The Spell

THREE

When Simon was very ill they had stopped making love, though much that passed between them seemed to carry the promise or the memory of sex. Robin had lain for night after night beside his friend, and fallen asleep with a hand laid lightly on his shoulder or thigh, in a gesture both distant and reassuring. He changed the sheets, and supervised the medication, and did everything for Simon, often complaining about the trouble and disturbance, as if he thought this was only a temporary problem. He treated him with the practical obtuseness of the healthy.

Simon was happiest in Dorset, he enjoyed the sheltered, sun-struck days in the cottage garden, and if there was a threatening breeze would sit in the greenhouse, with its sunken tank and humid unseasonal warmth, and read and doze like some doddery old expat. He liked the thick country darkness, which to Robin seemed newly sepulchral after the leaking glare and animation of London nights. Robin watched him slip over a threshold, into the tapering perspectives of fatal illness, in which all but the mildest pleasures lay in the past. In a terrifying dream he was himself the dying man, a mere consciousness gazing out from the eyes of a paralysed body, unable to call to the friends who hurried past the open doorway, on their way to tennis and dinner and sex. Occasionally a figure would stop and look in, with the resolve of someone testing their own capacity for suffering.

Robin was working that spring on a Queen Anne villa at Kew, and for much of the week he made his office in the little flat at Clapham, driving out each morning to watch the rotten beams come down, the riverward portico made safe, and then back at tea-time to Simon and rooms which seemed for the first few minutes peculiarly white and narrow. It was the sort of job he loved, the rescue of a house from near ruin, with a formal garden that could still be guessed at behind high red walls; the roof was made good, the cellar dried and sealed, a rainy week transformed by ancient colours scraped up bright on wood and stucco. But as the months went on, and the documents and photographs accumulated, he felt the countervailing force of the other record, the dipping graph of Simon’s strength, with its comfortless statistics. It was the darker half-hidden face of the ambiguous April days, success threaded in all the way with defeat.

For his last week Simon was in hospital, it was that stage already, when help and reassurance were most necessary and most futile. Robin shared the evening visits, or vigils, with Simon’s father and sister; then found his days troubled by a horrible anxious liveliness. He came back to the flat at lunch-time, so as to be on the move, then went out to run on the Common and exercised under the trees with his hand-weights. The horse-chestnuts were already leafing, the bushes bright green on black; there was a spring mood, casual but purposeful, and Robin envied the relief in the faces of other solitary joggers and unhurried couples.

One mild cloudy day he was turning home along the Common’s edge and went into a newsagent’s to buy a drink. He had to wait at the counter with a queue of punters handing in lottery slips, and found himself looking with unconscious intimacy at the man in front of him, who was half in profile to him, superstitiously checking the fifteen boards he had marked. It was like the impersonal closeness of a crowded tube train, which none the less fosters secret desires and lurches of excitement. Still warm and impatient from running, but slowed and held by the inertia of the crammed little shop, with its lurid video posters, its insulting birthday-cards, its amazingly compendious top shelf of thickly overlapping pornography, Robin had closed his fastidious inner eye, his architect’s eye; and now it opened again, in the unexpected presence of something beautiful among so much unregulated vulgarity.

In those queer, lulled seconds he looked more and more intently at the younger man’s glossy blond hair and full lips parted in vaguely unintelligent concentration. There was some- thing sleek and unreliable about him. Robin felt a kind of kinship with him, as with his own self of fifteen years or so before, habituated to sex and admiration. He wanted to hear him speak, to see if the generally public-school impression was accurate, but he handed over his chits and his foolish £15 without a word. Robin got himself beside him at the counter, almost as if they were together, and waited for him to receive his tickets, holding up his chilled bottle eagerly.

Out in the street whim thickened into necessity, goaded by the younger man’s complete unawareness of him, as if he had become a wraith like his dying lover, when he wasn’t, he was forty-six and big and fit and handsomely unshaven. He followed him back the way he had come, taking in, with a hushed involuntary groan, the heavily elegant backside, in tight and frayed old jeans, with one of the pockets half ripped off, as if by the failed flying tackle of an admirer. He felt his energies more and more focused and absorbed, and he saw that of course it was a long-obscured need of his own that was clarifying itself in the solid sauntering figure twenty yards ahead.

