always dimly busy in the background, doing things with baking tins, or socks. I must have been in Mrs Gray’s vicinity numerous times before I registered her in any particular, definite way. Confusingly, I have what is certain to be a false memory of her, in winter, applying talcum powder to the shinily pink inner sides of my thighs where they had become raw from the chafing of my trousers; highly unlikely, since apart from anything else the trousers I was wearing on that occasion were short, which would hardly have been the case if I was fifteen, since we were all in longed-for longers by the age of eleven or twelve at the latest. Then whose mother was that one, I wonder, the talc-applier, and what opportunity for an even more precocious initiation did I perhaps let pass?
Anyhow, there was no moment of blinding illumination when Mrs Gray herself stepped forth from the toils and trammels of domesticity and came skimming towards me on her half-shell, wafted by the full-cheeked zephyrs of spring. Even after we had been going to bed together for some time I would have been hard put to give a fair description of her—if I had tried, what I would have described would probably have been a version of myself, for when I looked at her it was me that I saw first, reflected in the glorious mirror that I made of her.
Billy never talked to me about her—why would he?—and seemed to pay her no more heed than I did for so long. He was a laggard, and often of a morning when I called for him going to school he was not ready, and I would be invited in, especially if it was raining or icy. He did not do the inviting—remember that suffusion of mute fury and burning shame we experienced when our friends got a glimpse of us
Oh, the morning smell of other people’s kitchens, the cotton-wool warmth, the clatter and haste, with everyone still half asleep and cross. Life’s newness and strangeness never seemed more vividly apparent than it did in such moments of homely intimacy and disorder.
Billy had a sister, younger than he, an unnerving creature with the look of a pixie, with long, rather greasy plaits and a narrow sharp stark white face the top half of which was blurred behind enormous horn-rimmed spectacles with circular lenses as thick as magnifying glasses. She seemed to find me irresistibly amusing and would wriggle inside her clothes with malignant hilarity when I appeared in the kitchen with my schoolbag, shuffling in like a hunchback. She was called Kitty, and indeed there was something feline in the way she would slit her eyes when she smiled at me, compressing her lips into a thin, colourless arc that seemed to stretch all the way between her intricately voluted, translucent, prominent pink ears. I wonder now if she, too, might have been sweet on me and all the snuffly amusement were a means of hiding the fact. Or is this just vanity on my part? I am, or was, an actor, after all. There was something the matter with her, she had some condition that was not spoken of that made her what in those days was called delicate. I found her unnerving, and was I think even a little afraid of her; if so, it was prescient of me.
Mr Gray, the husband and father, was long and lean, and myopic, too, like his daughter—he was an optician, as it happens, a fact the high irony of which is unlikely to be lost on any of us—and wore bow-ties and sleeveless Fair Isle jumpers. And of course there were, presently, those two short stubby horns sprouting just above his hairline, the cuckold’s mark, which I regret to say were my doing.
Was my passion for Mrs Gray, at the outset, at any rate, anything more than an intensification of the conviction we all had at that age that our friends’ families were so very much nicer, more gracious, more interesting—in a word, more desirable—than our own? At least Billy had a family, whereas there was only me and my widowed mother. She kept a boarding-house for travelling salesmen and other transients, who did not so much lodge in the place as haunt it, like anxious ghosts. I stayed out as much as I could. The Grays’ house was often empty in the latter part of the afternoons and Billy and I would lounge about there for hours after school. Where did the others, Mrs Gray and Kitty, for instance, where did they get to at those times? I can still see Billy, in his navy- blue school blazer and grubby white shirt from the collar of which he had just yanked one-handedly a stained school tie, standing in front of the fridge with the door open, gazing glassy-eyed into its lighted interior as if he were watching something engrossing on television. In fact there was a television set in the upstairs living room, and sometimes we would go up there and sit slumped in front of it with our hands plunged in our trouser pockets and our feet on our schoolbags, trying to watch the afternoon horse-racing from exotic-sounding places on the other side of the sea, such as Epsom, or Chepstow, or Haydock Park. Reception was poor, and often all we would see would be phantom riders cocked astride their phantom mounts, floundering blindly through a blizzard of static interference.
