The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [127]
“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