The Spell (17 page)

“I do feel quite lucky,” Alex said. He had the eerily restful country feeling that his homosexuality was completely invisible to these people.

Alex found that he’d contracted that occasional ailment of the late developer, an aversion to his own past. He had grown up in a country town, different from this one, duller probably, and more defiantly conformist; but his mood of ghostly familiarity deepened as he went from shop to shop. The poverty of the little supermarket, with its own-brand biscuits and jams; the high prices of the farm shop, with organic vegetables and free-range eggs crusted in authenticating dung; the brown old men who slapped down all their change on the newsagent’s counter, not yet used to the decimal currency, or leaned wheezily at the urinal under the town clock with their leather shopping-bags; the old outfitters selling brown and mauve clothes, and the charity thrift-shop indistinguishable from it, and the derelict boutiques with a spew of mail across the bare floor; the photos of fetes and beauty contests and British Legion dinners in the window of the newspaper office, which might almost have been the window of a museum; the peeling front of the main hotel, with its promise of fire-doors and meal smells; the word MONUMENTAL on an undertaker’s sunlit window thrown in sharp-etched shadow across a waiting tablet; the shyness of the country folk and the loudness of their jokes and greetings – he felt he knew it all, and was horrified by it, as though by some irremediable failing of his own. Then the cloud of the mood heaved slowly past and he drove out of town with a quivering sense of how his luck had swung round, like a weather-vane.

Something came back to him for the first time, it might have been waiting for its explanatory moment. It was the late summer of 89, the eve of his thirtieth birthday. He had left town on a Friday evening to drive out to his parents in Essex for the family celebrations. As always he felt he was leaving a scene of potential pleasure, even if only getting drunk with a straightish group of friends. He had a route through the lanes to the village where his parents had just bought the Old Rectory, with its acre of demanding garden. There was never any traffic, only local people heading to the pub in their Austin Maxis; but this time he ran into a line of cars, red tail-lights backed up in the twilight as far as he could see. After a while engines were switched off, and Alex watched the young men in the Dormobile ahead of him get out to stretch their legs and talk to the other drivers. He leant out himself and asked a boy standing on the verge what the trouble was. “They’re blocking us off,” he said. “We’re waiting for new directions.” A girl in leathers with a mobile phone came walking down the road, and the drivers, who were all young and excited, called out questions to her. The whole thing had the feel of a chaotic exercise by an oddly high-spirited rebel army. Pop music from different radio stations mingled in the still air. It turned out they were going to a rave.

Alex didn’t see why he should pretend he was going to a rave, perhaps he panicked slightly, though the mood was not aggressive, just voluble and collective. He wasn’t sure exactly what happened at a rave. He knew it was a horrible inconvenience to the people who lived in the area. He started up his engine, pulled out of the line and went up the just passable other side of the road, with kids gesturing and shouting things at him. Some of them clearly thought he was one of the wide-boys who’d organised the thing. Now and then he had to mount the low verge. Before long he came face to face with a police motor-cyclist. He could see he was in the wrong, but he explained where he was trying to get to, spoke vaguely of having just come from the Foreign Office, and after the policeman had spoken to colleagues up ahead, was told to follow him, he’d get him through. Alex saw it all now, his problematic progress through the lanes, up and down between second and third gear, the flashing stanchion of the motorbike revolving ahead of him. They went on past a mile and a half of stalled vehicles, the cheerful faces at the open windows, the thump of music and shimmer of petrol fumes in the scented evening. He began to feel like a fool, who had missed what was happening around him and asked to see out the last night of his twenties under lonely safe conduct.

R
obin 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, mus-clier 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
MaDmAn
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 jamjars 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.