The Spell

FOURTEEN

No, you’re right, sir. This room would need a bit of work.”

“If seven maids, with seven mops…” Justin trailed away.

“Sorry sir?”

“Nothing.”

“It does enjoy a south-westerly view.”

“If it enjoys that view,” said Justin, standing back from the window, “then it must be a masochist.”

Charles the estate agent gave an embarrassed chuckle. “Point taken, Justin,” he said. “Point taken.”

Justin wished he would decide what to call him, and stick to it. Charles was a tall, not unhandsome man in his late twenties, with the high colour and camel-like gait of a certain kind of public schoolboy. It was boiling hot, and he was in shirt-sleeve order; he had a bright joky tie which Justin imagined was a gift from a girlfriend who didn’t want him to turn into a fuddy-duddy. He kept smoothing it down as if he would like to smooth it away. “I’ve got another one to show you,” he said. They went downstairs and got into Charles’s white Rover – or “Rover car” as he called it. As before, there was a bit of trouble starting. “You run up quite a mileage in my job,” Charles said.

It was inexpressibly strange to be back in this neighbourhood, though the shock came not from what had changed but from what was exactly unaltered. There was that corner house with crazy “stonework” stuck over the brick, there were those peculiar children playing outside the dry-cleaners, there was the strikingly named Garbo’s off-licence, which had done so much to enhance the glamour of drinking alone; they were actually going to pass the end of Cressida Road, and he craned round to get a glimpse of Alex’s house, half-way along. “It’s a pleasant area, this,” said Charles. By and large, Justin thought he preferred the cockney Derek, from the other agency. The trouble with boys like Charles was the recurrent hint they gave off that they, and certainly their parents, lived in somewhere far grander than the properties they were trying to sell. Hence the note of pity, the wavering forms of address, and the ironic attachment to the euphemisms of the trade. “This next house has been the subject of interior design,” Charles said.

The woman of the house had stayed in to be available to them, and sat on the sofa with her legs crossed, drinking milky coffee and doing the Daily Mail crossword. When they had been upstairs for a while, she came up to see what was happening and showed them how the loft ladder worked. Justin saw that as a vendor she had come to believe the estate agents’ literature, and would be offended by almost anything he said about the house. He was itching to leave the place for ever, but found himself in a spasm of parodic politeness asking further questions about the central heating and just having another quick look at the little bedroom. As the front door closed behind them he realised he had been rather a success.

“So what did you think of that one?” Charles asked when they were back in the car.

Justin made a face of retching grief, and Charles laughed and said, as the car finally started, “You ought to have been an actor.” He looked around and went on cheerfully, “Well, that’s about it for now. Can I drop you somewhere? Or have you got the rest of the day off?”

“I need to get back to Knightsbridge,” Justin said, with a frown at his watch.

The days in London passed wonderfully quickly. If he wasn’t doing something, then he was luxuriously planning to do it. The estate agents’ bumf came in multiple envelopes each morning, and he looked through it in a trance of horrified amusement. Once he chose to view a place solely for the blinding vulgarity of its decor. He felt cheated when they only gave a photo of the view from the house. He needed to find somewhere, and had an image of the light and space in which he would live, but nowhere that he looked at had the right circulation, as Robin called it, the right flow of space and, what was it, disposition of offices. Justin’s new era, in which he starred as a virtually teenage heir who was also in some mysterious way retired from life, would depend on the discreet presence of staff. He was more and more fascinated by having people do things for money.

For the first few days he had been very good. He had only seen Gianni, whose number he had kept from way back, and who had provided all those amusing translations of people’s names into Italian. He was fine, but suffered from the common syndrome of having grown in memory. On the following Monday Justin went to see Mr Hutchinson, his father’s stockbroker, and left his Marylebone office feeling almost giddy with financial security. The detail of what Hutchinson said evaporated within seconds, but a sustaining sense of power remained. He went, from need, into the Gents at Oxford Circus, where the same skinny black guy he had sucked off years ago was standing in exactly the same place and gave him the same furtive glare; but Justin thought not. He strolled on into Soho in the late morning sunshine, entranced by the animation around him, the boys dashing about, the cyclists like acrobats. How anyone could prefer the country, with its cows and sheep, both literal and figurative, was beyond him. He went into a gay bar that had just opened for the day and wasn’t yet playing any ghastly dance-music, and had a beer and a chat with the barman and left with all the free gay papers under his arm.

