The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [153]
“Do you think Cecil Valance actually had an affair with Mrs. Jacobs?” said Paul.
“Oh! Well, I suppose only one person alive knows for sure, and that’s what she says. Of course you never know exactly what people mean by ‘an affair.’ ”
“No …,” said Paul, and sure enough he blushed again.
“I think Cecil was probably queer, don’t you?” said Peter, which was a mixture of a hunch and a certain amount of cheerfully wishful thinking, but Paul just gasped and looked away. There was a strange disturbance, almost subliminal at first. Over the rattling roar of the mower a few yards off a larger and darker noise began to drone and wallow, and then, not quite where they were looking, a military aircraft trawling low over the woods, steady, heavy-bellied, throbbing and majestic, and somehow aware, as if its pilot had waved, that its passage overhead was a marvel to the craning and turning figures below. Its four propellers gave it a patient, old-fashioned look, unlike the sleek unanswerable jets they saw long before they heard them. As it passed overhead and then over the house it appeared to rise a little before homing in through the lower haze towards the aerodrome five miles away. Mike sheltered his eyes with a raised right arm that seemed also to make a friendly claim or greeting. They went over, Peter introduced Paul, and Mike explained, amid the sweet and sharp smells of two-stroke exhaust and cut grass and his own sweat, that it was one of the big Belfast freighters they’d just brought in. “Sluggish old bus,” he said, “but it’ll carry anything.” In upper windows of the school, boys who’d been watching stood down and melted away. And then the evening re-established itself, but perceptibly at a later phase, as if the past two minutes had been a tranced half-hour.
Ahead of them the little creosoted cottage of the cricket pavilion waited under the lengthening shadow of the woods, a possible place for a snog, at least, but still too much in Mike’s view. Peter put his arm round Paul’s shoulders, and they strolled on stiffly for a few seconds, Paul again unsure what to do with his hands. “No,” said Peter smoothly, “I’d like to write something about old Cecil one day—I don’t think anyone has, since that Stokes memoir, you know.”
“Right …”
“Which is something of a period piece. Unreadable, really. That’s why I was asking George Sawle the other night.”
“Do you write then?”
“Well, I’m always writing something or other. And of course I keep a sensational diary.”
“Oh, so do I,” said Paul, and Peter saw him tremble and focus, “well, sensationally dull.” There it was, the tiny treasured bit of wit in him. Peter fell on it with a laugh.
Just beyond the whited boundary lay the slipcatch, mown all around, but little used, tall grass growing up through its silvery slats. Peter liked the shape of it, like some archaic boat, and sometimes on evening walks by himself he lay down in it and blew cigarette-smoke at the midges overhead. He imagined lying in it now, with Paul close beside him. It was another of those sites where half-glimpsed fantasies, always in the air, touched down questioningly for a minute, and then flitted on.
Paul had found a cricket ball in the long grass, and stepping back a few yards he threw it swerving through the dip of the slipcatch and up into the air, where no one of course was waiting to receive it—it bounced once and ran off quickly towards the old parked roller, leaving Paul looking both smug and abashed. “I can see you’re rather good,” said Peter drily; and nervous that he might be asked to put the slipcatch to its proper use, and lob a ball to and fro through it with Paul for half an hour, pretending not to care that he could neither catch nor throw, he walked smilingly on. There was something expert and even vicious in the flick of Paul’s arm and the hard momentary trundle of the ball along the curving rails.
It felt sweetly momentous to walk in under the edge of the wood. Here again the evening seemed suddenly advanced. Even the near distances were mysteriously barred and crowded with green, shadows blurred