In this extract from early in Our Evenings, the narrator Dave Win recalls a seaside holiday in the summer of 1962, when he was 14 years old. Dave and his mother, Avril, a dressmaker, live in a small Berkshire market town, and in previous summers they have always gone for a miserable week in Clevedon with his aunt and uncle; but this year they have been taken up by Avril’s new customer, the forceful Mrs Esme Croft, who has swept them off for 10 days in the north Devon resort of Friscombe. Dave has never met his father, a Burmese official with whom his mother had a brief affair when she worked as a secretary to the British governor in Rangoon in 1947. The onset of puberty has coincided with his winning a scholarship to a small local public school, where for the first time he is violently bullied for his appearance. A new self-consciousness combines with the hormonal turbulence of his intense feeling for other boys and men. The Friscombe holiday provides a sequence of sexual excitements and intimations – not all of them clearly understood by Dave himself. The well-to-do divorcee Mrs Croft has her own plans, and the town, the beach, and the hotel itself provide further temptations and surprises. Back home, the Wins’ telephone shares a party line with a man they have never met, but from whose overheard conversations Dave picks up a first speculative awareness of adult gay lives being led in close proximity to his own. All these questions, of race and sexuality, which will shape his whole future, are freshly in the air during this adolescent episode. Alan Hollinghurst In the dining room we had a table in the window, something else it seemed Esme insisted on. That first night on holiday I felt a prey to waiters, all settled into their parts in a way I wasn’t; it was raw contact dressed up with rigmarole and an allowance of charm they could easily withhold. As new arrivals we were greeted by Terence the head waiter, a tall lean-faced Yorkshireman in a black jacket who clearly enjoyed the unexpected effect of his voice and his humour in the soft Devon setting. We watched him at work on the next table, telling an elderly couple what to order and writing it down left-handed, his paw curled round the pad. In a minute he was back, at the window table. “Good evening, ladies!” he said, in a carrying tone. “Ah, yes, good evening,” said Esme, “now, I’d like – ” “Welcome to Friscombe, welcome to the Cliff hotel” – passing them small blue-bound menus, and smiling thinly at them. The third menu was tucked under his arm, and it was only after Esme had asked for a gin and tonic that his head jerked back and with a quick glance at the women, as if they were all in on the joke, “And who do we have here?” Mum looked up with a frown, but also, in the forcefield of a joker, a quick regretted laugh. “This is my son, David.” Terence’s head went back a fraction further. His shock was disguised in a quick-thinking silence of four or five seconds, as he stared out of the window. Then he leant in confidentially – “Let me know if he gives you any trouble, madam, won’t you,” he said, and grinned at his own mischief and pinched the smooth back of my neck quite hard. “And I’ll have a gin and tonic too,” Mum said. When he’d gone Esme sat gazing round at the room with a complicated expression, as the one who had picked this hotel, and wasn’t yet ready to confront its failings. Besides Terence, who barely spoke to us again, there were two staff, a waiter and a waitress, who over the week and a half of our stay came to colour and unsettle our lives, and not only at mealtimes. There was the Irish girl, Maureen, in a self-absorbed daze about doing things right, who made a dozen shy journeys from the sideboard to the tables, each time bearing a single item – a fish knife, a forgotten napkin, a pat of butter. Her procedure seemed to match the tempo of the kitchen, a semi-deliberate way of filling the long gap between ordering and serving. The wait for the starter felt the longest, measured out by Maureen’s well-meaning walks back and forth across the room and questions about who was having the soup. At last there came a point when the setting was complete, we had all the right cutlery, our bread roll and our water, in fact we’d eaten our bread roll some time ago and Esme was on to a second gin and tonic, and Maureen would stand in hesitant triumph by the table and enumerate the things she’d amassed on it. “You’ve got your knife, you’ve got your fork, you’ve got your other knife … ” until her climactic phrase, “You’ve got everything except your meal!” At which Esme, with unusual sweetness, would say, “You’re absolutely right, dear.” On the beach in high summer with the light behind me I was nearly a copper-tanned white boy – I felt less exposed wearing next to nothing Esme said Maureen was a “sweet little homesick thing”, and followed her movements indulgently when the melon and two bowls of cream of celery soup were finally brought to the table. The evening sun streamed through the big window, and while Maureen was serving I gazed at the figure who passed from the shadow through its horizontal