He had just turned along Old Compton Street when he heard his name shouted. This only ever happened when some popular person called Alex was by chance within a few yards of him, but he looked across the slow-moving traffic, and there, hand up like a referee, and choosing his moment to dart between the taxis, was Lars himself. He gave Alex a kiss and asked him what he was doing. Alex said “Nothing,” with a kind of smiling passivity – it was distinctly magical that he had appeared at this moment, sparkly-eyed and breathing a pale cloud into the night. His blue puffer-jacket showed a Norwegian respect for winter, but it was open to display his muscular chest and stomach in a tight white T-shirt. Alex loved having been claimed by him on the busy street.
They went into a bar that he and Justin had used in the early days of their affair, though it had been fiercely refitted since then as a high-tech cruising tank. Fast dance-music was playing, it wasn’t great for conversation, but Alex felt the tingle of arrival again. He grinned at Lars, and started to wonder if there was any reason they shouldn’t have sex; then saw that he was running ahead of himself. When he was cheerful, as he had been once or twice in recent weeks, there was something manic and fixated in the emotion.
“So,” said Lars, clinking his beer-bottle against Alex’s, “it’s good to see you.”
“You too.”
“Been busy?”
Alex blinked. It was a common formula that he thought must have some criminal meaning. He was never either busy or not busy. “Oh, you know,” he said. All he wanted Lars to be clear about was that he’d spent the past twelve weeks in heart-break. That was his story, and he’d had frustrating evenings with people who’d failed to grasp it. Sometimes he was childish enough to act miserable, to get attention. Sometimes he said, “I’m just so miserable,” and people thought he’d said, “I am, as always, fine,” or if they did understand they began to talk spaciously about some minor success they’d had.
“Well of course I heard about you and Danny,” Lars said, not flippantly, but with a suggestion that it was all a long time ago. “I guess Danny’s just not ready to settle down. If he ever will be.” Of course that was the trite official line. Alex was pretty sure Lars had had a fling with Danny, after all everyone had; but he wasn’t yet ready himself for that fondly sceptical tone. In fact now that they were talking about it he couldn’t quite think what to say. Lars said, “Sure, he’s a fun guy, but he’s not exactly Mr Reliable. Anyway I hope you’re not wishing now that you’d never met him.”
“If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be with you tonight,” said Alex, in the bar’s blue compensatory gleam.
Lars had something amusingly on his mind. “Do you know, I think that is the only family I have met where the father is even hotter than the son.”
“Oh…” said Alex. “I know some people do, um…” It was beyond him at times to grasp what they’d done to him. First the father smashed him up and then the son. They were terrifying to the outsider, like the Doones of Exmoor or something. “What is it they’ve got? The Woodfield…” – Alex pouted and shook his head.
“The Woodfield wotsit,” Lars said.
“That’s right.”
“Oh boy. Sometime, I will tell you a little story. But not now.” And he smiled like Danny used to, like all these boys on the scene did as a glimpse came back to them from their huge cross-indexed files of sexual anecdote; then he straightened up. “So, have you been out?” he said.
“No,” said Alex; and with a rather sly pathos: “I haven’t had anyone to go out with.”
Lars didn’t rise to this immediately. “That was Chateau, am I right, where I saw you and Danny?”
“Absolutely!” said Alex. He thought if he took his time Lars might suggest they went there again. A week ago he had found himself driving past it, the shutters down and padlocked, the neon logo grey and indecipherable in the dank late morning. It was a narrow facade, like a little old warehouse, with a mouth and two blacked-out eyes; the ordinary commuter could never have guessed what dreams unfurled behind it.
“Well it’s not so good at the moment.”
“Oh?”
“As you may know, they got raided. Last time half the queens are standing there just with a beer or whatever. Not so great for techno dancing.”
“I should think not,” said Alex, who felt he had been personally insulted; and then went on craftily, “Anyway, you can get the stuff somewhere else, obviously.”
Lars glanced round and then shrugged his jacket back to show more of himself. Maybe it was just Alex’s habit of idealising anyone he found attractive, maybe Lars wasn’t Mr Super-Reliable himself, but for the moment the boy seemed to have it all. He said, “Sure, we don’t have to go there. And don’t worry, darling, I can get you anything you want.”
Nick went back to the car for the bottle he’d insisted on bringing, and Alex waited by the gate, looking down at the cottage through the yellowing trees. Now that they were here the reasons for the visit escaped him. He didn’t like Robin, and he knew he was going to fuss over Nick and Justin to make sure that they saw the best in each other. It irked him that Justin had stayed with Robin after the promising disaffection of last year. At Christmas they had sent out a specially printed card, with a picture of the cottage on the front, under snow; it took Alex a minute to work out that they had signed each other’s names. And here the cottage still was, with them inside it, under that smothering lid of thatch. From above you saw thin smoke fading above the chimney, and vivid pink roses. Alex thought of arriving here and seeing Danny’s pink tank-top hanging from a deck-chair, like a mark of casual possession. He thought of Danny in uniform at the Royal Academy, and Danny’s account of his admirers pressing their numbers on him, like dollar-bills in a stripper’s G-string. He thought of Robin, barging in to find them naked and dozy after sex, saying, “Christ, Dan, you can’t be serious.”
It was Robin who let them in, wearing a short apron over his jeans, and a patch over his left eye. Alex murmured concern about the patch, though he was privately very pleased by it, and felt it balanced out his own social disadvantage as a double Woodfield casualty. Robin said it looked worse than it was, and excused himself to get on with the lunch. Justin was in the sitting-room reading the paper, and plucked off a pair of frameless spectacles as they came in. “I saw that,” said Alex, giving him a big moaning hug, and grinning at the shock of how much he loved him.
“Don’t, darling, it’s like Moorfields in here,” said Justin. He looked affectionately at Nick and said, “Hello, darling,” as if they were old friends agreeing to forget a tiff. For once Alex saw that a formal introduction was unnecessary. He stepped back with a feeling he shouldn’t intrude on a tender episode, one that was novel to him, and unexpectedly rich – the meeting of two of his lovers, with its momentary sequence of hidden appraisal and denial.
The room was subtly altered, and more cluttered. Other little pictures of a very different taste – Regency silhouettes and framed caricatures – filled in the gaps between the family portraits and Robin’s creepy watercolours of the cottage. Several highly varnished pieces of furniture – a magazine-rack, a china-cabinet, a nest of scallop-edged side-tables – had been thrust into an unlikely marriage with the resident arts and crafts. Alex realised that these were things saved from Justin’s father’s house. He strolled towards the book-shelves, saw something else, and after a moment’s consideration let out a shriek. On the deep window-sill, turned sideways to catch the best of the sun but glaring back into the room in a consummate sulk, was the polished bronze head of Justin, aged twelve, that Alex had always found so amusing. “I see you’ve salvaged “The Spirit of Puberty,” darling,” he said.