Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

Little groups were standing or sprawling in the garden, some intimate around the steady candles, others more noisily out of control. He saw that they were weaving shelters out of their London lives around themselves, though maybe the magic of the country night still glinted in through the chinks. In the sitting-room, with the french windows open, dancing had begun; the relentless club atmosphere of the music seemed slightly comic in a setting of watercolours and Bernard Leach pottery, and the first dancers were drunk but self-conscious, smiling a lot or staring at the floor. Robin thought he would move one or two things, and took a large vase through to the kitchen, where an intent little circle was gathered round the table. Danny had his back to him, and turned with a lazily criminal look, which he immediately guyed into a joke. “You’re not supposed to be in here!”

“A father’s place is in the kitchen, dear,” Robin said, and heard how rare it was for him to be camp.,

George was sitting chopping coke on the back of a dark shiny cookery-book. For a second, Robin worried more about the marks the razor would make on the cover than the substance the razor was so finely fanning and gathering and trailing into lines. It was something he had once done in this kitchen himself, though not of course when Danny was there; and evidently it was a ritual Danny had some experience of too; but it wasn’t an event that father and son had ever taken part in together, or that one had taught the other, and Robin felt embarrassed and a little compromised by the business. He saw the almost sexual expectancy of the ring of young men and the corrupt generosity of George, who had laid out so much money to impress them, and perhaps make them more malleable. He set down the vase that he was still clutching, and started putting plates in the dishwasher with censorious scrapings. George sniffed and pushed back his chair and was soon congratulating himself on the excellence of the stuff. Robin glanced across to see Alex being coached by Danny in how to snort a line, but when Danny’s own turn came he went outside.

He picked up a nearly full glass that was balanced on the window-sill and knocked it back – it was the cheap wine Dan had brought from London, and its appearance marked a further phase in the party’s downward career. He felt for a moment like a person who’s not much good at parties, the sort you find by themselves plucking books from the bookcase as if perfectly happy. He looked at the stars above the still trees and wondered if he wanted to be rescued and swept away by someone charming. The scene in the lane with Justin made him flinch with wretchedness and anger at having been snubbed. He had never been in such a situation before, and had a dread of life being different from now on, his powers steadily withdrawn, like cancelled memberships. He saw what they meant by the change of life. He stood hunched in a horrible new atmosphere of doubt, his mind crowded by Justin’s sexual presence, hardly able to believe that something so banal was happening to him. The tall black man who came round the corner of the house seemed to emerge quite naturally from this painful ruck of thought, and struck Robin as at once unexpected and inevitable. He was chatting in a careless hilarious way to one of the boys Robin had brought from the station; he was differently dressed, in a black roll-neck shirt and beige pants with a low crotch like an American serviceman, but Robin knew his rolling muscular walk exactly, and the naive friendly effect of his broken nose, and the glint of the gold cross that hung from his ear-ring.

He followed them indecisively through the back door and watched them drawn into the charged field of the coke-tooters, whom Danny seemed to be calling forward or discouraging according to some inscrutable regime of his own. Then Justin was coming through from the sitting-room, raising his hands to screen the drug-takers from his sight in a slightly old-maidish charade of his genuine disapproval, and Robin caught the moment of unprepared contact, the black man saying, “Oh, hello!,” Justin touching his arm and saying merely, distantly, “Hello darling” as he passed by, and the black man watching him go with a humorous, remembering look.

Justin put his hand on Robin’s shoulder for a few seconds and Robin welcomed the gesture and the palpable guilt that prompted it. “I knew it would come to this,” Justin said, with no awareness of the heart-stopping larger way in which his words could be taken; he meant simply the cocaine. And perhaps Robin’s anxiety on both subjects gave the edge to his question:

“Who’s that black guy you just spoke to?”

Justin turned with a heavy sigh; and clearly he was broad-brush and indiscriminate with drink. “What, that one, darling? No idea. Never seen him before in my life.” It was the most unguarded lie that Robin was aware of having heard from him, and he saw he couldn’t respond to it with the little sarcasms and chidings he used to sort out the minor evasions, some mystery in the phone-bill or a vanished bottle of wine. “Why don’t you ask Alex?” Justin went on. “He appears to be an old friend.” And it was true that Alex had an arm round the man’s shoulders, and in the middle of speaking to him suddenly plonked a kiss on his cheek. Robin thought, you poor fool.

He strolled over and interposed himself before the black guy could take the rolled-up banknote. “Hi, I’m Robin. I’m Danny’s father.”

“Oh. Hi – Gary,” said the man, half offering a long and beautiful hand, which Robin ignored, and assuming a look of insincere respect. Robin wondered if he knew he was gay, if Dan had talked about him, and for the first time in the evening hoped not.

“Is that your car, the yellow Escort?” He thought angrily of it trundling its way through all the months since he’d seen it before, and homing in at last by some mechanical instinct on this cottage a hundred miles away. He pictured it on the verge of the A303 at two in the morning, with the bonnet up and Gary jumping back from it flapping his elegant fingers. “I’m afraid it’s blocking our neighbours’ drive. Can you move it?”

Justin had come up, and said with a nervousness only Robin would have traced, “They’re called the Hairy Bollocks, darling. You mustn’t get in their way.”

Puzzled, smiling fairly good-naturedly, Gary followed Robin from the room, round the edge of the now almost unlit dance-floor, out of the house and up through the garden. Robin’s heart was thumping, but he felt concentrated; he knew he had the involuntary prim smile of masked tension. When they got to the gate, he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t want you here, you’re going to have to go.”

There couldn’t have been any doubt about his tone, but Gary sniggered, and stopped in the near-darkness to try to read his face. “Huh?”

“Please go.”

Gary shook his head, and the cross twinkled for a second. “What’s the problem?”

“It’s not your fault,” Robin said reluctantly. “I just don’t want you in my house.” His unreasonableness made him sound more bitter, as though to justify itself. He wished the guy wasn’t black, and so obviously nice enough. He thought he had the characterless niceness you’d expect from someone who pleased strangers for a living.

Gary said, “I just got here, man. I just drove three and a half hours, to see my mate Danny. It’s his birthday.”

“I know that,” said Robin quietly. He knew he was being a monster, and in the thick of this clumsy little episode saw objectively for a second that this was the kind of thing he did now. “You’ll have to stay somewhere,” he said, in a feeble concession, and pulled out the crumpled notes from his back pocket and thrust them at the insulted guest without counting them. He thought it was £40 or so.