“On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,…” He found her far and away the most alluring of the fictional heroines he had yet encountered in his brief acquaintance with English Literature. He read the opening of the poem again. He saw her lying in a huge rumpled bed, a lace peignoir barely covering two breasts as firm and symmetrical as halved grapefruits. He had had a bonk-on all the English lesson. It hadn’t happened to him since they’d read Great Expectations. What was her name? Estella. God, yes. She was almost as good as Belinda. He thought about his essay again. He liked English Literature. He wondered if he would be able to do it at university — if he could get to university at all. His father had not been at all pleased when he had announced that he wanted to do English A-level. “What’s the use of that?” he had shouted. “How’s English Literature going to help you sell machine tools?” Niles sighed. There was an opening for him in Gerald Niles (Engineering) Ltd. His father knew nothing of his plans for university.
Niles ran his hands through his thick wiry hair and rubbed his eyes. He picked up his pen. “Alexander Pope,” he wrote, “was a major poet of the Augustan period. ‘The Rape of the Lock’ was his most celebrated poem,” He sensed it was a bad beginning — uninspired, boring — but sometimes if you started by writing down what you knew, you got a few ideas. He scanned Canto One. “Soft bosoms,” he saw. Then “Belinda still her downy pillow prest.” He felt himself quicken. Pope knew what he was doing, all right. The associations: bosom and pillow, prest and breast. Niles shut his eyes. He was weighing Belinda’s perfect breasts in his hands, massaging her awake as she lay in her tousled noonday bed. He imagined her hair spread over her face, full lips, heavy sleep-bruised eyes. He imagined a slim forearm raised to ward off Sol’s tim’rous ray, Belinda turning on to her back, stretching. Jesus. Would she have hairy armpits? he wondered, swallowing. Did they shave their armpits in the eighteenth century? Would it be like that Frenchwoman he’d seen on a campsite near Limoges last summer? In the camp supermarket, wearing only a bikini, reaching up for a tin on a high shelf and exposing a great hank of armpit hair. Niles groaned. He leant forward and rested his head on his open book. “Belinda,” he whispered, “Belinda.”
“Everything okay, Quentin?”
He sat up abruptly, banging his knees sharply on the bottom of his desk. It was Bowler, his housemaster, his round, bespectacled face peering at him concernedly, his body canted into the study, pipe clenched between his brown teeth. Why couldn’t the bastard knock? Niles swore.
“Trying to write an essay, sir,” he said.
“Not that difficult, is it?” Bowler laughed. “Got the team for the league?”
Niles handed it over. Bowler studied it, puffing on his pipe, frowning. Niles looked at the sour blue smoke gathering on the ceiling. Typical bloody Bowler.
“This the best we can do? Are you sure about Grover at scrum-half? Crucial position, I would have thought.”
“I think he needs to be pressured a bit, sir.”
“Right-ho. You’re the boss. See you’re down for Pinafore.”
“Sorry, sir?”
“Pinafore. HMS. The opera. Didn’t know you sang, Quentin? Shouldn’t have thought it was your line really.”
“Thought I’d give it a go, sir.”
Bowler left and Niles thought about the opera. Holland had said it was a sure thing with the girls: they only came because they wanted to get off with boys. Niles wondered what they’d be like. Scottish girls from the local grammar school. He’d seen them in town often. Dark-blue uniforms, felt hats, long hair, miniskirts. They all looked older than he — more mature. He experienced a sudden moment of panic What in God’s name would he do? Holland and Panton would be there, everyone would see him. He felt his heart beat with unreasonable speed. It was a kind of proof. There was no chance of lying or evading the issue. It would be all too public.
They gathered in the music room behind the new chapel for the first mixed rehearsal. There had been three weeks of tedious afternoon practices during which some semblance of singing ability had been forcibly extracted from them by the efforts of Prothero, the music master. Now, Prothero watched the boys enter with a tired and cynical smile. This was his seventh Gilbert and Sullivan since coming to the school, his third HMS Pinafore. Two sets of forms faced each other at one end of the long room. The boys sat down on one set, staring at the empty seats opposite as if they were already occupied.
“Now, gentlemen,” Prothero began. “The ladies will be here soon. I don’t propose to lecture you any more on the subject. I count on your innate good manners and sense of decorum.”
Niles, Holland and Panton sat together. Whispered conversations were going on all around. Niles felt his lungs press against his rib cage. The tension was acute; he felt faint with unfamiliar stress. What if not one of them spoke to him? This was dreadful, he thought, and the girls weren’t even here. He looked at the fellow members of the chorus. There were some authentic tenors and basses from the school choir but the rest of them were self-appointed lads, frustrates and sexual braggarts. He could sense their crude desire thrumming through the group as if the forms they were sitting on were charged with a low electric current. He looked at the bright-eyed, snouty, expectant faces, heard whispered obscenities and saw the international language of sexual gesticulation being covertly practised as if they were a gathering of randy deaf-mutes. He felt vaguely soiled to be counted among them. Beside him Holland leaned forward and tapped the shoulder of a boy in front.
“Bloody Mobo,” he said quietly and venomously. “Didn’t you get the message? No queers allowed. What are you bloody doing here? It’s girls we’re singing with. Not lushmen, Mobo. No little lushmen.”
“Frig off, Holland,” the boy said tonelessly. “I’m in the choir, aren’t I?”
“Bloody choir,” Holland repeated, his face ugly with illogical aggression. “Bloody frigging choir.”
Then the girls came in.
No one had heard the bus from town arriving, and the room, to Niles’ startled eyes, seemed suddenly to be filled with chattering uniformed females. He heard laughter and giggles, caught flashing glimpses of cheeks and red mouths, hair and knees, as the other half of the chorus sat itself down opposite. The boys fired nervous exploratory glances across the two yards of floor between them. Niles studied his score with commendable intensity. He noticed Holland brazenly scrutinising the girls. Cautiously, Niles raised his eyes and looked over. They seemed very ordinary, was his first reflection. Dark-blue blazers, short skirts, some black tights. There was one tall girl with a severe, rather thin face. Her hair was tied up in an elaborate twisted bun and at first he thought she was a mistress, but then he saw her uniform. He scanned the features of the others but their faces refused to register any individuality; he might have been staring at a Chinese football team.