The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [152]
“March ’44.”
“So you don’t remember him at all …” Paul pursed his lips and shook his head. “God, I’m really sorry. So you have to support your mother?”
“Well, more or less,” said Paul, again with his air of hesitant acceptance, and familiarity with the fumbling sympathy of others when told the news.
“But she gets an Air Force pension, presumably?” Peter’s Aunt Gwen did, so he knew about these things.
Paul seemed slightly irritated by this. “Yes, she does,” he said; but then, more warmly, “No, that’s really important, obviously.”
“Oh, my dear,” said Peter quietly. He was naturally troubled, and half wished he hadn’t asked. He saw the flickering energy of the evening going out in sexless supportiveness; and some more shadowy sense of Paul having too many problems not to be a problem in himself.
“It’s sort of why I didn’t apply to university,” Paul said, with a shrug at this awkward conclusion.
“Mm, you see I didn’t realize …,” said Peter, and left it at that. He thought, in a momentary montage, of what he had done at university, and tried to blink away the further faint sense of pity and disappointment that seemed to hover between him and this possible new boyfriend. He glanced at him walking along beside him, in his neat brown shoes, quite a springy step, hands awkwardly in his jeans pockets then out of them again, and his agonized look at saying anything at all personal about himself. Well, best to see these problems clearly from the start; a more experienced lover would conceal them till the honeymoon was over. They went past the Ionic temple, where the boys’ pets hopped and fluttered in their cages, and Brookings and Pearson in their dungarees were mawkishly grooming their rabbits. They went past the fenced square of the boys’ gardens, a place, as everyone said, like a graveyard, with its two dozen flowered plots. Again there were a few of the senior boys, let out in this magic hour after prep, on their knees with trowels, or watering their pansies and nasturtiums. Peter thought he saw from Paul’s smile that he was slightly frightened of the boys. In the far corner, looking vulnerable in the open air, was the fairy construction of Dupont’s garden, a miniature alp of balanced rocks with a gap at the top through which water could be poured from a can down a twisting cascade and into the wilderness of heathers and mosses below. Equally vulnerable was its aching claim on First Prize in the competition, to be judged by Craven’s mother, who was very much a salvia and marigold kind of woman. “They’re like graves, aren’t they!” said Paul, and Peter touched him again forgivingly in the small of the back and they went on.
In the middle of the High Ground Mike Rawlins was mowing the sacred chain of the cricket pitch, in readiness for Saturday’s trouncing of Templers. Peter waved to him, and before they were near him he took Paul’s arm firmly and turned him round. “Now there you are …” There was the house, massive and intense, and the farmlands beyond, flat and painterly in the heavy light, with the con-trails of planes from Brize Norton slowly lifting and dissolving in the clearer air above. Peter said, “You must admit.” He wanted to get something out of Paul, as he might out of some promising but stubborn child. Though it occurred to him that the shyness he was trying to overcome might merely be a dullness he would always have to overlook.
“Amazing,” said Paul.
“It’s all coming back, you know,” Peter said, with a tight smile and shake of the head.
“How do you mean?”
“Victoriana. People are starting to understand it.” Last year at St. Pancras Station he had joined a small rally headed by John Betjeman; he dreamed of getting Betjeman to come and talk to the boys about Corley Court—he pictured his pleasure in the jelly-mould ceiling. “That’s my room, of course,” he said, without pointing, and saw Paul had no idea which one he meant. In one or two other windows strip lights showed against the evening sun, and in the end room on the first floor the curtains were closed, the Babies already in bed, in the barely muted light.