The Spell

Robin and George both went to meet the 19.10 arrival at Crewkerne station. Eight guests were expected to be on it, all of them unknown to Robin, though George was confident of recognising several. Robin didn’t warm to George and disliked his sarky intimacy with Danny; he hoped he wasn’t being trailed as a new boyfriend. George had avoided the day’s preparations by touring antique shops in Beaminster and Lyme. As they waited in the station car-park he praised one piece of furniture in the cottage, but only one.

When it came to it, there was no doubt who the party party were. Among the few Saturday commuters, local kids and dun-coloured hikers there was a swishing little posse of metropolitan muscle and glamour. In appearance the boys ranged from sexily interesting through very handsome to troublingly perfect. Robin watched them for a few droll seconds as they collected under the Gothic arch, looking careless but a little abashed by this alien place, a couple of them chewing gum and candidly eyeing Robin and George, so that when George called out ‘Hey, guys!’ and contact was made, something else was slyly acknowledged by their smiles. Robin had put on, almost unconsciously, his sexiest old button-fly jeans, and George was wearing leather trousers, which rather confused Robin with their hot attractive smell. He couldn’t help thinking they must look like a pair of affluent queens who’d hired a whole chorus-line of hustlers for the weekend. Perhaps it had looked like this to local people when those aristocratic buggery scandals of forty years ago were taking place.

Robin wanted to know his son’s friends, and had felt happy and punctilious all day at the prospect of welcoming them. George at once asserted a louche sort of claim to three of them, who went off with him in his BMW; Robin had to take four in the back of the Saab. They grumbled a bit, and made sluttish jokes about the tight squeeze. ‘Ooh, what’s that?’ they kept saying. ‘Whose is this?’ Robin couldn’t help thinking they were rather common; or perhaps it was just his concern about Danny, and his conviction that no one could be good enough for him. The standard of manners was certainly variable. ‘Can we stop for some fags!’ one of them called out, as if Robin were merely a taxi-driver. Up front he had a charming Norwegian called Lars, who reminded him of a trimmer, musclier Justin, and also, in the deliberate courtesy of his talk, of certain schoolfriends whom Danny used to bring home for weekend exeats. Though presumably he had been found, like the rest of them, in the new club scene where Danny was clearly so popular, and which Robin knew little about. He hadn’t really been out since Subway was closed down in 1984.

When they got back to the cottage there were several cars in the lane and another half-dozen boys stretching their legs on the verge beside a rented minibus. Bright-coloured groups were strolling through the garden with what looked like glasses of champagne. A window was open to let out surprisingly nice music. There hadn’t been a party here since the circumspect celebrations of Simon’s last birthday, nearly two years ago. Robin felt a tiny proprietary shock at the take-over by strangers.

He came round the house to find the Halls standing together, looking irritably at some shrubs. They had only ‘dropped in for a drink’, as Robin had suggested, though on their lips the phrase had a worrying looseness, with no implied promise of their dropping out again. Like all awkward guests they had arrived early and would have to be introduced cold to some unsuitable stranger. They had brought a little present for Danny – ‘It’s only a bottle, I’m afraid’ – and Robin was pleased they had come: they were among the few people in the village who remained friendly and hospitable after Simon’s death. Not that they could be said to revel lubriciously in the reported details of gay life. On occasion they were merrily caustic. (It was Mike Hall who had said, when shown a volume called The Cultivated Fruits of England, ‘Good god, a book about Woodfield and his chums.’) They made a wonderfully inadvertent contrast to the other guests, who were exploring the garden as if it was their first one – there were shrieks of laughter and worried gasps from the woodshed and the greenhouse. Margery was red-eyed and exhausted; the rape that was in flower in great garish blocks around the village gave her rashes and hay-fever. ‘I’m not supposed to drink with these pills,’ she said, taking the vast gin and tonic that Justin had made for her. Justin had an almost reverential fondness for the Halls, and ushered them indoors, perhaps relieved not to have to talk to what he called the Orchidaceae. There was something both evasive and host-like in this. Robin stood swaying in the wake of his beauty, and went off to struggle with the barbecue as if physically grappling with the malign mechanics of the situation, the enforced indifference. He had built the little sheltered griddle himself and was vexed by its frequent failure to draw.

When he came back to the kitchen, Danny was hectically opening bottles of champagne: it was that startling moment when you find that the party has taken off and is using up fuel. He was wearing black trousers and a crisp white collarless shirt, as though he’d been interrupted in dressing for some more formal event.

‘Hi Dad!’ he said. Then, ‘Have you got a drink?’

Robin realised that he hadn’t, and that it might be a good idea. ‘Where did all this bubbly come from?’ he said.

Danny looked confused – it was a look he’d had as a kid, on far earlier weekends, when Robin found him playing with expensive toys that were given him by Jane’s new men-friends. Well, he still came for weekends, and he had chosen to be here for his birthday – it was something, but it wasn’t nearly enough. ‘George brought a whole case,’ he said.

Robin gave a murmur. ‘That’s very generous of him.’ Perhaps George hadn’t yet got anywhere with him, and was giving him lifts and expensive drinks as an old-fashioned way to his heart; but it seemed out of character. He must have been frowning, because Danny said,

‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing going on. Oh, by the way, Mum rang, to wish me happy birthday. She said to tell you hi.’

‘Is that what she said . . .’ said Robin.