Back at the Musgrove he spread them out on the bed and lay there like a child with his heels in the air and his chin in his hands. The personal services pages seemed to have grown in number and frankness in the year since he had last used them, and a lot of the advertisers now had full nude photos, though sometimes with the face smudged. Others had a picture of their face only, which he preferred. Better still were the purely verbal ones. He liked maximum suggestion combined with surprise, like an optimal blind date. If they hit it off he might see them again, but the real point was the arrival of an absolute stranger. Justin was a gorgeous young man of thirty-five, of course, so the strangers themselves were usually relieved and excited. Sometimes they asked why he didn’t just go to a bar and pick up.

Perhaps there were too many rent-boys now. Justin had to get a pen to mark the possibilities. He thought there should be some stricter calibration of the superlatives of “well-endowed.” No one admitted to being less than VWE, many were VVWE or Massively VWE, which surely wasn’t right, it should be V Massively WE. He ringed Mark (the d he put in “buldging” was unaccountably arousing), as well as stunning Carlo, Italian hunk, biggest in town, and German Karlheinz, who offered watersports (“let me quentsch your thirst”). He saw that black Gary, aka Denzel, was still running the same ad (“You’re in for a big surprise”), and wondered what had happened to him on the night of Danny’s party; it had been a big surprise all right to see him there in the kitchen, and Robin’s jealousy had been almost uncanny. He’d have liked to see him again. His eye fell on the nondescript one-liner, “Phil. Central. In/Out,” whom he suspected was probably the best of all.

Mark, as big as a building, wasn’t answering, but Carlo came on at once, rather snappily. He was busy now, but he could be there at seven o’clock; Justin made it clear he wasn’t after a mere half-hour, and Carlo spoke with sulky eagerness of large vague sums of money, to which Justin agreed without. listening.

“Okay, so where is, please?”

“It’s the Musgrove Hotel”

“Oh. I never been to that one before.”

“No, I don’t imagine there would be much call for you here,” Justin said, picturing his boundingly virile arrival in the chintzy front hall. “Incidentally, Carlo, how big are you?”

“Yes, is twenty-five.”

“Goodness…”

“That’s in centimetri, of course, I mean to say.”

“Ah yes.”

“That the circonference…No, only jokin!”

“Ha-ha.” Justin sometimes felt he should wear a tape-measure clipped to his belt, as Robin did when he was on a job. “Well, see you this evening then.”

Which left him with a whole hot summer afternoon of waiting. He didn’t know what to do. He went down for a late lunch in the antique quiet of the Musgrove’s dining-room, and then sat with coffee and the Daily Telegraph in the lounge. People clearly mistook him for the nephew or grandson of a guest at the hotel. And part of his pleasure in the place was the reminiscence of holidays spent with his father in establishments chosen for their digestible cooking and ban on children; hotels where the lounge was empty by 9 p.m., though grumbles of conversation and bursts of high-volume TV could be heard from the rooms as he set out again for a stroll along the front to the improbably listed back bar of another hotel. From his armchair he could see through the lobby to the brilliant sunlight in the street. The stout old doorman, in maroon morning dress, was talking to some workmen outside, and stepped back to greet an elderly couple, guests who obviously knew him well. The rough tick-tick of a waiting taxi could be heard, against the fainter roar and distant squeals of traffic in the Brompton Road, a block away. The routines of London were so beautiful, calming and exciting at once, like being in love. In the words of certain masseurs, stimulating and relaxing. He thought of poor old Robin, over in Clapham, and Alex high up in his office in Whitehall, glancing out at the day through greying net curtains, and was gently aroused and lazily amused by their love and lust for him. He saw them standing side by side, with their very different penises sticking up in bewildered supplication as he swept past. They had been stopping-stations, hitching-posts in that embarrassing early part of life before one has quite enough money or knows what one is meant to do. Then there was a moment of change, of clarification. Money made everything clear.

