The Spell

NINE

Is he a scholar?” was Hugh’s first, rather off-beam question.

Alex said, “Not at all.”

“God, you’re lucky. I’ve got this kid after me who just won’t let up with the scholarly references and talks non-stop in about ten different languages. He makes me feel as if I’m All Souls College and he’s taking a fellowship exam to get into me. Actually, of course, the door’s open and the kettle steaming on the hearth.”

“No,” said Alex, who hadn’t come here to talk about Hugh’s dimly prospective amours, “Danny’s extremely bright and adaptable but he doesn’t really know anything. I mean, he’s seen one opera, by Handel, and he can’t remember which one. He seemed persuaded by each of the titles I suggested. He’s got a degree in something called cultural studies, which apparently doesn’t quite involve reading a book. I don’t know why I’m being so catty. And of course he’s terribly young. He does know all about dance-music”

“Coppelia and stuff.”

“No, darling.”

“I didn’t really think you meant that. How young is he?”

“He’s twenty-three tomorrow.”

“Ouch,” said Hugh, turning away with an envious grimace and looking for the bottle.

Alex and Hugh had been together at university, though Hugh had gone on to Oxford to pursue a D Phil and then landed a job in Coins and Medals at the British Museum. He was a wonderfully sedentary person, who nowadays rarely left a shallow rectangle of streets between the Museum, an Italian restaurant in Dyott Street, and his dark disorderly flat above the Spiritualist Meeting Rooms in High Holborn. Alex sometimes dropped in there for a drink, since it was hard to get Hugh to Hammersmith. Amazingly, they had been to Greece together, in 1980, though on an old-fashioned Hellenising trail rather than to the alarming possibilities of a modern gay resort. Hugh had been quite slim and attractive as he blustered selfconsciously down the beach in his tight old swimming-trunks, but since then he had given way to the steady spread of lun-cher’s middle and office bottom. “Let’s not” was his usual response to any suggestion of activity.

His friendship with Alex was intuitive, protected by their shared timidity and steeped in its own atmosphere of culture and fantasy. They talked on the phone, they listened to Haydn quartets together, they got drunk and ruminated obscenely about boys they had fancied, often long ago, looking out from Hugh’s rooms towards the roofs of Bloomsbury like a pair of dirty-minded spinsters. Alex’s occasional adventures were received by Hugh with curiosity and an oddly prudish pique; Hugh himself seemed not to have adventures, and his way of denying his needs was the recurrent fiction that someone was bothering him with their attentions, and he couldn’t decide about them. The appropriation of the gardens next to the Museum as central London’s liveliest cruising area gave him a new pretext for jokes and hinted misdemeanours. Alex felt that Hugh and Justin were the only two people who properly understood him; though, of course, when Justin came along -picked up, just like that, in the street – Hugh had retired wounded, as if somehow found wanting by his old friend. He was first with the condolences and candid analyses when Justin left. The announcement of a new affair was bound to be a little ticklish.

Alex told him how it had happened. “I went down to this cottage in Dorset in love with Justin and came back in love with Danny. It was a completely magical thing.”

“Surely you weren’t still in love with Betty Grable?” said Hugh.

It already seemed so long ago. “I think, in spite of everything, if I could have woken up beside anyone in the world it would still have been him.”

Hugh shook his head in a distress of incredulity; but then saw the bright side. “Anyway, it’s now definitely over.”

Alex chose not to be tryingly truthful. “The last two weeks have been extraordinary – I feel as if I’m under a beautiful spell”

“The thing about spells,” said Hugh, “is that you don’t know at the time if they’re good ones or bad ones. All black magicians learn how to sugar the pill.”

“Well I never had your mastery of the occult.”

“What’s his dick like, by the way?”

Alex gestured implausibly with both hands. “But you know I don’t care about that sort of thing.”

“Of course,” said Hugh, smacking his forehead, “I keep forgetting.” And then, “It’s like money, it’s easy not to care when you’ve got it.”

