The Spell (2 page)

They took an indirect route, he suspected, to his hotel; maybe the boy knew a short-cut, maybe he was conditioned to go a certain way that he had learnt in going somewhere else. It was midday, many of the streets were empty under the glare of the sun. I need a baseball-cap, Robin thought: then I’ll fit in. There were breezes in the garden palms and shade trees of the sidewalk, but the heat, though longed for, was slightly shocking, like someone else’s habitual luxury. They came almost to a halt at the end of one of the bleak cross-alleys that bisected the blocks – a central gutter, garbage cans, cables, the barred back-windows of stores and restaurants. The boy pointed and said,

“Good bar, Blue Coyote,” and nodded several times.

“Oh…is it?” Robin squinted sceptically into the empty sun-struck defile. He thought it must belong to a member of the family. He hoped he wasn’t suggesting they go there now.

“You like it.”

“Okay, thank you…I’ll remember that,” looking forward again, suddenly impatient for the hotel and the meal; but thinking, so rare were his guide’s pronouncements, that he probably would remember it. And it turned out to be very close to where they finally stopped, by the shabby-romantic deco San Marcos, with its peeling pink lobby and display of grotesque old succulents.

Robin found himself waiting for change, then was ashamed at his meanness and raised his hand to stop the boy’s unproductive gropings in a back pocket; he thought he probably didn’t have change, and that he had gone just too far to save them both from embarrassment. The boy gave a dignified nod. Robin smiled his clean seducer’s smile, though it was a mask to his confusion, his fleeting apprehension not of the honoured quaintness of being British, but of the class sense which tinted or tainted all his dealings with the world. He stuck out a hand. “I’m Robin,” he said.

“Victor,” the driver replied, and gave the hand a lazy shake.

“Hi!” said Robin; and then got out of the car.

The Blue Coyote had no windows, and so saw nothing of the boulevard-raking sunset, or the gorgeous combustion westward over the mountains. When he found you had to ring a bell, he almost turned away, it was only a whim to have an early-evening drink there; but the door half-opened anyway and he was appraised by a stout young man who wore shades for the task and who stood aside with an accepting “Yep.”

Any light in the room was husbanded and shielded – by the fake overhanging eaves of the bar and the hooded canopy above the pool table. Even before the door had shut behind him, Robin felt at a disadvantage. It was the gloomiest bar he’d ever been in and seemed designed to waken unease in the stumbling newcomer, eyed from the shadows by the dark-adapted regulars. A hush had fallen as he entered. He felt foolish to be so suggestible, so lightly carried here by his new sense of ease and possibility. Then “Automatically Sunshine” sang out from the juke-box and as if startled from hypnosis the drinkers set down their glasses, the talkers resumed their murmur, the pool-player blinked and stooped and potted his ball.

The barman poured the beer straight into the glass, so that the froth was at the brim in a second, and then over the brim; and stood the half-full bottle by it on the wet counter. “So what part of England are you from?” he said, with a frown that might have meant distrust of England in general, or the suspicion that he might not know the part, once named. He was a large man in his fifties, with a black pencil moustache and an air of having borne indignities.

Robin said, “Oh, sort of south-west. Dorset? Is where I grew up.”

“Dorset. Oh yeah, I heard of that,” said the barman, taking the dollar bill with a little twinkle of self-congratulation.

Robin turned and leant on the bar and scanned the room with a pretence of indifference. He watched a long-haired young man talking to an older businessman, who must just have come from work; making a point to him with hands jerked up and up in the air, and then, as the businessman laughed, smiling at him and bringing his hands to rest on his shoulders, the thumbs moving to a gentle caress behind his ears. Robin looked quickly away, and at the man on a barstool beside him, who he knew at once had been gazing at him with the same unsubtle fascination. He took in the glossy dark hair, the long humorous face, the legs apart in tight flared jeans. “I guess I must have been in Dorset when I was down in Plymouth,” he said.

“You might have passed through Dorset,” said Robin punctiliously; “though Plymouth itself is in Devonshire.”

The man smiled in a way that suggested he knew that. “I’m Sylvan,” he said.

Robin accepted the information broad-mindedly. “Robin, hi!” he said, and extended his callused rower’s hand.

