Growing Pains Read online

  Growing Pains

  by the same author from The Gay Men’s Press:

  Unnatural Relations

  Conduct Unbecoming

  Out of Bounds

  Full Circle

  with other publishers:

  Quick Singles

  Coppers: An Inside View of the British Police

  Fine Glances

  One Over Par

  Max: The Life and Music of Peter Maxwell Davies

  Turf Accounts

  Nice Tries

  First published 1999 by Millivres Ltd,

  part of the Millivres Prowler Group,

  3 Broadbent Close, London N6 5GG

  World Copyright ® 1999 Estate of Mike Seabrook

  The right of Mike Seabrook to be identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  ISBN 1 902852 05 2

  Distributed in Europe by Central Books,

  99 Wallis Rd, London E9 5LN

  Distributed in North America by InBook/LPC Group,

  1436 West Randolph, Chicago, IL 60607

  Distributed in Australia by Bulldog Books,

  P O Box 300, Beaconsfield, NSW 2014

  Printed and bound in the EU by WSOY, Juva, Finland

  As always, I have to thank my wife Perviz for her immense contribution to this book. In particular it is dedicated to her, and to my sister-in-law, Khorshed, for sitting for hours one afternoon in 1983 in the garden of The Feathers at Dersingham, patiently talking me into believing that my ambition to write stories for my living might not be quite as impossible of fulfilment as I then gloomily — and wrongly — assumed.

  “How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!

  How pleasant it is to have money.”

  (Arthur Hugh Clough)

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  1

  “Bonjour, vin,” said Stephen Hill, raising his glass and squinting at the sunlight fractured in its oily yellow contents. “Bienvenue à mon estomac.” There was a chuckle from the handful of early drinkers in the little café-bar. Stephen, a handsome, well-made boy of nineteen, with clear grey eyes and an untidy mop of dusty-blond hair, took a hefty slug of the wine, grunted appreciatively, and resumed shoving dirty glasses into the round mesh cage, ready for the dishwasher. He was lifting his glass for a second mouthful when the door opened and Graham Curtis walked in. Stephen’s hand halted half-way to his mouth, which remained open in surprise.

  “What’s up?” he said, quick concern registering simultaneously in his face and voice.

  Curtis, a stocky, athletic-looking man of about thirty, stood on the threshold for a moment while he took off his sunglasses and allowed his eyes to accustom themselves to the inside light. He waved a hand easily towards the half-dozen men at the bar, including Stephen in the wave, and grinned at him, reassuring him that nothing was amiss. Then he ran a hand through his hair and tramped through the room to the bar. As he came closer Stephen, who was intimately familiar with his entire repertoire of facial expressions, saw clearly that he was under the influence of some kind of shock or surprise. But he had enough sense to keep quiet and wait for Graham to volunteer explanations — of why, for example, he was back in Saint-Hippolyte barely an hour after leaving for Strasbourg. Graham looked hard at him, saw the question marks all over his fair, youthful face, and laughed.

  “Gimme a beer,” he said. “A sérieux, not one of those fart-arsing demis”

  Stephen served him a half-litre of pression, watched appreciatively, and yet with a tinge of anxiety, perhaps of insecurity, by Graham as he moved easily behind the bar. He had insisted on taking the job within days of his arrival from The Hague, declaring that he wasn’t going to be kept by anyone and was going to earn his keep. Graham hadn’t tried to talk him out of it. Indeed, he had thought it was a very good idea, with himself away in Strasbourg all day. Stephen had found the job as barman at a nearby café-bar, got it on sheer strength of personality, having nothing else in the way of qualifications to recommend him for it, and had picked it up in hours. Now, six months later, Graham reflected with a faint twinge of envy for the boy’s youth and quickness, he looked as if he had been born with a bar towel in one hand and a corkscrew in the other.

  He took a deep pull on the beer, gasped as the cold liquid hit his stomach, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then grimaced in disgust at himself and plied his handkerchief. Meanwhile Stephen kept working behind the bar according to his usual routine, serving coffees and beers, filling a pichet with Alsatian wine and dextrously twirling glasses along the bar for six Pastis-guzzling old men who had arrived after Graham, flushed and leg-pulling after an early morning boules challenge on which some mighty sum had, apparently, changed hands.

  The old men crowded noisily off to a side table, chattering like starlings, and Stephen leant easily across the bar as Graham swigged at his beer once more. “Aren’t you going to put me out of my misery,” he said at last, “and tell me what’s brought you back like this?”

  Graham grinnned at him. “I was waiting to see if you were in any misery to be put out of,” he said softly. He drew from his jacket pocket a fat, strange-sized manila envelope. “Had a letter this morning,” he said, passing the envelope over to Stephen. “Didn’t have time to open it till I got stuck in traffic in Strasbourg. Soon as I read it I turned straight round and came back again. Mainly,” he went on, watching Stephen closely as he slid his long, slim, off-spinner’s fingers into the envelope and drew out the contents, “to discuss it with you. See what you thought we ought to do. Go on, read it,” he added, jerking his head in the direction of the letter in Stephen’s hands as the boy hesitated.

