Chapter Text
The cottage door was ajar. There was no reason why Pine (should he think of him as Birch now? It had an agreeably flagellatory ring) should lock it: he didn’t have anything that needed protecting, none of Richard’s people did. They lived in the lap of luxury, but possessed nothing. Liberating, really: for a moment Richard almost envied them. But there was nothing to compare with being master of all one surveyed. He thought of his father, whose harrumphing insistence that an Englishman’s home was his castle increased in direct proportion to encroachments upon the stronghold by two successive wives, children, step-children, two re-mortgages, charwomen, caterers, handymen, gardeners, and eventually the nurses who superintended a decade of dementia. Richard always meant to do things differently: he would actually be lord of the manor, not just invoke him feebly in a cliché.
Still, the door troubled him. Pine had a tidy mind, but he was also capable of rampage. Richard did not want rampage on his patch, but he sensed that was not what the lightly creaking hinge seemed to indicate. The wedge of yellow light on the threshold had a whiff of ambush about it, but he felt a peculiar revulsion at the idea of summoning Tabby or Frisky: he had come to escape their leaden company and have Pine’s more mercurial demeanour to himself. And to turn back would be to make the insupportable admission that there might be a place in the compound where his writ did not run.
He pushed the door open, ready to draw back, but nothing happened, so he took a clear confident step, and nothing happened, and a second, and—
Then it happened. As he was half-expecting, he found his arms pinned with obdurate efficiency, a firm pectoral range pressed up against his shoulder blades, hot breath and spittle on the back of his neck and a kitchen knife to the front of it. His pulse ran high, blood surging like liquid fire, but a small steady intuition told him that, unlike the last time he’d been in roughly this situation, more than a decade ago, he had absolutely no chance of fighting his way out of it. Without conscious calculation, he let his body go limp. The unexpected dead weight made Pine lurch backwards as he released him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Pine said, breathing heavily and not sounding in the least apologetic. ‘But you might have knocked, or called out.’
Richard braced at the knees, put his palms on his thighs, and straightened up. ‘Quite all right. I appreciate your concern for security. You don’t really need to, you know, Corky and the boys have things covered, but perhaps you’d like something little less—improvised, personal protection-wise?’
Pine looked down at the knife in his hand. ‘Wüsthof Ikon. Nice, unpretentious little blade.’ He tested the edge with his thumb. ‘Somebody hasn’t been taking care of it. And no thanks, I think I’ll be fine.’ He put the the knife down on the worksurface.
Now that his own knees were steady, Richard could see that Pine was sweaty, more rattled than he had at first appeared, and with the Englishman’s inviolable instinct, he swung round and reached for the kettle.
‘Tea or coffee? Can’t offer you anything stronger, I’m afraid.’
‘That’s OK,’ Richard replied, drawing aside the curtain that separated the dining area from the galley kitchen. ‘I know your appallingly temperate habits. I brought my own.’ He took his hipflask from his trouser pocket, stood it on the table, and sat down. ‘Coffee, then. You’ll join me, won’t you? The caffeine cancels it out.’
Pine filled the kettle, not taking his eyes off him. Richard looked back evenly until he was obliged to turn away to get the caddy and coffee pot from the cupboard. It was curious, the first, fleeting impression was of breathtaking good looks. But a moment’s study exposed unignorable flaws: furrowed, uneven brow, eyes set too close, chin girlishly pointed, that insufferably austere expression—as if a small, anxious boy were looking at you through the mask of the tough, soulful loner. But the physique—broad shoulders, slender waist, firm backside and sinewy, long thighs—that couldn’t be faulted.
Thirty-five years ago, as a rowing Blue with Olympic ambitions, Richard could have boasted something similar himself. What would he give up to have it again? Not much, he had to admit, not even for the undoubted joy of inhabiting a body in peak condition, able to do with ease what others barely dared attempt, getting high on absorbing the pain of endurance, pushing always that little bit beyond your actual capacities. But how frail it was, in the end, compared to money and power. A minor road accident had ended his athletic hopes: in his final year he’d come off his bicycle on bloody Mitcham’s Corner and smashed up his knee, leading to a tedious sequence of operations and, as the years went on, agonising intolerance of British weather.
