Growing Pains Page 5

  In the end, after several abortive drafts he produced a long and fairly guarded letter that was tactful and gracious enough to pass the stern scrutiny of Richard and his father. He broke the fact of Graham’s death as gently as he could contrive it, saying only that he was a very close friend of Graham’s, and devoting most of the text to as sincere and delicate an expression of sympathy and regret as he could put together. He had received, by return, a courteous reply, in dignified, rather old-fashioned English, which gave nothing away about the parents’ feelings, or anything to indicate whether they had been aware of their son’s nature, or of Stephen’s existence, let alone the place he had occupied in Graham’s life. Graham’s mother wrote the reply, stating that they had already been informed, but thanking him for conveying the news so tactfully and saying that they would be in touch again soon. That had been all, and Stephen, Richard and Mr Fitzjohn between them had been unable to tease any further meaning, explicit or implicit, from it than that.

  The second task presented itself early the following week. The plane carrying Graham had blown up over water, and very few identifiable bodies were found, so Stephen was spared the necessity at least of a funeral, and of having to try to identify horribly blasted and charred remains; but the airline announced that it was to hold two memorial services for the dead, one at Strasbourg and one in London. “I can’t make up my mind whether to go or not,” said Stephen despondently, sitting on his bed the evening of the day they got the news. He was twirling a sock like a propeller in front of him, and staring into vacancy as he turned the matter over in his mind.

  “It’s not worth it if it’s going to upset you all over again,” murmured Richard anxiously.

  “Well, yes, I thought about that. But I think I… I’d like to go, as far as that goes. Not that I believe in any of their mumbo-jumbo — that was the main reason I fell out with my people, if you remember. But…”

  “Well, I don’t see that it can do any harm,” said Richard reasonably. “Okay, so you’re sceptical. So was Graham — you can bet your life he’ll be thinking it’s a great joke, if he’s looking in from somewhere. I know the religious part of it’s all bullshit; but if you feel it’s a last chance to remember him officially, in public, then go. It’d do you more good than harm in that case. But I really don’t see that it matters much.”

  “But it does matter,” argued Stephen, looking doubtful. “I’m not religious, but I can sit through a church service without feeling I’ve fatally compromised my immortal soul — if I thought I’d got one to compromise. Graham would have felt the same about me — but I’m pretty sure he’d simply have thought ‘It’s a service in part in Stephen’s honour, therefore I go.’ It’s just that in the first place there’s quite likely to be people there who never had a good word to say for Graham when he was alive, and in the second, the fucking church is more than half responsible for the problems Graham and I had to cope with anyway. If the church had been a bit more ready to extend a bit of Christian compassion towards gay people like us the law might never have been as fierce as it is. Then we’d never have had to fuck off to France in the first place, and Graham would never have been on that plane, would he?”

  Richard sat and thought about it for a while. Eventually he said “You’ve got a point about the church. If that part of it sticks in your craw, you’ll just have to stay away. But honestly, Stevie, if you want to trace one event to another, you could go on all night, and end up tracing everything back to everything else, all the way back to the big bang or whatever it was. If your aunt had balls she’d be your uncle, surely?”

  Stephen glanced up and gave him a quick involuntary grin, which pleased Richard very much. “As for the people who’re gonna be there,” he continued, “why, they’re nothing to do with anything. You’re there — if you go — to mourn Graham for yourself. It doesn’t matter that much” — he snapped his fingers — “who else is there. If Graham’s worst enemy turned up — or Idi Amin and Baby Doc Duvalier for that matter — it shouldn’t make the slightest difference to you. You’re still there to mourn and do honour to your beloved. It won’t make any difference to him who’s there and who’s not, will it?”

  Stephen sat once again in thought for a while. Then he looked up, with an only faintly troubled smile on his fair, regular features. “Will you come with me, Richard?” he asked. “Of course I’ll come, my lovely,” said Richard. “I wanted to go anyway, on my own account. I liked Graham — nothing to do with what he was for you. He was one of the nicer masters on the staff there, and I liked him. For himself. I couldn’t have gone if you’d decided not to, so I’m glad you’re going. Now how about putting that sock down, taking off its twin, followed by everything else, and doing some very illegal things with me?”

