The Line of Beauty (47 page)

"Yes, I've never understood about sin," said Nick, in a tone they didn't catch.

"Oh, the mortal ones are the worst," said Gemma.

"So she doesn't think AIDS is a punishment, at least."

"No, it can be," said Rosemary. "But Leo got it off a toilet seat at the office, which is full of godless socialists, of course."

"Or a sandwich," prompted Gemma.

There was something very unseemly in their mockery. Nick tried to imagine the house surprised by guilt and blame, the helpless
harshness of the bereaved . . . he didn't know.

Rosemary said, "She's got him back at the house."

"How do you mean?"

"She's got the ashes in a jar, on the mantelpiece."

"Oh!" Nick was so disturbed by this that he said, rather drolly, "Yes, I remember, there's a shelf, isn't there, over the
gas fire, with figures of Jesus and Mary and so on —"

"There's Jesus, and the Virgin Mary, and St Antony of Padua . . . and Leo."

"Well, he's in very good company!" said Nick.

"I know," said Gemma, shaking her head and laughing grimly. "I can't stand it, I can't go in there!"

"She says she likes to feel he's still there."

Nick shivered but said, "I suppose you can't begrudge her her fantasies, can you, when she's lost her son."

"They don't really help, though," said Rosemary.

"Well, they don't help us, pet, do they?" said Gemma, and rubbed Rosemary's back vigorously.

Rosemary's eyes were hooded for a moment, just like her mother's, with the family stubbornness. She said, "She won't accept
it about him, and she won't accept it about us." And then almost at once she shouldered her bag to go Nick blushed at his
slowness, and then was mortified that they might think he was blushing about them.

When the women had gone, he went back upstairs, but in the remorseless glare of the news, so that the flat looked even more
tawdry and pretentious. He was puzzled to think he had spent so much time in it so happily and conceitedly. The pelmets and
mirrors, the spotlights and blinds, seemed rich in criticism. It was what you did if you had millions but no particular taste:
you made your private space like a swanky hotel; just as such hotels flattered their customers by being vulgar simulacra of
lavish private homes. A year ago it had at least the glamour of newness. Now it bore signs of occupation by a rich boy who
had lost the knack of looking after himself. The piping on the sofa cushions was rubbed through where Wani had sprawled incessantly
in front of the video. The crimson damask was blotted with his own and other boys' fluids. He wondered if Gemma had noticed
as she sat there, making her inanely upsetting remarks. He wasn't letting her in here again, in her black boots. Nick felt
furious with Wani for fucking up the cushions. The Georgian desk was marked with drink stains and razor etchings that even
the optimistic Don Guest would have found it hard to disguise. "That's beyond cosmetic repair, old boy," Don would say. Nick
fingered at the little abrasions and found himself gasping and whooping with grief.

He sat on the sofa and started reading the
Telegraph,
as if it was known to be a good thing to do. He was sick of the election, but excited to think it was happening today. There
was something primitive and festive about it. He heard Rosemary saying, "Well, he died, you know . . ." or "Well, you know,
he died . . . " in recurrent, almost overlapping runs and pounces—his heart thumped at the dull detonation of the phrase.
He was horrified by the thought of his ashes in the house, and kept picturing them, in an unlikely rococo urn. The last photo
she had shown him was terrible: a Leo with his life behind him. Nick remembered making jokes, early on, in the first unguarded
liberty of a first affair, about their shared old age, Leo being sixty when Nick was fifty. And there he was already; or he'd
been sixty for a week before he died. He was in bed, in a sky-blue hospital gown; his face was hard to read, since AIDS had
taken it and written its message of terror and exhaustion on it; against which Leo seemed frailly to assert his own character
in a doubtful half smile. His vanity had become a kind of fear, that he would frighten the people he smiled at. It was the
loneliest thing Nick had ever seen.

