“Oh really.” There was a pause in which he pondered why this was wrong. “Robin, I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”
It was the “we” that disconcerted him. He thought for a moment she was referring to herself and some other man. And even when he saw, almost at once, that he must himself be the father, he retained an eerie sense that she had somehow done this without him.
“Oh Janey, that’s fantastic”
“Are you pleased?”
“Of course I am. Christ! When will it be? I mean it will change everything.”
“Oh”
“Or a lot of things. Will we have to get married?”
“Well, we’ll have to think about it, won’t we? It’s not till June.” She sounded mischievous, dawdling; and also to Robin indefinably larger. His blurred mental image of her had taken on already the pronounced jut of advanced pregnancy.
He dawdled himself when the call was over, with its awkwardly near-simultaneous “Bye’s” and “Love you’s”. His eyes ran abstractedly over the “NO LOITERING” sign while the news moved slowly and spasmodically through him. In a play or on television the phrase “I’m pregnant” was often a clincher, it solved things, or at least decided them. Robin gasped softly, and chewed his lip, and then smiled and nodded in a good-humoured acquiescence which there was no one there to see. It was still the first moment, but he saw himself in the sleepless moil of early parenthood, and felt a plunging anxiety, as if he had inadvertently ruined not only his own young life but someone else’s too. But then nudging the worry came a reluctantly conceded pride, a nostalgia for his friends at the crew’s steak dinner and the 1st XV feast, who would have stood him drinks all night and shared in his achievement with foul-mouthed shock and envy.
He probably couldn’t tell Sylvan. He would go back into the bar as if he hadn’t just had a conversation that changed his life. He saw perhaps he could forget the conversation, and put off his new life till the morning. A beautiful man was waiting for him and Robin glowed in the urgency and the lovely complacency of their wanting each other. He wanted nothing in his mind, in his sight, in his hands but Sylvan. He span back into the bar almost in a panic for Sylvan.
TWO
Alex left the engine running, and walked hesitantly to the gate; he wasn’t sure whether to open it and drive in, or to park outside in the lane. He saw the long roof of a cottage below, half-hidden by flowering trees, and a track of old bricks laid in the grass, where presumably a car could stand. To a town-dweller it seemed desirable to get a car in off the road; but perhaps a stronger sense of security would come from leaving it outside, ready for escape. He decided to back it up on to the verge, where it lay in long grass under a tall wild hedge. Climbing out and locking the door he brushed a hundred raindrops down across the canvas roof.
May had been wet and chilly this year, the spring evenings robbed of their softness and height, the mornings slow and dark. Alex woke each day to the early creak of the central heating, and still, after seven months alone, reached out in a little fumbled ritual to put a hand on the pillow where Justin’s head should have been; or he shifted on to that side of the bed and lay there as if he was keeping himself company. The weather lent its grey weight to the suspicion that his life had been taken away from him. Then abruptly the summer came, and he was waking to the chinking of the blackbirds, and again after dream-muddled sleep to the footsteps and voices of the first leavers, and early-morning light that entered at a shy angle into rooms that were sunless all winter. There was a new sense of distance, of the drowsy rumble of a city stretching away in haze and blossom – a rumoured invitation, which took on a sudden unexpected reality when Justin himself rang up and invited him to Dorset. And then as he braked and spurted through the narrowing lanes of the Bride valley a short, rattling shower had come, like a warning and a reminder.
They hadn’t seen each other since the dark October day when Justin came back to clear his things out of Alex’s house. Wet leaves blew across the windscreen as Alex drove him to Clapham with his little chaos of carrier-bags – the two of them silent, Alex out of grief and Justin out of guilty respect for his former lover’s feelings. Justin’s shoes and half-read novels and crumpled clothes, and the two or three pictures, the cushions, the dozen nearly empty cologne bottles and the brass travelling-clock that had been part of their home and were now on their way to become the unanticipated clutter of someone else’s. It was months before Alex could bring himself to look at the thumbprint-covered polaroids of him, red-eyed and drunk; and he had no other mementoes – Justin had never been known to write a letter. He closed the garden gate noiselessly behind him and wondered what his old friend looked like.
The cottage was low and very pretty and Alex scanned it with an Englishman’s nostalgia as well as a tall person’s sense of imminent discomfort. It was almost too much, it was the ideal of a cottage tuned close to the point of parody, the walls of gold-brown rubble patched with bits of chalk and brick, the straw fantail pigeons on the crest of the roof and the real ones that sidled on the slope of the thatch below, the white clematis and yellow Mermaid rose trained tumblingly above the small dark windows, the air of stunned homeliness…And this was where Justin woke up now, and looked out, over the secretive garden, with its wallflowers and box hedges, old lead sundial and brick paths leading away through further hedges to glimpses of glass. He must have changed very greatly. Or if not, his new man must answer to needs in Justin that Alex himself had never guessed at. From one of the upstairs windows a bunched blue duvet was lolling out to air and gave the house a feel of heedless privacy, as if no guest were expected. At another stood a jar of flowers and a stack of sun-bleached books. Beyond them was the impenetrable indoor darkness of a bright summer day.
There was no answer to his knock, and he stood back on the flagstones in a muddle of emotions: relief, annoyance, real fright about the coming encounters, and an incongruous alertness and desire to please, like someone on a first date. After another, perhaps quieter knock, he walked round to the side of the cottage and shaded his eyes to peer through a window. It was the kitchen, with something steaming on the Rayburn and a colander of chopped carrots on the table, which made him feel that he had in fact put them to some trouble. He turned the corner and saw the back garden, a lawn and a low wall, beyond which was an unmown meadow with a fast-running stream at the bottom. He wandered away from the house, still with the sense of being an intruder in an ordered but not invulnerable world; he thought he could call out, but part of him was clinging to the silence and secrecy. He felt slightly sick. It might still be possible, after all, to get back to the car and leave without being seen. Beyond a small orchard of apple-trees on the left there was a wooden shed with a tarred roof. He tried the door casually, then turned back towards the cottage.
At first he thought Justin was naked. He made a dip in the blue groundsheet, which spread in little hills and dales around him over the long, bent grass. Alex approached him warily, like a nature-watcher keeping downwind of some nervous creature – though the idea was doubly absurd for Justin, who was evidently asleep. Closer to, it turned out that he was wearing a kind of thong.
Alex loitered beside him for a minute, unable not to look, hot-faced and haggard above the sprawl of what he had lost. He wondered if it was a cruelly deliberate tease. His eyes took in the blond down on the calves darkened with sun-oil, and the slumbrous weight of the buttocks with the tongue of lycra buried between them, and the arms pointing backwards like flippers, and the head turned sideways; it was everything he remembered, but more than that too, correct in each unconscious detail, even in the changes, the new plumpness around the waist, the smooth fold under the chin.