The Folding Star (60 page)
Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
‘Staying in town for Christmas?’
‘I’m going back home in a couple of days.’
‘Back to London, yeah?’
‘Well, a bit south of London.’
‘Lucky you!’ He unbuttoned his shirt-pocket and took out a packet of Marlboro. ‘Want one?’
‘Thanks a lot.’ I offered a light.
‘Thanks. No, everyone seems to get out of here as quick as they can. Not that I blame them.’
I didn’t know what I thought about that. The place irked me, made me ache with the absence of Luc, each street mocked me, but I dreaded leaving, just for a few days, when he might need me, or might feel the seasonal tug home. ‘I was hoping Matt might be here.’
Ivo glanced at the clock. ‘It’s a bit early for Matt. Or whatever he’s called.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘Anyway, he’s probably busy.’
I smiled and blew out smoke. I wondered how much he knew about my friend. ‘Could well be.’ And indeed it was early for anybody: only the solstitial nightfall gave the hour the aura of drinks-time.
‘Being
kept
busy, from what I gather.’ I didn’t quite see this. ‘Is he still seeing that boy?’
I thought about it for a moment and a swallow of beer. ‘I don’t
think
so. Which one do you mean?’ I couldn’t honestly say I knew or was jealous.
Ivo assumed his scandalous ‘discreet’ manner. ‘I don’t know his name, dear. I just watched him pick him up in here one night. Then the next night he was telling me all about it when the kid comes in again. Couldn’t get enough, Matt said.’ He glanced both ways along the bar. ‘He had him
seven times
– and that was just the first night. I was moderately jealous. Not that he was my type – you know, tall, tall schoolboy, blond, mouth like a sponge. Still – only seventeen … It must be nice to get something really fresh.’
My hand was still steady, my heart flinty. ‘When would this have been?’
‘Ooh …’ he searched with no sense that it mattered: ‘Three or four weeks ago? One thing about Matt, he always gets what he wants. Though even he looked a
bit
shagged out. Then the kid kept kissing him, and Matt was groping him between the legs – white jeans, you know – I’m saying I didn’t fancy him but come to think of it he was completely gorgeous. I just prefer dark men,’ he said, with a bat of the eyelids, and slid off to answer another customer.
I was still perplexingly calm, though I pulled on the cigarette fiercely, and stared at the threadbare pommel of the bar-stool next to me, where he had sat so untouchably that evening. It was the arch ingenuousness of his remark ‘That guy Matt must be gay’ that came to me first; and then Matt’s obscene and encouraging gesture behind the boy’s back. I finished my drink quickly but thoughtfully and I was almost at the door when it flung open with consummate timing to admit the busy world of Ronald Strong. I thought for once I would speak to him, my mind was clear and fuelled, I stopped with an ironic glance – but he looked me up and down in an expressionless second and swept past. I went on out with a dull, half-audible ‘Fuck you’.
As I walked across town I was shocked but composed, as one is at first after a death one knew was coming. The horrible fact had been with me, known to me all along – it was none the less plausible for having been imparted in a dream.
Out towards Matt’s, those wide neglected streets, the houses shaken by lorries, the pavements and windows silted and blinded with dust. I was watching my own purposefulness curiously, wondering when it would falter. Matt cared about nothing, and so was oddly invulnerable – he was the great facilitator, he would say he was ‘only getting the kid ready’ for me, and perhaps that was true, perhaps he’d set him up to the whole thing. I pondered whether Matt could be involved in his disappearance – I couldn’t see the point. I’d thought I was about to break with him for good, to limp away in the laughable shreds of my dignity, but maybe that was pointless too; he liked me but he wouldn’t miss me, whereas I was snagged with a sentimental respect for the part he had played in my fiasco. I went on past the end of his road.
I was dawdling alongside parked cars that the street-lamps filled with shadow, though sometimes there was a box or a child’s shoe cross-lit all night in the back of a shooting-brake. How sombre and secure those welled interiors looked, with only a pane of glass to keep everything else out. Of course I’d always wanted a car, but never a car that I could afford – I scorned the prospect of days in the drive, daubing at the rust on a Maxi or an 1100. I wanted a Jensen CV8, or a love-hunting Giulietta like Paul’s. And here was the Fratry of St Caspianus, half-derelict, still sheltering some unimaginable obscurity of devotion. And then a sound you often heard at Matt’s, the two-note blast of a juggernaut’s horn, echoing from a narrow street like the Last Trump in an unknown Requiem.
The back of the house was dark, the jeep standing in the yard, loosely swathed in a nylon tarpaulin that rustled and lifted and sank in a stirring of breeze as if someone was there. I let myself in to the glass porch, which still held a dim vegetative smell from the withered azaleas and sprawling rubber-plants, and then into the flat, with its own bouquet of cologne-smothered squalor. So he’d brought Luc here. I lit a cigarette and hung around by the bed, disordering it further with a fastidious toe. For a second or more at a time I let myself imagine them. I seemed to have forgotten that I had slept here since, unknowing, hoping to forget.
The jeep was a raucous starter – and after that it took a while to figure out the lights and the dip-switch. Getting into reverse proved tricky too. But then I was out of the gate, sitting high up, ready for off, hearing in the growl of the exhaust a tremor of that first outing to the sea; I went jerkily round the block, getting used to being in control, quite hoping I’d pass Matt walking home, then relieved I hadn’t. I came up to a red light behind a little Fiat with three lads across the back, two more in front, joking and rowdy, off to a good time; my beam stroked the clean backs of their necks. I revved forlornly, and one of them turned, took in the flashy chrome and zipped-up rally lamps, and grinned – while the driver, scenting a challenge, revved as well, and when the light changed shot forward with a squeal. I let them go.
Out of town the night was windy and glossy, the lights of farms and isolated houses burned clear across the fields, or bare treetops dipped and splintered them. For a while the road followed the high embankment of the sea-canal, the water black and barely visible below. There was no shipping in it, only the archaic hulk of a dredger, its platform lit and deserted. I rested my free hand on the seat beside me, as if on the thigh of an invisible passenger. The jeep’s hood gibbered at its fastenings.
Luc was waiting at Ostend, staring out to sea through salt-stippled glass. He looked hollow-cheeked, eyes narrowed in hurt and defiance; I felt he had been robbed of his beauty, and that I would hardly have singled him out from the other kids around him. He had become a victim, to be stared at and pitied, to provoke pity for his family and friends – and just at the moment when his future was clearing like hills in the first light, to be ready for him when he woke. I stood in front of him and repeated his name, though I knew he couldn’t see me, or recall the night he had taken my life in his arms. He gazed past me, as if in a truer kinship with the shiftless sea. A few late walkers passed us, and saw me vigilant in my huge unhappy overcoat; they didn’t know if it was the charts of tides and sunsets I was studying, or the named photos of the disappeared.
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409002215
Published by Vintage 1998
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Copyright © Alan Hollinghurst 1994
The right of Alan Hollinghurst to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
The lines from ‘There’s Nothing Like Marriage for People’ by Ira Gershwin, © Warner Chappell Music Ltd, are reproduced by permission of IMP Ltd
First published in Great Britain by
Chatto & Windus Ltd 1994
Vintage edition 1995
Vintage
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099476917