gaze was fixed and almost sensual, and his speech had a hypnotic
steadiness of pace and tone, irrespective of meaning: he was inspired,
he seemed constantly to admit, but he wasn't in any dubious way
excitable. They were talking about the Falklands War and the need to
commemorate it with a monument and to celebrate it with an annual
public holiday. 'A Trafalgar Day for our times,' said Timms, and his
wife, in whom his certainty produced a more vibrant kind of urgency,
said, 'Why not revive Trafalgar Day itself? Trafalgar Day itself must be
revived! Our children are forgetting the War Against the French…'
John Timms gazed out into the room as though flattered by his wife's
zeal and loving her for it, but not himself being ready to go so far. He
hadn't been introduced to Nick (indeed the Timmses were really
speaking to each other), and his gaze played on him for a moment,
seemed to feel him and test him and doubt him. 'You'd like to see a
permanent Falklands memorial, wouldn't you,' he said.
'Mm, I wonder…' said Nick, not disrespectfully, and marvelled at
just how unavailable his thoughts on the subject were. The
doubdessness of Timms was a wonder in itself. He imagined Leo being
here beside him, and having one salient fact or objection to produce, of
the kind Nick could never remember. Catherine came past, sampling
each of the little power-centres in the room. 'We were talking about the
Falklands,' said Nick.
'I understand the Prime Minister favours an annual parade,' said
John Timms, 'as well as a prominent memorial. It was truly her
triumph.'
And the men's,' said Greta Timms, with her rich hormonal flush.
'The men were staunch.'
'They were certainly staunch, my darling,' said John Timms.
'They were daundess.'
'No,' said Catherine, covering her ears and grinning, 'it's no good,
I just can't bear words with that au sound in. Do you know what I
mean?'
'Oh…' said Greta Timms. 'I think I've always found them rather
splendid words!'
'Right, I'm off!' said Catherine, turning to the room with the big
smile which perhaps all her life would seem unguarded and
vulnerable. A rough chorus of 'Bye's, a chuckling 'Oh, is she off?', and
she was gazed at with relief, the suddenly conjured good humour that
sends a child up to its early bed. 'Bye, Gran!' she said, specially loudly,
kissing Lady Partridge in the middle of the room. 'See you in the
morning, Dad.' And picking up her bag she stalked out on her tall
heels. Lady Partridge peeped at Morden Lipscomb to gauge his
surprise; if he seemed amused by this vision of a sex-club door-girl she
was ready to take some droll credit as her grandmother. But Lipscomb
was looking disappointedly at Gerald.Lady Partridge was taken in to dinner by Lipscomb. They didn't
really 'take people in' at the Feddens', but the procession from the
drawing room, down the stone stairs, and into the candlelight, awoke a
memory sometimes, or an anxiety, in guests. Lipscomb, with
ponderous New World formality, presented his elbow to the senior
lady, and Gerald's mother, who had a hurtling look to her after two
gin-and-tonics, pressed against him like an old flame. In the dining
room Lipscomb peered around with guarded curiosity as people found
their places.
'Yes, I always think what a splendid room,' Lady Partridge said,
trailing away towards her chair.
'And are these your forebears, Lady Partridge?' Lipscomb asked.
'Yes… yes…' said Lady Partridge, in a daze of gracious-ness.
'No, they are not her forebears,' said Rachel, quiedy but firmly.
'They're my grandfather and my great-aunt.'
Nick was placed in the middle of the table, with Penny Kent on
his right and Jenny Groom on his left - the dullest place of all, but he
didn't mind because he had company of his own. He tucked into his
crab cake as if sharing a joke.
'How do you fit in?' Jenny Groom wanted to know, with the air of
someone steeled to unpleasant surprises.
'Oddly but snugly,' said Nick; and since she didn't like this, 'No,
I'm an old friend of Toby's.'
'Oh, Gerald's son, you mean… And I hear he's working for the
Guardian? The scandal of Toby's having a traineeship at the Guardian
seemed to Nick to eclipse his own dissidence, to be enough scandal for
one household.
'Well, you can ask him. He's sitting just over there,' said Nick,
loud enough to intrude on Toby as he listened to Greta Timms
extolling the virtues of the Family: Toby gave a half-secret smile of
acknowledgement but said, 'Yes, I see,' to Greta to show she still had
his attention.
'Oh, of course. He's got his father's looks,' said Jenny with a
frown. 'So what do you do?'
'I'm doing a doctorate at UCL - on… on Henry James,' said Nick,
seeing the style question might lose her completely.
'Oh…' said Jenny warily, getting a hook on it. Yes. I've never got
round to Henry James.'
'Well…' said Nick, not caring if she had or not. 'Or hang on, did I
read one? Dr Johnson or something.'
'No… I don't think so…'
'No, not Dr Johnson, obviously…!'
'I mean there's the Boswell.'
'It was set in Africa… I know: Mr Johnson.'
'Oh, Mister Johnson is a novel by Joyce Cary.''Exacdy, I knew I'd read something by him.'
When the venison came in Gerald yapped, 'Don't touch the
plates! Don't touch the plates!' so that it sounded as though something
had gone wrong. 'They have to be white hot for the venison.' The fact
was that the fat congealed revoltingly if the plates were less than
scorching. 'Yes, my brother-in-law has a deer park,' he explained to
Morden Lipscomb. A rare enough amenity these days.' The guests
looked humbly at their helpings. 'No,' Gerald went on, in his bristling
way of answering questions he wished someone had asked, 'this is
buck venison… comes into season before the doe, and very much
superior.' He went round with the burgundy himself. 'I think you'll like
this,' he said to Barry Groom, and Barry sniffed at it testily, as if he
knew he was thought to have more money than taste.
Nick shared a brief smile down the table with Rachel. It seemed
subtly to mock not only Barry but Gerald himself. Nick took his first
sip of die burgundy with a frisson at their shared understanding, like
the liberty allowed to a child by a confident mother - the pretended
conspiracy against the father. He wondered if Gerald and Rachel ever
rowed. If anything happened, then it was in the white secrecy of the
bedroom, which, with its litde vestibule, was removed from hearing
behind two heavy doors; it became somehow sexual.
When he thought of Leo after not thinking of him for a minute or
two he heard a big orchestral sound in his head. He saw Leo lying on
his coat under a bush, his shirt and jersey pushed up under his
armpits, his jeans and pants round his knees, small dead leaves
sticking to his thighs - and he heard the astonishing chord. It was high
and low at once, an abysmal pizzicato, a pounce of the darkest brass,
and above it a hair-raising sheen of strings. It seemed to knock him
down and fling him up all in one unresisted gesture. He couldn't
repeat it immediately, but after a while he would see Leo rising to kiss
him, and the love-chord would shiver his skin again. It startled him
while Penny was describing the enormous interest of working for
Gerald, and he jumped, and smiled at his invisible friend, so that
Penny worried that she'd been funny. He wondered if it came from
something he knew, or if he'd written it himself. It certainly wasn't the
Tristan chord, with its germ of catastrophe. The horrible thought came
to him that if it existed, it had probably been written by Richard
Strauss, to illustrate some axe-murder or beheading, some vulgar
atrocity.
Whereas to Nick, though it was frightening, it was also
indescribably happy. 'So how are you getting on at UCL?' said Penny
kindly, as if it must be a sorry comedown after Oxford. Nick and Penny
had never met as students, the word Oxford meant different things to
them, but Penny relied on it as a thing they had in common.'Oh, fine…!' said Nick; and went on obligingly, 'It's not at all like
Oxford, you know. The place itself is fairly grim. I've just found out
that the English department used to be a mattress factory.'
'Really!' said Penny.
'It is a bit depressing. I suppose it's no wonder half the staff are
alcoholics.' Penny laughed, oddly titillated, and Nick felt rather
treacherous.