  Stephen raised the sheaf of papers and read rapidly down the first sheet. As he read the others at the bar suspended conversations, set down morning papers and drinks and waited to see what news had brought one of their resident Anglais back so unexpectedly. They saw a look of stunned surprise dawn on Stephen’s face, followed, rapidly in turn, by shock, disbelief, and finally a flush of pleasure, still slightly shocked, that made his eyes sparkle.

  “I can hardly believe it,” Stephen said quietly after a few moments gazing into space as all the various possibilities struck him. “I mean, I had no idea he had all this… What shall we do, do you think?”

  “That’s what we’ve got to talk about,” said Graham, draining his beer. “Can you get time off from here, d’you think?”

  Stephen shook his head. “Shouldn’t think so, for a minute,” he said. “I’m on my own in the bar till Nicole comes on duty at three. Does it matter? I mean, we’ll have all night, shan’t we?”

  “That we shall,” assented Graham. “I’ve got to go into work some time, anyway. I’ll leave you here, love, all right, and go in? I’ll take tomorrow off, and you do the same here. I’ll just borrow their phone, if it’s all right by you, and let them know I’m on my way.” Stephen made way for him to slip past behind the bar, and grinned a minute later as he heard Graham blaming his tardiness on an imaginary malfunction in the car. Five minutes later Graham was gone, speeding back to Strasbourg. Stephen continued serving and washing up the enormous traffic in glasses, his mind far away from his work, daydreaming happily of things to come.

  * * *

  It had been a different story three months before.
<
br />   It had been, then, three months since Stephen had descended on Graham, tousled, desperately tired but joyous, straight from the scenes of debauchery marking the end of the cricket tour in The Hague. They had been three months of joy, unmarred by the slightest difference of feeling. They had spent the time getting to know each other, finding out all the small things about each other that lovers spend the first few months of married life discovering. Stephen had taken his job at the auberge, and Graham had continued exploring the potential of his new work at the language school in Strasbourg. And then, one Saturday morning, everything had changed for a while.

  They had been sitting about after breakfast, wondering what to do that day, when the telephone had rung. Stephen, who happened to be nearest, picked it up. “Allo. Bonjour.” There had been a pause. “Yes. No, he’s here. Just a moment, I’ll pass you over.” Graham looked interrogatively at him as he went to take the proffered phone, but Stephen had pulled a ‘don’t know’ face. “English,” he had murmured as Graham took the receiver from him and sat in the armchair beneath the instrument.

  “Hallo, Graham Curtis,” he said. There was a squawk from the other end. “What?” said Graham suddenly. Stephen looked up at him sharply. Something in his tone had reminded Stephen of when Graham had been a schoolmaster. He had sometimes rapped out a question in just that tart, not-to-be-denied tone, usually directing it at someone wool-gathering, their attention straying out through the form-room window to the cricket field across the quadrangle… quite often me, reflected Stephen, with a warm smile of reminiscence. It had been one such reprimand that had led to all this, he reflected. But he wasted little time on the moment of languorous remembering, because Graham’s face and tone of voice were getting more and more grave, and his questions increasingly sharp and monosyllabic. Eventually there was a long squawk of voice from the other end, and Graham was thanking whoever it was, profusely, and promising to be there, wherever ‘there’ was, within twenty-four hours. Stephen’s heart contracted in sudden fear. He had not been out of Graham’s arms for twenty-four hours, let alone his company. He wondered, desperately, over the final few pleasantries uttered tersely by Graham, as if he was in a great hurry to put the receiver down and act, what emergency could have arisen.

  Graham enlightened him as soon as he put down the receiver. “That was the London Clinic,” he said. He was staring blankly into space, and his voice was strangely blurred and muted. Stephen’s eyes opened. “Someone ill?” he said softly.

  “Yes,” said Graham in the same dreamy tone. “Old Reggie. He’s been asking for me, they said. He… he’s got forty-eight hours to live. If he’s lucky…” He sat, still with that glittering, thousand-yard stare in his unfocussed eyes, and suddenly began to shiver. Stephen, becoming seriously worried for his usually masterful friend, went hurriedly over to him, sat beside him on the sofa and put his arms tightly around him, rocking him slightly out of some instinct.

  After a few moments of this Graham pulled himself together and turned a pale, shocked face to Stephen. “Thanks, love,” he muttered. “I… I’m sorry to crack up like that. It was just… just that coming out of the blue like that… I thought the poor old chap was making a fine recovery, and to hear it baldly, out of a clear sky like that… I’m sorry, Stevie.”

  “Never mind that,” said Stephen. “What do you want to do? You’ll go to London, I suppose?”

  “Yes, I suppose I must,” muttered Graham. “Well, of course you must,” said Stephen, surprised that there should be any supposing about it. “Christ!” he exclaimed. “You’ll have to look slippy about it, too, if you’re gonna get there in time. You go and get a bag packed,” he said, taking charge for the moment, while Graham still sat on the edge of the armchair, all the stuffing knocked temporarily out of him. “Come on, love,” Stephen said again, urgently this time, shaking Graham gently by the shoulders. Graham roused himself, gazed at Stephen as if he was seeing him for the first time that morning, and then, abruptly, got himself back in hand again. “Sorry, Steve, my love,” he said briskly. “Shouldn’t have allowed it to wind me like that. I’ll go and pack, as you say. Will you be looking up flight times?”

