Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  But I gave it up." "I can't bear it when people give up instruments," I muttered, mortified that he had never told me. "I mean what's the fucking point of learning them, it's all such a waste." Poor Luc was quite abashed at this and mumbled sorry: since he wasn't at school any more . . . Gerard seemed to sense some advantage and pressed on with an account of the Happy Entry of Philip the Good in 1440. I had a nightmarish feeling that he was going to deliver the whole lecture on ceremonial antiphons that I had had a couple of months before. But Luc broke in childishly with "Does it make a lot of noise?" "As a matter of fact", said Gerard, "it's the loudest instrument there has ever been. It used to be used for raising alarms." He gave his hooting laugh, took out two of the sections and looked mischievously around the bar. "I absolutely forbid you to play that thing in here," I said. And fortunately the juke-box was activated at that moment, the Beach Boys came spinning through, and Gerard having got his drink and said how Luc was welcome to try his bombard some time, moved off. I thought I'd rather hurt him with my brusqueness. I heaved a big sigh and Luc started working on his backlog ofdrinks. "So," I said, resuming a conversation that he seemed quite prepared to let drop, "do you still want to leave the country?" It was mad of me to persist, I was grasping for evidence that could only upset me, but to be in his confidence was itself like love and I was thirsty for more. "Well, of course, I still do want to go to Dorset. But not maybe so far as LA! It would be nice not to be always in this town, where I have lived all my life and where my family have lived since the thirteenth century—but—" There was bragging in his complaint, and I felt the crisis was probably over. "You know how it is, sometimes, things get worse and worse, and then you attain a point when you think, I just want to get out of here and start all over again from scratch bottom." I laughed and puzzled him for a second. "I do know what you mean. Maybe that's why I'm here and not in England." He raised his eyebrows and leant forward as if this was especially astonishing, but in fact he was indicating someone hovering behind me, as the hand of another farcical interruption landed firmly on my shoulder. "So we meet again." The wrong-note matiness of Ronald Strong—it grated on Luc as well, I was glad to see. I turned and smiled at him for five seconds, then said quietly, "Piss off." He pushed against me, grinning.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Charlie let me know that it was what he called "the full scene", and came into my room unnecessarily to extol the virtues of Lisanne's breasts and the miracle of the pill. I didn't care about them, but being made to think of them only worsened my holiday blues, the sense of being sundered from the boys I felt and thought so much about. It was hot and tedious at home; my father was out of sorts and depressed and seemed withdrawn from us in a new and unaccountable way; the few friends who lived in the town had been whizzed off to Skye or Montpellier or Corfu with their families. I went up the hill a lot, semi-spying on sunbathers semi-hidden in the long grass, and thinking of Mawson and Turlough and El-Barrawi transforming whatever holiday thing they were doing just by being their enviable selves. My favourite time was soon after sunset, when I liked to catch the first sight of the evening star, suddenly bright, high in the west above the darkening outlines of the copses. It was a solitary ritual, wound up incoherently with bits of poetry said over and over like spells: sunset and evening star, the star that bids the shepherd fold, her fond yellow hornlight wound to the w e s t . . . It intensified and calmed my yearnings at the same time, like a song. In one poem I'd seen that first star referred to as the folding star, and the words haunted me with their suggestion of an embrace and at the same time a soundless implosion, of something ancient but evanescent; I looked up to it in a mood of desolate solitude burning into cold calm. I lingered, testing out the ache of it: I had to be back before it was truly dark, but in high summer that could be very late. I became a connoisseur of the last lonely gradings of blue into black. This evening was windless, with high grand cloud that the afterglow made into dream-towers of pink. A hawk went over in the dusk as I climbed to the top, then there was a nagging squeak—I thought of a small night animal, but it was only a boy on a bike, braking and juddering around the steep rutted paths. Well, others could share the twilight too. There would sometimes be a couple with a dog, relishing the cool, or kids from the Flats, not quite ready to go in. Charlie said the queers went up by the wood at night, and I imagined them with a mixture of distrust and fascination. I leant on the trig-point, and saw the bike approaching again.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  What puzzled me was the variations on the actual events. Always the sequence began with my leaving a group of friends and walking off briskly and excitedly, as I had done, towards the cottage. Which cottage it was, however, altered from night to night, much as it did, of course, in my actual routine. Sometimes I would make for the merry little Yorkshire Stingo, sometimes for the more dangerous shadowy dankness of Hill Place. Sometimes I would find myself going out to Hammersmith, intent on one of those picaresque ‘Lyric’ evenings; and this involved a cab, or bus or train, inevitably subject to diversions, wilful misunderstandings by the driver, or bodies on the line. Even if I was only walking a few hundred yards to a spot in Soho or that ever-fruitful market-barrow, the Down Street Station Gents, I was liable to lose my way or to be caught up in other business, other people’s demands, which only served to increase the frustrated urgency of my quest. Often I would arrive at