Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“Okay.” Robin offered him the letter bag. “Let’s have nine letters, then; and seventy-five extra if you put them all down.”

“Fine.” Justin smiled mysteriously, picked out an A, and added, “Oh, and no two-letter words.”

Robin drew breath to complain, but then thought better of it.

Justin held his letters away from him and scanned them fondly for a couple of minutes. “Do you know what my first word is going to be, darling?” he said.

“I don’t.”

“Well it begins with a G, and it ends with a Y, and the middle letter’s an A.”

Robin pursed his lips in the briefest pretence of amusement, and was already entering his score on the sheet when Justin put down GRAVY. “Ah. Very good, twenty-four,” he said, before doing a quick reshuffle of his rack and then laying out across the board, with calm ruthlessness, the word EXASPERATE. “Um…let me see…sixty, and the bonus…one hundred and thirty-five.”

“Marvellous,” said Justin, arranging his new letters and sending his mind off on a wilfully naughty excursion through his sexual activities of the past ten days. Gianni, and Carlo; and then Mark, who had bulged rather less than promised. No, Carlo was definitely the best. When he focused again on his rack he could only see a hedge of consonants, like a Welsh village. He thought how absurd it was to be doing this for fun, by choice; when surely the point about getting a little bit older and having money was that you never had to do anything that you didn’t want to. He put down GENTS, as a flat joke, and also, in their case, a romantic one, and scored a suicidal eight – he felt Robin’s disapproval of the wasted resource of the s. “Shall we have a drink, darling?” he suggested.

While Robin was out of the room Justin hopped up and looked at his rack, on which TEMPORISE was waiting to be deployed. He saw that if Robin laid it across the s of GENTS he would get a quadruple word score plus the bonus; which after a moment’s mental arithmetic would doubtless come out at several thousand points. He was back studying his letters, and accepted his gin and tonic abstractedly, only looking up when Robin had set down his tiles. The word he had made was PROEMS; which came to a timid twenty-six. “Rather a good word, I think,” Robin said.

For Justin the game was over at that moment. If they were both going to play deliberately badly, even though from quite different motives, then what was the point of continuing? He shouldn’t have looked at Robin’s letters, perhaps; and he remembered that though knowledge was power it could also involve a good deal of disappointment. Still, he couldn’t admit to having peeped, which might be considered a kind of cheating. He took about five minutes to make his next word. “Sorry…” he said at one point.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Robin, suppressing his gaping impatience as if playing with a child.

Justin was thinking about going out later, and the wonderfully unorthodox guide to village life he would be able to give to the newcomer. All he knew about him came from Margery Hall’s vague remark that he was a bachelor and rather musical, from which he had built up a convivial portrait of a boozy old opera queen who would of course find him very attractive and amusing. Then he did something most annoying, and put down half his word before hastily taking it up again. He said, “I think it would be nice to just sort of put down words.”

Robin frowned equably. “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“I mean, wherever we liked.”

“Oh I see,” said Robin. “Well, that might make an interesting variant. I think it’s probably best if you engage with your opponent’s words…”

Justin took a drink, and then quickly put down PIRRENT. “Eleven, darling.”

“What on earth is that supposed to be?”

Justin blinked offendedly over his sabotage. “It’s PIRRENT,” he said.

“Why don’t you have PRINTER?”

“Oh I far prefer this.”

“Yes, darling,” said Robin, clearly thinking he was being mocked, but remembering to indulge Justin, like someone senile or mad. “But what does it mean?”

“Oh…” – Justin kept shaking his head as he searched for the definition. “It means…sort of vainglorious .”

There was a long pause before Robin said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to challenge that.”

Justin twisted sideways to pick up his drink, and the jerk of his knee fetched the Scrabble board off the low table, and scattered the letters across the floor. “You know how superstitious I am,” he said. “I’m sure that must be a sign.”

Danny went down to Dorset for a few days to put some distance between himself and Alex; though the reason he gave was that he wanted to check up on his father and Justin. He knew Alex couldn’t object to this kind-hearted plan, and he tried to persuade himself that Alex too might feel ready to cool it. He brought his big notebook with him as usual, and his more secret plan was to try to write a play about some of the people he knew on the club scene, Heinrich and Lars and a few others, with talk of an enigmatic older man, which would be his homage to George, as well as a kind of revenge on him. He didn’t envisage any technical obstacles to writing something stageable and sensationally topical; he spent one morning planning the guest-list for the first-night party, and going over certain points in the interviews he would give.

At the end of the week Alex came down to join him. Danny half-hoped that Robin might make a fuss about this, but his father treated Alex these days with amiable indifference, perhaps out of respect to Danny’s boyfriend, perhaps because he guessed he wouldn’t be his boyfriend much longer. He arrived soon after ten on Saturday morning, which like so many of his actions made you calculate the exact degree of inconvenience and eagerness that lay behind it; he’d have got up at six at the latest. He stood about expectantly in the kitchen as the others ate a halting, hung-over breakfast. He had some photographs of their long weekend with him, and showed them round dotingly, like an excited voyeur of his own happiness. Justin was rather pointedly studying the Equity prices in The Times; Robin served up more and more fried food. Danny’s impression was that the two of them were having a lot of sex and a lot of rows, which was probably better than having neither, as had been the case before. Robin did what he could to shield him responsibly from both things, and made him wonder if he could dodge those two things himself this weekend.

It was a breezy blue day, and Danny thought they should get out of the house. “Shall we go down to the beach?” he said, with a tug on Alex’s shirt-sleeve, and an awkward sense of a withheld endearment. He stuffed some towels and a book he was reading into his knapsack, but left his notebook behind, as he didn’t want Alex getting interested in his play, or indeed in some of the other things it contained. They went up to the car, and Danny leapt into the passenger seat without opening the door. The car was fun, after all, and freedom. He switched on the CD player, which whirred and checked itself and jumped to the middle of some slammingly hard house that Alex must have been listening to en route . Really he wondered at times what he’d turned this nice Donizetti-fancying civil servant into. As they drove up the lane, Mr Harland-Ball was standing in his gateway, and Danny called out, “We’re queer!” in a helpful tone.

Alex changed into top on the Bridport road and let his hand drift from the gear-stick on to Danny’s thigh. And it was true that Danny was tinglingly randy after a night of red wine and Irish whiskey, and had been feeling a touch redundant, alone in the house with a busy couple – it required a certain tactful blindness, and deafness. He sprawled back for a moment, so that Alex could feel his cock, but then said, “Actually, you’d better concentrate on the road.”