The Line of Beauty (2 page)

He went into the kitchen, where Catherine, it must be, had made a mess since Elena's early morning visit. The cutlery drawers
tilted heavily open. There was a vague air of intrusion. He darted into the dining room, but the boulle clock ticked on in
its place on the mantelpiece, and the silver safe was locked. The brown Lenbach portraits of Rachel's forebears stared as
sternly as Leo himself. Upstairs in the drawing room the windows were open on to the curving rear balcony, but the blue lagoon
of the Guardi still gleamed and flashed above the mantelpiece. A low cupboard in the break-fronted bookcase stood open. Funny
how mere living in a house like this could have the look of a burglary. He peered down from the balcony, but there was no
one in the garden. He went more calmly up the further three flights of stairs, and when his nerves about Leo took hold of
him again they were almost a relief from the grown-up anxieties of guarding the house. He saw Catherine moving in her room,
and called out to her. A breeze had slammed his door and his own room was stifling, the books and papers on the table by the
window curled up and hot. He said, "I thought we'd had a break-in for a moment"—but the fear of it had already gone.

He picked out two possible shirts on their hangers, and was looking in the mirror when Catherine came in and stood behind
him. He sensed at once her desire to touch him and her inability to do so. She didn't meet his eye in the mirror, she simply
looked at him, at his shoulder, as though he would know what to do. She had the bewildered slight smile of someone only just
coping with pain. Nick smiled back more broadly, to make a few seconds of delay, as if it might still be one of their jokes.
"Blue or white?" he said, covering himself with the shirts again, like two wings. Then he dropped his arms and the shirts
trailed on the floor. He saw night falling already and Leo on his racing bike racing home to Willesden. "Not too good?" he
said.

She walked over and sat on the bed, where she leant forward and glanced up at him, with her ominous hint of a smile. He had
seen her in this little flowered dress day after day, it was what she strode about the streets in, something off the Portobello
Road that looked just right for the district or her fantasy of it, but now, armless, backless, legless, seemed hardly a garment
at all. Nick sat beside her and gave her a hug and a rub, as if to warm her up, though she felt hot as a sick child. She let
it happen, then shifted away from him a little. Nick said, "What can I do, then?" and saw that he was hoping to be comforted
himself. In the deep, bright space of the mirror he noticed two young people in an undisclosed crisis.

She said, "Can you get the stuff out of my room. Yeah, take it all downstairs."

"OK."

Nick went along the landing and into her room, where as usual the curtains were closed and the air soured with smoke. The
dense red gauze wrapped round the lampshade gave off a dangerous smell, and filtered the light across a chaos of bedclothes,
underwear, LPs. Drawers and cupboards had been gone through—the imaginary burglary might have reached its frustrated climax
here. Nick peered around and though he was alone he mugged a good-natured readiness to take control. His mind was working
quickly and responsibly, but he clung to his last few moments of ignorance. He made a low quiet concentrating sound, looking
over the table, the bed, the junk heap on the lovely old walnut chest. The cupboard in the corner had a wash-basin in it,
and Catherine had laid out half a dozen things on the tiled surround, like instruments before an operation: a heavy carving
knife, a curved two-handled chopper, a couple of honed-down filleting knives, and the two squat little puncheons that Nick
had seen Gerald use to grapple and turn a joint with, almost as though it might still get away. He gathered them up in an
awkward clutch, and took them carefully downstairs, with new, heavy-hearted respect for them.

She was adamant that he shouldn't call anyone—she hinted that worse things would follow if he did. Nick paced about in his
uncertainty over this. His ignorance of what to do was a sign of his much larger ignorance about the world in which he'd recently
arrived. He pictured the sick shock of her parents when they found out, and saw the stain on the record of his new life with
the Feddens. He was untrustworthy after all, as he had suspected he was, and they had not. He had a dread of being in the
wrong, but was also frightened of taking action. Perhaps he should try to find Toby? But Toby was a non-person to Catherine,
treated at best with inattentive politeness.

