But there were jobs to do, a start on jobs that could have gone on all weekend. They swept up, hundreds of dead flies, two dead mice, had a go at dusting, the dusters themselves worn through. There was a Ewbank which Ivan pushed squeaking over the three faded Indian rugs. Johnny did the bathroom (narrow, toplit, ingenious), the first water hoarse and rusty from the taps. He went out and picked heads of cow parsley from the bank beyond the house and set them in two earthenware pots on the dining table. It was a pleasure in itself, with a feel of preliminary ritual. ‘They’re not really indoor flowers, are they,’ said Ivan.
‘I like them, I’m going to draw them,’ said Johnny. At which Ivan raised his eyebrows and said he would make supper tonight. Johnny politely held back, opened the bottle of Noilly Prat that Kitty had given him, and wandered off with the thick green tumbler in his hand, to look at things – the magic of the house and the lift of the drink offset the tension of the long summer evening.
Johnny held his nerve when they went into the bedroom. Ivan saw him take his shirt off, a moment’s appraisal as if thinking of something else, then he went out again to clean his teeth. Johnny rolled the band from his wrist and tied his hair back, pulled off his jeans and socks, and slipped in under the sheet and the yellow bedcover, an old waxy smell re-awoken by the blanket beneath. He found the hot oblong in the centre of the bed, his feet in the cold damp margin. Then he got out quickly to turn off the overhead light – just the lamp on the bedside table: he didn’t mind which side he slept, he knew couples had their habits, one side with a small accepted deference to the other, his father, getting up early, nearer the door. Here the person with control of the lamp would perhaps be in charge. In his bag he had some KY jelly, used till now only to practise, breathless tension and yielding to his own fingers, which went only so far: he hid the tube just in reach under the edge of the bed. Ivan came back with a glass of water and a book. Johnny didn’t watch him getting undressed, but saw him lift the cover and slide in beside him, in his vest and his string pants. ‘Ooh . . .’ said Ivan, nudging into the warm centre, where Johnny lay facing him. He sat up with the sheet pulled over his chest, opened the book and uncapped his pen; he wrote something, underlined it, and sat biting his cheek. ‘I hope you’re not a light sleeper,’ he said.
‘I can sleep when I have to,’ said Johnny, edging over and with a small yawn raising his knee over Ivan’s left leg and sliding a hand round his stomach.
Ivan shook his fringe out of his eyes as he wrote. ‘You must be tired after all that driving, aren’t you?’
‘Mm? Not really,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m quite drunk, though . . .’
‘You drink too much,’ said Ivan, and turned the page with a nod. He wrote fast and vigorously, little rocking and circling movements passing up his arm into his body.
‘What are you doing?’
‘What do you think?’ said Ivan.
‘It must be very important,’ Johnny said, ‘if you have to do it now,’ wriggling his fingers in under the hem of Ivan’s vest.
‘I’m writing my diary. It has to be done every day.’
Johnny worked his hand up over the silky warmth of his stomach, touched his soft right nipple. ‘The day’s not over yet.’
‘If you don’t write it down before you go to sleep you forget it,’ said Ivan.
This didn’t sound very flattering. ‘So what are you saying about me?’
‘Well, it’s private, obviously.’
Johnny raised his head, watched him squint at the page in the lamp-light, amused or annoyed. He pushed himself up, kissed Ivan’s neck and nuzzled under his chin, getting in the way. He let his hard-on make his case, pushing out at the waistband of his pants as he rolled half on top of him. ‘Please . . . !’ said Ivan, but he put the book aside, turned away for a moment for a drink of water, while Johnny in a trance of boldness groped in his pants, plump, semi-hard – then Ivan stretched up and switched off the lamp. ‘That’s better,’ he said, snuggling back beside Johnny, who felt for him again, unaligned and with no idea in the sudden blackness of where Ivan was looking or what face he was making.
He woke early, 5.20 on his travel clock, the curtains light but the sun still behind the hills. Ivan was hunched away from him and also touching him, buttocks against his hip, a hard heel pressing his calf. Johnny shifted carefully, looked at what he could see of him in the dawn shadows, his shoulders, the back of his neck, the pale swoop of his vest. Rising on an elbow he took in the turned-away profile, soft but heavy in sleep, unwaking for minute after minute; the dark hair squashed up by the pillow where he’d pulled it round for comfort. Johnny dropped back, shifted so that only their bottoms touched, his boldly naked, Ivan at some unnoticed point back in his pants. He couldn’t decide what had happened. He had spent the night with him, an achievement, nudging, turning and settling; but they hadn’t had sex, not as Johnny thought of it and wanted it, and this was a failure – or it had the makings of one, after five months of waiting. Now the day after was beginning, and he felt tenuous, a stranger here, in the bedroom, the bed, of the copulating Goyles.
Ivan putting out the light – he felt it more than he should have done, like a small but lingering insult to his interest as a lover. Between their sighs and giggles, Ivan saying things, all the squirming round, big kisses sought and then half-avoided, he’d thought keenly of his hour in bed with Colin, its unstoppable, nearly speechless logic. Colin was totally a lights-on person, he loved seeing just what he was doing to you; and it was thinking of all that, in the teeming darkness, that had transformed him and made him fierce with Ivan, though he knew within seconds that he wasn’t happy. ‘Let’s just play around a bit,’ said Ivan, ‘you know.’ A few moments later he realized Ivan had come.
*
‘The sea tumbling in harness,’ said Ivan, very Welsh, looking out with the wind in his hair at the breakers rolling in far below.
‘What’s that?’ said Johnny; he locked the car, and felt, by this second day, used to it, and even possessive.
‘Oh, it’s just a line from a Dylan Thomas poem,’ said Ivan.
‘Which one?’ said Johnny. ‘I love Dylan Thomas.’
Ivan gave him a quick doubting look. ‘Let’s go down,’ he said.
The coast seemed to be all rocks and cliffs, except this one place tucked between two headlands, where a narrow white beach curved away for a sheltered quarter-mile. One other car was parked in the scooped-out parking place above; beyond it, a gap in the hedge and a rough path disappearing. A stream drained down through a little wood, the rocky path beside it, a stile at the bottom, and then the sand and breaking waves. The lone couple at the far end stared at the two boys – the woman had been swimming topless and wrapped a towel round herself as she came up to join the man, who lay reading on his front, half-hidden by a canvas bag, his hairy bottom naked to the sun. They were in their fifties perhaps, and to Johnny there was nothing exciting in the rare glimpse of nudity; though Ivan let out a disappointed ‘Hmmm’ when the man, who had ignored the woman’s promptings, at last sat up and pulled on a pair of loose blue shorts.
‘We should swim naked too,’ said Johnny.
‘Well, you can,’ said Ivan.
‘We’ll have to,’ said Johnny, ‘we haven’t got our things.’
‘I mean I can’t swim,’ said Ivan; and it was clear from his faint smile at the horizon that he didn’t like admitting this, and was hoping to suggest that swimming was a pointless activity anyway.
Johnny looked at him quizzically. ‘So what would you do, if I swam out round those rocks and suddenly got into trouble? You’d just sit here and watch, I suppose.’