Growing Pains Page 3
“Okay,” Graham smiled. “Just as long as you’re happy. But don’t forget, if you’re really missing cricket, we can go to Australia or New Zealand, if you like. It’s only a matter of popping across from here to Heathrow, and then jumping on Concorde. Be there in a couple of days, if you like. Personally, I like this central bit of Europe in the cold weather, and I think you’ll like Madrid, which is where I had in mind to trot off to next. But don’t forget the offer’s open, if you fancy seeing a bit of cricket. Come to that, we could just pop down to Oz for a few days, if you like. Watch a few days’ cricket, then come back here and carry on touring round.” He chuckled with glee at the idea of doing something so outrageously, ostentatiously expensive. “Conspicuous consumption with a vengeance,” he laughed.
“No, thanks, love,” said Stephen softly, and seriously, in contrast to Graham’s hilarity. “I appreciate it, believe me, dear Graham. It’s wonderful of you. But, no, I think I’d like to carry on poodling round Europe for a while yet, unless you really want to do something else. And then it’ll make it feel all the better when we do go back. And I’d like that to be for the beginning of next season. That’s when I’d like to go back, please, Graham.”
“Okay,” agreed Graham cheerfully. They said no more about it that day, and only ever spoke of cricket once again.
* * *
The next few weeks were a long series of short hops in aeroplanes, when both of them lapped up to the fullest the wondrous luxury of travelling first class, sumptuous hired cars, comfortable hotels. They wandered from city to city in Spain, spending a day or two in Barcelona, in Toledo, in a ferociously cold Madrid, admired the Alhambra and the other Moorish beauties in Granada, and finally fetched up on the south coast. They stayed for a few days in Malaga, where they discovered a restaurant which Stephen, who was learning Spanish fast under Graham’s guidance, christened Los Bandidos, run by two magnificently moustachioed and villainous-looking ex-colonials from one of Spain’s former possessions on the North African coast.
They took a taxi along the coast to Torremolinos and Fuengirola, and thoroughly enjoyed the encyclopaedic vulgarity of the resorts, with their “British pubs,” representative of all that was worst about such places. “Ah,” exclaimed Graham reminiscently as they sauntered into Barry’s British Bar. “Watney’s Red Barrel. How well I remember that. A headache in every pint was their proud guarantee, I think.” They sat under a multi-coloured umbrella drinking pints of the despised beer, watching the antics of the small number of holidaymakers taking winter breaks, and Graham reminisced a little sadly about when the resorts had been beautiful fishing villages with a few white cottages and miles of unspoiled, undiscovered golden beaches. “Still,” he said, brightening up, “they’re still worth seeing, don’t you think, Steve? I mean, it’d be awful to be on your deathbed and never have seen where Club 18-30 used to go for their holidays, wouldn’t it?”
An hour or so was enough of the delights of Torremolinos, however, so they fled back to Malaga, and thence to a tiny village along the coast, called Salobrena, which Graham swore was the last unspoiled spot on the whole littoral. “I just hope it still hasn’t been discovered by the Cook’s Tours shower of shit yet,” said Graham fervently as they sped along the coast road and Stephen admired the cactuses growing beside it.
It hadn’t, and they spent an idyllic week there, climbing the steep hill to the neat, compact village of white Moorish houses nestling on the hilltop, but mostly swimming lazily in the more or less unpolluted sea, and basking on the vast and almost totally empty beach. As the evenings drew on it became totally deserted, and they made love languorously on the sands every night, and then a good deal less languorously in bed later on.
* * *
“Damn,” said Graham mildly.
They were temporarily back at Saint-Hippolyte. After their idyll of untramelled joy in Spain they had decided to return home for a few days “to see what the postman’s brought” as Graham put it. They had aired the house and collected a small mountain of mail from the post office, and were rather enjoying taking life easy and opening the dozens of letters at their leisure. Stephen looked up from the letter he was reading and glanced over enquiringly when Graham swore.
“Got to go to London,” grunted Graham, pulling a face. “Some papers to sign. Something to do with those bloody directorships of Reggie’s. What a pain.”
