The Folding Star Read online

  THE FOLDING STAR

  A NOVEL

  ALAN HOLLINGHURST

  The author gratefully acknowledges the hospitality of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Woodside, California, where the early part of this novel was written.

  Les grands vents venus d'outremer

  Passent par la Ville, l'hiver,

  Comme des étrangers amers.

  Ils se concertent, graves et pâles,

  Sur les places, et leurs sandales

  Ensablent le marbre des dalles.

  Comme des crosses à leurs mains fortes

  Ils heurtent l'auvent et la porte

  Derrière qui l'horloge est morte;

  Et les adolescents amers

  S'en vont avec eux vers la Mer!

  Henri de Régnier

  Contents

  1 Museum Days

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  2 UNDER WOODS

  Chapter 14

  3 A MERRY GOOSE HUNT

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  1

  Museum Days

  Chapter 1

  A man was waiting already on the narrow island of the tramstop, and I asked him falteringly about the routes. He explained politely, in detail, as if it were quite an interest of his; but I didn't take it in. I was charmed by his grey eyes and unnecessary smile, and the flecks of white paint on his nose and his dark-blond hair. I nodded and smiled back, and he fell into a nice pensiveness, hands in pockets, looking out down the empty street. I decided I would follow him.

  The tram made its noiseless approach, headlamps on although the sky was still bright: the No 3, the Circular. We clambered up the steps together, I sought his help with the ticket-franking machine, which pinged as though I had won a prize. He swung into the seat behind me, and I felt his casual presence there as we trundled from stop to stop past churches and canals; when he whistled a little tune his breath stirred the hairs on the back of my neck. I thought, these are the evening routines which will soon be mine, the tug of an unknown suburb, or a bar, or a lover. I turned to ask him a further question I'd been nurturing, but it was just at the moment the tram seemed to lose its current and came to rest. A Young woman was waiting, smoking, and gave a contented wave. My friend jumped off and trotted her away under his arm, whilst the doors folded to with a sigh.

  I went on out, beyond the Stock Markets, hardly noticing, wondering what it was I had expected. For two or three stops I had the car to myself; I sensed the driver's puzzlement, and stared determinedly through the window at the featureless district we were passing through; then I panicked and rang the bell. When the tram moved off I found myself alone, and knew suddenly, as I had not done at the station or the hotel, that I had arrived in a strange city, in another country. Part of me shrank from the simple change of place.

  There was no one else in the street that led up to the church, no one in the shabby square that its tower overhung. St Vaast: an ugly old hulk, with a porch tacked on, all curlicues and dropping yellow stucco, with a nest-littered pediment above. It was locked, of course: no last light glimmering from a vestry window—no choral society meeting after work to rehearse their director's own Te Deum or some minatory Flemish motets. I went on with a shiver.

  From the further side of the square a lane led out to a still bleaker area. The street-lamps flickered into pink as I approached, but nothing else responded. The buildings were grandiose, like cinemas gone dark, the lower windows boarded up and plastered with posters for rock groups and the dud grins of politicians in the previous year's elections. The names of newspapers, printing works, engineering firms, in forward-looking Deco script, could still be read above the padlocked entrance grilles. There was a sense that cacophonous all-night business had been done here, and that the city, with a certain unflustered malevolence, had chosen its moment, and stilled it, and reasserted its own dead calm. At the street's end was the long vulgar front of a hotel, the Pilgrimage and Commercial, still with its brass entrance rail and the red and blue badges of motoring clubs. I climbed the steps, among the ghost-throng of arrivals, and peered through the splendid glass doors on to a shadowy half-acre of mud and rubble.

  I was at a bar that was quite crowded, back in the middle of town. I'd had a few drinks, my sense of possibilities was bobbing up again, as well as a feeling of justified delay—I'd only just arrived, there was time for everything. I looked out through my cigarette-smoke and the coppery half-light at various strangers, some chatting, some embracing, others airily alone. It was called the Cassette. I had a presentiment of it in a month or two's time, when these first impressions of brass taps and bottle-glass windows and little varnished compartments would be dulled, and I would take the manners of the two barmen, one taciturn, the other solicitous, for granted. I smiled at my own sense of anticipation, of being poised for change, ready to fall in love, and finding myself in the midst of this ordinary evening in the oddly mock-Tudor surroundings of the city's one gay bar.

  I thought perhaps I should go and eat somewhere, but I ordered another beer first. They were quick and lightweight—You could have as many as you liked. I stretched and admitted how tired I was. I'd been up at dawn to leave, my mother speechlessly helping, unable to disguise her misery and anxiety as she drove me to the Dover train. I sympathised with her, and felt confirmed in the rightness of what I was doing. It was something I couldn't explain, although explanations were asked for. I had mumbled reluctantly about time running on, and about the job abroad being only temporary; but not about the darker sense of stepping already along the outward edge of youth, and looking back at those who were truly young with unwelcome eagerness and regret.

