The Spell

Danny went down to Dorset for a few days to put some distance between himself and Alex; though the reason he gave was that he wanted to check up on his father and Justin. He knew Alex couldn’t object to this kind-hearted plan, and he tried to persuade himself that Alex too might feel ready to cool it. He brought his big notebook with him as usual, and his more secret plan was to try to write a play about some of the people he knew on the club scene, Heinrich and Lars and a few others, with talk of an enigmatic older man, which would be his homage to George, as well as a kind of revenge on him. He didn’t envisage any technical obstacles to writing something stageable and sensationally topical; he spent one morning planning the guest-list for the first-night party, and going over certain points in the interviews he would give.

At the end of the week Alex came down to join him. Danny half-hoped that Robin might make a fuss about this, but his father treated Alex these days with amiable indifference, perhaps out of respect to Danny’s boyfriend, perhaps because he guessed he wouldn’t be his boyfriend much longer. He arrived soon after ten on Saturday morning, which like so many of his actions made you calculate the exact degree of inconvenience and eagerness that lay behind it; he’d have got up at six at the latest. He stood about expectantly in the kitchen as the others ate a halting, hung-over breakfast. He had some photographs of their long weekend with him, and showed them round dotingly, like an excited voyeur of his own happiness. Justin was rather pointedly studying the Equity prices in The Times; Robin served up more and more fried food. Danny’s impression was that the two of them were having a lot of sex and a lot of rows, which was probably better than having neither, as had been the case before. Robin did what he could to shield him responsibly from both things, and made him wonder if he could dodge those two things himself this weekend.

It was a breezy blue day, and Danny thought they should get out of the house. ‘Shall we go down to the beach?’ he said, with a tug on Alex’s shirt-sleeve, and an awkward sense of a withheld endearment. He stuffed some towels and a book he was reading into his knapsack, but left his notebook behind, as he didn’t want Alex getting interested in his play, or indeed in some of the other things it contained. They went up to the car, and Danny leapt into the passenger seat without opening the door. The car was fun, after all, and freedom. He switched on the CD player, which whirred and checked itself and jumped to the middle of some slammingly hard house that Alex must have been listening to en route. Really he wondered at times what he’d turned this nice Donizetti-fancying civil servant into. As they drove up the lane, Mr Harland-Ball was standing in his gateway, and Danny called out, ‘We’re queer!’ in a helpful tone.

Alex changed into top on the Bridport road and let his hand drift from the gear-stick on to Danny’s thigh. And it was true that Danny was tinglingly randy after a night of red wine and Irish whiskey, and had been feeling a touch redundant, alone in the house with a busy couple – it required a certain tactful blindness, and deafness. He sprawled back for a moment, so that Alex could feel his cock, but then said, ‘Actually, you’d better concentrate on the road.’

Alex said, ‘It’s strange having the other two in the house again, after we had it all to ourselves.’

Danny paused and said, ‘It is their home.’

‘I know, darling. That’s not quite what I meant.’

‘You mustn’t be so possessive,’ Danny said, and smacked Alex’s knee to make a little joke of it; when he glanced at his face a moment later he saw his blush, and knew he was silently absorbing and refuting the charge. Danny turned off the music, which was a bit strong for eleven in the morning, and started fiddling with the radio. Alex said,

‘Did I tell you I saw Dave the other day?’

‘Dave who?’

‘Your friend who works in the porno shop.’

‘Oh, right.’ Danny found his favourite dance-music station, but it kept warping into a programme of hilarious advertisements in French. ‘You really need to get a better sound system,’ he said, not for the first time.

‘What is his surname, anyway?’

‘Whose?’

‘Dave’s . . .’

‘I don’t know,’ said Danny. ‘I’m not that intimate with him.’

It was already busy at the beach, and they had to park some way from the refreshment cabins and the edge of the shingle. Danny’s eyes moved mischievously around behind the unreadable black discs of his shades. He noted Terry’s Lovemobile drawn up at the side of the Hope and Anchor, by some special arrangement he had with the landlord; and there were some nice big teenagers and a few sexy young dads mixed in with the trashier holiday-makers. Danny glanced at Alex to see if he had noticed them, but he seemed absorbed in the practicalities of the expedition. He walked a few yards ahead, past the Fo’c’sle Fish Bar and the Kiss Me Hardy gift kiosk, which had lost the last letter of its name. And even that detail seemed to raise the sexual pitch of the day.

The top of the beach was a low ramp of shingle, but further down there were patches and stripes of coarse grey sand. To the right the deep channel of the river opened out between its timbered walls. Alex didn’t know about the death of a local boy there, who had dived on to a pleasure-boat and broken his neck; Danny had read the story in the West Dorset Herald and preferred not to look at the shrivelled flowers and blotched messages that were still heaped on the quayside. He trailed on towards the further end of the beach, where the cliffs reared up again, and there weren’t so many little kids. He wanted to sit down near some lads he could get into conversation with. Alex came along, upset and inquisitive about the death, and why Danny hadn’t waited for him. ‘I think we should go here, darling,’ he called, indicating the last free patch of sand; and Danny mopingly complied and turned back.

He had two contradictory feelings. He wished Alex wouldn’t call him darling all the time in public; and on the other hand he was so conditioned to a world in which everyone was gay that he found it hard to bear in mind, down here, a hundred miles from London, that almost everyone wasn’t. He raked the beach with a cruisy steadiness, a mysteriously knowledgeable smile, as if he had only to decide. Alex settled the bags and towels like an obstacle to escapades which, Danny briefly admitted, were never likely to happen. But there again, rationally, statistically, magnetically, there was a real chance that he might have picked up.

They sat down and he turned his attention to the sea, which Alex was reacting to in a forced, appreciative tone. There was a dazzle, even through sunglasses, on the small, noisy breakers, and the frothy film of water that slid back down the beach. A short way out there was an almost hidden rock over which a bright hood of foam reared and fell from time to time. After summers on the long surfing beaches north of San Diego, with their stilted lifeguard stations and neck-ricking parades of godlike men, Danny found the English seaside tackily spartan. Even on a hot day like this, there was a rough little breeze that hummed and buzzed over the nearby stones. He kept his T-shirt on and lay back looking at the sky; where there was nothing to see, except the highest faint plumes of cirrus. Alex said he thought there was something specially ethereal about the clouds, they were so high that it was hard to think of them as related to the earth, they were like vapour-trails of a war in heaven, or something. Danny, who had spent an instructive weekend with a Scotsman from the Met Office, said more scientifically that they were seven or eight miles up, and at that altitude would be composed entirely of ice-crystals.

When he sat up again he saw that Alex was looking at him, and said, ‘What . . .?’

‘Nothing, darling. Have you heard from George about the chain, by the way?’

Danny sounded cross. ‘No, I haven’t. I haven’t seen George, or heard a squeak out of him for weeks.’ It was only as he said the sentence that he decided who he was being cross with. ‘I think he’s dropped me, the bastard.’ He frowned very hard to stifle a grin. It was fun to have this entirely fictional pretext to talk about George. Alex looked both pleased and troubled.

