The Spell

TWELVE

The phone rang. “Alex, it’s Robin here.”

Alex was at work, and for a moment he thought it must be someone in the building. “Oh…”

“Robin Woodfield”

“Oh, Robin. I’m so sorry. Yes!” And he heard himself coming vocally to attention to meet the challenge of Robin and sustain himself at the right pitch of pretended friendliness.

“I hope it’s all right ringing you at the office. I can’t get through on Dan’s mobile.”

“Of course. I probably won’t be able to talk for long,” said Alex, proud and embarrassed at the same time to be coupled with Danny by his father.

“I’ll keep it short. It’s simply that we’ve got to spend the next two weeks or so in town, and we wondered if you and Dan would like to use the cottage for some of that time – all of it, even. I don’t know what your holiday arrangements are.”

“Gosh.” He hadn’t heard that smoothly unanimous “we” before, and felt the force of it like the buffeting air of a passing limousine. He said, with a critical kind of modesty, “Well, I can’t speak for Danny. But it sounds a lovely idea.” He glanced at his secretary – it was the first time he’d mentioned his new boyfriend in the office – but she seemed unshaken by it; though she must have noticed, he certainly hoped she’d noticed, his general rejuvenation and hip new taste for life. “I’ll ask him later. And one or other of us will give you a ring.”

“Fine.” There was a pause, in which Alex flicked through various pointless possible topics. All he said was,

“It’s very kind of you,” with a certain suggestion that he didn’t expect kindness. But Robin was saying,

“And again, I’m very sorry about what I said at the party. I wasn’t in my right mind, I’m afraid.”

“Well, none of us were.”

“No…You must have thought I was mad. I think I am going a bit mad,” said Robin, with such candour that Alex felt it must be an act.

“I’m sure you’re not,” he said firmly; he did think Robin’s behaviour worryingly erratic, every time he saw him he did something you might call mad, but he didn’t want to give him that excuse. “Don’t worry, I can hardly remember it myself.” What Robin had said was, “Christ, Dan, you can’t be serious.”

Alex thought again about that “we” when he got home. For a long time the idea of Justin’s being half of another couple had been so painful to him that he shut it out with a heavy black drop, like the curtain that comes down in the interval with “For thine especial safety” written on it. Things had slowly improved, although the moment of turning back the duvet retained its charge of inadmissible misery; he took to sleeping diagonally, so as to occupy both sides of the bed. That first weekend in Dorset had made him almost hate his own loyal, retrospective nature. But since the night at Chateau so much had changed, change itself became beautiful to him, and he looked at Justin’s new life with casual fondness and scepticism.

Even so, the “we” had lightly winded him. He changed out of his suit into shorts and a T-shirt, put on the washing-machine, which he thought Danny could well have done earlier, opened a bottle of Sauvignon and went to sit in the garden. The palette-pricking gooseberry of the wine was a phenomenon, and he commented on it in an undertone, in a knowing day-dream that Danny was also there. And that, he supposed, was the point: how much Danny wasn’t there, and how far he was from the legitimate use of a “we” himself. Danny needed air and distraction. Alex groaned with wonder at the thought of a week with him in the country, but he hardly dared put the plan to him.

This evening Danny was seeing his friend Bob, a handsome Jamaican who had shocked Alex at the party with his assertion that at thirty-one he had never been in love. Alex had cross-questioned him in a coke-fuelled harangue and clutched at his arm until Bob clearly thought he’d fallen in love with him. “We young ones don’t fall in love,” he said, with a large emotionless smile. “Oh yes we do,” said Alex gamely. Bob’s auntie was an air stewardess, and often swallowed fifty or sixty small packets of cocaine before a flight back from Kingston. Danny was supposed to come home with something tonight, and Alex was so excited by the idea, and by the matter-of-fact criminality to which Danny had introduced him, that he persuaded himself it wouldn’t happen.

Of course it was difficult for young people – really young ones. Nobody could quite explain it, but it seemed to be impossible for Danny to have a proper job. Robin didn’t help him much – there was surprisingly little family money. Alex thought Danny’s whole upbringing had been so dispersed, back and forth between schools and colleges in England and America, that it had somehow affected his powers of concentration; or maybe it was an early diet of Class A drugs that was responsible. There was something almost self-mortifying in the jobs he did take on; and he had left two of those since Alex had met him, and was moodily disinclined to explain why. The phone was ringing and Alex hurried inside.

“Darling, it’s your erstwhile lover,” said Justin.

“Um…who would that be?” said Alex vaguely.

“Very funny, darling. Now look, have you heard from Robin?”

“Yes.”

“And are you going to go down to Hinton Gumboil and mow the lawn?”

“I don’t know yet. Is mowing the lawn part of it?”

“It’s the essential part, darling. I’m amazed he didn’t mention it. There will be a list on the draining board – hedging and ditching, topping and tailing, mopping and mowing…”

Alex laughed tolerantly. “I don’t mind all that.”

“Because as you’ll have gathered we’re going to be away for a couple of weeks, and frankly without my incessant attention the garden will become a mess.”