the correct location to find that the cottage had disappeared, or been closed down and turned into a highly respectable shop. And in reality the places that I sought had in some cases long been closed or demolished. Down Street was shut up before the war; and the station at the British Museum, although I recall no lavatory there, was another imaginary rendezvous, that now is an abandoned Stygian siding; so that my dream dissolved one nostalgia in another, and showed how all closures, all endings, give warning of closures, greater yet, to come. I enter the narrow, half-dark space—again certain that there will be something for me there, but always uncertain what. In the dream it is only the acrid, medicinal scent that is missing—but the excitement from which it is almost indistinguishable survives. It is a smell as remote as can be from supposedly aphrodisiac perfumes, but its effect on me is electrifying. I unbutton at once, or in the dream remove most or even all of my clothes; my mood is optimistic and youthful—and my body too puts off half a lifetime of weight and care. After a few moments a handsome young man comes in, his eyes obscured by the brim of his hat; or the lightbulb in its wire cage is behind him, so that he is a figure of promising darkness. I realise that of course I had seen him in the street on my way here, and had had the impression that he returned my glance. He must have followed me in.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I picked on something which must have come from the ex-governor’s bequest: a schools edition of Pope, with notes by A. M. Niven, MA—one of those frustrating near-palindromes with which life is strewn. It had seen active service, and words such as ‘zeugma’ filled the margins in a round, childish script. I had not read Pope since I was a child myself, but I had a sudden keen yearning for his order and lucidity, which was connected in my mind with a vision of eighteenth-century England, and rides cut through woodland, and Polesden and all my literate country origins. The book contained the ‘Epistle to a Lady’ and various other shorter poems; of the longer works it gave only ‘The Rape of the Lock’ complete, and I fastened on this poem, and on Mr Niven’s account of how it had been designed to laugh two families out of a feud, as the flashings and gleams of a civilised world, where animosities were melted down and cast again as glittering artefacts. I determined to learn it all by heart, and put away twenty lines a day. The discipline, and the brilliance of the work itself, were a kind of invisible enrichment to me—though, lest I should feel like an actor learning a great part with no prospect of a performance, I had Bill hear my lines each time I mastered a new canto; and he seemed to enjoy it. Tempting though it was to retire into this inner world, there were always visits to look forward to—and to regret, for their cruel brevity and for the new firmness with which, afterwards, the door was shut, the walls of the cell confined one. The visitors carried their horror of the place about them and for a while after they had gone left one with an anguished vacancy of a kind I had never known before. All one’s little accommodations were laid bare.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  His father was a workaholic insurance-broker who stubbornly thought Dawn should be the same. Instead he took a menial job with the Acomat Carpet-Cleaning Co. For a year or more that great rear presented in bedrooms and sitting-rooms in the Croydon area as Dawn moved around on hands and knees, applying his Deep Foam Cleanser to the wine and cigarette damage of innumerable teenagers' parties. Once or twice he found himself removing stains of which he was himself the author. In time a friend of Edie's gave him a call and he was magicked up to London to be a picture-researcher on The World of Chandeliers. I didn't see much of him then, though I knew from Edie about the editor of the magazine, and the affair he had had with him. When the affair was over, so was the job. Dawn was on the loose then for about a year. I had a sense of his giddy footing and fucking around, of the various older, richer men who needed to look after him. It was 1983. When we met again he was different, flamboyant, high on sexual deceit. Then it started to go adrift—a lover of his died with incomprehensible swiftness. Suddenly he didn't have any money. For a while he was the young man who holds up the clocks and vases on the plinth at Christie's as the lot-numbers are announced. He wore the porters' maroon apron with a certain flair, as if it might catch on; but would blush terrifically with a hundred or more covetous pairs of eyes on him or at least on what he held in his hands. One such pair of eyes belonged to a sexy Italian dealer with shops in Bath and Tunbridge Wells who picked him up at a sale of antique chronometers and fucked him within five minutes in the customers' loo. That relationship lasted for five years, with Dawn in the end running the Tunbridge Wells establishment. To me he was still a boy, but he must have had a business nous I didn't quite like to think of his acquiring. Then very quietly he made the transition to Colin. It almost looked as if he had been passed over, in exchange perhaps for a lovely bureau that hadn't been tampered with. But Colin knew he was ill. He fell in love with him and he had the kind of love Dawn needed just then. You wouldn't have known it as you sat bored rigid by him in the pub and smiling wanly at his pleasantries, but Colin found himself in giving and sheltering and taking care. In my third year at Stonewell Dawn started to appear on the little train.