brilliance as he moved round the tables on the far side of the room. This was Marco, “from Bari”, “19”, “first time in England” – I picked up the facts from just-heard questions at other tables. Marco, here in the room, in and out of the shadows, back and forth through the swing doors of the kitchen, working in the section furthest from us, though sometimes he came over if called to a nearby table, or helped Maureen with the plates for a large serving. The food wasn’t at all what Marco was used to, and I noted the ways in which he wasn’t quite as charming as the guests expected. He answered pleasantly each time he was asked where he came from and how long he was here for, but he didn’t lay it on. Esme liked a stroll after dinner, just to clear the head, and when we came back to the hotel the dining room could be seen through the large seaward window, empty and brightly lit, and Marco, tie off and sleeves rolled up, setting places for breakfast, while Maureen ran the Hoover in and out under the tables and got in his way. There was something illusionless in the scene, stage-hands at work now the audience had left. Once when we came in from behind the hotel, Marco was standing by the lattice fence that screened the kitchen door, smoking a cigarette, I nodded bravely to him, he raised his head and half smiled as he blew out smoke, and the question of what he did and where he went when he wasn’t working seemed to hang in the night air. By the third day at the Cliff I could tell if Marco was present, even with my back to the room. The pitch of his voice, glancing light of his accent on English words, wove itself through the air, and the air itself had the shimmer of his presence as he moved behind us – then a neutral feeling, of interest removed, till the waft of the kitchen door and his tart little laugh brought him back in range. For a long stretch of every day we were on the beach, with the two light folding chairs, in different stripes, and the useful groundsheet that Esme had brought. Esme was fair-skinned, and got Mum to rub cream methodically into her shoulders and the white scoop of her back left bare by her swimsuit. Sometimes I saw to Mum myself, sometimes Esme said, “Let me do that.” Mum was a strong swimmer, quick as a knife, and was soon off past the rocks and out of sight. Esme strolled into the sea as if looking for something else, fell forward and shoved around with her head held up high. When I swam by myself I left them in their chairs, or Mum stretched out perhaps at Esme’s feet, and ran off towards the waves in the lick of windy sunlight embracing and exploring my bare body. On the beach in high summer with the light behind me I was nearly a copper-tanned white boy – I felt less exposed wearing next to nothing, just my cherry-red trunks with white stripes down the hips. One day we went to Combe Martin, another to Croyde, with its hard ribs of sand at low tide, and breeze-ruffled ribbons of clear water waiting between them. There were beaches all around, each with its promise of new men to look at and the pang of missing Ollie and the others at the beach we already knew. Did the women catch even a hint of this? I dissembled by instinct. When I swam by myself and came back up the beach, panting, heart racing with a new sense of power, I kicked past other nearly naked boys and men, in their family groups, glimpses keen and keepable as snapshots, and sometimes they glanced round too, unthinkingly curious as to who I was with, how I fitted in. I jogged up to Mum and Esme, in their low chairs. Mum shaded her eyes to look at me, and we chatted, all three, as I wrapped a towel round me and looked down on them, Esme large, white and firm in her red-skirted bathing suit, Mum more exposed in her black one-piece, a smaller and leaner woman. There was scope for embarrassment for a teenage boy at the sight of their unsupported bosoms and bare thighs – something I sensed that I ought to feel and, fleetingly, did. They weren’t unlike other holidaymakers, several women in pairs or trios paddling together or sharing a table in the hotel dining room, 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. Esme brought the Telegraph to the beach, and worked at the crossword, clicking her Biro while she thought. Sometimes Mum leaned over with a dim smile, and Esme let her see the corner she was stuck with. After some hesitation Mum would say, “Not WOMBAT … ? No … ” and Esme would stare and then write it in. Each day one of the clues was a quotation with a word missing, and these Esme read out loudly and slowly, as if speaking to a Frenchman. “‘In the south suburbs at the is best to lodge’ (Twelfth Night). Eight.” “At the Elephant!” I said, and she raised an eyebrow and wrote it in. The next day I was keyed up about the quotation – but it turned out to be from Paradise Lost, which we hadn’t done yet, and I let us all down. When the puzzle was finished, more or less, she turned to the share prices listed in tiny print at the back of the paper. “How are my Town and Country doing today?” she would say, and pull a face when she found the entry and its plus or