“He had to go,” Robin said, and remembering the half-dozen breakfast-times he’d seen him in Hammersmith, explained, “he got a call on his mobile.”
“Oh,” said Alex sentimentally. “He was rather sweet.”
Robin thought, You stupid cunt, day after day, within minutes of your going to work, that rather sweet man used to go into your house and fuck your boyfriend, in the bed you’d just got out of, or perhaps over the kitchen table, or even on the hall floor, and you knew nothing about it. But to tell that story would be to picture himself waiting outside in the car. The anxiety and humiliation gripped him again for a moment. He went to the cupboard and poured himself an anaesthetising Scotch.
Somehow the incident was kept from Danny, and when he found Gary had gone he was too reckless with coke to concentrate on the story. Robin alternated between keeping an eye on him and wondering if there was any point. The party was becoming sweaty. One or two of the bigger boys had taken their shirts off, and though Robin himself was often shirtless in the house and loved muscle weight and tone he found the effect disconcerting, as if guests had come to dinner and stayed on to play strip poker. He saw Terry Badgett come through, in his party clothes, sharply pressed navy-blue trousers and a baggy white shirt, looking, to Robin’s rusticated eye, far sexier than the city boys, who were so habituated to fashion and fun. He was wary of Robin, after the row of a fortnight ago, but Robin nodded at him genially and saw that he was Danny’s by right. As for himself he would never have anything so young again; a thirty-five-year-old was trouble enough. And if he did fall prey to some doting nostalgia for the lustre and stamina of twenty-two, he could always ring Gary or one of his colleagues; maybe that was the sort of thing that lay in wait in this unwelcome new phase of his life. “Hello Terry,” he said, and they shook hands.
“I’m going to be doing some work for a friend of yours,” Terry said; which made Robin wonder what friends he could be said to have. “Over at Tytherbury, at the mansion. Mr Bowerchalke’s got me in to do some decorating in his new rooms.”
“Oh, great,” said Robin, though he wasn’t sure Terry was up to the kind of thing he intended for the Odd Room. Tony was evidently saving money again. On his last visit Robin had agreed to a second Campari, saying “Really, just a drop,” and watched Tony, with no obvious intention of offending him, decant exactly that, as carefully as a chemist in a lab. “How did this come about?”
“Ah, my mum’s an old friend of Mrs Bunce,” said Terry, with a narrow-eyed smile that suggested even larger networks of obligation at his command. It was something else remotely Italian about him, along with the dark, slicked-back hair, and the wide-hipped unclassical body that reminded Robin of a Vespa-driving boy he’d been distracted with lust for on an early art-trip holiday with Jane. Then Dan came up and hugged them both and took Terry away to dance, like an old-fashioned host at a different kind of party.
Robin was looking around in the relief and tolerance of new drunkenness when Lars came up to him. He was clearly a bit spacy from the coke, but retained his air of wanting nothing more than to talk to whomever he was with. This was charming in itself and in its rarity; he didn’t have the feverish, alienated look of most of the others. And in fact he said, “I was thinking it’s quite like some gay club here, you don’t mind?”
Robin shrugged, smiled and said, without working it out, “I was going to gay clubs before you were born.”
“Oh…” said Lars, with amused surprise, though Robin couldn’t tell what part of his remark had provoked it. He said,
“I agree it is a bit different in your own home,” and finished his Scotch. “Actually, it’s just what the village needs.” They laughed and Robin said, “Do you want to smoke some hash?”
“Oh, sure,” said Lars, with the unintended tone of someone agreeing to do some light chore; but hesitated as Robin moved off, perhaps uncertain where they were supposed to do it. Robin turned to see where he was, and he came up and touched his elbow, and followed him out across the garden to the dark shape of the work-room. They both looked up at the moon, and even in the context of driving dance-music and half-naked men there was something miscreant about them. The Arab-looking boy ran into them, coming back from doing who knew what under the trees, and they spoke meaninglessly for a minute. Robin was glad Lars made no reference to their own little plan: his silence was a confirmation.
He felt for the key in the crack over the door, and let Lars in, reaching round him in the deep shadow to turn on the hooded brass desk-lamp. “So this is your den, am I right?” Lars said, looking at the books, the pinned-up drawings, the white slope of the drawing-board; silently taking in the photos of Justin, and Danny at his graduation, and Simon, whose very existence had been unknown to him. On the desk was the chunk of white vitreous china with SEMPE on it; he seemed to find it amusing and weighed it in his hand while Robin opened a drawer and took out an old tobacco-tin and his little hash-pipe. In the tin, wrapped in foil, was the dense cube of stuff he’d brought back from London earlier in the week, and had hidden here, with a rare and trivial sense of keeping a secret from Justin; though now it seemed, with Lars smiling and humming, and swinging round to perch one big handsome buttock on the edge of the desk, to be part of a larger deception. He found it hard to keep the amused expectancy out of his face and voice. He said, “Dan seems to be having fun.”
Lars smiled indulgently. “Well, that’s as usual.”
Robin picked up the lighter and said, “You must know him quite well?” For a second he heard a distorted echo of another kind of chat, the pipe-smoking housemaster and the prefect he wants to trust; though Lars seemed to understand, and even to be waiting for some mild interrogation.
“I’ve known him for a long time,” he said. “Five or six months.”
“Gosh,” said Robin, and sucked the flame down to the bowl and held the smoke in – it was a brief suspension of ordinary manners, he and Lars holding each other’s eye with impersonal concentration, as if waiting to record an experiment. Then he breathed out slowly, and passed the pipe over. It was like a little silvery spanner you use to mend a bicycle; Lars had trouble getting anything through it, and Robin reached up with the lighter and covered his hand with his own. Again they stared at each other – though he knew the hit would take a minute to come. The boy looked down with a quiet laugh and idly fingered the china fragment.
“This must have a story connected, am I right?”
Robin said, “My boyfriend Justin says it’s just a bit of an old bog,” with a sense that it would be honourable to mention him.
“Ah yes…” said Lars, perhaps uncertain of the slang. “Yes, he’s so funny.”
“He’s a scream, isn’t he.” Robin got up and came round the desk and dropped sideways into the old armchair. “It’s special to me, anyway,” he said. Of course he hardly noticed it any more, it was a sort of paperweight; but there were times when he remembered its tenuous accidental story and the quivering light of the day he stole it, or picked it up, which was the day he learned he was to become a father. All he told Lars was, “It’s a bit of an old bog from a house in Arizona that I went to when I was a student. When I was Dan’s age.”
“So what does SEMPE say?.” “It’s trying to say SEMPER, which is the Latin for always.”
“Ah,” said Lars wistfully. “So it’s almost always” – and then looked down at Robin with a coyness that dissolved to reveal something fiercer and less voluntary.
“Do you know everyone here?” Robin asked, aware of the bad continuity – it came from embarrassment and also perhaps from the muddling onset of the hash. He didn’t often smoke and was surprised each time by the stealthy twist the drug gave to his thoughts and sense impressions.