Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“Come on,” said Danny. “Day-dreaming.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’ve got to try and find someone.” He took Alex’s hand, but people barged between them and he let go. He followed on, caught up with him, then was suddenly alone when Danny stopped to hug and kiss someone. Which was how it continued. He began to think they would never get to the end of Old Compton Street. Danny knew every beautiful or interesting-looking person who came towards them, and those he didn’t know were registered, with a raised eyebrow or turn of the head, for future investigation. A bar or cafe with its tables out on the street could take five minutes to get past while he squeezed in between the chairs, bestowed stooping embraces, sat briefly on people’s laps and uttered bursts of mildly hilarious nonsense, underpinned by casual hand-holdings and caresses. Alex couldn’t tell if he was a star or a mascot. “This is my friend Alex,” he said punctiliously to everyone, and several of them found the time to say “Hello,” or at least “Hi,” and give him a cursory upward glance, before getting on with their chat, during which Alex stood about with a distant but forgiving expression. He felt somehow provincial, and afraid of showing his ignorance. Words like Trade, Miss Pamela and Guest-list were produced and received with the gratified ennui accorded to a well-established ritual. Anecdotes of excess got the most laughs, and Danny himself carried one or two that he heard to the next little group, in an easy pollination of gossip. When he moved on he waved impatiently as if it was Alex who was keeping him waiting. “Come on,” he said. Alex knew already he would do whatever he said. He thought he was showing off by marking his place in this world so insistently, it was really quite childish. But then he saw his own childish longing to be known and greeted in a world other than a third-floor corridor in Whitehall.

In the restaurant Danny was rather quiet and ordered only one course, as if hoping to discharge a social obligation as quickly as possible, while Alex chose a souffle with a twenty-minute handicap. They had a table in the window, and Danny sat breaking up bread and looking out past Alex’s shoulder at the parade of pleasure-seekers outside. At first he said “Yes…yes” with distracted regularity while Alex was telling him sweetly self-deprecating stories about the office: he had never had any special arts of courtship, being very nice was his only technique. He watched Danny’s cool grey eyes slide from right to left, passing briefly over the obstacle of himself. He said, “I’m sorry, it’s a bit dull in here,” feeling the gloom and discretion of the restaurant as if they were expressions of his own character, or indictments of it. He seemed to have picked the one place among these gay blocks that was still a haven for heterosexuals. Then Danny smiled enormously, and reached across to touch Alex’s arm. He leant forward, and re-angled his attention – it was a change of gear that thrilled Alex and slightly unnerved him, since he had seen Robin do just the same thing the previous weekend, in a physical convulsion of remembered manners; he had been glad of it and doubted it at the same time.

Danny said, “I wonder what Dad and Justin are up to this weekend.”

Alex looked at his watch. “Ten fifteen. I don’t know about…your father, but Justin will be drunk.”

“Mm,” said Danny nostalgically, and pulled the bottle out of the ice. He was drinking quickly but not heavily – it was the acceleration of the evening, which Alex only resisted because he couldn’t tell where it was going. “Did he always drink that much?”

It was a hard and posthumous-sounding question, like something asked in court. Alex wasn’t sure whether to protect Justin or expose him. “It varied. He never really gets hangovers, I don’t know why. It’s never really been a problem. He drank a lot last year, after his father died. That was a bad time for us. The beginning of the end, I suppose.” Alex found himself looking into the shallow bowl of a camera obscura in which a country scene was projected, lawns and chestnut-trees, a saturation of green, the agonising stupor of a summer day, Justin in a dark suit walking steadily away from him. “After the funeral things were never the same.”

“When was that?”

It really wasn’t what Alex wanted to think about – it was everything he was trying at last to escape, and it gave him a sense of foreboding to have it conjured up by the beautiful young man he hoped would be Justin’s replacement. “Exactly a year ago.”

Danny seemed to be working it out. “So when did he meet Dad?”

“Actually, I’m not sure. Some time after that,”

Danny was already laughing. “And we won’t go into how they met.”

“No, quite,” said Alex plonkingly, to hide the fact that he didn’t know and never wanted to. When at last the food arrived, the waiter drained the bottle into Danny’s glass and accepted his enthusiastic nod at the suggestion of another one.

“He’s quite a change from Simon,” Danny said, holding his knife and fork straight up as his eyes explored a plate of capriciously disguised cuts of guinea-fowl. And again he seemed to be smiling at a recollection he couldn’t politely explain. “Quite a change…”

There might have been some mockery of Justin in the air, and again Alex, who knew better than anyone what Justin’s failings were, was surprised to find himself lightly wounded on his behalf. “Why, what’s Simon like?”

Danny waited till he’d finished chewing and then said, “You’d have to ask in Golders Green cemetery,” and laughed quietly and bleakly. “No, he died last year.”

Alex raised his eyebrows and nodded, taking in the fact and with it a sense that he might have been unfair to Robin, whom he’d thought of up to now as a mere loose libido, a lordly saboteur of other people’s happiness. “AIDS?”

Danny paused and said, “Yeah,” as if it was unnecessary or even bad form to mention it.

“But…Robin’s okay?”

“Oh yes.” And with a grin: “My impression is he’s always been a pitcher not a catcher.” Alex wasn’t sure if they both saw the double meaning. He was oppressed again by his own dark inner loop, the melting fade into fade into fade of his memories of sex with Justin. “This is delicious by the way.”

“Good – this is too,” Alex said, though even the fugitive demands of a souffle were a little much for his amorously shrunken appetite.

“I mean he looks different, Simon was dark, I suppose they both had rather gorgeous bums. Do you think people always go for the same type?”

Alex wondered this about himself; part of the point of Danny was that he wasn’t like Justin. “It can be very nice to have a change. Some people have to have a blond, or can only get it up with black guys, or only like short people.” He sounded stolidly expert.

“Yeah, what about you?”

“Well, almost everyone’s short to me. Though I admit I never quite see the point of other tall people.”

“I like the way they go on and on,” Danny said impression-istically.

“Do you?” Alex gave a grateful smile.

“I do,” said Danny, acting sly.

Alex loved being with him, it went off like a rocket in his heart, the fierce ascent and all the soft explosions of descending stars. He wanted passers-by to stop and watch them leaning together in the candlelight and speculate enviously about them. He said, “I suppose the thing is, with types, it’s not so much the look as the psychological thing. Whether you’re drawn to givers or takers.”

“Mm”

“I’ve got a ruinous taste for takers.”

Danny was picking ferally at the last brown-mauve flesh on a white bone. “That’s just a typically modest way of saying you’re a giver,” he said, smiling with grease on his lips. “It’s really sweet of you to take me out to dinner.”