Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“How come you two got together?” said Terry. “I wouldn’t have thought he was your type.”

“I don’t have a type, darling,” said Danny, whose Utopian policy was to have everyone once. “I thought you knew, he used to go out with Justin.”

Terry wasn’t expecting that. “Well I wouldn’t have thought he was his type either.”

“Oh, you know,” said Danny: “shy top and bossy bottom, it happens all the time,” and watched Terry absorb this crude but worldly insight.

“Right,” he said. “So how did Justin get off with your dad?”

Justin himself was quite free with the story of the Clapham Common Gents, but a kind of family pride, or maybe just snobbery, dissuaded Danny from passing it on to Terry. “Oh, they met in London someplace.” In fact his laughter when Justin first told him had covered a few lost seconds of incredulity and shock.

“I suppose if I was Justin, I’d probably prefer…Mr Woodfield, rather than Alex,” said Terry, enjoying the new mood of frankness. “I always thought he was a bit of all right, your dad.”

“Hey, no you don’t! Hands off my old man!” said Danny, as if speaking in subtitles; and noticed the now uncontrolled mutiny in Terry’s trunks. “Justin’s fair enough…”

Terry blushed and turned on to his front. “And so’s Simon,” he said, “I suppose,” with an effect of hurriedly covering one piece of mischief with another.

Danny worked it out behind the black sheen of his shades. He wasn’t totally easy with knowing about Justin’s indiscretions; they troubled him because they were bad jokes against his father, who had always seemed immune to attack and powered by a scandalous personal authority. “You’d better tell me,” Danny said.

Terry sensed his reserve and said, “Nah, it doesn’t matter.”

“Go on,” said Danny, “if it doesn’t matter” – thinking of that Jewish funeral, and his father’s freaky stoicism, like indifference, as if his homosexual loss could not be mixed with the family’s grief and embarrassment.

“It was years ago,” said Terry, laying his head on his arms and giving Danny a charming porny smile. “He used to catch hold of me and, well…interfere with me.”

“Really,” said Danny, and smiled back, because it sounded such a simple and idyllic thing to have done.

“He used to say, “Is that a ferret in your pocket, Terry, or are you just pleased to see me?””

Danny tried to analyse his mood, it was distilled randiness laced with anxiety, which made the randiness even stronger. He saw Alex coming down towards them at a stumbling trot, the orange melt from an ice lolly dripping through his hands and blown on to his long pale legs by the breeze. He said very quietly, in a straight-faced parody of Terry, “I’d like to interfere with you an’ all,” and then wondered if there was some equally effective spell for making your dick go down.

Alex’s bad mood wasn’t helped by the stifled giggling of the boys. He nudged his way on to a corner of towel and sat sucking primly at the angled straw of a fruit-juice carton. “I hadn’t realised it was National Snogging Day,” he said, and scowled over his shoulder. “Every couple I passed were glued together at the larynx.”

“Must be the weather,” said Terry.

Danny was twisting his lolly round to catch the drips and mumble up the slushy fragments that slid off the stick at the lightest bite. He knew Alex was watching him and tensely daydreaming about the kisses he still thought they were going to share.

“The thing about Ada Ringroad,” said Justin, “is that Mike can’t stand him, but Marge is being stubbornly nice to him. She asks him round almost daily, the old fag-hag. Last time we were there, Mike called him a deviant of the worst kind.”

“How did he take that?” asked Alex.

“Well he was pissed, and we all laughed like lunatics, and he seemed to get the idea.”

Danny had just come down from a shower, and was buttoning his shirt and holding his own gaze in the sitting-room mirror, with a sense of readying himself for a testing premiere. “What does he do?” he said. He saw Justin come up behind him and felt him too as he slid a hand around him with a kind of sexiness that was somehow made possible by Alex’s presence, as if nothing could come of it.

“I believe he used to be a schoolmaster, darling.” Justin peered into the mirror. “One can see him being pretty eager with the slipper. He wears a bow-tie, which is a well-known sign of penile inadequacy.”

“I wasn’t actually thinking of him as a sexual partner,” said Danny, gently freeing himself.

“He has those schoolmaster shoes, like vulcanised Cornish pasties.”

Robin came into the room and slipped an arm round Justin in his turn. Justin glanced at his trousers and said, “That’s better,” and Danny knew he must have asked him to change. A little power-shift had happened as the price of the new togetherness: his father had been lightly pussy-whipped, or botty-whipped perhaps was the word, and once again the two of them were hugging and groping each other. He wondered for a second, in a spirit of fairness, if some new contract could save his affair with Alex; but saw how unalike the situations were. He didn’t need Alex.

Justin said, “I should warn you he’s very keen on the church; he plays the organ, and as you know Mike has a blood feud with the church. Adrian’s already very thick with the Bishops. I mean the people called Bishop,” he explained to Alex.

Danny said, “You seem a bit obsessed with this chappie.”

Justin turned back to the mirror with a pout. “In village life, darling, one seizes on what interest one can.”

“Yeah, right,” said Danny.

Alex got up and crossed the room to put a hand on Danny’s shoulder – it was a friendly gesture that had gone stiff with premeditation: it looked as if he was trying to restrain him.

The four of them set out through the village, sometimes like a gang across the road, then pairing up in different ways when a car came through, or a bouncing unharnessed tractor. Danny noticed the self-consciousness of the others. He thought of himself as a free person threatened by the muddled commitments of this group of older men. When his mobile rang, he answered it with a yell, and dawdled obliquely across the road, for privacy.

It took a moment to work out that it was Heinrich the barman, his boyfriend for a good ten days in the spring, who was clearly some way off his face and was talking without his usual courteous preambles and connections. “So, I want you to come across,” he said.

“I can’t come across, darling. I’m in Dorset.”

After a while Heinrich said, “Oh my god!,” as though he was the last to hear of something outrageous. “You know I am thinking about you quite intensely.”

“Are you by yourself?”

“Yes, I have taken an ecstasy by mistake, because I have a headache, so as you can imagine I am feeling very great indeed, but I have no one with me. And still I have a headache. Quite soon I will go to work.”

“Are you working at the Drop tonight?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I wish I was there!” said Danny, with a childish groan of frustration. He pictured Heinrich’s hairy legs and big friendly backside.

“Maybe we can have sex by the phone,” Heinrich suggested.

“Yeah, I can’t, darling,” said Danny, pushing his other hand into his pocket. “We’re just going out to drinks. We’re in the street” – he could do it as a dare, but he knew he would laugh too much.

“So who are you with just now?”

Danny looked at them across the road, in a moment’s alienated vision of them as another set of people who had nothing in common, Robin with his sportsman’s stroll and Alex anxiously slowing his angled stride and Justin, who had small feet, somehow hurrying between them. “Oh, with my dad, and some friends.” He raised his voice and smiled at them, to confirm their suspicion he was talking about them.