Junction X (9 page)

“The wind has quite ruined the honesty,” she said, investigating the herbaceous border at the bottom.

I peered at the ragged shrub she seemed to be looking at. “So, do you want it replaced?”

“No, I’m sure he can just prune it.”

“
I
could prune it.” I was mildly stung that I wasn’t even considered up to the challenge.

She straightened up. “No, I wouldn’t let you near secateurs again, darling.” The gate latch sounded, saving me from her blaming me again for killing one of her roses, and she turned, shielding her eyes with her hand. “Who’s that?”

It took me a while to focus, as the sun was dazzling. “Oh. It’s Alec. From next door.”

She gave a small laugh. “Of course from next door. How many Alecs do we know?” She put down the basket she was holding and turned her smile on Alec.

His face was a little guarded, it seemed to me—not the shuttered look he’d used when his father had come up to the attic but perhaps a little nervous, his eyes flickering from one of us to the other. His hair was all brushed to one side and looked dreadful. It was either damp or covered in Brylcreem. I could imagine his mother had done it, and it didn’t suit him the way the casual curls I’d seen the day before had.

It’s hard for me to remember that day objectively, to look back and see Alec through the eyes of that particular Ed Johnson. Because that Ed Johnson hadn’t long to live. He was about to vanish forever.

“Hello,” said Valerie. “How nice to see you.”

He shook the hand she offered him and I could swear he blushed a little. He didn’t seem the same person that had come for dinner; he was certainly happier, if not completely relaxed.

I took his hand. It was warm. “I asked Alec over,” I said, feeling a little defensive and not wanting to say he was a week late. “He’s going to look at my Sir Nigel Gresley.”

“Your what?”

“The Hornby—the train I had in the loft.”

“Oh, of course. It must be filthy. If you are going to get it down from there…”

“Already anticipated, darling,” I said. “Dust sheets are already down, and we won’t take it out of the conservatory.”

Alec shot me a look as Valerie picked up her basket and walked towards the chairs. His eyes were clear and a little anxious and the side of his mouth quirked in a half-grin. I can’t remember now whether I smiled back or not, but I remember that smirk of his.

Valerie led us across the lawn and she sat him down at the garden table, sending me in for cool drinks. When I emerged, they seemed to be getting on well. Valerie was a great hostess and always had been. Now she had him alone, she was putting him at his ease with her usual grace.

“I had no idea there was so much to it,” she was saying as I put the tray on the table. “Neither of the twins showed any interest in trains, although we did try them with a set when they were younger. Ed had a brief encounter, as you know. I think that’s why he loves
Rachmaninov
.” She laughed at her own joke, but Alec didn’t get it and gave her a brittle smile; as if he knew he was missing something.

She continued to chat to the boy—young man, I corrected myself—and I sat there, warm and comfortable in the sun, looking at both of them in turn. He complimented the garden, and she stood up and offered to show him around. The back of the garden was separated into little sections that you couldn’t see from the centre of the attic, and, as she led him off across the lawn, she was explaining the four different “rooms” that she had designed. I smiled. It surprised me that he was so considerate as to notice that the garden was her pride and joy.

I watched as she led him toward the herb garden, and I was suddenly struck with the similarity between them. They were much of a height, and, although Valerie’s Nordic hair was pale and platinum beside Alec’s darker head, they could have been brother and sister. Alec’s young body was like hers: his legs longer than most, his torso lean, her chest nearly as flat as his. Lazily, my eyes drifted downwards, noting that their legs were the same length. He was wearing the tight pair of jeans he’d worn before, and I found myself staring at the way his legs seemed to go on forever joining his backside with the minimum of fuss. The only difference between Alec’s legs and Val’s was that Valerie’s bottom was a little more padded than his.

I remember being amused at how similar my wife and Alec were. It’s hard to look back and believe that I was that blinkered.

They disappeared for a while into the garden rooms at the far end and emerged about five minutes later. I wondered what Alec thought; I couldn’t imagine that he’d really be interested in Japanese shrubs and rockeries. I saw him say something to her and she laughed. As they re-joined me, she bent down to kiss me.

“I’ll leave you to your trains,” she said. “I’m off to pick up the twins, and then I’m going into town. It was your first day at St. Peter’s last week, wasn’t it, Alec?”

He nodded.

“You’ll have to tell the twins what you think of the Upper School. They long to know—it’s so secretive with all those high brick walls.”

Alec actually stood up as she left us. Surprised at the old-fashioned gesture, I found myself rising to my feet with him. This won me a rather smug look from my wife.

We sat for a while in silence after she’d left. I wondered why I found it harder to strike up a conversation with him after his apparent ease with my wife. His face had darkened slightly, and he looked a little bored. I wondered if I had looked the same when forced into company with my parents’ friends. He made no overtures of conversation but simply sat in silence playing with his drink. I felt a rush of irritation—or at least I took it for irritation—that he had nothing to say to me.

Annoyed by the silence and by my own inability to strike up a conversation with a teenager, I stood up. “Well, let’s go in. I got the box down from the attic this morning.”

