A picture, unlike the dim labyrinth of a book, could be seen at once, but to bring it all to the front of the mind’s eye and hold it there was impossible. Some quite simple image might house an irreducible mystery: this he seemed always to have known. There was a photograph here with an atmosphere that excited and eluded him. In a room lit from the right, two lean young men sat on the end of a large double bed with a dark candlewick covering. There were psychedelic posters behind them and a blown-up photo of Mick Jagger dancing and pointing on the nearer side wall. Close up in the foreground, items on a tabletop loomed large, two glass ashtrays, a gleaming packet of Benson & Hedges, a painted bowl in which objects had been heaped, surmounted by a square white adaptor plug, strangely prominent. They didn’t have much, these two men, but they were tidy, and the adaptor was nothing to be ashamed of. Was it also the photographer’s way of saying something the men themselves couldn’t make so explicit? He got closer and closer to the glazed threshold of the photo, the world behind him receding. He seemed to stare into the room through a two-way mirror – from which, at that moment, both men looked away, as though on the brink of some hesitant exposure. Both sat forward, elbows on thighs, smoking. Both were sexy in the wild new way, the one on the left in a tight patterned sweatshirt, dark hair swept back to the collar, long sideburns, rings on two fingers; the other man, head sideways as if cradling a phone in his shoulder-length hair, was shirtless, with tattooed arms, brushing the tip of his roll-up against the rim of the fluted glass ashtray.
Johnny stood there as if lost, but conscious now of another man, a live one, reflected in the glass as he strolled and scuffed and stopped along the far side of the room, a bit older than himself, with short dark hair and an amusing face, black flared jeans and a duffel coat; the waiting and pacing deepened his appeal, as did the risk of him passing on, a missed chance. In a minute he came alongside, craned forward to search for what Johnny saw in the photo, while Johnny shifted from one foot to the other as if magnetized and touched shoulder to shoulder with him. The man stepped back a fraction and peered quizzically at Johnny, then back to the photo, as if finding a likeness and then accepting how absurd, and hilarious, it would have been if one of the long-haired men in the bedroom had been Johnny himself. Johnny was slow to see this, and when the stranger said, ‘Not you, then?’ he was able to laugh, ‘Oh . . . no!’ with sufficient surprise and briefly touched the man’s arm.
Their conversation went by loops and catches then, while they drifted from picture to picture in an English uncertainty about how seriously to take them. They touched shoulder to shoulder again as they tested each other’s tone, and knowledge. It was beautiful the instinct of it, quite new and alarming too to Johnny, though the idea that he fancied the man grew as it was encouraged and returned, and was smoothly akin to their joint enjoyment of the art, which now mattered rather less. He found he was called Colin, not a name he liked, but he adjusted to it – it made him fancy him more. Still the polite uncertainty survived, after the last picture, and they drifted back through the two rooms, nodding and saying yes to the ones they’d agreed on before. Then they were out in St Martin’s Place together, a cold wind blowing and a quick decision made.
It was cold in Colin’s flat, too, above a busy main road just south of the river, but they jumped into bed in their underwear and got hot kissing and tugging it up or down. Johnny hadn’t been with someone so hard and rough as Colin before, and he watched him for signals as to how he should behave – he was eager but there was a fractional delay, which oddly made the game more intense. Colin showed how much he liked him as he held him down and pushed him around – ‘Your hair!’ he said, grinning and tutting. He did just what he liked, so that Johnny’s shyness smiled helplessly through in the moment of throwing it off. But it all worked out, and seemed inevitable, the pain as well as the brutal excitement.
They lay around, Colin hopped out and lit a cigarette, which he shared with Johnny, specks of ash on their chests, as they lay side by side, Johnny’s foot trapped between Colin’s feet. It wasn’t only the area, with the motorbikes and lorries revving at the lights below, but the room itself, clean, carpetless, with a sheet for a curtain, that was so alien and convincing. Of course he thought of the room in the photograph: Londoners at Home. Colin asked him what his name was, and when he told him he said, ‘Oh, yes? Any relation?’ ‘Yeah – well, he’s my dad,’ said Johnny, ‘if that’s what you mean.’ He didn’t want the whole thing of blame and pity; and being in bed with another man, of course, made it awkward. Colin smiled and nodded slowly as he blew out smoke, ‘Would you believe it,’ he said, then dropped the cigarette in a cup by the bed and in a minute they were having another go, a humorous start that led to a quick, almost savage finish. It was amazing, and it was enough. After this they smiled and kissed as they stood close together in the curtained-off end of the bath which was also a shower. Johnny’s hair grew heavy and dark under the falling water, and unwaved itself into a shiny point between his shoulder blades. Colin’s hair was short and neat – he perhaps didn’t know yet that it was thinning on the crown. They towelled each other, which wasn’t easy to do well, and in the way Colin let Johnny dry him between the legs and half-excite him as he did so there was a vision of what day-to-day life with another man might be, everything he wanted of love and coupledom constantly granted. But Colin, with what seemed to Johnny his lavish gift of intimacy, was not one to repeat himself, and so far they had not met again. After two unanswered phone calls, a reawoken bashfulness kept Johnny from making a third.
Johnny didn’t tell Cyril he was going back to Cranley Gardens – any more than he’d told his father, on the phone, that he’d been there in the first place, and met a man who’d known him at Oxford. He was back in the house, on and off, all week, in his mind, among the pictures and the people, who seemed obscurely the key to a new life which would be damaged by contact with the old. It wasn’t just because of Ivan, he felt somehow homesick for it, after one visit, in a way that he didn’t for either of his parents’ houses. As he put on his coat and scarf he popped into the little cold lavatory at the back of the premises. At work he kept his hair held back in a rubber band; now he looked in the mirror as he folded the thick ponytail upwards and quickly pulled his corduroy cap over it, the peak high at the front, the elasticated hem at the back tight across his nape. As always he saw what he hoped someone else would see in his eyes and lips and broad cheekbones, and then with a turn of the head, as if in a hologram, another lurking image, mouth too big, nose not straight, skin touched up into spots by the oily tips of his hair. He called goodbye to Cyril, and went out into the February night with a chill round his ears.