He walked up the road to the seldom crowded designer basement of Harvey Nichols and sorted negligently through the rails of the better houses; here and there a young assistant would break off from an exacting afternoon of club gossip and shirt-refolding to solicit his custom. He tried on a couple of suits, loose summer linens, but they made him look fat and hot, like an old-fashioned sex-tourist. “It’s not right,” he said, with a note of more general protest. The prices too were rather tawdry. He got a taxi to Issey Miyake, where he was welcomed with ritualised surprise, like an arrival at a remote Zen temple. In the forty minutes he was there no other customer came in, but when he left with a suit and a shirt he had spent a fraction over £3,000, and he hailed another cab in a mood that was best summed up by one of his earliest word-muddles: he was in a state of beautitude.

Back at the hotel a more urgent excitement set in. He couldn’t help wondering what Carlo was going to look like, and the thought of having him here entirely at his disposal for hours on end made him prickle with pleasure. He wondered what he was doing now: working out, perhaps; or, more probably, simply working. An afternoon appointment with a dandruffed married man. Justin liked the idea of Carlo as a sex-machine, but hoped that he wouldn’t already be tired out at 7 p.m. Carlo was a strong name, though, like a fortified version of caro, which was the Italian for expensive. Of course the English for Carlo was Charles, which was the name of his estate-agent friend. That was a coincidence. Maybe Charles too was Massively VWE. It was hard to tell with those expansive pin-stripes. How would he put it? – “enjoys a substantial erection”…well, who didn’t? And perhaps there had been something a bit sexy, after all, about chugging round with Charles from house to house. Carlo, though, would be more than a bit sexy. But then you had to remember that Carlo almost certainly wasn’t his real name. There was still an hour and a half to go. Justin was so worked up that he wondered about getting another rentboy round, to fill in the time.

In the last minutes of the approach he rather lost interest -it was only sex, and would probably be a disappointment. The phone rang at five to seven, and the pleasant Scots girl, who made Justin think of bare knees in a cold wind, said, “There’s a Mr?…a Mr Carlo, to see you.” Justin was already in the towelling bath-robe that the hotel provided, powdered and sprayed in coquettish deference to his visitor, who might not share Mr Robin’s taste for b.o. He arranged himself in a chair, but then had to get up to open the door.

As Carlo came in, the couple in the next room were going down to an early dinner, and Justin heard the words “youth hostel” pass between them in a jolly but disconcerted tone. There was superficially something outward-bound about Carlo, in his homosexual boots and socks; the padded straps of his knapsack set off the curves of his chest and shoulders like a harness, and his black shorts, though baggy in cut, still caught and stretched around his thighs and buttocks as he moved. He was the urban parody of a hiker that you saw in any gay bar. He was by no means as tall as expected, but he was swelteringly good-looking; he had the mask-like orangey tan that comes from using the wrong “no sun” lotion. He shook Justin’s hand and looked round the room with an appreciative, comparing eye as he shrugged off his knapsack. Justin knew he’d made another good choice. The boy was like a package holiday on legs.

The next few moments had their usual fascination – the hand-over of the money, the little dent this made in the scenario of the romantic visit, and the immediate boost to it again after Carlo had counted the fold of notes; the hesitation as to what was wanted – a pretend love-scene or sex without preamble or some charged personal variant. Justin loosened his bath-robe to reveal the natural tan that was his reward for so much country tedium, and Carlo came up and started kissing him in the automatically imploring way of a shorter person. There was something pretty passionate about his warm snufflings, Justin thought, as he reached down to grasp the heavy stirring in the boy’s pants. But then Carlo stood back for a moment with a silly apologetic expression. “Only one second,” he said. “I need to use your toilet.”

Justin gazed at him forgivingly. “Darling,” he said, “I am my toilet.”