They went out together with clutches of glasses. A dark Arabic-looking boy, with a shaved head and a goatee, sprang up to Danny so that he jogged the drinks, and kissed him on the mouth. ‘See, I made it!’ he said. He was holding a loosely wrapped present, and slipped it under Danny’s arm. When his hands were free Danny opened it, and shook out a white T-shirt, with the disconcerting legend M_ADMA_N on the front. ‘Put it on,’ said the boy. There were one or two whistles as Danny fiddled with his cuff-links, and someone said, ‘He’s off . . .’ It was a tiny change in the climate, a casual tension, as if more than a young man’s upper body had been briefly bared. He had a small pendant on a chain, and Robin wondered if that was one of George’s gifts as well. Alex was standing close by with a protective but unpleasantly lustful look, and tucked in the label at the neck of the T-shirt when it was on. There was laughter and clapping, Robin said ‘I don’t get it’, though Alex seemed to find it funny, or wanted to suggest that he understood. Robin hoped with curt benevolence that Alex would get off with some nice London boy tonight, and stop hanging round his fucking house.

He was relieved to find that the coals had reached a pinkish orange, and tied on his apron; soon there was the expected smoke and spatter, and the reek of seared meat was drifting among the fir-trees and over the field where cows themselves stood munching unrecognisingly.

Danny behaved with a sweet combination of shyness and bossiness appropriate to a birthday boy; and Robin was aware too of the restraint that his own presence imposed. Some of the boys didn’t yet know who he was and said, ‘Oh, you’re the cook, are you – great food!’ or ‘How long have you known Danny?’ as though he might be some secret sugar-daddy rather than his real inadequate father. He brought out candles in jam-jars as the dusk set in and listened to Danny talking about his exchange year at college in Vermont. He thought it must be then that he had started taking drugs, though Jane claimed omnisciently that he never touched a thing at that time.

‘There was this guy who had really bad asthma,’ Danny said. ‘And he was always really speedy on some stuff he had, called Blocks Away ®?’ – he drew the trade-mark sign with his finger. ‘So we started trying it, and it was amazing, it made your heart race, but you were really concentrated as well – it had ephedrin in it.’

‘Oh, right,’ said one of the boys.

‘It was great for working late at night. Though more recreational uses did . . . suggest themselves once exams were over. We used to go into this little pharmacy in town, wheezing and panting, and the old guy there would say, “Sure is a lot of asthma up at that college”, and we’d say, “I know, sir, I reckon it’s the pesticides they put on the fields up there – that’s the one disadvantage of a college in a beautiful rural location like this, sir”, though often we were pretty high already and probably overdid the explanations. What my English prof called “trowelling on the authenticating detail, Whitfield”. And he never did get my name right . . .’

Robin smiled and got up to collect plates. He wondered how he could worry about Danny doing things he had done himself, or would have wanted to do. He’d never seen him like this, as an adult at the centre of a circle of friends. It was as if the revolve had brought a whole tableau of characters swiftly on stage, already drinking and laughing. Whether the detail was authentic he couldn’t tell. He went towards the back door and the lights went out, and then a gleaming white oblong of candlelit cake seemed to levitate into the garden, and high above it, in its ghostly but lively light, Alex’s pale captivated face.

Robin had worried from time to time about the Halls, but whenever he saw them they were caught up in serious talk with some new group of Orchidaceae. Margery was a quiet, stoical woman, with the spare weight and poor concentration of a reformed heavy smoker. Mike was the retired bursar of a military college, proud of his own intelligence, and always hungry for talk. His drunkenness had three phases: first an expansive open-mindedness and principled respect for ideas, then a rather moody period of stifled impatience with his interlocutors, whom it emerged he simply couldn’t agree with, and third, launched with sudden sneering force, an hour or so of unbridled contempt and obscenity, ending with an abrupt collapse. As he came through the house, Robin heard Mike’s voice in the front garden reaching a steady dogmatic yap, and thought it might be time to ease them homewards. He found him in an improbable group of young style-queens, whom he seemed to have roused to unexpected animation. ‘You know nothing of war,’ he was saying.

Lars said, ‘Well, in Norway the military expenditure . . .’

‘Look, what’s your name, Mike,’ another cut in.

‘Who is this guy?’ a third one said to no one in particular.

Margery saw Robin coming up, and said, ‘I think we’d better go now. It’s been lovely.’ She looked around. ‘I don’t know about Mike.’ Then Justin was there too, offering another gin and tonic, and put out to find she wanted to leave.

‘Oh, Margerina!’ he said, which he’d never called her to her face before, and carried on as though he hadn’t said it, ‘Well, at least let me walk you home’; and then snorted after all.

She said weakly, ‘Mike’; and somehow she managed to catch his eye and pass him a wordless but familiar message. At that moment the music jumped into a new mode and volume, it was another of those meaningful shifts of level as the party moved nearer its instinctive goal; and the effect must have been alien and horrible to a couple in their late sixties.

‘I’ll walk our friends home,’ said Justin.

‘I’ll come too,’ Robin said. ‘I might leave Danny to it for a bit.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Justin, with a meaning look of his own.

Margery made a little cringing grimace and said, ‘I don’t think they want us old crocks around.’

The four of them went up the shadowy path, Mike turning, like someone dragged from a fight, to call out, ‘You think about it’, with a grim laugh.

‘Now the fun’s really going to begin,’ said Margery, without a smile and with the remotest hint of nostalgia. ‘Though I don’t know who they’re going to find to dance with.’ Robin couldn’t tell if she was being mischievous; and as it happened, when they reached the gate a goggling taxi-driver was setting down a pair of virtually naked girls, who, if you ignored their crew-cuts and tattoos, might just have fitted the bill.

They walked slowly along in the warm late twilight, Justin and Robin flanking their guests. Robin glanced about into uncurtained windows, the flicker of televisions. You could certainly hear the party from some way off, but he tried not to care. A yellow quarter-moon had appeared between the beautiful tall crocketed finials of the church tower. Margery said, ‘I suppose it’s all a sort of Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

Mike wasn’t having this. ‘It is not a Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ he said. ‘People are always getting this wrong. Yesterday was the longest day, the 21st. That’s a fact, an astronomical fact. Midsummer Day, which is an ancient pagan festival, is on the 24th. Tomorrow, if you must, is Midsummer Eve.’ He shook his head furiously. ‘Today is nothing, absolutely nothing.’

