The Sparsholt Affair

8

‘You’re not a bad driver,’ said Ivan.

‘Oh, thanks very much!’ said Johnny, and wondered mildly why it had taken him two hours to say so.

‘I should really learn to drive.’

‘I’ll teach you if you like . . .’ – Johnny put his foot down as he shifted into the outside lane, and was aware of Ivan glancing at the speedometer.

‘It can’t be all that difficult,’ he said.

‘You mean, if I can do it?’

‘No, silly’ – Ivan tutted and twitched back his fringe as he looked away.

‘It’s best to start when you’re young, obviously.’

‘No time to lose, then.’

‘Ha, ha. I mean, I was driving when I was about fourteen.’

Ivan thought and said, ‘Did your father teach you, I suppose?’

‘He certainly did.’

‘But how could you drive when you were fourteen?’

‘Dad had permission to go on this old aerodrome near us, you could do what you liked.’

‘You were lucky, then,’ said Ivan, in a tone Johnny’d noted before – of pathos about his own father mixed with hidden curiosity about Johnny’s. ‘I expect your dad’s a fantastic driver.’

‘For god’s sake. He was a fighter pilot, wasn’t he,’ said Johnny and not wanting the questions about him to start up again he pressed the black knob of the radio, turned it up. It was something he felt at once that he knew, massive, thickly scored, aerated by the wireless’s warbles of distance and dense crunches of distortion. He edged the tuning dial very slightly into someone talking, and back more slightly still, and it focused and held for ten seconds, a quiet passage, hard to hear through the racket of the engine, Johnny pushing his head forward, staring down the fast lane as if at the not quite catchable name of the piece. Prokofiev . . . but he wanted to get it right, in front of Ivan. Now the heavy brass came tramping back, with battering timps and a bass drum too that jammed into a rattling fuzz of sound. He turned it down. And again it cleared, as they cleared the brow of a hill, the march stamped gleefully through to its slamming end, and applause burst out, fuzzy washes of sound, the ineffably judged pause before the announcer said, ‘The Sixth Symphony by Sergei—’

‘Prokofiev,’ said Johnny, a fraction of a second before she did, ‘yes.’

Ivan looked up from the map and said, ‘Now, when we’ve crossed the Severn Bridge, we keep straight on till the motorway turns into the A48.’

‘Just tell me when to go right or left,’ said Johnny, and twiddled the volume right down so that the talk and then the music that followed could be barely made out amid the roar of the road and the thunder and whine of the overtaking traffic.

‘Ah, there it is . . .’ – over a crest in the road, the two towers, the low arc of the roadway, at an angle and foreshortened, the two white arcs descending to kiss it, a haze of rain on the river and the Welsh shore. ‘Isn’t it beautiful.’ He felt Ivan took some pride in it: he looked up from the map, but said nothing. As they approached, it was as if a sketch resolved into a monument, sublime in its abstract absence of scale; then they came closer still and it rose and settled into place and detail. A minute later there was the swerve of freedom, half a dozen lanes, before the dark traps of the tollbooths. ‘Have you got 30p?’

Ivan groped in a pocket. ‘I’m not sure I have.’

‘Look in the glovebox, Auntie Kitty usually has some change in there.’ He slowed, joined a queue, wound his window right down. There was something to Johnny’s eye quite new as they came in under the canopy, a flash of light against shadow as if a photo had been taken, when the woman in her cabin looked down into the car and saw them together, Ivan beyond him, peering across as he offered the coins with an up-stretched arm. They were a couple, travelling. And then, doubted still for the second or two before it happened, the barrier flicked upwards and rocked where it stopped in the air, in a passing salute.

When they were on the bridge there was no stopping, and the two rows of fences screened off the view of the river, the high-loaded ship that was sliding beneath. The rhythmical pulse of the air through the open window smelt of the sea. After the great bridge was the smaller unheralded bridge, over the Wye – and ten seconds later they were back on land. ‘Welcome to Wales,’ said Ivan.

‘Thank you,’ said Johnny, and laid his left hand on Ivan’s knee.

Ivan shifted. ‘Do you want one of your auntie’s sweets?’

‘Yes, please.’ Ivan eased off the lid of the tin, in which chipped and sugared tablets, orange, yellow and lime-green, had fused long ago in a crystallized lump. ‘Can I have orange?’

‘You’ll have what you’re given,’ said Ivan, prising off a fragment, and when Johnny kept his hands on the wheel, pushing the sharp sticky lump into his mouth, which Johnny pretended to resist, and licked Ivan’s finger as well as the sweet. ‘You’ve got sugar on your chin,’ said Ivan; but this Johnny had to wipe off himself.

Twenty miles later the motorway ended, and they were on their own, and within half an hour on hilly roads almost deserted. Now the bluster of the wind in the car had a local softness and smell, freshened to a nice chill when they went fast, then slowing into warmth at a crossroads or a steep bend. They passed through villages and small towns with their chapels and shut houses and not much to look at. Sometimes a farm in the middle distance, in its shelter of old oaks, caught Johnny’s eye. ‘I can’t wait to see West Tarr,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Ivan, ‘I hope you like it.’

Johnny said, ‘As a Peter Orban fan . . .’ and smiled at him, picturing the house from a small grey photograph, a thin glass-fronted box on a bushy slope; if nothing happened between them he would have to make the most of the building. He was nervously optimistic – the weekend was Ivan’s idea, he was purposeful but mysterious. And at least in a Welsh valley, miles from anywhere, he probably wasn’t going to slip off with someone else, as it now seemed clear he had done from the Solly.

