The wine had made Danny tired. Noticing, his mum said, ‘It’s late. We thought you might prefer to sleep in the hotel. We’ve reserved the attic suite with the sea view.’
The three of them made the short walk over to the guest house. It was in the best condition Danny had ever seen it with handsome hand-painted signs and an extensive array of potted plants. His parents were now free of the crushing financial pressures that had shaped his childhood. They were able to enjoy their creation, so many years after they had bought it. A brisk woman from Potsdam was managing the hotel full-time. She welcomed Danny as though it were his first time here. At the bedroom door his dad said, ‘I know there were tough times growing up. But there were great times too. We can choose which ones we concentrate on.’
Danny wasn’t convinced.
‘Maybe we can’t.’
He dad looked down.
‘What a shame that would be.’
Once his parents left Danny helped himself to one of the biscuits, wrapping the other in a napkin to bring back to Luis. Looking around the room, he remembered how lonely he had been as a kid here, scrubbing the sink and toilet bowl,making sure no trace of any red-stickered guest remained. He took out his phone and called Luis to make sure that he had not merely imagined the life they had created together. Danny said, ‘Coming here was a mistake. Nothing has changed. I’m catching the first train back tomorrow. I can’t stay. I feel the way I used to feel. And I never want to feel that way again.’
Luis said, ‘Talk me through what happened.’
After listening to Luis’s measured interpretation that it seemed like his parents were trying their best, Danny showered, enjoying the sea-salt scrub his parents had spent many hours testing and selecting for their guests. Sitting on his bed he found the card his parents had written welcoming him to the guest house, as if they too had always known that he would rather have been a guest than their son.
Chapter Twenty-FourThe Terrible Thing I Never Told You
Danny woke up unsure where he was. Instinctively he reached for Luis and, not finding him, sat up. Over the years they rarely slept apart and always with their arms around each other as they had done on their first night together. As Danny slept on the right side of the bed the hotel linen on the left was smooth and untouched. It occurred to Danny that the desire to marry might be as simple as a fear of waking up alone. He pulled back the covers which smelt of talcum powder, selected by his parents to be as inoffensive as possible. Running a guest lodge was about navigating a neutral path, creating a centre ground where everyone felt welcome. It was something he could never do – create a house where everyone would feel comfortable staying, a polarizing figure by default, excluding him from the familybusiness before it had even been offered to him. On his way to the bathroom he opened the doors to the balcony and looked out over the sand dunes. Despite the unsettled November sky, he decided to swim in the sea.
It was a short walk to the beach, the sand streaked with lines of seaweed and driftwood after a storm. As there was no one else around Danny stripped naked, walking out into the freezing shallows before diving under the water, swimming along the seabed holding his breath for as long as possible. When he surfaced, he swam as fast as he could, suddenly tempted not to return. The pull was so powerful it took a conscious effort to stop. He trod water for a time, staring at the wide-open sea. The childhood fantasy of a kinder society under the waves no longer held the same grip over his imagination and he swam back to shore.
The hotel breakfast was porridge made with creamy milk from a local dairy and sweetened with heather honey from the moors. Afterwards Danny and his parents set out for a clifftop walk. Following their conversation last night his parents seemed to have compartmentalized the years they spent apart as something they could never fully comprehend, rationalizing it as the collateral damage of their son being gay. The family had experienced a rupture and a separation, one many parents of gay children grappled with to varying degrees. Over time a balance was found between the child’s chosen family and their biological family and it had simplytaken Danny longer to find that balance. But for Danny it wasn’t enough for his parents to merely attend the wedding, their attendance needed to mean something more – that they understood each other better, that they had not only restarted their relationship but also remade it.
At the top of the cliffs the three of them arrived at the Storm Tower, an octagonal structure decorated with the points of a compass, designed as a refuge for the coastguard, itself now in need of rescue from a crumbling cliff edge. Seeking shelter inside they looked out across the sea at the approaching rain. Danny had set his mind on telling them about a formative event that had happened when he was young. It explained, he believed, why he had needed to escape and why it had been so hard to come back. His dad crossed his arms. His mum took a seat. Danny began, ‘By the time I finished school, I didn’t know anyone who was gay aside from my drama teacher. There was no internet, no chat rooms, no mobile phones. I was eighteen years old and I had never been kissed. So, I paid for a lonely-hearts ad in the local papers.’
His dad shook his head in disbelief.
‘Dad, what other options were there? My friends had house parties to figure sex out. I had nothing. I collected the replies from a payphone in the visitors’ carpark so it wouldn’t appear on your bill. Mostly there were creepy messages but one was promising, a polite older man staying in a house close to Boscastle.’
His mum asked, ‘How much older?’
Danny noticed how quick his mother was to leap on the matter of age, as if she’d always believed that being gay was a form of corruption inflicted on Danny by an older man.
‘I was eighteen, claiming to be twenty-one. He was forty, claiming to be twenty-nine.’
Danny had been forced to lie since the age of consent for gay men wasn’t lowered to eighteen until 1994, prohibiting Danny from having sex through his university years.
‘We arranged a date on a Saturday afternoon. I studied the map, worked out how to get there. An hour and a half by bike. I picked out my best clothes, styled my hair, stole some aftershave. When I arrived, I left my bike outside and rang the bell. The man was good-looking. Neat and tidy. I had this idea that he was a teacher. He stood there, for a time, as if figuring me out. Which was odd because what was there to figure out? I was exactly who I claimed to be – an inexperienced young gay man. Looking back, he was probably calculating the odds.’
His dad sought clarification.
‘The odds of what?’
‘Whether I’d go to the police.’
Neither of his parents spoke.
Danny continued, ‘I should’ve walked away. I knew something wasn’t right about him. He was off. But I thought – maybe this is how men like me are when we growup. We’re all a bit off. I told myself that I was being a coward, that I wasn’t afraid of him, I was afraid of sex. Which was true. The reason that I thought he was a teacher was because that’s what I was looking for – a teacher, someone who could teach me what it meant to be gay. I hoped he’d sit me down, tell me the story of his life. Which was laughable. He didn’t want to talk. Inside I began to shiver even though it was the middle of summer, so I said no offence, change of mind, I’m going to leave, let’s do this some other time. He said I was being silly, why was I being so silly? I should have a drink. He took me by the wrist and walked me to the kitchen where he poured me a glass of red wine. I took one sip and my legs became weak, not because the drink was drugged but because I knew that I’d missed my chance to leave.’
At this point Danny’s dad stood up, walking to the doorway of the storm shelter as the rains arrived, sweeping over the cliffs.
‘If you’d told me, I would’ve killed him.’
Danny registered the violence in his reply.
‘The thing is, Dad, I wasn’t scared of what you’d do to him. I was scared of what you’d do to me.’
