Peter Crowther's book on the election was already in the shops. It was
called Landslide!, and the witty assistant at Dillons had arranged the
window in a scaled-down version of that natural disaster. The pale-gilt
image of the triumphant Prime Minister rushed towards die customer
in a gleaming slippage.
Nick stopped in the street, and then went in to look at a copy. He
had met Peter Crowther once, and heard him described as a hack and
also as a 'mordant analyst': his faint smile, as he flicked through the
pages, concealed his uncertainty as to which account was nearer the
truth. There was clearly something hacklike in the speed of
publication, only two months after the event; and in the actual writing,
of course. The book's mordancy seemed to be reserved for the efforts of
the Opposition. Nick looked carefully at trie photographs, but only one
of them had Gerald in it: a group picture of 'The 101 New Tory MPs', in
which he'd been clever enough, or quick enough, to get into the front
row. He sat there smiling and staring as if in his own mind it was
already the front bench. The smile, the white collar worn with a dark
shirt, the floppy breast-pocket handkerchief would surely be famous
when the chaps in the rows behind were mere forgotten grins and
frowns. Even so, he was mentioned only twice in the text - as a 'bon
viveur', and as one of the 'dwindling minority' of Conservative MPs whohad passed, 'as Gerald Fedden, the new Member for Barwick, so
obviously has', through public school and Oxbridge. Nick left the shop
with a shrug; but out in the street he felt delayed pride at this sighting
of a person he knew in a published book.
He had a blind date at eight that evening, and the hot August day
was a shimmer of nerves, with little breezy interludes of lustful
dreaming. The date wasn't totally blind - 'just very short-sighted',
Catherine Fedden said, when Nick showed her the photograph and the
letter. She seemed to like the look of the man, who was called Leo, and
who she said was so much her type; but his handwriting made her
jumpy. It was both elaborate and impetuous. Catherine had a
paperback called Graphology: The Mind in the Hand, which gave her
all sorts of warnings about peoples tendencies and repressions ('Artist
or Madman?'
'Pet or Brute?'). 'It's those enormous ascenders, darling,' she
said: 'I see a lot of ego.' They had pursed their lips again over the little
square of cheap blue writing paper. 'You're sure that doesn't just mean
a very strong sex drive?'
Nick asked. But she seemed to think not. He had been excited,
and even rather moved, to get this letter from a stranger; but it was
true the text itself raised few expectations. 'Nick - OK! Ref your letter,
am in Personnel (London Borough of Brent). We can meet up, discuss
Interests and Ambitions. Say When.
Say Where' - and then the enormous rampant L of Leo going
halfway down the page.
Nick had moved into the Feddens' big white Notting Hill house a
few weeks before. His room was up in the roof, still clearly the
children's zone, with its lingering mood of teenage secrets and
rebellions. Toby's orderly den was at the top of the stairs, Nick's room
just along the skylit landing, and Catherine's at the far end; Nick had
no brothers or sisters but he was able to think of himself here as a lost
middle child. It was Toby who had brought him here, in earlier
vacations, for his London 'seasons', long thrilling escapes from his own
far less glamorous family; and Toby whose half-dressed presence still
haunted the attic passage. Toby himself had never perhaps known why
he and Nick were friends, but had amiably accepted the evidence that
they were. In these months after Oxford he was rarely there, and Nick
had been passed on as a friend to his little sister and to their
hospitable parents. He was a friend of the family; and there was
something about him they trusted, a gravity, a certain shy polish,
something not quite apparent to Nick himself, which had helped the
family agree that he should become their lodger. When Gerald had won
Barwick, which was Nick's home constituency, the arrangement was
jovially hailed as having the logic of poetry, or fate.Gerald and Rachel were still in France, and Nick found himself
almost resenting their return at the end of the month. The
housekeeper came in early each morning, to prepare the day's meals,
and Gerald's secretary, with sunglasses on top of her head, looked in
to deal with the imposing volume of post. The gardener announced
himself by the roar of the mower outside an open window. Mr Duke,
the handyman (His Grace, as the family called him), was at work on
various bits of maintenance. And Nick was in residence, and almost,
he felt, in possession. He loved coming home to Kensington Park
Gardens in the early evening, when the wide treeless street was raked
by the sun, and the two white terraces stared at each other with the
glazed tolerance of rich neighbours. He loved letting himself in at the
three-locked green front door, and locking it again behind him, and
feeling the still security of the house as he looked into the red-walled
dining room, or climbed the stairs to the double drawing room, and up
again past the half-open doors of the white bedrooms. The first flight of
stairs, fanning out into the hall, was made of stone; the upper flights
had the confidential creak of oak. He saw himself leading someone up
them, showing the house to a new friend, to Leo perhaps, as if it was
really his own, or would be one day: the pictures, the porcelain, the
curvy French furniture so different from what he'd been brought up
with. In the dark polished wood he was partnered by reflections as dim
as shadows. He'd taken the % chance to explore the whole house, from
the wedge-shaped attic cupboards to the basement junk room, a dim
museum in itself, referred to by Gerald as the trou de gloire. Above the
drawing-room fireplace there was a painting by Guardi, a capriccio of
Venice in a gilt rococo frame; on the facing wall were two large gilt-
framed mirrors. Like his hero Henry James, Nick felt that he could
'stand a great deal of gilt'.
Sometimes Toby would have come back, and there would be loud
music in the drawing room; or he was in his father's study at the back
of the house making international phone calls and having a gin-and-
tonic - all this done not in defiance of his parents but in rightful
imitation of their own freedoms in the place. He would go into the
garden and pull his shirt off impatiently and sprawl in a deckchair
reading the sport in the Telegraph. Nick would see him from the
balcony and go down to join him, slightly breathless, knowing Toby
quite liked his rower's body to be looked at. It was the easy charity of
beauty. They would have a beer and Toby would say, 'My sis all right?