They went on, across the flat open Common, Robin remembering to look about him as if unconcerned with the lottery addict and trailing him by pure coincidence. They passed knots of schoolboys, a trampled goalmouth. He saw their course across a plan or map. An expert follower would have moved from tree to tree, or taken tangential paths that still kept his object inescapably in view. But Robin didn’t care, in fact he wanted to be seen. They approached and passed a high graffiti-blitzed bandstand, beyond which was a low wooden building, like a broken-down cricket-pavilion, with a boarded-up stall that still advertised Teas and Ice Cream. The blond was briefly out of view behind it, and when Robin came round the corner he was nowhere to be seen.

He saw angled wicker fences that screened the entry to public toilets, the Ladies’ was closed up with barbed wire, but from the Men’s, by some benign perseverance or dreamlike oversight, the hiss of the flush was heard, and the metal door swung open to the bright protesting arpeggio of an old spring.

Twelve minutes later, jogging back past walkers who knew nothing of what he had just done, boys’ shouts and football whistles on the breeze, an oblivious bounce in his stride, as if powered by some forbidden drug, the thrill of a secret transgression warming him to a blush that the innocent would put down to the wholesome effort of running…Of course someone saying couldn’t he have waited? But there was no choice, just as there was no excuse. And the thrilling squalor of it, the blond’s expressionless hunger, swallowing and swallowing on Robin’s slippery, kicking cock, then crouched forward over the filthy bowl, hands clasped round the down-pipe, the unlockable door swinging open behind them.

Robin should have showered, but he made do with a cold squirt of Escape under each arm, pulled on his jeans over his damp jockstrap and drove to Kew with aggressive speed, half guilty, half exultant. All afternoon, among the reliable old builders and the masked and overalled death-watch-beetle men, he had the smell of the stranger’s moist arse and sweet talc fading on his beard and fingertips. By the time he drew in to the hospital car-park it had gone.

Simon made a few widely spaced and incoherent remarks, and smiled with an apparent bitterness that was perhaps only an effect of his gauntness and the recurrence of half-suppressed pain. Robin dreaded any irony about his own good health; he was glad that Simon was dying “well,” that is to say under sufficient sedation for the horrors of the grave to have masked their faces.

The following lunch-time he went straight to the pavilion, and did his exercises alongside the schoolboys’ soccer pitch, almost as if he was waiting to go on. He kept the screened entrance casually in view. He liked the building’s reminiscence of his own teens and their successes – smells of linseed and creosote and changing-room staleness. He had a long wait, running off and back on an improvised course between invisible markers, but the hour raced forwards for him, lost in the image of the nameless man. Robin loved the dull glow and the fleshiness of him, which seemed in some barely acceptable way a recompense for what had happened to Simon. It was only lust, of course – he must remember that; he hadn’t even heard the man speak, beyond a grunted disdainful “Yeah” when he swiped a hand down his neck and whispered “Okay?” before he left. But it was electric lust, nothing sane or resistible. The shadowed ground among the trees was brightened by his floating image, like the dazzle inadvertently thrown off by a moving windscreen or an opened window. A wide pale shoulder, the grey-gold dusk of hair between his legs, unrelenting blue eyes, glimpses and gleams in the air of a spring day. When the man at last appeared Robin saw him with a shock of recognition – he had been remembering someone so different.

That night Simon said to him, “You look well,” and took his hand with a confused stare, proud and doubting. To Robin there seemed something clairvoyant about him; Simon knew him best of all, it was absurd to suppose that he wouldn’t know everything,he had done. Robin felt he had been left to decide, by some punishing honesty system, whether he had been accused or absolved. He said, “I love you,” which he had never done before in the presence of the younger sister and the admittedly deaf father. In the early hours of the morning Simon died.

Robin took it calmly, he acknowledged the facts with a stoicism that was part of his natural pride, and was also a Woodfield thing: he knew he had been given an occasion to behave well, as well as Simon had died. And there was a certain resilience too that came from his still unnegotiated standing with the family. In the event neither he nor the father seemed to know which of them had lost more, and which deserved the keener, the more unconditional, condolences.

