The Line of Beauty

  "Urn, yes, yes he is . . . Nick!" he called back—but Nick was already coming through, with a strange stilted walk, it seemed to himself, of embarrassment and pride. It was abrupt and confusing but he couldn't stop smiling. It was the first time in his life he'd had a lover call for him, and the fact had a scandalous dazzle to it. Gerald didn't ask Leo in, but stood back a little to let Nick pass and to see if there was going to be any kind of trouble.

  "Hello, Nick," said Leo.

  "Leo!"

  Nick shook his hand and kept holding it as he stepped out onto the shallow porch, between the gleaming Tuscan pillars.

  "How's it going?" said Leo, giving his cynical little smile, but his eyes almost caressing, passing Nick a secret message, and then nodding him a sign that Gerald had withdrawn; though he must have been able to hear him saying, ". . . some pal of Nick's . . ." and a few moments later, "No, black chappie."

  "I'm so pleased to see you," Nick said, with a certain caution because he didn't want to look mad with excitement. And then, "I've been thinking of you. And wondering what you were up to," sounding a bit like his mother when she was fondly suppressing a critical note. He looked at Leo's head as if he had never seen anything like it before, his nose, his stubble, the slow sheepish smile that admitted his own vulnerability.

  "Yeah, got your message," Leo said. He gazed down the wide white street, and Nick remembered his authentic but mysterious phrase about how he'd been round the block a few times. "Sorry I didn't get back to you."

  "Oh, that's all right," said Nick, and he found the weeks of waiting and failure were already half forgotten.

  "Yeah, I've been a bit off colour," Leo said.

  "Oh, no." Nick poured himself into believing this, and felt the lovely new scope it gave him for sympathy and interference. "I'm so sorry . . ."

  "Chesty thing," said Leo: "couldn't seem to shake it off."

  "But you're better now . . ."

  "Ooh, yeah!" said Leo, with a wink and a squirm; which made Nick think he could say,

  "Too much outdoor sex, I expect." Really he didn't know what was allowed, what was funny and what was inept. He feared his innocence showed.

  "You're bad, you are," said Leo appreciatively. "You're a very bad boy." He was wearing the same old jeans of their first date, which for Nick now had a touching anecdotal quality, he knew them and loved them; and a zipped-up tracksuit top which made him look ready for action, or for inaction, the rigours and hanging about of training. "I haven't forgotten our little tangle in the bushes."

  "Nor have I," said Nick, with giddy understatement, glancing over his shoulder.

  "I thought, he's a shy one, a bit stuck-up, but there's something going on inside those corduroy trousers, I'll give him a go. And how right I was, Henry!"

  Nick blushed with pleasure and wished there was a way to distinguish shy from stuck-up—the muddle had dogged him for years. He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

  "Anyway, I was in the area, so I thought I'd try my luck." Leo looked him up and down meaningfully, but then said, "I've just got to drop in on old Pete, down the Portobello—I don't know if you want to come."

  "Sure!" said Nick, thinking that a visit to Leo's ex was hardly his ideal scenario for their second date.

  "Just for a minute. He's not been well, old Pete."

  "Oh, I'm sorry . . . " said Nick, though this time without the rush of possessive sympathy. He watched a black cab crawling towards them, a figure peering impatiently in the back; it stopped just in front of them, and the driver clawed round through his open window to release the rear door. When the passenger (who Nick knew was Lady Partridge) didn't emerge, a very rare thing happened and the cabbie got out of the cab and yanked the door open himself, standing aside with a flourish which she acknowledged drily as she stepped out.

  "Now who's this old battleaxe?" said Leo. And there was certainly something combative in her sharp glance at the two figures on the front steps, and in her sharp blue dress and jacket, as if she'd come for dinner rather than a family lunch. Nick smiled broadly at her and called out, "Hello, Lady Partridge!"