‘I hope you’ll get it back soon.’

Danny nodded and looked out to sea. ‘You never told me where you got it,’ he said, with half-hearted wiliness.

‘I can tell you if you like. It was left to me by my grandmother.’

‘Really . . .?’

‘I think she thought I could give it to my wife.’

Danny guffawed anxiously. The next stage of his plan had been to confess that George had lost the chain or sold it out of a misunderstanding. He wished he could just say that it had been stolen – and quite possibly swallowed – by a satyromaniac Brazilian dwarf. But it was never easy to be brutal to Alex. In fact the need to treat him delicately, to protect him, as you protect your parents with small lies and omissions, was a strong part of Danny’s love for him. It was a kind of respect, and the lies themselves were coloured by solicitude. At times, the success of his deceits gave him a dizzy feeling of competence, at sustaining a double life; and that in turn made him proud of his affair with Alex, as an achievement, unlike the straightforward world of his miscellaneous fucks, with its perishable feelings and minimal commitments. But the grandmother’s jewellery, the wayward convictions that must have led Alex to make that gift . . . It was like a creepy bit of private magic, a secret engagement ring. Danny said, ‘I had thought of asking George down this weekend. I think you two should get to know each other better.’

Alex said, ‘You had, had you?’ and Danny laughed. It was so easy to trigger Alex’s jealousy, and funny that he didn’t realise that George was virtually the one person in his world that Danny could never have. The prohibition made the memories of him cruelly arousing, and he hunched forward to hide his erection.

Alex made quite a performance of changing into his swimming-trunks under a towel, like a straight person who has grown suspicious of the atmosphere in a locker-room. ‘Just get changed,’ Danny said. ‘Nobody cares.’

‘Thanks very much,’ said Alex. ‘I notice you’re not getting ready.’

‘I’ve got my shorts on under my jeans,’ Danny said. ‘Besides, you wouldn’t catch me going in there.’

‘The young of today have no fibre,’ said Alex, pulling his shirt over his head, and standing for a moment, square-shouldered and head back, to make a joke out of his self-consciousness. Danny glanced up at his tall flat body, and remembered how he had found it fascinating and elegant, in its lanky way, after all the superfluous muscle he was used to being gripped by. And Alex was surprisingly strong, even if the ghost of an old back injury warned him away from some of the more demanding sex holds. Beside Danny he looked eerily pale, though if you’d taken his trunks off you would have seen the thin priming of tan on the rest of him. ‘Well, I’m going in,’ Alex said, and stepped forward, still in mock-heroic fashion, knowing he would be watched all the way to the water. ‘And I don’t want you talking to those rough boys,’ he said, with a repressive nod at a group about twenty yards behind them.

When he was in quite deep and his head rising and dropping on the swell with a sleeked, stoic, solitary look, Danny gave him a wave, and thought maybe he was more like a child than a parent. Once you got him happy and absorbed in some activity you would be free to take up your own compromised interests again. Alex waved back, with a gasping grin, and seemed encouraged to strike out on a further lap. Now and then Danny saw the upward flicker of his elbows.

There was a rattle of shingle and Danny turned casually to see a couple of the rough boys hobbling down from their encampment of lilos and six-packs. One of them was blond and brawny, the other wiry and slight, with a dark pony-tail and Gothic tattoos: he had a boogy-board under his arm. Both of them wore long baggy shorts, as Danny liked to himself, though he knew they did it from a laddish fear of revealing themselves. He gave a tutting nod of greeting, and the dark boy said, ‘All right?’, which in a deep Dorset accent had a niceness, even a kind of chivalry, that it wouldn’t have had in London.

‘All right?’ said Danny. And then, ‘That your board?’ The bright skeleton-key of thoughtless phrases that unlocked each new contact, the quick-witted focusing of tone: he kept telling Alex there was no one you couldn’t talk to, if you wanted to, it didn’t matter what you said; but Alex was always worrying about the content.

It turned out they were Carl (blond) and Les, local lads. Carl was blushingly revealed as engaged, but Les was on the rebound and desperate to score. ‘I know what you mean,’ said Danny, and colluded with hesitant half-phrases in their appraisal of the nearby girls. Les was hardly his type but he had an unexpectedly sweet smile. He said,

‘This sea’s crap.’

Danny said, ‘You need north Cornwall, don’t you, for the surf?’ He tactfully withheld his Californian credentials, which he thought might crush the boys; he couldn’t imagine boogy-boarding in these stocky northern breakers if you’d done it out there, and could remember the jolting zoom of the ride in across a field of foam a hundred yards wide.

Carl said, ‘It’s usually better than this’, with a mixture of local pride and vague provincial discontent. ‘Where are you from then?’

‘London, yeah . . .’ said Danny, looking down and brushing sand from the towel he was sitting on. ‘My dad lives down here – well, Litton Garnbril.’

‘Ah, nice,’ said Les; but didn’t ask anything more.

Carl said, ‘I don’t know about that one, Les. I reckon she’d do for you’ – his eyes following a biggish teenage girl in her timid but heavy-footed approach to the water. Danny sniggered, but apparently the suggestion was serious: the two of them wandered a few paces away, and he read the skull-crowned Motorhead tattoo on Les’s left shoulder as he squinted seawards. Really, hetero life was so archaic and mad – Danny let out a quiet chuckle of relief at his own good fortune. And maybe Les too had his doubts:

‘No. She’d squash me,’ he said. ‘She’d squeeze all the life out of me, that one.’

Then up from the sea came Alex, so that they seemed to be staring at him: he clearly wondered what was happening.

‘Here comes your dad, then,’ said Carl. ‘Well, we’d better get in that sea if we’re ever going to.’ And off they trod, as butchly as possible, but stooping and jabbing out their arms as they went over pebbly bits. Danny noted a kind of social cringe in their avoidance of Alex. He watched him approach, breathing roughly, tilting his head sideways to shake water from his ears, and of course he felt the romance of it, his lover coming up from the waves, in the flush and shiver of his exertion, leaning out of the noon sky to pluck up his towel. And then it passed.

At lunch-time they trekked along to the Hope and Anchor, asking Carl and Les’s other friends to keep an eye on their things; though Alex was fretful about the arrangement. In the restaurant section at the back Danny spotted Terry, looking very handsome, in a blue-and-white striped sweat-shirt, like a minor sixties film-star, being treated to a huge lobster lunch by a man with glasses and a linen jacket, who might have been an Oxford don. It was amazing how well he did down here, with a little help presumably from Roger and John at the Mill. He looked up and winked at Danny over his patron’s shoulder.

