Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

The fragment of wall-painting was in the north aisle, and showed Tobias with the Angel Raphael. It was executed in various shades of brown, which merged with the discolouration of the plaster and the rough blots where the plaster had been patched, one of which rendered the angel enigmatically jawless. But the fat little boy could be seen, in his brown jerkin, and holding up his brown fish. Alex said, “It says here it was painted with a brush made from a squirrel’s tail.”

“It’s hard not to suspect an element of conjecture in that,” Nick said.

The angel guiding Tobias had flowing curly hair and a belted tunic; he was about eight feet tall, and strode forwards on a thickly outlined right leg with a very elegant foot – heel raised and long toes taking their purchase on the ground, which was implied by a dandelion-like tuft. It made Alex think of his last day with Danny, on the beach, and the memory was surprising even though this little trip to Dorset was all memory – ever since London he’d been waking himself up from the troubled trance of the past. At the end of that afternoon, he had walked with Danny along the sea’s edge, the sand was firm but sodden with water, and at each step a shiver of silvery light seemed to flash from under their feet. Alex pointed out the effect, in the lyrical but cringing tone that was forced on him by Danny’s coldness, and Danny had merely cleared his throat, with an unamusable downward curl of his big mouth.

Nick hugged him from behind, and they went out of the church. He was being vigorously kind this weekend, and any tension he felt about meeting Justin and Robin, and pottering round the landscape of Alex’s previous affair, was disguised as excitement and a hunger for ancient monuments. “And now the castle!” he said, as they came into the road.

“There’s not much to the castle,” murmured Alex, who was covering his tension less well, and was ready for a drink. “The Crooked Billet is a marvellously unspoilt old pub.”

“Art before alcohol, dear,” said Nick. He was a person who expressed large clear feelings and wants of all kinds and then showed a special charm in tuning and surrendering them to other people’s moods – or at least to Alex’s. “Of course, if you’d really rather not…I know this must be strange for you. You must tell me everything you’re thinking” – a phrase which to Alex always had the effect of a sudden inhibition.

“No, let’s go to the castle.”

They got back into Nick’s car and drove out of the village and along Ruins Lane, which had the stony dryness of summer still, though the chestnuts were already dropping their leaves and there were scarlet shocks of haws in the hedges. One other car was in the car-park – it had a caged rear section for a dog, and the forlorn admonishment about puppies being for life in the window. Nick led the way over a stile, and into the lumpy field where the ruins stood, or crouched. There was one picturesque bit, a towering fragment of the hall, with the airy grid of a bay window high above, and the barred-off opening of a narrow spiral staircase. Next to it was the kitchen, where Alex stooped under the lintel of the fireplace and peered up the chimney to the pale blue chink of sky.

Alex knew he would have loved it here as a boy, with his taste for lonely places; it was somehow akin to a hollow, roughly habitable oak in the woods at school, and to his dusty, torch-lit “house” in the cupboard under the stairs, with the ceiling that stepped down like a trap on the already long-legged child. “I’ve been playing hide and seek,” he used to say; and his mother said, “It can’t be hide and seek if no one’s coming to look for you, darling. It’s just hide.”

He walked off to the edge of the site, where some newly sawn pine-logs were stacked and giving off their fresh vomit smell as the sun warmed them. He watched Nick bustling about the stony knolls, reading the old Ministry of Works signs that said “Storerooms” or “Chapel.” There was an element of conjecture there too, no doubt. He thought how Danny had lived his youth, and followed his appetites, and slept with such a variety of men that you couldn’t see any common thread beyond the blind desire to know the world through sex. The thought made Alex sag with envy and loss, even though he had Nick, and though sex, of course, was not the only way to know the world. He wondered what Danny had meant when he said he loved him, or adored him, and whether meaning something had even entered into it. He clearly had no idea of the psychic shock, to someone like himself, of falling in love. Danny would be a great lover, that would be his career, though he knew next to nothing about love, just as some great musicians knew nothing about music, beyond their gift for making it.

In general he was very happy now. There was something sweet and justified about reliving the solitary excitements of his past in the company of someone as handsome and generous as Nick. Mornings of ruins and evenings of L’elisir d’amore . It must just be the fact of being here again in Litton Gambril that rekindled his sense of surreal and arbitrary injustice. Today, like every day of the past fourteen months, was a part of the life he had thought he would be sharing with Danny, and he was spending it without him, and to that extent he was spending it alone.

The Sicily tickets had come the morning after his return to London. They were to have been a beautiful surprise for Danny, and lay on Alex’s kitchen table, beside the brochure of the Excelsior Palace Hotel, Taormina, with the unforgivable ignorance of mail sent to the newly dead. Coming back into the room, preparing to go to work but still expecting to hear himself phone in sick, he saw the tickets again and started crying quite violently, pushing them around the table with a stiff, unaccepting arm. Later, he put everything back in the envelope, and went into the office.

In the evening he rang Hugh and cried some more through the inadequate medium of the telephone. Hugh said, “I’m so sorry, darling,” with real tenderness, as well as an irrepressible note of vindication.

“These have been the worst three days of my life,” said Alex, sincerely, and believing, in his retentive way, that you could compare one pain with another that was only remembered.

“Tell me again how old he was,” said Hugh.

“He was twenty-three. I mean, he still is.”

“Yes,” said Hugh. “They don’t want the same things as us, you know.”

Alex was so struck by the wisdom of this remark that he instinctively rejected it. “We were madly in love,” he said.

He went round to see Hugh the following evening and they got drunk in his flat before going out for some pasta. As they left the building they had to make their way through a small crowd of theosophists whose grateful expressions he attributed broadly to the effects of a seance. The restaurant was as always half-empty and too brightly lit, as though to draw attention to its meagre popularity. The hand-coloured photographs of Etna and Palermo Cathedral conspired in the gruesome excess of irony which bristles around any crisis.

Alex had favoured and then suppressed the idea several times, but at the end of the meal, loose on Corvo and a couple of grappas, and full of gratitude to his oldest friend, he said, “How would you like to come to Sicily with me next month for a couple of weeks, staying only at the best hotels?” As he said it he found he already regretted it – Hugh would get on his nerves and be a perpetual disappointment as he sat in Danny’s place, Alex would be ashamed of him in his tweed jacket and compromised by him in the Casanova pub and the Perroquet disco…

Hugh was looking down in the sudden flush of delicate feeling, and Alex was moved to see how touched he was, and instantly forgot his regrets – of course it would be better to visit the temples at Agrigento in the appreciative company of someone who sweated classical learning than in a state of sexual distraction with Danny, and anxiety at every moment that he might be getting bored. Not, of course, that he could go with Danny: that was why they were having this conversation, it was the still new fact, and it leapt up like a hot liquid burp in his throat, and brought tears to his eyes.