The Line of Beauty (20 page)

When he got to the cinema he found Leo near the head of the queue. "You made it," he said, looking round at the people behind
and nodding—"Yeah, it's the first night," as if it was a bore, he was a martyr to first nights. And when they reached the
window it turned out that the cinema was nearly full, and they wouldn't be able to sit together. Nick shrugged and said, "Ah
well . . . " backing into the couple behind them, who were trying to overhear. "We can come at the weekend."

But Leo said, "Yeah, we'll have them—god, we're here now," and gave him a look of friendly concern.

Nick said quietly, "I just thought, if we can't sit together . . ." since the only reason for sitting through a super-violent
three-hour gangster movie was to have Leo's weight and warmth against him and his hand in his open fly. They had touched each
other like that, with cautious delirious slowness, in
Rumblefish,
under the dreamy aegis of Matt Dillon, and in Fellini's
And the
Ship Sails On,
which had been Nick's hopeless choice of picture and a peculiar backdrop to an orgasm. Otherwise, they had only made love
in parks, or public lavatories, or once in the back of Pete's shop, which Leo had kept a key to, and which felt even more
furtive than these cinema handjobs. The thing about the cinema was that they seemed to share in the long common history of
happy snoggers and gropers, and Nick liked that.

But now he was alone again, he felt it very keenly, accepting the "better" ticket, in the middle of the back row. The ads
were already showing as he clambered along and in their patchy glare he loomed and ducked and apologized, and was a clumsy
intruder in a world of snuggling coupledom. He squeezed in and even the space of his seat seemed half absorbed by the lovers'
coats and bags and angled limbs. The 170 minutes stretched out ahead like a long-ago detention, some monstrous test. They
stretched out, in fact, like a film he had no wish to see, and for a moment he was gripped by a tearful bolshiness that he
himself thought astonishing in a grown man. He saw that he could get up and go home and come back at the end. But then he
was frightened of what Leo would say. There was so much at stake. There was a Bacardi advertisement, and the brilliance of
tropical sea and white sand lit up the auditorium. He stared at the left side, near the front, to try to spot Leo, but he
couldn't find him. Then he did see the squared-off silhouette of his head, and for a moment his oddly distant and attentive
profile, played over by the reflected light. Of course the scene of palm trees and surf was much the same as Mrs Charles's
mural. Now superbly handsome heterosexuals romped across it.

Critics had already described
Scarf ace
as "operatic," which perhaps was only their way of saying it was Latin, noisy and bombastic. It was set in a Miami so violent
and so opulent, so glittering and soulless, that Nick found himself worrying about how people survived in it, and then about
how he would survive in it. In his disaffected mood he kept wandering off from the film itself into paranoid doubts and objections.
He saw that he was reacting like his mother, for whom any film on the telly with a sex scene or the word shit in it took on
a nearly hostile presence, and was watched thereafter with warm mistrust.
Scarface
was all about cocaine, which alarmed him. He remembered tensely how Toby had taken it at Hawkeswood with Wani Ouradi. The
film confirmed his worst suspicions. Nowhere in it was there a hint of the delicious pleasure that Toby had spoken of. The
drug was money and power and addiction—a young blonde actress in the film snorted joyless volumes of it.

The couple on Nick's left were slumped in a slowly evolving embrace. He was aware of a hand on a thigh left bare by a very
short skirt—and when it moved, his glance twitched guiltily away. He had an unusual sense of the cinema as a room—a long narrow
space with the dusty plaster mouldings of an old theatre. Instead of the proper oblivion of the filmgoer he felt a kind of
foreboding. When the picture brightened his eyes yearned down across the shadowy ranks of heads, but Leo was little and so
was he, and he never had that one clear view of him again. Because the film was Leo's choice, he imagined him enjoying it,
taking it on, adjusting himself, as it went along, to its new standards of hardness. A film that was shocking quickly lowered
the threshold, it made people unshockable. Nick felt that if he'd been sitting with Leo he might have tittered and groaned
at the shootings and blood like everyone else. But now they were apart, as they might have been on occasion in this very cinema
before they even knew of each other's existence, sitting separately in the near dark. It was irrational, perhaps, but the
glaring unreality of the film seemed to throw a suspicion of unreality over everything else, and his affair with Leo, which
was so odd, so new, so unrecognized, felt open to crude but penetrating doubt. He wondered if he would have noticed Leo a
year ago, in the shuffling semi-patience of the exit line, or carried his image home to lie awake with. Well, probably not,
since one of Leo's affectations was to sit through to the very last credits, the lenses, the insurers, the thanks to the mayor
and police department of . . . oh, somewhere obscurely a solution and a puzzle at the same time.