Not too mad, I hope,' and Nick would say, 'She's fine, she's fine,'
shielding his eyes from the dropping August sun, and smiling back at
him with reassurance, among other unguessed emotions.
Catherines ups and downs were part of Nick's mythology of the
house. Toby had told him about them, as a mark of trust, one evening
in college, sitting on a bench by the lake. 'She's pretty volatile, youknow,' he said, quietly impressed by his own choice of word. 'Yah, she
has these moods.' To Nick the whole house, as yet only imagined, took
on the light and shade of moods, the life that was lived there as
steeped in emotion as the Oxford air was with the smell of the lake
water. 'She used to, you know, cut her arms, with a razor blade.' Toby
winced and nodded. 'Thank god she's grown out of all that now.' This
sounded more challenging than mere moods, and when Nick first met
her he found himself glancing tensely at her arms. On one forearm
there were neat parallel lines, a couple of inches long, and on the other
a pattern of right-angled scars that you couldn't help trying to read as
letters; it might have been an attempt at the word ELLE. But they were
long healed over, evidence of something that would otherwise be
forgotten; sometimes she traced them abstractedly with a finger.
'Looking after the Cat' was how Gerald had put it before they
went away, with the suggestion that the task was as simple as that,
and as responsible. It was Catherine's house but it was Nick who was
in charge. She camped nervously in the place, as though she and not
Nick was the lodger. She was puzzled by his love of its pompous
spaces, and mocked his knowledgeable attachment to the paintings
and furniture. 'You're such a snob,' she said, with a provoking laugh;
coming from the family he was thought to be snobbish about, this was
a bit of a facer. 'I'm not really,' said Nick, as if a small admission was
the best kind of denial, 'I just love beautiful things.' Catherine peered
around comically, as though at so much junk. In her parents' absence
her instincts were humbly transgressive, and mainly involved smoking
and asking strangers home. Nick came back one evening to find her
drinking in the kitchen with an old black minicab driver and telling
him what the contents of the house were insured for.
At nineteen she already had a catalogue of failed boyfriends, each
with a damning epithet, which was sometimes all Nick knew them by:
'Crabs' or 'Drip-Dry' or 'Quantity Surveyor'. A' lot of them seemed
almost consciously chosen for their unacceptability at Kensington Park
Gardens: a tramplike Welshman in his forties whom she'd met in the
Notting Hill Record Exchange; a beautiful punk with FUCK tattooed on
his neck; a Rastafarian from round the corner who moaned
prophetically about Babylon and the downfall of Thatcher.
Others were public schoolboys and sleek young professionals on
the make in the Thatcher slump. Catherine was slight but physically
reckless; what drew boys to her often frightened them away. Nick, in
his secret innocence, felt a certain respect for her experience with men:
to have so many failures required a high rate of preliminary success.
He could never judge how attractive she was. In her case the genetic
mixture of two good-looking parents had prdduced something different
from Toby's sleepy beauty: Gerald's large confidence-winning mouthhad been awkwardly squashed into the slender ellipse of Rachel's face.
Catherine's emotions always rushed to her mouth.
She loved anything satirical, and was a clever vocal mimic. When
she and Nick got drunk she did funny imitations of her family, so that
oddly they seemed not to have gone away. There was Gerald, with his
facetious boom, his taste for the splendid, his favourite tags from the
Alice books. 'Really, Catherine,' protested Catherine, you would try the
patience of an oyster.' Or, 'You recall the branches of arithmetic, Nick?
Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision…?' Nick joined in,
with a sense of treacherously bad manners. It was Rachel's style that
attracted him more, as a code both aristocratic and distantly foreign.
Her group sounded nearly Germanic, and the sort of thing she would
never belong to; her philistine, pronounced as a French word, seemed
to cover, by implication, anyone who said it differently. Nick tried this
out on Catherine, who laughed but perhaps wasn't much impressed.
Toby she couldn't be bothered to mimic; and it was true that he was
hard to 'get'. She did a funny turn as her godmother, the Duchess of
Flintshire, who as plain Sharon Feingold had been Rachel's best friend
at Cranborne Chase school, and whose presence in their lives gave a
special archness to their joke about Mr Duke the odd-job man.
The Duke that Sharon had married had a twisted spine and a
crumbling casde, and the Feingold vinegar fortune had come in very
handy. Nick hadn't met the Duchess yet, but after Catherine's
impression of a thoughtless social dynamo he felt he'd had the
pleasure without the concomitant anxiety. Nick never talked to
Catherine about his crush on her brother. He was afraid she would
find it funny.
But they talked; i good deal about Leo, in the week of waiting, a
week that crawled and jumped and crawled. There wasn't much to go
on, but enough for two lively imaginations to build a character from:
the pale-blue letter, with its dubious ascenders; his voice, which only
Nick had heard, in the stilted cheerful chat which finalized the plans,
and which was neutrally London, not recognizably black, though he
sensed a special irony and lack of expectation in it; and his colour
photograph, which showed that if Leo wasn't as handsome as he
claimed he still demanded to be looked at. He was sitting on a park
bench, seen from the waist up and leaning back - it was hard to tell
how tall he was. He was wearing a dark bomber jacket and gazed away
with a frown, which seemed to cast a shadow over his features, or to
be a shadow rising within them. Behind him you could see the silver-
grey crossbar of a racing bike, propped against the bench.
The substance of the original ad ('Black guy, late 20s, v. good-
looking, interests cinema, music, politics, seeks intelligent like-minded
guy 18-40') was half-obliterated by Nick's later dreamings and
Catherine's premonitions, which dragged Leo further and further offinto her own territory of uncomfortable sex and bad faith. At times
Nick had to reassure himself that he and not Catherine was the one
who had a date with him. Hurrying home that evening he glanced
through the requirements again. He couldn't help feeling he was going
to fall short of his new lovers standards. He was intelligent, he had just
got a first-class degree from Oxford University, but people meant such
different things by music and politics. Well, knowing the Feddens
would give him an angle.