In fact he revered Professor Ettrick, who had taken to him with
immediate subtle confidence, and seen possibilities in his thesis topic
that he himself hadn't dreamt of. But nothing much was being done,
and through most of Nick's library days his eyes wandered just beyond
the page in a deep monotonous reverie about Leo: the great unfolding
sentences of Meredith or James would slow and fade into subliminal
parentheses, half-hour subordinate clauses of remembered sex. And
he felt guilty, because he wanted to deserve the professor's trust and
be as clever and committed as he was meant to be. Penny said, 'Was it
Henry James you're working on?'
'Er… yes,' said Nick.
She seemed to setde comfortably on that, but only said, 'My
father's got tons of Henry James. I think he calls him the Master.'
'Some of us do,' said Nick. He blinked with the exalted humility of
a devotee and sawed off a square of brown meat.
'An makes life: wasn't that his motto? My father often quotes
that.'
'It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for
our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no
substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process,' said Nick.
'Something like that,' said Penny. She smiled contentedly into the
candlelight.
'What would Henry James have made of us, I wonder?' she went
on.
'Well…' Nick chewed it over. He thought she was rather like a
high-minded aunt, proposing questions with virginal firmness and
ignorance. He wondered condescendingly what her sexual prospects
were. A certain kind of man might like to raise the colour in-that
plump white neck. He said, 'He'd have been very kind to us, he'd have
said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he'd have
given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn't have realized
until just before the end that he'd seen right through us.'
'Because he did write about high society, didn't he?' said Penny,
clearly thinking that was where she was, and also perhaps that it was
proof against being seen through.
'Quite a lot,' said Nick; and remembering his chat with Lord
Kessler in the summer and really giving a long-pondered answer to
him, 'People say he didn't understand about money, but he certainlyknew all about the effects of money, and the ways having money made
people think.' He looked fondly across at Toby, who out of sheer
niceness tried now and then not to think like a rich person, but could
never really get the hang of it. 'He hated vulgarity,' he added. 'But he
also said that to call something vulgar was to fail to give a proper
account of it.'
Penny seemed to be puzzling this over, but in fact she was
listening to what Badger was suggesting in her other ear: her sudden
blush and giggle showed Nick that this was one of Badger's little
sexual challenges to him - it was almost a way of calling him a lag.
Toby was listening to (ireta Timms, but leaning past her to keep
an eye on Sophie, who was being drily examined by Morden Lipscomb.
'No,' said Sophie reluctantly, 'I've only been in one sort of major film.'
'And what of the stage?' said Lipscomb, with an odd mixture of
persistence and indifference.
'Well, I am abbut to be in something. It's… I'm afraid it's going to
be rather a trendy production… it's Lady Windermere's Fan.'
Jenny Groom started asking something about Catherine, was she
as mad as they said, and Nick's hesitations as he answered only half
allowed him to hear the truth that Lipscomb dragged out of Sophie,
that she wasn't playing Lady Windermere herself, but 'Oh, just a minor
part… No! Not too much to learn… Oh no, not her, that's a wonderful
part… Anyway it will probably all be ruined by the director…' and that
in fact she'd been cast as Lady Agatha, a role which famously
contained nothing but the two words 'Yes, mamma.' Nick thought this
was very funny, and then felt almost sorry for her.
Rachel said, 'My dear, what fun, we shall all come to your first
night,' apparently sincerely, so that a further alliance, of efficient,
almost impersonal solidarity, was seen to be in place between the
mother and her possible daughter-in-law.
Lady Partridge, jealous of Lipscomb's attention, went off on the
unobvious tangent of her hip replacement. 'Oh, I had it at the Dorset…
Well, yes, I always go there, I find them marvellous… charming girls…
The nurses, yes… One or two of the doctors are coloured, but there's
absolutely no need to have anything to do with them… Not that I'm
much of a one for hospital!' she reassured him. 'My late husband was
there a good deal.'
'Ah…' said Lipscomb, measuring the distance to a condolence.
She lifted her glass, with a worldly sigh. 'Well, I've oudived two
husbands, and that's probably enough,' she said, as if still leaving a
tiny loophole for further proposals. She looked at Lipscomb, perhaps
wondering if he had said something, and went on, 'Actually they were
both called Jack! They couldn't have been more different, as it
happens… chalk and cheese… I don't think they'd have got on for a
moment- had they ever met!' Nick thought she might almost have beenon the phone, hearing answers and questions from far away. 'Jack
Fedden, of course, Gerald's father, a funny sort of man, in a way… He
was in the law, very much a law man… very, very handsome… and
Jack Partridge, Sir Jack, of course… No, not a law man… Not at all…
He was a practical man, a builder, he built some of the new
motorways, as you may know… Yes, some of the Ms… the M, um… He
did marvellous work…'
At the head of the table Gerald was perceptibly distracted by his
mother's talk.
Nick knew that Jack Partridge had gone bust not long after
getting his knighthood, in one of the funny reversals of these recent
years; it was a subject which might seem to tarnish his stepson by
association. Gerald made a firm intervention and said, 'So, Morden, I
was absolutely gripped by your paper on SDL'
'Ah…' said Lipscomb, with a smile that showed he wasn't so
easily flattered. 'I wasn't sure that you'd agree with my conclusions.'
'Oh, absolutely' said Gerald, with a surprising mocking smile
which confirmed to Nick that he hadn't read beyond those first few
pages. 'How could one not!'
'Well… you'd be surprised,' said Lipscomb. 'Is this the
telephones?' said Lady Partridge. 'It's missile defence, Ma,' said Gerald
loudly. 'You know, Gran, Star Wars,' said Toby. 'You're thinking of
STD, Judy,' said Badger.
Ah,' said Lady Partridge, and chuckled, not in embarrassment
but at the attention she'd won for herself. 'The President announced
the Strategic Defence Initiative six months ago,' said Morden
Lipscomb, gravely but a litde impatiently. 'It aims to protect the United
States from any attack by guided missile systems. In effect a defensive
shield will be created to repel and destroy nuclear weapons before they
can reach us.'
'Delightful idea,' said Lady Partridge. This sounded satirical, and
the plan had indeed been greeted with derision as well as dismay; but
then Nick thought, no, the old lady would take pleasure in weaponry,
and arms budgets generally.
'It is, I believe, an irresistible one,' said Lipscomb, laying his left
hand commandingly on the table. He wore a signet ring on his litde
finger, but no wedding ring. Of course that didn't mean much; Nick's
own father and his father's male friends didn't wear wedding rings,
they were thought, for all their symbolism, to be vaguely effeminate. He
thought of the card, 'From the Desk of Morden Lipscomb' - it made one
wonder where else it might have come from: 'the Back-burner', 'the
Rest-room', 'From the Closet of Morden Lipscomb'… well, it was an
idea. He was clearly a man with his own defensive systems.
After pudding the ladies withdrew. Nick's thoughts went with
them as they climbed the stairs; he stood with one knee on his chair,hoping he might somehow be allowed to join them. 'Slide along, Nick,'
said Gerald. The men all closed up together at Gerald's end of the
table, in a grimly convivial movement, occupying the absent women's
places. Nick handed Lady Partridge's lipstick-daubed napkin to Elena,
who had come through to sort them out. There were many all-male
occasions that he liked, but now he missed the buffer of a female, even
Jenny Groom, whose general impatience he'd decided was a sad flower
of her hatred of her husband. Now Barry Groom was sitting down
opposite him with a scowl, as if familiar to the point of weariness with
the etiquette of such occasions. Nick looked across to Toby for help,
but he was laying out a box of cigars and the cigar cutter; Gerald was
setting the decanters off on their circuit. Nick pictured Leo, as he had
left him today, walking his bike away, and the love-chord sounded,
warily now - he didn't want tlie others to hear it. How could he
describe it, even to himself, Leo's step, his bounce, his beautiful half-
knowing, half-unconscious deployment of his own effects? 'I'll give you
one piece of advice,' said Barry Groom, choosing imperiously between
the unmarked port and claret decanters.
