At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [123]
It was love, of course, that separated them. So clear it shone it hurt to see. A dozen boys who loved their master. In loving they became extraordinary. Embodiments of unattainable desire, fantastic as the man they served.
For the schoolmaster, MacMurrough had found, was indeed fantastic. His aunt’s priest had made their introduction—Happy to, Servant, Yours to command—and shortly after had been called away. There was the least inquisition of a smile on the schoolmaster’s face. Hair glistened with oil against a broad white forehead. Deep-set eyes, one of which had something of a cast, occasioning MacMurrough to avert his glance and peer at his shoes instead.
Might he help the schoolmaster to wine? The schoolmaster thanked him, but he would not. MacMurrough understood the schoolmaster was to give an oration on the morrow. The schoolmaster had that honor, it was true. Was the departed a particular friend of the schoolmaster’s? They were not personally acquainted, but the deceased had worked long in the public arena.
It was pinch and cramp to get any conversation at all. MacMurrough scraped his bals on the gravel. He had heard the schoolmaster was recently returned from Connemara. Gravely nodded the high-walled forehead. Was MacMurrough familiar with the west of Ireland? MacMurrough was ashamed to say, no; however, he entertained a notion of its being picturesque. The schoolmaster would assure him of that. And had the schoolmaster enjoyed his holiday? For his sins, the schoolmaster had been much engaged in the penning of his oration.
Which rather had them back where they’d started. And that, on the face of it, was that. Save there had been an undertone quite the obverse of these mundanities. There could not be so very much in their ages, but the schoolmaster had made MacMurrough feel himself a schoolboy.
Or, rather, he had not quelled the feeling. For MacMurrough often had a sense of his being younger. This was not a fancy, certainly it was not deliberate. His unconscious mind had not kept pace with the years. He did not know why and he had given up wondering, but just on that threshold before thought or action his sense of himself was of a burgeoning youth. He was on the verge of manhood, always the verge. So persistent was this notion that strangers he encountered, ontologically his junior, he would often consider his psychological senior. His immediate disposition was to defer to such were they of his caste, be fucked by them were they not. This notion could not survive the liminal step into consciousness. Consciousness pulled him up, sharp as a looking-glass, and told out his proper years. But there it was. Before he thought or he acted, MacMurrough was a boy on the verge of manhood. Always, just.
And the schoolmaster, in his halting way, had not addressed himself ad hominem to MacMurrough. He had found out this youth, had found him out and drawn him on. For that little while on the terrace together, MacMurrough had consciously been a boy in the presence of his master. He had a schoolboy’s itch to play practical jokes on this reverent character. Even more, a schoolboy’s sense of fairness that it would be shabby to deceive so patently unworldly a man. He rather felt he wanted to please him. He wanted to overhear him say to another, Young MacMurrough is coming along well. We may expect great things of young MacMurrough.
It was all quite confusing and MacMurrough had been relieved to get away, to find Kettle in the library, and drink whiskey and soda with his urbane kind. Now, listening to the schoolmaster’s speech from the stage, he wondered had many of us this child inside. It would explain the appeal of this curious man. For his sentiments, though he spoke them with dignity and with some passion, were commonplace enough: the local expression of a continental