For the first few days he had been very good. He had only seen Gianni, whose number he had kept from way back, and who had provided all those amusing translations of people’s names into Italian. He was fine, but suffered from the common syndrome of having grown in memory. On the following Monday Justin went to see Mr Hutchinson, his father’s stockbroker, and left his Marylebone office feeling almost giddy with financial security. The detail of what Hutchinson said evaporated within seconds, but a sustaining sense of power remained. He went, from need, into the Gents at Oxford Circus, where the same skinny black guy he had sucked off years ago was standing in exactly the same place and gave him the same furtive glare; but Justin thought not. He strolled on into Soho in the late morning sunshine, entranced by the animation around him, the boys dashing about, the cyclists like acrobats. How anyone could prefer the country, with its cows and sheep, both literal and figurative, was beyond him. He went into a gay bar that had just opened for the day and wasn’t yet playing any ghastly dance-music, and had a beer and a chat with the barman and left with all the free gay papers under his arm.
Back at the Musgrove he spread them out on the bed and lay there like a child with his heels in the air and his chin in his hands. The personal services pages seemed to have grown in number and frankness in the year since he had last used them, and a lot of the advertisers now had full nude photos, though sometimes with the face smudged. Others had a picture of their face only, which he preferred. Better still were the purely verbal ones. He liked maximum suggestion combined with surprise, like an optimal blind date. If they hit it off he might see them again, but the real point was the arrival of an absolute stranger. Justin was a gorgeous young man of thirty-five, of course, so the strangers themselves were usually relieved and excited. Sometimes they asked why he didn’t just go to a bar and pick up.
Perhaps there were too many rent-boys now. Justin had to get a pen to mark the possibilities. He thought there should be some stricter calibration of the superlatives of “well-endowed.” No one admitted to being less than VWE, many were VVWE or Massively VWE, which surely wasn’t right, it should be V Massively WE. He ringed Mark (the d he put in “buldging” was unaccountably arousing), as well as stunning Carlo, Italian hunk, biggest in town, and German Karlheinz, who offered watersports (“let me quentsch your thirst”). He saw that black Gary, aka Denzel, was still running the same ad (“You’re in for a big surprise”), and wondered what had happened to him on the night of Danny’s party; it had been a big surprise all right to see him there in the kitchen, and Robin’s jealousy had been almost uncanny. He’d have liked to see him again. His eye fell on the nondescript one-liner, “Phil. Central. In/Out,” whom he suspected was probably the best of all.
Mark, as big as a building, wasn’t answering, but Carlo came on at once, rather snappily. He was busy now, but he could be there at seven o’clock; Justin made it clear he wasn’t after a mere half-hour, and Carlo spoke with sulky eagerness of large vague sums of money, to which Justin agreed without. listening.
“Okay, so where is, please?”
“It’s the Musgrove Hotel”
“Oh. I never been to that one before.”
“No, I don’t imagine there would be much call for you here,” Justin said, picturing his boundingly virile arrival in the chintzy front hall. “Incidentally, Carlo, how big are you?”
“Yes, is twenty-five.”
“Goodness…”
“That’s in centimetri, of course, I mean to say.”
“Ah yes.”
“That the circonference…No, only jokin!”
“Ha-ha.” Justin sometimes felt he should wear a tape-measure clipped to his belt, as Robin did when he was on a job. “Well, see you this evening then.”
Which left him with a whole hot summer afternoon of waiting. He didn’t know what to do. He went down for a late lunch in the antique quiet of the Musgrove’s dining-room, and then sat with coffee and the Daily Telegraph in the lounge. People clearly mistook him for the nephew or grandson of a guest at the hotel. And part of his pleasure in the place was the reminiscence of holidays spent with his father in establishments chosen for their digestible cooking and ban on children; hotels where the lounge was empty by 9 p.m., though grumbles of conversation and bursts of high-volume TV could be heard from the rooms as he set out again for a stroll along the front to the improbably listed back bar of another hotel. From his armchair he could see through the lobby to the brilliant sunlight in the street. The stout old doorman, in maroon morning dress, was talking to some workmen outside, and stepped back to greet an elderly couple, guests who obviously knew him well. The rough tick-tick of a waiting taxi could be heard, against the fainter roar and distant squeals of traffic in the Brompton Road, a block away. The routines of London were so beautiful, calming and exciting at once, like being in love. In the words of certain masseurs, stimulating and relaxing. He thought of poor old Robin, over in Clapham, and Alex high up in his office in Whitehall, glancing out at the day through greying net curtains, and was gently aroused and lazily amused by their love and lust for him. He saw them standing side by side, with their very different penises sticking up in bewildered supplication as he swept past. They had been stopping-stations, hitching-posts in that embarrassing early part of life before one has quite enough money or knows what one is meant to do. Then there was a moment of change, of clarification. Money made everything clear.
He walked up the road to the seldom crowded designer basement of Harvey Nichols and sorted negligently through the rails of the better houses; here and there a young assistant would break off from an exacting afternoon of club gossip and shirt-refolding to solicit his custom. He tried on a couple of suits, loose summer linens, but they made him look fat and hot, like an old-fashioned sex-tourist. “It’s not right,” he said, with a note of more general protest. The prices too were rather tawdry. He got a taxi to Issey Miyake, where he was welcomed with ritualised surprise, like an arrival at a remote Zen temple. In the forty minutes he was there no other customer came in, but when he left with a suit and a shirt he had spent a fraction over £3,000, and he hailed another cab in a mood that was best summed up by one of his earliest word-muddles: he was in a state of beautitude.
Back at the hotel a more urgent excitement set in. He couldn’t help wondering what Carlo was going to look like, and the thought of having him here entirely at his disposal for hours on end made him prickle with pleasure. He wondered what he was doing now: working out, perhaps; or, more probably, simply working. An afternoon appointment with a dandruffed married man. Justin liked the idea of Carlo as a sex-machine, but hoped that he wouldn’t already be tired out at 7 p.m. Carlo was a strong name, though, like a fortified version of caro, which was the Italian for expensive. Of course the English for Carlo was Charles, which was the name of his estate-agent friend. That was a coincidence. Maybe Charles too was Massively VWE. It was hard to tell with those expansive pin-stripes. How would he put it? – “enjoys a substantial erection”…well, who didn’t? And perhaps there had been something a bit sexy, after all, about chugging round with Charles from house to house. Carlo, though, would be more than a bit sexy. But then you had to remember that Carlo almost certainly wasn’t his real name. There was still an hour and a half to go. Justin was so worked up that he wondered about getting another rentboy round, to fill in the time.