Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

He loitered admiringly through the garden, stopping to sniff the roses and wallflowers, as if he might be being spied on by his better conscience; and in the back lane, with its convenient gate and mood of secret access, he still had the air of someone merely out for a stroll. There was no sign of Terry’s “Love-mobile,” his pale-blue A-reg soft-top Talbot Samba; but his mother was working in the garden, tying up bean-canes, and told him she was expecting him to look in soon.

“Something I want to ask his advice about,” said Justin.

“Oh…” said Mrs B., evidently impressed that her son should be required in a consultative capacity. “I’ll send him straight over.”

“Only if he gets in in the next hour or so,” Justin added cautiously.

“I’ll tell him.”

“Thanks a lot.” He turned for home, and then called back, “Tell him to come just as he is…” He had liked the thing last time of Terry shrugging off his overalls.

And now, really, with the appointment pretty well certain, he thought how outrageous it was of Robin to leave him locked up here, like a slave, a mistress with no life of her own. He walked on, past the back gate, along the lane to the main entrance, with its view towards the sea-obstructing hills; he despaired of the country, with its loathsome hedges and alarming animals and smelly little shops selling nothing but canned fruit and knicker elastic. No one he could talk to down here would know the meaning of anything he said. He began to wonder if they were even going to get the old queen who’d been promised as the next tenant of “Ambages” – or “Handbags” as Justin called it. He could walk up by the church and have a look, but he didn’t want to miss Terry.

He thought about how he wanted to be found. It wasn’t a sunbathing day, it was overcast and the air was full of idly circling insects, but it was hot enough to be about in nothing but his old linen shorts. He checked the effect in the wardrobe mirror, frowned down at his midriff, where sleekness was feebly holding out against slackness, and glancing up without moving his head caught sight of what could only be called a jowl. His mirror work was normally more carefully censored. What on earth did he look like in – well, three or four unflattering sexual positions came galloping to mind…? Thirty-five was youngish for jowls. He wondered, with a prickling of the scalp, quite what he was being fattened up for. But then a rap at the door sent all such worries out of his head.

Terry had come, charmingly enough, with his tool-box; and it took a minute or so of laborious double entendres to establish what sort of odd jobs needed to be done. Then there was some less charming banter about money. Apparently a couple of Hollywood location-scouts staying at Bride Mill had been astonished by Terry’s modest tariff. “They had one of them scratch limos,” he said. “They taught me a thing or two, I must say.”

“One’s never too young to learn,” said Justin.

“I gave as good as I got, mind,” Terry added cryptically.

“Let’s go upstairs, darling. How old are you, by the way?”

“I’m twenty,” said Terry, following him with the tool-box, for verisimilitude. “Well, nineteen, to be honest.”

Justin shook his head in wonder at a rent-boy who not only was honest, but pretended to be older than he was.

In the bedroom he got him out of his jeans and T-shirt and had him sit back on the rumpled sheets while he nosed round his pleasingly stained briefs – pale blue, which was so much his artless country colour. He could smell his cock through the tautening cotton and knew he’d already had sex today, he loved the sense of the kid being inexhaustibly in use. “That’s it,” said Terry. “Let him out, give him some air.”

Justin did as he said, and wondered if his pride would be hurt if he asked him not to talk.

“He’s a nice one, isn’t he?”

“Mmm,” Justin agreed, his mouth suddenly full.

Terry gasped. “He likes that.” He spoke of his penis as if it were some rare and lively rodent that he’d raised himself and could show to selected other boys with justifiable pride. “He’s thick at the bottom,” he explained, “and he’s even thicker at the top. He’s got a big broad snout to him.”

Justin sat back on his heels. “Yes, you said that before.”

“Well, you know you like him, Justin. He’s a nice one, all right.”

The fuck that followed (“That’s it, show him the way home!”) was disappointingly brief. Justin was about to upend into his favouritely abject position and found that Terry had already come. He brought himself off quickly, just to finish the thing, and wondered bleakly why he hadn’t done so hours before.

After that Terry quite settled in, and lay there talking point-lessly. He really ought to have left, but Justin remembered he was sort of a friend of the family, and felt an odd delicacy about asking him to go. The afternoon had grown darker and darker and indoors it was doubly gloomy. From time to time faraway thunder was heard. It seemed to hurry the evening towards them, and the moment that was. conjured up by the loose spin of the whisky-bottle cap, the wonderful renewal of booze.

“So when’s Robin getting back?” Terry asked, looking about into the shadows with a certain satisfaction at having tenanted the master bedroom.

“It could be any time now actually…”

“He’d better not catch me again.”

“No. That’s right.”

Terry sat up and the pale singlet-shape of his untanned chest had a vulnerable gleam. “Everything okay between you two?” he asked, a little too sagaciously. And then, with oblique persistence and a further frowning survey of the room, “It’s a nice house, this.”

“Yes indeed. We love it.”

“I thought you might be getting a house of your own now.”

Justin lay back and stared at the rough oak beams above. “Who or what gave you that idea?” He heard Terry shift, and the thump of his feet as he searched for his clothes.

“I thought you were a wealthy man,” Terry said after a bit. So was that what they said about him in the village? Or was it just Danny’s pillow-talk?

“You didn’t tell Dan about us, did you?” said Justin, severely, and with a hint of shame.

Terry tugged up his zip and said, “I never tell nobody nothing”; which if you didn’t construe it too strictly was a reassurance.

Danny asked his friend George to the party, and then rang him to suggest he might like to drive them both down to Dorset in his BMW the day before. George always raised objections, and sometimes ended up doing what Danny wanted. “Won’t you be working?” he said.

“No, I’ve quit.”

“I see. You’ve been fired.”

He sensed George’s disapproval and hoped to deflect it with a joke. He paused and said, in a Brooklyn whine, “So I was five minutes late…”

A year ago, on Danny’s first night alone in London, he had met George in a bar and gone back with him to a richly over-furnished flat in Holland Park. He had almost no sense of himself as a stroke of luck to a man pushing forty, and in fact was relieved by George’s wanting him, and comforted by the stuffy clutter of the rooms. It was as if the entire contents of a country house had been herded into one apartment by an aristocrat who couldn’t bring himself to sell – though it turned out that everything was for sale, since George was a dealer in antiques, with a special line in baroque tapestries, indoor obelisks and highly varnished paintings of dead game. He gave Danny his first experience of cocaine, and they spent a couple of days in a languid binge of sex that was magically protracted and insulated by George’s mastery of hangover deferral: a fat new line, the crack of a fresh Jack Daniels cap, at just the right moment.