They went up the narrow box staircase for a quick orientation of bathroom and sleeping arrangements – Alex only glanced over Justin’s shoulder into the almost unfurnished main bedroom: he saw a huge bed with an oak headboard and footboard and invalidish stacks of pillows, and the little brass clock under the bedside lamp. His own room was next door, with only a plank wall, and a single bed under a flowered counterpane. He said he liked it, although he knew the bed would give him cramps like an adolescent, and he had a vague sense of being in a servant’s room, despite the facetious collection of old brown books on the chest of drawers: Queer Folk of the West Country, Who’s Who in Surtees, Remarkable Sayings of Remarkable Queens. Justin hung in the doorway. “So are you seeing anyone?” he said.
The upstairs windows were set low in the walls, and though the midday sun made a dazzling lozenge on the window-sill the room was shadowy and cool under the thatch. The atmosphere was faintly illicit, as if they ought to have been tearing around outside but had sneaked back unnoticed into the open house.
“Not really.” Alex gave a little squashed smile. The truth was he had been too depressed, too shaken by his own failure, to believe that any other man would want him, or could ever fall in love with him. He didn’t often lie, and he was pained to hear himself say, “There’s someone who comes round; nothing serious.”
“Is he cute?”
“Yep.”
“Is he blond?”
“He is, actually.” Alex shrugged. “He’s very young.”
“He’s another virgin blond like me, isn’t he?” Justin made one of his experienced-barmaid faces. “Of course I’m foully jealous.” And despite the big congratulatory smile that followed, Alex registered the truth in the customary hyperbole; and then saw that the congratulation itself was mildly demeaning.
“It really isn’t anything,” he said.
They found Robin in running-gear and oven-gloves, knocking the loaves from their hot tins on to a wire rack. The latent smell of marjoram and garlic and rising dough had bloomed into the kitchen with its own stifling welcome. Justin scuffed through to the fridge and the jug of drink.
“Darling, this is Alex. Darling, this is Robin.”
“Just a minute.” Then, shaking off the padded pockets, Robin turned with a smile that Alex knew already, though he doubted if he would have recognised the rest of the big handsome boy in the big handsome man. Alex was in the first freeing ease of drink on an empty stomach, and came forward and shook his hand and grinned back; and then stood close by him for a second or two, feeling the damp heat of him. The sweat on his bare shoulders and in the channel of his chest under the loose tank-top, the sporting readiness of his manner, the glanced-at weight of his cock and balls in the silvery slip of his running-shorts, the tall cropped balding head with its lively but calculating grey eyes: Alex coloured at the mixture of challenge and seduction, then stepped back with a deflected compliment on the beauty of the house.
“It was a shell when he bought it,” said Justin, in a grim singsong that mocked Robin’s evident pride in the place.
“Really?” said Alex, but still looking at Robin. “I’m amazed. It feels so, um…”
“It was a big job,” said Robin lightly, sweeping the subject aside.
“There are fascinating before-and-after photographs,” Justin insisted; but Robin was already tugging his shirt from his waistband and saying he must shower.
Within a minute there were springy footsteps overhead, and the soft thump-thump of dropped shoes, and then the whine of the hot-water pipes.
Alex went to fetch his bag from the car, and walking up through the garden felt at once the pleasure of being alone; he realised it was too late to run away; he had a racing fuddled sense of surrender to the weekend and its rigours. It was like a training exercise, confusing and uncomfortable in itself, but possibly affording in the end some obscure feeling of achievement. In the bag he had a bottle of Scotch and another present for Justin, which he now knew was wrong, but when he got back to the sitting-room he handed it over, with a sprinting pulse.
Justin gave an “Oh…” of tolerant surprise, and Alex watched in a painful clarity of recall as he frowned and blushed over the red wrapping-paper, rather brusquely got the book out of it, murmured its title, and with a little smirk turned and stuffed book and paper into the top drawer of the oak commode behind him. So he was still unable to say thank you, which was a perverse flaw in someone who lived so much by taking. Alex watched him knee the drawer shut on his gauche but extravagant token of forgiveness.
After lunch they were all so drunk that they had to lie down. They went upstairs with yawns and stumbles, as if it was the middle of the night. Alex pushed off his shoes and lay on his back with the door open, but Justin slammed their door perhaps harder than he meant to: the wooden latch clattered. Alex grunted and turned on his side, and hoped they weren’t going to have audible sex. He woke dry-mouthed and horny in the still heat of the later afternoon.
Padding grumpily along to the bathroom, he passed the closed doors of other rooms not mentioned on the tour, and rubbed his eyes out of a dreamlike sense, in the half-dark, with only the spills of light under the doors, that the cottage must be far bigger inside than it was outside. At the end of the corridor hung the long ellipse of an old pier-glass, which only deepened the impression. He gave himself a friendly scowl.
It emerged that Robin had gone out while the other two were sleeping. Justin came down and found Alex drinking water in the kitchen. “He’s on a job,” he said.
“I didn’t know architects worked at weekends.”
“I’m afraid they do if they’re working for mad old queens. And mad old queens do seem to make up an awfully large proportion of Mr Woodfield’s clients.” Justin sat down at the table, from which, Alex realised, the lunch things had all been magically cleared; the dishwasher must have groaned and fizzed through its cycle while he slept.
“Who’s this particular one?”
“Oh, Tony Bowerchalke,” said Justin, with mocking fondness, as if they both knew him.
“Uh-huh”
“Do you want a drink, darling?”
“Good god no.”
“Perhaps you’re right. No, old Tony’s quite sweet, but he worries a lot. Robin rang him up the other day and he said, “I’m just having a tomato sandwich,” so he had to ring off and call him again later. His house is hideous.”
“You don’t mean Robin built a hideous house.”
“No, it’s a Victorian loony-bin.” Justin got up and moved indirectly towards the fridge. “Robin doesn’t actually build houses. He could be the Frank Lloyd Wright of the whole Bridport area, but mostly he just tarts up old queens’ dados. It’s called a country-house practice, darling. Of course, no one builds country houses any more unless they’re neo-classical pastiche by Quinlan Terry, so it tends to be repairs and turning them into flats.”
“Dearest, you’ve never heard of neo-classical pastiche by Quinlan Terry.”
Justin raised an eyebrow. “You’ll find me changed in many respects from the old lezzy you used to know.” He prised open a bottle of beer.
Later they went for a walk up a rutted lane already mysterious in the early evening under thickly leaved hazels and oaks, and out on to the high seaward slopes above the village. It was an intermittent three-mile climb to the cliff-tops, which Justin said was too far, as a rule he would only go for a walk if it was, as the French say, in the car. But Alex suddenly felt the pull of the sea, a holiday freedom that had seemed impossible in the airless cottage. He sprang ahead on his long legs over the tussocky hillside.
“We’re not in any hurry, are we?” said Justin, starting to breathe sharply and sweating enough for his face to give back an ethereal reflection of the light.