“After the disaster in town at midsummer, I thought this would be better.” Billy shrugged the rucksack with their picnic in it further up his back and tightened the straps. He had paused just before the first stile that punctuated the hardest path up Wednesday Hill, waiting for Martin to disengage himself from a passing family’s friendly red setter and follow him over.

Martin raised his head to look at him. His eyes were clearer than they had been when he arrived, and his body had opened up like a hedgehog uncurling when the threat has passed. “I really shouldn’t take money from the Early Dance Group to pay for my petrol. I feel kind of shit about that. But on the other hand I was going mad at home. Three more rejections and a ‘come for a further interview in a month.’ A month!”

Billy had a lifestyle in which he need never hold down a steady job. The money would keep coming in even if he lay in bed for a fortnight. He considered himself very fortunate, especially when watching what the extended period of joblessness and stress was doing to Martin.

The guy had been the picture of confidence when they’d met. Now he spoke more softly. His back was bowed. He occupied less space when he sat, and it took a special effort like this from Billy to remove the creases of his permanent frown from his forehead.

“Well, I thought I’d show you the sacred well, and some of the hill fort. James may even be there.”

The dog leapt up and licked Martin’s face in good-bye, then bounded off to follow its people. Martin straightened with a smile. “James?”

“He’s a member of that book club Finn told us about.” Billy clambered over the boot-polished step of the stile and landed on dusty wood chippings on the other side. When he was a boy, the path had been nothing but a scraping in the earth, a palm’s width of rubbed-off grass in the summer, a muddy drain in the winter. Trowchester council had obviously decided its tourists needed better than that.

“The gay book club?” Martin made heavy weather of getting over the fence, obviously unpractised in the art of navigating the countryside. His frown had returned, and it twinged something resentful and angry in Billy’s chest.

“Yes,” he said. “The gay book club. I thought I would go because I am gay. You are too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Martin gaped at him for a moment, perhaps taken aback by the unfamiliar note of anger in Billy’s tone. Then he lunged forward and wrapped both arms tight round Billy’s chest. He pushed his face into Billy’s neck and held on. The embrace was too tight, making Billy’s chest hurt, making him feel sorry that he ever raised the subject, sorry for being difficult and demanding at a time when Martin was already going through enough.

“I’m sorry,” Martin said into his collarbone. “I didn’t mean that to come out how it sounded. Not accusing. It’s just . . . you know. I know you want me to be open about this. I know you want me to be out. And I’m going to be. That is the plan. Long-term. But I don’t want to jinx my chances of getting a job. All it takes is one bigoted parent raising an unfounded scare about homosexuals and paedophilia and a school could find itself in more shit than it wants to handle, so of course they’re going to go for the uncontroversial option and find someone straight—white too. My dad is disappointed enough with me already. I just . . . I can’t face it, Billy, not right now.”

Martin smelled of citrus from his shower gel, and his arms were warm and strong. Billy let himself relax into them and relish the way they drove away his own demons. God, he hoped Martin’s current down was not his fault. Hoped that he was not somehow feeding off the man’s strength, sapping his will to do the things that scared him. Could that happen?

Billy sighed, and as he breathed in again, his lungs were filled with the scent of trees, with that leaf-mulch and high-oxygen thrill of the woods. Maybe this argument could wait. Billy could wait a little longer, couldn’t he, before he decided Martin’s closet was an unbearable place to be? He felt strong today, but he wasn’t sure he felt strong enough to have that fight Finn recommended.

“All right,” he said and kissed Martin’s eyebrow and the tip of his nose, making him smile. “Come on.”

You’re going to give in forever, you know. You always do. You have no fucking backbone at all. He’s never going to change, you’re never going to change. You’re going to carry on being dishonest for the rest of your life.

But the peace and the trees held him up, and it was another good day, and he could let that part of him ramble on to itself, a little grimy, a little wearying, but ignorable for now.

They trekked uphill again, through groves of hazel where the nuts were beginning to form. On into the deeper forest trees, bent oak and brave ashes and sycamore heavy with seeds like helicopters. Sun filtered down in shafts of heavenly gold, and as they went their strides opened out, and a blush of exertion came to Martin’s cheeks.

The path took a quick dog-leg around a jutting outcrop of rock, and then the hillside came closer on the left, the ground tilting up into a sheer face of grey stone in which ferns and the roots of bent little hardy trees were anchored like grappling irons. The land to their right began to slope down, glimpses of retreating views and sky showing through gaps in the branches. They heard the sound of water, intermittent and untrustworthy, over the sound of the trees.

And then the path swung hard left and the rock wall opened out into a grotto, an almost circular space in the cliff, as though nature had meant to create a tower room and forgotten to give it a roof. The ground had turned to wet red clay, sticky with the prints of thousands of hiking boots.

