The affair that followed was doomed, Danny saw it now, and he sometimes wondered if he would rather have done without the difficult four months; the ending, certainly, was the worst thing in his life. But then George, perhaps out of a guilt that even he was not frank enough to acknowledge, had insisted on their staying friends. This was hard for Danny because they had never been friends, they were lovers from the start; but George had also been his guide, and that perhaps was what made it possible to meet again, like a bright pupil and the teacher whose affection he had won. George had given him fluent access to the many-roomed edifice of London gay life, from the cellars to the salons. People had envied him his good-looking young protege, who would sometimes say, as they left a luncheon in Mayfair or an East End sex-club at five in the morning, how friendly the people were. George only explained it once: “Dearest, anyone would be friendly to you.”
Now, a summer later, Danny was waiting on the front step of his rooming-house. He had a couple of cases of cheap white wine and a hold-all of tapes and various party clothes. When George drew up he felt the old shock at the sight of him, a moment or two’s heavy-heartedness, as if the lessons and adjustments of the intervening months had never happened, and then at once a lightening, a mood of sentimental acceptance. In the boot of the car there was a case of champagne, but he said nothing about it – he couldn’t be sure it was intended for him. He got into the passenger seat and only then gave George a friendly kiss, and pictured, with a hum between his legs, what he would still do to him given the chance.
They got out of town just as the Friday rush, with its atmosphere of suppressed panic, was beginning; and urban though they were there was a sense of release as they came clear of the outskirts. Danny looked through the CDs and pressed Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony into the player, not sure if he would recognise it, and then exhilarated by the horns at the outset, which seemed designed to be heard at eighty miles an hour on a long trajectory through the summer landscape.
“So who’s going to be there?” said George, in his faintly despairing way. “I hope there’s someone I can talk to.”
“You can always talk to my hunky daddy.” And Danny laughed, as he did more and more, at the farce of sex, and the thought of novel pairings of people he knew.
“Of course, I want to meet him.”
“Then there’ll be Jim and Francois, and Carlton, and Bob and Steve and Jerry and Heinrich…” He remembered he’d wildly asked a number of virtual strangers at Chateau, though with no idea if they had accepted, or would themselves remember.
“So you’re bussing in a whole crowd of dizzy disco bunnies and letting them loose in the beautiful English countryside.”
“I know…” Danny murmured, with a fresh sense of the experiment of life.
“They may not be able to breathe country air. You’ll need respirators of poppers and CK One.”
“I think they can be relied on to bring those with them.” Danny squeezed George’s knee. “I’m hoping you may be going to stimulate our central nervous systems, darling.” At which George merely raised an eyebrow. Danny added, “Bob’s always loaded with goodies,” to offset the surfacing suggestion that George had only been asked for his coke and his car.
“So who are you going to set me up with?” George resumed, in a tone of voice that emphasised his appetite and a cheerfully heartless readiness to use his old lover in his turn.
“What are you like?” said Danny. And then, mischievously, “There’s young Terry, of course…” He made a pretence of conducting the music, with hammy head-shakings and no clear sense, so far from a drug and a DJ, of the rhythm of the thing. “Local boy.”
George scanned the road ahead with narrowed eyes. “You say young.”
“Twenty-two, like me, at least until midnight. Oh, professional age, twenty. If not nineteen.”
“I’m not paying, sweetie.” Though the idea had clearly taken root, since George said later, “Any other members of the profession coming down?”
Danny was pretty sure that, even during their affair, George had sent out for sex, he had seen ringed numbers in the back of Gay Times; though now he made himself laugh at the image of those boys, buzzed into the building with their knapsacks of accoutrements, and witnessing their own performances in one of George’s Empire mirrors. “I’ve asked Gary – the black one with the broken nose? But he may not come, it being the weekend…”
“Any women coming?” asked George, as if he missed Danny’s meaning, and was suddenly concerned with the propriety of the gathering.
“I hope Janet will be there.”
“She must have turned into a faggot by now, just from natural adaptation.”
“She was the only woman at Colon last week.”
George gave a slow nod of concession to the other point of this sentence. “Well, you’re certainly managing to find your way around without me, darling. Even I don’t go to Colon.” Though the odd thing was that since their clubbing days together, Danny had hardly ever seen George out; which made him think that either he had changed his habits, and entered a maturer phase, or that without having Danny to show off and show off to there were easier and quieter ways of getting what he wanted. Even in the old days, while Danny danced like a madman, George tended to loiter against the wall, where the boys were staring and fumbling with their wraps of speed.
“And who knows, my dad may be glad of some female company.”
“I see. He’s still interested?”
Danny didn’t want to overstate the case. He’d seen him sometimes watching a woman and felt there was something beneath the apparent impassivity and courtesy. “It might be a bit of a relief…But no, I think he just got queerer, like Oscar Wilde or someone. Once he thought he could do everything, then it polarised towards the one thing.”
“It’s pretty…cool, to have an out gay dad,” George said, supportively but humorously.
“Oh I quite agree,” said Danny, with a readiness that made him sound a bit straight himself. And there was a sort of anxiety, which he tended to blink away, that one of the figures at the edge of the dance-floor could perfectly well be his own father. There were still leather trousers and a studded thong in the wardrobe of the London flat.
Later George said, “You’ll have to tell me where to turn off.”
“Not for ages yet…” Danny was afraid the whole thing might pall on him as the necessary three hours unrolled. “You have to wait for the Crewkerne turning. Then it’s sort of…not as far as it was.”
“I take it you’ve got someone lined up for yourself, by the way. Total frankness, remember,” George went on; and Danny thought there was a tension in his voice, at the prospect of meeting a successor.