He couldn’t explain what happened a couple of days later. He went out with Charles again in the morning and looked at a smallish house off the Fulham Road that had been totally renovated. He didn’t expect to like it, he found the mere mention of Fulham depressing, and perhaps he only went because of his dotty new fixation on Charles, the secret stud. Charles picked him up outside the hotel, and his new pitch was a superstitious reluctance to talk about the house at all, as though anything he said might threaten the beautiful outside chance of Justin’s falling in love with it. “I’ll be very interested indeed to know what you think,” was all he said. He had the unlasting aura of a person one has surprisingly and happily had sex with in a dream; but he appeared not to notice Justin’s quizzical glances. There was an old signet-ring on his right hand, but his wedding-finger was reassuringly vacant.

Outside, the house was sameish white stucco, with a bald front garden where a cement-mixer had stood; but inside it had been given a coldly avant-garde make-over, and had lost all reference to the consolations of an ordinary home. The two men marched moodily over the creaking expanses of blond flooring, and Charles gave clumsy demonstrations of various concealed fixtures: Justin thought this must be his first visit to the property, and suspected that he had a significant hangover; he watched him take off his jacket and lay it on the graphite-coloured kitchen worktop, and took in the hinted bearing of chest and buttocks with revisionist indulgence and fascination. Then there was the trill of a mobile, and Charles wandered off trying to get a good reception. “Yes, I’m there now,” he was saying; and other laconic, shielded remarks, as if he couldn’t speak freely. Justin was alone for a moment in the kitchen, and quickly felt in the horizontal breast-pocket for Charles’s wallet – it came out with a tug, a fat old buttoned billfold, bulging with credit card slips and petrol vouchers. Behind the little glassine window inside was a snapshot of an extraordinarily beautiful black girl.

Well, that was all he needed to know. He moved to put the wallet back just as Charles, with an irritable turn of speed, was coming through from the front door. “Sorry, Pete, this bloody phone’s still playing up,” he said. “I’ll ring you later.” There was nothing Justin could do, and he started forward, saying hectically, “So this room doubles as a dining-room,” as he crammed the thing into his own pocket.

The rest of the inspection was purely histrionic. Justin ranged about and asked questions as though from a transparently remembered script, but all he could think of was the wallet and getting rid of it. Charles seemed relieved by his sudden liveliness, and perhaps thought he had had an undeserved success. At each stage of the following business, Charles picking up his jacket, their leaving the house, getting into the car, the ten-minute drive, and Justin’s getting out of the car, various ruses seemed briefly possible but then had already lost their moment. A straightforward explanation would have been humiliating. At one point he had the thing – so much not the thing of Charles’s that he wanted – in his hand and was about to slip or throw it into the back of the car, but his nerve failed him.

After being dropped he went into the hotel for a moment, and then emerged again with a certain unavoidable shiftiness, and ambled along the street. He couldn’t hand the wallet in, because he couldn’t be associated with it in any way. He couldn’t leave it somewhere, because another person might use the credit cards and cause Charles even more nuisance. He felt too guilty to look inside the wallet himself. This was among the more ridiculous things he had done, but was not to be classed with odd bits of trouble he’d had at school with taking other boys’ things. The thought that his momentary caprice was about to become a horrid little crisis for someone else required swift and frowning censorship. A huge garbage-truck was progressing down Beauchamp Place, with overalled men in fluorescent waistcoats lobbing sacks and boxes into its moaning and crackling tailgate. Justin stood and watched it pass, and as the men ran forward he stepped out to cross the road and tossed the wallet into the rearing jaws of the machine.

He decided to miss lunch, and got a taxi into Soho. He went to a bar where he had sometimes met up with Alex after work in the earlier, more outgoing phase of their affair; but it too had been the subject of interior design, and its new surfaces of polished steel and industrial rubber forbade nostalgia. He ordered a nutritious bloody Mary. He felt that he wasn’t drifting but adrift. He didn’t know what to do about the houses. He would have to see Charles again, to offset suspicions, but the idea of looking over another property was already vaguely sickening to him. He imagined ringing the office and being told that Charles would no longer be looking after him. And then he could simply abandon the search, it would be a sweet release; he could buy a brown felt hat and see out his days in the considerate hush of the Musgrove Hotel. He had a recurrent delusion, which seemed to him authentically criminal, that he could still smell the high-summer stink of the garbage-truck, beer-slops and rotten apples and cod-liver oil.

