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By Root 1088 0

they were stained with mud from the tussle ten minutes earlier. “Oh, you are shy,” said Cecil, almost crossly. George glanced over his shoulder, and forgot his anxiety about the mud in the larger strangeness of his nakedness, in the dappled woods, where any other walker could see him, and with Cecil, in his shirt and trousers and shoes, watching him steadily. He stepped down carefully across the dead leaves and oak mast towards the loose ellipse of water. The day was warm, but in and out of the patchy sunlight he shivered at the air on his back. He saw he was excited by the part he was playing, the new little scene of obedience, in which none the less his own worth and beauty were enhanced. It was something to know you were what Cecil wanted more than anything. He crouched down, still with his back to him, and peered into the water, which was brownish, loamy, stirred gently and continuously by the little rill that fell into it. Sunlight sparkled on the far side, twenty feet away. He slid a leg through the cold surface, and at once, when he felt the gripping chill of the water, flung himself in too. He circled and steadied and gasped out, “It’s delicious!”

After that it was his turn to watch Cecil, a readier and more practised undresser. Cecil’s way was just to be out of his things with a tug and a wiggle and a kick. He pranced down the leafy slope like a satyr, sun-burnt and sinewy, calves and forearms darkly hairy. Then he leapt into the little pond almost on top of George, drowned him for a second or two, their legs tangling violently as George gripped at him, frightened and excited. He wanted to calm Cecil and keep him. They circled each other, spitting out water, laughing, the surface settling and bubbling. Underneath, their feet kicked branches, stirred up leaves and slime. Cecil reached for him, had an arm round his shoulder, then closed with him inexorably underwater.

THEY LAY OUT to dry for a few last minutes at the edge of the wood, where the sun shone in under the high fringe of leaves. The field beyond had already been ploughed, and the tussocky grass of the headland was faded and trampled. The small stream that trickled down from the pool where they’d swum ran away behind them through a long ditch thick with brambles, its noise hardly louder than the miscellaneous birdsong. George had put his drawers back on, but Cecil spread out still naked, raised on his elbows, frowning lightly at his own body. George loved the confident display, and was vaguely, half-pleasurably, alarmed by it; he thought of the spaniel called Mary, and looked across the curve of the wood’s edge half-expecting to see the blue blouse and hear the dry chatter of the couple on the breeze. He looked back almost shyly at Cecil—he felt he would never stop taking him in. He loved the beautiful rightness of his bearing, that everyone saw, and he loved all the things that fell short of beauty, or redefined it, things generally hidden, the freckled shoulders swollen with muscle, knees knotty with sinew, black body-hair streaked flat, dark blemishes of the summer’s mosquito-bites fading on his arms and neck. Behind him rose the dim pillars and dappled shadow of the woodlands, “the Common,” which to George was the magical landscape of his own solitude. This was the man who had entered it, unaware of its secrets: he had quickly surveyed it and possessed it; now here he was, stretched out full length in front of it. Here he was, rolling over with an absent-minded stare and settling on top of him, twitching experimentally as he squashed him, big trickles of cold water running suddenly off his hair into George’s wincing and gasping face.

It was the hat that he saw first, over Cecil’s shoulder, while his friend moved rhythmically on top of him: red and white, distant, but clearly on the move, above the bracken, where the woodland curved out round the far edge of the field. “No, no …!”—he tried to draw up his knees, pushed at Cecil with his fists, tried to twist and topple him.

“No …?” said Cecil, sneering and panting in his face.

“No, don’t, Cess—no!