  Just in front of me was a boy with thick fair hair and a long rather mouthy face—it must be a local type. I saw that the older man he was with couldn't quite believe his luck and was clinging to it with clumsy determination while it lasted, though the boy himself appeared relaxed by his frequent caresses. I caught the boy's eye from time to time, while he carried on talking as if he couldn't see me. I found myself idly imagining our life together.

  A middle-aged man in a suit came and stood by me and started talking about his success in business; I was polite, as always, but he could probably tell I thought something wasn't right. He looked around a good deal and wanted seconding in his view of other people here; several times he backed into the pathway of kids who were going to the loo and then turned his apology into a hurried half-embrace. Sex was very firmly at the top of his agenda, but in some obscurely unflattering way he seemed not to regard me as a sexual possibility myself. He asked if I had any contact numbers. I said no, and then wondered what they would put you in contact with. I couldn't explain to him my odd sexual economy of the past few years, the fantasy-ridden continence, the sparse ration of intense and anonymous treats; I didn't know myself how it had come about. I wasn't sure I could expect much from my hotel, the Mykonos, which advertised in the English gay press. It had seemed the usual stuffy warren when I checked in, the tiny lounge sour and abandoned.

  At the other end of the bar, near the door, a man smiled at me quickly and sceptically, looked away, looked back. I stopped off by him for one more drink, offered him one, puzzling for a mome
nt over my fold of high-denomination notes, the unfamiliar portraits of the makers of Belgian history. There was a dangerous quality to him, square-jawed, handsome, offering some unspecified challenge, spittle at the corner of his mouth. He could have been an off-duty soldier, nervily alone, counting on the power of his build and his close-cropped head. I felt the hollow burn of attraction in my stomach, but he didn't give away what he felt. We stood close together, both of us also looking past each other, so that I saw him against the movement of the men beyond him, an arm around a waist, fingers that lightly touched a cheek. The surly barman, jowelled and braceleted, pulled the beers and muttered something to my friend, whom I watched pretending not to hear. The boy reached out his hand for the glass and I glimpsed tattooed letters on his four fingers: R, O, S, E.

  He was quiet and tense, and didn't react with much interest to anything I said. I felt his attention searching for a focus in the crowd behind me; or he looked into his glass in the grip of some bitter memory. I asked if he was in the Navy, and he waved his marked hand dismissively, without saying yes or no. I began to wonder why I'd bothered with him. Then with a little smile that made me think it was all shyness, that the tenderness he sought involved some cost to his pride, he said, "So tell me what you do."

  I told him I was a teacher, I'd come out here to teach some boys English.

  This didn't thrill him, it only ever touched those who had liked being taught: I saw a kind of wariness in his eyes, as if he might have owed me an essay.

  "Do you come from London then?"

  "A bit south of there. You won't have heard of it. Well, it's called Rough Common."

  "Then why did you come here, for god's sake?"

  I suppose I should have foreseen such casual and incurious asking of the hardest questions. I had the sense again of being guided deep down by motives too tenuous to explain. It was something to do with growing up in a singer's household, to the daily accompaniment of art, and with this little old city being famous for its music and pictures; I couldn't quite admit to myself the uncertainty I felt already at its deadness, its air of a locked museum, the recognition that what had happened had all been centuries ago. I said, "Well, I wanted to use my Dutch—my mother's family was Dutch, I studied it at school. I think you learn these things, then you discover a use for them." Over the past month of muttered revision I had imagined conversations that ran more smoothly, where the cheery exempla of the grammar book gave way to passionate declarations.

  He started to refer to all the money I had, and I said, "But that's everything I've got, I'm terribly poor!" I patted the pad of notes zipped in my jacket pocket and he looked at me with a friendly scepticism, that said he knew about the traveler's cheques folded among my shirts in the hotel cupboard, and my reliable background, how I could never fall through the net. And it was with a little bourgeois shock that I finally read the message of his eyes, the pupils shrunk to black pinpoints. I didn't know whether to mention it or not, wasn't totally sure I was right. Drugs frightened me and moved me to an impotent desire to help.

  I bought both the following rounds—I couldn't pretend that they weren't within my means; he accepted them with a hint of irritation, as though to have thanked me would have been an admission of his dependency. I was the victim of a con, in a way, someone who didn't know him, a fresh fool, on the first night of my capricious little exile, drunk and hungry for contact. Sometimes he scratched at his chest with a thumbnail, and the tiny crackle of chest-hairs under the cotton of his polo-shirt filled me with a wondering sense of his whole body, as keen as if he'd been leaning by me naked.

  I offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head contemptuously. "I've got to get hold of some money," he said, looking away from me, pretending to accept my plea of poverty. I saw it was all over, I hadn't worked out for him; he hadn't even told me his name. I thought of him simply as Rose. Rose of the Rose Tattoo! I suspected it wasn't worth explaining the literary joke. I muttered, "What is it you're on?"

  He was silent, I'd have thought rather vain if I hadn't felt his desperation. "Bad stuff," he said at last, firmly, but he wouldn't reveal what. Then, with unconvincing interest, "So who are you going to be teaching English to?"

  "A couple of boys, to start with."

