Late that afternoon we rehearsed the long scene between Marcus and Hildebrand, and acted it so overwhelmingly it felt definitive, too soon, perhaps not easy to repeat. Ray let it run, and surely sensed that something new was happening. Hector was electrifying – in a way that can turn the other actor into a mere stooge, but can also charge him up. My big speech in reply came out as one great gathering climax, and when I turned forgivingly at the end (I was kneeling, he standing up behind me) I saw tears in his eyes which I knew weren’t simply a tribute to my skills or the playwright’s. We looked at each other as we might have done after a great argument in real life, and also with a kind of wonder, amorous and half-doubting, at what we had just done together. Ray let a long silence follow, blinking, hesitant, before he said, ‘So we’ve been playing our old Sarah Bernhardt records again, have we.’
This was brutal, but the fact that our great transport of art had been ‘worryingly self-indulgent’ was no doubt worth learning – Ray’s adverb, as so often, undermining. And then at once I knew it was for Hec and me to take, or not, the path our ‘public wank’ had privately revealed to us. We packed up, Ray chatted smoothly with Ken about something else, and I sensed I was being avoided by the others as I left the room. In the entrance-way in the dusk we were self-conscious, from the corner of my eye I saw Hec fold his flares under his cycle-clips, button his donkey jacket – then he stood thinking, looked up and said, ‘Night, pal,’ and kissed me gently but squarely on the lips. No one saw, and as I went out to the bus stop I felt a longing to run after his disappearing tail-light, and then the lovely reassurance that I didn’t have to. At ten the next morning we would do it all again.
Lots of actors are in love with each other, there are husband and wife teams as famous as couples offstage as they are on it, dear old Hettie Barnes and Lionel Wilshire have been at it since their twenties, their whole personal and professional lives a shared enterprise. But falling in love in the course of rehearsing a play made its own drama, there was a new energy that I saw at once could be focused or disruptive. I knew we would both want to keep it secret, though in a group like ours, both tight-knit and unbuttoned, this might be hard. I feared it would be obvious to the others.
I went home on the Tube wrapped up among the five o’clock crowds in my own sensations, of a new chord that had sounded, and sounded again just as surely each time I found my way back to it. I felt entirely open to it, as a thing in itself, thrilling and unquestionable. I started thinking for the first time about making love to Hector. He had never appeared naked in one of Ray’s shows, but I’d warmed up with him often enough – I found I had a phantom memory in my hands of his heaviness and heat. I was puzzled and amused at how cheerful I felt as I came down Chris’s street, opened the gate for the thousandth time and let myself in to the dark musty hall. Claudia was moving round the kitchen in her usual stately way, oblivious of the sink full of dishes and the smell of the fridge. ‘What are you boys up to tonight?’ she said, and even this little logistical check to my fantasies failed to trouble me.
I sat in the kitchen drinking tea with her and eating one of the horrible sponge cakes she made as a treat for me. I don’t know where she went wrong, something basic in the quantities, then too brief a time in the oven. ‘Not as good as your mum’s, I bet,’ she said, pressing damp crumbs into a pellet on her plate.
‘Well . . .’ I said, weighing it up.
‘Another slice?’
‘I couldn’t, darling,’ I said, and raised a regretful hand.
‘Save it for tomorrow,’ she said.
When Chris came in and kissed Claudia on the cheek and then me on the lips I held his face to mine until he pulled back with a wary chuckle. ‘You seem pleased to see me . . .’
And I was – in my stunned excitement I almost wanted to share the good news about falling in love with Hector, if that is what had happened: about the psychic jolt that was a physical experience, I was certain, for both of us. I sat in a bizarre glazed excitement, insulated from the circumstances of my actual, perfectly enjoyable and sexually gratifying life. I smiled up at Chris himself with straightforward affection, and Claudia said, ‘Aah . . .! It’s lovely to see you two.’
‘How was your day?’ Chris said, feeling the pot – then refilling the kettle, a barely conscious routine.