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We sat, as before, in the little library, Charles’s den, the only part of the house which did not come under Graham’s orderly care. Each time I visited it there were signs of new disturbances, books moved from table to floor, old Kalamazoo folders stacked or scattered, as if some task of sorting and searching were being executed, leaving only greater confusion, like a site turned over for coins and amulets by amateurs. Books whose titles had caught my eye last time atop their teetering plinths were now cast down or overlaid by other strata: atlases with cracked spines, popular sheet-music (the ‘Valse’ from Love-Fifteen), magazines whose colour printing had freaked with sun and age and, Gauguin-like, showed brown royalty, pink dogs, pale blue grass. I felt at home there. As we sat on either side of the empty hearth, I was reminded of my Oxford tutorials, and the sense I often used to have of inadequacy and carelessness in the face of my tutor, whose hours with me, he came to imply, were needless distractions from his own, decades-long work on succession and the law. There was a similar maleness and candour to it, that scholarly inversion of the rules of the drawing-room that allowed one to talk about sodomy and priapism as though one were really talking about something else. There was a similar toleration of silence. ‘Most tiresome,’ Charles enigmatically resumed. ‘One lives in the past fully enough as it is, without people coming back like that.’ ‘Your grocer’s boy. Yes, I confess to having been a bit disappointed.’ ‘He couldn’t see that he only had meaning in the past, poor fellow.’ ‘I think Martyrs were perhaps a bit much for him.’ Charles smiled wistfully. ‘I thought they’d scare him off, but he rather took to them.’ ‘I can see that he must have been pretty hot stuff once,’ I conceded. ‘And the shop-boy thing is so glamorous, all the whistling and the boredom, and the way they’re trapped there, on show.’ ‘He used to go out on a bicycle,’ Charles corrected my over-warm reconstruction. ‘He did the deliveries with an apron on.’ I lifted the fluted shallow teacup to my lips, and my eyes rose again, as they inevitably did in this room, to the chalk drawing above the fireplace. Taking a risk on it, I said, ‘Is that Taha in that picture?’ Charles was looking at it too, and repeated the name, but stressing it differently. ‘Yes, yes, that’s him,’ he said, with a sad breeziness. ‘He’s very beautiful,’ I said honestly. ‘Yes. It’s not an especially good likeness. Sandy Labouchère did it soon after we got back from Africa—you can see he had a rather brilliant line when he wanted to. But he hasn’t brought out the child’s gaiety, a kind of radiance … He was the most beautiful thing on earth. You just wanted to look at him and look at him.’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  " He was in his mid-fifties, that's all." Paul did look rather piqued at this. "Besides he was infatuated, so age was hardly a consideration he would let stand in his way." And he gave me a complex little smile that referred perhaps to me, perhaps to his own past, I couldn't tell. "So he came to the church." "He came many times before he spoke to her; he hired a fiacre every Sunday morning to bring him and take him back. He could really hardly believe his eyes, he longed to be with her, but dreaded meeting her and being disabused." "Was she really so similar?" "It's rather touching, at first he thought identical, but myopically he couldn't be sure—the whole impression, the slow but electrifying movement, what he called Jane's Lady Macbeth quality, seemed to be perfectly reproduced. It was only when he had, well, picked her up, and taken her for a drive that he conceded the single difference—in place of Jane's virtually colourless eyes, hers were what he called chrysanthemum brown—a tarnished gold colour." "Presumably he got her to go with him without too much difficulty." "Of course. I think she virtually leapt into the cab. But then to him that only confirmed the sense of reincarnation, of a destined meeting. And she was no fool, she went along with it; she must have had a bit of the actress in her too, although she didn't have anything of the real Jane's artistic background or farrdly connections. She was just a woman of the people. There is an awful kind of unintended humour in his diary if you know what she was and what he thought about her. He simply believed what he so very much wanted to believe." "He can't really have believed there was any connection between the two women, surely?" Paul looked mildly around the church. "Beliefs a funny thing," he said. "It's the little obstacles to belief that spur one to make the leap of faith." When we were outside again, he had the air of someone who has dragged you to see a cult movie at a remote suburban cinema and suspects that it wasn't an unqualified success. "That was very fascinating," I said. "I'd hoped to show you something else; but we can't wait all day. It's simply that this church is still used by the prostitutes. I'd hoped some painted ladies might be praying to St Vaast."

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  turned me down, politely but firmly, which only reinforced my feelings for her. I obsessed over her for a while, and then I eventually came to my senses. Still, I was shocked when, a year later, I heard that she was dropping out of law school because she was pregnant. Today I look back at the incident with a strange mixture of distaste and pride. Should you act out an extreme fantasy when you have the chance? You’re asking the wrong guy—I still haven’t decided yet. WADE KRUEGER That's Awful, That's Nothing xj p on deck for a smoke break, we'd taken up the topic of aggression between brothers. It was the four of us: Birnauer, Hampton, Foster and I. A homely bunch of E-ls off the coast of Crete, our first Med cruise. The talk was charged with the heat of masculine competition. To have suffered the most un der a brother was to have an edge on the others. Plus, we’d de cided to make it interesting. Whoever won, we’d buy him drinks the whole time on the island. It had been decided, for no particular reason, that I should go first. “My brother had access to sausage,” I said. “Not patties but links. He worked in an Italian place. He’d bring home great long hoses of meat.” “What I wouldn’t give for some sausage,” said Hampton. “Fry it up in a big black skillet,” dreamed Foster. “Poke it with a fork.” “My brother would wait till I was asleep,” I went on. “Asleep or passed out drunk. He’d sneak into my room with a foot’s length of sausage and prod with it at my face. He’d talk to me the whole time. ‘Won’t you nibble on it? Little love bite? Lick the tip. Just lick the tip, that’s all I ask.’ I’d wake up with splotches of grease all over my cheeks and chin. I’d stink of pa prika all day long. One drunk night, I took the sausage from him and clasped it to me fiercely. I held it like a teddy bear. He had to get pictures. He made duplicates, put the shots in every one’s locker at school. Even my girlfriend’s. She could never look at me again.” “That’s awful,” Hampton said. “That’s nothing,” said Foster. “My brother hit twelve and went crazy for jerking off. He’d take hour-long showers and jerk it three or four times. He was a regular jizz factory. You could never get it all out of the tub. He’d clog up the drain with it. I’d find little rubbery filaments of his spunk all over my ankles.” “I never went in for doing it in the shower,” I said. “Oh I did,” Hampton said. “Still do. Bet I’ve used more Pert on my cock than my head.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I saw his legs and hands. He was a black man too, and I think he was called Harold.’ ‘Harold, yes, that’s Arthur’s big brother. Arthur sort of works for him sometimes.’ ‘I think he was very cross. He said he was going to give him a smack.’ ‘The idea!’ I exclaimed, as the real idea—which I had never seriously been able to disallow—seeped inexorably through my system. ‘It was so funny being where I was, because he had something hidden in his sock, all wrapped up in silver paper, and when he got it out he didn’t know I was there!’ Rupert sounded very excited by this bit. ‘What was in the paper?’ he asked, a shade cautious now. ‘I wouldn’t know, old boy.’ His silence told of his disappointment. ‘Did they say anything else?’ ‘Yes. Arthur said, “Where’s fucking Tony?” ’ He giggled. ‘Mm—there’s no need to do the accent and everything.’ ‘And Harold said, “He’s in the car,” or something, I can’t quite remember … And Arthur said something about “That Tony was lucky to be alive” and Harold said “Watch your—um—lip”—does that mean mind your ps and qs?’ ‘Yup, more or less. That’s very interesting, Roops.” I pictured Arthur’s lips, and imagined Tony, and wondered if it could possibly be the same one. ‘You didn’t get to see Tony, then?’ ‘No, he was in the car. Actually, they walked down the street a bit, and then there was a car going parp, parp. When I came out again they were just climbing into the car.’ ‘Was it a big yellow car?’ ‘It was a quite big yellow car—and all the windows were black.’ ‘That’s the one. Darling, you are a great genius. One day I shall have to give you a medal.’ ‘Well, I promised I’d tell you. Will?’ ‘Yes?’ I sensed some more probing question was coming. ‘Does Arthur and Harold still live in England?’ ‘Oh, I think so, yes.’ ‘He didn’t escape then?’ ‘It doesn’t look like it, my old duck.’ I spent a lackadaisical afternoon, sprawling in the window-seat half-reading the paper, then closing my eyes, as the sun came round. I drifted in and out of sleep, took off my shirt, woke to find the coarse stitching of the tapestry bolster had patterned my slightly sweating back. I thought about Arthur, and how minutely brief our affair had been, and difficult to understand. I saw him again licking my balls; or swallowing as he slowly sat down on my cock; or helpless beneath me, locking his dry heels behind my neck. I hated to think it was over—yet dawdled half-awake in a maudlin, jealous reverie. I imagined him servicing the scarred and despotic Tony as they rolled towards the West End in their black-windowed Cortina. So much had ended, so many things gone crooked and bad—and yet the high June afternoon lasted and lasted, grew stiller, more crystalline. There was no friendly darkness in it. I shifted and slept again.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  If only I could have heard his words. Pulling off the highway, Myrna parked at a lookout with a view stretching over the valley from San Jose all the way to San Francisco. She glanced upward through her windshield. What a sky today, she mused. A big sky. The words—what words to describe it? Sweeping—majestic—cloud-layered. Pellucid cloud ribbons. No, diaphanous. Better—I love that word. Diaphanous—diaphanous cloud ribbons. Or maybe a screen of fluted clouds—clouds like white-butter-sand rippled by gentle wind waves? Nice. Nice. I like that. She reached for a pen and jotted down the lines on the back of a pink dry-cleaning receipt she found in the glove compartment. Starting her car, she prepared to drive on, then turned off the ignition and thought some more. But suppose Daddy had said the words? “Myrna, I love you—Myrna, you fill me with pride—love you—love you—Myrna, you are the best—the best daughter a man ever had.” What then? Still dust. Words decay even faster than brains. And so what if he never said them? Did anyone ever say them to him? His parents? Never. The stories I heard of them—that bourbon-guzzling father who died sallow and silent, and his mother encoring twice with marriages to other alcoholics. And I? Did I ever say those words to him? Have I ever said them to anyone? Myrna shivered, yanking herself out of her reverie. How unlike her it was—these thoughts. The language, the search for beautiful words. And the memories of her father? That too was strange: she rarely visited him in her mind. And where was her resolve to concentrate on Dr. Lash? She tried again. For a moment she imagined him sitting at his rolltop desk, but then another image from the past superimposed itself. Late at night. She should have been long asleep. Tiptoeing down the hall. A crack of light streaming from under her parents’ door. Soft, intimate voices. Her name murmured. “Myrna.” They would be lying under the thick, downy comforter. Pillow talk. Talk about her. She flattened on the floor, scrunching her cheek against the icy beet-red linoleum, straining to see under the door, to hear her parents’ secret words about her. And now, she thought, glancing at her Walkman, I’ve captured the secret; I own the words. Those words at the end of the session—what were they again? She slipped in the cassette, rewound for a few seconds, and listened: “. . . Myrna. Listen hard to what I’m going to say. You’re collecting and hoarding. You’re accumulating information from me, but you’re not giving anything back! I believe you’re trying to relate to me differently now but I’m not experiencing it as engagement. I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person—it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals.” Making withdrawals from a “data bank.” She nodded. Maybe he’s right.