The Spell (27 page)

The effect of the candles was romantic, and perhaps funerary, a wake or a vigil, he didn’t know. The rain hissed, the quartet busied along, and when a voice emerged from the edge of the grudgingly retreating thunder Robin shivered and grunted and twisted round with the split-second certainty he was about to be attacked; and the immediate cover of showing he thought it was a joke. Terry Badgett was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, with an anorak hanging by its hood over his head for a dash through the rain. “Sorry to make you jump,” he said.

Robin supposed Terry must have knocked, he knew he was getting a little deaf, and wondered if he should offer an explanation for listening to chamber music shirtless by candlelight.

Then he thought there might be some emergency to do with his mother. He said, “Hello Terry?”

Terry looked at him for a second, so it seemed to Robin, with the amorous amazement of a figure from below-stairs. “I just saw all your windows were open in the car,” he said.

“Oh my god…”

“I didn’t like to touch it in case it’s alarmed.”

“No. Thank you so much.”

Robin ran up barefoot through the dwindling rain and had to start the car to activate the windows. It must have been gustier than he realised – the odd Swedish tweed of the passenger seat was soaked, and the glove-box and radio were drizzled over by the blown wet. He gave it a wipe, and decided he would leave it till tomorrow; he locked the car and the rain stopped, then it came back in a dash, like the last bit thrown out of a bucket, then stopped again. Terry’s Talbot Samba was parked at the gate; Above it the sky was toweringly dark where the storm moved eastwards, but beyond the cottage it had thinned into a brown-grey haze that half-obscured the fields like a coat of wood-varnish. Somewhere beyond that, discernible only in odd pressings and squeezings of light, the sun was setting. Robin took in the unusual effect, the sparkle on the dripping trees and hedges, and the astounding stink of the country after such heavy high-summer rain.

Terry was sitting on the sofa, leaning forward expectantly to learn the extent of the damage. He seemed disappointed not to have detected some more serious problem. “Only I just saw it…” he said.

“You deserve a drink,” Robin said. “If you have time.” He went through to the kitchen, and called back, so that Terry followed him, “I was hearing good things about you today.”

“Oh yes…?”

“I was at Tytherbury this morning. Mr Bowerchalke seemed very pleased with the work.” Robin still had a sense of Terry’s being on probation, after his trouble-making teens, and needing encouragement to keep him steady. In the resentful memory of the village he remained the youth who got the Bishop girl pregnant and let the water out of the Horensteins’ swimming-pool. “A beer okay for you?”

“Thanks very much.” Terry hung the anorak on a chair and looked round the kitchen with the ambitious interest of someone angling for promotion. He had had his hair cut, square at the back in the way of small-town barbers, and there was a new pale stripe above the sun-tanned neck. Robin noticed the salty blots where the sweat had dried in his black T-shirt.

“So what have you been doing today?”

Terry took the bottle. “Oh, running around,” he said, with a distant smile. “I’m getting a fair bit of work now.” Robin gestured them back into the sitting-room. “I’ve just come over from Bride Mill.”

“You get on well with Roger and John,” Robin said, referring to the Mill’s corduroyed co-hosts.

Terry smiled. “Yeah, I have a good repartee with them.”

They sat at either end of the sofa, the candles glowing in Terry’s dark eyes. Robin sprawled with his drink held loosely at crotch level. He wasn’t sorry to have the company of someone fresh and handsome and remote from any intuition of his own gloom. Terry’s face had lost the thickness of adolescence and the pained, untrusting expression of a boy who is always in the wrong. Robin liked the way he showed his curiosity, sometimes unguardedly, sometimes slyly. He believed he was a figure of some social fascination to Terry, and was pleased with his own relaxed manner with him. He said vainly, “I’m sorry, I ought to put a shirt on.”

Terry took a quick sip from his shining brown bottle. “Don’t mind me,” he said; and his eyes lingered on Robin again for a moment. “You by yourself tonight then?” – glancing away at the somehow ritualised room.

“I’m afraid so,” said Robin casually.

“Where’s that Justin then?”

“He’s still in London.”

“Oh yes? He made me laugh at that party.”

