The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [151]
Matron was holding a stack of folded sheets, with the grey starchy gleam of all the laundry at Corley. She peered into the room. “Oh, you’ve got a visitor,” she said, apology and disapproval struggling uncertainly. There was her slight wheeze, having toiled up from the laundry-room, and the almost subliminal whistle of the clean sheets against her white-coated bosom. Peter smiled and stared. “I’m giving out clean sheets tonight, because of Open Day,” Matron said. There was quite a charge of antagonism, a combative resistance to Peter’s charm, and, to be fair, his mockery.
“I hope my room’s not going to be open too, Matron,” he said. She grappled off the top sheet. “Here, let me …” Really he should introduce Paul, but he preferred to excite her suspicion.
“We all need to get ahead,” she said, with a tight smile.
“Oh, absolutely.” It wasn’t clear if she expected him to change the bed right now. She looked narrowly towards it.
“Well, then …! I’ll leave you to it,” she said. “Top to bottom.”
“Of course.”
And with that she withdrew. Peter closed the door firmly, gave Paul a queasy grin and poured out two glasses of gin and vermouth. “Sorry about that. Have a drink … chin chin.” They clinked their glasses, and Peter watched over his own raised rim as Paul sipped, with a little grimace, a swallowed urge to cough, and then put the glass down on the desk. He said, “God, you look so sexy,” exciting himself more by his own choked sound. Paul gasped, and picked up his drink, and said something inaudible, which Peter felt sure must be along the same lines.
He thought the Park would offer more shelter than a room with a chair jammed under the door-handle, but as soon as they got outside he was aware of the unusual hum and crepitation of activity, a mower running, voices not far off. Still, the school seemed more delightfully surreal after a large gin drunk in two minutes. The evening had a lift and a stride to it. He remembered summer evenings at his own prep-school, and the haunting mystery, lit only by glimpses, of what the masters did after the boys were tucked up in bed. He wondered now if any of them had done what he was about to do. Paul seemed changed by the gin too, loosened up and at once a little wary of what he might say and do as a result. Peter asked him on a hunch if he was an only child, and Paul said, “Yes—I am,” with a narrow smile, that seemed both to question the question and show exactly the only child’s sly self-reliance. “What about you?”
“I’ve got a sister.”
“I can’t imagine having a sister.”
“And what about the rest of your family?”—it was first-date talk, and Peter felt already he might not remember the answer. He wanted to get Paul into the Out-of-Bounds Woods. He took him quickly past the bleak little fishpond, and on towards the stone gate.
“Well, there’s my mum.”
“And what does she do?”
“I’m afraid she doesn’t do anything, really.”
“No, nor does mine, but I thought I should ask.”
Paul paused, and then said quietly, “She got polio when I was eight.”
“Oh, god, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah … it’s been quite difficult, actually.” Something flavourless in his words, from embarrassment perhaps and repetition.
“Where does she have it?”
“Her … left leg is quite bad. She wears a caliper … you know. Though she often uses a wheelchair when she goes out.”
“And what about your father?”
“He was killed in the War, in fact,” said Paul, with a strange, almost apologetic look. “He was a fighter pilot—but he went missing.”
“My god,” said Peter, with genuine sympathy, and seeing in a blundering way that all these things might help to explain Paul’s oddity and inhibition. “It must have been right at the end of the War.”
“Well, that’s right.”
“I mean, when were you born?