Growing Pains Page 4

  They had been like that, like a Rodin group, for twenty minutes, and Richard’s arm was going to sleep under the dead weight of Stephen’s head. “Have to let my hand breathe a bit, old chap,” he said very softly, wriggling his arm free. Stephen lifted his head a fraction of an inch to let him work his hand out from under. Richard stirred his stiffening limbs slightly, and decided to take matters a step further. “Just understand this, Stevie, my lovely,” he murmured, keeping his voice soothing. “No one’s going to put any pressure on you. You’re here for as long as you want to be here, and no strings attached. No one will bother you, least of all me. I shan’t touch you, either, unless you want me to. I think you’ll want to sleep a lot. Fine. You sleep. Come and go as you please. I’ve got a set of keys for you. But you’re going to have to try to think a bit, love. Like I said, there’s going to be things to be done, and you’re going to have to do them. Try and get yourself prepared, and tell me when you’re ready to talk about them. I’m going to leave you now.”

  Stephen stirred, rolled towards him, and opened his eyes. “Don’t go, Richard,” he said softly. “I know what you’re talking about, and I think I can talk about them — to you. Stay with me, won’t you?”

  Richard’s heart contracted and throbbed, and all the old desire came flooding back, robbed of none of its power by events. He swallowed hard, and took a firm grip on his emotions. “Sure?” he said, carefully. Stephen gave him the full searchlight glare of his large grey eyes, and nodded, awkwardly, sideways at him. Then he succeeded in surprising Richard. He slid off the bed and stripped to his underpants in almost a single, sinuous movement. It happened so quickly that he had shot across the room to Richard’s double bed, which he had occupied as his own for so long last summer, almost before Richard had had time to assimilate what was happening. Stephen drew the covers up in a quick, fussy, almost prim movement, and all Richard could see was a cascade of dusty-blond hair across his pillow, and a pair of grey eyes gazing at him over the raised ruff of quilt. There was no beseeching there, no pleading, just a serious look of enquiry from a friend in distress. “What was it you said once about a bit of quick-melting blond icecream?” said Stephen, and Richard could almost feel the waves of pain and loneliness flowing from him. “Come to me,” said Stephen softly. “I don’t want… That is… I mean, I can’t… couldn’t… you know what I mean. But you could come and cuddle me. Please.” He sounded like a hurt child. Richard stood up slowly, shed his clothes and slid silently into the bed.

  * * *

  They lay together for almost two days, chastely, holding each other in a clasp that was passionate yet somehow objective, for all the mounting desire that beset Richard as the memories of the previous summer flooded back to him. He killed the desire, and managed Stephen like a very expensive nurse, soothing him expertly but yielding to none of his own feelings, recognising the oddly sexless urgency of Stephen’s needs.

  It was Richard’s father who roused Stephen from his interlude of automatism and set him back onto a path of practicality that ultimately brought him out of his first, and worst, deep mourning and regression. Mr Fitzjohn was a large, soft-spoken, rumpled man, given to hairy sweaters and aromatic, leather-bound pipes. He watched patiently for the first couple of days, when the two boys hardly left their room, and waited for the first day when Stephen spent any length of time downstairs. Then he made an almost invisible motion with his head to his son, who had been waiting for some such signal and slipped unobtrusively from the room.

  “How are you feeling, old chap?” asked Mr Fitzjohn quietly, taking the pipe from his mouth and waggling the stem gently in Stephen’s direction. Stephen raised his head slowly and gazed for a long moment at him. Somehow sensing the goodwill and strength there, he pulled himself visibly together, knowing that he owed a sensible answer.

  “I… I’m getting over it,” he said slowly, fighting down the stammer that had lately begun to afflict his speech. “I’m… I’m feeling better than I did.” He paused to search Mr Fitzjohn’s face, and drew strength from what he saw there: concern, but not exaggerated, solicitude, but not sentimentalised, and above all something honest, straightforward, something that positively demanded a firm, undramatised acceptance that life was going on, and was going to go on. He looked steadily at Mr Fitzjohn, understood at last the nature of his loss, and responded. For the first time since he had last been with Graham, not knowing that he was doing it, Stephen smiled.

