The Line of Beauty (4 page)

He fixed his thoughts for the hundredth time on the little back bar of the Chepstow Castle, which he had chosen for its shadowy
semi-privacy—a space incuriously glanced into by people being served in the public bar, but barely used on summer evenings
when everyone stood outside on the pavement. There was an amber light in there, among the old whisky mirrors and photographs
of horse-drawn drays. He saw himself sitting shoulder to shoulder with Leo, their hands joined in secret on the dusty moquette.

As he approached the pub he registered a black man at the edge of the crowd of drinkers, then knew it was Leo, then pretended
he hadn't seen him. So he was quite small; and he'd grown a kind of beard. Why was he waiting in the street? Nick was already
beside him and looked again, very nervously, and saw his questioning smile.

"If you don't want to know me . . ." Leo said.

Nick staggered and laughed and stuck out his hand. "I thought you'd be inside."

Leo nodded, and looked down the street. "This way I can see you coming."

"Ah . . . " Nick laughed again.

"Besides, I wasn't sure about the bike, in this area." And there the bike was, refined, weightless, priceless, the bike of
the future, shackled to the nearest lamp-post.

"Oh, I'm sure it will be fine." Nick frowned and gazed. He was surprised that Leo thought this a bad area. Of course he thought
it was rather dangerous himself; and three or four corners away there were pubs he knew he could never enter, so bad were
their names, and so intense the mana of their glimpsed interiors. But here . . . A tall Rastafarian strolled by, and his roll
of the head was a greeting to Leo, who nodded and then looked away with what seemed to Nick a guarded admission of kinship.

"We'll have a little chat outside, eh?"

Nick went in to get the drinks. He stood at the counter looking through to the back bar—where in fact there were several people
talking, perhaps one of those groups that meet in a pub, and the room was brighter than he remembered it or would have wanted
it. Everything seemed to be a bit different. Leo was only having a Coke, but Nick needed courage for the evening and his own
identical-looking drink had a double rum in it. He had never drunk rum before, and was always astonished that anyone liked
Coke. His mind held the floating image of the man he had longed to meet, whom he had touched for a moment and left outside
in all his disconcerting reality. He was too sexy, he was too much what he wanted, in his falling-down jeans and his tight
blue shirt. Nick was worried by his obvious intention to seduce, or at least to show his capacity for seduction. He took the
drinks out with a light tremble.

There wasn't anywhere to sit down, so they stood and leaned against a brown-tiled window sill; in the opaque lower half of
the window the word SPIRITS was etched in fancy Victorian capitals, their serifs spiralling out in interlacing tendrils. Leo
looked at Nick frankly, since that was what he was here for, and Nick grinned and blushed, which made Leo smile too, for a
moment.

Nick said, "You're growing a beard, I see."

"Yeah—sensitive skin . . . it's a bloodbath when I shave. Literally," said Leo, with a quick glance that showed Nick that
he liked to make his point. "Then if I don't shave, I get these ingrowing hairs, fucking murder, have to pick the ends out
with a pin." He stroked his stubbly jaw with a small fine hand, and Nick saw that he had those shaving-bumps he had half-noticed
on other black men. "I tend to leave it for four days, say, five days, maybe, then have a good shave: try and avoid both problems
that way."

"Right . . . " said Nick, and smiled, partly because he was learning something interesting.

"Most of them still recognize me, though," said Leo, and gave a wink.

"No, it wasn't that," said Nick, who was too shy to explain his own shyness. His glance slipped up and down between Leo's
loose crotch and the neat shallow cushion of his hair, and tended to avoid his handsome face. He was taking Leo's word for
it that he was handsome, but it didn't quite cover the continuing shock of what was beautiful, strange, and even ugly about
him. The phrase "most of them" slowly took on meaning in his mind. "Anyway," he said, and took a quick sip of his drink, which
had a reassuring burn to it. "I suppose you've had lots of replies." Sometimes when he was nervous he asked questions to which
he would rather not have known the answers.

Leo made a little puff of comic exhaustion. "Yeah . . . yeah, I'm not answering some of them. It's a joke. They don't include
a picture, or if they do they look horrible. Or they're ninety-nine years old. I even had a thing from a woman, a lesbian
woman admittedly, with a view to would I father her child." Leo frowned indignantly but there was something sly and flattered
in his look too. "And some of the stuff they write. It's disgusting! It's not like I'm just looking for a bonk, is it? This
is something a bit different."

