The Spell (26 page)

At the end of the main corridor was his own room, which he opened up with self-conscious briskness. With its high single bed, formica-topped table and Germolene-coloured satin eiderdown it had the air of an old school sanatorium. The square of carpet was laid over beige linoleum. On the table was a transistor radio and an oldish book about wartime espionage. A further passage led into a tall narrow space enshrining the polished teak bench and scalloped porcelain bowl of the “Clifford,” a majestic Victorian water-closet. Robin didn’t like to examine the bedroom too closely. He knew little about Tony’s intimate life, but the singleness of the room agitated him, as if he had suddenly come on evidence of something he would rather ignore. On the wall there were framed photographs of permed middle-aged women, some pre-war children, a bull-terrier, nailed up in the inartistic but serviceable way that was perhaps Tony’s version of the family blindness. He thought of his own life, which seemed in retrospect to have been gripped and shaped by sexual love, the constant indispensable presence of another person, one after another, and overlapping – he thought of his awful behaviour in Simon’s last days and couldn’t suppress a certain shocked admiration for his own instinctual drive. Later Robin realised that this room had also carried a hushed resonance of the Wiltshire nursing-home in which his mother, the “redoubtable” Lady Astrid, had spent her last unreconciled year.

The top floor of the house could be reached by three different staircases, which Robin said would be convenient. Tony said, “They take some getting used to. Let’s go up this one. My aunt used to say that she came down this staircase but she would never go up it because she didn’t know where it went.”

After a minute or two Robin, with his normally fine sense of orientation, said, “I see what your aunt meant.” Up under the roofs there was a maze of odd-shaped stuffy rooms with tiny windows, linen-cupboards with skylights and ladders of empty shelves, unannounced changes of level. In several rooms chamber-pots or old tin basins had been placed on the threadbare carpets and bare iron bedsteads to catch dripping rainwater; though now they held only chalky stains. Tony flung open numerous cupboards, as if wanting to make a clean breast of the thing, though again it was only emptiness that he revealed. Robin felt very remote from the outer world. “You don’t often come up here,” he said.

“I did in my Sardines days,” Tony said, with one of his nervous schoolboyish gestures of straightening and neatening himself. “Those low cupboards under the eaves were admirable hiding-places.” Robin could imagine him crawling into one and pulling the door shut. “I go up to the Top Room, of course.”

“Oh yes, I want to see that.”

It appeared to be another closet with an ill-fitting door, but inside there was a narrow staircase, with fluffy dust at the side of the treads, and bright daylight up above. The Top Room was Tytherbury’s attempt at a tower, a little lookout among the chimney-stacks, with its own small summer-house fireplace and rattling leaded casements on three sides. In the old days visitors had always wanted to see it, and those with connections were invited to scratch their names on a window-pane with a diamond. Florence Hardy, Hallam Tennyson, Muriel Trollope: an interesting if strictly secondary collection. There was also an R. Swinburne, which Tony said people wanted to believe was A. Swinburne having trouble with his stylus; and a Wm Shakspere, facetiously introduced by Tony’s grandfather when he was a boy. “It’s ice-cold in winter,” Tony said, “and as you can see baking hot in summer.” Robin looked at the south-facing sills, which were warped by sunlight and rotted by rain-water. Beyond the glass the view was compromised: the light-industrial chimney, the new barns and silos on the Home Farm, part of the vanished layout of the garden visible in dry weather as in an aerial photograph; not the sea, but the straggly pines above it, and the top of the pyramid. That particular structure was taking on a further symbolic burden, as the task that wouldn’t go away, the problem that a younger man would already have solved, but which filled Robin with a paralysing sense of responsibility.

Tony asked him to stay to lunch, which they had in the kitchen. Robin knew that life here was already confined to a few of the smaller rooms, and that the occasional Campari he had had in the barely furnished drawing-room represented a special social effort. It was hard to praise the meal, of tinned tongue, with a tomato, a spring onion and a curl of lettuce; but Tony said, “These spring onions are jolly good.”

Rita Bunce said, “You’re going to split the old place up, then.”

“Well, I’ve only just started thinking about it.”

Her smile was responsible, and so seemed to hint at her anxiety about Tony. “We’ll all be much better off,” she said, which they each appeared to think about and find true. “No more housework. I don’t know what I’ll do all day.”

“Oh, I’ll keep you busy,” said Tony, perhaps more rakishly than he intended.

