George gasped and laughed. ‘You call him old,’ he said, ‘though I believe he’s not yet forty.’ The Cecil-type shock of this, the lightly brutal worldliness, brought its own little train of resistance, concession and in this case amusing relief. Cecil was always right. And of course there was something perversely delightful in the situation. It was only later that he saw the hazard to his mother. ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered,’ he said.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Cecil, and gave him an odd hard look, as though he thought him a fool. Now they were passing the gryphon-capped gate-piers of Stanmore Hall, a mansion almost as imposing as Corley Court; Cecil glanced in across the lawns, but if he had any feelings of curiosity he repressed them. He was smooth and unseeing after his little triumph about Harry. The Sawles barely knew the Hadleighs; their friends in the top end of the village were Mrs Wye, who took in sewing, and the Cattos, who bred show-birds in a straggle of huts and runs behind their cottage – people dear to George since childhood, but useless and even embarrassing for present purposes. He saw the deeply familiar paths and pavements, trees, walls and white-railed fences with renewed alertness, half-loving and half-critical, and longed for Cecil, with his poet’s eye, to give them his blessing.
‘Well, this is the first pond,’ he said, pulling him up by the muddy slipway where a small wild girl in a cloth hat was submerging a toy boat.
Cecil looked across the circle of brown water and green duckweed with a pursed, absent smile. ‘I don’t think even I could take my clothes off here,’ he said, ‘right next to these people’s cottages, and so on.’
‘Oh, we’re not swimming here,’ said George. ‘I’ve got somewhere much more pretty, and indeed private, in mind for that.’
‘Have you, Georgie?’ said Cecil, with a mixture of fondness and sauciness, and suspicion, since he liked to make the plans himself.
‘I have. There are three ponds here; I dare say the village lads will be swimming in the big one, beyond those trees, if you’d like to have a look at them…?’
Cecil peered pityingly at the little girl, who was perhaps too young to think sailing better than sinking; while the wooden block of the boat kept bobbing up and the sodden triangle of sail struggled to right itself. ‘As it happens,’ he said, distantly, ‘I only want to look at you,’ and then turned to smile at George, so that the remark seemed to have curved in the air, to have set out towards some more obvious and perhaps deserving target, and then swooped wonderfully home.
They went on across the open field towards the woods, no longer arm in arm, Cecil again a little ahead, in his habitual fashion, so that the lovely certainty of a minute before seemed vaguely called in question. The tiny separation felt to George like a foretaste of what would happen next morning. He planned to go down to the station in the van with Cecil, but was flustered and miserable already when he tried to picture it, there would be no time, no chance… Really everything rode on this last afternoon. ‘Wait for me!’ he said.
Cecil slowed and turned and smiled so widely and yet so privately that George felt almost faint with reassurance. ‘I hardly can wait,’ Cecil said, and kept smiling; then they went on, side by side, with a funny tongue-tied singleness of purpose. George was aware of his own breathing, his own pulse, as the ragged line of oaks rose up in front of them. His feelings absorbed him so completely that he seemed to float towards them, weak with excitement, across a purely symbolic landscape. Away to their right a middle-aged couple whom he didn’t recognize were also approaching the woods, with a pair of snuffling and bickering spaniels. He took them in exactly, but with no sense of their reality. The woman wore a bright blue blouse, and a low brown hat with a feather in it; the man, in country flannels, had a button-topped cap like Cecil’s, and raised his stick in amiable greeting. George nodded and quickened his pace, in a rush of guilt and exultation. He would easily be able to avoid these people. Other walkers were so predictable. There was a riding trail that ran for a mile or more along the wood’s edge; and other tracks led on from glade to glade across the whole breadth of the Common. Thinner pathways, under lower branches, had been made by the deer. George ducked in through one of these, a tight green tunnel through the oak and beech saplings, and Cecil was obliged to follow, with an odd sort of cough of surrender. ‘I can tell you know the way,’ he said.
The truth was that George had played in these woods for years, with his brother and sister, but just as often, since he was big enough, alone. There were half-a-dozen tall trees he had worked out, through long hours of held breath and anxious daring, how to climb without help; there were hiding places and burial places. To show them to Cecil was to admit to something very far from Cambridge, and the Society. He stood up in the small clearing at the tunnel’s end, and reached back to help Cecil and get in his way as he came up behind him.
Cecil stifled his usual yelp of a laugh and patted George’s side and held his forearm in a tight grip, to keep him at a distance but not to let him go. He seemed to be listening, his head raised and eyes warily sliding, his posture self-conscious. They heard the dogs barking and bothering each other, close by. For a second or two the blue of the woman’s blouse could be seen among the leaves, and the man called out ‘Mary! Mary!’, which George thought was the woman’s name but then she called it too. There was something unaccountably funny about a dog called Mary, perhaps it was after the Queen, and he giggled to himself as he stood, with his arm burning from Cecil’s grip; though that was nothing to the tantalized ache in the back of his thighs and the thick of his chest at Cecil’s muscular closeness, his shushing lips, the blatant evidence of his arousal. George was breathing half-forgetfully, in sighs, while his heart raced. They heard the dogs yelping again, a bit further off, and the notes, though not the words, of the couple talking, the strange flat tone of marriage. Cecil took a few cautious steps across the leafy floor, still gripping George at arm’s length, peering round. They were very close to the wood’s edge – below the green translucent fringe of beech leaves you could see the open field. Still, Cecil was being a little absurd – if Mary’s owners thought of them at all it would be their silence that puzzled them, their abrupt disappearance that seemed queer.
‘Let’s go a bit further,’ said Cecil. George sighed and followed behind him, rubbing his wrist with an air of grievance. He saw that this little mime of prudence, air of woodcraft, had just been Cecil’s way of getting on top and taking control of a scene which George for once had planned. Well, they were dreams as much as plans, memories mixed up with wild ideas for things they’d not yet done, perhaps could never do. Cecil, under other circumstances, was bold to the point of recklessness. George let him go ahead, pushing springy branches aside, barely bothering to hold them back for his friend, as if he could look after himself. It was all so new, the pleasure flecked with its opposite, with little hurts and contradictions that came to seem as much a part of love as the clear gaze of acceptance. He watched Cecil’s back, the loose grey linen jacket, dark curls twisting out under the brim of his cap, with a momentary sense of following a stranger. He couldn’t think what to say, his yearning coloured with apprehension, since Cecil was demanding and at times almost violent. Now they’d emerged by the huge fallen oak that George could have led him to by a much quicker path. It had come down in the storms several winters ago and he had watched it sink over time on the shattered branches beneath it, like a great gnarled monster protractedly lying down, bedding down in its own rot and wreckage. Cecil stopped and shrugged with pleasure, slipped off his jacket and hung it on the upraised claw above him. Then he turned and reached out his hands impatiently.