He took in the tiny kitchen in a photographic glance, the wall units with sliding frosted-glass doors, the orange curtains, the church calendar with its floating Jesus, the evidence of little necessary systems, heaped papers, scary wiring, bowls stacked within bowls, and the stove with plates misted and beaded on the rack above a bubbling pan; and at the centre Leo's mother, fiftyish, petite, with hooded eyes and straightened hair and a charitable smile of her own. "You're very welcome," she said, and her voice had the warm West Indian colour that Leo kept only as a special effect or a temporary camouflage. "Thank you," said Nick. "It's very good to meet you." He was so used to living by hints and approximations that there had always been something erotic in meeting the family of a man he was in love with, as if he could get a further vicarious fix on him by checking genetic oddities, the shared curve of the nose or echoing laziness of step. In the rich air of Kensington Park Gardens he seemed to live in the constant diffused presence of Toby, among people who were living allusions to him and thus a torment as well as a kind of consolation. But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the mother of the man who called him not only a "damn good fuck" but also a "hot little cocksucker" with "a first-class degree in arse-licking." Which clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a trance of revelation and gratitude.
And then there was Rosemary, coming in from work, home early, it seemed, to help her mother out with this underexplained guest they had. She was a doctor's receptionist, and wore a blouse and skirt under her belted mac. They had an awkward introduction, edging round Leo's bike in the hall. Perhaps it was shyness, but she seemed disdainful of Nick. He looked for her prettiness, and thought she was like a silky fluffy version of Leo, without the devastating detail of an ingrowing beard. Then brother and sister both went off to change. Nick couldn't work out the plan of the house, but there were subdivided rooms at the back, and a sense of carrying closeness that made the bike entirely necessary; it waited there, shuddered and jangled faintly as Nick bumped against it, as if conscious of its own trapped velocity.
"Ah, that bicycle," said Mrs Charles, as if it was some profane innovation. "I told him . . ."
They went into the front room, in which a heavy oak dining table and chain, with bulbous Jacobean-style legs, were jammed in beside a three-piece suite that was covered in shiny ginger leather, or something like it. There was a gas fire with a beaten copper surround under a ledge crowded with religious souvenirs. Mrs Charles's church life clearly involved a good deal of paperwork, and half the table was stacked with box-files and a substantial print-run of the tract "Welcoming Jesus In Today." Nick sat down at the end of the sofa and peered politely at the pictures, a large framed "mural" of a palm-fronded beach and a reproduction of Holman Hunt's The Shadow of Death. There were also studio photos of Leo and Rosemary as children, in which Nick felt himself taking an almost paedophiliac interest.
"Now, young sir," said Mrs Charles, with a clarity of enunciation that sounded both anxious and arch, "he tells me next to nothing, Leo, you know, at all. But I think you're the fellow who lives in the big white house, belongs to the MP?"
"Yes, I am," Nick said, with a self-deprecating laugh which seemed to puzzle her. Leo must have been talking up these facts to impress her, though on other occasions they were the object of vague derision.
"And how do you like it?" Mrs Charles asked.
"Well, I'm very lucky," Nick said. "I'm only there because I was at university with one of their children."
"So, you met her?"
Nick smiled back with a little pant of uncertainty. "What, Mrs Fedden, you mean . . ."
"No . . . ! Mrs Fedden . . . I assume you met Mrs Fedden, if I'm saying her name correctly." Nick blushed, and then smiled as he saw the way, simple but nimble, religious even, that she'd gone for the big question. "No—her. The lady herself. Mrs T!"
"Oh . . . No. No, I haven't. Not yet. . ." He felt obliged to go on, rather indiscreetly, "I know they'd love to have her round, he, um, Gerald Fedden, has tried to get her at least once. He's very ambitious."
"Ah, you want to make sure and meet Mrs T."