‘I suppose I meant . . .’

‘It drives me mad when people get that wrong.’

They parted at the Halls’ gate, though Robin glanced back to watch Mike muttering over the door-key. Margery must be very drunk too, of course, but she showed it only by her expressionless heaviness, and the occasional utterance of a harmless but incensing remark. There was a chink of light, and then the slam of the door.

Robin and Justin turned for home. Their shoulders touched lightly as they walked and Robin took Justin’s hand for a few steps, till Justin pretended he had to blow his nose. He felt miserably in love, with an almost teenage pain brought on by the distant presence of the dance-music in the summer night, and an older person’s bleaker ache at the shouts of his son’s friends funnelling into pleasure. ‘All right, darling?’ he said.

‘Fine,’ said Justin, as if he’d been accused of something.

A few paces later Robin said, ‘What do you make of this George character? I hope he hasn’t got designs on Dan.’ He peered into the heavy shadows under the copper beech on the green – its huge trunk was ringed by a seat where two of the boys from the party were sitting, you couldn’t quite see but they were obviously snogging, and he wondered if that could ever have happened before in the tree’s 300-year history. He thought it was the tree Hardy had in mind in his poem ‘An Assignation – Old Style’.

Justin said, ‘It’s a bit late to worry about that, I’m afraid. He was bragging to me just now about how crazy Danny was for him, and how he’d had to choke him off. His phrase, not mine. While you and I were settling into rustic bliss in Little Gumdrops it seems young Danny was round in Holland Park servicing Arthur Negus.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘Well that’s what he said.’

‘So you mean Dan is clinging on?’ It was more disturbing and unwelcome than he could rationally account for. He felt he should somehow have been there to screen and approve his son’s lovers, it was another dereliction too subtly painful ever to have been expected. ‘I mean, he’s so . . . charmless, and self-satisfied.’

‘He is quite sexy,’ Justin said. ‘You know boringness can be so arousing. One day I’ll have to work out why that is.’

In a mood of obscure retaliation, Robin said, ‘Your old boyfriend’s becoming quite a fixture.’

‘It was sweet of him to bring that champagne,’ said Justin, in a tone of serene acceptance he would never have shown to Alex in person.

‘No, George brought the champagne.’

‘I think not.’

‘Alex brought the cake, and George brought the champagne. Danny told me so.’

‘Darling, I saw Alex get the fucking champagne out of his car and take it up to put it in Mrs Badger’s fridge. You were far too busy strimming to notice.’

Robin stopped, less to argue than to enact his puzzlement. ‘But why?’

Justin took a moment to answer, out of delicacy, Robin thought. He looked down at the coping of the low wall beside him, where snails had left tracks that shone in the moonlight like chalked hearts and girlfriends’ names. ‘He just wants to fit in, darling. He’s terribly lonely – he obviously thinks you hate him. Alex is always giving people things, and often his presents are too extravagant, sometimes people are so embarrassed that they never speak to him again.’

‘But I’m giving this party,’ Robin said, with a childishness that he heard and couldn’t help laughing ruefully at.

‘You can hardly object to someone presenting you with a case of Bolly.’

‘No, I suppose not. It’s not Bolly, actually, it’s Clicquot, but still.’

‘It’s unquestionably Bolly.’

‘Oh what the fuck does it matter what it is?’ Robin shouted quietly and stamped off for a few paces, then turned and almost ran at Justin, who looked slightly frightened. Since the absurd and shaming incident in the car, Justin had shown a physical mistrust of him, and still winced if he touched his face, even though the bruise had gone. Now the kiss was long and hard, Justin didn’t resist, but there was something desolately stagey to it, as if it were very late in a run of one of the plays he no longer auditioned for. His tongue performed the usual explorations, Robin felt the awkward hardness of his trapped dick pressing against his own, that homosexual conundrum with its various witty solutions. But when it was over it was over, Robin saying, ‘I love you’, with tears of frustration in his eyes, and Justin, like a secretary briefly disarranged by an importunate boss, smoothing himself and murmuring, ‘We’d better get back.’

During their absence a new arrival had parked at the top of the lane, a battered yellow Escort that half-blocked the gateway of their tight-lipped neighbours the Harland-Balls (subject of some of Justin’s freest wordplay). Robin anticipated trouble and strode down through the garden with a new resolution to forget himself and think only of Danny. There were hours and hours of party to go, which seemed, from moment to moment, a torture and a blessing.

Little groups were standing or sprawling in the garden, some intimate around the steady candles, others more noisily out of control. He saw that they were weaving shelters out of their London lives around themselves, though maybe the magic of the country night still glinted in through the chinks. In the sitting-room, with the french windows open, dancing had begun; the relentless club atmosphere of the music seemed slightly comic in a setting of watercolours and Bernard Leach pottery, and the first dancers were drunk but self-conscious, smiling a lot or staring at the floor. Robin thought he would move one or two things, and took a large vase through to the kitchen, where an intent little circle was gathered round the table. Danny had his back to him, and turned with a lazily criminal look, which he immediately guyed into a joke. ‘You’re not supposed to be in here!’

‘A father’s place is in the kitchen, dear,’ Robin said, and heard how rare it was for him to be camp.

George was sitting chopping coke on the back of a dark shiny cookery-book. For a second, Robin worried more about the marks the razor would make on the cover than the substance the razor was so finely fanning and gathering and trailing into lines. It was something he had once done in this kitchen himself, though not of course when Danny was there; and evidently it was a ritual Danny had some experience of too; but it wasn’t an event that father and son had ever taken part in together, or that one had taught the other, and Robin felt embarrassed and a little compromised by the business. He saw the almost sexual expectancy of the ring of young men and the corrupt generosity of George, who had laid out so much money to impress them, and perhaps make them more malleable. He set down the vase that he was still clutching, and started putting plates in the dishwasher with censorious scrapings. George sniffed and pushed back his chair and was soon congratulating himself on the excellence of the stuff. Robin glanced across to see Alex being coached by Danny in how to snort a line, but when Danny’s own turn came he went outside.

