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There is a door. The sort of door men like him are not supposed to know about.
All his life, he’s heard quiet mentions of it, or heard of places like it. Word of it passed on through second or third-hand whispers or wielded by other men in cruel little jokes he has had to teach himself to laugh along with in case they recognise it’s really him they’re laughing at.
It takes some careful and covert investigation, but at last he finds it tucked away down a quiet side street in the heart of the city. A door that’s outwardly no different than any other. There are no lights on in the windows and the paint on the sign is faded and peeling, the name almost illegible. He can recognise a calculated attempt to keep a low profile when he sees one. It’s the kind of place designed to be invisible to those who aren’t looking for it, to be forgotten the instant it’s out of sight.
Only, now that he’s found it, he can’t quite work up the courage to go in. Because if he opens that door, then that makes him all the things he’s tried so long and hard to convince himself he isn’t. Because he doesn’t know what to expect or how to behave. Because what if he gets it wrong and they don’t want him here, either?
But knowing that it’s real, that it’s there, is enough for the moment.
For weeks, he watches the door, unable to put it out of his thoughts. He takes wide detours on his walk home to catch a passing glimpse of it or loiters across the way pretending to be lost or re-tying his shoelaces in the hopes of seeing someone entering or leaving, just so he knows it’s even possible, that he isn’t alone. Inch by inch he circles closer, testing the limits of both himself and the world at large, half daring it to punish him for this single small act of defiance, for straying from the narrow path of his life.
It rains the night that his curiosity finally outpaces his fear. The streets are slick with reflected light, ripples making the long shimmering streaks of colour tremble. Music plays from some hidden place, no more than a subdued hum beneath the sigh of the rain. The only other people in sight are hurrying to get out of the worst of the weather, paying little heed to anything else, least of all him.
He sucks in a deep breath of cold air, pulls his collar up, tips his hat low, and walks towards the door.
It takes every effort to keep his gait even, his demeanour indifferent, to not carry on walking straight past but to grasp the gleaming brass handle and pull the door open in one fluid motion as if such things were thoughtlessly ordinary.
The door swings shut behind him and… he has to wonder if this wasn’t all a case of crossed wires or an elaborate joke (and he fell right for it, of course he did). He finds himself standing in an unremarkable public house, indistinguishable from the hundreds of others peppered throughout the city, with threadbare carpets and mismatched tables, the air thick with the smell of stale smoke and spilled beer. There are only a ragged handful of other patrons, either huddled in the corners or propping up the bar, none of them in any way what he’d been expecting.
There’s nothing for it but to order a quick drink and make some bland comment about the weather to save face. But before he’s so much as taken a step, a man gets up from his seat in a corner booth, opens a door in the battered wood panelling, and slips inside. It only takes a matter of seconds, but it’s enough for the light and noise and music held behind it to be briefly set free. It’s a flare of a beacon in the darkness. A small accident of astonishing generosity.
He waits a beat or two, then follows.
Concealed beyond this new door, he discovers a flight of stone stairs leading down down down into the depths of the building. Where else? Only the siren call of the steady sway of the music below and all its shining promises is enough to entice him onwards.
What James finds within might as well be a different world entirely. The air crackles with the sense of something wild and wilfully disobedient, jewelled colours whirling and winking in the low light, glancing off the glasses. The music sings up through the soles of his shoes. People sit clustered around tables, their bodies carved from shadows and sketched outlines, talking and laughing and drinking as they would in any establishment. To one side, a young man drapes a lithe arm around another’s shoulders and says something in his ear that’s enough to make them both blush. On the other are two women, clearly an established couple, enjoying a quiet drink together in the only place they know won’t expect them to pretend otherwise. Countless such stories play out all around him, couples flirting and dancing and kissing, everyone existing in ways they would never dare to dream of out in the open.
It’s like an image out of a fairytale: a lost glittering kingdom hidden beneath the earth.
James doesn’t know how else to describe the emotion that engulfs him, body and soul, other than the solace of coming home at the end of a long day. And what a long day it’s been.
He finds a seat at the bar so he can take in the room at a safe distance. He isn’t here to meet someone, to embark on anything in the shape of a relationship. He just wants to know, if for only a brief moment, what such a life might look like.
The arrival of the barman pulls him from his reverie. ‘What’ll it be?’
‘I, er… half a bitter shandy. Please.’
In such situations, something a little stronger would normally be his first choice, but James promised himself he’d stay for one drink. If he ordered a whisky, there was every chance his nerves would get the better of him and he’d knock it back in one go, and then that would be that.
