8

Danny asked his friend George to the party, and then rang him to suggest he might like to drive them both down to Dorset in his BMW the day before. George always raised objections, and sometimes ended up doing what Danny wanted. ‘Won’t you be working?’ he said.

‘No, I’ve quit.’

‘I see. You’ve been fired.’

He sensed George’s disapproval and hoped to deflect it with a joke. He paused and said, in a Brooklyn whine, ‘So I was five minutes late . . .’

A year ago, on Danny’s first night alone in London, he had met George in a bar and gone back with him to a richly overfurnished flat in Holland Park. He had almost no sense of himself as a stroke of luck to a man pushing forty, and in fact was relieved by George’s wanting him, and comforted by the stuffy clutter of the rooms. It was as if the entire contents of a country house had been herded into one apartment by an aristocrat who couldn’t bring himself to sell – though it turned out that everything was for sale, since George was a dealer in antiques, with a special line in baroque tapestries, indoor obelisks and highly varnished paintings of dead game. He gave Danny his first experience of cocaine, and they spent a couple of days in a languid binge of sex that was magically protracted and insulated by George’s mastery of hangover deferral: a fat new line, the crack of a fresh Jack Daniels cap, at just the right moment.

After that George went to Paris for a week, and Danny couldn’t stop thinking about his dark cynical face and the vague first knottings and stretchings of age in his wide flat body, which moved him and aroused him so unexpectedly. In the lamplight, with a lover’s closeness, after a little silver pipe of hash, he had touched the tiny creases around the eyes and mouth and seen how they changed his dully faceted handsomeness into beauty. Danny had never had such intense and prolonged excitement with another person, and knew at once that he couldn’t go on without the certainty of more of it. George didn’t return his messages, and when he finally went round to the house seemed surprised and slightly annoyed to hear him on the intercom. The minute’s coolness in the hall, in the glow from a bronze torchere, and under the provoking gaze of a marble faun, was all it took. Danny knew he was in love.

George was a self-reliant bachelor unused to much genuine emotion, and wary of entanglement with a kid of twenty-one. He was moved by the poetry and artistry of things that he sold but had the low human expectations of a sexual predator. He was vain of his appearance and his largely uneducated instinct for objets de vertu. He could see how ripe Danny was to be hurt, which was why he decided not to see him again after the dream debauch of the first visit. But now here Danny was, with his boots off, and a drink in his fist, sitting up beside George in the deep Knole sofa and longing for a sign that it was okay, that he could touch him again, and more. George had been in analysis, and treated Danny to a confusing and grandiose half-hour tour of his psyche, which apparently had two poles: a delight in artifice and a mania for honesty. In fact his frankness could sometimes upset people. Danny listened and perused the carpet, only half understanding what George’s point was, feeling the possible diplomatic chill of so much reasonable talk, and waiting only for the tone of voice that meant yes, whatever the words were. Then he found George was pushing him on to his back, and felt his heart thumping through the black roll-neck shirt, and his hard dick at least grinding out the longed-for syllable. He told him later that he had felt vulnerable to Danny’s own vulnerability.

The affair that followed was doomed, Danny saw it now, and he sometimes wondered if he would rather have done without the difficult four months; the ending, certainly, was the worst thing in his life. But then George, perhaps out of a guilt that even he was not frank enough to acknowledge, had insisted on their staying friends. This was hard for Danny because they had never been friends, they were lovers from the start; but George had also been his guide, and that perhaps was what made it possible to meet again, like a bright pupil and the teacher whose affection he had won. George had given him fluent access to the many-roomed edifice of London gay life, from the cellars to the salons. People had envied him his good-looking young protege, who would sometimes say, as they left a luncheon in Mayfair or an East End sex-club at five in the morning, how friendly the people were. George only explained it once: ‘Dearest, anyone would be friendly to you.’

Now, a summer later, Danny was waiting on the front step of his rooming-house. He had a couple of cases of cheap white wine and a hold-all of tapes and various party clothes. When George drew up he felt the old shock at the sight of him, a moment or two’s heavy-heartedness, as if the lessons and adjustments of the intervening months had never happened, and then at once a lightening, a mood of sentimental acceptance. In the boot of the car there was a case of champagne, but he said nothing about it – he couldn’t be sure it was intended for him. He got into the passenger seat and only then gave George a friendly kiss, and pictured, with a hum between his legs, what he would still do to him given the chance.

They got out of town just as the Friday rush, with its atmosphere of suppressed panic, was beginning; and urban though they were there was a sense of release as they came clear of the outskirts. Danny looked through the CDs and pressed Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ Symphony into the player, not sure if he would recognise it, and then exhilarated by the horns at the outset, which seemed designed to be heard at eighty miles an hour on a long trajectory through the summer landscape.