“Talking of sugaring the pill,” Alex said, and went on to give what account he could of taking ecstasy. The urge to tell had been distracting him all week, it seemed nearly a necessity, like the born-again’s compulsion to spread the word at bus-stops and street-corners. He thought it best not to confide in anyone at the office, though he guessed from overheard phone-calls that his sober-suited secretary was, technically, a raver; he met young Barry’s curious, doubting look with the blandest “Good morning.”

Every detail of his initiation was touched by the magic, though it was in the nature of the night – arriving drunk, the wild sprint of time once the drug took effect – that most of it was forgotten. He kept saying, “It was fabulous, it was fantastic, I can’t describe it.”

“Hmm,” said Hugh, poised somewhere between scepticism, envy and shock.

“It was the combination of the pill and Danny of course, feeling suddenly on the inside of life rather than the outside. It made me see how depressed I’d been, I think the depression was so insidious and all-pervasive that I only noticed it when it was gone.”

“It’s only a drug, though, isn’t it. It’s not a real high.”

“I don’t know, it’s real enough when it’s happening. I’m not a philosopher.”

“But what about the after-effects?”

“You just carry on feeling wonderful. I’ve been talking to people all week. Danny’s amazing like that – if he likes the look of someone he just starts talking to them, where I would normally wait ten years for an introduction in writing.”

“Wasn’t everyone else about sixteen? – they are on television,” Hugh said, and Alex looked at him, with his scruffy haircut and his dense brown habitat of books and folders, as if he had suddenly slipped a generation. He felt a vague affectionate dismay at Hugh’s life of paper, the teetering research for the still unfinished thesis, the stacks of numismatic journals with a dirty cup on top or a half-dead Busy Lizzie, and doubtless, tucked away deep down, an issue or two of Big Latin Dicks. “I didn’t notice, darling.” The truth was he had no regrets, he longed to do it again, he loved his late start and was glad to think he hadn’t exhausted these pleasures when he was Danny’s age. Danny spoke already about mid-week glooms and short-term memory loss. Alex said, “I feel somehow I’ve been set free.”

“Well, don’t become a slave to your need for freedom, will you,” Hugh said, with a mixture of concern and self-satisfaction. “I mean people do die.”

“I find I’ve overcome a lot of crusty old prejudices,” Alex summed up. “Until last week, I was appalled by the idea of drugs, as you know I thought pop music was witless rubbish, I really couldn’t be doing with the noise and trash of the gay scene, I hated chewing-gum and trainers and baseball caps with writing on, in fact any clothes with writing on the outside. And now I think they’re all absolutely marvellous.”

“So you’re going to be turning into a whatsaname, are you?” said Hugh.

“I don’t know what I’m turning into,” Alex said. “ ‘We know what we are but not what we may be’: Ophelia.”

“Well, look what happened to her,” said Hugh.

Hugh put on his jacket and they strolled down to Dyott Street for a quick bowl of pasta before Alex set off to Dorset. The staff were Sicilian, and a hand-coloured photograph of the 1928 eruption of Etna hung above the bar. Hugh knew them all well, and spoke to them in confident Italian. The waiters made a fuss of him, but were quick and business-like, and brought San Pellegrino and a plate of bruschetta without being asked, since that was what he always had. Perhaps just because of his speaking their language everything that was said by either side caused immediate amusement, and left behind a mood of wistful reassurance. Alex chatted and drifted, and nursed the plan that had just come to him, to take Danny away to Sicily at the end of the summer: the plan swallowed him up so that he couldn’t do much more than prod and repeatedly re-coil his tagliatelle. He was dying for a drink, the glamour of any kind of stimulant was immense, but he knew that he had a long drive ahead, and held off. He sensed a continuity between the benign routines of the restaurant and the larger movements beyond it, flights, journeys, days and nights. It was the oneness he had felt on ecstasy, which came back now and then like an image from a dream that surfaces again in the absent-minded mid-morning. He had never been to Sicily, and said casually to the waiter who was clearing the plates, “Does Etna still erupt from time to time?”