The barman returns with his shandy, and as he sets it down, he leans forward, his face softened with understanding. ‘It’s alright. You’re among friends now,’ he says, and it’s clear he genuinely means it. He must have seen this exact scene a hundred times before.
James can’t quite find the words to do justice to the gratitude rushing up through him, but he manages a quick smile and a nod.
Sat hunched over his drink, he darts glances at the people on the dance floor, still unsure whether or not it’s the done thing to look openly, to acknowledge the reason they’re all there. Young women sway together, smiling shyly. Men hold hands as they dance, performing little dips and twirls, out then back, never losing contact. Couples standing so close, arms wound around shoulders, waists, hips, lost in each other as much as the music. An endless array of knowing glances and lingering touches and tender kisses shared in full view as if it were nothing. As if it were that easy.
It’s the relief of the place that strikes James hardest. Both his own and that of those around him. Everyone moves and talks and simply exists with a lightness that suggests an unseen weight has been lifted. All of them strangers in a room full of friends.
All in all, it isn’t anything frivolous, scarcely even approaching decadent, but life is certainly a little brighter down here.
And although no one has baulked at his presence, James can’t help but feel terribly conspicuous amidst the effortless relaxed openness of it all. It’s all very much a young man’s game. Good for them, but it’s rather too late for the likes of him.
He’ll have this one drink, and then he’ll go.
The chap sitting next to him isn’t his usual type, but Anthony has learnt not to be so picky. He’s a little on the stocky side and clean-shaven, but he seems nice enough: handsome—in this light, at least—and charming, and he’s definitely interested. He’s already trailed his hand along Anthony’s arm half a dozen times and called him “ever such a lovely thing”. Standard patter, perhaps, but it’s difficult to turn down such enthusiastic flattery.
He is younger than Anthony, too, though not by much. Nothing drastic. No harm in a bit of change, is there? And, time moving ever onwards as it does, it was only inevitable he would become the older man who attracts a certain kind of attention.
The details don’t matter. This fellow is only a means to an end, as Anthony likely is to him. He’ll do. Anthony tries not to make a habit of visiting these haunts; he’s never quite been able to get comfortable with the whole exhausting dance of it, to be so plain in his intentions. It’s only every now and then when the nights are long and dark and the loneliness becomes unbearable and he needs to scratch that itch.
There’s always a flighty, romantic part of him that can’t help but hope that every visit will be the one he finds something more. That there could be love and contentment and happiness waiting for him rather than the usual dulled shame of a furtive fumble, both of them only seeking to satisfy their own needs. That he could allow any of his encounters to become anything more than they are. But tonight, it seems, will be as fruitless as all the others before it.
Resigned to his choices, Anthony is just steeling himself to ask the old “your place or mine?” when a figure across the room turns their head to watch the couples dancing and his face catches the light in such a way that leaves Anthony transfixed. He sits illuminated with almost deliberate precision as if he were a priceless work of art in a museum, and the mere sight of him sets Anthony’s heart fit to fly apart with equal parts recognition and want.
It can’t be. Surely not. But there’s no mistaking him. As if Anthony could ever forget that profile.
James.
Time comes to an abrupt halt and all the years in-between crowd in and there he is; all beautiful hard lines and soft eyes and the light spilling through his silvery hair and everyone else must have noticed him by now—how could they not?—and it will only be a matter of moments before someone strides over to him and starts up a conversation and takes him away and—
‘Friend of yours?’ Anthony’s companion asks, looking back towards the bar to see what has him so captivated.
‘What? Oh, yes… something like that.’ He can’t tell him. How could he ever begin to explain?
The young man raises an enquiring eyebrow. ‘Are you sure? You’ve gone quite pale. You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Do I? It’s just… it’s been a long time. We met during the war; I didn’t think I’d ever see him again.’
How long has it been? 1940 feels like an achingly vast amount of time ago. Fifteen years, Anthony realises with a sick jolt, though it may as well have been a lifetime given how much everything has changed around him since then. Those few months he and James spent together seem fragmentary and insignificant by comparison, but they still echo on as loud as ever.
It feels like an eternity, but also no time at all.
The war had worn on for far longer than any of them had expected, and by the time the end of it rolled around, Anthony couldn’t help but question whether his old captain would even remember who he was, let alone if there was any light left in that spark they’d perhaps both once felt. The possibility only grew more remote after he returned to civilian life. He could see how it might look if he went chasing down the details of one particular former C.O. So he let it—let him—be, and left what might have been to drift away into the haze of the thousand other lives he might have lived.
