Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“You might have passed through Dorset,” said Robin punctiliously; “though Plymouth itself is in Devonshire.”

The man smiled in a way that suggested he knew that. “I’m Sylvan,” he said.

Robin accepted the information broad-mindedly. “Robin, hi!” he said, and extended his callused rower’s hand.

“Oh, okay…” Sylvan raising his hand from his knee and complying with the courtesy; and smiling rather insistently as if to press the stranger to a quick glowing acknowledgement of something as yet unsaid. Robin knew what it was and hid his indecision, and the snug sense of power it gave him, in an English innocence.

“What took you to Plymouth?”

Sylvan looked down. “Oh, family. That kind of thing.” Then bright and intimate again: “What brings you to the Valley of the Sun?”

It was never easy saying these things to strangers. “Research, actually.” He slid the rest of the beer gently into the tilted glass. “Yeah, I’m doing some stuff on Frank Lloyd Wright?” He saw he’d already got the habit of the interrogative statement. He glanced up at Sylvan.

“Okay, so you’ve been out to Taliesin West, you’ve seen the…stumps, those big pillars of the Pauson House, all that’s left of them. What else?”

Robin smiled sportingly, and absorbed the fact that he was a tourist among many others. “No, I’ve only just arrived.”

“First stop the Blue Coyote. A man who knows what he’s after.” Sylvan slapped the bar lightly. “I could do a lot of that kind of research. Same again please, Ronnie,” to the turning barman. “And another beer?”

“I’m fine,” said Robin. “No, I’ve been out to the ruins of the Ransom House today.”

Sylvan paused and nodded. “Yeah. That’s serious. I never saw that. You know, if you’re in school here, you get to do all of that stuff. I remember the day he died, old Frankie Lloyd, and the teacher comes in for art class and tells us with a real catch in his voice, you know?, “ladies and gentlemen…” We were all pretty upset.” He looked at Robin with a wistful pout, as if he still needed consoling. “So how the hell d’you get out there? You got four-wheel drive?”

“I got an Indian from the reservation to drive me,” said Robin, still proud of his initiative.

“Wo-ho! And you lived to tell the tale?”

“Just about, yes…” – and now he was uneasy about grudges and feuds, the hardened candour with which a local hopes to disabuse the naively fair-minded newcomer. He wouldn’t tell him about the sand-trap. “No, he was great. Just a kid.”

Sylvan looked at him with concern. “Well you were lucky, man. Cos I’m telling you, they are the worst.”

It was true that Victor had been an unsettling driver. But he’d also been clairvoyant. In the moment or two that Robin disliked Sylvan he saw how beautiful he was; and surely available to him, completely at his pleasure, if he said the word. He had to frown away the smile that rose to his lips on a kind of thermal of lust.

“It’s the drink or it’s the peyote,” Sylvan went on, fluttering a hand beside his head to suggest a crazy befuddlement.

“Oh”

“You know peyote? Edible cactus. Gives you visions, man.” Sylvan swaying his head and making a little crooning sound. Then grinning and putting a reassuring hand on Robin’s own, and leaving it there. “No, it’s part of their religion. Isn’t that great? Big ceremony, eat peyote, trip out…Of course the kids here are into all that now, the hippies? They go out in the desert and they’re out of their fuckin’ heads for days on end .”

Robin wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not. He’d got a kind of trance off the desert as it was, he could breathe in and feel it again now, a partly physical elation; and something else, that perhaps was religious, or at least philosophical, the inhuman peace. He pictured that burnt-out folly, which was a lesson taught to a wealthy family who presumed they could make a home in such a place and lay a claim to it. Was it $10,000 they’d spent just on drilling for water? He was watching a very camp couple smoking and bawling with laughter. He thought how he wasn’t that kind of person. He shifted his weight so that his leg pressed against Sylvan’s knee. He realised he’d had a plan for the evening involving dinner and a phone-call; but the plan was meaningless in face of the unplanned. With a little freeing twist he withdrew his fingers and then slid them back between the other man’s.

“So…” said Sylvan.

Robin looked into his long-lashed, untrustworthy eyes. “Is there a phone here?” he said. “I must just make a quick call.”

The phone was in the back by the Gents, in an area even bleaker and more functional than the bar. He dialled and stood gazing at the deadpan irony of an old enamel sign saying “NO LOITERING.” He wasn’t a loiterer. To him the words had only ever meant “Get on with it!” When he made his infrequent visits to the lavs at Parker’s Piece or in the Market Square, eyebrows raised as if at the exploits of someone else, he always seemed to find gratification at once, from a man who clearly was a loiterer, and had probably been loitering for hours. He was through to the operator, who sounded relaxed, almost sleepy, but a nice woman, who took pleasure in bringing sundered friends together. A man came past and nodded “Hi!” to him, like an overworked colleague – Robin gave an abstracted smile and peered into the imagined middle-distance of the expectant caller. He was both keen to talk and keen to have the conversation over.

When Jane answered he was talking at once, and he felt it like a rebuke when the operator spoke over him to ask her if she would accept the call.

Then, “Hello Janey, it’s me,” he said, “did I wake you up?” -and heard his words repeated, with a fractional delay, by the unsparing mimicry of the transatlantic echo.

“No, I was awake,” she said, as if it might be an emergency.

“It must be quite late.”

“It’s twenty past one.”

“Anyway, you’re all right?”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes, it’s amazing, I can’t tell you.”

“Because if it is, I’m so glad you rang.”

“Oh thank you, darling,” murmured Robin, with a vague sense of undeserved success. “I just wanted to hear your voice, and tell you I’m all in one piece” – and the echo gave him back his last words. When he spoke again, he found she was already talking.

“Actually I was asleep. I’d just got off, I’m extremely tired, but I’m so excited at the moment that it’s quite difficult to go to sleep.”

Robin had left her only two days earlier and her words were at odds with his assumption that she must be missing him terribly. He was jealous of her excitement, but also reassured, in a way, that she could be excited without him; she seemed to license his own unmentioned freedoms. “Has something happened?” he asked lightly and cautiously. He was surprised to hear a giggle, maybe just a sign of nerves.

“Something clearly has happened: in fact you probably remember it. More important, something’s going to happen.”

He thought how you never really pictured a friend when you spoke to them on the phone: they had the shadowiness of memory, of something not looked at directly; you saw a presence in a half-remembered room or merely a floating image of their house or street. The phone Jane was a subtly stronger character – darker, more capricious and capable – than the Jane he lived with and loved. He said, “Have you got another interview?”

“Oh really.” There was a pause in which he pondered why this was wrong. “Robin, I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”

It was the “we” that disconcerted him. He thought for a moment she was referring to herself and some other man. And even when he saw, almost at once, that he must himself be the father, he retained an eerie sense that she had somehow done this without him.