The Line of Beauty

  "God, the snobs."

  Nick laughed. "They're not really snobs," he said. "Well, he is perhaps a bit. They're . . ."It was hard to explain, hard to know, in the dense compact of the marriage, who sanctioned what. They were each other's alibi. And Nick saw that Leo was using the word in a looser way, to mean rich people, who lived in nice places, to mean nobs. It struck him that he might be about to take the whole treat of coming to Kensington Park Gardens and making love in a bed as an elaborate but crushing rebuff. He watched him sip some more, deliberately, and then wander towards the front windows. He tried to act on his advice of fifteen minutes earlier, tried to trust his Uncle Leo. The room was devised and laid out for entertaining, on a generous scale, and for a second, as if a thick door had opened, he heard the roar of accumulated talk and laughter, the consensual social roar, instead of the clock's ticking and the fizz of silence.

  "That's a nice bit of oyster," Leo said, pointing at a walnut commode. "And that's Sevres, if I'm not wrong, with that blue."

  "Yes, I think it is," Nick said, feeling that this nod at a common interest also brought old Pete rather critically into the room. Old Pete would have had some smart gay backchat to deal with an awkward moment like this.

  "No, they've got some nice pieces," Leo said, flatly, and a little ponderously, and so perhaps shyly. He turned round, nodding. "You've done well."

  "Darling, none of it's mine . . ."

  "I know, I know." Leo sat down at the piano, and after a moment's thought stood his glass on a book on the lid. "What's this, then. . . Mozart, all right, that's not too bad," checking the cover of the music on the stand, but letting it fall back to the eternally open Andante. "So what key's this in?"—as if the key required some special tactics, like a golf-shot. "F major . . ."

  "It's a funny old piano," said Nick. He felt that if Leo played the piano, especially if he played it badly, it would waken the unconscious demons of the house and bring them in yawning and protesting.

  "Ah, that's all right," Leo murmured courteously; and he started to play, with a distracted frown at the page. It was the great second movement of K533, spare, probing, Bach-like, that Nick had discovered, and tried to play, on the night when he'd lost his chance of meeting Leo—till Catherine had complained, and he'd apologized and doodled off into Waldorf music. To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, "vulgar and unsafe"—that was the worst thing. And the music seemed to know this, to know the irresistible curve of hope, and its hollow inversion. Leo played it pretty steadily, and Nick stood behind him, willing it along, nudging it through those quickly corrected wrong notes and tense hesitations that are a torture of sight-reading and yet heighten the rewards when everything runs clear and good. When Leo suddenly went steeply wrong he gave a disparaging shout, struck a few random chords, then reached for his glass. "Must be too pissed to play," he said, not necessarily joking.

  Nick sniggered. "You're good. I can't play that. I didn't know you could play." He felt very touched, and chastened, as if by a glimpse of his own unquestioned assumptions. It opened a new perspective, the sight of Leo in his jeans and sweatshirt and baseball boots raising Mozart out of the sonorous old Bosendorfer. And it seemed to have loosened him up, he was like a shy guest who makes a brilliant joke, its lustre heightened by delay and distillation, and who suddenly finds he's enjoying himself. Nick grabbed him from behind and squashed a kiss onto his cheek.

  Leo chuckled and said, "All right, babe . . ."

  Nick said, "I love you," shaking him in a tight hug, and grunting at the hard muscular heat of him. Leo reached up with his free right hand and gripped his arm. After a while he said,

  "That's a terrible picture."

  It was Norman Kent's portrait of Toby, aged sixteen, and it was the image—beyond the intimidating bronze bust of Liszt—on which the eyes of the doodling pianist tended to dwell. While Leo had been playing, it had lent its sickly colour to Nick's thoughts.

  "I know . . . Poor Toby."

  "Cos he's quite tasty, in my opinion."

  "Oh yes."

  "You never told me if you had him, when you were all up at Oxford University."

  Nick had still not quite let on to Leo that before their tangle in the bushes he had never exactly "had" anyone. He said, "No, no, he's completely straight."

  "Yeah?" said Leo, sceptically. "You must have had a go."

