There was the sound of Denis cleaning his teeth, and then he came in, barefoot, in his dark red pyjamas with black piping. ‘What page?’ he said, slipping into bed, so that Evert closed the book and moved over. ‘I thought they would never go.’
‘You know Iffy,’ said Evert, with a smile that indulged her and Denis too.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Denis. The sleepy provocation of his pyjamas, the dim peppermint of his breath, his hard knees as he pushed for more space, were as natural as yesterday. He let Evert kiss him between the eyes. ‘Mm,’ he said, yawning. ‘I thought Freddie was a bit funny about your reading.’
‘Did you?’ said Evert – it was just what he didn’t want to think.
‘You can tell he wants to write about the famous Club himself.’
Evert grunted. ‘Well, no one’s stopping him.’ He saw that Freddie’s approval was what he most needed; and hadn’t he been very nice about it afterwards? But Denis was a great diviner of motives. His excitement showed through his odd flat tone as he went on,
‘You haven’t said what you thought about young Sparsholt.’
‘Oh – well, he was certainly a surprise,’ said Evert.
‘I’m afraid he got awfully drunk,’ said Denis.
‘Did he? Yes. He seemed very quiet to me – I didn’t get much out of him, I’m afraid.’
‘He’s just a bit shy, Evert. You can all be quite intimidating.’ Denis seemed not to include himself in this image of the gang; and shifted himself away as if to get comfortable. ‘Anyway he knows about art – he’s a picture person.’
‘No, you’re right – he said he wants to be a painter,’ said Evert, who in the past had loved their treacherous bedtime breakdowns of their friends’ behaviour, but now longed to change the subject.
‘Very nice bum though,’ Denis said.
‘I really didn’t notice.’
‘You lying old queen,’ said Denis.
‘I am not!’ – Evert grinning and running his hand almost nervously over Denis’s chest. Denis had acutely sensitive nipples – he scowled but there was a gasp of a smile as he said,
‘Ivan was wildly excited to meet the son of a famous criminal.’
‘I’d hardly call him a criminal – what he did would be quite legal now.’
‘You’re forgetting the detail.’
‘Am I?’ Evert didn’t want to lose the nearness of body heat, and the prospect, surely still not impossible or unworthy, of their getting inside one another’s pyjamas. He took off his glasses, reached round Denis and put them on the table. ‘You’re probably right.’ But there was a sense, all too familiar in recent months, that Denis hadn’t yet made his point.
‘I thought it would be nice for you to have someone new, Evert, someone a bit younger.’
Evert said, with anxious brightness, ‘You’re quite young enough for me.’
‘I’m not nearly as young as Ivan, of course.’
‘No, Ivan’s a mere baby.’
‘He hates me.’
‘I don’t know why you say that. I can’t see Ivan hating anybody.’
‘Isn’t it obvious? He’s completely besotted with you.’
Evert tutted mildly at this idea, which didn’t interest him or displease him. The truth was that he was in bed with the person he wanted most. ‘He seemed to get on well with Johnny.’
‘Ivan only likes old men.’
‘Well, I may be too young for him,’ Evert said gamely, and encouraged by the thought he slid his foot between Denis’s calves. It was absurd to be driven, after fourteen years, to these tense gambits of a first seduction.
Denis resumed, ‘Anyway, I’m glad you liked Jonathan.’
‘Hm, well I hardly know if I do like him yet.’
‘Well, it feels as if you like him’ – Denis slipping his hand into the fly of his pyjamas.
After a tense few moments Evert said, ‘For god’s sake, I like you’ – and had already pushed himself up half on top of him—
‘Ow, careful.’
‘Oh?’
Denis made a quick cold sigh and turned his head sharply aside from Evert’s lips. ‘Not now, Evert, please,’ he said, in that tone of renewed disappointment that Evert had come to dread and detest. He disengaged himself, slipped aside and sitting up slid out from under the covers. ‘Well, I’ll see you at breakfast, if you’re up.’
Evert lay there, saying nothing, knowing that a scene, an outburst of rage, would only be met with puzzlement and faint disgust. He was doubtless meant to see, against the light from the landing, the triangular silhouette of Denis’s pyjamas, like a drawn bow being slowly lowered . . . Then he snatched up The Heart’s Achievement and hurled it against the wall. He flinched as it struck – he had the impression the thick slab of pages was ripped from the binding. Once he had heard the inevitable click of Denis’s door, he got out of bed, and picked the wounded volume up.
After breakfast, Denis went to the room he had claimed as his study, up on the third floor. The ‘work’ he was engaged in lay on the table . . . Beyond the table was a window, and it was this rather than the notebooks and typewriter that absorbed his attention this morning. Up here the views were both wider and deeper – a sweep westwards, over the tops of the next street, two Victorian churches, great bare plane trees between houses, three or four chimney pots with glinting cowls, which revolved and beckoned to each other no matter how still the day; but also a steep view down, over low roofs into the mews. He stood there now and stretched, with the unconcerned look of someone who thought he might be being watched, and then leaning against the left side of the window, with the pushed-back curtain bunched behind him, he peered down at an angle. But the black doors of the repair shop were closed, and not a soul about.
Denis was as touchy as Evert himself when asked how his work was going. His manner as they parted after breakfast each day was one of apparent impatience for study, though in fact most mornings went by in a distracted daze of doodling and wanking, from which he broke off now and then to make trips of indefinite length to the bank or the shops. Sometimes an errand for Evert kept him out all day, on a crazily sparking circuit of excitements, his late return unexplained and the evening enacted, as they moved round each other, poured drinks and shook out the newspaper, to a faint, strange sound, the hum of unvoiced thoughts.
He wondered if he had an inordinate sex drive, and how many other men of thirty-three gave so much of their lives, when not actually doing it, to the rapt distraction of imagining it. Of course he knew them when he met them, nameless but identified by need, in a dozen locations, and a lot of them a good deal older than he was. It didn’t matter. It was a lesson itself in the power of lust, and in their eyes as they stared and gasped he read his own beautiful fate: for him too it was going to go on and on. The problem really was old Evert. When they’d met all those years ago he was a still virile forty, and a great educator in life and sex to a ravenous new arrival from Jersey, a mere nineteen years old. Now Evert was a lot older, ‘knocking sixty’ as Denis said, and matters were much less satisfactory. To see the silly old thing with nothing on and his bottom in the air was as laughable as it was depressing. The cheeky taunt, ‘Come on, old man!’ that had once thrilled them both as Evert ‘tupped’ Denis twice a day, was now barely usable for its note of pathos and criticism.
Denis got up again and peered down into the mews, where the doors of the garage at last stood open on an empty strip of cobbles. He didn’t want to go out and enquire about the car unless Roy was there, and there was no sign of him yet. A keen restlessness and jealousy of Roy overtook him – the very thing he liked about him now seemed a great disadvantage. Roy was his ideal kind of cockney (extending the term louchely to any working-class Londoner): he was twenty-five, a bit shorter than Denis, ‘coarse-featured’, it had to be said, but, as Roy himself said, ‘the living end’ when doubled over to examine the entrails of an engine. He had a girlfriend he bragged and complained about, and like Denis he had a surplus of energy that spilled out readily and (it had to be faced) indiscriminately. There was a kind of adulterers’ honour between them, but not the least question of fidelity. In fact even the honour was mixed up with mockery of Denis for being posh, and complaints about his meanness. It was very hard to make Roy believe that he had no money at all of his own.