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Well, aren’t I the lucky one, and all.
A light sleeper and an early riser, David Evans—and of course his flatmate, his dear flatmate, the other darling David, cannot be expected to dispense with ordinary titivation simply because he has this unusual guest! The kettle shrieks from the cooker, and the bedraggled vision—seated at the kitchen table, biting its nails—flinches, hard. It would be most unreasonable to leave him in a bedroom all alone, or for his erstwhile lover to begin the day with prickled chin and ratty hair.
Whereas expecting David to entertain him for a few minutes—well, more like half an hour—
And David looks bitterly, glancingly, at his watch—but he knows he hasn’t been half as subtle as he needs to be when he looks up again and catches the vision’s dark, damp eye.
Oh, just a little favour between friends, eh, Minns? He pours the boiling water fast—and far more clumsily than he ever usually is, splashing a little. For God’s sake. It’s only bloody breakfast, hardly a garden party at Buck House...
Yet he feels a peculiar obligation to direct their best cup—technically his best cup; he’s the one who spotted it, this lone Wedgwood pearl nestling among the mostly-swine of a Notting Hill junk shop—to the stranger’s usage. Those full, sensitively-moulded lips were made to sup from bone china, and from crystal... And, he can’t help thinking, made to lap at other things. The man’s prominent teeth only draw more attention to his mouth; it’s hard not to wonder—
“Here,” he says, as kindly as he can when he’s speaking to an obvious headcase whose squeals have kept him awake half the night. “Get that into you, you’ll feel much better.”
It’s the most he’s willing to acknowledge of the nerves that have this creature in their fearsome grip. He’s not the first hysteric either of them’s brought home, he won’t be the last—and while it’s best not to be unkind, there’s no need to indulge it. Cold, delicate hands accept the cup, and for an instant David thinks that, trembling like that, he’ll surely drop it...
No, it’s safe, and he has rather nice manners; David is still receiving stammered thanks—the vision seems as surprised as anyone to have been allowed to stay all night—when the woodsy softness of David Minns’ cologne precedes the man himself into the room.
It is enough to get the vision up and out of his chair in an instant—and David thinks, I’d believe it if they said he was a dancer, not this rock business—because he’s so quick on his feet, so oddly graceful—
He’s flung his arms round the David for whom he’s been waiting. A huge gasping breath, edged with tears, but nobody could doubt that what has moved him, cast him so desperately towards the other man, is joy. It’s an unsettling sight—this much passion, in their ordinary kitchen, with its faded linoleum floor.
David can see the look on his flatmate’s face, too. Startled, taken aback—though he says nothing, and rubs the thin shoulder blades...
There is no reason not to go on with making breakfast, David supposes, and so he picks up the bread knife and starts to saw at their dwindling loaf. Better not to involve himself in whatever it is—
Whatever it is. As if he doesn’t know! Damn and blast it, because you cannot simply love each other and be gone, oh no. It must come back and come back to this—to anguish, and breathlessness, and somebody else standing awkwardly by, half-afraid to get on with the toast.
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He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him.
– Mary Renault, from The Charioteer
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