The Folding Star (17 page)

It was voices that alerted me, and I sidled back to the window with abrupt and gloomy excitement. Another fight was going on, with Patrick asking Luc a question, accusing him of something but embarrassed already by possibly being wrong; Luc shook his head in a mime of disbelief and backed away – then turned, slung out a hip and pushed his trousers down to show a strip of blue undershorts. Such a saucy, commonplace little mime it was: I didn’t like it. Patrick went back into the house, and Luc hung about for a couple of minutes by himself. I felt he was self-conscious, as if distantly aware of being looked at. I began to pick up on the odd tempo of the voyeur’s day, the scattered sightings, the extended lulls, the great patient investment of time, the eerie, more than social intimacy with figures utterly detached and unconscious of you; they were the twitching puppets of their own routines and whims, immune to your muttered urgings, your baffled telepathy, your shielded stare. I’d known it before, once or twice – and half-ashamed – watching a boy next door waste a day, his expanses of day-dreaming, his occasional inscrutable actions. I remembered the texture of the thinnish, slow time in which he existed, the one-sock-on, one-sock-off doldrums of a morning alone. I hated the Donningtons – not for any particular reason, just in that keen, general way one hates one’s neighbours, with their boat and their extension – and as I trained the binocs on young Gerry, whose round face was being brusquely thumbed, pinched and generally rethought by the gods of puberty, I felt I was taking a secret revenge. I shut myself in the bathroom and watched and watched. It was like a corrupt privilege granted in a dream or in an ancient public school.

‘Let’s have a look.’ Matt came up beside me, bored, rather brutal. I was still peering at the empty lawn.

‘There’s nothing to see at the moment.’

A flesh-mantled finger with a tiny oblong of lost nail pushed down the blind-slat, and the leathered cylinders of a massive pair of field-glasses slid into position.

‘Man, you can see everything with these.’ How did he do it? I was ineffectual again, a mere blundering inner man, protected and outwitted by my cold-hearted friend. Another blunt finger rocked the milled focus-wheel. ‘Incredible. You can count the blades of grass,’ he said. ‘If you want to.’

‘Let’s have a look.’

His whole identity was obscured by the glasses, and his grin might only have been the sneer of a face screwed up against the sun. ‘You could count the pubes on his balls.’

‘He doesn’t have pubes on his balls. Now can I have a look, please?’

‘Yeah … yeah …’ – a concentrating tongue peeped and havered. ‘Oh boy. Here comes Big Boy. Just look at that … Looks like they’re going boating again.’ I squinted through, somehow convinced that without the binoculars I wouldn’t be able to see a thing, though there of course Sibylle and Patrick were, encumbered with paddles and a bailer and boxy pink lifejackets.

‘Now where’s your little friend, I wonder? He’ll probably stay indoors to do his reading, and you won’t see him at all, which will be your fault.’ I gave Matt a blow in the ribs – just like the boys fighting, I saw – and he cackled and said, ‘No, hold on, who do we have here?’ And Luc was back again, awkward on the steps, as if unable to give help when it was expected of him. ‘If I was young … Luc,’ said Matt, ‘I’d be getting a bit jealous of Big Boy and the girl.’ When I got the glasses at last though, and caught the pair as they scuffed out on to the beach, there was an angry firmness about them. They looked unlikely to enjoy themselves. I took off my specs and twiddled the focus to my shorter sight. The lenses were powerful, ocean-sweepers proved perhaps in some war-time conning-tower, treasured later for their ability to capture shore-birds’ markings and charming movements. The heavy casing was chipped, the leather was frayed and in the paint the name DHONDT was roughly scratched.

Half an hour raced and drifted by before Luc appeared again. Then things began to unfold with a canny momentum of their own. He came on to the porch and I had the field-glasses on him: he was startlingly clean and close, palpable but also stylised in the flowing depthless picture-plane. When I shifted my position the picture twitched uncaringly to various greenery, a nodding sapling’s top, and I had to run the glasses down and across in a worried blur to find him strolling over the lawn, just beneath me it seemed, like a figure in the flattened foreground of a Japanese print. I didn’t dare open the blinds further, and the picture was hazily occluded above and below by the unfocused slats. They gave an edge of mystery to the brilliant image they framed.