  4

  “Dad? It’s me. Stephen.”

  There was a silence at the other end of the line. Then his father’s voice came on, sounding a little strained. Stephen thought he could identify surprise, anxiety and a trace of hostility in the voice, but he dismissed the speculation as irrelevant. “I… er… I wanted to ask you something, Dad,” he said, a little hesitant himself now that he had steeled himself to make the call. It had been preying on his mind somewhat, and it had taken him a day or two to summon up the resolve to ring the number at all. However, he had done it now, and made himself carry on. “I… I’ve had some pretty awful news in the last week or so, Dad,” he said slowly.

  “Oh?” said his father quickly, and there was nothing but concern in the voice now. “What’s happened? Where are you speaking from?”

  “I’m in England again, Dad. At Richard’s, in fact. I… I’ve come back. The fact is,” he went on in a stronger voice, “it’s about Graham…”

  There was a noise from the other end, half-way between a grunt and a snort, but he pressed on. “He… he was flying back to England to do some business. And… and his plane… his plane… you heard about that airbus? Well, he was on it. He’s… he’s dead…”

  There was another silence. When his father spoke again his voice was different yet again, gentler, and sounding rather stunned. “Oh. Stephen… I’m… I’m very sorry about that. I had no idea. No idea you were back here, to begin with.” He paused again, for some time. “We heard about that plane, of course. Well, you know how we felt about your… relationship with him… But I should never have wished this on anyone. I really am deeply sorry, Stephen. What are you going to do now?” he asked after a further pause while Stephen could almost hear the thoughts running through his head.

  “I’m not really sure what I’m going to do,” he replied slowly, reflecting as he said it that that was nothing more than the simple truth. “I suppose some time I shall have to go on some kind of… of… well, not a holiday, exactly, but some kind of break. Go off to think and get my head back together again. For the moment I’m just trying to get through each day as it comes. Richard’s helping me a lot, of course, and his people are very kind. And it’s the cricket season next week, and that’ll help. I think that’ll be good for me. It’ll be full of memories, of course, but I think Graham would want me to go back and throw myself into it. I haven’t really thought further than that.”

  “Have you thought about coming home?” asked his father, and Stephen felt sure he could hear a coldness creeping back into the voice. He hesitated, wondering how to say what he knew he was going to say without causing any more pain than he must.

  “Well, I did think of it, Dad, yes, of course,” he said. “But I really didn’t think it would be… well, very wise, I suppose. I mean, I’d have liked to come and tell you, but the way Mother’s been… she wouldn’t have felt happy about seeing me in the house again, would she? I mean, she more or less told me never to darken her door again, that time I came back after I wrote to you from Holland. She seems to have taken my… the way I am…” He trailed off into an unhappy silence.

  His parents’ reaction to his elopement the previous summer had been the only real source of sorrow or
doubt about his relationship with Graham. He had grown a very long way apart from them during the year or so after he had become Graham’s lover, but in the few months before he had made his decision and gone to Saint-Hippolyte to live with him he had begun to feel that his father, at least, was beginning to come to terms with facts, and ready to come to some kind of accord with him. He knew that his mother, on the other hand, was becoming a source of considerable worry to his father. She had been a good deal more unbending in her attitude to her son’s desertion first of his religious observance — Stephen had continued to observe long after losing every trace of faith — and then of his family. She had spoken not a single word to Stephen since some time before his cricket tour to Holland and his flight from there to Alsace, and his father’s mentions of her in his infrequent letters consistently indicated that her attitude was, if anything, hardening towards him. On his only visit to his parents’ home, to which he had just referred, she had been pointedly out of the house, and his father had sadly made it clear that it was not by chance.