"Well, I'll certainly tell you if I do," said Nick, looking round gratefully as Leo came into the room. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and Nick had a vivid image of him ejaculating. Then he saw the heavy spit as it loitered and drooled down the taut ginger back of the sofa. He felt deliciously brainwashed by sex, when he closed his eyes phallus chased phallus like a wallpaper pattern across the dark, and at any moment the imagery of anal intercourse, his new triumph and skill, could gallop in surreal montage across the street or classroom or dining table.
"And can I be allowed to hope you are a regular church-attender?"
Nick crossed his legs to hide his excitement and said, "I'm not really, I'm afraid. At the moment, anyway."
Mrs Charles looked used to such disappointments, and almost cheerful, as if taking a very long view. "And what about your father and mother?"
"Oh, they're very religious. My father's a churchwarden, and my mother often does the church flowers . . . for instance." He hoped this compensated, rather than merely highlighting, his own delinquency.
"I'm very happy to hear it. And what is your father's occupation?" she demanded, pressing on in interview mode, which made Nick wonder if she did somehow know, however subconsciously, that he was trying to tie his life to her son's. He was a puzzle, Nick, in many contexts—he was often being interviewed obliquely, to see how he fitted in.
He said, "He's an antiques dealer—old furniture and clocks, mostly, and china."
Mrs Charles looked up at Leo. "Well, isn't that the exact same thing as old Pete!"
"Yeah," said Leo, whose whole manner was withdrawn and unhelpful. He dragged out one of the dining chairs and sat down at the table behind them. "There's a lot of antique dealers about."
"The exact same thing," said Mrs Charles. "You go on, look around. We got some good old antiques here. You don't know old Pete?"
"Yes, I do," Nick said, glancing round the room and wondering what Pete had said about it all before him, and how Pete had been explained to her.
"It's a small little world," she marvelled.
"Well, Leo introduced me to him . . ."
"Ah, he's a good man, old Pete. You know we always called him 'old' Pete, though he can't be not more than fifty."
"He's forty-four," said Leo.
"He was a great help to my son. He helped him with getting through college, and with the job on the council. And he didn't stand to get nothing from it—leastways not in this world. I always say to Leo he's his fairy godfather."
"Something like that," said Leo, with the sourness of a child subjected to the astounding iterations of a parent's treasured phrases—treasured often because they put a bright gloss on some anxious denial. The clumsy unconscious joke in this one must have made it specially wearing.
"A proper decent father Leo didn't have," said Mrs Charles candidly, and again with an almost cunning air of satisfaction that they had been so tested. "But the Lord looks after his own. And now, don't you reckon he's a good boy?"
"Yes, he's . . . splendid!" said Nick.
"What's for tea?" said Leo.
"I'm hoping your sister is bringing it off now," said Mrs Charles. "We're giving our guest our special spicy chops and rice. In this country," she observed to Nick, "you don't fry the chops so much, you're always grilling them, isn't that right?"
"Um . . . I don't know. I think we do both." He thought of his own mother, as an embodiment of any such supposed tradition; but went on charmingly, "But if you fry them rather than grilling them, then that's also what we do in this country!"
"Ha . . . " said Mrs Charles, "well that's certainly one way of looking at the matter."
At table the movement of Nick's left arm was limited by the leaning tower of "W
elcoming Jesus In Today." He came down on his food in a hesitant but predatory fashion. The meal was a bold combination of bland and garishly spicy, and he wondered if Rosemary had mockingly overdone the chillies to make fun of his good manners. He was full of round-eyed appreciation, which was also a cover for the surprise of having his evening meal at five forty-five; some absurd social reflex, the useful shock of class difference, a childish worry perhaps at a changed routine, all combined in a mood of interesting alienation. At Kensington Park Gardens they ate three hours later, and dinner was sauntered towards through a sequence of other diversions, chats and decantings, gardening and tennis, gramophone records, whisky and gin. In the Charles household there was no room for diversions, no garden to speak of, and no alcohol. The meal came on straight after work, a wide-ranging grace was declaimed, and then it was eaten and done with, and the whole long evening lay ahead. There were things Nick guessed about them, from the habits of his own family, which lay somewhere between the two; but there were others he would have to wait for and learn. He had never been in a black household before. He saw that first love had come with a bundle of other firsts, which he took hold of like a wonderful but worrying bouquet.