“Yes of course. I can see that. You’ll be in Clapham, will you?”

“Well, he will. I’m in the Musgrove.”

“How do you mean?”

Justin paused. “Ah. He didn’t tell you.”

“We only spoke for a moment.”

“We’re having a trial separation, darling.”

“Good god…Are you all right?”

“Things have been hopeless lately, as you can’t have failed to notice.” There was a large swallowing noise – not emotion, Alex realised, but gin. “Frankly, I think it’s over. But I’ve agreed to have a further think. So I’m doing it in the Musgrove, which is marvellous. He doesn’t know where I am, by the way. I’m just having a pre-dinner drink.”

“Where is the Musgrove?”

“Don’t you know it? It’s just next to Harrods. I’m the youngest person here by about forty years. It’s where old lady dons stay. They all wear brown felt hats in the dining-room. I think a lot of them are lesbians. I mean real lesbians – you know, female ones.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say.” Alex was surprised to find his scepticism so quickly vindicated, and surprised at how he felt for his old friend, when it should have been Robin he identified with. Justin was clearly quite drunk; he pictured him in this funny hotel – the elderly side of his character. He thought he must want company.

Justin said, “I’ll probably buy a house.”

“Right…”

“They’ve finally sold Daddy’s place, so I’m swilling in money. There’s no rush, of course. I’ll have a look round while I’m here.”

Alex couldn’t imagine him doing anything so practical. The mention of Justin’s father lit a fuse, which he tried to stamp out, to the muffled explosion of a year ago, the awful week of his death and the funeral. “Where were you thinking of?”

“What’s Hammersmith like these days?”

Alex said, “I think you need somewhere more central,” rather quickly and frigidly.

“Anyway, we’ll see.” And Justin passed suavely to another question. “So how are things with Miss Daisy?”

“Fine.” Alex found that despite the openness about Robin there was something impolite and even treacherous in discussing his own new affair with his ex.

“Mmm?”

“It’s fine. I hope he’ll like the Dorset idea.”

“I should warn you that we’re hideously unpopular down there.”

“Since the party?”

“They weren’t mad about us before, but they loathe us now. There were formal complaints. PC Bertram Burglar came round and gave us a wigging.”

“Did he darling?” Alex was sorry to have missed that. “It was only noise, wasn’t it?”

“It was homosexual noise. That’s what they don’t like.”

“We were very tidy.” Alex remembered the time, about 4 a.m., the sky already paling, when they had all started clearing up obsessively; apparently it was an effect of the cocaine. Glasses were gathered and washed, bottles collected; disco-queens darted round with dusters and damp cloths, furniture was swiftly and exactly rearranged; he had found Danny in the lavatory, putting all the back-numbers of the Architectural Review into chronological order.

Justin said, “They don’t really know you, so you should escape the worst of the contumely.”

“I certainly hope so,” said Alex, tickled, lightly haunted, to hear that word again, which Justin had learned in an audition piece and kept on using with a variety of meanings.

“Mrs Dodgett is still with us, of course, and the Halls. The Halls are virtually outcasts too, but they only play Gregorian chant.” And following a clear process of suggestion Justin paused to refill his glass – Alex heard the clink of the ice and the joggling noise as it rose in the fizz of the tonic. “So you’re in love, are you?”

“Yes, I think so. I mean, I am. He does seem pretty keen.”

“Don’t keep too tight a rein on him,” Justin said impatiently, as if this was something he’d meant to get off his chest a year or more ago.

“No, darling.”

“Did Robin say anything about it?”

“He apologised again for what he’d said before.”

Justin seemed satisfied by that. “It came as a bit of a shock to us,” he said, in his parental mode. Then, “Is it an open marriage?”

“Certainly not. No, we’re living together. You know I’m incapable of an open marriage. He has every opportunity, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mess around.”

“He’s fully settled in at Brassica Road, then.”

Alex was a little exasperated by this. “Well, he has his own place, but mostly he’s here.”

“I’m just trying to picture it, darling. I’m rather jealous.”

“You don’t need to picture it, it’s nothing to do with you. Jealous of whom?”

But Justin laughed tremendously at that.

Afterwards Alex saw that he should be flattered by this vicarious interest. He had a quite pleasant sense of himself going up as Justin went down, and of being recharged in Justin’s eyes by his success with Danny. But then he saw that if Justin left Robin he would be on the loose again, and he felt a feebly possessive instinct realerted. He also thought wistfully how nice it would be, on top of all his other perfections, his sulky beauty and manic energy, those breathtaking sprints and tranced lulls, if Danny made him laugh like Justin did.