  It was a crucial breakthrough, and the cure proceeded apace from that point onwards. Mr Fitzjohn eased Stephen back to health, treating him with the same uncondescending respect with which he had treated his son from the age of six. He heard the full story of Stephen’s relationship with Graham, asked many questions of which none was in the finest degree prurient, and kept his opinions mostly to himself. When Stephen asked him directly for a judgment he gave it placidly, and it was invariably shrewd and worldly, uttered in a tone of cool assessment, and with an almost serious, friendly twinkle, as if to tell him ‘It’s all right, Steve, I’m on your side.’ That was how Stephen took it, and how Mr Fitzjohn meant him to take it. Richard was present at the therapy sessions, sitting quietly on the floor leaning against Stephen’s legs and saying little. When they had talked themselves out for the evening he would lead Stephen upstairs and lie with him in bed, holding him gently until he fell asleep, then slipping softly across the room to the single bed to find for himself the relief that he ached to find with Stephen but Stephen couldn’t provide.

  * * *

  “Time for a dose of normality for you, Steve,” said Mr Fitzjohn one day later that week. Stephen looked trustingly at him, not really taking in the sense of what he had said.

  “Yes,” said Mr Fitzjohn briskly. “You’ve done your mourning, old chap, and it’s time to start living again. Your pal’d want that, if he had a vote in the matter. So does Dick, and so do you. There’s life going on out there, and you’re letting it pass you by. Well, that was necessary for a while. A very short while. You’d been hurt, intolerably as it seemed to you at the time, but it’s time to start flexing your muscles. There’s another thing, too. You’ve got things to do.” Stephen raised his eyebrows at him. “Dick knows,” murmured Mr Fitzjohn, directing a jet of blue smoke at the ceiling. He stood up, smoothed his rumpled pullover, did the same with his hair, and went out with his pipe clamped between his teeth, pausing to ruffle Stephen’s hair as he passed. “I’m taking Lydia off for a week or so,” he remarked casually as he passed on. “Going off for one of our little jaunts. We’re leaving you lads to fend for yourselves. If you’ll take my advice you’ll start getting out and enjoying yourselves. And start knocking things off that list of jobs.” Stephen rose from his armchair to his feet in a single movement, unaware of how graceful he was. Mr Fitzjohn saw it, appreciatively; and he saw for one vivid moment of revelation what Graham Curtis had seen. Graham might have died young, he reflected in that moment’s insight, but he achieved something few men do. He had his heart’s desire for a time.

  “What are these things to do?” asked Stephen.

  “Dick knows,” repeated Mr Fitzjohn placidly, and left the room in a mantle of blue smoke.

  Richard slipped into the room as his father went out. “Come on, Stevie,” he said in a carefully normal tone, slipping his arm affectionately round Stephen’s waist. “We’re going out. Mes parents vont on the piss in Austria, and we’re going on it somewhere less glamorous.”

  “Oh?” said Stephen, feeling a faint inner quiver of pleasurable excitement such as he had feared was dead in him. “Where?”

  “Elderton Park Cricket Club,” announced Richard. “It’s only a week or two till the season starts, and you’ll want to bung your name in the availability book.” And he bustled Stephen rapidly out of the house, carefully contriving not to give him any time in which to think. He yelled farewells to his parents as they went out of the door, and Stephen unconsciously followed suit.

  To Stephen’s immense relief there
were few people about when the two boys arrived at the cricket ground. They entered the big old pavilion, and Stephen felt a wave of yearning for the recent past break coldly over him as he smelled the familiar odours of leather, whitener, beer and old, faint sweat. Images of Graham tumbled helter-skelter through his mind: Graham taking his arm and leading him through the crush to drive him home after his first match for the club, Graham walking back in, flushed, streaming with sweat but wearing a broad grin of pure contentment after a big innings; Graham sitting at a table, talking, talking endlessly, about everything under the sun, serious but twinkling, picking up his glass occasionally to sip his lager, or glancing up to smile or make some remark to one of the players passing on the way to the bar.