'Oh, yes,' said Nick, and felt his erection begin to subside. 'Never
speculate with more than twelve per cent of your capital.'
'Oh…' Nick gasped humorously, but seeing Barry Groom was
almost angrily in earnest he went on, ' Twelve per cent. Right… I'll try
and remember that. No, that sounds like good advice.'
'Twelve per cent,' said Barry Groom: 'it's the best advice I can
give you.' He slid the decanters over to him, since they formed the
bridge, furthest from Gerald. Nick took some port and passed it on to
Morden Lipscomb, with a litde show of promptness and charm.
Lipscomb was just clipping a cigar, and his thin mouth, turned down
in concentration, seemed to brood on some disdain, not of the cigar,
but of the company he found himself in. This was presumably the
moment when he should be made way for, in the solemn but
disinhibiting absence of the women, but he was cagey, or sulky. Nick
felt sorry for Gerald, but didn't see how he could help. His own way of
getting on terms with people was through the sudden intimacy of talk
about art and music, a show of sensibility; but he felt Lipscomb would
rebuff him, as though refusing intimacy of another kind. He wondered
again what Leo would have said and done: he had such clear, sarcastic
opinions about things. 'So, Derek,' said Barry Groom, in his cuttingly
casual tone, 'how long are you staying here?'
Badger puffed coaxingly for a second or two, and then let out a
roguish cloud of smoke. 'As long as the old Banger'U have me,' he said,
jerking his head towards Gerald.
'Ah, that's what you call him, is it?' said Barry, with a rival-rous
twitch.Badger grunted, took a quick suck on his cigar, and said, 'Oxford
days…' knowing how easy Barry was to tease. 'No, I'm having a place
done up at the moment, that's why I'm here.'
'Oh, really? Where is it?' said Barry suspiciously.
Badger was deaf to this question, so Barry repeated it and he
said at length, as if conceding a clue to a slow guesser, 'Well, it's quite
near your place of work, actually.' The secrecy was presumably a
further tease, though it fitted with something seedily hush-hush about
Badger. 'It's just a little flat - a little pied-a-terre.'
A fuck-flat in other words,' said Barry, sharply, to make sure the
illusionless phrase, and his offensiveness in using it, struck home.
Even Badger looked slightly abashed. Gerald gave a disparaging gasp
and plunged as if confidentially into new talk with John Timms and
his old mentor about the genius of the Prime Minister. Nick glanced
across at Toby, who half closed his eyes at him in general if unfocused
solidarity.._
'I had wondered whether the Prime Minister might be with us
this evening,' said Lipscomb. 'But I see of course it's not that kind of
party.'
'Oh…' said Gerald, looking slightly guilty. 'I'm so sorry. I'm afraid
she wasn't free. But if you'd like me to bring you together Lipscomb
gave a rare smile. 'We're lunching on Tuesday, so it's not at all
necessary.'
'Oh, you are?' said Gerald, and smiled too, in a genial litde mask
of envy.
And so it went on for ten or fifteen minutes, Nick perching at the
corner of two conversations, the 'odd man', as Gerald had briskly
predicted. He passed the decanters appreciatively, and sat smiling
faintly at the reflections of the candelabra in the table top or at a
disengaged space just above Barry Groom's head. He grunted
noncommittally at some of Badger's jokes, Badger appearing in the
candlelight and its mollifications as almost a friend among the other
guests. He nodded thoughtfully, without following the thread, at one or
two of Lipscomb's remarks that caused general pauses of respect. The
cigar stench was the whole atmosphere, but the alcohol was a secret
security. There was something so irksome about Barry Groom that he
had a fascination: you longed for him to annoy you again. He was
incredibly chippy, was that the thing? - all his longings came out as a
kind of disdain for what he longed for. And yet he got on with Gerald,
they were business partners, they saw a use for each other; and that
perhaps was the imponderable truth behind this adult gathering.
Barry said, 'The way you Oxford fuckers go on about the Martyrs'
Club,' and frowned sharply as he swallowed some claret. 'What were
you martyrs to, that's what I'd like to know'Ooh… hangovers,' said Badger. 'Yes, drink,' Toby put in, and
nodded frankly. 'Overdrafts and class distinctions,' said Nick drolly.
Barry stared at him, "What, were you a member?'
'No, no…' said Nick. 'I didn't think so!'
And then there was a rattle in the hall as the front door was
opened and the bang of it slamming shut. Then immediately the bell
rang, in three urgent bursts. There was a shout of vexation, the door
was jerked open again, and Catherine, it must have been, was talking -
from the dining room they heard only the hurried shape of her talk.
Nick's eyes slid round the faces of the others at the table, who looked
puzzled, displeased, or even lightly titillated. John Timms stared
unblinking towards the closed door of the room; Badger sat back in a
curl of smoke. 'All right!' It was Catherine.
'That child would try the patience of an oyster,' said Gerald, with
evident feeling but also a snuffle of amusement, a darting glance to
judge the effect of his allusion.
Then the front door closed again, more thoughtfully, and a man's
voice was heard - 'You need to be careful, girl…' Nick gave a little
snigger, trying to commute it into Russell's voice, but Gerald had set
down his cigar and stood up: 'Sorry…" he murmured, and walked
towards the door with a dwindling smile.
'That's my sis,' said Toby. As I was saying…' said Morden
Lipscomb. When Gerald opened the door, the man was going on quietly
but urgendy, You need to calm down, Cathy, I don't like it, I don't like
seeing you like this at all…' and Nick's heart went out to the Caribbean
accent, in instant sentimental allegiance - he felt himself float out
towards it from the cigar-choked huddle at the table, the Oxonian
burble and Barry's whine. 'Who are you?' said Gerald.
'Oh, Christ, Dad!' said Catherine, and it was clear she was
crying, the last word broke as she raised her voice. c And are you
Cathy's father, then Nick got up and went into the hall, with the feeling
he must try to curb Gerald's unhelpful sharpness, and an anxious
sense of the things Gerald didn't know, that might now have to be
named and negotiated. He was half in the dark himself. If someone
told you they were OK, was it wrong to believe them? She was standing
at the foot of the stairs, gripping the gold chain of her bag in both
hands and looking both angry and vulnerable: Nick almost laughed, as
you do for a second at the latest catastrophe of a child, and seem to
mock it when you mean to reassure it; though he was frightened too.
There was quite a chance he'd have to do something. He peered at her,
with the frank curiosity allowed in a crisis - it really was childlike, the
quick fall; she had only gone out two hours ago.
Her mouth quivered, as if with accusation. She was tiny in her
high heels. Nick knew the man, he was the minicab driver she'd been
friendly with, the one she'd had back to the house when Gerald andRachel were away, fiftyish, grizzled at the temples, heavy-built, a sweet
hint of ganja about him: well, all the Orbis drivers sold the stuff. He
was completely and critically different from everything else in the
house. Nick said, 'Hi!' under his breath, and rested a hand on his
shoulder. 'What's happened, darling?' he said. 'Who is this man?' said
Gerald.
'I'm called Brentford, since you're asking,' the man said slowly. 'I
brought Catliy home.'
'That's really kind of you,' said Nick. 'How do you know my
daughter?' said Gerald. 'She needs taking care of,' said Brentford. 'I
can't help her tonight, I got a job.'
'He's the minicab driver,' said Nick. 'Does he need paying?' said
Gerald.
'I don't charge her,' said Brentford. 'She call me when he dump
her.'
'Is this true?' said Gerald. 'It's really kind of you,' said Nick.
Catherine made a little scream of disbelief, and came and took
Brentford's arm, but he kept a wary dignity with her too and didn't
hold her: he pushed her gendy towards Nick, and she leaned against
him, wailing but not holding on to him. She was in her own distress,
she wasn't seeking solace from Nick, just somewhere to stand; still he
put a cautious arm round her. 'Is it Russell?' he said. But she couldn't
begin to answer. 'What is it, darling?' said Rachel, hurrying
downstairs.