He found the tolerant age range comforting. He was only twenty,
but he could have been twice that age and Leo would still have wanted
him. In fact he might be going to stay with Leo for twenty years: that
seemed to be the advertisement's coded promise.
The second post was still scattered across the hall, and there was
no sound from upstairs; but he felt, from a charge in the air, that he
wasn't alone. He gathered up the letters and found that Gerald had
sent him a postcard. It was a black-and-white picture of a
Romanesque doorway, with flanking saints and a lively Last
Judgement in the tympanum: 'Eglise de Podier, XII siecle'. Gerald had
large, impatient handwriting, in which most of the letters were missed
out, and perhaps unnegotiable with his very thick nib. The author of
Graphology might have diagnosed an ego as big as Leo's, but the main
impression was of almost evasive haste. He had a sign-off that could
have been 'Love' but could have been 'Yours' or even, absurdly, 'Hello' -
so you didn't quite know where you stood with him. As far as Nick
could make out they were enjoying themselves. He was pleased to have
the card, but it cast a slight shadow, by reminding him that the
August idyll would soon be over.
He went into the kitchen, where Catherine, it must be, had made
a mess since Elena's early morning visit. The cutlery drawers tilted
heavily open. There was a vague air of intrusion. He darted into the
dining room, but the boulle clock ticked on in its place on the
mantelpiece, and the silver safe was locked. The brown Lenbach
portraits of Rachel's forebears stared as sternly as Leo himself.
Upstairs in the drawing room the windows were open on to the
curving rear balcony, but the blue lagoon of the Guardi still gleamed
and flashed above the mantelpiece. A low cupboard in the break-
fronted bookcase stood open. Funny how mere living in a house like
this could have the look of a burglary. He peered down from the
balcony, but there was no one in the garden. He went more calmly up
the further three flights of stairs, and when his nerves about Leo took
hold of him again they were almost a relief from the grown-up anxieties
of guarding the house. He saw Catherine moving in her room, and
called out to her. A breeze had slammed his door and his own room
was stifling, the books and papers on the table by the window curledup and hot. He said, 'I thought we'd had a break-in for a moment' - but
the fear of it had already gone.
He picked out two possible shirts on their hangers, and was
looking in the mirror when Catherine came in and stood behind him.
He sensed at once her desire to touch him and her inability to do so.
She didn't meet his eye in the mirror, she simply looked at him, at his
shoulder, as though he would know what to do.
She had the bewildered slight smile of someone only just coping
with pain. Nick smiled back more broadly, to make a few seconds of
delay, as if it might still be one of their jokes. 'Blue or white?' he said,
covering himself with the shirts again, like two wings. Then he dropped
his arms and the shirts trailed on the floor. He saw night falling
already and Leo on his racing bike racing home to Willesden. 'Not too
good?' he said.
She walked over and sat on the bed, where she leant forward and
glanced up at him, with her ominous hint of a smile. He had seen her
in this little flowered dress day after day, it was what she strode about
the streets in, something off the Portobello Road that looked just right
for the district or her fantasy of it, but now, armless, backless, legless,
seemed hardly a garment at all. Nick sat beside her and gave her a hug
and a rub, as if to warm her up, though she felt hot as a sick child.
She let it happen, then shifted away from him a little. Nick said, "What
can I do, then?' and saw that he was hoping to be comforted himself.
In the deep, bright space of the mirror he noticed two young people in
an undisclosed crisis.
She said, 'Can you get the stuff out of my room. Yeah, take it all
downstairs.'
'OK.'
Nick went along the landing and into her room, where as usual
the curtains were closed and the air soured with smoke. The dense red
gauze wrapped round the lampshade gave off a dangerous smell, and
filtered the light across a chaos of bedclothes, underwear, LPs.
Drawers and cupboards had been gone through - the imaginary
burglary might have reached its frustrated climax here. Nick peered
around and though he was alone he mugged a good-natured readiness
to take control. His mind was working quickly and responsibly, but he
clung to his last few moments of ignorance. He made a low quiet
concentrating sound, looking over the table, the bed, the junk heap on
the lovely old walnut chest. The cupboard in the corner had a wash-
basin in it, and Catherine had laid out half a dozen things on the tiled
surround, like instruments before an operation: a heavy carving knife,
a curved two-handled chopper, a couple of honed-down filleting knives,
and the two squat little puncheons that Nick had seen Gerald use to
grapple and turn a joint with, almost as though it might still get away.He gathered them up in an awkward clutch, and took them carefully
downstairs, with new, heavy-hearted respect for them.
She was adamant that he shouldn't call anyone - she hinted that
worse things would follow if he did. Nick paced about in his
uncertainty over this. His ignorance of what to do was a sign of his
much larger ignorance about the world in which he'd recently arrived.
He pictured the sick shock of her parents when they found out, and
saw the stain on the record of his new life with the Feddens. He was
untrustworthy after all, as he had suspected he was, and they had not.
He had a dread of being in the wrong, but was also frightened of taking
action. Perhaps he should try to find Toby? But Toby was a non-
person to Catherine, treated at best with inattentive politeness. Nick
was shaping the story in his head. He persuaded himself that disaster
had been contemplated, stared at, and rejected. There had been a
ritual of confrontation, lasting an hour, a minute, all afternoon - and
maybe it would never have been more than a ritual. Now she was
almost silent, passive, she yawned a lot, and Nick wondered if the
episode had already been taken away, screened and isolated by some
effective mechanism. Perhaps his own return had always played a part
in her design. Certainly it made it hard for him to refuse her when she
said, 'For god's sake don't leave me alone.' He said, 'Of course I won't,'
and felt the occasion close in on him, suffocatingly, from a great
distance. It was something else Toby had mentioned, by the lake: there
are times when she can't be alone, and she has to have someone with
her. Nick had yearned then to share Toby's duty, to steep himself in
the difficult romance of the family. And now here he was, with his own
romance about to unfold in the back bar of the Chepstow Castle, and
he was the person she had to have with her. She couldn't explain, but
no one else would do.
