The Lying Tongue (11 page)

Crace’s narrow, slit eyes widened, his nostrils flared and he leaned closer toward me.

“At school, I suppose I had terrible crushes on a series of slightly older boys, which everyone says is perfectly natural, but then there was something else. There was a sort of longing. I never did anything, you understand, but it was always there, like a shadow in the background.”

“I see.”

“I remember one lunchtime when I was in the fifth form, I was sitting by myself in a classroom reading a book when one of the boys, one of the boys I liked, came in. I can hardly describe what I felt. He swaggered into the room—he was built like a rugby player—and sat on the desk in front of me. Then, without looking at me, he lay across the neighboring desk and stretched himself out.”

Crace swallowed and ran a moist tongue over his thin lips. His eyelids had started to droop and it looked as though he was slipping into some kind of hypnosis. I continued with my story.

“He raised his arms above his head and then he ran one of his hands across his shirt, so that he exposed his stomach. I couldn’t bear it any longer, I wanted to reach out and touch him, but I felt confused. His head faced the blackboard, turned away from me so I couldn’t look into his eyes and perhaps he was completely unaware of my presence or at least regarded me as so insignificant as to not worry about. I stretched out my hand and”—I reached across the table as if to imitate the action, maintaining eye contact with Crace as I did so. I checked the position of the key, still lying by his plate at the edge of the table and then grabbed Crace’s left hand—“touched him.”

Crace woke up from the somnambulistic state with a start. His hand jumped, displacing my own. Exaggerating the force of the movement, I brought the top of my hand down on the key and brushed it off the table so that it landed near my foot. I quickly moved my shoe, trapping it underneath. I was certain that Crace, with his poor eyesight, had not seen.

“Oh God, how stupid of me,” I said. “I’m so sorry, but I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. I just hope it hasn’t gone down one of the cracks in the floor.”

Crace was silent.

“I can’t believe I told you all that nonsense,” I said as I continued to pretend to scan the floor. “Sorry to burden you with all that.”

Crace turned and looked down at me. I felt my face reddening.

“No, not at all. Obviously it’s something you needed to get off your chest, so to speak. Never mind about the key—you can look for it later. You may as well continue telling me the rest of the story.”

“Well,” I said, clearing my throat, “these things never end how you want them to, do they? Just as I reached out, another boy burst into the room. I think he saw what I was about to do but didn’t say anything. Nothing happened after that—we never had the opportunity, he left to go to university and we never met again. But it’s funny that hardly a week goes past that I don’t think about him.”

“And how did this affect your relationship, may I ask?”

“Eliza always suspected that I might have had those kind of feelings. I told her I had never done anything about it, and she was so supportive and understanding. She even suggested that I try it; she said she wouldn’t mind. Of course, now in retrospect, I realize why she had said that—she would feel less guilty about her own secrets.”

“Yes, I see,” said Crace, nodding sympathetically. “And how do you feel now?”

“Confused,” I said. “I’m not sure what I want—and I still have feelings for Eliza.”

“Do you mind if I give you one piece of advice?” said Crace, clearing his throat.

“No, please do. I’d be really grateful. I am in a bit of a state about all this.”

“Of course, I don’t know the whole situation, by any means,” he said, overemphasizing the last three words of the sentence. “But if I were you, I would make a clean break of it with your girlfriend and tell her the truth—that you are uncertain about your preferences and need some time to explore various options. There’s no point suppressing anything at your age. You need to experiment.”

“But I feel apprehensive; it seems so wrong somehow. A bit seedy—do you know what I mean?”

Crace paused.

“It’s far from wrong or dirty, Adam. In fact, the love between two men can be one of the most beautiful things on earth.”

He didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then his eyes started to dance nervously around the room. Clearly, his confession had embarrassed him and he wanted to retreat into the safety of our previous conversation.

“Where is it? It must be on the floor somewhere,” said Crace, shifting in his chair to turn around.

“I’m sure I’ll find it,” I said, taking the opportunity to quickly bend down and pocket the key.

I stood up and walked across the kitchen. I crouched down to pretend to look for the key, but as I ran my hands across the floor, something caught the cut on my thumb.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Adam, watch what you’re doing. You’re bleeding all over the place. Go into the bathroom and wash it off.”

I pushed my thumb into my mouth and sucked the blood away. Yet as soon as I pulled it out again, a bright red bead bubbled up to the surface of the skin.

“Just let me clean this up first,” I said, getting a cloth from under the kitchen sink. But as I bent down to wipe up the smear, more blood trickled out of me.

“Give it here,” said Crace. “You’d better go and find a plaster before you bleed to death.”

“Okay, you’re right,” I said, knowing that if I was quick, this was my opportunity to retrieve the letter.

I walked down to the bathroom, opened the mirrored cabinet above the washbasin, and took out the tin box that housed various creams, lotions and pills. The medicinal smell reminded me of school. I fingered around in it, careful not to spill any drops of blood into the tin, and fished out a plaster. After applying it to my thumb, I switched on the taps, dashed back through the hall, careful that Crace didn’t see me, down the steps and into the courtyard, sunlight blinding me as I moved out of the shadows. I dug deep into my pockets to retrieve the tiny key, but as I brought it out, ready to insert into the letter box, it seemed to slip about like a little fish out of water. I looked up at the top of the staircase to make sure Crace wasn’t watching me before pushing it into the lock. With one click, it opened.