Gerald explained, 'That bloody little shit's dumped her,' clearly
saying, through pretended indignation, what he most hoped had
happened. 'Poor old Puss.'
Rachel looked at the three men, and there was a hint of fear in
her face, as if Brentford had brought some threat much larger than
Catherine's tantrum into the house. 'Come upstairs, darling,' she said.
Barry Groom had come out into the hall, staring and twitching
his head, and so drunk suddenly that there were unconscious delays
to his aggression. 'Look here, you!' he shouted at Brentford. 'I don't
know who you are. You fucker!' Gerald put a hand on his wrist. 'It's all
right, Barry'
'You keep your hands off her, you 'Oh, shut up… you arsehole!'
said Nick, without planning to, and shaken by the sound of his own
raised voice.
'Yes, shut up, you wanker!' said Catherine, through her tears.
'Now, now!' said Barry, and then something awful, a sly smile,
slid on to his face. 'God, I'm really sorry…' said Nick to Brentford. 'Why
are we all standing here?' said Gerald. 'Darling, come up,' said Rachel.
'Let's finish our port and cigars,' said Gerald, turning his back on
Brentford.He had to show, for the sake of the party, that he took scenes
like this with habitual good humour. 'Will you take her up, darling?' he
said, as if there were really a chance he might do it himself.
Catherine moved away and started up the stairs, and Rachel
tried to put an arm round her, but she shook it off. Nick took
Brentford to the door. 'Are you sure we can't pay you?' he said, though
he doubted he had the price of a fare from Stoke Newington himself.
He wanted Brentford to know he wasn't guilty of the thing the whole
house stood accused of. 'He's a bad man,' said Brentford, on the
doorstep.
'Oh…' said Nick, yes…' He wasn't certain which man was being
referred to, and Brentford's shake of the head and flap of the arm
seemed to write them all off.
Nick stood on die pavement for a while after die Sierra had gone,
and heard the laughter of the women from an open window above. It
was good to be out of die house, in the night air. He was trembling a
litde from having shouted at someone he hated. He thought of Leo, and
smiled, and hugged his hands under his armpits.
He wondered what Leo was doing, the afternoon flared up again
and warmed him with amazement; then the thought of Pete came over
it like the chill of a cloud.
He went in and slowed as he passed by the half-open door of the
dining room: '… the beggar stank of pot!' Gerald was saying, to odd
humourless laughter. Now perhaps he could really go upstairs, and
taste the freedom of being the odd man.
He didn't have a place in either of the two parties. It was bad
form to go away, it admitted a prior desire to do so; but he couldn't go
back and sit with Barry Groom. He thought Gerald might be angry
with him too, but he would surely be glad of his taking an interest in
Catherine. It couldn't be called a shirking of responsibility. Nick
started to climb the stone stairs, and had hummed several bright
anticipatory bars from Schumann's Fourth Symphony before he
stopped himself..'God, you're a twit,' said Leo. He looked fretfully at different parts of
Nick, unable to place his dissatisfaction exacdy. In the end he licked
his thumb and rubbed his cheek, as if Nick was a child. This word
twit, a tiny sting, had come up before, and signalled some complex ofminor reproaches, class envy, or pity, the obvious frustrations of
having a boy like Nick to teach. As always Nick searched for something
else in it too, which was Leo's tutting indulgence of his pupil; he still
longed for flawless tenderness, but he forgave Leo, who for once was
nervous himself. They were on the Willesden pavement, ten yards from
his front gate. 'You're so fucking preppy,' said Leo. 'I don't know what
that means.' Leo shook his head. 'What am I going to do with you?'
They had met after work, across the road from the Council
offices, and Leo was wearing a dark grey suit with square shoulders
and a white shirt and a wide but sober tie. It was the first time Nick
had seen this beautiful everyday metamorphosis, and he couldn't help
smiling. He was in love to the point of idolatry, but the smiles, the
appreciative glances, seemed to strike Leo like a kind of sarcasm. 'You
look so handsome,' Nick said.
'Yeah, and so do you,' said Leo. 'Right, we're going in. Now what
did I tell you, don't take the name of the Lord in vain. Don't say, "Oh
my god!" Don't even say, "Good Lord!" ' (Leo fluted tliese phrases in the
way that was his puzzling imitation of Nick.) 'Don't say, "Jesus fucking
bollocks." '
'I'll try not.'
Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a
nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older
people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted
excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the
faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with
which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had
arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation
because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it,
detecting those magnetic embarrassments towards which it would
always twitch and bend. 'My sister sort of knows,' said Leo. 'You want
to watch her.'
'Rosemary.'
'She's pretty.'
Nick followed him up the short concrete path and said in his ear,
'Not as pretty as you, I bet,' one of his light flirty jokes that he watched
swoop to earth under its own weight of adoration.
Mrs Charles and her son and daughter lived on the ground floor
of a small red-brick terrace house; there were two front doors side by
side in the shallow recess of the porch. Leo applied himself to the
right-hand one, and it was one of those locks that require tender
probings and tuggings, infinitesimal withdrawals, to get die key to
turn. Nick reflected briefly on the coloured glass in the inset window
and the old Palm Sunday cross pinned above the doorbell. He pictured
Leo going through this routine every day; and he noted his own small
effort of adjustment, his disguised shock at the sight of the street andthe house - perhaps he was a twit after all. When he stepped inside he
had a memory, as sharp as die cooking smell in die hall, of school
afternoons of community service, going into the homes of the old and
disabled each charitable visit a lesson in life and also - to Nick at least
- in the subde snobbery of aesthetics.
He took in the tiny kitchen in a photographic glance, the wall
units with sliding frosted-glass doors, theorange curtains, the church
calendar with its floating Jesus, the evidence of litde necessary
systems, heaped papers, scary wiring, bowls stacked within bowls, and
the stove with piates misted and beaded on the rack above a bubbling
pan; and at the centre Leo's mother, fiftyish, petite, with hooded eyes
and straightened hair and a charitable smile of ller own. 'You're very
welcome,' she said, and her voice had the warm West Indian colour
that Leo kept only as a special effect or a temporary camouflage.
'Thank you,' said Nick. 'It's very good to rreet you.' He was so
used to living by hints and approximations that there had always been
something erotic in meeting die family of a man he was in love with, as
if he could get a further vicarious fix on him by checking genetic
oddities, the shared curve of the nose or echoing laziness of step. In
the rich air of Kensington Park Gardens he seemed to live in the
constant difiiised presence of Toby, among people who were living
allusions to him and thus a torment as well as a kind of consolation
.3ut of course he had never done more than hug Toby and siss him on
the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis a(a college urinal.
Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden he was talking to the mother
of the man who called him rot only a 'damn good fuck' but also a 'hot
litde cocksucker' with 'a first-class degree in arse-licking'. Which
clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a
trance of revelation and gratitude.
And then there was Rosemary, coming in from work, home early,
it seemed, to help her mother out vith this under-explained guest they
had. She was a doctor's receptionist, and wore a blouse and skirt
under her belted mac. They had an awkward introduction, edging
round Leo's bike in the hall. Perhaps it was shyness, but she seemed
disdainful of Nick. He looked for her prettiness, and thought she was
like a silky fluffy version of Leo, without the devastating detail of an
ingrowing beard. Then brother and sister both went off to change.
Nick couldn't work out the plan of the house, but there were
subdivided rooms at the back, and a sense of carrying closeness that
made die bike entirely necessary; it waited there, shuddered and
jangled faintly as Nick bumped against it, as if conscious of its own
trapped velocity.
