The Spell

May had been wet and chilly this year, the spring evenings robbed of their softness and height, the mornings slow and dark. Alex woke each day to the early creak of the central heating, and still, after seven months alone, reached out in a little fumbled ritual to put a hand on the pillow where Justin’s head should have been; or he shifted on to that side of the bed and lay there as if he was keeping himself company. The weather lent its grey weight to the suspicion that his life had been taken away from him. Then abruptly the summer came, and he was waking to the chinking of the blackbirds, and again after dream-muddled sleep to the footsteps and voices of the first leavers, and early-morning light that entered at a shy angle into rooms that were sunless all winter. There was a new sense of distance, of the drowsy rumble of a city stretching away in haze and blossom – a rumoured invitation, which took on a sudden unexpected reality when Justin himself rang up and invited him to Dorset. And then as he braked and spurted through the narrowing lanes of the Bride valley a short, rattling shower had come, like a warning and a reminder.

They hadn’t seen each other since the dark October day when Justin came back to clear his things out of Alex’s house. Wet leaves blew across the windscreen as Alex drove him to Clapham with his little chaos of carrier-bags – the two of them silent, Alex out of grief and Justin out of guilty respect for his former lover’s feelings. Justin’s shoes and half-read novels and crumpled clothes, and the two or three pictures, the cushions, the dozen nearly empty cologne bottles and the brass travelling-clock that had been part of their home and were now on their way to become the unanticipated clutter of someone else’s. It was months before Alex could bring himself to look at the thumbprint-covered polaroids of him, red-eyed and drunk; and he had no other mementoes – Justin had never been known to write a letter. He closed the garden gate noiselessly behind him and wondered what his old friend looked like.

The cottage was low and very pretty and Alex scanned it with an Englishman’s nostalgia as well as a tall person’s sense of imminent discomfort. It was almost too much, it was the ideal of a cottage tuned close to the point of parody, the walls of gold-brown rubble patched with bits of chalk and brick, the straw fantail pigeons on the crest of the roof and the real ones that sidled on the slope of the thatch below, the white clematis and yellow Mermaid rose trained tumblingly above the small dark windows, the air of stunned homeliness . . . And this was where Justin woke up now, and looked out, over the secretive garden, with its wallflowers and box hedges, old lead sundial and brick paths leading away through further hedges to glimpses of glass. He must have changed very greatly. Or if not, his new man must answer to needs in Justin that Alex himself had never guessed at. From one of the upstairs windows a bunched blue duvet was lolling out to air and gave the house a feel of heedless privacy, as if no guest were expected. At another stood a jar of flowers and a stack of sun-bleached books. Beyond them was the impenetrable indoor darkness of a bright summer day.

There was no answer to his knock, and he stood back on the flagstones in a muddle of emotions: relief, annoyance, real fright about the coming encounters, and an incongruous alertness and desire to please, like someone on a first date. After another, perhaps quieter knock, he walked round to the side of the cottage and shaded his eyes to peer through a window. It was the kitchen, with something steaming on the Rayburn and a colander of chopped carrots on the table, which made him feel that he had in fact put them to some trouble. He turned the corner and saw the back garden, a lawn and a low wall, beyond which was an unmown meadow with a fast-running stream at the bottom. He wandered away from the house, still with the sense of being an intruder in an ordered but not invulnerable world; he thought he could call out, but part of him was clinging to the silence and secrecy. He felt slightly sick. It might still be possible, after all, to get back to the car and leave without being seen. Beyond a small orchard of apple-trees on the left there was a wooden shed with a tarred roof. He tried the door casually, then turned back towards the cottage.

At first he thought Justin was naked. He made a dip in the blue groundsheet, which spread in little hills and dales around him over the long, bent grass. Alex approached him warily, like a nature-watcher keeping downwind of some nervous creature – though the idea was doubly absurd for Justin, who was evidently asleep. Closer to, it turned out that he was wearing a kind of thong.

Alex loitered beside him for a minute, unable not to look, hot-faced and haggard above the sprawl of what he had lost. He wondered if it was a cruelly deliberate tease. His eyes took in the blond down on the calves darkened with sun-oil, and the slumbrous weight of the buttocks with the tongue of lycra buried between them, and the arms pointing backwards like flippers, and the head turned sideways; it was everything he remembered, but more than that too, correct in each unconscious detail, even in the changes, the new plumpness around the waist, the smooth fold under the chin.

