Our Evenings

“That night I […] shut my bedroom door in a mood of fragile security, then got undressed and put on my pajamas determinedly deaf to what I knew was waiting, when I turned off the light and curled up facing the window in the chilly darkness: the inward surge of the feeling, the shaming and engulfing emotions, a grip on the heart and in the throat, unsayable.”

While he is staying with the Hadlows, 13-year-old Dave fears that Giles will come to his room at night and bully and play aggressively and even sexually with him. Giles does this for two nights, even though Dave is unwilling, before Dave finds a key to the room and locks the door at night. Giles’s style of bullying ties into Dave’s fear that his sexual orientation is obvious to others and possibly hints at the deep repression and internalized antigay prejudice that propels Giles’s later political career.

“I turned the page, where Clytemnestra’s speech went on for a good thirty lines more, and I started to adjust, felt the madness and excitement of ranting about Troy in the sitting room after breakfast, and then quite soon after all I came in again, my heart speeding up with my new sense of what acting required.”

Thirteen-year-old Dave is helping Elise Pleynet rehearse her part in the play Agamemnon. He gets one of his first glimpses into the excitement of acting in a play. He does not know it at this point, but he is in the process of finding his vocation in life. Acting suits his talents and allows him to sink himself into identities other than his own.

“There was the shiver, before the swirl of a skirt like a ball gown around my bare legs, of something not in fact a skirt, a longyi for a child, in pink and blue tartan, wrapped round and tied, and a door being opened in front of me; but the room I entered was a brown blur, not the present-day flat but somewhere we had lived before.”

This is one of Dave’s few brief and frustrating excursions into the Burmese side of his heritage. His Indian friend at Bampton, Manji, has just asked him what his earliest memory is, and this is part of his reply. He vaguely remembers being dressed in the Burmese style. The door that opens only to disappoint serves as an appropriate metaphor because whenever Dave thinks of his origins, he comes up almost blank since his mother says so little about his father and the time she spent in Burma.

“I came trotting toward them—my embarrassment blinding me somehow to Mum’s intense self-consciousness: that she’d got here late, she knew next to no one in the great watching circle of her fellow-parents, had no husband of her own to show off and share with them, and thought perhaps, as she shaded her eyes with her hand to look at the game, that she would never have been there at all if it hadn’t been for her son’s exhibition.”

Dave hurriedly approaches his mother and Esme, who are joining him late at a school cricket match. He is struck by a sense of his mother’s isolation, sensing that she feels out of place there. The technique of first-person narration is apparent here since Dave, the narrator, has no direct knowledge of what his mother is thinking and feeling (unless she tells him, which here she does not), so the author inserts the word “perhaps” to maintain the integrity and limitations of the point of view while also allowing Dave an insight into his mother’s likely state of mind.

“They weren’t unlike other holidaymakers […] but the difference was that these two had a foreign-looking child. I wondered sometimes what those others made of us—I was a refugee, perhaps, an orphan being taken to the seaside for a special treat.”

Dave sits on a crowded beach in Devon with his mother and Esme. The two women blend in well with everyone else, but as he does on a number of other occasions, Dave expresses his sense of being different than the people around him, who are, without exception, white. On this occasion, he imagines them to be merely curious rather than actively hostile toward him, perhaps tinged with a kind of sentimental, even patronizing kindliness. On other occasions, he senses more direct Racism and Prejudice in how others regard him.

“Fascist Harris came through, signalling smaller boys out of his way, and stared disdainfully at the lists. I watched his blue eyes and blond forelock reflected in the glass beside me, his look of outrage when he saw he was in Kent and his vengeful grin as he turned away.”

This shows the harshness that Dave has to put up with at Bampton School from bullies like Giles and Harris. Harris is a house captain, so he has some authority over the boys, which he enjoys wielding in a dictatorial manner. Here, he is looking at the list of Field Day groups. Not liking the group he has been assigned to, he reacts with anger, and Dave sees in his facial expression that he is already plotting his revenge.

“It was years since I heard him on the phone, before we lost the precious party line, though I’d thought of him often, and I knew, with a feeling both logical and magical, that it must be him. The beauty of it falling into place was as great as the terrible novelty, the squeeze of danger, of being in his car.”

Dave is hitching a ride home after Field Day, and he recognizes that the man who picks him up, Jeffrey, is the same man he overheard talking salaciously about men and boys on the party line some years previously. In spite of the possibility of danger, Dave is excited by the presence of a man who may well be interested in him—this is the first time this has happened and part of Discovering and Accepting One’s Sexual Orientation. Dave reveals through words like “magical” and “beauty” how much he longs for this kind of connection and the elevated feelings it arouses in him.

