The Line of Beauty

  A small commotion at the door, Simon looking up, going over, Melanie setting down her pad. A crop-headed black girl, like a busty little boy, and a skinny white woman with her . . . it was usually a mistake, or they were market kids trotting round cheap Walkmans, cheap CDs. No one much, sad to say, arrived by design at the Ogee office. Melanie came back. "Oh, Nick, it's a, um, Rosemary Charles to see you. Sorry . . . " Melanie twitched with her own snobbery, part apology, part reproach—she stood in the way, box-shouldered, high-heeled, so that Nick leant back in his chair to look round her, down the length of the office, and with a view of the two words Rosemary Charles bobbing on the air, weightless signifiers, that took on, over several strange seconds, their own darkness and gravity. He stood up and went towards her, her and the other woman, who seemed to be here as a witness of his confusion. It was a momentary vertigo, a railing withdrawn. He gave them a smile that was welcoming and showed a proper unfrivolous regard for the occasion, and well . . . he was afraid he knew why they'd come, more or less. He felt something like guilt showed in his pretence that he didn't. He grasped Rosemary's hand and looked at her with allowable pleasure and curiosity—she was still coming clear to him, from four years back, when she was pretty and fluffy and her eyes were sly: and now she was beautiful, revealed, the drizzle silvering the fuzz of her crown, her jaw forward in the tense half-smile of surprise that her brother had had when he'd called for Nick one morning, unannounced, and changed his life.

  "Yes, hello," she said, with a hint of hostility, perhaps just the hard note of the resolve that had brought her here. Of course she was looking for him too, down this four-year tunnel: how he used to be and how he'd changed. "This is Gemma."

  "Hi," said Nick warmly. "Nick."

  "I hope you don't mind," said Rosemary. "We went to your house. The woman there told us where you were."

  "It's wonderful to see you!" said Nick, and saw the phrase register with them like some expected annoyance. They had something dreadful about them, with their undeclared purpose and their look of supporting each other for some much bigger challenge than Nick was ever going to offer them. "Come in, come in."

  Gemma peered round the room. "Is there somewhere private where we could talk?" she said. She was Yorkshire, older, blue-eyed, hair dyed black, black T-shirt and black jeans and Doc Martens.

  "Of course," said Nick. "Why don't you come upstairs."

  He took them out and in again and up to the flat, with a responsible smile that threatened to warp into a smirk, as if he was proud of this kitsch apartment and its possible effect on the two women. He saw it all with fresh eyes himself. They sat down in the "Georgian-revival''-revival library.

  "Look at all these books . . . " said Gemma.

  On the low table all the papers were laid out, as in the reading room of a club. CHUCK HER OUT, begged the Mirror. THREE TIMES A LADY, bawled the Sun.

  Rosemary said, "It's about Leo."

  "Well, I thought . . ."

  She looked down, she wasn't settled in the room, on the sofa's edge; then she stared at him for a second or two. She said, "Well, you know, my brother died, three weeks ago." Nick listened to the words, and heard how the West Indian colour and exactness in her tone claimed it as a private thing. It had been one of Leo's tones too: the cockney for defence, the Jamaican crackle and burn for pleasure, just sometimes, rare and beautiful like his black blush.

  "Nearly four weeks now, pet," said Gemma, with her own note of bleak solidarity. "Yes, May the sixteenth." She looked at Nick as though the extra days made him more culpable, or useless.

  "I'm so sorry," Nick said.

  "We're trying to contact all his friends."

  "Well, because, you know . . . " said Gemma.

  "All his lovers," said Rosemary firmly. Nick remembered that she was, or had been, a doctor's receptionist; she was used to the facts. She unzipped her shoulder bag and delved into it. He found it screened them both, this angular attention to business—he was flinching at the frighteningly solemn thing she had just told him, and she twitched too at the power of her words, even if (as he thought he saw) they had a certain softness or drabness for her now from use, from their assertion of something that was shifting day by day from the new into the known. He said, with a sense of good manners that took him back to their long-ago meeting,

  "How is your mother?"

  "OK," said Rosemary. "OK . . ."

  "She has her faith," said Gemma.