He picked up a nearly full glass that was balanced on the window-sill and knocked it back – it was the cheap wine Dan had brought from London, and its appearance marked a further phase in the party’s downward career. He felt for a moment like a person who’s not much good at parties, the sort you find by themselves plucking books from the bookcase as if perfectly happy. He looked at the stars above the still trees and wondered if he wanted to be rescued and swept away by someone charming. The scene in the lane with Justin made him flinch with wretchedness and anger at having been snubbed. He had never been in such a situation before, and had a dread of life being different from now on, his powers steadily withdrawn, like cancelled memberships. He saw what they meant by the change of life. He stood hunched in a horrible new atmosphere of doubt, his mind crowded by Justin’s sexual presence, hardly able to believe that something so banal was happening to him. The tall black man who came round the corner of the house seemed to emerge quite naturally from this painful ruck of thought, and struck Robin as at once unexpected and inevitable. He was chatting in a careless hilarious way to one of the boys Robin had brought from the station; he was differently dressed, in a black roll-neck shirt and beige pants with a low crotch like an American serviceman, but Robin knew his rolling muscular walk exactly, and the naive friendly effect of his broken nose, and the glint of the gold cross that hung from his ear-ring.

He followed them indecisively through the back door and watched them drawn into the charged field of the coke-tooters, whom Danny seemed to be calling forward or discouraging according to some inscrutable regime of his own. Then Justin was coming through from the sitting-room, raising his hands to screen the drug-takers from his sight in a slightly old-maidish charade of his genuine disapproval, and Robin caught the moment of unprepared contact, the black man saying, ‘Oh, hello!’, Justin touching his arm and saying merely, distantly, ‘Hello darling’ as he passed by, and the black man watching him go with a humorous, remembering look.

Justin put his hand on Robin’s shoulder for a few seconds and Robin welcomed the gesture and the palpable guilt that prompted it. ‘I knew it would come to this,’ Justin said, with no awareness of the heart-stopping larger way in which his words could be taken; he meant simply the cocaine. And perhaps Robin’s anxiety on both subjects gave the edge to his question:

‘Who’s that black guy you just spoke to?’

Justin turned with a heavy sigh; and clearly he was broad-brush and indiscriminate with drink. ‘What, that one, darling? No idea. Never seen him before in my life.’ It was the most unguarded lie that Robin was aware of having heard from him, and he saw he couldn’t respond to it with the little sarcasms and chidings he used to sort out the minor evasions, some mystery in the phone-bill or a vanished bottle of wine. ‘Why don’t you ask Alex?’ Justin went on. ‘He appears to be an old friend.’ And it was true that Alex had an arm round the man’s shoulders, and in the middle of speaking to him suddenly plonked a kiss on his cheek. Robin thought, you poor fool.

He strolled over and interposed himself before the black guy could take the rolled-up banknote. ‘Hi, I’m Robin. I’m Danny’s father.’

‘Oh. Hi – Gary,’ said the man, half offering a long and beautiful hand, which Robin ignored, and assuming a look of insincere respect. Robin wondered if he knew he was gay, if Dan had talked about him, and for the first time in the evening hoped not.

‘Is that your car, the yellow Escort?’ He thought angrily of it trundling its way through all the months since he’d seen it before, and homing in at last by some mechanical instinct on this cottage a hundred miles away. He pictured it on the verge of the A303 at two in the morning, with the bonnet up and Gary jumping back from it flapping his elegant fingers. ‘I’m afraid it’s blocking our neighbours’ drive. Can you move it?’

Justin had come up, and said with a nervousness only Robin would have traced, ‘They’re called the Hairy Bollocks, darling. You mustn’t get in their way.’

Puzzled, smiling fairly good-naturedly, Gary followed Robin from the room, round the edge of the now almost unlit dance-floor, out of the house and up through the garden. Robin’s heart was thumping, but he felt concentrated; he knew he had the involuntary prim smile of masked tension. When they got to the gate, he said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want you here, you’re going to have to go.’

There couldn’t have been any doubt about his tone, but Gary sniggered, and stopped in the near-darkness to try to read his face. ‘Huh?’

‘Please go.’

Gary shook his head, and the cross twinkled for a second. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Robin said reluctantly. ‘I just don’t want you in my house.’ His unreasonableness made him sound more bitter, as though to justify itself. He wished the guy wasn’t black, and so obviously nice enough. He thought he had the characterless niceness you’d expect from someone who pleased strangers for a living.

Gary said, ‘I just got here, man. I just drove three and a half hours, to see my mate Danny. It’s his birthday.’

‘I know that,’ said Robin quietly. He knew he was being a monster, and in the thick of this clumsy little episode saw objectively for a second that this was the kind of thing he did now. ‘You’ll have to stay somewhere,’ he said, in a feeble concession, and pulled out the crumpled notes from his back pocket and thrust them at the insulted guest without counting them. He thought it was £40 or so.

‘I wouldn’t touch your fucking money,’ said Gary; though the offer clearly marked a point of no return. He backed away, and Robin was glad he couldn’t see his expression. The boys who had been smooching under the copper beech were just coming home, and one of them greeted Gary, who was too angry and hurt to say more than ‘Look out for that one, he’s a wanker’ as he got into his car. They all watched his squealing, snaking reverse down the lane. Then the boys slipped past Robin with an evasive murmur. He waited for a minute or two, thinking what he would say to Danny; then went slowly down the path with the sense that what he’d done might one day be forgiven but could never be explained. He came into the kitchen with a sure feeling that word of the event had preceded him; he took up a bottle brightly and offered it round but he knew he brought with him a mood of smothered crisis and a host’s too evident desire that his guests should know nothing of it. Alex came up and put an arm round him, with a ridiculous new friendliness, and asked confidentially what had happened to Gary.