Robin smiled warily. “He can be amusing. But we mustn’t talk about him behind his back.” He was aware of his own desire, after a couple of drinks, to be critical of Justin, but alert to any mistaken intimacy on Terry’s part.

“It’ll be good to see him again,” Terry said indulgently, but also as though he had in mind a particular date. “Where is it we’re all supposed to be going, Italy is it or something?”

“Sicily, wasn’t it, for some reason?” said Robin, with forced hilarity of recall.

“That’s right, Sicily. To celebrate his so-called new-found wealth. At one point I worked out he was taking about twenty of us.” Robin said nothing, and already half-regretted having let Terry in, like a boy with a rod, to angle in the sullen pond of his misfortunes. “Of course he’s probably just taking you, isn’t he?” Terry added quietly.

Robin thought Justin would never spend anything on him, and began to understand that there was some deeper connection between the money from the house coming through and Justin’s deciding to move on, as if the cottage had been merely a convenience. Which, after all, as Justin often plonkingly joked, was what a cottage was. The quartet ended, rather oddly, and he got up to eject the CD; it was only as he pressed it back into the case that he saw it had five movements. “Mm,” he said. “But you don’t know Justin” – a phrase which brought. the whole year of luxurious sexual privacy in a shocking rush before his mind’s eye.

“I don’t know him like you do,” said Terry, in a very diplomatic tone.

Robin looked along the CD shelf – there they were again, Van Morrison, Abba, some Mozart, Vaughan Williams’s “London” Symphony, of course. He had one arm raised against the shelf above, the biceps squared up and veined. He was surprised by his need to be admired by the boy. And the effect was so quick, almost too easy.

“You’re looking good,” Terry said.

“Ooh, I’ve looked better.”

“You been to that new gym in Bridport?”

“Um…no, not yet. Any cop?”

“Oh yeah. They got all the machines. One of the instructors is a mate of mine. I was trying to get Dan to go. I told him I could get him in free.”

“No, he’s not into that sort of thing,” Robin said, and seemed to be claiming some slightly embarrassing exemption on his behalf.

“No. He’s got a nice little body, though,” Terry said, with a shy insistence that he did have some private connection with this decadent household of Londoners. Robin said to himself, in his bare-chested sceptical way, that he couldn’t get worked up about this kid who slept with his son; but when he thought back to that small-hours encounter in the bathroom, Terry muddle-haired and still boyishly stiff after sex, he had a stifled shudder of longing, as if someone had breathed in his ear, and wondered bleakly whether there was much point to all his romantic good behaviour.

“Let’s not bother with music,” he said, and sat down again. It was getting cool, with the windows open, and he really would have to put a shirt on soon. He said, “Did you see Dan when he was down?”

Terry said, “My mum said he was down with Alex,” which wasn’t quite an answer. Robin wondered how tender his feelings for Danny were, and saw that despite various things that had happened he didn’t really think of Terry as being homosexual. But perhaps Terry had similar doubts about him.

If so, his next move didn’t show it. “You look cold,” he said, with a wide, tense smile, sliding, half-crawling along the sofa to chafe Robin’s upper arm. He leaned across him to stand the beer-bottle on the carpet, and then slid his other hand between his legs. There was an absolute lack of transition that might have been explained by either ignorance or genius. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

Robin pulled back his head with a soft snort of surprise; then looked away from the boy and back at his waiting face in a small enactment of his dilemma. If he did, it would be his first betrayal of Justin, though what was more uncomfortable was the hinted betrayal, the furtive shadowing of Dan. He smiled at the unusual delicacy of the situation. “You know I’m a quarter of a century older than you, don’t you?” It was very strange to be making such a protest.

Terry took his hand from Robin’s thigh, and sat back a little. “If you don’t want to,” he said.

“Well, yeah, I want to,” said Robin, though he thought it was a good question; he blushed for the first time in years at his own hesitation. “I’m just thinking of…other people.”

“They won’t know, will they,” Terry said. “Anyway, I’ve had my eye on you for some time.”

“Really”

Terry breathed in Robin’s face: “Only ever since you came down here, when you got this place.”

