‘Well, we had your brandy in the boiler room and we got into very high spirits, and well… one thing led to another and we… do you know, I can’t say it.’
‘You danced the one-step? You juggled fire together?’
‘Please do be serious, Bart. Have you ever had any desires that to you seem quite… abnormal?’
‘Well, I once wanted to learn German.’
She jumped off the bed. ‘Stop cracking jokes, Bart! You’re always doing this! You always – every time.’
He laughed. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help myself! Genuinely, I can’t. Please, come back to bed.’ He put on a repentant face.
‘When you act like this, I feel I can’t quite trust you. And if I can’t trust you—’
‘But you can! Honestly, you can. Look, I’m sorry. I’m a clown. I’m a stupid, childish clown. Come back to bed and tell me all about how you and Margo shared a passionate tryst in the romantic setting of your school boiler room.’
She stared at him. ‘Your mother told you.’
He shook his head – his mother had told him nothing. But it’d been bloody obvious where all this was going. High spirits and abnormal urges. ‘Really, it’s not so shocking,’ he said. ‘Bunch of randy hormonal girls crammed teat-to-teat in a restrictive environment, I’d be shocked if it didn’t happen. Now come here, come back to your Barty.’ He patted the space next to him again.
Smiling, she got back into bed. ‘And you don’t think I’m a pervert?’
‘Of course I do. Bravo, I say. Was she a better kisser than me?’
‘Well, it was all very sloppy and excitable. You won’t tell anyone?’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’
She huddled in closer, resting her temple against his stubbled jaw. ‘I feel much better now, for having told you. But Mother and Father are frothing at the mouth about it. Father called me a silly little slut. His exact words.’
He hissed in air through his teeth. ‘That’s a tad uncalled for.’
A knock at the door. Bettina jumped off the bed just as it was flung open. It was Bart’s mother.
‘Bettina, darling, your father said to hurry things along.’
‘Oh, tell him to keep his knickers on,’ said Bart. ‘I almost died, remember.’
Lucille slanted her head sardonically. ‘I do remember, as it happens.’ She brought her cigarette to her mouth with a graceful movement of the wrist and took a puff. ‘I’m sorry, Bettina, but I must respect your father’s wishes.’ Smoke oozed out of her nose. ‘I’m sure Bart is grateful for the visit, regardless of its brevity.’
Bettina nodded and thanked his mother. ‘Well, goodbye then,’ she said to Bart. ‘I’m so relieved to see you well. The train journey over here was pure hell – I’ve never prayed so much in my life.’ She stood awkwardly for a moment, probably not knowing whether she should hug him in front of his mother. She squeezed his arm and then left.
His mother stood there for some time, smoking and watching him. She was wearing a loose beige dress with a low waist, a gold-sequinned hairband and lots of gold bangles. He’d always thought his mother stylish and felt proud of her – well, as much as one can be proud of one’s mother. She had big hips and a humongous arse – truly humongous – but she’d never let this stop her from embracing the newest styles, unlike his Auntie May, who unsuccessfully hid her wide arse under flouncy monstrosities leftover from the Victorian nightmare.
‘The birdies have been tweeting,’ his mother said finally, a twinkle in her eye, ‘regarding your just-departed friend.’
‘Don’t the birdies have anything better to do?’
‘No, they don’t actually.’
‘Save your breath – I already know it.’
‘Do you now? If it was about someone else – Sir Percy’s daughter perhaps, or that plain girl you always like to make fun of—’
‘Average Anastasia—’
‘If it was about her or someone else, you’d be laughing your head off right now and we both know it.’
‘It’s true, I would. But it’s not about them. It’s about Bettina.’
‘And lucky it was! Did you know her father is a benefactor to St Vincent’s?’
‘Of course.’
‘A most generous benefactor, Neesh told me. He donated fifty pounds last year. And here’s the hilarious thing – you are going to love this’ – she leaned forward, the whites of her eyes glittering – ‘it was his donation that paid for the new heating system in the very boiler room in which she was caught!’ She held her hands out incredulously. ‘The irony! Ha! She’d have been expelled otherwise, for the drinking. Bit of an idiotic thing to do.’
‘I’ll thank you to show some restraint, Lucille.’
His mother’s mouth scythed into a grin. ‘It is rather funny, though. I always thought her such a stuck-up sort.’
‘Well, she’s not. I’m very fond of her.’
‘Don’t get too fond of her.’ A raised brow. ‘If she does indeed prefer a stroll through the peach orchard to a jog through the banana grove.’
A laugh burst out of his chest. He couldn’t help it. ‘Away with you, witch!’
She tilted her head back and cackled, then left, a trail of loose-tendrilled smoke in her wake. His mother had this tendency to move through daily life as if she was being filmed, and this was another quality of hers that he grudgingly admired.
Chapter 6
Oh, the things they’d done! Pure carnality. Oh, and his cock… Bart brought a pillow down under the blankets and started to hump it, his breath quickening, when suddenly he remembered the letters. Hips slowed down, eyes opened. The pillow became a pillow again. ‘Oh, shit and rot,’ he whispered, rolling onto his back and staring ghoul-eyed at the ceiling.
Back at school he kept his personal correspondence and anything else of intimate value locked up in the battered but hardy tuck trunk he’d had since the age of eleven. Not to mention the contraband. There were two bottles of gin and a tin of tobacco. An illustration ripped out of a Berlin magazine depicting a sailor fellating another sailor, a pack of cards and a velvet drawstring pouch filled with poker chips.
He kept the trunk key in his trouser pocket at all times. And the last thing he could remember of his descent into sickness was sitting on the toilet with his trousers around his ankles as his entire insides steamed out… so, what became of those trousers? Did he manage to get them back on? Did Roger see to them? It’s likely he got shit on them. Did they get sent to the cleaners?
He hadn’t always been kind to them, the fags – especially Roger, whose very presence irritated him. He was always snotty and runny-eyed, scratching his neck eczema with his red, flaky claw-hands. His obsequiousness grated. Bart had given him a hiding a few times, and if he was being honest with himself, these hidings hadn’t always been earned. If Roger got into that trunk, Bart’s life was over. He wasn’t being melodramatic. He would be in the same predicament as Bettina, only twenty times worse. Bettina had her father’s protection, and anyway, she was just a silly girl play-acting – that’s what everyone would think. Her future husband would smirk at such girlish nonsense. Just making do with what was available before the almighty cock came along with its dazzling finality! And likewise, if Bart had been caught messing around with the house tart, this too might be treated with some tolerance, because boys locked up with other boys will do their thing, whether it’s in Eton or Oxford or fucking Swansea. But the letters, they spoke of love. Not brotherly love, not convenient love, not the awkward jism-handed love of a pair of confused schoolboys who would no doubt go on to marry and procreate in the proper way, but radical, crushing, self-aware love.