He spread out a pale blue towel with tattered edges, an old towel kept for the beach, for tar and sun-oil. Then he paced around it in a territorial sort of way, and looked out towards the dunes. I thought for a while he might be going on to the beach instead and that I would lose my almost supernatural vantage-point. But he resolved on privacy and I saw at once his shy, clever dignity – it made me love him even more. He tugged off his jersey and lay down, reaching out for a cloth bag: I watched him take out some lotion and read the bottle before deciding he wasn’t likely to get burnt; the sun was bright, though, and he put on visor sunglasses, their arms linked behind by a short embroidered band. Then he rolled on to his front and opened a book, he was looking away from me and I refined the focus over his shoulder and made out a typical page of
Poets of Our Time
: he must have folded a pencil in as a marker, and he was soon underlining words and scoring the margin and then for about five minutes he worked on a dense, formal doodle – I think it was on a Roy Campbell page. The thing about Our Time was that it was really Our Fathers’ Time. I wondered at my own impulse to keep him back with me in a shared childhood of unfashionable lyrics and discredited rhetoric. I studied his naked brown back more closely than I had ever studied anything – the wide plates of his shoulderblades, the slight boyish dip between as he leant on his elbows, traces of pink scratches on the shoulders, the shaped, back-swept golden hair stacked in the embroidered sling of the shades-band.

When I put down the binoculars to take off my trousers I was confused to find myself indoors, in another house, and not kneeling just behind his open legs ready to fuck him or tickle his feet. I came back to my vigil to find him standing up and looking around, and I thought perhaps he was giving up already. Matt was quite wrong to say he was skinny; he was lean but no more skinny than Matt was, and his chest was surprisingly big, with wide milky nipples. I knelt there teasing the air with my tongue and teeth, and working my jaw in imaginary kisses.

He was taking his trousers off.

I can’t go on about the next hour. Luc on the grass in his shallow blue shorts, rather discreet; the tan-lines of the summer, of his red ducks and of longer shorts than these, marking comical sexy stages up his long legs to the whiteness I just glimpsed where the hem rode high by a finger’s breadth on the rise of his buttocks. Already the little creases and blue nodes of veins on his inner thighs. Nothing about his cock, but a couple of seconds’ vision of crinkled scrotum (I may have imagined that). The discarding of
Poets of Our Time
and the getting on of a yellow Walkman. Its not being Schubert. The scary challenge of a look my way, half-sitting up as if alerted by a noise or the glint of the lens, then lying back again, fingers in his waistband. My envy of his hands as they cupped his head, or flicked at an insect or a tickling grass, the light scratches with the back of a thumbnail. My envy of a long-toed, dirty-soled foot rubbed against the opposite calf, then sliding slowly down till it lay by the other and tick-tocked to the beat of the music.

He had to move as the sun swung round and the shadow of our house advanced across the lawn; the steep roof and the lower sunroom took an ominous form, like the blind head and paws of the Sphinx, I thought. Twice he picked up the towel and resettled himself further away, frowning, the subject of an experiment in light he seemed not to have grasped. Twice Matt brought me off. I needed both hands to hold the heavy glasses without shaking. I was rather tied up, head and hands in one place, heart and mind out there where my pupil lay and daydreamed and shifted from the advance of the cool tide of shadow.

I must have been early for the lesson. I was approaching from the other side, on the streets I associated with disappointment, the pilgrim’s reluctant departure from the shrine, sores and deformities still unhealed, though this way round the sombre landmarks took on a new aura of hope and apprehension. I was calming my nerves with tricks against stage-fright that my father had taught me. And there was Luc, walking ahead of me, not running but clearly anxious not to be late. I was bucked up when I saw him look at his watch; my authority was manifested in that quick gesture – undiminished, maybe even heightened, by my tolerance in rearranging the lesson. Then wasn’t I pained too to know what a distant figure I was to him still, the martinet of dead poetry and strict time?

He had turned a corner and when I came round it twenty seconds later I saw him talking to a man who must have stopped him. They were holding on to either side of the unfolded tourist map and Luc, taller by a head, was stooping across it in the search for a street, I assumed, that the man had asked for. I heard him groan with annoyance and giggle with shame at not finding it; while the visitor wore a calm, almost gratified expression, finding himself not so stupid after all. To ask the hard question is simple, I thought.