“My eyes slid away from the book or the record sleeve to the back of his neck, or dwelt while he talked on his strong hairless forearm and his wristwatch with its webbed leather strap. He wore grey flannels in school, snug round his seat, loose in the front, nothing clearly suggested, though the question, for me, always lurked.”

Dave is closely observing Mr. Hudson, his classical music mentor. He enjoys their regular sharing of classical music recordings in Mr. Hudson’s study. Dave also has erotic thoughts about Mr. Hudson, which are never acted on by either. He nonetheless feels that he and the schoolmaster have a special kind of connection. The fact that Dave offers subtle suggestion rather than overt description of sexual interest indicates perhaps that the thought is too risky or scary for Dave to even form it completely to himself.

“The pretence that they were just two middle-aged friends, a widow and a divorcée, living together for company and convenience, was kept up at first so effectively that I had started to wonder if it was true, and everything that Cousins and Wynans and others at school had gloatingly imagined, and forced me to imagine, was simply a schoolboys’ fantasy.”

Dave is thinking about his mother and Esme, who have just moved in together. He has guessed that there is more to their relationship than meets the eye, but for a moment, he doubts his intuition. Soon, though, he will realize without a doubt that his mother and her friend are in a lesbian relationship, and he adapts well to the new situation. The relationship between the two women forms a stable, long-term backdrop to Dave’s own attempts to form gay relationships, offering a rare model of committed and loving same-gender partnership.

“As for you, you’re a stuck-up little ponce.”

Dave’s uncle Brian speaks angrily to him over the telephone. Brian has called to tell Avril that because she is in a relationship with another woman, she has disgraced the family name and he is cutting her out of their family. The word “ponce” is a British slur from the 1960s, a term of abuse applied to gay men. It reveals what the bigoted Brian has likely always believed about Dave but has not said explicitly up to this point.

“And I saw as if in another room all Mum’s grief and anxiety, and thought perhaps that was the worst thing about it, the crisis for her, who had steered me through everything, somehow, superbly, up till the end of last week.”

Prompted by Esme’s remark that his mother has been upset about Dave’s recent failure at Oxford, Dave thinks about what Avril must be going through. He feels empathy for her and gratitude for how she raised him, which reflects the love between them. The irony is that Dave does not fully communicate with his mother for the next few years as he makes a new life for himself in London; he will later realize this and regret it.

“The words had a physical presence—it was like being high in the garden with Nick himself, words printed on the night, imminent, and so obvious in prospect that you thought you might have said them already.”

Dave has just said outright, to his mother and Esme, that he is gay. It is a significant moment because he has never said anything like this to anyone before. The tension of the moment is almost instantly defused by the generous and accepting response from the two women. Yet he is still reluctant to go into any more detail with them about his sexuality.

“I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I knew that I’d lived my life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.”

Dave is responding to theater director Ray Fairfield, who has just critiqued Dave’s rehearsal of a speech by Edgar in King Lear. Ray wants Dave to draw more from his authentic experience as a “young man with a grievance,” which forces Dave to consider whether that is an apt description of him. His words say a great deal about his personality as well as the contrasting circumstances in which he has lived his life: He has had a privileged education but also faces prejudice because of his racial heritage.

“I realized, not as a flash, but in a slow welling-up of unresolved feelings, formless and confusing but rising into clarity, how cruel—how neglectful, and unkind—I had been to my mother for the past three years, my shame at myself taken out on her.”

Dave is walking with his friend Chris Canvey around Foxleigh. Chris, who is visiting Dave and his family, has just told Dave that Avril and Esme would like to attend some of the plays he is in but think that he does not want them there. As Dave reflects on this, he gradually realizes that he has not been including his mother in his life, and he thinks this is due to the shame he feels over his failure at Oxford.

“‘You have some marvelous things’ […] I said. Of course, I was very aware of being in a homosexual house, objects and pictures more or less eloquent of the fact, a rich anomaly, buried deep in the country.”

Dave is visiting Derry Blundell, an older gay man who had spent many decades involved in the theater who symbolizes one version of a possible future for Dave. The photographs on the walls and other displayed memorabilia, as well as Derry’s stories about the actors and dancers he has known over the years, give Dave an insight into gay people who have come before him in the theater. He is glimpsing a hidden subculture from the past, of which he is also now a part of, in its contemporary setting.

“Hector was electrifying—in a way that can turn the other actor into a stooge, but can also charge him up. My big speech in reply came out as one gathering climax, and when I turned forgivingly at the end…I saw tears in his eyes which I knew weren’t simply a tribute to my skills or the playwright’s. We looked at each other as we might have done after a great argument in real life, and also with a kind of wonder, amorous and half-doubting, at what we had just done together.”

