It wasn’t what Johnny wanted to talk about. ‘Oh, yes, well, I got what I wanted.’ He looked narrowly at him for a second. ‘It was so funny,’ he said to the girls, ‘I ran into Ivan at Victoria last week.’
The girls didn’t seem to think it was that funny. ‘Mm . . .’ said Francesca, and looked away.
‘How was your uncle?’ said Johnny.
‘Oh, very well – we had a great time.’
‘Where did you go with him?’
Ivan seemed distracted by talk behind them. Francesca said, ‘Oh, my god, she is here. Don’t look now.’ Una and Ivan turned their heads, and stared at someone who’d just arrived at the bar.
‘She looks awful.’
‘Frightful,’ said Francesca.
In a few minutes Johnny offered to get them more drinks, and they all said yes, Ivan drinking up quickly. In the crowd at the bar he wasn’t sure which of the two women the frightful woman was; he had the sense of pressing his way into the gay world, alone among dozens of people all knowing from previous experience what was going to happen. He didn’t know what to expect, in his limbo with Ivan, but people smiled at him, a man turning from the bar with drinks lifted high raised an eyebrow and grinned at him. In the mirror behind the barman he could barely see himself between the optics and ranged bottles. He ordered and waited, holding his wallet, and saw enough to know the man leaning beside him was looking at him, then felt his hand on his upper arm. A handsome man in his thirties, with swept-back blond hair and good teeth. ‘Are you with Franny?’ he said. ‘Yeah, I thought I saw you, I’m an old friend of hers – Tony’ – and they shook hands. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Oh, Johnny,’ said Johnny, pleased to be talking to someone among these strangers, and abashed by Tony’s physical presence, the tight blue T-shirt and, glimpsed when he looked down to pocket his change, the big jutting packet, oddly round, as if he wore a cricket box.
‘I’ll come and join you,’ Tony said. ‘Really great to meet you.’
When Johnny got back to the table a fat middle-aged man with a tray was hovering there. ‘It’s your salads,’ he said, and started to unload little bowls among the bottles and glasses.
‘Oh, god,’ said Francesca.
‘I’m not hungry,’ said Ivan.
‘It’s all free, it comes with your membership,’ said the man, smiling firmly.
‘We’ve already eaten,’ said Francesca.
‘It’s just your salads,’ he said, as if a salad were a medicine, and with the air of someone used to resistance, for all his pleasantness. ‘You’ve got to have them.’ He put down four forks wrapped in paper napkins.
Johnny peered into the bowls, which each contained a bit of iceberg lettuce, a ring of tomato and (almost hidden, unnameable) a glistening square of meat. He sat down when the man moved on to the next table, and unwrapped a fork. ‘I didn’t know we got this,’ he said.
‘Don’t eat it,’ said Una.
‘No?’ said Johnny.
‘It’s the licensing law,’ said Ivan, ‘they have to serve a meal.’ This seemed to Johnny both absurd and quite fortunate, he was more hungry now than he’d been before dinner, and food was here, the shameful stopgap of the boozing student.
‘Well, doesn’t look too bad.’ And with the others gazing at him, and then thinking it better to resume their conversation, he ate his lettuce and tomato, there was no dressing on it, and popped in the pink-grey tongue-sized piece of meat, which he chewed uncertainly, thinking it was probably ham, pre-packed, sweaty, and with a knot of gristle in it that he had to bring out behind his hand and hide in the bowl under his screwed-up napkin. It was dismaying, and connected in a momentary violence of image with the glazed squashed ducks earlier. Sometimes meat disgusted him. He took a swig from his cold beer bottle.
Ivan raised an eyebrow into his fringe and gestured to his own bowl. ‘Have mine . . .’ he said.
‘No, thanks,’ said Johnny. ‘Or, well, actually . . . ,’ and switching the two bowls, he ate Ivan’s salad too, it only took a minute, smiling defiantly as he chewed and thought of other things of Ivan’s he’d like.
And when that was done, the thing with the force now of some future anecdote, he pulled Una’s salad towards him, and polished it off. He rested, he felt some natural deference as he looked at Francesca, then he smirked, and she said, ‘What? Oh, go on,’ waving her hand over the bowl as she turned her head in mingled amusement and disgust.
Ivan put up a struggle, only partly humorous, when Johnny tried to pull him to his feet. ‘Maybe later,’ he said, and squeezed Johnny’s hand as he pushed him off. So it was Johnny and Una who edged on to the bright pulsing square of the dance floor. Una hardly danced herself; she angled her shoulders moodily and moved her weight from one foot to the other; now and then a powerful quiver passed upwards through her large body, her head nodded and then settled again as the wave passed downwards. She gazed at a spot beyond Johnny, or else at the floor just in front of her toes. Johnny smiled and touched her loyally on the elbow, feeling men rub against him, bump into him, wanting a man to dance with, feeling the tense start of a new freedom, then starting to strut to and fro between the other dancers, and loving dancing, surprised by a desire to be looked at, smiled at, not laughed at – he felt himself balance and sway, cheerful but lonely. Then he turned back to Una, and found she’d given up dancing and gone to the bar. At the edge of the floor there was the risk of being shoved off it altogether by raised elbows and shrugging shoulders. He stood for a bit jiggling, watching, on the margin, in the hollow tension of not knowing where Ivan was: his eyes searched for him among the cute couples and grinning groups of friends, faces hollowed and shadowed as they danced on the upcast light of the floor. Just behind him when he swivelled Francesca was with the man Tony, looking over the floor like grown-ups at a children’s party.
He could just hear her saying, ‘Yah, his father’s David Sparsholt, of course.’
‘Oh, really . . .’ said Tony. ‘Yeah, he looks a bit like him. Does he talk about it?’
‘Oh, god, he wants to get away from all that. He’s . . . he’s an artist,’ Francesca said, ‘a painter.’
‘I think I’d like to see his work,’ said Tony.
‘I knew you’d fancy him.’
‘He’s got a great arse,’ said Tony. And Johnny, thrown by the compliment as much as the bleak inescapable phrases before it, pushed his way into the crowd that was swinging and pointing to ‘You’re So Vain’, and swung his arse about just a bit too, in half-proud, half-indignant reaction. He thought he saw Colin and his heart sped up – it was someone who looked like him, his smile barely returned, the wave slid back down the beach . . . but in his reawakened absence he was gripped by a longing for particular men he’d fixed on in streets and shops, the black businessman reading Le Monde on the morning bus, the young barman at the Chairman’s Arms: why shouldn’t the world of fantasy step on to the dance floor and show itself as real, touchable, kissable? Two men dancing with a girl pulled him in, and he joined the game, pointing and mugging, ‘You’re so vain! You prob’ly think this song is about you . . .’ – it was last summer at college, a song he knew all the words to. ‘What’s your name?’ said one of the boys, hand on Johnny’s shoulder as they bopped. He told him, grinned back at him, unsure if the question was social or something more, but thinking already, did he fancy him, if it came to that? But it seemed he was the boyfriend of the other man, the more handsome one, and they both danced with the girl, pretty, Indian perhaps, as if the point was just to have fun. He saw Ivan, standing beyond the dance floor, looking on, with a faint smile and the hunch, which Johnny understood, of someone unable to let himself go. He took his new friend’s hand, then put his hands on his shoulders and danced with him for a minute, throwing his head back and laughing, and when he looked round again Ivan had disappeared.