Bastien got into the Jensen as if it was any old car. Johnny climbed in behind, and sat looking fearfully at the lost profile of his friend – there must be an element of nerves in his indifference, his refusal to be at the disadvantage of admiring anything. Johnny’s father was friendly and straightforward with him, but wasn’t a great talker himself. They couldn’t tell yet how good Bastien’s English was, and he gave them little chance to find out. They came into Nuneaton the long way, perhaps to avoid traffic, but almost the first thing they saw was the works, the high brick end-wall of the building with its large white-painted lettering, D. D. SPARSHOLT ENGINEERING, which seemed to Johnny to dominate this side of the town and compel the attention of anyone coming in. His father said nothing, and Johnny, afraid Bastien was missing it, leant forward and touched his shoulder: ‘That’s us.’ He thought it registered, that little upward nod again of guarded, almost sceptical interest, a glance through the gate into the yard as they passed. When they turned off Merivale Road it was still only half an hour since they’d met, and once they were alone without Johnny’s father, things would surely change, Bastien’s heart-turning smile would break out of hiding and the wrestling would begin. They swung into the drive of ‘Hornbeams’ and Bastien took in the red brick, the creeper-covered porch, the half-timbered gable, with a strange throat-clearing, as if about to say something difficult, though it seemed from his distantly matey tone when he came into the hall that he didn’t really consider himself to be there. Johnny’s father said, ‘Welcome,’ and smiled rather oddly: ‘I’ll let Jonathan show you round.’ But the expected tour, run over a hundred times in his head as if ‘Hornbeams’ were Haddon Hall, now felt threatened, a contest of his desire and the visitor’s coolness. They went upstairs. ‘So this is your room!’ he said, and sat dumbly on the bed, while Bastien glanced out of the window and then opened the wardrobe. ‘And I’m just next door!’ They went into Johnny’s room, and he put his arm round Bastien’s shoulders and showed him his Danish biro, with the bronzed young man on the side whose swimming-trunks vanished when you turned it upside down. Bastien turned it over himself, lower lip sticking out, and said, ‘You like that,’ as he gave it back. Then Johnny explained some of his drawings, taped up above the bed; he saw these also needed to be taken in the right spirit. It was starkly unlike how he’d imagined it would be, having Bastien at last in his own room.
Johnny’s mother was staying with her sister, who’d had an operation, so the set-up for these first three days was odd, his father out early to work, and Mrs Doyle coming in to clean and make lunch. In the evenings June Palmer, his father’s secretary, came back to have dinner with them. There was a feeling of substitute mothers, as there might have been if his real one had died rather than gone to London for five nights. She seemed to be the one thing Bastien was curious about. On the first tour of the house, when they came back downstairs, he picked up the honeymoon photo in the sitting room, taken at Swanage, with the weird grey shapes on the beach behind them. ‘That was in the War,’ Johnny said, leaning forward into Bastien’s breath, then a hand round his shoulder, warm through the rugby shirt. ‘Those were the concrete things they put up in case the Germans invaded. You see Dad’s in his RAF uniform – he was a fighter pilot; in fact he won the DFC.’ Bastien was smiling. ‘That stands for the Distinguished Flying Cross.’
‘Elle est bandante, ta mère,’ said Bastien in a murmur, and when Johnny, uncertain, hungry for approval, looked up at him, he made a gesture with his free hand of outlining and then grasping a woman’s breasts. Then he nudged Johnny, pushed against him as he put the photo down, in a momentary overflow of physical feeling that was also a clear signal of where his interests now lay.
4
There was nowhere to hide at ‘The Lookout’. Bastien had made the boys’ bedroom his own, and for long half-hours the bathroom too. Johnny found himself corners to draw in, there was a semi-private place between the carport and the dustbins where he could sit and puzzle out the effects of sunlight and clouds on the sea. Norma Haxby spotted him there when she came in next day; ‘Still at it, then?’ she said, and tried to make him show her what he was doing. He showed her the palm tree. ‘You’ve got the shape of that all wrong,’ she said.
In the house itself there was nothing much to look at. It was the holiday home of some people from Devizes, who came here several times a year themselves; above the phone in the hall a framed colour photo of the family in sailing gear showed them having more fun than their present guests seemed able to manage, the big teenage son beaming and holding an oar. The house was just five years old, and everything in it sturdy and primary-coloured. There were three flashy blue-and-white paintings by the same person, of sailing boats at sea, whose garish deficiencies were shown up each time you lifted your gaze to the real thing. The chairs and tables were modern and plain. There were rag rugs that slid and rode up, and lamps made from bottles, with lampshades of newspapers, overlaid, and repeating, like a wallpaper pattern, with half-hidden headlines and corners of pictures. You made up the stories yourself. Norma tilted her head, semi-sozzled one evening, to look at them. ‘Nothing about you, Cliff!’ she said.
The Haxbys were round a lot, Johnny’s father taking all this in his stride, as the expected working out of a plan Johnny’s mother seemed not yet to know the extent of. The Sparsholts were never invited to ‘Greylags’, the bungalow just down the hill that the Haxbys had taken, though his mother asked Norma airy questions about its kitchen and provision of crockery. When Johnny’s father needed a discussion with Clifford about the Archer Square plans or some such subject they walked off together to one of the hotel bars – Johnny had seen them once through the window of the King Mark, sitting over pint glasses, smiling about something. Clifford and Norma were town people, away, but not really on holiday. Where the Sparsholts wore old shorts and moccasins and pulled on unfashionable waterproofs if it looked like rain, Clifford was generally turned out in sharp grey flannels and looked ready to chair a meeting of the planning committee at any moment; a bit of blue piping on a jacket or a bell-bottomed trouser-suit were Norma’s main concessions to the seaside. She was good-looking, in her hard, immaculate way; and Clifford, too, with his black moustache, low broad brow and oiled-down hair, clearly thought himself very dashing. There was something instructive to Johnny in seeing him side with a man as famously handsome as his father. After supper, when they were watching The Saint on the portable TV, Johnny sitting at the table could capture them, under cover of general doodling, without making them self-conscious. He drew his father almost shyly, knowing he needed to do justice not only to the strong clean features in profile across the room but to who he was, something larger and harder to get. Mainly of course he drew Bastien, who wanted the TV on because he was bored but was bored by the programmes themselves which he could hardly understand.
Johnny found a book at the house called Cornish Landscape and Legend. ‘Bloody fairies!’ Clifford said, hanging over his shoulder and breathing on his neck. ‘Ooh, not in Cornwall, Cliff!’ Norma said – not a joke at all, but they laughed and Johnny darkened with sullen embarrassment, for himself but really for them. Then they left him alone with it, and that small devaluing of pleasure that you had to fight against for a minute or two. It had lovely photographs, in a process called Dufay-colour, sand and cliffs gold and bronze, the sea in the coves the extravagant blue of (he searched for the likeness) the toilet-flush in this house. He was charmed by the chemical magic of the colours, even as he worked out what was wrong with them – well, not wrong, but inaccurate. In a broad stretch of heather on Bodmin Moor the purple and brown were nearly fused, the distant tor either grey or green. He went back over them. The book had been published before the War . . . MCMXXXVII . . . not thirty years old, but a peculiar gel of romance seemed to fix the scenes further back, caught at times of day, early morning, early closing, when no one was about, small boats bobbed at their moorings and no car or coach was seen on the pink and fawn ribbons of the roads.