“I do feel quite lucky,” Alex said. He had the eerily restful country feeling that his homosexuality was completely invisible to these people.
Alex found that he’d contracted that occasional ailment of the late developer, an aversion to his own past. He had grown up in a country town, different from this one, duller probably, and more defiantly conformist; but his mood of ghostly familiarity deepened as he went from shop to shop. The poverty of the little supermarket, with its own-brand biscuits and jams; the high prices of the farm shop, with organic vegetables and free-range eggs crusted in authenticating dung; the brown old men who slapped down all their change on the newsagent’s counter, not yet used to the decimal currency, or leaned wheezily at the urinal under the town clock with their leather shopping-bags; the old outfitters selling brown and mauve clothes, and the charity thrift-shop indistinguishable from it, and the derelict boutiques with a spew of mail across the bare floor; the photos of fetes and beauty contests and British Legion dinners in the window of the newspaper office, which might almost have been the window of a museum; the peeling front of the main hotel, with its promise of fire-doors and meal smells; the word MONUMENTAL on an undertaker’s sunlit window thrown in sharp-etched shadow across a waiting tablet; the shyness of the country folk and the loudness of their jokes and greetings – he felt he knew it all, and was horrified by it, as though by some irremediable failing of his own. Then the cloud of the mood heaved slowly past and he drove out of town with a quivering sense of how his luck had swung round, like a weather-vane.
Something came back to him for the first time, it might have been waiting for its explanatory moment. It was the late summer of 89, the eve of his thirtieth birthday. He had left town on a Friday evening to drive out to his parents in Essex for the family celebrations. As always he felt he was leaving a scene of potential pleasure, even if only getting drunk with a straightish group of friends. He had a route through the lanes to the village where his parents had just bought the Old Rectory, with its acre of demanding garden. There was never any traffic, only local people heading to the pub in their Austin Maxis; but this time he ran into a line of cars, red tail-lights backed up in the twilight as far as he could see. After a while engines were switched off, and Alex watched the young men in the Dormobile ahead of him get out to stretch their legs and talk to the other drivers. He leant out himself and asked a boy standing on the verge what the trouble was. “They’re blocking us off,” he said. “We’re waiting for new directions.” A girl in leathers with a mobile phone came walking down the road, and the drivers, who were all young and excited, called out questions to her. The whole thing had the feel of a chaotic exercise by an oddly high-spirited rebel army. Pop music from different radio stations mingled in the still air. It turned out they were going to a rave.
Alex didn’t see why he should pretend he was going to a rave, perhaps he panicked slightly, though the mood was not aggressive, just voluble and collective. He wasn’t sure exactly what happened at a rave. He knew it was a horrible inconvenience to the people who lived in the area. He started up his engine, pulled out of the line and went up the just passable other side of the road, with kids gesturing and shouting things at him. Some of them clearly thought he was one of the wide-boys who’d organised the thing. Now and then he had to mount the low verge. Before long he came face to face with a police motor-cyclist. He could see he was in the wrong, but he explained where he was trying to get to, spoke vaguely of having just come from the Foreign Office, and after the policeman had spoken to colleagues up ahead, was told to follow him, he’d get him through. Alex saw it all now, his problematic progress through the lanes, up and down between second and third gear, the flashing stanchion of the motorbike revolving ahead of him. They went on past a mile and a half of stalled vehicles, the cheerful faces at the open windows, the thump of music and shimmer of petrol fumes in the scented evening. He began to feel like a fool, who had missed what was happening around him and asked to see out the last night of his twenties under lonely safe conduct.
TEN
Robin and George both went to meet the 19.10 arrival at Crewkerne station. Eight guests were expected to be on it, all of them unknown to Robin, though George was confident of recognising several. Robin didn’t warm to George and disliked his sarky intimacy with Danny; he hoped he wasn’t being trailed as a new boyfriend. George had avoided the day’s preparations by touring antique shops in Beaminster and Lyme. As they waited in the station car-park he praised one piece of furniture in the cottage, but only one.
When it came to it, there was no doubt who the party party were. Among the few Saturday commuters, local kids and dun-coloured hikers there was a swishing little posse of metropolitan muscle and glamour. In appearance the boys ranged from sexily interesting through very handsome to troublingly perfect. Robin watched them for a few droll seconds as they collected under the Gothic arch, looking careless but a little abashed by this alien place, a couple of them chewing gum and candidly eyeing Robin and George, so that when George called out “Hey, guys!” and contact was made, something else was slyly acknowledged by their smiles. Robin had put on, almost unconsciously, his sexiest old button-fly jeans, and George was wearing leather trousers, which rather confused Robin with their hot attractive smell. He couldn’t help thinking they must look like a pair of affluent queens who’d hired a whole chorus-line of hustlers for the weekend. Perhaps it had looked like this to local people when those aristocratic buggery scandals of forty years ago were taking place.
Robin wanted to know his son’s friends, and had felt happy and punctilious all day at the prospect of welcoming them. George at once asserted a louche sort of claim to three of them, who went off with him in his BMW; Robin had to take four in the back of the Saab. They grumbled a bit, and made sluttish jokes about the tight squeeze. “Ooh, what’s that?” they kept saying. “Whose is this?” Robin couldn’t help thinking they were rather common; or perhaps it was just his concern about Danny, and his conviction that no one could be good enough for him. The standard of manners was certainly variable. “Can we stop for some fags!” one of them called out, as if Robin were merely a taxi-driver. Up front he had a charming Norwegian called Lars, who reminded him of a trimmer, mus-clier Justin, and also, in the deliberate courtesy of his talk, of certain schoolfriends whom Danny used to bring home for weekend exeats. Though presumably he had been found, like the rest of them, in the new club scene where Danny was clearly so popular, and which Robin knew little about. He hadn’t really been out since Subway was closed down in 1984.
When they got back to the cottage there were several cars in the lane and another half-dozen boys stretching their legs on the verge beside a rented minibus. Bright-coloured groups were strolling through the garden with what looked like glasses of champagne. A window was open to let out surprisingly nice music. There hadn’t been a party here since the circumspect celebrations of Simon’s last birthday, nearly two years ago. Robin felt a tiny proprietary shock at the take-over by strangers.
He came round the house to find the Halls standing together, looking irritably at some shrubs. They had only “dropped in for a drink,” as Robin had suggested, though on their lips the phrase had a worrying looseness, with no implied promise of their dropping out again. Like all awkward guests they had arrived early and would have to be introduced cold to some unsuitable stranger. They had brought a little present for Danny – “It’s only a bottle, I’m afraid” – and Robin was pleased they had come: they were among the few people in the village who remained friendly and hospitable after Simon’s death. Not that they could be said to revel lubriciously in the reported details of gay life. On occasion they were merrily caustic. (It was Mike Hall who had said, when shown a volume called The Cultivated Fruits of England, “Good god, a book about Woodfield and his chums.”) They made a wonderfully inadvertent contrast to the other guests, who were exploring the garden as if it was their first one – there were shrieks of laughter and worried gasps from the woodshed and the greenhouse. Margery was red-eyed and exhausted; the rape that was in flower in great garish blocks around the village gave her rashes and hay-fever. “I’m not supposed to drink with these pills,” she said, taking the vast gin and tonic that Justin had made for her. Justin had an almost reverential fondness for the Halls, and ushered them indoors, perhaps relieved not to have to talk to what he called the Orchidaceae. There was something both evasive and host-like in this. Robin stood swaying in the wake of his beauty, and went off to struggle with the barbecue as if physically grappling with the malign mechanics of the situation, the enforced indifference. He had built the little sheltered griddle himself and was vexed by its frequent failure to draw.