Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

Alex lay in the bath with his hair sleeked back and his knees sticking out of the water. Justin had been in first, and the floor was wet, and there were arcs of scattered talcum-powder across it. There hadn’t been time for the tank to reheat properly, and Alex played with himself listlessly, and more for warmth than excitement. His thoughts ran back and forth between this evening and last year, with a choking sense of mystery, of some missed briefing, an explanation he had failed to understand and which would never be repeated. He knew he’d been told, but he couldn’t remember for the life of him why Justin wasn’t still his boyfriend. He looked across heavy-heartedly at the mingled soaps and cosmetics crowded round the basin, the muddle of crimson bath-towels, Robin’s running-shorts and vest kicked into a thoughtless ruck with Justin’s cast-off shorts, as if acting out their owners’ lusts without them. Above his rising and falling navel his sponge grounded itself and floated free, grounded and floated. He pulled himself up and reached out to the shelf for Justin’s favourite cologne, the squat decanter of Bulgari, and sprayed it upwards. When he leant into the costly mist it was instantly two years ago; and when he opened his eyes, his hopeless uncorrected feelings seemed to tingle around him in the scented air.

Justin was sleeping, or perhaps just sulking, in their room; Alex took his time dressing and perfecting himself, stupidly afraid of being alone with his host; he knew already that Robin cooked with a concentration that made talk artificial and discontinuous. He stooped downstairs, and wandered towards the kitchen and the noise of the opera, which he thought would be a cover for his discomfort; perhaps they could just drink and listen to it, and it would block out the roughly jealous appetite-killing sexual imaginings which the cottage seemed to force on him. Then amongst the music he heard a voice speaking, rapid and casual, not Robin’s cultured baritone, which interrupted it with the stately answer “Salmon,” but a young man’s classless indifferent tenor. “I need a bath,” he said.

Alex paused before the presence of a further guest, a further fact which no one had thought worth mentioning to him: it rattled him, though a moment later he welcomed the idea of a fourth person who might ease the insoluble tensions of the other three. He heard his name with a start. “Alex is in there, I think,” Robin said.

“Oh, right…Who’s that?”

“Justin’s ex.”

A hesitation. “Is he cute?”

“Well…Quite.”

“Do you think he wants his back scrubbed?”

The noise of Robin scraping something quickly from a bowl with a fork or spoon. “I’m sure he’s longing for it. Though I’m not sure it’s you he wants to do it. No…no…he’s perfectly all right. About nine feet tall. He’s rather like a ghost-”

At which point Alex ducked into the room with a dim generalised exclamation of pleasure – the bath, the smell of food, the prospect of a drink, simply being there.

Across the kitchen, and framed this time by the thickening dusk beyond the back door, the two figures were standing, Robin with his right hand on the neck of the young man, in what Alex thought of as a gesture of special admiring tenderness. It wasn’t what he’d expected; and Robin at once dropped his arm, while the stranger looked at Alex with raised eyebrows, as if also awaiting an explanation. Robin should have said something, but he let the social pause deepen, while Alex stepped forward, glancing at the newcomer, who seemed so at ease here, himself an ex perhaps, who shared with Robin certain unforgotten habits and tones; young though, twenty-two or three, with a cropped fuzz, and a pointed blond tuft under his lower lip and a black T-shirt tight on his lean figure. His mouth was plump, down-turned, sleepy, vaguely disdainful; but a smile woke up in it and you changed your mind. He moved towards Alex and squeezed his upper arm with a sweet spivvish suddenness of friendship. “I’m Dan,” he said, tipping his head oddly towards Robin. “He’s my dad.”

Alex looked at him again, to confirm and explore this undreamt-of fact.

When Simon was very ill they had stopped making love, though much that passed between them seemed to carry the promise or the memory of sex. Robin had lain for night after night beside his friend, and fallen asleep with a hand laid lightly on his shoulder or thigh, in a gesture both distant and reassuring. He changed the sheets, and supervised the medication, and did everything for Simon, often complaining about the trouble and disturbance, as if he thought this was only a temporary problem. He treated him with the practical obtuseness of the healthy.

Simon was happiest in Dorset, he enjoyed the sheltered, sun-struck days in the cottage garden, and if there was a threatening breeze would sit in the greenhouse, with its sunken tank and humid unseasonal warmth, and read and doze like some doddery old expat. He liked the thick country darkness, which to Robin seemed newly sepulchral after the leaking glare and animation of London nights. Robin watched him slip over a threshold, into the tapering perspectives of fatal illness, in which all but the mildest pleasures lay in the past. In a terrifying dream he was himself the dying man, a mere consciousness gazing out from the eyes of a paralysed body, unable to call to the friends who hurried past the open doorway, on their way to tennis and dinner and sex. Occasionally a figure would stop and look in, with the resolve of someone testing their own capacity for suffering.

Robin was working that spring on a Queen Anne villa at Kew, and for much of the week he made his office in the little flat at Clapham, driving out each morning to watch the rotten beams come down, the riverward portico made safe, and then back at tea-time to Simon and rooms which seemed for the first few minutes peculiarly white and narrow. It was the sort of job he loved, the rescue of a house from near ruin, with a formal garden that could still be guessed at behind high red walls; the roof was made good, the cellar dried and sealed, a rainy week transformed by ancient colours scraped up bright on wood and stucco. But as the months went on, and the documents and photographs accumulated, he felt the countervailing force of the other record, the dipping graph of Simon’s strength, with its comfortless statistics. It was the darker half-hidden face of the ambiguous April days, success threaded in all the way with defeat.

For his last week Simon was in hospital, it was that stage already, when help and reassurance were most necessary and most futile. Robin shared the evening visits, or vigils, with Simon’s father and sister; then found his days troubled by a horrible anxious liveliness. He came back to the flat at lunch-time, so as to be on the move, then went out to run on the Common and exercised under the trees with his hand-weights. The horse-chestnuts were already leafing, the bushes bright green on black; there was a spring mood, casual but purposeful, and Robin envied the relief in the faces of other solitary joggers and unhurried couples.

One mild cloudy day he was turning home along the Common’s edge and went into a newsagent’s to buy a drink. He had to wait at the counter with a queue of punters handing in lottery slips, and found himself looking with unconscious intimacy at the man in front of him, who was half in profile to him, superstitiously checking the fifteen boards he had marked. It was like the impersonal closeness of a crowded tube train, which none the less fosters secret desires and lurches of excitement. Still warm and impatient from running, but slowed and held by the inertia of the crammed little shop, with its lurid video posters, its insulting birthday-cards, its amazingly compendious top shelf of thickly overlapping pornography, Robin had closed his fastidious inner eye, his architect’s eye; and now it opened again, in the unexpected presence of something beautiful among so much unregulated vulgarity.