‘It’s Ok.’
‘Was he talking in his sleep again?’
‘Oh . . . yeah . . . a bit.’
‘You know, I can go back in with Dad, if you want to use the other room.’
‘Dad’s snoring’s much worse!’ said Johnny. ‘No, I’ll be OK.’ There was something he didn’t want to lose in the broken nights . . . Bastien clambering in and out, the brief functional rocking of the bunk beds as he had his wank, and then when he slept the loud fragments of speech which suggested an inner life far more dramatic than he gave any hint of when awake.
‘Well, you will say,’ said his mother, ‘won’t you?’
‘Yes, Mum.’ The house, downstairs, with just the two of them, was so peaceful. ‘Where’s Dad?’
‘Clifford came up just now in the car – they’ve gone off somewhere . . . just for an hour.’
‘Oh . . .’
She tucked her chin in, smiled at him firmly as she turned back to the sink. ‘We’ll all do something nice together this afternoon.’ There was a thump overhead, creaks, the slam of the bathroom door. ‘Ah, here we go . . .’
Johnny scrunched on his cereal, in the now familiar tension of longing to see him and dreading his coming through the door.
Bastien had arrived in England a week ago, but the awful disappointment of his visit had begun (Johnny saw it now) many months before. In Nîmes, last year, he’d been Bastien’s gullible pupil, and almost at times his slave. He had gone there to work on his French, his stumbling innocence shown up the more by the barely grasped murmurs and exclamations with which Bastien bossed him around. It went on all the time, Johnny blushingly at war with his own modesty, at the Pont du Gard, on the beach near Aigues-Mortes, in the bedroom the Marcs had thought it would be nice for the boys to share. Nothing like this had happened at school, no one would survive such a scandal, he had had to go to France for it. When they were alone together their roles were easily maintained; when the family were present Bastien, with all the distractable energy of a fourteen-year-old boy, forgot the strict terms of the drama – he was lazy, rowdy, unobservant. Johnny sensed the mysterious force of the parts they played, a structure in the dealings between two friends that kept them going and could never be escaped. Bastien was disdainful, and mocked him each morning and night for wanting the very things he had taught him to ask for. His genius, even then, was his perfect selfishness, a beautiful smile that he must have learned early in life brought him anything he wanted. Mme Marc herself seemed obedient to it.
Johnny remembered his own laboured efforts at politeness, when the family had taken him to see the sights. None of them had much English and they pretended, to be on the safe side, that they had none at all. Johnny had too little French to say that he thought one particular church they’d seen was very ugly: when he mentioned it they all assumed that he wanted to praise it. ‘Ah, oui!’ they said, ‘la basilique . . .’ Johnny didn’t know the word for ugly; he temporized: ‘Elle n’est pas belle’ – with an instant sense of the difference. Mme Marc, seeing a worthwhile subtlety, said, ‘Pas belle, tout à fait, non, mais assurément magnifique à sa façon.’ Johnny caught his breath and had another go, but felt constrained already by this first demurral. After a minute, the potential offence of what he wanted to say had grown in his mind as these far milder objections were imagined and cautiously allowed (it was very large . . . it was a bit on the dark side . . . it was nineteenth-century), and to insist on its ugliness now would have been positively hostile. When Mme Marc suggested they should all go to Mass there on Sunday, since he was so interested in the building, he gave up, watched mockingly by Bastien who was leaning in the doorway behind his parents with a blatant erection in his little black shorts. Ah, that was what had made all the difference; that was what had been truly beau.
Nîmes had been different in every way from what he’d been used to – the meals, which either failed his needs and habits (a breakfast of milk coffee and hard-crusted French stick) or heavily exceeded them (rich meats, crêpes for pudding, a small disorienting tumbler of red wine); the movable duvet, the two-pin plugs, the button light-switches, the taps that switched themselves off to save water – all the things with which they, and Bastien above all, were unthinkingly intimate. He was humble, hesitant, in the presence of these fixtures, which had, like the French words for them, an educational quality; and aware of his own good manners in using such starved, stiff and miserably designed things without criticism, even at times with hinted admiration.
The Marcs’ house, modern, medium-sized, was very close to a busy road out of town, and with its electrically operated shutters and narrow strip of garden behind a green mesh fence hardly looked like a house at all – a closed office, maybe. On the side away from the road it had red and white awnings over the windows as well as steel shutters, a patio crazy-paved in dirty white marble, a dry lawn stretching down to some shrubs and another chain-link fence. The house was completely without character, and the first afternoon, as he unpacked his case dumbly homesick in the twin-bedded room, he saw nothing to console him; it was only after supper, both the boys stoned with the wine, Johnny headachy, dry-mouthed, that Bastien started wrestling with him. By the end of the long three weeks the featureless house, yellow-white pebbledash, the telephone wires coming in at an angle above the lawn to a bracket between the bedroom windows, had something ideal about it. Johnny felt more clearly than before the imperative to draw – he sat at the end of the garden with pencil and paper, aghast at the thought of going home. The Marcs themselves were welcoming, somehow both earnest and relaxed. Mme Marc, source of Bastien’s large lips and dark eyes, looked steadily at Johnny when they had their exchanges in French: she wanted them to understand each other. And maybe she understood too, from stray glimpses, stifled phrases, the stink of semen in the boys’ room, that something was going on. But he didn’t think so; and if she did, her looking him so firmly in the eye was a sign of her French intelligence on all things to do with sex. The blank-looking house, with its cactuses and spider-plants, and the traffic at the back all day and much of the night, was infused with the mood of permission, experiment, things not to be spoken of yet, in English or French.
In the long months since then, Johnny’s troubles with reading, his parents’ squabbles, the worry of resitting the Common Entrance, his father’s embarrassment on the subject, and his none the less repeatedly telling people about it, had all been offset by a sequence of memories, melting and reforming, a secret theatre on the edge of sleep where at last, a year on, Bastien himself would be welcomed on stage when he came to Nuneaton for more. Best of all, he would join the Sparsholts for their week in Cornwall, allowed by Johnny’s father as a special privilege.
Johnny had gone to Birmingham airport with his father to meet him, with a breathless sensation, in the slow, congested traffic on the A45, of running much faster towards something dense and inescapable. They were late, and found Bastien in the arrivals hall chatting with a tall blonde girl in a miniskirt and black halter top. Johnny saw him, went towards him, slowed now by his own wordless calculation, and after ten seconds said to his father, ‘There he is!’ Bastien seemed not to have seen him, or even, when he stood beside him and said ‘Hello!’, to be expecting him. He said something with a smirk to the girl before he turned and came over with a little upward nod to meet Johnny’s father. Of course memory was out of date: he was three inches taller than last year, his lips, nose, chin, fringe still beautiful but all larger and coarser and in a somehow different relation with each other. He wore tight blue jeans of a kind Johnny wasn’t allowed, a black-striped rugby shirt and a blue baseball cap which he didn’t take off when introduced to Johnny’s father. They all shook hands, the long-imagined hug and lustful murmur in the ear obstructed by his huge black suitcase, bound round with red elastic straps. Johnny grappled the case towards the exit, panting and grinning and with a sense of foreboding at its unexplained weight.