getting into his stride, Donaldson pulled out something bigger, the Bourdon stop perhaps, for the next verse of the hymn, its loud plonking drone giving them a kind of cover. ‘Have you seen the Shelley Memorial in Oxford?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Surely the only portrait of a poet to show his cock,’ said Peter, and glanced over at Donaldson’s mirror to see if he’d been heard.

‘Mm, I expect it is,’ murmured Paul, but seemed too startled to catch his eye. He went up to look at the poet’s head, with Peter close behind him, blandly pretending to share his curiosity. Again he put his arm lightly across Paul’s shoulders, where his red sweater was slung round – ‘Handsome fellow,’ he said, ‘don’t you think?’ – and then with tense luxuriance let his hand drift slowly downwards, just the thin shirt here between his fingers and the warm hard curve of his spine – ‘I mean, not that he really looked like that’ – to that magical spot called the sacral chakra, which an Indian boy at Magdalen had told him one night was the pressure-point of all desires. So he pressed on it, tenderly, with a little questioning and promising movement of his middle finger, and felt Paul gasp and curl his back against him as if in some trap where the effort to escape only caught you the more tightly.

‘Fell at Maricourt,’ said Paul, now leaning forward as though he was going to kiss Cecil.

‘Well, quite,’ said Peter. He was entranced by his secret mischief, the ache of expectation like vertigo in his thighs and his chest. Paul half-turned towards him, flushed and shifty, worried perhaps by his own arousal. There was a comically disconcerting suggestion that Cecil himself had something to do with it. Now they had to be careful. As if archly colluding, Donaldson engaged the octave coupler for a further verse. Peter half expected to see his smirk in the mirror, but the boy was responding too hard to the querulous demands of his own instrument. Under the piping blare (‘free from sorrow, free from sin’) Peter said humorously and straightforwardly, ‘I really think we’d better go up to my room, don’t you.’

‘Oh… oh all right.’ Paul seemed to think ahead, as if at an unexpected change of plan.

Peter took him up the nearest back-stairs, and the first-floor corridor brought them past the laundry-room – at some point he wanted to take Paul up through the skylight there and on to the roof, which was for good reason the most out-of-bounds thing in the whole school. But he saw at once that the door was open – Matron was fossicking round in there, just her large white rump showing now to the passer-by. ‘Well, if you come again,’ he murmured; and saw Paul himself uncertain of such a prospect, eagerness struggling with some entrenched habit of disappointment. They went on, climbed the grand stairs to the second floor, there was the creak of the floorboard that Paul was hearing for the first time, and then they were in Peter’s room, with the door snapped shut between them and the world. He pulled Paul towards him and kissed him, and the door he was leaning on rattled in its lock at the sudden impact of their two bodies.

What he’d forgotten was that Paul would immediately start talking – his mouth two inches from Peter’s cheek, about how nice this first kiss had been, and how he liked Peter’s tie, and he’d been thinking all week… his colour at the happy end of the spectrum of embarrassment, his head hot and glowing, and the string of words, half-candid, half-senseless, a jerking safety-line… so Peter kissed him again, a long almost motionless kiss to calm him and shut him up and then, perhaps, to break him down. Focused as he was, he took in the familiar creak and rustle, way off behind him, through a mere thickness of oak, and then the short groan, like a polite but determined cough, of the floorboard just outside the door. There was a sharp knock, which they both felt. They froze for one second, Peter letting Paul slide out of his arms, then quickly buttoning his jacket, while still leaning heavily against the door. The handle turned, and the door budged slightly. None of the rooms at Corley had a key. He saw Paul had picked up a book, with a horrified pretence of calm, like a schoolboy about to be caught. Peter called, ‘Sorry, Matron!’ in a hollow voice, and with a funny impromptu kick at the door spun round and snatched it wide open.