And it wasn't in fact until all that was over that Leo came into the foyer, blinking and nodding and then genially puzzled
at the troubled look on Nick's face. "All right, babe," he said quietly, and gripped his upper arm to steer him out. "That's
what I call snorting coke," he went on, referring to a scene in the film's final hour where Pacino had torn open a huge plastic
bag of cocaine on his desk and plunged his nose into it, the slave at last to his own instrument of power. It had struck Nick
as completely ridiculous. "Did you like that, then?"

Nick hummed and cleared his throat like an anxious bringer of bad news. "Not much," he said, and gave Leo a thin smile.

"It was quite a laugh," said Leo. "The ending was outrageous."

"Yes . . . yes it was," Nick agreed, hesitantly but firmly, recalling the comprehensive final bloodbath. As so often he had
the feeling that an artistic disagreement, almost immaterial to the other person, was going to be the vehicle of something
that mattered to him more than he could say.

But Leo said, "Nah, sorry about that, babe, it was pretty crappy. And we never got our kiss and cuddle."

"I know," said Nick with an archness that covered and somehow dissolved three hours of regrets—in his relief he couldn't see
where he was going and grabbed and rattled one of the cinema's already locked glass doors.

Leo went out and into the blocked-offside street where he'd left his bike, and when Nick followed he found him putting his
arms round his neck and kissing him, chastely but tenderly, on the forehead; then he kept looking at him, lightly frowning
and smiling at the same time, with humorous reproach.

"Nicholas Guest."

"Mm . . ."—Nick colouring but holding Leo's gaze submissively.

"You worry too much. You know that?"

"I know . . ."

"Yeah? You do trust your Uncle Leo, don't you?"

"Of course I trust you," Nick burst out quietly, as if he'd been asked a simpler question.

"Well, don't worry so much, then. Will you do that for me?" And again he was all cockney softness.

"Yes," said Nick, glancing a little worriedly none the less to left and right, since Leo was holding him against the wall
like a mugger as much as a lover—he worried what people would think. In the wake of his relief this short exchange raised
a vague dissatisfaction.

"Don't ever forget it."

"I won't," Nick murmured, and Leo stood back. He wasn't sure what it was that he mustn't forget, he had a restless ear for
syntax, but he smiled at the general drift of the little catechism of reassurance. It was lovely that Leo saw at once what
was wrong, even if his avuncular tone didn't put it completely right. Nick found he was confident enough, despite his racing
heartbeat, to mention his plan.

"You're sure they're not here, yeah?"

"Yes, I'm positive. Well, Catherine might be in."

"Catherine, right, that's your sister, yeah?" And then Leo winked.

The heavy, sharp-edged key to the mortise locks had already cut a gash in Nick's trouser pocket, and the whole bunch was tangled
in the torn threads and hanging against the top of his thigh. As he tugged at it a few of the new pound coins dropped ticklingly
down his leg and rolled across the tiled floor of the porch. Leo jumped on them. "That's right, throw it away," he said.

A light always burned in the hall, and gave it tonight a somehow eerie vigilance. Nick locked the door behind them, and put
the keys back in his pocket, and this time, after two steps, they had shaken their way down his leg and out on to the chequered
marble. Leo, peeking in the hall mirror, raised an eyebrow but said nothing. On the console table were spare car keys, opera
glasses, one of Gerald's grey fedoras, a letter "By Hand" addressed to the Rt Hon Mr and the Hon Mrs Gerald Fedden—and together,
as a careless still life, reflected in the mirror, they seemed to Nick both wonderful and embarrassing. He stood still for
a moment and listened. The light, from a brass lantern hanging in the well of the stair, threw steep shadows down inside the
threshold of the dining room, revealing only the black satin bodice of a nineteenth-century Kessler. The Hon and the Rt Hon
were both in Barwick for the night on constituency business, and whilst he confirmed this to himself he was also rewording
the sentence in which he would explain Leo to them if, after all, they came chattering in. He had a sense of their possessing
the house and everything in it, calmly but defiantly, and of its stone staircase and climbing cornices reaching rather pitilessly
up into the shadows. He gave Leo a passing kiss on the cheek, and drew him into the kitchen, where the under-unit lighting
stammered and blinked into life. "Do you want a whisky?"

