The Line of Beauty (6 page)

"I'm really just a friend of Toby's," Nick said.

"We were saying only the other night, Gerald Fedden will be in the Cabinet by Christmas. He knows me, by the way, you must
give him all the very best from both of us, from Geoffrey and Trudi." Nick seemed to shrug in acquiescence. "He's just the
sort of Tory we need. A splendid neighbour, I should say at once, and I fancy a splendid parliamentarian." This last word
was played out with a proud, fond rise and fall and almost whimsical rubato in its full seven syllables.

"He's certainly a very nice man," Nick said, and added briskly, to finish the conversation, "I'm really more a friend of Toby
and Catherine."

After Geoffrey had wandered off Leo stood up and took command of his bike. Nick didn't know what to say without making matters
worse, and they walked along the path together in silence. He avoided looking up at the Feddens', at his own window high up
in the roof, but he had a sense of being noticed by the house, and the verdict of "vulgar and unsafe" seemed to creep out
like a mist and tarnish the triumph of the evening.

"Well," said Leo under his breath, "two sorts of arse-licking in ten minutes"— so that Nick laughed and hit him on the arm
and immediately felt better. "Look, I'll see you, my friend," Leo said, as Nick opened the gate. They came out a bit shiftily
on to the street, and Nick couldn't tell if the sentence really meant its opposite. So he was clear about it.

"I want to see you," he said, and the five light words seemed to open and deepen the night, with the prickling of his eyes,
the starred lights of the cars rushing past them and down the long hill northwards, towards other boroughs, and neighbourhoods
known only from their mild skyward glare.

Leo stooped to fit on his lamps, front and back. Then he leant the bike against the fence. "Come here," he said, in that part-time
cockney voice that shielded little admissions and surrenders. "Give us a hug."

He stepped up to him and held him tight, but with none of the certainty of minutes before, beside the compost heap. He pressed
his forehead against Leo's, who was so much the right size for him, such a good match, and gave him a quick firm kiss with
pursed lips—there was a jeer and a horn-blast from a passing car. "Wankers," murmured Leo, though to Nick it felt like a shout
of congratulations.

Leo sat on the bike, one foot straight down like a dancer's to the pavement, the other in the raised stirrup. A kind of envy
that Nick had felt all evening for the bike and its untouchable place in Leo's heart fused with a new resentment of it and
of the ease with which it would take him away. "Look, I've got a couple more to see, yeah?" At which Nick nodded dumbly. "But
I'm not letting you go." He settled back on the saddle, the bike wobbled and then he rode round in ratcheting circles, so
that Nick was always facing the wrong way. "Besides," said Leo, "you're a damn good fuck." He winked and smiled and then darted
out across the road and down the hill without looking back.

3

N
ICK'S BIRTHDAY WAS
eight days after Toby's, and for a moment there had been an idea that the party for Toby's twenty-first
should be a joint celebration. "Makes obvious sense," Gerald had said; and Rachel had called it "a fascinating idea." Since
the party was to be held at Hawkeswood, which was the country house of Rachel's brother, Lord Kessler, the plan almost frightened
Nick with its social grandeur, with what it would confer on him and demand from him. Thereafter, though, it had never been
mentioned again. Nick felt he couldn't allude to it himself, and after a while he allowed his mother to make arrangements
for his own family party at Barwick a week later: he looked forward to that with queasy resignation.

Toby's party was on the last Sunday in August, when the Notting Hill Carnival would be pounding to its climax, and when many
local residents shuttered and locked their houses and left for their second homes with their fingers crossed: since the race
riots of two summers earlier the carnival had been a site of heightened hopes and fears. Nick had lain in bed the night before
and heard the long-legged beat of reggae from down the hill, mixed in, like the pulse of pleasure, with the sighing of the
garden trees. It was his second night without Leo. He lay wide-eyed, dwelling on him in a state beyond mere thought, a kind
of dazzled grief, in which everything they'd done together was vivid to him, and the strain of loss was as keen as the thrill
of success.

Next morning at eleven they gathered in the hall. Nick, seeing Gerald was wearing a tie, ran up and put one on too. Rachel
wore a white linen dress, and her dark hair, with its candid streaks of grey, had the acknowledged splendour of a new cut
and a new shape. She smiled her readiness at them, and Nick felt their fondness and efficiency as a family unit. He and Elena
stowed the overnight luggage in the Range Rover, and then Gerald drove them out, past blocked-off streets, through gathering
crowds. Everywhere there were groups of policemen, to whom he nodded and raised his hand authoritatively from the wheel. Nick,
sitting in the back with Elena, felt foolish and conceited at once. He dreaded seeing Leo, on his bike, and dreaded being
seen by Leo. He imagined him cruising the carnival, and yearned to belong there in the way that Leo did. He saw him dancing
happily with strangers in the street, or biding his turn in the dense mutating crowds at the underground urinals. His longing
jumped out in a little groan, which became a throat-clearing and an exclamation: "Oh I say, look at that amazing float."

