It took them a minute to feel the heat, when they came out and ran up the beach with the water all over them still. With a touch of clowning Bastien picked up a Zulu, and slipped it over his head; Johnny did the same, and they stood pulling the towelling round them from inside, to get roughly dry. Then Johnny realized Bastien was untying his trunks and with two stooping twists pushing them down: they appeared round his ankles, and he stepped out of them. Johnny did the same as calmly as he could, picked them up, and wrung them out, and took them up to the baskets, thrilled by his own hidden nakedness. When he turned back, he found Bastien had sat down on a towel, was huddled up but with his knees apart under the Zulu.
It was something Johnny had done, last year, with the secret daring that seemed nothing when the impulse was so strong. He thought at first Bastien was pretending, as he sat down facing him, and then he knew, with a piercing sense of a last and only chance and at the same time of cruel exclusion, that it was for real. ‘I race with you!’ he said. It was a jolt, a sudden opening, and Johnny was doing it too, with quite new feelings of not wanting to race, of wanting it to go on for a long time, to be saved and postponed into something different and better. If it was a race it would soon be over, Bastien could come unbelievably fast, forty seconds from starting last year, when they’d tried it, but in bed then, together. He stared at him avidly, saying nothing. He was part of the game but the game kept them apart, each of them focused on his own desires, though Johnny’s, he knew, burned in his face: he doubted how long he could look at Bastien and think of him in that way. Bastien smiled at him, was he mocking him or saying that of course he loved him? He had the intense private look of the approaching climax, it seemed terribly obvious, but no one was watching, and his eyes twitched away beyond Johnny’s shoulder in a last hungry stare at the two girls up by the wall.
The boys gathered up the things and started back to the house, the mood cool, quiet, souring in the sun on the steep path, the clamber up steps encumbered with the baskets, but with something strange still binding them, the one shared act that neither of them mentioned. The relief of being part of Bastien’s mutiny rather than its target carried him through, and gave a new twist of hope, and anxiety, to the remaining three days. On the final lane climbing out of town – the sunroom windows of ‘The Lookout’ glimpsed above and to the left, over the pampas grass – Bastien seemed uncertain. Was it better to drag behind, with sullen thwacks of his flip-flops, or to stride ahead, competent and careless? The driveway to ‘Greylags’, cut from the shaly bank, climbed sharply on the right to its covered carport, and it must have been because Clifford Haxby’s Daimler was already parked in it that the maroon back end of the Jensen, pulled in behind it, jutted out. Johnny stopped for a second, in surprise and disappointment that they were back, and the unusual freedom of the hours with the women at an end already. It seemed too soon – how far was it to Truro? About fifteen miles, but on twisty roads. He looked at his watch and it was ten past three, on the beach they had forgotten time and now it had caught them out. Bastien came up behind. ‘This is their house?’ he said and of course there was no one else he could be referring to.
‘It’s Dad’s car,’ said Johnny, ‘the Jensen.’
‘Ah,’ said Bastien, and nodded.
‘They’re back already.’
‘Perhaps it was not far?’ said Bastien, going a few steps up the drive as if to check Johnny was right, seeing some interest in the situation when he might have been counted on to shrug and pass by. He stood peering, with his basket, as if delivering something.
‘Come on,’ said Johnny, ‘I’m hungry, let’s have lunch,’ and when Bastien went a bit further, ‘They’re probably still talking business.’
Bastien said, too loud, ‘Have you seen the house?’ He was at the top of the drive. ‘It’s nice.’
‘No,’ said Johnny – he’d wanted to see it, but the Haxbys had put a bad spell on it for him. ‘Come on.’
‘In a minute . . .’ with a flap of his free hand. He put down the basket and went on out of view.
So Bastien was being difficult, again, after all, and he was left at the gateway, scuffing the stones in his plimsolls. ‘I’m going home.’
He went a few steps up the road, hoping Bastien would follow, but when he didn’t he stopped again. Clifford Haxby hated Bastien, and his father would be furious if he caught him creeping about while they were having a meeting. They were friends but it would seem like trespassing.
When he reached the top of the drive, Johnny couldn’t see him. ‘Greylags’ was a bungalow, expensive-looking, clad in reddish wood, and with French windows on to a front lawn. All the windows were closed: they could only just have got back, and there was a feeling almost that no one was in, they had parked the car there and gone away – gone over, it struck him in all its simplicity, to ‘The Lookout’ itself. There was no one here, and he studied the house across its smooth lawn with a gripping impatience, even so, for Bastien to reappear. A car came down the steep lane behind, slowed, but went on, to the left, into the town. A great screaming jabber of seagulls broke out, echoed round from the harbour below, the horn of the ferry sounded distinctly, a man close by behind the fence of the next house spoke, and a woman answered; and still the Haxbys’ house, or the house they were renting, sat closed and unresponsive, while Johnny made up excuses, breezy and hopeless, for standing and staring at it. Here Bastien was now, coming out from round the side of the house, moving quickly but with feet clenched to silence his flip-flops. Had he been seen? He gave Johnny the quick grin of someone who has kept a friend waiting. ‘No one here,’ said Johnny.
Bastien shrugged, and looked vaguely disgusted at the pointlessness of the thing. Then, stumbling, scratching back at one point with his foot to capture his shoe, he started to run down the drive. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Lunch time, I’m hungry.’
‘What, did they see you?’ Johnny said.
‘Nothing to see, my friend,’ said Bastien, ‘nothing to see,’ and reached out to bring him with him, sudden brotherly warmth of his body against him, marching him out under the strength of his arm, Johnny’s hand in a moment round him, the beltless waist of his jeans, nothing on, of course, underneath.
‘Oh, your basket . . .’
He had to break out of Bastien’s embrace to go back for it. He reached the edge of the lawn, snatched up the basket, and in the moment that he turned he saw, or thought he saw (the reflections of sky, cloud and blue in the wide windows), the unfolding ripple, the slow wink of light and shade, of the fine slats of a Venetian blind swivelled upwards and then downwards on their cord and closed.
THREE
Small Oils
1
‘Hello. You’re new!’
Johnny gave a cautious smile. ‘Am I?’
‘And what have you got for us there?’
‘Well, it’s for Mr Dax, in fact.’ He showed the flat brown-paper parcel, with its pasted label, Evert Dax Esq., Cranley Gardens. ‘It’s a picture.’
‘Of course I thought it must be.’ The man peered at it teasingly, his lean, humorous head on one side. He wore a bow tie, a brown velvet jacket and flared tweed trousers surprising on a man of sixty. The woman with him, who was younger, red ruffles at her bosom under a red coat, said defiantly,
‘Well, we’re going to take the lift.’ They crossed the hall to where the cage of a lift ran up in the narrow embrace of the stairs. ‘I’m Clover, by the way.’
‘Oh, Johnny,’ said Johnny, ‘Johnny Sparsholt.’
She half-turned and looked at him for a moment more closely. ‘Oh, yes. And do you know my husband.’