They didn’t travel down together. Danny, who was free to do so, went down the day before on the train, and had arranged to be met at Crewkerne by Terry; Alex wasn’t sure if he was paying him. He went disconsolately to a straight dinner-party in Wandsworth, in the house of contemporaries who seemed to him already middle-aged; he felt he had dropped a decade. He wanted to tell them about his new impromptu life, so remote from these pleasant predictable evenings, and he noted their nostalgia and worry when the talk touched on what their teenage children did, but he kept it to himself. He always took the young people’s side, which was droll for someone who worked in pensions. His last dinner-party had been a takeaway at Danny’s friend Carlton’s, where they sat on the floor and listened to techno. Techno was like house, but “harder,” as Danny said, and seemed to have no words or tunes in it; you could only have it on very loud. It wasn’t the perfect Tafel-musik, but Alex had loved crouching there and bawling his head off.

Danny rang early next morning, as excited as a child. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” he said. “It’s fantastic down here. I’ve been up since six. It’s a fantastic day!”

“I’m just on my way, darling.”

“Good. I can’t wait to see you.”

“I’m longing to see you.” Alex laughed. “I do adore you, Danny.”

“Oh I love you so much,” said Danny, and rang off as if too elated to say anything else. Alex gazed at the phone with tears running down his cheeks and an aching erection.

He hardly noticed the three hours of the journey, they were eaten up by his thoughts and feelings. It was a hazy morning which clarified into stunning heat, and he roared along with the roof down in a private vortex of wind and sunlight. He sensed there were comparisons to be made between this journey to Dorset and the earlier two, but he left them luxuriously unexamined. The points on the route, turn-offs, sudden views, an ugly garage, cropped up with the stumbling fluency of something almost learnt, expected as soon as seen. When he came to the junction where an old white finger-post made the first reference to Litton Gambril his heart raced with proprietary emotion. He had to remind himself that the villagers were all against him; though when he drove past the church and the cottage gardens with their pink rose arches and the early lunch-time groups outside the Crooked Billet, he knew the place was nothing more than indifferent to him.

The gate was open and he ran the car in on to the bricks. Any moment he would have his first sight of Danny, perhaps leaping up through the garden to meet him – he jerked his bag out of the boot with a smothered smile as if already being watched. But there was no sign of him yet, there would be a tiny delay, which seemed worse, now Alex was here, than all the solitary hours before. Danny’s faded pink tank-top was hanging from the back of a deck-chair, a casual flag of occupancy.

The front door was locked, and Alex went round to the back; he heard Danny’s voice before he saw him and the knowledge that he wasn’t alone was like the small black cloud that briefly cheats a sunlover. He scowled to think some terrible bore had called in, to complain perhaps; or even that Danny had asked someone else to stay – he was startled at how his mind ran to that unlikely possibility. But it was only Mrs Badgett. She had her back to Alex, but Danny saw him and lost the thread of the talk as he looked past her and started smiling. “You remember Alex…”

“Hello Mrs Badgett.” For the moment he just nodded amiably at Danny, as if he knew all about him but hadn’t yet been introduced.

“Ah, there he is! I was just saying to Danny how you couldn’t keep away.”

“Not possibly,” said Alex rather archly.

“Now, have you brought any champers this time, that’s what we want to know.” Alex merely grinned at this. “Ah, you boys had a good time, anyway.”

“I wish everyone was as nice as you,” Danny said, scuffing his bare feet on the grass. It seemed all he had on was a tatty old pair of shorts. Alex saw that he still wasn’t wearing the gold chain, another tiny cloud, but it burnt up and vanished in the glow of his gaze. He was astounded that Danny, who was a ravishing idea of his, could actually be standing in front of him, the perfect and only embodiment of himself, reconstituted in every detail, remembered and unremembered – after a moment he had to look away. Mrs Badgett’s presence added a hallucinatory element of suspense.

“I’ll tell you something,” she was saying: “they’re a lot of stuffy old buggers in this village. When did they last go out dancing, I wonder? They’ve got no idea of how to have fun, most of them.” And she swung her hips as if she wouldn’t mind having a bit of a dance right now. Alex tried to refocus his attention on her. He thought that the green-fingered motherly side of her character coexisted with something gypsyish that you saw in Terry too. Perhaps that explained their connection with the caravan business. Terry had told him something about Mr Badgett at the party, but he couldn’t recover the facts from his blurred memory of the whole odd episode, during which he had got the impression that Terry was offering him sex for money. He’d been somewhat offended by that, on top of his trifling jealousy of Terry as a former bedmate of Danny’s.

Danny said, “Are you going to the disco up at Broad Down?,” not quite seriously.

“I might well,” she said. “I might well. I’m not sure I’m exactly in tune with the music these days. If I can get Terry to put on some of the old slower songs, I wonder if he’s got them though.”

Alex thought the conversation was never going to end. He stepped back to pick up his bag from the lawn, and gave Danny a staring, hungry smile over her shoulder. They only had four days here together, they couldn’t waste time like this.

“Mind you, when I was your age,” she said, half-turning to take in Alex as well, which proved how much younger he’d become, “we went into Weymouth for the rock “n” roll dances every week. I’ll tell you who was a great dancer, was Rita Bunce. You know Rita, don’t you, up at Tytherbury. Of course she’s a fair bit older than me, she married a Yankee airman over here in the war. There was a whole lot of them stationed up at Henstridge…”

“I’m just going to take my stuff in,” Alex said.

