The Line of Beauty (18 page)

Rachel looked at the three men, and there was a hint of fear in her face, as if Brentford had brought some threat much larger
than Catherine's tantrum into the house. "Come upstairs, darling," she said.

Barry Groom had come out into the hall, staring and twitching his head, and so drunk suddenly that there were unconscious
delays to his aggression. "Look here, you!" he shouted at Brentford. "I don't know who you are. You fucker!"

Gerald put a hand on his wrist. "It's all right, Barry."

"You keep your hands off her, you . . ."

"Oh, shut up . . . you arsehole!" said Nick, without planning to, and shaken by the sound of his own raised voice.

"Yes, shut up, you wanker!" said Catherine, through her tears.

"Now, now!" said Barry, and then something awful, a sly smile, slid on to his face.

"God, I'm really sorry . . . " said Nick to Brentford.

"Why are we all standing here?" said Gerald.

"Darling, come up," said Rachel.

"Let's finish our port and cigars," said Gerald, turning his back on Brentford. He had to show, for the sake of the party,
that he took scenes like this with habitual good humour. "Will you take her up, darling?" he said, as if there were really
a chance he might do it himself.

Catherine moved away and started up the stairs, and Rachel tried to put an arm round her, but she shook it off. Nick took
Brentford to the door. "Are you sure we can't pay you?" he said, though he doubted he had the price of a fare from Stoke Newington
himself. He wanted Brentford to know he wasn't guilty of the thing the whole house stood accused of.

"He's a bad man," said Brentford, on the doorstep.

"Oh . . . " said Nick, "yes . . . " He wasn't certain which man was being referred to, and Brentford's shake of the head and
flap of the arm seemed to write them all off.

Nick stood on the pavement for a while after the Sierra had gone, and heard the laughter of the women from an open window
above. It was good to be out of the house, in the night air. He was trembling a little from having shouted at someone he hated.
He thought of Leo, and smiled, and hugged his hands under his armpits. He wondered what Leo was doing, the afternoon flared
up again and warmed him with amazement; then the thought of Pete came over it like the chill of a cloud. He went in and slowed
as he passed by the half-open door of the dining room: " . . . the beggar stank of pot!" Gerald was saying, to odd humourless
laughter. Now perhaps he could really go upstairs, and taste the freedom of being the odd man. He didn't have a place in either
of the two parties. It was bad form to go away, it admitted a prior desire to do so; but he couldn't go back and sit with
Barry Groom. He thought Gerald might be angry with him too, but he would surely be glad of his taking an interest in Catherine.
It couldn't be called a shirking of responsibility. Nick started to climb the stone stairs, and had hummed several bright
anticipatory bars from Schumann's Fourth Symphony before he stopped himself.

6

"
G
OD YOU'RE A
twit," said Leo. He looked fretfully at different parts of Nick, unable to place his dissatisfaction exactly.
In the end he licked his thumb and rubbed his cheek, as if Nick was a child. This word
twit,
a tiny sting, had come up before, and signalled some complex of minor reproaches, class envy, or pity, the obvious frustrations
of having a boy like Nick to teach. As always Nick searched for something else in it too, which was Leo's tutting indulgence
of his pupil; he still longed for flawless tenderness, but he forgave Leo, who for once was nervous himself. They were on
the Willesden pavement, ten yards from his front gate. "You're so fucking preppy," said Leo.

"I don't know what that means."

Leo shook his head. "What am I going to do with you?"

They had met after work, across the road from the Council offices, and Leo was wearing a dark grey suit with square shoulders
and a white shirt and a wide but sober tie. It was the first time Nick had seen this beautiful everyday metamorphosis, and
he couldn't help smiling. He was in love to the point of idolatry, but the smiles, the appreciative glances, seemed to strike
Leo like a kind of sarcasm. "You look so handsome," Nick said.

"Yeah, and so do you," said Leo. "Right, we're going in. Now what did I tell you, don't take the name of the Lord in vain.
Don't say, 'Oh my god!' Don't even say, 'Good Lord!' " (Leo fluted these phrases in the way that was his puzzling imitation
of Nick.) "Don't say, 'Jesus fucking bollocks.' "

"I'll try not."

Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older
people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state
of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be
headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty
seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments towards which it would always twitch and
bend.

"My sister sort of knows," said Leo. "You wrant to watch her."

"Rosemary."

"She's pretty."

Nick followed him up the short concrete path and said in his ear, "Not as pretty as you, I bet," one of his light flirty jokes
that he watched swoop to earth under its own weight of adoration.