‘Well . . .’ I said – and here a vague sense of diplomacy did begin to impinge. ‘Ray was an absolute . . .’ – I paused and blinked, since we watched our language in front of Claudia; she was at worst a ‘darn’ and ‘bother’ sort of woman, and I felt I was pushing it a bit when I said, ‘Ray was an absolute bastard.’
‘Nothing new there, then,’ Chris said.
I smiled as I conjured it up. ‘I was doing a scene with Hector – you remember him in Troilus, the new black guy?’
‘Oh, yes, he’s amazing,’ said Chris.
‘Mm, I remember you liked him, Christopher,’ said Claudia, in a rather pert manner.
‘Yah – no, he’s a lovely guy,’ I said. ‘Anyway, we did a thrilling run-through of the end of Act One, a long scene, just the two of us – I wish you could have heard us, actually: the sort of thing you just know is genius.’
‘And Ray tore it to shreds.’
‘I won’t tell you in front of Claudia what Ray said.’
‘Oh . . .’ said Claudia, with a little shrug.
‘Well, you’ve said before,’ Chris said, ‘the painful path to self-knowledge, and all that’ – as the kettle on the far side of the room started singing like a bore and rose in three seconds to a scream.
The next day I got in early, not with any plan beyond wanting to be there and see him. I paced about muttering a speech in my head, then put myself in charge of the coffee, the big drum of Maxwell House, mess of sugar on the table, people having their particular mugs. I was in the Gents refilling the kettle at the basin, the door opened, and there in the mirror was Hector himself, his astonishing neat presence, in his coat still, knapsack on his shoulder, and a shiver went through me, a smile of triumph and good luck, as I said, ‘Morning!’ and he said, ‘Oh . . .! Morning . . . yes . . . yes . . .’, and after a glance at the vacant urinal went into a cubicle and bolted the door. There was a lot of rustling and banging then in the tiny space as the water ran over the brim of the kettle and I twiddled furiously at the tap. I was back at the table, saying, ‘Ken, yours is the Superman mug, right, and Jack, you’re Klimt’ – acting, really, over my fear that I’d made an agonizing mistake. Perhaps his kiss in the hall last night, so sudden and promising and true to our new mood, was no more than a kiss of condolence for the bollocking we’d had, and to him was as chaste and devoid of intention as the kiss of an aunt.
In the warm-up I did stretches and pat-a-cakes with Gary, forceful and businesslike as ever, and in the general activity, while Ray smoked and circled and took us all in, I looked across at Hector, on his back, with Wendy almost riding, like a child, on his foot as she stretched his raised leg. Then he was doing the same for her, and I was shaken, astonished by how his presence in the room had a charge for me today – though of course I knew the sensation, a shadowy line-up of men I’d adored unavailingly in the past seemed to roam and jostle out of reach beyond him. After this, we did the Death Circle, the usual madhouse of clashing tunes as we strode round the room singing. Jack went down first, and I was nearest to Ray when he made the next signal – dropped where I stood, cardiac arrest. I lay on my front with my eyes shut as the feet tramped round, bodies thumped to the floor and the singing grew quieter and clearer, with an uncanny feeling each time when Hec’s forceful bass-baritone came closer and he skirted my corpse and strode on, as he had to do, until he was the last one alive and we all lay still for a minute or more listening to him marching and singing and waiting for Ray’s coup de grâce.
The Death Circle was always unnerving, a taster of tragedy, nothing giggly or Pyramus-and-Thisbe-ish allowed. It was designed to shock us into the other reality of acting. And it put me in a strange mood for the big last scene in Act One, which Ray started us off with – ‘now you’ve both had a chance to think about it’. I laughed submissively and Hector nodded and pursed his lips to show he wasn’t so forgiving.