He looked away, at the trees, the white glints and curls on the hurrying greeny-black surface of the stream. The air was drugged with the sharpness of flowering hawthorn and cow-parsley and the lushness of the grass in the heat after the shower. Wood-doves made their half-awake calls, and at the edge of hearing there was the trickle of the brook. He glanced at Justin again, who seemed very remote from him, lost in the senseless countryside and the unsocial vacancy of sun-worship. Alex squatted down, and held his breath as he reached out a hand to wake him. Blue eyes opened wide, squeezed shut against the glare, then squinted upwards.

‘You’re outrageously early,’ Justin said, with a further blink and a yawn.

‘Hello, darling,’ said Alex, and grinned to hide how wounded he was by Justin’s tone. He watched him turn over and sit up.

‘You’re such an old pervert to be staring at me like that. How long have you been there? I’ll probably have to report you to Police Constable Barton Burton.’ He frowned, and Alex leant in awkwardly for a kiss.

‘I’ve only just got here. Of course one didn’t expect a welcome.’

Justin gave him a level, sparring look, and then smiled coyly. ‘What do you think of my tanga?’ he said.

‘Is that what you call it? I think you’ve put on some weight,’ said Alex.

‘It’s Robin, dear.’ He stood up and turned round once: he was lightly tanned all over. ‘He feeds me and feeds me. He also has a mania for getting one’s kit off. He’ll have you out of all that, darling.’ At which Alex felt needlessly shy, as if warned at the beginning of a party of some worrying game to be played after tea. Justin put an arm through Alex’s to lead him back to the cottage. ‘You’re looking very groomed, darling, for the country. This is the country.’ He gestured weakly with his other hand. ‘You can tell because of all the traffic, and the pubs are full of fascists. Apparently there’s another homo moving into the village. We’re terribly over-excited, as you can imagine.’

They were standing in the kitchen, in another kind of heat, fuelled and flavoured by cooking. Justin lifted the lid that half-covered the slow soup on the hob and peered in with pretended competence. Alex said, ‘There’s a wonderful smell.’

‘That’s the bread, dear. He pops it in before he goes for his run, and when he gets back it’s the exact second to take it out again. He makes all sorts of different sorts of bread.’

Alex pictured his return. ‘I don’t think he ought to find us like this.’

Justin gave a smile and looked down at his sleek near-nakedness. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said, reaching for an apron from the Rayburn’s front rail, and sauntering out of the room in it like a French maid in an elderly work of pornography. Alex turned away from the sight.

He knew he’d been an idiot to come here. He stood where he was, fixed in the well-mannered paralysis of a guest who has been left alone, and humbled by the yeasty efficiency of this strange kitchen. He sensed the presence of the man who owned it, Robin Woodfield, with his capable country name, underlying or impregnating everything around him, and this was a bleaker challenge than he had anticipated. Justin had taken a clear, cowardly and sensible decision to swing along as if Alex and he were no more than good old friends. But Alex himself was petrified by the crackle of undead emotions. There was a squeak of floorboards above and the dulled coming and going across the ceiling of Justin’s heavyish footsteps. Was their bedroom there then, with the warm chimney behind the bedstead, and baking smells rising through the floor? Alex gripped the back of the chair he was standing by, and then let it go, with doubting relief, like someone who thought for a moment he had seen a ghost.

And here Justin physically was, in crumpled linen shorts and trodden-down moccasins, which Alex remembered from earlier summers, and a baggy white T-shirt with the signature of Gianlorenzo Bernini, hugely magnified, disappearing round the sides. ‘I see you’re wearing Bernini,’ Alex said.

Justin ignored him with a half-smile which hinted that he did indeed imagine Bernini to be a couturier. ‘Do you want an aperitif? And then I’ll show you round.’ He plucked open the tall clinking door of the fridge and reached in for a jug of bloody Mary, from which he filled two virtually pint-size glasses. ‘Come and see the house.’ Alex followed him through a low, latched door, with an unannounced step down beyond, on which he jolted upright and hit his head on a beam. ‘Watch out for the vernacular detail, dear,’ said Justin.

Several tiny vernacular rooms had been knocked into one to form the cottage’s main space, and floor-length windows opening on to the rear garden let in a modern requirement of light and air. It was sparely furnished with old oak and hollowed-out sofas and a number of arts-and-crafts chairs like conscientious objectors to the idea of comfort. At one end was the empty grate of a big stone fireplace and at the other a wall of books on architecture and gardening. Justin gestured at the black-glazed vases on the deep window-sills. ‘Those pots, darling,’ he said, ‘were made by potters of the greatest probity.’

