The Spell

by Alan Hollinghurst

It was the first big break-up he had been responsible for, and with an older man there was of course that further question of respect. He stopped to brush and slap at the mess on his trousers.

‘It can’t be hide and seek if no one’s coming to look for you, darling. It’s just hide.’

He clearly had no idea of the psychic shock, to someone like himself, of falling in love. Danny would be a great lover, that would be his career, though he knew next to nothing about love, just as some great musicians knew nothing about music, beyond their gift for making it.

Today, like every day of the past fourteen months, was a part of the life he had thought he would be sharing with Danny, and he was spending it without him, and to that extent he was spending it alone.

with the unforgivable ignorance of mail sent to the newly dead.

‘Tell me again how old he was,’ said Hugh. ‘He was twenty-three. I mean, he still is.’ ‘Yes,’ said Hugh. ‘They don’t want the same things as us, you know.’ Alex was so struck by the wisdom of this remark that he instinctively rejected it. ‘We were madly in love,’ he said.

This second failure was a shocking reinforcement of the first. And yet he had to admit that there was something ambiguously easier about it too: he already knew the lesson, he knew the bereft amazement of finding that you had unwittingly had your last fuck, your last passionate kiss, your last taxi-ride hand-in-hand in the gloom; and he knew too that on both occasions there had been signals, like the seen but noiseless drum-strokes of a tympanist checking his tuning.

It was that time of day he loved, when the lowering sun struck right in among the trees and made every branch burn.

On reflection he thought you couldn’t really act out of character, and he went in under the arch and down in the lift with the sense that he had just paid a visit to a remote suburb of himself.

the heavy atmosphere of permission