Nick brought her down to the drawing room and she chose some
music by going to the record cupboard and pulling out a disc without
looking and then putting it on. She seemed to say she could act, but
that deliberations were beyond her. It came on jarringly. The arm had
come down in the wrong place, as if looking for a single. 'Ah yes…!'
said Nick. It was the middle of the scherzo of Schumann's Fourth
Symphony. He kept an eye on her, and felt he understood the way she
let the music take care of her; he saw her drifting along in it, not
knowing where she was particularly, but grateful and semi-interested.
He was agitated by indecision, but he went with it himself for a few
moments. The trio returned, but only for a brief airing before the
magical transition to the finale… based, very obviously, on that of
Beethoven's Fifth: he could have told her that, and how it was really
the second symphony, and how all the material grew from the opening
motif, except the unexpected second subject of the finale… He stood
back and decided, in the bleak but proper light of responsibility, thathe would go downstairs at once and ring Catherine's parents. But
then, as he left the room, he thought suddenly of Leo, and felt sure he
was losing his only chance with him: so he rang him instead, and put
off the call to France until later. He didn't know how to explain it to
Leo: the bare facts seemed too private to tell a stranger, and a watered-
down version would sound like an invented excuse.
Again he saw himself in the wrong. He kept clearing his throat as
he dialled the number.
Leo answered very briskly, but that was only because he was
having his dinner and still had to get ready - facts which Nick found
illuminating. His voice, with its little reserve of mockery, was exactly
what he had heard before, but had lost in the remembering. Nick had
only begun his apologies when Leo got the point and said in an
amiable way that he was quite relieved, and dead busy himself. 'Oh
good,' said Nick, and then felt almost at once that Leo could have been
more put out. 'If you're sure you don't mind…' he added.
'That's all right, my friend,' said Leo quietly, so that Nick had the
impression there was someone else there. 'I'd still really like to meet
you.' There was a pause before Leo said, 'Absolutely.'
'Well, what about the weekend?'
'No. The weekend I cannot do.'
Nick wanted to say 'Why not?' but he knew the answer must be
that Leo would be seeing other hopefuls then; it must be like
auditions. 'Next week?' he said with a shrug. He wanted to do it before
Gerald and Rachel got back, he wanted to use the house. 'Yeah, going
to the Carnival?' said Leo.
'Perhaps on the Saturday - we're away over the bank holiday.
Let's get together before then.' Nick longed for the Carnival, but felt
humbly that it was Leo's element. He saw himself losing Leo on their
first meeting, where a whole street moves in a solid current and you
can't turn back. 'The best thing is, if you give us a ring next week,' said
Leo.
'I most certainly will,' said Nick, pretending he thought all this
was positive but feeling abruptly miserable and stiff in the face. 'Look,
I'm really sorry about tonight, I'll make it up to you.' There was
another pause in which he knew his sentence was being decided - his
whole future perhaps. But then Leo said, in a throaty whisper, 'You bet
you will!' - and as Nick started to giggle he hung up. So that little
pause had been conspiratorial, a conspiracy of strangers. It wasn't so
bad. It was beautiful even. Nick hung up too and went to look at
himself in the high gilt arch of the hall mirror. With the sudden hilarity
of relief he thought how nice-looking he was, small but solid, clear-
skinned and curly-headed. He could see Leo falling for him. Then the
colour drained from him, and he climbed the stairs. When it had
cooled Nick and Catherine went down into the garden and out throughthe gate into the communal gardens beyond. The communal gardens
were as much a part of Nick's romance of London as the house itself:
big as the central park of some old European city, but private, and
densely hedged on three sides with holly and shrubbery behind high
Victorian railings. There were one or two places, in the surrounding
streets, where someone who wasn't a keyholder could see through to a
glade among the planes and tall horse chestnuts - across which
perhaps a couple would saunter or an old lady wait for her even slower
dog. And sometimes in these summer evenings, with thrush and
blackbird song among the leaves, Nick would glimpse a boy walking
past on the outside and feel a surprising envy of him, though it was
hard to know how a smile would be received, coming from the inside.
There were hidden places, even on the inside, the path that curled, as
if to a discreet convenience, to the gardeners' hut behind a larch-lap
fence; the enclosure with the sandpit and the children's slide, where
genuine uniformed nannies still met and gossiped with a faint air of
truancy; and at the far end the tennis courts, whose overlapping
rhythms of serves and rallies and calls lent a calming reminder of
other people's exertions to the August dusk. From end to end, just
behind the houses, ran the broad gravel walk, with its emphatic
camber and its metaledged gutters where a child's ball would come to
rest and the first few plane leaves, dusty but still green, were already
falling, since the summer had been so hot and rainless all through.
Nick and Catherine strolled along there, arm in arm, like a slow old
couple; Nick felt paired with Catherine in a new, almost formal way. At
regular intervals there were Victorian cast-iron benches, made with no
thought of comfort, and between them on the grass a few people were
sitting or picnicking in the warm early twilight.
After a minute Nick said, 'Feeling a bit better?' and Catherine
nodded and pressed against him as they walked. The sense of
responsibility came back to him, a grey weight in his chest, and he saw
them from the point of view of the picnickers or an approaching jogger:
not a dear old couple at all but a pair of kids, a skinny girl with a large
nervous mouth and a solemn little blond boy pretending he wasn't out
of his depth. Of course he must ring France, and hope that he got
Rachel, since Gerald wasn't always good with these things. He wished
he knew more about what had happened and why, but he was
squeamish too. 'You'll be all right,' he said. He thought that asking her
about it might only reopen the horror, and added, 'I wonder what it
was all about,' as if referring to a mystery of long ago. She gave him a
look of painful uncertainty, but didn't answer. 'Can't really say?' Nick
said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive
sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises;
nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was
subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice. 'No, not really.''Well, you know you always can tell me,' he said.
