It was Paul who liked to crack his knuckles. The habit had a ghastly fascination for me, once I understood that it wasn’t painful. Imagine having so much confidence in your bones that you would meddle with their safe socketing like that! But Patrick must have thought it was a tactless habit to indulge in front of me. He would blush and start to send Paul agitated glances if he saw one hand getting ready to yank at the fingers of the other. Paul would usually get the message, which was a shame. I’d always rather see uninhibited behaviour than something that has been tidied up for my benefit. According to principles that are pure guesswork anyway.
The same thing happened in the larger world of the school. There was a craze, for instance, for boys to stand in doorways pressing their arms outwards and upwards against the frame for a whole minute. Then when they stepped forwards and let their shoulders relax, their arms would rise to the horizontal of their own accord. Their faces wore stupid grins as their bodies were caught out, adjusting to one set of pressures and lagging behind when the situation changed.
If I was around they would tend to stop the game, as if I would rather not see them enjoy it. But why so? Their bodies were no sort of reproach to mine. Why wouldn’t I like to see them wandering the corridors of the school with their arms spread out wide, like a band of gormless probationary angels?
It was normally Patrick who pushed the Tan-Sad, and Paul who was at the front, and consequently in my line of sight. I had the impression that this state of affairs was engineered by Paul, to keep the object of my interest out of sight, but if so he wasn’t too hot on psychology. In matters of the heart there is nothing more persuasive than the evidence of things unseen. With Patrick out of sight I could tune my ears to his breathing and even to his imagined heartbeat, and use my specialised knowledge of breathing techniques to inhale his smell through a single discriminating nostril.
Within the limits of unfulfilled desire I could get away with a lot. I could persuade Patrick Savage to come with me to the library for private chats, unattended by Paul. School libraries are traditionally unstaffed and deserted, and therefore fertile grounds for sexual experiment, even if (as at Burnham) the library wasn’t some gracious suite of wood-panelled chambers but something more like a sliproom, the scanty shelves filled with dog-eared paperbacks and public-library surplus. In privacy, nevertheless, Patrick and I would sit together and play games.
We played some exhilarating cricket matches in that library. For me the sound of the game will always be supremely evocative, the lazy air of summer, the sound of a distant mower or nearby bee, the muffled clatter of metal on a laminated table-top. By cricket I mean the handy distillation of it called Howzat, in which the distracting physical side of the game is stripped away. Howzat was essentially a dice game, even though the dice were non-standard shapes. One looked like a primitive garden roller, though its cross-section was a hexagon rather than a circle, the six faces labelled NO BALL, LBW and so on. Patrick was a useful cricketer, though Paul was the star, but in this tinned version of the game (the pieces came in a little tin, with a leaflet) I outplayed him on a regular basis.
I would ask him to show me his fidelity ring. These were craze objects of the time — compound rings of silver wire, easily tarnished, which fell apart (when taken off the finger) into half-a-dozen linked subsidiary rings, mysteriously and irregularly kinked.
Patrick felt awkward showing me the ring, on the usual basis. Any activity seemed to be inhibited which might draw attention to my incapacities, and my fingers certainly couldn’t provide any sort of perch for the ring, but what was Patrick going to do, refuse me? When I was at my most pretty-please-with-cream-and-sugar? He pulled the ring off his finger and held it over his palm. Then he dropped it those few inches, giving it just enough of a spin for it to come apart into its connected fragments before it landed. Then he put it back together at top speed, racing through the enigmatic moment when a looping-the-loop movement was needed to make the individual rings nest against each other properly and coalesce into a unit, their kinks unified into a sort of turk’s-head motif.
I wasn’t satisfied. ‘You haven’t told me the story. The story is a part of it — you can’t show someone the ring without telling the story. You have to do it again.’ He sighed and said, ‘All right.’ He dropped it back into his palm and the one ring became many.
‘Once there was a Sultan …’ — the owners of other identical rings might say Maharajah or Sheikh, we had a very undifferentiated sense of the exotic — ‘who gave his wife a silver ring to be sure of her fidelity. Everyone in the kingdom’ — if I was feeling mischievous I might correct him with ‘Sultanate’ — ‘knew the ring of the Sultan. Now the Sultan went away on a journey —’
‘Was he a Muslim?’
‘Er … possibly. Why?’
‘He might have been going on the hajj, you know, the pilgrimage to Mecca.’
‘Fine, he went on a pilgrimage. But before he left he gave her this very special ring. Then while the Sultan was on pilgrimage, to Mecca, his wife fell in love with a noble at court. With her husband’s deputy.’
‘Deputy?’
‘Chancellor.’
‘“Grand Vizier” sounds better. Go on.’
‘The Grand Vizier fell in love with her too, and they went to bed. But before they did, she took off the ring …’
‘Why did she do that?’
‘Because it was her fidelity ring and she was being unfaithful.’
‘Why not leave it on, all the same, with someone who knew all about it? The story would work better if she was going to bed with someone who didn’t know she was even married — say a travelling lute-player.’
‘How is a travelling lute-player going to fall in love with the Sultan’s wife and not know who she is?’
‘She could go to a concert of his in disguise.’
‘And then she says, “Come back to my palace for some Turkish delight?” How’s that going to work any better?’
Eventually we’d hammer out a more or less plausible story. If I suggested that a sensible adulteress would carefully slip the ring off her finger and onto, say, a candle, he would agree rather uneasily and then say, rather desperately, that the lovers were so passionate that the candle fell off the Sultana’s dressing table. Sometimes I could persuade him to say ‘Sultana’. A burst of invention along those lines would cheer him up. The point of all this from my point of view, of course, was to make him concentrate on the narrative — on the Sultan returning so that the wife panics as she tries in vain to reassemble the pledge of her honesty — and not think of his hands while he spoke.
Not all hands are beautiful. I’ve seen plenty that have made me feel happy with what I’ve got. But Patrick’s hands were both large and handsome. It was part of the mystery of the twins that they should be so broad and well-built. It seemed miraculous that a single wombful could yield such a tonnage, even after a decade and a half’s regular feeding.
At the end of the demonstration Patrick would return the ring to his finger — the little finger, the only one on which it would fit. Perhaps it really was made for a woman’s hand, though there was nothing effeminate about the way the cheap silver gleamed on his adult paw, despite the nails left a little long for extra purchase on the fretboard of his guitar. It was the other, plucking hand which had the calluses on the tips of its fingers.