Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“Hello Mrs Badgett.” For the moment he just nodded amiably at Danny, as if he knew all about him but hadn’t yet been introduced.

“Ah, there he is! I was just saying to Danny how you couldn’t keep away.”

“Not possibly,” said Alex rather archly.

“Now, have you brought any champers this time, that’s what we want to know.” Alex merely grinned at this. “Ah, you boys had a good time, anyway.”

“I wish everyone was as nice as you,” Danny said, scuffing his bare feet on the grass. It seemed all he had on was a tatty old pair of shorts. Alex saw that he still wasn’t wearing the gold chain, another tiny cloud, but it burnt up and vanished in the glow of his gaze. He was astounded that Danny, who was a ravishing idea of his, could actually be standing in front of him, the perfect and only embodiment of himself, reconstituted in every detail, remembered and unremembered – after a moment he had to look away. Mrs Badgett’s presence added a hallucinatory element of suspense.

“I’ll tell you something,” she was saying: “they’re a lot of stuffy old buggers in this village. When did they last go out dancing, I wonder? They’ve got no idea of how to have fun, most of them.” And she swung her hips as if she wouldn’t mind having a bit of a dance right now. Alex tried to refocus his attention on her. He thought that the green-fingered motherly side of her character coexisted with something gypsyish that you saw in Terry too. Perhaps that explained their connection with the caravan business. Terry had told him something about Mr Badgett at the party, but he couldn’t recover the facts from his blurred memory of the whole odd episode, during which he had got the impression that Terry was offering him sex for money. He’d been somewhat offended by that, on top of his trifling jealousy of Terry as a former bedmate of Danny’s.

Danny said, “Are you going to the disco up at Broad Down?,” not quite seriously.

“I might well,” she said. “I might well. I’m not sure I’m exactly in tune with the music these days. If I can get Terry to put on some of the old slower songs, I wonder if he’s got them though.”

Alex thought the conversation was never going to end. He stepped back to pick up his bag from the lawn, and gave Danny a staring, hungry smile over her shoulder. They only had four days here together, they couldn’t waste time like this.

“Mind you, when I was your age,” she said, half-turning to take in Alex as well, which proved how much younger he’d become, “we went into Weymouth for the rock “n” roll dances every week. I’ll tell you who was a great dancer, was Rita Bunce. You know Rita, don’t you, up at Tytherbury. Of course she’s a fair bit older than me, she married a Yankee airman over here in the war. There was a whole lot of them stationed up at Henstridge…”

“I’m just going to take my stuff in,” Alex said.

He went through the kitchen, where a wasp was tapping and fretting against the window-pane, and into the sitting-room. Everything had been tidied away, and there was a fusty stillness inside the house which added to the mood of sexual expectation. He felt as if he had broken in – he couldn’t explain the dreamlike sense of truancy; he supposed it was something to do with Robin’s not being here, with his butchly assertive way of knowing how to do everything, as though each loaf baked and log chopped implied a scorn of you for not having baked or chopped it yourself. And then Alex did remember his earliest visit, seeing Justin naked and amazing in the kitchen as the bread rose, before he even knew that Danny existed; his testing the nature of his feelings, despair and perseverance in a dubious alloy.

Danny was laughing and shouting “Alex!” from the kitchen. Alex said nothing, but stood where he was, almost helpless with the certainty of happiness. Danny strode in and ran at him with a comic growl, jumping up on him with his arms round his neck and his legs round his waist and smiling so much that it was difficult to kiss.

They slept in Robin’s – and Justin’s – bed; and again Alex had a sense of transgression, which faded when he was in it, with Danny in his arms, but came back to trouble and please him when he woke in the early light with one arm numb from Danny’s weight, and the beams, the bedside table and all the furniture of that other relationship steadily materialising out of the dark. The nearly noiseless tick of Justin’s little clock, and its visible quivering escapement, lent an eerie continuity. Then he slept again, and woke and slept, always with the reassurance that Danny slept more heavily while he himself was fitfully vigilant and protective. Afterwards he thought of the cottage on these days as a place of sleep, and the garden too as a sleepy hollow, in its dull high-summer greens now the blossom was over, with wood-doves in the trees and the stream dwindling and trickling in the heat as if half-asleep itself. Despite all his alertness to Danny’s presence, and his honeymoon sense of luck, he kept waking up and squinting at the time and finding how much sleep had got the better of him.

Danny seemed to share his awareness of the absent couple. To him they were usually a fairly comic proposition, though now there was a note of puzzlement and concern about his father. He would ask Alex idle questions about them as they lay on the grass with the papers or soaped each other in a lukewarm summer bath. “Do you think Justin and Dad will get together again?,” “I wonder what Justin’s doing tonight.” Alex was no more likely to know the answers than he was, and Danny laughed in his disquieting private way, as if at a strain of romantic folly to which he was himself immune. He seemed intermittently aware of Alex’s shyness on the subject.

In the bathroom on the first night, getting ready for bed, he said, “You don’t know what it’s like having a gay dad.” Alex thought of Murray Nichols, his own father, distantly benign, industrious, hidden in his work, and tried to imagine him seducing one of the junior partners: he couldn’t even get the hand on to the knee. He said,

“I suppose it’s a further twist on not being able to imagine your parents having sex.”

But Danny said, “I can imagine him and Justin only too well.”

“Yes, so can I,” said Alex, and changed the subject abruptly. “Aren’t you wearing your chain any more, darling?”

Danny started to clean his teeth, and made a garbled noise with the brush in his mouth. “Whore Darn Laid Learn!” he explained.

“I didn’t quite make out…”

He stooped and spat and found Alex’s eye in the mirror. “I said, Sorry darling, I left it in London.”

“That’s okay – you don’t have to wear it all the time…You don’t have to wear it at all.”

But he was treating the matter seriously. “No, I want to. Actually I took it round to George to get it valued. I thought it ought to be insured. I meant to pick it up before I left.”

“Oh…It’s not that precious,” said Alex.

“It is to me,” said Danny, with sentimental promptness.

Alex pushed in at the basin, the light adhesiveness of skin pressed against skin. “You didn’t say you’d been to George’s.”

Danny was baring his teeth and peering in the mirror. “Yeah.”

Alex thought he’d almost rather hear that the chain had been lost. His instinct had been against George from the start. The fact that Danny never talked about his friendship with him, even when asked directly, was odd, since he gossiped graphically about everyone else he knew. Alex was certain he’d invented the valuation business just as a pretext for seeing George. “How is old George?” he said, as if he weren’t afraid of him.

“Mm? Fine”

“Well, give him my best,” Alex said, undecided what degree of irony to go for.