  "Not really," Nick said. He stood back, with his hands still on Leo's shoulders, and smiled wanly at the pink-faced blazered boy. The old regret could always come alive again, and for a moment even Leo, warm under his hands, seemed cheap and provisional compared to the unattainable bloom of Toby.

  "I just thought the way he kissed you and looked at you was a bit poofy."

  "Don't!" Nick murmured, and then laughed, pulling Leo to get him up, and get the real kisses from him, the ones that Toby would never give him.

  But Leo held out a moment longer. "So they're easy about having a bender in the house, are they, their lordships?"

  "Of course," said Nick. "They're absolutely fine with it." And in his mind he heard Catherine saying, "As long as it's never mentioned." He went on, with a degree of exaggeration, "They've got lots of gay friends. In fact they asked me to bring you here, darling."

  "Oh," said Leo, with a subtlety of register worthy of Rachel herself.

  Nick lay naked on top of the duvet, in quick-pulsed amazement. Leo had rung his mother, told her he was staying over: it was a risk, a yielding, and therefore a commitment. Nick listened to the hiss of the shower in the bathroom across the landing. Then, since he could see himself in the wardrobe mirror, he got under the bedclothes. He lay there, with one hand behind his head, in an almost painful state of happiness and worry. Far down below, the front door was triple-locked, the lights were all out in the drawing room and kitchen, the one lantern cast its cold glare into the hall. Catherine's bedroom door was closed, but he was certain she was out. They had the house to themselves. The window was open a notch, and he could hear the throat-tearing runs and trills of a robin that had taken to singing in the garden at night, and which he had eagerly decided was a nightingale; an old lady standing listening on the gravel path had put him right. He had still, therefore, never heard a nightingale, but he couldn't imagine it bettering his robin. The question was what time would Gerald and Rachel get back. But actually, probably, not till late, it was Gerald's "surgery" in the morning, then a two-hour drive. Nick smiled at their unconscious generosity.

  The shower-noise had stopped, and the robin skirled on, with sulky pauses and implacable resumptions. Nick would have liked it even better if Leo had come to bed without showering, he loved the faint sourness of his skin, the sharpness of his armpits, the sweet staleness deep between his legs. Leo's smells were little lessons constantly re-learnt, little shocks of authenticity. But to Leo himself they were a source of annoyance and almost of shame. He had a terribly keen sense of smell, revealed in a queue or a crowded room by a snubbed upper lip and an aristocratic flinching of the nostrils. He insisted he liked Nick's smells, and Nick, who had never really thought of himself as having smells, was nervously unsure if this was truth or chivalry. Perhaps it was a loving mixture of the two.

  There was a kind of magic in this—to be lying in bed, a single bed, with all that it implied, and playing gently with himself, and waiting for his lover to appear. It was the posture of a lifelong singleness, incessant imagining, the boy's supremacy in a world of dreams, where men kept turning up to do his bidding; and now, that rattle of the bathroom door, snap of the light cord, squeak of the landing floor, were the signals of an actual arrival, and within three seconds the door would open and Leo would come in—

  How black he looked, in the white skirt of a bath towel pulled tight round his buttocks and over the curbed jut of his dick. He held his folded clothes in his hands, like a recruit, stripped and scrubbed and given his slops—he looked around, then put them down on the desk, by the blue library books. He
was a trifle formal, he winked at Nick but he was clearly moved by the ordinariness and novelty of the moment. To Nick it darkened, it had the feeling of an elopement, of elated action haunted by the fears it had defied, of two lovers suddenly strangers to each other on their first night in a foreign hotel. But after all they had only eloped upstairs, it was absurd. He felt breathless pride at having Leo here. He threw back the duvet, and said, "I'm sorry about the bed"—shifting a bit to make room.

  "Eh . . . ?" said Leo.

  "I don't think you'll get much sleep."

  Leo let his towel drop to the floor and stared at Nick without smiling. "I'm not planning on getting any," he said.

  Nick accepted the challenge with a little moan. It was the first time he had seen Leo naked, and the first time he had seen the masking shadow of his face, lazily watchful, easily cynical, clever and obtuse by turns, melt into naked feeling. Leo breathed through his mouth, and his look was a wince of lust and also, it seemed to Nick, of self-accusation—that he had been so slow, so vain, so blind.