In a side street a team of young black men with high yellow wings and tails like birds of paradise were preparing for the
parade. "It's marvellous what they do," said Rachel.

"Not very nice music," said Elena, with a cheerful shiver. Nick didn't reply—and found himself in fact at one of those unforeseen
moments of inner transition, when an old prejudice dissolves into a new desire. The music shocked him with its clear repetitive
statement of what he wanted. Then one vast sound system warred happily with the next, so that there were different things
he wanted, beautiful jarring futures for him—all this in forty or fifty seconds as the car slipped out and away into the ordinary
activity of the weekend streets.

Still, if he couldn't be with Leo it was best to be somewhere quite different. Gerald drove them out along the A40, at a somehow
preferentially high speed, as if led by an invisible police escort. Soon, however, they came into massive roadworks, and a
long unimpressionable tailback, as you did everywhere these days. Here they were taking out the last old roundabouts and traffic
lights and forcing an unimpeded freeway across the scruffy flat semi-country. Nick gazed out politely at the desert of digging
and concrete, and beyond it a field where local boys were roaring round and round on dirt-bikes in breakneck contempt for
the idea of actually going anywhere. They didn't care about the carnival, they'd never heard of Hawkeswood, and they'd chosen
to spend the day in this field rather than anything else. Beside them perhaps a mile of solid traffic stood stationary on
the motorway of the future.

As always, Nick felt a need to make things all right. He said, "I wonder where we are. Is this Middlesex, I suppose?"

"I suppose it's Middlesex," Gerald said. He hated to be thwarted and was already impatient.

"Not very nice," said Elena.

"No . . . " said Nick, hesitantly, humorously, as if considering a defence of it, to pass the time. He knew Elena was anxious
about the party, and about her role for the evening. She had asked a couple of questions already about Fales, who was Lionel
Kessler's new butler, with whom she was about to find herself pressed into some unspecified relation.

"If Lionel's giving us lunch," said Gerald, "we'd better stop somewhere and ring ahead. We'll be late."

"Oh, Lionel won't mind," said Rachel, "we're just taking pot luck."

"Hmm," said Gerald. "One doesn't as a rule find the words Lionel and pot luck used in the same sentence." The tone was mocking,
but suggested a certain anxiety of his own about his brother-in-law, and a sense of obligation. Rachel settled back contentedly.

"Everything will be fine," she said. And in fact the traffic did then make a move, and an optimistic attitude, which was the
only sort Gerald could bear, was cautiously indulged. Nick thought about the old-fashioned name Lionel. Of course it was related
to Leo; but Lionel was a little heraldic lion, whereas Leo was a big live beast.

Five minutes later they were at a standstill.

"This fucking traffic," said Gerald; at which Elena looked a bit flustered.

"As well as everything else," Nick said, with determined brightness, "I can't wait to see the house."

"Well, you're going to have to," said Gerald.

"Ah, the house," said Rachel, with a sighing laugh.

Nick said, "Or perhaps you don't like it. It must be different for you, having grown up there." He felt he was rather fawning
on her.

"I don't know," Rachel admitted. "I hardly know if I like it or not."

"You'd have to say, I think," said Gerald, "that it's the contents that make Hawkeswood. The house itself is something of
a Victorian monstrosity."

"Mmm . . ." In Rachel's conversation a murmured "mmm" or drily drawn-out "I
know . .
." could carry a note of surprising scepticism. Nick loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing
except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement; he longed to master it himself. It was so different from the bounding
effort of Gerald's conversation that he sometimes wondered if Gerald himself understood her. He said,

"I think I'll like the house as well as the contents."

Rachel looked grateful, but remained vague about the whole thing, and Nick felt slightly snubbed. Perhaps it was impossible
to describe a place one had known all one's life. She didn't disparage Nick's interest, but she showed she couldn't quite
be expected to be interested herself. It had been her fortune not to describe but to enjoy. She said, "You know of course
there's modern art, as well as the Rembrandts," with a brief smile at having retrieved a notable detail.

Hawkeswood had been built in the 1880s for the first Baron Kessler. It stood on an artificially flattened hilltop among the
Buckinghamshire beech woods, which had since grown up to hide all but its topmost spirelets from outside view. The approach,
after trailing through the long linked villages, entering past a lodge and a cattle grid and climbing the half-mile of drive
among grazing deer, was a complex climax for Nick; as the flashing windows of the house came into view he found himself smiling
widely while his eyes darted critically, admiringly—he didn't know what—over the steep slate roofs and stone walls the colour
of French mustard. He had read the high-minded but humorous entry in Pevsner, which described a seventeenth-century chateau
re-imagined in terms of luxurious modernity, with plate-glass windows, under-floor central heating, numerous bathrooms, and
running hot water; but it had left him unprepared for the sheer staring presence of the place. Gerald pulled up in front of
the
porte cochere
and they got out and went in, Nick coming last and looking at everything, while Fales, a real butler in striped morning trousers,
materialized to meet them. There they were, already, in the central hall, the great feature of the house, two storeys high,
with an arcaded gallery on the upper level, and a giant chimneypiece made from bits of a baroque tomb. Nick felt he'd stepped
into the strange and seductive fusion of an art museum and a luxury hotel.

