In the last minutes of the approach he rather lost interest -it was only sex, and would probably be a disappointment. The phone rang at five to seven, and the pleasant Scots girl, who made Justin think of bare knees in a cold wind, said, “There’s a Mr?…a Mr Carlo, to see you.” Justin was already in the towelling bath-robe that the hotel provided, powdered and sprayed in coquettish deference to his visitor, who might not share Mr Robin’s taste for b.o. He arranged himself in a chair, but then had to get up to open the door.
As Carlo came in, the couple in the next room were going down to an early dinner, and Justin heard the words “youth hostel” pass between them in a jolly but disconcerted tone. There was superficially something outward-bound about Carlo, in his homosexual boots and socks; the padded straps of his knapsack set off the curves of his chest and shoulders like a harness, and his black shorts, though baggy in cut, still caught and stretched around his thighs and buttocks as he moved. He was the urban parody of a hiker that you saw in any gay bar. He was by no means as tall as expected, but he was swelteringly good-looking; he had the mask-like orangey tan that comes from using the wrong “no sun” lotion. He shook Justin’s hand and looked round the room with an appreciative, comparing eye as he shrugged off his knapsack. Justin knew he’d made another good choice. The boy was like a package holiday on legs.
The next few moments had their usual fascination – the hand-over of the money, the little dent this made in the scenario of the romantic visit, and the immediate boost to it again after Carlo had counted the fold of notes; the hesitation as to what was wanted – a pretend love-scene or sex without preamble or some charged personal variant. Justin loosened his bath-robe to reveal the natural tan that was his reward for so much country tedium, and Carlo came up and started kissing him in the automatically imploring way of a shorter person. There was something pretty passionate about his warm snufflings, Justin thought, as he reached down to grasp the heavy stirring in the boy’s pants. But then Carlo stood back for a moment with a silly apologetic expression. “Only one second,” he said. “I need to use your toilet.”
Justin gazed at him forgivingly. “Darling,” he said, “I am my toilet.”
He couldn’t explain what happened a couple of days later. He went out with Charles again in the morning and looked at a smallish house off the Fulham Road that had been totally renovated. He didn’t expect to like it, he found the mere mention of Fulham depressing, and perhaps he only went because of his dotty new fixation on Charles, the secret stud. Charles picked him up outside the hotel, and his new pitch was a superstitious reluctance to talk about the house at all, as though anything he said might threaten the beautiful outside chance of Justin’s falling in love with it. “I’ll be very interested indeed to know what you think,” was all he said. He had the unlasting aura of a person one has surprisingly and happily had sex with in a dream; but he appeared not to notice Justin’s quizzical glances. There was an old signet-ring on his right hand, but his wedding-finger was reassuringly vacant.
Outside, the house was sameish white stucco, with a bald front garden where a cement-mixer had stood; but inside it had been given a coldly avant-garde make-over, and had lost all reference to the consolations of an ordinary home. The two men marched moodily over the creaking expanses of blond flooring, and Charles gave clumsy demonstrations of various concealed fixtures: Justin thought this must be his first visit to the property, and suspected that he had a significant hangover; he watched him take off his jacket and lay it on the graphite-coloured kitchen worktop, and took in the hinted bearing of chest and buttocks with revisionist indulgence and fascination. Then there was the trill of a mobile, and Charles wandered off trying to get a good reception. “Yes, I’m there now,” he was saying; and other laconic, shielded remarks, as if he couldn’t speak freely. Justin was alone for a moment in the kitchen, and quickly felt in the horizontal breast-pocket for Charles’s wallet – it came out with a tug, a fat old buttoned billfold, bulging with credit card slips and petrol vouchers. Behind the little glassine window inside was a snapshot of an extraordinarily beautiful black girl.
Well, that was all he needed to know. He moved to put the wallet back just as Charles, with an irritable turn of speed, was coming through from the front door. “Sorry, Pete, this bloody phone’s still playing up,” he said. “I’ll ring you later.” There was nothing Justin could do, and he started forward, saying hectically, “So this room doubles as a dining-room,” as he crammed the thing into his own pocket.
The rest of the inspection was purely histrionic. Justin ranged about and asked questions as though from a transparently remembered script, but all he could think of was the wallet and getting rid of it. Charles seemed relieved by his sudden liveliness, and perhaps thought he had had an undeserved success. At each stage of the following business, Charles picking up his jacket, their leaving the house, getting into the car, the ten-minute drive, and Justin’s getting out of the car, various ruses seemed briefly possible but then had already lost their moment. A straightforward explanation would have been humiliating. At one point he had the thing – so much not the thing of Charles’s that he wanted – in his hand and was about to slip or throw it into the back of the car, but his nerve failed him.
After being dropped he went into the hotel for a moment, and then emerged again with a certain unavoidable shiftiness, and ambled along the street. He couldn’t hand the wallet in, because he couldn’t be associated with it in any way. He couldn’t leave it somewhere, because another person might use the credit cards and cause Charles even more nuisance. He felt too guilty to look inside the wallet himself. This was among the more ridiculous things he had done, but was not to be classed with odd bits of trouble he’d had at school with taking other boys’ things. The thought that his momentary caprice was about to become a horrid little crisis for someone else required swift and frowning censorship. A huge garbage-truck was progressing down Beauchamp Place, with overalled men in fluorescent waistcoats lobbing sacks and boxes into its moaning and crackling tailgate. Justin stood and watched it pass, and as the men ran forward he stepped out to cross the road and tossed the wallet into the rearing jaws of the machine.
He decided to miss lunch, and got a taxi into Soho. He went to a bar where he had sometimes met up with Alex after work in the earlier, more outgoing phase of their affair; but it too had been the subject of interior design, and its new surfaces of polished steel and industrial rubber forbade nostalgia. He ordered a nutritious bloody Mary. He felt that he wasn’t drifting but adrift. He didn’t know what to do about the houses. He would have to see Charles again, to offset suspicions, but the idea of looking over another property was already vaguely sickening to him. He imagined ringing the office and being told that Charles would no longer be looking after him. And then he could simply abandon the search, it would be a sweet release; he could buy a brown felt hat and see out his days in the considerate hush of the Musgrove Hotel. He had a recurrent delusion, which seemed to him authentically criminal, that he could still smell the high-summer stink of the garbage-truck, beer-slops and rotten apples and cod-liver oil.