'Ah, that bicycle,' said Mrs Charles, as if it was some profane
innovation. 'I told him…'They went into die front room, in which a heavy oak dining table
and chairs, with bulbous Jacobean-style legs, were jammed in beside a
three-piece suite tiiat was covered in shiny ginger leadier, or something
like it. There was a gas fire with a beaten copper surround under a
ledge crowded with religious souvenirs. Mrs Charles's church life
clearly involved a good deal of paperwork, and half the table was
stacked with box-files and a substantial print-run of the tract
'Welcoming Jesus In Today'. Nick sat down at the end of die sofa and
peered politely at the pictures, a large framed 'mural' of a palm-
fronded beach and a reproduction of Holman Hunt's The Shadow of
Death. There were also studio photos of Leo and Rosemary as children,
in which Nick felt himself taking an almost paedophiliac interest.
'Now, young sir,' said Mrs Charles, with a clarity of enunciation
that sounded both anxious and arch, 'he tells me next to nothing, Leo,
you know, at all. But I think you're the fellow who lives in the big white
house, belongs to the MP?'
'Yes, I am,' Nick said, with a self-deprecating laugh which seemed
to puzzle her. Leo must have been talking up these facts to impress
her, though on other occasions they were the object of vague derision.
'And how do you like it?' Mrs Charles asked.
'Well, I'm very lucky,' Nick said. 'I'm only there because I was at
university with one of their children.'
'So, you met herV Nick smiled back with a little pant of
uncertainty. 'What, Mrs Fedden, you mean 'No…! Mrs Fedden… I
assume you met Mrs Fedden, if I'm saying her name correcdy.'
Nick blushed, and then smiled as he saw the way, simple but
nimble, religious even, that she'd gone for the big question. 'No - her.
The lady herself. Mrs T!'
'Oh… No. No, I haven't. Not yet…' He felt obliged to go on, rather
indiscreetly, 'I know they'd love to have her round, he, um, Gerald
Fedden, has tried to get her at least once. He's very ambitious.' Ah, you
want to make sure and meet Mrs T'
'Well, I'll certainly tell you if I do,' said Nick, looking round
gratefully as Leo came into the room. He was wearing jeans and a
sweatshirt and Nick had a vivid image of him ejaculating. Then he saw
the heavy spit as it loitered and drooled down the taut ginger back of
the sofa. He felt deliciously brainwashed by sex, when he closed his
eyes phallus chased phallus like a wallpaper pattern across the dark,
and at any moment the imagery of anal intercourse, his new triumph
and skill, could gallop in surreal montage across the street or
classroom or dining table.
And can I be allowed to hope you are a regular church-attender?'
Nick crossed his legs to hide his excitement and said, 'I'm not
really, I'm afraid. At the moment, anyway.'Mrs Charles looked used to such disappointments, and almost
cheerful, as if taking a very long view. And what about your father and
mother?'
'Oh, they're very religious. My father's a churchwarden, and my
mother often does the church flowers… for instance.' He hoped this
compensated, rather than merely highlighting, his own delinquency.
'I'm very happy to hear it. And what is your father's occupation?'
she demanded, pressing on in interview mode, which made Nick
wonder if she did somehow know, however subconsciously, that he
was trying to tie his life to her son's. He was a puzzle, Nick, in many
contexts -he was often being interviewed obliquely, to see how he fitted
in.
He said, 'He's an antiques dealer - old furniture and clocks,
mostly, and china.'
Mrs Charles looked up at Leo. 'Well, isn't that the exact same
thing as old Pete!'
'Yeah,' said Leo, whose whole manner was withdrawn and
unhelpful. He dragged out one of the dining chairs and sat down at the
table behind them. 'There's a lot of antique dealers about.'
'The exact same thing,' said Mrs Charles. 'You go on, look
around. We got some good old antiques here. You don't know old Pete?'
Yes, I do,' Nick said, glancing round the room and wondering
what Pete had said about it all before him, and how Pete had been
explained to her. 'It's a small little world,' she marvelled. 'Well, Leo
introduced me to him…'
'Ah, he's a good man, old Pete. You know we always called him
"old" Pete, though he can't be not more than fifty.'
'He's forty-four,' said Leo.
'He was a great help to my son. He helped him with getting
through college, and with the job on the council. And he didn't stand
to get nothing from it - leastways not in this world. I always say to Leo
he's his fairy godfather.'
'Something like that,' said Leo, with trie sourness of a child
subjected to the astounding iterations of a parent's treasured phrases -
treasured often because they put a bright gloss on some anxious
denial. The clumsy unconscious joke in this one must have made it
specially wearing.
'A proper decent father Leo didn't have,' said Mrs Charles
candidly, and again with an almost cunning air of satisfaction that
they had been so tested. 'But the Lord looks after his own And now,
don't you reckon he's a good boy?'
'Yes, he's… splendid!' said Nick. 'What's for tea?' said Leo.
'I'm hoping your sister is bringing it off now,' said MR Charles.
'We're giving our guest our special spicy chops anc rice. In thiscountry,' she observed to Nick, you don't fry ths chops so much, you're
always grilling them, isn't that right?'
'Um… I don't know. I think we do both.' He thought o: his own
mother, as an embodiment of any such supposec tradition; but went
on charmingly, 'But if you fry them rathei than grilling them, then
that's also what we do in this country!
'Ha…' said Mrs Charles, 'well that's certainly one way o: looking
at the matter.'
At table the movement of Nick's left arm was limited by
th«leaning tower of 'Welcoming Jesus In Today'. He came dowr on his
food in a hesitant but predatory fashion. The meal wa a bold
combination of bland and garishly spicy, and he won dered if
Rosemary had mockingly overdone the chillies tc make fun of his good
manners. He was full of round-eyec appreciation, which was also a
cover for the surprise of having his evening meal at five forty-five; some
absurd social reflex the useful shock of class difference, a childish
worry perhaps a a changed routine, all combined in a mood of
interesting alienation. At Kensington Park Gardens they ate three hour
later, and dinner was sauntered towards through a sequence o other
diversions, chats and decantings, gardening and tennis gramophone
records, whisky and gin. In the Charles household there was no room
for diversions, no garden to speak of, and no alcohol. The meal came
on straight after work, a wide-ranging grace was declaimed, and then
it was eaten and done with, and the whole long evening lay ahead.
There were things Nick guessed about them, from the habits of his
own family, which lay somewhere between the two; but there were
others he would have to wait for and learn. He had never been in a
black household before. He saw that first love had come with a bundle
of other firsts, which he took hold of like a wonderful but worrying
bouquet.
After a longish silence Leo said, 'So how's it going at college?' as if
they hardly knew each other.
'Oh, it's all right,' said Nick, disconcerted but then touched by
Leo's stiffness. Whenever Leo was cold or rough to him he felt it like a
child - then he turned it round and found some thwarted love in it. He
was in awe of Leo, but he saw through him too, and each time he
followed this little process of indulgence he felt more in love. 'It hasn't
been very exciting so far. I suppose it's just different from what I've
been used to.' He always came away from the sunless back court
where the English department was with two or three newly shaped
anecdotes, which gave his days there a retrospective sparkle; but he
found it hard to interest Leo in them and they often went to waste. Or
they were stored up, with a shadowy sense of resentment. 'He was at
Oxford University before,' said Leo. 'And now where is he?' Mrs Charles
wondered.'I'm at University College,' Nick said. 'I'm doing a doctorate now.'
Leo chewed and frowned. 'Yeah, what is it again?'
'Oh…' said Nick, with a disparaging wobble of die head, as if he
couldn't quite get the words out. 'I'm just doing something on style in
the - oh, in the English novel!' Aaaah yes,' said Mrs Charles, vith a
serene nod, as if to say that this was something infinitelr superior but
also of course fairly foolish.
Nick said, 'Umm…' - but tren she broke out, 'He's crazy for
studying! I'm wandering just how old he is.' Nick chuckled awkwardly.
Tn twenty-one.'
And he doesn't look like no nure than a little boy, does he,
Rosemary?'