“I don’t know,” said Stephen thoughtfully. “The season’s nearly starting, you know. We could stay over there for a bit and have a game or two. Old Bill’d be happy to have us back, you know that. He says so in every letter he writes, and gets the others to say so as well.” They both grinned.
“I s’pose we could give the old bugger a ring,” conceded Graham, secretly delighted with the idea. “See if he’s got room for us. I wouldn’t mind a game, I must say. I hated losing the second half of last season.” Stephen nodded approvingly. “Better get the flight booked first, though,” muttered Graham. He picked up the telephone directory, thumbed through the yellow pages and scribbled a number, and lifted the phone. Two minutes’ fluent French later, he replaced it and turned to Stephen, looking faintly annoyed. “Hmph!” he grunted. “We’ll have to travel separately, by the looks of it.” Stephen raised his eyebrows.
“They say there’s only one seat left, out of all the flights in the next three days — one seat.” He muttered to himself in annoyance for a moment, then shrugged. “Oh well,” he said, “I s’pose I can take it, and you can follow on a day or so later.”
Stephen’s face fell. “Can’t it just wait a few days till there’s two seats?” he demanded. Graham shook his head. “I’ve got to sign these bloody papers right away, according to the solicitor,” he said. “Something to do with tax, from what little I can follow of their gobbledegook.” He tut-tutted to himself, shaking his head. “Honestly, I don’t know why the hell they bother explaining all this in their letters. I understand about one word in ten. It might as well be in Swahili. And I bet it’s costing me a small fortune to receive these pieces of code. Anyway,” he said briskly, returning to the point, “whatever this jargon means, it’s clear enough that I’ve got to leap aboard the first passing plane and do the necessary. I’ll leave you here, and you can take the next flight.”
“Why can’t we drive it and go over on the hover?” asked Stephen peevishly. He didn’t feel like his own company, and he enjoyed long night drives with Graham.
“Take too long, love,” said Graham briskly, dismissing Stephen’s attempts to talk him out of it in four airy words. “Might as well wait for the next flight with seats available as do that. We wouldn’t be in London till…” He closed his eyes and did a rapid mental calculation. “Next Wednesday,” he finished. “No, old love, I’m afraid there’s no way round it. Besides, what’s the panic? You can do without me for a couple of days, can’t you? I’ll shoot into Strasbourg now, and you can take the next one. There’s the number.” He gestured to the slip of paper beside the phone book. “Same travel agents we use normally.” And he went off upstairs, whistling, quite happy with his brisk and efficient arrangements. He didn’t see the glare of annoyance Stephen directed after him. Stephen remembered it, though, afterwards.
Graham packed a few things in a small overnight bag, and a few hours later he was gone in a taxi to Strasbourg, waving cheerfully to Stephen as the car pulled away. Stephen raised a hand glumly, then went back to the pile of mail, a little disgruntled.
Three hours later there was a brief moment of instant sunshine over the English Channel as an airbus exploded in mid-air. All 298 people aboard died in seconds.
* * *
Stephen could never clearly remember afterwards the sequence of events; nor could he ever say exactly how he had managed to get through the first few days after he heard the news. Assuredly he could remember individual moments, but they were jumbled and out of sequence, fading into and out of each other with the insane parody of reality of nightmare, like lighted galleries scattered
along an endless corridor of unrelieved darkness.
With the insensate, nightmarish randomness of memory at such moments, he could remember the precise point the Clint Eastwood western that had been showing had reached when the newsflash interrupted it, and his vague irritation at the French insistence of dubbing an utterly un-Clint-Eastwood-like voice over the action, and the distraction it never failed to bring with it. He could remember the sudden clenching feeling of faintness as the sense of the announcement penetrated his idle half-attention.
