Chapter One #3
Sasha.
Black hair, brown eyes—a face which was, in its own way, as
aristocratic as the one Laurie saw in the mirror. He wasn’t sure
why he couldn’t shake the image from his mind. The tutor who’d been
charged with knocking him into shape for resitting his exams was
not due for another two days, and Laurie had time on his
hands.
At least
it was London time, which meant he had resources. There was a
scatter of small playhouses in the area, around whose backstage
areas and greenrooms he had made himself familiar over past school
holidays—never doing more than helping shift scenery and run
errands, but buying himself contented hours in the one environment
where he felt really at home. He’d been asked a couple of times to
undertake extra and bit work but had never dared accept. He held a
deep conviction that some kind of alarm would go off in his
father’s study the second his foot touched the boards. A great
admirer of drama was Sir William, but not as a career for his boy.
Laurie might as well have announced at once that he was going to
become a prostitute or join the Chippendales. He made his way down
the Strand toward the Twilight without allowing himself to look
into doorways.
It was
another world anyway at bright December noon. Laurie found himself
wondering if he had imagined his encounter of the night before. The
entrance to Lindley’s was washed, gleaming, thronged with Christmas
shoppers. No traces of the night and the shadow people who belonged
to it. For a few minutes, walking briskly down the Strand, warm in
his sheepskin jacket, Laurie tried on the idea that this was the
real and only world, the day side, where everyone he saw looked
rosy and well-heeled. It was a nice thought. Experimentally he
fitted himself into it, straightened his shoulders, and looked
around. He was a wealthy young man of good family. In his wallet
was a credit card of unspecified limit. He had nothing to worry
about, really. If he closed his eyes, shut down those inconvenient
parts of himself his mother assured him were mere youthful
sentiment anyway, ready to burn off in the arid light of
adulthood…
No way
that he could find Sasha again in that bright world, even had he
wanted to. Laurie pushed open the backstage door of the Twilight,
the warm gust of air that greeted him a reminder of contrasts from
the night before. He slipped into the shadows, quietly greeting the
stagehands who remembered him.
Not
quietly enough. Two racks of costumes down at the end of a corridor
gave a warning shudder and broke apart, expelling a plump shape in
pink cashmere. Dora, the Twilight’s talented and faithful dresser,
paused for a moment as if scenting the air, then got a fix on him
and came cannoning down the corridor to intercept. “Laurie!
Darling!” She hadn’t learned the art of air kissing, and he stood,
resigned, while she planted a lip-glossed smacker on each of his
cheeks. “God, I swear. You get more knicker-dampeningly gorgeous
every time I see you. Are you of legal age yet? Please say
yes.”
Laurie
looked at her—her nice smile, her luminous eyes. Soft, fragrant
hair, a body as generous and easygoing as her nature. She had made
a massive, unsubtle pass at Laurie every year since he was fifteen.
It was almost a festive tradition. He smiled at her. “Hi, Dora.
More or less, I think. But…”
“I know, I know. Don’t tell me.” She raised her hands in mock
surrender. “You’re gay. It’s always the same. They come through
here year after year, these gorgeous boys, and then the second
they’re legal—boom—they’re after cock. Don’t you worry, darling.”
She deposited a third noisy kiss, this time on his brow. “Dora’s
used to it. I tell you what. Before someone comes and nabs you for
set painting, you come down here and help me steam press a few
cloaks. I don’t know what they think I’m made of here, but I can
scarcely lift the bloody things.”
Dazed,
Laurie followed her. She set him a load of industrial ironing and
wandered around him chattering, requiring little by way of reply.
Laurie liked her a lot. She was kind, and her offers of a
no-strings roll on the trapdoor mattress were quite sincere. But
when he tried to imagine going through with it, all he could
envisage was Sasha and a pair of dark-lashed brown eyes.
The one
thing he dared look at even less than his love of the theatre and
reasons for remaining at home was his sexuality. He had sealed it
up, set it determinedly aside. In public school, you either leaped
for the safe moral high ground of loudly stated straightness, to
include lurid tales of weekend conquests with Roedean girls and
cutouts of topless tabloid models stuck to the inside of your
locker. Or you drowned among the rest of them—boys who hadn’t
learned to conceal the fact that a natural consequence of being
trapped for years in a single-sex school was to fall in love,
however temporarily, with other boys. Life for this second group,
this underclass, Laurie had soon seen, was barely worth living. You
moved from being an older boy’s fag to being his or someone else’s
faggot, and these two terms might as well have been seared on your
brow. You went from polishing shoes to being buggered in the locker
room. Every single boys’ school cliché was true and had not altered
from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Laurie was not
sure how he had walked the line between these two extremes. The
pressure to be one thing or the other was incredible, and he hadn’t
even been bright enough to clamber into an ivory tower and raise a
flag of frigid intellectualism. He’d had a couple of girlfriends,
carefully selected scions of other good families, and enjoyed their
company with ill-defined longings for touch. If ever he dreamed of
greener grass and the other side of the fence, he took fervent
precautions to hide the fact from himself and anyone else. If Sir
William had a thing about foreigners and Jews, you should see how
he could make himself pleasant on the subject of
homosexuals.
Probably Laurie should come down off his stepladder and take
hold of Dora’s warm hand. He had been rescued from the steam press
by the set builder’s assistant, who had put him to work on a giant
fantasy background for the Twilight’s Christmas satire of Narnia.
Laurie looked at his paint-stained hands and tried to imagine them
closing on soft, white female flesh. Why not? She was sweet, and
she’d given plenty of his fellow backstage lads a useful sexual
initiation. He could hardly take her home, but Sir William would be
delighted to hear of his prowess. You
young dog, Laurence.
Laurie
chuckled, shaking the stepladder dangerously beneath him. In the
magical shadows of the stage below, Dora flitted back and forth,
never failing to give him a glittering smile or a wave.
Nevertheless, as the afternoon began to close in to December dusk,
he climbed down, washed the paint from his hands with eye-stinging
turpentine, and set off—not in the direction of home.