But now here he is. In this bar. Alone. His hair has gone fully grey, and the creases around his eyes are a little deeper. But it’s him. And the spark Anthony had thought long extinguished roars back to life inside him.
‘You should go and talk to him. If you don’t, I just might,’ his companion says airily, chancing another look over his shoulder. He lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and sighs out a slow plume of smoke while regarding Anthony with a cool detachment. ‘Go on.’ He says it less like an order and more as though it’s as good as already happened.
And even after so long apart, Anthony still finds himself wondering if all that is not best left back in the past, if any good can come from unearthing what he’d long buried. But James’s presence feels like an act of some kind of benevolent providence, and Anthony’s mind is already clamouring with everything he’d wanted to say but had never been brave enough, and the thought that this might be his last chance is almost intolerable.
For all his insistence on only staying for the space of one drink, returning to the ordinary world has become quite a daunting prospect and James isn’t ready to leave. There’s some small consolation in the company here, the quiet camaraderie of like minds, even if he hasn’t spoken to anyone but the barman. But he still can’t settle, every muscle in his body humming with the certainty that any minute someone will clap a hand down on his shoulder and let him know he doesn’t belong here and they all know it. Or worse. Every second he stays only stretches his luck thinner. He’s already stayed too long, if anything.
He drains the last drops of his shandy and is about to take his leave when a warm hand rests on his. The touch is gentle and courteous, but it’s enough to pin James in place. He looks around to find its owner, and the sight knocks the very breath from him.
At first, there is the thunderclap of dread at having been caught in such a den of disrepute, and by a fellow officer, no less, the admission implicit in his presence there. But no. That isn’t what this is. That’s not who they are anymore.
Anthony has aged well; his boyish good looks have settled into something more distinguished and refined and quite remarkably dashing. The first flashes of grey shine at his temples, and oh, those scars. Not so uncommon for men of their generation, but James’s heart turns over at the thought of what caused them, of any harm coming to Anthony at all. Even so, he’s more handsome than ever.
Anthony must be older now than James was when they first met. Now there’s a thought.
After whatever fleeting, tentative connection had passed between them when they were stationed together, James had spent five long years wanting more than anything to see Anthony alive and well again. But when the fighting finally ended, he lost his nerve. The war had shaken everything up and swept the world along at an alarming pace, but James had somehow been left out of all of it, still in exactly the same position he’d been in when it had started.
There had even been an event back at Button House of all places, but James had been turned away, all his hard work and dedication during the war suddenly not good enough. And presumably Anthony, too, had surpassed him in every regard. The humiliation at the gate had been one thing, but to face Anthony’s rejection would be quite another.
In all the time since, the memory of Anthony had occasionally floated to the surface of James’s thoughts, accompanied by the bittersweet sting of all he might have had if life had only been kinder. But now here he is, appearing like a vision in a dream, only wonderfully, impossibly real.
‘Goodness me,’ James says, the words escaping as if of their own volition, all other language having deserted him. ‘Hello.’
Anthony smiles at him and, oh gracious, all that lost time vanishes in an instant. ‘Hello,’ he says back. ‘I don’t suppose I can buy you a drink?’
And suddenly the prospect of staying a little longer isn’t quite so daunting.
The room all but disappears around them as they talk, their drinks forgotten, the bar and the other customers and the whole world rendered irrelevant. The conversation flows as easily as ever, picking up from right where they’d left off, only now there is no need for the same strained caution or to conceal the great unspoken secret they share.
‘I’m so sorry. I should’ve tried to find you.’
‘I could say the same, but don’t worry about all that. I’m here now.’
Anthony’s fingers play against his, their hands in constant motion in slow explorations and careful touches, winding together, neither able to tolerate the idea of breaking the contact. Not again.
‘Come home with me,’ Anthony whispers, the words soft against James’s cheek. It’s less of a request than a resignation to the inevitable, spoken as though they had both been lost and wandering in search of each other for all those years in between. As though there could never be anywhere for them to go but home.
And James doesn’t need to answer, mere words now much too clumsy and inefficient for all he needs to say. He only has to find Anthony’s mouth with his, to kiss him at last, pouring out all the unmet longing and love and grief for a life that had been denied him until now.
And Anthony pulls James closer, gathers him into his arms, and kisses him back, eager and deep and hungry, overcome with relief.
And together they slip out through the door and into the street and away into the kind shadows of the boundless night, the whole city conspiring to hide them from prying eyes and unfeeling disapproval behind its eternal dazzle and clatter. If anyone does notice the two of them, they are, to all appearances, no more than two strangers merely making their way back home at the end of a long day.