I didn’t like the look of this man – fortyish, fit, with curly fair hair receding above a long boring face. I could imagine people saying he was good-looking and he gave the impression of believing this himself. He had a neat little knapsack with a cape packed across the top.

I stopped before I got to them, determined to reach the house after Luc, and staggered too, seeing him only feet away, to think where I had been, in mind and body, since we had last met. Only yesterday I’d come twice across his naked legs – or rather, on to a cushioned window-seat and a sprawl of time-crinkled TV magazines in a derelict house – but still it had seemed to me as if we had made love, the intimacy was so prolonged and detailed; I knew his body better than he did himself. I saw now that it wasn’t quite fair, incredibly he didn’t know, he’d been reading and listening to music at the time. The man was excusing Luc for his failure, his free hand grasped his upper arm consolingly. ‘Don’t worry, it’s a very special, odd interest of mine,’ he was saying in English as I stepped forward and gripped Luc’s other elbow in an involuntary challenge to the stranger’s claim. How dare he foist his special odd interests on the boy?

‘He wanted to know where the Fratry of St Caspianus is,’ Luc said as we walked on the last hundred yards to the house. ‘I know I ought to know that, I have learnt it once.’

I could have told him, god knows. It was a dingy, patched-up little place on the edge of town, close to where Matt lived; I passed it every day and never saw a sign of life. Only the most insatiable antiquary could ever have dreamt of going there by choice. I could have impressed him, even gently squashed him with my knowledge, which wasn’t even monk-knowledge, just a part of the accusing streetscape of the morning after. But my mouth was as dry as cloth and my features had a rubbery stiffness, as if I had been terribly wounded by an old friend and didn’t know what to say. Luc glanced sideways at me, but thought perhaps I was merely angry, and that he was in for a difficult hour. I was on the brink of tears just to be walking beside him in the real world, the two of us in our black jeans and smart today with light sports-jackets, though his was costly and Scottish whilst mine was American and second-hand.

‘So whatever did happen to your glasses?’ Luc asked with new informality as we sat down in our regular places at the dining-room table.

I fingered the cracked bridge and the side-hinges stiffly fixed with tape. I wanted to tell him how when he had finally gone into the house and left nothing but the silvered oblong on the grass where his towel had been spread I had stood up and wandered desolately over the half-seen floor, treading on the spectacles that I had discarded to make love to him and inflicting the damage he could now see. ‘I fell off my bicycle,’ I said absurdly: ‘or more accurately I was knocked off.’

‘I hope you weren’t hurt, Edward,’ he said with eager sympathy, almost more eager than sympathetic, but he was only seventeen and what did he know? ‘Everybody rides bicycles and I think they can be very dangerous.’ I shrugged to show that I was fine. ‘I didn’t know you had a bicycle,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t actually
my
bicycle,’ I admitted. ‘It was a friend’s.’ I could see myself being pressed further and further into deceit rather as a lying quick answer to a barber’s question, incuriously followed by a further question, can lead in minutes to a crazy-house of invention and non-sequitur. ‘I won’t be riding it again,’ I emphasised. ‘It was a complete write-off.’

‘A write-off. Yes. Anyway, I think of you as a walker,’ he said. (So he
thought
of me.) ‘I have often seen you walking along this street, when I am working in the evening, and it reminds me to work even harder.’

He had seen me … And was there controlled anger in his cool delivery, a new tone in our affairs? I lobbed the blame clumsily back – ‘You can’t have been working very hard if you were looking out of the window’ – and heard what a leaden censorious jerk I sounded, and grinned to deflect his hatred.

‘Perhaps you don’t know all about our little mirrors in the window, which are present in most of the old houses. We can sit and do what we want to do and then we just look up quickly and we can see all along the street.’

I blushed and nodded with genuine enlightenment. Of course I had seen these spying-glasses; but I hadn’t realised just how routinely nosy these people were. I began to feel that everything I did might be observed and censured from within the dark old windows of the town. ‘How was your weekend?’ I said.

‘Oh, it was very good, thank you.’