He could recall with eerie vividness the sensation of the blood draining rapidly from his face. He had a sudden fancy that he could actually see himself in some crazy distorting mirror, growing blanched and haggard in mid-air before his own eyes. He could not remember frantically scrabbling among the piles of discarded envelopes and letters in search of the pen. He did not remember his cry of anguish as he recalled that the pen had been almost the last thing Graham had touched before hurrying out to the waiting taxi, jotting single words or brief shorthand notes on letters and bills of the action they required. He had no memory of scribbling the emergency telephone number the newscaster gave for relatives to ring for news of passengers feared to have been on the aircraft.
He could remember falling with a crash into the armchair he had leapt from to get the pen, his legs suddenly refusing to hold him up, and the headlong welter of conflicting thoughts, the reasoning half of him asserting with a deadly finality that Graham must have been aboard the flight while the rest of him howled and screamed in protest that it could not be so. A lunatic certainty that Graham had somehow been delayed and missed the plane seized him, temporarily drowning the dim but insistent awareness that he was doing nothing more than erecting fantasies to keep out the appalling, unbearable truth.
He could not remember making the telephone call to the emergency number he had scribbled, or cursing like a madman when he found it engaged the first twenty times he rang it; yet he could recall with total clarity the moment of icy detachment that descended on him and enveloped him, rescuing him, necessarily, the moment he got the answering tone. That merciful detachment sustained him while the police officer confirmed that a Monsieur Graham Curtis had indeed been among the passengers, and through the man’s brief, almost curt, but none the less obviously sincere expression of sympathy, which had somehow been the worst moment of all.
He had no recollection afterwards of how he came to be at the auberge where he had worked until Graham’s unexpected inheritance; but he remembered clearly enough suddenly being surrounded by a crowd of his former regular customers, stunned and tongue-tied but full of a desperate, clumsy, inarticulate pity for the boy: everyone at the auberge had taken to him very quickly after his arrival among them. He remembered his feelings of startled surprise at finding himself somehow transported to the proprietor’s own sitting room, crying on the ample bosom of the proprietor’s wife, while Nicole the late-shift barmaid clucked and fussed over him and forced some violent drink down his throat. He remembered, ridiculously, becoming unreasonably distraught about the fact that the auberge had been summarily closed for the evening, and trying to insist that they must not lose a night’s takings on his account; and being smartly told off by the motherly proprietress.
They filled him with enough drink to get him moderately but not catastrophically drunk, then bedded him down on the premises. He lay awake, half-drunk, rising and sinking in a morass of pain, until just before three o’clock in the morning, at which hour, for no reason that made any particular sense, he decided he must be in his own home, jumped up and slipped out into the night. When he reached home he had made a telephone call and finally dropped into a sleep of physical and emotional exhaustion in the armchair. He had woken, cold, cramped and wondering if it had all been an impossibly awful nightmare, later in the morning, with an insatiable craving for a drink, and went straight out to the auberge. He remembered, guiltily, thanking them far less effusively than they deserved, feeling nothing himself except an unyielding, aching emptiness and loneliness.
The telephone call he had made at three that first morning after had not been to his mother, but to Richard Fitzjohn in England; and it was from that telephone call that his recovery could in truth be said to have begun.
* * *
Richard walked through the door of the auberge six hours and forty-three minutes after putting the receiver of his telephone down, charmed everyone in seconds, and had Stephen walking beside him to his own house in ten minutes. He left the staff and the early morning patrons of the auberge with quiet, sincere thanks that made the women weep and the men fight not to, and with assurances that he, and Stephen himself, would be back soon to express their gratitude properly and sensibly, even as he was propelling Stephen out into the street. Half an hour later he had Stephen sat down at home, talking, at last, quietly, rationally and dry-eyed. He was still talking eight hours later, while Richard sat quietly and let him run on until the poison was flushed from his system. Then, equally quietly and calmly, he gathered him up and took him home to England.
Richard left his parents, who knew Stephen very well and liked him very much indeed, to look after him. He himself flew straight back to Strasbourg, hired a car and drove to Saint-Hippolyte, and set about methodically winding up Stephen’s — and Graham’s — affairs. He arranged with the post office to redirect mail to his own address; he interviewed the landlord of the house Graham had rented as soon as he had arrived from England nine months before, and terminated the lease. The landlord, who had liked both his tenants and was deeply sympathetic when he heard of the tragedy, immediately wanted to waive the three months’ rent payable for premature departure. Richard gently and politely declined his offer.