After a couple of pints of strong lager Danny felt much more cheerful, and for a while was full of randomly focused energy. Alex only drank Appletise, because he was driving, or didn’t want to get a headache. He watched with a tense half-smile when Danny drifted away from him to gossip with strangers, feed crisps to their children, and briefly take part in a game of darts. It was a compulsion of Danny’s, he wasn’t being deliberately neglectful, in fact he introduced Alex to a good-looking man he had just introduced himself to, but Alex was so stiff, and the conversation died as soon as he left them together. When they were outside again Alex started talking in a hopeless farcical way about someone who worked in his office. Danny scanned the parking-lot and then the beach as they walked along, and said ‘Yeah’ with adequate regularity. An athletic-looking blond couple were walking ahead of them, both presumably in swimsuits, but they were covered by long T-shirts, so that they seemed from behind to be wearing nothing but the T-shirts. The man had beautiful muscular legs, with a glimmer of down on the back of the calves; the back of his head was square and Germanic, cropped short up to a thick topknot, which was stiffly untidy where salt-water had dried in it. The woman laughed and put her arm round his waist, his hem-line rose a fraction and showed the edge of his tight blue trunks. Danny was imagining licking the back of his neck as he fucked him. ‘Well I thought it was funny anyway,’ said Alex.

Danny looked at him poker-faced, and then laughed, and said, ‘It is funny, darling. Very funny.’ He wondered how long it was since the Germans had had sex, and how much longer the woman could possibly defer having it again. He dropped a little behind Alex, as he sometimes did, in the caressing grip of his own thoughts, and also with a sad but liberating recognition of something quite obvious: they had nothing in common. Their paths in life had joined for a moment, Danny had done a good deal for him, one way and another he’d got him sorted, and now it was natural and right that he should send him gently on his way. The process was so logical that he thought Alex himself, after the first upset of it, would be bound to see that it was right.

Back at their spot, Danny said, ‘Okay, time for a kip, I think’, and lay out flat on his towel. Alex hopped about between him and the sun, getting undressed all over again. He said,

‘Aren’t you taking anything off?’

‘Oh all right,’ said Danny, sitting up and twisting off his canvas shoes, one against the other. ‘You don’t want to get skin cancer.’ Actually it was very hot, but he enjoyed the tease of keeping his jeans and T-shirt on. Alex was always looking at him, time and again he would be gazing at him when he woke up, as if he couldn’t believe his luck. ‘Anyway, you’ve seen it all before,’ he said.

‘Hm,’ said Alex, clearly thinking that was rather beneath him. And Danny saw that being so much younger he must resist the temptation to be childish. He decided to read, and got out the bizarre book he had found in the lav at the cottage. If you started it at the front it was called Memoirs of an Old Man of Thirty; but you could turn it round and start from the back, where the text, which otherwise appeared upside-down, was called Loves of a Young Man of Eighty. It seemed to be a dodgy piece of 1890s smut; the Young Man of Eighty referred to his dick as his yard, which Danny took a while to get the hang of. He couldn’t see why people kept wanting to look at his yard. Alex said, ‘What are you reading?’ and when he held up the book he seemed oddly put out by it. ‘Are you enjoying it?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, I guess.’

And then rather anxiously, ‘Do you find it sexy?’

Danny made a moue of uncertainty. ‘I suppose you could just about wring a wank out of it, if you were desperate.’

Alex inspected the book prudishly and winced at the overlapping wine-rings on the white vellum binding. ‘It’s been half torn out of its covers,’ he said, and threw it down again on the towel. ‘But what does it matter? It’s only a rare book. Perhaps you’d put some stuff on my back.’

‘Sure.’ Danny knelt and squirted out a curl of aloe cream between Alex’s shoulder-blades and rubbed it in briskly all the way down towards the black edge of his Speedos. He thought how uncertain sex-magic was. It struck, and there was a tingle in the air around a man, and when you touched him it flowed round you too. Some people kept it for you for years, and when you saw them there was the same dependable shock, the shiver of rightness, the cool burn deep between the legs, the gentle thump on the chest, the private surrender of a smile. And with others it faded, like a torch left on, or with the quick disillusion that followed a hit of coke. A couple of months ago he adored Alex’s back, he had mauled it and scratched his heels across it, amazed by Alex’s fierceness on top of him; and he had arched over it too, in the lovely dismissive lust of a fuck from behind, getting crueller and crazier to the tune of Alex’s shouts. Yet oddly, here on the beach, he could think of those things without a twitch. Presumably the light swipes and probings of his fingers were giving Alex pleasure, but to him this was a sportsmanlike task. He gave him a couple of slaps and said, ‘You’re done.’

Then he lay down again and slept and half-slept, in a tumult of bright dreams that shrank away when a child shrieked or the pebbles clattered, but then crowded back at once with their unlikely predicaments and jabber of new arrivals. He was aware of Alex talking and had the sense of himself as a joke, lying there while they talked about him and said ‘I don’t think he’s really asleep’. He smiled to show that he wasn’t, and after a necessary moment’s calculation said, ‘Hello Terry’, without opening his eyes. ‘Come and join us.’

Terry had evidently said goodbye to his lunch companion and had time on his hands before going up to Broad Down to sort out the disco. Danny made a space for him, and Alex moved too, without much enthusiasm, and said, ‘You do things over at Bride Mill, don’t you Terry?’

‘I have been known to,’ said Terry.

‘And what’s it like? I gather it’s on the expensive side.’

‘Gor, the prices there. It’s very nice, mind, it’s beautiful.’

‘I thought I might take Danny for lunch tomorrow.’

‘Well, very nice,’ said Terry. ‘It’s, you know, it’s posh. It’s mainly for people of the older persuasion.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ said Danny quietly; though what sounded like a flattered demurral masked a moment of decision for him. He couldn’t go to the Mill with Alex. He couldn’t sit with him in the oak-beamed dining-room, and chatter at him over the fresh-cut roses and the leather-bound folio of the wine-list, and smirk with him about the chorus-line of cow-licked young waiters as if nothing was wrong that couldn’t be made right by a little fine living. He could feel the quality of anxiety in Alex’s extravagance, and foresee the claustrophobic coupledom of Sunday lunch under John and Roger’s velvety patronage. So whatever was going to happen would have to happen before then. He found he had a deadline, and that meant he had a few words to prepare.

Terry said, ‘I got that Billy Nice, is it, CD.’

‘Oh, Ricky Nice,’ said Alex, before Danny could say anything.

‘Yeah. It’s great when you’ve had a few.’

‘A few what . . .?’ said Alex.

‘You want to hear him live,’ Danny said, and pushed at Terry’s knee impatiently. ‘You’ve got to come and see me in London, man. I’ll take you down to BDX.’ He hadn’t planned the first person singular, but it was true to his mood and his instantaneous vision of Terry naked and face down in his Notting Hill room.

‘Yeah, we’ll show you a good time,’ Alex said.

After a minute, Danny said, ‘Gosh, I’d like an ice cream, or a cold drink.’

‘Yeah,’ said Terry, with a slow nod and a look of ready but undirected cunning.

Alex said, ‘I am a bit dry . . .’

‘Perhaps,’ said Danny, ‘darling, you might be a complete hero and go and get us something. I don’t think I could face walking all the way back. What do you want, Terry, a Coke? I think I’ll have an ice lolly. Oh please . . .’ and he made a feeble gesture of supplication and fell backwards on to the towel.

