One Saturday lunch-time he drank a bottle of Gilbey’s with the Halls and rang Justin’s number when he got back, in a mood of truculent reasonableness. “Let’s cut the crap,” he said, as he span the phone-dial through the eleven laborious numbers, which seemed in their old-fashioned way to be giving him time to think twice about the call. After a couple of rings a pleasant unfamiliar voice recited the last seven digits back to him, ending on a little interrogative rise. It was a tone of such easy and unsuspecting efficiency that Robin hesitated, and when after a few seconds Alex said “Hello,” the tone hardening but still tolerant, he hung up. He sat hunched forward on the sofa in the stillness of the country afternoon. Up in London a young man he had never seen would be putting down the receiver with a shrug and speaking innocently to the man they shared; Robin knew he was house-proud, and pictured him in an apron. He found a note of reproach in that happy mechanical answering of the phone, in the enviable pleasant boredom of their affair. Then he got to his feet with a sullen longing to break it up, which he drunkenly allowed to become a plan.
Back in town he was in a mood of fatalistic excitement that was new to him. He thought he must at least see his rival and drove over early on the Monday morning to the quiet Victorian street where the two of them were living. He slipped into a space almost opposite the house, and sat looking at it, professionally adjudicating the commonplace glazing and pointless panels of terracotta tiles so as to subdue his sense of its special aura and of the bulging secret it sheltered. He saw an upstairs curtain pulled open by a shirt-sleeved arm, and then tugged half-back again, as if after a wincing protest. It was an ordinary redbrick terrace house, made remotely pretentious by arts-and-crafts details. Once it would have had a maid and children in it. Robin wondered how Alex and Justin lived in it, what they had done with it.
His view of the front door was interrupted by a battered yellow Escort dawdling past in search of a parking-space. The driver was a flat-faced young black with a gold cross ear-ring which glinted as he craned round. Seeing Robin in his car he mouthed a question as to whether he was about to leave, and when Robin shook his head gave him an incoherent grin, which seemed to have some kind of sex-sympathy in it. He stopped a short way ahead, in the middle of the road, and waited. It was the half-hour of going to work and to school. All along the street goodbyes were being shouted down hallways or front doors double-locked for the silent daytime. Robin started to feel conspicuous as children were hurried past. He looked carelessly at the black driver, who he thought might be an electrician or painter, and saw him angle the rear-view mirror so as to check his hair in it, and ogle his own eyes and teeth as if for crumbs of sleep or breakfast. He saw him squirt a little aerosol into his mouth. He missed the opening of the door opposite, but turned at the knock of its shutting and the rattle of the letter-flap. A pale young man in a grey suit came out on to the road; he was so tall that he seemed almost to trip over the flimsy front gate. Robin thought there was something rather 1890s in the long profile and the almost black swept-back hair; he was more beautiful than Justin had led him to expect. At the same time he thought brutishly of the sex-life he had with Justin and couldn’t imagine how this man could ever have satisfied him. He saw him stoop to unlock a vulnerable old soft-top Mercedes, and as he drove off, with a look as if surprised and embarrassed by the competitive noise he was producing, the driver of the Escort backed up alertly and into the space he had left.
So that was it. He had seen his lover’s partner in the barely thinking routine of his workday morning; and it was better to see and to know than to be haunted by imaginings. He felt it had been worth it. And it was really only then that it occurred to him that he might see Justin now himself: he could be late at Kew and have a fierce half-hour with him first, in the musty marital bed, or over the kitchen table, shaking the breakfast things on to the floor. At the moment he loved the idea of sex that smashed things up. Even so, he waited. He was frightened of Justin.
A minute later he heard the remote trilling of a phone, and glancing across the road saw the black guy nodding into a mobile and then poking its little aerial back in before getting out of the car, reaching in for a knapsack, slamming the door shut. He was broad and muscular, with curvy legs in ripped old jeans; he strolled confidently round the car, through Justin and Alex’s flimsy front gate, and in at the door, which opened already as he approached. Robin saw a flash of white bathrobe on a welcoming arm before the door closed. He sat with his mouth open, his lips hard and curled, as if about to be sick. Upstairs in the bedroom’s bay-window the half-open curtain was tugged carelessly shut.
FOUR
Alex gets nicer and nicer when he’s drunk,” said Justin. “Don’t you, darling?”
Alex gave a slow frowning nod of agreement and when Danny laughed slid a smile at him and held his eye for a second. “Some of us do,” he said.
Justin noticed the contact and then took in Robin’s steady gaze across the table, the turned-down smile that said that he usually indulged him but tonight might side with the others. “I’m an angel when I’m drunk,” said Justin.
It was the end of a long rich dinner, Danny clearing the dishes in the rational way of a trained waiter, leaving Justin with his spoiled helping of now cold pudding, which he eyed with baffled alarm, like an emblem of a life he couldn’t recall ordering. “You can take my spotted dick, darling,” he said; at which Alex alone laughed, out of a remembered habit.
“Anyone for coffee?” said Robin loudly. “Or homegrown borage tea…?”
“Come and sit on my knee,” said Justin, pawing vaguely at Danny’s passing leg.
“I’m a bit busy at the moment, Justin. Doing the clearing up.”
Justin mulled this over for a moment. “Well it’s awfully good of you to do that,” he said.
Alex reached across to top up people’s water-glasses. “Have you got Justin to do any housework or things like that yet?” he asked Robin.
“Oh no,” said Robin hastily. “I sometimes wonder if he’d like to. He watches me doing housework with what seems to be genuine interest, but I think without any real confidence that he could ever learn to do it himself.”
Justin smiled past them forgivingly. He didn’t know at the time why he had invited Alex down, except out of restlessness and a loose desire for trouble. But it was satisfactory to bring the two main men in his life together, and watch them politely squaring up and backing off, Alex with his Scottish dryness and hot hurt feelings, Robin with his well-bred charm and hints of sexual ruthlessness. He liked the power he had in knowing these two men as he did, the faces under their faces that were only visible in the light of their desire for him. There was a surplus of power, with its delicious tendency to corrupt. He looked at Danny, stooping to stack the dishwasher, the loose singlet hanging off his lean young shoulders. “Hey-ho,” he said, lifting up his glass. “Country life.” “Country life,” said Robin, taking it defiantly as a toast; while Alex looked on with the old anxiety at Justin’s menacing changes of tack and private ironies.
“There’s the most marvellous pig in the village,” Justin said to him. “I must take you to see it. It’s probably the most interesting thing in the village. It’s an enormous great big pig.”