Ivan was the host, with a necessary belief in the treat he was offering, and with something new in his tone, once the name of the nearest town appeared on the signposts: a furtive evasion of responsibility. ‘Of course I don’t know what it’s like now, Jonathan. As I told you, no one’s been there for two years, at least.’

‘But someone keeps an eye on it.’

‘Sort of. It’s very hidden away.’

‘Mm, I like the sound of that,’ Johnny warming the talk when he could.

Ivan said, ‘Of course you like modern things.’

‘Don’t you?’ said Johnny.

They couldn’t see the sea but there was a sense of it in the sky above the long bare hill, a freshness, a deflected lustre. The lane turned back from it, dropped slowly then steeply into the sheltered valley, there were a dozen grey cottages, a chapel, tiny, tin-roofed, and then the messy gateway to a farm, ruts strewn with hay. The broad fields above had just been mown. ‘It’s after the farm,’ said Ivan, ‘if I remember correctly.’ They passed an overgrown gate. ‘I think that’s it.’

Johnny backed up, pulled in and let him get out – watched him walk down the short incline in front of the car, small, neat, urban against the unpeopled landscape. It was a light five-barred field gate, aluminium, tall nettles round the posts. Along the verge, and on the far side of the low broken wall, cow parsley held up its tilting crowns. Ivan was fiddling with the padlock. He was a puzzle, a stranger, grey flannels, Viyella shirt, no tie at least today, but a jacket on the back seat with everything checked in the pockets before they left: wallet, address book, fountain pen. At the petrol station near Chippenham, the pub where they’d had lunch, he had seemed embarrassed by Johnny’s threadbare jeans, and the way people looked at his hair. Now he turned, and beamed, lifted and thrust the gate wide, and Johnny smiled back and let his foot off the brake.

The way down to the house had a high bank on the left, and a view through a hedge across the valley on the right. Clearly it was used, once in a while, by farm machinery, a tractor and trailer – the tyre-gouged ruts held long shallow puddles. Johnny was anxious about his aunt’s Renault; anxious too that it should do the job. He smirked guiltily as they dropped and jolted, brambles tearing vainly at the doors, wild flowers thrusting their heads through the open window and then rearing back. The Calor gas canister thumped in the boot. Round a bend the track swung to the right into a field, ignoring the second gate, straight in front of them; beyond which Johnny saw no more than a pale horizontal, a gleam of glass among leaves, and felt, as he had all his life, the pull of any unknown building, and the odd but essential twist of fear in his need to look at it.

The door was at the side, the narrow end of the box. Johnny stood with the bags, shifting between concern about the blocked gutter and strip of white trim hanging off and a guest’s pretence of being happy with everything. Ivan had a further key, a tatty label attached to the key ring, ‘West Tarr’, in rusted ink, a glimpse, as he pushed it into the lock, of the habits of the Goyles, who had come here thirty-five years ago. ‘Are there any paintings by Stanley here?’ said Johnny.

‘Not paintings, I don’t think. There are some of his things – you’ll see.’ Ivan struggled with the key, there was a moment’s smiled-through doubt about it, and then they were in.

In the dark lobby Johnny felt at home, for all the mystery of that first minute, of closed curtains, half-seen objects, the stored and pickled smell of winter damp and baking sun. Hard to know now, in the small kitchen, with bathroom beyond, if it was warm or chilly. Ivan went ahead into a larger room, pulled back one floor-length curtain, then another, the sunshine fell instantly at an angle on low tables and a sofa which kept for a few seconds a look of intimate surprise. It was the living room, and behind a folding wall the studio, two easels, a high window looking the other way. Ivan turned a key, reached for a sliding bolt, pushed open a tall glass door and stepped out, as if his first impulse on being here again was to leave. Johnny followed him, more slowly, smiling, fingers on the metal frame, the tapered wing of the steel handle. He turned, stood, put his arm through Ivan’s in thanks and encouragement, but said nothing as he took it in. It was a small house, and the whole point was its simplicity, as he’d known it would be, the very act of construction tempered by a longing to have next to nothing. Not much money, according to Iffy, a house for one artist built by another, both fired up with ideas about space, form, economy, something mystical as well as technical in Orban’s soul. For Johnny the sense of being home was partly a feeling of being back at Hoole, where all these precepts still filled the air. Here a platform had been built, bedded into the hillside at the back and projecting in a broad deck at the front. The whole front of the house was glass, gazing out across the valley to the last ridge of hills that hid the sea. He craned over his shoulder at the edge of the deck, a drop of six feet into nettles and grass; then looked back at the house, the trees pushing round, grass and a small bush in the choked guttering, the sun-bleached and damp-stained linings of the curtains against the glass. He said, ‘I love it!’ and squeezed Ivan’s arm.

‘Was your college like this?’ said Ivan, as they went back in.

‘We had the same sort of windows,’ said Johnny, making do with a detail, and caught in an unshareable memory—

‘Leaky ones, you mean . . . ?’— Ivan scuffed his shoe-tip over the swollen and blistered sill.

‘Well, they could be.’

‘I just can’t imagine living here, can you?’

It was something Johnny was imagining so vividly that he laughed. ‘I think it’s got everything I need,’ he said, thinking really it would need Ivan too. He knew the hard square armchairs were an Orban design, and in the sagging bookshelves on the far side of the room he recognized three or four of the spines, bold lettering on torn jackets, Henry Moore, Mondrian, Kandinsky, old books on modern art. Ivan searched for a moment and pulled out a smaller book, wide-format, and passed it to him: ‘Did you read this, I expect?’

‘What is it?’

‘Evert’s little monograph on Stanley.’

‘Oh . . . yes . . . interesting,’ turning a few pages, ‘I mean no, not yet.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Ivan, crossing towards a further door. ‘Well, have a look at it.’

‘I will . . .’

