The Line of Beauty (3 page)

He followed her. "But then it changes back again . . ." he said.

"Yes, Nick, it does," she said, with the offended tone that sometimes follows a moment of self-exposure.

"I'm only trying to understand." He thought her tears might be a sign of recovery, and put an arm round her shoulder—though
after a few seconds she made another gesture that meant freeing herself. Nick felt a hint of sexual repudiation, as if she
thought he was taking advantage of her.

Later on, in the drawing room, she said, "Oh, god, this was your night with Leo."

Nick couldn't believe that she'd only just thought of that. But he said, "It's all right. I've put him off till next week."

Catherine smiled ruefully. "Well, he wasn't really your type," she said.

Schumann had given way to The Clash, who in turn had yielded to a tired but busy silence between them. Nick prayed that she
wouldn't put on any more music—most of the stuff she liked had him clenched in resistance. He looked at his watch. They were
an hour later in France, it was too late to ring them now, and he welcomed this rational and thoughtful postponement with
a sense of cloudy relief. He went over to the much-neglected piano, its black lid the podium for various old art folios and
a small bronze bust of Liszt—which seemed to give a rather pained glance at his sight-reading from the Mozart album on the
stand. To Nick himself the faltering notes were like raindrops on a sandy path, and he was filled with a sense of what his
evening could have been. The simple Andante became a vivid dialogue in his mind between optimism and recurrent pain; in fact
it heightened both feelings to an unnecessary degree. It wasn't long until Catherine stood up and said, "For god's sake, darling,
it's not a fucking funeral."

"Sorry, darling," said Nick, and vamped through a few seconds of what they called Waldorf music before getting up and wandering
out on to the balcony. They had only just started calling each other darling, and it seemed a nice part of the larger conspiracy
of life at Kensington Park Gardens; but outside in the cool of the night Nick felt he was play-acting, and that Catherine
was frighteningly strange to him. Her mirage of the beautiful poisonous universe shimmered before him again for a moment,
but he couldn't hold it, and it slipped quickly away.

There was a supper party in a nearby back garden, and the talk and light clatter carried on the still air. A man called Geoffrey
was making everyone laugh, and the women kept calling out his name in excited protest between the semi-audible paragraphs
of his story. Out in the communal gardens someone was walking a small white dog, which looked almost luminous as it bobbed
and scampered in the late dusk. Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet
heights. In summer, when windows everywhere were open, night seemed made of sound as much as shadow, the whisper of the leaves,
the unsleeping traffic rumble, far-off car horns and squeals of brakes; voices, faint shouts, a waveband twiddle of unconnected
music. Nick yearned for Leo, away to the north, three miles up the long straight roads, but possibly anywhere, moving with
invisible speed on his silver bike. He wondered again in which park the photo of him had been taken; and of course what person,
routinely intimate with Leo, had taken it. He felt hollow with frustration and delay. The girl with the white dog came back
along the gravel path, and he thought how he might appear to her, if she glanced up, as an enviable figure, poised against
the shining accomplished background of the lamplit room. Whereas, looking out, leaning out over the iron railing, Nick felt
he had been swept to the brink of some new promise, a scented vista or vision of the night, and then held there.

2

"
S
OMETHING FOR EVERYBODY
!" Gerald Fedden said, striding into the kitchen with a rattling brown-paper carrier bag. "All must
have prizes!" He was tanned and tireless, and a lost energy came back into the house with him, the flash of his vanity and
confidence—it was almost as though the words of the returning officer were fresh in his ears and he were responding to applause
with these high-spirited promises. On the side of the bag was the emblem of a famous Perigueux delicatessen, a blue goose
with its head through what looked like a life-saving ring, its beak curling Disney-wise in a complacent smile.

"Yuk, not foie gras," Catherine said.

"In fact this quince jelly is for the Purring One," said Gerald, taking out a jar in a gingham cap and bow and sliding it
across the kitchen table.

Catherine said, "Thanks," but left it there and wandered away to the window.

"And what was it for Tobias?"

"The . . . um . . . " Rachel gestured. "The
carnet."

"Of course." Gerald rummaged discreetly before passing his son a small notebook, bound in odorous green suede.

"Thanks, Pa," said Toby, who was sprawling in shorts on the long banquette and obliquely reading the paper while he listened
to his mother's news. Behind him, the wall was a great hilarious page of family history, with numerous framed photographs
of holidays and handshakes with the famous, as well as two wicked caricatures of Gerald, which he had made a point of buying
from the cartoonists. When Gerald was in the kitchen, guests always found themselves contrasting him with his grinning, hawk-nosed
cartoon image; the comparison was obviously to his advantage, though it couldn't help stirring the suspicion that under his
handsome everyday mask this predatory goon might indeed be lurking.

Now, in linen shorts and espadrilles, busying back and forth from the car, he was full of anecdotes about life at the manoir,
and mentioned particular local characters to stir up amusement and regret in his children. "It's such a shame we couldn't
all be there together. And you know, you really should come down one year, Nick."

