“So what have you been doing today?”
Terry took the bottle. “Oh, running around,” he said, with a distant smile. “I’m getting a fair bit of work now.” Robin gestured them back into the sitting-room. “I’ve just come over from Bride Mill.”
“You get on well with Roger and John,” Robin said, referring to the Mill’s corduroyed co-hosts.
Terry smiled. “Yeah, I have a good repartee with them.”
They sat at either end of the sofa, the candles glowing in Terry’s dark eyes. Robin sprawled with his drink held loosely at crotch level. He wasn’t sorry to have the company of someone fresh and handsome and remote from any intuition of his own gloom. Terry’s face had lost the thickness of adolescence and the pained, untrusting expression of a boy who is always in the wrong. Robin liked the way he showed his curiosity, sometimes unguardedly, sometimes slyly. He believed he was a figure of some social fascination to Terry, and was pleased with his own relaxed manner with him. He said vainly, “I’m sorry, I ought to put a shirt on.”
Terry took a quick sip from his shining brown bottle. “Don’t mind me,” he said; and his eyes lingered on Robin again for a moment. “You by yourself tonight then?” – glancing away at the somehow ritualised room.
“I’m afraid so,” said Robin casually.
“Where’s that Justin then?”
“He’s still in London.”
“Oh yes? He made me laugh at that party.”
Robin smiled warily. “He can be amusing. But we mustn’t talk about him behind his back.” He was aware of his own desire, after a couple of drinks, to be critical of Justin, but alert to any mistaken intimacy on Terry’s part.
“It’ll be good to see him again,” Terry said indulgently, but also as though he had in mind a particular date. “Where is it we’re all supposed to be going, Italy is it or something?”
“Sicily, wasn’t it, for some reason?” said Robin, with forced hilarity of recall.
“That’s right, Sicily. To celebrate his so-called new-found wealth. At one point I worked out he was taking about twenty of us.” Robin said nothing, and already half-regretted having let Terry in, like a boy with a rod, to angle in the sullen pond of his misfortunes. “Of course he’s probably just taking you, isn’t he?” Terry added quietly.
Robin thought Justin would never spend anything on him, and began to understand that there was some deeper connection between the money from the house coming through and Justin’s deciding to move on, as if the cottage had been merely a convenience. Which, after all, as Justin often plonkingly joked, was what a cottage was. The quartet ended, rather oddly, and he got up to eject the CD; it was only as he pressed it back into the case that he saw it had five movements. “Mm,” he said. “But you don’t know Justin” – a phrase which brought. the whole year of luxurious sexual privacy in a shocking rush before his mind’s eye.
“I don’t know him like you do,” said Terry, in a very diplomatic tone.
Robin looked along the CD shelf – there they were again, Van Morrison, Abba, some Mozart, Vaughan Williams’s “London” Symphony, of course. He had one arm raised against the shelf above, the biceps squared up and veined. He was surprised by his need to be admired by the boy. And the effect was so quick, almost too easy.
“You’re looking good,” Terry said.
“Ooh, I’ve looked better.”
“You been to that new gym in Bridport?”
“Um…no, not yet. Any cop?”
“Oh yeah. They got all the machines. One of the instructors is a mate of mine. I was trying to get Dan to go. I told him I could get him in free.”
“No, he’s not into that sort of thing,” Robin said, and seemed to be claiming some slightly embarrassing exemption on his behalf.
“No. He’s got a nice little body, though,” Terry said, with a shy insistence that he did have some private connection with this decadent household of Londoners. Robin said to himself, in his bare-chested sceptical way, that he couldn’t get worked up about this kid who slept with his son; but when he thought back to that small-hours encounter in the bathroom, Terry muddle-haired and still boyishly stiff after sex, he had a stifled shudder of longing, as if someone had breathed in his ear, and wondered bleakly whether there was much point to all his romantic good behaviour.
“Let’s not bother with music,” he said, and sat down again. It was getting cool, with the windows open, and he really would have to put a shirt on soon. He said, “Did you see Dan when he was down?”
Terry said, “My mum said he was down with Alex,” which wasn’t quite an answer. Robin wondered how tender his feelings for Danny were, and saw that despite various things that had happened he didn’t really think of Terry as being homosexual. But perhaps Terry had similar doubts about him.
If so, his next move didn’t show it. “You look cold,” he said, with a wide, tense smile, sliding, half-crawling along the sofa to chafe Robin’s upper arm. He leaned across him to stand the beer-bottle on the carpet, and then slid his other hand between his legs. There was an absolute lack of transition that might have been explained by either ignorance or genius. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
Robin pulled back his head with a soft snort of surprise; then looked away from the boy and back at his waiting face in a small enactment of his dilemma. If he did, it would be his first betrayal of Justin, though what was more uncomfortable was the hinted betrayal, the furtive shadowing of Dan. He smiled at the unusual delicacy of the situation. “You know I’m a quarter of a century older than you, don’t you?” It was very strange to be making such a protest.
Terry took his hand from Robin’s thigh, and sat back a little. “If you don’t want to,” he said.
“Well, yeah, I want to,” said Robin, though he thought it was a good question; he blushed for the first time in years at his own hesitation. “I’m just thinking of…other people.”
“They won’t know, will they,” Terry said. “Anyway, I’ve had my eye on you for some time.”
“Really”
Terry breathed in Robin’s face: “Only ever since you came down here, when you got this place.”
There was something remotely threatening about him. Robin had the picture for a moment of one of those teenage gangsters with a couple of kids in different households and a forty-year-old woman he sees in the afternoons. He wasn’t going to say how he remembered Terry from that time. Simon was always complaining lustfully about the little hunk in the back lane, who sat on the wall to watch the workmen and had a dick like a trapped animal in his pocket. Robin kissed Terry on the nose, out of courtesy, or as a token of the omitted seduction. Or perhaps he thought the last seven years had been the seduction, the haphazard, unrecognised approach. “Come on then,” he said; and heard other unspoken words that might have followed: “It’s late,” “It’s past your bed-time.”
After it was fully dark the wind got up quite quickly, and Robin lay with his back to the lamp listening to the stirring in the trees. It was a hissing and pattering like a clever dry sound-effect for rain. Terry was curled in against him, talking desultorily and pretending not to doze. Robin thought of the day, at varying times from spring to spring, when you were first aware of the wind in the leaves, not the empty moan of winter but a new impression of vast, almost substanceless resistance. It was hard to hear it in town, where the spirit of the place was often muted. It was one of the reasons he wanted to sleep beside trees and fields.
He had been wise to hesitate about Terry, though perhaps not foolish to give in. In bed Terry was lively but self-regarding, as if he wanted to show this older man that he knew how to do it – he was quick and vain; beautiful, but he didn’t touch Robin in any but the most mechanical sense. He was a merely cursory kisser, whereas Robin always wanted to snog heavily, especially with strangers. Terry seemed to find that too intimate or too compromising. He was very proud of his broad-backed dick, which reared off at an angle as if long since tugged askew by the obsessive attentions of his right hand. He had an idiotic patter about it, but Robin shut him up in the simplest way he knew; even so, occasional noises emerged, like the conscientious rejoinders of a dentist’s patient. He seemed somehow displeased by the dense but fountaining volume of Robin’s ejaculation; and Robin himself observed it as a phenomenon of nature, with an almost total absence of sensation. It wasn’t the ending he had hoped for through his spooky weeks of continence.