He thought he should write a letter and sat down at the desk. He felt a need to console Leo's mother, or to put himself right
with her. Some deep convolution of feelings about his own mother, as the one person who really suffered for his homosexuality,
made him see Mrs Charles as a figure to be appeased as well as comforted. "Dear Mrs Charles," he wrote, "I was so terribly
sorry to learn about Leo's death": there, it existed, he'd hesitated, but written it, and it couldn't be unwritten. He had
a feeling, an anxious refinement of tact, that he shouldn't actually mention the death. "Your sad news," "recent sad events"
. . .: "Leo's death" was brutal. Then he worried that "I was so terribly sorry" might sound like gush to her, like calling
her wonderful. He knew his own forms of truth could look like insincerity to others. He was frightened of her, as a grieving
woman, and uncertain what feelings to attribute to her. It seemed she had taken it all in her own way, perhaps even with a
touch of zealous cheerfulness. He could see her being impressed by his educated form of words and best handwriting. Then he
saw her looking mistrustfully at what he'd written. He felt the limits of his connoisseurship of tone. It was what he was
working on, and yet . . . He stared out of the window, and after a minute found Henry James's phrase about the death of Poe
peering back at him. What was it?
The extremity of
personal absence had just overtaken him.
The words, which once sounded arch and even facetious, were suddenly terrible to him, capacious, wise, and hard. He understood
for the first time that they'd been written by someone whose life had been walked through, time and again, by death. And then
he saw himself, in six months' time perhaps, sitting down to write a similar letter to the denizens of Lowndes Square.

14

W
HEN HE GOT
back to Kensington Park Gardens he didn't tell Catherine about Leo straight away. To himself he seemed to gleam
with his news, to be both the pale bereaved and the otherworldly messenger. He found himself lengthening his natural sighs
and stares to provoke a question. But after ten minutes he accepted that she hadn't noticed. She was slumped in an armchair,
with newspapers all around her, and half-empty glasses of water and mugs of tea on the table beside her. He looked down on
her from behind, and she seemed as small and passive as a sick child. She looked up and said, with an effort at brightness,
"Oh, Nick, it's
Election
Special
after the news," as though it had taken great effort to find this out, as though it was itself a piece of good news.

"OK, darling," said Nick. "Great, we'll watch that." He gazed round the room, feeling for the precedence, the protocol of
their relative afflictions. "Um . . . yes . . . OK!" It didn't seem right to land her with the news of a death. He felt that
like all news it had its own momentum, and it would somehow go stale and unsayable if it was left too long.

He went up to his room with a slight mental stoop from the burden of Catherine's condition. It was hard work living with someone
so helpless and negative, and much worse if you'd known them critical and funny. Well, sometimes, perhaps, it made your own
problems look light; at others it amplified them, by a troubling sympathetic gloom. He had borrowed a book of Rachel's by
Dr Edelman, who was treating Catherine,
A Path
Through the Mountains: Clinical Responses to Manic Depression.
He had groaned over Dr Edelman's style, and corrected his grammar to protect himself from a superstitious fear that the book
awoke in him: of finding the symptoms in himself, now he knew what they were. They certainly seemed to be present in all the
more volatile, the more irascible or oddly lethargic people he knew.

The book had helpful facts in it, but it left Nick with an imaginative uncertainty, as to where Catherine was when he looked
at her and spoke to her: not in the black and shiny place of her old depressions, but in some other unfeatured place, policed
by Dr Edelman's heavy new dosage of lithium. She lacked the energy and motivation to describe it herself. She said she couldn't
concentrate on a book, or even an article. Sometimes she acted in her quick pert way, but it was a reflex: she observed it
herself with bewilderment and a kind of longing. Mostly she sat and waited, but without any colour of expectation. Nick found
himself talking with awful brightness of purpose, as if to someone old and deaf; and it was more awful because she didn't
find it condescending.

There were various phone calls that evening. Nick's mother rang and talked excitedly about the election, which she seized
on as a chance to share in Nick's London life. He was cool and humourless with her, and saw himself, as so often, almost blaming
her for not knowing the important thing he was incapable of telling her. She had never heard of Leo, and he thought if he
did try to tell her they would work each other up into a state of mutual resentment at the fact. She gave an account of Gerald's
performance on the local radio, as if Nick needed to hear praise of him. "He said we don't want these, you know, lesbian workshops,"
she said, not unaware of her own bravery in using the word. Then Gerald himself was on the other line, and she rang off as
if she'd been caught. "All well?" said Gerald airily, obviously wanting to talk about himself. It was the long evening's wait
for the results, when his confidence was the most stretched, and he was fishing for sympathy, almost as though he'd lost.
"How did your speech go?" said Nick. "Went down like dinner," Gerald said. "Which is more than I can say for dinner itself—what?
God these provincial hotels." Nick felt a punitive urge to make Gerald listen to his problem, since he'd met Leo and had even
been gingerly in favour of him; but he knew he wouldn't get his attention, it was the wrong moment, the wrong week, and actually
the wrong death.

