Free The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair Page B

the oval portrait.
    ‘Very well, Isa. The game must go on.’
    He spoke in the voice of an actor who receives a fateful telegram just as the curtain is about to rise on some smart drawing-room comedy.
    Matthew had never found himself closer to detesting Isabelle than at this instant. He detested her for having exacted from Théo, from his friend, a humiliating covenant of whose precise nature he remained as yet in ignorance but which already evoked uneasy memories of indignities inflicted by leering Boy Scouts in tents pitched in lonely glades.
    Yet we are most merciless when we discover our own baseness, our own wretched hypocrisies, reflected in another’s, and the dread which swept over him, a dread encompassing not only Théo’s but his own future on this island, this planet, in this first-floor flat off the place de l’Odéon, was coupled with an almost uncontrollable exhilaration.
    Théo stood up and took off his sweater. Unbuttoning his shirt, he drew it back over his shoulder-blades. His chest was hairless except for a single dark wisp which sprang from his navel like a mountain stream before plunging underground beneath his trouser belt. Unbuckling the belt, he let his corduroy jeans crumpleto his feet. Then, bending forward, he jerked them free.
    Whereupon, Isabelle clapped her hands over her eyes and shrieked, ‘No, no! For the love of God, no!’
    Matthew was astonished. Was she having second thoughts? Did she realise that Théo had outsmarted her by calling her bluff?
    Hardly. For, peeking gingerly through her interlocked fingers as through two slats in a blind, she shuddered.
    ‘How often have I told you never to take your trousers off before your socks! Look at yourself, you half-wit, you’ve got navy blue socks on. They give you that ghastly truncated look when you’re naked. Take them off at once.’
    Scowling at his sister, Théo tugged off his socks. After a pause, he began to remove his white underpants, rolling rather than drawing them over his sexual organs the way a woman will roll back a nylon stocking before inserting her foot in its sheath and smoothing it out along her leg with the flat of her hand. Then he flipped them about his ankles and stood before them, knees together, shivering slightly, like some arrowless Sebastian .
    Now that he was free of the grubby chrysalis of his own clothes, the transformation was as startling as withthose raggedy street urchins of Fez or Tangiers who, once on the beach, moult into the finery of their nakedness .
    He stood for a second or two contemplating his penis. It was almost erect. His testicles looked as heavy as gourds.
    He knelt on the bed beneath the oval portrait. His eyes captivated by the mask of imperturbability with which the actress requited their gaze, he started to massage himself. Paced by the rhythm of the bedsprings, which reverberated through the room like the pistons of an express train carrying him closer and closer to his goal, his hand went faster and faster, instinctively rediscovering its old familiar pulsation. It was as though his livid member were steering his hand’s movements, not vice versa, as though he wouldn’t have been capable of unprising his fingers from it even had he wished to, the way, for a single frightful moment, one’s fingers stick fast to the scalding handle of a saucepan. And when the climax arrived, the jet of sperm that his penis discharged , sperm glistening, so it appeared to Matthew, with tiny, pearly scintillae of light, hovered in the air for a split second, arrested in flight, like a fountain that all of a sudden freezes over, producing, at the snap of one’sfingers against the sparkling little pinnacle of ice that it has become, a high, pure, silvery musical note.
    Then, brusquely, all was damp stickiness, matted hair on the thighs, the faint, sweetish odour of fish paste.
    Théo lay back on the bed, panting, propped up on one side, his hands aligned along the ridge of his spine, in the posture of