  Stephen allowed these reflections to run at radio speeds through his mind before picking up the thread of his conversation with his father. “Anyway, Dad, the long and the short of it is that I thought it would probably do no good for me to come home — at least for a while, until Mother’s… well, for a while, anyway — and quite possibly it might do a lot of harm. So I didn’t. But I… I’ve missed seeing you. I wanted to talk to you, I did, really…” He broke off, and mentally admonished himself. It occurred to him that he very often, indeed nearly always, somehow ended up sounding as if he was pleading when he spoke to his father, and the thought was followed instantly by the further one that that had been the case for a very long time. He shook himself and continued. “Anyway, the real reason I’m ringing is that there’s a memorial service for Graham — well, I mean, of course, it’s for all the passengers and the crew of the plane — in London, next week; I’m going, of course, and I wondered…”

  He let the sentence drift into nothing, and there was another long silence from the other end. “I wondered if you’d like to come,” finished Stephen, more strongly as he got it out.

  His father’s voice sounded a little subdued when he answered. “I… er… It’s good of you to think of us,” he said at last. “But I’m not really sure… Will you let me think about it for a short while?” he said after a little thought. “Give me a chance to consider?”

  “Of course I will, Dad,” said Stephen, feeling rather relieved. “But you don’t have to let me know until next week. The service isn’t until next Thursday. You don’t even have to let me know at all, I suppose, come to that. I mean, you could just turn up. But there’ll be a lot of people there, and if you want to meet, well…”

  “There’s another difficulty,” said his father slowly. “Mother?”

  “Er… well, yes,” was the reluctant reply. “I’m not at all sure how she’ll react to the idea. I’m afraid I’m pretty sure she won’t come herself, you realise that, don’t you, Stephen?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” said Stephen, beginning to feel distressed and a little angry. The last person his father seemed to be thinking about was Graham, who was, after all, the most important figure in the matter. “But do you have to mention it to her at all?”

  “Stephen,” said his father, with a weary sigh, “I’m afraid you have a tendency to judge others by your own standards. Things like that — simply not mentioning something when it happens to be unpalatable, or to suggest inconvenient consequences — may be your way of going about things, but it most certainly isn’t ours. Of course I shall have to mention it to your mother. I wouldn’t dream of not doing so even if it might be practicable to avoid it. But I’m a little anxious about her reaction. And — I’m afraid I must be completely candid with you about this, Stephen — if I feel that it may hurt her in any way for me to raise this matter with her, well, I’m afraid I simply shan’t do so.”

  They talked on for a few more minutes, a rather chilly, sterile conversation, both of them feeling awkward and slightly embarrassed in each other’s presence, even only down a telephone line. Richard was waiting and watching, concerned for his friend, as Stephen put the receiver down. Stephen turned to him with a frown, half puzzled, half irritated. “No?” said Richard.

  “God, I wish he wasn’t so bloody pompous,” growled Stephen. “Pompous and… and…” He sawed the air with his hands in frustration as he sought for the word. “And self-righteous,” he said, finding it. “He always was, and he doesn’t seem to be changing.” He related the gist of the conversation, and Richard, who could not quite keep a faint smile of half-amusement from crossing his face, tut-tutted gently in sympathy.

  “Why can’t some people tell the difference between lying and being diplomatic?” Stephen demanded crossly. “Christ, he’s talking like someone who’s been cheating on his wife, and then goes and confesses to her when it’s all over, to ease his own conscience, and all he’s really doing is passing the bloody burden from himself to someone else. As if there’s some kind of absolute, inherent virtue in telling the truth, for its own sake. Jesus! It doesn’t make it any more right, or sensible, to tell people certain things, just because they’re true, does it?” He shook his head despairingly as he considered human silliness.

