The Folding Star (7 page)

Then, shouting sporadic obscenities, a small bearded man in torn and filthy tweeds came past, waving a stick and making occasional growling sallies at parents and at their slightly scared children, who I guessed were wondering if their mums and dads also knew these wild words that were never heard at home. In front of him hurried a black-and-white terrier, which seemed partly to share in and partly to apologise for its master’s performance, and glanced at the animals that were for sale as if to show a puzzled awareness of kinship. When the man wasn’t ranting the dog barked, so as to keep the noise more or less continuous. ‘It’s only old Gus,’ said a man next to me; but his bearing wasn’t old – it had a certain mocking rectitude – and when he glanced at me I flinched from a sharp-eyed handsomeness lined and broken under matted hair and a week of beard. He was old in the sense that a ‘character’ is old, and with the premature old age of the destitute. Once he had gone past, one or two of the boys had the courage to whoop a childish insult at him.

I had finished with the market but waited a moment until Gus had gone before following him – wary of the man, although when he did turn and brace his shoulders, or dart at someone who embodied for a second whatever it was he hated and raged against, the swipes of his stick fell short; and his words could be laughed uneasily off. At the street’s end light struck in from the wider thoroughfare that crossed it and people stood talking in a weekend muddle of idleness and busyness. A nice-looking short dark boy, hands in the pockets of baggy blue corduroys, a guernsey round his shoulders, stepped backwards laughing just as Gus came up behind him. They both recoiled, the boy with momentarily delayed horror, Gus with the snarl of one who loathes above all to be touched; then silence and then a brown-toothed smile. He stepped forward, clutching with his left hand at the low, blackened crotch of his trousers. ‘I know all about little boys,’ he said, ‘I know all about cocks and cunts’ – so that the kid backed off and turned away fast, though with a mock-cheery shout to his companions. But Gus had already lost interest.

The indolent bunching of the shoppers, a parked van, the street corner with its hanging lamp and mutilated figure of St Anthony of Padua – all prevented me from seeing that broad-shouldered, strong-bottomed lad, and on impulse I followed him round the corner. He and his friends had cantered on for a bit, and it took me a moment to find them, stopped again under the iron and glass marquee of the theatre. There was my friend, and a taller fair boy beside him; beyond them, looking back at me, was a calm, wide-faced girl, hair cut in a shining bob. The shorter boy’s hand rested above the small of the taller one’s back, as if he had touched it lightly to reassure him or command his attention and then left it there in comfortable forgetfulness. It was a turning-point in my life, this second sighting of Luc. I knew at once how the shape of him lingered in me, like a bright image gleaming and floating on the sleepy retina: there was a kind of miserable excitement, a lurch of the heart. At the moment I recognised him and laid a hopeless claim to him, I knew I was observing him on the loose in a world that barely touched on mine: I had the clearest sense of his indifference, as he stood there with his back to me in a brown suede jerkin and white jeans, his back on which this appealing stranger was allowed to rest his hand, confident in some unguessed intimacy. Never love at first sight; but second sometimes – while I strode through the theatre colonnade, as if unaware of the three, and with a certain glamorous urgency bent on some objective beyond them, the singing echoes of my shoe-tips rang through a longer arched perspective, and seemed to summon up the skitterings of earlier loves setting out on their improbable journeys. The three had perhaps reached a natural pause in their conversation, though of course I thought their quite abrupt silence, when I was just by them but looking away at the long irrelevant announcements for
Henry VIII
and
La Siffleuse
, was virtually an act of aggression. I swept on stiffly to the Grote Markt, and crossed it as if they were still watching me, even following me. It was not till I got to the Tourist Office, went unhesitatingly inside and stood at a rack of cards, looking past it through the huge lettered window and found that they were nowhere to be seen, that I marvelled abjectly at how my sudden burst of feeling had wrongfooted me. I had lost the chance of an easy greeting, a display of the amiable equality of our dealings, a word or two with his beautiful friends. I could have put my arm around that broad suede back, just above the other one, and claimed the beginnings of a friendship just as intense. I plucked out postcards one after another and amassed them like a terrible hand at pontoon: the Belfry, the Belfry, a frozen canal, a mural from the Town Hall, painted by Edgard Orst.