I took him through to the conservatory, where I’d unpacked the engine and some of the rolling stock, and sat down on a wicker chair to watch him. I had a chance then to study him a little more closely than I had before. His face was squarish, his chin blunt. His eyes were large and grey, and his brows and lashes were slightly darker than his hair. His mouth was straight, turning neither up nor down, a decision that life would make for him, as it did for us all, but his face was naturally serious. Later I was often to tease him that he gave the impression of someone who is always thinking serious thoughts. Deceptive. Strong currents beneath a millpond.

He spent a little time examining the train, then straightened up and brushed his hands on his jeans as if he knew that he dared not get dirt on the furniture. Possibly the dustsheets spread over the floor and the glass table had given him a clue.

“It’s in very good condition,” he said, and I could see he was suddenly shy again—or careful, at the very least. “It was good of you to let me see it.”

 
I wondered why the sudden formality. It was as if the sun had gone in, although the light was almost unbearable in the conservatory.

“But will it work on your layout?”

He pushed his fringe back and looked up at me. “You shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s too valuable.” He launched into a litany of specifications and manual-memorised facts and figures. All I could gather was that there had been few made and there were fewer still with their original boxes. “You should sell it. Or keep it.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of things being kept and not used.”

He grinned then, caught out in his own paradox. “Well. Yeah. But it’s not my train.”

Suddenly I understood. He was embarrassed at my offer. “I don’t go back on a promise.”

“You didn’t promise anything.”

“Not out loud.”

“Oh.
That
kind of promise.”

The air around us seemed to shrink, and my chest felt tight. The sun went behind a cloud. One small tiny cotton wool ball blocking out a billion tons of heat and light.

“I meant what I said. If it’s compatible, then you can have it.”

“My Da…father would never let me.”

“I’m not giving it to him. In fact—I’m not giving it to
you
. You can use it and when you’re fed up or your wife makes you pack it all up into boxes, then you can give it back.”

Alec seemed to give up, and he smiled. The cloud, beaten at last by larger odds, gave up in tandem, vanished into the blue-white sky and the sun streamed back into the conservatory. The light hit Alec’s hair and I think that’s when I saw him the way I would have seen him if life were a book, the way I
should
have seen him the first time.

The tightness in my chest increased and I had to stand up and move into the house. “It’s too hot in here,” I said hurriedly. “Come through to the kitchen.” I was shocked; my legs were shaking. I felt weak, like I’d been drained of blood, and my heart thudded erratically in my chest.

I’d looked at him and found him beautiful.

Up to then he’d been the young man next door, nothing more, no matter that that sounds like the worst kind of self-deception.

I was not. Am. Not. The sort of man who looks at teenagers in that way. I’d never even looked at a
man
in that way. Despite what Phil and I indulged in, I’d never appraised my workmates. I’d not even considered the aesthetics of Phil, although I knew that he was tanned and blond, and I knew he wasn’t ugly. But I’d never considered his attractiveness. I didn’t do what I did with him because he was handsome, but because we were friends. I never found myself staring at him and thinking of his looks in that way. He was…just Phil.

As I pulled open kitchen cabinets with one hand while with the other I dug my nails into my palm hard enough to draw blood, I reminded myself that men were not supposed to be beautiful. It wasn’t a term that one applied. But, as I turned with an empty glass in my hand and told Alec to help himself to more lemonade, I felt preconceptions that I’d clung to slip away. I knew I was wrong. If Alec hadn’t taken the glass at that moment, I probably would have crushed it.

He
was
beautiful.

Chapter 7

The rest of Alec’s visit was a nightmare, and one I would look back on and get cold flushes about for months after. Even in the cool of the kitchen I was too hot, my clothes felt tight and I slid back to not being able to communicate with him. I knew that I had gone scarlet when I’d seen him in that new way, and I knew that he’d seen, because he’d been looking right at me when it happened. He’d looked away, and his brow contracted like he knew what I was thinking. I remember sitting down again and hoping that he didn’t know, that he’d take a grown man blushing to be shyness or something—even if I couldn’t think for one moment what else it could be.

I lapsed into a silence that suffocated and strangled the words even as they formed in my mind. Everything I thought of was trite or seemed heavy with double meaning.

At last, he pushed his chair back. “Well, I’d better go.”

“I’ll help you with the engine.”

“No need. I can manage.” He lifted the cardboard box easily and I had to look away because I found I was watching at the shift of the muscles in his bare arms.

All I could do was follow him out of the French door and open the gate for him. My mind was racing as I tried to think of something to say.

“Let me know when you’ve got it running, then.”

He stopped on the other side of the gate. He was looking at the ground and his brows were contracted, as if he was deep in thought. I had the feeling that if he could have given back the train and never seen me again, he would have, but his good manners prevailed. He rested the box on the fence between us and held out his hand. “Thanks.” And then he smiled.

I knew it was all right then, that he hadn’t taken my behaviour for anything strange. Feeling a groundswell of relief run through me, I shook his hand, then watched him walk down the drive.

If he hadn’t smiled, I wonder how different this account would have been. If he’d really been embarrassed or angry and hadn’t made that one small gesture, would I be writing this now?

Strange that for all that I do or do not remember, that smile of his, golden and warm, stays with me. Easiest to recall, and the last thing to fade—like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

That afternoon, I attempted to do some paperwork and read the week’s
Financial Times
again from cover to cover, but I was restless and distracted. I couldn’t settle. In Valerie’s absence, I had a couple of whiskies, though it was unsuitably early.