And for once Leo said, "I don't mind if I do! Yeah, that would be nice. Thanks very much, Nick." He strolled round the room
as if not really noticing it, and stood scanning the wall of photographs.
One
of the
Tatler
pictures from Toby's twenty-first had now been bought, blown up and framed: a wildly smiling family group in which the Home
Secretary seemed to show some awareness of being an intruder. Just above them the student Gerald, in tails, was shaking hands
with Harold Macmillan at the Oxford Union. Again Leo made no comment, but when Nick handed him the cold tumbler he saw in
his eyes and in his very faint smile that he was noting and storing. Perhaps he was calculating the degree of affront represented
by all this Toryness and money. Nick felt his own kudos as family friend, as keyholder, was a very uncertain quantity. "Let's
go upstairs," he said.

He went up two at a time, in too much of a hurry, and when he looked back on the turn he saw Leo dawdling by the same factor
that he was rushing; he went into the drawing room and pressed switches that brought on lamps on side tables and over pictures—so
that when Leo sauntered in he saw the room as Nick had first seen it two years before, all shadows and reflections and the
gleam of gilt. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, longing for it to be a triumph, but taking his cue from the suppressed
curiosity in Leo's face.

"I'm not used to this," Leo said.

"Oh . . ."

"I don't drink whisky."

"Ah, no, well —"

"Who knows what it'll do to me? I might get dangerous."

Nick grinned tightly and said, "Is that a threat or a promise?" He reached out and touched Leo's hip—his hand lay there for
a second or two. Normally, together, alone, they would have been snogging, holding each other very tightly; though sometimes,
it was true, Leo laughed at Nick's urgency and said, "Don't panic, babe! I'm not going anywhere! You've got me!" Leo rested
his glass on the mantelpiece, and eyed Guardi's
Capriccio with
S. Giorgio Maggiore,
which certainly seemed a rather pointless picture after
The Shadow of Death.
It was hard to imagine Rachel haranguing her guests about the clever something in it. Underneath it the invitations were
propped, overlapping, making almost one long curlicued social sentence, Mr and Mrs Geoffrey—& Countess of Hexham—Lady Carbury
"At Home" for—Michael and Jean—The Secretary of State . . . and those others, amazingly thick, with chamfered edges, The Lord
Chamberlain is Commanded by Her Majesty to Request . . . which tended to stay there long after the events they referred to,
and which gave Nick as well a lingering pompous thrill. Though he saw now, very quickly, that such a pleasure required willing
complicity in Gerald's habit of showing off to himself. He turned away, pretending the invitations weren't there, and Leo
said, with a derisive tut,

"God, the snobs."

Nick laughed. "They're not really snobs," he said. "Well, he is perhaps a bit. They're . . ."It was hard to explain, hard
to know, in the dense compact of the marriage, who sanctioned what. They were each other's alibi. And Nick saw that Leo was
using the word in a looser way, to mean rich people, who lived in nice places, to mean nobs. It struck him that he might be
about to take the whole treat of coming to Kensington Park Gardens and making love in a bed as an elaborate but crushing rebuff.
He watched him sip some more, deliberately, and then wander towards the front windows. He tried to act on his advice of fifteen
minutes earlier, tried to trust his Uncle Leo. The room was devised and laid out for entertaining, on a generous scale, and
for a second, as if a thick door had opened, he heard the roar of accumulated talk and laughter, the consensual social roar,
instead of the clock's ticking and the fizz of silence.

"That's a nice bit of oyster," Leo said, pointing at a walnut commode. "And that's Sevres, if I'm not wrong, with that blue."

"Yes, I think it is," Nick said, feeling that this nod at a common interest also brought old Pete rather critically into the
room. Old Pete would have had some smart gay backchat to deal with an awkward moment like this.