Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

It was Robin who let them in, wearing a short apron over his jeans, and a patch over his left eye. Alex murmured concern about the patch, though he was privately very pleased by it, and felt it balanced out his own social disadvantage as a double Woodfield casualty. Robin said it looked worse than it was, and excused himself to get on with the lunch. Justin was in the sitting-room reading the paper, and plucked off a pair of frameless spectacles as they came in. “I saw that,” said Alex, giving him a big moaning hug, and grinning at the shock of how much he loved him.

“Don’t, darling, it’s like Moorfields in here,” said Justin. He looked affectionately at Nick and said, “Hello, darling,” as if they were old friends agreeing to forget a tiff. For once Alex saw that a formal introduction was unnecessary. He stepped back with a feeling he shouldn’t intrude on a tender episode, one that was novel to him, and unexpectedly rich – the meeting of two of his lovers, with its momentary sequence of hidden appraisal and denial.

The room was subtly altered, and more cluttered. Other little pictures of a very different taste – Regency silhouettes and framed caricatures – filled in the gaps between the family portraits and Robin’s creepy watercolours of the cottage. Several highly varnished pieces of furniture – a magazine-rack, a china-cabinet, a nest of scallop-edged side-tables – had been thrust into an unlikely marriage with the resident arts and crafts. Alex realised that these were things saved from Justin’s father’s house. He strolled towards the book-shelves, saw something else, and after a moment’s consideration let out a shriek. On the deep window-sill, turned sideways to catch the best of the sun but glaring back into the room in a consummate sulk, was the polished bronze head of Justin, aged twelve, that Alex had always found so amusing. “I see you’ve salvaged “The Spirit of Puberty,” darling,” he said.

Justin came across, his features perhaps unconsciously jelled into an adult version of the same expression. Alex watched him decide he could take the joke at last. “You mean the Litton Gambril Ganymede. Yes, darling. Though the insurance, as you may imagine, is a frightful drain.” Nick stood around behind them, in a leisurely uncertainty about the pitch of irony.

They went into the kitchen for drinks, and Nick drew out Robin – who kept twitching his head round to find things -by asking him about the castle and other local landmarks. Apparently Robin had been building some more flats in that hideous house they’d all been dragged off to see on Alex’s first visit, but the nice old boy who owned the place had died, and the plans had all come to nothing. Robin spoke about all his wasted work as though that were the real tragedy of the thing.

Justin was clearly bored to the limits of endurance by the subject, and tugged Alex gently through the back door into the garden.

“I’m sorry about Captain Blood, darling,” he said, when they were more or less out of earshot.

“I hope it’s nothing serious,” said Alex.

“No, I don’t think so. He burst a blood vessel, and it’s all gone rather horrid.”

“Does that mean he’s lost his sight?”

“Oh he can see ,” said Justin. “But it looks so frightful for everyone else. I had to get him to cover it up.”

Alex wasn’t sure who was being protected by this. “How did it happen?”

“In bed, darling. Apparently it’s caused by sneezing, or vomiting, or, um…Of course now I don’t dare suggest sex, in case it happens to the other one. He’d have to wear a blindfold!”

Alex took a swig from his bloody Mary. They were standing at the low wall between the lawn and the long grass, where he had found Justin sunbathing on that day last summer, which was also the day he had first set eyes on Danny. He felt very confident with Nick, but still he wanted Justin’s approval, or at least some palpably jealous withholding of it. “It’s good to be back here,” he offered blandly, staring out towards the stream and the rise of the hill beyond, and feeling again the mood of sexual jostling and sarcasm that went so oddly with the pastoral unconsciousness of the place.

“You should see it in winter,” said Justin. “There’s nothing but those sort of dead brown plants.”

“Docks, you mean.”

“Mm.” Justin looked into his glass and shook the vivid last half-inch. “Well, you’ve found yourself a real man this time, darling.”

“I think so,” said Alex, though Justin’s implicit self-disparagement took the zest out of the thing.

“You didn’t tell me much about him.”

Alex said, “It seemed rather bad manners.”

Justin said, “You say you met him in a club,” with a wary, judicial tone that almost masked his envy of the world of meetings…

“Yes.”

“So you just go to clubs now, do you?”

Alex smiled; and of course it was sweet to be teased on the subject. “I went out with that boy Lars, Danny’s friend, you remember.”

“Oh yes. I think General Dayan’s rather keen on him.”

“That’s because he’s a retread of you, dear. In a way. He’s what you’d be like if you were twelve years younger, came from Oslo, and lived in a gym.”

Justin seemed to find that satisfactory. “Well, I’m impressed that you threw him over for someone twice his age.”

“Nick’s only forty-one,” Alex said. And of course it hadn’t been quite like that, he hadn’t been sure if something was happening with Lars or not, and it was only when Lars said that if Alex didn’t move in on Nick, he would, that Alex began to understand what was possible – or, as it seemed through the empathetic lens of the drug, inevitable. “He was terribly friendly,” Alex went on. “You know, it could have been the friendliness of a lunatic or a bore, but in fact he’s only a little bit of either.” He saw he was keen not to wound Justin by praising Nick’s real merits.

Justin said, “Well, you’re used to lunatics, darling. Have you heard from Miss D., by the way?”

“I had a card about…ooh, nine months ago. How about you?”

“He was here for a few days in the summer, with a shattering Spanish boyfriend. They seemed happy,” said Justin, who was perhaps less careful of Alex’s feelings, though he gave the impression of speaking from outside some conspiracy of happiness.

After lunch Nick said he wanted to see the cliffs, and Robin said he knew the best place to go. Justin refused to take part in the outing if Robin drove, and told Nick with uncomfortable candour about the time when they had all nearly been thrown to their deaths. Alex was drinking pretty intently, since for once he wasn’t driving; so it was agreed that Nick would take them. Robin sat up front with him to give directions.

When they turned into the narrow lane at the end of the village, Nick said, “Going up!” and powered ahead, just as Robin had done; it was some boyish physical thing that Alex had never had. He sprawled back and touched the button to let in a rush of air. The banks were high on either side, and the hedges above were festooned with the soft swarming stars of traveller’s joy, already turning grey and mothy. One or two brown fans of chestnut leaves dropped across the bonnet. As before, there was no one coming the other way.

Robin got out when they reached the gate, and Alex thought how enjoyable it would be to leave him there, and watch him running up to meet them, pretending he took it as a joke. Nick drove through and waited for him, watching in the mirror, till he came back and opened his door and said, “I’ll run the last mile. Just keep going towards that gap.” So they bumped on without him across the steep incline, the grassy tussocks hissing along the bottom of the car. Alex looked aside and saw the whole panorama inland come steadily clear, the line of ascent from the valley bottoms, the silage-heaps weighted with old tyres, little fields overgrown with alder, up past sheltered farms under hanging woods and low bald pastures, and on to the open hilltops, the windwalks and long ridged heights.