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Did your lesson go well?" asked Cherif, almost with a note of mature concern for his trampled rival. "He was ill," I said, "terrible cold, we didn't have the lesson." "Oh. So what did you do all day?" Cruel question. "Well, I had Marcel Echevin in the afternoon. We did cloze tests. It was fun," I said bleakly. "What's that?" "It's when you miss out words from a passage and he has to provide them to show he's understood it." Cherif looked alarmed by this. He ran his hand up my thigh, and gave me a fluttered kiss as if to blink away all this stuff he didn't know or care about anyway. I went on, "I might say, 'Cherif Bakhtar comes from Paris—he is a .' And he will say . . ." " 'He is a very sexy man'." "No. 'A Parisian' is what he will say. It has to follow from what I said; actually that does kind of follow, I agree." "And I will say, 'Mr Manners comes from England', and he will say 'He is a very, very sexy man'. " I suppose there was a sort of wretched charm in this squashed joke. "I don't think he would say that, you know. He's in love with a beautiful girl called Sibylle. Unfortunately for him Sibylle is the girlfriend of Luc." I ran the name in quietly as a test for both of us—he gave a sweet cooing laugh he had, whilst I heard a drumming protest from my heart at the syllable, and the pain of his coldness, and the force of this supposition about the girl. Otherwise—I went on to myself, while Cherif had started talking again—why did he pretend she was not at St Ernest all those futile weeks ago? Hadn't he told me, even earlier still, that she was his closest friend, and set my prospects sickeningly askew? Why did nothing lead anywhere but to the stale air of this bar and the blond shallows of the glass? " . . . and it was really cold," Cherif was saying, "and it started to rain, and I didn't have anything." He slumped into an indefinably fictional posture—I'd seen it before, where he acted out his own neediness, made a quite possibly unconscious bid for sympathy. "You ought to have a proper coat," I said—like my firmly benevolent mother again. "That skimpy little jacket's useless." I was kind of fond of it, a street-market bargain of years back, fashionable only in a time-locked Third World way, the gingery surface coming off in patches, like cracked veneer. He shrugged. "Okay, but I haven't got the money." "Don't be ridiculous. You must earn good money, doing all that heavy work, whatever it is."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  A child is far too self-centered to relate to any dilemma which does not, somehow, relate to him-to his own evolving dilemma. The child escapes into what he would like his situation to be, and I certainly did not wish to be a fleeing fugitive on a moving train; and, also, with quite another part of my mind, I was aware that Joan Craw ford was a white lady. Yet, I remember being sent to the store sometime later, and a colored woman, who, to me, looked exactly like Joan Crawford, was buying something. She was so incredibly beautiful-she seemed to be wearing the sun light, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile-that, when she paid the man and started out of the store, I started out behind her. The storekeeper, who knew me, and others in the store who knew my mother's little boy (and who also knew my Miss Crawford!) laughed and called me back. Miss Crawford also laughed and looked down at me with so beautiful a smile that I was not even embar rassed. Which was rare for me. 479 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK Tom Mix, on his white horse. Actually, it was Tom Mix's hat, a shadow in the shadow of the hat, a kind of rocky back ground (which, again, was always moving) and the white horse. Tom Mix was a serial. Every Saturday, then, if memory serves, we left Tom Mix and some bleakly interchangeable girl in the most dreadful danger-or, rather, we left the hat and the shadow of the hat and the white horse: for the horse was not interchangeable and the serial could not have existed with out it. The Last of the Mohicans: Randolph Scott (a kind of fif teenth-rate Gary Cooper) and Binnie Barnes (a kind of funky Geraldine Fitzgerald), Heather Angel (a somewhat more be wildered Olivia de Havilland) and Philip Reed (a precursor of Anthony Quinn). Philip Reed was the Indian, Uncas, whose savage, not to say slavish adoration of Miss Angel's fine blonde fr ame drives her over a cliff, headlong, to her death. She has chosen death before dishonor, which made perfect sense. The erring Uncas eventually pays for his misguided lust with his life, and a tremulous, wet-eyed, brave couple, Randolph Scott and Binnie Barnes, eventually, hand in hand, manage to make it out of the wilderness. Into America, or back to England, I really do not remember, and I don't suppose that it matters.