  "She's got the church," said Nick; "and she's also got you."

  "Well . . . " said Rosemary. "Yes, she has."

  The first thing she passed him was a small cream-coloured envelope addressed to Leo in green capitals. He felt he knew it and he didn't know it, like a letter found in an old book. It had a postmark of August 2, 1983. She nodded, and he opened it, while they watched him; it was like learning a new game and having to be a good sport as he lost. He unfolded a little letter in his own best handwriting, and the photo slipped out into his lap. "That's how we knew where to find you," Rosemary said. He had sent it in the blank envelope to Gay Times, doubting how it could survive, how his own wish could take on form and direction, and someone there with a green biro had sent it on—he was seeing the history of his action, and seeing it as Leo himself had seen it, but distant and complete. He picked up the photo with the guarded curiosity he had for his earlier self. It was an Oxford picture, a passport-size square cut out from a larger group: the face of a boy at a party who somehow confides his secret to the camera. He only glanced at what he'd written, on the Feddens' embossed letterhead—the small size, meant for social thank-yous, because he hadn't had much to say. The writing itself looked quaint and studied, though he remembered Leo had praised it: "Hello!" he'd begun, since of course he hadn't yet known Leo's name. The cross-stroke of the H curled back under the uprights like a dog's tail. He saw he'd mentioned Bruckner, Henry James, all his Interests—very artlessly, but it hadn't mattered, and indeed they had never been mentioned again, when the two of them were together. At the top there was Leo's annotation in pencil: Pretty. Rich? Too young? This had been struck through later by a firm red tick.

  Nick folded it away and peeped at the two women. It was Gemma's presence, the stranger in the room, that brought it home to him; for a minute she seemed like the fact of the death itself. She didn't know him, but she knew about the letter, the affair, the tender young Nick of four years ago, and his shyness and resentment went for nothing in the new moral atmosphere, like that of a hospital, where everything was found out and fears were justified as diagnoses. He said, "I wish I'd seen him again."

  "He didn't want people seeing him," said Rosemary. "Not later on."

  "Right . . . " said Nick.

  "You know how vain he was!"—it was a little test for her grief, an indulgent gibe with a twist of true vexation, at Leo's troublesomeness, alive or dead.

  "Yes," said Nick, picturing him wearing her shirt. And wondering if the man's shirt she had on now was one of his.

  "He always had to look his best."

  "He always looked beautiful," said Nick, and the exaggeration released his feelings suddenly. He tried to smile but felt the corners of his mouth pulled downwards. He mastered himself with a rough sigh and said, "Of course I hadn't seen him for a couple of yean."

  "OK . . . " said Rosemary thoughtfully. "You know we never knew who he was seeing."

  "No," said Gemma.

  "You and old Pete were the only ones who got asked to the house. Until Bradley, of course."

  "I don't know about Bradley," said Nick.

  "My brother shared a flat with him," said Rosemary. "You knew he moved out."

  "Well, I knew he wanted to. That was about the time he . . . I'm not sure what happened. We stopped seeing each other." He couldn't say the usual accusing phrase he dumped me, it was petty and nearly meaningless in the face of his death. "I think I thought he was seeing someone else." Though this itself wasn't the whole truth: it was the painful story he'd told himself at the tim
e, to screen a glimpse he'd had of a much worse story, that Leo was ill.

  But Bradley had been there. He sounded like a square-shouldered practical man, not a twit like Nick.

  "Bradley's not well, is he?" said Gemma.

  "You knew old Pete died . . . " said Rosemary.

  "Yes, I did," said Nick, and cleared his throat.

  "Anyway, you're all right, pet," said Gemma.

  "Yes, I'm all right," said Nick. "I'm fine." They looked at him like police officers awaiting a confession or change of heart. "I was lucky. And then I was. . . careful." He put the letter on the table, and stood up. "Would you like some coffee? Can I get you anything?" Gemma and Rosemary pondered this and for a moment seemed reluctant to accept.

  In the kitchen he gazed out of the window as the kettle boiled. The rain fell thin and silvery against the dark bushes of the garden and the brick backs of the houses in the next street. He gazed at the familiar but unknown windows. In a bright drawing room a maid was hoovering. At the edge of hearing an ambulance wailed. Then the kettle throbbed and clicked off.

