The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [150]
“Oh, yes …”
Getting into his stride, Donaldson pulled out something bigger, the Bourdon stop perhaps, for the next verse of the hymn, its loud plonking drone giving them a kind of cover. “Have you seen the Shelley Memorial in Oxford?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Surely the only portrait of a poet to show his cock,” said Peter, and glanced over at Donaldson’s mirror to see if he’d been heard.
“Mm, I expect it is,” murmured Paul, but seemed too startled to catch his eye. He went up to look at the poet’s head, with Peter close behind him, blandly pretending to share his curiosity. Again he put his arm lightly across Paul’s shoulders, where his red sweater was slung round—“Handsome fellow,” he said, “don’t you think?”—and then with tense luxuriance let his hand drift slowly downwards, just the thin shirt here between his fingers and the warm hard curve of his spine—“I mean, not that he really looked like that”—to that magical spot called the sacral chakra, which an Indian boy at Magdalen had told him one night was the pressure-point of all desires. So he pressed on it, tenderly, with a little questioning and promising movement of his middle finger, and felt Paul gasp and curl his back against him as if in some trap where the effort to escape only caught you the more tightly.
“Fell at Maricourt,” said Paul, now leaning forward as though he was going to kiss Cecil.
“Well, quite,” said Peter. He was entranced by his secret mischief, the ache of expectation like vertigo in his thighs and his chest. Paul half-turned towards him, flushed and shifty, worried perhaps by his own arousal. There was a comically disconcerting suggestion that Cecil himself had something to do with it. Now they had to be careful. As if archly colluding, Donaldson engaged the octave coupler for a further verse. Peter half expected to see his smirk in the mirror, but the boy was responding too hard to the querulous demands of his own instrument. Under the piping blare (“free from sorrow, free from sin”) Peter said humorously and straightforwardly, “I really think we’d better go up to my room, don’t you.”
“Oh … oh all right.” Paul seemed to think ahead, as if at an unexpected change of plan.
Peter took him up the nearest back-stairs, and the first-floor corridor brought them past the laundry-room—at some point he wanted to take Paul up through the skylight there and on to the roof, which was for good reason the most out-of-bounds thing in the whole school. But he saw at once that the door was open—Matron was fossicking round in there, just her large white rump showing now to the passer-by. “Well, if you come again,” he murmured; and saw Paul himself uncertain of such a prospect, eagerness struggling with some entrenched habit of disappointment. They went on, climbed the grand stairs to the second floor, there was the creak of the floorboard that Paul was hearing for the first time, and then they were in Peter’s room, with the door snapped shut between them and the world. He pulled Paul towards him and kissed him, and the door he was leaning on rattled in its lock at the sudden impact of their two bodies.
What he’d forgotten was that Paul would immediately start talking—his mouth two inches from Peter’s cheek, about how nice this first kiss had been, and how he liked Peter’s tie, and he’d been thinking all week … his colour at the happy end of the spectrum of embarrassment, his head hot and glowing, and the string of words, half-candid, half-senseless, a jerking safety-line … so Peter kissed him again, a long almost motionless kiss to calm him and shut him up and then, perhaps, to break him down. Focused as he was, he took in the familiar creak and rustle, way off behind him, through a mere thickness of oak, and then the short groan, like a polite but determined cough, of the floorboard just outside the door. There was a sharp knock, which they both felt. They froze for one second, Peter letting Paul slide out of his arms, then quickly buttoning his jacket, while still leaning