Alex walked about, watched by Justin, who seemed keen for a favourable verdict. When the phone rang Justin left him to look at the pictures. There were brown oils of Georgian children, which might have been inherited, and a number of just competent watercolours, signed ‘RW’, showing the cottage itself. ‘No, I’m sorry, Tony, he’s not here,’ Justin was saying. ‘That’s right, he’s out. Yes, I’ll get him to ring you . . . I’ll ask him to ring you . . . Yes, don’t worry, I’ll ask him to ring you.’ Robin’s paintings made the place look impenetrably private, in its circuit of trees and high old walls; leaves and petals in the foreground half-obscured the lower windows of the house, the rounded bulk of the thatch was shadowed by the bosomy beeches above it.

On a side-table there was a framed black-and-white photo of a young man in white shorts and a singlet, standing with an upright oar, like a lance, on which he seemed to lean. When Justin rang off Alex said at once, ‘Who’s this in the picture?’

His ex-lover wandered across with a little ‘Mm?’ of feigned uncertainty and slipped an arm round his shoulder. ‘That’s him,’ he said – and Alex, who knew the whole repertoire of Justin’s tones, heard in the two quiet syllables a rare tremor of pride and anxiety. It was a kind of introduction.

‘He’s very good-looking,’ said Alex, in his own tone of dry fair-mindedness. They stood, in their loose embrace, sipping at their drinks, as if assessing this judgement on the big English boy with his wavy hair and rower’s shoulders and beautiful long legs. The wide smile conveyed the certainty of success in some imminent struggle, and so seemed to invite curiosity as to how it had in fact turned out.

Justin gave Alex a couple of consoling pats as he drew away from him. ‘Well, you should see him now.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ said Alex, explaining the hairstyle, the whole look, to himself.

‘Oh god darling. It’s pre-war. I mean, it’s Julia Margaret Cameron, that one.’

And that was a kind of comfort, along with the cold tomato-juice and its after-burn of strong spirits. All he’d known of his successor till that morning was his name, his profession, and his addresses in London and here. He had wanted as little as possible for his imagination to worry at. So it was something to learn that he hadn’t been left, in his thirty-seventh year, for a kid on a sports scholarship.

Justin flushed and smirked like a braggart anticipating jeers. ‘No, he’s gorgeously old.’

(Even so, thought Alex, I hope I haven’t lost him to a pensioner. And then dimly saw the powerless absurdity of such hopes – the muddled desire to have been replaced by someone better, which was crushing but evolutionary, and by someone inferior, which would show Justin’s weakness of judgement, and prove to Alex that he was better off without him.)

They went up the narrow box staircase for a quick orientation of bathroom and sleeping arrangements – Alex only glanced over Justin’s shoulder into the almost unfurnished main bedroom: he saw a huge bed with an oak headboard and footboard and invalidish stacks of pillows, and the little brass clock under the bedside lamp. His own room was next door, with only a plank wall, and a single bed under a flowered counterpane. He said he liked it, although he knew the bed would give him cramps like an adolescent, and he had a vague sense of being in a servant’s room, despite the facetious collection of old brown books on the chest of drawers: Queer Folk of the West Country, Who’s Who in Surtees, Remarkable Sayings of Remarkable Queens. Justin hung in the doorway. ‘So are you seeing anyone?’ he said.

The upstairs windows were set low in the walls, and though the midday sun made a dazzling lozenge on the window-sill the room was shadowy and cool under the thatch. The atmosphere was faintly illicit, as if they ought to have been tearing around outside but had sneaked back unnoticed into the open house.

‘Not really.’ Alex gave a little squashed smile. The truth was he had been too depressed, too shaken by his own failure, to believe that any other man would want him, or could ever fall in love with him. He didn’t often lie, and he was pained to hear himself say, ‘There’s someone who comes round; nothing serious.’

‘Is he cute?’

‘Yep.’

‘Is he blond?’

‘He is, actually.’ Alex shrugged. ‘He’s very young.’

‘He’s another virgin blond like me, isn’t he?’ Justin made one of his experienced-barmaid faces. ‘Of course I’m foully jealous.’ And despite the big congratulatory smile that followed, Alex registered the truth in the customary hyperbole; and then saw that the congratulation itself was mildly demeaning.

‘It really isn’t anything,’ he said.

They found Robin in running-gear and oven-gloves, knocking the loaves from their hot tins on to a wire rack. The latent smell of marjoram and garlic and rising dough had bloomed into the kitchen with its own stifling welcome. Justin scuffed through to the fridge and the jug of drink.

‘Darling, this is Alex. Darling, this is Robin.’