‘It’s very good indeed.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Johnny, sensing there was a line about Stanley and that he must be careful. He stood looking at the small sameish colour plates for a minute, then put the book down and went after Ivan, who was pulling back the curtains in the room beyond.

There was the main bedroom, which had a low double bed covered by a yellow counterpane but with no sheets underneath – long unused but still with the indefinable presence of a bed a particular couple had occupied for years, its confidence and privacy. And in a windowless room behind there was a narrow single bed, with boxes stacked on it, cardboard soft and bulging, books dropping from the bottom of one as Ivan lifted it and quickly put it down, brown bowls and plates and pitted chrome candlesticks in the other, which Johnny looked at distractedly as the unnamed but undenied likelihood came clear: they would be sleeping together. Ivan went out to turn on the water and electricity, while Johnny picked up the bags and came back alone into the main bedroom. Vacant, cross-lit by the three o’clock sun, the bed was a stage, floating in shadow. The truth was he had never spent the night in a double bed. They had come with four single sheets and Kitty’s electric blanket, and he spread them out under the cover, and plugged the blanket in; nothing, then the little red light came on. On the wall above the near bedside table hung a small woodcut: a naked man and woman, Adam and Eve, rough and darkly inked, the man heavy-hung, the woman heavy-breasted. Johnny sat down on the hard edge of the mattress, the Goyles just out of view but present, as a challenge and perhaps a reproach.

To make tea they had to link up the Calor-gas cylinder to the stove, and give the lime-scaled kettle a good clean-out. Johnny liked these tasks, playing house with Ivan, a hand on his back as they passed in the narrow space between sink and table. ‘I’ll make a fire later if you like, dry the place out a bit.’ He felt one eagerness merge and take cover in another.

‘Oh, if you like,’ said Ivan. ‘Or I can do it.’

‘I’m just going to look in the studio.’

He found there were paintings, six or seven oil sketches stacked in the corner, unframed and possibly unfinished, in Goyle’s later minimal style; they looked feeble to Johnny, routine startings going nowhere. He felt but of course didn’t say that there was something depressing in general about the way Goyle repeated himself, to the point of monotony; perhaps to him each new work had been an adventure, but to the casual eye he appeared to be stuck in a rut. In a cupboard in the lobby, smelling of old macs and boots, there was a folder of drawings on an upper shelf. ‘I found these,’ he said, taking them into the kitchen, where Ivan was pouring boiling water into a brown-glazed teapot.

‘It was always said,’ said Ivan, as if from a vantage point much later in life than twenty-three, ‘that Stanley couldn’t draw at all. He said himself that when he got into the Slade he couldn’t draw for toffee, but the professor there was very sympathetic and said, “Don’t worry about it, young man – just get on with painting” – he saw he had a gift.’

‘Yes,’ said Johnny, who could see that Stanley had thought in paint, not in line, there was nothing graphic at all to his slabs of slate colour and dull green and his grey-black sea. He remembered the small landscape, almost an abstract, that Cyril had cleaned and which had introduced him to Evert and to Ivan himself. Without that little painting he wouldn’t be here now.

They sat down side by side with their tea to go through the folder of drawings. ‘I don’t know, they look all right to me. What do you think of them?’ said Ivan. Johnny turned over the dog-eared sheets of cartridge paper, faintly damp and spotted here and there with mildew; the sketches seemed to him perfectly competent, and more varied than the paintings: details of walls, fallen trees, the tin-roofed chapel they’d passed in the village. Tucked in underneath them were three studies of a middle-aged woman in the nude. ‘Oh, my god, it’s Auntie Jen,’ said Ivan, ‘ – sorry, I wasn’t expecting to see that.’ He giggled and covered his mouth. And there was something funny in the contrast of Auntie Jen’s large-breasted figure and her tightly permed sharp-featured head. She wasn’t a nude model, such as Johnny had got used to studying at Hoole; she was a housewife who’d taken her clothes off in the middle of the day. She sat with thighs stoutly apart, and a worried look, as if she’d just remembered something in the oven.

‘He was a randy old goat,’ said Ivan. ‘You know he wrote these poems about her that caused a bit of a stir locally. There was a famous one that began, I come to you, loins bared.’ They both laughed, Johnny gazed at him and thought, wouldn’t it be best to kiss him now, put an arm round him, get the whole thing going?

But there were jobs to do, a start on jobs that could have gone on all weekend. They swept up, hundreds of dead flies, two dead mice, had a go at dusting, the dusters themselves worn through. There was a Ewbank which Ivan pushed squeaking over the three faded Indian rugs. Johnny did the bathroom (narrow, toplit, ingenious), the first water hoarse and rusty from the taps. He went out and picked heads of cow parsley from the bank beyond the house and set them in two earthenware pots on the dining table. It was a pleasure in itself, with a feel of preliminary ritual. ‘They’re not really indoor flowers, are they,’ said Ivan.

‘I like them, I’m going to draw them,’ said Johnny. At which Ivan raised his eyebrows and said he would make supper tonight. Johnny politely held back, opened the bottle of Noilly Prat that Kitty had given him, and wandered off with the thick green tumbler in his hand, to look at things – the magic of the house and the lift of the drink offset the tension of the long summer evening.