Rosemary didn't answer exacth but she raised one eyebrow and
seemed to cut her food up ini very ironical way. Nick was blushing red
and it took him a nwnent to notice Leo's embarrassment, die
mysterious black bush, frowningly denied. His secret was heavy in his
face, anc Nick suddenly understood that the difference in their ages
nattered to Leo, and that even an innocent reference to it seemel to lay
his fantasy bare. Old Pete was licensed by being old, in obscurely
benign institution; it was much harder to accoint for his friendship
with a studious little boy of twenty-one.
Nick had to go on, though he (ould hear that he was out of tune,
'Of course one misses one's friends - it takes a while to setde down - I
expect it will all be marvellous in the end!' There was another rather
critical pause, so he went on, 'The English department used to be a
mattress factory. At least half the tutors seem to be alcoholics!'
Both these remarks had g»ne down rather well at Kensington
Park Gardens, and lad left Nick suppressing a smile at his own
silliness. But all lamilies are silly in their own way, and now he was
left with a pizzled and possibly offended silence. Leo chewed slowly and
gtve him a completely neutral look. 'Mattresses, yeah?' he said.
Rosemary stared firmly at her plate and said, 'I should tliink they
ought to get help.'
Nick gave an apologetic laugh. 'Oh… of course, they should.
You're quite right.
I wish they would!'
After a while Mrs Charles said, 'You know, all die men like that,
that's got that sort of problems, each and every one of them got a great
big hole right in the middle of their lives.'
Ah…' Nick murmured, flinching widi courteous apprehension.
And they can fill that hole, if only they know how, with the Lord
Jesus. That's what we pray, that's what we always pray. Isn't that so,
Rosemary?'
'That's what we do,' said Rosemary, with a shake of the head to
show there was no denying it.'So what's your success rate?' said Leo, in a surprisingly
sarcastic tone; which explained itself when Mrs Charles leant
confidentially towards Nick. You couldn't stop a mother when she was
on the track of her 'idea'.
'I pray for all those in darkness to find Jesus, and I pray for the
two children I've brought into this world to get themselves hitched up.
At the altar, that's to say.' And she laughed fondly, so that Nick
couldn't tell what she really thought or knew.
Leo scratched his head and shivered with frustration, though
there was a kind of fondness in him too, since he was going to
disappoint her. Rosemary, who was clearly her mother's right hand,
found herself linked with Leo, and protested flatly that she was ready,
just as soon as the perfect man turned up. With her eyes half closed
she had her mother's devout look. 'There's nothing keeping me from
the altar except that one thing,' she said, and as the look fell on Leo
she seemed to play with betrayal, and then once again to let it go.
When the fruit and ice cream had been brought in, Mrs Charles
said to Nick, 'I see you been looking at my picture there, of the Lord
Jesus in the carpenter's shop.'
'Oh… yes,' said Nick, who'd really been trying to avoid looking at
it, but had none the less found himself gingerly dwelling on it, since it
hung just above Leo's shoulder, straight in front of him. 'You know,
that's a very famous old picture.'
'Yes, it is. You know, I saw the original of it quite recently -it's in
Manchester.'
• 'Yeah, I knew that's not the original when I saw one just the
same in the Church House.'
Nick smiled and blinked, not sure if he was being teased. 'The
original's huge, it's life-size,' he said. 'It's by Holman Hunt, of course
Aha,' Mrs Charles murmured and nodded, as if a vaguely unlikely
attribution had been shown to her in a newly plausible light. It was
just the sort of painting, doggedly literal and morbidly symbolic, that
Nick liked least, and it was even worse life-size, when the literalism so
cried out to be admired. 'I heard tell he's die same fellow as painted
The Light of the World, with the Lord Jesus knocking on the door.'
'Oh yes, that's right,' said Nick, like a schoolteacher pleased by
the mere fact of a child's interest, and leaving questions of taste for
much later. 'Well, for that you only have to go to St Paul's Cathedral.'
Mrs Charles took this in. 'You hear that now, Rosemary? You and
me's going out to St Paul's Cathedral any day now to look at that with
our own naked eyes.' And Nick saw her, in shiny shoes and the small
black hat like an air hostess's that was nesting on a chair in the
corner, making her way there, with waits at a number of bus stops,
and the nervous patience of a pilgrim - he saw her, as if from the air,
climbing the steps and going into the stupendous church, which hefelt he owned, all ironically and art-historically, more than her, a mere
credulous Christian. 'Or else, of course, you and me can go… eh?' she
said to Nick, somehow shyly not using his name.
'I'd love to do that,' Nick said quickly, taking the chance to be
kind and likeable that had been denied him earlier on.
'We'll go together and have a good look at it,' said Mrs Charles.
'Excellent!' said Nick, and caught the hint of mockery in Leo's
eyes.
Mrs Charles said, cocking her head on one side, 'You know, they
always got something clever about them, these old pictures, don't
they?'
'Often they do,'
Nick agreed.
'And you know the clever thing about this one now…' She gave
him the tolerant but crafty look-of someone who holds the answer to a
trick question.
To Nick the clever thing was perhaps the way that the Virgin,
kneeling by the chest that holds the hoarded gifts of the Magi, and
seeing the portent of the Crucifixion in her son's shadow cast on the
rear wall of the room, has her face completely hidden from us, so that
the painting's centre of consciousness, as Henry James might have
thought of her, is effectively a blank; and that this was surely an anti-
Catholic gesture. He said, 'Well, the detail is amazing - those wood
shavings look almost real, everything about it's so accurate…'
'No, no…' said Mrs Charles, with amiable scorn. 'You see, the
way the Lord Jesus is standing there, he's making a shadow on the
wall that's just the exact same image of himself on the Cross!'
'Oh… yes,' said Nick, 'indeed… Isn't it called in fact-'
'And of course that all goes to show how the death of the Lord
Jesus and his Resurrection is foretold in the Bible from ancient times.'
Nick said, 'Well, it certainly illustrates that view even if it doesn't
prove it,' in a perhaps misjudged tone of equable deliberation. Leo shot
him a wincing glance and created a diversion.
'Yeah, I like the way he's got him yawning,' he said; and he
stretched his own arms out and up and tilted his head with a yawn
that was just like the Lord Jesus except that he was holding an ice-
cream-smeared dessert spoon in his left hand. It was the kind of camp
you see sometimes in observant children -and Rosemary watched him
with the smothered amazement and mocking anticipation of a good girl
whose brother has been insolent and reckless. But she said, 'Mm, it
makes me shiver when he does that.' Leo tutted and grinned, as his
own shadow, in the room's less brilliant evening light, stretched and
shrugged and faltered across the wall above his chair. When the meal
finished Leo was checking his bike and they were out in the street
almost at once. Nick was relieved but ashamed - he made a joke ofbeing dragged away in the middle of a sentence, as if Leo was a lively
dog on the end of a leash. But Mrs Charles seemed hot to mind. Ah,
you go on now,' she said, as if she might be quite relieved herself.
Or perhaps, he thought, as he hurried along in silence beside
Leo, she had sensed his own relief, and been saddened by it for a
second, and then had hardened herself against him… Her tone was
nearly dismissive, and perhaps she thought he was false… Well, he
was condescending, in a way… These anxieties flared dully through
him. He began to resent Mrs Charles for thinking he was
condescending.
Leo was walking briskly, as if they'd agreed where they were
going, but he said nothing. Nick couldn't tell if he was sulky, angry,
ashamed, defiant… but he knew that all these emotions could rise and
rush and fizzle and mutate very quickly, and that it was wiser to let
him settle than to guess his mood and risk the wrong opener. Nick's
consciousness of being wise was a small refuge when Leo was difficult
or distant. He took in the after-sunset chill, the upswept trails of dark
cloud above the rooftops, and the presence of autumn, light but
penetrating, in the cold cobalt beyond. In their four weeks together
these evening walks, with the ticking bicycle beside them or between
them, had taken on a deepening colour of romance. He worried that
the silence itself was a kind of comment, and as they reached the end
of the road he pulled Leo against him with a quick chafing hug and
said, 'Mmm, thank you for that, darling.' Leo snorted softly. 'What are
you thanking me for?'
