“Mark, and Curtis,” said one of the boys, with actually rather thin tolerance, and lifted an empty champagne bottle to his lips.
Robin looked at them from his own stoned distance. Standing alone by the stream for five minutes, ten minutes, his head ringing, his eyes twitching across the plains of stars, he had been gripped by a ghastly adolescent sense of helplessness – though he knew his thoughts had been wilfully fucked up or unblocked by the hash. He was still so randy that he shivered and swallowed as his mind groped round Justin, round one or two others at the party, and Lars of course, to whom he’d ended up feebly saying, “I’m very sorry, please don’t tell anyone”; as he’d watched him go off into the shadows he was picturing what he might have done with him if they’d met up fifteen years ago in some club -. though Lars was only about nine then probably. Robin found himself laughing dully at the thought that he could have seen him as a schoolboy on his honeymoon trip northwards with Simon; their visit to the wooden palace at Trondheim came back to him with extraordinary clarity. That was another effect of the drug, a vividness of memory, almost as if under hypnosis, he could walk from room to room of a house he hadn’t seen for twenty years, or feel the presence of a long-forgotten man with the stifling closeness of a figure summoned up by a medium.
“Where have you been darling?” said Justin, and the boys tittered because he had an amusing way of speaking – he could hint at a lurking joke in “Pass the salt,” which was why there was something so grim to his black moods, when his command of the saving funniness of things was shown to be a mere rhetorical trick.
“Have you missed me?” Robin asked, running his hand over the top of his head with a sudden horror that it might still be streaked with Lars’s dried semen.
Justin paused to consider this opportunity for marital pleasantness. Maybe he sensed Robin’s unusual odour of guilt, maybe Lars had in fact blabbed about being led on by Danny’s daddy in the garden shed. Justin said, “I’m entertaining, darling. I can’t think of everyone,” at which Robin managed a pained smile and turned away to find a drink. He felt the usual loneliness of the party-giver heightened, a memory of something he didn’t know had happened to him, the time when all the guests had gone and you went to bed alone.
A hawkishly handsome young man was standing by the fridge, watching the party’s lurching rallies through the kitchen with a cool smile. Perhaps because he was wearing both a shirt and a jacket he gave the impression of being unpopular. Robin cracked himself a beer and nodded at him, and the boy said, “Hullo there, you don’t know me, my name’s Gordon,” as though he was trying to sell him double-glazing over the phone.
“I’m Robin…Danny’s father.”
“Ah yes!” They shook hands, Gordon lowered his head and peeped up at him in a mock-modest way that seemed to carry some reproof. “You’re enjoying the party,” he said.
“Am I?” said Robin, wondering just how bombed and sweaty he looked.
“I mean, I hope you are.” Gordon laughed, and of course it was the slight Scottish colouring to his voice that gave him his critical leverage. He nodded sideways, at the boys, the music, the chaos. “It might be quite a shock having all these youngsters in the house.”
“I was a youngster myself, you know, until…well, quite recently,” Robin said, with a powerful smile.
“I didn’t mean to suggest you were old.” Gordon gestured at his own physiognomy, and then toiled in his error: “Heavens, I’m thirty-four myself. It was my birthday last week, in fact. Born June the sixteenth 1962, in Perth’s Memorial Infirmary.” Robin nodded and raised his can in salutation. “Ah, there are a couple of seats free,” Gordon said, and ushered him towards them as if, whatever he might claim, he was venerable enough to need a sit-down.
“Um…”
“You may be asking yourself how I know Danny,” Gordon was saying. “We slept together a couple of times, not far apart, back in February. Once at his place, once at mine.”
“Ah,” said Robin, wondering if he’d missed the passage of some new freedom of information act. “And just how far apart did you sleep?”
“Ha-ha,” said Gordon dryly. “No, we’ve kept in touch. And I was very honoured to be asked to the party.” Robin supposed he could see what Danny had seen in the young man; the humourless twinkle was itself obscurely provocative. “I don’t really do this sort of thing any more.”
Robin hid his sympathy with that remark. “You’ve not done any of this, for instance?” – nodding at a couple leering rival-rously over the busy razor.
“What, the charlie, the snow, the laughing powder?” said Gordon, with the weary sarcasm of a customs officer. “No, I don’t do that stuff. I don’t drink, either,” he added, clarifying something else Robin found odd about him, the scary availability of his hands for exaggerated gestures; again there was the sense of salesmanship. “No, no. I prefer the high of life.”
“Ah, that,” said Robin.
Gordon leant forward – they were knee to knee. “I think the real excitement comes from embracing life as it is, not escaping from it into unsustainable fantasies.” He was smiling, but Robin thought there was some kind of challenge in his unconver-sational tone, and said easily and courteously,
“Don’t you think sometimes the escape can be part of the embracing? I mean, altered mental states, or whatever, may all be experiences worth having.” Gordon was looking at him intently, and Robin recognised the attitude of someone who waits with apparent respect for a phrase they can attach their argument to. “How do you go about embracing life as it is?” Robin asked. “At any given moment?”
Gordon didn’t answer this directly; he smiled thinly to suggest he’d spotted a trick question. Then he said, very quietly and confidentially, “We have to be ready for change, when it comes.”
Robin said, “Yes, quite. Though as an architect I have a certain taste for permanence…”
“I don’t think we have any idea of the changes that are going to happen, very soon, as God’s plan for the new universe is worked out.”
Robin snickered, out of irritable embarrassment at…his name being mentioned, and also at the contrast between this encounter and the previous one in the shed, which he saw in a vivid regretful flashback. Of course the boy was an evangelist, and an evangelist of change, which would make him all the more inflexible. He said, “I don’t know about that,” and looked around. Gordon had rather cleverly got them trapped in these chairs behind the door and out of the rescuing flux of the party. Robin saw his own progress through the evening, a veering line through the margins of his son’s event, a sequence of volatile encounters in the near-dark. But Gordon’s next question seemed to let him off:
“Do you read much?”
“Not as much as I’d like,” said Robin. “I’ve been reading a bit of Hardy lately; for local reasons.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Thomas Hardy? Celebrated Dorset novelist. And poet.”
“Right…You haven’t read Arthur Conan Doyle.”
“Oh. Well, not since I was a boy. I suppose everyone reads him when they’re young, don’t they? Or used to, anyway.” Gordon nodded – that seemed to confirm something he’d heard. “Do you just like the Holmes stories or do you like Brigadier Gerard as well?”
There was a pause while the question was assayed for relevance. “I’ve spoken to him,” Gordon said.
“Brigadier Gerard, you mean, or -?”
“I’ve spoken to Arthur.”
“Recently?”
“A friend of mine is in close and frequent contact with him.”
“I see,” said Robin. “You mean your friend’s a medium” -aware that he had thought of mediums only minutes before, which was in itself faintly spooky.