Elena had prepared some cannelloni, which Nick and Catherine ate in the kitchen, under the family gallery of photographs and
cartoons; this had now spread over the pantry door and down the other side, where Marc's caricature of Gerald had pride of
place. Gerald had still not received the accolade of a
Spitting Image
puppet in his likeness, but it was one of his main hopes for the new Parliament. Catherine stared at her food as she worked
through it, like someone performing a meaningless task as a punishment, and Nick found himself contrasting her to her eager
six-year-old self, with only half her big teeth, and a grin of excitement so intense it was almost painful; and to a feature
from
Harper's
ten years later, where rich people's children modelled evening clothes, and white gloves covered the first scars on her arms.
Really, though, it was Gerald's wall, and his wife and children appeared as decorative adjuncts to the hero's life, unfolding
in a sequence of handshakes with the famous. The Gorbachev was the latest trophy, not a handshake, but a moment of conversation,
the Soviet leader's smile just hinting at the tedium of hearing English puns explained by an interpreter. Nick said, "Can
you remember when that picture of you was taken?" and Catherine said, "No, I can't. I can only remember the picture." She
glanced up over her shoulder with an apologetic cringe. It was as if all the pictures might come bashing down about her ears.

He said, "Mum says there's a cartoon of Gerald in the
Northants Standard;
she's sending it down for possible inclusion."

"Oh . . ." said Catherine. She looked at him steadily. "I don't know about cartoons."

"You love satire, darling, especially if it's of Gerald."

"I know. Just imagine if people did look like that, though. Hydrocephalous is the word. Monstrous teeth of Gerald . . . "
and her hand shook. She seemed startled to recall these words.

Afterwards they went up to the drawing room, and Nick, suddenly shaky too, poured himself a large Scotch. They sat side by
side on the sofa, in the heavy but unselfconscious silence she generated. He remembered the one time Leo had come to this
room, and surprised him, moved him, and slightly rattled him by playing Mozart on the piano. They'd both had a glass of whisky
then, the only time he'd known Leo to drink. He caught the beautiful rawness of those days again, the life of instinct opening
in front of him, the pleasure of the streets and London itself unfolding in the autumn chill; everything tingling with newness
and risk, glitter of frost and glow of body heat, the shock of finding and holding what he wanted among millions of strangers.
His sense of the scandalous originality of making love to a man had faded week by week into the commonplace triumph of a love
affair. He saw Leo crossing this room, the scene brilliant and dwindling, as if watched in a convex mirror. It was the night
he had stepped warily, with many ironic looks, into Nick's deeper fantasy of possession: his lover in his house, Nick owning
them both by right of taste and longing.

Now the rain had stopped, and the sky brightened a little just as the dusk was falling. Pale neutral light stretched in through
the front windows, seemed to search and fail and then probe again. Nick formulated the thing, "I had some terribly sad news
today, I heard that Leo's died, you remember . . ."; but it stayed shut in his head, like a difficult confession.

He listened to the birdsong from the gardens, with a more analytical ear than usual for the notes of warning and protest and
ruffled submission. The long neutral light grew more tender and burning as it touched the gilt handles of the fire irons and
the white-marble vines beneath the mantelpiece. Then it reached the turned legs of an old wooden chair and made them glow
with new and unsuspected presence, like little people, skittle-people, with bellies and collars and Punchinello hats, shining
fiercely and stoically with their one truth, that they would last for centuries longer than the young live people who were
looking at them.

On the nine o'clock news they were talking already about a Tory landslide. Nick had another huge whisky, and felt a familiar
relief begin to smooth down the bleak edges of the day. He felt he was missing the regard that was due to the bereaved, the
indulgence, like a special sad prize, that was given to boys at school when the news came through. He even wondered for a
while about a toot, but he knew he didn't want the irrelevant high spirits of coke. Drink showed more respect for the night,
and seemed ready to mediate, for three or four hours, between the demands of grief and current affairs.