Pot luck turned out to be an exquisite light lunch served at a round table in a room lined with rococo
boiseries
that had been removed wholesale from some grand Parisian town house, and painted pale blue. On the ceiling, in a flowered
ellipse, two naked females held a wreath of roses. Nick saw at once that the landscape over the fireplace was a Cezanne. It
gave him a hilarious sense of his own social displacement. It was one of those moments that only the rich could create, and
which came for Nick all wrapped up in its own description, so that he was already recounting it to some impressionable other
person—a person, that is, as impressionable as himself. He didn't know whether he should refer to it, but Lord Kessler said
as he sat down, "You see I've moved that Cezanne."

Rachel peered at it briefly and said, "Oh yes." Her whole manner was comfortable, almost sleepy; she made a charming shrug
of welcome, of dissolved formality, gesturing Nick to his place. Gerald looked at the painting more critically, with a sharp
way he had of scanning any document which might come in useful later on.

Nick thought he could say, "It's very beautiful." And Lord Kessler said, "Yes, isn't it a nice one."

Kessler was perhaps sixty, shorter and stouter than Rachel, bald, with an alert, not quite symmetrical face. He had on a dark
grey three-piece suit which made no concession to fashion or even to the season; he looked warm in it, but seemed to say that
this was simply what one wore. He ate his salmon and drank his rather sweet hock with an indefinable air of relished routine,
an admission of lifelong lunching in boardrooms and country houses and festival restaurants all over Europe. He said, "So
Tobias and Catherine are coming down when?"

"I wouldn't want to put too precise a time on it," said Gerald. "Toby is driving down with a girlfriend, Sophie Tipper, who's
a daughter of
Maurice
Tipper, incidentally, and a very promising young actress." He looked to Rachel and she said,

"No, she's awfully promising . . ."—the remark hesitating towards something she seemed to see in the middle distance but which,
as so often, she left amiably unexpressed. Nick sometimes felt that being people's children was the only claim that some of
his friends had on the attention of their preoccupied elders. He observed Lord Kessler's snuffle and murmur at the name of
Maurice Tipper, the incalculable ironies of different kinds of rich people about each other. The Sophie Tipper thing had been
dragging on pointlessly since the second year at Oxford, as if Toby were pliably fulfilling expectations by dating the daughter
of a tycoon.

"As for Catherine," Gerald went on, "she's being brought down by a so-called boyfriend whose name escapes me and whom I'm
bound to say I've never met." He smiled broadly at this. "But I expect a late arrival and burning rubber. Actually Nick probably
knows more on this front than we do."

Nick knew almost nothing. He said, "Russell, you mean? Yes, he's terribly nice. He's a very up-and-coming photographer"—in
a successful imitation of their manner and point of view. Russell had only been announced as a boyfriend the day before, in
a helpless reaction, Nick felt, to his own success with Leo, which of course he'd had the pleasure of describing to Catherine,
entirely truthfully. He hadn't in fact met Russell, but he thought he'd better say again, "He's awfully nice."

Lord Kessler said, "Well, there are umpteen bedrooms ready here, and Fales has made bookings at the Fox and Hounds and the
Horse and Groom, both perfectly decent, I'm told. As to the precise arrangements, I avert my eyes." Kessler had never married,
but there was nothing perceptibly homosexual about him. Towards any young people in his social orbit he maintained a strategy
of enlightened avoidance. "And we're not getting the PM," he added.

"We're not getting the PM," Gerald said, as if for a while it had really been likely.

"A relief, I must say."

"It is rather a relief," said Rachel.

Gerald murmured in humorous protest, and retorted that various ministers, including the Home Secretary, very much were still
expected.

"Them we can handle," Lord Kessler said, and shook the little bell to call in the servant.

After lunch they strolled through several large rooms that had the residual hush, the rich refined dry smell of a country
house on a hot summer day. The sensations were familiar to Nick from visits he made with his father to wind the clocks in
several of the great houses round Barwick—they went back to childhood, though in those much older and remoter houses the smells
were generally mixed up with dogs and damp. Here there was a High Victorian wealth of everything, pictures, tapestries, ceramics,
furniture—it made Kensington Park Gardens look rather bare. The furniture was mostly French, and of astonishing quality. Nick
straggled behind to gaze at it and found his heart beating with knowledge and suspicion. He said, "That Louis Quinze escritoire
. . . is an amazing thing, sir, surely?" His father had taught him to address all lords as sir—bumping into one had been a
constant thrilling hazard on their clock-winding visits, and now he took pleasure in the tone of smooth submission.