Ruth did the end of her short speech and went ‘off’ and then it was Hector and me, in the imaginary prison, observed by the others, blank-faced as they perched or sprawled at the side of the room in the practised double act of being our audience and working discreetly on their own lines. Hector circled me again, spoke his opening accusation, with a bitter kind of lightness, action and intention scarily distinct, unlike yesterday’s blind rush at feeling. It made me tremble on the spot about how I would answer him – it was, what? ninety seconds to the climax of the scene, I had the words and spoke them, as if I’d just thought of them, as if they were only accidentally in verse. I came up to him, put my hand on his shoulder, looked in his eyes, the words ran on, and I was nearly thrown by the multiple intimacies of acting – the lurking business of my real-life feelings and the terrible closeness of the characters we were playing, at a pitch of emotional conflict I’d never experienced offstage. When he spoke next he was loud, his breath strong in my face, and his large dark eyes seemed from moment to moment to be glittering surface and unreadable depth. I fell to my knees, he moved away behind me, I was aware of Ray watching, and I felt he was right, the broken, unmusical style that he liked had made the scene modern and gripping to the others. At the end, they weighed in at once, with nods and murmurs, collective affirmation before Ray could open his mouth and spoil it all. In fact he smiled, shrugged, spread his hands – ‘Very good.’ He was pleased, above all, to have imposed himself and got his way, but he was pleased with us too. ‘Act Two, Scene One . . .?’ Hector sat down, and I looked for a place, sat where Ken had been sitting, some way off. A little later he turned and found me looking at him, raised his eyebrows in mild enquiry, then nodded slowly, to say we’d done it, and perhaps – who knew? – would do more yet.
Jack gave a party at his flat – ‘any time after seven’, Chris very much invited. They’d met a few times after shows, and Jack fancied him, I could tell, and Chris in his ever-ready way no doubt fancied Jack, and more than that loved to be included by the Terra gang, who were friendly but never took much interest in him. So I felt vindicated and also just a little on guard. Chris, eager and liking a drink, chafed at my saying there was no point in arriving before eight. Big Ben could be heard striking eight fifteen across the river when we rang the bell, against a thin pulse of music from an open window up on the fourth floor. I put on a smile at the top of the stairs and went in at the door that was left half-open, into a narrow hall and beyond it a bright room with the chairs round the walls, and the emptiness of a party getting ready, Beach Boys playing, crisps in bowls, two or three voices from the kitchen beyond, and an ugly roaring noise – when we looked in we saw Jack was making hummus in a liquidizer, amid a mess of garlic skins and squeezed half-lemons. Johnny was there with a dark young man, Mick – the first time we’d been allowed to see him. ‘And this is Chris!’ I said, and Chris beamed ‘Hi!’ and handed over our bottle of Chianti. In the small kitchen there were also two friends of Jack’s, a Dutch artist called Hans and his girlfriend, who was helping Jack make the hummus and had her own ideas about it; she was Malaysian, and I felt the flicker of affinity and of resistance to it as we introduced ourselves – ‘No, Burma!’ I said. ‘Oh, Burma!’ she echoed. ‘But I’ve never been there,’ I said, to get that out of the way.
It was clear Jack wouldn’t be ready for another hour, and Chris and I felt so superfluous, or I did, that we sat down and chatted to each other as if we’d just met, and drank most of a bottle of Rioja before the rest of the party arrived. All the time I was wondering if Hector was coming, and the drinking was an answer to the tension, close to worry, that he would or he wouldn’t – I didn’t know which was worse. He wasn’t in the big batch of guests who came in just after nine, but things livened up then at once, and soon Chris was deep in discussion with Jack about Westminster Council politics – housing budgets and road schemes. Jack had a look of mesmerized fascination, at this unexpected access to the inside story, or anyway to Chris, and stroked his arm appreciatively now and then as he listened.
