The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst

shoulder. The sight of Justin from behind could still startle a little noise from him, half grunt, half gasp, of lust and admiration. It was love’s clear thrilled focus on its object in a blurred irrelevant field. Alex was talking to him but Robin looked only ahead, with a fixated half-smile. When he did turn, to show a form of courtesy, he saw that they had both been staring at the same thing.
    In the car going home there was a mood of idle resentment among the others, as if they had behaved well for very little reward. Robin said, “Bowerchalke’s a nice old boy, isn’t he,” but it was only Alex who bothered to say yes, whatever he might really have felt. Robin saw how you could play tricks on someone so self-repressing and ready to agree. “Of course he’s a silly old fool,” he said; but Alex merely gazed out of the window with a wincing smile at the sunlight from a high cloud’s edge.
    Justin said, in a tone both loud and confidential, “I gather you were a very naughty boy last night, Danny.”
    “Not particularly,” said Danny.
    There was a little pause. “Well, that’s not what your father says, Danny.” Justin spoke like a mother who has landed the task of conveying a sad parental disappointment. “Up till all hours hobnobbing with Terry Blodgett; and what-have-you. And you know your father’s feelings about rough trade.”
    “Oh do I,” said Danny.
    “And don’t be cheeky.”
    “Terry may be rough trade to you,” said Danny, in a light bored voice, “but he’s an old friend of mine.”
    “Mm, old friend maybe. But you hadn’t…you know…before, had you.”
    Danny made it clear that while the whole discussion was a joke it was also beneath him. “Only half a dozen times,” he said; which got him a scream and a slap from Justin.
    “The young today. It’s enough to break a mother’s heart.”
    “Fortunately I have a very tough-hearted mother.” Danny buzzed his window half-open, and let in a refreshing draught across the back of the car.
    Robin allowed this nonsense to go on behind him, because he felt he had already said enough, and Danny was right, even though he himself was not wrong. The parental instincts that Justin was lampooning were awkwardly strong sometimes. Even though the marriage had broken up eighteen years ago, Danny’s visits still left Robin with an aftertaste of disappointment, of adulterated sweetness; sometimes they had been anxious charades of the life they might have led together, but played out with an eye on the clock and a mawkishness which shifted from one to the other. The weekends, the half-vacations, were planned as treats, but for Robin were always reminders of his failure as a husband. The failure remained, however much he reinvented it as a triumph of instinct. He avoided meeting Jane, and could be severe with Danny, as if to refute some imagined accusation of negligence. He ran a good house. He wanted to know who was sleeping under his roof. He didn’t want his boy turning into a slut. But Danny had come back from California last summer in a perversely independent mood, which Robin blamed feebly on Jane, a Distinguished Professor now, who wrote acclaimed books in an idiolect Robin couldn’t understand.
    He looked in the mirror and felt a tug of futile envy for Danny’s freshness and freedoms – even a smothered mood of rivalry, having watched Terry Badgett grow up over the years and turn from one kind of trouble-maker into another. It was exciting as well as distasteful in the small hours to find Terry frowning naked into the bathroom mirror, still glowing from sex, the cast-off condom unflushed in the bowl. It was the first unignorable evidence he had seen of Danny’s sex-life, and his anger surprised him, as did the lingering sense of protest.
    Alex was smiling tensely at the backseat badinage. Then Danny said, with mischievous brightness, “Justin, why don’t you tell us the story of how you met Dad?” – and didn’t see the full