The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst Read Free Book Online

trees with his hand-weights. The horse-chestnuts were already leafing, the bushes bright green on black; there was a spring mood, casual but purposeful, and Robin envied the relief in the faces of other solitary joggers and unhurried couples.
    One mild cloudy day he was turning home along the Common’s edge and went into a newsagent’s to buy a drink. He had to wait at the counter with a queue of punters handing in lottery slips, and found himself looking with unconscious intimacy at the man in front of him, who was half in profile to him, superstitiously checking the fifteen boards he had marked. It was like the impersonal closeness of a crowded tube train, which none the less fosters secret desires and lurches of excitement. Still warm and impatient from running, but slowed and held by the inertia of the crammed little shop, with its lurid video posters, its insulting birthday-cards, its amazingly compendious top shelf of thickly overlapping pornography, Robin had closed his fastidious inner eye, his architect’s eye; and now it opened again, in the unexpected presence of something beautiful among so much unregulated vulgarity.
    In those queer, lulled seconds he looked more and more intently at the younger man’s glossy blond hair and full lips parted in vaguely unintelligent concentration. There was some- thing sleek and unreliable about him. Robin felt a kind of kinship with him, as with his own self of fifteen years or so before, habituated to sex and admiration. He wanted to hear him speak, to see if the generally public-school impression was accurate, but he handed over his chits and his foolish £15 without a word. Robin got himself beside him at the counter, almost as if they were together, and waited for him to receive his tickets, holding up his chilled bottle eagerly.
    Out in the street whim thickened into necessity, goaded by the younger man’s complete unawareness of him, as if he had become a wraith like his dying lover, when he wasn’t, he was forty-six and big and fit and handsomely unshaven. He followed him back the way he had come, taking in, with a hushed involuntary groan, the heavily elegant backside, in tight and frayed old jeans, with one of the pockets half ripped off, as if by the failed flying tackle of an admirer. He felt his energies more and more focused and absorbed, and he saw that of course it was a long-obscured need of his own that was clarifying itself in the solid sauntering figure twenty yards ahead.
    They went on, across the flat open Common, Robin remembering to look about him as if unconcerned with the lottery addict and trailing him by pure coincidence. They passed knots of schoolboys, a trampled goalmouth. He saw their course across a plan or map. An expert follower would have moved from tree to tree, or taken tangential paths that still kept his object inescapably in view. But Robin didn’t care, in fact he wanted to be seen. They approached and passed a high graffiti-blitzed bandstand, beyond which was a low wooden building, like a broken-down cricket-pavilion, with a boarded-up stall that still advertised Teas and Ice Cream. The blond was briefly out of view behind it, and when Robin came round the corner he was nowhere to be seen.
    He saw angled wicker fences that screened the entry to public toilets, the Ladies’ was closed up with barbed wire, but from the Men’s, by some benign perseverance or dreamlike oversight, the hiss of the flush was heard, and the metal door swung open to the bright protesting arpeggio of an old spring.
    Twelve minutes later, jogging back past walkers who knew nothing of what he had just done, boys’ shouts and football whistles on the breeze, an oblivious bounce in his stride, as if powered by some forbidden drug, the thrill of a secret transgression warming him to a blush that the innocent would put down to the wholesome effort of running…Of course someone saying couldn’t he have waited? But there was no choice, just as there was no