By late morning an almost physical discomfort had set in -faint nausea, a distracted clumsiness, panicky breathlessness. The stoically observed sequence in the hospital, the emphatic last breath and the following silence, the subtle relaxation and emptying of the face, the timid but steady squeaking of the nurse’s shoes on the linoleum, and the dark confirming descent of the Indian doctor, came back to him with the clarity of something belatedly understood. He barged around the flat, picking things up and throwing them down, appalled by their irrelevance or their crude pathos. His thoughts were unpleasantly sexual, he pictured Simon as he had been ten years ago, with his fat Jewish cock always thickening up and needing work; there was something suspect in thinking of his cock as Jewish, as if it was a little person; he imagined it now, cold and bloodless between the wasted thighs.

He went into the bedroom, got undressed, and then pulled on his singlet and running-shorts with tense excitement. He remembered the day twenty years before when his grandmother had died at her flat in the Boltons and he had gone out as if in a trance to one of the Earl’s Court pubs and picked up a man in a leather cap and fucked him all afternoon.

When he hit the street he found a fine clinging rain was in the air. It was comforting, and intimate, like some barely palpable form of therapy; it seemed to define his warm agitated body within its weightless cool. He saw the trees of the Common at the end of the street, and ran without slowing across two streams of edging and accelerating traffic to reach them. He wasn’t jogging exactly, it was faster than that. When the wooden shack came into view, with its boarded-up windows and offers of Refreshments, there was already something habitual about it, that filled Robin with relief and shame. He ran straight into the Gents, which was empty, and stood panting against the wall, silvered with drizzle.

But by three o’clock no one had come in, except a blind man with a stick and a dog, like a figure in a comic sketch, and some noisy kids in football studs who glanced back at him apprehensively as he withdrew into the cubicle. He leant against the door to keep it shut and cried silent tears of grief and humiliation.

The next time he saw the blond was a week later, in the West End, among the crowding shoppers in Long Acre. He was thinking of him, and there was a blurred half-second of adjustment as the remembered features dissolved into the real ones: the shock of his presence was sweetly subdued by Robin’s sense that he had been there, on the floating gauze of his imagination, all along. He had the discernible aura of an idea made flesh. The clothes were different, he seemed somehow in disguise, but Robin smiled, to show he knew his secret, as the blond passed by, with a quick unrecognising stare.

He could hardly believe that the moment had come already, and gone; and after a few seconds of bumping into people he turned back. It was the stare that wounded and provoked him, he would have hated it in anyone else, and was already making peculiar allowances for it: the man was terribly short-sighted, or was himself perhaps lost in grief; or it was just an unamusing game. He stood alongside him at the window of an expensive men’s shop, where the stare was directed with more affectionate concern at the mixture of oddly cut suits and sporty clubwear in black, orange and lime-green. The shadows of the two men who had twice had fierce speechless sex together fell vaguely across the stilted little tableau of clothes and accessories, the pinned baize, the bodiless folds of trouser-legs and shirt-sleeves. There was a faint reflection in the wall of glass, too pale and inconstant to let them see each other steadily. Robin’s eyes milled over the baffling price-tickets. He started to feel that like an agent making contact he should produce a pre-arranged phrase, something gnomic but commonplace. He had never felt so constrained. He found he was gripping the other man’s shoulder and saying quite loudly, “I’ve got to see you again.”

They started meeting in the afternoons at Robin’s flat. Justin lived with a boyfriend in Hammersmith, and arrived about 2.30 by taxi. The boyfriend worked for the pensions fund of a government department – Robin thought one day Justin said the Home Office, another the Foreign Office. Various facts came out in the conversations after sex, when Robin made strong coffee for himself and a precocious gin and tonic for his visitor: Justin had sometimes worked as an actor; he was thirty-four; he had an unusually old father, in his nineties, who was a manufacturer; he had been with his boyfriend for a year and a half, he loved him but was bored with him physically. Robin felt no guilt or hostility towards this other man, just a distant curiosity. He said nothing about having once been married, and having a grown-up son; but after a shamed little unseen pantomime of hiding Simon’s photo in a drawer he left it on the bedside table, and Justin seemed gratified by its presence. Robin got the feeling that duplicity was a constant part of Justin’s life.

He found him charming and funny, with a line in absurdity that he hadn’t expected. By the time of his third visit and his second gin and tonic they were grinning at one of his stories and holding each other’s gaze above a sudden deepening of intimacy which seemed to Robin both dangerous and possible. When Justin strolled and sprawled around the flat, naked or in his boxer shorts, he created a half-pleasant mood of lazy confinement. Robin watched him with a new alertness to his own four small white rooms, as if given a fresh chance to judge their effect. But Justin noticed nothing, and so made all the considered details and improvements seem rather negligible -Robin wondered if Simon himself had ever really appreciated them.