Johnny held his nerve when they went into the bedroom. Ivan saw him take his shirt off, a moment’s appraisal as if thinking of something else, then he went out again to clean his teeth. Johnny rolled the band from his wrist and tied his hair back, pulled off his jeans and socks, and slipped in under the sheet and the yellow bedcover, an old waxy smell re-awoken by the blanket beneath. He found the hot oblong in the centre of the bed, his feet in the cold damp margin. Then he got out quickly to turn off the overhead light – just the lamp on the bedside table: he didn’t mind which side he slept, he knew couples had their habits, one side with a small accepted deference to the other, his father, getting up early, nearer the door. Here the person with control of the lamp would perhaps be in charge. In his bag he had some KY jelly, used till now only to practise, breathless tension and yielding to his own fingers, which went only so far: he hid the tube just in reach under the edge of the bed. Ivan came back with a glass of water and a book. Johnny didn’t watch him getting undressed, but saw him lift the cover and slide in beside him, in his vest and his string pants. ‘Ooh . . .’ said Ivan, nudging into the warm centre, where Johnny lay facing him. He sat up with the sheet pulled over his chest, opened the book and uncapped his pen; he wrote something, underlined it, and sat biting his cheek. ‘I hope you’re not a light sleeper,’ he said.

‘I can sleep when I have to,’ said Johnny, edging over and with a small yawn raising his knee over Ivan’s left leg and sliding a hand round his stomach.

Ivan shook his fringe out of his eyes as he wrote. ‘You must be tired after all that driving, aren’t you?’

‘Mm? Not really,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m quite drunk, though . . .’

‘You drink too much,’ said Ivan, and turned the page with a nod. He wrote fast and vigorously, little rocking and circling movements passing up his arm into his body.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What do you think?’ said Ivan.

‘It must be very important,’ Johnny said, ‘if you have to do it now,’ wriggling his fingers in under the hem of Ivan’s vest.

‘I’m writing my diary. It has to be done every day.’

Johnny worked his hand up over the silky warmth of his stomach, touched his soft right nipple. ‘The day’s not over yet.’

‘If you don’t write it down before you go to sleep you forget it,’ said Ivan.

This didn’t sound very flattering. ‘So what are you saying about me?’

‘Well, it’s private, obviously.’

Johnny raised his head, watched him squint at the page in the lamp-light, amused or annoyed. He pushed himself up, kissed Ivan’s neck and nuzzled under his chin, getting in the way. He let his hard-on make his case, pushing out at the waistband of his pants as he rolled half on top of him. ‘Please . . . !’ said Ivan, but he put the book aside, turned away for a moment for a drink of water, while Johnny in a trance of boldness groped in his pants, plump, semi-hard – then Ivan stretched up and switched off the lamp. ‘That’s better,’ he said, snuggling back beside Johnny, who felt for him again, unaligned and with no idea in the sudden blackness of where Ivan was looking or what face he was making.

He woke early, 5.20 on his travel clock, the curtains light but the sun still behind the hills. Ivan was hunched away from him and also touching him, buttocks against his hip, a hard heel pressing his calf. Johnny shifted carefully, looked at what he could see of him in the dawn shadows, his shoulders, the back of his neck, the pale swoop of his vest. Rising on an elbow he took in the turned-away profile, soft but heavy in sleep, unwaking for minute after minute; the dark hair squashed up by the pillow where he’d pulled it round for comfort. Johnny dropped back, shifted so that only their bottoms touched, his boldly naked, Ivan at some unnoticed point back in his pants. He couldn’t decide what had happened. He had spent the night with him, an achievement, nudging, turning and settling; but they hadn’t had sex, not as Johnny thought of it and wanted it, and this was a failure – or it had the makings of one, after five months of waiting. Now the day after was beginning, and he felt tenuous, a stranger here, in the bedroom, the bed, of the copulating Goyles.

Ivan putting out the light – he felt it more than he should have done, like a small but lingering insult to his interest as a lover. Between their sighs and giggles, Ivan saying things, all the squirming round, big kisses sought and then half-avoided, he’d thought keenly of his hour in bed with Colin, its unstoppable, nearly speechless logic. Colin was totally a lights-on person, he loved seeing just what he was doing to you; and it was thinking of all that, in the teeming darkness, that had transformed him and made him fierce with Ivan, though he knew within seconds that he wasn’t happy. ‘Let’s just play around a bit,’ said Ivan, ‘you know.’ A few moments later he realized Ivan had come.

*

‘The sea tumbling in harness,’ said Ivan, very Welsh, looking out with the wind in his hair at the breakers rolling in far below.

‘What’s that?’ said Johnny; he locked the car, and felt, by this second day, used to it, and even possessive.

‘Oh, it’s just a line from a Dylan Thomas poem,’ said Ivan.

‘Which one?’ said Johnny. ‘I love Dylan Thomas.’

Ivan gave him a quick doubting look. ‘Let’s go down,’ he said.

The coast seemed to be all rocks and cliffs, except this one place tucked between two headlands, where a narrow white beach curved away for a sheltered quarter-mile. One other car was parked in the scooped-out parking place above; beyond it, a gap in the hedge and a rough path disappearing. A stream drained down through a little wood, the rocky path beside it, a stile at the bottom, and then the sand and breaking waves. The lone couple at the far end stared at the two boys – the woman had been swimming topless and wrapped a towel round herself as she came up to join the man, who lay reading on his front, half-hidden by a canvas bag, his hairy bottom naked to the sun. They were in their fifties perhaps, and to Johnny there was nothing exciting in the rare glimpse of nudity; though Ivan let out a disappointed ‘Hmmm’ when the man, who had ignored the woman’s promptings, at last sat up and pulled on a pair of loose blue shorts.

‘We should swim naked too,’ said Johnny.

‘Well, you can,’ said Ivan.

‘We’ll have to,’ said Johnny, ‘we haven’t got our things.’

‘I mean I can’t swim,’ said Ivan; and it was clear from his faint smile at the horizon that he didn’t like admitting this, and was hoping to suggest that swimming was a pointless activity anyway.

Johnny looked at him quizzically. ‘So what would you do, if I swam out round those rocks and suddenly got into trouble? You’d just sit here and watch, I suppose.’

