He put the diary away and felt on the top of the wardrobe for the copy of Films and Filming that he’d hidden there. There was a still on the cover from the new film Privilege, starring Jean Shrimpton and Paul Jones. They seemed to be in bed together. Jean Shrimpton’s pale profile hovered over Paul Jones, whose eyes were closed, and his lips, and teeth, slightly parted. At first Paul had thought she must be watching him sleep, too entranced by his pretty face to want to wake him. Then he’d guessed, with a strange prickly rush, that they must be making love, and that the pop-star’s open mouth wasn’t snoring but gasping in surrender. Though actually you couldn’t be sure. There was a suggestion of his naked shoulder and chest, and thus of other things you might get to see if you went to the film. It wouldn’t come here, of course, he’d have to go into Swindon or Oxford on the bus. In the angle between the two faces there was a disconcerting limb, perhaps Jean’s right arm crooked back insect-like as she crouched over him, or maybe Paul Jones’s own left elbow, oddly twisted. He saw for the first time it could be his left wrist, much closer, the hand hidden in Jean’s hair. In the grey and white close-up Paul Jones’s puppyish neck looked fleshy and pitted. Also he had no ear-lobes, a weird thing you couldn’t entirely overlook once you’d noticed it. Paul Bryant wasn’t sure about Paul Jones. His mother had fancied him quite openly once, on Top of the Pops, and you couldn’t very easily share a fantasy with your mother. His own desire, in its way very modest, was simply to kiss Paul Jones.
He sat propped up on the bed to look through the small ads for the third or fourth time. It was like a mild hallucination, or one of those drawings in the paper containing ten hidden objects: it made him shiver to see the concealed invitations. He went systematically through Services, domestic work sought by ‘refined young men’ in ‘private flats and houses’, or by ‘masculine’ odd-job men, ‘anything considered’. He wasn’t seeking Services himself, but he was keenly preoccupied by their being offered. There were various masseurs. Someone called Mr Young, a ‘manipulative therapist’, could visit between 10.45 and 3 in north-west London only. Paul felt he would be rather intimidated by Mr Young, even if he managed to be in the area at the specified time. His eye worked through the tiny type of ‘For Sale and Wanted’, the ads all looking alike, so that you could lose one and find it again with a slightly magical sense of significance. Mainly it was magazines and films. There were hysterical pleas: ‘Stills, Photos, Articles, Magazines, ANYTHING dealing with Cliff Richard’. An unnamed ‘studio’ offered ‘physique and glamour movies’ for ‘artists, students and connoisseurs’, someone else sold ‘50-foot action films’, however long that was. Paul imagined the reel going round on a projector… he didn’t think you could get much action into fifty feet, it would surely be over in no time. Anyway, he didn’t have a projector; and couldn’t see himself getting one on his present salary. Not that there would really be room in here… and then he’d need a screen as well… Quite a few people were fans of something called ‘tapespond-ing’, where it seemed you recorded a message and sent it through the post, which might be romantic, but then he didn’t have a tape-recorder either, and even if he did Mrs Marsh would think he’d gone mad, talking away for hours on end in his room. He wasn’t a very confident talker, and couldn’t imagine how he’d fill up a tape.
The Personals were the climax of his solitary ritual, the words themselves bulging and bending with outrageous meaning: ‘Undisciplined bachelor (32) would like to meet strong-minded person with modern outlook.’ ‘Motorcyclist, ex-Navy, seeks another for riding weekends.’ It was 6d a word, but some people went on as garrulously as any tapesponder: ‘Motorcyclist, 30, but still a novice, seeks further instruction and would also particularly like to contact a qualified watersports trainer. North London/Hertfordshire area preferred.’ Paul read all this with a beating pulse, smiling narrowly, in a sustained state of fascinated shock. Only one man seemed to have completely missed the point, and asked to meet a girl with an interest in gardening. Otherwise it was a world of ‘bachelors’, many of them with ‘flats’, and most of those flats in London. ‘Central London flat, large and comfortable. Young bachelor needed to share with another. No restrictions.’ Paul looked up at the floral curtains and the evening sky above the mirror. ‘Energetic bachelor (26), own flat, seeks others, similar interests’ – he hadn’t said what his interests were, it must be taken as read. ‘Interests cinema, theatre, etc’, said some, or just ‘interests varied’. ‘Interests universal’, said ‘bachelor, late forties’, leaving nothing, or was it everything, to chance.
Paul closed his eyes in a heavy-hearted dream of bachelor flats, his gaze slowly making out, among the pools of lamplight, the shared sofa, the muddled slippers, the advanced pictures, opening the door on to the bathroom, where he himself was shaving as Peter Rowe, now looking oddly like Geoff Viner, lolled in the bath, reading, smoking and washing his hair all at the same time, then opening, through a sort of purple vapour, the door of the bedroom, on to a shadowy scene more thrilling and scandalous than anything described in Films and Filming – in fact a scene that, as far as he knew, had never been described at all.
4
Peter sat in the Museum, writing up the labels with his four-coloured biro. ‘Whose is the sword, again?’
‘Oh, the sword, sir? Brookson’s, sir,’ said Milsom 1, coming over and watching intently for a moment.
‘He claims it was his grandfather’s, sir,’ said Dupont.
‘Admiral’s Dress Sword,’ Peter wrote, in black, and then, flicking to red, ‘Lent by Giles Brookson, Form 4’. He felt the boys themselves ought really to do the labels, but they had a thing about his handwriting. Already he saw his Greek e, his looped d, his big scrolly B, seeping through the school, infecting the print-like hand they had hitherto based on the Headmaster’s. It was funny, and flattering in a way, but of course habitual; ten years before, he had copied those Bs from a favourite master of his own. ‘Voilà!’
‘Merci, monsieur!’ said Milsom, and took the card over to the display cabinet, where the more precious and dangerous exhibits were to be housed. There was a lovely set of Indian clay figures in the dress of different ranks and trades – military piper, water-seller, chokidar – very trustingly lent by Newman’s aunt. The shelf above was home to a hand-grenade, it was assumed unarmed, a flintlock pistol, Brookson’s grandfather’s sword, and a Gurkha kukri knife, which Dupont had taken down and was working on now with a wad of Duraglit. He and Milsom were talking about their favourite words.
‘I think I’d have to say,’ said Milsom, ‘that my favourite word is glorious.’
‘Not gorgeous?’ said Dupont.
‘No, no, I far prefer glorious.’