  "TO WHOM DO YOU BEAUTIFULLY BELONG?"

  (1986)

  7

  NICK WENT AHEAD on the path and held the gate open for Wani, so that for several seconds the outside world had a view of naked flesh before the gate, with its "Men Only" sign, swung shut behind them. It was a small compound, a concrete yard, with benches round the walls under a narrow strip of roof. It was like a courtyard of the classical world reduced to pipes and corrugated iron. There was something distantly classical, too, in the protracted nakedness, and something English, school-like and comfortless in the concrete and tin and the pond-water smell. Nick crossed the open space, past the books and towels of one or two sunbathers, and he saw it take account of them, someone greeted him, conversations stretched and lulled, and he felt the gaze of the little crowd, like idle fingertips, run over him and come to rest, more tenderly and curiously, on Wani. Wani, in ice-blue mirror shades, was a figure of novel beauty, and only Nick perhaps, sitting down and beckoning to him, saw the wariness in his half-smile.

  "Mm, very primitive," Wani said, as if the place confirmed a suspicion he had about Nick.

  Nick said, "I know," and grinned—it was just what he loved about it.

  "Where do we put our things?"

  "Just leave them here, they'll be fine."

  But Wani flinched at this. He had the keys to the Mercedes in his jeans pocket, and his watch, as he had told Nick more than once, cost a thousand pounds. "Yah, maybe I won't go in." And maybe Nick, who had never owned anything, was guilty of failing to imagine the worries of a millionaire.

  "Really, it'll be fine. Put your stuff in here," he said, offering him the Tesco carrier bag which had held his towel and trunks.

  "This watch cost a thousand pounds," said Wani.

  "Perhaps don't tell everyone about it," Nick said.

  There was an old man drying near them, squat and bandy and brown all over, and Nick remembered him from last year, an occupant of the place, of the compound and the jetty and the pond, and more especially of the screened inner yard where on a hot day men sunbathed naked, hip to hip. He was lined but handsome, and Nick felt that smoothed and uniformed, in vigilant half-profile, his picture could well have accompanied the obituary of a general or air vice-marshal. He nodded amiably at him, as a leathery embodiment of the spirit of the place, and the old man said, "George has gone, then. Steve's just told me, went last night."

  "Oh," said Nick, "I'm sorry. No, I didn't know George," but assuming that by "gone" the old boy didn't mean gone on holiday. It was George who needed the obituary.

  "You knew George." He looked at Wani as well, who was undressing in a slow, abstracted way, with pauses for thought before each sock, each button. "He was always here. He was only thirty-one."

  "I've never been here before," Wani said, courteous but cold. The old man frowned back and nodded, accepting his mistake, but perhaps thinking less of them for not knowing George.

  After a pause Nick said, "How's the water?" and held his stomach in as he took his shirt off because he wanted the man to admire him. But he didn't reply, and perhaps he hadn't heard the question.

  Out on the jetty Nick strode ahead again, in his blue Speedos, and opened his arms to meet the embrace of the view, the green and silver expanse of the pond, young willows and hawthorns all round it, and the Heath behind, glimpsed only as patches of sunlit hillside. Nick was pleased with his own body, and he preened in pardonable ways, stretching and flicking his feet up against his buttocks as he ran on the spot. Across the surface of the water moved the dotted heads of swimmers. There was something sociable and inquisitive about them. Out in the middle of the pond was the old wooden raft, the site of endless easy contacts, and the floating platform of some of Nick's steadiest fantasies. Half a dozen men were on it now, and soon he would be with them. He turned round and grinned to encourage Wani, who was dawdling by the curved downward rail of the ladder, and gazing at the distant heads of the swimmers as if wondering how they'd ever got there. It seemed swimming was a rare omission from the list of things he did beautifully. There was a mild and interesting cruelty in bringing him here, so far out of his element. "You've got to jump in," he said. "You'll find it torture going in slowly." He smiled at Wani's tight black trunks, the smoothness and delicacy of his pale brown body, and the usual provocation of his penis, now held upright over his balls like a bold exclamation mark. Then he jumped in himself, to show how easy it was, and felt the shock of the cold water just below the thin warmth of the surface. He hung there, kicking back and nodding at Wani, who stood stooped like a skier, but with one hand pinching his nose; and then flung himself into the pond. When he came up he was gasping and sploshing about and for a second he had a look of undisguised fear. His black curls were half unwound by the water, and hung over his eyes and ears. Nick bobbed beside him and felt his grip on his upper arm; he let his legs wander and slide consolingly between Wani's, and with his free hand he swept his hair back, and that seemed to steady Wani, who swam off in a hasty, upright breaststroke, as if nothing had happened.

