‘Of course not,’ said Ivan; and after a pause, ‘I’d get that man over there involved’ – and he glanced again along the beach to the plump figure treading down to the sea’s edge, his chest hair all the whiter on his sun-browned body.
Ivan’s joke was a kind of intimacy, though something within it was not. Johnny scuffed off his sandals, and pulled his shirt over his head, his hair falling on his bare shoulders. There was an image, lurking and folding in the tumble of the sea: the hour on a Cornish beach a long eight years ago, when Bastien held his eye and grinned and thought of someone else.
‘Are you going in, then?’ said Ivan.
Johnny said, ‘I’ll just soak up some rays,’ and lay back on his elbows on the warm fine sand.
‘OK . . . well . . .’ – and Ivan had an odd expression, carrying on talking as he unbuttoned his shirt. ‘I suppose Denis told you I’m a gerontophile, did he.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Johnny, as if he didn’t pay much heed to what Denis said.
‘He tells most people.’
‘Well,’ Johnny glanced at the pale smooth torso he’d gripped, stroked, kissed here and there last night, but had hardly seen, ‘do you mind?’
‘Sometimes . . .’ said Ivan, and sat back beside him. ‘Do you know what it is?’
It was more delicacy towards Ivan than his own uncertainty that made him say, ‘Sort of . . .’
‘I tend to like older men, that’s all.’
‘Oh . . . I see,’ said Johnny. Something clarified for him, a small sense of vindication mixed up with the bleaker meanings.
‘I mean, I like young men too,’ and he knocked his fist against him, as if Johnny had put him in the wrong.
‘I can tell,’ said Johnny chivalrously. ‘Still, you like old men better?’
‘Well . . .’ Ivan smiled, the fist a finger now, running down Johnny’s arm. ‘Old-er. Not really old!’
So he had a new, serious and quite unexpected shortcoming, in Ivan’s eyes: he was too young. It was wisdom turned on its head, but his immediate effort with all these disappointments was to be reasonable about it – it was frank, a confession, after all. ‘I suppose there’s more security, is there, with older men?’
Ivan twisted round and lay on his front, and to Johnny his round firm bottom seemed subtly different in the light of what he’d admitted. ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ he said.
‘Older people don’t run off so much.’
‘Oh, they can’t believe their luck,’ said Ivan, and had the grace to laugh at himself.
Johnny drew with a small stone in the gritty sand. ‘And have you had . . . affairs?’ – a note of irritation after all.
‘Just this and that, you know. Nothing serious.’
‘Right . . .’
‘Not yet.’
‘There are lots of old men out there,’ said Johnny gamely. ‘Oh, there are . . .’
‘Just waiting for you.’
Ivan smiled at him and looked away. ‘There’s quite a lot of rivalry, you know, later on. You remember Jeff and Bradley.’
‘Do I?’
‘At the Solly.’
‘The really fat old guy?’
Ivan raised his eyebrows. ‘You say that, but Bradley’s terrified Jeff will find someone even fatter and older, and run off with him instead.’
‘Probably not run,’ said Johnny.
The King’s Arms was the hotel in the town, large and stony at the crest of the main street, and English in its bearing and its beers; Johnny couldn’t decide if he was pleased or disappointed. There was nowhere else to get lunch, and he pushed open the glass-paned door into the hall with the apprehension of childhood holidays at the other end of Wales, the Sparsholt family torn between making do and walking out. ‘It’s all right,’ said his father, his mother said, ‘Mm, I don’t know,’ or it might be the other way round, Johnny prey to his own intuitions about the interest or dirt or smell of the place. Here there was a stale smell of beer and cigarette smoke, and as they looked into the lounge and then the bar something else under it, chilly, residual, the stink of cooked lamb. Johnny screwed up his nose, but Ivan didn’t seem to notice. The waitress looked at them warily, and though the dining room was half-empty she gave them a table almost hidden by the swing door to the kitchen. Thick white cups inverted on saucers were part of the lunch setting, no tablecloth but blistered place mats with Lionel Edwards hunting scenes, just like his father and June now had, though neither of them took the least interest in hunting. The talk on the beach sank in, the odd shifting tension of pain and relief. He had got it all wrong. Ivan liked old men. All the hopes of the past few months were absurd. And yet here they were.
The lamb smell in the dining room was fresher, juicier, revived each day. Ivan ordered lamb, by unconscious suggestion, and Johnny had the chicken curry, written down carefully by the waitress, and clearly something of an experiment for the kitchen. There was a family at the table by the window, middle-aged couple, younger daughter and son of eighteen or so, towards the end of taking holidays with his parents, half-parental himself with his little sister. He sat back in a bored but uncomplaining way, made interventions, mocking, doctrinaire. His dark hair was parted in the middle, swept behind the ears. The barman came through with a tray, unloaded a Coke for the girl, a bitter lemon, two pints of shandy for the men. Johnny looked away, gently startled by his own absorption in the family, his sense of recall, the boy unreachable on the far side of the room. There was a glimpse under the table of blue shorts, brown legs. ‘Well, don’t make it too obvious,’ said Ivan.
After lunch Ivan sat reading the obituaries in the Telegraph, and when the other man in the lounge went out he jumped up and seized his Times to compare the obituaries there. Johnny looked at the advertisements in Country Life. Did he prefer a magnificent Georgian house in Hampshire with ten bedrooms or a magnificent Elizabethan house in Cheshire with six acres and a staff cottage? To a guest at West Tarr they both looked rather overdone. He wrinkled his nose. He was struck by how he didn’t get used to it, in fact the reverse, the smell pervaded the room, seemed to hang in the dusty pelmets and curtains and settle deep into the brown armchairs. He got up and wrestled for a minute with the unopening sash window. ‘It’s amazing,’ Ivan said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Percy Slater’s died.’
‘Oh, yeah . . . ?’
‘The Times says, “He never married”, and the Telegraph talks about his work with Hans Oder without even hinting that they were lovers for thirty years, though everyone knew.’
‘Did they?’ said Johnny.
‘Well, almost everyone . . .’ said Ivan, with a pert little smile.
Johnny banged at the window frame with his fist. He said, ‘Not everyone wants every detail of their private lives in the paper.’
‘Well,’ said Ivan, ‘you could argue . . .’ – but he saw Johnny’s point. ‘I mean, do you know about Percy?’
Johnny turned, and went towards the door. ‘Tell me later,’ he said.
*
When they came back to the house, there was already, for Johnny, a ghostly sense of routine – Ivan getting out to undo the gate, the ruts and drops in the track remembered if not avoided, a more luminous pattern of two men passing their days together latent in the seizing of shopping bags, car doors nudged shut with a hip, the unlocking of the house, and the evidence on the kitchen table and the bedroom floor of the time they had spent here before they went out. Johnny stayed in the bedroom, pulled the curtains closed and lay down for an hour, feeling it just possible Ivan might join him. When he came back out at six o’clock he found him sitting at the little fold-down desk, writing in his diary.
Tonight Johnny was cooking, something else mastered last year at college, his best dish. Ivan, suddenly flirty, kissed him on the cheek as he poured him a drink and then leant against the sink to watch while he chopped onions. ‘What is it exactly?’ he said.