Really he shouldn’t be left alone like this. He’d had years of it now, the awful neglect of lovers who had jobs. And he saw, with the sharpness of something remembered for the first time, the little leaded window-panes of Alex’s bedroom, and the view of similar windows across the road on all those days that he was left there, with nothing to do but play with himself and watch Neighbours and get drunk. Here you had the noise of cuckoos and sheep and tractors; there it was the workmen’s drills in the street, or a car-alarm, with its merciless re-startings, or the clink of shirt-buttons against the glass door of the drier. Loading the drier was a thing he could do. Alex suggested early on that he try housework, but the washing-machine broke the first time he used it, and anything to do with cooking was beyond him, though he looked forward to food. He found washing up depressing. He did once hoover, the thing pulling behind him like a recalcitrant dog that had smelt a bitch in the opposite direction, its lead tangling and jamming around doors and chair-legs. He remembered even Alex could be a bit snappy when hot from hoovering.
One simple possibility for today was to give Terry a ring, but he rejected it with a clear sense of tactics. He mustn’t give Robin any new occasion for his old grievances, and Terry’s discretion was still untested. He took a mug of tea through to the sitting-room and then remembered that there were some photographs of Danny in the little commode. He kept forgetting that he fancied him now as well. He squatted down to pull open the drawer and there on top of the albums and the Scrabble and the boxes of candied fruits was something half- wrapped in shiny red paper, it looked like a book, and it was only after he’d read the title that it all came back to him. He never thanked Alex for it properly, but Alex knew he couldn’t say thank you, it was his one unconquerable inhibition. And then a book… After all, there had been bleakish passages back then, those evenings with the opera CDs, squashed up side by side to follow the tiny libretto, Alex turning the page surprisingly soon, while Justin was still trying to square what he was hearing with the words of the previous aria, never quite sure which was Aroldo and which Enrico, even with the help of the waxen pomaded costume portraits in the booklet. Actually Alex was a frightful stick-in-the-mud. Dame Kiri te Kanawa sings Rodgers and Hammerstein was the risque thing he sometimes put on after dinner when people came round (“So good to hear it done by someone who can really sing”).
Justin got out the photo album that Robin had once shown him, a big optimistic-looking thing designed to house a whole family’s sentimental history, but reverting, after the first few cheerful episodes, to thirty or forty pages of charcoal vacancy. There was baby Danny in the bath, which didn’t give one much to go on, and dancing up and down in a sling hung in a doorway to make him walk. There was Robin, a mere soft-faced boy himself, in his tight flared corduroys, bending sexily over his little son; and Danny’s mother, ample, exhausted, maybe a bit stoned, smiling out from under five years’ growth of thick dark hair. There were Robin’s handsome parents, in their changeless county couture, admiring the baby but clearly glad that they wouldn’t have to hold it for long; and proudly unaware, like Edwardian, gentry, of the upheavals ahead. In one of the pictures the young Woodfields were joined on the lawn by the hunky little Marcus whom Robin was probably already seeing on the side. There was a seventies mood of sexual conspiracy about them, as if they had all just been in bed together; though clearly that was far from the case – Jane had been blind to her husband’s dammed-up queerness.
Tucked in loose at the end of the album, roughly where it would have been if the sequence hadn’t been broken, was another photo of the boy and his mother, taken last year on the beach at La Jolla, Danny lean and sunned in long baggy drawers, Jane fierce and fit in a one-piece black swimsuit, hair cropped, something fanatical in the way she gripped her son round the shoulder and pulled him off-balance, though they were both laughing and doubtless acting up to the photographer. Danny had such big nipples; they must come from his mother, like his big soft lips. He wondered if he shared Robin’s thing of looking as if he was about to be sick just before he came. Though he never acknowledged it, Justin was longsighted, and he had to hold the picture away to study it in detail. You really couldn’t tell if that curve of shadow was a crease in the shorts or a hugely lolling half-erection. Or maybe it was caused by something heavy in the pocket. Justin found the uncertainty undermined the fantasy, oddly enough; and the presence of the mother was chastening too. After a minute he put the photos away.
He bathed through to elevenses, and waiting again for the kettle to mark the next stage of his virtuous pre-drinks morning, leafed through the local paper. There was an eyecatching headline about Bridport boys dicing with death, though it turned out their way of doing it was to dive into the harbour beside the ferries and pleasure-boats. Apparently they did it for dares. An editorial said local people must make sure they knew where their kids were. And that in itself set him thinking. There were pages and pages of property, for locals and strangers alike, everything from cowmen’s prefabs to fortified manor-houses; and the thriving and abstruse classified pages, abstruse at least to someone used to the different codes of Boyz or Gay Times. Still, Justin looked through them with an irreducible tinge of hope, wondering brightly if the “Mangles for Sale” were machines or vegetables; and there, in its own. black-ruled box, as if placed by his personal tempter, was the question “Need Something Doing, Now?” and the favoured, solution, “For All Those Odd Jobs – Terry,” and what Justin well knew to be a mobile number. He smiled and folded the paper away. Well, he could hardly ring him, especially since Robin checked every entry in the itemised phone-bill; they’d already had a row about some £30 calls to a gay chat-line.
Justin had a glass of wine with his soup, and followed it with a couple more: a substantial Australian red of the kind Robin often kept for special occasions. Staying with Australia he watched overlapping episodes of three soaps on different channels, thumbing between them to make sure he didn’t miss any shirtless appearances of his favourite actors. After that he found he’d had a bit of a snooze, and had woken up to the still, heavy country afternoon in a state of delinquent horniness. He thought of the period, later on with Alex, when he went to the Common at this time of day; and his wild afternoons early on with Robin, who’d been quite mad then, and the most exciting sex he’d ever had. “Dove sono,” he said out loud, which was an aria Alex used to try to sing. He thought he might at least toddle up to Mrs Bodgett’s cottage and see if Terry was around.
He loitered admiringly through the garden, stopping to sniff the roses and wallflowers, as if he might be being spied on by his better conscience; and in the back lane, with its convenient gate and mood of secret access, he still had the air of someone merely out for a stroll. There was no sign of Terry’s “Love-mobile,” his pale-blue A-reg soft-top Talbot Samba; but his mother was working in the garden, tying up bean-canes, and told him she was expecting him to look in soon.
“Something I want to ask his advice about,” said Justin.
“Oh…” said Mrs B., evidently impressed that her son should be required in a consultative capacity. “I’ll send him straight over.”
“Only if he gets in in the next hour or so,” Justin added cautiously.
“I’ll tell him.”
“Thanks a lot.” He turned for home, and then called back, “Tell him to come just as he is…” He had liked the thing last time of Terry shrugging off his overalls.