  “Well, no, it doesn’t,” assented Richard mildly. “He could come to this do and say he’d been to London on business, and everybody’s happy. You are cos he’s come, he is cos he’s had an excuse — no, not an excuse, an opportunity — to see you, which he clearly wants to do, and your mother’s not caused completely unnecessary distress. But he’s entitled to have his own point of view, isn’t he? I mean, I agree with you about this religious business. Always seems a bit daft to me to get so het up about something you can’t be sure is real that it upsets your relationships with people you know are real. But he’s obviously sincere about it, and it ain’t quite fair to damn him just because it doesn’t fit in with what you want, is it?” He took the sting out of the mild reproof by giving Stephen a naughty wink, and a lazy, sexy smile. Stephen glowered into space for a few seconds while he thought about it; then his face, too, relaxed into a faintly grudging smile. “You’re right as usual,” he admitted, shaking a fist at his friend. “It must get boring being right all the time, mustn’t it? Specially when you’ve got a hot-head like me to deal with.” Richard grinned at him, and he grinned back, a genuine grin this time, full of the deep liking that had extracted it from him.

  “Anyway, the upshot of it is,” he said, “that he wants time to think about it, and he’ll let me know.”

  In the end his father took the easiest road out. He didn’t ring back, and he and Stephen’s mother didn’t attend the memorial service.

  * * *

  A couple of days before the service another letter arrived from Graham’s parents. It was very short and to the point, suggesting that as a special friend of Graham’s Stephen might care to meet them before the service. Stephen telephoned to tell them he would be glad to, and then spent the intervening period worrying about the encounter. “S’pose they don’t know he was gay,” he said, confiding in Richard that night. “S’pose they just think I’m some pal from the cricket club or something.”

  “Well, you are a pal from the cricket club,” said Richard in surprise, looking up at him from where he was lying lazily on his bed. “You don’t have to be ashamed of being gay to recognise that there’s no point in ramming the fact down people’s throats. If they raise the matter, talk openly about it. If they don’t, you don’t. Cross your bridges when you come to them, and stop worrying, that’s my advice.” Stephen threw himself down beside him and started playing with him, comforted and relieved as always by his friend’s good sense. But he still looked forward to meeting his lover’s parents with great apprehension, and lay staring into the darkness long after Richard, relaxed and satiated, had stretched like a cat and dropped instantly into a deep and peaceful sleep. Eventually, lulled by R
ichard’s light snore, he fell into a shallow and troubled sleep of his own.

  * * *

  They spotted Graham’s parents immediately, waiting at the agreed point outside the great church, and Stephen’s heart sank at the sight of them. The father was shortish and stockily built like his son, but with a high-bridged nose and high cheekbones that Graham had lacked, giving him an austere, even slightly arrogant look. He also had an impeccably trimmed head of distinguished silver hair and moustache, and an unmistakably military bearing. Stephen remembered, with a sudden searing bolt of almost physical pain, that Graham had mentioned, on one of the rare occasions when he had spoken of his parents, that his father had been something stratospheric in the RAF. “Literally and metaphorically,” as he had put it. The mother was taller than her husband, good-looking in a well-groomed and expensively-tailored way. Even while they were still a good distance away the boys could see clearly a lot of Graham’s features in her. They exchanged apprehensive glances. “Better get on and get it over with,” muttered Richard, not looking forward to the interview. They forced their way through the early arrivals at the church.

  As it turned out, their apprehensions were unfounded. The Curtises spotted them edging through the milling people and came forward to meet them immediately. Richard dropped back a pace. Stephen, gulping slightly, offered his hand to the woman first. “I’m Stephen Hill,” he said, anxious to get his word in first. She gave him a very rapid head-to-foot appraisal, but she did it so quickly that there was no time for it to give offence before she was giving him her hand. Her handshake was firm and brisk, two firm, sharp pumps, rather masculine. But she softened the effect by a brief, taut smile. “Elizabeth Curtis,” she said formally. “How do you do?” Her voice was educated rather than county, and the smile looked genuine. “My husband,” she added, stepping aside to allow her husband to offer Stephen his hand. He gave Stephen a brief, hard grip, almost whiplashing Stephen’s hand off. “How d’you do?” he barked, and he, too, bestowed a fast up-and-down look on the boy from slightly bulging blue eyes.