So the poster had been a bad idea. What next? Maybe he would come round. Maybe it would be up on his wall tomorrow morning. I’ll check, he decided. Surely it was the same as an ordinary lad having a picture up of some tart with her baps out? What was wrong with that? It was healthy. Only appetite. To him Vince was just the same, only the other way round. Vince didn’t have to have such a different life.
Vince himself didn’t see that yet. He wanted to seem queer.
There would be no grandchildren, though. Never mind. He went to wash the dishes.
Grandchildren make you old. Teddy boys can’t be old. You can’t be an old rebel. You can’t have a leather jacket with a grey quiff. Distressed leather, fine; distressed hair is another thing altogether.
But a house of bachelors, washing two dirty plates by themselves. No noise except Gene Pitney.
And now, the noise of pebbles against glass. Thrown from the field, out of the darkness. A swift ricochet and into the grass. Someone was out there, throwing stones at Vince’s window. The floorboards creaked upstairs. Vince would be craning his neck out the window. His father did the same. He saw a dark figure; Prussian blue, fists clenched, looking up.
‘Vince!’ he heard, cautiously hissed by a male voice.
Leaving everything simmering, Liz had rushed upstairs for last-minute adjustments to herself. Penny went to oversee the pasta, which she found clagged together, bubbling in a sickly yellow froth. Liz was a careless and extravagant cook. Penny set about separating pasta twirls with a wooden spatula.
The dining room was aglow with golden candles and sprays of plastic tiger lilies in blue glass vases. Liz had reappeared, standing ready, arm draped on a chairback. The scene had taken on the unctuous gaudiness of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The wine they had drunk already was making Penny lose her appetite.
‘Open another one.’ Her mother passed a bottle. She couldn’t deal with the cork herself because of her nails. Penny went to the kitchen sink; she might spill red wine everywhere. Her nerves were shot. Liz busied herself, easing the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever from its worn sleeve.
‘I’ve been made homeless. Can I stay here?’
It wasn’t certain whether Andy was asking Vince or Vince’s father. One was frozen on the stairs, the other was holding the back door.
Andy was in his leather jacket, carrying his rucksack. He looked whiter than ever, fading away beneath the unshaded kitchen light. His eyes roved hungrily around the room.
‘He’s your friend, Vince?’ Vince nodded. His father asked, ‘Who threw you out?’
‘My uncle. Because he’s getting married.’
‘That’s hard luck. You’d better close the door.’
Vince took a hesitant step downstairs. ‘You’re letting him stay?’
Out of his blue nylon uniform the bus driver looked strange to Penny. He was grinning hugely, a vision in the steamy kitchen, a bunch of roses in either hand. Liz stepped forward and kissed the bus driver’s cheek. ‘Hello.’
I hope she’s shaved properly, Penny thought. Of course she has.
This was the crucial moment for Liz. This was the moment by which she could gauge the future. It was the moment when something new becomes something current and ongoing.
Penny recalled one of the late-night washing-machine conversations, years ago. Her father sitting in a kimono, clean-shaven and with his hair cut short. He was telling her about one-night stands and lasting relationships.
‘A first meeting, first-night sex, is something that seems to happen outside of time. The mental life is suspended, no matter how lucid and unphysical you may be. Thinking about consequences is for the future. You’ve been rendered exempt from time. The next morning, waking together, may still be like that. But it is too early to be sure. It is not until the moment that the lover returns’ (This moment. Penny was thinking) ‘or when you return to the lover, that you may begin to see how things will end up.
‘Does he smile? Does she look happy to see you again? Are you content to return to the present together? To pick up the everyday strands at once and in the same place, start to wind them together into a tangle of both? Can you tell?’
Liz beamed. ‘I’m so pleased you could come.’
‘I can’t,' Andy whispered, corpsing with laughter. He was crushing his jacket into the mattress with his back, squirming as Vince unpicked his fly buttons with his teeth. ‘Not with your old man downstairs.’
Vince drew back, palms pressed down like the Sphinx, pinning Andy to the bed. ‘He’s probably listening in.’ Thoughtfully and tenderly, he took Andy into his mouth for a while, nuzzling shoulders under the backs of Andy’s legs, feeling the thighs relax and tense, of one movement now. He loved the feel of the end of someone’s cock in his mouth. The oxymoronic thrill of it: something so tender and yet determined. It was the most intimate thing Vince knew. They had hardly exchanged two sentences tonight and here they were.
He paused at a well-known point, recognising the spasm. The lull before crisis. ‘Well, I can. And so can you.’
And he proved it.
Andy had come home.
TWELVE
Penny looked down at the ruined remains. They had been talking for so long that the leftover garlic bread was hardening. Almost an hour ago the music had petered out without anyone getting up to change it. Their conversation had carried them through. It had been endless, seamless. Cliff never stopped.
Liz held her wineglass carefully, watching him talk, content not to break in. The night had been hers also. She had been full of energy. Penny wondered whether she was on something. She kept jumping up as if pulled