‘So,’ Pine said, bringing a single tumbler to the table, ‘what can I do for you?’
‘Well, let’s have a little light on the subject, for starters. Do you always sit around in the dark?’
Pine reached across him and turned on a small lamp on the bookshelf. ‘I was trying to sleep.’
‘Have trouble in that department, do you? You wouldn’t be the only one.’
Pine smiled blandly. ‘My body-clock’s naturally set for the late shift. Has been since I was about thirteen. Why, what keeps you up at night?’
‘Depends on the night.’ He poured a tot of whisky into the glass. ‘Tonight it’s domestic. Thought it politic not to dally in Monaco after the meeting. Still a bit of atmosphere after poor old Caro kicked off like that. County fillies used to be bred up to take it in their stride, but I suppose we’re all petty bourgeois now. Sandy shouldn’t be so damned predictable.’
The kettle whistled. Pine filled the pot and brought it through, along with two mugs.
‘Dan was upset. He took it personally, I think,’ he said. There was no reproach in his tone, but Richard felt a momentary impatience nonetheless. Had he acquired a front of house man, or a damned nursemaid? No, no, it was all for the good. It anchored him to the organisation.
‘Poor little sod. He’s had enough atmosphere to last anyone a lifetime, and he’s only seven. Still, kids are resilient, aren’t they?’
‘Depends on the kid.’ Pine gave a thin, hardy smile.
Richard wondered if all these displays of stoical sensitivity were quite called for, but he said kindly, ‘You were.’
‘Yes and no.’
‘Best not to dwell on it, I always think. A good childhood’s one you don’t really remember. I say, speaking of Dans, you didn’t happen to see his phone anywhere, did you?’
Pine’s fingers paused on the plunger. ‘No. He said on Monday night he’d lost it. And I helped him look yesterday, but we couldn’t find it.’
Richard stared in disbelief. What he’d actually acquired, it seemed, was a fucking imbecile. Was he kicking Corky into touch for this?
‘You—Monday night?’ he stammered. ‘What the hell were you playing at? You should have told me straight away. We’ve bricked it now, of course—but, damn.’ He thumped the table in frustration at the thought of the forty perilous hours the phone might have lain, active, in disloyal hands. If any member of the household staff were found to have handled it, retribution would be swift and brutal, but that in itself was an acknowledgement of its futility. He drank the whisky at a gulp.
‘He was afraid you’d be angry, so I said that meant he had to tell you himself as soon as you got back from Monaco. He seemed to get my drift at the time. Did he?’ He pushed down the plunger, filled a mug and pushed it across the table. In the dim light his wary eyes appeared an improbable shade of sea-green.
‘Were you Captain of your bloody House or something, Jonathan?’ Richard was not, in truth, much mollified, but something about the pose of incorruptibility was disarming nonetheless.
Pine poured coffee for himself. ‘We said Head of the Line.’
‘Where was that?’
‘Shireburn.’
‘Oh. I wouldn’t have guessed. The digging foot, I mean.’
Pine glanced up at the ceiling; did he give the faintest of eye-rolls? ‘I’m not in good standing.’
Richard raised an eyebrow. ‘I dare say.’
‘It’s slightly different from being in a state of mortal sin,’ Pine added fussily. ‘Though I’m that as well, of course. Good standing is pietas, going to Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation, confession once a year and communion at Easter, not the condition of your soul as such—’
Richard could not have been less interested in this casuistry. He waggled the hip-flask. Pine shook his head, so he dosed his own coffee.
‘What was it like?’
‘What was what? Oh, school? All right. I liked it.’
‘Any scandals?’