The party didn’t reach capacity till after ten, but by then I was so exhausted by drink and drunken chit-chat and waiting for Hector while keeping an eye on Chris flirting with Jack that I was ready to call it a night. I was sketching out a miserable story for leaving, when a vision arrived, too large as it squeezed through the narrow hallway, then uncooped into the room in an explosion of stiff skirts and writhing feather boas. It took me a good ten seconds to understand it was Gary – with Derek behind, in severe grey separates, a sort of lady’s companion. I was dazzled, slightly frightened as well as amused, and Chris stared happily. Gary had all the licence of drag, glittering, challenging, a display of power to which we all had to adjust. ‘It’s Zeta!’ someone said. ‘Zeta, what can I get you?’ I said. Zeta looked at me quizzically: ‘Have you,’ she said in a deep voice, ‘a very small dry sherry?’ – so I had to laugh. ‘Ooh, they’re so posh ’ere, they’ve got a fuckin’ butler!’ At which Chris laughed rather sharply too. ‘Buttle me, darling, will you?’ Zeta said, back from Cockney to Coward, ‘buttle me sideways.’ And then, ‘I’ll ’ave whatever she’s ’aving,’ nodding the stiff height of his blonde wig at Chris. ‘Hello, darling, I’m Zeta, who are you?’ ‘Hi!’ said Chris, with a grin, and holding out his hand gamely, as if they hadn’t met a dozen times before: ‘I’m Christopher, David’s other half.’ ‘Awfully good to meet you, Christopher,’ said Zeta, and wrung his hand like the second-row forward he’d once been.
I came back a minute later with a glass of red for Zeta, but it was hard to get his attention, rushed along as he was by his own performance and throwing the rest of us off. His feet were forced into gigantic high heels, and he controlled, surprised by it himself, the odd dangerous wobble. ‘Have you met Ethel?’ he said. ‘Is she your sister, then?’ said Chris, entering the game. ‘Sister, how dare you!’ Gary said. ‘She’s my great-aunt!’ I must say Derek was marvellous in his role, and did clever things with it that weren’t quite in Gary’s range: the unflagging but subtly mutinous support of his mistress, self-effacement turned into a steely kind of display. I don’t know how long Hector had been there, but when I saw the back of his head a few feet away, nodding as he talked to somebody I couldn’t see, the whole room with its real and its would-be dramas was remote for ten seconds as if I was about to faint.
Then Hector and I and Malaysian Sue were all waiting outside the bathroom, which by now had a pillaged look, damp towels on the floor, the loo seat coming off, and the lock broken, so that the front person queuing was also the guard. We gallantly let Sue go in ahead of us, and then had to talk nonsense to a woman who’d just arrived while I tried to guess how we would be talking if she hadn’t been there. Sue came out of the bathroom with a flinching look at what I was about to experience, and as I went in I gave a sideways glance at Hector – only half closed the door, and he looked from one side to the other and then nipped in too. My hands were round his waist, and he said, ‘I’m not sure we ought to be doing this,’ and leant back against the door, but he let me kiss him, a mad pouring out of all my unagreed feelings; I felt he was rather marking his part as I pressed myself against him, but then half giving in, and his hard-on was the real thing. He doubled up with a gasp when I gripped the black denim. ‘You’re very bad,’ he said, straight-faced, and didn’t smile when I giggled at this and put my head on one side. ‘Things to think about,’ he said quietly, ‘things to think about.’ Nothing more was said, and after a minute I slipped out first, and went with a racing heart back to the living room, where now only the strung-up party lights were winking and Chris was slow-dancing to ‘Walk On By’ with Wendy and Johnny’s Mick, not quite in the same style as them, but he was a nice mover, he’d waltzed me round Claudia’s kitchen once or twice, and been patient teaching me the steps. Now he took me in very smoothly and happily, and I grooved about for five minutes not daring to look round until I said I really must go home.
‘You’d look great in drag!’ said Chris as we went down the stairs.
I said, ‘Ah, you should have met me twenty years ago . . .’ It was agony to leave but impossible to stay. I saw Hector loosening up now we’d gone, getting drunk and hitting on someone else in the hot crush of the dancing – it was a poky little council-flat living room but it expanded, took on depth and mystery . . . from the street the music was much louder now, reddish flickers at the open window, screams and laughter and in the unexpected chill of the night the certainty the party had forgotten us already.
‘That was fun, actually,’ Chris said. ‘Jack’s a great host.’
