Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“ Coppelia and stuff.”

“No, darling.”

“I didn’t really think you meant that. How young is he?”

“He’s twenty-three tomorrow.”

“Ouch,” said Hugh, turning away with an envious grimace and looking for the bottle.

Alex and Hugh had been together at university, though Hugh had gone on to Oxford to pursue a D Phil and then landed a job in Coins and Medals at the British Museum. He was a wonderfully sedentary person, who nowadays rarely left a shallow rectangle of streets between the Museum, an Italian restaurant in Dyott Street, and his dark disorderly flat above the Spiritualist Meeting Rooms in High Holborn. Alex sometimes dropped in there for a drink, since it was hard to get Hugh to Hammersmith. Amazingly, they had been to Greece together, in 1980, though on an old-fashioned Hellenising trail rather than to the alarming possibilities of a modern gay resort. Hugh had been quite slim and attractive as he blustered selfconsciously down the beach in his tight old swimming-trunks, but since then he had given way to the steady spread of lun-cher’s middle and office bottom. “Let’s not” was his usual response to any suggestion of activity.

His friendship with Alex was intuitive, protected by their shared timidity and steeped in its own atmosphere of culture and fantasy. They talked on the phone, they listened to Haydn quartets together, they got drunk and ruminated obscenely about boys they had fancied, often long ago, looking out from Hugh’s rooms towards the roofs of Bloomsbury like a pair of dirty-minded spinsters. Alex’s occasional adventures were received by Hugh with curiosity and an oddly prudish pique; Hugh himself seemed not to have adventures, and his way of denying his needs was the recurrent fiction that someone was bothering him with their attentions, and he couldn’t decide about them. The appropriation of the gardens next to the Museum as central London’s liveliest cruising area gave him a new pretext for jokes and hinted misdemeanours. Alex felt that Hugh and Justin were the only two people who properly understood him; though, of course, when Justin came along -picked up, just like that, in the street – Hugh had retired wounded, as if somehow found wanting by his old friend. He was first with the condolences and candid analyses when Justin left. The announcement of a new affair was bound to be a little ticklish.

Alex told him how it had happened. “I went down to this cottage in Dorset in love with Justin and came back in love with Danny. It was a completely magical thing.”

“Surely you weren’t still in love with Betty Grable?” said Hugh.

It already seemed so long ago. “I think, in spite of everything, if I could have woken up beside anyone in the world it would still have been him.”

Hugh shook his head in a distress of incredulity; but then saw the bright side. “Anyway, it’s now definitely over.”

Alex chose not to be tryingly truthful. “The last two weeks have been extraordinary – I feel as if I’m under a beautiful spell”

“The thing about spells,” said Hugh, “is that you don’t know at the time if they’re good ones or bad ones. All black magicians learn how to sugar the pill.”

“Well I never had your mastery of the occult.”

“What’s his dick like, by the way?”

Alex gestured implausibly with both hands. “But you know I don’t care about that sort of thing.”

“Of course,” said Hugh, smacking his forehead, “I keep forgetting.” And then, “It’s like money, it’s easy not to care when you’ve got it.”

“Talking of sugaring the pill,” Alex said, and went on to give what account he could of taking ecstasy. The urge to tell had been distracting him all week, it seemed nearly a necessity, like the born-again’s compulsion to spread the word at bus-stops and street-corners. He thought it best not to confide in anyone at the office, though he guessed from overheard phone-calls that his sober-suited secretary was, technically, a raver; he met young Barry’s curious, doubting look with the blandest “Good morning.”

Every detail of his initiation was touched by the magic, though it was in the nature of the night – arriving drunk, the wild sprint of time once the drug took effect – that most of it was forgotten. He kept saying, “It was fabulous, it was fantastic, I can’t describe it.”

“Hmm,” said Hugh, poised somewhere between scepticism, envy and shock.

“It was the combination of the pill and Danny of course, feeling suddenly on the inside of life rather than the outside. It made me see how depressed I’d been, I think the depression was so insidious and all-pervasive that I only noticed it when it was gone.”

“It’s only a drug, though, isn’t it. It’s not a real high.”

“I don’t know, it’s real enough when it’s happening. I’m not a philosopher.”

“But what about the after-effects?”

“You just carry on feeling wonderful. I’ve been talking to people all week. Danny’s amazing like that – if he likes the look of someone he just starts talking to them, where I would normally wait ten years for an introduction in writing.”

“Wasn’t everyone else about sixteen? – they are on television,” Hugh said, and Alex looked at him, with his scruffy haircut and his dense brown habitat of books and folders, as if he had suddenly slipped a generation. He felt a vague affectionate dismay at Hugh’s life of paper, the teetering research for the still unfinished thesis, the stacks of numismatic journals with a dirty cup on top or a half-dead Busy Lizzie, and doubtless, tucked away deep down, an issue or two of Big Latin Dicks . “I didn’t notice, darling.” The truth was he had no regrets, he longed to do it again, he loved his late start and was glad to think he hadn’t exhausted these pleasures when he was Danny’s age. Danny spoke already about mid-week glooms and short-term memory loss. Alex said, “I feel somehow I’ve been set free.”

“Well, don’t become a slave to your need for freedom, will you,” Hugh said, with a mixture of concern and self-satisfaction. “I mean people do die.”

“I find I’ve overcome a lot of crusty old prejudices,” Alex summed up. “Until last week, I was appalled by the idea of drugs, as you know I thought pop music was witless rubbish, I really couldn’t be doing with the noise and trash of the gay scene, I hated chewing-gum and trainers and baseball caps with writing on, in fact any clothes with writing on the outside. And now I think they’re all absolutely marvellous.”

“So you’re going to be turning into a whatsaname, are you?” said Hugh.

“I don’t know what I’m turning into,” Alex said. “ ‘We know what we are but not what we may be’: Ophelia.”

“Well, look what happened to her,” said Hugh.

Hugh put on his jacket and they strolled down to Dyott Street for a quick bowl of pasta before Alex set off to Dorset. The staff were Sicilian, and a hand-coloured photograph of the 1928 eruption of Etna hung above the bar. Hugh knew them all well, and spoke to them in confident Italian. The waiters made a fuss of him, but were quick and business-like, and brought San Pellegrino and a plate of bruschetta without being asked, since that was what he always had. Perhaps just because of his speaking their language everything that was said by either side caused immediate amusement, and left behind a mood of wistful reassurance. Alex chatted and drifted, and nursed the plan that had just come to him, to take Danny away to Sicily at the end of the summer: the plan swallowed him up so that he couldn’t do much more than prod and repeatedly re-coil his tagliatelle. He was dying for a drink, the glamour of any kind of stimulant was immense, but he knew that he had a long drive ahead, and held off. He sensed a continuity between the benign routines of the restaurant and the larger movements beyond it, flights, journeys, days and nights. It was the oneness he had felt on ecstasy, which came back now and then like an image from a dream that surfaces again in the absent-minded mid-morning. He had never been to Sicily, and said casually to the waiter who was clearing the plates, “Does Etna still erupt from time to time?”