Alex half-turned but still didn’t look directly at him. “Is it George?” he said.
Danny chuckled sourly. “George wouldn’t let me anywhere near him.”
“It’s not Terry, for god’s sake?”
“Alex, it’s not anyone!” He wanted to touch him consolingly, but also to push him off the fence, where he was nodding forward and hugging himself delicately, as if every liaison of Danny’s were a broken rib or an unhealed cut.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said, “I can’t take in anything you’re saying. You seem to be talking gibberish. We’re two people wildly in love with each other, and you’re saying you can’t see me any more.”
“Well, I’ve changed, darling, people change. I’m sorry.” He glanced back over the full two months of their affair, and remembered getting dressed in front of Alex on the first evening he came round, and thinking he’d never seen anyone so well-mannered and so sex-starved. It had been at a strange moment in his own little number with cynical black Bob, and he could see now that there had been something defiant and capricious, perhaps, about taking up with Alex.
“I haven’t changed at all,” said Alex. “Apart from coming to love you more and more.”
“You know, we don’t have anything in common,” said Danny, and had to acknowledge that it didn’t sound that great.
Alex shook his head. “I thought the affair itself was what we had in common,” he said.
“Yeah, well…” Danny stuck to his idea that there was nothing to talk about. He frowned and blinked away the muddled imagery of their nights together, the happiness and sweat; and he knew there was a dappled prospect of things he could have learned from Alex, if he’d given him time and attention. But for the moment, and so perhaps for ever, he needed the story to be bare and shadowless. They’d gone out and got off their faces, and Alex had had his mind opened to dance-music. And now they were ending up in music, something altogether more monastic – even if distantly interspersed with Mike shouting “Cunt!” out of the window. Danny decided quickly and analytically that Alex, in spite of his wounded bafflement, accepted what had happened. There was no immediate suggestion of working out problems, or a trial separation. He couldn’t put it into words, but he saw something fatalistic in Alex rush forward to acknowledge the disaster. “Come on,” said Danny.
As they toiled out of the long grass, he gestured courteously to Alex to go ahead of him, and followed a few paces behind him up the rather notional path. The chanting grew grander as they approached the house, and he knew there would be some solemn moments ahead; but he quite admired the way he’d brought it off. It was the first big break-up he had been responsible for, and with an older man there was of course that further question of respect. He stopped to brush and slap at the mess on his trousers.
SIXTEEN
Fabulous finials!”
“I know!” Alex stepped backwards through the long damp grass to look up at the top stages of the tower: the hooded niches, the little pinnacles like stalagmites that grew from the ledges of the buttresses, the taller pinnacles, three to each corner and one to each side, that crowned the whole thing. The effect was extravagant, and like many strictly superfluous things it was what he most remembered. Not that he’d ever looked at it properly in the Danny period. Danny wasn’t big on finials, and they had hurried on by.
He turned and watched Nick wandering among the gravestones, stooping and scratching off moss with that pleasant thoroughness he had, the suggestion that even if something wasn’t worth doing, it was worth doing properly. Nick was the first person Alex had slept with who was older than himself, and though at their age it hardly made a difference, there was something, well, restful about it, and solidly grounded, after the jolting berths and squealing point-changes of nights with Danny. The pattern had been broken, since Nick wasn’t a taker, and shared Alex’s own determination to give; his amused absorption in every aspect of Alex’s life, as if Alex’s story were the one thing to master and see the beauty of, had felt almost invasive after Danny’s fidgety indifference.
“I know there’s an interesting wall-painting,” he said, coming back and poking his arm through Alex’s to steer him into the porch. The gesture, like many of Nick’s, seemed to compress time: they were romantic undergraduates from some Oxonian golden age but also a nice old county couple who hadn’t lost their appetite for life. The leap of the latch echoed into the interior, and reminded Alex, who felt warily suggestible today, of the characteristic clatter of the latches in Robin’s cottage; though beyond that there were fainter echoes, of church-visiting on childhood holidays, and of going in to play in the pulpit while his mother did the flowers. It was a sunny October day, and the church, which was unwarmed, was full of light. Nick strode about appreciatively, while Alex, who always believed in reading the instructions, studied the information bat.
The fragment of wall-painting was in the north aisle, and showed Tobias with the Angel Raphael. It was executed in various shades of brown, which merged with the discolouration of the plaster and the rough blots where the plaster had been patched, one of which rendered the angel enigmatically jawless. But the fat little boy could be seen, in his brown jerkin, and holding up his brown fish. Alex said, “It says here it was painted with a brush made from a squirrel’s tail.”
“It’s hard not to suspect an element of conjecture in that,” Nick said.
The angel guiding Tobias had flowing curly hair and a belted tunic; he was about eight feet tall, and strode forwards on a thickly outlined right leg with a very elegant foot – heel raised and long toes taking their purchase on the ground, which was implied by a dandelion-like tuft. It made Alex think of his last day with Danny, on the beach, and the memory was surprising even though this little trip to Dorset was all memory – ever since London he’d been waking himself up from the troubled trance of the past. At the end of that afternoon, he had walked with Danny along the sea’s edge, the sand was firm but sodden with water, and at each step a shiver of silvery light seemed to flash from under their feet. Alex pointed out the effect, in the lyrical but cringing tone that was forced on him by Danny’s coldness, and Danny had merely cleared his throat, with an unamusable downward curl of his big mouth.
Nick hugged him from behind, and they went out of the church. He was being vigorously kind this weekend, and any tension he felt about meeting Justin and Robin, and pottering round the landscape of Alex’s previous affair, was disguised as excitement and a hunger for ancient monuments. “And now the castle!” he said, as they came into the road.
“There’s not much to the castle,” murmured Alex, who was covering his tension less well, and was ready for a drink. “The Crooked Billet is a marvellously unspoilt old pub.”
“Art before alcohol, dear,” said Nick. He was a person who expressed large clear feelings and wants of all kinds and then showed a special charm in tuning and surrendering them to other people’s moods – or at least to Alex’s. “Of course, if you’d really rather not…I know this must be strange for you. You must tell me everything you’re thinking” – a phrase which to Alex always had the effect of a sudden inhibition.
“No, let’s go to the castle.”