He went through the kitchen, where a wasp was tapping and fretting against the window-pane, and into the sitting-room. Everything had been tidied away, and there was a fusty stillness inside the house which added to the mood of sexual expectation. He felt as if he had broken in – he couldn’t explain the dreamlike sense of truancy; he supposed it was something to do with Robin’s not being here, with his butchly assertive way of knowing how to do everything, as though each loaf baked and log chopped implied a scorn of you for not having baked or chopped it yourself. And then Alex did remember his earliest visit, seeing Justin naked and amazing in the kitchen as the bread rose, before he even knew that Danny existed; his testing the nature of his feelings, despair and perseverance in a dubious alloy.

Danny was laughing and shouting “Alex!” from the kitchen. Alex said nothing, but stood where he was, almost helpless with the certainty of happiness. Danny strode in and ran at him with a comic growl, jumping up on him with his arms round his neck and his legs round his waist and smiling so much that it was difficult to kiss.

They slept in Robin’s – and Justin’s – bed; and again Alex had a sense of transgression, which faded when he was in it, with Danny in his arms, but came back to trouble and please him when he woke in the early light with one arm numb from Danny’s weight, and the beams, the bedside table and all the furniture of that other relationship steadily materialising out of the dark. The nearly noiseless tick of Justin’s little clock, and its visible quivering escapement, lent an eerie continuity. Then he slept again, and woke and slept, always with the reassurance that Danny slept more heavily while he himself was fitfully vigilant and protective. Afterwards he thought of the cottage on these days as a place of sleep, and the garden too as a sleepy hollow, in its dull high-summer greens now the blossom was over, with wood-doves in the trees and the stream dwindling and trickling in the heat as if half-asleep itself. Despite all his alertness to Danny’s presence, and his honeymoon sense of luck, he kept waking up and squinting at the time and finding how much sleep had got the better of him.

Danny seemed to share his awareness of the absent couple. To him they were usually a fairly comic proposition, though now there was a note of puzzlement and concern about his father. He would ask Alex idle questions about them as they lay on the grass with the papers or soaped each other in a lukewarm summer bath. “Do you think Justin and Dad will get together again?,” “I wonder what Justin’s doing tonight.” Alex was no more likely to know the answers than he was, and Danny laughed in his disquieting private way, as if at a strain of romantic folly to which he was himself immune. He seemed intermittently aware of Alex’s shyness on the subject.

In the bathroom on the first night, getting ready for bed, he said, “You don’t know what it’s like having a gay dad.” Alex thought of Murray Nichols, his own father, distantly benign, industrious, hidden in his work, and tried to imagine him seducing one of the junior partners: he couldn’t even get the hand on to the knee. He said,

“I suppose it’s a further twist on not being able to imagine your parents having sex.”

But Danny said, “I can imagine him and Justin only too well.”

“Yes, so can I,” said Alex, and changed the subject abruptly. “Aren’t you wearing your chain any more, darling?”

Danny started to clean his teeth, and made a garbled noise with the brush in his mouth. “Whore Darn Laid Learn!” he explained.

“I didn’t quite make out…”

He stooped and spat and found Alex’s eye in the mirror. “I said, Sorry darling, I left it in London.”

“That’s okay – you don’t have to wear it all the time…You don’t have to wear it at all.”

But he was treating the matter seriously. “No, I want to. Actually I took it round to George to get it valued. I thought it ought to be insured. I meant to pick it up before I left.”

“Oh…It’s not that precious,” said Alex.

“It is to me,” said Danny, with sentimental promptness.

Alex pushed in at the basin, the light adhesiveness of skin pressed against skin. “You didn’t say you’d been to George’s.”

Danny was baring his teeth and peering in the mirror. “Yeah.”

Alex thought he’d almost rather hear that the chain had been lost. His instinct had been against George from the start. The fact that Danny never talked about his friendship with him, even when asked directly, was odd, since he gossiped graphically about everyone else he knew. Alex was certain he’d invented the valuation business just as a pretext for seeing George. “How is old George?” he said, as if he weren’t afraid of him.

“Mm? Fine”

“Well, give him my best,” Alex said, undecided what degree of irony to go for.

Danny was slipping him an old-fashioned look in the mirror, and when Alex said “What…?” he shouted with laughter and then kissed him on the cheek. Alex hoped for a second that the whole thing had been a tease; but Danny said,

“Since you obviously can’t stand him!”

Well, it was good to have the truth broken out like that. Alex blushed and murmured in a pretend refutation, though Danny was already putting his arms round him – he tensed and relaxed as a purposeful hand slid under his waistband.

Every morning when Alex woke he thought of Danny; his thoughts emerged from the watery interview or vanishing railway-carriage of dreams, stumbled on for a few forgetful instants, pale and directionless, and then fled towards Danny in a grateful glow of remembered purpose. It was love, and all the day would be coloured by it. Or perhaps love was the primary thing, on to which the events of the day were transiently projected – that was how it seemed afterwards, when his memory gave back rather little from these months. Alex could never picture Danny as a whole – he was an effect of light, a cocky way of walking, a smooth inner thigh, a lithe sweaty weight, a secretive chuckle, a mouth drawn back before orgasm as though he was about to be sick. Alex woke up, thought of Danny, and on these lucky days felt his breath on his neck, or the curve of his hip under his hand.