In the desperate idleness of one of those afternoons Billy hunted out the key to the cocktail cabinet—yes, the Grays possessed such an exotic item, for they were among the town’s more well-to-do folk, though I doubt anyone in the house ever actually drank a cocktail—and we broke into a precious bottle of his father’s twelve-year- old whiskey. Standing at the window, cut-glass tumbler in hand, my pal and I felt like a pair of Regency rakes looking down in high disdain upon a drably sober world. It was my first drink of whiskey, and although I would never develop a liking for the stuff, that day the sullen, bitter reek of it and the scald of it on my tongue seemed portents of the future, a promise of all the rich adventures that life surely had in store for me. Outside in the little square the wan sunlight of early spring was gilding the cherry trees and making the black, arthritic tips of their branches glisten, and old Busher the rag-and-bone man on his cart went grinding past, a wagtail scurrying out of the way of the frilled hoofs of his horse, and at the sight of these things I felt a sharp sweet ache of yearning, objectless yet definite, like the phantom pain in an amputee’s missing limb. Did I see, or sense, even then, away down the tunnel of time, tiny in the distance yet growing steadily more substantial, the figure of my future love, chatelaine of the House of Gray, already making her abstracted, dallying way towards me?
What used I call her, I mean how did I address her? I do not remember saying her name, ever, though I must have. Her husband sometimes called her Lily, but I do not think I had a pet-name, a love-name, for her. I have a suspicion, which will not be dismissed, that on more than one occasion, in the throes of passion, I cried out the word
Billy took the whiskey bottle into the bathroom and topped up the telltale gap with a gill of water from the tap, and I dried and polished the glasses as best I could with my handkerchief and put them back where they had been on the shelf in the cocktail cabinet. Partners in crime, Billy and I were suddenly shy of each other, and I took up my schoolbag hurriedly and made my getaway, leaving my friend slumped on the sofa again, watching the unwatchable racers pounding through the electric snow.
I would like to be able to say it was that day, because I remember it so particularly, that I came face to face with Mrs Gray for the first, real, time, at the front door, perhaps, she coming in as I was going out, her face flushed from the thrilling air of outdoors and my nerves tingling still after the whiskey; a chance touch of her hand, a surprised, lingering look; a thickening in the throat; a soft jolt to the heart. But no, the front hall was empty except for Billy’s bicycle and an unpartnered roller-skate that must have been Kitty’s, and no one met me in the doorway, no one at all. The pavement when I stepped on to it seemed farther away from my head than it should be, and tended to tilt, as though I were on stilts and the stilts had squashy springs attached to the ends of them—in short, I was drunk, not seriously so, but drunk nevertheless. Just as well, then, that I did not encounter Mrs Gray, being in such a state of soggy euphoria, for there is no telling what I might have done and thereby ruined everything before it had even started.
And look! In the square, when I come out, it is, impossibly, autumn again, not spring, and the sunlight has mellowed and the leaves of the cherry trees have rusted and Busher the rag-and-bone man is dead. Why are the seasons being so insistent, why do they resist me so? Why does the Mother of the Muses keep nudging me like this, giving me what seem all the wrong hints, tipping me the wrong winks?
My wife just now climbed all the way up here to my eyrie under the roof, unwillingly negotiating the steep and treacherous attic stairs that she hates, to tell me that I have missed a telephone call. At first, when she put her head in at the low door—how smartly I encircled this page with a protective arm, like a schoolboy caught scribbling smut—I could hardly understand what she was saying. I must have been concentrating very hard, lost in the lost world of the past. Usually I hear the phone ringing, down in the living room, a far-off and strangely plaintive sound that makes my heart joggle anxiously, just as it used to do long ago when my daughter was a baby and her crying woke me in the night.