Matron was holding a stack of folded sheets, with the grey starchy gleam of all the laundry at Corley. She peered into the room. ‘Oh, you’ve got a visitor,’ she said, apology and disapproval struggling uncertainly. There was her slight wheeze, having toiled up from the laundry-room, and the almost subliminal whistle of the clean sheets against her white-coated bosom. Peter smiled and stared. ‘I’m giving out clean sheets tonight, because of Open Day,’ Matron said. There was quite a charge of antagonism, a combative resistance to Peter’s charm, and, to be fair, his mockery.

‘I hope my room’s not going to be open too, Matron,’ he said. She grappled off the top sheet. ‘Here, let me…’ Really he should introduce Paul, but he preferred to excite her suspicion.

‘We all need to get ahead,’ she said, with a tight smile.

‘Oh, absolutely.’ It wasn’t clear if she expected him to change the bed right now. She looked narrowly towards it.

‘Well, then…! I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘Top to bottom.’

‘Of course.’

And with that she withdrew. Peter closed the door firmly, gave Paul a queasy grin and poured out two glasses of gin and vermouth. ‘Sorry about that. Have a drink… chin chin.’ They clinked their glasses, and Peter watched over his own raised rim as Paul sipped, with a little grimace, a swallowed urge to cough, and then put the glass down on the desk. He said, ‘God, you look so sexy,’ exciting himself more by his own choked sound. Paul gasped, and picked up his drink, and said something inaudible, which Peter felt sure must be along the same lines.

He thought the Park would offer more shelter than a room with a chair jammed under the door-handle, but as soon as they got outside he was aware of the unusual hum and crepitation of activity, a mower running, voices not far off. Still, the school seemed more delightfully surreal after a large gin drunk in two minutes. The evening had a lift and a stride to it. He remembered summer evenings at his own prep-school, and the haunting mystery, lit only by glimpses, of what the masters did after the boys were tucked up in bed. He wondered now if any of them had done what he was about to do. Paul seemed changed by the gin too, loosened up and at once a little wary of what he might say and do as a result. Peter asked him on a hunch if he were an only child, and Paul said, ‘Yes – I am,’ with a narrow smile, that seemed both to question the question and show exactly the only child’s sly self-reliance. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ve got a sister.’

‘I can’t imagine having a sister.’

‘And what about the rest of your family?’ – it was first-date talk, and Peter felt already he might not remember the answer. He wanted to get Paul into the Out-of-Bounds Woods. He took him quickly past the bleak little fishpond, and on towards the stone gate.

‘Well, there’s my mum.’

‘And what does she do?’

‘I’m afraid she doesn’t do anything really.’

‘No, nor does mine, but I thought I should ask.’

Paul paused, and then said quietly, ‘She got polio when I was eight.’

‘Oh, god, I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah… it’s been quite difficult actually.’ Something flavourless in his words, from embarrassment perhaps and repetition.

‘Where does she have it?’

‘Her… left leg is quite bad. She wears a caliper… you know. Though she often uses a wheelchair when she goes out.’

‘And what about your father?’

‘He was killed in the War, in fact,’ said Paul, with a strange, almost apologetic look. ‘He was a fighter pilot – but he went missing.’

‘My god,’ said Peter, with genuine sympathy, and seeing in a blundering way that all these things might help to explain Paul’s oddity and inhibition. ‘It must have been right at the end of the War.’

‘Well, that’s right.’

‘I mean, when were you born?’

‘March ’44.’

‘So you don’t remember him at all…’ Paul pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘God, I’m really sorry. So you have to support your mother?’

‘Well, more or less,’ said Paul, again with his air of hesitant acceptance, and familiarity with the fumbling sympathy of others when told the news.

‘But she gets an Air Force pension presumably?’ Peter’s Aunt Gwen did, so he knew about these things.

Paul seemed slightly irritated by this. ‘Yes, she does,’ he said; but then, more warmly, ‘No, that’s really important, obviously.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ said Peter quietly. He was naturally troubled, and half wished he hadn’t asked. He saw the flickering energy of the evening going out in sexless supportiveness; and some more shadowy sense of Paul having too many problems not to be a problem in himself.

