The Folding Star (36 page)

He stopped again a few feet away, slightly stooping forward to mime his curiosity. ‘Hi,’ he said, tentatively. A loud owl-call came from the wood, and then another, further off. I couldn’t tell if they were real or people signalling – I knew real ones always sounded like imitations. He turned his head towards them and the faint cloud-gleam showed steel-rimmed spectacles, a white square face with swept-back dark hair. ‘Someone’s making a night of it,’ he said. The voice was troublingly cultured, with a hint of drink-blur – he wasn’t aware of the long pause that followed as I worked out how I could escape him in the dark. I’d played and stood about all over here, but the dimensions and positions were vague at this moment. ‘Looks rather tempting, don’t you think?’

He felt slowly, amusedly, in his breast pockets, and brought out cigarettes and a lighter. ‘Do you smoke?’

‘No’ – it was a little anxious cough. ‘No,’ I said again.

When the lighter flared I saw him lit up for several seconds; black leather jacket, grey jeans a bit tight around the midriff, the ghoulish chiaroscuro of the face above the flustered flame, wishful dark eyes lifting to make out what they could of me. The image floated on the moment’s blackness that followed, suspended in the dry warmth of French tobacco smoke.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Eighteen,’ I said, adding on a year as if I had been challenged in a pub. And then, with a tenuous politeness I thought would protect me, ‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty.’ He exhaled ponderingly. ‘Three.’

Even more than I’d expected. I felt it like a sinister disgrace, being out in the night with this person, the menacing vagueness of his intentions, the seedy self-confidence of the queers out in their secret element. I’d better walk off quietly towards the tent.

‘Why don’t you come over here?’ he said, with a new intimacy and tenseness. He swung his cigarette arm out in a casual shrug of possibility, but stayed where he was, as though not to waste the effort if I wasn’t interested. ‘Well – suit yourself. I’d like it, if you’d like it.’ I couldn’t associate the voice with anything to do with desire. It was like being propositioned by an announcer on Radio 3.

‘No, thank you,’ I muttered offendedly. And then to my great surprise: ‘My father’s very ill, actually.’

He took this in with another glowing pull on his Gitane. ‘Shit.’

‘He’s only got a couple of weeks left to live,’ I explained carefully, though it was myself I was explaining to.

He threw his cigarette away into the dry grass and I watched anxiously in case a fire began to crackle round it – there hadn’t been rain for over a month. I wanted to criticise him bitterly for that. ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ he whispered heedlessly as he came up close. My face was stiff, I wasn’t actually crying, just breathing out through my mouth in brusque sighs. When he put an arm around me I was hugged into leather and smoke and beer – it was horrible but remotely consoling, the firm clutch of another world that could take me if I let it. He stood and rocked me as if I
were
crying – I felt pinched and self-conscious not being able to, the vessel of tears sealed up tight inside. I slid my arm woodenly across the stranger’s back. I thought, if my father could see me now …

‘Edward, Edward?’ – a low querying call. Dawn’s unmistakable form, the swish of the grasses in his hesitant approach. The stranger smudged a kiss by my ear at the moment I broke away.

‘No … no …’ I was saying, almost under my breath, as I hit at his arm and half-stumbled in my desire to get free.

‘Edward …?’ both of them said.

Dawn was triggered into the sudden belligerence I found both unnecessary and exciting. ‘Fuck off,’ he said to the man, with a short, spittly chuckle.

‘Okay, okay,’ backing off a pace or two. ‘The kid’s upset, okay?’ A wariness to his tone, as though he’d heard this before. He began to walk away and called back, ‘He just wants looking after.’

‘Fucking queers,’ said Dawn with another incredulous laugh. And then peevishly to me, ‘He can fucking look after himself.’

I couldn’t answer that. I felt lost and utterly unknown. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘He didn’t do anything.’ I turned back towards the tent. If only we were in our respective homes, if we’d just put the tent up one morning in the garden to see how it was done. I hated the tent, and the hours to come, with Dawn squashing me and nowhere to escape to but the night and its predators. I wouldn’t say anything about it now, but I felt I could reasonably get up at first light, under the pretext of writing a poem.

When I looked back I could just make out Dawn running very fast across the slope, the retreating stranger peeping round at the last moment as he brought him down with a quick easy tackle, got up and jogged back. Beyond them both, on the crest of the hill, figures were moving among the trees.

