Our Evenings

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, racism, antigay bias, and bullying.

“I was flat on my front in the stony grass, the wind knocked out of me, a burning pain in my left arm, and Giles on top of me, fumbling for my right arm and pulling it back.”

Dave and Giles are playing war games in the Berkshire Downs, but Giles is a bully and is far too aggressive for Dave. This gives a vivid snapshot of their relationship as boys and sets up the ongoing contrast between them that appears many times in the novel. As they make their way in life, they are guided by very different principles and ways of relating to others.

“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.