Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“Alex would make you a super boyfriend.”

“I’m sure he would,” said Danny, breezily but not impolitely.

“You’re like me, darling, you need someone older to look after you. I know Alex is rather shy and sensitive, but he’s got plenty of money and a comfortable house and a sports car -and in bed…well-”

“Please!” murmured Alex.

“It’s the leverage he gets with those long legs…”

There was a knock at the door-frame. “Am I interrupting?” A broad-faced young man with slicked-back dark hair came hesitantly out of the night. He wore painter’s dungarees over a blue T-shirt, with the bib unbuttoned on one side, and scruffy old gym-shoes. The effect was authentic, but you felt he was exploiting it. “I’m just on my way to my mum’s,” he said, with the distinctive vowels of the place.

“Come in, Terry,” said Robin; and Danny ambled over to him and squeezed his arm.

“Have a drink, Terry,” said Justin gruffly. And so a chair was found for him and a glass, and the bottles were lifted to the light and tilted to see if any wine was left.

“I’m surprised you’re not busy on a Saturday night,” said Robin, in what seemed to Justin an equivocal way. Terry was a local factotum and Romeo, with a family interest in the Broad Down caravan park, a famous eyesore on the other side of Bridport, as well as a vaguer association with the pretentious Bride Mill Hotel.

“I’ve been doing some work for Bernie Barton,” said Terry. “Papering his back room.”

“Do you mean PC Barton Burton?” Justin enquired.

Terry was uneasy with Justin’s humour, and said merely, “Whatever you say,” and grinned at the others for solidarity.

“Been over to the Mill lately?” asked Robin, in a tone that irritated Justin. “How are the prices doing? Still £35 for fish and chips?”

“Something like that,” said Terry. “Cheers” – taking a cautious drink and then laughing retrospectively. “Or it may have gone up.”

What was annoying was the slightly roguish joviality, the way Robin’s own vowels became ambiguous, half-rusticated, a sort of verbal slouch as if to disclaim their differences in age and class. He should be what he is, thought Justin, who was not too drunk to know that his annoyance was sharpened by guilt. The present impromptu occasion was a test for Terry as much as himself. He didn’t know how practised Terry would be at deceit, and it was perhaps his own snobbery to assume that a Londoner would do better at concealing a transaction like theirs. He was far cheaper than the London boys too, and Justin believed in general that what you paid more for must be better. He should have given him a larger tip. Glancing at him now, with his forearms and broad brow already pinky-brown from the sun, Justin felt the sweet bite of his addictive nature, and looked forward to other mornings when Robin had gone to Tytherbury and left him in the waking surge of hangover lust.

“This is Alex, by the way,” said Danny.

“How do you do?” said Terry, half getting up to shake his hand across the table.

“Do you live near by?” said Alex feebly.

“Very near by,” said Terry, with a genial laugh at his ignorance. “No, my mum lives up here, in the back lane.” He tipped his head backwards. “I can slip in through the back gate.”

Justin wondered how artless all this talk of back bedrooms and back lanes was. He said, “Mrs Doggett grows marvellous delphinia.”

Terry frowned at this, in the suspicion that it was another joke. “She’s won some prizes,” he said. “It’s Badgett.”

Justin himself was slow on the uptake – it was a genuine confusion, arising perhaps from Doggett’s Coat and Badge, a pub on Blackfriars Bridge where he had lost several evenings with a randy young sub from the Sunday Express . He thought there was no point in apologising.

“You don’t need any jobs doing?” Terry asked with a vague head-shake.

Justin said, “Robin’s famous for doing all his jobs himself.”

There was a little pause. “Are you running the disco this year?” said Robin, as though it was an event he especially looked forward to.

“Yeah, I expect so, come the holidays, come July,” said Terry quietly, and continued to nod at the difficulty of the task and his readiness to perform it. Justin could see his blue briefs through the side-pocket of the dungarees. Nothing else underneath then.

“We’ll have some great music for my party,” said Danny, leaning forward from the other side and resting a hand on Terry’s thigh in a split-second enactment of Justin’s own fantasy. “You’re all invited,” he went on, apparently making it up on the spot. “Two weeks’ time, right here. That’s cool, isn’t it, Dad?”

Robin shrugged and spread his hands: “Sure…” Justin saw it at once as a plan dense with potential opportunities and embarrassments. Alex obviously wouldn’t be there, though he was already accepting with a show of flattered surprise; and maybe Robin too, as a parent, would see fit to pass the evening with the Halls…He supposed there would be drugs, which always made him uneasy, and seemed to make their users amorous but incapable.

“How old will you be, darling?” he said.

“Twenty-three,” said Danny, with a grimace at the ghastliness of it; then muttered histrionically, “What have I done with my life?” At which everyone but Terry harumphed and refilled their glasses with a despairing leer.

“Well, Alex has done very well in his chosen profession, of pensions,” said Justin, and smiled to see his former lover unable to sift the compliment from the mockery. “Robin perhaps hasn’t quite fulfilled the promise of his early work on The House in the Landscape and the Landscape in the House, have you sweetie?”

“You haven’t exactly broken every known fucking box-office record as an actor,” said Robin, in what was probably a parody of annoyance. Justin looked at Danny and Terry side by side, uncertain which to enlist.

“I was in a play,” he said.

Soon the party broke up, Terry called back “Cheers” from the door, and Danny went out with him, talking quietly. Justin saw Alex start to wander after them, as if sleepily attracted, or simply from an instinct to escape; then stand in the doorway with a pretence of stretching and yawning. Upstairs in the bathroom Justin switched off the light and squatted on the low window-sill, letting his eyes adjust to the night outside: the unsuspecting trees, crowded dim moons of cow-parsley, and slowly more and more starlight on the slope of the greenhouse, on the motionless roses, and the immensity of the hill beyond. He couldn’t see the boys, though occasionally he heard a louder phrase or both of them laughing, and then for a minute or more only the brook. He wanted to turn the brook off. He thought Danny would walk Terry home, through the gate in the wall and fifty yards up the shadowed lane; but there were their voices again, close by, the words indistinct, with the idling rhythms and inscrutable pauses of the overheard. Well, if Terry wanted to tell Danny what had happened, he would do so. They had woken a bird up and it gave out a series of disoriented chuckles.

Robin decided to go to Tytherbury on Sunday as a break from Alex’s apologetic presence and the unnecessary tensions of the weekend. But then Tony Bowerchalke said to bring over the whole party, not for lunch but for a drink before lunch. Getting them into the Saab had not been easy. Alex, who had started out unconvincingly in shorts, rushed upstairs to change and hit his head quite hard on a beam. Then both Alex and Justin seemed to want to sit in the back with Danny, though Danny himself said he wanted to sit in the front. Justin won by arguing that Alex had the longest legs, and then drove Danny mad by playing “round and round the garden” on his bare forearm. Danny was clearly in a sulk after Robin’s frowning and in fact rather frightened encounter with a naked Terry Badgett in the bathroom at 3 a.m. Perhaps after all Alex was the best person to have in the passenger seat, with his responsible pleasure in the villages and the riot of flowering chestnuts and may.