‘It’s sort of why I didn’t apply to university,’ Paul said, with a shrug at this awkward conclusion.

‘Mm, you see I didn’t realize…’ said Peter, and left it at that. He thought, in a momentary montage, of what he had done at university, and tried to blink away the further faint sense of pity and disappointment that seemed to hover between him and this possible new boyfriend. He glanced at him walking along beside him, in his neat brown shoes, quite a springy step, hands awkwardly in his jeans pockets then out of them again, and his agonized look at saying anything at all personal about himself. Well, best to see these problems clearly from the start; a more experienced lover would conceal them till the honeymoon was over. They went past the Ionic temple, where the boys’ pets hopped and fluttered in their cages, and Brookings and Pearson in their dungarees were mawkishly grooming their rabbits. They went past the fenced square of the boys’ gardens, a place, as everyone said, like a graveyard, with its two dozen flowered plots. Again there were a few of the senior boys, let out in this magic hour after prep, on their knees with trowels, or watering their pansies and nasturtiums. Peter thought he saw from Paul’s smile that he was slightly frightened of the boys. In the far corner, looking vulnerable in the open air, was the fairy construction of Dupont’s garden, a miniature alp of balanced rocks with a gap at the top through which water could be poured from a can down a twisting cascade and into the wilderness of heathers and mosses below. Equally vulnerable was its aching claim on First Prize in the competition, to be judged by Craven’s mother, who was very much a salvia and marigold kind of woman. ‘They’re like graves, aren’t they!’ said Paul, and Peter touched him again forgivingly in the small of the back and they went on.

In the middle of the High Ground Mike Rawlins was mowing the sacred chain of the cricket pitch, in readiness for Saturday’s trouncing of Templers. Peter waved to him, and before they were near him he took Paul’s arm firmly and turned him round. ‘Now there you are…’ There was the house, massive and intense, and the farmlands beyond, flat and painterly in the heavy light, with the con-trails of planes from Brize Norton slowly lifting and dissolving in the clearer air above. Peter said, ‘You must admit.’ He wanted to get something out of Paul, as he might out of some promising but stubborn child. Though it occurred to him that the shyness he was trying to overcome might merely be a dullness he would always have to overlook.

‘Amazing,’ said Paul.

‘It’s all coming back, you know,’ Peter said, with a tight smile and shake of the head.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Victoriana. People are starting to understand it.’ Last year at St Pancras Station he had joined a small rally headed by John Betjeman; he dreamed of getting Betjeman to come and talk to the boys about Corley Court – he pictured his pleasure in the jelly-mould ceiling. ‘That’s my room, of course,’ he said, without pointing, and saw Paul had no idea which one he meant. In one or two other windows strip lights showed against the evening sun, and in the end room on the first floor the curtains were closed, the Babies already in bed, in the barely muted light.

‘Do you think Cecil Valance actually had an affair with Mrs Jacobs?’ said Paul.

‘Oh! Well, I suppose only one person alive knows for sure, and that’s what she says. Of course you never know exactly what people mean by an affair.’

‘No…’ said Paul, and sure enough he blushed again.

‘I think Cecil was probably queer, don’t you?’ said Peter, which was a mixture of a hunch and a certain amount of cheerfully wishful thinking, but Paul just gasped and looked away. There was a strange disturbance, almost subliminal at first. Over the rattling roar of the mower a few yards off a larger and darker noise began to drone and wallow, and then, not quite where they were looking, a military aircraft trawling low over the woods, steady, heavy-bellied, throbbing and majestic, and somehow aware, as if its pilot had waved, that its passage overhead was a marvel to the craning and turning figures below. Its four propellers gave it a patient, old-fashioned look, unlike the sleek unanswerable jets they saw long before they heard them. As it passed overhead and then over the house it appeared to rise a little before homing in through the lower haze towards the aerodrome five miles away. Mike sheltered his eyes with a raised right arm that seemed also to make a friendly claim or greeting. They went over, Peter introduced Paul, and Mike explained, amid the sweet and sharp smells of two-stroke exhaust and cut grass and his own sweat, that it was one of the big Belfast freighters they’d just brought in. ‘Sluggish old bus,’ he said, ‘but it’ll carry anything.’ In upper windows of the school boys who’d been watching stood down and melted away. And then the evening re-established itself, but perceptibly at a later phase, as if the past two minutes had been a tranced half-hour.

