Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“And who knows, my dad may be glad of some female company.”

“I see. He’s still interested?”

Danny didn’t want to overstate the case. He’d seen him sometimes watching a woman and felt there was something beneath the apparent impassivity and courtesy. “It might be a bit of a relief…But no, I think he just got queerer, like Oscar Wilde or someone. Once he thought he could do everything, then it polarised towards the one thing.”

“It’s pretty…cool, to have an out gay dad,” George said, supportively but humorously.

“Oh I quite agree,” said Danny, with a readiness that made him sound a bit straight himself. And there was a sort of anxiety, which he tended to blink away, that one of the figures at the edge of the dance-floor could perfectly well be his own father. There were still leather trousers and a studded thong in the wardrobe of the London flat.

Later George said, “You’ll have to tell me where to turn off.”

“Not for ages yet…” Danny was afraid the whole thing might pall on him as the necessary three hours unrolled. “You have to wait for the Crewkerne turning. Then it’s sort of…not as far as it was.”

“I take it you’ve got someone lined up for yourself, by the way. Total frankness, remember,” George went on; and Danny thought there was a tension in his voice, at the prospect of meeting a successor.

“Total frankness. Okay,” said Danny, confused to find how much he wanted to tell and how much he would have liked to keep the thing secret. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt him to set it out for someone else, though he knew from the awful stalled debates of their break-up that frankness wasn’t in itself a solution. If you were truly frank you saw only what a muddle you were in, and how you felt three different things at the same time. He said, “Well, I’ve sort of got a new boyfriend.”

“Right, How old is he?”

“Thirty-six.”

“Uh-huh. Name?”

“Alex. Alexander Nichols.”

“No, I don’t know him. Good Scottish name,” said George, with an absurd air of expertise.

“I suppose so. He sounds completely English. Went to Bristol University, his father’s a solicitor in Chelmsford. He told me loads about his family, but you know how it is when you’re talking in bed, you get much more interested in their shoulder-blade or their armpit or something.”

“What’s his dick like?”

“You waited such a long time to ask that.”

“One doesn’t like to pry.”

“In fact it’s a bit like him – longer and thinner than…the norm. He’s six foot four.”

George mulled this over as if he didn’t really find it satisfactory. “Does he have a job?”

“He works in the Foreign Office. He’s quite well off,” said Danny, with an evident sensible belief that this was an active element in someone’s appeal. Then, rather shyly, stroking his throat, “He’s given me this gold pendant thing.”

George glanced across as he pulled it free of his shirt. “I’ll have to look at that,” he said. “It could be valuable.”

“It is valuable,” said Danny.

They drove on in silence for a while, till George said, “He must be keen on you”; and with a sudden and lonely burst of charm, “not that I find that hard to understand.”

“I think he’s madly in love with me.”

“And you?” George asked.

“No, I like him, I think he’s really sweet.” Danny couldn’t explain his sense of bewilderment at being adored so unconditionally by Alex, or his wariness, since George, of allowing himself to feel anything strongly. The past six months had been a riotous escape from all that, compressed by hindsight into a continuous orgy of casual sex.

“I see. You haven’t said where you met him.”

Danny chuckled. “This is the funny thing. You’re going to have to be really discreet about this, actually. He’s Justin’s ex, from before my dad. And of course, Justin doesn’t know; and I don’t want Dad to know either, not yet anyway. We met at where we’re going, Hilton Gumboot as Justin calls it, two weeks ago. Alex came down and I could tell he was a bit keen; then I went out with him last weekend – and I’ve seen him a few times since.”

“Well, it certainly sounds like we’re going to have fun,” George said sourly.

“I put him on his first E,” Danny went on with a slow smile. “I thought he was never going to come.”

George paid this remark the homage of a knowing snicker due to any drug anecdote. “But the sex is good?”

Danny wondered for a second how he’d ever got on with George’s dreary sexual supremacism. “Sex is fine. He’s quite passionate.”

“You mean passion – but not genius. Technique? Technique can sometimes be mistaken for genius.”

“George, he’s so innocent, and strange…” How was he going to explain him? “He’s thirty-six, he’s only had one real affair in his life, with Justin, who I would have thought was totally inappropriate. Anyway it was a big deal for two years, until, of course, Justin broke his heart. The first night he told me he hadn’t touched another man for a year. Then he talked and talked all next day. He was still very mellow from the night before. As I say, I couldn’t take it all in, but…He’s just different. He’s not jaded. I sound like I’m a hundred years old but it was so sweet to be out with someone who finds everything new and amazing. He’s quite serious too. He kept analysing everything he felt. You should have seen him at Chateau.” Danny smiled. “He kept saying, “Look at the men! I love men!” It was like he was coming out all over again.”

“I hope you took him upstairs at Chateau.”

“To be absolutely frank, I did leave him for a bit and go upstairs, because Gary wanted to…see me. I think upstairs can wait for later. Anyway, I wanted to keep him for myself.”

“He’s a cultured sort of chap, is he?”

“Oh, yeah, he knows all about opera, and he’s read masses.”

“It’ll do you good to get some culture,” said George. Danny stored this remark away, and went on as if he hadn’t heard,

“Though he clearly hasn’t read Vanity Fair – I caught him out on that.”

George seemed to ponder the whole thing for a while, then said, “So what is it you care for least about him?”

But Danny wasn’t prepared to be negative. After they’d taken the Crewkerne turning, and certain features, an old T-junction sign, a pub, a row of trees, began to stir the subtle anxieties of arrival, he did briefly think about it, but only out of slightly decadent curiosity. There was something frustrating perhaps in a companion who had never heard of most of the new gay bars and had no conception of the pivotal importance of the DJ, who he clearly thought was just the bloke who played the records; at moments in the past week, as Danny showed Alex round what was after all his own town, he’d felt towards him as you do towards the duller schoolfriend you lend your notes to and end up almost teaching yourself.

Is he a scholar?” was Hugh’s first, rather off-beam question.

Alex said, “Not at all.”

“God, you’re lucky. I’ve got this kid after me who just won’t let up with the scholarly references and talks non-stop in about ten different languages. He makes me feel as if I’m All Souls College and he’s taking a fellowship exam to get into me. Actually, of course, the door’s open and the kettle steaming on the hearth.”

“No,” said Alex, who hadn’t come here to talk about Hugh’s dimly prospective amours, “Danny’s extremely bright and adaptable but he doesn’t really know anything. I mean, he’s seen one opera, by Handel, and he can’t remember which one. He seemed persuaded by each of the titles I suggested. He’s got a degree in something called cultural studies, which apparently doesn’t quite involve reading a book. I don’t know why I’m being so catty. And of course he’s terribly young. He does know all about dance-music”