By mid-afternoon he had been round three bars, accompanied on the last leg by a talkative young man called Ivor, who had met him and Robin at a party last Christmas. Justin had only a filtered recollection of that earlier occasion -of being shown off by Robin, of being very beautiful and amusing, and, perhaps, of Ivor being one of those he had impressed. “I often repeat that joke of yours,” Ivor said.

“Oh…” said Justin.

“When I said what a pillar of strength you were to Robin, and he said, “Oh, more than that,” and you said, “What, an arcade?”” Justin chuckled bashfully, and thought it was quite funny, or would have been when he said it. Ivor seemed to be mesmerised by him, his chatter was partly nervous, and when Justin started speaking he sat with his lips apart, as if to memorise what he said. He was a nice enough looking chap, with short black hair and sporty club gear that he must have thought suitable for daytime wear. The opportunity never quite arose for Justin to tell him he had left Robin, and he sheltered behind Ivor’s understandable ignorance, and found it comfortable, and then uncomfortable. “I’d love to have you two round for a meal,” Ivor said, “while you’re both in town. Or perhaps you’d like to come and see my new show.”

“Sure…” said Justin, turning to signal to the barman.

“You don’t remember what I do, do you?” said Ivor, clearly thrilled by his own insignificance.

Justin didn’t like to say that, strictly speaking, he couldn’t remember Ivor at all. He said, “We’ll only be here for a couple more days.” And then, “Do you want another drink?”

The bar they were in was small and sparingly lit, with walls of mirror to allay the sense of being in a trap. It was clearly a haunt of Ivor’s, and they were soon joined by a loose group of his friends. Justin bought drinks for them all, with a strained heartiness that wasn’t his natural style. One of the boys said to him quietly, “Are you okay?” He was a thickset rugger blond, whom Justin had immediately hoped to impress – it was confusing to be shown this wary solicitude. He had had what, four bloody Marys and then a couple of summery screwdrivers. He wasn’t that far gone. But maybe his gaze at the boy, who was still soberly shy and reasonable, had been unwittingly heavy. He said, “I’m fine,” and the boy shrugged and lifted his bottle and murmured, “Cheers.”

Later, he was buying a drink for another man, and told him he was looking for a house, three or four bedrooms, in west or south-west London, but north of the river. He may have rather bragged about his requirements. The man said, “Well, let me know when you find one. I suppose you won’t need a lodger?”

Justin said, “I might have a sort of paying sex-guest.”

This didn’t seem to be what the man had in mind, but he laughed, and said, “Anyway, you must have a boyfriend.”

“Yes, I must,” said Justin.

Ivor, who tended to audit and sample anyone else’s conversations with Justin, said excitably, “He’s got a bloody gorgeous, boyfriend. Haven’t you? He’s this gorgeous architect.” He took a sip from his salt-rimmed glass, and added, “They’re made for each other,” with a note of extravagant regret.

Justin looked in the mirror on the facing wall. The bar was reflected in it, and their group of seven or eight, and his eye tracked across it to find himself. The skin of his face felt tight, with the dry tingle of afternoon drunkenness, the hint of giddiness and dissociation…He knew he should leave, but winced at the thought of the bright sunlight outside, and saw the wince in the mirror as an ugly little convulsion in the indefinably alien stiffness and slackness of his face. Everyone else seemed to be all right, he saw that the man who might be his lodger had noticed him looking at himself, and was smiling ironically at him. The bar was really terribly small. He took in, with delayed displeasure, that the cool quiet jazz of earlier had mutated, as the afternoon ran over some invisible threshold, into louder dance-music, with its threatening chemical eagerness. Ivor was saying something else to him, more unguarded as he got drunker himself. Justin turned and stared deliberately at the polished surface of the bar. His breathing was rapid and shallow.

