They clambered out of the car, a small adjustment taking place. Wilfrid said, ‘I haven’t gone dancing since just after the War.’
‘You’ll love it,’ Jenny told him, with a confident nod. She was in effect, in this lopsided group, his partner.
‘Everybody danced with everybody then.’
Peter locked the car, and gave Paul a helpless but happy look, a shrug and a smirking shake of the head.
People were leaving the Corn Hall, the women scantily dressed in the summer night, but clinging to the men. Paul disguised his reawoken tension about seeing Geoff, and chatted pointedly to Jenny as they went into the lobby. As he squinted through the glass doors, the high-raftered hall, under the slow sweep of coloured lights, was thick with the promise of his presence. A boomingly lively song was going on, and Jenny was dancing a bit already – ‘Can we just go in?’
‘Only another twenty minutes, my love,’ said the woman at the door.
‘You’re not charging us, are you?’ Jenny said, defying her to ask her her age.
The woman gazed at her, but the tickets and the cash were all put away, people pushed past, waiting and staggering out past the cloakroom, the lavatories with their stained-glass doors. So in they went.
Paul thanked god for the drink – he strode straight across the hall, round by the stage, smiling into the shadows, as if he lived in places like this – but no, Geoff wasn’t here… he came back to the others with a pang of sadness and relief; then remembered his tie, and pulled it off impatiently. He felt almost as shy about dancing as kissing, but this time it was Jenny who took him in hand – their little group started bopping together, Paul smiling at all of them with mixed-up eagerness and anxiety, Wilfrid studying Jenny but not quite getting her rhythm as she rocked in her jutting-out frock and waved her hands in front of her, perhaps waiting for someone to take them, while Julian lit and voraciously smoked a cigarette. Beyond him, peeping mischievously at Paul through the patterned light, Peter did his own dance, a kind of loose-limbed twist. Around them other couples made way, looked at them with slight puzzlement, made remarks, surely… Surely people in the town knew Jenny, Julian certainly got frowns and smiles of surprise. Paul followed two couples jiving rapturously together, with sober precision despite the abandon of their faces, back and forth in front of the stage.
A big red-faced woman in a spangled frock picked up Wilfrid… did she know him? – no, it seemed not, but he was ready for her, a gentleman, truly sober, and with a certain serious determination to do well. Paul watched them move off, with a smile covering his faint sense of shock, and Jenny leant in towards Paul and nodded, ‘A friend of yours.’
Paul’s hand on her shoulder for a second, prickly fabric, warm skin, strangeness of a girl – ‘Mm?’
‘Young Paul?’
He hunched into himself as he turned and there was Geoff, reaching out to him but rearing back in broad astonishment; then his face very close, Geoff’s hot boozy breath as if he was about to kiss him too, careless and friendly, ‘What are you doing here!’ – and showing Sandra, who shook hands and was inaudibly introduced, looking only half-amused, but Paul was a colleague, perhaps he’d mentioned him. She crossed her arms under her bosom and then looked aside, at others making for the door. ‘Christ, is old Keeping here too?’ – Geoff big with his own joke. ‘Just young Keeping,’ said Paul, nodding at Julian, but he didn’t seem to get it, stood nodding as the lights came teasingly hiding and colouring the contours of his tight pale slacks and the deep V of his open-necked shirt, a first heart-stopping glimpse of naked Geoff. He leant in again, his rough sideburn brushed Paul’s cheek for a half-second, ‘Well, we’re off’ – Sandra tugging, smiling but moody, as if to say Paul mustn’t encourage him. ‘See you Monday!’ – and then his arm was round Sandra’s waist as he escorted her in a gallant grown-up way towards the lit square of the exit.
‘Well, he’s rather fab!’ said Jenny.
‘Oh, do you think?’ said Paul and raised an eyebrow, as if to say girls were a push-over, turning to look for him as he went out into the light, and then into the dark, as though he were a real missed opportunity, then grinning gamely at Peter as he swayed and sloped towards them, biting his lower lip, and gripped them both in a loose very drunken embrace and whispered in Paul’s ear, ‘Tell me when you want to go.’
‘A mad one and a slow one,’ announced the lead guitarist of the Locomotives, the words heavy and resonant in the high roof of the hall. ‘Then it’s goodnight.’
‘Let’s stay a bit longer,’ said Paul, ‘now we’re here.’
The final dance, the watch showing five past twelve, and the two policemen standing genially by the open door in the bright light there, talking to the woman that took the coats. They looked in, across the floor, now sparsely occupied by the dancers who felt the lonely space expanding about them, the night air flowing in, Jenny and Julian locked together in a stiff experimental way, his chin heavy on her shoulder, Paul and Peter now leaning by the wall, swaying in time but a few feet apart, their faces in fixed smiles of uncertain pleasure, and out in the middle, Wilfrid and his new friend, who’d adjusted herself imaginatively to her partner’s rhythms and was making up a kind of military twostep with him to the tune of ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’.
6
Peter roared along Oxford Street, so very different from its famous namesake, the few shops here with their blinds down in the early torpor of the summer evening, and just before he came into the square he wondered with disconcerting coolness if he did fancy Paul, and what he would feel when he saw him again. He wasn’t exactly sure what he looked like. In the days since he’d kissed him at the Keepings’ party his face had become a blur of glimpses, pallor and blushes, eyes… grey, surely, hair with red in it under the light, a strange little person to be so excited by, young for his age, slight but hard and smooth under his shirt, in fact rather fierce, though extremely drunk of course on that occasion – well, there he was, standing by the market-hall, oh yes, that’s right… Peter thought it would be all right. He saw him in strange close focus against the insubstantial background, the person waiting who is also the person you are waiting for. Peter was a little late – in the four or five seconds as the car slowed and neared he saw Paul glance at the watch on his inside wrist, and then up at the Midland Bank opposite, as if he was keen to get away from it, then saw him take in the car and with a little shiver pretend he hadn’t, and then, as Peter came alongside, his jump of surprise. He’d changed after work into clean snug jeans, a red pullover slung round his shoulders; the attempt to look nice was more touching than sexy. Peter stopped and jumped out, grinning – he wanted to kiss him at once, but of course all that would have to keep. ‘Your Imp awaits!’ he said, and tugged open the passenger door, which made a terrible squawking sound. He saw perhaps he could have tidied the car up a bit more; he shifted a pile of papers off the floor, half-obstructed Paul with his tidying hands as he got in. Paul was one of those lean young men with a bum as fetchingly round and hard as a cyclist’s. Peter got in himself, and when he put the car in gear he let his hand rest on Paul’s knee for two seconds, and felt it shiver with tension and the instant desire to disguise it. ‘Ready for Cecil?’ he said, since this was the pretext for the visit. It seemed Cecil had already become their codeword.
‘Mm, I’ve never been to a boarding-school before,’ said Paul, as if this were his main worry.
‘Oh, really?’ said Peter. ‘Well, I hope you’ll like it,’ and they swept off round the square, the car making its unavoidable coarse noise. It was something a bit comic about a rear-engined car, the departing fart, not the advancing roar.