* 20,000 Years in Sing Sing: Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Gone. I went to Atlanta alone, I do not remember why. I wore the suit I had bought for my Carnegie Hall appearance with Martin. I seem to have had the foresight to have reserved a hotel room, for I vaguely remember stopping in the hotel and talking to two or three preacher type looking men, and we started off in the direction of the church. We had not got far before it became very clear that we would never get anywhere near it. We went in this direction and then in that direction, but the press of people choked us off. I began to wish that I had not come incognito, and alone, for now that I was in Atlanta, I wanted to get inside the church. I lost my compan ions and sort of squeezed my way, inch by inch, closer to the church. But, directly between me and the church, there was an impassable wall of people. Squeezing my way up to this point, I had considered myself lucky to be small; but now my size worked against me, for, though there were people on the church steps who knew me, whom I knew, they could not possibly sec me, and I could not shout. I squeezed a few more inches and asked a very big man ahead of me please to let me through. He moved, and said, "Yeah, let me see you get through this big Cadillac." It was true-there it was, smack in fr ont of me, big as a house. I saw Jim Brown at a distance, but he didn't sec me. I leaned up on the car, making fr antic signals, and, finally, someone on the church steps did see me and came to the car and sort of lifted me over. I talked to Jim Brown fi>r a minute, and then somebody led me into the church and I sat down. TO BE BAPTIZED 449 The church was packed, of course, incredibly so. Far in the front, I saw Harry Belatonte sitting next to Caretta King. I had interviewed Caretta years ago, when I was doing a profile on her husband. We had got on very well; she had a nice, free laugh. Ralph David Abernathy sat in the pulpit. I remembered him fr om years ago, sitting in his shirtsleeves in the house in Montgomery, big, black, and cheerful, pouring some cool soft drink, and, later, getting me settled in a nearby hotel. In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt---covered in black, looking like a lost ten-year-old girl-and Sidney Poirier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me and nodded.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was quite taken by her portrait of the young Duke of Bermondsey and absorbed myself with deliberate enthusiasm in her topsy-turvy world. Then I finished my glass and the pleasure shrivelled. I closed the book and sat back with my head against the wall, drumming my fingers tentatively on the cover, half-smiling to myself with misery that this could have happened again. And with the excitement of a recognised necessity, too. Out in the streets I walked fast but aimlessly around, dry-mouthed and giddy with early-afternoon drunkenness under the glare of thin cloud. Soon I was in my street, I was in my room and closed the door. It felt warm and remote there, like a room left behind when everyone has gone to church: and there were the cold coffee-cups and old papers strewn about for a maid to clear in their absence. Somewhere, now, Luc was . . . doing something. At home, perhaps, over lunch with his mother, eating well amid sparse conversation. She didn't understand how beautiful he was, she censured the sprawl of those long white-jeaned thighs under the table where he and I had sat for our hour. He was in the starry dream-orbit of his youth and she was trying to ground him with her worries and precautions. Or perhaps he had gone to a cafe with his two friends, they had got a bit drunk and excited on a bottle of red. The friends must love him and more or less openly desire him. I lay spreadeagled on the jangling bed to think, the back of a hand across my eyes. I heard St Narcissus strike three. When I woke the room was full of shadows and through the chambered thickness of the walls came the laughter of the Spanish girls. It was not too early to go to the Cassette, and I had the makings of a bright, dry headache which could best be prevented by a flood of light Belgian beer. In the various streets and small squares around the Town Hall the markets were closing up now, the canvas was folded off the stalls, rails of clothes were trundled with flailing wheels over the cobbles towards waiting vans, a huge compressor lorry inched through the debris, fed at the back by teams of overalled oldsters . . . The proper emptiness of the place was being re-admitted, surrendered to—and it filled me with gratitude and panic in rapid alternation. The annoying distractions were being removed, but the vacancy that followed left me impatient for company: company to hold and hint at my wild new secret amongst.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Edward, what really good luck! I wanted to ask you something and I didn't know how to get into contact with you." "Oh." "Then I saw you actually walking past the window at the very moment I was thinking about you!" He was agitated enough not to notice perhaps how oddly I responded. "Don't you think that must be a good sign?" "I certainly hope so." I wondered if he was going to ask me in, and I glimpsed an evening utterly changed, even if just a drink with him and his mother and high baroque trumpet-blasts of power and lust breaking out soundlessly above us. "Well, I hope very much you will let me change my lesson tomorrow, because I want to go away out of the town." "Oh, of course, well, where are you going?" "I am going to the seaside, I think I have told you about it before, to where my friends have a house." So that was what the three had been planning . . . And already the old city began to feel irksome and desolate without them, without him, as it might have done centuries before when the court that Gerard had described to me moved on and took its revels with it. "How long will you be gone?" "Only till Sunday night or Monday. I can see you on Monday, perhaps in the afternoon to be quite definite." "Yes, okay. As long as you make sure you take some books with you. We've got a lot of books to look at, you know; you can't get too casual about this." I had the astonishing image of him in my mind frowning through smoke and drinking vodka in a cabin on some rusty old tanker, dealing cards to a ring of blond sailors in singlets, who exchanged glances and chatted about him in a language he couldn't understand. "You bet, Edward. I will be reading The Poets of our Time in each free moment." "Good." There was a pause in which we simply looked in each other's eyes and his grin of self-congratulation seeped away and he was shifting and waiting to be dismissed. I had never seen him so childish—it was a sign of trust, maybe, that he wasn't bothering with his usual indifference, though he must have known too that keenness and high spirits won adults' hearts and persuaded them that there was goodness left in the world. Then when he turned and jogged back to the house I thought I had never seen him so manly—so broad and so slimly heavy and incontrovertibly grown. I went on towards Matt's, the street-lights warming and yellowing as the twilight fell. Chapter 8