I hadn’t been in All Saints for years and had forgotten what a reassuringly unsacred building it was; the old village church had been replaced in the late eighteenth century by a broad stuccoed box with an organ gallery and white box pews and a huge east window of clear glass, with trees and the vicar’s upstairs windows visible as one sat and listened to him or thought about lunch. Only the old grey west tower had been kept from the earlier building, and that was under wraps again, being gently cleaned by weeks of running water. I arrived early and found the vicar negotiating with the masons about sheltering the mourners from the incessant cold downward flow. Then we went inside and pulled the chains that kindled primitive overhead heaters: I paced around through their warping blast, getting the feel of the place, more distracted by nerves than grief. I remembered the nausea that preceded class when I was a schoolteacher; even a personal tutorial could approach with a certain chill tread. ‘Oh darling!’ I gasped, and loitered, fiddling with a pew-door’s loose brass catch, lost in a gripping daydream of love for Luc.

‘Everything all right?’ murmured the vicar, resting a hand on my shoulder and swishing his alien skirts against my legs.

It was wonderful who came – our old friends, school contemporaries I hadn’t seen for a decade, unfamiliar queens from London in oddly cut, somehow cheerful suits, antiques young men and other frauds, a tall deaf man whom nobody knew, who was Colin Maylord’s father, a lad fresh off a motor-bike (oh Ralphie!) climbing in leathers and pony-tail into a pew beside startled country aunts and uncles, Gerald and Anne de Souzay, grandly self-effacing, with Edie’s unhappy young brother Pip. I went to greet them, like an usher at a wedding, wondering if perhaps Edie wasn’t coming. I was apprehensive about seeing her, after what she had been through, and about seeing her grieving, which I knew might be more harrowing than the grief I felt myself. But she had stopped outside to talk to Danny and Simon, and came in just behind them looking pale and composed, with the ghostly beauty people sometimes have when they are ill. She wore a magnificent black hat, with a tumbled pomp of sooty plumes about the brim. We embraced but said nothing, and she slipped in beside her immaculate mother.

I took a place at a pew’s end and waited through that grim interval before the entry of the family and the bearers with their shocking burden of proof. The organist was wittering on through his formless and infinitely extendable introit, music that had never been written down, mere sour doodlings to fill the time, varied now and then by a yawning change of registration like a false alert. The occasional chink of a chisel or half-sung call came from the workmen outside. A sliver of a last night’s dream came back to me and melted away as I tried to grasp it. Matt in the bar teasing me and mocking me with the story of how he’d seduced Luc the afternoon I’d left town – how easy it had been for him, the boy almost bawling for it, four, five times, how he was having him again tonight … I started thinking forward impatiently to my return flight tomorrow, wishing away the unrepeatable hours.

A prospect of the backs of heads, the part of yourself you didn’t know about, which always came as a surprise in a clothes-shop or a barber’s glancing hand-mirror, the part so trustingly turned to a lover. There were heads here I’d sat behind in school: Tony Barnett who used to stow his hair into his turned-up collar with the aid of grease and paper-clips, a big director of commercials these days with a shiny bald patch like a tonsure; Hilary Smythe (poor fellow), teenage cottager you saw hanging on the railings by the traffic lights in town, along with the drunks in torn tweed jackets, looking drably smart now, with a grey moustache; beside him that broad-necked figure like a boisterous but not ill-natured dog, actually called Boxer, captain of rugby, mopping at his eyes with a red handkerchief; in front of him the forgotten Sindon twins, Doug and Greg, or was it Greg and Doug, completely unchanged, brilliant swimmers interested in nothing else – I suddenly remembered their address, like a far-off holiday, and their bathroom with its smell of chlorine and drying towels – they were here in padded silvery suits; I wanted to lick the identical blond ferns in the hollows of their necks.

I couldn’t listen to much of the service before I was on; we sang a hymn with the wrong tune, so that nobody did more than mumble till the last verse. I tried to sing, but was voiceless with tears, glancing forward to the awful box, which held what was left of my friend for the little while before we burnt him again. I kept trying to name people, not to fidget as the time raced closer. Suddenly the vicar announced my reading, before the Gospel, much earlier than I expected. I looked stupidly about, hoping that no one might have noticed. The audience settled back, some blowing their noses. There was a thin wail from Dawn’s mother in the front row, I knew how she must long for it to be over, but must want it done properly. So I went up and read.