Alex pulled on his shoes, and began his long tramp over the shingle, holding his money in his hand. When he was thirty yards away Danny and Terry both got undressed, with the absent-minded rapidity of something often rehearsed. Under his jeans Terry had on a pair of very tight yellow swimming-trunks, cut square across the thigh, with a gold medallion like a belt-buckle sewn on the wide waistband; either they were camp sixties retro or had remained in stock since that time in one of the slower-moving Bridport outfitters. Danny was in his usual boyish shorts, stone-coloured but semi-transparent when wet. He passed Terry the sun-block and got him to massage it into his back as he lay with his chin on his fist, and his stiffening dick pressing into the sand. Terry himself was a wonderful colour – the patchy burns from different outside jobs had fused by now into a steady Greek or Spanish brown. When he’d finished he stretched out beside Danny, on Alex’s towel, and said, ‘I suppose this is as far as it goes.’

‘Um . . . I’m not sure about that,’ Danny said. He had a funny little sense of responsibility.

‘You two not getting on so well any more?’ said Terry, in his blunderingly intuitive fashion. Danny looked up to where Alex could still be seen moving away, his long strides hampered by the slipping pebbles. ‘I reckon he’s still tipping his hat at you, anyway,’ Terry said.

‘He’s a really sweet guy,’ Danny said. ‘I love him very much. But, you know how it is. I used to jump on him, now he jumps on me.’

‘Well then. You’re not in love with him.’

Danny wondered if Terry knew what he was talking about. ‘I’ve only been in love once,’ he said; and decided in a second not to elaborate. He’d seen George chatting up Terry at the party, and had been careful not to find out what happened – it was one shake of the sex-dice he didn’t want to contemplate. He said, ‘You know me, Terry. I’m not ready to settle down. I have to keep things from him all the time. We’re just not meant to be together.’

‘Still a chance for me then,’ said Terry, touchingly enough. Danny looked him over, his eyes coming back to play between his legs, where a stealthy upheaval had already taken place.

‘There will always be a place for you in my, um . . .’ he said, and reached out to snap at the elastic of his trunks. He wondered if there was some futuristic way they could have sex here, in the middle of the beach, without anyone knowing. Then he said, ‘Or do you mean a chance with Alex?’

Terry pondered it. ‘I’d say he’s quite nice-looking. And I dare say he’s quite well endorsed.’

‘Okay. Sure – none of that’s a problem.’ Danny remembered the days of his rapid initiation into the scene, and how anyone who had split up said ‘The sex was never that great’; so that he wondered after a while why anyone had a partner, and after a while more whether any couples actually had sex – at least with each other. And now he found the same words at the front of his mind, as an easy alternative to the more peculiar truth.

‘How come you two got together?’ said Terry. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he was your type.’

‘I don’t have a type, darling,’ said Danny, whose utopian policy was to have everyone once. ‘I thought you knew, he used to go out with Justin.’

Terry wasn’t expecting that. ‘Well I wouldn’t have thought he was his type either.’

‘Oh, you know,’ said Danny: ‘shy top and bossy bottom, it happens all the time’, and watched Terry absorb this crude but worldly insight.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘So how did Justin get off with your dad?’

Justin himself was quite free with the story of the Clapham Common Gents, but a kind of family pride, or maybe just snobbery, dissuaded Danny from passing it on to Terry. ‘Oh, they met in London someplace.’ In fact his laughter when Justin first told him had covered a few lost seconds of incredulity and shock.

‘I suppose if I was Justin, I’d probably prefer . . . Mr Woodfield, rather than Alex,’ said Terry, enjoying the new mood of frankness. ‘I always thought he was a bit of all right, your dad.’

‘Hey, no you don’t! Hands off my old man!’ said Danny, as if speaking in subtitles; and noticed the now uncontrolled mutiny in Terry’s trunks. ‘Justin’s fair enough . . .’

Terry blushed and turned on to his front. ‘And so’s Simon,’ he said, ‘I suppose’, with an effect of hurriedly covering one piece of mischief with another.

Danny worked it out behind the black sheen of his shades. He wasn’t totally easy with knowing about Justin’s indiscretions; they troubled him because they were bad jokes against his father, who had always seemed immune to attack and powered by a scandalous personal authority. ‘You’d better tell me,’ Danny said.

Terry sensed his reserve and said, ‘Nah, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Go on,’ said Danny, ‘if it doesn’t matter’ – thinking of that Jewish funeral, and his father’s freaky stoicism, like indifference, as if his homosexual loss could not be mixed with the family’s grief and embarrassment.

‘It was years ago,’ said Terry, laying his head on his arms and giving Danny a charming porny smile. ‘He used to catch hold of me and, well . . . interfere with me.’

‘Really,’ said Danny, and smiled back, because it sounded such a simple and idyllic thing to have done.

‘He used to say, “Is that a ferret in your pocket, Terry, or are you just pleased to see me?”’

Danny tried to analyse his mood, it was distilled randiness laced with anxiety, which made the randiness even stronger. He saw Alex coming down towards them at a stumbling trot, the orange melt from an ice lolly dripping through his hands and blown on to his long pale legs by the breeze. He said very quietly, in a straight-faced parody of Terry, ‘I’d like to interfere with you an’ all’, and then wondered if there was some equally effective spell for making your dick go down.

Alex’s bad mood wasn’t helped by the stifled giggling of the boys. He nudged his way on to a corner of towel and sat sucking primly at the angled straw of a fruit-juice carton. ‘I hadn’t realised it was National Snogging Day,’ he said, and scowled over his shoulder. ‘Every couple I passed were glued together at the larynx.’

‘Must be the weather,’ said Terry.

Danny was twisting his lolly round to catch the drips and mumble up the slushy fragments that slid off the stick at the lightest bite. He knew Alex was watching him and tensely day-dreaming about the kisses he still thought they were going to share.

‘The thing about Ada Ringroad,’ said Justin, ‘is that Mike can’t stand him, but Marge is being stubbornly nice to him. She asks him round almost daily, the old fag-hag. Last time we were there, Mike called him a deviant of the worst kind.’

‘How did he take that?’ asked Alex.

‘Well he was pissed, and we all laughed like lunatics, and he seemed to get the idea.’

Danny had just come down from a shower, and was buttoning his shirt and holding his own gaze in the sitting-room mirror, with a sense of readying himself for a testing premiere. ‘What does he do?’ he said. He saw Justin come up behind him and felt him too as he slid a hand around him with a kind of sexiness that was somehow made possible by Alex’s presence, as if nothing could come of it.

‘I believe he used to be a schoolmaster, darling.’ Justin peered into the mirror. ‘One can see him being pretty eager with the slipper. He wears a bow-tie, which is a well-known sign of penile inadequacy.’

‘I wasn’t actually thinking of him as a sexual partner,’ said Danny, gently freeing himself.

‘He has those schoolmaster shoes, like vulcanised Cornish pasties.’