Ahead of them the little creosoted cottage of the cricket pavilion waited under the lengthening shadow of the woods, a possible place for a snog, at least, but still too much in Mike’s view. Peter put his arm round Paul’s shoulders, and they strolled on stiffly for a few seconds, Paul again unsure what to do with his hands. ‘No,’ said Peter smoothly, ‘I’d like to write something about old Cecil one day – I don’t think anyone has, since that Stokes memoir, you know.’

‘Right…’

‘Which is something of a period piece. Unreadable, really. That’s why I was asking George Sawle the other night.’

‘Do you write then?’

‘Well, I’m always writing something or other. And of course I keep a sensational diary.’

‘Oh, so do I,’ said Paul, and Peter saw him tremble and focus, ‘well, sensationally dull.’ There it was, the tiny treasured bit of wit in him. Peter fell on it with a laugh.

Just beyond the whited boundary lay the slipcatch, mown all around, but little used, tall grass growing up through its silvery slats. Peter liked the shape of it, like some archaic boat, and sometimes on evening walks by himself he lay down in it and blew cigarette-smoke at the midges overhead. He imagined lying in it now, with Paul close beside him. It was another of those sites where half-glimpsed fantasies, always in the air, touched down questioningly for a minute, and then flitted on.

Paul had found a cricket ball in the long grass, and stepping back a few yards he threw it swerving through the dip of the slipcatch and up into the air, where no one of course was waiting to receive it – it bounced once and ran off quickly towards the old parked roller, leaving Paul looking both smug and abashed. ‘I can see you’re rather good,’ said Peter drily; and nervous that he might be asked to put the slipcatch to its proper use, and lob a ball to and fro through it with Paul for half an hour, pretending not to care that he could neither catch nor throw, he walked smilingly on. There was something expert and even vicious in the flick of Paul’s arm and the hard momentary trundle of the ball along the curving rails.

It felt sweetly momentous to walk in under the edge of the wood. Here again the evening seemed suddenly advanced. Even the near distances were mysteriously barred and crowded with green, shadows blurred the massive tree-boles while the roof of the wood formed a far-off, slowly stirring dazzle. The horse-chestnuts and limes that made a great undulating wall around the playing-fields were mixed further in with large oaks and sinister clusters of yews. The children climbed and hid in the unchecked brushwood round the base of the limes, and scratched out their tunnels in the rooty soil beneath. Here and there the undergrowth thickened artificially with barricades of dead branches, the camouflaged camps they made, with hidden entrances too small for any master to crawl through. You couldn’t be sure if a rustling noise was a child at his spy-hole or a blackbird among the dead leaves.

Paul’s behaviour was more anxious now, he hung back again, craned round at the trees, found inexplicable interest among the leaves underfoot; his thin stiff smile of admiration was almost comical to see. ‘Come here,’ said Peter, and when Paul came to him, as if good-naturedly leaving something more involving, which still half-held his attention, he locked an arm tight under his elbow, making a quick necessary joke of that too, and marched him briskly along. ‘You’re coming with me!’ he said, and found himself shivering and swallowing with excitement and a kind of latent violence. He really wasn’t waiting for more than a minute longer – it was only the dim consciousness that outside this hot-faced rush of beautiful necessity there might still be boys about, among the trees, in the dugout of a camp, that kept him from seizing him roughly there and then. He saw of course that Paul needed this treatment, needed someone to override him. Still, he had to give in, after a few ducking and face-shielding yards of scrambling through the saplings and thick undergrowth, to Paul’s ‘Um, actually…!’, his tug and grimace less scared than indignant.

