I would have stayed in my bedroom that day—I was reading Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson—had it not been for the scream. It came from the second floor, where Maude’s study was located, and echoed around the house in such a fashion that I assumed someone was dead. Running out to the landing, I peered over the bannister and saw a little girl of about five in a pale-pink coat standing on the floor below me, her hands pressed to her cheeks as the most horrific sound emerged from her mouth. I had never seen her before and within a few seconds she turned on her heel and ran like an Olympic athlete down the stairs toward the first floor, down once again to the ground floor, along the hallway and out onto the street beyond, slamming the heavy wooden door behind her so hard that the knocker rattled against the plate several times. I went back into my room and looked out the window and there she was, charging into the heart of Dartmouth Square, at which point I lost sight of her. My heart was beating wildly in my chest and I went back out to the landing, hoping for an explanation, but there was no one there and the house had returned to silence.
Disturbed now from my reading, I realized that I was thirsty and made my way downstairs in search of something to drink and to my surprise found another child—a boy of my own age—sitting in a chair in our hallway, a chair that existed for ornamental reasons and was not supposed to be used, turning the pages of a comic.
“Hello,” I said, and he glanced up at me and smiled. He had blond hair and piercing blue eyes that captivated me immediately. Perhaps it was because I had been silent for more than a week that my words tumbled out of me like water overflowing a neglected bath. “My name’s Cyril Avery and I’m seven years old. Charles and Maude are my parents, although they’re not my real parents, they’re my adoptive parents, I’m not sure who my real parents are, but I’ve lived here forever and I have a room on the top floor. No one ever goes up there, except the maid to clean it, so I have things just as I like them. What’s your name anyway?”
“Julian Woodbead,” said Julian. And a moment later I realized that I didn’t feel shy around him at all. And that my stutter had gone.
Julian
There is no denying the privilege in which Julian and I were brought up. Our families had money and status. They moved in elegant circles, with friends who held important positions in government or the arts. We lived in large houses where the menial work was undertaken by middle-aged women who arrived on early-morning buses, making their way from room to room under the weight of dusters, mops and brooms, and who were discouraged from speaking to us.
Our housekeeper was named Brenda, and Maude insisted that she wear slippers around the house as the sound of Brenda’s shoes on the wooden floors disturbed her writing. Her study was the only room in the house that the housekeeper was not permitted to clean, which accounted for the fact that there were always dust mites floating in the air alongside the cigarette smoke, creating a heavy atmosphere that was at its most overpowering in the late afternoon when the sun poured through the windows as it continued its journey westward. While Brenda was a constant of my childhood, Julian’s family employed a series of maids, none of whom lasted more than a year, and whether it was the difficulty of the work or the unkindness of the Woodbeads that drove them away I never knew. But for all that we had, for all the luxury to which we were accustomed, we were both denied love, and this deficiency would be scorched into our future lives like an ill-considered tattoo inscribed on the buttocks after a drunken night out, leading each of us inevitably toward isolation and disaster.
We attended different schools. I walked down to Ranelagh every morning, where I had a place at a small junior preparatory, while Julian was in a similar establishment a few miles north on a quiet street close to St. Stephen’s Green. Neither of us knew where we would be going after sixth class but as Charles and Max had both been Belvedere College boys in their youth—this was where they had met, in fact, becoming friends as stalwarts of the rugby team that had lost to Castleknock College in the final of the 1931 Leinster Schools Cup—we assumed that there was a good chance that we would end up there too. Julian was not as unhappy in the education system as I was but then he was much more of an extrovert by nature and found it easier to fit in with others.
On the afternoon that we met we exchanged only a few pleasantries in the hallway before I invited him upstairs, as children do, to see my room, and he followed me cheerfully and without question to the top of the house. As he stood beside my unmade bed, examining the books on my shelves and the toys that lay scattered on the floor, it occurred to me that he was the first child, other than myself, ever to set foot in there.
“You’re lucky to have so much space,” he said, balancing on the tips of his toes as he looked out the window into the square beyond. “And you have it all to yourself?”
“Yes,” I said, for my domain consisted of three rooms: a bedroom, a small bathroom and a living area, which, I suppose, made it more of a self-contained apartment than anything else, not something that most seven-year-olds could lay claim to. “Charles has the first floor, Maude has the second and we all share the ground.”
“You mean your parents don’t sleep together?” he asked.
“Oh no,” I said. “Why, do yours?”
“Of course they do.”
“But why? Don’t you have enough bedrooms?”
“We have four,” he said. “My bedroom is next door to my sister’s,” he added, pulling a face.
“Was that the little girl who ran screaming from here earlier?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Why was she screaming? What upset her?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” said Julian with a shrug. “She’s always becoming hysterical over something. Girls are strange creatures, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know any,” I admitted.
“I know lots. I love girls, even though they’re crazy and mentally unbalanced, according to my father. Have you ever seen a pair of breasts?”
I stared at him in surprise. I was only seven years old; such thoughts had not yet occurred to me but even then Julian’s sexually precocious mind was already turning toward women. “No,” I said.
“I have,” he told me proudly. “At a beach on the Algarve last summer. All the girls were going around topless. I got sunburned I stayed out so long. Second-degree burns! I can’t wait to have sex with a girl, can you?”
I frowned. The word was a new one to me. “What’s sex?” I asked.
“You really don’t know?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and he took great delight in describing in detail actions that to me seemed not just unpleasant and unsanitary but possibly criminal.
“Oh that,” I said when he was finished, pretending that I had known all along, for I didn’t want him to look down on me and think me too innocent for his friendship. “I thought you were talking about something else. I know all about that.”
“Do you have any dirty magazines?” he asked me then.
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“I have. I found one in my father’s study. It was full of naked girls. It was an American magazine, of course, because naked girls are still illegal in Ireland.”
“Are they?” I asked, wondering how they bathed if that was the case.
“Yes, the Church doesn’t let girls be naked until they’re married. But the Americans do and they take their clothes off all the time and let their pictures go into magazines and then men go into shops and buy them with copies of History Today or Stamps Monthly so they don’t look like perverts.”
“What’s a pervert?” I asked.
“It’s someone who’s a sex maniac,” he explained.
“Oh.”
“I’m going to be a pervert when I grow up,” he continued.
“So am I,” I said, eager to please. “Perhaps we could be perverts together.”