‘Of course not,’ said Ivan; and after a pause, ‘I’d get that man over there involved’ – and he glanced again along the beach to the plump figure treading down to the sea’s edge, his chest hair all the whiter on his sun-browned body.

Ivan’s joke was a kind of intimacy, though something within it was not. Johnny scuffed off his sandals, and pulled his shirt over his head, his hair falling on his bare shoulders. There was an image, lurking and folding in the tumble of the sea: the hour on a Cornish beach a long eight years ago, when Bastien held his eye and grinned and thought of someone else.

‘Are you going in, then?’ said Ivan.

Johnny said, ‘I’ll just soak up some rays,’ and lay back on his elbows on the warm fine sand.

‘OK . . . well . . .’ – and Ivan had an odd expression, carrying on talking as he unbuttoned his shirt. ‘I suppose Denis told you I’m a gerontophile, did he.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Johnny, as if he didn’t pay much heed to what Denis said.

‘He tells most people.’

‘Well,’ Johnny glanced at the pale smooth torso he’d gripped, stroked, kissed here and there last night, but had hardly seen, ‘do you mind?’

‘Sometimes . . .’ said Ivan, and sat back beside him. ‘Do you know what it is?’

It was more delicacy towards Ivan than his own uncertainty that made him say, ‘Sort of . . .’

‘I tend to like older men, that’s all.’

‘Oh . . . I see,’ said Johnny. Something clarified for him, a small sense of vindication mixed up with the bleaker meanings.

‘I mean, I like young men too,’ and he knocked his fist against him, as if Johnny had put him in the wrong.

‘I can tell,’ said Johnny chivalrously. ‘Still, you like old men better?’

‘Well . . .’ Ivan smiled, the fist a finger now, running down Johnny’s arm. ‘Old-er. Not really old!’

So he had a new, serious and quite unexpected shortcoming, in Ivan’s eyes: he was too young. It was wisdom turned on its head, but his immediate effort with all these disappointments was to be reasonable about it – it was frank, a confession, after all. ‘I suppose there’s more security, is there, with older men?’

Ivan twisted round and lay on his front, and to Johnny his round firm bottom seemed subtly different in the light of what he’d admitted. ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ he said.

‘Older people don’t run off so much.’

‘Oh, they can’t believe their luck,’ said Ivan, and had the grace to laugh at himself.

Johnny drew with a small stone in the gritty sand. ‘And have you had . . . affairs?’ – a note of irritation after all.

‘Just this and that, you know. Nothing serious.’

‘Right . . .’

‘Not yet.’

‘There are lots of old men out there,’ said Johnny gamely. ‘Oh, there are . . .’

‘Just waiting for you.’

Ivan smiled at him and looked away. ‘There’s quite a lot of rivalry, you know, later on. You remember Jeff and Bradley.’

‘Do I?’

‘At the Solly.’

‘The really fat old guy?’

Ivan raised his eyebrows. ‘You say that, but Bradley’s terrified Jeff will find someone even fatter and older, and run off with him instead.’

‘Probably not run,’ said Johnny.

The King’s Arms was the hotel in the town, large and stony at the crest of the main street, and English in its bearing and its beers; Johnny couldn’t decide if he was pleased or disappointed. There was nowhere else to get lunch, and he pushed open the glass-paned door into the hall with the apprehension of childhood holidays at the other end of Wales, the Sparsholt family torn between making do and walking out. ‘It’s all right,’ said his father, his mother said, ‘Mm, I don’t know,’ or it might be the other way round, Johnny prey to his own intuitions about the interest or dirt or smell of the place. Here there was a stale smell of beer and cigarette smoke, and as they looked into the lounge and then the bar something else under it, chilly, residual, the stink of cooked lamb. Johnny screwed up his nose, but Ivan didn’t seem to notice. The waitress looked at them warily, and though the dining room was half-empty she gave them a table almost hidden by the swing door to the kitchen. Thick white cups inverted on saucers were part of the lunch setting, no tablecloth but blistered place mats with Lionel Edwards hunting scenes, just like his father and June now had, though neither of them took the least interest in hunting. The talk on the beach sank in, the odd shifting tension of pain and relief. He had got it all wrong. Ivan liked old men. All the hopes of the past few months were absurd. And yet here they were.

The lamb smell in the dining room was fresher, juicier, revived each day. Ivan ordered lamb, by unconscious suggestion, and Johnny had the chicken curry, written down carefully by the waitress, and clearly something of an experiment for the kitchen. There was a family at the table by the window, middle-aged couple, younger daughter and son of eighteen or so, towards the end of taking holidays with his parents, half-parental himself with his little sister. He sat back in a bored but uncomplaining way, made interventions, mocking, doctrinaire. His dark hair was parted in the middle, swept behind the ears. The barman came through with a tray, unloaded a Coke for the girl, a bitter lemon, two pints of shandy for the men. Johnny looked away, gently startled by his own absorption in the family, his sense of recall, the boy unreachable on the far side of the room. There was a glimpse under the table of blue shorts, brown legs. ‘Well, don’t make it too obvious,’ said Ivan.

After lunch Ivan sat reading the obituaries in the Telegraph, and when the other man in the lounge went out he jumped up and seized his Times to compare the obituaries there. Johnny looked at the advertisements in Country Life. Did he prefer a magnificent Georgian house in Hampshire with ten bedrooms or a magnificent Elizabethan house in Cheshire with six acres and a staff cottage? To a guest at West Tarr they both looked rather overdone. He wrinkled his nose. He was struck by how he didn’t get used to it, in fact the reverse, the smell pervaded the room, seemed to hang in the dusty pelmets and curtains and settle deep into the brown armchairs. He got up and wrestled for a minute with the unopening sash window. ‘It’s amazing,’ Ivan said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Percy Slater’s died.’