‘He had to go,’ Robin said, and remembering the half-dozen breakfast-times he’d seen him in Hammersmith, explained, ‘he got a call on his mobile.’

‘Oh,’ said Alex sentimentally. ‘He was rather sweet.’

Robin thought, You stupid cunt, day after day, within minutes of your going to work, that rather sweet man used to go into your house and fuck your boyfriend, in the bed you’d just got out of, or perhaps over the kitchen table, or even on the hall floor, and you knew nothing about it. But to tell that story would be to picture himself waiting outside in the car. The anxiety and humiliation gripped him again for a moment. He went to the cupboard and poured himself an anaesthetising Scotch.

Somehow the incident was kept from Danny, and when he found Gary had gone he was too reckless with coke to concentrate on the story. Robin alternated between keeping an eye on him and wondering if there was any point. The party was becoming sweaty. One or two of the bigger boys had taken their shirts off, and though Robin himself was often shirtless in the house and loved muscle weight and tone he found the effect disconcerting, as if guests had come to dinner and stayed on to play strip poker. He saw Terry Badgett come through, in his party clothes, sharply pressed navy-blue trousers and a baggy white shirt, looking, to Robin’s rusticated eye, far sexier than the city boys, who were so habituated to fashion and fun. He was wary of Robin, after the row of a fortnight ago, but Robin nodded at him genially and saw that he was Danny’s by right. As for himself he would never have anything so young again; a thirty-five-year-old was trouble enough. And if he did fall prey to some doting nostalgia for the lustre and stamina of twenty-two, he could always ring Gary or one of his colleagues; maybe that was the sort of thing that lay in wait in this unwelcome new phase of his life. ‘Hello Terry,’ he said, and they shook hands.

‘I’m going to be doing some work for a friend of yours,’ Terry said; which made Robin wonder what friends he could be said to have. ‘Over at Tytherbury, at the mansion. Mr Bowerchalke’s got me in to do some decorating in his new rooms.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Robin, though he wasn’t sure Terry was up to the kind of thing he intended for the Odd Room. Tony was evidently saving money again. On his last visit Robin had agreed to a second Campari, saying ‘Really, just a drop’, and watched Tony, with no obvious intention of offending him, decant exactly that, as carefully as a chemist in a lab. ‘How did this come about?’

‘Ah, my mum’s an old friend of Mrs Bunce,’ said Terry, with a narrow-eyed smile that suggested even larger networks of obligation at his command. It was something else remotely Italian about him, along with the dark, slicked-back hair, and the wide-hipped unclassical body that reminded Robin of a Vespa-driving boy he’d been distracted with lust for on an early art-trip holiday with Jane. Then Dan came up and hugged them both and took Terry away to dance, like an old-fashioned host at a different kind of party.

Robin was looking around in the relief and tolerance of new drunkenness when Lars came up to him. He was clearly a bit spacy from the coke, but retained his air of wanting nothing more than to talk to whomever he was with. This was charming in itself and in its rarity; he didn’t have the feverish, alienated look of most of the others. And in fact he said, ‘I was thinking it’s quite like some gay club here, you don’t mind?’

Robin shrugged, smiled and said, without working it out, ‘I was going to gay clubs before you were born.’

‘Oh . . .’ said Lars, with amused surprise, though Robin couldn’t tell what part of his remark had provoked it. He said,

‘I agree it is a bit different in your own home,’ and finished his Scotch. ‘Actually, it’s just what the village needs.’ They laughed and Robin said, ‘Do you want to smoke some hash?’

‘Oh, sure,’ said Lars, with the unintended tone of someone agreeing to do some light chore; but hesitated as Robin moved off, perhaps uncertain where they were supposed to do it. Robin turned to see where he was, and he came up and touched his elbow, and followed him out across the garden to the dark shape of the work-room. They both looked up at the moon, and even in the context of driving dance-music and half-naked men there was something miscreant about them. The Arab-looking boy ran into them, coming back from doing who knew what under the trees, and they spoke meaninglessly for a minute. Robin was glad Lars made no reference to their own little plan: his silence was a confirmation.

He felt for the key in the crack over the door, and let Lars in, reaching round him in the deep shadow to turn on the hooded brass desk-lamp. ‘So this is your den, am I right?’ Lars said, looking at the books, the pinned-up drawings, the white slope of the drawing-board; silently taking in the photos of Justin, and Danny at his graduation, and Simon, whose very existence had been unknown to him. On the desk was the chunk of white vitreous china with SEMPE on it; he seemed to find it amusing and weighed it in his hand while Robin opened a drawer and took out an old tobacco-tin and his little hash-pipe. In the tin, wrapped in foil, was the dense cube of stuff he’d brought back from London earlier in the week, and had hidden here, with a rare and trivial sense of keeping a secret from Justin; though now it seemed, with Lars smiling and humming, and swinging round to perch one big handsome buttock on the edge of the desk, to be part of a larger deception. He found it hard to keep the amused expectancy out of his face and voice. He said, ‘Dan seems to be having fun.’

Lars smiled indulgently. ‘Well, that’s as usual.’

Robin picked up the lighter and said, ‘You must know him quite well?’ For a second he heard a distorted echo of another kind of chat, the pipe-smoking housemaster and the prefect he wants to trust; though Lars seemed to understand, and even to be waiting for some mild interrogation.

‘I’ve known him for a long time,’ he said. ‘Five or six months.’

‘Gosh,’ said Robin, and sucked the flame down to the bowl and held the smoke in – it was a brief suspension of ordinary manners, he and Lars holding each other’s eye with impersonal concentration, as if waiting to record an experiment. Then he breathed out slowly, and passed the pipe over. It was like a little silvery spanner you use to mend a bicycle; Lars had trouble getting anything through it, and Robin reached up with the lighter and covered his hand with his own. Again they stared at each other – though he knew the hit would take a minute to come. The boy looked down with a quiet laugh and idly fingered the china fragment.

