“Dear oh dear…”
“I know, darling.” Alex thought he wouldn’t believe him if he told him how long he had once gone without sex. “He made me feel like a stranger in my own bed.” He could see this was also an alien concept to Danny, who rocked his head consolingly against Alex’s hip. “Anyway, I decided to take him to Paris on the train, and he said he didn’t want to go, he was perfectly happy staying at home and going to the off-licence. But I got a package deal at the George V, and that did finally seem too good to turn down.”
“I hope you got a decent shag out of it,” said Danny, frown-ingly representing Alex’s interests.
“Sure…” Alex swallowed again on the bitter lesson of that afternoon, Justin kissing him as though he’d been paid to do so, the sex only just possible. “Anyway, it didn’t last long. That night we got a call to say his father had had a stroke. Justin was out of the room for some reason, and I answered the phone, and had to tell him. He took it very badly.”
“Well, that’s hardly surprising.”
“I mean he was furious with me: for taking him away at a time when his father might have died. He said he had been worried about it all along; though in fact his father’s only symptom was being ninety-four or whatever he was.”
“What about the mother?”
“She’d died, from drink I think probably, when Justin was a schoolboy. I’m sure that increased his sense of guilty panic -he was the only one left. Actually guilt’s a huge problem with him, but that’s another story. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of his tempers, but in my view they’re always violent repudiations of guilt. So we rushed back on the first train, we were almost the only people on it, and then we got another train straight to Coventry, but when we reached the hospital his father was already dead.”
“Hmm.”
“And then after that it was just awful. I could understand what was happening, but if I tried to make him see that he was displacing everything on to me he thought I was attacking him. You couldn’t help him. And then there was the funeral and something very strange seemed to happen to Justin as he walked round, it was a baking hot day, and he realised he was the owner of this large ugly house full of Maples furniture. I have an image of it, I can’t really explain, I sort of dogged his footsteps, hoping I might be allowed to help him; but he was already taking possession, going from room to room totting things up in his head. We went out across the lawn to get away from the others, who were mostly retired old men from the works whom Justin simply couldn’t cope with, and who obviously knew nothing about us. I said, “Are you all right, darling?” or something simple like that, and he just looked at me, it was quite chilling, and said, “You are unforgivable,” and then turned and walked back to the house. I suppose he’d been drinking all morning. Anyway we never…made love again. That was the end for us. He was probably already seeing your father.” Alex glanced down at Danny, who appeared to be working it out. “Though actually I don’t think that was the point. It was the money. At last he’d got it, and he couldn’t bear the thought of sharing it.”
Danny said, “Well, you said he was a taker, not a giver.” It was always interesting to see what he had remembered.
The light was changing more rapidly, and only the long green top of the far hillside now caught the sun. Through the stillness Alex heard the distant scrape of a dog’s bark, and voices from the farm below, with its grass-grown ricks and empty sheep-pens, to show that there was life there after all. He loved this time of day, with its delicate atmosphere of reward, and this evening especially he was touched by a sense of pattern, or providence. He said, “It’s such a miracle we met.”
“It is, darling,” Danny agreed, with an upward cartoon gape of joy which stealthily declined into a yawn.
When they got in, Danny put on some dance-music – there wasn’t any talk about it, and Alex, who’d actually been feeling a bit Vaughan Williamsish, suppressed his disappointment. He’d brought down a double CD of Barbirolli conducting the “London” Symphony and the “Pastoral” Symphony, though its aptness was to remain a purely private satisfaction. He spread out the Sunday papers on the sofa and sat at an angle reading them while Danny danced loosely around with a bottle of beer held out in front of him. He found he had a new impatience with newspapers, and only skimmed the first paragraph of most articles before his eye twitched to another piece; he especially disliked full-page reports from crisis zones, with their out-of-date assumption that he had nothing more pressing to do than read them. He sometimes looked at opera reviews, but the only stories he really liked were ones about drugs. Another teenager had died that week after taking ecstasy, and happily there were several articles about her, forking over the same old lies and opinions. Alex, having taken the drug once, and read a lot of other articles on it, felt he possessed the subject, and sighed indignantly over what he read, while his heart raced and his stomach tightened in recollection of the experience. He was shocked and rather thrilled to find he was angry at the girl for fucking up. And now the music reached him like a hypnotist’s coded phrase, and set up a moaning hunger for some beautiful stimulant. He sat back and stared his hunger at Danny, who worked across the room towards him, like an over-animated stripper, until he had one foot up on the arm of the sofa and was inching his zip down and wheezing with stifled laughter; at which point the phone rang. They both stared at it peevishly, until Danny let Alex answer.
“Oh, is that the wrong number?”
“This is Bridport, um, 794-”
“Darling!”
“Oh, Justin…”
“I thought I’d ring and find out how you’re getting on. It sounds like a disco down there.”
“We’re just listening to some music”
“Things have certainly changed, darling. I mean, it’s not exactly Frescobaldi, is it? Act Twelve, Leonora’s delirium.”
Alex mugged regretfully at Danny over the receiver and watched him go off into the kitchen. “Have you had dinner?”
“I wasn’t all that hungry.” It was worrying, sober oneself, to hear the quick decay of his speech, the half-conscious pauses and runs. “How are you getting on with Daniella Bosco-Campo?”
“Extremely well.”
“Did you know that was the Italian for Woodfart?”
“We were on the brink of having sex when you rang.”
“Let me see, where is it…Pettirosso Bosco-Campo is the father’s name,” Justin went on.
“You’ve clearly signed on at a language laboratory since you got to town.”
Justin grew arch at the slap of a sarcasm. “Let’s just say I’ve been talking to an Italian with a very large vocabulary.”
Alex found he didn’t want to know. “Anyway, you’re getting on all right. Have you spoken to Robin?”
“No, you don’t speak, darling, if you’re having a trial separation. You remain in your room, obviously much of the day is spent in meditation. It’s a time for plumbing the depths, darling.” Justin paused, and Alex suddenly had the impression that he wasn’t alone: an unrelated movement, a door tactfully closed, Justin perhaps unaware of these sounds, and the awkward collusion they demanded from Alex. “I don’t suppose he’s rung you?”
“Not me. Danny called him this morning, I think it was, just to check up on him. Dan’s quite anxious about the whole thing, actually.”
Alex thought Justin was absorbing this, with an unusual intuition as to how his actions affected other people, but after a moment all he said was, “I must say, it’s marvellous not being in the country.”
Alex said stoutly, “Well, we think it’s marvellous being in the country.”
Justin gave a dryish laugh. “Ah yes. It’s called Love in a Cottage, darling. Make the most of it, because it doesn’t last long.” He pondered his own words, and then said again, “Anyway, I just wanted to see how you were getting on.”