Seven
Crossing the river by way of the Sonnet Bridge on a direct course from the President's Lodge to Donald Trefusis's room in Hawthorn Tree Court, Adrian slapped each stone ball that marched along that noble structure's span in frustration. He had hated that meeting, hated the relish with which Garth Menzies had read out the article in the
Hell and hot shit, he said to himself, Donald of all people.
The Tea Room Trade they called it in America; in English, Cottaging. Putting yourself up for quick sex in a public loo.
'Bad news, Adrian,' the President had said that morning. 'Donald has gone and popped up in the guise of a lavatory cowboy. He tells me he's due in court at ten thirty. The
Adrian remembered the times he had sprawled on Donald's chesterfield of a summer evening, hot from a game of cricket. Or the weeks they had shared hotel rooms in Venice and Florence and Salzburg during last year's long vacation. The man had never so much as touched Adrian's shoulder. But then why on earth should he have? There were plenty of lanky, languid undergraduates in the University more appetising than Adrian. Anyway, maybe Donald's tastes were more Orton than Auden. Perhaps it was only anonymous rough trade that lit his fire. Live and let live, of course: but better he should paw Adrian than kneel before some greasy truck driver to whom the name Levi Strauss meant nothing but jeans and, by blowing him, blow a reputation, a career and a way of life.
It was Adrian's last summer, but whenever he crossed the bridge, no matter how occupied he might be, he could never prevent himself from looking across at the Backs, the green train of lawn and willow that swept along the river behind the colleges. With a late afternoon mist descending on the Cam, the absurd beauty of the place depressed him deeply. Depressed him because he caught himself failing to react properly to it. There had been a time when that blend of natural and human perfection would have caused him to writhe with pleasure. But now human affairs and the responsibilities of friendship had claimed that part of him that was capable of feeling and there was nothing left over for nature or the abstract.
Donald Trefusis, a urinal Uranian, a bog bugger. Who'd've thought it?
Adrian, no stranger to sexual adventurism, had never been struck by the charms of the public lavatory as an erotic salon. There had been an occasion, not long after his expulsion from school, when he had found himself forced to answer the griping of his bowels in a Gents in the bus-station at Gloucester.
Sitting there, gently encouraging his colon, he had suddenly become aware of a note being fed through an uncomfortably large hole in the wall that divided him from the neighbouring cubicle. He had taken and read it more in an innocent spirit of good citizenship than anything else. Perhaps some unfortunate disabled person had got into trouble.
'I like young cock,' the note said.
Shocked, Adrian looked at the hole. Where the note had been there was now a human eye. Because he couldn't think of anything else to do under the circumstances, or because he was born foolish, Adrian smiled. A winning smile, accompanied by a friendly, faintly patronising wink: the kind of beaming encouragement you might give a toddler who has presented you with an incompetent drawing.
There immediately followed a shuffle of feet next door and a clink of belt buckle hitting concrete. After a brief pause, a bulky and rather excited penis pushed itself through the hole and twitched urgently.
Without pausing for hygiene and comfort, Adrian had yanked up his trousers and fled in panic. For the next half-hour he wandered Gloucester looking for a place in which he might wipe himself, not daring to risk another public convenience. To this day Adrian failed to see any allure in the lavatory. Apart from anything else the smell. And the risk . . . but risk was the whole point, he supposed.
But nonetheless, the Trefusis that he knew - the man with startled white hair and Irish thorn-proof jackets, patched at the elbows, Trefusis the Elvis Costello fan and Wolseley driver, Trefusis the sports fan and polyglot - it wasn't easy to imagine that Trefusis frenziedly gobbling at a trucker. It was like trying to picture Malcolm Muggeridge masturbating or Margaret and Denis Thatcher locked in coital ecstasy. But hard to imagine or not, these things had all presumably happened.
Adrian hopped across the lawn of Hawthorn Tree Court, a precaution learnt from schooldays.
'Healey, can't you read?' they used to shout after him.
'Oh yes, sir. I'm very good at reading, sir.'
'Then can't you see that it clearly says, Don't Walk On The Grass?'
'I'm not walking, sir. I'm hopping.'
'Don't be clever, boy.'