Nick was shaping the story in his head. He persuaded himself that disaster had been contemplated, stared at, and rejected.
There had been a ritual of confrontation, lasting an hour, a minute, all afternoon—and maybe it would never have been more
than a ritual. Now she was almost silent, passive, she yawned a lot, and Nick wondered if the episode had already been taken
away, screened and isolated by some effective mechanism. Perhaps his own return had always played a part in her design. Certainly
it made it hard for him to refuse her when she said, "For god's sake don't leave me alone." He said, "Of course I won't,"
and felt the occasion close in on him, suffocatingly, from a great distance. It was something else Toby had mentioned, by
the lake: there are times when she can't be alone, and she has to have someone with her. Nick had yearned then to share Toby's
duty, to steep himself in the difficult romance of the family. And now here he was, with his own romance about to unfold in
the back bar of the Chepstow Castle, and he was the person she had to have with her. She couldn't explain, but no one else
would do.

Nick brought her down to the drawing room and she chose some music by going to the record cupboard and pulling out a disc
without looking and then putting it on. She seemed to say she could act, but that deliberations were beyond her. It came on
jarringly. The arm had come down in the wrong place, as if looking for a single. "Ah yes . . . !" said Nick. It was the middle
of the scherzo of Schumann's Fourth Symphony. He kept an eye on her, and felt he understood the way she let the music take
care of her; he saw her drifting along in it, not knowing where she was particularly, but grateful and semi-interested. He
was agitated by indecision, but he went with it himself for a few moments. The trio returned, but only for a brief airing
before the magical transition to the finale . . . based, very obviously, on that of Beethoven's Fifth: he could have told
her that, and how it was really the second symphony, and how all the material grew from the opening motif, except the unexpected
second subject of the finale . . . He stood back and decided, in the bleak but proper light of responsibility, that he would
go downstairs at once and ring Catherine's parents. But then, as he left the room, he thought suddenly of Leo, and felt sure
he was losing his only chance with him: so he rang him instead, and put off the call to France until later. He didn't know
how to explain it to Leo: the bare facts seemed too private to tell a stranger, and a watered-down version would sound like
an invented excuse. Again he saw himself in the wrong. He kept clearing his throat as he dialled the number.

Leo answered very briskly, but that was only because he was having his dinner and still had to get ready—facts which Nick
found illuminating. His voice, with its little reserve of mockery, was exactly what he had heard before, but had lost in the
remembering. Nick had only begun his apologies when Leo got the point and said in an amiable way that he was quite relieved,
and dead busy himself. "Oh good," said Nick, and then felt almost at once that Leo could have been more put out. "If you're
sure you don't mind . . ." he added.

"That's all right, my friend," said Leo quietly, so that Nick had the impression there was someone else there.

"I'd still really like to meet you."

There was a pause before Leo said, "Absolutely."

"Well, what about the weekend?"

"No. The weekend I cannot do."

Nick wanted to say "Why not?" but he knew the answer must be that Leo would be seeing other hopefuls then; it must be like
auditions. "Next week?" he said with a shrug. He wanted to do it before Gerald and Rachel got back, he wanted to use the house.

"Yeah, going to the Carnival?" said Leo.

"Perhaps on the Saturday—we're away over the bank holiday. Let's get together before then." Nick longed for the Carnival,
but felt humbly that it was Leo's element. He saw himself losing Leo on their first meeting, where a whole street moves in
a solid current and you can't turn back.

"The best thing is, if you give us a ring next week," said Leo.

"I most certainly will," said Nick, pretending he thought all this was positive but feeling abruptly miserable and stiff in
the face. "Look, I'm really sorry about tonight, I'll make it up to you." There was another pause in which he knew his sentence
was being decided—his whole future perhaps. But then Leo said, in a throaty whisper,

"You bet you will!"—and as Nick started to giggle he hung up. So that little pause had been conspiratorial, a conspiracy of
strangers. It wasn't so bad. It was beautiful even. Nick hung up too and went to look at himself in the high gilt arch of
the hall mirror. With the sudden hilarity of relief he thought how nice-looking he was, small but solid, clear-skinned and
curly-headed. He could see Leo falling for him. Then the colour drained from him, and he climbed the stairs.