It was very like the grind of Justin’s old joke as he explained his plan to stay in a hotel: “With no housework to do, I shall have some time to myself for a change.” Robin was lost at once in the gloom of that other story, which undercut the good fortune the three of them were quietly welcoming. Work, which was a salvation from empty misery, was shown up by it as the feeble consolation of the loser. The secret technical joy he had always got from buildings and the art of building shrivelled away, as if poisoned. He set down his knife and fork and asked for another glass of water.

“I hope you approved of young Terry’s efforts in the flats,” Mrs Bunce said.

“He made a decent job of it,” said Robin. “I was pleasantly surprised.”

“He’s turned out a good lad, after some bad beginnings,” Mrs Bunce said. “He’s very clean.”

“He’s a buster, isn’t he,” said Tony.

“He’ll be busy with the discos now, of course,” said Mrs Bunce.

“You ought to go over one night,” said Tony. “Rita’s a great dancer, you know.”

“Going back a bit!” Mrs Bunce said, while a blush surfaced through her cream and powder. Robin glanced at her with courteous interest, and she went on, “No, that was the jitterbug-ging we used to do. They don’t do that these days, or else I’m very much mistaken.”

“I’m afraid not. I’m not even quite sure what it is.”

“And I’m not going to show you!” Robin saw that she’d brought the faintest hint of sexual sparring into the conversation, even though she was turning him down. “That’s how I met my other half,” she said: “Billy Bunce from Clifton, New Jersey. He could jitterbug them all into the ground. That was magic. Well, I’ve never seen anything to touch it since. The modern dancing, oh dear, you see it on the telly.”

“I know,” said Robin, with a widowed sense that he would never go dancing again, and that his style of Mick Jaggerish strutting and shaking had already gone to join the jitterbug in dance limbo, along with the twist and the Charleston, the quadrille and the gavotte.

The mood clung to him as he drove on to Litton Gambril. He was miserably distracted by the idea of Justin’s freedom in London, the complete freedom he had chosen from the botched experiment of life down here. Robin pictured him at the garish little newsagents in Clapham where he had first seen him, or among shoppers in Long Acre, and was horrified by the fact that mere chance had brought them together in those two places. For the first time, it struck him as absurd to expect loyalty from someone he had met in a toilet.

Normally when he arrived at the cottage he felt happily divided, and opened the place up in a capable adult way while his eyes and thoughts ran round the house and garden like imaginary children, making contact with their favourite spots. But today, in the sunless heat, he could only think of how he missed Justin, and the house in its private hollow looked like an elaborate emblem of failure. He had to have someone always around. Nights spent by himself were more and more bewildering to him. It was clear that Dan and his friend had slept in the big bed, and there seemed something inexorable in that. The kitchen showed signs of the misplaced tidiness of guests, everything subtly wrong. It was like the endless summer weekends he had spent here when Justin was still living with Alex, but darkened now by a hint of dispossession.

He did what he could to counter the mood. He got into shorts and hurried round with a show of unchallenged physical energy. The lawn in this dry weather didn’t need mowing again, and he saw that the dead-heading of the roses had been done exactly to his instructions. There was only a little perfectionist weeding to do. He carried the heavy black book of the Tyther-bury plans to the work-hut, but the air there was stifling, and the book lay on the desk like a penance: he looked out at the long field and the hanging wood which were the constant counterparts to his working thoughts and wondered how he could ever make a drawing again. Everything was flavourless, or slightly bitter.

When it was cooler he went for a run round the fields. The wheat was coming on with its usual evenness of purpose, but it was a scruffy time of year, the path dry and cracked among dead cow-parsley and tall brown grass. A field of rape had been cut and left in its unEnglish chaos of gigantic tussocks. He didn’t see anyone else in the half-hour he was out, and he had the feeling he was the only person who had put up a resistance to the heavy heat of the day. He pinched the sweat out of his eyes.

When he got in he had a long shower and examined himself in the mirror as he dried, with a sportsman’s attention to particular muscles and a firmer acknowledgement than before that something in his bearing was changing, that the flow and swing of his body were becoming strange to him. Of course you saw it in others at the gym, the little fold of skin at the armpit, gooseflesh at the throat, the flattening of the buttocks, the slump of the chest. A wiry young man had a perceptible stoop, a regular heart-breaker’s smile took on a worried persistence. In some of them the marks of time were sexy – as Robin’s own baldness obviously was. He thought of Justin, with his plump little underchin, his contained sleekness mysteriously yielding, the pattern of his hair-loss revealing itself, and found every detail rousing and real. Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be. He smiled sternly at his sun-browned handsomeness, and remembered the absurd remark Tony once dragged up about his father’s being the handsomest man in Wessex. It was funny because it was both so pompous and so camp; which didn’t mean that it wasn’t also quite likely to be true. His father would have frowned at the phrase and thought there was something pansy about it; but in the privacy of his dressing-room he probably turned it over and admitted it was pretty near the mark.