The waiter tucked in his chin and said, “No, signore,” with a warm smile, as if to discourage a harmful rumour; and then, seeing Alex’s disappointment, said, “Well, a little bit, signore. Yes, from time to time.”

Hugh walked with Alex to his Mercedes, and they stood for a while looking down at it in the odd hesitation before saying goodbye, with its trail of unnecessary recaps and puzzled attempts to remember something else that needed saying. Hugh was more cheerful and loving after a flask of Orvieto and the chance to absorb the impact of Alex’s news. He kissed him on both cheeks, and said, “That club sounds fantastic, actually. You must: take me some time.”

“Of course, darling,” said Alex, slithering into the car, but thinking, as he drove off with an uncharacteristic toot, that if it came to it Hugh would certainly decide “Let’s not.” They had once been to Heaven together, twelve or thirteen years ago, and Alex still remembered Hugh’s way of taking the floor, with hands on hips and his legs kicking out spasmodically as if in some distant holiday recollection of Greek folk-dancing.

He sped across town as the sun was setting. It was the Summer Solstice. Everywhere people were launching on their weekends, thronging into restaurants and bars. He wished them well, but he felt the town was largely pointless now Danny had left it; he and his friend must already have been at Litton Gambril for three or four hours, they’d have had drinks with Justin and Robin, and perhaps dinner, though the friend was staying at Bride Mill, so perhaps was dining there. Alex picked at the plans. The presence of Justin was going to be almost surreal, as was the agreement with Danny to keep their affair a secret. He wished they could have gone down together, but there wasn’t room for everything in his two-seater, and he already had a case of champagne in the boot. In other respects, though, the car had come into its own; Justin had always shown a non-driver’s inability to distinguish it from any other car, but Danny admired it from the start, and in the past week they had driven on a number of unnecessary diversions along Old Compton Street with the roof down, Danny waving like an over-eager starlet, and often shouting quite loudly to make sure he’d been seen by some dim disco acquaintance.

Alex switched on the radio, and it was one of Haydn’s opus 76 string quartets that he had sometimes listened to with Hugh. It held him for a minute with its familiar novelties, and he tapped lightly on the wheel to demonstrate his involvement with it, but he couldn’t resist a feeling that it would always be there, and found himself reaching into the glove-box for his latest purchase from Harlot Records, Monster House Party Five, a three-CD compilation of forty pounding dance tracks mixed by DJs Sparkx, Joe Puma and Queen Marie.

The thwacking bass at the opening of Joe Puma’s set (if that was the word) made him grin and shiver. His drugged remark about wanting to live in house music had only shown up how unobservant he was: he had been living in it all along. Now he heard it, everywhere, or something very like it to the novice’s ear: in cafes, clothes shops, of course in gay bars with Danny, and thumping from a van in slow-moving traffic in Whitehall, so that he kept catching up with it as he walked away from work; idly channel-surfing on a night alone, he found it glittering like an open secret through programmes on fashion, holidays, local politics, and ads for drinks and cars. He almost envied the barmen and shop-assistants who lived with its promise of pleasure all week long. Maybe they wouldn’t even wait for the weekend to go dancing and be off their faces again. Driving west into the last of the day with the music in his ears he saw the electric storm of the dance-floor, the racing languor of the chill-out room – it was literally heart-warming, he felt his pulse hurry and his face colour up. And then he remembered waking in Danny’s room on the Sunday afternoon, their foreheads pressed together, the same tired lungful of air breathed back and forth between them, the muted sunshine through unlined curtains…Alex had rolled gently away and examined his happiness to the rhythm of the wallpaper, the clutches of pink roses like featureless putti floating hypnotically ceil-ingwards.