‘Oh, yeah . . . ?’

‘The Times says, “He never married”, and the Telegraph talks about his work with Hans Oder without even hinting that they were lovers for thirty years, though everyone knew.’

‘Did they?’ said Johnny.

‘Well, almost everyone . . .’ said Ivan, with a pert little smile.

Johnny banged at the window frame with his fist. He said, ‘Not everyone wants every detail of their private lives in the paper.’

‘Well,’ said Ivan, ‘you could argue . . .’ – but he saw Johnny’s point. ‘I mean, do you know about Percy?’

Johnny turned, and went towards the door. ‘Tell me later,’ he said.

*

When they came back to the house, there was already, for Johnny, a ghostly sense of routine – Ivan getting out to undo the gate, the ruts and drops in the track remembered if not avoided, a more luminous pattern of two men passing their days together latent in the seizing of shopping bags, car doors nudged shut with a hip, the unlocking of the house, and the evidence on the kitchen table and the bedroom floor of the time they had spent here before they went out. Johnny stayed in the bedroom, pulled the curtains closed and lay down for an hour, feeling it just possible Ivan might join him. When he came back out at six o’clock he found him sitting at the little fold-down desk, writing in his diary.

Tonight Johnny was cooking, something else mastered last year at college, his best dish. Ivan, suddenly flirty, kissed him on the cheek as he poured him a drink and then leant against the sink to watch while he chopped onions. ‘What is it exactly?’ he said.

‘I’m just doing fegato alla veneziana,’ Johnny said.

‘Oh, right . . . great,’ said Ivan, looking thoughtfully at the ingredients on the table. ‘By the way, we mustn’t forget the postcards.’

‘We must send one to my auntie, obviously.’

‘Yes. And Iffy,’ said Ivan. ‘She’ll want to know about the house.’

‘And what about the girls?’ All their friends seemed to have some sort of interest in their weekend.

‘The girls definitely,’ said Ivan. ‘And I must send one to Evert.’

‘Let’s both send one, shall we?’ said Johnny.

‘Oh, OK – if you like,’ said Ivan. ‘And what about your friends? You must have friends from college?’

‘Not really,’ said Johnny.

Ivan smiled narrowly at him. ‘Bit of a lone wolf, aren’t you, Jonathan.’ He tilted his glass one way, then the other. ‘And your parents?’

‘Well, I could send one to Mum, I suppose.’

Ivan looked up almost slyly. ‘What about your dad?’

‘He’s not really a postcard person.’

‘It might be a nice surprise for him,’ said Ivan.

Johnny drew the chopped onions into a neat line on the board. ‘No, I’ll send one to Mum and Barry, they’d like that.’ Ivan had the tactical smile of someone framing a new question; but all he said in the end was, ‘I’ll write Evert’s card, anyway, shall I?’

‘OK.’ Johnny chuckled. ‘You’re quite close with old Evert, actually, aren’t you?’

Ivan turned his brown eyes and large smile on him. ‘Old Evert?’ he said, ‘Oh, I love him.’ And as he went out through the door into the main room, ‘Don’t you?’

When he came back a minute later with the cards he said, ‘I wonder what the girls are up to this weekend.’

‘Yeah, I wonder.’ They seemed far enough away to be talked about in a more exploratory light than in London.

‘Probably going to that awful club.’

‘Oh, I like it. The Solly, you mean.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Ivan, flatly, the matter of their night there just under the surface.

‘You’d think Fran and Una couldn’t stand it, from what they say about it, but they seem to go there all the time.’

Ivan laughed and said, ‘You know they want to have a baby.’

‘Really?’ Johnny stooped to light the gas, turned it up and edged it down. ‘That might be a bit difficult!’

‘There are ways, of course,’ said Ivan.

‘Adopting, you mean? – they wouldn’t be allowed, would they?’

‘No, silly, one of them would have a baby and they’d bring it up together.’

‘Two mothers.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Oh, OK . . . How would they . . . I mean how would it be done, physically?’

Ivan was a little obscure: ‘They don’t want to, you know, actually do it,’ he said.

‘No, right . . .’ said Johnny, at sea once again in the radical imaginings of the lesbian world. ‘So who do they want to be the father?’

‘Well, they want someone they know,’ said Ivan, and looked down rather sternly.

‘I see . . . you mean they’ve asked you?’ – Johnny laughed.

Again Ivan didn’t quite answer. ‘I wouldn’t want to do it,’ he said.

Johnny got on with moving the onions round in the hot pan – ‘Oh, I don’t know, I like small children.’

‘First I’ve heard of that, my dear,’ said Ivan. Johnny didn’t answer either, but a few minutes later, as he dropped in the soft triangles of liver and the cold blood sizzled in the oil he thought two things: that there was a great deal about him Ivan had never heard of; and that after this week, perhaps even after today, he was never going to eat meat again.

He kept this to himself, and ten minutes later was forking down his dinner in a trancelike state, both eager and reluctant. He loved meat, he loved liver in particular, and while they went on chatting he found himself sighing and smiling at the imminent drama of change. It wasn’t the taste but the intolerable meaning of food that came from slaughter that he wanted to excise from his life. The decision had been shaping inescapably for months, perhaps years, and even now he found he was keeping it, for a day or so longer, to himself. When they went to bed and Ivan snuggled up with his back to him, Johnny was happy just to lay an arm over him and hear him fall asleep. Long afterwards he turned on to his back and lay awake, his eyes reading more detail, and losing it, as the night darkened further, minute by minute, the shadowed rafters, the edge of the cupboard, the just paler stripe of the unlined curtain. The green darts of the hours on the square dial of his travel clock gleamed faintly, the luminous long hand hid the short hand for a minute at five past one, the little tick he’d heard muffled but amplified under his pillow at school for five years busied on uncomplainingly. He was excited, he turned and held Ivan again, his hard-on came and went, his hand lying, barely pressing, on the soft curved strip between his friend’s rucked-up T-shirt and the waistband of his pants. He thought there were countless things he could do nothing about – being gay, and dyslexic, and in Ivan’s eyes far too young. But this was a pure choice, it had the beauty of action, unlike the long compromise of being acted upon.