Pine’s top lip curled infinitesimally over the mug. ‘People always ask that. And seem a bit disappointed when I say no, or not really. No industrial-scale drug-dealing, we left that to Ampleforth; one priest convicted of sexual abuse, but he was gone long before my time. Nothing that you wouldn’t get rather more of at an average suburban comp, in fact.’
Old school tie, or an individualist’s disdain for the too-obvious question? Richard thought the latter, but it wasn’t altogether easy to tell. Either way, it was clear Pine thought him crass. So crass he would be.
‘Was there a lot of sex?’
‘Didn’t let girls in till the year after I left.’
Richard tilted his head, significantly.
Pine had the grace to look shy. ’Oh, I see. But by my time that sort of thing—didn’t really apply. Couple of blokes I was friendly with were gay, of course, but—’
‘Of course.’
‘Well,’ Pine replied, unruffled. ‘Probability. Between one in ten and one in twenty of the population.’
Richard saw him anew as the boy who used his enviable looks and his contemporaries’ concomitant presumption of impeccable heterosexuality to protest against the daily repertoire of insult: shirt lifter, fudge packer, arse bandit. It was curious that the active role was the one anathematised, when the other would seem to be the more shameful, or maybe it wasn’t: we deprecate what we fear. Richard had never been afraid of it, so he had never seen the point.
‘But they weren’t out at school,’ Pine continued. ‘I only got to know for sure later. I suppose Eton in the sixties had its—traditions to maintain?’
Richard hadn’t thought Pine had so much bitchiness in him, but he liked it. ‘Seventies, please!’
‘Yes, of course,’ he murmured. ‘You start to forget how long ago—’
‘Not really. Free Love was all the rage, of course, but only the hetero sort. The other was felt to be out of date, I suppose. A faute de mieux that was no longer necessary. Opportunity missed, I thought. At the time, and—’ Would he say it? Was it worth the inevitable complication? Goddammit, what did it matter? ’And—now.’
‘Really? I don’t expect you missed much. Teenage fumblings are pretty ghastly regardless.’
Richard said nothing, and watched realisation dawn. It was, regardless of the nature of the realisation, always one of his favourite sights. Pine took a deep breath, but kept his cool; Richard had expected no less.
‘Caroline said you were—what was her phrase? Steadfastly faithful.’
Richard slung an arm over the chairback and slumped, feigning an insouciance he did not feel. He was excited, but he wasn’t sure if the excitement was sexual. His cock was soft. It was how he felt when he was about to close a negotiation, give a speech or order a test firing. Everything seemed theoretical. ‘Doesn’t count, does it?’
Pine snorted incredulously. ‘Jed might beg to differ.’
‘She’d be envious of me. As opposed to jealous. If you get me.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s the sort of distinction I’d expect a Jesuit-educated boy to appreciate. I notice you haven’t said no.’
‘You’re not serious.’ Pine was still, obviously controlling his breathing. He ran a long, capable finger around the rim of his mug.
‘I’ve been more serious, that’s true. But on the other hand, why not?’
‘I think you ought to go.’ Pine sounded like something in a play, the sort that Richard had gallantly donned dinner jacket and taken his step-mother to when he was a sixth-former, forging an uneasy détente over Terence Rattigan as the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ peaked at #2.
‘Thing is, Jonathan, you can’t very well chuck me out of my own house, you know.’
Pine broke his gaze, staring over Richard’s shoulder into the kitchenette. Richard sensed that one might follow his eye to something incriminating, but probably he was just regretting that the knife was out of reach. ‘What do you want? Is this some kind of test? A condition of my being allowed to leave?’ He made a small, cross, contained gesture.
‘Not at all. I’ve something quite different in mind for that. You’ll find out tomorrow. I was just curious.’ He thought of Pine’s shoulders and arms breaking the surface of the swimming pool, of his cautious, baseline-hogging style on the tennis court. ‘I thought you might be curious too.’