minus figure. She also had shares in something called Malahide, which were on the up and up. “They seem very strong, Dave,” she said, “but it was a tip from Gilbert, so I don’t wholly trust them.” “You could always sell them,” said Mum, bored by Esme moaning about money when she seemed to have so much of it. “Well, I could,” said Esme, and gazed forgivingly towards the sea. A minute later, “A pretty little thing,” she said, with a nod to draw Mum’s attention to a woman settling further down the beach. “Mm … ” said Mum, in the bland screened tone she had at times with Esme. “Though the husband looks rather a brute.” It was the beautiful husband I’d been watching already, as he changed under a towel, very deftly, just a glimpse of bare bum, and then knotting the drawstring of his tight blue trunks, and now I peered at him strictly, as if weighing up what Esme had said. The man trotted down to the water’s edge while the pretty wife folded his clothes and put on a hat. There was an odd sharing or not sharing of talk between the three of us on the beach – me and Mum, Mum and Esme, sometimes Esme and me, rarely all three of us. I lay sunbathing, on my back then on my front, with Washington Square, which I wasn’t really taking in. Esme chatted, in her forthright fashion, and Mum, sitting back in a stupor with her eyes closed, smiled distantly, and murmured in a way that seemed both intimate and evasive, as if conscious that I could hear. “Did I say I had a letter from Bobs?” Esme said. “Mm …no, you didn’t,” said Mum, with a pinch of a smile on her upturned face: “How is she?” Esme sighed. “Well, I don’t think it’s been easy for the old sausage. That house in Fulham takes a great deal of work.” “Yes, it’s a large house, isn’t it.” “And you remember Betty Matthews, dark little thing, reminds me just a tiny bit of you.” “Did I meet her?” “She was at Bobs’s party that night.” “There were so many people there, weren’t there …” Mum said, and then, “Oh, yes, of course!” in a tone of such certainty that I knew she couldn’t remember this woman at all, but didn’t want Esme to describe her further: “Yes, Betty.” At which point, turning over, I said, “I didn’t know you’d been up to London, Mum” – and she opened her eyes and looked at me with a slight concern. “I’m sure I told you,” she said. I was teasing her, wounded a little by the fact she’d kept it secret. Esme had a disconcerted frown, as if sensing she’d put her foot in it but not exactly knowing how. “Well, it was some time ago, wasn’t it,” she said, “I mean when was it, back in May probably.” “No, you didn’t tell me,” I said, “I’d have remembered.” Mum sat up then and smiled at me in a private way that seemed to call on some family understanding, and need for tact. Esme said, “Do you care for London, Dave?” “Well, I’ve only been a couple of times,” I said; “We went to the National Gallery.” This set Esme off. “Do you remember what Betty said that time – when she got back from London and Derek said, ‘Well, where did you go? Harrods? Or the National Gallery?’ And she said, ‘Oh, Derek … you can’t expect me to remember things like that!’” “Anyway,” Mum said, teasing me in turn, sitting back and closing her eyes again, “I don’t have to tell you everything I do.” “Of course,” said Esme, “we all knew where she had been. Poor Derek … ” A little later, when Mum had gone into the sea, I said, “Do you have a party line, Esme?” “For the telephone, you mean? Oh, no, Dave, no – can’t stand the things. The number of times I’ve tried to ring your mother and there’s been these other people on the line – I don’t know how she puts up with it.” “Do you know who they are, then?” I said. “Some man in the town, isn’t it – I think your mother knows. He seems to spend half his life blathering on the phone. Probably someone we see all the time without realising it.” “Yes, I wonder if it is,” I said, and rolled over and gazed out to sea, with the bright floating thought that I could find out who Lovey was, and beyond it the other, not really surprising, disclosure that Esme was always on the phone to Mum. “You still haven’t told me about Burma,” said Esme, at dinner that night, “not really.” It was about halfway through the holiday. Mum shook her head and looked down, “No … well,” she said. “I suppose you weren’t there all that long.” “No, I wasn’t.” “Sort of how long?” said Esme, distracted briefly by signalling to Maureen with her wine glass. Mum sighed, reluctance half-disguised as thought. “Well, less than a year, you see.” “You were a secretary, I think you said … or perhaps something more?” Esme narrowed her eyes at me, as if we were colluding in dragging secrets out of her; though to me, to Mum as well, it was one of those alarming occasions when an outsider saunters unawares into a subject very rarely mentioned at home. At passing moments Burma was allowed to be beauty and adventure, but mostly it was an avoided subject. “Do you think your mother was a spy?” Esme said. “Mm, I expect so,” I said. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is published by Picador (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com