In the restaurant Danny was rather quiet and ordered only one course, as if hoping to discharge a social obligation as quickly as possible, while Alex chose a souffle with a twenty-minute handicap. They had a table in the window, and Danny sat breaking up bread and looking out past Alex’s shoulder at the parade of pleasure-seekers outside. At first he said “Yes…yes” with distracted regularity while Alex was telling him sweetly self-deprecating stories about the office: he had never had any special arts of courtship, being very nice was his only technique. He watched Danny’s cool grey eyes slide from right to left, passing briefly over the obstacle of himself. He said, “I’m sorry, it’s a bit dull in here,” feeling the gloom and discretion of the restaurant as if they were expressions of his own character, or indictments of it. He seemed to have picked the one place among these gay blocks that was still a haven for heterosexuals. Then Danny smiled enormously, and reached across to touch Alex’s arm. He leant forward, and re-angled his attention – it was a change of gear that thrilled Alex and slightly unnerved him, since he had seen Robin do just the same thing the previous weekend, in a physical convulsion of remembered manners; he had been glad of it and doubted it at the same time.
Danny said, “I wonder what Dad and Justin are up to this weekend.”
Alex looked at his watch. “Ten fifteen. I don’t know about…your father, but Justin will be drunk.”
“Mm,” said Danny nostalgically, and pulled the bottle out of the ice. He was drinking quickly but not heavily – it was the acceleration of the evening, which Alex only resisted because he couldn’t tell where it was going. “Did he always drink that much?”
It was a hard and posthumous-sounding question, like something asked in court. Alex wasn’t sure whether to protect Justin or expose him. “It varied. He never really gets hangovers, I don’t know why. It’s never really been a problem. He drank a lot last year, after his father died. That was a bad time for us. The beginning of the end, I suppose.” Alex found himself looking into the shallow bowl of a camera obscura in which a country scene was projected, lawns and chestnut-trees, a saturation of green, the agonising stupor of a summer day, Justin in a dark suit walking steadily away from him. “After the funeral things were never the same.”
“When was that?”
It really wasn’t what Alex wanted to think about – it was everything he was trying at last to escape, and it gave him a sense of foreboding to have it conjured up by the beautiful young man he hoped would be Justin’s replacement. “Exactly a year ago.”
Danny seemed to be working it out. “So when did he meet Dad?”
“Actually, I’m not sure. Some time after that,”
Danny was already laughing. “And we won’t go into how they met.”
“No, quite,” said Alex plonkingly, to hide the fact that he didn’t know and never wanted to. When at last the food arrived, the waiter drained the bottle into Danny’s glass and accepted his enthusiastic nod at the suggestion of another one.
“He’s quite a change from Simon,” Danny said, holding his knife and fork straight up as his eyes explored a plate of capriciously disguised cuts of guinea-fowl. And again he seemed to be smiling at a recollection he couldn’t politely explain. “Quite a change…”
There might have been some mockery of Justin in the air, and again Alex, who knew better than anyone what Justin’s failings were, was surprised to find himself lightly wounded on his behalf. “Why, what’s Simon like?”
Danny waited till he’d finished chewing and then said, “You’d have to ask in Golders Green cemetery,” and laughed quietly and bleakly. “No, he died last year.”
Alex raised his eyebrows and nodded, taking in the fact and with it a sense that he might have been unfair to Robin, whom he’d thought of up to now as a mere loose libido, a lordly saboteur of other people’s happiness. “AIDS?”
Danny paused and said, “Yeah,” as if it was unnecessary or even bad form to mention it.
“But…Robin’s okay?”
“Oh yes.” And with a grin: “My impression is he’s always been a pitcher not a catcher.” Alex wasn’t sure if they both saw the double meaning. He was oppressed again by his own dark inner loop, the melting fade into fade into fade of his memories of sex with Justin. “This is delicious by the way.”
“Good – this is too,” Alex said, though even the fugitive demands of a souffle were a little much for his amorously shrunken appetite.
“I mean he looks different, Simon was dark, I suppose they both had rather gorgeous bums. Do you think people always go for the same type?”
Alex wondered this about himself; part of the point of Danny was that he wasn’t like Justin. “It can be very nice to have a change. Some people have to have a blond, or can only get it up with black guys, or only like short people.” He sounded stolidly expert.
“Yeah, what about you?”
“Well, almost everyone’s short to me. Though I admit I never quite see the point of other tall people.”
“I like the way they go on and on,” Danny said impression-istically.
“Do you?” Alex gave a grateful smile.
“I do,” said Danny, acting sly.
Alex loved being with him, it went off like a rocket in his heart, the fierce ascent and all the soft explosions of descending stars. He wanted passers-by to stop and watch them leaning together in the candlelight and speculate enviously about them. He said, “I suppose the thing is, with types, it’s not so much the look as the psychological thing. Whether you’re drawn to givers or takers.”
“Mm”
“I’ve got a ruinous taste for takers.”
Danny was picking ferally at the last brown-mauve flesh on a white bone. “That’s just a typically modest way of saying you’re a giver,” he said, smiling with grease on his lips. “It’s really sweet of you to take me out to dinner.”
“It’s a pleasure, darling,” Alex murmured, obliterating, with the gentle pounce of his endearment, a momentary discontent – he hadn’t yet said he was treating him, so Danny had robbed him of a moving gesture later in his synopsis for the evening. It was strangely as if Danny knew this when he said,
“I really want you to have a good time tonight. This is your night.”
“Is it? Thank you…” said Alex, though still with a feeling that he was being pitied or at least humoured, and that it was “his” night in the exceptional way that a birthday was, or the annual visit to town of a terrified old relative. “Well, I’m in your hands.”
Danny nodded his head with a firm, self-confident moue. “I thought we could go to Chateau, it’s pretty fantastic right now. If you’d like to.”