It was dark by the time he reached the Crewkerne turn-off, and he drove on in silence so as to concentrate on the signs and the bends. The road was unrecognisable from his first journey. He rolled down the window to smell the trees and fields and the cool air that had been warm all day. On corners his headlights swept past tree-trunks, a white cottage dark for the night, impassive horses in a field. He felt romantically alone. On a high open stretch of the road he saw the stars, which at first he thought were the upward reflections of the car’s lit dials in the windscreen; later there was the glimmer of a town beyond the long black line of a hill. Moths, labouring through the dark on their own amorous callings, rushed to obliterate themselves on the beacon of the car.

Robin seemed surprised, even exasperated, to have Alex in the house again; it was one thing for Justin to invite him, but then for Danny to take pity on him too…Alex watched the Woodfield social reflex come into play, the sudden over-compensation of smiles and offers of drinks – that making the best of things that could seem faintly schizoid. Justin’s welcome had been more muted but more genuine. He said, “I didn’t think you’d come back, darling,” and held his hand in a way that asked for affection more than it offered it. It was midnight, of course, and he was a little maudlin. As for Danny, there was a tantalising distance, crossed only by touches and winks that felt almost negligent in their furtiveness. They hadn’t worked out their story properly, and acted as if they had barely met. The effect was that all three of them appeared to wonder why Alex was here. Alex felt that Danny’s surely rather cold and watchful friend George was being treated with an easy fondness that he would have been glad of himself. Danny messed around nerve-jarringly with tapes of something called drum “n” bass, which he said was “massive” this summer; house, apparently, was all too commercial, you heard it everywhere now, you had to have been there four years ago, when it was at its underground zenith. “Oh,” said Alex, unable to protest, and feeling obscurely betrayed by his own teacher. When they came to turn in, Robin took him up to a different room from last time, with a filing cabinet in it, and various large objects covered with a cotton bedspread. “You shouldn’t be too uncomfortable,” he said. Alex lay awake in a horrible turmoil as to whether he should have come; then woke with a start to a presence in the room, the muttered breaths of sleepy concentration, a cool hand patting the pillow, patting his shoulder, his elbow, then the warm weight of a man stretching gently, half-clumsily along him in the dark.

Robin was up early next morning, with a number of noisy jobs to do. Baking smells spread slowly through the house, and as soon as the dew was off the grass he was out with the mower. He was taking the party seriously, and there was to be enough food for more than the thirty people Danny thought might turn up. Alex came down to find him shirtless by the fridge, with a wisp of grass caught in his chest hair, drinking milk from the bottle, then brusquely wiping away the white moustache. He still gave off his air of challenging competence, although for Alex his threat had been nicely displaced: the rival had emerged as the potential father-in-law, whose approval he might one day hope to win.

Alex offered his help and it was agreed he would drive into Bridport to do some shopping and pick up some things on order. Danny was busy with more abstruse planning. He stood around in the sitting-room saying, “Right, they’ll come in here. “ with great decisiveness, then pondering the matter again. He had a large flat notebook, a survival of his American student days, with pictures of rock stars taped to the cover, and a headline from the National Enquirer, “DAN THE BEAST”; he was writing in this in a sunny spot of the garden as Alex went up to the car.

The secrecy was certainly a bore, and went against Alex’s mood of expansion and freedom. In the car he kept telling his news to himself, though he couldn’t get the wording right. “I’m madly in love with him” gave the first quick spurt of release, and the cliche, as happened in love, seemed fresh after all. But it wasn’t sufficient. “I’m wildly in love with him,” “I’m utterly in love with him” – he couldn’t find an adverb pungent and reckless enough.

He spent an hour in the town, with its broad Georgian streets called North, South, East and West, the compass of a region remote from London, and with its own procedures. In the cake-shop there was worried talk of a customer preparing to go up to the Smoke. When it was Alex’s turn, the baker said, “How are you today?” as if he knew of some ongoing health problem.