I lifted the metal lid and dropped my hand inside. I heard a rustling of paper and pulled out a thin, airmail envelope covered with scrappy handwriting. It was from her. I desperately wanted to tear it open and read its contents, but I had to get back upstairs. I shoved it into my pocket, dropped the lid of the letter box and turned the lock. Then I ran back upstairs, down the portego to the bathroom, switched off the taps and into the kitchen. Crace was struggling to get up from his kneeling position.

“I’m sorry. The damned thing just wouldn’t stop bleeding, so I had to keep it under the tap,” I said as I helped him to his feet.

“Let’s see,” said Crace, grasping my hand and bringing the cut digit closer to his face. “Your hand is still hot.”

He eyed me with suspicion.

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to buy time to think.

“You can’t have put your hand under the tap to stop the bleeding because your hand is not cold.”

I didn’t know what to say. Had he guessed? Had he seen me?

“Let me explain—”

Crace cut me off. “You fool, you’re supposed to put it under the cold, not the hot tap. Didn’t your parents teach you anything?”

I had to disguise my relief.

“I just hope I never have to depend on you for first aid.”

We both laughed.

“Now, let’s find that fucking key, shall we?”

Needless to say, it didn’t take us long to find it. When I thought Crace wasn’t looking, I simply took it out of my pocket and quietly placed it on the floor, behind one of the legs of the dining table.

“There it is,” I said, pointing. You could just see the end of it sticking out from the shadows. I stretched out and grabbed it, bringing it up to show Crace as proudly as a boy diver brandishing an oyster containing a fat pearl.

“Well done, Adam, well done,” he said, patting me lightly on the arm. “So let’s go and see what secrets the box holds, shall we? You don’t mind, do you?”

He seemed unusually keen to accompany me downstairs, and I couldn’t fob him off any more. Perhaps my story had been so compelling that he now felt unusually involved, curious to know more about Eliza and the situation back home. Maybe he even felt like part of me in a funny sort of way. It didn’t matter. Who cared? Now there was nothing to fear. I had retrieved the letter from the box. I was on his trail. I was in control.

We walked slowly together down the portego. I supported him as he lowered himself down one stair at a time into the courtyard, his skeletal hands cupping themselves around my shoulders, occasionally touching my neck as we descended. Crace stopped for a moment as we passed the Cupid sculpture in the center of the courtyard and mumbled something about love not looking with the eyes but the mind. He turned to me and smiled.

“Go on then, Adam. Let’s see what’s inside.” He gestured to the box.

As I pushed the key into the lock, a bloody fingerprint on the lid looked back at me like an unblinking, dark red eye.

“Found anything?” asked Crace.

I lifted the lid, trying to smudge away the print as I did so. I reached inside.

“There’s nothing here,” I said.

“Now, isn’t that strange?”

All I wanted to do was escape into my bedroom where I could read the letter. But as I helped Crace into his chair in the drawing room, he patted the neighboring chair and gestured for me to sit by him. He looked at me with a serious, concerned expression.

“I think we need to talk a little more about what we were discussing earlier,” he said.

There was no way out of this one. I sat down beside him. I could feel my face beginning to burn.

“But before we do, I feel it only fair that I tell you a little about myself,” Crace said, his tongue flicking over his thin, dry lips. “I’ve deliberately given you very little information or insight into my life, and please don’t think that is a reflection on you. In fact, it has nothing to do with you whatsoever. I have to be careful, you see. Well, I suppose I feel I have to be careful. Oh, I’m afraid I’m making very little sense.” His face seemed to crease and crumple like an old sheet of paper. “Of course, I know what you must think of me, living here without stepping outside—”

I tried to speak, to come to his defense out of a spirit of politeness, but he raised his hand and brushed aside whatever I was going to say.

“And I do think that to the outside world I must appear rather an eccentric, indeed quite a sad creature—never engaging with anyone, never experiencing anything, forever locked into my own little world, surrounded by my books and my art, remnants of another age. But I’m happy, whatever that really means. Well, as happy as I’m sure I could ever be.”

He paused and took a deep breath before he shifted in his seat.

“Listen to me, circumnavigating the main issue as usual. Sorry, Adam, it’s just that I haven’t talked like this for such a long time. You’ll have to forgive me if I digress or wander off down some conversational pathway that looks like it’s leading to nowhere. But the only reason I’m doing this—the only reason at all—is because I feel it might help you. There was a time in my life when I felt confused and unhappy and… uncertain about what and who I wanted.”

I waited for him to continue.

“I was young, like you. After Oxford I started work as an English master, and one of my first jobs was at this school in Dorset. Again like you, I had ambitions to write. I had an idea for a novel, and I worked on it when I wasn’t teaching. It all seems so long ago now. In a way, I can’t believe it’s me I’m talking about. Anyway, soon after starting at the school, I became very friendly with another teacher, Ruth Chaning, who taught art on a part-time basis. She was about my age, in her early twenties, and as both of us were new to the school and did not know many people in the area, it was only right and proper that we should spend time together. Throughout our friendship I waited for the right moment to tell her that… that I was not attracted to women. But when, one night, walking back from the village pub, she reached out and pulled me toward her and kissed me, I felt like it was too late. The right moment had passed. It wasn’t that I felt sorry for her, but looking back it was terribly immature of me not to say anything.”