Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“It would be marvellous,” Hugh was saying. “But I really don’t think I can.”

“Oh, come on,” said Alex. “You can’t stay in boring old Bloomsbury for ever. It would be fun. Think what a great team we were in Greece, all those years ago.” Though this wasn’t quite how he’d thought of it at the time.

“The thing is, I’m going to be away then myself, actually. This didn’t seem the right moment to tell you, but I’m going off, with a friend, to, er, to Nigeria for three weeks.” Hugh looked shaken to be making this announcement, but couldn’t help smiling. “I’m already having the jabs.”

“Good god!” said Alex, in a tone of cheery alarm. “And who is this person?”

“Oh…he’s called Frederick.”

“I see. I assume he’s Nigerian, is he?”

“What…? Yes, he is.”

“And how old…?”

“Um…he’ll be thirty-six next month – well, whilst we’re in Lagos, as it happens.”

“I won’t ask you how you met him”: at which Hugh looked a little crestfallen, for all his air of thrilled reluctance as the facts came out. He piled and smoothed the sugar in the bowl into a tiny Etna of his own.

“I’ll tell you anyway. I picked him up in Russell Square.”

Alex sat back and nodded at the revealed logic of this fait accompli . He knew what question Hugh wanted him to ask next, and he brought it out with airy courtesy: “What’s his dick like, by the way?” Hugh’s glow of tactfully suppressed pleasure deepened to a triumphant blush.

Alex wasn’t sure, over the following weeks, what he felt about Hugh’s unprecedented affair. He was moving through the obscurely delineated phases of grief, and his reactions to matters outside himself were unpredictably null or intense. In the first few days the slightest pressure made him weep, and he nearly got in a fight with someone he swore at from the car. After that came a phase when he longed to weep, but couldn’t, which seemed perversely like yet another failure. He went round, just for a drink, to meet the boyfriend. Frederick was slender and a little shy, and had a deeply melancholy look even when he was laughing. He enquired, with disconcerting politeness, about the well-being of all Alex’s relatives. As the drinks went down, he grew more and more physical with Hugh, and Alex too came in for brief knee-strokings and lingering smiles. When Hugh went out of the room, Frederick said, “Hugh told me your boyfriend left you.” Alex merely nodded, and Frederick took his hand and said, “Well, I’m more than sure you going to find another one,” with a long glance that was not only flirtatious but had an embarrassing prophetic certainty. Soon afterwards Alex kissed and hugged them both, and left. He was naturally delighted by his friend’s happiness. Those were the words he used to himself as he tried to eliminate the small residual feeling of envy and betrayal.

He had very little contact with Danny, beyond a few impossible phone-calls, one of them an absurdist vignette of blocked communication because of the bad reception on Danny’s mobile. “I said: This has been the worst week of my life,” Alex barked, three or four times, till he sounded more furious than miserable. Danny left a message on his machine to tell him when he was going to California, and Alex groaned at the way that silly idea had been allowed to harden into a life-changing fact. He was sure he would never see him again; and then bleakly soothed by the knowledge that he couldn’t bear to see him anyway. He wrote him a long letter, which he worked on and recast in his head and on paper for days and days, so as to make it reasonable; he dropped it into a pillar-box in Whitehall after work and was immediately terrified that he might reply.

Justin rang several times and asked a lot of questions; he was tender but fairly probing – it seemed almost as though he had found a way to observe the effects of his own breakup with Alex, but from a later, guiltless angle; or perhaps there was an element of atonement. Alex himself, sighing and switching about in his bed, was typically alert to the pattern. This second failure was a shocking reinforcement of the first. And yet he had to admit that there was something ambiguously easier about it too: he already knew the lesson, he knew the bereft amazement of finding that you had unwittingly had your last fuck, your last passionate kiss, your last taxi-ride hand-in-hand in the gloom; and he knew too that on both occasions there had been signals, like the seen but noiseless drum-strokes of a tympanist checking his tuning.

One Sunday in late October he made the long journey right across London to have lunch in Hampstead with a kind colleague from work; and coming out a bit drunk into the street decided he would go up on to the Heath and see if he bumped into anyone. It was a bright blue day, and though by now the warm sunshine was going from the streets, it was still dazzling when he emerged on to the westward slopes of the hill. He wasn’t exactly sure where to go, but he saw a sympathetic-looking man with short grey hair and a darker goatee turn purposefully down a path ahead of him, and followed on at a casual pace, but with a quickening sense that something important was being allowed to happen. He looked about keenly. The chestnuts were already bare, but the oaks were thick with gold and withered green, and a half-denuded poplar stood in a reflecting pool of its own fallen leaves. It was that time of day he loved, when the lowering sun struck right in among the trees and made every branch burn.

He came down into a more shadowy area of woodland, with patchy tall undergrowth and vague paths crackly with beech-mast. There were a number of men mooching about in the bushes. He couldn’t see the man he had followed, though he kept a certain presence in Alex’s mind, as a guide who had silently appeared and disappeared. Now he had to fend for himself, and he was useless at cruising, even in somewhere as unchoosy and anonymous as this. He walked on, had a look at his watch, wondered if he should just go home after all, and then within a few seconds he had stumbled into a large and still relatively leafy bush with a dark, thickset man, and was kneeling in the sex-litter and soft loam with the stranger’s stiffening cock in his mouth. The man chewed gum and looked around, apparently indifferent to the exquisite thing that was being done for him. Occasionally he said “Yeah,” like someone on the phone. Then he pulled his hips back quickly, and nudged out a little load over Alex’s cheek and nose.

As sex it was about the least gratifying Alex could remember; the man was hardly his type, and had clearly had no interest in reciprocating the favour; also his trousers would now have to go to the dry-cleaner’s. Yet the episode struck him as significant. He strode back up through the woods, casually observed by the same waiting men, and down again through the steep narrow streets to the station, with the fascinated feeling that he’d acted out of character. The street-lamps were starting to glow through the odd neutral light after sunset, and the faces of people he passed took on a kind of romance – he couldn’t say why. On reflection he thought you couldn’t really act out of character, and he went in under the arch and down in the lift with the sense that he had just paid a visit to a remote suburb of himself. Through the following days he sometimes remembered the taste of the stranger, the roughness of seam rivets and stitching in his thick denims, the heavy atmosphere of permission in the wood. In bed, the event took on a beauty it had lacked at the time, and Alex thought he’d quite like to see the man again.

In December there were parties in the early evening, and he would often find himself, about nine o’clock, speedy and unselfcritical with drink, stepping back out into the clinging chill of the night, and ready for the new kinds of fun he had learnt from Danny. He saw he had started to recoup the Danny disaster in an obscurely private way. He had an appetite for drugs again, but no clear idea how to get some. He knew it would be a bad idea to ask his secretary. He’d heard that the murmuring boys you walked past in clubs would happily sell you paracetamol or household cleansers, and he knew they could tell that he was a patsy. He hadn’t kept in touch with Danny’s friends, but he still had Jamaican Bob’s number, and one night when he got home he gave him a ring.