He had fallen in love with Hugo Alexander Timothy Cartwright the moment he laid eyes on him, when, as one of a string of five new arrivals, the boy had trickled into evening hall the first night of Adrian's second year.
Heydon-Bayley had nudged him.
"What do you reckon, Healey? Lush, or what?"
For once Adrian had remained silent. Something was terribly wrong.
It had taken him two painful terms to identify the symptoms. He looked them up in all the major textbooks. There was no doubt about it. All the authorities concurred: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Ovid, Keats, Georgette Heyer, Milton, they were of one opinion. It was love. The Big One.
Cartwright of the sapphire eyes and golden hair, Cartwright of the Limbs and Lips: he was Petrach's Laura, Milton's Lycidas, Catullu's Lesbia, Tennyson's Hallam, Shakespeare's fair boy and dark lady, the moon's Endymion. He was Garbo's salary, the national gallery, he was cellophane: he was the tender trap, the blank, unholy surprise of it all and the bright golden haze on the meadow: he was honey-honey, sugar-sugar, chirpy chirpy cheep-cheep and his baby-love: the voice of the turtle could be heard in the land, there were angels dining at the Ritz and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.
Adrian had managed to coax Cartwright into an amusing half-hour in the House lavs two terms previously, be he had never doubted he could get the trousers down: that wasn't it. He wanted something more from him than the few spasms of pleasure that the limited activities of rubbing and licking and heaving and pushing could offer.
He wasn't sure what the thing was that he yearned for, but one thing he did know. It was less acceptable to love, to ache for eternal companionship, than it was to bounce and slurp and gasp behind the fives courts. Love was Adrian's guilty secret, sex his public pride.