“Oh, most of them,” said Lars, with a shrug, as if the distantly thumping party was a forgettable preamble to this scene in the hut. The room still held the old-fashioned warmth that had gathered in it all day – an odour of wood-stain and tar, like the shed at home where they had stored the tennis-net and the croquet box. Robin was sensitive to the smell and its suggestions. He shared with Justin an aroused openness to smells, which was why they both liked sex first thing on a summer morning, after sweaty sleep which was itself brought on, magically quick and deep, by the abrupt exhaustion from sweaty sex before it. He saw his mind caught up in the blurred rhythm of remembered and expected sex, and glanced down dopily to see how noticeable his erection was; and then remembered further that he and Justin had barely touched each other for a fortnight. Of course the room had the illicit smell of hash now, though he could still pick up Lars’s ambiguous cologne, he was just beside him after all, a beautiful lime-scented presence sitting side-saddle on the edge of his desk. For the moment it made him careless and ironic about Justin. “Pass me the pipe again,” he said.
When they’d both had another hot pull on it, he watched Lars get up and go across in front of him to shift some papers from the other chair and sit down. His movements were decisive but inaccurate, and Robin found that a comforting proof that they were getting out of it together. He had the feeling with this young man that he didn’t need to pretend, that he could perfectly well tell him things about his life and how it wasn’t one he’d ever planned on, things he hadn’t yet told to anyone else. It was the feeling of unexpected arrival that marked out some friendships in their first hours, and left other chance encounters as memories of unexplored potential. Even so, he was forty-seven, and stoned and horny, and knew what he was allowing to happen.
“Wow,” said Lars, “this is quite something,” and shook his head and pushed both hands back through his shiny pale-blond hair. It was a three-legged Frank Lloyd Wright chair he was sitting on, with his thighs apart, following the suggestion of the triangular seat. Robin knew they weren’t saying much, but wasn’t sure if the boy did, or if they savoured the smiling silence in the same way – how many parts lust, how many mere stunned surrender to the drug.
“You probably had a lot of coke first,” Robin said, and they both found something a bit comic in his words; sometimes everything you said was funny, and waited for with a bottled-up laugh, as if the simple fact of enunciation were preposterous – as it had often seemed in the giggly tedium of adolescence.
“Whatsaname,” Lars said, “Danny’s lover is quite off his face, I think.”
The words hung for a while in Robin’s mind before finding any clear referents in the outside world. He watched Lars undoing one, two, three shirt-buttons and sliding a hand in to stroke and comfort himself. The phrase “Danny’s lover,” which Robin had never heard before, was coolly unambiguous, but he couldn’t attach it to a particular person. He saw how lover had become a gay term; you didn’t hear straight people talk about their lover, there was a new defiance in the bucolic old word. He thought Lars might mean George, and said, “Well, he brought the stuff, didn’t he? He’s probably had much more than anyone else.”
Lars was smiling distantly at him, as though he hadn’t heard him. Then he said, “No, you mean George. I mean his new lover.” He looked down, the matter seemed to be closed, but he added, “I hate George.”
“Yes, he’s an absolute shit,” said Robin, which they both found extremely funny.
“I’ve been with George,” Lars went on, “and I can tell you -quite uncategorically – how he treated me, well…he treated me like shit.”
“He dumped you!” Robin said, with a broad new sense of metaphor. “Baby, you were lucky.” He swung round with a grin to sit square in the chair, with his strong Blue’s legs in their pale old denim stretched out in front of him. He let the matter of Danny’s new lover slip away into the remote context of the party and the night outside. He wasn’t going to do anything with Lars, but it was thrilling being with him. The reflection of the lamp in the window obliterated the view of the moonlit field they might otherwise have had. Robin felt a steady buzz between his legs, and a ringing in his ears, and surreally imagined them connected, like an impatiently thumbed doorbell. He laid a hand loosely across his lap, concealing and emphasising. It was a lovely mood, he felt his unrefusable sexual power again, with the certainty that it was what made his life worth living. Just the weight of his hand was electrifying. He saw the photos on the wall, and thought of Simon when he had first met him, and Marcus coming round in the afternoons while Jane was at the library; and Justin in the stinking Gents on Clapham Common – he dared himself to think of him, and found he could do so with a new complacency.
Lars was crouching by Robin’s chair, with an arm across his knees to balance himself. His finger drew a little pattern again and again on Robin’s right thigh, but he was looking up into his face, hardly aware of what he was doing. Robin found himself gasping quietly, as if he kept forgetting to breathe. Lars’s features had taken on a marvellous intensity, they seemed to have been cleansed to their essential beauty in a solution of desire. Robin had never taken ecstasy, but he thought its effect might be something inexpressibly vivid like this. Lars was familiar, but he was compellingly strange too – Robin frowned and sneered as he ran his fingers over the young man’s cheeks and nose and open lips. Lars butted his face repeatedly against his hands, licking and biting them, and muttering what Robin might have said, “You’re so beautiful.”
He slid up along Robin’s sprawled body, and the warm squeezing weight of him was almost a torture of excitement. They were face to face when someone tried the door, and after a moment a slow loud voice said, “I dunno, it’s locked, there’s a light on,” and the handle was rattled again. “Someone shagging in there already” – and a sullen laugh. Then the voices retreating, with a shouted afterthought, “Give ‘im one from me!” The two of them were still, their parched mouths inches apart, faces a flushed blur. Robin smelt the stale coke-breath that outlasted the sweet reek of the hash smoke; he tested it for its own perverse sweetness, since it was Lars’s breath. And then there was the kiss, slow and luscious at first, and then choking and ferocious, as though each was trying to cram his head into the other’s mouth. Something happened then for Robin, maybe it was the ghost presence of his lover’s cold kiss beneath the passionate kiss of this virtual stranger, some oblique and painful reminder, the drug’s jumped connections. He felt it sharpen and chill like the alarm that penetrates a dream before it wakes you. He held the boy’s heavy head away from him – he kept pushing towards Robin’s ear with the slurred whisper, “I want you to fuck me…” Robin said, “No…no…” firmly, regretfully, and made himself awkward against him, though he knew he was in no state to understand. He watched with guilty dismay as Lars struggled to his feet, pushing down his trousers and pants in a sort of sexual fury. Robin shut his eyes and heard the shout and felt the warm accusing strokes fall lightly across his face.
“Darling, have you heard, we’re all going to Sicily,” said Justin, though the last word didn’t come out quite right. He was leaning by the sink with his arms round two young men, who were chewing and grinning on and off as they remembered or forgot where they were; one was half-naked and had a faint stubble across a once-shaved chest. Each of them seemed to support the others by some clever structural counterpoise. It was clear that Justin, who was merely very drunk, had happily synchronised with their different disarray. “We’re going to Sissy with Marge, and Curtains,” he said, shaking each of them in turn to win confirmation of this delightful new fact.