Robin came into the room and slipped an arm round Justin in his turn. Justin glanced at his trousers and said, ‘That’s better’, and Danny knew he must have asked him to change. A little power-shift had happened as the price of the new togetherness: his father had been lightly pussy-whipped, or botty-whipped perhaps was the word, and once again the two of them were hugging and groping each other. He wondered for a second, in a spirit of fairness, if some new contract could save his affair with Alex; but saw how unalike the situations were. He didn’t need Alex.

Justin said, ‘I should warn you he’s very keen on the church; he plays the organ, and as you know Mike has a blood feud with the church. Adrian’s already very thick with the Bishops. I mean the people called Bishop,’ he explained to Alex.

Danny said, ‘You seem a bit obsessed with this chappie.’

Justin turned back to the mirror with a pout. ‘In village life, darling, one seizes on what interest one can.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Danny.

Alex got up and crossed the room to put a hand on Danny’s shoulder – it was a friendly gesture that had gone stiff with premeditation: it looked as if he was trying to restrain him.

The four of them set out through the village, sometimes like a gang across the road, then pairing up in different ways when a car came through, or a bouncing unharnessed tractor. Danny noticed the self-consciousness of the others. He thought of himself as a free person threatened by the muddled commitments of this group of older men. When his mobile rang, he answered it with a yell, and dawdled obliquely across the road, for privacy.

It took a moment to work out that it was Heinrich the barman, his boyfriend for a good ten days in the spring, who was clearly some way off his face and was talking without his usual courteous preambles and connections. ‘So, I want you to come across,’ he said.

‘I can’t come across, darling. I’m in Dorset.’

After a while Heinrich said, ‘Oh my god!’, as though he was the last to hear of something outrageous. ‘You know I am thinking about you quite intensely.’

‘Are you by yourself?’

‘Yes, I have taken an ecstasy by mistake, because I have a headache, so as you can imagine I am feeling very great indeed, but I have no one with me. And still I have a headache. Quite soon I will go to work.’

‘Are you working at the Drop tonight?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I wish I was there!’ said Danny, with a childish groan of frustration. He pictured Heinrich’s hairy legs and big friendly backside.

‘Maybe we can have sex by the phone,’ Heinrich suggested.

‘Yeah, I can’t, darling,’ said Danny, pushing his other hand into his pocket. ‘We’re just going out to drinks. We’re in the street’ – he could do ii: as a dare, but he knew he would laugh too much.

‘So who are you with just now?’

Danny looked at them across the road, in a moment’s alienated vision of them as another set of people who had nothing in common, Robin with his sportsman’s stroll and Alex anxiously slowing his angled stride and Justin, who had small feet, somehow hurrying between them. ‘Oh, with my dad, and some friends.’ He raised his voice and smiled at them, to confirm their suspicion he was talking about them.

‘Of course you will say this is because I am drug-fucked,’ said Heinrich, showing a German sense of extenuation none the less, ‘but you know what I think about you. You know to me, well, you are the best.’

Danny saw his friend again, with exact sexual recall, in the mirrored brilliance and blackness of London bars and clubs, and felt an aggravated regret for the night they would not be sharing there, the habitual regret of the pleasure-lover, but shaded with a darker discontent by the sense of something needlessly thrown aside, out of fear perhaps, though the reasons were mysterious, he had slipped away from Heinrich in an amiable absence of will, like a dreaming passenger on a slowly departing train. He said, ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get back’, and ended the call.

‘Who was that, darling?’ said Alex.

‘Yes, who was it?’ said Justin. ‘They’ve got you quite pink.’

Robin smiled at him encouragingly, confident it was some other lover seizing his chance; and Danny sensed that his father’s acceptance of him, which was so much clearer than two months ago, was easier if he was uncommitted.

As they approached the Halls’, the church clock struck six, and Justin said, ‘Listen to that! The collective whoosh of tonic-water from every middle-class home in the land’; but after only a few seconds of this imaginary susurration they heard instead the charmless preparatory tolling of the bells being raised.

‘I’m afraid we’re in for some campanology,’ Alex said.

‘That will make Mike hopping mad,’ said Justin.

In the lane beyond the church there was ‘Lostwithiel’, formerly the rectory, then the frivolously pretty ‘Ambages’, which Justin said would turn anyone queer who lived in it, and then Mike and Margery’s apparently nameless house, which he proposed should be called ‘Gordon’s’. ‘Lostwithiel’, which looked semi-derelict, was the home of the senile but beautifully spoken Miss Lawrence, who wandered in the village and forgot where she lived. She had been burgled over and over, and though nothing had been proved, Terry Badgett was still thought to have been involved. Her old untended damson-tree dropped small copious fruit across the path; where it fizzed with wasps, and people messed their shoes with it, and it gave off a sharp stale smell.

They had to wait a minute at the Halls’ front door. Danny noticed how the area round the Yale lock was scoured by innumerable rough attempts at getting the key into it. When Margery opened, she said in her melancholy way, ‘Sorry, they’re watching the cricket.’ Justin jumped at her and hugged her, in the style that he called ‘bringing the West End to the West Country’; Robin greeted her with the usual bungled chivalry of a second kiss. Danny watched Alex shake her hand, and thought how exasperatingly formal he was.

In the sitting-room Mike Hall and Adrian Ringrose were standing watching the television, as if they knew it should be switched off and were abetting each other in deferring the moment. Margery introduced Alex and Danny over the commentary on a dubious dismissal; then Mike snapped the telly off. ‘Crawley and Knight are doing well,’ he said.

Alex said to Adrian, ‘Are you interested in cricket?’ and he replied, in a mild but precise tone,

‘No, not at all.’

Danny sat down in a high-backed armchair with Alex beside him but hidden from view by the wings of the chair; he didn’t want to cuddle up to him or to be catching his eye all the time. Already, in the hall, Alex’s hand had rested on his shoulder again, as if for guidance around the obstacles of the evening, and then trailed down secretively to touch his bum. He had wriggled away, but felt the presence of his rebuff, like a bruise in the air behind him. He was saying his words in his head, repeatedly and with exaggerated confidence. He wanted the business done with fast-moving dignity, and to his own credit. It was important not to miscue it, or be hurried into it on a wave of irritation. ‘I love you very much, but you know I can’t go on seeing you.’ It steadied, and became reasonable, and at the same time, like anything repeated, began to sound like nonsense. Robin was saying, ‘Yes, Dan is my son. And Alex is, well, originally a great friend of Justin’s . . .’

‘I see,’ said Adrian, with a delayed flicker as he stored this information, though without, presumably, the hint that Danny heard, of the family closing ranks. ‘I hadn’t thought of you as old enough to have a grown-up son,’ he went on, in a drily fruity way.

‘You’re very kind,’ said Robin, tumbling into a low armchair. ‘Oddly enough, if you lose your hair before fifty, people tend to think you’re younger.’

‘It’s the hormones,’ Justin explained, like the owner, or perhaps the trainer, of a thoroughbred.

