‘I’m all right.’ He braced himself, smiled slyly to show he was up for anything.
‘It must have been so difficult for you,’ said Ivan, and his hand still behind Johnny’s ear made it hard for him to shift away. ‘And, you know, finding out you were gay yourself.’
It was still strange to hear, in so many words, that he was. ‘Well, it didn’t help, I suppose,’ said Johnny quietly. The point was, surely, here he was, with Ivan’s soft breath in his face . . .
‘Something so public . . .’ Ivan raised his head slightly and leaning over him kissed him softly on the cheek, and then above his eye. ‘I wish you’d tell me about it.’
The sense of years-long danger was mixed with a faint, never-faced uncertainty as to what the danger was. ‘About what?’
‘You know, when it happened.’
‘It’s all a bit of a blur . . . you know.’
Ivan’s smile tightened for a second at this, then relaxed. ‘I mean, did your dad ever talk to you about what went on?’
‘No – of course not.’
‘No, I suppose . . . .’ Ivan laughed at himself. ‘It would have been a bit odd!’
‘That’s right,’ said Johnny, ‘it would.’
‘I just think it must have been so awful for you, with it on the news, everyone reading about it in the papers,’ Ivan said.
‘I didn’t read the papers, Mum told me not to.’ The bizarre idea that Ivan himself, at what? fifteen, had done so, came to him for the first time. ‘Did you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Ivan, ‘of course I did. Well, it was a big story, wasn’t it, for a while. Money, power . . . gay shenanigans! It had everything.’
‘Oh, yeah, it was perfect,’ said Johnny.
Ivan lay back a little, still up against him, his hand drifted from his neck to the tight sheet over his shoulder, Johnny helpless in his hidden nakedness gazing close up at him. It had the fright of a new kind of excitement – to be in the power of someone he was shiveringly keen to submit to entirely. ‘And your poor dad at the centre of it. I mean how did he cope at first, you know, when he came out of prison?’
Johnny almost laughed, at his persistence, and at the coy delay in whatever was starting to happen; he was making him work for it. ‘He just carried on, really.’
‘He must have picked himself up, somehow.’
‘Dad always said, “Work’s the thing,”’ said Johnny. He thought no one had ever worked like his father, at whatever he did, and whether it was work or not.
‘No, that’s very good,’ said Ivan responsibly. He stroked Johnny’s shoulder before he went on: ‘I mean, did you actually meet Clifford Haxby?’ He made him sound like someone you might have wanted to meet, a film star.
After a moment Johnny said, ‘Yes, I did.’
‘I just remember that photo,’ said Ivan, ‘taken through a window.’
‘Oh . . . yes.’
‘I remember trying to work it out . . . you know . . . what was going on.’
‘Well, I’m glad it turned you on,’ said Johnny, pushing himself against him, as far as he could, with a little grunt.
‘I mean, was Clifford in love with your dad, would you say?’
Johnny looked at him and at the question through the shimmer of his own early morning sensations. ‘How would I know . . . ? Possibly?’ – tender feelings had been nothing but sex, it seemed, in the glare of the case, and sex itself was a means to something else; but it was hard for him to think about, then or now. He shifted an inch or two, under the weight of Ivan’s knee, drawn up a little further now, and holding him there.
‘And what about your dad? Was he in love with him?’
‘No!’ said Johnny. ‘Of course not.’ He looked at Ivan, and his words took a strange weight and humour from the position he was in. ‘Dad’s not . . .’ – he didn’t know what was best – ‘gay, not really.’
Ivan seemed slightly offended. ‘Well, he must be bisexual, anyway, mustn’t he.’
‘No . . . well, I suppose he must have been, in a way. If he needed to be.’ He met Ivan’s smile with his own. ‘You seem a bit obsessed with my dad.’
‘Oh . . .’ said Ivan.
‘I can see I’m going to have to introduce you.’
Ivan laughed disparagingly, and they lay, not quite meeting each other’s eye, in a tingling nearness that made Johnny gasp and twist with desire in his tight cocoon. Ivan leant in, gave him a soft kiss on the bridge of his nose, then swung round and stood up. He looked down at him for several seconds. ‘When?’ he said.
After breakfast Johnny said, ‘I want to see what that building is.’
‘Which building . . .?’
‘Is it a barn – where the trees begin on the far side.’
‘Oh, yes . . .’ said Ivan. ‘Well, let’s have a walk before we go.’
Johnny’s idea had been to go off by himself. ‘If you feel like it.’
In five minutes they were ready. Johnny jumped off the edge of the platform and got stung on the arm by nettles for his bravado. ‘You won’t need a jacket,’ he said as Ivan came round, having closed the windows, and locked the door. ‘It’s a boiling hot day.’
‘Well, you never know,’ he said.
‘I can’t tell what it is,’ said Johnny. ‘Have you been to it before?’
‘I’ve never noticed it,’ Ivan said, ‘but let’s see.’
They walked at first over the mown hayfields, already green with foggage. It was a lovely effect, the delicate first blades of grass among the silver stalks. Ivan was cheerful, but evasive, he went ahead, unusually alert for things to comment on; while Johnny was caught almost at once in the strange lulled swoon of each warm step to step: he saw how his footprint flattened the new growth and crunched the soft stubble inseparably. Ivan waited for him at the gate into the next field, nervous perhaps about the cows grazing a hundred yards off. He took Johnny’s arm. ‘Thank you for telling me all that, my dear, you know, earlier.’
Was he being sarcastic? ‘Oh, well, it wasn’t much.’
‘No, no . . .’
‘I never talk about it at all, normally, so you were lucky.’
Two or three of the cows noticed them, stared, unsure at first, and seemed to decide they were just about worth a closer look. Johnny wasn’t frightened of cows; as a child he’d moved among them, on their friend Sam Peachey’s farm; he slowed as he felt Ivan pull him forward: ‘As long as you’re all right,’ squeezing his arm tighter for a second, as he looked round.
Johnny stopped, turned and waited, looked cheerfully into the brown face of the nearest cow, twenty yards off. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m a Sparsholt, after all!’, lowering his forehead and shaking his long hair, so that the cow stopped, puzzled a few moments, and cautiously dropped its head again to graze.
‘And are we all right?’ said Ivan, with a giggle.
‘They’re only cows, for Christ’s sake,’ said Johnny, as the others started coming forward, the whole herd following them for reasons of their own up to the next gate.
From here, when they climbed over and turned round, there was a clear view back across the valley to West Tarr, at an angle, glinting, and looking larger, among the crowding trees and bushes, than it did close-to. ‘My word, it stands out,’ said Ivan.
‘Great, isn’t it.’
‘They’d never get away with it now, of course.’
‘What year was it, before the War?’
‘Nineteen thirty-nine,’ said Ivan. ‘It must have been easier then.’
From half a mile away the very notion of the glass box, the modernist ideal, seemed more principled, more foreign and more forlorn. Trees, grass, bleaching sun and rotting rain would undo any kind of house in time, but here these elements had been almost recklessly defied.
‘It would be different in California or somewhere.’