He woke again to a much brighter room, raised his head to see the clock, lay back, befuddled with late sleep and slow to understand, as the night’s advances re-occupied his mind, that the pressure against his side was Ivan, sitting up next to him. He half-turned, looked quickly at him – he was on top of the covers, dressed already, in shirt and old grey flannels, leaning on his elbow to look down at him. ‘You are a heavy sleeper,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching you.’

‘Oh have you . . .’ said Johnny, huffing the sheet over himself, turning away, but then, with a slow yawning twist of his whole body rolling back to face Ivan. He had woken up hard as usual and wasn’t sure if Ivan had noticed, or if he wanted him to notice. ‘How did I look?’

‘You must have been dreaming, you made little faces.’

‘Well I dream a lot.’ All his life he’d disliked being watched, but there was an unexpected sliver of pleasure in having been at Ivan’s mercy. ‘How long have you been up?’

‘About an hour? I’m an early riser.’ It was hard to work out the change of mood, Johnny looking up, wary but ready, into Ivan’s eyes, with their glitter of promise and habitual reserve. Ivan reached out, the back of his hand for a moment against Johnny’s cheek, fingertips tracing the line of his neck and running up, through his hair, holding him, his thumb just moving in tentative circles on the secret curve behind the ear. Johnny gasped softly, and with arms pinned under the bedclothes waited powerlessly for the kiss, not in the dark, after all, but in this thinly curtained daylight. He swallowed, closed his eyes, and felt Ivan pushing back his hair. ‘It’s amazing,’ Ivan said.

Johnny laughed softly as he opened his eyes again. Ivan seemed to marvel at his face, his head, as if he had only just seen it, or seen what he ought to have found in it long before. ‘Oh, yes?’

‘Has anyone ever told you?’

Johnny looked solemn. ‘I should get my hair cut.’

‘No, silly.’ In the new atmosphere Ivan himself hesitated. ‘You look just like your dad when your hair’s pulled back.’

‘Ah . . .’ This again. He turned his head slightly, stared past Ivan’s shoulder. ‘As far as I know, you’ve never met my dad.’

‘No, but I know what he looks like, don’t I.’

‘Yeah,’ said Johnny, ‘I suppose so,’ as if he didn’t really mind, to get dad out of the way.

Ivan slid down more comfortably next to him, shrugged into his pillow, lay just smiling, his clothed knee above the covers pressing Johnny’s naked one beneath. It was a long gaze, eyes questioning, avoiding and returning, and a doubt still in Johnny’s mind as to what the question was. ‘You poor thing . . .’ said Ivan.

‘I’m all right.’ He braced himself, smiled slyly to show he was up for anything.

‘It must have been so difficult for you,’ said Ivan, and his hand still behind Johnny’s ear made it hard for him to shift away. ‘And, you know, finding out you were gay yourself.’

It was still strange to hear, in so many words, that he was. ‘Well, it didn’t help, I suppose,’ said Johnny quietly. The point was, surely, here he was, with Ivan’s soft breath in his face . . .

‘Something so public . . .’ Ivan raised his head slightly and leaning over him kissed him softly on the cheek, and then above his eye. ‘I wish you’d tell me about it.’

The sense of years-long danger was mixed with a faint, never-faced uncertainty as to what the danger was. ‘About what?’

‘You know, when it happened.’

‘It’s all a bit of a blur . . . you know.’

Ivan’s smile tightened for a second at this, then relaxed. ‘I mean, did your dad ever talk to you about what went on?’

‘No – of course not.’

‘No, I suppose . . . .’ Ivan laughed at himself. ‘It would have been a bit odd!’

‘That’s right,’ said Johnny, ‘it would.’

‘I just think it must have been so awful for you, with it on the news, everyone reading about it in the papers,’ Ivan said.

‘I didn’t read the papers, Mum told me not to.’ The bizarre idea that Ivan himself, at what? fifteen, had done so, came to him for the first time. ‘Did you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Ivan, ‘of course I did. Well, it was a big story, wasn’t it, for a while. Money, power . . . gay shenanigans! It had everything.’

‘Oh, yeah, it was perfect,’ said Johnny.

Ivan lay back a little, still up against him, his hand drifted from his neck to the tight sheet over his shoulder, Johnny helpless in his hidden nakedness gazing close up at him. It had the fright of a new kind of excitement – to be in the power of someone he was shiveringly keen to submit to entirely. ‘And your poor dad at the centre of it. I mean how did he cope at first, you know, when he came out of prison?’

Johnny almost laughed, at his persistence, and at the coy delay in whatever was starting to happen; he was making him work for it. ‘He just carried on, really.’

‘He must have picked himself up, somehow.’

‘Dad always said, “Work’s the thing,”’ said Johnny. He thought no one had ever worked like his father, at whatever he did, and whether it was work or not.

‘No, that’s very good,’ said Ivan responsibly. He stroked Johnny’s shoulder before he went on: ‘I mean, did you actually meet Clifford Haxby?’ He made him sound like someone you might have wanted to meet, a film star.