‘So who’s going to be there?’ said George, in his faintly despairing way. ‘I hope there’s someone I can talk to.’

‘You can always talk to my hunky daddy.’ And Danny laughed, as he did more and more, at the farce of sex, and the thought of novel pairings of people he knew.

‘Of course, I want to meet him.’

‘Then there’ll be Jim and François, and Carlton, and Bob and Steve and Jerry and Heinrich . . .’ He remembered he’d wildly asked a number of virtual strangers at Chateâu, though with no idea if they had accepted, or would themselves remember.

‘So you’re bussing in a whole crowd of dizzy disco bunnies and letting them loose in the beautiful English countryside.’

‘I know . . .’ Danny murmured, with a fresh sense of the experiment of life.

‘They may not be able to breathe country air. You’ll need respirators of poppers and CK One.’

‘I think they can be relied on to bring those with them.’ Danny squeezed George’s knee. ‘I’m hoping you may be going to stimulate our central nervous systems, darling.’ At which George merely raised an eyebrow. Danny added, ‘Bob’s always loaded with goodies’, to offset the surfacing suggestion that George had only been asked for his coke and his car.

‘So who are you going to set me up with?’ George resumed, in a tone of voice that emphasised his appetite and a cheerfully heartless readiness to use his old lover in his turn.

‘What are you like?’ said Danny. And then, mischievously, ‘There’s young Terry, of course . . .’ He made a pretence of conducting the music, with hammy head-shakings and no clear sense, so far from a drug and a DJ, of the rhythm of the thing. ‘Local boy.’

George scanned the road ahead with narrowed eyes. ‘You say young.’

‘Twenty-two, like me, at least until midnight. Oh, professional age, twenty. If not nineteen.’

‘I’m not paying, sweetie.’ Though the idea had clearly taken root, since George said later, ‘Any other members of the profession coming down?’

Danny was pretty sure that, even during their affair, George had sent out for sex, he had seen ringed numbers in the back of Gay Times; though now he made himself laugh at the image of those boys, buzzed into the building with their knapsacks of accoutrements, and witnessing their own performances in one of George’s Empire mirrors. ‘I’ve asked Gary – the black one with the broken nose? But he may not come, it being the weekend . . .’

‘Any women coming? asked George, as if he missed Danny’s meaning, and was suddenly concerned with the propriety of the gathering.

‘I hope Janet will be there.’

‘She must have turned into a faggot by now, just from natural adaptation.’

‘She was the only woman at Colon last week.’

George gave a slow nod of concession to the other point of this sentence. ‘Well, you’re certainly managing to find your way around without me, darling. Even I don’t go to Colon.’ Though the odd thing was that since their clubbing days together, Danny had hardly ever seen George out; which made him think that either he had changed his habits, and entered a maturer phase, or that without having Danny to show off and show off to there were easier and quieter ways of getting what he wanted. Even in the old days, while Danny danced like a madman, George tended to loiter against the wall, where the boys were staring and fumbling with their wraps of speed.

‘And who knows, my dad may be glad of some female company.’

‘I see. He’s still interested?’

Danny didn’t want to overstate the case. He’d seen him sometimes watching a woman and felt there was something beneath the apparent impassivity and courtesy. ‘It might be a bit of a relief . . . But no, I think he just got queerer, like Oscar Wilde or someone. Once he thought he could do everything, then it polarised towards the one thing.’

‘It’s pretty . . . cool, to have an out gay dad,’ George said, supportively but humorously.

‘Oh I quite agree,’ said Danny, with a readiness that made him sound a bit straight himself. And there was a sort of anxiety, which he tended to blink away, that one of the figures at the edge of the dance-floor could perfectly well be his own father. There were still leather trousers and a studded thong in the wardrobe of the London flat.

Later George said, ‘You’ll have to tell me where to turn off.’

‘Not for ages yet . . .’ Danny was afraid the whole thing might pall on him as the necessary three hours unrolled. ‘You have to wait for the Crewkerne turning. Then it’s sort of . . . not as far as it was.’

‘I take it you’ve got someone lined up for yourself, by the way. Total frankness, remember,’ George went on; and Danny thought there was a tension in his voice, at the prospect of meeting a successor.

‘Total frankness. Okay,’ said Danny, confused to find how much he wanted to tell and how much he would have liked to keep the thing secret. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt him to set it out for someone else, though he knew from the awful stalled debates of their break up that frankness wasn’t in itself a solution. If you were truly frank you saw only what a muddle you were in, and how you felt three different things at the same time. He said, ‘Well, I’ve sort of got a new boyfriend.’