At the end of the path there was the gardener's cottage, huddled
quaintly and servilely under the cream cliff of the terrace. Beyond it a
gate gave on to the street and they stood and looked out through its
iron scrolls at the sporadic evening traffic. Nick waited, and thought
despairingly of Leo at large in the same summer evening. Catherine
said, 'It's when everything goes black and glittering.'
'Mm.'
'It's not like when you're down in the dumps, which is brown.'
'Right…'
'Oh, you wouldn't understand.'
'No, please go on.'
'It's like that car,' she said, nodding at a black Daimler that had
stopped across the road to let out a distinguished-looking old man.
The yellow of the early street lights was reflected in its roof, and as it
pulled away reflections streamed and glittered in its dark curved sides
and windows. 'It sounds almost beautiful.'
'It is beautiful, in a sense. But that isn't the point.'
Nick felt he had been given an explanation which he was too
stupid, or unimaginative, to follow. 'It must be horrible as well,' he
said, 'obviously…'
'Well, it's poisonous, you see. It's glittering but it's deadly at the
same time. It doesn't want you to survive it. That's what it makes you
realize.' She stepped away from Nick, so as to use her hands. 'It's the
whole world just as it is,' she said, stretching out to frame it or hold it
off: 'everything exactly the same. And it's totally negative. You can't
survive in it. It's like being on Mars or something.' Her eyes were fixed
but blurred. 'There you are, that's the best I can do,' she said, and
turned her back. He followed her. 'But then it changes back again…'
he said.
'Yes, Nick, it does,' she said, with the offended tone that
sometimes follows a moment of self-exposure.
'I'm only trying to understand.' He thought her tears might be a
sign of recovery, and put an arm round her shoulder - though after a
few seconds she made another gesture that meant freeing herself. Nick
felt a hint of sexual repudiation, as if she thought he was taking
advantage of her. Later on, in the drawing room, she said, 'Oh, god,
this was your night with Leo.'
Nick couldn't believe that she'd only just thought of that. But he
said, 'It's all right. I've put him off till next week.'
Catherine smiled ruefully. 'Well, he wasn't really your type,' she
said.
Schumann had given way to The Clash, who in turn had yielded
to a tired but busy silence between them. Nick prayed that shewouldn't put on any more music - most of the stuff she liked had him
clenched in resistance. He looked at his watch.
They were an hour later in France, it was too late to ring them
now, and he welcomed this rational and thoughtful postponement with
a sense of cloudy relief. He went over to the much-neglected piano, its
black lid the podium for various old art folios and a small bronze bust
of Liszt - which seemed to give a rather pained glance at his sight-
reading from the Mozart album on the stand. To Nick himself the
faltering notes were like raindrops on a sandy path, and he was filled
with a sense of what his evening could have been. The simple Andante
became a vivid dialogue in his mind between optimism and recurrent
pain; in fact it heightened both feelings to an unnecessary degree. It
wasn't long until Catherine stood up and said, 'For god's sake, darling,
it's not a fucking funeral.'
'Sorry, darling,' said Nick, and vamped through a few seconds of
what they called Waldorf music before getting up and wandering out
on to the balcony. They had only just started calling each other
darling, and it seemed a nice part of the larger conspiracy of life at
Kensington Park Gardens; but outside in the cool of the night Nick felt
he was play-acting, and that Catherine was frighteningly strange to
him. Her mirage of the beautiful poisonous universe shimmered before
him again for a moment, but he couldn't hold it, and it slipped quickly
ay.
There was a supper party in a nearby back garden, and the rlk
and light clatter carried on the still air. A man called: eoffrey was
making everyone laugh, and the women kept calling out his name in
excited protest between the semi-audible paragraphs of his story. Out
in the communal gardens someone was walking a small white dog,
which looked almost luminous as it bobbed and scampered in the late
dusk. Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky
faded upwards into weak violet heights. In summer, when windows
everywhere were open, night seemed made of sound as much as
shadow, the whisper of the leaves, the unsleeping traffic rumble, far-off
car horns and squeals of brakes; voices, faint shouts, a waveband
twiddle of unconnected music. Nick yearned for Leo, away to the north,
three miles up the long straight roads, but possibly anywhere, moving
with invisible speed on his silver bike. He wondered again in which
park the photo of him had been taken; and of course what person,
routinely intimate with Leo, had taken it. He felt hollow with
frustration and delay. The girl with the white dog came back along the
gravel path, and he thought how he might appear to her, if she glanced
up, as an enviable figure, poised against the shining accomplished
background of the lamplit room. Whereas, looking out, leaning out
over the iron railing, Nick felt he had been swept to the brink of somenew promise, a scented vista or vision of the night, and then held
there.
'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 almostannoying 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 tliat 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 diumbing some warm and hairy part of
Toby himself. Toby was talking of becoming a journalist, so the gift was
vaguely insulting, a lary attempt at aptness, die sense of mere duty in
die 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
his 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 thedoor 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 ratfier 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 tallRastafarian 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 Goke,
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, 10 they stood and leaned
against a brown-tiled window sill; in die opaque lower half of the
window the word SPIRITS was etched in fancy Victorian 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 hadlots of replies.' Sometimes when he was nervous he asked questions to
which he would rather not have known the answers.