‘This must have a story connected, am I right?’

Robin said, ‘My boyfriend Justin says it’s just a bit of an old bog’, with a sense that it would be honourable to mention him.

‘Ah yes . . .’ said Lars, perhaps uncertain of the slang. ‘Yes, he’s so funny.’

‘He’s a scream, isn’t he.’ Robin got up and came round the desk and dropped sideways into the old armchair. ‘It’s special to me, anyway,’ he said. Of course he hardly noticed it any more, it was a sort of paperweight; but there were times when he remembered its tenuous accidental story and the quivering light of the day he stole it, or picked it up, which was the day he learned he was to become a father. All he told Lars was, ‘It’s a bit of an old bog from a house in Arizona that I went to when I was a student. When I was Dan’s age.’

‘So what does SEMPE say?’

‘It’s trying to say SEMPER, which is the Latin for always.’

‘Ah,’ said Lars wistfully. ‘So it’s almost always’ – and then looked down at Robin with a coyness that dissolved to reveal something fiercer and less voluntary.

‘Do you know everyone here?’ Robin asked, aware of the bad continuity – it came from embarrassment and also perhaps from the muddling onset of the hash. He didn’t often smoke and was surprised each time by the stealthy twist the drug gave to his thoughts and sense impressions.

‘Oh, most of them,’ said Lars, with a shrug, as if the distantly thumping party was a forgettable preamble to this scene in the hut. The room still held the old-fashioned warmth that had gathered in it all day – an odour of wood-stain and tar, like the shed at home where they had stored the tennis-net and the croquet box. Robin was sensitive to the smell and its suggestions. He shared with Justin an aroused openness to smells, which was why they both liked sex first thing on a summer morning, after sweaty sleep which was itself brought on, magically quick and deep, by the abrupt exhaustion from sweaty sex before it. He saw his mind caught up in the blurred rhythm of remembered and expected sex, and glanced down dopily to see how noticeable his erection was; and then remembered further that he and Justin had barely touched each other for a fortnight. Of course the room had the illicit smell of hash now, though he could still pick up Lars’s ambiguous cologne, he was just beside him after all, a beautiful lime-scented presence sitting side-saddle on the edge of his desk. For the moment it made him careless and ironic about Justin. ‘Pass me the pipe again,’ he said.

When they’d both had another hot pull on it, he watched Lars get up and go across in front of him to shift some papers from the other chair and sit down. His movements were decisive but inaccurate, and Robin found that a comforting proof that they were getting out of it together. He had the feeling with this young man that he didn’t need to pretend, that he could perfectly well tell him things about his life and how it wasn’t one he’d ever planned on, things he hadn’t yet told to anyone else. It was the feeling of unexpected arrival that marked out some friendships in their first hours, and left other chance encounters as memories of unexplored potential. Even so, he was forty-seven, and stoned and horny, and knew what he was allowing to happen.

‘Wow,’ said Lars, ‘this is quite something’, and shook his head and pushed both hands back through his shiny pale-blond hair. It was a three-legged Frank Lloyd Wright chair he was sitting on, with his thighs apart, following the suggestion of the triangular seat. Robin knew they weren’t saying much, but wasn’t sure if the boy did, or if they savoured the smiling silence in the same way – how many parts lust, how many mere stunned surrender to the drug.

‘You probably had a lot of coke first,’ Robin said, and they both found something a bit comic in his words; sometimes everything you said was funny, and waited for with a bottled-up laugh, as if the simple fact of enunciation were preposterous – as it had often seemed in the giggly tedium of adolescence.

‘Whatsaname,’ Lars said, ‘Danny’s lover is quite off his face, I think.’

The words hung for a while in Robin’s mind before finding any clear referents in the outside world. He watched Lars undoing one, two, three shirt-buttons and sliding a hand in to stroke and comfort himself. The phrase ‘Danny’s lover’, which Robin had never heard before, was coolly unambiguous, but he couldn’t attach it to a particular person. He saw how lover had become a gay term; you didn’t hear straight people talk about their lover, there was a new defiance in the bucolic old word. He thought Lars might mean George, and said, ‘Well, he brought the stuff, didn’t he? He’s probably had much more than anyone else.’

Lars was smiling distantly at him, as though he hadn’t heard him. Then he said, ‘No, you mean George. I mean his new lover.’ He looked down, the matter seemed to be closed, but he added, ‘I hate George.’

‘Yes, he’s an absolute shit,’ said Robin, which they both found extremely funny.

‘I’ve been with George,’ Lars went on, ‘and I can tell you – quite uncategorically – how he treated me, well . . . he treated me like shit.’

‘He dumped you!’ Robin said, with a broad new sense of metaphor. ‘Baby, you were lucky.’ He swung round with a grin to sit square in the chair, with his strong Blue’s legs in their pale old denim stretched out in front of him. He let the matter of Danny’s new lover slip away into the remote context of the party and the night outside. He wasn’t going to do anything with Lars, but it was thrilling being with him. The reflection of the lamp in the window obliterated the view of the moonlit field they might otherwise have had. Robin felt a steady buzz between his legs, and a ringing in his ears, and surreally imagined them connected, like an impatiently thumbed door-bell. He laid a hand loosely across his lap, concealing and emphasising. It was a lovely mood, he felt his unrefusable sexual power again, with the certainty that it was what made his life worth living. Just the weight of his hand was electrifying. He saw the photos on the wall, and thought of Simon when he had first met him, and Marcus coming round in the afternoons while Jane was at the library; and Justin in the stinking Gents on Clapham Common – he dared himself to think of him, and found he could do so with a new complacency.