  "Just two."

  "Rather difficult boys." He nodded. "They've been in some sort of trouble," I assured him. "The older one looks very sexy."

  Rose gave a little snort. "I should have known that was your game."

  "No, no. I can show you if you like." And it was true I had his papers on me, like a keepsake of a lover, of a contact, perhaps, whom I was yet to meet. I pulled the envelope from my inner pocket, and took out the folded sheet with the photo-booth image attached—Luc Altidore, 17, interests History, the Arts. It was spread on the damp counter, offered slightly anxiously to Rose, as though I were searching for this boy and thought he might recognise the picture and give me a lead. Surely no one could forget that pale mask, with the large dry lips and the hair falling forward and a mutinous blankness to the eyes in the camera's flash, as if dissenting from his own beauty. I recalled distantly having taught him already in dreams, I had lived through the slow-burning hours of tuition face to face with him.

  I had become less likeable to my companion, as if I had already gained power over the kid through the corrupt persuasions of literature.

  "I may have to do other work," I said. "I'll need the cash. Besides, I don't want to read books all day." I stroked his forearm, which I felt actually vibrate with the mastered desire to withdraw it.

  "Why not?"

  I hesitated and said, "Books are a load of crap."

  "You're really wrong," he said fiercely. "You're lucky. You're a teacher. Books are your life." And he walked away from me, leaving me with nothing but the private and lonely satisfaction of my quotation, which perhaps proved his final point.

  When I came back from the lav I saw him making for the exit, his arm round the shoulder of the suited bore I'd escaped from earlier, whose face was flushed and confused at his almost too sudden change of luck.

  In the austere Town Museum I picked up Cherif, a Moroccan, but born in Paris and uncircumcised. I felt a little out of step among those chaste northern saints and inward-looking Virgins—there wasn't one of them that welcomed you or held your gaze as the dark-eyed Italian gods and holy men so often did. Absurd, but I wanted a greeting, even across five hundred years. Here everyone looked down or away, in gestures of reproachful purity. The pious, unflattering portraits, too, of capped and wimpled worthies, were proudly abstinent. They drew respectful crowds of Sunday couples in rustling waterproofs (the day had made an uncertain start).

  They were not to Cherif’s taste, however. He was mooching about, shaking his head and scratching his balls, in front of a hellish-paradisal Bosch. Later he told me he had cruised men there before: he didn't know much about painting, but he knew the deeper drift of museum days, the art compulsion of the single man, reflections in the glass that screens some dark old martyrdom, the licence to loiter and appraise, the tempo of pursuit from room to room . . . I came alongside and we pointed in turn at the viler mutations in the Garden of Delights: the pig-bottomed lady, the slug gentleman, the whore with lobster claws. My friend pushed back the staid tweed cap which gave his brown features and dull black curls a touching air of displacement and grinned at me in a manner unclouded by questions of art history.

  We wandered on past the sour sermons of still-lifes (the fly on the lemon, the perishable plenty) and across the hall into the deserted galleries where later pictures hung: waxen historical tableaux, brown cottage scenes, dusks of phosphor and violet, the Sphinxes and Athenas of the local Symbolists. And one of these did extend a troubled greeting—a woman with disordered red hair, ruby earrings, one breast uncovered: I stooped to read the printed title: "Edgard Orst: 'Jadis Herodias, quoi encore?' " To the badged butch lady-guard, who stepped from one room to the next to keep us in view, we must have seemed a couple tired of eac
h other's company, killing time, hoping that art might help us through a rainy Sunday, but finding ourselves as bored by the pictures as she was. Cherif caught my eye and I swallowed at the secret certainty of our plan.

  Even at the Mykonos, I thought, Cherif, in his brown leather jerkin and working-man's boots, might appear too rough and set on mischief to be admitted. But that was only British class pudeur—the receptionist nodded to him equably as the key was handed over. (And then I thought, perhaps Cherif had brought his custom here before; and wasn't there something shrewd and cold-blooded about the desk-clerk himself, doubling and trebling as barman and hooverer of the TV lounge?)

  The moment I had locked the door he was on to me, chewing and stuffing my mouth and knocking my glasses up skew-whiff over the top of my head. He was an animal, that great thing for someone else to be. A second or two later he was grinding one hand up and down on my bum and with the other guiding me down to rub his cock where it stood out hard and at an angle in his loose old jeans.

  On the way from the Museum we had crossed a bridge above swans and the putter of an empty bâteau-mouche, the commentary running on regardless, when he had suddenly held out in his palm a little packet with a rubber's squashed ring contour. I didn't mind the wordless confirmation, but I turned my head away, too full of feeling for this boy, who had only been my friend for twenty minutes, who felt nothing for me but was so unhesitatingly himself, a little overweight, his upper lip and chin roughened already with shadow. Now he was sitting in my lap, riding on me with a certain urgent disregard—I swept my hands across his sleek and trusting back, and reached up to shoulders where muscles powerful from work gathered and dispersed. I was glad he couldn't see me, gaping and heavy-hearted with praise for him.