  "Hullo," said Lady Partridge, with the minimal warmth, the hurrying good grace, of a famous person hailed by an unknown fan. Nick couldn't believe that she'd forgotten him, and went on with almost satirical courtesy,

  "May I introduce my friend Leo Charles? Lady Partridge." Up close the old woman's jacket, heavily embroidered with glinting black and silver thread, had a scaly texture, on which finer fabrics might have snagged and laddered. She smiled and said,

  "How do you do?" in an extraordinarily cordial tone, in which none the less something final was conveyed—the certainty that they would never speak again. Leo was saying hello and offering his hand but she had already drifted past him and in through the open front door. "Gerald, Rachel darling!" she called, edgy with the need for reassurance.

  The Portobello Road was only two minutes' stroll from the Feddens' green front door, and there was no time for a love scene. Leo was walking his bike with one hand, and Nick ambled beside him, possibly looking quite normal but feeling giddily attentive, as if hovering above himself. It was that experience of walking on air, perhaps, that people spoke of, and which, like roller skating, you could master with practice, but which on this first try had him teetering and lurching. He had such an important question to ask that he found himself saying something else instead. "I see you know about Gerald, then," he said.

  "Your splendid Mr Fedden," said Leo, in his deadpan way, almost as if he knew that splendid was one of Gerald's top words. "Well, I could tell there was something you didn't want me to know, and that always gets me—I'm like that. And then your friend Geoffrey in the garden was going on something about parliament—I thought, I'll look into all this at work. Electoral roll, Who's Who, we know all about you . . ."

  "I see," said Nick, flattered but taken aback by this first glimpse of the professional Leo. Of course he'd done similar researches himself when he'd fallen for Toby. There had been a proxy thrill to it, Gerald's date of birth, pastimes, and various directorships standing in somehow for the intimate details, the kisses and more he had wanted from his son. He thought it probably wasn't like that for Leo.

  "He's quite nice-looking for a Tory," Leo said.

  "Yes, everyone seems to fancy him except me," said Nick.

  Leo gave him a shrewd little smile. "I don't say I fancy him exactly," he said. "He's like someone on the telly."

  "Well, soon I'm sure he will be someone on the telly. Actually of course there are monsters on both sides—looks-wise."

  "True enough."

  Nick hesitated. "There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism, though, isn't there."

  "Yeah?"

  "That blue's an impossible colour."

  Leo nodded thoughtfully. "I wouldn't say that was their main problem," he said.

  The weekend crowds were pressing steadily along the lane from the station and down the steep hill into the market. Pete's establishment was in the curving row of shops on the left: PETER MAWSON in gold on black, like an old jeweller's, the windows covered in mesh though today the shop was open. Leo shouldered the door and the wired doormat, as he stood there manoeuvring the bike in, kept sounding a warning chime. Nick had peered into the shop before, on one of the dead weekdays, when it was all locked up, and the mail lay unattended across the floor. There was a pair of marble-topped Empire tables in the windows flanking the door, and beyond that a space that looked more like a half-empty warehouse than a shop.

  Pete could be heard on the phone in a back room. Leo propped up his bike in a familiar way and wandered through, and Nick was left alone, blinking longingly at that last image of him, the slight bounce or dance in his step. He heard Pete ringing off, a murmur of kissing and hugging. "Ooh, you know . . . " said Pete. "No, I'm a bit better."

  "I've brought my nice new friend Nick round to see you," said Leo, in a silly cheerful voice which made Nick realize this
might be an awkward half-hour for all of them. He was very sensitive to anything that might be said. As so often he felt he had the wrong kind of irony, the wrong knowledge, for gay life. He was still faintly shocked, among other emotions of interest and excitement, at the idea of a male couple. He and Leo had come together, in their odd transitory way, but the truth was they weren't yet a couple themselves.

  "So what's all this?" Pete asked, following Leo back into the room.

  "This is Pete, this is Nick," said Leo, with a large smile and a mime of urging them together. The effort to charm and reassure was a side of him that Nick hadn't seen before; it seemed to make all sorts of other things possible, in the longer view. "Pete's my best old friend," he said, in his cockney voice of concessions. "Aren't you, darlin'?" They shook hands, and Pete winced, as at the grip of something not quite welcome, and said,

  "I see you've been hanging around the school gates again, you terrible old man."

  Leo raised an eyebrow and said, "Well, I won't remind you how old I was when you snatched me from my pram."