  Somehow coming there made Graham’s death real and tangible in a way that nothing else had been able to do. Stephen came head on to the realisation that Graham really wasn’t going to come back: that he would never see his face again. He halted abruptly a pace or two across the threshold and stood for some moments, absorbing the shock of the realisation. He looked about him, carefully, as if he was seeing the big, airy room with its high raftered ceiling and its masculine decorations and impedimenta for the first time, or as if he had to memorise the exact layout of the place for an observation test later. Richard stood at his side, watching him closely, and a little anxiously. He had known the moment of entry there would be critical, and almost held his breath as he waited to see Stephen’s reaction.

  And then, suddenly, his fears were relieved. For Stephen, it suddenly became, somehow, much easier to accept. The reality was so stark in this setting that it became, paradoxically, far easier to face and surmount: as if the very nearness of Graham that he felt all about him in this room was itself urging him to pick up the course of his life and accept that an early, indescribably, almost impossibly happy chapter had simply come to an end.

  After that it was downhill. The boys went to the bar, where the steward greeted them effusively, and naturally asked how they had wintered. One or two other members were already drinking, and gathered round sympathetically when they heard Stephen telling the steward of Graham’s death. Drinks and condolence were proffered liberally, but the men, ranging in age from fourteen to eighty, were so transparently genuine, and so obviously full of concern for Stephen, that it made the breaking of the ice easier than he — or even Richard, generally more optimistic and also more intuitive — had dared to hope.

  The turning point came when they had been there for half an hour. The door was hurled open as if a small depth charge had been detonated behind it, and Bill McKechnie walked in. He tramped in with his customary heavy tread, bawling good evenings in his broad Derbyshire tones, and had reached the bar before his eye fell on the boys. His big, bristling red eyebrows rose sharply as he saw who was there. “Biggsy!” he boomed, and clapped Stephen on the shoulder with a huge red hand, sending him staggering. “Aren’t you in France with your partner in crime?” He stared at Stephen for a few moments, then suddenly grinned. “You haven’t come back to play for us after all, have you?” Stephen nodded, a little shy all of a sudden, and Bill slapped him on the back again, knocking the breath out of him, at the same time roaring to the steward for pints. “Great, Steve!” he bawled. “I’ve been at the pair of you to come back, haven’t I? Where’s his nibs?”

  And then they had to tell him, and he became the other Bill, who had helped Stephen in his hour of greatest need, kept a surreptitious but keenly observant eye on his well-being, and looked after him in the most discreet but efficient manner. Beneath the stentorian bawl and the ‘hail, fellow, well met’ gaiety, beneath the leader of rugby song choruses, the hardest of hard drinking heads, and the great teddy-bear of a man setting his face resolutely against the idea of growing up, there lay a deep and sensitive friend, wise and generous and kind.

  Now he became instantly quiet, took Stephen gently by the arm and steered him to a table in the farthest, darkest corner of the big pavilion, jerking his head at Richard to follow. He sat the boys down, got up and went briefly back to the bar to collect the glasses, and returned, looking steadily and observantly at Stephen as he came. Richard noticed that he was walking almost noiselessly. He sat down, and demanded, very gently but in a tone that brooked no argument, to be told the entire story. Stephen told it, glad to be able to do so, for it enabled him to unravel many of his own tangled emotions as he quietly worked his way through the events of the last few months.

  When he had finished Richard took up the account, explaining that Stephen was back with him for the foreseeable future, and concluding with his own resolve to come to the club that evening for Stephen to put his name in the book. When the story was finished Bill sat looking keenly at Stephen for some moments. Then he got up, patting Richard on the shoulder as he gathered their glasses. “You did quite right to bring the lad down here,” he said, heading for the bar. He returned with the availability book, and thrust it at Stephen. “Here y’are, our kid,” he said, still speaking softly, but with no loss of his normal strength of personality. “Stick your name down. You too, Richard — I take it you’re still gonna score for us?” Richard nodded. Bill went off again, returned with the refilled glasses, and sat down. He put a big, hard hand gently on Stephen’s shoulder.

