‘Do you love me?’
Luis laughed.
‘Very much.’
But Danny wasn’t done.
‘You don’t need me to be more…’
Maybe he didn’t mean more at all. Maybe the word he was looking for was less. Luis kissed him on the cheek and opened the door.
While Luis showered Danny stripped down to his pistachio-coloured briefs, leaving his vintage tennis attire heaped on the couch. He had no idea where his Slazenger racket was – lost in the herb garden somewhere. Eventhough it was past midnight he filled his steel watering can and began tending to the lavender, jasmine and honeysuckle so densely arranged on their balcony that there was barely enough space to stand. The plants in their terracotta pots were glad for a drink after the heat of the day. Finished, he set down the watering can and leaned on the rail, following the progress of a lithe black cat walking atop a fence. Having taken the balcony as far as it could go, Danny imagined owning a garden and tending to rows of marrows and squashes. He pictured a crumbling stone wall for climbing vines, a cedarwood gazebo coiled with wisteria where he could read and vape.
He and Luis had bought this apartment early on in their relationship. The property had been a wreck, a studio attic belonging to an aspiring artist who had left the interior with paint-flecked walls and populated with pinboards of nude male Polaroids. In despair, the artist had taken his own life, a tragedy which resulted in the apartment being sold on the cheap by relatives too disgusted with their kin to inspect the property, let alone clean it up. Luis had resisted buying it, his Catholic spirituality unnerved by the death, but Danny wanted to reverse the sadness of this space, arguing that they would never get a better chance at owning their own home. They pooled their savings and applied for a joint mortgage which at that time required HIV tests, a demand Danny queried. Declined by every major lender they eventuallyfound a brokerage firm which assisted gay buyers navigate a hostile financial world.
In retrospect buying a place together had taken on the significance of a proxy commitment ceremony. It wasn’t as fun; there had been no party, no vows, no dressing-up, no marquees and no floral arch, but there were documents to sign, and in the absence of a wedding it served as a legal expression of their devotion to each other. Luis pointed out that gay couples had been using property law for many hundreds of years as the only way of solemnizing their union, referencing Spanish academics who found deeds in the Monastery of Celanova, in Galicia, which recorded the property purchase by Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz. The document made it clear that the two men shared their lives as well as their home – arguably the first recorded gay union in history, dating back over nine hundred years to 1061. Property as promise. A title deed for a ring.
Emerging from the shower with a towel around his waist, Luis mixed an Old Fashioned using Macallan whisky, sculpting a coil of orange peel – a man who rarely did anything unless he could do it well. Looking towards the open balcony doors he asked if Danny wanted a drink.
‘I want a garden.’
Luis replied, ‘All I can offer right now is a drink.’
Danny stood firm.
‘What are we waiting for?’
Taking a sip of his Old Fashioned, Luis pointed out, ‘I didn’t realize we were waiting for anything.’
Guessing the inspiration for Danny’s desire, Luis added, ‘A garden in Notting Hill is out of our reach.’
Danny shook his head.
‘I don’t want their garden. I want our garden. I want to know what our garden would be. Wasn’t the best part about owning this apartment making it ours? Taking something rundown and fixing it up. I want to do that again. This time with a garden.’
Luis put down his drink.
‘A garden you’ve never mentioned before?’
Danny shot back, ‘I never realized how much I wanted one before.’
Bringing the conversation to an end, Luis asked, ‘Can we have sex and talk about it tomorrow?’
Danny weighed the proposition seriously before declaring, ‘Sure.’
Chapter FourWater Is a Cure
On Sunday morning Danny woke with a hangover, convinced that he had made a fool out of himself at the garden party. That his role was either clown or carer. Wrapping himself in a blanket he sat on the balcony, his bare feet nestled among the plant pots, dozing in the sun. His intermittent dreams incorporated a miscellany of summer sounds including music from an ice-cream van and the laughter of children playing in the nearby park. After a time, he went inside where Luis was reading the international print editions of El País and El Mundo, a fixture of his weekends. Danny lay on the sofa, resting his head on Luis’s legs, listening to the crinkle of the pages.
Danny decided to shake off his malaise by swimming at the Hampstead Ponds. He was a regular at the Men’s Ponds ever since he moved to London from Bude. Water was a big part of Danny’s childhood. In the summer months he would swim in the sea, enjoying the sensation of being underwater, his fingertips brushing the seabed, holding his breath for as long as possible, sheltering from the world above. As a teenager he read obsessively about mermaids and mermen, from the historical accounts of explorers who spotted them at a galleon’s bow to their fictional incarnations, longing for an invitation to join their underwater society.
In search of a replacement for the sea, Danny discovered the Ponds. Over time he developed an appreciation of them as a place in London like no other. Some swimmers showed up for the exercise, the Orthodox Jews and fitness fanatics, others for fun, boisterous groups of straight friends intermingling with gay guys who turned up to talk, hang out, hook up, sunbathe nude and generally treat the Ponds as an outdoor social club, spending hours with a book or embroiled in conversation. It was a space free from indicators of money or status, with everyone sitting on their small patch of sun-baked concrete swapping stories over handfuls of berries.
Unofficial chairman of this social club was Chris, a retired civil servant in his early seventies, a man with an encyclopaedic mind who had devoted his professional life to theservice of his country and who now spent his summers by the Ponds and his winters by the fire. As lean as a competitive swimmer with a deep tan, cropped silver hair and a silver beard, his appearance resembled a handsome desert-island castaway who, despite being stranded, somehow managed to keep up appearances. He wore sapphire blue Speedos with a white trim and sat among an ever-changing court of miscellaneous men discussing anything from travel plans to politics, flipping from the frivolous to the sincere. One enduring topic of discussion was the looming fear that the council would regulate the Ponds, installing ticket barriers and tearing down the nude sunbathing area, forcing them into well-behaved conformity with every other humdrum municipal swimming pool across town. Out of habit Danny would sit within Chris’s orbit, answering questions but posing few of his own, acknowledging his position as a junior member of this queer social club.
Today was different. During three brisk laps, circling beneath red kites and grey herons, Danny plucked up the courage to ask Chris a personal question, breaking an unwritten rule that intimate information should be volunteered and never solicited.
‘Was there ever someone?’
