He half-saw Peter fling open the shed door, with rakish impatience, and heard the clatter of canes, ‘Oh, shit! Oh shit…’ a sense of the shed like a booby-trap. ‘Mm, it’s rather hell in there,’ Paul said, giggling at his own drollery more than he could quite explain. He was drunk, it was one of the hilarious uncorrectable disasters of being drunk. Now Peter was stooping and furiously thrusting and jamming the tumbled canes back in and failing to get the door shut. He shut it; at once it creaked open again. ‘I should leave it,’ said Paul.
He’d brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter’s hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking than the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter’s head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man’s wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him. He twisted his head in Peter’s two-handed grasp, tried to turn it to a humorous wistful nuzzle against his chin, his chest. ‘What an amazing party,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’m so glad Mrs Keeping asked me to help with the parking.’
‘Mm?’
‘I meant to say I like your tie, by the way…’
Peter was holding him at arm’s length with a serene, almost humorous, almost smug look, Paul felt, as if he were measuring him on some scale of previous kisses and conquests. ‘Oh, my dear,’ he murmured, with a sort of swallowed laugh, that suggested some shyness after all. They held each other, cheek to cheek, Peter’s evening stubble a further part of the dreadful strangeness of being with a man. Paul wasn’t sure if he had fluffed it hopelessly, like his frightened scuttle behind the pampas grass when he’d first arrived; or if this could be taken as a natural amorous pause in which his own confusion would be smoothly concealed and forgiven. He knew he had already been found wanting. And quite quickly he thought, well, it was a sort of triumph just to have kissed another man. ‘I suppose we should go back,’ he said.
Peter merely sighed at this, and slid his hands tighter round Paul’s waist. ‘You see, I rather thought we might stay out here a bit longer. We’ve both earned it, don’t you think?’ Paul found himself laughing, curving to him, suddenly gripping him hard so as to keep him with him and somehow immobilize him at the same time.
Drink and kissing seemed to move to their own clock. When the two of them got back to the house the crowds were already thinning, though a few of the oldsters had settled in, in new arrangements of the crowded chairs in the drawing-room. Paul felt that he and Peter must be bringing a gleam of the unspeakable with them out of the night beyond the french windows, though everyone amiably pretended not to notice. Drink seemed to have captivated them all, reducing some to silent smiles, others to excitable gabble. John Keeping, very drunk, was raptly explaining the virtues of the port he was drinking to a man three times his age. Even Mr Keeping, with the globe of a brandy glass in his hand, looked unselfconsciously happy; then when he saw Paul he glanced awkwardly away. There had been another change of music, it was some old dance number that sounded to Paul like a scene from a wartime movie, and on the clear square of floor beside the piano, barely moving but with a captivated look of their own, Mrs Jacobs was dancing with the farmer man, who turned out to be Mark Gibbons, the marvellous painter she’d mentioned, who’d lived in Wantage. Another couple Paul didn’t know revolved at twice the speed beyond them. Paul smiled at them mildly and benevolently, from beyond the enormous dark distance he had just travelled, which made everything else appear charming but weirdly beside the point. ‘I think I’ve got to go,’ Peter said to Julian, resting his hand on his shoulder, and Paul painfully half-believed the story even though he knew they were meeting up again by the car.
Outside the loo he was waylaid by Jenny. ‘Do you want to come to the Corn Hall with us?’ she said.
Julian looked surprised, then deliciously shifty. ‘Yeah, do you think we can… yeah, come with us, that would be good, actually… Do you want to ask Dad?’ he said to Paul.
‘Um… I think probably not,’ said Paul, pleased that his tone of voice got a laugh. He ought to thank Mr Keeping for the evening before he left – the gratitude suddenly keen and guilty, and haunted by a new suspicion that perhaps he hadn’t been meant to stay for the whole party, and had made a large and unmentionable mistake.
‘I mean it goes on till midnight, what is it now?’
Paul couldn’t tell them that he had promised to go with Peter and sit – where? – he pictured a shadowy lay-by where he’d seen courting couples in cars. It was a further shock when Peter said, ‘Oh, why not? – just for half an hour – I feel like dancing’ – just as if their own plans didn’t matter at all.
‘OK…’ said Julian – a slight sense inexpressible in the air that though he needed them as a cover he wasn’t completely thrilled at the idea of dancing at the Corn Hall with them.
‘Is your brother coming?’
‘God, don’t tell him,’ said Jenny.
‘I love dancing,’ said Peter.
‘Mm, me too,’ said Jenny, and to Paul’s confusion the two of them started rolling their hips and twitching their shoulders at each other. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said.
In the hall Mrs Keeping was standing in rapid, muttered conversation with another woman. ‘He really can’t,’ she was saying, as Paul hung guiltily back. Out on the drive, at the edge of the spread of light from the front door, Uncle Wilfrid was standing, arms folded tightly but face turned up to admire the heavens as if the rest of him were not knotted up with tension and rejection. ‘I’ve got Jenny in the box-room, Mother in the spare room, both the boys home… he should have said he was coming.’
‘I’m sure we could find a corner for him,’ the other woman said.
‘Why can’t he get a taxi back?’
‘It’s a bit late, darling,’ said the woman.
‘Is it?’
‘I don’t suppose he’s got his jim-jams…?’
A sort of desperate solidarity seemed to take over Julian’s face, even if it meant not going to the Corn Hall after all. He slipped out into the drive – ‘Hullo, Uncle Wilfrid…’ taking him aside, a bit further off.
‘You can see the Crab, Julian,’ said Wilfrid.
And a minute later they were all in the Imp, in the sharp little comedy of sudden proximity, everyone being witty, everyone laughing, shifting the books and litter from under their bottoms as the car bounced at getaway speed along Glebe Lane. They could hear the grass in the crown of the road swiftly scouring the underside of the car. Wilfrid was in the front, Paul, Jenny and Julian in a painfully funny squash in the back. Julian’s hot thigh pressed against Paul’s thigh, and Paul found the boy was gripping his hand, he thought just out of general abandon and selfless high spirits. He didn’t dare squeeze it back. They rattled out into Church Lane, down the Market Place into the surprising surviving outside world, which included a police car and two officers standing by it just outside the Bell. Peter was supremely unimpressed, shot past them, pulled up and turned off the lights, the engine, just in front of the Midland Bank. A sense of reckless disorder overcame Paul for a moment. But tomorrow was Sunday…