“Don’t breathe on the objects please sir.” Danny was beside him, and slid an arm quickly round his waist.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, fine.” His demanding mouth twisted into a grimace. “It’s so great to see you,” he said.
“You too,” said Alex. “I suddenly realised on my way here you might be on duty.”
“You mean you didn’t come just to see me?”
“Of course I did really,” Alex said, glad that the little pleasantry was also the truth.
“I was going to give you a ring actually.”
“Oh…”
“See if you wanted to go out one night.”
This was exactly what Alex wanted to do, and he said, “That would be gorgeous.”
“I felt so sorry for you last weekend,” Danny said, perhaps revealing that his motives were mainly charitable. “What is the matter with my dad at the moment? Justin not giving him his Weetabix, maybe.”
“I don’t think that can be it,” said Alex quietly, with a sick second of recall of the sound of the two of them at it. “It was probably stupid of me to come.”
“No, I’m glad you did. It made it much more bearable for me, you know. I was getting such a heavy number about Terry staying over.”
“Ah yes…”
Danny looked around to see if they could be overheard. “Dad’s not all that together about me liking blokes.”
“Oh!…Well…”
“That stunt in the car!” Danny frowned and slowly shook his head. “What the fuck was all that about…?”
Alex gave a curt unamused laugh; then said, “He was very upset afterwards.”
“Must be the time of life…” Danny said, sagely or cynically, Alex couldn’t tell.
A couple of young men drifted past, one of them in sunglasses as if the art might hurt his eyes, the other talking and swivelling his arm from the elbow, perhaps to explain it to his friend, but eyeing Danny lazily up and down – then gasping and stretching back to him, flicking his fingers as if he had been asked a difficult question. Eventually he said, “Sean!”
Danny nodded tolerantly. “It’s Dan,” he said.
“Dan! I nearly walked right past you, in all that butch clobber. This is Hector by the way.”
Hector winced in acknowledgement.
“This is my friend Alex.”
“Pleased to meet you Alex. I’m Aubrey.” He gazed at Danny and clutched his hands to his chest in almost tearful amazement at the encounter.
“Well!” he said. “Haven’t seen you out for ages.”
“I was in the country last weekend – we both were,” said Danny, signalling Alex and giving a surprising suggestion of closeness. Aubrey looked unimpressed by this.
“Ooh, not settling down, I hope.”
“How about you?”
“I don’t know…” He gestured in turn to the speechless, perhaps non-anglophone, Hector, and gave him an irritable sluttish stare. “What you doing this weekend?”
“Not quite sure,” said Danny. “May be at the Ministry tomorrow night.”
“Oh…” Alex murmured, wondering which Ministry, and picturing some familiar function, Danny in uniform checking bags and coats.
“It’s a bit straight, isn’t it? Though what’s it matter when everyone’s off their face anyway?” Aubrey smiled wearily. “Can you get us on the guest-list?” Alex thought that would be pretty unlikely, unless it was somewhere very socially compromised, like Ag and Fish.
“Look, I’m not supposed to talk to people when I’m on duty,” Danny said, and pointed to the tab on his shoulder, on which the word ALERT was embroidered.
Aubrey took it well. “All right, doll, well maybe see you” -giving him a kiss on the cheek, which was obviously also not allowed. Hector smiled and shook hands firmly, as if after an invigorating exchange of views.
“Shagged them both,” said Danny, when the couple had turned the corner; “though Aubrey doesn’t know that.” He glanced around naughtily. “Hector is” – and he merely mouthed the word “huge,” with a comic mime of staring incredulity. He walked off, in his squashy, slightly squeaky Doc Martens, but turned, in front of a long Greek lion. “I’ll ring you tonight…but Saturday, okay. Keep it free.” And he gave him the smile again, which to Alex seemed more than ever private and unpredictable, like something you might normally only discover with more intimate knowledge of a person, like Hector’s hugeness, but which to him was far more exciting than anything like that.
On the way back to the office he realised he’d forgotten to have lunch, and ate a sandwich on a bench in St James’s Square. The plane-trees, in their grandly reluctant way, were only just coming into leaf. Alex felt the beautiful unwise emotions of something starting up, and grinned to himself between bites, as if his sandwich was unaccountably delicious; though what he was savouring was the longed-for surprise of being wanted. He looked up, with a sense of being still in the exhibition, at the statue of William of Orange on its tall plinth. The king was heroically bare-chested, and reined his horse back with a glare into the future he was destined to command. The horse’s high bronze foreleg was frozen in the air – and Alex pictured it plunging forward, along the paths and away under the trees.
Danny lived just off Ladbroke Grove in a tall terrace house which until last Christmas had been a private hotel. Beside the front door the words HOT AND COLD and APPROVED could still faintly be seen through a covering of whitewash. Alex arrived early and walked on past; he wasn’t sure how keen he should appear to be, though he had been thinking ravenously about Danny for the past two days. He had forgotten the mood of a new affair, the compulsive mix of risk and reassurance. He had spent an hour that morning in Sloane Street having his hair made fractionally shorter; and more than an hour walking about the house in different clothes and glancing soulfully but self-critically into mirrors. He never put on weight and at thirty-six could still wear everything he owned. He found himself zipping up jeans and laboriously unbuttoning shirts he hadn’t touched since long before he met Justin; some of them were probably fashionable again, though others, he was pretty sure, were merely evidence of a styleless past. He finally left home in blue jeans, a white T-shirt and a short black leather jacket, an anonymously classic effect which belied the carnival of uncertainty that had produced it.
So this was Danny’s neighbourhood. Alex wondered if he ever used that gloomy, velvet-curtained pub, the Chepstow Castle – though of course gay men nowadays were meant to use bars, where there was nowhere to sit down and the drinks cost twice as much. There was a launderette, a caged West Indian off-licence, and an Italian restaurant which looked attractively mysterious from outside, though photos in the window showed the interior as a hell of crowded tables, sadistic gypsy fiddlers and dangling Chianti bottles. He thought of the evening he’d been meant to spend, Traviata and then dinner with his old friend Hugh, and Hugh’s swiftly hidden envy when he learned why he’d been chucked.
He came back and searched the tall panel of bells. A housing trust now ran the place and seemed to have welcomed in an extraordinary number of people. The bell marked “Woodfield” was near the bottom, and seeing the name again, with its trilling resonance of sexual power, Alex felt the incongruity of chasing after Robin’s son. He wasn’t sure if he was taking a devious revenge on Robin for stealing Justin, or if he was helplessly joining Justin under the spell of the family. But then Danny himself was jumping at him with a kiss on the cheek and a tight hug that was almost aggressive.