"Well, I'd love to," said Nick, who had been hovering with an encouraging but modest expression. Of course it would have been
grand to summer with the Feddens at the manoir, but less marvellous, he couldn't help feeling, than staying in London without
them. How different the room looked now, with all of them noisily and unnoticingly back in it. Their return marked the end
of his custodianship, and his real pleasure in seeing them again was stained with a kind of sadness he associated with adolescence,
sadness of time flying and missed opportunities. He was keen for a word of gratitude to ease the mysterious ache. Of course
his main achievement, in the crisis with Catherine, went unmentioned. It seemed an omission which could still be redeemed,
by a quick firm gesture of good conscience, and Catherine herself looked nervously aware of the unstated subject; but Nick
saw, in the unsuspecting presence of her parents, that he had somehow sided with her, and that it was never going to be declared.
"

However," said Gerald, "it was simply great for us that you could be here to look after the Cat that Walks by Herself. I hope
she wasn't any trouble?"

"Well . . . " Nick grinned and looked down.

As an outsider, he had no pet name, and was exempt from the heavy drollery of the family lingo. His own gift was a small knobbly
bottle of cologne called "Je Promets." He took an appreciative sniff, and read into it various nice discriminations on the
part of the donors; certainly his own parents would never have given him anything so fragrant or ambiguous. "I trust it's
all right," said Gerald, as if to say he'd made a generous stab at something outside his competence.

"It's wonderful—thank you so much," said Nick. As an outsider he found himself floating again in a pleasant medium of social
charm and good humour. Toby and Catherine could frown and sulk, and exercise their prerogative not to be impressed or amused
by their parents. Nick, though, conversed with his hosts in an idiom of tremendous agreement. "Did you have glorious weather?"
"I must say we had
glorious
weather." "I hope the traffic wasn't too frightful. . ."
"Frightful!"
"I'd love to see the little church at Podier." "I think you'd
love
the little church at Podier." So they knitted their talk together. Even disagreements, for instance over Gerald's taste for
Richard Strauss, had a glow of social harmony to them, of relished licence, and counted almost as agreements transposed into
a more exciting key.

There was a lot of wine in the back of the Range Rover and Nick offered to help Gerald carry it in. He couldn't help noticing
the almost annoying firmness of the MP's backside, pumped up no doubt by daily tennis and swimming in France. The suntanned
legs were a further hint of sexual potential that Nick would normally have thought impossible in a man of forty-five—he thought
perhaps he was so excited by the prospect of Leo that he was reacting to other men with indiscriminate alertness. When the
last case was in, Gerald said, "We were stung for a hell of a lot of duty on this stuff."

Toby said, "Of course if trade barriers were lifted in the EC you wouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing."

Gerald smiled thinly to show he wasn't rising to the bait. There were a couple of bottles for Elena, who was involved in an
anxious transfer of household powers to Rachel, and put them aside in her black shopping bag, to take home. Elena, a widow
in her sixties, was treated with affection and a careful pretence of equality by the family, so it was revealing to see her
nervousness as she accounted for what she had done in their absence. Nick couldn't quite rid himself of a sense of embarrassment
with her, the ghost of an elaborate but misdirected courtesy. On his first visit to Kensington Park Gardens, he'd been welcomed
by Toby and then left briefly alone in the house, with the warning that his mother would soon be home. Hearing the front door
open and close, Nick went downstairs and introduced himself to the good-looking woman with jet-black hair who was sorting
out the mail on the hall stand. He spoke excitedly about the painting he'd been looking at in the drawing room, and it was
only slowly, in face of the woman's smiling deference and heavily accented murmurings, that he realized he wasn't talking
to the Honourable Rachel but to the Italian housekeeper. Of course there was nothing wrong in being charming to the housekeeper,
and Elena's views on Guardi were probably just as interesting as Rachel's and more so than Gerald's, but still the moment
which she seemed to remember for its charm Nick recalled as a tiny faux pas.

Even so, sliding on to the seat beside Toby, taking in the soap and coffee smell of him, pressing briefly against his bare
knee as he reached for the sugar, he felt what a success he had had. That was a year ago, and now everything was rich with
association. He picked up the notebook, which had barely been looked at, and stroked the soft pile of its cover, to make up
for Toby's lack of appreciation and remotely, too, as if he were thumbing some warm and hairy part of Toby himself. Toby was
talking of becoming a journalist, so the gift was vaguely insulting, a lazy attempt at aptness, the sense of mere duty in
the givers disguised by the stinking costliness of the production. The notebook wouldn't open flat, and a few addresses or
"ideas" would have filled it. It was certainly hard to imagine Toby using it as he visited a picket line or jostled for an
answer from a camera-mobbed minister.

"You heard about Maltby, of course," said Toby.

Immediately Nick felt the air in the room begin to tingle, as if at the onset of an allergic reaction. Hector Maltby, a junior
minister in the Foreign Office, had been caught with a rent boy in his Jaguar at Jack Straw's Castle, and had rapidly resigned
from his post and, it seemed, from his marriage. The story had been all over the papers last week, and it was silly of Nick
to feel as self-conscious as he suddenly did, blushing as if he'd been caught in a Jaguar himself. It was often like this
when the homosexual subject came up, and even in the Feddens' tolerant kitchen he stiffened in apprehension about what might
carelessly be said—some indirect insult to swallow, a joke to be weakly smiled at. Even the case of the absurd fat Maltby,
a real-life cartoon of the greedy "new" Tory, seemed to Nick to allude to his own quiet case and, in a brief twinge of paranoia,
to raise a question about his closeness to Toby's beautiful brown leg.