"Quite," said Nick—though bonk was a troublingly casual way of referring to something which preoccupied him so much.

"This dog's been round the block a few times," Leo said, and looked off down the street as if he might spot himself coming
home. "Anyway, you looked nice. You've got nice writing."

"Thanks. So have you."

Leo took in the compliment with a nod. "And you can spell," he said.

Nick laughed. "Yes, I'm good at that." He'd been afraid that his own little letter sounded pedantic and virginal, but it seemed
he'd got it about right. He didn't remember it calling for any great virtuosity of spelling. "I always have trouble with 'moccasin,'"
he said.

"Ah, there you are . . . " said Leo, with a wary chuckle, before changing the subject. "It's nice where you live," he said.

"Oh . . . yes . . ." said Nick, as if he couldn't quite remember where it was.

"I went by there the other day, on the bike. I nearly rang your bell."

"Mm—you, should have. I've had the place virtually to myself." He felt sick at the thought of the missed chance.

"Yeah? I saw this girl going in . . ."

"Oh, that was probably only Catherine."

Leo nodded. "Catherine. She's your sister, yeah?"

"No, I don't have a sister. She's actually the sister of my friend Toby." Nick smiled and stared: "It's not my house."

"Oh . . ." said Leo. "Oh."

"God, I don't come from that sort of background. No, I just live there. It belongs to Toby's parents. I've just got a tiny
little room up in the attic." Nick was rather surprised to hear himself throwing his whole fantasy of belonging there out
of the window.

Leo looked a bit disappointed. He said, "Right . . . " and shook his head slowly.

"I mean they're very good friends, they're a sort of second family to me, but I probably won't be there for long. It's just
to help me out, while I'm getting started at university."

"And I thought I'd got myself a nice little rich boy," Leo said. And perhaps he meant it, Nick couldn't be sure, they were
total strangers after all, though a minute before he'd imagined them naked together in the Feddens' emperor-size bed. Was
that why his letter did the trick—the address, the Babylonian notepaper?

"Sorry," he said, with a hint of humour. He drank some more of the sweet strong rum and Coke, so obviously not his kind of
drink. The refined blue of the dusk sky was already showing its old lonely reach.

Leo laughed. "I'm only kidding you!"

"I know," Nick said, with a little smile, as Leo reached out and squeezed his shoulder, just by his shirt collar, and slowly
let go. Nick reacted with his own quick pat at Leo's side. He was absurdly relieved. A charge passed into him through Leo's
fingers, and he saw the two of them kissing passionately, in a rush of imagination that was as palpable as this awkward pavement
rendezvous.

"Still, your friends must be rich," Leo said.

Nick was careful not to deny this. "Oh, they're rolling in money."

"Yeah . . . " Leo crooned, with a fixed smile; he might have been savouring the fact or condemning it. Nick saw further questions
coming, and decided at once he wouldn't tell him about Gerald. The evening demanded enough courage as it was. A Tory MP would
shadow their meeting like an unwelcome chaperon, and Leo would get on his bike and leave them to it. He could say something
about Rachel's family, perhaps, if an explanation was called for. But in fact Leo emptied his glass and said, "Same again?"

Nick hastily finished his own drink, and said, "Thanks. Or maybe this time I'll have a shot of rum in it."

After half an hour more Nick had slid into a kind of excited trance brought on by his new friend's presence and a feeling,
as the sky darkened and the street lamps brightened from pink to gold, that it was going to work out. He felt nervous, slightly
breathless, but at the same time buoyant, as if a lonely responsibility had been taken off him. A couple of places came free
at the end of a picnic table with fixed benches, and they sat leaning towards each other as though playing, and then half-forgetting,
some invisible game. For Nick the ease and comfort of the rum were indistinguishable parts of the intimacy which he felt deepening
like the dusk.

He found himself wondering how they looked and sounded to the people around them, the couple beside them at the table. It
was all getting noisier as the evening went on, with a vague sense of heterosexual threat. Nick guessed Leo's other dates
would have met him in a gay pub, but he had flunked that further challenge. Now he regretted the freedom he would have had
there. He wanted to stroke Leo's cheek and kiss him, with a sigh of surrender.