On the first morning at the cottage, Alex lay for a while exploring his mood. It seemed they had announced themselves as a couple after all, by coming away, it wasn’t like one of them sleeping over at the other’s place. He could say “we” now, but felt a superstitious reluctance to do so after trying it out in an imaginary phone-call. And it was true that Danny’s own riotous yacking sessions on the mobile, when friends rang from London, left Alex largely unmentioned, and foolishly unoccupied too, while the unheard jokes came thick and fast and the interrupted mood thinned out and disappeared…He raised himself on an elbow and looked at Danny, sprawled on his front with his head turned away; then ran his fingertips very gently across his shoulders, over the bare nape of his neck where the chain might have wriggled under the touch, the deep blue ineradicable knot of the tattoo, and down the long smooth slide of the back to the smooth buttocks where the kicked-off single sheet of a summer night dipped between and hid the rest of him. One or two pale hairs showed and a smear of wiped gel. He didn’t know if Danny was awake, and couldn’t tell if his super-delicate caresses were giving pleasure to both of them or merely to himself.

In the cool of the evening they went for a walk up the hill. It felt unnatural to Alex to be in the country and not have a walk each day, but Danny said he thought that was only if you had a dog. They went up the back lane by Mrs Badgett’s and out into the fields – the way he had gone with Justin on that first late afternoon. Danny wasn’t protesting like Justin, but seemed even less certain what it was one did on a walk; he bounded about with a sudden access of energy after a day spent sunbathing and dozing while Alex mowed around him. At one point he climbed a tree and Alex waited in a prolonged paroxysm of boredom, saying, “Jolly good, darling, come down now.” He held hectoring conversations with uncommitted-looking groups of sheep. When they got to the stream, more stone than water now, and hedged in with tall coarse grass, he stood on the plank bridge and did a little shuffling dance, grinning at Alex as if they could both hear the music. Alex explained how this was the same stream that ran down and round and past the cottage, and had a moment’s recall of boys peeing into it, and finding the stars a poor approximation to clublight. He mocked Danny for his ignorance of country things – he couldn’t tell wheat from barley or an oak from a beech.

Alex was looking out for the giant’s sofa, where he had sat with Justin six weeks earlier, but its shallow declivity was covered up with thick green bracken, and they climbed on past it and left it, like any of those unspoken sadnesses or unguessed embarrassments that one partner keeps from the other for ever. Higher up there was a tiny local outcrop of flat grey stones, and Danny loped up on to it. Alex followed and they stood for a while with their arms round each other and a sense of unspecified achievement. Danny smelt of sun-oil and sweat, sweet and sharp. They sat down, and he stretched out with his head in Alex’s lap and a happy sigh. It was as if he was leaving it to his older friend, with his particular knowledge of trees and probably harmless enthusiasm for crops, to appraise the landscape while he rested and chatted and purred under his hand.

The end of day was extraordinarily still. Even the great ragged bulk of a grey poplar was motionless, until a breeze too slight to feel moved a little patch of it in a glinting whisper. Its shadow slipped towards them across the hillside, and every- where between the shadows the light grew tender and solicitous after the rigours of the day. Alex’s fair skin felt tight and warm – he’d childishly tried to keep up with Danny, who tanned easily. “You’ll have to plaster me in aloe vera,” he said.

“I will, darling,” said Danny fruitily. “I will.”

Alex looked down at him, the sun-pinked nose, the dip at the base of the throat, the lop-sided tenting-up of his shorts that any friendly physical contact seemed to bring about, the bare ankles scratched by grass stalks. It would have been unreasonable to expect more than this from life. He picked up Danny’s hand and kissed it.

Danny said, “Is Justin rich?”

Alex recognised that he and Danny didn’t often follow the same line of thought, so that when they did there was something explosively funny or sexily mysterious about it, like the first double-take of love itself. This moment was a different kind of telepathy. It struck Alex for the first time that Danny might be jealous of Justin. He said, “I was just thinking about that – in a way.”

“Really?”

“In a way. Yes, he is quite rich.”

“He doesn’t show it. I mean, he doesn’t have anything.”

“He says he’s going to buy a house – though you’d better not tell Robin that. He’s not mean exactly, but he does find it difficult to spend. Sometimes he gives himself a treat. He always goes in for the lottery, and occasionally wins the smaller amounts, you know, a few hundred quid.”

“Of course I never win anything,” Danny said.

“Then he came into a lot of money when his father died. I don’t know if I told you. His father had a factory. He made a rather ridiculous object of common domestic use.”

“Oh…?”

