The Line of Beauty

'You're going to be late for lunch,' and thought he sounded rather rude.

'I know,' said Toby. 'Gran wants one of her sessions with Sophie. So we're keeping it as short as possible.'

'Well, I love your grandmother,' Sophie said, with mock petulance.

'No, she's a marvellous old girl,' said Toby; and it reminded Nick of second-hand things he used to say at Oxford, sagacious remarks about his parents' famous friends. He smiled vaguely at Leo. If Sophie hadn't been there, Nick thought, then he could have shown Toby off to Leo as a glamorous accessory to his own past, perhaps something more… But like this Toby was hopelessly claimed and placed.

Nick said, 'Sophie Tipper, Toby Fedden: Leo Charles,' and Leo said 'Leo' both times as he shook hands.

'Right,' said Toby, 'fantastic… We know all about you,' and he gave an encouraging grin.

'Oh, do you,' said Leo, drily doubtful at the return of his own phrase.

'Leo's Nick's new boyfriend,' Toby said to Sophie. 'Yah, it's really great.'

Nick only took a quick agonized peep at Leo, whose expression was scarily blank, as if to dramatize his unrelinquished power of choice. The welling confidence of a few minutes before looked a foolish thing. Nick said, 'Well, we don't want to jump the gun.'

'But that's wonderful,' said Sophie, as though Nick's welfare, his unhappy heart, had long been her concern. He saw her reaching wide to bless the double triumph of boyfriend and black.

'He's been keeping you very much to himself,' said Toby. 'But now we've caught you at it. So to speak!' And he blushed.

'We're just going for a little toddle,' said Leo.

'That's marvellous.' Toby seemed as thrilled as Sophie by what they imagined was happening, and Nick had a sad clear sighting of his deeper, perhaps even unconscious reason: that an obscure pressure, a sense of unvoiced expectations, might be lifted from him by the transference of Nick's adoration to another man. As Gerald might have said of something quite different, it was hugely to be encouraged. And maybe Sophie sensed that too. They'd probably even talked about it, before sleep, as a vague problem-just for a moment, before it shrank into irrelevance like shoes kicked off at the end of the bed…'So you're not joining us for lunch?' Toby went on.

'Not invited,' said Leo, but with a cheerful shake of the head. Nick raced away from the mere idea of it, as a nexus of every snobbery and worry, scene of tortured intercessions between different departments of his own life: Leo-Gerald-Toby-Sophie-Lady Partridge…

'Well, another time,' said Toby. 'We must be going, Pips. But let's all meet up soon?'

'I knew we wouldn't find my ring,' said Sophie, with the crossness that hides a sweetness that hides a toughness.

'We'll come back after lunch. The girl's got to have a ring,' Toby explained, which Nick didn't like the sound of.

Leo had kept up an attitude of steady ironic contemplation of the young couple, but then he said, 'I know I've seen you,' and looked faintly embarrassed by his own gambit. Sophie's face was a lesson in hesitant delight.

'Oh…'

'I may be completely wrong,' said Leo. 'Weren't you in English Rose?'

Disappointed, she seemed to struggle to remember. 'Oh, no… Clever you, but no, I wasn't in that one.'

'That was Betsy Tilden,' said Nick.

'Right, oh yeah, Betsy… No, I know I've seen you…'

Nick wanted to say that she'd only been in two things, an episode of Bergerac and a student-made film of The White Devil, bankrolled by her father, which had had a single late-night screening at the Gate.

'I was in a film that was called The White Devil,' said Sophie, as though speaking to a child.

'That was it!' said Leo. 'Yes! That was a fantastic film. I love that film.'

'I'm so glad,' said Sophie. 'You are kind!'

Leo was smiling and staring, as if the scenes were spooling through his head again, miraculously matched by the woman in front of him. 'Yeah, when he poisons him, and… Did you see this film, Nick, White Devil…?'

'Stupidly, I missed it,' Nick said; though he had a clear recollection of undergraduates acting at being film- makers, bouncing round in jeeps and wearing dark glasses at night; the Flamineo, Jamie Stallard, a drawling Martyrs' Club twit, was one of his favourite betes noires.

'I've got to tell you, that guy-Jamie, is it?-ooh-ooh…'

'I know,' said Sophie. 'I thought you'd like him.'

'You're not wrong, girl,' laughed Leo, so lit up with sassy excitement that Nick thought he might be teasing Sophie. 'But he's not, though-you'd better tell me-he's not... is he…?'

'Oh…! I'm afraid he isn't, no. A lot of people ask that,' Sophie admitted.

Leo took it philosophically. 'Well, when it comes on again I'm definitely taking him,' he said, tutting as if they both thought cultivated, first-class Nick, still heavy-headed with exam knowledge, steeped to the chaps in revenge tragedy, was a bit of a slob.

'All right,' said Nick, seeing it at least as a couple of hours in the warm dark together, rather than behind a bush. 'And I can tell you all about Jamie Stallard,' he added.

But Leo's real interest was in Sophie. 'So what are you doing next?' he said. Nick raised his eyebrows apologetically to Toby, who shook his head kindly, as if to say that going out with a promising actress he was bound to find himself in an attendant role. Sophie herself looked slightly overexcited, partly at the praise but partly because she wasn't used to talking to anyone like Leo, and it seemed to be going really well. 'I'll let you know,' she was saying. 'I can get your number off Nick!'

Nick wished he could match Toby's confidence. He felt snubbed by Leo's attentions to Sophie, but perhaps it was only because he felt foolish, childish at having put it about that they were boyfriends. Toby said, 'Really, we must go, Pips,' and there was something so silly about this nickname that it helped Nick not to care.

But then, alone again in the street with Leo, neither of them saying anything, he had a sense of what an affair might actually be like, and the endless miraculous permission was only a part of it. His limbs were oddly stiff, his hands tingling as if he'd just come in from snowballing to stand by a blazing fire. He felt the moment echoing other occasions when he had just missed success through a failure of nerve, or a stupidly happy anticipation. All Leo's effusiveness with Pete and then with Sophie had ebbed away, and left just the two of them, in this horrible noise and crush. Nick glanced at him with a tight smile; at which Leo stretched his neck with a moody, uninvolved air. 'Well,' said Nick finally, 'where do you want to go?'

'I don't know, boyfriend,' Leo said.

Nick laughed ruefully, and something kept him back from a further He. 'A caff?' he said. 'Indian? A sandwich?'-which was the most he could imagine managing.

'Well, I need something,' said Leo, in his tone of flat goading irony, looking at him sharply. 'And it isn't a sandwich.'

Nick didn't take a risk on what this might mean. 'Ah… ' he said. Leo turned his head and scowled at a stall of cloudy green and brown glassware, which was taking its place in their crisis, and seemed to gleam with hints of a settled domestic life. Leo said,

'At least with old Pete we had his place, but where are me and you ever going to go?'

Could this be his only objection, the only obstacle…? 'I know, we're homeless,' Nick said.

'Homeless love,' said Leo, shrugging and then cautiously nodding, as if weighing up a title for a song.

5

NICK CHOSE A moment before dinner to pay the rent. It was always awkward. 'Oh… my dear… ' said Rachel, as if the two ten-pound notes were a form of mild extravagance, like a box of chocolates, or like flowers brought by a dinner guest, which were also a bit of a nuisance. She looked for somewhere to put down her bowl of steeping apricots. 'If you're sure… '