‘Sorry, my dear, am I hurting you?’ Peter’s grasp became a reasonable stroke, a clumsy holding hands, two fingers plaited for a moment, his endearment gleaming with his humorous annoyance at being checked. He looked around as if thinking of something else; it seemed all right, and then, with a moment’s courteous questioning pause in the air, he kissed him fully but gently on the lips. He made the promise of withdrawing a part of the advance, a tantalizing tremor. And again, as if overcome, Paul yielded; and again, when Peter pulled back and smiled, he started talking. ‘Oh god…’ he said, in a sort of tragical quiet voice Peter hadn’t heard before. ‘Oh my god.’

‘Come on then,’ said Peter quietly, and they walked on with a new sense of purpose, surely, towards the massive old wreck of a tree which Peter thought of as a kind of Herne’s Oak. Beyond here was the line, invisible but potent as any prep-school law or prohibition, dividing the In-Bounds from the Out-of-Bounds Woods.

Peter dropped Paul in Marlborough Gardens, watched from behind the wheel as he let himself in, with a quick turn of the head in the lighted doorway but no wave. At a bedroom window a light already showed through unlined pink curtains; in a minute the bathroom light went on. He had a sense of the private but simple life of the household marked out in lights, and Paul reabsorbed into its routines, which both were and weren’t his own; relieved to be back, in a way, but glowing and inattentive surely with new knowledge. Peter wrestled the car into gear and made off with his usual air of helpless indiscretion round the loop of the Gardens.

He wondered if Paul might be too strange for him after all. It might be hard work having such a silent boyfriend, his reserve seemed like a judgement on you. Still, certainly worth holding on to him in the present dearth of opportunity. Someone else might not see the point of him at all – someone who hadn’t touched his hot sleek skin, felt his hesitations and his burning little stabs at letting go. He had a charming, slightly tapering cock, hard as a hat-peg, which he had clearly been astonished, and almost appalled, to see in the hands of someone other than himself, and then in the mouth. He had panted and giggled at the shock. And then quickly, afterwards, he started to fret – he let Peter hold him, and hold his hand, but he had a troubled look, as if he felt he had let himself down. They almost rushed, then, to get him back home; they parted with only a ‘See you soon’ and the darting, deniable kiss on the cheek in the insecure shadow of the car. Yet all these little awkwardnesses raised the game for Peter, and excited him more. It wasn’t at all like other affairs he had had, but he felt the same disorienting rush of insight, the roll and lift of some larger conveyance than a rattling Hillman Imp. On the main road back to Corley, with the windows down, a new smell blew in, the moist sweet night smell off the fields and trees, all the more mysterious when the nights were so short. The sun would be up a little after four: and find them both waking to their separate sense of how things had changed. Peter saw his thoughts drifting during lessons, and Paul with the paying-in books, preoccupied by his sensations, perched on his swivel stool in a distracting new awareness of being thought about and wanted.

He slowed and indicated to the empty road, and turned in through the gates to the heavier occluded darkness of the Park. The lights of home… the mile of scented darkness… The woods had grown up a lot, clearly, since Cecil’s day: now the lights of the school were hidden. That mile, too, was a purely poetical distance – or a social one, perhaps, designed to impress. It was one of Cecil’s many invitations to admire him, though not, presumably, to turn up at Corley Court in person. He appeared to the reader on fast-moving horse-back, this latter-day world of cheap cars and jet-planes superbly unimagined.

Between the White Horse downs and Radcot Bridge

Nothing but corn and copse and shadowed grazing,

Grey village spires and sleeping thatch, and stems

Of moon-faced mayweed under poplars gazing

Upon their moon-cast shadows in the Thames.

It was one of his better pre-war poems, though with that tendency to sonorous padding that spoiled almost everything he wrote if judged by the sternest standard.

