The Line of Beauty (19 page)

"I'm at University College," Nick said. "I'm doing a doctorate now."

Leo chewed and frowned. "Yeah, what is it again?"

"Oh . . . " said Nick, with a disparaging wobble of the head, as if he couldn't quite get the words out. "I'm just doing something
on style in the—oh, in the English novel!"

"Aaaah yes," said Mrs Charles, with a serene nod, as if to say that this was something infinitely superior but also of course
fairly foolish.

Nick said, "Umm . . ."—but then she broke out,

"He's crazy for studying! I'm wondering just how old he is."

Nick chuckled awkwardly. "I'm twenty-one."

"And he doesn't look like no more than a little boy, does he, Rosemary?"

Rosemary didn't answer exactly, but she raised one eyebrow and seemed to cut her food up in a very ironical way. Nick was
blushing red and it took him a moment to notice Leo's embarrassment, the mysterious black blush, frowningly denied. His secret
was heavy in his face, and Nick suddenly understood that the difference in their ages mattered to Leo, and that even an innocent
reference to it seemed to lay his fantasy bare. Old Pete was licensed by being old, an obscurely benign institution; it was
much harder to account for his friendship with a studious little boy of twenty-one.

Nick had to go on, though he could hear that he was out of tune, "Of course one misses one's friends—it takes a while to settle
down—I expect it will all be marvellous in the end!" There was another rather critical pause, so he went on, "The English
department used to be a mattress factory. At least half the tutors seem to be alcoholics!"

Both these remarks had gone down rather well at Kensington Park Gardens, and had left Nick suppressing a smile at his own
silliness. But all families are silly in their own way, and now he was left with a puzzled and possibly offended silence.
Leo chewed slowly and gave him a completely neutral look. "Mattresses, yeah?" he said.

Rosemary stared firmly at her plate and said, "I should think they ought to get help."

Nick gave an apologetic laugh. "Oh . . . of course, they should. You're quite right. I wish they would!"

After a while Mrs Charles said, "You know, all the men like that, that's got that sort of problems, each and every one of
them got a great big hole right in the middle of their lives."

"Ah . . . " Nick murmured, flinching with courteous apprehension.

"And they can fill that hole, if only they know how, with the Lord Jesus. That's what we pray, that's what we always pray.
Isn't that so, Rosemary?"

"That's what we do," said Rosemary, with a shake of the head to show there was no denying it.

"So what's your success rate?" said Leo, in a surprisingly sarcastic tone; which explained itself when Mrs Charles leant confidentially
towards Nick. You couldn't stop a mother when she was on the track of her "idea."

"I pray for all those in darkness to find Jesus, and I pray for the two children I've brought into this world to get themselves
hitched up. At the altar, that's to say." And she laughed fondly, so that Nick couldn't tell what she really thought or knew.

Leo scratched his head and shivered with frustration, though there was a kind of fondness in him too, since he was going to
disappoint her. Rosemary, who was clearly her mother's right hand, found herself linked with Leo, and protested flatly that
she was ready, just as soon as the perfect man turned up. With her eyes half closed she had her mother's devout look. "There's
nothing keeping me from the altar except that one thing," she said, and as the look fell on Leo she seemed to play with betrayal,
and then once again to let it go.

When the fruit and ice cream had been brought in, Mrs Charles said to Nick, "I see you been looking at my picture there, of
the Lord Jesus in the carpenter's shop."

"Oh . . . yes," said Nick, who'd really been trying to avoid looking at it, but had none the less found himself gingerly dwelling
on it, since it hung just above Leo's shoulder, straight in front of him.

"You know, that's a very famous old picture."

"Yes, it is. You know, I saw the original of it quite recently—it's in Manchester."

"Yeah, I knew that's not the original when I saw one just the same in the Church House."

Nick smiled and blinked, not sure if he was being teased. "The original's huge, it's life-size," he said. "It's by Holman
Hunt, of course . . ."

"Aha," Mrs Charles murmured and nodded, as if a vaguely unlikely attribution had been shown to her in a newly plausible light.
It was just the sort of painting, doggedly literal and morbidly symbolic, that Nick liked least, and it was even worse life-size,
when the literalism so cried out to be admired. "I heard tell he's the same fellow as painted
The Light of the World,
with the Lord Jesus knocking on the door."

"Oh yes, that's right," said Nick, like a schoolteacher pleased by the mere fact of a child's interest, and leaving questions
of taste for much later. "Well, for that you only have to go to St Paul's Cathedral."

Mrs Charles took this in. "You hear that now, Rosemary? You and me's going out to St Paul's Cathedral any day now to look
at that with our own naked eyes." And Nick saw her, in shiny shoes and the small black hat like an air hostess's that was
nesting on a chair in the corner, making her way there, with waits at a number of bus stops, and the nervous patience of a
pilgrim—he saw her, as if from the air, climbing the steps and going into the stupendous church, which he felt he owned, all
ironically and art-historically, more than her, a mere credulous Christian. "Or else, of course, you and me can go . . . eh?"
she said to Nick, somehow shyly not using his name.

"I'd love to do that," Nick said quickly, taking the chance to be kind and likeable that had been denied him earlier on.

"We'll go together and have a good look at it," said Mrs Charles.

"Excellent!" said Nick, and caught the hint of mockery in Leo's eyes.

Mrs Charles said, cocking her head on one side, "You know, they always got something clever about them, 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 of being 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 not 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 little 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
ofScarface
at the Gate—it had just come out and Leo had all the facts on it, including its enormous length, 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 have had 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.