At moments the sense of sacrilege was very strong – but then the point perhaps was that the stranger knew nothing of the man whose place he was taking: he had no obligation towards him. Robin sobbed when he told him of his death, but the loose hug that followed, the wiping of a cheek with a rough thumb, moved in ten seconds into sex – Robin heard his own tearful breaths modulate helplessly into gasps as Justin’s flickering mouth got to work. He stroked and clutched at his thick golden hair – and how it all came back, the life of love and excitement he had once thought of as his right and his inevitable future.

In theory the afternoon arrangement was ideal for him, since it left the mornings free for visits to the site and he could work on through the lunch-hour, while the builders sat out under the portico, with their sandwiches and cigarettes, and their incurious air of owning the place. Then he could be home in twenty minutes, and after his two or three hours with Justin the early evening opened out with its usual patterns of exercise, and unusual invitations from old friends who were clearly still making him a priority. Robin quickly saw that his preoccupied manner and sad lack of interest in other men were indistinguishable from the symptoms of contained English mourning. At times he wondered why he wasn’t mourning more.

But after a couple of weeks the romantic secrecy and restriction were themselves becoming painful. The purposeful mornings were thrown askew by the intensity of looking forward to the afternoons. He had to be told things twice, he was in a daze which again might be put down to grief, he got behind with his work while he watched the clock like a schoolboy. It was as if he saw through the plans he was studying to something uncontrolled and turbulent beneath. Justin crowded his thoughts, aroused him and slightly irritated him by having so complete and monotonous a hold on his imagination: he appeared to him both as a devouringly passive lover and as a kind of cock-teaser, a grown-up school tart, with his refusal to be touched, even to be seen, before 2.30 in the afternoon. Robin wore out his most intimate images of him by turning them over so persistently in his mind.

And then the whole movement of withdrawal, around five o’clock, the friendly but businesslike silence in which they got dressed, the new note of anxiety when Justin checked his watch…and the first seconds of being alone again after the door had shut, Robin wandering sightlessly from bed to desk to sink with the weak smile, tender, rueful and shocked, of a feeling suddenly deprived of its object. The dusks grew longer and lonelier day by day as his feeling deepened. He walked out again to the gym and in the softening light, the slowly precipitating pinks and blues of a lover’s evening, he saw he was in a trap. The fact of having Justin was undermined by the fact of not having him; he needed nights with him, not hours. The old self that Justin had reawakened couldn’t be satisfied by the arrangement he had imposed.

Robin had always been, in his well-mannered way, an initiator. He didn’t have the predatory disregard for the other person that some of his friends had, but he was used to creating a mood and exploiting a possibility. He thought he had never been resisted by anyone worth having. If he had felt trapped before, in the years of his marriage, and in the early restless days with Simon, he had shown a proud instinct for survival and escape. He found he was thought of as slightly dangerous, the handsome, athletic young architect, whose father was Sheriff of the county, who had a son at a good prep-school, but who was also known to a more secret elite in the underground clubs of early-eighties London. So it was a new experience, like the troubling physical changes of middle age – the sudden hair-loss, the slowing sex-drive, the half-doubted dulling of his hearing – to find himself in the submissive position of a mistress, the yearning but unacknowledgeable creature of the afternoons.

Worst of all were the weekends, the three whole days from Friday lunch-time to Monday lunch-time, the enforced or at least accepted silence…It was a silence with an irresistible sense of crisis to it, as if everything must be over between two lovers who left each other alone for so long. Robin went down to Litton Gambril, where the early summer was pushing on senselessly without him, and where he could invent useful jobs for himself, get the Rayburn going and cook an elaborate meal out of the garden and eat it with the sorry haste of the newly widowed. The cottage was solid and stubborn and as he had left it; it wouldn’t come to life. He had a feeling he had made a mistake, and was acting with a parody of purpose. He lay on his customary side of the huge old farmhouse bed and swept out an arm over the cool double vacancy. He felt for everything he’d lost in Simon, and everything he needed in Justin, snivelling and exciting himself at the same time, till he felt quite freakish with pitiful and possessive emotions, and brought himself off so as to be able to sleep.

