Alex was sitting on the back-door step, looking down the sloping, untidy garden. Danny came through the kitchen and sat beside him, but without touching him. Alex said, “Oh Dan” – it was very rare for him to call him by name.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said. He thought perhaps by some miracle Alex had understood everything.
“I really do think you might have told me about this US thing.”
“Yeah…”
“You terrify me at times.” Alex reached for his hand, and he let him hold it, but without any return of pressure. “I mean, what happens to us? I can come and see you, of course. I look forward to that. But it’s hardly very convenient.”
“Well”
“Or perhaps you’re not really going,” Alex went on, in a tetchily forgiving tone. “But if you are it would have been nice not to have heard it announced in the middle of a drinks-party.”
They had never had a row, merely separate hurts and irritations which they seduced each other out of. Danny saw that he hadn’t done this right, and it made him sulkily aggressive. “I may not go,” he said, and withdrew his hand.
“I mean, I’m your boyfriend. That lanky bloke whose arms are round you when you wake up, and who then goes off to make your breakfast: that’s me.”
“Yeah, I wondered who it was,” said Danny. “Look, it doesn’t really matter whether I’m here or in San Diego, I can’t go on seeing you, Alex.”
Alex had already drawn the breath that should have carried his next remark, but he halted and let it out in a tragic sigh.
Danny stood up and strolled back across the kitchen and drew a glass of water. The whisky was giving him a slight headache; rather like poor Heinrich…“I’m very sorry,” he said.
When he glanced round, Alex was sitting in the same place, but tipped sideways against the door-frame, as though he had been thrown there by a blast. The pose was somehow histrionic and got on Danny’s nerves. He saw him roll his head, once, quickly, to see where he was, and Danny had the feeling that he himself had become the embodiment of something dreaded, that could hardly be looked at.
Back in the sitting-room he was told to help himself to another drink. He knew he had been sobered by the adrenalin of the past five minutes, and unexpectedly humiliated by Alex snapping at him to leave him alone. The others all seemed pathetically drunk and old. Adrian was asking about ladies-that-did, and various village names were rummaged for, each followed by a horrifying cautionary anecdote.
“We’ve never had any fucking charwoman,” said Mike; which nobody pretended to be surprised by.
Justin said, “You can always have nude housework done, of course.”
Adrian pursed his lips, but would clearly have liked to know more.
Mike said, in a marvelling monotone, “You lot talk so much fucking tripe.”
“I’m not against nude housework,” said Margery, “but I think I’d have to go out while it was being done.”
“Where’s the silent Scotsman?” said Mike. “Polishing his nails?”
Danny studied their five faces again; they all had a foolish look of temporary confidence, which he forgot he must often have had himself, in extremer forms too. Even Mike, who got furious on drink, seemed to have entered into a richer and more involving relation with himself. “Alex is just getting a bit of air,” Danny said; at which Mike nodded and drummed his fingers on his knee. Both he and Margery had renounced cigarettes, and the peculiar ashtrays mounted on stirruped thongs had gone from the arms of the sofa; but still the magnolia paintwork was dimly varnished with smoke and gave the room an atmosphere of terminated pleasures. Perhaps the others didn’t care, or were too sozzled to notice the room filling with shadows; but Danny never lost his sense of the speed of time. When he thought of Alex’s epic hesitations – the years without sex, the unaccountable solitariness – it brought him close to a panic of impatience.
He saw that Justin was peering at him again, with a hint of a smile – he couldn’t work out the ironies in it, it seemed encouraging and disappointed at the same time, as well as secretively sexual, as if they already had an agreement to meet up later. He knew he had just done something serious, and needed assurance that he had been right. Then the bells came tumbling down the scale and stopped.
The overtones swam there for a moment, and after that the ear was haunted by the bells and heard them fadingly continuing. The silence was astonishing, being ordinary existence thrown into relief by the hour or more of incessant sound, unwavering in rhythm and volume. And then it wasn’t silence. Mike got up and pushed the windows open, and there was a bird twittering, a car whining as it reversed, the dry runs of an old-fashioned mower, like a child’s rattle. Alex was somewhere outside, in the wilderness of the garden. Danny had been sent in, but he guessed he would have to go back out to him.
Mike sped across the room with the brawler’s roll he had when drunk. “Right!” he said, switching on the old blue-leather Philips gramophone, which he had confidently attached to an even older-looking valve amplifier and big, BDX-size, speakers.
“I think they’ve cut it rather short,” said Adrian, unwisely.
“Don’t get me wrong, Ringrose,” said Mike over his shoulder. “But your bell-ringing pals are fucking cunts.”
“Oh dear,” said Margery.
“I’m afraid so,” said Mike, exhilarated to have reached this stage of the evening already.
“I’m just going to check on Alex,” Danny said.
He was in the kitchen when he heard the music start, and then it came out very clearly through the windows when he stepped into the garden. It was Mike’s retaliation against the bells, a crackly old record of Gregorian chant, turned up offensively loud, though the music itself remained more than unflappable: the spare and echoing rise and fall of men’s voices, the ritual Latin. Danny stood for a moment by the two deck-chairs on the rough circle of lawn, and thought of calling to Alex, like someone getting a child in for a meal or bed. But he saw that the tone would be wrong: he was annoyed with Alex for still being here, and then a second later he was a little frightened at his responsibility. He stooped past the woody buddleia and down a path under apple-trees. There was a shed, and a fruit-cage covered in convolvulus, and one weedy but cultivated patch of kitchen-garden. After that the lot tapered, and there was only wild grass thigh-deep, and a big old tree at the bottom where the fences met. He saw Alex perched on the fence, with his back against the tree-trunk, looking unapproachably lonely. You could still see the curving track he had made through the grass, and Danny, out of some barely conscious symbolic scruple, made a separate wading path towards him. The grass was dry, and bleaching from the mid-
August heat, and where Danny’s hands trailed into it they found it dusty and sometimes sticky with secretions like bubbled spit; underfoot there was a crackling, and he realised he was treading on tiny grey snails – and there were dozens of them clinging like seed-cases on the thicker stalks. By the time he came to stand at Alex’s shoulder, his baggy black jeans were streaked and powdered from the field. He thought Alex might be crying, and that he’d been sent away so as not to witness that, but when he peered at him sidelong there was no sign of it. “I’ve come to see how you are,” he said.
After a while Alex said, “It’s like fucking murder in the cathedral.”
“The music, you mean,” said Danny, with a snigger.
Then Alex went on, very tensely, as if afraid of anything Danny might say, “You remember we walked up there not long ago.” He swept his hand up quickly, to hide its shaking.
Danny detected some sentimental reproach. “Yes, of course, it was a beautiful evening,” he said; though he did find it striking that Alex should mention it, because that evening up on the hill had been the silent turning-point for him, with Alex talking about his failure with Justin, and a sense of failure coming off him, like someone you would be unwise to set up business with. Danny said, pretty confident that it wouldn’t be put to the test, “You know we’ll always be friends.”