I was in a dingy old bookshop, running my eye blindly over the stock, waiting for the storm in my head to pass: the place was a refuge, a bunker, insulated by its own dusty tedium and the bulkheads of paper and worn leather. I froze off the donnish assistant, who enquired as to my special interests and who may have thought I was a thief – I who had stolen nothing in my life. I worked my way into the remotest back-room, where there were three or four shelves of English books under the stairs, and crouched down in front of them with the feeling I was asking them for help.

H. E. Bates,
Hard Times
, Drabble, ancient abridged texts of
Gulliver
and
Crusoe
with the cancelled library stamp of St Narcissus, the ringed golden flower on the dull green boards … The Poetry Section, Arkell, Armstrong, Arnold (Edwin and Matthew), it was like Digby’s at home, where I’d had my first holiday job – a receiving area for dead and dying enthusiasms. Some local Anglophile of advanced years must have passed away. I saw my long-lost schoolfriend
Poets of Our Time
, and took it out and clutched it without opening it. I thought I would give it to Luc; we could study the Binyon and Bottomley and Masefield together, without his knowing how their phrases ran through my past, the melancholy secrecy of reading. It struck me I should buy him other books as well, they would be presents, too musty to be recognised as such, with invisible inscriptions. I took down an
Awkward Age
, a
Persuasion
, a
Love’s Labour’s Lost
with immediate firmness. And of course a tough enough reading-list would keep him busy, he’d have no spare time for his vacuous pawing friends, his day would be somehow mine; and the evenings – perhaps he would need to see me in the evenings to sort out his finer uncertainties, questions of motive and metaphor … I ran along the shelf again and frowned to read the rubbed title of a novel; it took several seconds for me to be sure – it really was one of my Aunt Tina’s, foxed and crumbly, on wartime paper, and priced as if the dealer knew the value it would have to one affectionate customer. There were family as well as friends here under the stairs.

When I didn’t go to the Cassette I went to the Golden Calf, an old men’s bar in the middle of town but so tucked away up an alley full of bicycles and beer crates that it could have been anywhere. The regulars either sat in unexpecting silence or spoke loudly and infrequently about what they’d seen on television. You could have been in a lounge bar in a market town in the west of England, or even in the George IV at home, except that here there was no music, which made it better for reading or writing letters. Today I sat with
Careful, Mary!
to distract me between the malty mouthfuls of a lunchtime ‘Silence’ – a flooring brew from Antwerp alleged to be made by Trappist monks. I felt obtusely proud of the filthy little book, and wanted to tell the old boy next to me how Christina McFie was my comical-tragical great-aunt.

Careful, Mary!
was, or else wasn’t, one of her best – it depended on whether you took her seriously or enjoyed her as a bizarre joke. Aunt Tina had spent a long childless adulthood in Africa, married to a Scottish coffee-planter, and her novels had come to her almost unbidden, like letters full of homesickness and childish make-believe. The more she wrote of England the more romantic her picture of it became – after three or four books it was barely recognisable; but her gaffes began to attract her a new audience, who loved the inadvertent comedy of her naively lofty style. For a while there had even been a Christina McFie fan-club, though it was never quite clear if she was fooled or if she took it in the camp spirit in which it was intended. I remembered the disappointment I’d felt as a child when she returned from Kenya and I discovered that she wasn’t black, merely tanned and wizened; she had a sharp smell that struck a hugged six-year-old keenly, and wore trousers and smoked yellow cigarettes.

I had read
Careful, Mary!
when I was still too young to know what was wrong with it; it was the one in which she got muddled up and wrote about Bermondsey when she clearly meant Belgravia; the raffish ‘Bermondsey set’ were like figures from Thackeray oddly translated to the era of Victrolas and racing Bentleys. Still, why not? I thought. And then she had ended up in Chislehurst, in eccentric isolation amid some private fantasy of England.

I was quite taken by her portrait of the young Duke of Bermondsey and absorbed myself with deliberate enthusiasm in her topsy-turvy world. Then I finished my glass and the pleasure shrivelled. I closed the book and sat back with my head against the wall, drumming my fingers tentatively on the cover, half-smiling to myself with misery that this could have happened again. And with the excitement of a recognised necessity, too. Out in the streets I walked fast but aimlessly around, drymouthed and giddy with early-afternoon drunkenness under the glare of thin cloud. Soon I was in my street, I was in my room and closed the door. It felt warm and remote there, like a room left behind when everyone has gone to church: and there were the cold coffee-cups and old papers strewn about for a maid to clear in their absence.

