Kitty’s birthday gift was a microscope—she was supposed to have a scientific bent—yet another cost-price item, I spitefully surmise, from Gray’s the Optician. A sumptuous instrument it was, though, matt-black and solid where it stood on its single, semi-circular foot, the barrel silky and cold to the touch, the little winding-nut so smooth in action, the lens so small yet giving on to so magnified a version of the world. I coveted it, of course. I was particularly taken by the box it came in, and in which it would live when not in use. It was made of pale polished wood hardly heavier than balsa, dove-tailed at the corners—what a tiny blade such fine work must have called for!—and had a lid, with a thumbnail-shaped notch in it, that slid open lengthways along two waxed grooves in the sides. It was fitted within with a wonderfully delicate set of tiny trestles, carved from wafer-thin plywood, on which the instrument lay snugly on its back, like a doted-on black baby asleep in its custom-made crib. Kitty was delighted, and with a beadily possessive light in her eye took it off into a corner to gloat over it, while her friends, suddenly forgotten, stood about in leporine uncertainty.
Now I was torn between envying Kitty and keeping a jealous watch on Mrs Gray as she attended to her husband, home wan and weary from the day’s breadwinning. His arrival had affected the atmosphere, the wild party spirit had drained from the air, and the guests, sobered and subdued and disregarded still by their undersized hostess, were getting ready in their bedraggled way to go home. Mr Gray, folding his long frame as if it were a delicate piece of geometrical equipment, a calipers, say, or a big wooden compass, sat down in the old armchair beside the stove. This chair, his chair, covered with a worn, pilled fabric that resembled mouse-fur, seemed wearier even than its occupant, sagging badly in the seat as it was and leaning drunkenly at one corner where a castor was missing. Mrs Gray brought the whiskey glass from the table and once again pressed it on her husband, more tenderly this time, and again he thanked her with his invalid’s dolorous smile. Then she stood back, her hands clasped under her bosom, and contemplated him with a worriedly helpless air. This was how it always seemed to be between them, he at the end of some vital resource that only the greatest effort would replenish, and she anxiously eager to aid him but at a loss to know how.
Where is Billy? I have lost track of Billy. How—I ask it again—how did he not see what was going on between his mother and me? How did they all not see? Yet the answer is simple. They saw what they expected to see and did not see what they did not expect. Anyway, why do I exclaim so? I am sure that I for my part was no more perspicacious than they were. That kind of myopia is endemic.
The attitude that Mr Gray displayed towards me was curious—that is to say, it was strange, for certainly it betrayed no trace of interest. His eye would fall on me, would roll over me, rather, like an oiled ball-bearing, registering nothing, or so I believed. He never seemed quite to recognise me. Perhaps, with his poor eyesight, he imagined it was a different person he was seeing each time I appeared in the house, a succession of Billy’s friends all inexplicably similar in appearance. Or perhaps he was afraid I was someone he was supposed to know perfectly well, a family relation, a cousin of the children’s, say, who came on frequent visits and whose exact identity he was at this late stage too embarrassed to enquire into. For all I know he may have thought I was a second son, Billy’s brother, whom he had unaccountably forgotten about and now must accept without comment. I do not think I was singled out particularly for his lack of attention. As far as I could see he looked upon the world in general with the same slightly puzzled, slightly worried, fogged-over gaze, his bow-tie askew and his long, bony, twig-like fingers moving over the surface of things in feeble, fruitless interrogation.
We had an assignation that evening, the evening of Kitty’s party, Mrs Gray and I. Assignation: that is a word I like, suggestive as it is of the velvet cloak and tricorn hat, the fluttering fan, the bosom heaving under tautened satin; I fear our circumspect outings had little of such flash and dash. How did she manage to slip away, with so many chores to be done in the aftermath of the party?—in those days women cleared up and washed the dishes without expectation of help or thought of protest. In fact, it galls me that I do not know how she managed any of our desperate liaison, or how she got away with it for as long as she did. Our luck held remarkably, given the dangers we ran. I was not the only one who tweaked the love god’s nose. Mrs Gray herself took foolhardy risks. As it happened, that was the very evening we ventured together for a stroll on the boardworks. It was her idea. I had been expecting, indeed warmly anticipating, that we would do on this occasion what we always did when we managed to be alone together, but when she arrived at our meeting place on the road above the hazel wood she had me get into the station wagon and drove off at once, and would not answer when I asked where we were going. I asked again, more plaintively, more whiningly, and still getting no response I lapsed into a sulk. I should confess that sulking was my chief weapon against her, nasty little tyke that I was, and I employed it with the skill and niceness of judgement that only a boy as heartless as I would have been capable of. She would resist me for as long as she was able, as I fumed in silence with my arms clamped across my chest and my chin jammed on my collar-bone and my lower lip stuck out a good inch, but always it was she who gave in, in the end. This time she held out until, rattling along by the river, we had passed the entrance to the tennis club. ‘You’re so selfish,’ she burst out then, but laughing, as if it were an undeserved compliment. ‘Honest to God, you have no idea.’
At this of course I became at once indignant. How could she say such a thing of me, who for her sake risked the ire of Church, State and my mother? Did I not treat her as the sovereign of my heart, did I not indulge her every whim? So wrought was I that anger and self-righteousness formed a hot lump in my throat, and even if I had been willing to I would not have been able to speak.
It was June, midsummer, the time of endless evenings and white nights. Who can imagine what it was like to be a boy and loved in such of the world’s weather? What I was still too young to recognise, or acknowledge, was that even at its glorious height the year was already poised to wane. Had I given time and time’s vanishings their due it would perhaps have accounted for the prick of indefinite sorrow in my heart. But I was young, and there was no end in sight, no end to anything, and the sadness of summer was no more than a faint bloom, of a delicate cobweb shade, on the cheek of love’s ripe and gleaming apple.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Mrs Gray said.
Well, why not? The simplest, the most innocent thing in the world, you would think. But consider. Our little town was a panopticon patrolled by warders whose vigilance never flagged. True, there should not have been much to remark in the sight of a respectably married woman strolling along the quayside in the broad light of a summer evening in the company of a boy who was her son’s best friend—not much, that is, for an observer of an averagely unspeculative and unsuspicious disposition, but the town and everyone in it had an unregenerately filthy mind that never ceased computing, and by putting one and one together was always sure to come up with an illicit two, clasped and panting in each other’s guilty arms.