Adrian himself had crinkly old-fashioned hair, very dark for a man in his sixties. Danny’s lazily accurate sensors failed to detect in him whatever it was that might make them friends – a capacity for abandon, perhaps. He gave him a preoccupied smile and looked round the room, waiting to be amused. If his sensors picked up sex, Danny could talk a functional kind of drivel, but in a situation like this he felt it was weak or dishonest to show an interest you didn’t feel. Maybe it was just the tension of tonight, but he wondered for a sober half-minute what the fuck he was doing in this dreary room, with its worn floral carpet and crocheted cushion-covers and the various bits of short-tempered wiring that Mike had rigged up. His father said you had to get drunk here to numb the aesthetic nerve. The few pictures of Highland cattle and Spanish dancers – though, as Justin pointed out, never the two together – showed a kind of hostility to art.

Mike had gone out to get some ice, and came back in a stinging shimmer of eau de cologne, perhaps having sniffed himself in the kitchen. Danny remembered the fragrance from earlier occasions, and pictured him shaking it all over, like vinegar on to chips; last time the drinks themselves had been faintly scented from where Mike had handled the ice.

They were all taking their first two sips as the church bells broke loose in a plunging peal. Margery set down her drink as if it cost a thousand pounds and went to close the windows. ‘This is a disadvantage of village life,’ she said to Adrian.

Mike said, ‘They’re bloody bastards.’

Adrian gave a deprecating smile and said, ‘Oh, it’s a fine sound if it’s well done.’

‘They come from Salisbury,’ said Mike, ‘or Southampton, deliberately to ring the bells. Now we shall have to shout all evening.’

Clearly Margery thought this would be nothing new. ‘I suppose it is rather a fine sound,’ she said.

Danny could tell he was going to get drunk. He seemed instantly to have swallowed half of his tall Scotch and ginger ale. He thought of Heinrich again, and the striking fact of his having rung this evening, before going off to the all-night scrum of the Drop, where doubtless at some point a wide-eyed Spanish boy or French boy would lure him out to the corridor at the back. There was Heinrich himself, who was taking on new definition as a neglected suitor, and there was the world where Heinrich earned his living, where hundreds of men were forever catching his eye and poking money at him, and Danny felt jealous of both. ‘Of course I love you, Alex. But we’re not meant to be together. You know as well as I do. We have nothing in common.’ He swayed his head to the bells, which seemed for the moment to be improvising on Madonna’s ‘Bedtime Story’ and its recurrent good idea, ‘Let’s get unconscious, honey’.

Adrian said, ‘I don’t need to tell you that Litton Gambril has the oldest peal of eight bells in the county.’

‘Is that right,’ said Mike, none too pleased to be lectured on the matter by someone who’d only been in the county five minutes.

Margery smiled graciously. ‘Do you peal yourself?’ she asked, with a tiny throat-clearing to bridge her doubt about the verb.

Adrian’s long fingers smoothed and balanced his bow-tie. ‘I used to ring. I rang for Cambridge. But I fear a tendonitis made me something of a liability in the chamber later on.’

‘Well I ran for Cambridge,’ said Mike, in one of his mordant asides. ‘No bloody g.’

‘I think tonight we may hear a full grandsire major.’

The noise was muffled in the room, but still all-pervasive, and Danny found himself listening to the dense sonic aura of the overtones, which seemed like some acoustic perception you might have in the trance of an E; though the hypnotic thing was the evolving eight-note phrase, which imposed itself on the conversation, and broke up your thoughts.

Adrian, who had rapidly reverted to schoolmaster mode, was explaining some niceties of change-ringing to Justin. ‘So the conductor, as he’s known, calls out “bob” at the lead ends to produce a new row, from which further changes can then be rung.’

‘What, “Bob” . . .?’ – Margery tried it distantly, as though recalling someone she had once been fond of. She looked into her drink. ‘I suppose there must be dozens of changes.’

Adrian simpered for a second or two. ‘Well, with eight bells the number of possible changes would be factorial eight.’

‘That’s eight times seven times six times . . .’ Robin said.

There was a pause for thought. Justin said, ‘So if they rang the full grandmother’s footsteps it would be over four million changes . . .!’

‘Fucking hell . . .’ muttered Mike, and emptied his glass.

‘No, no,’ said Adrian, with a bright nervous giggle. ‘But it would be well over forty thousand, obviously.’

‘Well, they’d better not do well over forty thousand tonight,’ Mike said, getting up and standing over Adrian while he gulped down the rest of his drink.

Alex was very quiet, and Danny wondered if he knew what was coming. He probably did, he was very sensitive; and he’d been through this kind of thing before. Danny looked casually at Justin, whom he found alien in many ways, and saw that they were about to share the shabby distinction of having thrown Alex over. He knew from his break-up with George what the pain might be like. And he noticed that having been through it himself he felt somehow authorised, and even empowered, to inflict it on someone else. It was the hard currency of human business. Slightly giddy from his own philosophy, he reached up to take his second cold drink.

Adrian said, ‘I do think we’re so lucky in having this marvellous castle in the village.’ He had the surprised talkativeness of a buttoned-up person abruptly filled with alcohol.

‘I hadn’t realised just how lucky we were,’ murmured Margery.

‘There’s not much to the castle, is there?’ said Justin doubtfully.

‘My darling Justin has never actually seen the castle,’ said Robin, with a funny gloving of his gibe. ‘But he’s only lived here a year.’

‘No, ten months, actually, sweetie, and three days,’ Justin said. ‘Anyway, I never thought it wise to go down Ruins Lane.’

Adrian, who was disconcerted by jokes, said, ‘I found poor Miss Lawrence wandering up there yesterday. She had no idea where she was going.’

‘There you are,’ said Justin.

‘She needs taking care of,’ said Mike, with a certain softening of tone. ‘What are the so-called fucking social services doing?’

‘She’s as mad as a house,’ said Justin. ‘Did I tell you I saw her talking to a beetle?’

Danny smirked, and drew a finger through the wet on his glass. Mike said to him, ‘You’re very quiet tonight, young feller-me-lad.’

‘He’s always quiet,’ said Margery. ‘It’s nice.’

Justin said, ‘It’s the country air that tires him out. He’s not used to all this oxygen, are you darling. He normally goes round in a cloud of LSD, don’t you darling.’

‘I don’t think you smoke LSD,’ said Adrian.

‘No, you don’t,’ said Alex.

‘I’m sure Danny doesn’t, anyway,’ said Margery.

Adrian said, with the casualness of the shockable, ‘Do you see anything of all this drugs business up in London?’

Danny felt it would be absurd to lie. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said warmly. He could be nice to them, he guessed, but he hated the silly compromises that were forced on you when you entered the remote moral atmosphere of closety old bores. As he didn’t say anything else, Adrian nodded and coloured and said,

‘You do . . . yes . . .’ (Yes, thought Danny, in a spasm of frustration and worry, and I can get in free to any club in London, and get off my face for days on end, and have anyone there I want.) ‘Yes. I saw a lot of it in South America, of course. There was cocaine everywhere, which I believe cost almost nothing. I must say, I was never tempted to try it.’