Pine lowered his head and ran a slow hand through his hair. When he looked up again it was if he had sloughed something off: he looked remade, clean and pitiless, in the lineaments of reckless ennui. This was the last human face, Richard thought uneasily, that the poor fucker in Devon—what was his name, Sean, Shane, Wayne Harlow?—had ever seen. Men who had killed, hand to hand, face to face, did emanate a certain something—Corky had it, even Tabby and Frisky. A puling CND type would surely remark that Richard had been responsible for more deaths than they could ever dream of, but it wasn’t the same, just as taking delivery of a lorryload of frozen drumsticks and nuggets wasn’t the same as wringing a chicken’s neck.
‘All right.' Pine stood up abruptly; the chairlegs screamed on the tiles. 'But I’m not doing something squalid and deniable in here. Come into the bedroom.’
Richard wasn’t sure if Pine had meant to make him feel like a trick, and if he was supposed to be aroused or abashed by it—he was still neither, but the balance was beginning to tip to arousal. It would be satisfying to put a crack in Pine’s carapace, even if it was the trivial, purely physical sort engendered by climax. As Richard followed him to the bedroom, Pine tugged his t-shirt off with exhibitionist flair and slung it over his shoulder. He was really quite a tart. Catholic girls, in Richard’s experience, rarely lived up to their lubricious reputation: perhaps Catholic boys did.
Pine turned on the bedside lamp and closed the blind. The bed separated them. For a hysterical moment Richard thought he was going to indicate the location of the climate control panel, the minibar, the TV remote, will-there-be-anything-else-sir? But he just laid the t-shirt aside and unbuckled his belt.
‘You too,’ Pine said.
Richard swallowed dryly: it was an order, and he rather relished Pine’s cheek, but he had not exposed himself to first-time sexual scrutiny since acquiring Jed, eighteen months ago, and not to a man’s since he had cut the figure of a not-quite-Olympic rower. He applied himself to the buttons of his shirt. There was a small thump as Pine’s trousers hit the floor. Wearing just underpants, he looked like an advert for underpants, something on a bus shelter, that a vandal would come along and scrawl a dick on.
Except—Richard realised that he had been adhering more or less to locker-room protocol, and nothing, at that moment, could be more redundant. He let himself stare as he shrugged out of his shirt. Pine’s cock was hard; grey jersey (Corky’s choice, presumably, he was a man who thought about such things) and deep shadow made a fine picture of it. Pine knelt on the bed. Richard took a step closer and laid the flat of his hand against Pine’s chest, almost hairless, but not shaved: there was a patch of sparse curls in the centre, some more around the nipples. Richard swept his hand over Pine’s pecs and stomach. His flesh was improbably firm and faintly clammy; it felt like bringing marble to life.
Pine grabbed and tugged the waistband of Richard’s trousers, inviting him onto the bed.
‘Hold on.’ Richard hurried for the social advantage of total nudity, no longer caring what Pine might think of the southward slump of his musculature. He was only half-hard even now—that was middle age for you—and his cock bobbed about absurdly as he freed it from his underpants and climbed on the bed. But the very absurdity seemed to have a certain virile swagger about it, which would be ruined were they to kiss. There was something grotesque about grown men kissing, rubbing stubbled chins together; to forestall it he caught Pine’s jaw in his hand and ran his thumb roughly over his lips. Pine kept his mouth closed, throwing his head back to expose an astonishing length of tender throat. When Richard pushed the point, though, he yielded charmingly. After a few thrusts with his thumb, Richard substituted his fore- and index fingers, enjoying the distended look when he pressed the walls of Pine’s mouth. He was completely hard at last: with his free hand he gave himself a couple of strokes.
‘Are you any good at giving head, Jonathan?’ He pushed Pine’s tongue down so he could only groan and choke. ‘Have you ever actually sucked a chap off before?’
Pine’s eyes were wild with humiliation and defiance, but his prick was still straining hard. He shuddered as Richard withdrew his fingers.
‘Why don’t I show you how it’s done? Hm?’