  For a few minutes they pushed along in a rough circle, following the white cords strung between floating rings which marked the boundary of the swimming area. Beyond it, Nick supposed, the water must lie too shallowly over the deep soft mud. Wani swam well enough, in fact, with head up and the facetious expression of someone forced to be a good sport; he stopped at one of the rings and clung to it for a rest, with a heavy-breathing grin, and a shake of the head that seemed to say "I can do this" as well as "I'll get you back for it." Nick pulled up the goggles that were bobbing loosely round his throat, and duck-dived. Under the yellowish sparkle of the surface the water was muddy green, deepening into murky brown, a world of bottle-glass colours. He twisted round, deciding what trick to play on Wani. Bubbles, dazzles from the rippling surface, stirred-up specks of black leaves swung and fled around Wani's legs, which hung there, lazily chasseing, in a princely pretence that no underwater attack was expected. And perhaps it was too childish, with Wani all at his mercy—instead of a grab or a tickle he shot up bursting for breath and laughing in his face. He would have kissed him if a watchful old gent hadn't been cruising so very close by them.

  When they set off again, Nick raced ahead and came back, triumphing over Wani, decorating his steady course with curlicues, and all the while looking out for who else was there. It was hard to tell from their sleeked heads in the water; but through the smear of the goggles each figure waiting on the jetty or clambering onto the raft had the gleam of a new possibility. Nick swam close to the raft once, and kicked round it on his back, while he and a couple who were standing on it wondered if they knew each other.

  After an almost complete turn of the pond Wani had done enough, and they trod water for a minute and talked while Nick glanced to left and right with his naked eyes. He loved it here but he was disappointed, it was too early in the season perhaps, he matched the calm of today and the chill of the water against t
he swarming heat wave Sundays of last year, the raft mad with clutching and jumping, the toilets crowded and intent, the queens on the grass outside packed like a city in a dozen rivalrous districts.

  There were shouts and splashes from the raft, where a new group had converged. Nick felt the tug of curiosity and saw the chance to show Wani off and to show off to him, which was a lovely double vanity. Wani shivered and Nick said, "You need to keep moving," and kicked away towards the middle of the pond. A couple of dark men in black trunks were standing up, clumsily repelling a big blond muscle-queen who was trying to climb onto the stiffly lurching deck. Two other men who were crouching on the edge fell in, they half threw themselves in, like kids, and then scrambled back to join the assault. Thirty seconds of struggle followed, which some took more seriously than others, or with more thought for how they looked. Nick followed it all with smiling intensity, looking for his place in it.

  Now there was a kind of truce, and everyone got back on board, so that when Nick cruised past he had a view of dangling legs, pinched dicks at funny angles, streaked hair and glistening skin, a floating tableau of men against the sky. Sex made them half conscious, half forgetful of the picture they made; they were sportsmen resting in stunned camaraderie, but some of them wriggled and held hands and breathed lustfully in each other's faces. They kicked their feet in the water, indolent but purposeful. One of them who was standing behind leant forward, out of the sky and the trees, and Nick reached him a hand and shot up and hopped out streaming as two queens plumped apart to make room for him. He stood breathing and grinning in a loose but curious embrace with the men in the middle. He had a sense of something fleeting and harmonic, longed for and repeated—it was the circling trees, perhaps, and the silver water, the embrace of a solitary childhood, and the need to be pulled up into a waiting circle of men.

  "Don't I see you at Bang last week?" the man beside him said, who had put a steadying hand on Nick's shoulder and left it there.