“I won’t go short on meat, anyway,” said Mrs. Carter, nodding in the direction of our front window, where a couple of rabbits were hanging from steel hooks through their necks. “Do you always keep them out like that?”
“Out like what?” asked my mother.
“Open to the world. Where anyone can see them.”
My mother frowned, unsure where else a butcher’s shop could display its wares, but said nothing.
“If I’m honest,” continued Mrs. Carter, “I’m more of a fish person, anyway.”
Bored by their talk, I tried to get Peter to return to our game, but he pulled away from me and shook his head, dropping the football again before bouncing it a dozen or more times on his knee as Sylvia watched him silently. Then, ignoring him, she turned her attention to me and her lips turned upwards slightly, the hint of a smile, before she looked away and disappeared inside her front door to explore her new home.
And that, as far as I was concerned, was the end of that.
But it wasn’t long before she became a near-constant presence in our lives. Peter was smitten by her and it became obvious that to try to exclude her from our company was to ensure that I would be excluded from his, the idea of which was very painful to me.
But then the strangest thing happened. Perhaps it was because of Peter’s evident devotion or my apparent indifference, but Sylvia began to direct all her attention towards me.
“Shouldn’t we call for Peter?” I would ask when she knocked on my door, full of ideas for an afternoon’s entertainment.
She’d shake her head quickly. “Not today, Tristan,” she’d say. “He can be such a bore.”
It made me furious when she insulted him like that. I would have argued his case, but I suppose I was flattered by her attentions. She had a somewhat exotic air, after all—she had not grown up in Chiswick, for one thing, and had an aunt who lived in Paris—and it was obvious that she was beautiful. Every boy wanted to be her friend; Peter was desperate to secure her favours. And yet she was choosing to bestow them on me. How could I not have been flattered?
Peter noticed this, of course, and was driven half mad with jealousy, which left me in a quandary over how to solve the problem. The fact was that the longer I encouraged her, the less possibility there was of her throwing me over for my friend.
As my sixteenth birthday approached I grew more tormented. My feelings towards Peter had clarified themselves in my head by now—I recognized them for what they were—and they were only amplified by my inability to verbalize or act upon them. I would lie in bed at night, curled into a tight ball, half encouraging the most lurid fantasies to energize the dark hours, half desperate to dismiss them out of pure fear of what they implied. As the summer approached and Peter and I took to the islands past Kew Bridge, I would encourage play-acting on the river banks in an attempt to force a physical bond between us but was always forced to pull away at the moments of the most intense thrill for fear of discovery.
And so I allowed Sylvia to kiss me under the chestnut tree and I tried to make myself believe that this was what I wanted.
“Did you like it?” she asked as she pulled away, half drunk on what she considered to be her own desirability.
“Very much,” I lied.
“Do you want to do it again?”
“Perhaps later. Anyone might see us out here.”
“And so what if they do? What does that matter?”
“Perhaps later,” I repeated.
I could tell that this was not the answer she expected and my continued indifference, my utter refusal to be seduced by her, finally brought her campaign to a crashing end. She simply shook her head, as if dismissing me from her mind once and for all.
“I’ll be getting home, then,” she said, taking off across the fields without me, leaving me there alone to ponder my disgrace. I knew immediately that I had lost her favour and didn’t care in the slightest. Move away, I thought. Go back where you came from. Take up with your aunt in Paris if you want. Just leave us all in peace.
And then, a day or two later, Peter came to see me in a state of great excitement.
“There’s something I have to ask you, Tristan,” he said, biting his lip and trying to keep his enthusiasm at bay. “You’ll give me a straight answer, won’t you?”
“Of course,” I said.
“You and Sylvia,” he said. “There’s nothing between you, is there?”
I sighed and shook my head. “Of course not,” I told him. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Well, I had to ask,” he said, breaking into a smile, unable to keep his news to himself any longer. “Look, the thing is that she and I, well, we’re an item now, Tristan. It’s all decided.”
I remember I was standing up at the time and to my left was a small table where, before going to bed at night, my mother would leave a bowl of water and a jug for me to wash with in the morning. My hand instinctively went out and rested atop that table for fear that my legs might give way beneath me.
“Is that so?” I asked, staring at him. “Well, lucky you.”
I told myself that it was all something and nothing, that sooner or later he would make some idiotic comment that would annoy her and she would throw him over—but no, it was impossible, I realized, for who in their right mind would ever secure Peter’s affections and then discard them? No, she would betray him with another and then he would put her aside and return to me and agree that girls were a bad lot and it would be for the best if we stuck to each other from now on.
Of course that didn’t happen. Something more real, an actual romance, unfolded before my eyes and it was painful to observe. And so I made my great mistake, the one that within a few short hours would see me expelled from school, home and family and from the only life I had ever known.
It was a school day, a Thursday, and I found myself alone with Peter in our classroom, a rare occurrence now, for Sylvia was almost always by his side, or, rather, he was almost always by hers. He was telling me about the previous evening, how he and Sylvia had gone for a walk along the river together and there had been no one around to catch them so she had allowed him to place his hand on the soft cotton fabric of her blouse. To “feel her up,” as he put it.
“She wouldn’t let me go any further, of course,” he said. “She’s not that type of girl, not my Sylvia.” My Sylvia! The words revolted me. “But she said we might go back again this weekend if it’s sunny and if she can find an excuse to get away from her dragon of a mother.”
He was prattling on, twenty to the dozen, unable to stop himself in the intensity of his feelings. It was obvious how much she meant to him, and without pausing to think about the consequences of my actions, overwhelmed by the power of his own longings, I reached forward, took his face in my hands and kissed him.
The embrace lasted a second or two, no more than that. He pulled away in shock, gasping, tripping over his own feet as I stood still before him. He stared at me in confusion, then repulsion, wiped his hand against his mouth and looked at it as if I might have left a stain upon his skin. Of course I knew immediately that I had made a terrible miscalculation.
“Peter,” I said, shaking my head, ready to throw myself on his mercy, but it was too late: he was already running from the room, his boots pounding along the corridor outside as he sought to put as much distance between the two of us as he could.
It’s an astonishing thing: we had been friends all our lives but I never laid eyes on him again after that. Not once.