Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

When he was in quite deep and his head rising and dropping on the swell with a sleeked, stoic, solitary look, Danny gave him a wave, and thought maybe he was more like a child than a parent. Once you got him happy and absorbed in some activity you would be free to take up your own compromised interests again. Alex waved back, with a gasping grin, and seemed encouraged to strike out on a further lap. Now and then Danny saw the upward flicker of his elbows.

There was a rattle of shingle and Danny turned casually to see a couple of the rough boys hobbling down from their encampment of lilos and six-packs. One of them was blond and brawny, the other wiry and slight, with a dark ponytail and Gothic tattoos: he had a boogy-board under his arm. Both of them wore long baggy shorts, as Danny liked to himself, though he knew they did it from a laddish fear of revealing themselves. He gave a tutting nod of greeting, and the dark boy said, “All right?,” which in a deep Dorset accent had a niceness, even a kind of chivalry, that it wouldn’t have had in London.

“All right?” said Danny. And then, “That your board?” The bright skeleton-key of thoughtless phrases that unlocked each new contact, the quick-witted focusing of tone: he kept telling Alex there was no one you couldn’t talk to, if you wanted to, it didn’t matter what you said; but Alex was always worrying about the content.

It turned out they were Carl (blond) and Les, local lads. Carl was blushingly revealed as engaged, but Les was on the rebound and desperate to score. “I know what you mean,” said Danny, and colluded with hesitant half-phrases in their appraisal of the nearby girls. Les was hardly his type but he had an unexpectedly sweet smile. He said,

“This sea’s crap.”

Danny said, “You need north Cornwall, don’t you, for the surf?” He tactfully withheld his Californian credentials, which he thought might crush the boys; he couldn’t imagine boogy-boarding in these stocky northern breakers if you’d done it out there, and could remember the jolting zoom of the ride in across a field of foam a hundred yards wide.

Carl said, “It’s usually better than this,” with a mixture of local pride and vague provincial discontent. “Where are you from then?”

“London, yeah…” said Danny, looking down and brushing sand from the towel he was sitting on. “My dad lives down here – well, Litton Gambril.”

“Ah, nice,” said Les; but didn’t ask anything more.

Carl said, “I don’t know about that one, Les. I reckon she’d do for you” – his eyes following a biggish teenage girl in her timid but heavy-footed approach to the water. Danny sniggered, but apparently the suggestion was serious: the two of them wandered a few paces away, and he read the skull-crowned Motorhead tattoo on Les’s left shoulder as he squinted seawards. Really, hetero life was so archaic and mad – Danny let out a quiet chuckle of relief at his own good fortune. And maybe Les too had his doubts:

“No. She’d squash me,” he said. “She’d squeeze all the life out of me, that one.”

Then up from the sea came Alex, so that they seemed to be staring at him: he clearly wondered what was happening.

“Here comes your dad, then,” said Carl. “Well, we’d better get in that sea if we’re ever going to.” And off they trod, as butchly as possible, but stooping and jabbing out their arms as they went over pebbly bits. Danny noted a kind of social cringe in their avoidance of Alex. He watched him approach, breathing roughly, tilting his head sideways to shake water from his ears, and of course he felt the romance of it, his lover coming up from the waves, in the flush and shiver of his exertion, leaning out of the noon sky to pluck up his towel. And then it passed.

At lunch-time they trekked along to the Hope and Anchor, asking Carl and Les’s other friends to keep an eye on their things; though Alex was fretful about the arrangement. In the restaurant section at the back Danny spotted Terry, looking very handsome, in a blue-and-white striped sweat-shirt, like a minor sixties film-star, being treated to a huge lobster lunch by a man with glasses and a linen jacket, who might have been an Oxford don. It was amazing how well he did down here, with a little help presumably from Roger and John at the Mill. He looked up and winked at Danny over his patron’s shoulder.

After a couple of pints of strong lager Danny felt much more cheerful, and for a while was full of randomly focused energy. Alex only drank Appletise, because he was driving, or didn’t want to get a headache. He watched with a tense half-smile when Danny drifted away from him to gossip with strangers, feed crisps to their children, and briefly take part in a game of darts. It was a compulsion of Danny’s, he wasn’t being deliberately neglectful, in fact he introduced Alex to a good-looking man he had just introduced himself to, but Alex was so stiff, and the conversation died as soon as he left them together. When they were outside again Alex started talking in a hopeless farcical way about someone who worked in his office. Danny scanned the parking-lot and then the beach as they walked along, and said “Yeah” with adequate regularity. An athletic-looking blond couple were walking ahead of them, both presumably in swimsuits, but they were covered by long T-shirts, so that they seemed from behind to be wearing nothing but the T-shirts. The man had beautiful muscular legs, with a glimmer of down on the back of the calves; the back of his head was square and Germanic, cropped short up to a thick topknot, which was stiffly untidy where salt-water had dried in it. The woman laughed and put her arm round his waist, his hem-line rose a fraction and showed the edge of his tight blue trunks. Danny was imagining licking the back of his neck as he fucked him. “Well I thought it was funny anyway,” said Alex.

Danny looked at him poker-faced, and then laughed, and said, “It is funny, darling. Very funny.” He wondered how long it was since the Germans had had sex, and how much longer the woman could possibly defer having it again. He dropped a little behind Alex, as he sometimes did, in the caressing grip of his own thoughts, and also with a sad but liberating recognition of something quite obvious: they had nothing in common. Their paths in life had joined for a moment, Danny had done a good deal for him, one way and another he’d got him sorted, and now it was natural and right that he should send him gently on his way. The process was so logical that he thought Alex himself, after the first upset of it, would be bound to see that it was right.

Back at their spot, Danny said, “Okay, time for a kip, I think,” and lay out flat on his towel. Alex hopped about between him and the sun, getting undressed all over again. He said,

“Aren’t you taking anything off?”

“Oh all right,” said Danny, sitting up and twisting off his canvas shoes, one against the other. “You don’t want to get skin cancer.” Actually it was very hot, but he enjoyed the tease of keeping his jeans and T-shirt on. Alex was always looking at him, time and again he would be gazing at him when he woke up, as if he couldn’t believe his luck. “Anyway, you’ve seen it all before,” he said.

“Hm,” said Alex, clearly thinking that was rather beneath him. And Danny saw that being so much younger he must resist the temptation to be childish. He decided to read, and got out the bizarre book he had found in the lav at the cottage. If you started it at the front it was called Memoirs of an Old Man of Thirty; but you could turn it round and start from the back, where the text, which otherwise appeared upside-down, was called Loves of a Young Man of Eighty . It seemed to be a dodgy piece of 1890s smut; the Young Man of Eighty referred to his dick as his yard, which Danny took a while to get the hang of. He couldn’t see why people kept wanting to look at his yard. Alex said, “What are you reading?” and when he held up the book he seemed oddly put out by it. “Are you enjoying it?” he asked.