Read Online Equivocator by Stevie Davies - Free Book Online Page A

is, these two poor little chaps, each the runt of its respective litter, were seven or eight years old, when they were packed off to prep school, to be bullied and abused in the name of civilised British values. Together they located this bolthole. They’d reminisce over it in the most rhapsodic terms. Know what it was? A broom cupboard! A place to escape. Oh the scent of mansion polish and chamois leather! Do you remember when we …? Etcetera. After that, there was public school and Cambridge – but they never found anything to match whatever it was they’d found in their secret world. So there you are.’
    Yes, I see. I think I do. They were far from home. All their lives. Even with me and Elise, Jack was a homeless person. She says nothing about Rhys’s proposal of marriage. Perhaps she’s forgotten it, if it ever happened.
    â€˜So – anyway – about the lights. Rhys was always there in our house, morning, noon and night. Or about to be there. Or being referred to. Oh Rhys this, Rhys that. Jack and he were infatuated with one another but they were also jealous – or envious – rivals. What one had, the other coveted. Once I said to Rhys as we were chopping vegetables in the kitchen (for he was always wanting to enter into household activities), “You can take over from me and be Jack’s wife if you fancy it, Rhys, do please feel free – it’s quite a demanding job though, I have to warn you.” He grinned and said he might pass on that. Said he had something to Jack’s purpose nothing. Shakespeare’s Sonnets – look it up, Sebastian. But surely you remember Rhys from those days?’
    I shake my head.
    â€˜He was practically a fixture. He’d take you for walks to the park and the zoo.’
    â€˜No,’ I object, quite sharply. ‘I remember Dad taking me to the park. Pushing me on the swing, that kind of thing.’
    All Elise replies is, ‘Right?’ As if to say, Believe that and you’ll believe anything.
    â€˜He did, Elise. I remember clearly. He did all sorts of things with me. We went fishing. He took me on a steam train.’
    â€˜Well, anyway. Don’t distress yourself.’
    I’m not going to insist or ask further. My mother’s raised eyebrows are telling me I’ve confabulated. Memory has changed the mask on the face of the man who accompanied me on those outings. It’s easily done. Apparently.
    Rhys at that time was a handsome, quietly charismatic fellow, Elise continues – magnificent head of hair, which he still in the 1970s wore in the hippie-style, eyes pale, with long lashes. Jack had brought back from Thailand for each of them a pa kao mah , a sarong, which they liked to lounge around in. Elise was always in jeans and they all liked the feeling of release from constraints of gender. The electricity used to fail: it was rationed, in the time of the strikes and fuel shortages – and, sod’s law, usually at dinner time. They’d cook on calor gas and eat by candle light. Those meals would go on for hours. The talk of gods. Except when it was more like the braying of asses. My mother kept a diary, by candle-light.
    One evening Jack and Rhys were spaced out, they were dreamy and happy and sloshed. They smoked roll-ups and relived their lives backwards. Finally they arrived at their childhood refuge – in the boarding school cupboard with the mops and the smuggled torch, the place where they imagined themselves heroes and supermen and ate their Homeric feasts of tuck sent by Rhys’s mam and thick wedges of bread and jam smuggled from the tea-time meal served before prep and dinner.
    The hash was probably helping their mood, and the brandy. The room was brimming with hilarity and that sort of mellow, melting tenderness they felt for each other – and which flowed to include Elise. Perhaps it overflowed too far.
    They were discussing courtly love; it was a thing of