Mrs Charles and her son and daughter lived on the ground floor of a small red-brick terrace house; there were two front doors
side by side in the shallow recess of the porch. Leo applied himself to the right-hand one, and it was one of those locks
that require tender probings and tuggings, infinitesimal withdrawals, to get the key to turn. Nick reflected briefly on the
coloured glass in the inset window and the old Palm Sunday cross pinned above the doorbell. He pictured Leo going through
this routine every day; and he noted his own small effort of adjustment, his disguised shock at the sight of the street and
the house—perhaps he was a twit after all. When he stepped inside he had a memory, as sharp as the cooking smell in the hall,
of school afternoons of community service, going into the homes of the old and disabled, each charitable visit a lesson in
life and also—to Nick at least—in the subtle snobbery of aesthetics.

He took in the tiny kitchen in a photographic glance, the wall units with sliding frosted-glass doors, the orange curtains,
the church calendar with its floating Jesus, the evidence of little necessary systems, heaped papers, scary wiring, bowls
stacked within bowls, and the stove with plates misted and beaded on the rack above a bubbling pan; and at the centre Leo's
mother, fiftyish, petite, with hooded eyes and straightened hair and a charitable smile of her own. "You're very welcome,"
she said, and her voice had the warm West Indian colour that Leo kept only as a special effect or a temporary camouflage.
"Thank you," said Nick. "It's very good to meet you." He was so used to living by hints and approximations that there had
always been something erotic in meeting the family of a man he was in love with, as if he could get a further vicarious fix
on him by checking genetic oddities, the shared curve of the nose or echoing laziness of step. In the rich air of Kensington
Park Gardens he seemed to live in the constant diffused presence of Toby, among people who were living allusions to him and
thus a torment as well as a kind of consolation. But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek;
he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the
mother of the man who called him not only a "damn good fuck" but also a "hot little cocksucker" with "a first-class degree
in arse-licking." Which clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a trance of revelation and gratitude.

And then there was Rosemary, coming in from work, home early, it seemed, to help her mother out with this underexplained guest
they had. She was a doctor's receptionist, and wore a blouse and skirt under her belted mac. They had an awkward introduction,
edging round Leo's bike in the hall. Perhaps it was shyness, but she seemed disdainful of Nick. He looked for her prettiness,
and thought she was like a silky fluffy version of Leo, without the devastating detail of an ingrowing beard. Then brother
and sister both went off to change. Nick couldn't work out the plan of the house, but there were subdivided rooms at the back,
and a sense of carrying closeness that made the bike entirely necessary; it waited there, shuddered and jangled faintly as
Nick bumped against it, as if conscious of its own trapped velocity.

"Ah, that bicycle," said Mrs Charles, as if it was some profane innovation. "I told him . . ."

They went into the front room, in which a heavy oak dining table and chain, with bulbous Jacobean-style legs, were jammed
in beside a three-piece suite that was covered in shiny ginger leather, or something like it. There was a gas fire with a
beaten copper surround under a ledge crowded with religious souvenirs. Mrs Charles's church life clearly involved a good deal
of paperwork, and half the table was stacked with box-files and a substantial print-run of the tract "Welcoming Jesus In Today."
Nick sat down at the end of the sofa and peered politely at the pictures, a large framed "mural" of a palm-fronded beach and
a reproduction of Holman Hunt's
The
Shadow of Death.
There were also studio photos of Leo and Rosemary as children, in which Nick felt himself taking an almost paedophiliac interest.

"Now, young sir," said Mrs Charles, with a clarity of enunciation that sounded both anxious and arch, "he tells me next to
nothing, Leo, you know, at all. But I think you're the fellow who lives in the big white house, belongs to the MP?"

"Yes, I am," Nick said, with a self-deprecating laugh which seemed to puzzle her. Leo must have been talking up these facts
to impress her, though on other occasions they were the object of vague derision.

"And how do you like it?" Mrs Charles asked.

"Well, I'm very lucky," Nick said. "I'm only there because I was at university with one of their children."

"So, you met
her?"

Nick smiled back with a little pant of uncertainty. "What, Mrs Fedden, you mean . . ."

"No . . . ! Mrs Fedden . . . I assume you met Mrs Fedden, if I'm saying her name correctly." Nick blushed, and then smiled
as he saw the way, simple but nimble, religious even, that she'd gone for the big question. "No—
her.
The lady herself. Mrs T!"

"Oh . . . No. No, I haven't. Not yet. . ." He felt obliged to go on, rather indiscreetly, "I know they'd love to have her
round, he, um, Gerald Fedden, has tried to get her at least once. He's very ambitious."

"Ah, you want to make sure and meet Mrs T."

"Well, I'll certainly tell you if I do," said Nick, looking round gratefully as Leo came into the room. He was wearing jeans
and a sweatshirt and Nick had a vivid image of him ejaculating. Then he saw the heavy spit as it loitered and drooled down
the taut ginger back of the sofa. He felt deliciously brainwashed by sex, when he closed his eyes phallus chased phallus like
a wallpaper pattern across the dark, and at any moment the imagery of anal intercourse, his new triumph and skill, could gallop
in surreal montage across the street or classroom or dining table.