  He took the coffee tray through. "This is so sad," he said. He had always thought of this as a slight word, but its effect now was larger than mere tactful understatement. It seemed to surround the awful fact with a shadowing of foreknowledge and thus of acceptance.

  Rosemary raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. There was something stubborn about her, and Nick thought perhaps it was only a brave hard form of shyness, unlike his own shyness, which ran off into flattery and evasion. She said, "So you met Leo through a lonely hearts?"

  "Yes, that's right," said Nick, since she obviously knew this. He had never been sure if it was a shameful or a witty way to meet someone. He didn't know what the women would think either (Gemma gave him a sighing smile). "It was such a wonderful piece of luck he chose me," he said.

  "Paght . . . " said Rosemary, with a look of sisterly sarcasm; which maybe wasn't that, but a hint that he shouldn't keep boasting about his luck.

  "I mean he had hundreds of replies."

  "Well, he had a lot." She reached into her bag again, and brought out a bundle of letters, pinched in a thick rubber band.

  "Oh," said Nick.

  She pulled off the rubber band and rolled it back over her hand. For a moment he was at the doctor's—or the doctor was visiting him, with the bundled case notes of all her calls. Both brother and sister were orderly and discreet. "I thought some of them might mean something to you."

  "Oh, I don't know."

  "So that we can tell them."

  "What did he do?" said Gemma. "He went out and tried them all?"

  Rosemary sorted the letters into two piles. "I don't want to go chasing people up if they're dead," she said.

  "That's the thing!" said Gemma.

  "I don't expect I'll know anyone," said Nick. "It's very unlikely . . ." It was all too bleakly businesslike for him—he'd only just heard the news.

  The funny thing was that all the envelopes were addressed in the same hand, in green or sometimes purple capitals. It was like one crazed adorer laying siege to Leo. The name came up at him relentlessly off the sheaf of letters. "It must have looked odd, these arriving all the time," he said. A lot of them had the special-issue army stamps of that summer.

  "He told us it was all to do with some cycling thing, a cycling club," said Rosemary.

  "His bike was his first love," said Nick, unsure if this was merely a quip or the painful truth. "It was clever of him."

  "These ones I think he didn't see. They've got a cross on."

  "There's even a woman wrote to him," said Gemma.

  So Nick started going through the letters, knowing it was pointless, but trapped by the need to honour or humour Rosemary. He saw her as a stickler for procedure, however unwelcome. He didn't need to read them in detail, but the first two or three were eerily interesting—as the private efforts of his unknown rivals. He concealed his interest behind a dull pout of consideration, and slow shakes of the head. The terms of the ad were still clear to him, and the broad-minded age-range, "18 to 40." "Hi there!" wrote Sandy from Enfield, "I'm early 40s, but saw that little old ad of yours and thought I'd write in anyway! I'm in the crazy world of stationery!" A snap of a solidly built man of fifty was attached to the page with a pink paper clip. Leo had written, House/Car. Age? And then, presumably after he'd seen him, Too inexperienced. Glenn, "late 20s," from Barons Court, was a travel agent, and sent a Polaroid of himself in swimming trunks in his flat. He said, "I love to party! And sexpecially in bed! (Or on the floor! Or halfway up a ladder!! Whoops—!)" Too much? wondered Leo, before making the discovery: Invisible dick. "Dear Friend," wrote serious-looking black Ambrose from Forest Hill, "I like the sound of you. I think we have some love to share." The exclamation marks, which gave the other letters their air of inane self-consciousness, were resisted by Ambrose until his final "Peace!" Nick liked the look of him, but Leo had written, Bottom. Boring. Nick made a stealthy attempt to remember the address.