After a longish silence Leo said, "So how's it going at college?" as if they hardly knew each other.
"Oh, it's all right," said Nick, disconcerted but then touched by Leo's stiffness. Whenever Leo was cold or rough to him he felt it like a child—then he turned it round and found some thwarted love in it. He was in awe of Leo, but he saw through him too, and each time he followed this little process of indulgence he felt more in love. "It hasn't been very exciting so far. I suppose it's just different from what I've been used to." He always came away from the sunless back court where the English department was with two or three newly shaped anecdotes, which gave his days there a retrospective sparkle; but he found it hard to interest Leo in them and they often went to waste. Or they were stored up, with a shadowy sense of resentment.
"He was at Oxford University before," said Leo.
"And now where is he?" Mrs Charles wondered.
"I'm at University College," Nick said. "I'm doing a doctorate now."
Leo chewed and frowned. "Yeah, what is it again?"
"Oh . . . " said Nick, with a disparaging wobble of the head, as if he couldn't quite get the words out. "I'm just doing something on style in the—oh, in the English novel!"
"Aaaah yes," said Mrs Charles, with a serene nod, as if to say that this was something infinitely superior but also of course fairly foolish.
Nick said, "Umm . . ."—but then she broke out,
"He's crazy for studying! I'm wondering just how old he is."
Nick chuckled awkwardly. "I'm twenty-one."
"And he doesn't look like no more than a little boy, does he, Rosemary?"
Rosemary didn't answer exactly, but she raised one eyebrow and seemed to cut her food up in a very ironical way. Nick was blushing red and it took him a moment to notice Leo's embarrassment, the mysterious black blush, frowningly denied. His secret was heavy in his face, and Nick suddenly understood that the difference in their ages mattered to Leo, and that even an innocent reference to it seemed to lay his fantasy bare. Old Pete was licensed by being old, an obscurely benign institution; it was much harder to account for his friendship with a studious little boy of twenty-one.
Nick had to go on, though he could hear that he was out of tune, "Of course one misses one's friends—it takes a while to settle down—I expect it will all be marvellous in the end!" There was another rather critical pause, so he went on, "The English department used to be a mattress factory. At least half the tutors seem to be alcoholics!"
Both these remarks had gone down rather well at Kensington Park Gardens, and had left Nick suppressing a smile at his own silliness. But all families are silly in their own way, and now he was left with a puzzled and possibly offended silence. Leo chewed slowly and gave him a completely neutral look. "Mattresses, yeah?" he said.
Rosemary stared firmly at her plate and said, "I should think they ought to get help."
Nick gave an apologetic laugh. "Oh . . . of course, they should. You're quite right. I wish they would!"
After a while Mrs Charles said, "You know, all the men like that, that's got that sort of problems, each and every one of them got a great big hole right in the middle of their lives."
"Ah . . . " Nick murmured, flinching with courteous apprehension.
"And they can fill that hole, if only they know how, with the Lord Jesus. That's what we pray, that's what we always pray. Isn't that so, Rosemary?"
"That's what we do," said Rosemary, with a shake of the head to show there was no denying it.
"So what's your success rate?" said Leo, in a surprisingly sarcastic tone; which explained itself when Mrs Charles leant confidentially towards Nick. You couldn't stop a mother when she was on the track of her "idea."
"I pray for all those in darkness to find Jesus, and I pray for the two children I've brought into this world to get themselves hitched up. At the altar, that's to say." And she laughed fondly, so that Nick couldn't tell what she really thought or knew.
Leo scratched his head and shivered with frustration, though there was a kind of fondness in him too, since he was going to disappoint her. Rosemary, who was clearly her mother's right hand, found herself linked with Leo, and protested flatly that she was ready, just as soon as the perfect man turned up. With her eyes half closed she had her mother's devout look. "There's nothing keeping me from the altar except that one thing," she said, and as the look fell on Leo she seemed to play with betrayal, and then once again to let it go.
