Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

He had been wise to hesitate about Terry, though perhaps not foolish to give in. In bed Terry was lively but self-regarding, as if he wanted to show this older man that he knew how to do it – he was quick and vain; beautiful, but he didn’t touch Robin in any but the most mechanical sense. He was a merely cursory kisser, whereas Robin always wanted to snog heavily, especially with strangers. Terry seemed to find that too intimate or too compromising. He was very proud of his broad-backed dick, which reared off at an angle as if long since tugged askew by the obsessive attentions of his right hand. He had an idiotic patter about it, but Robin shut him up in the simplest way he knew; even so, occasional noises emerged, like the conscientious rejoinders of a dentist’s patient. He seemed somehow displeased by the dense but fountaining volume of Robin’s ejaculation; and Robin himself observed it as a phenomenon of nature, with an almost total absence of sensation. It wasn’t the ending he had hoped for through his spooky weeks of continence.

Even so, afterwards, drifting sleepwards, he was glad to have Terry with him. His hands rubbed across the skin and joints and smooth transitions of a body that hadn’t yet dreamt of the changes Robin had studied earlier in the mirror. It was interesting – like an eerily privileged visit to his younger self, or to some aspect of it. But he wouldn’t want to make the journey often. How could all the ageing lovers of boys bear it, the distance growing longer and lonelier year by year? Robin liked the particulars of Terry, the very hairy calves and the smooth thighs, the marks of sweaty chafing between his legs, the small scar on the wrong side for the appendix, the damp talcky knots of his armpits. Had he really fancied Robin when he was fifteen? They got the roof on the house in time to have his fortieth birthday party between its unplastered walls, with builders’ caged lamps on long flexes clipped to the beams, and a tilting JCB backed up outside in the rutted mudslide of the garden. He cooked long skewers of sea-food in the open fireplace. He had been unsure about forty, but then in the new house, with Simon, he saw that forty was only a beginning. Of course he thought Simon would be here with him for the rest of his life, by which he meant his own life.

It wasn’t clear whether Terry was staying. He seemed to have quite settled in. Robin thought it must be strange for him to find himself in this room, when he had recently spent the night in Dan’s bed, a couple of doors along. Now he was sleeping, his jaw had dropped, he was a mouth breather. Robin curled round and turned off the lamp, and it was only that small domestic action that startled him with the image of Justin, or rather with its opposite, the sudden teeming darkness in which Justin disappeared each night, as they turned and settled in each other’s arms. The great loves in his life – and here he was with a pointless trick, and all the vague social disadvantage that would follow.

Terry swallowed and mumbled “All right?” as Robin hugged him.

“Mmm.” He wondered if Justin was alone at this moment, if he was really in a hotel; he half-admired the stony way he had stuck to his resolution, and not rung home – like other addictive personalities he had a mystical respect for the total ban, as the only alternative to chaos. Still, the effect was severe. Robin listened to the wind, and thought of that other day, at the far end of summer, when a little shift occurred in the weather, that might have been nothing, a morning’s chill after weeks of glittering heat, but was in fact the airy chink through which the autumn came pouring, with its vivid forgotten lights and ache of inexact memory and surprising sense of relief.

“I ought to be off,” Terry said flatly. “I haven’t had my dinner.” Robin pulled him closer, with a sentimental growl.

He must have slept, maybe only for a few seconds, and when he woke it was to a subtly confused apprehension of where he was. Terry stretched and sighed and seemed to kiss his arm, but in the darkness Robin drifted on the unexamined certainty that he was with someone else. He murmured a half-awake phrase, blunt but solicitous, with the routine humour and dry wistfulness of some established intimacy. It happened sometimes in moments of giggly sweetness, when you found you were treating one friend as if he were another older and better one – a sudden access through a similar gesture or simply through the likeness of friendships. Quite often, Robin called Justin Simon, and was forced to apologise. In the dark, as breathing slowed and the hands lost the sense of where they lay, it seemed one lover could become another, like the smoothly metamorphosing figures in dreams. In Robin’s dream a stranger was shouting; he woke up and it took him several frightened seconds to work out that Terry was asking him for thirty pounds.

No, you’re right, sir. This room would need a bit of work.”

“If seven maids, with seven mops…” Justin trailed away.

“Sorry sir?”

“Nothing.”

“It does enjoy a south-westerly view.”

“If it enjoys that view,” said Justin, standing back from the window, “then it must be a masochist.”

Charles the estate agent gave an embarrassed chuckle. “Point taken, Justin,” he said. “Point taken.”

Justin wished he would decide what to call him, and stick to it. Charles was a tall, not unhandsome man in his late twenties, with the high colour and camel-like gait of a certain kind of public schoolboy. It was boiling hot, and he was in shirt-sleeve order; he had a bright joky tie which Justin imagined was a gift from a girlfriend who didn’t want him to turn into a fuddy-duddy. He kept smoothing it down as if he would like to smooth it away. “I’ve got another one to show you,” he said. They went downstairs and got into Charles’s white Rover – or “Rover car” as he called it. As before, there was a bit of trouble starting. “You run up quite a mileage in my job,” Charles said.

It was inexpressibly strange to be back in this neighbourhood, though the shock came not from what had changed but from what was exactly unaltered. There was that corner house with crazy “stonework” stuck over the brick, there were those peculiar children playing outside the dry-cleaners, there was the strikingly named Garbo’s off-licence, which had done so much to enhance the glamour of drinking alone; they were actually going to pass the end of Cressida Road, and he craned round to get a glimpse of Alex’s house, half-way along. “It’s a pleasant area, this,” said Charles. By and large, Justin thought he preferred the cockney Derek, from the other agency. The trouble with boys like Charles was the recurrent hint they gave off that they, and certainly their parents, lived in somewhere far grander than the properties they were trying to sell. Hence the note of pity, the wavering forms of address, and the ironic attachment to the euphemisms of the trade. “This next house has been the subject of interior design,” Charles said.

The woman of the house had stayed in to be available to them, and sat on the sofa with her legs crossed, drinking milky coffee and doing the Daily Mail crossword. When they had been upstairs for a while, she came up to see what was happening and showed them how the loft ladder worked. Justin saw that as a vendor she had come to believe the estate agents’ literature, and would be offended by almost anything he said about the house. He was itching to leave the place for ever, but found himself in a spasm of parodic politeness asking further questions about the central heating and just having another quick look at the little bedroom. As the front door closed behind them he realised he had been rather a success.