Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

Alex said, “It’s strange having the other two in the house again, after we had it all to ourselves.”

Danny paused and said, “It is their home.”

“I know, darling. That’s not quite what I meant.”

“You mustn’t be so possessive,” Danny said, and smacked Alex’s knee to make a little joke of it; when he glanced at his face a moment later he saw his blush, and knew he was silently absorbing and refuting the charge. Danny turned off the music, which was a bit strong for eleven in the morning, and started fiddling with the radio. Alex said,

“Did I tell you I saw Dave the other day?”

“Dave who?”

“Your friend who works in the porno shop.”

“Oh, right.” Danny found his favourite dance-music station, but it kept warping into a programme of hilarious advertisements in French. “You really need to get a better sound system,” he said, not for the first time.

“What is his surname, anyway?”

“Whose?”

“Dave’s”

“I don’t know,” said Danny. “I’m not that intimate with him.”

It was already busy at the beach, and they had to park some way from the refreshment cabins and the edge of the shingle. Danny’s eyes moved mischievously around behind the unreadable black discs of his shades. He noted Terry’s Lovemobile drawn up at the side of the Hope and Anchor, by some special arrangement he had with the landlord; and there were some nice big teenagers and a few sexy young dads mixed in with the trashier holiday-makers. Danny glanced at Alex to see if he had noticed them, but he seemed absorbed in the practicalities of the expedition. He walked a few yards ahead, past the Fo’c’sle Fish Bar and the Kiss Me Hardy gift kiosk, which had lost the last letter of its name. And even that detail seemed to raise the sexual pitch of the day.

The top of the beach was a low ramp of shingle, but further down there were patches and stripes of coarse grey sand. To the right the deep channel of the river opened out between its timbered walls. Alex didn’t know about the death of a local boy there, who had dived on to a pleasure-boat and broken his neck; Danny had read the story in the West Dorset Herald and preferred not to look at the shrivelled flowers and blotched messages that were still heaped on the quayside. He trailed on towards the further end of the beach, where the cliffs reared up again, and there weren’t so many little kids. He wanted to sit down near some lads he could get into conversation with. Alex came along, upset and inquisitive about the death, and why Danny hadn’t waited for him. “I think we should go here, darling,” he called, indicating the last free patch of sand; and Danny mopingly complied and turned back.

He had two contradictory feelings. He wished Alex wouldn’t call him darling all the time in public; and on the other hand he was so conditioned to a world in which everyone was gay that he found it hard to bear in mind, down here, a hundred miles from London, that almost everyone wasn’t. He raked the beach with a cruisy steadiness, a mysteriously knowledgeable smile, as if he had only to decide. Alex settled the bags and towels like an obstacle to escapades which, Danny briefly admitted, were never likely to happen. But there again, rationally, statistically, magnetically, there was a real chance that he might have picked up.

They sat down and he turned his attention to the sea, which Alex was reacting to in a forced, appreciative tone. There was a dazzle, even through sunglasses, on the small, noisy breakers, and the frothy film of water that slid back down the beach. A short way out there was an almost hidden rock over which a bright hood of foam reared and fell from time to time. After summers on the long surfing beaches north of San Diego, with their stilted lifeguard stations and neck-ricking parades of godlike men, Danny found the English seaside tackily spartan. Even on a hot day like this, there was a rough little breeze that hummed and buzzed over the nearby stones. He kept his T-shirt on and lay back looking at the sky; where there was nothing to see, except the highest faint plumes of cirrus. Alex said he thought there was something specially ethereal about the clouds, they were so high that it was hard to think of them as related to the earth, they were like vapour-trails of a war in heaven, or something. Danny, who had spent an instructive weekend with a Scotsman from the Met Office, said more scientifically that they were seven or eight miles up, and at that altitude would be composed entirely of ice-crystals.

When he sat up again he saw that Alex was looking at him, and said, “What…?”

“Nothing, darling. Have you heard from George about the chain, by the way?”

Danny sounded cross. “No, I haven’t. I haven’t seen George, or heard a squeak out of him for weeks.” It was only as he said the sentence that he decided who he was being cross with. “I think he’s dropped me, the bastard.” He frowned very hard to stifle a grin. It was fun to have this entirely fictional pretext to talk about George. Alex looked both pleased and troubled.

“I hope you’ll get it back soon.”

Danny nodded and looked out to sea. “You never told me where you got it,” he said, with half-hearted wiliness.

“I can tell you if you like. It was left to me by my grandmother.”

“Really…?”

“I think she thought I could give it to my wife.”

Danny guffawed anxiously. The next stage of his plan had been to confess that George had lost the chain or sold it out of a misunderstanding. He wished he could just say that it had been stolen – and quite possibly swallowed – by a satyromaniac Brazilian dwarf. But it was never easy to be brutal to Alex. In fact the need to treat him delicately, to protect him, as you protect your parents with small lies and omissions, was a strong part of Danny’s love for him. It was a kind of respect, and the lies themselves were coloured by solicitude. At times, the success of his deceits gave him a dizzy feeling of competence, at sustaining a double life; and that in turn made him proud of his affair with Alex, as an achievement, unlike the straightforward world of his miscellaneous fucks, with its perishable feelings and minimal commitments. But the grandmother’s jewellery, the wayward convictions that must have led Alex to make that gift…It was like a creepy bit of private magic, a secret engagement ring. Danny said, “I had thought of asking George down this weekend. I think you two should get to know each other better.”

Alex said, “You had, had you?” and Danny laughed. It was so easy to trigger Alex’s jealousy, and funny that he didn’t realise that George was virtually the one person in his world that Danny could never have. The prohibition made the memories of him cruelly arousing, and he hunched forward to hide his erection.

Alex made quite a performance of changing into his swimming-trunks under a towel, like a straight person who has grown suspicious of the atmosphere in a locker-room. “Just get changed,” Danny said. “Nobody cares.”

“Thanks very much,” said Alex. “I notice you’re not getting ready.”

“I’ve got my shorts on under my jeans,” Danny said. “Besides, you wouldn’t catch me going in there.”

“The young of today have no fibre,” said Alex, pulling his shirt over his head, and standing for a moment, square-shouldered and head back, to make a joke out of his self-consciousness. Danny glanced up at his tall flat body, and remembered how he had found it fascinating and elegant, in its lanky way, after all the superfluous muscle he was used to being gripped by. And Alex was surprisingly strong, even if the ghost of an old back injury warned him away from some of the more demanding sex holds. Beside Danny he looked eerily pale, though if you’d taken his trunks off you would have seen the thin priming of tan on the rest of him. “Well, I’m going in,” Alex said, and stepped forward, still in mock-heroic fashion, knowing he would be watched all the way to the water. “And I don’t want you talking to those rough boys,” he said, with a repressive nod at a group about twenty yards behind them.