‘Just a minute.’ Then, shaking off the padded pockets, Robin turned with a smile that Alex knew already, though he doubted if he would have recognised the rest of the big handsome boy in the big handsome man. Alex was in the first freeing ease of drink on an empty stomach, and came forward and shook his hand and grinned back; and then stood close by him for a second or two, feeling the damp heat of him. The sweat on his bare shoulders and in the channel of his chest under the loose tank-top, the sporting readiness of his manner, the glanced-at weight of his cock and balls in the silvery slip of his running-shorts, the tall cropped balding head with its lively but calculating grey eyes: Alex coloured at the mixture of challenge and seduction, then stepped back with a deflected compliment on the beauty of the house.

‘It was a shell when he bought it,’ said Justin, in a grim singsong that mocked Robin’s evident pride in the place.

‘Really?’ said Alex, but still looking at Robin. ‘I’m amazed. It feels so, urn . . .’

‘It was a big job,’ said Robin lightly, sweeping the subject aside.

‘There are fascinating before-and-after photographs,’ Justin insisted; but Robin was already tugging his shirt from his waistband and saying he must shower.

Within a minute there were springy footsteps overhead, and the soft thump-thump of dropped shoes, and then the whine of the hot-water pipes.

Alex went to fetch his bag from the car, and walking up through the garden felt at once the pleasure of being alone; he realised it was too lace to run away; he had a racing fuddled sense of surrender to the weekend and its rigours. It was like a training exercise, confusing and uncomfortable in itself, but possibly affording in the end some obscure feeling of achievement. In the bag he had a bottle of Scotch and another present for Justin, which he now knew was wrong, but when he got back to the sitting-room he handed it over, with a sprinting pulse.

Justin gave an ‘Oh . . .’ of tolerant surprise, and Alex watched in a painful clarity of recall as he frowned and blushed over the red wrapping-paper, rather brusquely got the book out of it, murmured its title, and with a little smirk turned and stuffed book and paper into the top drawer of the oak commode behind him. So he was still unable to say thank you, which was a perverse flaw in someone who lived so much by taking. Alex watched him knee the drawer shut on his gauche but extravagant token of forgiveness.

Padding grumpily along to the bathroom, he passed the closed doors of other rooms not mentioned on the tour, and rubbed his eyes out of a dreamlike sense, in the half-dark, with only the spills of light under the doors, that the cottage must be far bigger inside than it was outside. At the end of the corridor hung the long ellipse of an old pier-glass, which only deepened the impression. He gave himself a friendly scowl.

It emerged that Robin had gone out while the other two were sleeping. Justin came down and found Alex drinking water in the kitchen. ‘He’s on a job,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know architects worked at weekends.’

‘I’m afraid they do if they’re working for mad old queens. And mad old queens do seem to make up an awfully large proportion of Mr Woodfield’s clients.’ Justin sat down at the table, from which, Alex realised, the lunch things had all been magically cleared; the dishwasher must have groaned and fizzed through its cycle while he slept.

‘Who’s this particular one?’

‘Oh, Tony Bowerchalke,’ said Justin, with mocking fondness, as if they both knew him.

‘Uh-huh . . .’

‘Do you want a drink, darling?’

‘Good god no.’

‘Perhaps you’re right. No, old Tony’s quite sweet, but he worries a lot. Robin rang him up the other day and he said, “I’m just having a tomato sandwich”, so he had to ring off and call him again later. His house is hideous.’

‘You don’t mean Robin built a hideous house.’

‘No, it’s a Victorian loony-bin.’ Justin got up and moved indirectly towards the fridge. ‘Robin doesn’t actually build houses. He could be the Frank Lloyd Wright of the whole Bridport area, but mostly he just tarts up old queens’ dados. It’s called a country-house practice, darling. Of course, no one builds country houses any more unless they’re neo-classical pastiche by Quinlan Terry, so it tends to be repairs and turning them into flats.’

‘Dearest, you’ve never heard of neo-classical pastiche by Quinlan Terry.’

Justin raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ll find me changed in many respects from the old lezzy you used to know.’ He prised open a bottle of beer.

Later they went for a walk up a rutted lane already mysterious in the early evening under thickly leaved hazels and oaks, and out on to the high seaward slopes above the village. It was an intermittent three-mile climb to the cliff-tops, which Justin said was too far, as a rule he would only go for a walk if it was, as the French say, in the car. But Alex suddenly felt the pull of the sea, a holiday freedom that had seemed impossible in the airless cottage. He sprang ahead on his long legs over the tussocky hillside.

‘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.

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.