In the inner curve of the wall, a hole gaped, about the size of a football. From its upper arch, where a long green fern hung, several unimpressive dribbles tinked into the lower, where the water formed a hand-sized pool before spilling over the lip and onto the ever-wet ground.

“Is that a severed head?” Martin asked, squinting up at the faint scratches that surrounded the spring.

Billy was impressed. “Come here.” He shoved Martin to the best spot, where the combination of light and shadow would pick out the age-worn carvings most clearly. “Yeah it is. See his long hair and his beard? It’s been dated to somewhere in the one thousand BC range. So you can’t blame people for thinking it’s sacred, even if no one really knows what it means.”

Thinking that it was sacred had not stopped people from dropping their rubbish here. Billy picked up crisp packets and Coke cans and empty water bottles as Martin stood in the centre of the stone chimney and soaked up the chill of heavy shade and cold water under the eyes of that drooling face.

They were blessed with a heartbeat of numinous terror and silence before a loudspeaker on the outward track crackled and an enthusiastic voice cried, “And now the sacred well of Urd!” A coachful of tourists in skimpy summer wear and flip-flops emerged from the woods opposite and began sliding unhappily over the blood-red ground.

“This way out.” Billy caught Martin’s arm and waded through the scrum to the other side of the clearing, where a larger, tarmacked path followed the slope of the hill to where a small car park had been cut in its side.

Billy led Martin through the car park and up the footpath beyond, watching with delight as Martin caught his first glimpse of the hill fort. As they climbed out of the trees, the first wall caught them by surprise, its bank like a moat of shadow under it, its face sheer, still with traces of lime clinging to the stones, making it shine white under its cap of green grass.

“This is fantastic!” Martin exclaimed, all his lines of stress wiped away and a blazing smile in their place. He pushed ahead as the footpath threaded itself through the first bank and ditch, sloped up and curved to pierce the second.

Inside the third circle of battlements on the hill, high above a spectacular view of forest and furze and the red-tiled rooftops of Trowchester set in burgeoning farmland, the tarpaulins and blue plastic that shielded the dig were something of an eyesore. But after walking around the inner bank, surveying the world like the king of this castle, Martin wandered over to them curiously, as Billy had known he would.

A grid of tape had been laid down over a half acre of land in the centre of the fort, measuring sticks at each corner. Two students from the academy were kneeling in opposite corners, one scraping at the dried earth with a trowel, the other brushing fine particles of dirt off something brown.

Although Billy had a lot of respect for archaeology as a discipline, he hadn’t really got over his feeling that if it wasn’t gold, he didn’t want to know. The thing she had found seemed to be a potsherd, which was probably fascinating to those in the know about such things, but it didn’t make his heart race. Martin, however, lurched closer as if he’d been pulled, and his expression took on a hint of yearning that made Billy’s heart clench.

Be nice if he looked at me like that.

“James not here?” Billy asked the girl with the trowel. He’d hoped that perhaps introducing Martin to a few more openly gay people would help reassure the man that life after coming out was not all that bad.

“A metal detectorist down Hincksley Bottom found something Roman, he said. James had to go off and examine it.” She didn’t trouble to look up at him, carefully delineating a line of light-brown soil from a line of dark.

“Will he be back today?”

“I don’t think so.”

Damn.

Martin watched the excavations for another half hour, while Billy found a patch of long grass and cornflowers in which to lie down and bask like a lizard. He would have liked Martin to lie next to him, pliable and warm, so they could sun themselves together and exchange lazy kisses. But when Martin came, he sat a good metre away, obviously conscious of the possibility that the girls might look up and see.

Billy shared out jam sandwiches and crisps, poured the thermos of coffee, and listened to Martin speak about Bronze Age society, with his eyes shining and his limbs loose and his mobile mouth turned up at the ends.

He thought about saying, Come live with me and be my love, and the words got trapped somewhere in his lungs, somewhere under his ribs. Because, God, Martin was so beautiful when he was transported like this, with his deep voice rolling like the land, and his mind full of wonderful things that he had to teach, and his hands expressive and strong like the way he danced. He was wonderful, and Billy wanted him to be his.

But he didn’t want, he very much didn’t want to be invisible in his own life, and Martin threatened to make him that.

So he ate his picnic and sunned himself and said nothing.

In the evening they went home to Billy’s and cooked together and ate and laughed over the TV, and planned out the upcoming appearance of Bretwalda, the Griffins, and the Early Dance Group at Hunstanton Country Fair. Still he wanted to tell Martin to stay, so they could keep doing this forever. And still he couldn’t make himself say the words.