As soon as he was out in the street he felt better, and he walked a block or two unseeingly in short charges and pauses. Whenever he thought back to the bar the panic returned, with a sudden wrong beat of the heart; but the effect diminished a little each time. It might have been all right, but he avoided looking in shop-windows or car-windows. He went into Soho Square, which he thought would be free of reflections, and sat firmly on the grass, in the middle of the lawn, under the airy canopy of the planes. One of the gay boys near by came and asked him for a light, but he just shook his head. After a while he got up quickly and went to a phone-box. He jabbed at the numbers and listened to the ringing tone without a clue what he was going to say. He felt it was out of his control, and that whatever he said would come to him in the moment that he said it. He had a vague image of the Clapham flat, the sex-box as he used to call it, and Robin darting to the phone. A preoccupied and not quite recognisable voice said, “Alex Nichols.” Justin winced, and for a paranoid half-second thought that Alex was there with Robin; then he started to wonder how he had dialled that number, by some flustered instinct -it was well over a year since he’d rung Alex at work. “Alex Nichols,” the voice said again, wearily. Justin stood there panting, like a pervert, and heard Alex hang up. Then, more deliberately, as if trying to see where he had gone wrong the first time, Justin keyed in the sex-box number. Within a second he heard the muffled clatter of the ansafone, and Robin’s voice, unlifelike, businesslike, making the impossible announcement that he had gone away.

By the time he reached Crewkerne it was dark, and he saw the last taxi pull out from the station yard as he emerged with his bags. There was a slight chill and a sharp grassy smell in the air. He went to the phone-box to call a cab, and then stood under the lamp at the station door. The ticket-office was closed, and the lit platforms and waiting-rooms were unmanned, in the modern way. Occasionally a car that wasn’t his cab came slowly past, and then accelerated away. The edge of a small country town at 10.30 at night, with rear lights disappearing: it was a definition of loneliness.

He noticed that the driver didn’t take credit cards, and decided not to tell him he had no cash. He sat in the back, with his overnight bag clutched on his knee, and watched the car’s headlights sweep corner after corner of the high-hedged lanes. The driver took them fast, and several times raised a squeal. He probably wanted to finish for the night, this was far out of his way – Justin was indifferent to him but glad of the mood of emergency. He swung from side to side, gripped by the muddled emotions of coming home and going into exile. He had made a mistake, but he didn’t know which it was.

When the car stopped at the gate he did a cursory mime of dismay over his wallet. “It’s all right, I live here,” he said; but the driver held on to his luggage. He hurried down through the dark garden, hoping more than ever that Robin would be in. A light was visible through the apple-trees – it was like a house at the end of the world, and he had a sense that he had left it thirty years ago, rather than ten hapless days.

Some punctilio, or maybe a taste for drama, made him ring the bell, though his keys were in his pocket. He heard the springy thump of Robin’s footsteps, and knew he would be barefoot, and pictured his puzzlement at a late-night visit. The door was plucked open, and there he was, shockingly himself, utterly lifelike. Justin saw his sigh of surprise, and then the doubting but unstoppable smile. “Have you got twelve quid, darling?” he said. “I’ve got to pay the taxi.”

Robin came up to carry his bags, and Justin thanked him quietly, as for an expected but still agreeable tribute. In the kitchen they had a quick hug, but sat apart across the table. Justin had the beginnings of a dry headache. When he looked up he saw that Robin was crying.

He always rather froze in the presence of other people’s distress. He had only once seen Robin cry before, not long after they’d met, when he had told him about Simon – and it was true that on that occasion he had found it terribly sexy. Now he said, “So when did you come back?”

Robin pulled a hand across his face and cleared his throat. “Um…about three days ago. I couldn’t stand not hearing from you – knowing you were somewhere near by.” Justin read his desire to ask a dozen questions, some of them important. “Are you going to tell me where you were?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Robin sniffed and stood up. “Drink?”

“Yep. Scotch.”

He got glasses and a half-empty bottle. “Did you have fun?”

“Yes, for a bit. I needed time. You mustn’t forget I’m a city girl, darling, at heart. I grew up in Solihull.” He took the glass that Robin slid towards him, and peered into it absently. “Anyway, then I decided it was time to get back to dear old Luton Gasbag.” He smiled briefly and then drank, but with no show of celebration. He was anxious to prevent avowals from being made. “Did you get up to any mischief in my absence?”

Robin hesitated for a moment, as though trying to make up something silly, and said, “I slept with Terry Badgett.”

“Huh…I see.” Justin scraped back his chair. “That’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it?”