"And can I be allowed to hope you are a regular church-attender?"

Nick crossed his legs to hide his excitement and said, "I'm not really, I'm afraid. At the moment, anyway."

Mrs Charles looked used to such disappointments, and almost cheerful, as if taking a very long view. "And what about your
father and mother?"

"Oh, they're
very
religious. My father's a churchwarden, and my mother often does the church flowers . . . for instance." He hoped this compensated,
rather than merely highlighting, his own delinquency.

"I'm very happy to hear it. And what
is
your father's occupation?" she demanded, pressing on in interview mode, which made Nick wonder if she did somehow know, however
subconsciously, that he was trying to tie his life to her son's. He was a puzzle, Nick, in many contexts—he was often being
interviewed obliquely, to see how he fitted in.

He said, "He's an antiques dealer—old furniture and clocks, mostly, and china."

Mrs Charles looked up at Leo. "Well, isn't that the exact same thing as old Pete!"

"Yeah," said Leo, whose whole manner was withdrawn and unhelpful. He dragged out one of the dining chairs and sat down at
the table behind them. "There's a lot of antique dealers about."

"The exact same thing," said Mrs Charles. "You go on, look around. We got some good old antiques here. You don't know old
Pete?"

"Yes, I do," Nick said, glancing round the room and wondering what Pete had said about it all before him, and how Pete had
been explained to her.

"It's a small little world," she marvelled.

"Well, Leo introduced me to him . . ."

"Ah, he's a good man, old Pete. You know we always called him 'old' Pete, though he can't be not more than fifty."

"He's forty-four," said Leo.

"He was a great help to my son. He helped him with getting through college, and with the job on the council. And he didn't
stand to get nothing from it—leastways not in this world. I always say to Leo he's his fairy godfather."

"Something like that," said Leo, with the sourness of a child subjected to the astounding iterations of a parent's treasured
phrases—treasured often because they put a bright gloss on some anxious denial. The clumsy unconscious joke in this one must
have made it specially wearing.

"A proper decent father Leo didn't have," said Mrs Charles candidly, and again with an almost cunning air of satisfaction
that they had been so tested. "But the Lord looks after his own. And now, don't you reckon he's a good boy?"

"Yes, he's . . . splendid!" said Nick.

"What's for tea?" said Leo.

"I'm hoping your sister is bringing it off now," said Mrs Charles. "We're giving our guest our special spicy chops and rice.
In this country," she observed to Nick, "you don't fry the chops so much, you're always grilling them, isn't that right?"

"Um . . . I don't know. I think we do both." He thought of his own mother, as an embodiment of any such supposed tradition;
but went on charmingly, "But if
you
fry them rather than grilling them, then that's also what we do in this country!"

"Ha . . . " said Mrs Charles, "well that's certainly one way of looking at the matter."

At table the movement of Nick's left arm was limited by the leaning tower of "Welcoming Jesus In Today." He came down on his
food in a hesitant but predatory fashion. The meal was a bold combination of bland and garishly spicy, and he wondered if
Rosemary had mockingly overdone the chillies to make fun of his good manners. He was full of round-eyed appreciation, which
was also a cover for the surprise of having his evening meal at five forty-five; some absurd social reflex, the useful shock
of class difference, a childish worry perhaps at a changed routine, all combined in a mood of interesting alienation. At Kensington
Park Gardens they ate three hours later, and dinner was sauntered towards through a sequence of other diversions, chats and
decantings, gardening and tennis, gramophone records, whisky and gin. In the Charles household there was no room for diversions,
no garden to speak of, and no alcohol. The meal came on straight after work, a wide-ranging grace was declaimed, and then
it was eaten and done with, and the whole long evening lay ahead. There were things Nick guessed about them, from the habits
of his own family, which lay somewhere between the two; but there were others he would have to wait for and learn. He had
never been in a black household before. He saw that first love had come with a bundle of other firsts, which he took hold
of like a wonderful but worrying bouquet.

After a longish silence Leo said, "So how's it going at college?" as if they hardly knew each other.

"Oh, it's all right," said Nick, disconcerted but then touched by Leo's stiffness. Whenever Leo was cold or rough to him he
felt it like a child—then he turned it round and found some thwarted love in it. He was in awe of Leo, but he saw through
him too, and each time he followed this little process of indulgence he felt more in love. "It hasn't been very exciting so
far. I suppose it's just different from what I've been used to." He always came away from the sunless back court where the
English department was with two or three newly shaped anecdotes, which gave his days there a retrospective sparkle; but he
found it hard to interest Leo in them and they often went to waste. Or they were stored up, with a shadowy sense of resentment.

"He was at Oxford University before," said Leo.

"And now where is he?" Mrs Charles wondered.