Free A Disturbing Influence by Julian Mitchell Page A

doesn’t answer. She walks slowly beside me, and I listen to her skirt against her calves and think of the sea hushing itself in a golden cove in Scotland. We are going to Scotland in September—September the first—and are the Simpsons going anywhere?
    And alas they are, and all too soon, on August the sixteenth the Simpsons are going to France, to the Loire valley.
    We stop beneath the yews, and my arm, which has been fidgeting all this while against my side, reaches across, volitionless, and touches her shoulder, hovers there a moment, hesitates, then moves slowly to her waist, curls itself round it, settles down, holding her lightly, feeling her relax against it. And she says: ‘Then we won’t see much of each other, will we?’
    ‘No.’
    And we stand there in silence, and my arm shifts, holds her more firmly against our absence from each other. We walk slowly on.
    I say: ‘We could run away together. We could drive off somewhere and they wouldn’t find us for ages.’
    She smiles, a little sad, says nothing.
    ‘We did Romeo and Juliet last term,’ she says, suddenly. We are near the end of the avenue, the sunset end, but the sun is still quite high, it won’t set for an hour or more, and she will be gone by then.
    ‘I played Mercutio.’
    ‘Romeo,’ I say, murmur rather. ‘Alfa Romeo.’
    ‘What?’
    I’ll be your Alfa Romeo, sleek and fast, and we will go together all over Europe, across the Bosphorus to Turkey, and then on and on, at a hundred and fifty, to Syria, Persia, India, Siam, Indo-China …
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘You’re funny, Teddy,’ she says, and she slips away from me and leans against one of the prehistoric trunks and looks across the small dip which we call a valley to where the spire of Cartersfield church is like a finely sharpened pencil against the horizon.
    ‘I’ll be your Alfa Romeo,’ I say.
    Do you love me, Teddy? Oh, but I do, just ask me, please ask me, but she doesn’t move, her brown hair is curly and soft at the back of her neck, and her mouth is a serious straight line. The longest distance between two points, so I define our kisses, never yet kissed. And her eyes are hazel, and they look out across the water-meadow, with the cows strung out like amber beads from one of my mother’s old necklaces, and the sky is like the cyclorama in the school theatre, and she has been Mercutio and I am Alfa Romeo, and I want to say: ‘I love you with my whole heart and soul, Molly,’ but I don’t.
    And we wander together again, holding hands, away from the avenue, into the beech wood that skirts the meadow, and high above us an aeroplane drones like a mosquito, and then we can’t be seen and I kiss her, the first kiss this holidays or ever, and her lips feel very soft and slippery, and my wrists feel weak again, and I tell her about how I skidded two days ago.
    And then we walk slowly back again, because the Simpsons will be going soon, they can’t stay to dinner, they’re so sorry, they have to get back, but it was a lovely drink and so nice to see us again. And as they go, the car moving very slowly away, careful of the gravel on the drive, I see her face, turned back over her shoulder, watching me, grave as ever, and not so much as a smile, though I stand and watch the dust settle for five minutes, trying to pluck one from the air.
    *
    August the twelfth, grouse season opens, my diary informs me, it is a Saturday, there is a gymkhana.
    There is a small crowd, local people only, watching their children compete. They sit on rugs and move picnic baskets aboutwith an air of authority. The shells of hard-boiled eggs are snatched into paper bags. Apple-cores, of course, go to the ponies. The sun blinds from a hundred windscreens.
    I sit in the car. My father is scornfully angry because I am listening to the radio. At Silverstone the Ferraris are leading. On the twenty-fifth lap Stirling Moss is in trouble. He pulls in at the pits, he withdraws from the race. I switch off, grief