I wonder now, suddenly, if it was his mother who bought the manicure set for him to give to me, a coy and secret gift, delivered by proxy, that she thought I might guess had really come from her. This was some months before she and I had become—oh, go on and say it, for God’s sake!—before we had become lovers. She had known me, of course, for I had been calling for Billy at the house most days that winter on the way to school. Did I look to her like the kind of boy who would think a manicure set just the thing for Christmas? Billy’s own attentions to personal hygiene were less than thorough. He bathed even more infrequently than the rest of us did, as indicated by that intimate, brownish whiff he gave off on occasion; also the pores in the grooves beside his nostrils were blackly clogged, and with a shiver of mingled relish and revulsion I would imagine getting at them with my thumbnails for pincers, after which I would certainly have had need of that elegant little ivory gouge. He wore jumpers with holes in them and his collars seemed never to be clean. He possessed an air rifle and shot frogs with it. He was truly my best friend, and I did love him, in some way or other. Our chumship was sealed one winter eve when we were sharing a clandestine cigarette in the back seat of the family station wagon parked outside the house—this is a vehicle we shall become deeply familiar with presently—and he confided to me that his given name was not William, as he would have the world believe, but Wilfred, and further that his middle name was Florence, after his dead uncle Flor. Wilfred! Florence! I kept his secret, I can say that for myself, which is not much, I know. But, ah, how he wept, for pain and rage and humiliation, the day he met me after he had found out about his mother and me; how he wept, and I the prime cause of his bitter tears.
I cannot remember the first time I saw Mrs Gray, if she was not the woman on the bike, that is. Mothers were not people that we noticed much; brothers, yes, sisters, even, but not mothers. Vague, shapeless, unsexed, they were little more than an apron and a swatch of unkempt hair and a faint sharp tang of sweat. They were always dimly busy in the background, doing things with baking tins, or socks. I must have been in Mrs Gray’s vicinity numerous times before I registered her in any particular, definite way. Confusingly, I have what is certain to be a false memory of her, in winter, applying talcum powder to the shinily pink inner sides of my thighs where they had become raw from the chafing of my trousers; highly unlikely, since apart from anything else the trousers I was wearing on that occasion were short, which would hardly have been the case if I was fifteen, since we were all in longed-for longers by the age of eleven or twelve at the latest. Then whose mother was that one, I wonder, the talc-applier, and what opportunity for an even more precocious initiation did I perhaps let pass?
Anyhow, there was no moment of blinding illumination when Mrs Gray herself stepped forth from the toils and trammels of domesticity and came skimming towards me on her half-shell, wafted by the full-cheeked zephyrs of spring. Even after we had been going to bed together for some time I would have been hard put to give a fair description of her—if I had tried, what I would have described would probably have been a version of myself, for when I looked at her it was me that I saw first, reflected in the glorious mirror that I made of her.
Billy never talked to me about her—why would he?—and seemed to pay her no more heed than I did for so long. He was a laggard, and often of a morning when I called for him going to school he was not ready, and I would be invited in, especially if it was raining or icy. He did not do the inviting—remember that suffusion of mute fury and burning shame we experienced when our friends got a glimpse of us in flagrante in the naked bosom of our families?—so it must have been she. Yet I cannot recall a single instance of her appearing at the front door, in her apron, with her sleeves rolled, insisting I come in and join the family circle at the breakfast table. I can see the table, though, and the kitchen that it almost filled, and the big American-style fridge the colour and texture of curdled cream, the straw basket of laundry on the draining board, the grocery-shop calendar showing the wrong month, and that squat chrome toaster with a seething gleam of sunlight from the window reflected high on its shoulder.
Oh, the morning smell of other people’s kitchens, the cotton-wool warmth, the clatter and haste, with everyone still half asleep and cross. Life’s newness and strangeness never seemed more vividly apparent than it did in such moments of homely intimacy and disorder.
Billy had a sister, younger than he, an unnerving creature with the look of a pixie, with long, rather greasy plaits and a narrow sharp stark white face the top half of which was blurred behind enormous horn-rimmed spectacles with circular lenses as thick as magnifying glasses. She seemed to find me irresistibly amusing and would wriggle inside her clothes with malignant hilarity when I appeared in the kitchen with my schoolbag, shuffling in like a hunchback. She was called Kitty, and indeed there was something feline in the way she would slit her eyes when she smiled at me, compressing her lips into a thin, colourless arc that seemed to stretch all the way between her intricately voluted, translucent, prominent pink ears. I wonder now if she, too, might have been sweet on me and all the snuffly amusement were a means of hiding the fact. Or is this just vanity on my part? I am, or was, an actor, after all. There was something the matter with her, she had some condition that was not spoken of that made her what in those days was called delicate. I found her unnerving, and was I think even a little afraid of her; if so, it was prescient of me.
Mr Gray, the husband and father, was long and lean, and myopic, too, like his daughter—he was an optician, as it happens, a fact the high irony of which is unlikely to be lost on any of us—and wore bow-ties and sleeveless Fair Isle jumpers. And of course there were, presently, those two short stubby horns sprouting just above his hairline, the cuckold’s mark, which I regret to say were my doing.
Was my passion for Mrs Gray, at the outset, at any rate, anything more than an intensification of the conviction we all had at that age that our friends’ families were so very much nicer, more gracious, more interesting—in a word, more desirable—than our own? At least Billy had a family, whereas there was only me and my widowed mother. She kept a boarding-house for travelling salesmen and other transients, who did not so much lodge in the place as haunt it, like anxious ghosts. I stayed out as much as I could. The Grays’ house was often empty in the latter part of the afternoons and Billy and I would lounge about there for hours after school. Where did the others, Mrs Gray and Kitty, for instance, where did they get to at those times? I can still see Billy, in his navy-blue school blazer and grubby white shirt from the collar of which he had just yanked one-handedly a stained school tie, standing in front of the fridge with the door open, gazing glassy-eyed into its lighted interior as if he were watching something engrossing on television. In fact there was a television set in the upstairs living room, and sometimes we would go up there and sit slumped in front of it with our hands plunged in our trouser pockets and our feet on our schoolbags, trying to watch the afternoon horse-racing from exotic-sounding places on the other side of the sea, such as Epsom, or Chepstow, or Haydock Park. Reception was poor, and often all we would see would be phantom riders cocked astride their phantom mounts, floundering blindly through a blizzard of static interference.