Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

After that George went to Paris for a week, and Danny couldn’t stop thinking about his dark cynical face and the vague first knottings and stretchings of age in his wide flat body, which moved him and aroused him so unexpectedly. In the lamplight, with a lover’s closeness, after a little silver pipe of hash, he had touched the tiny creases around the eyes and mouth and seen how they changed his dully faceted handsomeness into beauty. Danny had never had such intense and prolonged excitement with another person, and knew at once that he couldn’t go on without the certainty of more of it. George didn’t return his messages, and when he finally went round to the house seemed surprised and slightly annoyed to hear him on the intercom. The minute’s coolness in the hall, in the glow from a bronze torchere, and under the provoking gaze of a marble faun, was all it took. Danny knew he was in love.

George was a self-reliant bachelor unused to much genuine emotion, and wary of entanglement with a kid of twenty-one. He was moved by the poetry and artistry of things that he sold but had the low human expectations of a sexual predator. He was vain of his appearance and his largely uneducated instinct for objets de vertu . He could see how ripe Danny was to be hurt, which was why he decided not to see him again after the dream debauch of the first visit. But now here Danny was, with his boots off, and a drink in his fist, sitting up beside George in the deep Knole sofa and longing for a sign that it was okay, that he could touch him again, and more. George had been in analysis, and treated Danny to a confusing and grandiose half-hour tour of his psyche, which apparently had two poles: a delight in artifice and a mania for honesty. In fact his frankness could sometimes upset people. Danny listened and perused the carpet, only half understanding what George’s point was, feeling the possible diplomatic chill of so much reasonable talk, and waiting only for the tone of voice that meant yes, whatever the words were. Then he found George was pushing him on to his back, and felt his heart thumping through the black roll-neck shirt, and his hard dick at least grinding out the longed-for syllable. He told him later that he had felt vulnerable to Danny’s own vulnerability.

The affair that followed was doomed, Danny saw it now, and he sometimes wondered if he would rather have done without the difficult four months; the ending, certainly, was the worst thing in his life. But then George, perhaps out of a guilt that even he was not frank enough to acknowledge, had insisted on their staying friends. This was hard for Danny because they had never been friends, they were lovers from the start; but George had also been his guide, and that perhaps was what made it possible to meet again, like a bright pupil and the teacher whose affection he had won. George had given him fluent access to the many-roomed edifice of London gay life, from the cellars to the salons. People had envied him his good-looking young protege, who would sometimes say, as they left a luncheon in Mayfair or an East End sex-club at five in the morning, how friendly the people were. George only explained it once: “Dearest, anyone would be friendly to you.”

Now, a summer later, Danny was waiting on the front step of his rooming-house. He had a couple of cases of cheap white wine and a hold-all of tapes and various party clothes. When George drew up he felt the old shock at the sight of him, a moment or two’s heavy-heartedness, as if the lessons and adjustments of the intervening months had never happened, and then at once a lightening, a mood of sentimental acceptance. In the boot of the car there was a case of champagne, but he said nothing about it – he couldn’t be sure it was intended for him. He got into the passenger seat and only then gave George a friendly kiss, and pictured, with a hum between his legs, what he would still do to him given the chance.

They got out of town just as the Friday rush, with its atmosphere of suppressed panic, was beginning; and urban though they were there was a sense of release as they came clear of the outskirts. Danny looked through the CDs and pressed Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony into the player, not sure if he would recognise it, and then exhilarated by the horns at the outset, which seemed designed to be heard at eighty miles an hour on a long trajectory through the summer landscape.

“So who’s going to be there?” said George, in his faintly despairing way. “I hope there’s someone I can talk to.”

“You can always talk to my hunky daddy.” And Danny laughed, as he did more and more, at the farce of sex, and the thought of novel pairings of people he knew.

“Of course, I want to meet him.”

“Then there’ll be Jim and Francois, and Carlton, and Bob and Steve and Jerry and Heinrich…” He remembered he’d wildly asked a number of virtual strangers at Chateau, though with no idea if they had accepted, or would themselves remember.

“So you’re bussing in a whole crowd of dizzy disco bunnies and letting them loose in the beautiful English countryside.”

“I know…” Danny murmured, with a fresh sense of the experiment of life.

“They may not be able to breathe country air. You’ll need respirators of poppers and CK One.”

“I think they can be relied on to bring those with them.” Danny squeezed George’s knee. “I’m hoping you may be going to stimulate our central nervous systems, darling.” At which George merely raised an eyebrow. Danny added, “Bob’s always loaded with goodies,” to offset the surfacing suggestion that George had only been asked for his coke and his car.

“So who are you going to set me up with?” George resumed, in a tone of voice that emphasised his appetite and a cheerfully heartless readiness to use his old lover in his turn.

“What are you like?” said Danny. And then, mischievously, “There’s young Terry, of course…” He made a pretence of conducting the music, with hammy head-shakings and no clear sense, so far from a drug and a DJ, of the rhythm of the thing. “Local boy.”

George scanned the road ahead with narrowed eyes. “You say young.”

“Twenty-two, like me, at least until midnight. Oh, professional age, twenty. If not nineteen.”

“I’m not paying, sweetie.” Though the idea had clearly taken root, since George said later, “Any other members of the profession coming down?”

Danny was pretty sure that, even during their affair, George had sent out for sex, he had seen ringed numbers in the back of Gay Times; though now he made himself laugh at the image of those boys, buzzed into the building with their knapsacks of accoutrements, and witnessing their own performances in one of George’s Empire mirrors. “I’ve asked Gary – the black one with the broken nose? But he may not come, it being the weekend…”

“Any women coming?” asked George, as if he missed Danny’s meaning, and was suddenly concerned with the propriety of the gathering.

“I hope Janet will be there.”

“She must have turned into a faggot by now, just from natural adaptation.”

“She was the only woman at Colon last week.”

George gave a slow nod of concession to the other point of this sentence. “Well, you’re certainly managing to find your way around without me, darling. Even I don’t go to Colon.” Though the odd thing was that since their clubbing days together, Danny had hardly ever seen George out; which made him think that either he had changed his habits, and entered a maturer phase, or that without having Danny to show off and show off to there were easier and quieter ways of getting what he wanted. Even in the old days, while Danny danced like a madman, George tended to loiter against the wall, where the boys were staring and fumbling with their wraps of speed.