One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,

Along the heath, and near his fav’rite tree;

Another came; nor yet beside the rill,

Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

The next with dirges due in sad array

Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne …

My father brought me through it, reminded me how to clear my head and strike out with that impalpable falsity that actors need. As I looked down through the grey November light at wretched faces, I remembered him describing an audience and its expectations, the control of yourself you needed to control them. They wanted something from me that it was surprisingly in my power to give. ‘Speak out,’ he said. It was rather like on certain still nights, I had never told anyone, but I felt him stooping out of the dark continuum he was banished to and pressing about me with advice too stern to be strictly followed.

Back in my seat I was quietly elated, almost expecting congratulations, and took a moment or two to adjust to the heavy-heartedness around me. I’d shared a sympathetic smile with one of Dawn’s sisters – all three were in the front row with their parents, two of them married to men who sat between them with the diplomatic dry-eyed look of outsiders. It was odd the role these women played in my sense of Dawn, odd that in my keenest memory of him I was absent and they were there – their family holiday, when he was just sixteen.

It is some banal Mediterranean resort, the sand shuffled and rubbishy at the end of the day, the sea still and salivary, the four children tearing about, Ralph muscly in tight little trunks, his shoulders pink from the sun, lightly terrorising the girls, whom he keeps on kissing and pinching, picking up and throwing into the water. He is full of unfocused energy which finds issue all day long in teasing and chasing, broken by spells of lordly basking, when they rub creams into him and, hoping for a truce, bring him drinks. He is all potential. His sturdy little cock gets hard as he nestles in the sand, and he likes to surprise the girls with the jut of it; they are censorious about it, as they are about his four chest hairs, and as he is about their breasts. What a busty little group they are. The day cools and the girls trail in while he has a last swim – a long fast lap of crawl. Then I see him wait out there, treading slowly, breathing sharply, looking back at the land where the first lights have appeared. He kicks his legs apart and feels the cool water touch his grateful sphincter. No one ever knew, no one ever will know, so I have him thinking of me, back at Rough Common, thinking of him, waiting for him, reaching down, as I imagine him doing, to feel the quick undertow of possibility.

The cars bearing the family nudged their stately way out across the abashed, resentful traffic for the drive northwards to the crematorium. The rest of us gathered loosely on the gravel, I ran over to Edie and we clutched each other in a brief agony of sobbing and stifled shouts. The de Souzays were to give a reception later and she said to come with them now. I clambered into the back of their long senatorial Daimler and into the hushed, complex atmosphere of this other family. We crept forward giving sympathetic smirks to the people who hardly heard the car. Gerald lowered the window and called out, ‘Come to us at one, you know where it is’, though the Sindon boys looked a bit at a loss. The lad with the motor-bike seemed to have made friends. Others straggled along the road into the centre of town, advised of the fire and mulled wine at the George IV. Out ahead of them was a brisk stooped figure in a dark grey coat and trilby, flicking his walking-stick forward at each stride.

‘Can we fit him in?’ murmured Anne, and her husband slowed as she lowered her window in turn. ‘Can’t we give you a lift, Perry?’ she called out. But he kept on walking, merely raising his hat and hooting back, ‘I’m fine, thank you!’

‘See you later, then.’

‘He’s nearly ninety, you know,’ she said as we moved on. ‘How very sweet of him to have turned out.’

I glanced back at him, wondering if he’d remembered our meeting as he heard me read, now that I was fatter and older and never wrote poems. He still looked about him in the same way, as if anticipating greetings, still had that air of redundant youthfulness. There was something moving and irrelevant in his having come, as though Georgian England must be represented at these end-of-century exequies.

Later, much later. Five and twenty to midnight the greeny-white figures dimly showed. The day doused in drink and almost out. I rambled home from someone’s house, alone but charged up by intense communings with virtual strangers, the compulsive unity that follows a funeral and its unambiguous end. The night was damp and still, the street-lamps hazed among the nearly bare trees, a moment I recognised when no one was about except barmen from pubs walking their Alsatians, taxis bringing passengers from the last train and leaving their perfume of burnt fuel.