  “Already doing it,” called Stephen. A minute later he was bounding upstairs. “There’s an Air France flight in two hours and five minutes,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Graham over his shoulder, busy packing a small overnight case. “I’ll take a cab into Strasbourg. Have to teach you to drive, you know, Stevie.”

  “I’ve booked the cab,” said Stephen quietly. “He’ll be here in five minutes. And I’ll start learning to drive when you get back.”

  Graham closed the case and twisted the catches to lock it, then turned and looked steadily at Stephen for some moments. “You’re a good boy,” he said, in a low, serious voice that made the small hairs on Stephen’s neck stand on end. “You’re bloody good for me, you know that, Steve?” said Graham. He stood like that, gazing levelly at Stephen, for a few seconds more. Then the moment was over, and Stephen was hurrying downstairs, asking questions over his shoulder as he went.

  “I can’t really answer any of them right now, Stevie,” said Graham apologetically, peering out of the window to see if the cab had arrived. “I’ll have to stay there as long as I’m needed — or wanted. I’ll ring you at the auberge to let you know I’ve got there, and then again this evening here, to tell you where I’m staying and so on. After that, we’ll just have to play it by ear, old chap.”

  And then the taxi had arrived, and apart from a forlorn little wave through the window of the house they were renting, that was the last Stephen had seen of Graham for a week. Stephen spent it fretting, missing his lover more than he had ever seemed to in the bad days when they had still been schoolmaster and sixth-form pupil. And yet those days had been bad enough, he thought to himself when he was feeling particularly lonely and miserable. They’d been bloody near intolerable. But his reason had supplied the answer readily enough: this was the first time they’d been kept apart since they had been in France, where there was no reason why they had to be apart.

  When Graham telephoned one evening to tell him that there had been a slight improvement in the old man’s condition, and that he might be in London for a week or even two, Stephen had felt a brief spasm of jealousy, which sinuously, like a dragon forming out of a wreath of smoke, turned into a momentary wish — that made itself felt despite his instant revulsion and suppression of it — that the old man ought to have the decency to die and let Graham get back where he was needed. Then he shuddered, and gave himself a ferocious reprimand, full of self-hatred and contempt. The following day he volunteered for overtime at the auberge, and told no one there about the little impromptu calendar he had made, just like the ones he had made towards the end of term as a very small boy at school, on which he could tick off the hours till Graham was restored to him.

  And yet when Graham finally did return, grey-faced and bone-weary from an almost unbroken vigil at his old friend’s bedside for the final thirty-six hours of his life, things were wrong. Neither of them, afterwards, could say what exactly had gone wrong; only that something had gone sour between them, for almost the first time since they had known each other. Graham was crotchety and irritable, inclined to bite Stephen’s head off at the slightest provocation, or at no provocation at all. He also developed a tendency to slope off on exploratory strolls round the little town, drinking quite hard and late into the evening, ending up, often, at the auberge where Stephen worked, half-drunk and in a mood to force an argument or even, once or twice, an open quarrel. They slept apart quite often, for the first time since they were together in France, and Stephen lay sleepless, staring into the darkness of the spare room and wondering what he had done to offend Graham. He would think himself round in circles, endlessly and fruitlessly, trying to work out rationally something that was far beyond, above or beneath reason, and sometimes crying himself to sleep as the dawn light came up, which he hadn’t done since he had been a littl
e boy.

  The truth of it was that Graham was a man of unusually highly-developed conscience, inclined to tax himself with duties and responsibilities that few would have acknowledged, and to be very hard on himself when he felt that he had been remiss, or insufficiently responsive to his duty. He was, thus, feeling heavily responsible for his dear old friend’s death, believing that he ought to have spent more time with him over the last few years, and that if he had done so he might have spotted the signs of encroaching illness before the old man had seen them unaided.

  Stephen, who was a thoroughly ordinary, average kind of boy, with all the insouciance and casuistry of youth, coupled with a generous ration of youth’s ability to find extenuating circumstances when duty contended with pleasure and pleasure won, saw much more clearly than Graham himself that Graham’s quite unnecessarily hard line with himself was uncalled for, unhealthy and foolish. But if he tried to voice any such opinion he was brusquely shut up by Graham, who preferred to wallow, for the while at least, in the soupy waters of self-flagellation and the opposite side of the same penny, self-pity. He insisted on blaming himself for neglecting Reggie Westwood, swore that the old man’s death would have been averted had he, Graham, been more willing to go and talk to him. Stephen found such self-absorption irritating, pitiful and incomprehensible at the same time, and rapidly began to let his feelings show.

  There was an awful period of three or four days during which Stephen, whose eyes were clearer during that difficult time, really thought they were going to break up over the matter. He cried himself to sleep at night, reflecting on the absurdity of human emotions, that could enable the two of them to overcome almost insurmountable difficulties in order to force a chance of living together and then, a matter of a few weeks later, look as if it was likely to make it impossible for them to do so.