The House on Fortune Street Page 8

  Mr. Yardley was our Latin teacher and Mr. Stevenson was our physics teacher, and Davy had some notion that the two men were a couple. I was equally adamant that they weren’t. The argument could not be resolved, partly due to lack of evidence but mostly because the real subject of the dispute was something that neither of us was ready to mention; this was rural Scotland in the 1960s.

  “Don’t talk rubbish,” I had said. “How are you translating Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus?”

  “You always say that,” said Davy. “You don’t like to admit that anyone is doing anything. Freud would have said you’re repressed.”

  “Of course I’m repressed. I live with my parents.”

  At that time I threw around words like “repressed” and “inhibited” with no notion of their true meaning. My ignorance about sex, both physically and emotionally, now seems unimaginable, but neither at school nor at home was the topic ever discussed openly. When we studied Othello, it was hinted that Othello’s jealousy stemmed from his intimate relations with Desdemona. And one day while we were thinning the lettuces, my father said, “You’ll be getting into the girls soon, Cameron. Just don’t get carried away thinking that the first one is the love of your life. Not so close together,” he added, pointing at the spindly green plants. So it never occurred to me to connect our playground words, “bugger,” “fag,” “queer,” “poof,” with the sense that had been growing in me for some time that Davy was different from most of our school-fellows. The feeling had intensified that summer when, after an unusually hot day’s harvesting, we’d gone swimming in the river. As I changed into my trunks, I had felt an odd pressure, as if a hundred people were watching me, not just Davy, also changing a few yards away, who’d seen me naked dozens of times. I had hurried into the water and kept my distance rather than indulging in our customary horseplay.

  We finished the harvesting, school started again, and Davy had begun to harp on our teachers’ private lives with tedious frequency. That afternoon, trying as usual to change the subject, I had said I wanted a smoke. We had set Horace aside and headed down the lane where I’d held forth about the ethics of eating meat. Now Davy led me to an adjacent field where the pigs held sway. We had last visited them while studying Animal Farm, and agreed that it was easy to see why Orwell made them his leaders. Their small, pale eyes were disquietingly human, as was their nakedness. Davy claimed that if you fell while feeding them they would try to eat you. After the rain their field was even more of a quagmire than usual. The teats of the sow nearest the gate grazed the mud.

  “How about Mabel?” said Davy, pointing at a pig with a large black patch on one haunch. “She killed three of her last litter by rolling over on them. I’m sure she’s ready for the great sty in the sky.”

  As Mabel rooted around searching for acorns, the poor pig’s truffles Davy called them, I made one last effort to explain myself. “If I’m going to eat meat,” I said, “then it seems immoral to be squeamish about killing animals but happy to benefit from someone else doing it.”

  “You eat carrots and you don’t grow them. Come on.”

  The breeze was quickening and in the hedgerows the birds, as if at some secret signal, had fallen silent. Davy was already heading down the road, back to the house. I trailed a few steps behind. At the back door he told me to wait. I stood idly scraping my boots on the boot scraper, hoping that whatever prank he had in mind would restore our relationship to its former ease. When he reappeared, he was carrying a rifle.

  “Are you allowed to have that thing?” I said.

  The only answer came from above as the rain started to fall. Davy was already striding across the farmyard. Once again I followed, hands in pockets, head down, as if demonstrating my reluctance to him, and to myself. I could never have admitted that somewhere deep inside I was also excited, swept up by Davy’s passion and wherever it was taking us. Back at the field, he balanced the rifle on the top rung of the metal gate and, just as I’d imagined, squinted down the barrel. Mabel had moved closer.

  “Fifty feet,” he said. “A tricky shot for a novice, but it’s easier to aim when you have a support.”

  “No.”

  Davy lifted the rifle off the gate, and held it out to me. I backed away. “Do you want people to think you’re a coward?” he said, looking me square in the face.

  “What people? There’s only you and the pigs.”

  Still looking at me, still holding out the gun, he took a step toward me. “Besides,” I added, “I’m not.”

