Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

Lars said, “Well, in Norway the military expenditure…”

“Look, what’s your name, Mike,” another cut in.

“Who is this guy?” a third one said to no one in particular.

Margery saw Robin coming up, and said, “I think we’d better go now. It’s been lovely.” She looked around. “I don’t know about Mike.” Then Justin was there too, offering another gin and tonic, and put out to find she wanted to leave.

“Oh, Margerina!” he said, which he’d never called her to her face before, and carried on as though he hadn’t said it, “Well, at least let me walk you home”; and then snorted after all.

She said weakly, “Mike”; and somehow she managed to catch his eye and pass him a wordless but familiar message. At that moment the music jumped into a new mode and volume, it was another, of those meaningful shifts of level as the party moved nearer its instinctive goal; and the effect must have been alien and horrible to a couple in their late sixties.

“I’ll walk our friends home,” said Justin.

“I’ll come too,” Robin said. “I might leave Danny to it for a bit.”

“It’s okay,” said Justin, with a meaning look of his own.

Margery made a little cringing grimace and said, “I don’t think they want us old crocks around.”

The four of them went up the shadowy path, Mike turning, like someone dragged from a fight, to call out, “You think about it,” with a grim laugh.

“Now the fun’s really going to begin,” said Margery, without a smile and with the remotest hint of nostalgia. “Though I don’t know who they’re going to find to dance with.” Robin couldn’t tell if she was being mischievous; and as it happened, when they reached the gate a goggling taxi-driver was setting down a pair of virtually naked girls, who, if you ignored their crew-cuts and tattoos, might just have fitted the bill.

They walked slowly along in the warm late twilight, Justin and Robin flanking their guests. Robin glanced about into uncurtained windows, the flicker of televisions. You could certainly hear the party from some way off, but he tried not to care. A yellow quarter-moon had appeared between the beautiful tall crocketed finials of the church tower. Margery said, “I suppose it’s all a sort of Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Mike wasn’t having this. “It is not a Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he said. “People are always getting this wrong. Yesterday was the longest day, the 21st. That’s a fact, an astronomical fact. Midsummer Day , which is an ancient pagan festival, is on the 24th. Tomorrow, if you must, is Midsummer Eve .” He shook his head furiously. “Today is nothing, absolutely nothing.”

“I suppose I meant…”

“It drives me mad when people get that wrong.”

They parted at the Halls’ gate, though Robin glanced back to watch Mike muttering over the door-key. Margery must be very drunk too, of course, but she showed it only by her expressionless heaviness, and the occasional utterance of a harmless but incensing remark. There was a chink of light, and then the slam of the door.

Robin and Justin turned for home. Their shoulders touched lightly as they walked and Robin took Justin’s hand for a few steps, till Justin pretended he had to blow his nose. He felt miserably in love, with an almost teenage pain brought on by the distant presence of the dance-music in the summer night, and an older person’s bleaker ache at the shouts of his son’s friends funnelling into pleasure. “All right, darling?” he said.

“Fine,” said Justin, as if he’d been accused of something.

A few paces later Robin said, “What do you make of this George character? I hope he hasn’t got designs on Dan.” He peered into the heavy shadows under the copper beech on the green – its huge trunk was ringed by a seat where two of the boys from the party were sitting, you couldn’t quite see but they were obviously snogging, and he wondered if that could ever have happened before in the tree’s 300-year history. He thought it was the tree Hardy had in mind in his poem “An Assignation – Old Style.”

Justin said, “It’s a bit late to worry about that, I’m afraid. He was bragging to me just now about how crazy Danny was for him, and how he’d had to choke him off. His phrase, not mine. While you and I were settling into rustic bliss in Little Gumdrops it seems young Danny was round in Holland Park servicing Arthur Negus.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Well that’s what he said.”

“So you mean Dan is clinging on?” It was more disturbing and unwelcome than he could rationally account for. He felt he should somehow have been there to screen and approve his son’s lovers, it was another dereliction too subtly painful ever to have been expected. “I mean, he’s so…charmless, and self-satisfied.”

“He is quite sexy,” Justin said. “You know boringness can be so arousing. One day I’ll have to work out why that is.”

In a mood of obscure retaliation, Robin said, “Your old boyfriend’s becoming quite a fixture.”

“It was sweet of him to bring that champagne,” said Justin, in a tone of serene acceptance he would never have shown to Alex in person.

“No, George brought the champagne.”

“I think not.”

“Alex brought the cake, and George brought the champagne. Danny told me so.”

“Darling, I saw Alex get the fucking champagne out of his car and take it up to put it in Mrs Badger’s fridge. You were far too busy strimming to notice.”

Robin stopped, less to argue than to enact his puzzlement. “But why?”

Justin took a moment to answer, out of delicacy, Robin thought. He looked down at the coping of the low wall beside him, where snails had left tracks that shone in the moonlight like chalked hearts and girlfriends’ names. “He just wants to fit in, darling. He’s terribly lonely – he obviously thinks you hate him. Alex is always giving people things, and often his presents are too extravagant, sometimes people are so embarrassed that they never speak to him again.”

“But I’m giving this party,” Robin said, with a childishness that he heard and couldn’t help laughing ruefully at.

“You can hardly object to someone presenting you with a case of Bolly.”

“No, I suppose not. It’s not Bolly, actually, it’s Clicquot, but still.”

“It’s unquestionably Bolly.”

“Oh what the fuck does it matter what it is?” Robin shouted quietly and stamped off for a few paces, then turned and almost ran at Justin, who looked slightly frightened. Since the absurd and shaming incident in the car, Justin had shown a physical mistrust of him, and still winced if he touched his face, even though the bruise had gone. Now the kiss was long and hard, Justin didn’t resist, but there was something desolately stagey to it, as if it were very late in a run of one of the plays he no longer auditioned for. His tongue performed the usual explorations, Robin felt the awkward hardness of his trapped dick pressing against his own, that homosexual conundrum with its various witty solutions. But when it was over it was over, Robin saying, “I love you,” with tears of frustration in his eyes, and Justin, like a secretary briefly disarranged by an importunate boss, smoothing himself and murmuring, “We’d better get back.”

During their absence a new arrival had parked at the top of the lane, a battered yellow Escort that half-blocked the gateway of their tight-lipped neighbours the Harland-Balls (subject of some of Justin’s freest wordplay). Robin anticipated trouble and strode down through the garden with a new resolution to forget himself and think only of Danny. There were hours and hours of party to go, which seemed, from moment to moment, a torture and a blessing.