The Lake of Darkness Read Online Free PDF

seemed to be generated in that moment and the intensity of pleasure each felt. They might have been brothers, long-separated. Was it because the meeting took place on a summer’s morning and under the greenwood tree? Was it the unlikelihood of the wood as a meeting place? Martin had never quite been ableto understand why this chance encounter had brought him a sensation of instant happiness and hope, and why there had come with it a prevision of lifelong friendship. It was almost as if what he and Tim had experienced for each other, spontaneously and simultaneously, had been love.
    But with the utterance of that word to himself Martin had felt both excited and very frightened. Before parting from him, Tim had briefly put an arm round his shoulder, lightly clapping and then gripping his shoulder, the sort of thing a man may do to another man in comradely fashion but which no man had ever before done to him. It left him feeling confused and shaken, and two days later, when Tim phoned, it took him a few seconds to find his normal voice.
    Tim had only wanted to know if he could consult him as an accountant. He was worried about the tax he had to pay on his free-lance earnings. Martin agreed at once, he couldn’t help himself, though he had mental reservations.
    It was a maxim of Walter Urban’s that one man cannot tell if another is attractive. He can only judge in respect of the opposite sex. Martin thought about this and it troubled him. In his case now it wasn’t true, and what kind of a man did that make him?
    Tim was very handsome, beautiful even, except that that wasn’t a word one could use about a man. He had an actor’s beauty, dashing, rather flamboyant. One could imagine him as a duellist. His hair was black, short by current standards (though not so short as Martin’s), and his eyes a vivid sea-blue. There was something Slavonic about his high cheekbones and strong jaw and lips that were full like a woman’s. He was tall and very thin, and his long thin hands were stained leather-coloured down the forefingers from nicotine. He had been smoking in the wood, and he lit a Gauloise the moment he entered Martin’s office.
    Tim’s affairs were in considerably less of a muddle than Martin was accustomed to with new clients. It impressed him that, as he studied the columns of figures, Tim was ableto repeat them perfectly accurately out of his head. He had a photographic memory. Martin promised to arrange things so as to save him money and Tim had been very gratified.
    Were they going to see each other again, though? Were they going to meet socially? Apparently, they were. Martin could no longer remember whether it was he who had phoned Tim or the other way about. But the upshot had been a pub lunch together, then a drink together one Friday evening, encounters at which Martin had been uneasy and nervous, though extraordinarily happy as well with a curious tremulous euphoria.
    After that Tim had become a fairly frequent visitor at the flat in Cromwell Court, but what Martin had dreaded during their first few meetings had never happened. Tim had never touched him again beyond shaking his hand, never tried to take him in his arms as had sometimes seemed so likely, so imminent, just before their partings. Yet Tim must be homosexual, for what other explanation could there be for his obvious fondness for him, Martin? What else could explain why he continued to find Tim so attractive? For he did find him attractive. He had wrenched this confession out of himself. Normal men probably did find certain homosexuals attractive if they were honest with themselves. Martin was sure he had read that somewhere, in a book about the psychology of sex probably. The fact was that he liked watching Tim, listening to the sound of his deep yet light voice, as one might like watching and listening to a woman.
    It came to him at last that what he really wanted was to
fight
Tim, to engage with him, that is, in some kind of wrestling match. Of