Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

It appeared to be another closet with an ill-fitting door, but inside there was a narrow staircase, with fluffy dust at the side of the treads, and bright daylight up above. The Top Room was Tytherbury’s attempt at a tower, a little lookout among the chimney-stacks, with its own small summer-house fireplace and rattling leaded casements on three sides. In the old days visitors had always wanted to see it, and those with connections were invited to scratch their names on a window-pane with a diamond. Florence Hardy, Hallam Tennyson, Muriel Trollope: an interesting if strictly secondary collection. There was also an R. Swinburne, which Tony said people wanted to believe was A. Swinburne having trouble with his stylus; and a Wm Shakspere, facetiously introduced by Tony’s grandfather when he was a boy. “It’s ice-cold in winter,” Tony said, “and as you can see baking hot in summer.” Robin looked at the south-facing sills, which were warped by sunlight and rotted by rain-water. Beyond the glass the view was compromised: the light-industrial chimney, the new barns and silos on the Home Farm, part of the vanished layout of the garden visible in dry weather as in an aerial photograph; not the sea, but the straggly pines above it, and the top of the pyramid. That particular structure was taking on a further symbolic burden, as the task that wouldn’t go away, the problem that a younger man would already have solved, but which filled Robin with a paralysing sense of responsibility.

Tony asked him to stay to lunch, which they had in the kitchen. Robin knew that life here was already confined to a few of the smaller rooms, and that the occasional Campari he had had in the barely furnished drawing-room represented a special social effort. It was hard to praise the meal, of tinned tongue, with a tomato, a spring onion and a curl of lettuce; but Tony said, “These spring onions are jolly good.”

Rita Bunce said, “You’re going to split the old place up, then.”

“Well, I’ve only just started thinking about it.”

Her smile was responsible, and so seemed to hint at her anxiety about Tony. “We’ll all be much better off,” she said, which they each appeared to think about and find true. “No more housework. I don’t know what I’ll do all day.”

“Oh, I’ll keep you busy,” said Tony, perhaps more rakishly than he intended.

It was very like the grind of Justin’s old joke as he explained his plan to stay in a hotel: “With no housework to do, I shall have some time to myself for a change.” Robin was lost at once in the gloom of that other story, which undercut the good fortune the three of them were quietly welcoming. Work, which was a salvation from empty misery, was shown up by it as the feeble consolation of the loser. The secret technical joy he had always got from buildings and the art of building shrivelled away, as if poisoned. He set down his knife and fork and asked for another glass of water.

“I hope you approved of young Terry’s efforts in the flats,” Mrs Bunce said.

“He made a decent job of it,” said Robin. “I was pleasantly surprised.”

“He’s turned out a good lad, after some bad beginnings,” Mrs Bunce said. “He’s very clean.”

“He’s a buster, isn’t he,” said Tony.

“He’ll be busy with the discos now, of course,” said Mrs Bunce.

“You ought to go over one night,” said Tony. “Rita’s a great dancer, you know.”

“Going back a bit!” Mrs Bunce said, while a blush surfaced through her cream and powder. Robin glanced at her with courteous interest, and she went on, “No, that was the jitterbug-ging we used to do. They don’t do that these days, or else I’m very much mistaken.”

“I’m afraid not. I’m not even quite sure what it is.”

“And I’m not going to show you!” Robin saw that she’d brought the faintest hint of sexual sparring into the conversation, even though she was turning him down. “That’s how I met my other half,” she said: “Billy Bunce from Clifton, New Jersey. He could jitterbug them all into the ground. That was magic. Well, I’ve never seen anything to touch it since. The modern dancing, oh dear, you see it on the telly.”

“I know,” said Robin, with a widowed sense that he would never go dancing again, and that his style of Mick Jaggerish strutting and shaking had already gone to join the jitterbug in dance limbo, along with the twist and the Charleston, the quadrille and the gavotte.

The mood clung to him as he drove on to Litton Gambril. He was miserably distracted by the idea of Justin’s freedom in London, the complete freedom he had chosen from the botched experiment of life down here. Robin pictured him at the garish little newsagents in Clapham where he had first seen him, or among shoppers in Long Acre, and was horrified by the fact that mere chance had brought them together in those two places. For the first time, it struck him as absurd to expect loyalty from someone he had met in a toilet.

Normally when he arrived at the cottage he felt happily divided, and opened the place up in a capable adult way while his eyes and thoughts ran round the house and garden like imaginary children, making contact with their favourite spots. But today, in the sunless heat, he could only think of how he missed Justin, and the house in its private hollow looked like an elaborate emblem of failure. He had to have someone always around. Nights spent by himself were more and more bewildering to him. It was clear that Dan and his friend had slept in the big bed, and there seemed something inexorable in that. The kitchen showed signs of the misplaced tidiness of guests, everything subtly wrong. It was like the endless summer weekends he had spent here when Justin was still living with Alex, but darkened now by a hint of dispossession.

He did what he could to counter the mood. He got into shorts and hurried round with a show of unchallenged physical energy. The lawn in this dry weather didn’t need mowing again, and he saw that the dead-heading of the roses had been done exactly to his instructions. There was only a little perfectionist weeding to do. He carried the heavy black book of the Tyther-bury plans to the work-hut, but the air there was stifling, and the book lay on the desk like a penance: he looked out at the long field and the hanging wood which were the constant counterparts to his working thoughts and wondered how he could ever make a drawing again. Everything was flavourless, or slightly bitter.

When it was cooler he went for a run round the fields. The wheat was coming on with its usual evenness of purpose, but it was a scruffy time of year, the path dry and cracked among dead cow-parsley and tall brown grass. A field of rape had been cut and left in its unEnglish chaos of gigantic tussocks. He didn’t see anyone else in the half-hour he was out, and he had the feeling he was the only person who had put up a resistance to the heavy heat of the day. He pinched the sweat out of his eyes.

When he got in he had a long shower and examined himself in the mirror as he dried, with a sportsman’s attention to particular muscles and a firmer acknowledgement than before that something in his bearing was changing, that the flow and swing of his body were becoming strange to him. Of course you saw it in others at the gym, the little fold of skin at the armpit, gooseflesh at the throat, the flattening of the buttocks, the slump of the chest. A wiry young man had a perceptible stoop, a regular heart-breaker’s smile took on a worried persistence. In some of them the marks of time were sexy – as Robin’s own baldness obviously was. He thought of Justin, with his plump little underchin, his contained sleekness mysteriously yielding, the pattern of his hair-loss revealing itself, and found every detail rousing and real. Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be. He smiled sternly at his sun-browned handsomeness, and remembered the absurd remark Tony once dragged up about his father’s being the handsomest man in Wessex. It was funny because it was both so pompous and so camp; which didn’t mean that it wasn’t also quite likely to be true. His father would have frowned at the phrase and thought there was something pansy about it; but in the privacy of his dressing-room he probably turned it over and admitted it was pretty near the mark.