The Line of Beauty Read online

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  "SOMETHING 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 h
is 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.

  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 Vi
ctorian 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.