Peter parked on the front gravel and made a poor attempt to shut the car door quietly. The moon was up, among streaky clouds, and before going in he walked round in front of the house, across the lawn by the fishpond, and back up the rise towards the gate into the High Ground. He seemed to stride through the complex calm of sexual gratification, borne along by running and looping images of what had happened – he saw himself enhancing it, warming it by little touches, then felt the countervailing cool of something like unease, the cool of loneliness. If Paul were with him still, they would make it better, do it over again. No doubt it was painful for anyone who was courting, but for two men… He stopped in front of the Ionic temple and peered into the deep shadow, oddly wary of the warm life caged invisibly there. Perhaps disturbed by him, a rabbit or hamster rustled and scratched, a budgie hopped and fluttered and tinkled its bell. He went on and stood by the gate, looking back, the moonlight and its shadows making the house insubstantial, for all its pinnacled bulk, as if half in ruin. The dorms were all dark but the light of the Headmaster’s television flickered inside the oriel window. The moon gleamed sharply on the pointed vane of the chapel roof, and on the dial of the stopped clock in the central gable, under the pale stone banner of the Valance motto, ‘Seize the Day’.

It was funny how Paul had been turned on by Cecil’s tomb, and by the fact of Corley having been his home. Cecil’s brother, of course, had stayed on here for thirty years more, till the military took over. It was surely good luck in the end that all the Victorian work was boxed in – there was nothing for the army to ruin. Dudley Valance’s hatred for the house was what had preserved it. It would be worth trying to talk to him about the early days, about Cecil as a boy. In Black Flowers he dealt very coolly with his brother – there was quite a sarcastic tone to some of it. Still, what a subject, two writers growing up in this astonishing place, the whole age that had built it riding for a fall. Perhaps he should seize the day himself, and start gathering materials, talking to people like old Daphne Jacobs who still remembered Cecil, and had loved him, and apparently been loved back.

Were people interested in Cecil? How did he rank? Undeniably a very minor poet, who just happened to have written lines here and there that had stuck… But his life was dramatic as well as short, and now everyone was mad about the First World War – the Sixth Form all learned ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by heart, and they liked the Valance war poems he had shown them. There was something a little bit queer about several of these poems; something he suspected in Dudley, too. Dudley seemed if anything the queerer one, with his intense devotion to the man he called Billy Prideaux, who’d been shot beside him on a night recce, and seemed to have triggered a nervous breakdown, powerfully but obscurely described in his book.

Peter came back to the stone bench by the fishpond and lit a cigarette. Cecil’s letters would be the thing to get a look at – Peter hoped his charm had worked last week on George Sawle, who must have all sorts of useful memories. Interesting what he’d said about Lytton Strachey too, and this book that was about to come out. Was the era of hearsay about to give way to an age of documentation? He looked at the house, as if it enshrined the mystery and in its Victorian way imposed the task. Was he up to writing a biography? It would take a much more orderly existence than any he’d managed so far… It was odd, it often struck him, being here in the country with these eighty children and a group of adults he would never have chosen as friends. But it would be at least a symbolic advantage, if he were to write the book. The stars thickened in the outer sky and the sinking moon threw the steep black profile of the roof into Gothic relief. It was windless and warm, the near-stasis of an ideal English summer. It all looked very good for the Open Day. He got up and strolled back towards the house in the nice tired mood of prospective exertion.

What was that? A hand stroked the back of his neck as the shadow of a tall brick chimney high above the Headmaster’s window wobbled and shifted. A kite-like form detached itself, and moved with dreamy-looking wariness across the sloping upper leads; five seconds later another, hesitant but committed, and making it seem that the inky shadow might harbour many more of them. They were strangely antique, these two figures, of uncertain size and height, and seemed to flow like oily shadows themselves, in dressing-gowns left open like cloaks. They crept from chimney-stack to chimney-stack, towards the higher slope of the chapel roof, with its crowning spirelet still far above their heads. Once or twice Peter could hear very faintly the patter or slither of their slippered feet.

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