  “I’m not gonna try an say much in the way a sympathy,” he said in a soft murmur that was utterly unlike his usual conversation bellow. “There ain’t a lot that’s worth sayin, an what there is, you know without my sayin it. You had a fine friend in Graham. We all did. But I’ll tell you this, young Steve. We all appreciated him a lot better because a you. You brought the best out in him, you made him blossom — I’m speakin as a cricketer, now, as well as a friend. You made him very happy, we could all see that, once we knew what the score was. You took him out of himself, an made him a better pal, a better cricketer certainly, an I’d guess a better man an all. Think about that when it gets hard to bear, our kid. An if there’s anything I can do — anything at all, you come to me an you ask, all right?” He sat watching Stephen, who blinked at him through wet eyelashes, too moved to speak. Richard’s eyes were moist also. He snuffled loudly, and all three of them jumped, and then laughed. It was a very important moment, because it broke the tension. After that Bill deliberately steered the conversation onto other things, recounting anecdotes about the antics of various members over the winter, and the laughter came more easily, and more often. Throughout the evening he also ensured, without ever making it obvious that he was doing it, that they were left alone by the other players and members who arrived in a steady stream to drink. Richard, who missed very little and was a precocious master of tact himself, conceived an enormous admiration for the skill and discretion with which he did it, so that no one ever actually realised they were being excluded and kept at a distance.

  Bill also unobtrusively made sure that Stephen’s glass was never allowed to stand empty for more than a second or two, with the result that when the time came for them to go back through the dark and deserted streets both boys were a little unsteady on their feet, and somewhat the worse for wear. Bill saw the fact, understood that his intention had been achieved, and informed them that he was driving them home. They found themselves being propelled into the back of his car, and were very glad of the lift as it had begun to rain — a fine, spiteful, sleety rain that would have made them very wet indeed without appearing to. Bill repeated his sympathy, sincerely but without ceremony, turned round to lean over the back of his seat, and made Stephen promise that he would not fail to ask if he wanted or needed anything. Then he watched while the boys let themselves into Richard’s house, gave them a quick bib on the horn and disappeared.

  The boys made tea before going rather unsteadily upstairs, and there, for the first time since his return, Stephen gravitated without thinking to Richard’s bed. He dropped his clothes in a pile at his feet where he stood, slid down into Richard’s bed, and waited, propped on one elbow and gazing levelly at Richard. Richard could sens
e that something out of the ordinary was afoot, and his heart throbbed and began beating faster as he wondered if it might be what he desired more than anything. It was: that night they made love, fully, firmly and with months of passion cruelly repressed to make up for. It was, Richard felt safe in assuring himself, at least the end of the beginning.

  * * *

  The first of the unpleasant items for Stephen to tick off his list he had fulfilled some days before: after a great deal of agonising he had managed to steel himself and compose a letter to Graham’s parents. Graham had not spoken often of his parents, and Stephen had realised only when he sat down to write to them that he had no idea if they had known of his existence, let alone his relationship with their son. He didn’t know, either, if they could have been informed of his death by any other means. Richard didn’t know either, so they asked his father. “I think you’ll find that the airline will have had a record of his passport on their passenger manifest,” Mr Fitzjohn told them. “Which means they’ll have informed the Home Office, or the Passport Office, or whoever it is they inform in these cases. He’ll have had to fill in details of next-of-kin — you have to tell the buggers your great-granny’s favourite colour these days, to get a passport at all. Convince em you’re not an illegal immigrant coming in on the night rowing-boat from Bangladesh. Yes, I think they’ll have been contacted, Stephen. Poor people,” he ruminated. “Some young copper knocking on their door, I imagine.”