Free Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair Page A

for: ‘Ronnie Bostock: 20 Facts We Bet You Didn’t Know About Him. Page 36’; and there, as well, in a separate, boxed-in little column listing the magazine’s gallery of pin-ups, alongside Kirk and Shane, Ralph, Jordan and River, his name appeared again.
    I did not turn to page 36. Instead, I calmly closed the magazine, glanced along the rows and rows of publications, selected a motoring journal with an enormous red sports car, sleek and streamlined to a degree, practically thrusting its way off the cover, and in some embarrassment – an embarrassment no longer my own but that, not, I fancy, unskilfully assumed for the occasion, of a family man commissioned by his adolescent daughter to buy her reading matter of which he has more than once had cause to express the mildest and most affectionate form of disapproval – I handed my two purchases over to a disarmingly apathetic shop assistant and paid for them.
    In the street I wound my copy of
Teen Dream
into so tight a cylinder that no passer-by could have identified it and disposed of the motoring journal by dropping it into a litter bin very handily located just opposite the newsagent’s shop. Then, with a spring in my step, I hurried back up to my Hampstead home.
    *
    I stood in front of the looking-glass over the mantelpiece in my study.
Teen Dream
was lying, still unopened, unperused, on top of my thick sheaf of notes for
Adagio
. For a long, long time I stood thus, examining my reflection. Finally, my motionless features creased into a gentle, recalcitrant smile; the ice was broken; the reflection smiled back. ‘If,’ I said to myself, ‘if I affect a certain style, if I strike a certain pose, it’s because I find it almost impossible to look at myself in the glass, even for the purpose of baring my soul, without at the same time straightening the knot of my tie.’ And then (but solely because it did happen to be crooked) I straightened the knot of my tie.
    Flushed and fertile with expectation, the expectation of at last grafting an objective reality on to a being who had not, not until now, not until this very instant, been any less spectral than the scrunched-up gargoyles’ faces that had haunted me in my sleep (and, oddly, haunted me no more), I turned to the magazine I had just bought. With a trembling hand I opened it at page 36. The first thing to catch my eye was the ‘pin-up’ on the page opposite. Ronnie (I.was on a first-name footing with him now) was shown in profile, rather
à la
Karsh, except that he had turned his head unsmilingly towards the camera, his chin resting in a somewhat stilted manner on the knuckles of his left hand, the thumb tucked lightly underneath as though ‘chucking’ it. He wore an unexpectedly bespoke-tailorish sort of white shirt with narrow, vertical blue-grey stripes; it would appear to have been just unpacked from its box on the evidence of an immaculate crease that my eye followed along the upper arm to the elbow and on to the generous cuffwhich, because of the overly stiff and starchy press, did not embrace as it might have the boy’s slender, hairless wrist; and around the rakishly unbuttoned collar, its two wide flaps even more rakishly upturned on the neck, hung a loosely knotted grey woollen tie. There was something about the shirt, the open collar and the woollen tie that conjured up the conventional image of the English public schoolboy. Something, too, about the pose, half in profile as it was, as though the model were bending over a chair, which made me think, hard as I struggled to expel a thought so squalid, of just such a schoolboy compelled by his fellows to receive a caning on his bared buttocks.
    His hair was longer, and seemed blonder, than in the film. It tumbled in underneath the turn-up of his collar at the nape of his neck with the odd, randomly uncombed tuft poking out over the top. His eyebrows, of a much darker shade than his hair, darker