Leo made a little puff of comic exhaustion. 'Yeah… yeah, I'm not
answering some of them. It's a joke. They don't include a picture, or if
they do they look horrible. Or they're ninety-nine years old. I even had
a thing from a woman, a lesbian woman admittedly, with a view to
would I father her child.' Leo frowned indignantly but there was
something sly and flattered in his look too. 'And some of the stuff they
write. Its disgusting! It's not like I'm just looking for a bonk, is it? This
is something a bit different.'
'Quite,' said Nick - though bonk was a troublingly casual way of
referring to something which preoccupied him so much.
'This dog's been round the block a few times,' Leo said, and
looked off down the street as if he might spot himself coming home.
'Anyway, you looked nice. You've got nice writing.'
'Thanks. So have you.'
Leo took in the compliment with a nod. 'And you can spell,' he
said.
Nick laughed. 'Yes, I'm good at that.' He'd been afraid that his
own little letter sounded pedantic and virginal, but it seemed he'd got
it about right. He didn't remember it calling for any great virtuosity of
spelling. 'I always have trouble with "moccasin",' he said.
'Ah, there you are…' said Leo, with a wary chuckle, before
changing the subject.
'It's nice where you live,' he said.
'Oh… yes…' said Nick, as if he couldn't quite remember where it
was.
'I went by there the other day, on the bike. I nearly rang your
bell.'
'Mm - you should have. I've had the place virtually to myself.' He"
felt sick at the thought of the missed chance. 'Yeah? I saw this girl
going in…'
'Oh, that was probably only Catherine.' Leo nodded. 'Catherine.
She's your sister, yeah?'
'No, I don't have a sister. She's actually the sister of my friend
Toby' Nick smiled and stared: 'It's not my house.'
'Oh…' said Leo. 'Oh.'
'God, I don't come from that sort of background. No, I just live
there. It belongs to Toby's parents. I've just got a tiny little room up in
the attic'
Nick was rather surprised to hear himself throwing his whole
fantasy of belonging there out of the window.
Leo looked a bit disappointed. He said, 'Right…' and shook his
head slowly.'I mean they're very good friends, they're a sort of second family
to me, but I probably won't be there for long. It's just to help me out,
while I'm getting started at university.'
'And I thought I'd got myself a nice little rich boy,' Leo said. And
perhaps he meant it, Nick couldn't be sure, they were total strangers
after all, though a minute before he'd imagined them naked together in
the Feddens' emperor-size bed. Was that why his letter did the trick -
the address, the Babylonian notepaper?
'Sorry,' he said, with a hint of humour. He drank some more of
the sweet strong rum and Coke, so obviously not his kind of drink. The
refined blue of the dusk sky was already showing its old lonely reach.
Leo laughed. 'I'm only kidding you!'
'I know,' Nick said, with a little smile, as Leo reached out and
squeezed his shoulder, just by his shirt collar, and slowly let go. Nick
reacted with, his own quick pat at Leo's side. He was absurdly relieved.
A charge passed into him through Leo's fingers, and he saw the two of
them kissing passionately, in a rush of imagination that was as
palpable as this awkward pavement rendezvous.
'Still, your friends must be rich,' Leo said.
Nick was careful not to deny this. 'Oh, they're rolling in money'
'Yeah…' Leo crooned, with a fixed smile; he might have been
savouring the fact or condemning it. Nick saw further questions
coming, and decided at once he wouldn't tell him about Gerald. The
evening demanded enough courage as it was. A Tory MP would shadow
their meeting like an unwelcome chaperon, and Leo would get on his
bike and leave them to it. He could say something about Rachel's
family, perhaps, if an explanation was called for. But in fact Leo
emptied his glass and said, 'Same again?'
Nick hastily finished his own drink, and said, 'Thanks. Or maybe
this time I'll have a shot of rum in it.' After half an hour more Nick had
slid into a kind of excited trance brought on by his new friend's
presence and a feeling, as the sky darkened and the street lamps
brightened from pink to gold, that it was going to work out. He felt
nervous, slightly breathless, but at the same time buoyant, as if a
lonely responsibility had been taken off him. A couple of places came
free at the end of a picnic table with fixed benches, and they sat
leaning towards each other as though playing, and then half-
forgetting, some invisible game. For Nick the ease and comfort of the
rum were indistinguishable parts of the intimacy which he felt
deepening like the dusk.
He found himself wondering how they looked and sounded to the
people around them, the couple beside them at the table. It was all
getting noisier as the evening went on, with a vague sense of
heterosexual threat. Nick guessed Leo's other dates would have met
him in a gay pub, but he had flunked that further challenge. Now heregretted the freedom he would have had there. He wanted to stroke
Leo's cheek and kiss him, with a sigh of surrender.
Nothing very personal was said. Nick found it hard to interest Leo
in his own affairs, and his various modest leads about his family and
his background were not picked up. There were things he'd prepared
and phrased and turned into jokes that were not to be heard - or not
tonight. Once or twice he took Leo with him: into a falsely cheerful
dismissal of the idea that Toby, though fairly attractive, was of any real
interest to him (Leo would think him a weirdo to have loved so long
and pointlessly); into a sketch of Rachel's banking family, which Leo
interrupted with a sour smile, as if it was all proof of some general
iniquity. He had a certain caustic preoccupation with money, Nick
could see; and when he told Leo that his father was an antiques dealer
the two words, with the patina of old money and the flash of business,
seemed to combine in a dull glare of privilege. Among his smart Oxford
friends Nick managed to finesse his elbow-patched old man, with his
Volvo estate full of blanket-wrapped mirrors and Windsor chairs, into a
more luminous figure, a scholar and friend of the local aristocracy.
Now he felt a timid need to humble him. And he was wrong, because
Leo's long-time boyfriend, Pete, had been an antiques dealer, on the
Portobello Road. 'Mainly French work,' Leo said. 'Ormolu. Boulle.' It
was the first clear thing he had said about his private past. And then
he changed the subject.
Leo was certainly quite an egotist - Catherine's graphological
analysis had been spot on. But he didn't expound his inner feelings.