'Oh, just for taking me home. For introducing me to your family.
It means a lot to me.' And he found his litde avowal released a
sentiment he hadn't quite felt before he made it. He was very touched.
'So, now you know what they're like,' said Leo, stopping and
staring, with just his mother's narrowing of the gaze, across the major
road beyond. The evening traffic was let slip from the lights and
accelerated down the hill towards them and past them, then thinned,
and then there was only a waiting emptiness again.
'They're wonderful,' Nick said, meaning only to be kind -though
he heard the word hang, in the silence between the lights, as if in
inverted commas, and underlined too: the wonderful of gush, of
connoisseurship, of Kensington Park Gardens. Leo seemed to find it
absurdly unexpected, and kept blinking, but then smiled and said with
a dry laugh, 'If you say so… darling' - the darling, longed for by Nick,
taking on a dubious ironic twang.
Nick had a large wild plan of his own for the night, but for now
he let Leo take charge: they were going to go back to Notting Hill and
catch the seven fifteen screening of Scarface at the Gate - it had just
come out and Leo had all the facts on it, including its enormouslength, 170 minutes, each one of which appeared to Nick like a
shadowy unit of body heat, of contact and excitement.
They would be pressed together in the warm darkness for three
hours. Leo said what a great actor Al Pacino was, and spoke of him
almost amorously, which Nick couldn't honestly do - to him Pacino
wasn't that sort of idol. There was an interview with him in the new
Time Out, which Leo had probably read, since his ideas on film seemed
to Nick to be drawn pretty closely from the capsule reviews in that
magazine. Still, film was Leo's province, rather humourlessly patrolled
against Nick's pretensions, it was one of the interests he'd originally
advertised, and Nick conceded, 'No, he's a genius,' which was a word
he could thrill them both with. They stood at the bus stop with that
idea in their heads.
When the bus came Nick hopped on and sat looking out at the
back at Leo, who was ages fiddling with his bike and then getting on it,
dwindling away every second into the night-lit street. Then the bus
pulled in at a further stop, and the bike came almost floating up, Leo
rising from his forward crouch to glance in at Nick - he seemed to ride
the air there for a second, and then he winked and stooped and with a
click of the gears he slipped past. Nick was glad of the wink this time,
he raised his hand and grinned, and then was left, in the public
brightness of the bus, to be eyed by the people opposite with vague
suspicion.
The bus threaded down at last across the Harrow Road and
began its long descent of Ladbroke Grove. He pictured Leo whizzing
ahead, and kept losing him in the gleams and shadows of the night
traffic. Where was he now? Nick was still in the alien high reach of the
road, with the canal and the council estates, and longing for the other
end, his own end, the safety and aloofness of white stucco and private
gardens. He wondered what Leo thought as he made the transition,
which occurred at the dense middle part by the market and the
station, under clangorous bridges, where people loitered and
shouted… After that there was a stretch of uneasy gentility, before the
Grove climbed, taking palpable advantage of the hill as a social
metaphor, and touching into life the hint of an orchard or thicket in
the very name of the street. He didn't fool himself that Leo was
sensitive to these things - he was a figure of wrenching poetry to Nick,
but was not himself poetic, and clearly found something daft and even
creepy in Nick's aesthetic promptings and hesitations. Nick sometimes
made the mistake of thinking that Leo didn't feel things strongly, and
then the shock, when his love and need for him leapt out, angry at
being doubted, took his breath away, and almost frightened him. He
thought back over the meal, the visit, and saw that of course it had
meant a lot to Leo as well, but that everything was squashed and
denied by secrecy: if he had been a woman the occasion would havehad a ritual meaning, and Leo's mother could have let herself dream of
the altar steps at last. To Nick the bulging subject of the visit had been
his love for Leo, which obsessed him just as much as Mrs Charles's
love of Jesus did her; but she had given herself licence to express her
fixation, had embraced a duty to do so, whilst his burned through only
in blushes and secret stares. She had eclipsed him completely.
When he got to the cinema he found Leo near the head of the
queue. 'You made it,' he said, looking round at the people behind and
nodding - 'Yeah, it's the first night,' as if it was a bore, he was a martyr
to first nights. And when they reached the window it turned out that
the cinema was nearly full, and they wouldn't be able to sit together.
Nick shrugged and said, 'Ah well…' backing into the couple behind
them, who were trying to overhear. 'We can come at the weekend.'
But Leo said, 'Yeah, we'll have them - god, we're here now,' and
gave him a look of friendly concern.
Nick said quietly, 'I just thought, if we can't sit together…' since
the only reason for sitting through a super-violent three-hour gangster
movie was to have Leo's weight and warmth against him and his hand
in his open fly. They had touched each other like that, with cautious
delirious slowness, in Rumblefish, under the dreamy aegis of Matt
Dillon, and in Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, which had been Nick's
hopeless choice of picture and a peculiar backdrop to an orgasm.
Otherwise, they had only made love in parks, or public lavatories, or
once in the back of Pete's shop, which Leo had kept a key to, and
which felt even more furtive than these cinema handjobs. The thing
about the cinema was that they seemed to share in the long common
history of happy snog-gers and gropers, and Nick liked that.
But now he was alone again, he felt it very keenly, accepting the
'better' ticket, in the middle of the back row. The ads were already
showing as he clambered along and in their patchy glare he loomed
and ducked and apologized, and was a clumsy intruder in a world of
snuggling coupledom. He squeezed in and even the space of his seat
seemed half absorbed by the lovers' coats and bags and angled limbs.
The 170 minutes stretched out ahead like a long-ago detention, some
monstrous test. They stretched out, in fact, like a film he had no wish
to see, and for a moment he was gripped by a tearful bolshiness that
he himself thought astonishing in a grown man. He saw that he could
get up and go home and come back at the end. But then he was
frightened of what Leo would say. There was so much at stake. There
was a Bacardi advertisement, and the brilliance of tropical sea and
white sand lit up the auditorium. He stared at the left side, near the
front, to try to spot Leo, but he couldn't find him. Then he did see the
squared-off silhouette of his head, and for a moment his oddly distant
and attentive profile, played over by the reflected light. Of course thescene of palm trees and surf was much the same as Mrs Charles's
mural. Now superbly handsome heterosexuals romped across it.
Critics had already described Scarf ace as 'operatic', which
perhaps was only their way of saying it was Latin, noisy and
bombastic. It was set in a Miami so violent and so opulent, so glittering
and soulless, that Nick found himself worrying about how people
survived in it, and then about how he would survive in it. In his
disaffected mood he kept wandering off from the film itself into
paranoid doubts and objections. He saw that he was reacting like his
mother, for whom any film on the telly with a sex scene or the word
shit in it took on a nearly hostile presence, and was watched thereafter
with warm mistrust. Scarface was all about cocaine, which alarmed
him. He remembered tensely how Toby had taken it at Hawkeswood
with Wani Ouradi. The film confirmed his worst suspicions. Nowhere
in it was there a hint of the delicious pleasure that Toby had spoken
of. The drug was money and power and addiction - a young blonde
actress in the film snorted joyless volumes of it.
The couple on Nick's left were slumped in a slowly evolving
embrace. He was aware of a hand on a thigh left bare by a very short
skirt - and when it moved his glance twitched guiltily away. He had an
unusual sense of the cinema as a room - a long narrow space with the
dusty plaster mouldings of an old theatre.
Instead of the proper oblivion of the filmgoer he felt a kind of
foreboding.
When the picture brightened his eyes yearned down across the
shadowy ranks of heads, but Leo was litde and so was he, and he
never had that one clear view of him again. Because the film was Leo's
choice, he imagined him enjoying it, taking it on, adjusting himself, as
it went along, to its new standards of hardness. A film that was
shocking quickly lowered the threshold, it made people unshockable.