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I looked across with a frown and blush of my own. A little blonde ghost had appeared at the sofa's end, and Willie's strong arm opened towards it and brought it noiselessly into his embrace. "Sit with us for a while." I pushed my glasses on again and saw the child wriggle and shake her head and hide her face in her father's shirt-front. He rocked her for a bit, resting his chin abstractedly on her curly crown and gazing at the wall. "Sorry, Edward, do go on," he said, snugly, as if he were rocking himself to sleep. "She'll drop off in a minute or two." "Oh, it doesn't matter." He didn't protest, he seemed to find security in the reawakened claims of fatherly duty. I knew he'd prefer it if I went. Before long the child was asleep, or had wandered at least into the dream thickets on the path towards . . . I hunched forward and made half-pissed conventional noises about her beauty and temperament. When he came down again I was waiting in the hall. "How's that drink?" he said. "I've finished it." "Gosh." "I'll get back to my mother's." He stood in his socks in the doorway whilst I turned on the step and looked up at slow-moving cloud and three or four stars. "See you tomorrow," I said. "I've got to read, god knows how I'll manage." "You'll do it beautifully. Do you want a taxi?" "I'll walk a bit and perhaps get the little bus if it comes." "I haven't asked you anything about Belgium and your job and . . . I don't even know why you went." I grinned at him. "Oh, the usual mixture of panic and caprice—" I couldn't explain to him why this was a place to get out of. I stepped forward with a shiver and slipped my arms round him and hugged him and after a second or two he gave me a comforting rough rub between the shoulderblades. I kissed him on the cheek and then pushily kissed his mouth, until he shook his head away. "I can't," he said, "I'm sorry. I mean I'm so sorry about everything."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was gripped by Orst's obsession with his actress. I loved the superior way he had renounced everything in its favour, and made such a show of retreating from view into the snows of a dream. Of course I was working it up rather from the few facts given in the pamphlet: my mind ran ahead and took possession of the idea. I imagined a life consecrated to the image of Luc, a shuttered house, the icon of his extraordinary face candlelit in each room—until I saw with a shiver that I had killed him off already, perhaps too high a price for either of us to pay. I went upstairs in search of Jane, standing aside at the first turning for the couple who had come in before me, and overhearing their firm Cheshire distaste for what they had walked all this way to see; I warmed to them and despaired of them at the same moment; then past the door of Paul Echevin's office, which was slightly open in approved Orstian style, his voice heard on the phone, trying to wind up a conversation. And there Jane was. She wasn't entirely alone: other figures and various beasts paced and waited in the starry twilight, the jewelled Hades that she inhabited. But she was always the one on whom the drama turned or the mood centred. In a big triptych, hinged like an altarpiece, you saw only her ringed left hand scooping a train of crumpled satin, like a bride entering a carriage, but you knew it was her. In other pictures, cropped in similar startling ways, you were given only the firm-jawed lower half of her face and the hair spread out, or gathered round her like a shroud. A conversation-piece, where half a dozen women lazed on a terrace with tea and sewing and cigarettes while sunset waned through trees and spires beyond, turned out to be all Jane—full face, once smiling, once pensive, both profiles, a chicly bustled rear view, stretching, hands pressed to the small of the back, and a tender profil perdu, which spoke of intimacy and oblivion; in the mannered vastness of the flat gold frame, the words "Leal Souvenir" were inscribed in red.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I have one or two." And how unreal it must seem to be kept from them and their routines and gossip by this square of garden and this dull canal. It was as if one of the classrooms had floated off in a dream and perched nearby, filling its solitary pupil with a mood of privilege and anxiety. "I should have asked you before if you knew my other boy, Luc Altidore?" He mumbled, "No, I don't really know him." "Of course, he would be older than you." I turned and looked at him encouragingly. He was ready to go now and clearly waiting out of politeness, remembering perhaps that I was to come to dinner again, that he could never get away from me. "You must miss it all, Marcel, don't you?" I urged. "The companionship especially." "It is a very clever school, but I am not so very clever." He shook his head, to say it was touch and go whether he was happier then or now; and I understood that he had not been happy either at school or out of it. I had known him from the first as a boy set apart by his illness, but I had at least imagined a hobby—in the simplest