Free The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst Page A

everyone but Terry harumphed and refilled their glasses with a despairing leer.
    “Well, Alex has done very well in his chosen profession, of pensions,” said Justin, and smiled to see his former lover unable to sift the compliment from the mockery. “Robin perhaps hasn’t quite fulfilled the promise of his early work on The House in the Landscape and the Landscape in the House, have you sweetie?”
    “You haven’t exactly broken every known fucking box-office record as an actor,” said Robin, in what was probably a parody of annoyance. Justin looked at Danny and Terry side by side, uncertain which to enlist.
    “I was
in
a play,” he said.
    Soon the party broke up, Terry called back “Cheers” from the door, and Danny went out with him, talking quietly. Justin saw Alex start to wander after them, as if sleepily attracted, or simply from an instinct to escape; then stand in the doorway with a pretence of stretching and yawning. Upstairs in the bathroom Justin switched off the light and squatted on the low window-sill, letting his eyes adjust to the night outside: the unsuspecting trees, crowded dim moons of cow-parsley, and slowly more and more starlight on the slope of the greenhouse, on the motionless roses, and the immensity of the hill beyond. He couldn’t see the boys, though occasionally he heard a louder phrase or both of them laughing, and then for a minute or more only the brook. He wanted to turn the brook off. He thought Danny would walk Terry home, through the gate in the wall and fifty yards up the shadowed lane; but there were their voices again, close by, the words indistinct, with the idling rhythms and inscrutable pauses of the overheard. Well, if Terry wanted to tell Danny what had happened, he would do so. They had woken a bird up and it gave out a series of disoriented chuckles.

FIVE
    R obin decided to go to Tytherbury on Sunday as a break from Alex’s apologetic presence and the unnecessary tensions of the weekend. But then Tony Bowerchalke said to bring over the whole party, not for lunch but for a drink before lunch. Getting them into the Saab had not been easy. Alex, who had started out unconvincingly in shorts, rushed upstairs to change and hit his head quite hard on a beam. Then both Alex and Justin seemed to want to sit in the back with Danny, though Danny himself said he wanted to sit in the front. Justin won by arguing that Alex had the longest legs, and then drove Danny mad by playing “round and round the garden” on his bare forearm. Danny was clearly in a sulk after Robin’s frowning and in fact rather frightened encounter with a naked Terry Badgett in the bathroom at 3 a.m. Perhaps after all Alex was the best person to have in the passenger seat, with his responsible pleasure in the villages and the riot of flowering chestnuts and may.
    As they turned in between the tall brick gate-piers Robin felt the fresh awareness that went with showing a familiar place to newcomers – he seemed to share their curiosity and vague social apprehension as the pitted half-mile of the drive unwound between dense banks of rhododendrons, fields planted up close to the road as in wartime, eerie poplar plantations with pheasant-runs in their straight alleys, through to the horrible shock of the house itself. The kids, as Robin found himself thinking of them, slipped reluctantly out of the car, as though they had just been brought back to boarding-school.
    Tony was standing around on the rough daisy-crowded lawn to the left; he was evidently waiting for them with his usual nerviness and fear of accidents, though he pretended not to have seen them until the car-doors were arrhythmically clunking shut. He hurried across, tugging down his pullover and smoothing back his flat oiled hair. Introductions were made, Tony holding the hands of Alex and Danny for a second or two to help him memorise their names. They stood in an uncertain group, loosely focused on the central feature of the gravelled circle, a