“He sold out in the eighties some time, as Justin didn’t seem to see his future in the die-cast business. The father was about sixty when Justin was born, it was quite unusual. He adored him and believed he was going to be a great actor, and never seemed to notice his lack of progress. There was a terrible bronze bust of Justin in their house, done when he was about twelve. He was very wounded when I laughed at it, it was highly idealised, and very sulky – it was the ideal sulk, I suppose; though I can tell you it was nothing compared to the moods he got in later on.”

“Really?” said Danny encouragingly, like a child who wants to hear a particular bit of a story. And Alex hesitated at the thought of this one, because he had never told it and was afraid that merely telling it would fail to convey his meaning. He looked down at the village and the wooded hills rising beyond in the penetrating light, and thought of sitting almost here with Justin and taking in the view as if it were another unexpected part of the inheritance. Now he wondered if Justin would ever come back here, except to pick up his clothes and his clock. The horizontal sun shone right in among the trees and he saw a woman with a dog emerge from under them and skirt the field below as clearly as through binoculars, though she must have been half a mile away. In the field itself he saw how tractors had drawn curlicues in the silver-gold corn.

“We’d gone away,” he said. “I suppose it was rather like the trial separation, except we were trying to be together. This was a bit over a year ago – last June.” Alex didn’t know how much to say; he felt he might make himself unattractive to Danny by giving him a true picture of his earlier failure, and the futility he had only recently been rescued from. He went on quickly, “We’d been having less and less sex – sometimes we went for weeks just lying side by side, or there’d be a quick hug and a “good-night.” Sometimes the vibrations would wake me up and he’d be having a wank.”

“Dear oh dear…”

“I know, darling.” Alex thought he wouldn’t believe him if he told him how long he had once gone without sex. “He made me feel like a stranger in my own bed.” He could see this was also an alien concept to Danny, who rocked his head consolingly against Alex’s hip. “Anyway, I decided to take him to Paris on the train, and he said he didn’t want to go, he was perfectly happy staying at home and going to the off-licence. But I got a package deal at the George V, and that did finally seem too good to turn down.”

“I hope you got a decent shag out of it,” said Danny, frown-ingly representing Alex’s interests.

“Sure…” Alex swallowed again on the bitter lesson of that afternoon, Justin kissing him as though he’d been paid to do so, the sex only just possible. “Anyway, it didn’t last long. That night we got a call to say his father had had a stroke. Justin was out of the room for some reason, and I answered the phone, and had to tell him. He took it very badly.”

“Well, that’s hardly surprising.”

“I mean he was furious with me: for taking him away at a time when his father might have died. He said he had been worried about it all along; though in fact his father’s only symptom was being ninety-four or whatever he was.”

“What about the mother?”

“She’d died, from drink I think probably, when Justin was a schoolboy. I’m sure that increased his sense of guilty panic -he was the only one left. Actually guilt’s a huge problem with him, but that’s another story. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of his tempers, but in my view they’re always violent repudiations of guilt. So we rushed back on the first train, we were almost the only people on it, and then we got another train straight to Coventry, but when we reached the hospital his father was already dead.”

“Hmm.”

“And then after that it was just awful. I could understand what was happening, but if I tried to make him see that he was displacing everything on to me he thought I was attacking him. You couldn’t help him. And then there was the funeral and something very strange seemed to happen to Justin as he walked round, it was a baking hot day, and he realised he was the owner of this large ugly house full of Maples furniture. I have an image of it, I can’t really explain, I sort of dogged his footsteps, hoping I might be allowed to help him; but he was already taking possession, going from room to room totting things up in his head. We went out across the lawn to get away from the others, who were mostly retired old men from the works whom Justin simply couldn’t cope with, and who obviously knew nothing about us. I said, “Are you all right, darling?” or something simple like that, and he just looked at me, it was quite chilling, and said, “You are unforgivable,” and then turned and walked back to the house. I suppose he’d been drinking all morning. Anyway we never…made love again. That was the end for us. He was probably already seeing your father.” Alex glanced down at Danny, who appeared to be working it out. “Though actually I don’t think that was the point. It was the money. At last he’d got it, and he couldn’t bear the thought of sharing it.”

Danny said, “Well, you said he was a taker, not a giver.” It was always interesting to see what he had remembered.

The light was changing more rapidly, and only the long green top of the far hillside now caught the sun. Through the stillness Alex heard the distant scrape of a dog’s bark, and voices from the farm below, with its grass-grown ricks and empty sheep-pens, to show that there was life there after all. He loved this time of day, with its delicate atmosphere of reward, and this evening especially he was touched by a sense of pattern, or providence. He said, “It’s such a miracle we met.”

“It is, darling,” Danny agreed, with an upward cartoon gape of joy which stealthily declined into a yawn.

