Robin wasn’t happy, and he didn’t want to show it. He wasn’t in control. Justin had insisted on sex at eight this morning and moaned and yelped like someone dubbing a porn film. They heard Alex shifting in his bed next door, and when the excitement was over Robin couldn’t help imagining the effect of their grunts and laughter, and felt humiliated to have behaved so cruelly. The absence of any allusion to it in Alex’s face and conversation over breakfast was a clear sign of how upset he must have been. It seemed he had made a pass at Justin yesterday, he was obviously still in love with him and having a ghastly time. Robin felt sorry for him, but in a theoretical way: his loss was Robin’s gain, it would be awful to lose Justin, but Robin himself had never been left.
He stood in the Odd Room, where the new plaster had quickly dried in the hot weather from rosy chocolate to the sand-pink of a powder compact. The arcs of the workmen’s floats could be faintly seen in the surface, which was marble-smooth and yet left a chalky dust on the fingertips. The room held the pleasing smell of plaster and fresh sawdust. His footsteps reverberated. He liked this clean practical phase of the project, when nothing was compromised by use.
Back outside, Mrs Bunce was collecting the glasses, and told him the rest of the party had set off to see the mausoleum, a word she produced with a lightly mocking grandeur. “Your young man wanted to see it,” she said, by which he supposed she meant Danny. Justin would only have wanted to see it if everybody else didn’t.
He saw them from the top of the field, just too far away to shout to without sounding silly. Danny and Alex were on either side of Tony, Alex stooping attentively and looking quickly about like a royal duke being shown something enterprising. Away to the left Justin wandered, swiping at grasses, unsocial, fuelled by nothing more than a weak aperitif. Robin climbed the fence and jogged down towards them; all he could think of was claiming Justin, jumping him or tackling him into the long grass.
Tytherbury had been built a little inland, out of sight of the sea, and the estate reached to the shore only at one point, a mysterious sunless combe or chine, raggedly wooded with yews and rhododendrons and overspreading cedars. A small, almost hidden stream ran down through it and under a fence and cut a wandering channel across the beach. The wood had an unusual abundance of lichens and epiphytes, which gave it the look of a dwarf rain-forest, and Tony sometimes sent obstructive letters to ecologists who wanted to study it. He had learnt his lesson with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, whom he had entertained to dinner and given the run of his archive, and who had repaid him, in the Dorset volume of The Buildings of England, with a merciless sentence about the house: “An extreme example of a justly neglected type.”
Pevsner didn’t record his impressions of the chine, or of the discomforting structure perched above it, in a clearing among storm-wrecked Douglas firs: “In the grounds, MAUSOLEUM of Thomas Light Bowerchalke. A pyramid.” After several inspections Robin found it still had its monumental effect, the steep planes of finely mortared purple brick confused the visitor’s sense of scale: was it thirty feet high? Forty? Fifty? It gave a squeeze to the heart and called for a mild bravery in those who approached it. It was completely smooth, until at the very top of each face a glazed oculus let light into the unimaginable interior.
Tony hurried forward, like a put-upon sacristan, searching through his keys. The door of the pyramid was below ground level, and he seemed to step down into the earth as he entered the long ramp that led to it. Robin followed him, and Danny, and Alex and Justin with their different hesitations. Robin glanced round and saw that Justin had turned his back to have a piss. Tony was saying something about the mask over the door – an impassively staring Roman face that had been vandalised into noseless Egyptian flatness; Robin at least was never sure if it was a man or a woman. Above it there was an inscription in Greek, which no one was quite clear about, but which Tony said meant, “He is going to his long home.” A padlocked grille covered the door, which had oxidised bronze fittings and scraped open heavily across the floor.
Inside, the first surprise was the still cold after the breezy heat of the day, and the before-dawn dimness on sun-narrowed eyes. Justin came in last with his shades on and groped his way round the happily shivering Danny. Alex was gazing at the crossing brick trusses overhead and stumbled backwards into the sarcophagus, on which he found himself demurely sitting down for a moment – a single polished slab of brown marble, quarried at Purbeck twenty miles to the east.
Robin was still puzzled by the structure of the building. Where other such pyramids he had seen, in landscaped parks and manorial churchyards across the country, contained a domed chamber, which looked almost as if quarried from the heart of a solid mass, the Tytherbury one was an open space from the sunken burial chamber to the apex. It was like being inside a church steeple, or an oast-house, except that the joists were not made of timber but of brick, and seemed to hang in narrow intersecting arcs one above the other. The effect, in the grey gleam from the weather-limed skylights, was both mysterious and claustrophobic. Tony claimed that the mosque at Cordoba had been its inspiration. It was the buckling of one of these brick strainer arches that Robin was expected to remedy. A shallow dip half-way up on the lichenous north face had alerted them to the danger. Robin explained it rather cryptically to the others, as if expecting, or even hoping, not to be understood, pointing to a spot high up that none of them could honestly see. “How can you work on that without what’s above it falling down?” asked Alex.
“I don’t know,” said Robin.
There were frills of damp between the courses of brick just beside them. He didn’t like this building, and had a clear image, a tiny loop of film, in which it fell in on him. He found its lack of religious assurances surprisingly bleak. It was over a year since they’d buried Simon, but he was chilled and troubled by literal-minded imaginings, standing within a few feet of a dead body that must be withered and grinning after more than a century of unbelieving rest. Alex gave him a rueful smile, perhaps about the repair job, though it seemed to have some subtler intuition in it. He said, “I never know how you know, how people ever know what will stand up.”
“Well…” said Robin broadly, as if it was, actually, within the competence of any intelligent adult. He thought, he’ll start on stresses and strains in a minute.
“It’s the whole thing of stresses and strains, isn’t it?” – Alex looking away to where Justin was speaking quietly to Danny, Danny tracing a line with his toe in the gritty dust on the stone floor. “And we certainly know something about them…”
And that was what Robin disliked, the spurious intimacy that Alex was ready to suggest between them, as though to bring him down to his own level of failure and niceness. Robin had what he thought of as an upper-class mistrust of niceness.
He turned away on a pretence of looking for something, to show he wasn’t here merely for pleasure; he unclipped the metal tape-measure which he carried like a carpenter on his belt, and measured the low doorway, to see what might or might not be brought in. When he turned back the other four were smiling about something, standing close together just beyond the sarcophagus. He was embarrassed to hear Danny saying something about opium. Tony had once confided in him, as if it were still a problem, that his great-grandfather had been an addict; and Robin had mentioned to Danny his theory that the pyramid, and perhaps the house itself, was an attempt to realise the architectural phantasmagoria of an opium dream. He heard Tony making some hasty rejoinder, and Danny saying, “That’s so cool.”
Outside in the sunlight, hearing the door dragged to, the grille padlocked, a brief silence of readjustment among the group – his son, his lover, his guest, their sweet expectant old host – Robin wondered at his own paranoia, and made a characteristic effort to banish it: a deep breath, squaring of the shoulders, an irritable frown and then a wide handsome smile at the others. Justin was a flirt and it meant nothing, he liked to be a nuisance; when drunk he would sit on the laps of virtual strangers who had come to dinner or push himself against old friends of Robin’s in little faux-fucks, like a dog. He said it was just a sign of his shyness.