There was something remotely threatening about him. Robin had the picture for a moment of one of those teenage gangsters with a couple of kids in different households and a forty-year-old woman he sees in the afternoons. He wasn’t going to say how he remembered Terry from that time. Simon was always complaining lustfully about the little hunk in the back lane, who sat on the wall to watch the workmen and had a dick like a trapped animal in his pocket. Robin kissed Terry on the nose, out of courtesy, or as a token of the omitted seduction. Or perhaps he thought the last seven years had been the seduction, the haphazard, unrecognised approach. “Come on then,” he said; and heard other unspoken words that might have followed: “It’s late,” “It’s past your bed-time.”

After it was fully dark the wind got up quite quickly, and Robin lay with his back to the lamp listening to the stirring in the trees. It was a hissing and pattering like a clever dry sound-effect for rain. Terry was curled in against him, talking desultorily and pretending not to doze. Robin thought of the day, at varying times from spring to spring, when you were first aware of the wind in the leaves, not the empty moan of winter but a new impression of vast, almost substanceless resistance. It was hard to hear it in town, where the spirit of the place was often muted. It was one of the reasons he wanted to sleep beside trees and fields.

He had been wise to hesitate about Terry, though perhaps not foolish to give in. In bed Terry was lively but self-regarding, as if he wanted to show this older man that he knew how to do it – he was quick and vain; beautiful, but he didn’t touch Robin in any but the most mechanical sense. He was a merely cursory kisser, whereas Robin always wanted to snog heavily, especially with strangers. Terry seemed to find that too intimate or too compromising. He was very proud of his broad-backed dick, which reared off at an angle as if long since tugged askew by the obsessive attentions of his right hand. He had an idiotic patter about it, but Robin shut him up in the simplest way he knew; even so, occasional noises emerged, like the conscientious rejoinders of a dentist’s patient. He seemed somehow displeased by the dense but fountaining volume of Robin’s ejaculation; and Robin himself observed it as a phenomenon of nature, with an almost total absence of sensation. It wasn’t the ending he had hoped for through his spooky weeks of continence.

Even so, afterwards, drifting sleepwards, he was glad to have Terry with him. His hands rubbed across the skin and joints and smooth transitions of a body that hadn’t yet dreamt of the changes Robin had studied earlier in the mirror. It was interesting – like an eerily privileged visit to his younger self, or to some aspect of it. But he wouldn’t want to make the journey often. How could all the ageing lovers of boys bear it, the distance growing longer and lonelier year by year? Robin liked the particulars of Terry, the very hairy calves and the smooth thighs, the marks of sweaty chafing between his legs, the small scar on the wrong side for the appendix, the damp talcky knots of his armpits. Had he really fancied Robin when he was fifteen? They got the roof on the house in time to have his fortieth birthday party between its unplastered walls, with builders’ caged lamps on long flexes clipped to the beams, and a tilting JCB backed up outside in the rutted mudslide of the garden. He cooked long skewers of sea-food in the open fireplace. He had been unsure about forty, but then in the new house, with Simon, he saw that forty was only a beginning. Of course he thought Simon would be here with him for the rest of his life, by which he meant his own life.

It wasn’t clear whether Terry was staying. He seemed to have quite settled in. Robin thought it must be strange for him to find himself in this room, when he had recently spent the night in Dan’s bed, a couple of doors along. Now he was sleeping, his jaw had dropped, he was a mouth breather. Robin curled round and turned off the lamp, and it was only that small domestic action that startled him with the image of Justin, or rather with its opposite, the sudden teeming darkness in which Justin disappeared each night, as they turned and settled in each other’s arms. The great loves in his life – and here he was with a pointless trick, and all the vague social disadvantage that would follow.

Terry swallowed and mumbled “All right?” as Robin hugged him.

“Mmm.” He wondered if Justin was alone at this moment, if he was really in a hotel; he half-admired the stony way he had stuck to his resolution, and not rung home – like other addictive personalities he had a mystical respect for the total ban, as the only alternative to chaos. Still, the effect was severe. Robin listened to the wind, and thought of that other day, at the far end of summer, when a little shift occurred in the weather, that might have been nothing, a morning’s chill after weeks of glittering heat, but was in fact the airy chink through which the autumn came pouring, with its vivid forgotten lights and ache of inexact memory and surprising sense of relief.