He did something Nick couldn't imagine doing himself, which was to
make statements about the sort of person he was. 'I'm the sort of guy
who needs a lot of sex,' he said, and, 'I'm like that, I always say what I
think.' Nick wondered for a moment if he'd inadvertently contradicted
him. 'I don't bear grudges,' Leo said sternly: 'I'm not that kind of
person.'
'I'm sure you're not,' Nick said, with a quick discountenancing
shudder. And perhaps this was a useful skill, or tactic, in the blind-
date world, even if Nick's modesty and natural fastidiousness kept him
from replying in the same style ('I'm the sort of guy who likes Pope
more than Wordsworth,'
'I'm crazy about sex but I haven't had it yet'). It added to the
excitement of the evening. He wasn't here to share quickly matched
intuitions with an Oxford friend. He loved the hard self-confidence of
his date; and at the same time, in his silent, superior way, he thought
he heard how each little brag was the outward denial of an inner
doubt.
With the third drink Nick grew warm and half-aroused and he
looked undisguisedly at Leo's lips and neck and imagined unbuttoning
the shiny blue short-sleeved shirt that cut so tighdy under his arms.Leo hooded his eyes for a second, a signal, secret and ironic, and Nick
wondered if it meant he could see he was drunk. He wasn't sure if he
should somehow signal back - he grinned and took another quick sip.
He had the feeling that Leo had drunk Coke since he was a child, and
that it was one of the nearly unnoticed facts of life to him, beyond
choice or criticism. Whereas in his family it was one of a thousand
things that were frowned on - there had never been a can or bottle of it
in the house. Leo couldn't possibly have imagined it, but the glass of
Coke in Nick's hand was a secret sign of submission, and afterwards
die biting sweetness of the drink, like flavouring in a medicine, seemed
fused with the other experiments of die night in a complex impression
of darkness and freedom. Leo yawned and Nick glanced into his
mouth, its bright white teeth uncor-rupted by all the saccharine and
implying, Nick humbly imagined, an almost racial disdain for his own
stoppings and slants. He put his hand on Leo's forearm for a moment,
and then wished he hadn't - it made Leo look at his watch. 'Time's
getting on,' he said. 'I can't be late getting back.' Nick looked down and
mumbled, 'Do you have to get back?' He tried to smile but he knew his
face was stiff with sudden anxiety. He moved his wet glass in circles on
the rough-sawn table top. When he glanced up again he found Leo was
gazing at him sceptically, one eyebrow arched.
'I meant back to your place, of course,' he said. Nick grinned and
reddened at the beautiful reversal, like a teased child abruptly
reprieved, rewarded. But then he had to say, 'I don't think we can Leo
looked at him levelly. 'Not enough room?' Nick winced and waited - the
truth was he didn't dare, he just couldn't do that to Rachel and
Gerald, it was vulgar and unsafe, the consequences unspooled ahead
of him, their happy routines of chortling agreement would wither for
ever. 'I don't think we can. I don't mind going up to your place.' Leo
shrugged. 'It's not practical,' he said.
'I can jump on the bus,' said Nick, who had studied the London
A-Z in absorbed conjecture about Leo's street, neighbourhood, historic
churches, and access to public transport.
'Nah-' Leo looked away with a reluctant smile and Nick saw that
he was embarrassed. 'My old lady's at home.' This first hint of shyness
and shame, and the irony that tried to cover it, cockneyfied and West
Indian too, made Nick want to jump on him and kiss him. 'She's dead
religious,' Leo said, with a short defeated chuckle.
'I know what you mean,' said Nick. So there they were, two men
on a summer night, with nowhere to call their own. There was a kind
of romance to that.
'I've got an idea,' he said tentatively. 'If you don't mind, um, being
outside.'
'I don't care,' said Leo, and looked lazily over his shoulder. 'I'm
not dropping my pants in the street.'No, no…' Tm not that sort of slut.'
Nick laughed anxiously. He wasn't sure what people meant when
they said they'd had sex 'in the street' - even 'on Oxford Street', he'd
once heard. In six months' time perhaps he would know, he'd have
sorted out the facts from the figures of speech. He watched Leo twist
and lift a knee to clamber free of the bench - he looked keen to get on
with it, and he acted of course as if Nick knew the procedure. Nick
followed him with a baked smile and a teeming inward sense of
occasion. He was consenting and powerless in the thrust of the event,
the rich foregone conclusion of the half-hour that opened ahead of
them: it made his heart race with its daring and originality, though it
also seemed, as Leo squatted to unlock his bike, something everyday
and inevitable. He ought to tell Leo it was his first time; then he
thought it might bore him or put him off. He gazed down at his strictly
shaved nape, the back of a stranger's head, which any minute now he
would be allowed to touch. The label of Leo's skimpy blue shirt was
turned up at the collar and showed the temp's signature of Miss
Selfridge.
It was a little secret given away, a vanity exposed - Nick was
light-headed, it was so funny and touching and sexy. He saw the long
muscles of his back shifting in its sleek grip, and then, as Leo
hunkered on his heels and his loose jeans stood away from his waist,
the street lamp shining in on the brown divide of his buttocks and the
taut low line of his briefs. He unlocked the gate and let Leo go in ahead
of him. 'Cycling isn't permitted in the gardens, but I dare say you can
walk your bike.'
Leo hadn't learnt his mock-pompous tone yet. 'I dare say
bumshoving isn't permitted either,' he said. The gate closed behind
them, an oiled click, and they were together in the near-darkness of
the shrubbery. Nick wanted to hold Leo and kiss him at once; but he
wasn't quite certain. Bumshoving was unambiguous, and encouraging,
but not romantic exactly… They strolled cautiously forward, leaning
against each other for a step or two as they steered for the path. There
was the slightest chill in the air now, but Nick shivered wildly in a
spasm of excitement. His fingers felt oddly stiff, as though he was
wearing very tight gloves. Even in the deep shadow he wanted to
conceal his weird smirk of apprehension. He did so hope it would be
him who got to do the shoving, but didn't know how you arranged that,
perhaps it all just became clear. Perhaps they both had to have a go.
