It was still hard to tell if Paul’s solemn, self-conscious look expressed emotion or mere beetling politeness. He came back close to Peter to speak, as if the chapel imposed a certain discretion. ‘Funny, it doesn’t say he was a poet.’
‘No… no, that’s true,’ said Peter, moved himself and aroused by their repeated touching; ‘though the Horace, I suppose…’
‘Mm?’
He touched the plaited Gothic letters. ‘Tomorrow we shall set forth upon the boundless sea’ – trying not to sound too like a teacher as he translated.
‘Oh, yes…’
Getting into his stride, Donaldson pulled out something bigger, the Bourdon stop perhaps, for the next verse of the hymn, its loud plonking drone giving them a kind of cover. ‘Have you seen the Shelley Memorial in Oxford?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Surely the only portrait of a poet to show his cock,’ said Peter, and glanced over at Donaldson’s mirror to see if he’d been heard.
‘Mm, I expect it is,’ murmured Paul, but seemed too startled to catch his eye. He went up to look at the poet’s head, with Peter close behind him, blandly pretending to share his curiosity. Again he put his arm lightly across Paul’s shoulders, where his red sweater was slung round – ‘Handsome fellow,’ he said, ‘don’t you think?’ – and then with tense luxuriance let his hand drift slowly downwards, just the thin shirt here between his fingers and the warm hard curve of his spine – ‘I mean, not that he really looked like that’ – to that magical spot called the sacral chakra, which an Indian boy at Magdalen had told him one night was the pressure-point of all desires. So he pressed on it, tenderly, with a little questioning and promising movement of his middle finger, and felt Paul gasp and curl his back against him as if in some trap where the effort to escape only caught you the more tightly.
‘Fell at Maricourt,’ said Paul, now leaning forward as though he was going to kiss Cecil.
‘Well, quite,’ said Peter. He was entranced by his secret mischief, the ache of expectation like vertigo in his thighs and his chest. Paul half-turned towards him, flushed and shifty, worried perhaps by his own arousal. There was a comically disconcerting suggestion that Cecil himself had something to do with it. Now they had to be careful. As if archly colluding, Donaldson engaged the octave coupler for a further verse. Peter half expected to see his smirk in the mirror, but the boy was responding too hard to the querulous demands of his own instrument. Under the piping blare (‘free from sorrow, free from sin’) Peter said humorously and straightforwardly, ‘I really think we’d better go up to my room, don’t you.’
‘Oh… oh all right.’ Paul seemed to think ahead, as if at an unexpected change of plan.
Peter took him up the nearest back-stairs, and the first-floor corridor brought them past the laundry-room – at some point he wanted to take Paul up through the skylight there and on to the roof, which was for good reason the most out-of-bounds thing in the whole school. But he saw at once that the door was open – Matron was fossicking round in there, just her large white rump showing now to the passer-by. ‘Well, if you come again,’ he murmured; and saw Paul himself uncertain of such a prospect, eagerness struggling with some entrenched habit of disappointment. They went on, climbed the grand stairs to the second floor, there was the creak of the floorboard that Paul was hearing for the first time, and then they were in Peter’s room, with the door snapped shut between them and the world. He pulled Paul towards him and kissed him, and the door he was leaning on rattled in its lock at the sudden impact of their two bodies.
What he’d forgotten was that Paul would immediately start talking – his mouth two inches from Peter’s cheek, about how nice this first kiss had been, and how he liked Peter’s tie, and he’d been thinking all week… his colour at the happy end of the spectrum of embarrassment, his head hot and glowing, and the string of words, half-candid, half-senseless, a jerking safety-line… so Peter kissed him again, a long almost motionless kiss to calm him and shut him up and then, perhaps, to break him down. Focused as he was, he took in the familiar creak and rustle, way off behind him, through a mere thickness of oak, and then the short groan, like a polite but determined cough, of the floorboard just outside the door. There was a sharp knock, which they both felt. They froze for one second, Peter letting Paul slide out of his arms, then quickly buttoning his jacket, while still leaning heavily against the door. The handle turned, and the door budged slightly. None of the rooms at Corley had a key. He saw Paul had picked up a book, with a horrified pretence of calm, like a schoolboy about to be caught. Peter called, ‘Sorry, Matron!’ in a hollow voice, and with a funny impromptu kick at the door spun round and snatched it wide open.
Matron was holding a stack of folded sheets, with the grey starchy gleam of all the laundry at Corley. She peered into the room. ‘Oh, you’ve got a visitor,’ she said, apology and disapproval struggling uncertainly. There was her slight wheeze, having toiled up from the laundry-room, and the almost subliminal whistle of the clean sheets against her white-coated bosom. Peter smiled and stared. ‘I’m giving out clean sheets tonight, because of Open Day,’ Matron said. There was quite a charge of antagonism, a combative resistance to Peter’s charm, and, to be fair, his mockery.
‘I hope my room’s not going to be open too, Matron,’ he said. She grappled off the top sheet. ‘Here, let me…’ Really he should introduce Paul, but he preferred to excite her suspicion.
‘We all need to get ahead,’ she said, with a tight smile.
‘Oh, absolutely.’ It wasn’t clear if she expected him to change the bed right now. She looked narrowly towards it.
‘Well, then…! I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘Top to bottom.’
‘Of course.’
And with that she withdrew. Peter closed the door firmly, gave Paul a queasy grin and poured out two glasses of gin and vermouth. ‘Sorry about that. Have a drink… chin chin.’ They clinked their glasses, and Peter watched over his own raised rim as Paul sipped, with a little grimace, a swallowed urge to cough, and then put the glass down on the desk. He said, ‘God, you look so sexy,’ exciting himself more by his own choked sound. Paul gasped, and picked up his drink, and said something inaudible, which Peter felt sure must be along the same lines.
He thought the Park would offer more shelter than a room with a chair jammed under the door-handle, but as soon as they got outside he was aware of the unusual hum and crepitation of activity, a mower running, voices not far off. Still, the school seemed more delightfully surreal after a large gin drunk in two minutes. The evening had a lift and a stride to it. He remembered summer evenings at his own prep-school, and the haunting mystery, lit only by glimpses, of what the masters did after the boys were tucked up in bed. He wondered now if any of them had done what he was about to do. Paul seemed changed by the gin too, loosened up and at once a little wary of what he might say and do as a result. Peter asked him on a hunch if he were an only child, and Paul said, ‘Yes – I am,’ with a narrow smile, that seemed both to question the question and show exactly the only child’s sly self-reliance. ‘What about you?’
‘I’ve got a sister.’
‘I can’t imagine having a sister.’
‘And what about the rest of your family?’ – it was first-date talk, and Peter felt already he might not remember the answer. He wanted to get Paul into the Out-of-Bounds Woods. He took him quickly past the bleak little fishpond, and on towards the stone gate.
‘Well, there’s my mum.’
‘And what does she do?’
‘I’m afraid she doesn’t do anything really.’
‘No, nor does mine, but I thought I should ask.’
Paul paused, and then said quietly, ‘She got polio when I was eight.’
‘Oh, god, I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah… it’s been quite difficult actually.’ Something flavourless in his words, from embarrassment perhaps and repetition.
‘Where does she have it?’
‘Her…
‘And what about your father?’
‘He was killed in the War, in fact,’ said Paul, with a strange, almost apologetic look. ‘He was a fighter pilot – but he went missing.’
‘My god,’ said Peter, with genuine sympathy, and seeing in a blundering way that all these things might help to