The election unrolled at its own unsatisfactory tempo. For ages the pundits sat in the studio, waiting for results to process
and pronounce on. The tedium of the four long weeks of the election reached its purest form in their attempts to summarize
and predict. Various old maxims and traditions were rehearsed, with a consoling effect of pantomime. Reporters were seen,
perched in a dozen town halls with nothing as yet to report. Below them, out of focus, the tellers at their long tables were
racing to finish, so that another game seemed to flourish on the back of the main contest. They were going to show the Barwick
declaration later on, and for five seconds Nick saw the council room in the Market Hall and the not quite familiar figures
at work; then there was a film clip showing the main candidates canvassing. Gerald's style was one of crisp confidence, striding
through the square with glancing "Good morning"s, like a boss coming into an office, and not listening to anything that was
being said. The inexperienced Alliance woman, by contrast, got snagged in well-meaning debate with Tracey Weeks, who she was
slow to realize, and on camera was reluctant to acknowledge, wasn't all there. It was sad that the Barwick electorate should
be exemplified to the nation by old Tracey; Nick distanced himself from his home town with a cagey laugh, though he was very
curious to see it on TV. It had a steady provincial look to it, surprised but not overwhelmed to have been noticed by the
outside world. It wasn't exactly the place he knew.

Later Nick was downstairs -when Catherine called out, "It's Polly Thing!" and he rushed back up and leant over the back of
the sofa—the returning officer was already speaking. Polly Tompkins was standing for Pershore, traditionally Tory but with
a strong SDP vote in '83; he couldn't be sure of getting in, and Gerald, who admired Polly, warned that his age might tell
against him. Nick had read an article about young candidates—of the hundred and fifty or so under thirty the dry expectation
was that half a dozen would get elected. Standing in the middle of the stage, fat and hot in a double-breasted suit, Polly
could have passed for forty-five; he seemed camouflaged in his own elected future. Nick couldn't decide if he wanted him to
win or not. It was a spectacle, and he looked at it with untroubled cruelty, like a boxing match. It would be good to see
him smacked down. Nick supposed the candidates must know the result by now, since they'd been at the count; but perhaps not,
if it was very close. Now Polly was staring out into the challenge of the lights, the invisible millions who suddenly had
their eyes on him. The tiny Labour vote was announced, and he gave a heartless wince of commiseration. And now his own name
was being said, "Tompkins, Paul Frederick Gervase"—("Conservative" in murmured parenthesis)—"seventeen thousand, two hundred
and thirty-eight votes": the word
votes
shouted over a roar of triumph so quick that Polly himself seemed not to have worked it out—there was a moment's blankness
in his face, and then you saw him give in to the roar and grin like a boy and raise two fists in the air—he was monstrous,
Catherine said, "God . . ." in her dullest tone, but Nick felt his grin turn wistful with unexpected pleasure as the returning
officer fought on against the noise, "And I therefore declare the said Paul Frederick Gervase Tompkins duly elected . . .
" "Paul Tompkins," said the reporter briskly, showing in his equable tone that he hadn't known Polly as the nightmare queen
of the Worcester MCR, "only twenty-eight years old . . ."as Polly shook hands crushingly with the losers, and then stepped
backwards, peered round with a kind of cunning confusion, using the crowd's indulgence, his first thrill of popularity, and
stretched out an arm to call a woman forward from the back of the stage. She strode up to him, nudged against him, their fingers
fumbled together, and then he jerked their hands upwards in the air. "A great night for Paul Tompkins's wife, too," said the
commentator: "only married last month—Morgan Stevens, one of the guiding lights at Conservative Central Office—I know she's
been working tirelessly behind the scenes on this campaign . . . " Polly carried on shaking their awkwardly linked fists above
their heads, his lapel dragged up against his jowls, and something he couldn't disguise in his face, something deeper than
scorn, the madness of self-belief. It was already time for him to make a speech, but he milked the acclaim crudely—he looked
a bit of a buffoon. He stepped forward, still loosely holding Morgan's hand, and then dodged back and kissed her, not wedding-style,
but as one might kiss an aunt. He had hardly started to speak when the viewers were abruptly returned to the studio.

"Is Morgan really a woman?" said Catherine.

"Very fair question," said Nick; "but I think so."

"She's got a man's name."

"Well, there was Morgan Le Fay, wasn't there, the famous witch."

"Was there?"

"Anyway, she's married to a man called Polly, so it's probably all right."

Now the results were coming in too fast to be sure of individual notice. The talk of a landslide took shape in vertiginous
diagrams. "I thought it was a landslide last time," said Catherine. "We had that book about it."

"Yes, it was," said Nick.

She stared at the screen, where the famous swingometer was virtually at rest. "But nothing's changing," she said. "I mean
there's two more Labour seats. That's not a landslide."