“Oh, okay…” Sylvan raising his hand from his knee and complying with the courtesy; and smiling rather insistently as if to press the stranger to a quick glowing acknowledgement of something as yet unsaid. Robin knew what it was and hid his indecision, and the snug sense of power it gave him, in an English innocence.

“What took you to Plymouth?”

Sylvan looked down. “Oh, family. That kind of thing.” Then bright and intimate again: “What brings you to the Valley of the Sun?”

It was never easy saying these things to strangers. “Research, actually.” He slid the rest of the beer gently into the tilted glass. “Yeah, I’m doing some stuff on Frank Lloyd Wright?” He saw he’d already got the habit of the interrogative statement. He glanced up at Sylvan.

“Okay, so you’ve been out to Taliesin West, you’ve seen the…stumps, those big pillars of the Pauson House, all that’s left of them. What else?”

Robin smiled sportingly, and absorbed the fact that he was a tourist among many others. “No, I’ve only just arrived.”

“First stop the Blue Coyote. A man who knows what he’s after.” Sylvan slapped the bar lightly. “I could do a lot of that kind of research. Same again please, Ronnie,” to the turning barman. “And another beer?”

“I’m fine,” said Robin. “No, I’ve been out to the ruins of the Ransom House today.”

Sylvan paused and nodded. “Yeah. That’s serious. I never saw that. You know, if you’re in school here, you get to do all of that stuff. I remember the day he died, old Frankie Lloyd, and the teacher comes in for art class and tells us with a real catch in his voice, you know?, “ladies and gentlemen…” We were all pretty upset.” He looked at Robin with a wistful pout, as if he still needed consoling. “So how the hell d’you get out there? You got four-wheel drive?”

“I got an Indian from the reservation to drive me,” said Robin, still proud of his initiative.

“Wo-ho! And you lived to tell the tale?”

“Just about, yes…” – and now he was uneasy about grudges and feuds, the hardened candour with which a local hopes to disabuse the naively fair-minded newcomer. He wouldn’t tell him about the sand-trap. “No, he was great. Just a kid.”

Sylvan looked at him with concern. “Well you were lucky, man. Cos I’m telling you, they are the worst.”

It was true that Victor had been an unsettling driver. But he’d also been clairvoyant. In the moment or two that Robin disliked Sylvan he saw how beautiful he was; and surely available to him, completely at his pleasure, if he said the word. He had to frown away the smile that rose to his lips on a kind of thermal of lust.

“It’s the drink or it’s the peyote,” Sylvan went on, fluttering a hand beside his head to suggest a crazy befuddlement.

“Oh”

“You know peyote? Edible cactus. Gives you visions, man.” Sylvan swaying his head and making a little crooning sound. Then grinning and putting a reassuring hand on Robin’s own, and leaving it there. “No, it’s part of their religion. Isn’t that great? Big ceremony, eat peyote, trip out…Of course the kids here are into all that now, the hippies? They go out in the desert and they’re out of their fuckin’ heads for
days on end
.”

Robin wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not. He’d got a kind of trance off the desert as it was, he could breathe in and feel it again now, a partly physical elation; and something else, that perhaps was religious, or at least philosophical, the inhuman peace. He pictured that burnt-out folly, which was a lesson taught to a wealthy family who presumed they could make a home in such a place and lay a claim to it. Was it $10,000 they’d spent just on drilling for water? He was watching a very camp couple smoking and bawling with laughter. He thought how he wasn’t that kind of person. He shifted his weight so that his leg pressed against Sylvan’s knee. He realised he’d had a plan for the evening involving dinner and a phone-call; but the plan was meaningless in face of the unplanned. With a little freeing twist he withdrew his fingers and then slid them back between the other man’s.

“So…” said Sylvan.

Robin looked into his long-lashed, untrustworthy eyes. “Is there a phone here?” he said. “I must just make a quick call.”

The phone was in the back by the Gents, in an area even bleaker and more functional than the bar. He dialled and stood gazing at the deadpan irony of an old enamel sign saying “NO LOITERING.” He wasn’t a loiterer. To him the words had only ever meant “Get on with it!” When he made his infrequent visits to the lavs at Parker’s Piece or in the Market Square, eyebrows raised as if at the exploits of someone else, he always seemed to find gratification at once, from a man who clearly was a loiterer, and had probably been loitering for hours. He was through to the operator, who sounded relaxed, almost sleepy, but a nice woman, who took pleasure in bringing sundered friends together. A man came past and nodded “Hi!” to him, like an overworked colleague – Robin gave an abstracted smile and peered into the imagined middle-distance of the expectant caller. He was both keen to talk and keen to have the conversation over.

