Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

“We’re not in any hurry, are we?” said Justin, starting to breathe sharply and sweating enough for his face to give back an ethereal reflection of the light.

Alex turned and gazed at him and the improbable landscape in which they found themselves. He supposed that in the right kind of fantasy he might have appeared as a golden-haired drover or hay-harvester; but it would have been a fantasy. “It’s all so green,” he said, gesturing gratefully.

Justin came up and anchored him with an arm. “Yes, it’s the rain. I heard someone talking about it. Apparently it makes everything go green.”

They went on up, through gaps in hedges, past the low outbuildings of a farm with nettle-choked sheep-pens and a van full of straw, along the fenced perimeter of a silent pine plantation. They went on a dipping plank across a quick little stony stream, which Justin took as a place to stop and point out how it ran down and around and was the stream that raced past the cottage. Alex began to get an Alpine sense of distance and scale, though they were only a few hundred feet up. Beyond the stream there was a belt of young green bracken shooting out of the brown detritus of last year’s growth, and high up in it they came to a shallow turfy scoop, the sofa of a stone-age giant, and sat down in it, looking back at other hills that climbed away more slowly northwards. In the huge open shelter of the valley the air was still and mothering, though Alex thought that up behind them there would be cooler breezes dropping about the cliffs.

The village of Litton Gambril lay below, and Justin pointed out its few features with a lazy imprecision which couldn’t quite disguise his regard for the place, and for his own good fortune in living there. “That’s the church, and that’s the steeple, darling. Those are the houses of various old monsters. That house there, you can’t really see it, is where the Halls live, who I must say are the most fabulous drunks. They’re roaring drunk the whole time, except allegedly between about eight and nine a.m. We often go there, it’s like a pub that never closes.” Alex peered at the church, which didn’t have a steeple, but a tower whose ornate finials rose against green cornfields with an effect of unaccountable extravagance. There was a loose knot of old houses around it, and the high dark crest of a copper beech on the village green. Out to the right there were walkers on the stony track that led to the ruins of a castle – “Ruined by the Roundheads, darling,” said Justin, to whom even the dustiest of double entendres deserved the experiment of an airing. The cottage itself was completely hidden in its cultivated hollow at the village’s other end; but to Alex the whole place communicated a slow shock of domesticity and loss.

He thought of his own neighbourhood in Hammersmith, nothing so self-contained, just a block or two worn half-invisible by use, the place in the oblivious city where for him life slowed and gleamed and recovered. The newsagent and the butcher and the dry-cleaner still had the nicknames Justin had given them. For two years and a month Justin ambled through those streets, the buzzer doormat in the off-licence offered its alert reassurance, he walked to the same corner for a taxi heading into town.

It was amazing where love took you – and Alex thought it was the one thing you would go, anywhere for. In their early days together Justin was his entree to pleasure, to the routine of certain bars, the instant friendship of good-looking men, blowsy gay dinner-parties with their undertow of sex. Alex was with him, he was accepted with a lack of hesitation that was flattering if indiscriminate, his long pale face and glossy black hair became more beautiful, his rangy walk more touching and seductive. At just the moment he gave himself completely to Justin, other men suddenly started to want sex with him. He became a charged particle. And now here he was, lying on a hillside in a part of the country he had never seen before, still dimly magnetised. He put a hand on Justin’s bare forearm, not quite unconsciously, and after a minute Justin, as usual at any place of natural or historic beauty, got up and went for a piss. Alex watched him standing a few yards off, playing the glittering arc over a patch of young bracken; in the level sunlight the curled-up fronds of the bracken twitched open here and there, giving the hillside an air of furtive animation.

“So what do you think of Robin?” said Justin when he had sat down again, his chin on his drawn-up knees.

It was kind of brutal. Alex looked away and then back and said, “He’s a good cook.” You couldn’t say what you thought about people, not at the time. He remembered the things his friends had said about Justin, with funereal relish, after he had gone – how he was a cheat and a bore and a drunk and an ungrateful slut, and actually they’d always thought so. He’d been surprised, he’d never acknowledged their hinted hostility, and was still obscurely resistant to what they said, in spite of the wounding evidence that they were right. He said, “I hope you’re being good to him,” which showed oblique generosity as well as suspicion.

Justin pouted and peered out at the village, his head rocking slightly, as if unable to decide between a nod and a shake. “Try not being good down here,” he said. “Anyway, what about your bloke? You’ve been pretty quiet about him.”

Alex smiled with complex regret. “Actually there isn’t anyone. I was just teasing you.”

“Oh darling…” said Justin, with a comparably subtle pretence of concern.

On their way down the hill, Alex slipped his arm through Justin’s, in a decorous way, or as if one of them at least was quite old, and when Justin’s smooth-soled shoes slid on the turf he caught at his wrist, they were almost hand-in-hand again for a second, then tumbled down together. They weren’t hurt, of course, but a moment of recovery seemed legitimate, and they lay there, arms under each other, Alex’s knee between his old boyfriend’s thighs, their trousers tugged up tight, as if the stone-age giant had lifted them by their belts from behind and flung them down. Alex was gazing at the sky, the depth of blue just beginning to silver and crumble. He turned his head slowly and with a little grimace which seemed to mock the wish that was making the pulse pluck in his neck; but Justin looked past him, as if meditating on something else. Alex half-lifted himself and kissed him unplayfully on the mouth; then struggled apart from him and stepped away with a breezy “Come on, let’s go.” He saw the lane that ran along the valley and climbed out towards London. He saw himself squealing through the villages on his way down here, in his optimistic old sports car. He glanced at Justin on the grass, still oddly expressionless, extending a hand so as to be helped up. The sun had left the garden by the time they came back, the birds were silent, but the flowers and bushes glowed with a brief intensity of colour against the neutral light. The time of day touched an old anxiety and loneliness in Alex, but Justin, who had been oppressively thoughtful on the downward walk, and seemed half-aggrieved, half-gratified by the intensity of the kiss, brightened up at the sight of the lit kitchen windows. He led Alex in from a back gate, past the greenhouse and an open shed where pale-ended logs were stacked. “That’s where we stack the wood,” he said. “When we’ve been wooding.” They came round the back of the cottage, where a relay of Tosca swirled out from the kitchen doorway and mingled for a moment with the colder music of the stream. Alex hung back outside the bright oblong and saw Robin, with a long whittled knife in his hand, stride towards Justin, who somehow slipped by, so that the kiss barely touched his cheekbone.