Lars was crouching by Robin’s chair, with an arm across his knees to balance himself. His finger drew a little pattern again and again on Robin’s right thigh, but he was looking up into his face, hardly aware of what he was doing. Robin found himself gasping quietly, as if he kept forgetting to breathe. Lars’s features had taken on a marvellous intensity, they seemed to have been cleansed to their essential beauty in a solution of desire. Robin had never taken ecstasy, but he thought its effect might be something inexpressibly vivid like this. Lars was familiar, but he was compellingly strange too – Robin frowned and sneered as he ran his fingers over the young man’s cheeks and nose and open lips. Lars butted his face repeatedly against his hands, licking and biting them, and muttering what Robin might have said, ‘You’re so beautiful.’

He slid up along Robin’s sprawled body, and the warm squeezing weight of him was almost a torture of excitement. They were face to face when someone tried the door, and after a moment a slow loud voice said, ‘I dunno, it’s locked, there’s a light on’, and the handle was rattled again. ‘Someone shagging in there already’ – and a sullen laugh. Then the voices retreating, with a shouted afterthought, ‘Give ’im one from me!’ The two of them were still, their parched mouths inches apart, faces a flushed blur. Robin smelt the stale coke-breath that outlasted the sweet reek of the hash smoke; he tested it for its own perverse sweetness, since it was Lars’s breath. And then there was the kiss, slow and luscious at first, and then choking and ferocious, as though each was trying to cram his head into the other’s mouth. Something happened then for Robin, maybe it was the ghost presence of his lover’s cold kiss beneath the passionate kiss of this virtual stranger, some oblique and painful reminder, the drug’s jumped connections. He felt it sharpen and chill like the alarm that penetrates a dream before it wakes you. He held the boy’s heavy head away from him – he kept pushing towards Robin’s ear with the slurred whisper, ‘I want you to fuck me . . .’ Robin said, ‘No . . . no . . .’ firmly, regretfully, and made himself awkward against him, though he knew he was in no state to understand. He watched with guilty dismay as Lars struggled to his feet, pushing down his trousers and pants in a sort of sexual fury. Robin shut his eyes and heard the shout and felt the warm accusing strokes fall lightly across his face.

‘Darling, have you heard, we’re all going to Sicily,’ said Justin, though the last word didn’t come out quite right. He was leaning by the sink with his arms round two young men, who were chewing and grinning on and off as they remembered or forgot where they were; one was half-naked and had a faint stubble across a once-shaved chest. Each of them seemed to support the others by some clever structural counterpoise. It was clear that Justin, who was merely very drunk, had happily synchronised with their different disarray. ‘We’re going to Sissy with Marge, and Curtains,’ he said, shaking each of them in turn to win confirmation of this delightful new fact.

‘Mark, and Curtis,’ said one of the boys, with actually rather thin tolerance, and lifted an empty champagne bottle to his lips.

Robin looked at them from his own stoned distance. Standing alone by the stream for five minutes, ten minutes, his head ringing, his eyes twitching across the plains of stars, he had been gripped by a ghastly adolescent sense of helplessness – though he knew his thoughts had been wilfully fucked up or unblocked by the hash. He was still so randy that he shivered and swallowed as his mind groped round Justin, round one or two others at the party, and Lars of course, to whom he’d ended up feebly saying, ‘I’m very sorry, please don’t tell anyone’; as he’d watched him go off into the shadows he was picturing what he might have done with him if they’d met up fifteen years ago in some club – though Lars was only about nine then probably. Robin found himself laughing dully at the thought that he could have seen him as a schoolboy on his honeymoon trip northwards with Simon; their visit to the wooden palace at Trondheim came back to him with extraordinary clarity. That was another effect of the drug, a vividness of memory, almost as if under hypnosis, he could walk from room to room of a house he hadn’t seen for twenty years, or feel the presence of a long-forgotten man with the stifling closeness of a figure summoned up by a medium.

‘Where have you been darling?’ said Justin, and the boys tittered because he had an amusing way of speaking – he could hint at a lurking joke in ‘Pass the salt’, which was why there was something so grim to his black moods, when his command of the saving funniness of things was shown to be a mere rhetorical trick.

‘Have you missed me?’ Robin asked, running his hand over the top of his head with a sudden horror that it might still be streaked with Lars’s dried semen.

Justin paused to consider this opportunity for marital pleasantness. Maybe he sensed Robin’s unusual odour of guilt, maybe Lars had in fact blabbed about being led on by Danny’s daddy in the garden shed. Justin said, ‘I’m entertaining, darling. I can’t think of everyone’, at which Robin managed a pained smile and turned away to find a drink. He felt the usual loneliness of the party-giver heightened, a memory of something he didn’t know had happened to him, the time when all the guests had gone and you went to bed alone.

A hawkishly handsome young man was standing by the fridge, watching the party’s lurching rallies through the kitchen with a cool smile. Perhaps because he was wearing both a shirt and a jacket he gave the impression of being unpopular. Robin cracked himself a beer and nodded at him, and the boy said, ‘Hullo there, you don’t know me, my name’s Gordon’, as though he was trying to sell him double-glazing over the phone.

‘I’m Robin . . . Danny’s father.’

‘Ah yes!’ They shook hands, Gordon lowered his head and peeped up at him in a mock-modest way that seemed to carry some reproof. ‘You’re enjoying the party,’ he said.

‘Am I?’ said Robin, wondering just how bombed and sweaty he looked.

‘I mean, I hope you are.’ Gordon laughed, and of course it was the slight Scottish colouring to his voice that gave him his critical leverage. He nodded sideways, at the boys, the music, the chaos. ‘It might be quite a shock having all these youngsters in the house.’

‘I was a youngster myself, you know, until . . . well, quite recently,’ Robin said, with a powerful smile.

