“Arthur is very much one of the higher spirits working for world change. A truly great spirit.”
Robin’s eyes made a quick panicky search of the kitchen. Danny was just slipping out into the garden. He wondered if his son had heard all this from Gordon, or if they’d been too busy having sex. He supposed he must have invited everyone in his address-book, perhaps from a fear that few would come so far – though the bores, of course, were always eager to travel.
“He has a very fine voice,” Gordon was saying. “I may say a truly fine voice.”
Robin didn’t know quite how to signal that for him the conversation was over. “What did he say?” he asked, and took a scowling swig from his beer-can.
“I’ve got to wait. He told me I’ve got to wait; and when the time comes to move, then he’ll let me know. With the Millennium, of course, there will be many and great changes. He said, “You’re in the right place at the right time,” which was truly wonderful. It’s already been a great help to me with traffic problems, always getting a green light, avoiding the major tailbacks at road-works and so forth.”
“That must be useful.”
“Oh that’s just a tiny example. It was Arthur who told me that I had been a sixteen-year-old fish-seller in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus Christ.”
“You’d never suspected?” Robin had an abnormal sense of himself as a fount of unnoticed irony.
“He also told me that I’m not really gay. I just happen to be attracted to certain men. It’s a spiritual thing, in fact, a spiritual magnetism; usually we’ve known each other in another life. Arthur said what I really have to find is a wife, he was strict about that.” And here Gordon too looked round the room with a tinge of anxiety. “It’s the woman’s destiny to support the man,” he said; which perhaps gave some idea of the nature of the new world order, when it came about in four years’ time.
“I don’t know about that,” said Robin, shaking his emptyish beer-can and beginning to nod goodbye.
Gordon had an almost cunning look. “I understand you’re now living as a gay man,” he said.
“Well I am a gay man,” said Robin. He stood up, and as he did so he saw Justin stepping cautiously out into the garden. “Ah, there goes life,” he said. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and embrace it.”
ELEVEN
Early in July, Danny got a new job, working nights in security at a City office-building. He knew Alex wouldn’t be pleased, and mentioned the hours – eight till six – quite negligently, like a child vainly hoping to slip some new freedom past its parents. Alex looked aside with an instant bright flush, as though he’d been slapped, the corners of his mouth turned down. Danny saw that he hadn’t chosen the moment all that well, the early-evening chat over Alex’s kitchen table; the distinguished bottle of wine he’d persuaded him to open was a clumsy palliative – of course he wouldn’t want to celebrate. “I’m not working Saturdays,” Danny said.
All Alex said was, “Oh darling.”
Danny felt the reproach, and said, “I need the money, Alex.” And then, “I know the hours aren’t great for us, but the pay is really good.”
Alex was both hesitant and impatient as he took up his old theme: “I’ve got masses of money…”
Danny sighed in acknowledgement, and said, “I know that. But I can’t live off you.” He wondered if he should bring in a gibe about not being a kept boy, but saw the confusion in Alex’s face and took a shifty sip from his glass instead.
“I don’t see why not.”
Danny said quietly, “I’m not Justin,” and then gave a little laugh at the idea, picturing him in this house. It was the careless mockery of a predecessor, with its tacit fraction of suspicion that the predecessor might still be a rival. “You know I hate doing nothing.”
“I know, sweetie, but nights.” He could see Alex doing the calculations he had already done, as to how they could meet, and for how long; and keeping them to himself in case the correct answer was even worse than it seemed. It was won- derful to be loved so much by somebody, and Danny jumped up with a surge of cheerful fondness for Alex and went round behind his chair and hugged him loosely from above.
“We’ll have fantastic weekends,” he said.
“Mm.”
He poked his long tongue into Alex’s ear, and when he had him shivering and swallowing he played him the tune he knew he wanted to hear, though he did it like an urchin, not a tempter: “I’ll take you out and stuff you full of drugs.”
The effect wasn’t immediate. It would have been rather hurtful if it was. Alex had to bend slowly and gracefully to the idea without suggesting that it erased his earlier doubts. “But you could do that anyway,” he said. Danny saw the benefits of having kept him on such a short leash – he had yet to give him his second E, though Alex had begged him for it, and even sulkily pointed out that he’d paid for it. “Well that would be lovely,” he said.
Danny slid round and sat across his lap for a short snog. “Anyway,” he said, “you know me: I’ll probably resign within a week.”
He started a couple of days later and pretended to Alex that it was a terrible drag; he never tried to tell him quite how much he liked the job. He had always been a night creature, sometimes went to clubs that didn’t even open till three or four in the morning, and found himself in a state of incredulous alertness whenever Alex wandered off at 11.30 or so to clean his teeth and clamber into bed; so there was nothing abnormal to him in sitting out the small hours in St Mary Axe except the silence and the sobriety. The expanse of time he had learnt to set aside for the long trajectory of an acid trip or a couple of Es was now spent keeping a casual eye on the blue eventless-ness of a bank of video monitors, or making hourly tours of the corridors in the fifteen floors above.
Three guards were on duty at any time, one of them a superior. They took it in turns to move about, and Danny was given a break at 1 a.m. when he went to the staff-room, made a new thermos of tea and read for an hour, or wrote in his notebook. The life of the building wasn’t simple, there were several firms that worked there, some of which closed down at six, while others straggled on till late, a couple of voices in an office, a single desk-lamp or computer-screen reflected in a window. The lifts were all switched off and waited with their doors open and mirrors gleaming, but he had a special key to operate them for the planners and dealers of the early hours. It was high summer, so the shift began in the refined late daylight and came to a close with the light strengthening again beyond the tinted plate-glass of the lobby. Around five their reflections began to dissolve and the narrow old street outside to redefine itself, remotely as though some trance-like stimulant were wearing off. The cleaners came in as he was hanging up his uniform, and he could leave for the early Tube with a beautiful sense of having seen something through that you never got from a banally visible day-job. Then there would be breakfast with Alex and if he didn’t feel like sex he could tease him and deafly press for second and third helpings, heaping on praise for his cooking, until Alex simply had to get dressed and leave for work; and then a long uninvaded morning of sleep from which he would wake about three with a bizarre absence of hangover symptoms or other toxic after-effects. The successful discipline of it all gave a sparkle to his self-regard.
His first week he worked with the same people; the senior one, Martin, was a moustached fitness-freak of about fifty, with a barrel chest and upper arms that stretched the vented seams of his short-sleeved shirt. Danny imagined he was gay, though various discreet remarks based on this conjecture had been met with a distancing sarcasm. The other man was a morose heterosexual with a pudding-basin haircut and a copy of Mayfair in his locker. There was a mood of stifled sexuality about the place through all those vacant hours, and Danny assumed that the other two were also caught up in private worlds, and imagining quite different scenes as they gazed at the steeply angled views of the lobbies, the goods entrance and the underground car-park.