‘Really . . .?’ said Alex, who was leaning forward to catch Danny’s eye.

‘I didn’t know you’d been in South America,’ said Mike, irritated by this claim on his curiosity. ‘Whereabouts?’

‘Oh, very much so. I was with the British Council in Caracas, and then in Lima for four years. This was in the late fifties, after Cambridge.’

‘After your ringing years.’

‘Yes . . .’

‘They used to say they were all flower-arrangers in the British Council,’ said Mike.

Adrian looked down for a moment, to give this remark time to clear, and went on, ‘I’ve got some very lovely folk-art that I brought back, some of which you’ll see when you come to “Ambages”. I have a beautiful Peruvian hanging in my bedroom.’

The words themselves hung in the air, lightly and evenly stressed, against the background clamour of the bells, and it was Margery who started to laugh first, an almost noiseless polite snuffle, and then a cackle came from Justin, Danny heard the chug-chug of Alex’s laugh, and then he got it himself, through the glaze of his preoccupation, and started to giggle breathlessly, with an edge of hysterical relief, before Mike gave out his rarely heard whimper. It was never quite clear whether Adrian had seen the joke. The amusement was too general for him to go against it, and he sat smiling bashfully, looking sideways at the floor.

After a while, Margery struggled to make a long face, and said, ‘Adrian, I’m so sorry’, with the insincere regret that follows a burst of instinct.

Embarrassed, and obliged to show willing, Adrian said, ‘Well, Danny, perhaps you should go to South America. People sniff cocaine in Lima like you and I drink sherry.’

Danny nodded with another after-tremor of laughter. ‘Yeah, that might be good.’ He looked away. ‘Actually, I’m going back to the States next month. I think that’s more the sort of place for me.’

When he looked up again, Justin was making a ‘Get her!’ face, and Robin said with a tender frown, ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’ Alex, of course, he couldn’t see – only the convulsion of his legs uncrossing and crossing the other way. ‘You’re going to your mother’s?’ Robin mastered the situation.

‘Yeah, I think so,’ said Danny. ‘She says she can always get me a job out there again.’

‘And where is that?’ said Adrian.

‘San Diego . . .’

‘No, I don’t imagine I’ll ever fly again,’ said Mike, loudly and slowly, as though that were the really interesting aspect of the matter. Danny saw Justin looking gently in Alex’s direction – to the others, of course, this sudden birthing of a plan was neither here nor there.

He said, surprised by his own note of involuntary bitterness, ‘Well, there’s not much to keep me in this country.’ When you had an audience you could say things easily that were almost impossible to bring out one-to-one, even in bed. Though perhaps it was also easy to say too much.

Mike said, ‘I suppose we could hang each bell-ringer from his individual rope.’

‘I’m quite getting used to it,’ said Margery. ‘I think we’ll all rather miss it when it stops.’ Then, seeing Alex had got up and was going towards the door, she said, ‘It’s across the hall and turn left.’ He blinked and went out.

The conversation ambled on, given sly prods and perverse turns by Justin, who seemed to feel responsible for the success of the occasion, in a way that he never did at home. Mike was wincing at the wall, too caught up in the smoulder of his outrage to make his usual polemical sallies. Danny had the childish sensation of being ignored and unvalued after his clumsy moment in the spotlight. He couldn’t think about how cruel he had just been to Alex, and when he tried to run through his resignation speech again it had a horrible echoless deadness to it, like something said in a recording studio. He looked along the faces of the others, wondering what they were talking about. His father’s expression was specially husbandly and benign. Then Danny found Justin was staring privately at him, and he knew he was right when he twitched his head towards the door. ‘I must just go too,’ Danny said under his breath as he slipped out.

The lavatory door was shut, and he waited for a minute outside, suddenly fidgery for a pee himself. Then he thought, well he’s still my boyfriend, and tapped and went in. But Alex wasn’t there; and in the white emptiness of the stuffy little room Danny knew the crisis had closed in on him. As he peed he looked sideways into the mirror, and saw how terribly beautiful he was: the image itself was reflected again off some hard vain surface deep in his eye, and he thought, with easy pity, how little Alex would want to lose him. On the narrow shelf above the basin was a thinning hairbrush, and a comb, and a square bottle of cologne: he pulled out the stopper to confirm it was the one they had been breathing all evening, and turned down his mouth in the mirror when he saw it was called ‘Bien-Etre’.

Alex was sitting on the back-door step, looking down the sloping, untidy garden. Danny came through the kitchen and sat beside him, but without touching him. Alex said, ‘Oh Dan’ – it was very rare for him to call him by name.

‘I’m sorry,’ Danny said. He thought perhaps by some miracle Alex had understood everything.

‘I really do think you might have told me about this US thing.’

‘Yeah . . .’

‘You terrify me at times.’ Alex reached for his hand, and he let him hold it, but without any return of pressure. ‘I mean, what happens to us? I can come and see you, of course. I look forward to that. But it’s hardly very convenient.’

‘Well . . .’

‘Or perhaps you’re not really going,’ Alex went on, in a tetchily forgiving tone. ‘But if you are it would have been nice not to have heard it announced in the middle of a drinks-party.’

They had never had a row, merely separate hurts and irritations which they seduced each other out of. Danny saw that he hadn’t done this right, and it made him sulkily aggressive. ‘I may not go,’ he said, and withdrew his hand.

‘I mean, I’m your boyfriend. That lanky bloke whose arms are round you when you wake up, and who then goes off to make your breakfast: that’s me.’

‘Yeah, I wondered who it was,’ said Danny. ‘Look, it doesn’t really matter whether I’m here or in San Diego, I can’t go on seeing you, Alex.’

Alex had already drawn the breath that should have carried his next remark, but he halted and let it out in a tragic sigh.

Danny stood up and strolled back across the kitchen and drew a glass of water. The whisky was giving him a slight headache; rather like poor Heinrich . . . ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said.

When he glanced round, Alex was sitting in the same place, but tipped sideways against the door-frame, as though he had been thrown there by a blast. The pose was somehow histrionic and got on Danny’s nerves. He saw him roll his head, once, quickly, to see where he was, and Danny had the feeling that he himself had become the embodiment of something dreaded, that could hardly be looked at.

Back in the sitting-room he was told to help himself to another drink. He knew he had been sobered by the adrenalin of the past five minutes, and unexpectedly humiliated by Alex snapping at him to leave him alone. The others all seemed pathetically drunk and old. Adrian was asking about ladies-that-did, and various village names were rummaged for, each followed by a horrifying cautionary anecdote.

‘We’ve never had any fucking chairwoman,’ said Mike; which nobody pretended to be surprised by.

Justin said, ‘You can always have nude housework done, of course.’

Adrian pursed his lips, but would clearly have liked to know more.

Mike said, in a marvelling monotone, ‘You lot talk so much fucking tripe.’