  Davy took another step. In the rain his hair had turned almost black, and his eyes had a flat, bright look. “Come on,” he whispered, his face so close that I felt, rather than heard, his words. The barrel of the gun nudged my chest.

  People sometimes claim that at moments of crisis everything was a blur or, alternatively, crystal clear. For me that afternoon in the pig field was both. Davy’s eyes never left mine; the gun pressed against my chest; the pigs grunted and scuffled. I took the gun and I imitated Davy. I rested the barrel on the gate, peered along it until it seemed to be pointing, roughly, in the direction of Mabel’s patchwork rump, and pulled the trigger. I had no intention of hurting her. This was all about Davy and me and a certain heat between us. The gun kicked; my head filled with noise and the sharp smell made my nostrils prickle. Mabel screamed and the other pigs plunged into confusion.

  “Damn,” said Davy. “What have you done?”

  He scrambled over the gate. He had covered only a few yards—the mud slowed him down—when, still clutching the gun, I mounted the slippery metal bars and followed. The other pigs had stampeded to a far corner. If I fell, I thought, they could eat me in a minute.

  Davy came to a stop a few yards from Mabel. “Damn,” he said again. “I never thought you’d do it.”

  Close up she was much larger than she had appeared from the gate. Her eyes were the palest blue. She lay on her side, squealing, trotters churning the air. I hoped vainly that I had only grazed her. Then I caught sight of the blood, welling up through the mud on her belly.

  We both stood watching, transfixed. “My dad’s going to kill us,” Davy said above her screams.

  “I thought you said it was okay.”

  “What sort of idiot are you? Pigs are worth money. You don’t go round killing them. Give me the gun.”

  I was about to do his bidding when suddenly I grasped his intention. Instead I threw the gun, clumsily, as far as I could. Davy started toward it; so did I. And then we were wrestling over it, struggling to keep our footing. Within seconds we were dragging each other down. I was underneath, my clothes instantly soaked. Davy was on top, red-faced, panting. I could feel, through his jeans, that he was excited and I knew he could feel that I wasn’t. He pushed my head back into the mud—he was much stronger than me—and, quite suddenly, he leaned forward and bit my neck.

  FOR THE REST OF THAT YEAR I WORKED TO PAY DAVY’S FATHER BACK for Mabel, and during all those months, while I mucked out the byre and fed the hens and watered the cows, Davy didn’t speak to me. Several times I tried to explain that I’d never, in a million years, thought I would hit Mabel, but he cut me dead. I soon gave up and followed his example, keeping my head down when our paths crossed. At school we changed our desks to sit on opposite sides of the room, and when classes ended in June we went our separate ways—he to study French at Aberdeen University, me to do chemistry at Glasgow—without even saying good-bye.

  After I graduated, I worked in a laboratory in Glasgow for five years before moving to London. A few friends lived there, and I’d been offered a well-paid job, developing new colors of paint, that promised to be more interesting than my current one. Fiona had started work at the company as a secretary the month before, and she was kind about showing me where to keep my lunch, how to request supplies. She was tall and ungainly, with a mobile, expressive face and a light, girlish voice. Her short, fair hair framed her face in little wisps. One afternoon when I found her having lunch at he
r desk, folding an origami crane, she told me that she’d gone to art school and had thought a job with a paint company might somehow benefit her work. “What an idiot,” she said, holding up a blue crane. That evening we went for a drink, and from then on every few weeks one or the other of us would suggest a trip to the pub. Once we went to the cinema; afterward we caught our separate buses home with a casual wave. Then one day, when I had been in London for six or seven months, she asked if I’d like to join her and some friends that weekend for a picnic in the rose garden at Regent’s Park.

  Sunday, 15 June 1969, was a perfect summer day, warm with a light breeze, everything still fresh and green and not yet soiled by the heat. People smiled as they passed me, walking along in my white trousers and blue T-shirt, carrying a plate of cucumber sandwiches; I was taking part in some recognizable English ritual. I was almost at the garden when I caught sight of Fiona kneeling beside a dark-haired child, a girl of about eight or nine, who was wearing red trousers and a white blouse patterned with butterflies.