When they got in, Danny put on some dance-music – there wasn’t any talk about it, and Alex, who’d actually been feeling a bit Vaughan Williamsish, suppressed his disappointment. He’d brought down a double CD of Barbirolli conducting the “London” Symphony and the “Pastoral” Symphony, though its aptness was to remain a purely private satisfaction. He spread out the Sunday papers on the sofa and sat at an angle reading them while Danny danced loosely around with a bottle of beer held out in front of him. He found he had a new impatience with newspapers, and only skimmed the first paragraph of most articles before his eye twitched to another piece; he especially disliked full-page reports from crisis zones, with their out-of-date assumption that he had nothing more pressing to do than read them. He sometimes looked at opera reviews, but the only stories he really liked were ones about drugs. Another teenager had died that week after taking ecstasy, and happily there were several articles about her, forking over the same old lies and opinions. Alex, having taken the drug once, and read a lot of other articles on it, felt he possessed the subject, and sighed indignantly over what he read, while his heart raced and his stomach tightened in recollection of the experience. He was shocked and rather thrilled to find he was angry at the girl for fucking up. And now the music reached him like a hypnotist’s coded phrase, and set up a moaning hunger for some beautiful stimulant. He sat back and stared his hunger at Danny, who worked across the room towards him, like an over-animated stripper, until he had one foot up on the arm of the sofa and was inching his zip down and wheezing with stifled laughter; at which point the phone rang. They both stared at it peevishly, until Danny let Alex answer.

“Oh, is that the wrong number?”

“This is Bridport, um, 794-”

“Darling!”

“Oh, Justin…”

“I thought I’d ring and find out how you’re getting on. It sounds like a disco down there.”

“We’re just listening to some music”

“Things have certainly changed, darling. I mean, it’s not exactly Frescobaldi, is it? Act Twelve, Leonora’s delirium.”

Alex mugged regretfully at Danny over the receiver and watched him go off into the kitchen. “Have you had dinner?”

“I wasn’t all that hungry.” It was worrying, sober oneself, to hear the quick decay of his speech, the half-conscious pauses and runs. “How are you getting on with Daniella Bosco-Campo?”

“Extremely well.”

“Did you know that was the Italian for Woodfart?”

“We were on the brink of having sex when you rang.”

“Let me see, where is it…Pettirosso Bosco-Campo is the father’s name,” Justin went on.

“You’ve clearly signed on at a language laboratory since you got to town.”

Justin grew arch at the slap of a sarcasm. “Let’s just say I’ve been talking to an Italian with a very large vocabulary.”

Alex found he didn’t want to know. “Anyway, you’re getting on all right. Have you spoken to Robin?”

“No, you don’t speak, darling, if you’re having a trial separation. You remain in your room, obviously much of the day is spent in meditation. It’s a time for plumbing the depths, darling.” Justin paused, and Alex suddenly had the impression that he wasn’t alone: an unrelated movement, a door tactfully closed, Justin perhaps unaware of these sounds, and the awkward collusion they demanded from Alex. “I don’t suppose he’s rung you?”

“Not me. Danny called him this morning, I think it was, just to check up on him. Dan’s quite anxious about the whole thing, actually.”

Alex thought Justin was absorbing this, with an unusual intuition as to how his actions affected other people, but after a moment all he said was, “I must say, it’s marvellous not being in the country.”

Alex said stoutly, “Well, we think it’s marvellous being in the country.”

Justin gave a dryish laugh. “Ah yes. It’s called Love in a Cottage, darling. Make the most of it, because it doesn’t last long.” He pondered his own words, and then said again, “Anyway, I just wanted to see how you were getting on.”

“Thank you. It’s heaven,” said Alex. And as he rang off and stood there with the music pulsing past him through the empty room he thought that that was how it would resolve itself, the doubts and subtle disappointments would be forgotten, and it would be heaven after all.

He went towards the kitchen and on a sceptical impulse stopped by the little commode and tugged open the top drawer. For a moment he thought he’d done Justin an injustice (that was an old play on words). There was a large album there, which he didn’t like to look in, and under it the Scrabble box, but already he had seen the edge of red paper and, loosely wrapped in it, the instantly discarded, never remembered book. He supposed that it would stay there for years after Justin had cleared out, and no one would know what it was.

Danny was sitting at the table meticulously rolling a joint. Alex leant against the cold Rayburn and half-watched him, with disguised interest and relief. He thought how his little sighs and delayed breaths of concentration were like his breathing in bed. “We can just have this,” Danny said, “and then we can drop an E.” He ran his tongue along the paper’s edge. “That music’s really put me in the mood.”

With the whole of gratification suddenly in view, Alex decoyed negligently. “I suppose you don’t want something to eat.” He didn’t know what it would be; he was a decent cook but felt unmanned by Robin’s kitchen with its hung-up switches of herbs and magnetised Sabatier knives. One of the cupboards contained a jumbled armoury of disassembled mincers and other patent devices in pitted aluminium and chipped enamel such as you might find in the pantry of an elderly relative. Another held labelled bottles of home-made wine, some with their corks rising. “It would be lovely to just find a meal,” Alex said, “all steaming on a tray.”

Danny grinned and said, “Have some of this instead.”