He led Leo through on to a wide inner lawn, the bike bouncing out
beside them, controlled only by a hand on its saddle - it seemed to
quiver and explore just ahead of them. To the right rose a semicircle of
old planes and a copper beech whose branches plunged to the ground
and made a broad bell-tent that was cool and gloomy even at midday.
Away to the left ran the gravel walk, and beyond it the tall outline ofthe terrace, and the long, intermitted rhythm of glowing windows. As
they skirted the lawn Nick counted confusedly, searching for the
Feddens'. He found the first-floor balcony, the proud brightness of the
room beyond the open French windows. 'Yeah, how far is it?' said Leo.
'Oh, just over here…' - Nick giggled because he didn't know if
Leo's grumpiness was real. He went ahead a bit, anxiously responsible.
As his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness nowhere seemed private
enough - there was more show-through from the street lights, voices
on the pavement were unnervingly close. And of course on a summer
night there were keyholders still at large, picnickers charmed into long
late reminiscence, walkers of white dogs. He stooped under the copper
beech, but the branches were rough and confusing and the mast
crackled underfoot. He backed out again, bashing into Leo and
gripping his waist for a moment to steady himself. 'Sorry…' The feel of
his warm hard body under the silky shirt was almost worryingly
beautiful, a promise too lavish to believe in.
He prayed that Leo didn't think he was a fool. The other men in
Leo's life, anonymous partners, answerers of ads, old boyfriends, old
Pete, massed impatiently behind him - as if a match had flared he saw
their predatory eyes and moustaches and hardened sex-confidence. He
led the way quickly to the little compound of the gardeners' hut.
All right, this'U do,' said Leo, propping his bike against the larch-
lap screen.
For a moment it seemed he was going to chain it up again, then
he stopped himself and left it there with a regretful laugh. Nick tried
the door of the hut even though it was padlocked. Beside it there was a
shadowy area where a flat-bedded barrow was kept, and a broken
bench; there were laurels, and a yew tree hanging over; the dusty sour
smell of the yew was mixed with the muted sweetness of a huge
compost heap, a season's grass cuttings mounded high in a chicken-
wire coop. Leo came up to Nick and hesitated for a second, looking
away, trailing his fingers over the warm cuttings. 'You know, these
composts get really hot inside,' he said. 'Yes…' Nick had known this all
his life. 'Too hot to touch - like a hundred degrees.'
'Is that right…?' He reached out like a tired child.
'Anyway,' Leo said, letting Nick's hand slide round his waist,
putting his arm, his elbow, round Nick's neck to pull him close against
him. 'Anyway…' His face slipped sideways across Nick's as he breathed
the word, the unguessed softness of his lips touched his cheeks and
neck, while Nick sighed violently and ran his hand up and down on
Leo's back. He pushed his mouth towards Leo's, and they met, and
hurried into a kiss. To Nick it felt simply like a helpless admission of
need, and the shocking tiling was the proof of Leo's need, in die force
and thoroughness with which he worked on him. They pushed apart,Leo faindy smiling, Nick gasping and tormented just by die hope that
they would do it again.
They kissed for a minute more - two minutes, Nick wasn't
counting, half-hypnotized by the luscious rhythm, the generous
softness of Leo's lips and the thick insistence of his tongue. He was
gasping from die rush of reciprocity, die fact of being made love to.
Nothing at the pub, in dieir aimless conversation, had even hinted at
it. He'd never seen it described in a book. He was achingly ready and
completely unprepared. He felt the coaxing caress of Leo's hand on the
back of his head, roaming through the curls there, and then lifted his
other hand to stroke Leo's head, so beautifully alien in its hard stubbly
angles and the dry dense firmness of his hair. He thought he saw the
point of kissing but also its limitations - it was an instinct, a means of
expression, of mouthing a passion but not of satisfying it. So his right
hand, that was lightly clutching Leo's waist, set off, still doubting its
freedom, to dawdle over his plump buttocks and then squeeze them
through the soft old denim.
The prodding of Leo's angled' erection against the top of Nick's
thigh seemed to tell him more and more clearly to do what he wanted,
and get his hand inside his waistband and inside the stretched little
briefs. His middle finger pushed into the deep divide, as smooth as a
boy's, his fingertip even pressed a little way into the dry pucker so that
Leo let out a happy grunt. 'You're a bad boy,' he said.
He moved away from Nick, who clung to him, then let him go
with a sulky laugh.
'I'm coming back,' Leo said, and edged off past the shed. Nick
stood for a little while, holding himself and sighing, alone again, aware
of the unending soft roar of London and a night breeze hardly dipping
the dark leaves of the laurel. What was Leo doing? He was getting
something from the slim side pannier of his bike. He was amazing with
his habits, he was fabulous, but then Nick's skin prickled for a
moment at the thought of himself out here in the dark with a stranger,
the risk of it, silly little fool, anything could happen. Leo felt his way
back, shadow among shadows. 'I think we might be needing this,' he
said, so that the rush of risk flowed beautifully into the mood of
adventure.
Next day Nick wandered for lost half-hours through what he'd
done, taking the tube of gel, that was folded back neatly, three-
quarters empty, and peering at it in the gloom with relief and
embarrassment; turning Leo round in his arms and unbuttoning his
jeans as if they were his own, and prising his broad blunt hard-on
from his pants as he eased them down, and pushing him forward to
hold on to the bench as he knelt behind him and paid the kind of
homage with his tongue and lips that he'd dreamed of paying for years
to a whole night-catalogue of other men. He loved the scandalous idea