‘I didn’t mean to suggest you were old.’ Gordon gestured at his own physiognomy, and then toiled in his error: ‘Heavens, I’m thirty-four myself. It was my birthday last week, in fact. Born June the sixteenth 1962, in Perth’s Memorial Infirmary.’ Robin nodded and raised his can in salutation. ‘Ah, there are a couple of seats free,’ Gordon said, and ushered him towards them as if, whatever he might claim, he was venerable enough to need a sit-down.

‘Um . . .’

‘You may be asking yourself how I know Danny,’ Gordon was saying. ‘We slept together a couple of times, not far apart, back in February. Once at his place, once at mine.’

‘Ah,’ said Robin, wondering if he’d missed the passage of some new freedom of information act. ‘And just how far apart did you sleep?’

‘Ha-ha,’ said Gordon dryly. ‘No, we’ve kept in touch. And I was very honoured to be asked to the party.’ Robin supposed he could see what Danny had seen in the young man; the humourless twinkle was itself obscurely provocative. ‘I don’t really do this sort of thing any more.’

Robin hid his sympathy with that remark. ‘You’ve not done any of this, for instance?’ – nodding at a couple leering rivalrously over the busy razor.

‘What, the charlie, the snow, the laughing powder?’ said Gordon, with the weary sarcasm of a customs officer. ‘No, I don’t do that stuff. I don’t drink, either,’ he added, clarifying something else Robin found odd about him, the scary availability of his hands for exaggerated gestures; again there was the sense of salesmanship. ‘No, no. I prefer the high of life.’

‘Ah, that,’ said Robin.

Gordon leant forward – they were knee to knee. ‘I think the real excitement comes from embracing life as it is, not escaping from it into unsustainable fantasies.’ He was smiling, but Robin thought there was some kind of challenge in his unconversational tone, and said easily and courteously,

‘Don’t you think sometimes the escape can be part of the embracing? I mean, altered mental states, or whatever, may all be experiences worth having.’ Gordon was looking at him intently, and Robin recognised the attitude of someone who waits with apparent respect for a phrase they can attach their argument to. ‘How dc you go about embracing life as it is?’ Robin asked. ‘At any given moment?’

Gordon didn’t answer this directly; he smiled thinly to suggest he’d spotted a trick question. Then he said, very quietly and confidentially, ‘We have to be ready for change, when it comes.’

Robin said, ‘Yes, quite. Though as an architect I have a certain taste for permanence . . .’

‘I don’t think we have any idea of the changes that are going to happen, very soon, as God’s plan for the new universe is worked out.’

Robin snickered, out of irritable embarrassment at . . . his name being mentioned, and also at the contrast between this encounter and the previous one in the shed, which he saw in a vivid regretful flashback. Of course the boy was an evangelist, and an evangelist of change, which would make him all the more inflexible. He said, ‘I don’t know about that’, and looked around. Gordon had rather cleverly got them trapped in these chairs behind the door and out of the rescuing flux of the party. Robin saw his own progress through the evening, a veering line through the margins of his son’s event, a sequence of volatile encounters in the near-dark. But Gordon’s next question seemed to let him off:

‘Do you read much?’

‘Not as much as I’d like,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve been reading a bit of Hardy lately; for local reasons.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Thomas Hardy? Celebrated Dorset novelist. And poet.’

‘Right . . . You haven’t read Arthur Conan Doyle.’

‘Oh. Well, not since I was a boy. I suppose everyone reads him when they’re young, don’t they? Or used to, anyway.’ Gordon nodded – that seemed to confirm something he’d heard. ‘Do you just like the Holmes stories or do you like Brigadier Gerard as well?’

There was a pause while the question was assayed for relevance. ‘I’ve spoken to him,’ Gordon said.

‘Brigadier Gerard, you mean, or – ?’

‘I’ve spoken to Arthur.’

‘Recently?’

‘A friend of mine is in close and frequent contact with him.’

‘I see,’ said Robin. ‘You mean your friend’s a medium’ – aware that he had thought of mediums only minutes before, which was in itself faintly spooky.

‘Arthur is very much one of the higher spirits working for world change. A truly great spirit.’

Robin’s eyes made a quick panicky search of the kitchen. Danny was just slipping out into the garden. He wondered if his son had heard all this from Gordon, or if they’d been too busy having sex. He supposed he must have invited everyone in his address-book, perhaps from a fear that few would come so far – though the bores, of course, were always eager to travel.

‘He has a very fine voice,’ Gordon was saying. ‘I may say a truly fine voice.’

Robin didn’t know quite how to signal that for him the conversation was over. ‘What did he say?’ he asked, and took a scowling swig from his beer-can.

‘I’ve got to wait. He told me I’ve got to wait; and when the time comes to move, then he’ll let me know. With the Millennium, of course, there will be many and great changes. He said, “You’re in the right place at the right time”, which was truly wonderful. It’s already been a great help to me with traffic problems, always getting a green light, avoiding the major tailbacks at road-works and so forth.’

‘That must be useful.’

‘Oh that’s just a tiny example. It was Arthur who told me that I had been a sixteen-year-old fish-seller in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus Christ.’

‘You’d never suspected?’ Robin had an abnormal sense of himself as a fount of unnoticed irony.

‘He also told me that I’m not really gay. I just happen to be attracted to certain men. It’s a spiritual thing, in fact, a spiritual magnetism; usually we’ve known each other in another life. Arthur said what I really have to find is a wife, he was strict about that.’ And here Gordon too looked round the room with a tinge of anxiety. ‘It’s the woman’s destiny to support the man,’ he said; which perhaps gave some idea of the nature of the new world order, when it came about in four years’ time.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Robin, shaking his emptyish beer-can and beginning to nod goodbye.

Gordon had an almost cunning look. ‘I understand you’re now living as a gay man,’ he said.

‘Well I am a gay man,’ said Robin. He stood up, and as he did so he saw Justin stepping cautiously out into the garden. ‘Ah, there goes life,’ he said. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and embrace it.’