When it had cooled Nick and Catherine went down into the garden and out through the gate into the communal gardens beyond.
The communal gardens were as much a part of Nick's romance of London as the house itself: big as the central park of some
old European city, but private, and densely hedged on three sides with holly and shrubbery behind high Victorian railings.
There were one or two places, in the surrounding streets, where someone who wasn't a keyholder could see through to a glade
among the planes and tall horse chestnuts—across which perhaps a couple would saunter or an old lady wait for her even slower
dog. And sometimes in these summer evenings, with thrush and blackbird song among the leaves, Nick would glimpse a boy walking
past on the outside and feel a surprising envy of him, though it was hard to know how a smile would be received, coming from
the inside. There were hidden places, even on the inside, the path that curled, as if to a discreet convenience, to the gardener's
hut behind a larch-lap fence; the enclosure with the sandpit and the children's slide, where genuine uniformed nannies still
met and gossiped with a faint air of truancy; and at the far end the tennis courts, whose overlapping rhythms of serves and
rallies and calls lent a calming reminder of other people's exertions to the August dusk.

From end to end, just behind the houses, ran the broad gravel walk, with its emphatic camber and its metal-edged gutters where
a child's ball would come to rest and the first few plane leaves, dusty but still green, were already falling, since the summer
had been so hot and rainless all through. Nick and Catherine strolled along there, arm in arm, like a slow old couple; Nick
felt paired with Catherine in a new, almost formal way. At regular intervals there were Victorian cast-iron benches, made
with no thought of comfort, and between them on the grass a few people were sitting or picnicking in the warm early twilight.

After a minute Nick said, "Feeling a bit better?" and Catherine nodded and pressed against him as they walked. The sense of
responsibility came back to him, a grey weight in his chest, and he saw them from the point of view of the picnickers or an
approaching jogger: not a dear old couple at all but a pair of kids, a skinny girl with a large nervous mouth and a solemn
little blond boy pretending he wasn't out of his depth. Of course he must ring France, and hope that he got Rachel, since
Gerald wasn't always good with these things. He wished he knew more about what had happened and why, but he was squeamish
too. "You'll be all right," he said. He thought that asking her about it might only reopen the horror, and added, "I wonder
what it was all about," as if referring to a mystery of long ago. She gave him a look of painful uncertainty, but didn't answer.
"Can't really say?" Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family
sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just
a form of cowardice.

"No, not really."

"Well, you know you always can tell me," he said.

At the end of the path there was the gardener's cottage, huddled quaintly and servilely under the cream cliff of the terrace.
Beyond it a gate gave on to the street and they stood and looked out through its iron scrolls at the sporadic evening traffic.
Nick waited, and thought despairingly of Leo at large in the same summer evening. Catherine said, "It's when everything goes
black and glittering."

"Mm."

"It's not like when you're down in the dumps, which is brown."

"Right . . ."

"Oh, you wouldn't understand."

"No, please go on."

"It's like that car," she said, nodding at a black Daimler that had stopped across the road to let out a distinguished-looking
old man. The yellow of the early street lights was reflected in its roof, and as it pulled away reflections streamed and glittered
in its dark curved sides and windows.

"It sounds almost beautiful."

"It is beautiful, in a sense. But that isn't the point."

Nick felt he had been given an explanation which he was too stupid, or unimaginative, to follow. "It must be horrible as well,"
hesaid, "obviously. . ."

"Well, it's poisonous, you see. It's glittering but it's deadly at the same time. It doesn't want you to survive it. That's
what it makes you realize." She stepped away from Nick, so as to use her hands. "It's the whole world just as it is," she
said, stretching out to frame it or hold it off: "everything exactly the same. And it's totally negative. You can't survive
in it. It's like being on Mars or something." Her eyes were fixed but blurred. "There you are, that's the best I can do,"
she said, and turned her back.