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By Root 2130 0

him. Or knew, for Julian was always double-minded, that he needed to indulge in the fantasy that he had always been in love with him. Tom at eighteen was lovely in the way he had been lovely at twelve, with the same rapid, shy, awkward grace, the same perfectly proportioned face, the same—for Julian was now experienced—lovely buttocks in his flannels. He was still like a carving, with his mass of honey-hair and his long gold lashes almost on his cheek when he blinked. And his mouth was quiet and calm, and the odd fact that he had become very hairy, on both face and body, only complicated the carved effect by veiling it. Men who loved boys, Julian thought, simply loved beauty, in a way men who loved girls did not. There were beautiful girls who had the same pure effect as beautiful boys, but girls were to be assessed as mothers-to-be, they were not simply and only lovely. He had no illusion that kissing Tom, or simply touching him, would have anything to do with communing with Tom’s soul. Tom’s body was opaque. If there was a soul animating it, Julian felt that it would be both presumptuous and possibly unrewarding to try to commune with it. He watched the light in the hairs on Tom’s forearm as he swung his pack to his shoulders. He felt—apart from a stirring in his trousers—as he felt when his father showed him a gleaming mediaeval spoon, when the wrapping fell away. He thought to himself that Tom had done well to leave Marlowe so precipitously. If he had stayed, he would have become prey to the hunters and possibly learned to be a nasty flirt, as happened to so many. This Julian thought along with many other things, as they strode along the field-paths and round the woodlands, for Tom was not given to conversation, only to companionable pace-keeping, so Julian talked to himself, in his head. Julian decided wryly that he had to be on his best behaviour, because Tom had been foolishly entrusted to him by their elders.

Tom did not look at Julian, almost at all. He poked with his stick in hedgerows, or stopped, raising his hand, to listen quietly to birdsong and rustlings. Julian knew that he himself was not only not beautiful, he was not even handsome. He was slight and wiry; his mouth was long, narrow and mobile; he was slightly knock-kneed, and he walked circumspect and hunched, unlike Tom’s habitation of all the air around him. Because he had the sense to say nothing for a very long time, Tom did begin to initiate conversations. They were about hedges and ditches. He pointed out good places to set snares. He found an orchid—“quite rare.” He discussed good and bad coppicing.

And at night—they slept out, on unrolled blankets and a waterproof—he talked about the stars. He knew them all, the planets and the constellations. Bright Venus, almost aligned with red Mars, Mercury faint on the horizon. The head of the Water-Snake, “just to the left of Canis Major” just below Gemini. The gibbous moon, waning.

He did not talk about himself. He never said “I want…” or “I hope …” and only rarely “I think …” He did express an impersonal grief at the vanishing of certain predatory species, exterminated by gamekeepers, the hen harrier, the pine marten, the raven. He speculated about why the weasel, stoat and crow had proved more cunning and more pertinacious. Julian said

“Perhaps you should be a naturalist? Study zoology and write books, or work in the Natural History Museum.”

“I don’t think so,” said Tom. “I don’t write.”

“What are you going to do? What do you want to do?”

“Do you remember at the Midsummer party, they asked us all what we wanted to be? And Florian said, he wanted to be a fox in a foxhole?”

“Well?”

“I have some sympathy with that.”

“And since you can’t be a fox in a foxhole?” said Julian lightly, lightly.

“I don’t know,” said Tom. His face clouded. “They go on at me,” he said. “They want me to go to Cambridge. They make me sit exams. And so on.”

“Cambridge isn’t bad. It’s beautiful. Full of interesting people.”

“Cambridge is all right for you. You like people.”

“And you don’t?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t