Nick felt that if he'd been sitting with Leo he might have tittered and
groaned at the shootings and blood like everyone else. But now they
were apart, as they might have been on occasion in this very cinema
before they even knew of each other's existence, sitting separately in
the near dark. It was irrational, perhaps, but the glaring unreality of
the film seemed to throw a suspicion of unreality over everything else,
and his affair with Leo, which was so odd, so new, so unrecognized,
felt open to crude but penetrating doubt .11c wondered il lie would
have noticed Leo ayear ago, in the sliullling semi patience of the exit
line, or carried his image home to lie awake with. Well, probably not,
since one of Leo's affectations was to sit through to the very last
credits, the lenses, the insurers, the thanks to die mayor and police
department of… oh, somewhere obscurely a solution and a puzzle at
the same time.And it wasn't in fact until all that was over that Leo came into die
foyer, blinking and nodding and then genially puzzled at the troubled
look on Nick's face. All right, babe,' he said quietly, and gripped his
upper arm to steer him out. 'That's what I call snorting coke,' he went
on, referring to a scene in the film's final hour where Pacino had torn
open a huge plastic bag of cocaine on his desk and plunged his nose
into it, the slave at last to his own instrument of power. It had struck
Nick as completely ridiculous. 'Did you like that, then?'
Nick hummed and cleared his throat like an anxious bringer of
bad news. 'Not much,' he said, and gave Leo a thin smile. 'It was quite
a laugh,' said Leo.
'The ending was outrageous.'
'Yes… yes it was,' Nick agreed, hesitantly but firmly, recalling the
comprehensive final bloodbath. As so often he had the feeling that an
artistic disagreement, almost immaterial to the other person, was
going to be the vehicle of something that mattered to him more than he
could say.
But Leo said, 'Nah, sorry about that, babe, it was pretty crappy.
And we never got our kiss and cuddle.'
'I know,' said Nick with an archness that covered and somehow
dissolved three hours of regrets - in his relief he couldn't see where he
was going and grabbed and rattled one of die cinema's already locked
glass doors.
Leo went out and into die blocked-offside street where he'd left
his bike, and when Nick followed he found him putting his arms round
his neck and kissing him, chastely but tenderly, on the forehead; then
he kept looking at him, lighdy frowning and smiling at the same time,
with humorous reproach. 'Nicholas Guest.'
'Mm…' - Nick colouring but holding Leo's gaze submissively. 'You
worry too much.
You know that?'
'I know…'
'Yeah? You do trust your Uncle Leo, don't you?'
'Of course I trust you,' Nick burst out quiedy, as if he'd been
asked a simpler question.
'Well, don't worry so much, then. Will you do that for me?' And
again he was all cockney softness.
'Yes,' said Nick, glancing a little worriedly none the less to left
and right, since Leo was holding him against the wall like a mugger as
much as a lover - he worried what people would think. In the wake of
his relief this short exchange raised a vague dissatisfaction. 'Don't ever
forget it.'
'I won't,' Nick murmured, and Leo stood back. He wasn't sure
what it was that he mustn't forget, he had a resdess ear for syntax, but
he smiled at the general drift of the little catechism of reassurance. Itwas lovely that Leo saw at once what was wrong, even if his avuncular
tone didn't put it completely right. Nick found he was confident
enough, despite his racing heartbeat, to mention his plan. 'You're sure
they're not here, yeah?'
'Yes, I'm positive. Well, Catherine might be in.'
'Catherine, right, that's your sister, yeah?' And then Leo winked.
The heavy, sharpedged key to the mortise locks had already cut a
gash in Nick's trouser pocket, and the whole bunch was tangled in the
torn threads and hanging against the top of his thigh. As he tugged at
it a few of the new pound coins dropped ticklingly down his leg and
rolled across the tiled floor of the porch.
Leo jumped on them. 'That's right, throw it away,' he said.
A light always burned in the hall, and gave it tonight a somehow
eerie vigilance. Nick locked the door behind them, and put the keys
back in his pocket, and this time, after two steps, they had shaken
their way down his leg and out on to the chequered marble. Leo,
peeking in the hall mirror, raised an eyebrow but said nothing. On die
console table were i. pare car keys, opera glasses, one of Gerald's grey
fedoras, a letter 'By Hand' addressed to the Rt Hon Mr and the Hon
Mrs Gerald Fedden - and together, as a careless still life, reflected in
the mirror, they seemed to Nick both wonderful and embarrassing. He
stood still for a moment and listened. The light, from a brass lantern
hanging in the well of the stair, threw steep shadows down inside the
threshold of the dining room, revealing only the black satin bodice of a
nineteenth-century Kessler. The Hon and the Rt Hon were both in
Barwick for the night on constituency business, and whilst he
confirmed this to himself he was also rewording the sentence in which
he would explain Leo to them if, after all, they came chattering in. He
had a sense of their possessing the house and everything in it, calmly
but defiantly, and of its stone staircase and climbing cornices reaching
rather pitilessly up into the shadows. He gave Leo a passing kiss on
the cheek, and drew him into the kitchen, where the under-unit
lighting stammered and blinked into life. 'Do you want a whisky?'
And for once Leo said, 'I don't mind if I do! Yeah, that would be
nice. Thanks very much, Nick.' He strolled round the room as if not
really noticing it, and stood scanning the wall of photographs. One of
the Tatler pictures from Toby's twenty-first had now been bought,
blown up and framed: a wildly smiling family group in which the Home
Secretary seemed to show some awareness of being an intruder. Just
above them the student Gerald, in tails, was shaking hands with
Harold Macmillan at the Oxford Union. Again Leo made no comment,
but when Nick handed him the cold tumbler he saw in his eyes and in
his very faint smile that he was noting and storing. Perhaps he was
calculating the degree of affront represented by all this Toryness andmoney. Nick felt his own kudos as family friend, as keyholder, was a
very uncertain quantity. 'Let's go upstairs,' he said.
He went up two at a time, in too much of a hurry, and when he
looked back on die turn he saw Leo dawdling by the same factor that
he was rushing; he went into the drawing room and pressed switches
that brought on lamps on side tables and over pictures - so that when
Leo sauntered in he saw the room as Nick had first seen it two years
before, all shadows and reflections and the gleam of gilt.
Nick stood in front of the fireplace, longing for it to be a triumph,
but taking his cue from the suppressed curiosity in Leo's face. 'I'm not
used to this,' Leo said. 'Oh…'
'I don't drink whisky.' Ah, no, well-'
'Who knows what it'll do to me? I might get dangerous.'
Nick grinned tightly and said, 'Is that a threat or a promise?' He
reached out and touched Leo's hip - his hand lay diere for a second or
two. Normally, together, alone, diey would have been snogging, holding
each other very tightly; though sometimes, it was true, Leo laughed at
Nick's urgency and said, 'Don't panic, babe! I'm not going anywhere!
You've got me!' Leo rested his glass on the mantelpiece, and eyed
Guardi's Capriccio with S. Giorgio Maggiore, which certainly seemed a
rather poindess picture after The Shadow of Death. It was hard to
imagine Rachel haranguing her guests about the clever something in
it.
Underneath it the invitations were propped, overlapping, making
almost one long curlicued social sentence, Mr and Mrs Geoffrey - amp;
Countess of Hexham - Lady Carbury At Home' for - Michael and Jean -
The Secretary of State… and those others, amazingly thick, with
chamfered edges, The Lord Chamberlain is Commanded by Her
Majesty to Request… which tended to stay there long after the events
they referred to, and which gave Nick as well a lingering pompous
thrill. Though he saw now, very quickly, that such a pleasure required
willing complicity in Gerald's habit of showing off to himself. He turned
away, pretending the invitations weren't there, and Leo said, with a
derisive tut, '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