The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst Page A

and shocked, of a feeling suddenly deprived of its object. The dusks grew longer and lonelier day by day as his feeling deepened. He walked out again to the gym and in the softening light, the slowly precipitating pinks and blues of a lover’s evening, he saw he was in a trap. The fact of having Justin was undermined by the fact of not having him; he needed nights with him, not hours. The old self that Justin had reawakened couldn’t be satisfied by the arrangement he had imposed.
    Robin had always been, in his well-mannered way, an initiator. He didn’t have the predatory disregard for the other person that some of his friends had, but he was used to creating a mood and exploiting a possibility. He thought he had never been resisted by anyone worth having. If he had felt trapped before, in the years of his marriage, and in the early restless days with Simon, he had shown a proud instinct for survival and escape. He found he was thought of as slightly dangerous, the handsome, athletic young architect, whose father was Sheriff of the county, who had a son at a good prep-school, but who was also known to a more secret elite in the underground clubs of early-eighties London. So it was a new experience, like the troubling physical changes of middle age – the sudden hair-loss, the slowing sex-drive, the half-doubted dulling of his hearing – to find himself in the submissive position of a mistress, the yearning but unacknowledgeable creature of the afternoons.
    Worst of all were the weekends, the three whole days from Friday lunch-time to Monday lunch-time, the enforced or at least accepted silence…It was a silence with an irresistible sense of crisis to it, as if everything must be over between two lovers who left each other alone for so long. Robin went down to Litton Gambril, where the early summer was pushing on senselessly without him, and where he could invent useful jobs for himself, get the Rayburn going and cook an elaborate meal out of the garden and eat it with the sorry haste of the newly widowed. The cottage was solid and stubborn and as he had left it; it wouldn’t come to life. He had a feeling he had made a mistake, and was acting with a parody of purpose. He lay on his customary side of the huge old farmhouse bed and swept out an arm over the cool double vacancy. He felt for everything he’d lost in Simon, and everything he needed in Justin, snivelling and exciting himself at the same time, till he felt quite freakish with pitiful and possessive emotions, and brought himself off so as to be able to sleep.
    One Saturday lunch-time he drank a bottle of Gilbey’s with the Halls and rang Justin’s number when he got back, in a mood of truculent reasonableness. “Let’s cut the crap,” he said, as he span the phone-dial through the eleven laborious numbers, which seemed in their old-fashioned way to be giving him time to think twice about the call. After a couple of rings a pleasant unfamiliar voice recited the last seven digits back to him, ending on a little interrogative rise. It was a tone of such easy and unsuspecting efficiency that Robin hesitated, and when after a few seconds Alex said “Hello,” the tone hardening but still tolerant, he hung up. He sat hunched forward on the sofa in the stillness of the country afternoon. Up in London a young man he had never seen would be putting down the receiver with a shrug and speaking innocently to the man they shared; Robin knew he was house-proud, and pictured him in an apron. He found a note of reproach in that happy mechanical answering of the phone, in the enviable pleasant boredom of their affair. Then he got to his feet with a sullen longing to break it up, which he drunkenly allowed to become a plan.
    Back in town he was in a mood of fatalistic excitement that was new to him. He thought he must at least see his rival and drove over early on the Monday morning to the quiet Victorian street where the two of them were living. He slipped into a space