When the fruit and ice cream had been brought in, Mrs Charles said to Nick, "I see you been looking at my picture there, of the Lord Jesus in the carpenter's shop."
"Oh . . . yes," said Nick, who'd really been trying to avoid looking at it, but had none the less found himself gingerly dwelling on it, since it hung just above Leo's shoulder, straight in front of him.
"You know, that's a very famous old picture."
"Yes, it is. You know, I saw the original of it quite recently—it's in Manchester."
"Yeah, I knew that's not the original when I saw one just the same in the Church House."
Nick smiled and blinked, not sure if he was being teased. "The original's huge, it's life-size," he said. "It's by Holman Hunt, of course . . ."
"Aha," Mrs Charles murmured and nodded, as if a vaguely unlikely attribution had been shown to her in a newly plausible light. It was just the sort of painting, doggedly literal and morbidly symbolic, that Nick liked least, and it was even worse life-size, when the literalism so cried out to be admired. "I heard tell he's the same fellow as painted The Light of the World, with the Lord Jesus knocking on the door."
"Oh yes, that's right," said Nick, like a schoolteacher pleased by the mere fact of a child's interest, and leaving questions of taste for much later. "Well, for that you only have to go to St Paul's Cathedral."
Mrs Charles took this in. "You hear that now, Rosemary? You and me's going out to St Paul's Cathedral any day now to look at that with our own naked eyes." And Nick saw her, in shiny shoes and the small black hat like an air hostess's that was nesting on a chair in the corner, making her way there, with waits at a number of bus stops, and the nervous patience of a pilgrim—he saw her, as if from the air, climbing the steps and going into the stupendous church, which he felt he owned, all ironically and art-historically, more than her, a mere credulous Christian. "Or else, of course, you and me can go . . . eh?" she said to Nick, somehow shyly not using his name.
"I'd love to do that," Nick said quickly, taking the chance to be kind and likeable that had been denied him earlier on.
"We'll go together and have a good look at it," said Mrs Charles.
"Excellent!" said Nick, and caught the hint of mockery in Leo's eyes.
Mrs Charles said, cocking her head on one side, "You know, they always got something clever about them, th
ese old pictures, don't they?"
"Often they do," Nick agreed.
"And you know the clever thing about this one now . . . " She gave him the tolerant but crafty look of someone who holds the answer to a trick question. To Nick the clever thing was perhaps the way that the Virgin, kneeling by the chest that holds the hoarded gifts of the Magi, and seeing the portent of the Crucifixion in her son's shadow cast on the rear wall of the room, has her face completely hidden from us, so that the painting's centre of consciousness, as Henry James might have thought of her, is effectively a blank; and that this was surely an anti-Catholic gesture. He said, "Well, the detail is amazing—those wood shavings look almost real, everything about it's so accurate . . ."
"No, no . . ." said Mrs Charles, with amiable scorn. "You see, the way the Lord Jesus is standing there, he's making a shadow on the wall that's just the exact same image of himself on the Cross!"
"Oh . . . yes," said Nick, "indeed . . . Isn't it called in fact —"
"And of course that all goes to show how the death of the Lord Jesus and his Resurrection is foretold in the Bible from ancient times."
Nick said, "Well, it certainly illustrates that view even if it doesn't prove it," in a perhaps misjudged tone of equable deliberation. Leo shot him a wincing glance and created a diversion.
"Yeah, I like the way he's got him yawning," he said; and he stretched his own arms out and up and tilted his head with a yawn that was just like the Lord Jesus except that he was holding an ice-cream-smeared dessert spoon in his left hand. It was the kind of camp you see sometimes in observant children—and Rosemary watched him with the smothered amazement and mocking anticipation of a good girl whose brother has been insolent and reckless. But she said,
"Mm, it makes me shiver when he does that."
Leo tutted and grinned, as his own shadow, in the room's less brilliant evening light, stretched and shrugged and faltered across the wall above his chair.