The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [142]
He’d brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter’s hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking than the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter’s head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man’s wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him. He twisted his head in Peter’s two-handed grasp, tried to turn it to a humorous wistful nuzzle against his chin, his chest. “What an amazing party,” he heard himself say. “I’m so glad Mrs. Keeping asked me to help with the parking.”
“Mm?”
“I meant to say I like your tie, by the way …”
Peter was holding him at arm’s length with a serene, almost humorous, almost smug look, Paul felt, as if he were measuring him on some scale of previous kisses and conquests. “Oh, my dear,” he murmured, with a sort of swallowed laugh, that suggested some shyness after all. They held each other, cheek to cheek, Peter’s evening stubble a further part of the dreadful strangeness of being with a man. Paul wasn’t sure if he had fluffed it hopelessly, like his frightened scuttle behind the pampas grass when he’d first arrived; or if this could be taken as a natural amorous pause in which his own confusion would be smoothly concealed and forgiven. He knew he had already been found wanting. And quite quickly he thought, well, it was a sort of triumph just to have kissed another man. “I suppose we should go back,” he said.
Peter merely sighed at this, and slid his hands tighter round Paul’s waist. “You see, I rather thought we might stay out here a bit longer. We’ve both earned it, don’t you think?” Paul found himself laughing, curving to him, suddenly gripping him hard so as to keep him with him and somehow immobilize him at the same time.
DRINK AND KISSING seemed to move to their own clock. When the two of them got back to the house the crowds were already thinning, though a few of the oldsters had settled in, in new arrangements of the crowded chairs in the drawing-room. Paul felt that he and Peter must be bringing a gleam of the unspeakable with them out of the night beyond the french windows, though everyone amiably pretended not to notice. Drink seemed to have captivated them all, reducing some to silent smiles, others to excitable gabble. John Keeping, very drunk, was raptly explaining the virtues of the port he was drinking to a man three times his age. Even Mr. Keeping, with the globe of a brandy glass in his hand, looked unselfconsciously happy; then when he saw Paul he glanced awkwardly away. There had been another change of music, it was some old dance number that sounded to Paul like a scene from a wartime movie, and on the clear square of floor beside the piano, barely moving but with a captivated look of their own, Mrs. Jacobs was dancing with the farmer man, who turned out to be Mark Gibbons, the marvellous painter she’d mentioned, who’d lived in Wantage. Another couple Paul didn’t know revolved at twice the speed beyond them. Paul smiled at them mildly and benevolently, from beyond the enormous dark distance he had just travelled, which made everything else appear charming but weirdly beside the point. “I think I’ve got to go,” Peter said