He gathered up all the mail, and arranged with the landlord and a local removal contractor to have the pair’s possessions shipped to Britain at the earliest convenient moment. He settled the telephone and electricity bills, sold Graham’s car, and cancelled the newspapers, French and English, that they had on order at the local newsagents. Finally, he found a florist’s, commandeered the entire staff and most of the stock, then drove on to the auberge, where he presented the landlady and Nicole the barmaid with the most enormous bouquets of flowers ever seen in Saint-Hippolyte. He sat with the regulars and the staff for an hour, charming every man and woman of them and refusing to allow anyone to pass a centime over the counter. Then, having yielded gracefully to the insistent demands of everyone there that he return, with Stephen, very soon, he waited for a moment when everyone was talking at once, and slipped away. Nicole, who was one of the few who saw him leave, turned to the proprietress, her eyes swimming. So were the proprietress’s. “Is he like Stephen and… and p-p-poor Graham, do you think?” Nicole asked. “Is he one of those?”
“I suppose so,” said the older woman with a gallic shrug. “Must be, I should think.”
“Jesus, what a pity,” muttered Nicole.
3
For Stephen it was rather like getting back to normal life after a long and delirious illness. The day Richard brought him home he was installed, without fuss or ceremony, in the spare bed in Richard’s room, where he had spent so much of the past year of his life, and which he had come to find more familiar than his room at his own home. Richard’s parents had always treated him as another son, and dropped back into the same habit as effortlessly as if he had never been away. And, after his lightning trip to Alsace to wind things up there, there was, always, Richard.
On the evening when he got back from Saint-Hippolyte he found Stephen lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He padded over and dropped gracefully onto the floor. His head was close to Stephen’s, but he carefully avoided getting too close, and made especially sure that he didn’t touch him. “How’re you feeling, Stevie?” he asked gently.
Stephen rolled onto his side so he could look straight into Richard’s light brown eyes, and gave him a very difficult, strained smile. “I’ll be all right,” he whispered. “Thanks to you. I�
� I haven’t really started to come to terms yet… I still can’t really believe it’s happened — like that, just normal one minute, and then, bang!” There was a long silence, while Richard delicately devoted his attention to the floor between his thighs. “I could have been on that plane with him, you know,” said Stephen, in a low voice that vibrated with horror. “I sometimes wish I had been, you know, Richard. But I don’t, not really. And then I hate myself for not wishing I had been, you know what I mean?” Richard nodded gravely, and held his gaze.
“There’s nothing for you to reproach yourself for, old chap,” he said. “Everyone feels guilty for being the one to survive. He never felt a thing, you can be sure of that. One moment he was flying along. Thinking of you, for sure. The next: well, if there’s anything in what the clerics say, he’s playing cricket somewhere, and waiting for you, knowing there’s all the time in the world. If there’s nothing in what they say, he was thinking of you, and then there was nothing at all. The big problem now is you. There’s going to be things to do, and they’re not going to be pleasant. How do you feel?”
Stephen looked at him in silence for a long time. Then he smiled. It was tentative, uncertain, and a little wobbly, but it was real. After a moment or so, he equally tentatively stretched out a hand and ran his fingers lightly through Richard’s abundant shock of white-blond hair. Richard had to fight hard to keep still and betray nothing of the tumult of emotion that the small, almost child-like gesture set off in him. It was the first gesture of physical affection Stephen had offered since Richard’s precipitate arrival at Saint-Hippolyte, and Richard’s mind worked overtime to decide how best to respond to it.
After a moment he slid an arm under Stephen’s neck and let it rest there, taking pleasure from the weight of his head. Stephen flinched for a second, then rallied, and almost shyly nestled his head down, in a tiny motion of confidence, fitting the back of his head into Richard’s palm. Richard let his fingers stir very softly in Stephen’s hair, and let the small motion continue, soothing Stephen, who closed his eyes and seemed content to remain like that.