One Saturday lunch-time he drank a bottle of Gilbey’s with the Halls and rang Justin’s number when he got back, in a mood of truculent reasonableness. “Let’s cut the crap,” he said, as he span the phone-dial through the eleven laborious numbers, which seemed in their old-fashioned way to be giving him time to think twice about the call. After a couple of rings a pleasant unfamiliar voice recited the last seven digits back to him, ending on a little interrogative rise. It was a tone of such easy and unsuspecting efficiency that Robin hesitated, and when after a few seconds Alex said “Hello,” the tone hardening but still tolerant, he hung up. He sat hunched forward on the sofa in the stillness of the country afternoon. Up in London a young man he had never seen would be putting down the receiver with a shrug and speaking innocently to the man they shared; Robin knew he was house-proud, and pictured him in an apron. He found a note of reproach in that happy mechanical answering of the phone, in the enviable pleasant boredom of their affair. Then he got to his feet with a sullen longing to break it up, which he drunkenly allowed to become a plan.

Back in town he was in a mood of fatalistic excitement that was new to him. He thought he must at least see his rival and drove over early on the Monday morning to the quiet Victorian street where the two of them were living. He slipped into a space almost opposite the house, and sat looking at it, professionally adjudicating the commonplace glazing and pointless panels of terracotta tiles so as to subdue his sense of its special aura and of the bulging secret it sheltered. He saw an upstairs curtain pulled open by a shirt-sleeved arm, and then tugged half-back again, as if after a wincing protest. It was an ordinary redbrick terrace house, made remotely pretentious by arts-and-crafts details. Once it would have had a maid and children in it. Robin wondered how Alex and Justin lived in it, what they had done with it.

His view of the front door was interrupted by a battered yellow Escort dawdling past in search of a parking-space. The driver was a flat-faced young black with a gold cross ear-ring which glinted as he craned round. Seeing Robin in his car he mouthed a question as to whether he was about to leave, and when Robin shook his head gave him an incoherent grin, which seemed to have some kind of sex-sympathy in it. He stopped a short way ahead, in the middle of the road, and waited. It was the half-hour of going to work and to school. All along the street goodbyes were being shouted down hallways or front doors double-locked for the silent daytime. Robin started to feel conspicuous as children were hurried past. He looked carelessly at the black driver, who he thought might be an electrician or painter, and saw him angle the rear-view mirror so as to check his hair in it, and ogle his own eyes and teeth as if for crumbs of sleep or breakfast. He saw him squirt a little aerosol into his mouth. He missed the opening of the door opposite, but turned at the knock of its shutting and the rattle of the letter-flap. A pale young man in a grey suit came out on to the road; he was so tall that he seemed almost to trip over the flimsy front gate. Robin thought there was something rather 1890s in the long profile and the almost black swept-back hair; he was more beautiful than Justin had led him to expect. At the same time he thought brutishly of the sex-life he had with Justin and couldn’t imagine how this man could ever have satisfied him. He saw him stoop to unlock a vulnerable old soft-top Mercedes, and as he drove off, with a look as if surprised and embarrassed by the competitive noise he was producing, the driver of the Escort backed up alertly and into the space he had left.

So that was it. He had seen his lover’s partner in the barely thinking routine of his workday morning; and it was better to see and to know than to be haunted by imaginings. He felt it had been worth it. And it was really only then that it occurred to him that he might see Justin now himself: he could be late at Kew and have a fierce half-hour with him first, in the musty marital bed, or over the kitchen table, shaking the breakfast things on to the floor. At the moment he loved the idea of sex that smashed things up. Even so, he waited. He was frightened of Justin.

A minute later he heard the remote trilling of a phone, and glancing across the road saw the black guy nodding into a mobile and then poking its little aerial back in before getting out of the car, reaching in for a knapsack, slamming the door shut. He was broad and muscular, with curvy legs in ripped old jeans; he strolled confidently round the car, through Justin and Alex’s flimsy front gate, and in at the door, which opened already as he approached. Robin saw a flash of white bathrobe on a welcoming arm before the door closed. He sat with his mouth open, his lips hard and curled, as if about to be sick. Upstairs in the bedroom’s bay-window the half-open curtain was tugged carelessly shut.