This is the rehearsal in which Dave falls in love with Hector and believes that Hector has fallen in love with him too. It shows the intensity they bring to their theatrical roles, even though Ray Fairfield, the director, criticizes their efforts. In spite of that, Dave realizes that something momentous has taken place between him and Hector in real life, not just in terms of their theatrical scene together. It is one of the novel’s several examples of Dave’s experience of The Ease of Falling in Love—something he often does immediately after meeting a man and still not knowing him well. The intense emotional rush is heady but typically not long-lasting.

“He was full of quietly nursed ambitions, he took nothing for granted and often almost secretly was seriously at work on something.”

Dave shows how carefully and astutely he has studied Hector’s personality and way of life. He is also accurate, having put his finger on how Hector, in spite of discouragements and setbacks, eventually becomes extremely successful as a Hollywood actor. This passage also reveals the contrast in the two men’s characters. Dave is not as ambitious as Hector and does not have his drive to succeed, so although Dave makes a comfortable living and is moderately well-known, his achievements are eventually far surpassed by those of Hector.

“Other people in the shop fell silent, as we came out an old couple sketched a brief courtesy as they swerved aside and glanced back and murmured to each other as they crossed the road. On tour the theatres and the company explained us and licensed us, people paid good money to see us. Here they scowled at us—or anyway three or four of them did, turned and stared and nudged each other: I filtered them out while Hector, I knew, stored them up.”

Hector and Dave are in a gift shop on their short vacation in Devon. Over just a few minutes, they are subject to a number of microaggressions, as people show not-so-subtle resentment to the presence of two gay men of color. Dave and Hector react differently, in keeping with their personalities: Dave is more willing to let things go since there is nothing he can do about them, while Hector broods and remembers every slight. The passage thus adds to the characterization of both characters.

“Mum stood and gazed astonished at what had happened—for the first time in my life, she broke down with me, she turned to me, mouth creased and tears crumbling from her eyes, and allowed me to take charge of her, stoop around her seventy-eight-year-old frame and hold her tight while she shook and gasped with sobbing.”

Esme has died, and Dave’s mother decides to have all the trees on their property cut down as a way of consoling herself regarding her loss—by removing the things that remind her of Esme. However, when the project is completed, it only increases her grief. In a moment, however, she will be her old capable self again, calmly acknowledging how much she misses Esme.

“From the moment I unlocked the door and reached in for the light switch, the stillness in the house was posthumous. It was there, unannounced, and admitted no doubt: the unimagined truth of absence, known in an instant for what it was.”

Dave has just returned to his mother’s empty house after visiting her in the hospital. The house has a death-like feel to it, silently presenting Dave with a premonition of the death of its owner that Dave marks with words like “posthumous” and “absence.” Avril actually lives for another eight months, and yet the house does not lie: The end is close.

“[A] poem by Giles Hadlow, ‘The Old Farmer’, ten lines, simple but touching, the unexpected first showing of a boy’s hand and heart any schoolmaster thrills to, which turned out to be copied, with two small changes, from a poem by Quasimodo in the previous week’s Listener.”

Dave describes the contents of an old issue of The Hive, the Bampton student magazine. It is amusingly presented, leading the reader to think that finally, Dave is going to point out something good about Giles—he wrote a “touching” poem when he was a boy. Then, the sledgehammer falls: The one good thing turns out to be false, an early example of Giles’s lack of ethics and his propensity to cheat. (The Listener was a well-known British magazine that was no doubt easily available in the school library for Giles to copy from.)

“The other boys seem to show that they know I’m there; I feel I’m displayed, as something unusual they have in their lives […] and are almost proud of. But I have no memory of the picture being taken. I found myself wondering, ‘What is the smiling Burmese boy doing there? Am I related to him in some way? What was he thinking?’”

Dave looks at a photograph of himself posing with the rugby team in The Hive, the school magazine. Dave is now 68, so the photo is over 50 years old. Looking back, he is still aware of feeling different, but the long passage of time has given this a positive slant, almost a glow, rather than being something problematic. However, Dave still has not connected with one side of his heritage, and he feels disconnected not only from his teenage self but also from the Burmese background he knows so little about, which has been an issue for him most of his life.

“‘It’s the immigration really. It’s out of control. I’m sorry, Dave,’ he said, as if I were an immigrant myself. ‘I don’t like being bossed around.’”

Dave’s friend, the veteran actor Ted York, explains why he will vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum. He gives expression to what many British people felt. The discussion between Dave, Ted, and two other actors shows how the referendum gripped people’s minds at the time; the debate revolved primarily around issues of immigration, with the pro-leave side stoking nativist fears. Unlike Ted, Dave votes to “remain,” and he is devastated when he hears the result the following morning.