In the lane beyond the church there was LostwithieP, formerly the rectory, then the frivolously pretty “Ambages,” which Justin said would turn anyone queer who lived in it, and then Mike and Margery’s apparently nameless house, which he proposed should be called “Gordon’s.” LostwithieP, which looked semi-derelict, was the home of the senile but beautifully spoken Miss Lawrence, who wandered in the village and forgot where she lived. She had been burgled over and over, and though nothing had been proved, Terry Badgett was still thought to have been involved. Her old untended damson-tree dropped small copious fruit across the path; where it fizzed with wasps, and people messed their shoes with it, and it gave off a sharp stale smell.
They had to wait a minute at the Halls’ front door. Danny noticed how the area round the Yale lock was scoured by innumerable rough attempts at getting the key into it. When Margery opened, she said in her melancholy way, “Sorry, they’re watching the cricket.” Justin jumped at her and hugged her, in the style that he called “bringing the West End to the West Country”; Robin greeted her with the usual bungled chivalry of a second kiss. Danny watched Alex shake her hand, and thought how exasperatingly formal he was.
In the sitting-room Mike Hall and Adrian Ringrose were standing watching the television, as if they knew it should be switched off and were abetting each other in deferring the moment. Margery introduced Alex and Danny over the commentary on a dubious dismissal; then Mike snapped the telly off. “Crawley and Knight are doing well,” he said.
Alex said to Adrian, “Are you interested in cricket?” and he replied, in a mild but precise tone,
“No, not at all.”
Danny sat down in a high-backed armchair with Alex beside him but hidden from view by the wings of the chair; he didn’t want to cuddle up to him or to be catching his eye all the time. Already, in the hall, Alex’s hand had rested on his shoulder again, as if for guidance around the obstacles of the evening, and then trailed down secretively to touch his bum. He had wriggled away, but felt the presence of his rebuff, like a bruise in the air behind him. He was saying his words in his head, repeatedly and with exaggerated confidence. He wanted the business done with fast-moving dignity, and to his own credit. It was important not to miscue it, or be hurried into it on a wave of irritation. “I love you very much, but you know I can’t go on seeing you.” It steadied, and became reasonable, and at the same. time, like anything repeated, began to sound like nonsense. Robin was saying, “Yes, Dan is my son. And Alex is, well, originally a great friend of Justin’s…”
“I see,” said Adrian, with a delayed flicker as he stored this information, though without, presumably, the hint that Danny heard, of the family closing ranks. “I hadn’t thought of you as old enough to have a grown-up son,” he went on, in a drily fruity way.
“You’re very kind,” said Robin, tumbling into a low armchair. “Oddly enough, if you lose your hair before fifty, people tend to think you’re younger.”
“It’s the hormones,” Justin explained, like the owner, or perhaps the trainer, of a thoroughbred.
Adrian himself had crinkly old-fashioned hair, very dark for a man in his sixties. Danny’s lazily accurate sensors failed to detect in him whatever it was that might make them friends -a capacity for abandon, perhaps. He gave him a preoccupied smile and looked round the room, waiting to be amused. If his sensors picked up sex, Danny could talk a functional kind of drivel, but in a situation like this he felt it was weak or dishonest to show an interest you didn’t feel. Maybe it was just the tension of tonight, but he wondered for a sober half-minute what the fuck he was doing in this dreary room, with its worn floral carpet and crocheted cushion-covers and the various bits of short-tempered wiring that Mike had rigged up. His father said you had to get drunk here to numb the aesthetic nerve. The few pictures of Highland cattle and Spanish dancers -though, as Justin pointed out, never the two together – showed a kind of hostility to art.
Mike had gone out to get some ice, and came back in a stinging shimmer of eau de cologne, perhaps having sniffed himself in the kitchen. Danny remembered the fragrance from earlier occasions, and pictured him shaking it all over, like vinegar on to chips; last time the drinks themselves had been faintly scented from where Mike had handled the ice.
They were all taking their first two sips as the church bells broke loose in a plunging peal. Margery set down her drink as if it cost a thousand pounds and went to close the windows. “This is a disadvantage of village life,” she said to Adrian.
Mike said, “They’re bloody bastards.”
Adrian gave a deprecating smile and said, “Oh, it’s a fine sound if it’s well done.”
“They come from Salisbury,” said Mike, “or Southampton, deliberately to ring the bells. Now we shall have to shout all evening.”
Clearly Margery thought this would be nothing new. “I suppose it is rather a fine sound,” she said.
Danny could tell he was going to get drunk. He seemed instantly to have swallowed half of his tall Scotch and ginger ale. He thought of Heinrich again, and the striking fact of his having rung this evening, before going off to the all-night scrum of the Drop, where doubtless at some point a wide-eyed Spanish boy or French boy would lure him out to the corridor at the back. There was Heinrich himself, who was taking on new definition as a neglected suitor, and there was the world where Heinrich earned his living, where hundreds of men were forever catching his eye and poking money at him, and Danny felt jealous of both. “Of course I love you, Alex. But we’re not meant to be together. You know as well as I do. We have nothing in common.” He swayed his head to the bells, which seemed for the moment to be improvising on Madonna’s “Bedtime Story” and its recurrent good idea, “Let’s get unconscious, honey.”
Adrian said, “I don’t need to tell you that Litton Gambril has the oldest peal of eight bells in the county.”
“Is that right,” said Mike, none too pleased to be lectured on the matter by someone who’d only been in the county five minutes.
Margery smiled graciously. “Do you peal yourself?” she asked, with a tiny throat-clearing to bridge her doubt about the verb.
Adrian’s long fingers smoothed and balanced his bow-tie. “I used to ring. I rang for Cambridge. But I fear a tendonitis made me something of a liability in the chamber later on.”
“Well I ran for Cambridge,” said Mike, in one of his mordant asides. “No bloody g.”
“I think tonight we may hear a full grandsire major.”
The noise was muffled in the room, but still all-pervasive, and Danny found himself listening to the dense sonic aura of the overtones, which seemed like some acoustic perception you might have in the trance of an E; though the hypnotic thing was the evolving eight-note phrase, which imposed itself on the conversation, and broke up your thoughts.
Adrian, who had rapidly reverted to schoolmaster mode, was explaining some niceties of change-ringing to Justin. “So the conductor, as he’s known, calls out “bob” at the lead ends to produce a new row, from which further changes can then be rung.”
“What, ‘Bob’…?” – Margery tried it distantly, as though recalling someone she had once been fond of. She looked into her drink. “I suppose there must be dozens of changes.”
Adrian simpered for a second or two. “Well, with eight bells the number of possible changes would be factorial eight.”
“That’s eight times seven times six times…” Robin said.
There was a pause for thought. Justin said, “So if they rang the full grandmother’s footsteps it would be over four million changes…!”
“Fucking hell…” muttered Mike, and emptied his glass.