‘Oh, yes . . .’ I said – Jack had got so drunk that hosting wasn’t quite the word.
‘They’re all so lovely, your gang – not like my lot.’ And I thought of course they had been nice to big smiling Chris, they’d liked him and fancied him and it was only me who shamefully hadn’t wanted him to be there. ‘Very nice to have a chat with Hector.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know you’d spoken to him.’
‘Well, just for a minute,’ said Chris, with a glance at me. ‘I told him how wonderful we both thought he was.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, and my unsteady grasp of the evening slipped again.
‘So, so handsome.’
‘You old tart!’ I said, and slapped him quite hard on the arm.
‘Ow!’ he said, ‘anyway, don’t you think he’s handsome?’
‘No, he is, of course,’ I said. ‘He’s got great presence.’
‘He certainly has,’ said Chris. I walked on, head held high. ‘Oh, baby, don’t be silly!’ – he gripped my upper arm and nuzzled up, ‘Nothing like such a big presence as you.’
So there was a fraction of an atmosphere upstairs on the bus, half-disguised, half-excused by tiredness, and more complex than he knew. The air was foul with beer and cigarette smoke, an empty bottle rolling down the aisle and after a while rolling all the way back. ‘I’m going to sleep well tonight,’ I said, with a convincing yawn, and though I didn’t look at Chris I sensed his lips shaping the phrase he then decided not to say. But as the bus crawled on, with its long stops for ranting drunks and shrieking kids to get on and then in a great lurching line clatter downstairs to get off, later for cooks and waiters from half a dozen restaurants to clamber on amid their own tired smells of turmeric and saffron, we slumped together, his thigh pressed against mine on the narrow seat while I pulled a cuff over my hand to wipe the window and see if we weren’t, as we ached to be, at our own stop.
On Monday in the lunch break Hector said, ‘Fancy a stroll?’ and we slipped off with our sandwiches to a small nearby garden that was part of an old churchyard; the headstones had been lined up like a fence beside the path, and giant plane trees blocked the blue above. It was clear that things had moved on since the party, though I’d acted blank with him all morning, to get through, and Hector spoke with careful clarity. We sat on a bench and there was a strange active atmosphere, for all the quiet, sparrows waiting for crumbs, a squirrel in the branches overhead. Hector ate his sandwich before he spoke.
‘You all right?’ he said.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know . . .’
‘I don’t like breaking something up,’ he said, so responsibly that I felt he had made the decision to do so. ‘You know . . .?’
‘Sometimes these things happen,’ I said, as if speaking from experience. It was fairly astonishing, now it had been said.
‘I mean Chris seems a nice guy. How long have you been together?’
‘Oh . . . two and a half years?’ I said.
Hec was cautious. ‘Right. Right. I wouldn’t have thought, necessarily, that you’d be a couple.’
‘Well, there you are,’ I said – now it came to it I wasn’t going to talk down the man I lived with, though Hec was interestingly opening the way for me to admit certain frustrations, incompatibilities . . . He was five years younger than me but I felt for a moment like his pupil, and this itself was so unlike being with Chris that it gave what he said seriousness and something like inevitability.
We had our first night together in the hotel on the edge of Leeds: low glare of car park outside and beyond it the whine and rumble of a major arterial road building up before dawn. Not that we cared, we were exhausted from travel and doing two shows in a day, and the romantic certainty we were going to go through with it struggled with the timetable of sleep. He locked the door and took me in a tight strong grip, and it was beautiful to be kissed by him at last, the shyness of waiting still felt in the first sweet seconds of letting go. When he pulled back and touched my face and kissed me again I had an almost solemn sense of reassurance, a taste of what was to come. He sat on the edge of the bed to undo his laces, and in between pulling off one boot and the other he gave an enormous yawn – he turned it into a grin as he looked up at me, and said, ‘Let me do that,’ stood up and unbuttoned my shirt and ran his cool hands over me under my vest while I undid his belt and prised open the stiff top button of his jeans.