  When he'd read a letter he passed it back to Rosemary, who put it face down on the table, by the coffee pot. The sense of a game ebbed very quickly with his lack of success. The fact was these were all men who'd wanted his boyfriend, who'd applied for what Nick had gone on to get. Some of them were pushy and explicit, but there was always the vulnerable note of courtship: they were asking an unknown man to like them, or want them, or find them equal to their self-descriptions. He recognized one of the men from his photo and murmured, "Ah . . . !" but then let it go with a shrug and a throat-clearing. It was a Spanish guy who'd turned up everywhere, who'd been a nice dark thread in the pattern of Nick's early gym days and bar nights, almost an emblem of the scene for him, its routine and compulsion, and he knew he must be dead—he'd seen him a year ago at the Ponds, defying his own fear and others' fear of him. Javier, he was called. He was thirty-four. He worked for a building society, and lived in West Hampstead. The mere facts in his letter of seduction had the air of an obituary.

  Nick stopped and drank some coffee. "Was he ill for a long time?" he asked.

  "He had pneumonia last November, he nearly died; but he came through it. Then things got, well, a lot worse in the spring. He was in hospital for about ten days at the end."

  "He went blind, didn't he," said Gemma, in the way people clumsily handle and offer facts which they can neither accept nor forget.

  "Poor Leo," said Nick. Relief at not having witnessed this was mixed with regret at not having been called on to do so.

  "Did you bring the photos?" said Gemma.

  "If you want to see . . ." said Rosemary, after a pause.

  "I don't know," said Nick, embarrassed. It was a challenge; and then he felt powerless in the flow of the moment, as he had on his first date with Leo, he met it as something that was going to happen, and took the Kodak wallet. He looked at a couple of the pictures and then handed them back.

  "You can have one if you like," said Rosemary.

  "No," said Nick; "thank you."

  He sat, rather hard-faced, over his coffee.

  After a bit Gemma said, "This is proper coffee, isn't it."

  "Oh . . . !" said Nick, "do you like it. It's Kenyan Rich, medium roast . . . It comes from Myers' in Kensington Church Street. They import their own. One pays more, but I think it's worth it."

  "Mm, it's lovely and rich," said Gemma.

  "I'd rather not look at the other letters now," Nick said.

  Rosemary nodded. "OK," she said, as if skimming forward for another appointment, a cancellation. "I can leave them with you . . . ?"

  "No, please don't," said Nick. He felt he was being pressed very hard very fast, as in some experiment on his emotions.

  Gemma went to the lavatory—she murmured the directions to herself as she tried the door, and then slipped in as if she'd met a friend. There was silence for a while between Nick and Rosemary. The extremity of events excused anything, of course, but her hardness towards him was another shock to get used to
: it added puzzlingly to the misery of the day. She was his lover's sister, and he thought of her naturally as a friend, and with spontaneous fondness and fresh sympathy on top of mere politeness. But it seemed it didn't work the other way round. He smiled tentatively. There was such a physical likeness now that he might have been asking Leo himself to be nice to him, after some row. But she'd decided against the note of tenderness, even towards Leo himself.

  "So you hadn't seen him for a year or two?" she said.

  "That's right . . ."

  She looked up at him warily, as though starting to concede his own, homosexual claim on her brother and wondering where such a shift might lead her. "Did you miss him?" she said.

  "Yes . . . I did. I certainly did."

  "Do you remember the last time you saw him?"

  "Well, yes," said Nick, and stared at the floor. The questions were sentimental, but the manner was detached, almost bored. "It was all very difficult."

  She said, "He hadn't made a will."

  "Oh, well . . . he was so young!" said Nick, frowning because he found himself on the edge of tears again, at the thought that she was going to offer him something of Leo's—of course she was cold because she found it all so difficult herself.

  "We had him cremated," Rosemary said. "I think it's what he would have wanted, though we didn't ask him. We didn't like to."

  "Hm," said Nick, and found he was crying anyway.

  When Gemma came back she said, "You must see the toilet." Rosemary gave a loyal but repressive smile. "Or is that trick photography?"

  "Oh . . . !" said Nick. "No . . . no, it's real, I'm afraid." He was glad of the absurd change of subject.

  "There's a picture of him dancing with Maggie!"

  It was one of the photos from the Silver Wedding, Nick red-faced and staring, the Prime Minister with a look of caution he hadn't been aware of at the time. He wasn't sure Gemma would get the special self-irony of the lavatory gallery. It was something he'd learnt from his public-school friends. "Do you know her, then?" she said.