‘I’m not against nude housework,’ said Margery, ‘but I think I’d have to go out while it was being done.’

‘Where’s the silent Scotsman?’ said Mike. ‘Polishing his nails?’

Danny studied their five faces again; they all had a foolish look of temporary confidence, which he forgot he must often have had himself, in extremer forms too. Even Mike, who got furious on drink, seemed to have entered into a richer and more involving relation with himself. ‘Alex is just getting a bit of air,’ Danny said; at which Mike nodded and drummed his fingers on his knee. Both he and Margery had renounced cigarettes, and the peculiar ashtrays mounted on stirruped thongs had gone from the arms of the sofa; but still the magnolia paintwork was dimly varnished with smoke and gave the room an atmosphere of terminated pleasures. Perhaps the others didn’t care, or were too sozzled to notice the room filling with shadows; but Danny never lost his sense of the speed of time. When he thought of Alex’s epic hesitations – the years without sex, the unaccountable solitariness – it brought him close to a panic of impatience.

He saw that Justin was peering at him again, with a hint of a smile – he couldn’t work out the ironies in it, it seemed encouraging and disappointed at the same time, as well as secretively sexual, as if they already had an agreement to meet up later. He knew he had just done something serious, and needed assurance that he had been right. Then the bells came tumbling down the scale and stopped.

The overtones swam there for a moment, and after that the ear was haunted by the bells and heard them fadingly continuing. The silence was astonishing, being ordinary existence thrown into relief by the hour or more of incessant sound, unwavering in rhythm and volume. And then it wasn’t silence. Mike got up and pushed the windows open, and there was a bird twittering, a car whining as it reversed, the dry runs of an old-fashioned mower, like a child’s rattle. Alex was somewhere outside, in the wilderness of the garden. Danny had been sent in, but he guessed he would have to go back out to him.

Mike sped across the room with the brawler’s roll he had when drunk. ‘Right!’ he said, switching on the old blue-leather Philips gramophone, which he had confidently attached to an even older-looking valve amplifier and big, BDX-size, speakers.

‘I think they’ve cut it rather short,’ said Adrian, unwisely.

‘Don’t get me wrong, Ringrose,’ said Mike over his shoulder. ‘But your bell-ringing pals are fucking cunts.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Margery.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Mike, exhilarated to have reached this stage of the evening already.

‘I’m just going to check on Alex,’ Danny said.

He was in the kitchen when he heard the music start, and then it came out very clearly through the windows when he stepped into the garden. It was Mike’s retaliation against the bells, a crackly old record of Gregorian chant, turned up offensively loud, though the music itself remained more than unflappable: the spare and echoing rise and fall of men’s voices, the ritual Latin. Danny stood for a moment by the two deck-chairs on the rough circle of lawn, and thought of calling to Alex, like someone getting a child in for a meal or bed. But he saw that the tone would be wrong: he was annoyed with Alex for still being here, and then a second later he was a little frightened at his responsibility. He stooped past the woody buddleia and down a path under apple-trees. There was a shed, and a fruit-cage covered in convolvulus, and one weedy but cultivated patch of kitchen-garden. After that the lot tapered, and there was only wild grass thigh-deep, and a big old tree at the bottom where the fences met. He saw Alex perched on the fence, with his back against the tree-trunk, looking unapproachably lonely. You could still see the curving track he had made through the grass, and Danny, out of some barely conscious symbolic scruple, made a separate wading path towards him. The grass was dry, and bleaching from the mid-August heat, and where Danny’s hands trailed into it they found it dusty and sometimes sticky with secretions like bubbled spit; underfoot there was a crackling, and he realised he was treading on tiny grey snails – and there were dozens of them clinging like seed-cases on the thicker stalks. By the time he came to stand at Alex’s shoulder, his baggy black jeans were streaked and powdered from the field. He thought Alex might be crying, and that he’d been sent away so as not to witness that, but when he peered at him sidelong there was no sign of it. ‘I’ve come to see how you are,’ he said.

After a while Alex said, ‘It’s like fucking murder in the cathedral.’

‘The music, you mean,’ said Danny, with a snigger.

Then Alex went on, very tensely, as if afraid of anything Danny might say, ‘You remember we walked up there not long ago.’ He swept his hand up quickly, to hide its shaking.

Danny detected some sentimental reproach. ‘Yes, of course, it was a beautiful evening,’ he said; though he did find it striking that Alex should mention it, because that evening up on the hill had been the silent turning-point for him, with Alex talking about his failure with Justin, and a sense of failure coming off him, like someone you would be unwise to set up business with. Danny said, pretty confident that it wouldn’t be put to the test, ‘You know we’ll always be friends.’

Alex half-turned but still didn’t look directly at him. ‘Is it George?’ he said.

Danny chuckled sourly. ‘George wouldn’t let me anywhere near him.’

‘It’s not Terry, for god’s sake?’

‘Alex, it’s not anyone!’ He wanted to touch him consolingly, but also to push him off the fence, where he was nodding forward and hugging himself delicately, as if every liaison of Danny’s were a broken rib or an unhealed cut.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alex said, ‘I can’t take in anything you’re saying. You seem to be talking gibberish. We’re two people wildly in love with each other, and you’re saying you can’t see me any more.’

‘Well, I’ve changed, darling, people change. I’m sorry.’ He glanced back over the full two months of their affair, and remembered getting dressed in front of Alex on the first evening he came round, and thinking he’d never seen anyone so well-mannered and so sex-starved. It had been at a strange moment in his own little number with cynical black Bob, and he could see now that there had been something defiant and capricious, perhaps, about taking up with Alex.

‘I haven’t changed at all,’ said Alex. ‘Apart from coming to love you more and more.’

‘You know, we don’t have anything in common,’ said Danny, and had to acknowledge that it didn’t sound that great.

Alex shook his head. ‘I thought the affair itself was what we had in common,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well . . .’ Danny stuck to his idea that there was nothing to talk about. He frowned and blinked away the muddled imagery of their nights together, the happiness and sweat; and he knew there was a dappled prospect of things he could have learned from Alex, if he’d given him time and attention. But for the moment, and so perhaps for ever, he needed the story to be bare and shadowless. They’d gone out and got off their faces, and Alex had had his mind opened to dance-music. And now they were ending up in music, something altogether more monastic – even if distantly interspersed with Mike shouting ‘Cunt!’ out of the window. Danny decided quickly and analytically that Alex, in spite of his wounded bafflement, accepted what had happened. There was no immediate suggestion of working out problems, or a trial separation. He couldn’t put it into words, but he saw something fatalistic in Alex rush forward to acknowledge the disaster. ‘Come on,’ said Danny.

As they toiled out of the long grass, he gestured courteously to Alex to go ahead of him, and followed a few paces behind him up the rather notional path. The chanting grew grander as they approached the house, and he knew there would be some solemn moments ahead; but he quite admired the way he’d brought it off. It was the first big break-up he had been responsible for, and with an older man there was of course that further question of respect. He stopped to brush and slap at the mess on his trousers.