“Totally pathetic. I was lonely, he jumped me. It was a waste of time. And money.”

“You don’t mean you paid him for sex?”

“The sex was hopeless, and then he woke me up and asked me to pay for it. He obviously sees himself as some kind of hustler.”

Justin tried to show he was above such things, but he felt bitterly wounded; and baffled by Robin’s motives in telling him. “I’m not sure I needed to know that,” he said.

“Well, you asked. I’ve never had secrets from you, and I’m not starting now. I thought you’d left me, for fuck sake. I haven’t taken a vow of chastity.”

“Maybe I have left you,” Justin said. He felt his anger waking up, with its exhilarating potential to take him far from home, and he slammed the hatch down on its head and bolted it shut. “Anyway, I hope he didn’t stay the night.”

“No,” said Robin impatiently. “He was only here about an hour. It was nothing.”

An hour, thought Justin. An hour of betrayal. He said, “I don’t want all the village knowing about it”; and then started laughing, and carried on laughing for longer than was pleasant.

When they were in bed he curled up in Robin’s arms and felt his hard cock pushing apologetically against the back of his thighs – he thought it was more like Alex’s shy lust than Robin’s usual masterful advance. He said, “Do you mind if we don’t tonight. I have, genuinely, got a headache.” He shifted away, but reached back to grip his powerful hand.

In the morning Robin lay in much longer than usual, and kept rolling on to Justin with pretend-sleepy humphs and gropes. But Justin could outsleep anyone. Eventually Robin swung his legs out of bed and went to the bathroom, leaving the door open. Justin listened for the boyish noisiness of his peeing, always straight into the water, and the flush pulled just before he finished. A minute later he heard rattling in the kitchen beneath. He lay there waiting for the Terry thing to break loose again; but nothing very much happened, and he wondered if perhaps he didn’t care. He intuited some motive of revenge in the whole business, which made it amusing in a way, and he saw that it was something he could always bring up. He pushed back the covers, and turned round on the bottom sheet like a dog in its basket. It didn’t take him long to find half a dozen bent black hairs, which he picked up fastidiously and took between thumb and forefinger down to the kitchen. Robin was laying the breakfast, and Justin set them down with a conscientious frown on his side-plate. “How much did you have to pay for these?” he said.

Robin’s face was instantly shadowed. “I said, I didn’t know you were coming.” He turned away with a shake of the head, as if he could never do anything right.

It was extraordinary to have such power over someone to whom you longed only to submit. There they both were, half naked in the kitchen, the back door open, the noise of birdsong fading under the gathering roar of the kettle. Justin said, “Shall we do housewife surprised over breakfast by meter-reader? Or are these the Lucy Rie plates?”

Robin said, “Mike Hall rang and asked us to go round. They’re having the new man from “Ambages.” I imagine he wants some moral support.”

“I’m not sure I can give that,” said Justin. “What’s his name?”

He was very cheered by the thought of a social evening, with old people.

Robin went to the phone, where he’d written it down. “His name’s Adrian Ringrose.”

Justin raised an eyebrow. “He sounds like the ballet critic of a provincial newspaper.”

“That’s what he may well have been. I think he’s retired down here.”

“He’ll be awfully glad he’s met us,” said Justin, with a companionable yawn, and a sense of the significance of the first person plural. “Still, there’s lots of time before then.”

“Masses,” Robin agreed, and raised his eyebrows optimistically. He had taken the day off work, to be with Justin, which was both comforting and oppressive. He came back across the room to sit beside him on the sofa, and put a hand on his thigh.

Justin said, “Shall we have a game of Scrabble, darling?” in a special broody tone.

Robin seemed to ponder for a moment if this was code for something even more enjoyable, and then modified his caress into an encouraging rub. “Sure, if you really want to.”

“I do, darling.”

“Okay.” Robin jumped up to get things ready, with a slightly exaggerated air of keenness and self-denial, like a hospital visitor. Their two previous games of Scrabble had been reduced to absurdity or even aborted by Justin’s childish resentment of the rules. It was especially risky if they played one of the Woodfield variants, where the rules had been devised by Robin himself. “What shall we play?”