  Nick laughed eagerly, though it was a kind of camp slapstick he didn't naturally find funny, and it was surprisingly painful to be given a glimpse of their past together. He found himself picturing and half believing the story of Leo in his pram. Being small and fresh-faced was usually an advantage, but he was anxious not to be thought a child. "Actually, I'm twenty-one," he said, in a mock-gruff tone.

  "Hark at him!" Pete said.

  "Nick lives just round the corner," said Leo. "Kensington Park Gardens."

  "Oh. Very nice."

  "Well, I'm just staying there for a while, with an old college friend."

  Leo tactfully didn't elaborate; he said, "He knows about furniture. His old man's in the trade."

  Pete made a shrugging gesture that took in the sparse contents of the shop. "Feel free . . . " he said; so Nick had politely to do that, while the old lovers fell back into quiet scoffing chatter, which he deliberately blocked out with tunes in his head, not wanting to learn anything, good or bad. He examined some knocked-about Louis Seize chairs, a marble head of a boy, a suspiciously brilliant ormolu-mounted cabinet, and the pair of tables in the window, which made him think of the ones turned into washstands at Hawkeswood. One wall was covered with a huge dreary tapestry showing a bacchanalian scene, with figures dancing and embracing under red and brown trees; it was too high for the space, and on its loosely rolled bottom edge a satyr with a grin seemed to slide forwards like a limbo dancer on to the floor.

  The only real object of interest, the thing to acknowledge and be equal to, was Pete himself. He was perhaps in his mid-forties, with a bald patch in his sandy hair and a bit of grey in his thin beard. He was lean, an inch or two taller than Nick and Leo, but already slightly stooped. He wore tight old jeans and a denim shirt, and something else, which was an attitude, a wearily aggressive challenge—he seemed to come forward from an era of sexual defiance and fighting alliances and to cast a dismissive eye over a little chit like Nick, who had never fought for anything. Or so Nick explained his own sense of discomfort, the recurrent vague snobbery and timidity with which he peered into the world of actually existing gayness. Nick had pictured Pete as the fruity kind of antique-dealer, or even as a sexless figure like his own father, with a bow tie and a trim white beard. That Pete should be as he was threw such a novel light over Leo. He glanced at Leo now, with his sublime little bottom perched on the corner of Pete's desk, and saw him totally at home with a far from attractive middle-aged man—he had been his lover and done a hundred things with him that Nick still only dreamed of, time and time again. Nick didn't know how it had ended, or when; they seemed to share the steadiness of something both long established and over, and he envied them, although it wasn't quite what he wanted himself. It was part of Leo's game, or maybe just his style, to have told Nick almost nothing; but if Pete was Leo's kind of man it looked suddenly unlikely that Nick would be chosen to replace him.

  "Have a look at that, Nick," Pete called out, as if amiably trying to keep him occupied. "You know what that is."

  "That's a nice little piece," said Leo.

  "It's a very nice little piece," said Pete. "Louis Quinze."

  Nick ran his eye over the slightly cockled boulle inlay. "Well, it's an encoignure," he said, and with a chance at charm: "n'est-ce pas?"

  "It's what we call a corner cupboard," Pete said. "Where did you get this one, babe?"

  "Ooh . . . I just found him on the street," said Leo, gazing quite sweetly at Nick and then giving him a wink. "He looked a bit lost."

  "Hardly a mark on him," said Pete.

  "Not yet," said Leo.

  "So where's your father's shop, Nick?" said Pete.

  "Oh, it's in Barwick—in Northamptonshire?"

  "Don't they pronounce that Barrick?"

  "Only frightfully grand people."

  Pete lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, and then coughed and looked almost sick. "Ah, that's better," he said. "Yes, Bar-wick. I know Barwick. It's what you'd call a funny old place, isn't it."

  "It has a very fine eighteenth-century market hall," Nick said, to help him to remember it.

  "I picked up a little Directoire bureau there once, bombe it was, you'll know what that means."

  "That probably wasn't from us. It was probably Gaston's. My father sells mainly English things."

  "Yeah? What's trade like up there these days?"

  "Pretty slow, actually," Nick said.