‘Right. How old is he?’

‘Thirty-six.’

‘Uh-huh. Name?’

‘Alex. Alexander Nichols.’

‘No, I don’t know him. Good Scottish name,’ said George, with an absurd air of expertise.

‘I suppose so. He sounds completely English. Went to Bristol University, his father’s a solicitor in Chelmsford. He told me loads about his family. but you know how it is when you’re talking in bed, you get much more interested in their shoulder-blade or their armpit or something.’

‘What’s his dick like?’

‘You waited such a long time to ask that.’

‘One doesn’t like to pry.’

‘In fact it’s a bit like him – longer and thinner than . . . the norm. He’s six foot four.’

George mulled this over as if he didn’t really find it satisfactory. ‘Does he have a job?’

‘He works in the Foreign Office. He’s quite well off,’ said Danny, with an evident sensible belief that this was an active element in someone’s appeal. Then, rather shyly, stroking his throat, ‘He’s given me this gold pendant thing.’

George glanced across as he pulled it free of his shirt. ‘I’ll have to look at that,’ he said. ‘It could be valuable.’

‘It is valuable,’ said Danny.

They drove on in silence for a while, till George said, ‘He must be keen on you’; and with a sudden and lonely burst of charm, ‘not that I find that hard to understand.’

‘I think he’s madly in love with me.’

‘And you?’ George asked.

‘No, I like him, I think he’s really sweet.’ Danny couldn’t explain his sense of bewilderment at being adored so unconditionally by Alex, or his wariness, since George, of allowing himself to feel anything strongly. The past six months had been a riotous escape from all that, compressed by hindsight into a continuous orgy of casual sex.

‘I see. You haven’t said where you met him.’

Danny chuckled. ‘This is the funny thing. You’re going to have to be really discreet about this, actually. He’s Justin’s ex, from before my dad. And of course, Justin doesn’t know; and I don’t want Dad to know either, not yet anyway. We met at where we’re going, Hilton Gumboot as Justin calls it, two weeks ago. Alex came down and I could tell he was a bit keen; then I went out with him last weekend – and I’ve seen him a few times since.’

‘Well, it certainly sounds like we’re going to have fun,’ George said sourly.

‘I put him on his first E,’ Danny went on with a slow smile. ‘I thought he was never going to come.’

George paid this remark the homage of a knowing snicker due to any drug anecdote. ‘But the sex is good?’

Danny wondered for a second how he’d ever got on with George’s dreary sexual supremacism. ‘Sex is fine. He’s quite passionate.’

‘You mean passion – but not genius. Technique? Technique can sometimes be mistaken for genius.’

‘George, he’s so innocent, and strange . . .’ How was he going to explain him? ‘He’s thirty-six, he’s only had one real affair in his life, with Justin, who I would have thought was totally inappropriate. Anyway it was a big deal for two years, until, of course, Justin broke his heart. The first night he told me he hadn’t touched another man for a year. Then he talked and talked all next day. He was still very mellow from the night before. As I say, I couldn’t take it all in, but . . . He’s just different. He’s not jaded. I sound like I’m a hundred years old but it was so sweet to be out with someone who finds everything new and amazing. He’s quite serious too. He kept analysing everything he felt. You should have seen him at Chateâu.’ Danny smiled. ‘He kept saying, “Look at the men! I love men!” It was like he was coming out all over again.’

‘I hope you took him upstairs at Chateâu.’

‘To be absolutely frank, I did leave him for a bit and go upstairs, because Gary wanted to . . . see me. I think upstairs can wait for later. Anyway, I wanted to keep him for myself.’

‘He’s a cultured sort of chap, is he?’

‘Oh, yeah, he knows all about opera, and he’s read masses.’

‘It’ll do you good to get some culture,’ said George. Danny stored this remark away, and went on as if he hadn’t heard,

‘Though he clearly hasn’t read Vanity Fair – I caught him out on that.’

George seemed to ponder the whole thing for a while, then said, ‘So what is it you care for least about him?’

But Danny wasn’t prepared to be negative. After they’d taken the Crewkerne turning, and certain features, an old T-junction sign, a pub, a row of trees, began to stir the subtle anxieties of arrival, he did briefly think about it, but only out of slightly decadent curiosity. There was something frustrating perhaps in a companion who had never heard of most of the new gay bars and had no conception of the pivotal importance of the DJ, who he clearly thought was just the bloke who played the records; at moments in the past week, as Danny showed Alex round what was after all his own town, he’d felt towards him as you do towards the duller schoolfriend you lend your notes to and end up almost teaching yourself.