Pine hadn’t expected that little refinement: he gasped. Distrust flickered across his face, but he nodded warily. At Richard’s push to his shoulder he obediently leaned back, resting on his hands. He was a picture, you had to say that. A fairly pornographic one. Richard positioned him to his satisfaction, running hands up his thighs to spread them, brushing his balls with the back of his hand, tweaking his nipples to make him arch his back and shiver, all the little objectifications that beautiful women, having too much of it from the world at large, tended to resent, but beautiful men could never get enough of. By the time he had everything just so, Pine was making small tense sounds through his teeth; a dark patch had appeared on the light grey of his underpants. Richard bent to the sickeningly well-proportioned outline filling them and mouthed it through the fabric; it sprang in the semi-independent way of pricks, that looked most odd when it was not your own.
‘Christ,’ Pine murmured, as Richard blew on the dampened material, ‘I had no idea.’
Richard wanted to ask what he had no idea about, but he had a sense he wouldn’t like the answer, so he eased the waistband of Pine’s underpants down so that most of him was out, but his balls were still trapped. He hadn’t tasted cock since—the birthdate on Andrew Birch’s passport flashed vividly to mind—since before Pine was born, conceived even. That was not a good thought to be having right now: he banished it.
He liked the taste, truth be told, as much as he liked the ranker savour of cunt, or perhaps it was just Pine’s he liked; mingled with the musk of his crotch was a boyish scent of the seaside: kelp, sand and the inevitable coconut of sunscreen. He wondered if he’d been losing out, all this time. He hadn’t consciously ever missed it: his line to himself was that just as he’d joined Footlights to prove to himself that he wasn’t a comedian, he’d messed about with Miles at every Footlights party to prove he wasn’t gay.
It was abominable, how your mind wandered: he’d done this mainly to see Pine with his guard down, and now his murmured string of blasphemies and expletives was no more than a distant ambient soundtrack to Richard’s reminiscence of an interminable sketch he’d devised with Miles, parodying sentimental American post-apocalyptic science fiction—he could remember every laboured line—which somehow led into a memory of his stand-up row in the Eagle with the cox of the Lady Margaret VIII after the ’79 Lent Bumps.
It wouldn’t do, he was growing bored, and Pine was still, as far as he was any judge of these things, some distance from the finish line. A finger up the bum had always done it for him, but that had been in the prelapsarian days of the late 70s, when Miles kept a tube of KY in a crocodile-skin cigar case, embellished with a jet and gold leaf medallion of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, in his back jeans pocket. There was a spot behind the balls you could apply some pressure to, but he wasn’t at all sure he could locate it with precision—worth a try, though, surely.
He slipped his fingers behind the underpants and fondled Pine’s bollocks for a bit, then essayed the springy patch beyond them. Pine grunted obscenely and affirmatively, but it still seemed like an aeon before he came, with a high, thin squeal and a convulsive jerk of his hips. Swallowing was like a mistimed oyster, letting the packet slide down your throat too easily and not getting the benefit.
Pine with his guard down, carapace cracked, Pine post-coitally vulnerable—why had he imagined it would be a revelation?—was merely a series of inarticulate noises and apologies, hang on, my foot’s gone to sleep, a wriggle and kick, finally discarding the underpants, until he lay full-length on his back, hands folded behind his head, blinking and smiling crookedly.
‘Fuck,’ he sighed. ‘I’ve never—I mean, I didn’t imagine, when you—’
‘Yes, it has been a crowded hour.’
‘Do you want me to—?’
‘Yes, I rather think so, don’t you?’ Richard straddled his chest before he could get any ideas, shoved a second pillow behind his head. He slapped his face playfully, and in response to his reflexive flinch administered a slightly more earnest backhand, reddening the golden skin.
‘Look lively.’ Richard tapped Pine’s parting lips with his cock. ‘Open wide, say aah. Let’s see those tonsils.’