After a moment Johnny said, ‘Yes, I did.’

‘I just remember that photo,’ said Ivan, ‘taken through a window.’

‘Oh . . . yes.’

‘I remember trying to work it out . . . you know . . . what was going on.’

‘Well, I’m glad it turned you on,’ said Johnny, pushing himself against him, as far as he could, with a little grunt.

‘I mean, was Clifford in love with your dad, would you say?’

Johnny looked at him and at the question through the shimmer of his own early morning sensations. ‘How would I know . . . ? Possibly?’ – tender feelings had been nothing but sex, it seemed, in the glare of the case, and sex itself was a means to something else; but it was hard for him to think about, then or now. He shifted an inch or two, under the weight of Ivan’s knee, drawn up a little further now, and holding him there.

‘And what about your dad? Was he in love with him?’

‘No!’ said Johnny. ‘Of course not.’ He looked at Ivan, and his words took a strange weight and humour from the position he was in. ‘Dad’s not . . .’ – he didn’t know what was best – ‘gay, not really.’

Ivan seemed slightly offended. ‘Well, he must be bisexual, anyway, mustn’t he.’

‘No . . . well, I suppose he must have been, in a way. If he needed to be.’ He met Ivan’s smile with his own. ‘You seem a bit obsessed with my dad.’

‘Oh . . .’ said Ivan.

‘I can see I’m going to have to introduce you.’

Ivan laughed disparagingly, and they lay, not quite meeting each other’s eye, in a tingling nearness that made Johnny gasp and twist with desire in his tight cocoon. Ivan leant in, gave him a soft kiss on the bridge of his nose, then swung round and stood up. He looked down at him for several seconds. ‘When?’ he said.

After breakfast Johnny said, ‘I want to see what that building is.’

‘Which building . . .?’

‘Is it a barn – where the trees begin on the far side.’

‘Oh, yes . . .’ said Ivan. ‘Well, let’s have a walk before we go.’

Johnny’s idea had been to go off by himself. ‘If you feel like it.’

In five minutes they were ready. Johnny jumped off the edge of the platform and got stung on the arm by nettles for his bravado. ‘You won’t need a jacket,’ he said as Ivan came round, having closed the windows, and locked the door. ‘It’s a boiling hot day.’

‘Well, you never know,’ he said.

‘I can’t tell what it is,’ said Johnny. ‘Have you been to it before?’

‘I’ve never noticed it,’ Ivan said, ‘but let’s see.’

They walked at first over the mown hayfields, already green with foggage. It was a lovely effect, the delicate first blades of grass among the silver stalks. Ivan was cheerful, but evasive, he went ahead, unusually alert for things to comment on; while Johnny was caught almost at once in the strange lulled swoon of each warm step to step: he saw how his footprint flattened the new growth and crunched the soft stubble inseparably. Ivan waited for him at the gate into the next field, nervous perhaps about the cows grazing a hundred yards off. He took Johnny’s arm. ‘Thank you for telling me all that, my dear, you know, earlier.’

Was he being sarcastic? ‘Oh, well, it wasn’t much.’

‘No, no . . .’

‘I never talk about it at all, normally, so you were lucky.’

Two or three of the cows noticed them, stared, unsure at first, and seemed to decide they were just about worth a closer look. Johnny wasn’t frightened of cows; as a child he’d moved among them, on their friend Sam Peachey’s farm; he slowed as he felt Ivan pull him forward: ‘As long as you’re all right,’ squeezing his arm tighter for a second, as he looked round.

Johnny stopped, turned and waited, looked cheerfully into the brown face of the nearest cow, twenty yards off. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m a Sparsholt, after all!’, lowering his forehead and shaking his long hair, so that the cow stopped, puzzled a few moments, and cautiously dropped its head again to graze.

‘And are we all right?’ said Ivan, with a giggle.

‘They’re only cows, for Christ’s sake,’ said Johnny, as the others started coming forward, the whole herd following them for reasons of their own up to the next gate.

From here, when they climbed over and turned round, there was a clear view back across the valley to West Tarr, at an angle, glinting, and looking larger, among the crowding trees and bushes, than it did close-to. ‘My word, it stands out,’ said Ivan.

‘Great, isn’t it.’

‘They’d never get away with it now, of course.’

‘What year was it, before the War?’

‘Nineteen thirty-nine,’ said Ivan. ‘It must have been easier then.’

From half a mile away the very notion of the glass box, the modernist ideal, seemed more principled, more foreign and more forlorn. Trees, grass, bleaching sun and rotting rain would undo any kind of house in time, but here these elements had been almost recklessly defied.

‘It would be different in California or somewhere.’

‘I suppose so . . .’ Johnny saw that he was right – in England, in Wales, a building like this appeared a double self-assertion, against bad taste and bad weather. How much longer would it be there? As they walked in single file along the headland towards the ruined barn Johnny felt the pang of regret that came before leaving a place he would never see again. Ivan pressed on, while Johnny lingered and was brought almost to a stop. His father’s word came from industrial relations – when they were out for a walk Johnny went on a ‘go-slow’: his parents got on with it while he hung back, unaccountably transfixed by the colour and the feeling of a field, a summer hedgerow, a church tower among trees. ‘I don’t know what you’re gawping at, young man,’ his father said, ‘you look all gone out’; though his mother’s impatience was different perhaps, a soft thwarted glance at the things she herself had once loved looking at and had been obliged to give up. In her smile there was a hint of hopeless allegiance. But not in Ivan’s. He caught up with him, they walked to the next gate shoulder to shoulder, but it was a game of closeness, and Johnny, in the loneliness of his difference, felt something subtler than their failure in bed, but confirming it, that someone who shared so little of his mood could never share his life.