The Line of Beauty (46 page)

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

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

"Right . . . " said Nick.

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

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

"He always had to look his best."

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

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

"No," said Gemma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I mean he had hundreds of replies."

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

"Oh," said Nick.

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

"Oh, I don't know."

"So that we can tell them."

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

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

"That's the thing!" said Gemma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did you bring the photos?" said Gemma.

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

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

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

"No," said Nick; "thank you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's right . . ."

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

"Yes . . . I did. I certainly did."

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

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

She said, "He hadn't made a will."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, no," said Nick, "I just got drunk at a party . . ." as if it could happen to anyone.

"Go on, I bet you voted for her, didn't you?" Gemma wanted to know.

"I did not," said Nick, quite sternly. Rosemary showed no interest in this, and he said, "I remember I promised to tell your
mother if I ever met her."

"Oh . . . ?"

He smiled apprehensively. "I mean, how has she coped with all this?"

"You remember what she's like," said Rosemary.

"I'll write to her," said Nick. "Or I could drive over and see her." He pictured her at home with her pamphlets and her hat
on the chair. He had a sense of his charm not having worked on her years ago and was ready to do something now to make good.
"I'm sure she's been wonderful."

Rosemary gave him a pinched look, and as she stood up and collected her things she seemed to decide to say, "That's what you
said before, wasn't it? When you came to see us?"

"What . . . ?"

"Leo told us, you said we were wonderful."

"Did I?" said Nick, who remembered it painfully. "Well, that's not such a bad thing to be." He paused, unsure if he'd been
accused of something. He felt there was a mood of imminent blame, for everything that had happened: they had hoped to pin
it on him, and had failed, and were somehow more annoyed with him as a result. "Of course, she didn't know, did she, that
Leo was gay? She was talking about getting him to the altar."

"Well, he's been to the altar now," said Rosemary with a harsh little laugh, as though it was her mother's fault. "Almost,
anyway."

"It's a terrible way to find out," said Nick.

"She doesn't accept it."

"She doesn't accept the death . . ."

"She doesn't accept he was gay. It's a
mortal sin,
you see," said Rosemary, and now the Jamaican stress was satirical. "And her son was no sinner."