Five minutes later he said, “Feeling mellow?” and Alex nodded and kissed his cheek. There was something mellow in agreeing to the smug old hippy word mellow; just as there was something thrilling in submitting his high feelings about ecstasy to the drug’s autistic jargon, drug-fucked, monged, off yer face. They were lying on the sofa, and the CD, which was one long supple ride over a dozen linked tracks, had reached its cruising speed, and out beyond the dazzling rhythms a woman sang “Oh-oh yeah!,” the three notes shining and resonating as if called from a dome. It was just a sample, Danny said; the phrase came back identically perhaps a dozen times – the only words in the song. But Alex was instantly fixated on it, and closed his eyes to see it in its imagined height and depth. It sounded like a welcome and an absolute promise, the yes of sex and something bodiless and ideal beyond it – what it might be like to float over a threshold into total acceptance by another man. Danny’s head was nodding gently to the rhythm against Alex’s chest – “Fucking great, this one,” he said.

“Mm,” Alex murmured, and then started smiling at the thought of the pill. He didn’t know you could do it if you weren’t in a club, with its religious sense of belonging. He said, “When we take the pills, darling, which I hope will be soon, what are we going to do? Sort of dance up and down in here for four hours?” He didn’t mind, but was afraid he would keep hitting his head on the ceiling.

Danny said, “You’ll see,” and Alex understood that all this had been planned for him; or perhaps was an improvisation passed off as a plan. The music ended, and Danny bustled about preparing the tray of their alternative feast – water, gum, a couple of bottles of beer, garibaldi biscuits, a nameless videotape, and a deep-blue coffee-saucer holding the off-white tablets. Alex thought of the beta-blockers his mother placed in his father’s dessert-spoon, to be sure he would remember them; and had a sharp contraction of guilt that he hadn’t rung home this weekend – a routine had evolved of a call at sherry-time before Sunday lunch: it meant they didn’t have to run in crossly from the garden, and the inflexible timing of lunch gave the conversation a natural term. Now it was too late – 10.30 was emergencies only, and he would have to ring tomorrow with some explanatory hint at what he so far hadn’t mentioned to them, the new man in his life. Danny too was clearly briefly elsewhere. He said, “Ricky Nice is playing at BDX tonight.”

They went upstairs, got undressed and dropped their tabs in the bedroom, which had the still warmth of an airing-cupboard even though the windows were open under the eaves. They lay in a loose embrace and watched the moths come in, clumsy ones that knocked about inside the lampshade and others, with long transparent wings, that gathered noiselessly on the ceiling, and made a random frieze along the tops of the walls. Alex liked this decorative invasion of nature, the drug came up, Danny massaged his swiftly sensitised shoulders and back, and he tingled with a sense of the closeness of trees and fields and animals trotting warily about.

It was very different from the first time, and afterwards he saw how clever Danny had been to make a direct comparison impossible and so defer any feeling of disillusion. Time accelerated, but was never lost; the thrills were more measured; he was clenched around Danny in a shivering hug without music and dancing to set his adoration alight. They watched a video compilation that Dave from the porn-shop had made, which Alex feared would be three hours of close-up sodomy, but turned out to be a magical sequence of cartoon shorts and nature films: they gasped at the throb of colours as flowers sped from seed to bloom, a storm of flamingos rose from a lake, and the sun set over the Grand Canyon. Alex felt very hot, and drank a lot of water, but couldn’t pee; he chewed and chewed, and gripped Danny with an impossible snail-like longing to touch all over at once. There was something invalidish about them, on the bed there, glowing and incapacitated.

He slept shallowly, with racing dreams of ceaselessly mutating forms, bright and artificial as toy jewellery. He felt they ought to be frightening, but for some reason they weren’t. They were like the speeded-up orchids and ephemeral desert blooms, but alchemised into plastic. Some churring night-creature woke him up, an owl on its prey perhaps, and though he closed his eyes again he was still awake. The woman’s bright voice kept calling out “Oh-oh yeah!” from the threshold of total happiness, the phrase was stuck in his brain and began to mock him and turn to rubbish with repetition. He tried to counter it, each time it came, with what might have been its opposite, Chopin’s A-minor mazurka, with its mood of etherised regret, and after a while he found they had fused into an unlikely new genre; he almost woke Danny up to tell him about it, the house mazurka. Maybe Ricky Nice would do a remix of it. The flickering dance rhythm ran on for ever, like a night-train over points.

Already the darkness was turning grainy and dimly translucent where a glass of water stood; the wardrobe mirror answered with the greyest gleam to the first hint of dawn at the window. Soon the birds would start up. He thought back to his walk through the streets in London after Chateau, hand-in-hand with Danny, the astonishing crowds on the pavement at 5 a.m., buses surging up for unheard-of antiquarian destinations, Whipps Cross, Chingford Hatch, the blearily milling boys smelling of sweat and smoke, pupils huge and bewildered by daylight, fag-ends imbedded in chewing-gum stuck round the welts of their shoes – the rapturous novelty of it all. Absurd though it was, with the same beautiful young man snoring naked beside him, he longed to be back there again, looking out for the improbable taxi that would take them home together for the first time, in the magically protracted hour when he knew that his life had been given back to him.