"Silly old Hector," said Gerald.

"I don't think we were terribly surprised," Rachel said, with her characteristic tremor of irony.

"You must have known him?" Toby asked, in a ponderous new "interview" style he had.

"A bit," said Rachel.

"Not really," said Gerald.

Catherine was still gazing out of the window, indulging her dream of not being connected to her family. "I really don't see
why he has to go to jail," she said.

"He's not going to jail, you daft old puss," Gerald said. "Unless you know something I don't. He was only caught with his
trousers down." By some half-conscious association he looked to Nick for confirmation of this.

"As far as I know," said Nick, trying to make the five little words sound both casual and judicious. It was horrible to imagine
Hector Maltby with his trousers down; and the disgraced MP didn't seem after all to merit much in the way of solidarity. Nick's
taste was for aesthetically radiant images of gay activity, gathering in a golden future for him, like swimmers on a sunlit
bank.

"Well, I don't see why he had to resign," Catherine said. "Who cares if he likes a blow-job now and then?"

Gerald smoothed this over but he was clearly shocked. "No, no, he had to go. There was really no alternative." His tone was
ruffled but responsible, and the sense of his own voice submitting to the common line and formula of politics was vaguely
disturbing, though Catherine laughed at it.

"It may all do him good," she said. "Help him to find out who he really
is.

Gerald frowned, and pulled a bottle from the cardboard crate. "You have the oddest idea of what might do people good," he
said, musingly but indignantly. "Now I thought we might have the Podier St-Eustache with dinner."

"Mm, lovely," Rachel murmured. "The thing is, darling, quite simply, that it's vulgar and unsafe," she said, in one of her
sudden hard formulations.

Gerald said, "You'll dine with us tonight, Nick?"

Nick smiled and looked away because the generous question raised a new uncertainty about his status on subsequent nights.
How much and how often would he be sharing with them? They had mentioned he might sometimes be called on to make up numbers.
"I'm terribly sorry, but I can't tonight," he said.

"Oh . . . what a shame, our first night back . . ."

He wasn't sure how to put it. Catherine watched his hesitation with a fascinated smile. "No, Nick can't because he's got a
date," she said. It was annoying to have her frankness applied to his tender plans, and a treacherous reward for his silence
about her affairs. He coloured, and felt a further crackle of social static pass through the room. Everyone seemed to be humming,
doubtful, encouraging, embarrassed, he couldn't tell.

Nick had never been on a date with a man before, and was much less experienced than Catherine imagined. In the course of their
long conversations about men he had let one or two of his fantasies assume the status of fact, had lied a little, and had
left some of Catherine's assumptions about him unchallenged. His confessed but entirely imaginary seductions took on—partly
through the special effort required to invent them and repeat them consistently—the quality of real memories. He sometimes
had the sense, from a hint of reserve in people he was talking to, that while they didn't believe him they saw he was beginning
to believe himself. He had only come out fully in his last year at Oxford, and had used his new licence mainly to flirt with
straight boys. His heart was given to Toby, with whom flirting would have been inappropriate, almost sacrilegious. He wasn't
quite ready to accept the fact that if he was going to have a lover it wouldn't be Toby, or any other drunk straight boy hopping
the fence, it would be a gay lover—that compromised thing that he himself would then become. Proper queens, whom he applauded
and feared and hesitantly imitated, seemed often to find something wrong with him, pretty and clever though he was. At any
rate they didn't want to go to bed with him, and he was free to wander back, in inseparable relief and discouragement, to
his inner theatre of sexual make-believe. There the show never ended and the actors never tired and a certain staleness of
repetition was the only hazard. So the meeting with Leo, pursued through all the obstacles of the system which alone made
it possible, was momentous for Nick. Pausing for a last hopeful gaze into the gilt arch of the hall mirror, which monitored
all comings and goings, he found it reluctant to give its approval; when he pulled the door shut and set off along the street
he felt giddily alone, and had to remind himself he was doing all this for pleasure. It had taken on the mood of a pointless
dare.

As he hurried down the hill he started focusing again on his Interests and Ambitions, the rather surprising topic for the
meeting. He saw that interests weren't always a sexy thing. A shared passion for a subject, large or small, could quickly
put two strangers into a special state of subdued rapture and rivalry, distantly resembling love; but you had to hit on the
subject. As for ambitions, he felt it was hard to announce them without sounding either self-deluding or feeble, and in fact
unambitious. Gerald could say, "I want to be Home Secretary," and have people smiling but conceding the possibility. Whereas
Nick's ambition was to be loved by a handsome black man in his late twenties with a racing bike and a job in local government.
This was the one thing he wasn't going to be able to admit to Leo himself.