  “Annabel,” said Fiona, “this is Cameron.”

  “Hi,” said Annabel. She had the kind of face we call heart-shaped: wide across the eyes, narrow at the chin. Her teeth were slightly too big for her mouth. “Please,” she said to Fiona. “One more go.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Fiona. “I have to help with the picnic. Annabel wants another shot on the swings,” she added to me.

  Unhesitatingly I held out my plate of sandwiches to Fiona and bent down. “I’d be happy to give you a go.”

  “Cameron,” said Annabel. She gave my name all three syllables, and reached up a hot, sticky hand.

  Years later Fiona told me that that was the moment when she began to fall in love with me, when she saw me walking off hand in hand with Annabel toward the swings. What did the two of us talk about on that first meeting? Her hamster, or school, or how her mother was teaching her chess, I have no recollection. I do recall Annabel’s giddy delight as I pushed her higher and higher. A woman pushing a much smaller child on the next swing said, “Your daughter’s very fearless.”

  “Just a friend,” I said.

  Annabel and I played until even she had had enough. As we started back to the picnic, she looked up at me from beneath her dark eyelashes and asked if I would carry her. Unthinkingly I hoisted her up. She wrapped her legs around me with practiced ease, and rested her flushed cheek on my shoulder; I felt she had delivered her entire self into my keeping. I would have carried her, happily, for hours, days. I was twenty-seven years old and, until that moment, I had no idea what my heart was capable of.

  Since I left home I had had a number of girlfriends, several at university, more afterward. I had slept with them, taken holidays in Venice and the Dordogne, I had even lived with one for six months, but I had never been sorry when the relationship ended, had always been puzzled by the arguments, the vehemence. Things had worked for a while, now they didn’t. What was the problem? Which was, of course, the problem. You’re like a machine, one girl said. Another called me a cold fish.

  The cucumber sandwiches were gone by the time Annabel and I reached the picnic, but plenty of cakes and scones remained. The hosts, Annabel’s parents, offered me food as if I had returned from a long journey. They were old friends of Fiona’s. She had grown up with Sheila in Lancashire and been on holiday several times with her and Giles. They were one of those couples I met frequently at that time where the woman did something virtuous and poorly paid—in Sheila’s case social work—and the man did something businesslike and lucrative—in Giles’s case, advertising. They had two other children besides Annabel, both younger.

  Reunited with her parents, Annabel ignored me. She ate two slices of the lopsided chocolate cake Fiona had brought and played with the son of another couple, a quiet boy with a purple birthmark on his left ear. At one point, chasing him round the edge of the rug, she knocked over my tea. It spilled harmlessly onto the grass but Sheila grabbed her arm. “Calm down, Annabel. You spilled Cameron’s tea. Say you’re sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I was finished.”

  “Sorry,” said Annabel, not even looking at me.

  Giles took a photograph of the group and I followed suit. As a boy, I’d had an old Brownie that I seldom used: the developing was so expensive and the results frequently disappointing. Soon after I moved to London, though, I had bought a 35-millimeter camera that I was gradually learning to use. Now I photographed our picnic from different angles before turning to take a picture of the children, who were searching the grass for four-leaf clovers. I took half a dozen. In the last shot Annabel is looking up at me, smiling; every eyelash is distinct. Later I gave a framed copy of that photograph to Sheila and Giles.

  I put the camera away. Giles produced a bottle of gin, someone else had brought tonic, and we segued into cocktail hour. I drank two strong ones and listened idly to a conversation about Crete: the beaches, the labyrinth. Fiona sat beside me, contributing anecdotes from her visit there the previous spring. Then one of the children fell asleep and people stood up and began to reclaim their possessions. Without discussion, Fiona caught the bus home with me and we slept together. I liked her body, her small breasts, her narrow hips, more than I expected, and she seemed to like mine, which is five foot ten, reasonably fit, ordinary, save for the sickle-shaped scar where I had my appendix out when I was eleven.