  "It's at a fucking standstill here. It's going backwards. Another four years of Madam and we'll all be on the street." Pete coughed again and flapped away Leo's attempt to take the cigarette off him. "So how long have you been in London, Nick?"

  "About . . . six weeks?"

  "Six weeks . . . I see. You'll still be doing the rounds, then. Or are you just shopping local? You've done the Volunteer."

  Leo saw Nick hesitating, and said, "I wouldn't want him going to that old flea-box. At least not till he's sixty, like everyone else in there."

  "I'm exploring a bit," said Nick.

  "I don't know, where do the young things go these days?"

  "Well, there's the Shaftesbury," Nick said, naming a pub that Polly Tompkins had described as the scene of frequent conquests.

  "You're not so much of a pubber, though, are you?" Leo said.

  "He wants to get down the Lift," said Pete, "if he's a bit of a chocoholic."

  Nick blushed and shook his head dumbly. "I don't know really." He was very embarrassed, in front of Leo, but undeniably fascinated to have his taste guessed at and defined. He felt he had only just guessed at it himself.

  "When did you meet Miss Leontyne?"

  That he knew exactly, but said, "About three weeks ago," feeling more foolish with his quick straight answers to chaffing questions. He didn't flinch at the girl's name for Leo, and he had sometimes laboured through whole conversations calling Polly Tompkins "she," but he'd never found it as necessary or hilarious as some people did.

  "That's what I call her," said Pete, "Leontyne Price-tag. I hope you've got your chequebook ready."

  There was nothing to say to this, but Leo muttered dutifully, "There's not much you don't know about price tags, is there, Pete."

  Nick tittered and watched the affronted look fade from Pete's drawn features as he smoked and gazed at the dreary tapestry. It could have been one of those items which never sell, which the dealer ends up almost giving away because they seem to bring bad luck on the whole shop. He remembered that Pete had been ill, though he didn't know in what way. "I've got this fucking great bed," Pete said. "I can't shift it." The phone rang, and he went off into the back room. "Have a look at it."

  The bed had been taken apart and the fluted poles, the ornate square frame of the canopy and the head- and footboards inset with painted rococo scenes were leaning up against the wall. "Let's have a look at this, then," Leo said, wandering over and briefly stroking Nick's arm as he passed; he was being sweet to both of them,
he surely didn't really want to look at the bed. They didn't want to move anything in case it all fell over. Nick peered at the faded gilt and the unpolished inner edges that would normally be hidden. All his life he'd looked at furniture from odd angles, and he still had his childhood sense of tables and sideboards as elaborate little wooden buildings that you could crawl into, their bosses and capitals and lion-heads at face height, their rough under-surfaces retaining a dim odour of the actual wood. This was a very grand bed, but there was worm in the frame and apparently it had no hangings with it. He felt the old impulse to put it together and get into it. Leo squatted down to look at the picture on the footboard. "This is nice," he said. "What do you think?"

  Nick, standing behind him, gazed down on him as he had on their first date, when he was fiddling with the bike. Then he looked away, almost guiltily, at the wide-skirted ladies and their lovers in doublets, plucking at lutes; the trees that were blue and silver. Then he looked down again, at where Leo's beltless jeans stood away from his waist. He had lived and lingered through that glimpse a hundred times since their first meeting, it was almost more powerful and emblematic than the sex that had followed: the swell of Leo's hardened buttocks, the provoking blue horizontal of his briefs. So to be offered a second look had a double force, like the confirmation of a promise, and Nick's hesitation was only the twitch of wariness he felt at any prospect of happiness. "It's very nice," he said.

  Leo shifted slightly on his heels. "Can you see?" he said.

  Nick was grinning and sighing at the same time. "Yes, I can see," he said, in a murmur that shrank the conversation away from Pete into heady subterfuge.

  "And what do you think?" asked Leo brightly.

  "Oh . . . it's beautiful," Nick whispered. He checked the open door to the back room before he stooped and slid his hand in and verified that this time there was no blue horizontal, there was only smooth, shaved, curving Leo. A second or two, and then Nick straightened up and put his hands gently round Leo's neck—who tipped back against his legs for support, and rolled his shoulder a couple of times against Nick's hard-on.