Every morning when Alex woke he thought of Danny; his thoughts emerged from the watery interview or vanishing railway-carriage of dreams, stumbled on for a few forgetful instants, pale and directionless, and then fled towards Danny in a grateful glow of remembered purpose. It was love, and all the day would be coloured by it. Or perhaps love was the primary thing, on to which the events of the day were transiently projected – that was how it seemed afterwards, when his memory gave back rather little from these months. Alex could never picture Danny as a whole – he was an effect of light, a cocky way of walking, a smooth inner thigh, a lithe sweaty weight, a secretive chuckle, a mouth drawn back before orgasm as though he was about to be sick. Alex woke up, thought of Danny, and on these lucky days felt his breath on his neck, or the curve of his hip under his hand.
On the first morning at the cottage, Alex lay for a while exploring his mood. It seemed they had announced themselves as a couple after all, by coming away, it wasn’t like one of them sleeping over at the other’s place. He could say “we” now, but felt a superstitious reluctance to do so after trying it out in an imaginary phone-call. And it was true that Danny’s own riotous yacking sessions on the mobile, when friends rang from London, left Alex largely unmentioned, and foolishly unoccupied too, while the unheard jokes came thick and fast and the interrupted mood thinned out and disappeared…He raised himself on an elbow and looked at Danny, sprawled on his front with his head turned away; then ran his fingertips very gently across his shoulders, over the bare nape of his neck where the chain might have wriggled under the touch, the deep blue ineradicable knot of the tattoo, and down the long smooth slide of the back to the smooth buttocks where the kicked-off single sheet of a summer night dipped between and hid the rest of him. One or two pale hairs showed and a smear of wiped gel. He didn’t know if Danny was awake, and couldn’t tell if his super-delicate caresses were giving pleasure to both of them or merely to himself.
In the cool of the evening they went for a walk up the hill. It felt unnatural to Alex to be in the country and not have a walk each day, but Danny said he thought that was only if you had a dog. They went up the back lane by Mrs Badgett’s and out into the fields – the way he had gone with Justin on that first late afternoon. Danny wasn’t protesting like Justin, but seemed even less certain what it was one did on a walk; he bounded about with a sudden access of energy after a day spent sunbathing and dozing while Alex mowed around him. At one point he climbed a tree and Alex waited in a prolonged paroxysm of boredom, saying, “Jolly good, darling, come down now.” He held hectoring conversations with uncommitted-looking groups of sheep. When they got to the stream, more stone than water now, and hedged in with tall coarse grass, he stood on the plank bridge and did a little shuffling dance, grinning at Alex as if they could both hear the music. Alex explained how this was the same stream that ran down and round and past the cottage, and had a moment’s recall of boys peeing into it, and finding the stars a poor approximation to clublight. He mocked Danny for his ignorance of country things – he couldn’t tell wheat from barley or an oak from a beech.
Alex was looking out for the giant’s sofa, where he had sat with Justin six weeks earlier, but its shallow declivity was covered up with thick green bracken, and they climbed on past it and left it, like any of those unspoken sadnesses or unguessed embarrassments that one partner keeps from the other for ever. Higher up there was a tiny local outcrop of flat grey stones, and Danny loped up on to it. Alex followed and they stood for a while with their arms round each other and a sense of unspecified achievement. Danny smelt of sun-oil and sweat, sweet and sharp. They sat down, and he stretched out with his head in Alex’s lap and a happy sigh. It was as if he was leaving it to his older friend, with his particular knowledge of trees and probably harmless enthusiasm for crops, to appraise the landscape while he rested and chatted and purred under his hand.
The end of day was extraordinarily still. Even the great ragged bulk of a grey poplar was motionless, until a breeze too slight to feel moved a little patch of it in a glinting whisper. Its shadow slipped towards them across the hillside, and every- where between the shadows the light grew tender and solicitous after the rigours of the day. Alex’s fair skin felt tight and warm – he’d childishly tried to keep up with Danny, who tanned easily. “You’ll have to plaster me in aloe vera,” he said.
“I will, darling,” said Danny fruitily. “I will.”
Alex looked down at him, the sun-pinked nose, the dip at the base of the throat, the lop-sided tenting-up of his shorts that any friendly physical contact seemed to bring about, the bare ankles scratched by grass stalks. It would have been unreasonable to expect more than this from life. He picked up Danny’s hand and kissed it.
Danny said, “Is Justin rich?”
Alex recognised that he and Danny didn’t often follow the same line of thought, so that when they did there was something explosively funny or sexily mysterious about it, like the first double-take of love itself. This moment was a different kind of telepathy. It struck Alex for the first time that Danny might be jealous of Justin. He said, “I was just thinking about that – in a way.”
“Really?”
“In a way. Yes, he is quite rich.”
“He doesn’t show it. I mean, he doesn’t have anything.”
“He says he’s going to buy a house – though you’d better not tell Robin that. He’s not mean exactly, but he does find it difficult to spend. Sometimes he gives himself a treat. He always goes in for the lottery, and occasionally wins the smaller amounts, you know, a few hundred quid.”
“Of course I never win anything,” Danny said.
“Then he came into a lot of money when his father died. I don’t know if I told you. His father had a factory. He made a rather ridiculous object of common domestic use.”
“Oh…?”
“He sold out in the eighties some time, as Justin didn’t seem to see his future in the die-cast business. The father was about sixty when Justin was born, it was quite unusual. He adored him and believed he was going to be a great actor, and never seemed to notice his lack of progress. There was a terrible bronze bust of Justin in their house, done when he was about twelve. He was very wounded when I laughed at it, it was highly idealised, and very sulky – it was the ideal sulk, I suppose; though I can tell you it was nothing compared to the moods he got in later on.”
“Really?” said Danny encouragingly, like a child who wants to hear a particular bit of a story. And Alex hesitated at the thought of this one, because he had never told it and was afraid that merely telling it would fail to convey his meaning. He looked down at the village and the wooded hills rising beyond in the penetrating light, and thought of sitting almost here with Justin and taking in the view as if it were another unexpected part of the inheritance. Now he wondered if Justin would ever come back here, except to pick up his clothes and his clock. The horizontal sun shone right in among the trees and he saw a woman with a dog emerge from under them and skirt the field below as clearly as through binoculars, though she must have been half a mile away. In the field itself he saw how tractors had drawn curlicues in the silver-gold corn.
“We’d gone away,” he said. “I suppose it was rather like the trial separation, except we were trying to be together. This was a bit over a year ago – last June.” Alex didn’t know how much to say; he felt he might make himself unattractive to Danny by giving him a true picture of his earlier failure, and the futility he had only recently been rescued from. He went on quickly, “We’d been having less and less sex – sometimes we went for weeks just lying side by side, or there’d be a quick hug and a “good-night.” Sometimes the vibrations would wake me up and he’d be having a wank.”