  THE WEDDING TOOK PLACE A YEAR LATER. I REMEMBER BEING relieved when Fiona agreed that a registry office made sense—we would use our small savings toward buying a flat—and then a little disturbed by my relief. Although I hadn’t been to church in years, it had been a regular part of my childhood, and the prospect of making these very public promises before the altar had given me pause. But I put aside my doubts and allowed myself to be carried along by that optimism which was one of Fiona’s most endearing traits: of course we would find a parking space, the train would wait, the weather would improve. Her parents and her sister, Leslie, came down from Lancashire and my parents from Scotland. We had visited both families at Easter and they had all exclaimed with pleasure when we broke the news.

  Fiona wore a blue dress. Annabel came also wearing a blue dress and carrying a bunch of white flowers—they had a rather cloying smell—which she presented to Fiona. After the ceremony, Fiona threw them into our small crowd of guests, and her sister caught them. Then we retired to Sheila and Giles’s. They felt pleasantly implicated in our marriage and gave a party for us in their garden. My parents spent most of the evening talking to Davy. He too now lived in London, and he and I were reconciled. He had shown up at the registry office wearing a white suit, his new boyfriend, Joe, at his side. From time to time I glanced over at this odd quartet, wondering whether to intervene, but conversation never seemed to falter, and twice I saw my mother doubled over with laughter. She thinks they’re just friends, I thought; she hasn’t a clue. But when I telephoned a fortnight later—Fiona and I were newly back from our honeymoon in Greece—she remarked how glad she was to see Davy with a nice young man. I could not have said exactly why I put down the receiver in such a bad mood.

  After Mabel’s death, Davy and I had not spoken for nearly a decade. Then one evening, the January after the picnic, I went swimming at the pool near Covent Garden. I was standing in the shallow end, adjusting my goggles, when a figure walking on the far side caught my eye. Without thinking, I swam over and called his name.

  “Cameron,” he said, squatting down so that I was level with his muscular, freckled legs. “I knew I’d run into you eventually.”

  From that one sentence it was clear we were friends again. We thrashed back and forth—we both still did the crude version of the crawl we’d learned at school—and went out for an Italian meal. Davy managed a posh furniture shop. He had meant to use his degree in French, perhaps work at the UN, but he’d taken a summer job at the shop and never left. “Of course it’s a stereotype,” he said, “the poofter with the matrons, but I enjoy it.” He smiled.

>   “That’s the main thing,” I said, trying to convey unruffled approval. Except for his pristine shirt and perfectly styled hair he did not, to my eyes, look queer, but I saw the waiter shoot him a sly glance as he took our order.

  “Funny,” Davy said, “when we were growing up, I was sure you were too. I was always trying to drop hints that your secret was safe with me.”

  “And I didn’t know how to tell you that I wasn’t. Do you remember you used to bang on about those teachers: Yardley and Stevens?”

  “Stevenson. Yes, they were a bright light for me. I had these feelings that no one between Edinburgh and John O’Groats seemed to share, but here were two adults who, at least in my imagination, were doing unspeakable things and they had jobs and people calling them ‘sir.’”

  Then he told me that a couple of years before he had been up north, visiting his parents, and bumped into Yardley in a gay pub in Edinburgh. “At first we both pretended we were just there for a drink. Then Yardley said, ‘Well, it never occurred to me that you were.’ ‘I can’t say the same,’ I said, and he laughed. I couldn’t help asking if it wasn’t a kind of torture teaching in a boys’ school, all that forbidden fruit. ‘Forbidden fruit?’ he said. ‘Don’t you fancy yourself. Happily, I’m no pederast.’

  “I asked about Stevenson, and Yardley said he was one of those odd ducks who wants to take care of his mum. He kept a photograph on his desk of a girl he claimed was his dead fiancée. Yardley’s theory was that he’d bought it in an antique shop. We chatted for a few more minutes and then his pal showed up, a thickset, burly fellow. He looked like a plumber, which was exactly what he was.”