When Jane answered he was talking at once, and he felt it like a rebuke when the operator spoke over him to ask her if she would accept the call.

Then, “Hello Janey, it’s me,” he said, “did I wake you up?” -and heard his words repeated, with a fractional delay, by the unsparing mimicry of the transatlantic echo.

“No, I was awake,” she said, as if it might be an emergency.

“It must be quite late.”

“It’s twenty past one.”

“Anyway, you’re all right?”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes, it’s amazing, I can’t tell you.”

“Because if it is, I’m so glad you rang.”

“Oh thank you, darling,” murmured Robin, with a vague sense of undeserved success. “I just wanted to hear your voice, and tell you I’m all in one piece” – and the echo gave him back his last words. When he spoke again, he found she was already talking.

“Actually I was asleep. I’d just got off, I’m extremely tired, but I’m so excited at the moment that it’s quite difficult to go to sleep.”

Robin had left her only two days earlier and her words were at odds with his assumption that she must be missing him terribly. He was jealous of her excitement, but also reassured, in a way, that she could be excited without him; she seemed to license his own unmentioned freedoms. “Has something happened?” he asked lightly and cautiously. He was surprised to hear a giggle, maybe just a sign of nerves.

“Something clearly has happened: in fact you probably remember it. More important, something’s going to happen.”

He thought how you never really pictured a friend when you spoke to them on the phone: they had the shadowiness of memory, of something not looked at directly; you saw a presence in a half-remembered room or merely a floating image of their house or street. The phone Jane was a subtly stronger character – darker, more capricious and capable – than the Jane he lived with and loved. He said, “Have you got another interview?”

“Oh really.” There was a pause in which he pondered why this was wrong. “Robin, I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”

It was the “we” that disconcerted him. He thought for a moment she was referring to herself and some other man. And even when he saw, almost at once, that he must himself be the father, he retained an eerie sense that she had somehow done this without him.

“Oh Janey, that’s fantastic”

“Are you pleased?”

“Of course I am. Christ! When will it be? I mean it will change everything.”

“Oh”

“Or a lot of things. Will we have to get married?”

“Well, we’ll have to think about it, won’t we? It’s not till June.” She sounded mischievous, dawdling; and also to Robin indefinably larger. His blurred mental image of her had taken on already the pronounced jut of advanced pregnancy.

He dawdled himself when the call was over, with its awkwardly near-simultaneous “Bye’s” and “Love you’s”. His eyes ran abstractedly over the “NO LOITERING” sign while the news moved slowly and spasmodically through him. In a play or on television the phrase “I’m pregnant” was often a clincher, it solved things, or at least decided them. Robin gasped softly, and chewed his lip, and then smiled and nodded in a good-humoured acquiescence which there was no one there to see. It was still the first moment, but he saw himself in the sleepless moil of early parenthood, and felt a plunging anxiety, as if he had inadvertently ruined not only his own young life but someone else’s too. But then nudging the worry came a reluctantly conceded pride, a nostalgia for his friends at the crew’s steak dinner and the 1st XV feast, who would have stood him drinks all night and shared in his achievement with foul-mouthed shock and envy.

He probably couldn’t tell Sylvan. He would go back into the bar as if he hadn’t just had a conversation that changed his life. He saw perhaps he could forget the conversation, and put off his new life till the morning. A beautiful man was waiting for him and Robin glowed in the urgency and the lovely complacency of their wanting each other. He wanted nothing in his mind, in his sight, in his hands but Sylvan. He span back into the bar almost in a panic for Sylvan.

A
lex left the engine running, and walked hesitantly to the gate; he wasn’t sure whether to open it and drive in, or to park outside in the lane. He saw the long roof of a cottage below, half-hidden by flowering trees, and a track of old bricks laid in the grass, where presumably a car could stand. To a town-dweller it seemed desirable to get a car in off the road; but perhaps a stronger sense of security would come from leaving it outside, ready for escape. He decided to back it up on to the verge, where it lay in long grass under a tall wild hedge. Climbing out and locking the door he brushed a hundred raindrops down across the canvas roof.