Nothing very personal was said. Nick found it hard to interest Leo in his own affairs, and his various modest leads about
his family and his background were not picked up. There were things he'd prepared and phrased and turned into jokes that were
not to be heard—or not tonight. Once or twice he took Leo with him: into a falsely cheerful dismissal of the idea that Toby,
though fairly attractive, was of any real interest to him (Leo would think him a weirdo to have loved so long and pointlessly);
into a sketch of Rachel's banking family, which Leo interrupted with a sour smile, as if it was all proof of some general
iniquity. He had a certain caustic preoccupation with money, Nick could see; and when he told Leo that his father was an antiques
dealer the two words, with the patina of old money and the flash of business, seemed to combine in a dull glare of privilege.
Among his smart Oxford friends Nick managed to finesse his elbow-patched old man, with his Volvo estate full of blanket-wrapped
mirrors and Windsor chairs, into a more luminous figure, a scholar and friend of the local aristocracy. Now he felt a timid
need to humble him. And he was wrong, because Leo's long-time boyfriend, Pete, had been an antiques dealer, on the Portobello
Road. "Mainly French work," Leo said. "Ormolu. Boulle." It was the first clear thing he had said about his private past. And
then he changed the subject.

Leo was certainly quite an egotist—Catherine's graphological analysis had been spot on. But he didn't expound his inner feelings.
He did something Nick couldn't imagine doing himself, which was to make statements about the sort of person he was. "I'm the
sort of guy who needs a lot of sex," he said, and, "I'm like that, I always say what I think." Nick wondered for a moment
if he'd inadvertently contradicted him. "I don't bear grudges," Leo said sternly: "I'm not that kind of person." "I'm sure
you're not," Nick said, with a quick discountenancing shudder. And perhaps this was a useful skill, or tactic, in the blind-date
world, even if Nick's modesty and natural fastidiousness kept him from replying in the same style ("I'm the sort of guy who
likes Pope more than Wordsworth," "I'm crazy about sex but I haven't had it yet"). It added to the excitement of the evening.
He wasn't here to share quickly matched intuitions with an Oxford friend. He loved the hard self-confidence of his date; and
at the same time, in his silent, superior way, he thought he heard how each little brag was the outward denial of an inner
doubt.

With the third drink Nick grew warm and half-aroused and he looked undisguisedly at Leo's lips and neck and imagined unbuttoning
the shiny blue short-sleeved shirt that cut so tightly under his arms. Leo hooded his eyes for a second, a signal, secret
and ironic, and Nick wondered if it meant he could see he was drunk. He wasn't sure if he should somehow signal back—he grinned
and took another quick sip. He had the feeling that Leo had drunk Coke since he was a child, and that it was one of the nearly
unnoticed facts of life to him, beyond choice or criticism. Whereas in his family it was one of a thousand things that were
frowned on—there had never been a can or bottle of it in the house. Leo couldn't possibly have imagined it, but the glass
of Coke in Nick's hand was a secret sign of submission, and afterwards the biting sweetness of the drink, like flavouring
in a medicine, seemed fused with the other experiments of the night in a complex impression of darkness and freedom. Leo yawned
and Nick glanced into his mouth, its bright white teeth uncorrupted by all the saccharine and implying, Nick humbly imagined,
an almost racial disdain for his own stoppings and slants. He put his hand on Leo's forearm for a moment, and then wished
he hadn't—it made Leo look at his watch.

"Time's getting on," he said. "I can't be late getting back."

Nick looked down and mumbled, "Do you have to get back?" He tried to smile but he knew his face was stiff with sudden anxiety.
He moved his wet glass in circles on the rough-sawn table top. When he glanced up again he found Leo was gazing at him sceptically,
one eyebrow arched.

"I meant back to your place, of course," he said.

Nick grinned and reddened at the beautiful reversal, like a teased child abruptly reprieved, rewarded. But then he had to
say, "I don't think we can . . ."

Leo looked at him levelly. "Not enough room?"

Nick winced and waited—the truth was he didn't dare, he just couldn't do that to Rachel and Gerald, it was vulgar and unsafe,
the consequences unspooled ahead of him, their happy routines of chortling agreement would wither for ever. "I don't think
we can. I don't mind going up to your place."