“I don’t mind, darling. You decide.” Justin was charmed by his own cosiness and pliancy, and couldn’t have said how ironic he was being, or where it would all lead. “Something a bit different?” He knew that Robin and his mother had played obsessively in her last years, and that Lady Astrid had made and memorised a list of all the two-letter words in the language.

“Okay.” Robin offered him the letter bag. “Let’s have nine letters, then; and seventy-five extra if you put them all down.”

“Fine.” Justin smiled mysteriously, picked out an A, and added, “Oh, and no two-letter words.”

Robin drew breath to complain, but then thought better of it.

Justin held his letters away from him and scanned them fondly for a couple of minutes. “Do you know what my first word is going to be, darling?” he said.

“I don’t.”

“Well it begins with a G, and it ends with a Y, and the middle letter’s an A.”

Robin pursed his lips in the briefest pretence of amusement, and was already entering his score on the sheet when Justin put down GRAVY. “Ah. Very good, twenty-four,” he said, before doing a quick reshuffle of his rack and then laying out across the board, with calm ruthlessness, the word EXASPERATE. “Um…let me see…sixty, and the bonus…one hundred and thirty-five.”

“Marvellous,” said Justin, arranging his new letters and sending his mind off on a wilfully naughty excursion through his sexual activities of the past ten days. Gianni, and Carlo; and then Mark, who had bulged rather less than promised. No, Carlo was definitely the best. When he focused again on his rack he could only see a hedge of consonants, like a Welsh village. He thought how absurd it was to be doing this for fun, by choice; when surely the point about getting a little bit older and having money was that you never had to do anything that you didn’t want to. He put down GENTS, as a flat joke, and also, in their case, a romantic one, and scored a suicidal eight – he felt Robin’s disapproval of the wasted resource of the s. “Shall we have a drink, darling?” he suggested.

While Robin was out of the room Justin hopped up and looked at his rack, on which TEMPORISE was waiting to be deployed. He saw that if Robin laid it across the s of GENTS he would get a quadruple word score plus the bonus; which after a moment’s mental arithmetic would doubtless come out at several thousand points. He was back studying his letters, and accepted his gin and tonic abstractedly, only looking up when Robin had set down his tiles. The word he had made was PROEMS; which came to a timid twenty-six. “Rather a good word, I think,” Robin said.

For Justin the game was over at that moment. If they were both going to play deliberately badly, even though from quite different motives, then what was the point of continuing? He shouldn’t have looked at Robin’s letters, perhaps; and he remembered that though knowledge was power it could also involve a good deal of disappointment. Still, he couldn’t admit to having peeped, which might be considered a kind of cheating. He took about five minutes to make his next word. “Sorry…” he said at one point.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Robin, suppressing his gaping impatience as if playing with a child.

Justin was thinking about going out later, and the wonderfully unorthodox guide to village life he would be able to give to the newcomer. All he knew about him came from Margery Hall’s vague remark that he was a bachelor and rather musical, from which he had built up a convivial portrait of a boozy old opera queen who would of course find him very attractive and amusing. Then he did something most annoying, and put down half his word before hastily taking it up again. He said, “I think it would be nice to just sort of put down words.”

Robin frowned equably. “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“I mean, wherever we liked.”

“Oh I see,” said Robin. “Well, that might make an interesting variant. I think it’s probably best if you engage with your opponent’s words…”

Justin took a drink, and then quickly put down PIRRENT. “Eleven, darling.”

“What on earth is that supposed to be?”

Justin blinked offendedly over his sabotage. “It’s PIRRENT,” he said.

“Why don’t you have PRINTER?”

“Oh I far prefer this.”

“Yes, darling,” said Robin, clearly thinking he was being mocked, but remembering to indulge Justin, like someone senile or mad. “But what does it mean?”

“Oh…” – Justin kept shaking his head as he searched for the definition. “It means…sort of vainglorious.”

There was a long pause before Robin said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to challenge that.”

Justin twisted sideways to pick up his drink, and the jerk of his knee fetched the Scrabble board off the low table, and scattered the letters across the floor. “You know how superstitious I am,” he said. “I’m sure that must be a sign.”