Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

The waiter tucked in his chin and said, “No, signore,” with a warm smile, as if to discourage a harmful rumour; and then, seeing Alex’s disappointment, said, “Well, a little bit, signore. Yes, from time to time.”

Hugh walked with Alex to his Mercedes, and they stood for a while looking down at it in the odd hesitation before saying goodbye, with its trail of unnecessary recaps and puzzled attempts to remember something else that needed saying. Hugh was more cheerful and loving after a flask of Orvieto and the chance to absorb the impact of Alex’s news. He kissed him on both cheeks, and said, “That club sounds fantastic, actually. You must: take me some time.”

“Of course, darling,” said Alex, slithering into the car, but thinking, as he drove off with an uncharacteristic toot, that if it came to it Hugh would certainly decide “Let’s not.” They had once been to Heaven together, twelve or thirteen years ago, and Alex still remembered Hugh’s way of taking the floor, with hands on hips and his legs kicking out spasmodically as if in some distant holiday recollection of Greek folk-dancing.

He sped across town as the sun was setting. It was the Summer Solstice. Everywhere people were launching on their weekends, thronging into restaurants and bars. He wished them well, but he felt the town was largely pointless now Danny had left it; he and his friend must already have been at Litton Gambril for three or four hours, they’d have had drinks with Justin and Robin, and perhaps dinner, though the friend was staying at Bride Mill, so perhaps was dining there. Alex picked at the plans. The presence of Justin was going to be almost surreal, as was the agreement with Danny to keep their affair a secret. He wished they could have gone down together, but there wasn’t room for everything in his two-seater, and he already had a case of champagne in the boot. In other respects, though, the car had come into its own; Justin had always shown a non-driver’s inability to distinguish it from any other car, but Danny admired it from the start, and in the past week they had driven on a number of unnecessary diversions along Old Compton Street with the roof down, Danny waving like an over-eager starlet, and often shouting quite loudly to make sure he’d been seen by some dim disco acquaintance.

Alex switched on the radio, and it was one of Haydn’s opus 76 string quartets that he had sometimes listened to with Hugh. It held him for a minute with its familiar novelties, and he tapped lightly on the wheel to demonstrate his involvement with it, but he couldn’t resist a feeling that it would always be there, and found himself reaching into the glove-box for his latest purchase from Harlot Records, Monster House Party Five , a three-CD compilation of forty pounding dance tracks mixed by DJs Sparkx, Joe Puma and Queen Marie.

The thwacking bass at the opening of Joe Puma’s set (if that was the word) made him grin and shiver. His drugged remark about wanting to live in house music had only shown up how unobservant he was: he had been living in it all along. Now he heard it, everywhere, or something very like it to the novice’s ear: in cafes, clothes shops, of course in gay bars with Danny, and thumping from a van in slow-moving traffic in Whitehall, so that he kept catching up with it as he walked away from work; idly channel-surfing on a night alone, he found it glittering like an open secret through programmes on fashion, holidays, local politics, and ads for drinks and cars. He almost envied the barmen and shop-assistants who lived with its promise of pleasure all week long. Maybe they wouldn’t even wait for the weekend to go dancing and be off their faces again. Driving west into the last of the day with the music in his ears he saw the electric storm of the dance-floor, the racing languor of the chill-out room – it was literally heart-warming, he felt his pulse hurry and his face colour up. And then he remembered waking in Danny’s room on the Sunday afternoon, their foreheads pressed together, the same tired lungful of air breathed back and forth between them, the muted sunshine through unlined curtains…Alex had rolled gently away and examined his happiness to the rhythm of the wallpaper, the clutches of pink roses like featureless putti floating hypnotically ceil-ingwards.

It was dark by the time he reached the Crewkerne turn-off, and he drove on in silence so as to concentrate on the signs and the bends. The road was unrecognisable from his first journey. He rolled down the window to smell the trees and fields and the cool air that had been warm all day. On corners his headlights swept past tree-trunks, a white cottage dark for the night, impassive horses in a field. He felt romantically alone. On a high open stretch of the road he saw the stars, which at first he thought were the upward reflections of the car’s lit dials in the windscreen; later there was the glimmer of a town beyond the long black line of a hill. Moths, labouring through the dark on their own amorous callings, rushed to obliterate themselves on the beacon of the car.

Robin seemed surprised, even exasperated, to have Alex in the house again; it was one thing for Justin to invite him, but then for Danny to take pity on him too…Alex watched the Woodfield social reflex come into play, the sudden over-compensation of smiles and offers of drinks – that making the best of things that could seem faintly schizoid. Justin’s welcome had been more muted but more genuine. He said, “I didn’t think you’d come back, darling,” and held his hand in a way that asked for affection more than it offered it. It was midnight, of course, and he was a little maudlin. As for Danny, there was a tantalising distance, crossed only by touches and winks that felt almost negligent in their furtiveness. They hadn’t worked out their story properly, and acted as if they had barely met. The effect was that all three of them appeared to wonder why Alex was here. Alex felt that Danny’s surely rather cold and watchful friend George was being treated with an easy fondness that he would have been glad of himself. Danny messed around nerve-jarringly with tapes of something called drum “n” bass, which he said was “massive” this summer; house, apparently, was all too commercial, you heard it everywhere now, you had to have been there four years ago, when it was at its underground zenith. “Oh,” said Alex, unable to protest, and feeling obscurely betrayed by his own teacher. When they came to turn in, Robin took him up to a different room from last time, with a filing cabinet in it, and various large objects covered with a cotton bedspread. “You shouldn’t be too uncomfortable,” he said. Alex lay awake in a horrible turmoil as to whether he should have come; then woke with a start to a presence in the room, the muttered breaths of sleepy concentration, a cool hand patting the pillow, patting his shoulder, his elbow, then the warm weight of a man stretching gently, half-clumsily along him in the dark.

Robin was up early next morning, with a number of noisy jobs to do. Baking smells spread slowly through the house, and as soon as the dew was off the grass he was out with the mower. He was taking the party seriously, and there was to be enough food for more than the thirty people Danny thought might turn up. Alex came down to find him shirtless by the fridge, with a wisp of grass caught in his chest hair, drinking milk from the bottle, then brusquely wiping away the white moustache. He still gave off his air of challenging competence, although for Alex his threat had been nicely displaced: the rival had emerged as the potential father-in-law, whose approval he might one day hope to win.

Alex offered his help and it was agreed he would drive into Bridport to do some shopping and pick up some things on order. Danny was busy with more abstruse planning. He stood around in the sitting-room saying, “Right, they’ll come in here . “ with great decisiveness, then pondering the matter again. He had a large flat notebook, a survival of his American student days, with pictures of rock stars taped to the cover, and a headline from the National Enquirer , “DAN THE BEAST”; he was writing in this in a sunny spot of the garden as Alex went up to the car.