Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

He decided to miss lunch, and got a taxi into Soho. He went to a bar where he had sometimes met up with Alex after work in the earlier, more outgoing phase of their affair; but it too had been the subject of interior design, and its new surfaces of polished steel and industrial rubber forbade nostalgia. He ordered a nutritious bloody Mary. He felt that he wasn’t drifting but adrift. He didn’t know what to do about the houses. He would have to see Charles again, to offset suspicions, but the idea of looking over another property was already vaguely sickening to him. He imagined ringing the office and being told that Charles would no longer be looking after him. And then he could simply abandon the search, it would be a sweet release; he could buy a brown felt hat and see out his days in the considerate hush of the Musgrove Hotel. He had a recurrent delusion, which seemed to him authentically criminal, that he could still smell the high-summer stink of the garbage-truck, beer-slops and rotten apples and cod-liver oil.

By mid-afternoon he had been round three bars, accompanied on the last leg by a talkative young man called Ivor, who had met him and Robin at a party last Christmas. Justin had only a filtered recollection of that earlier occasion -of being shown off by Robin, of being very beautiful and amusing, and, perhaps, of Ivor being one of those he had impressed. “I often repeat that joke of yours,” Ivor said.

“Oh…” said Justin.

“When I said what a pillar of strength you were to Robin, and he said, “Oh, more than that,” and you said, “What, an arcade?”” Justin chuckled bashfully, and thought it was quite funny, or would have been when he said it. Ivor seemed to be mesmerised by him, his chatter was partly nervous, and when Justin started speaking he sat with his lips apart, as if to memorise what he said. He was a nice enough looking chap, with short black hair and sporty club gear that he must have thought suitable for daytime wear. The opportunity never quite arose for Justin to tell him he had left Robin, and he sheltered behind Ivor’s understandable ignorance, and found it comfortable, and then uncomfortable. “I’d love to have you two round for a meal,” Ivor said, “while you’re both in town. Or perhaps you’d like to come and see my new show.”

“Sure…” said Justin, turning to signal to the barman.

“You don’t remember what I do, do you?” said Ivor, clearly thrilled by his own insignificance.

Justin didn’t like to say that, strictly speaking, he couldn’t remember Ivor at all. He said, “We’ll only be here for a couple more days.” And then, “Do you want another drink?”

The bar they were in was small and sparingly lit, with walls of mirror to allay the sense of being in a trap. It was clearly a haunt of Ivor’s, and they were soon joined by a loose group of his friends. Justin bought drinks for them all, with a strained heartiness that wasn’t his natural style. One of the boys said to him quietly, “Are you okay?” He was a thickset rugger blond, whom Justin had immediately hoped to impress – it was confusing to be shown this wary solicitude. He had had what, four bloody Marys and then a couple of summery screwdrivers. He wasn’t that far gone. But maybe his gaze at the boy, who was still soberly shy and reasonable, had been unwittingly heavy. He said, “I’m fine,” and the boy shrugged and lifted his bottle and murmured, “Cheers.”

Later, he was buying a drink for another man, and told him he was looking for a house, three or four bedrooms, in west or south-west London, but north of the river. He may have rather bragged about his requirements. The man said, “Well, let me know when you find one. I suppose you won’t need a lodger?”

Justin said, “I might have a sort of paying sex-guest.”

This didn’t seem to be what the man had in mind, but he laughed, and said, “Anyway, you must have a boyfriend.”

“Yes, I must,” said Justin.

Ivor, who tended to audit and sample anyone else’s conversations with Justin, said excitably, “He’s got a bloody gorgeous, boyfriend. Haven’t you? He’s this gorgeous architect.” He took a sip from his salt-rimmed glass, and added, “They’re made for each other,” with a note of extravagant regret.

Justin looked in the mirror on the facing wall. The bar was reflected in it, and their group of seven or eight, and his eye tracked across it to find himself. The skin of his face felt tight, with the dry tingle of afternoon drunkenness, the hint of giddiness and dissociation…He knew he should leave, but winced at the thought of the bright sunlight outside, and saw the wince in the mirror as an ugly little convulsion in the indefinably alien stiffness and slackness of his face. Everyone else seemed to be all right, he saw that the man who might be his lodger had noticed him looking at himself, and was smiling ironically at him. The bar was really terribly small. He took in, with delayed displeasure, that the cool quiet jazz of earlier had mutated, as the afternoon ran over some invisible threshold, into louder dance-music, with its threatening chemical eagerness. Ivor was saying something else to him, more unguarded as he got drunker himself. Justin turned and stared deliberately at the polished surface of the bar. His breathing was rapid and shallow.

As soon as he was out in the street he felt better, and he walked a block or two unseeingly in short charges and pauses. Whenever he thought back to the bar the panic returned, with a sudden wrong beat of the heart; but the effect diminished a little each time. It might have been all right, but he avoided looking in shop-windows or car-windows. He went into Soho Square, which he thought would be free of reflections, and sat firmly on the grass, in the middle of the lawn, under the airy canopy of the planes. One of the gay boys near by came and asked him for a light, but he just shook his head. After a while he got up quickly and went to a phone-box. He jabbed at the numbers and listened to the ringing tone without a clue what he was going to say. He felt it was out of his control, and that whatever he said would come to him in the moment that he said it. He had a vague image of the Clapham flat, the sex-box as he used to call it, and Robin darting to the phone. A preoccupied and not quite recognisable voice said, “Alex Nichols.” Justin winced, and for a paranoid half-second thought that Alex was there with Robin; then he started to wonder how he had dialled that number, by some flustered instinct -it was well over a year since he’d rung Alex at work. “Alex Nichols,” the voice said again, wearily. Justin stood there panting, like a pervert, and heard Alex hang up. Then, more deliberately, as if trying to see where he had gone wrong the first time, Justin keyed in the sex-box number. Within a second he heard the muffled clatter of the ansafone, and Robin’s voice, unlifelike, businesslike, making the impossible announcement that he had gone away.

By the time he reached Crewkerne it was dark, and he saw the last taxi pull out from the station yard as he emerged with his bags. There was a slight chill and a sharp grassy smell in the air. He went to the phone-box to call a cab, and then stood under the lamp at the station door. The ticket-office was closed, and the lit platforms and waiting-rooms were unmanned, in the modern way. Occasionally a car that wasn’t his cab came slowly past, and then accelerated away. The edge of a small country town at 10.30 at night, with rear lights disappearing: it was a definition of loneliness.

He noticed that the driver didn’t take credit cards, and decided not to tell him he had no cash. He sat in the back, with his overnight bag clutched on his knee, and watched the car’s headlights sweep corner after corner of the high-hedged lanes. The driver took them fast, and several times raised a squeal. He probably wanted to finish for the night, this was far out of his way – Justin was indifferent to him but glad of the mood of emergency. He swung from side to side, gripped by the muddled emotions of coming home and going into exile. He had made a mistake, but he didn’t know which it was.