Pine’s look of irritated embarrassment was really very attractive; Richard giggled as he breached his mouth. He was ginger at first, and slightly clumsy, perilously grazing Richard’s foreskin with his teeth, which turned out rather nice, but could very easily not have been. Richard usually relished the sight of his lovers’ cheeks bulging with dick, but Pine’s solemn, chivalrous look as he nodded and slurped was too comic for words: where the hell did he get off with this noble paladin act of his, a common thief who’d pilfered from dear pedantic old Meisner and used the proceeds to run amok through half the West Country? He was Dan’s white knight, he supposed, but still, pretty greyed in the wash. What if Corky wasn’t wrong? Corky had proved unreliable, and it seemed increasingly likely that his drinking or his procession of rent boys were the starting point for the investigative line drawn between Apo and Sandy, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t right about Pine.
Imagine if Corky could see them now: he’d go off like a stubby little Roman candle, perhaps in more than one sense. Much as he hated Pine, he must surely want him: Richard wanted him, and he wasn’t even gay. Jed—no, he didn’t need to bring Jed into this.
It occurred to him that he could do whatever he wanted with him: Pine’s shining armour would not let him admit defeat, or even protest. He cupped the back of Pine’s head, tangling his fingers into the bronze waves of his hair, and drove him hard until his breath came in sobs and he gagged. He relented and then did it again, and again. He wouldn’t last long, this way, but he didn’t want to. The insistent undercurrent of orgasm started, low in his abdomen, and he let himself be borne away.
‘I’m going to decorate your pretty face, Jonathan,’ he muttered. ‘You ready for that?’ He crammed his head down one more time, then withdrew all the way, letting him drop on the pillow, and wanked his way over the edge.
Richard could usually put on a pretty impressive show in terms of volume, especially if it had been a few days, and Jed’s recent sulks served him admirably now.
The boy looked a sight: his hair furrowed and tumbled on his forehead, blobbed with come, his eyes red-rimmed and watering, a thick, mucous pearl traversing the side of his nose, a cataract of dribble glistening over his chin. The shadows curiously replicated the bruises he’d had when he arrived. He coughed and made to wipe his face; Richard caught his wrist with one hand and with the other scooped some of the spunk from his cheek and fed it to him. He took it meekly, like an invalid, but his bloodshot eyes were blazing with shame and rage: St George fused with the Dragon, Richard thought, fancifully. His work here was done, though he was not quite sure what that work was, and suspected already that it may have been a mistake. He often felt a bit low after a shag, he supposed most men did; Pine, though, clearly got the full poleaxing tristesse monty. That was Catholics all over. Miles, for all his affectations, was C of E, but he had not infrequently wept, and quoted: All this the world well knows; yet none knows well / To tum ti tum ti something hell. It was Shakespeare, anyway.
Richard climbed off him and reached down to the floor for the handkerchief in his trouser pocket.
Wiping his face as Richard put his underpants back on, Pine coughed and croaked, ‘Do I get a ring?’
It wasn’t very inspired, but it broke the tension. Richard chuckled and said, ‘I’ll still love you in the mor—’
‘No,’ Pine interrupted, no jocosity in his expression. ‘A signet ring.’ He pinched his left pinky between the thumb and forefinger of the other hand.
‘Oh. I see.’ Richard pulled up his trousers and buttoned the fly. ‘Corky doesn’t wear that because we—I mean, we never have. That’s not how it is.’
Pine made a derisive noise. Richard made a point of never being embarrassed, but he was exasperated. ‘For Christ’s sake. Why would I lie? There’s no future in pretending to you of all people, that I’m not—bisexual,’ (he had never used the word of himself before, as it happened). ‘But Corky’s not my type and I’m not his. You must see that.’
Pine stared back, wordlessly. His long, naked body looked like an Art Deco bas-relief on the front of a public building: flat, over-emphatic and totalitarian. Outdoor noises—cicadas, the lapping sea, the distant scream of a civet cat—flowed into the room.
‘If you really must know,’ Richard said, ‘he wears it because I saved his life.’