Somewhere, now, Luc was … doing something. At home, perhaps, over lunch with his mother, eating well amid sparse conversation. She didn’t understand how beautiful he was, she censured the sprawl of those long white-jeaned thighs under the table where he and I had sat for our hour. He was in the starry dream-orbit of his youth and she was trying to ground him with her worries and precautions. Or perhaps he had gone to a café with his two friends, they had got a bit drunk and excited on a bottle of red. The friends must love him and more or less openly desire him. I lay spreadeagled on the jangling bed to think, the back of a hand across my eyes. I heard St Narcissus strike three. When I woke the room was full of shadows and through the chambered thickness of the walls came the laughter of the Spanish girls.

It was not too early to go to the Cassette, and I had the makings of a bright, dry headache which could best be prevented by a flood of light Belgian beer. In the various streets and small squares around the Town Hall the markets were closing up now, the canvas was folded off the stalls, rails of clothes were trundled with flailing wheels over the cobbles towards waiting vans, a huge compressor lorry inched through the debris, fed at the back by teams of overalled oldsters … The proper emptiness of the place was being re-admitted, surrendered to – and it filled me with gratitude and panic in rapid alternation. The annoying distractions were being removed, but the vacancy that followed left me impatient for company: company to hold and hint at my wild new secret amongst.

Cherif was already at the bar, apart at the far end, leaning on the counter, drunk and dejected after a couple of hours of TV football. On the screen above, pundits in white sweaters were analysing the game, and Cherif brought his fist down on the bar again at the slow-motion replay of an upsetting first-half goal. It took him a moment to refocus on me, and to accept the odd fervour of my kiss and embrace. I bought us beers and stood behind him as he watched the interview with the winning manager, and hugged him tight with my head on his shoulder. I sniffed up his smoky, beery slowness, and tucked my right hand in his waistband and felt for the clean beginning of the hair above his cock – what at ten or twelve, awed as children in a fairy-tale, we had called a ‘forest’. How any groping, now, at thirty-three, retained the freshness and the shock of those first twilight wanderings out of bounds, the first wonder of consent … My left hand was in his left pocket, working on his dick through the rough lining, gently, so no one down the room would notice – until he twisted away and denied me with a little gasp.

Now that it came to it I didn’t know how to make my confession. I took him off to a table in the corner, though I knew he was still looking from time to time at the TV screen perched beyond me and at an angle, so that he could only half make out the picture but couldn’t stop trying to follow it. He couldn’t see why we’d had to move, though I was so caught up in my secret and the acclaim that would greet it that I missed the note of bossiness in my own voice.

‘Cherif, listen,’ I said: ‘I’m in love.’

He looked at me dully, then leant forward and kissed me on the lips. I felt quite pleased that I had his blessing. ‘My friend,’ he said.

‘It’s all a bit sudden, though I suppose I could see it coming.’ He remained silent, incurious, then looked down as if feeling had for a moment made him shy; and reached in the pockets of his leather jacket for cigarettes and matches. ‘I suppose you can guess who it is,’ I said, with a little breathy giggle now I was so near to saying. He lit a fag and then offered me one, and though nerves tempted me and I was relishing already the shot of smoke and the gently crackling combustion, my hand was trembling too much to accept. He glanced up at the TV again and then back to me. I said, ‘It’s my pupil Luc’, and he said flatly, ‘I love you too’, at exactly the same moment.

I had reached across the table to cover his fist for the announcement and in the silence that followed he looked down at this loose handclasp with a rather impressive contempt. He let me force my fingers into the curl of his, but I soon withdrew them. ‘Of course I still want to be with you,’ I said, like the clumsiest kind of adulterer – and for a second or two I hungered for Cherif and was mad with irritation at him and myself. After that he was in an angry sulk for the rest of the evening and was difficult company. I wandered and settled amongst the other people I was getting to know. Perhaps I forced myself on them – but I presumed on a kind of queer camaraderie and drank so as not to notice.