“Very well indeed, thanks,” said Alex. “How are you?”

“Not too dusty,” said the baker, to which Alex could only murmur “Ah,” unsure from his tone if that meant pretty good or a bit off-colour. He asked for a large white cake in the window, which the man lifted out with pride. “That’s a lovely wedding-cake,” he said. “You’re not the lucky man?”

“I do feel quite lucky,” Alex said. He had the eerily restful country feeling that his homosexuality was completely invisible to these people.

Alex found that he’d contracted that occasional ailment of the late developer, an aversion to his own past. He had grown up in a country town, different from this one, duller probably, and more defiantly conformist; but his mood of ghostly familiarity deepened as he went from shop to shop. The poverty of the little supermarket, with its own-brand biscuits and jams; the high prices of the farm shop, with organic vegetables and free-range eggs crusted in authenticating dung; the brown old men who slapped down all their change on the newsagent’s counter, not yet used to the decimal currency, or leaned wheezily at the urinal under the town clock with their leather shopping-bags; the old outfitters selling brown and mauve clothes, and the charity thrift-shop indistinguishable from it, and the derelict boutiques with a spew of mail across the bare floor; the photos of fetes and beauty contests and British Legion dinners in the window of the newspaper office, which might almost have been the window of a museum; the peeling front of the main hotel, with its promise of fire-doors and meal smells; the word MONUMENTAL on an undertaker’s sunlit window thrown in sharp-etched shadow across a waiting tablet; the shyness of the country folk and the loudness of their jokes and greetings – he felt he knew it all, and was horrified by it, as though by some irremediable failing of his own. Then the cloud of the mood heaved slowly past and he drove out of town with a quivering sense of how his luck had swung round, like a weather-vane.

Something came back to him for the first time, it might have been waiting for its explanatory moment. It was the late summer of 89, the eve of his thirtieth birthday. He had left town on a Friday evening to drive out to his parents in Essex for the family celebrations. As always he felt he was leaving a scene of potential pleasure, even if only getting drunk with a straightish group of friends. He had a route through the lanes to the village where his parents had just bought the Old Rectory, with its acre of demanding garden. There was never any traffic, only local people heading to the pub in their Austin Maxis; but this time he ran into a line of cars, red tail-lights backed up in the twilight as far as he could see. After a while engines were switched off, and Alex watched the young men in the Dormobile ahead of him get out to stretch their legs and talk to the other drivers. He leant out himself and asked a boy standing on the verge what the trouble was. “They’re blocking us off,” he said. “We’re waiting for new directions.” A girl in leathers with a mobile phone came walking down the road, and the drivers, who were all young and excited, called out questions to her. The whole thing had the feel of a chaotic exercise by an oddly high-spirited rebel army. Pop music from different radio stations mingled in the still air. It turned out they were going to a rave.

Alex didn’t see why he should pretend he was going to a rave, perhaps he panicked slightly, though the mood was not aggressive, just voluble and collective. He wasn’t sure exactly what happened at a rave. He knew it was a horrible inconvenience to the people who lived in the area. He started up his engine, pulled out of the line and went up the just passable other side of the road, with kids gesturing and shouting things at him. Some of them clearly thought he was one of the wide-boys who’d organised the thing. Now and then he had to mount the low verge. Before long he came face to face with a police motor-cyclist. He could see he was in the wrong, but he explained where he was trying to get to, spoke vaguely of having just come from the Foreign Office, and after the policeman had spoken to colleagues up ahead, was told to follow him, he’d get him through. Alex saw it all now, his problematic progress through the lanes, up and down between second and third gear, the flashing stanchion of the motorbike revolving ahead of him. They went on past a mile and a half of stalled vehicles, the cheerful faces at the open windows, the thump of music and shimmer of petrol fumes in the scented evening. He began to feel like a fool, who had missed what was happening around him and asked to see out the last night of his twenties under lonely safe conduct.