It was oppressively still in the house, where every window was open, and when Robin stood at the back door he saw the sky to the west was full of purple-black promise; he leant against the door-frame with a bottle of cold beer pressed to his bare chest and waited for the first miraculous spits of rain on the path. There was a blink of lightning and he counted the seconds and worked out that the storm was breaking over Lyme and Charmouth; he pictured the dusty water running down the steep streets towards the sea. He felt his mood shifting, his cleanness pricking with fresh sweat, and the prospect of the long loveless summer evening already coloured by the storm with an enjoyable mood of crisis. The Wessex Woodfields rose to a crisis. It was the indeterminacy of recent weeks that disheartened him: he had been cheated of a crisis and left to wander in a private desert, which to everyone else still had the look of a richly cultivated landscape.

He hadn’t come for nearly seven weeks, by far the longest abstinence in his thirty-five years of maturity. (He once said to Justin that he had probably first ejaculated on the day that he was born, but Justin seemed to detect some impropriety in the alignment.) He was surprised by the pattern of sensation – the taunting sex-urge that built up after three or four days of being pushed away had quickly declined at the end of a week, and apart from the night of Dan’s birthday, when it was abnormally provoked, it seemed to have gone into a monkish kind of aestivation. It was a mystery he had never even hoped to experience, he was proud of his sex-life and impatient of any sort of sex “problem”; but now he found there was some symbolic magic to it, like the private discipline of a prisoner which gives him strength to wait for the moment of release.

He saw he would have to get drunk. He thought of ringing Mike Hall, but felt too delicate for the sarcasms and abuse of Mike’s “late” phase. He cracked up some ice and made himself a Justinian half-pint of gin and tonic. He considered smoking more of the famous hash, which must still be hidden in the work-shed, but then felt it would be futile to escape from loneliness into a state that only focused the longing for another person. It grew darker in the house and there were gratifying stamps of thunder, as if someone had dropped a safe upstairs. When the rain started, abrupt and vertical, Robin left the windows open and let the displacement of damp air flow in over his chest and shoulders. He pictured Justin coming to stand behind him in a rare unironical surrender to the thrash of the rain and the retina-printing lightning; though in fact Justin was nervy in storms and roamed around sulkily to disguise his slightly shaming anxiety. Robin took a mouthful of gin and tonic, and chewed it like a taster to make the chilled bubbles seethe across his palate.

He thought he would put on some music, and stood looking along the shelf with an indecision that threatened to let the misery in again. The little flickers of elated sensation, from the power of his body or the colour of the storm, expired upwards like the bubbles that plinked and whispered in the glass, and left him with a darker sense of solitude. His old vinyls, in bumped, coffee-ringed sleeves, were all here, the Beatles and the Stones, the Doors, the Incredible String Band. To look at them was to risk the tumble into a picturesque past of essay crises, car troubles, sleeping with girls. He peeped at the Kinks, in their crotch-gripping flares, and recalled rolling joints on
Revolver
. Robin had the small accidental CD collec- tion of someone uninterested in music, who still made the occasional purchase and sometimes bought the wrong thing because he couldn’t remember what it was that had been recommended. He hadn’t even known that he owned Vaughan Williams’s “London” Symphony, and had certainly never listened to it. Anyway, he didn’t want to think about London. There was something that must be Dan’s,
Dance Forever
, that he thought he would just try, but after a minute of primitive repetition he guessed you had to be in the right mood for it. He tried some Mahler, which was loud in a different way, but it got on his nerves. In the end he settled for a Beethoven quartet, which he found he knew quite well, and hummed along to without apology. He got himself another gin, and coming back among the deep shadows of the sitting-room where only the oscillating displays of the stereo gave out any light, he imagined candles. The storm rumbled close again, in an exciting sabotage of the music; on the window-sill was an old silver candelabrum and he liked the thought of struggling flames against the backdrop of downpour. There were matches somewhere in the little commode, and he went through the top drawer impatiently. Underneath everything else was the box of Swans and for some reason a book, wrapped in torn, shiny paper. He pulled it out with a frown, couldn’t think what it was, and left it on the top to look at later. He wondered if it was something Justin had planned to give him, and then saw that he was being absurdly sentimental.