terms, stamps or model kits—and a friend or two he shared it with. But I could see that Luc himself would not be such a friend. "And what do you know about Luc's girlfriend?" I boomed roguishly, appallingly, and blushed as I did so. Marcel shook his head and took on a dogged look, as if the lesson and its catechism were starting up all over again. "What's she called?" I hammed on—"Sibylle something?" Marcel looked down and fiddled with his satchel-buckle. He was flushing more richly than I was. "She is not his girlfriend," he said. "They are just friends." "Not his girlfriend," I echoed quietly. "No, I suppose he is a little young to have . . . " And what did Marcel know about girlfriends? "Well, I'll see you on Wednesday. No, tomorrow night. That will be nice." "He was never interested in girls," he said quickly in Flemish, as if the idea were too serious or shocking to manage in this difficult other language. I let the lapse pass, and hid away the longed-for but doubtful information to look at later.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I am very well disposed towards my mother," Luc said solemnly. "I don't want you to think I am not. I get annoyed when she is making so much fuss about him and imagines he will come back, when it is obvious that he won't. Most of the time I can look after her, but when my father is corning there is not too much I can do." How poignant and humbling suddenly to see Luc as the watchful support of this woman I had always thought of as absurd, and now began to picture as the heart-broken dupe of a husband far younger than herself. "Already", he said, "I know enough about love to understand why she does it. But still . . ." I stared at him for an agonised few seconds, then blurted out optimistically, "So you do get on with your father?" "I do, of course. And you see, he is very amusing and full of life and so forth." He looked down at his two squared fists, which he was knocking nervily together. "I used to think it was possible he did not want to have a child. Now I am not sure—I think we are better friends now that we never see each other." I didn't know how to follow so muted and painful a statement. I think he was as surprised as I was at everything that had come out. I leant forward, I might easily have stroked his hand and coaxed the fist into a grateful clasp. "Have you met the . . . actress?" "Yes, once at a party with both my parents. It was a long time ago, I think before this love affair began." He looked round, as if he might stretch out on the bed, but then thought better of it. "But how can we tell?" I don't think he expected an answer. "Oh, we can't tell." "She was in a film on the television which was in two or three parts, which I could watch if my mother was not in the house." Again the thoughtfulness mixed with mischief. "I must say that she is very beautiful, even if she is a very bad actress. You might fall in love with her yourself if you saw her, Edward." "I wonder." "I think I am right that she was only seventeen when he met her." I couldn't tell if he was looking at me pensively, abstracted by his picturing of the girl, or if he was speaking with deadpan cheek. "Anyway, he told me once that it was love like a blow of lightning for him, though not for her, which took much more time." All this talk of love from him suddenly, it was as if he had just learnt the word: he used it lightly and consciously like a new swearword packed with untried power and provocation. "And what about your grandfather's château? Have you ever seen it?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I can't go on about the next hour. Luc on the grass in his shallow blue shorts, rather discreet; the tan-lines of the summer, of his red ducks and of longer shorts than these, marking comical sexy stages up his long legs to the whiteness I just glimpsed where the hem rode high by a finger's breadth on the rise of his buttocks. Already the little creases and blue nodes of veins on his inner thighs. Nothing about his cock, but a couple of seconds' vision of crinkled scrotum (I may have imagined that). The discarding of Poets of our Time and the getting on of a yellow Walkman. Its not being Schubert. The scary challenge of a look my way, half-sitting up as if alerted by a noise or the glint of the lens, then lying back again, fingers in his waistband. My envy of his hands as they cupped his head, or flicked at an insect or a tickling grass, the light scratches with the back of a thumbnail. My envy of a long-toed, dirty-soled foot rubbed against the opposite calf, then sliding slowly down till it lay by the other and tick-tocked to the beat of the music. He had to move as the sun swung round and the shadow of our house advanced across the lawn; the steep roof and the lower sunroom took an ominous form, like the blind head and paws of the Sphinx, I thought. Twice he picked up the towel and resettled himself further away, frowning, the subject of an experiment in light he seemed not to have grasped. Twice Matt brought me off. I needed both hands to hold the heavy glasses without shaking. I was rather tied up, head and hands in one place, heart and mind out there where my pupil lay and day-dreamed and shifted from the advance of the cool tide of shadow. Chapter 9 I must have been early for the lesson. I was approaching from the other side, on the streets I associated with disappointment, the pilgrim's reluctant departure from the shrine, sores and deformities still unhealed, though this way round the sombre landmarks took on a new aura of hope and apprehension. I was calming my nerves with tricks against stage-fright that my father had taught me. And there was Luc, walking ahead of me, not running but clearly anxious not to be late. I was bucked up when I saw him look at his watch; my authority was manifested in that quick gesture—undiminished, maybe even heightened, by my tolerance in rearranging the lesson. Then wasn't I pained too to know what a distant figure I was to him still, the martinet of dead poetry and strict time?