The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [143]
Outside the loo he was waylaid by Jenny. “Do you want to come to the Corn Hall with us?” she said.
Julian looked surprised, then deliciously shifty. “Yeah, do you think we can … yeah, come with us, that would be good, actually … Do you want to ask Dad?” he said to Paul.
“Um … I think probably not,” said Paul, pleased that his tone of voice got a laugh. He ought to thank Mr. Keeping for the evening before he left—the gratitude suddenly keen and guilty, and haunted by a new suspicion that perhaps he hadn’t been meant to stay for the whole party, and had made a large and unmentionable mistake.
“I mean it goes on till midnight, what is it now?”
Paul couldn’t tell them that he had promised to go with Peter and sit—where?—he pictured a shadowy lay-by where he’d seen courting couples in cars. It was a further shock when Peter said, “Oh, why not?—just for half an hour—I feel like dancing”—just as if their own plans didn’t matter at all.
“OK …,” said Julian—a slight sense inexpressible in the air that though he needed them as a cover he wasn’t completely thrilled at the idea of dancing at the Corn Hall with them.
“Is your brother coming?”
“God, don’t tell him,” said Jenny.
“I love dancing,” said Peter.
“Mm, me too,” said Jenny, and to Paul’s confusion the two of them started rolling their hips and twitching their shoulders at each other. “Don’t you think,” she said.
In the hall Mrs. Keeping was standing in rapid, muttered conversation with another woman. “He really can’t,” she was saying, as Paul hung guiltily back. Out on the drive, at the edge of the spread of light from the front door, Uncle Wilfrid was standing, arms folded tightly but face turned up to admire the heavens as if the rest of him were not knotted up with tension and rejection. “I’ve got Jenny in the box-room, Mother in the spare room, both the boys home … he should have said he was coming.”
“I’m sure we could find a corner for him,” the other woman said.
“Why can’t he get a taxi back?”
“It’s a bit late, darling,” said the woman.
“Is it?”
“I don’t suppose he’s got his jim-jams …?”
A sort of desperate solidarity seemed to take over Julian’s face, even if it meant not going to the Corn Hall after all. He slipped out into the drive—“Hullo, Uncle Wilfrid …,” taking him aside, a bit further off.
“You can see the Crab, Julian,” said Wilfrid.
And a minute later they were all in the Imp, in the sharp little comedy of sudden proximity, everyone being witty, everyone laughing, shifting the books and litter from under their bottoms as the car bounced at getaway speed along Glebe Lane. They could hear the grass in the crown of the road swiftly scouring the underside of the car. Wilfrid was in the front, Paul, Jenny and Julian in a painfully funny squash in the back. Julian’s hot thigh pressed against Paul’s thigh, and Paul found the boy was gripping his hand, he thought just out of general abandon and selfless high spirits. He didn’t dare squeeze it back. They rattled out into Church Lane, down the Market Place into the surprising surviving outside world, which included a police car and two officers standing by it just outside the Bell. Peter was supremely unimpressed, shot past them, pulled up and turned off the lights, the engine, just in front of the Midland Bank. A sense of reckless disorder overcame Paul for a moment. But tomorrow was Sunday …
They clambered out of the car, a small adjustment taking place. Wilfrid said, “I haven’t gone dancing since just after the War.”
“You’ll love it,” Jenny told him, with a confident nod. She was in effect, in this lopsided group, his partner.
“Everybody danced with everybody then.”
Peter locked the car, and gave Paul a helpless but happy look, a shrug and a smirking shake of the head.
People were leaving the Corn Hall, the women scantily dressed in the summer night, but clinging to the men. Paul disguised his reawoken tension about seeing Geoff, and chatted pointedly