The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair

Author:Gilbert Adair [Gilbert Adair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780571319817
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Un p’tit village, un vieux clocher …

‘Forfeit,’ Isabelle repeated calmly.

‘I won’t do it.’

‘Won’t do it?’

‘You wouldn’t.’

Isabelle grinned. Looking up at the portrait, she said, ‘Gene Tierney isn’t my type.’

‘What a bitch you are. A bitch and a sadist.’

‘No, I’m a Sadian. Not quite the same thing.’ She yawned. ‘Are you going to pay the forfeit or chicken out – which, you realise, will mean the end of the game?’

Théo’s eyes took in each of them in turn – Isabelle, Matthew, 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 crumple to 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 with those 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.

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