The Line of Beauty

'Well, that was very jolly,' said Leo, with a half-teasing, half-aspiring use of a Nick word. 'Very jolly indeed.'

'Did you enjoy it, darling?' said Nick.

'I didn't mind it,' said Leo.

Nick glowed and grinned. 'I thought it was bearable.'

'I expect you can bear it,' said Leo. 'You don't have to ride a bike.'

Nick looked around at the half-open door. 'Was it too much for you?' he said wonderingly, and with a sense that recurred and recurred these weeks-of enormous freedom claimed through tiny details, of everything he said being welcome.

'You're a very bad boy,' said Leo.

'Mm, so you keep saying.'

'So what are you doing?'

'Well… ' said Nick. It was lovely to be talking to Leo, but he wasn't quite sure why he had rung, and as it was the first time he had ever done so it made Nick uneasily expectant; until it struck him that probably Leo himself was only claiming the simple pleasure of talking to his lover, of talking, as he said he loved to fuck, for the sake of it. 'I'm sitting behind Gerald's desk with a most tremendous hard-on,' said Nick.

There was a pause and Leo murmured, 'Now don't get me going. My old lady's here.'

It was shadowy already in the room, and Nick pulled the chain that switched on the desk lamp. Gerald, like an uxorious bigamist, had photos of both Rachel and the Prime Minister in silver frames. A large desk diary was open at the 'Notes' pages at the back, where Gerald had written, 'Barwick: Agent (Manning)-wife Veronica NOT Janet (Parker's wife).' With his breezily asking Parker how Veronica was and Manning how Janet was, he had got some very confused looks. Nick knew Janet Parker, of course, she was a manager at Rackhams and sang in the Operatic. 'So what are you doing later?' Leo wanted to know.

'Oh, we've got a big dinner party,' Nick said. He noticed that he hoped to impress Leo with their life at Kensington Park Gardens and at the same time was ready to repudiate it. 'It'll probably be very tedious-they only really ask me to make up the numbers.'

'Oh,' said Leo doubtfully.

'It'll be a lot of horrible old Tories,' Nick said, in an attempt at Leo's language and point of view, and sniggered.

'Oh, is Grandma coming, then?'

'She certainly is,' said Nick.

'Old bitch,' said Leo; the passing insult of their doorstep meeting, unregistered at the time, had risen later like a bruise. 'You ought to ask me over, to continue our fascinating conversation,' he said.

The theme of Leo's coining over had cropped up several times since their first date, and hung and faded. Nick said, 'Look, I'm sure I can get out of this.' And really it did seem as if the logic of the evening-the numbers, the etiquette, the superstition-was only an expression of a deeper natural force, a love logic, pulling him out of the house and back into Leo's arms. 'I'm sure I can get out of it,' he said again. Though as he did so he felt there was also a lightness in not seeing Leo, a romance in separation, while the fabulous shock of their afternoon together sank in. Days like these had their design, their upward and downward curves: it would be unshapely to change the plan.

'No, you enjoy yourself,' said Leo, wise perhaps with the same instinct. 'Have a glass of wine.'

'Yes, I expect I'll do that. Unless you've got a better idea… ' Nick swivelled in the desk chair with a tensely mischievous smile-the red phone cord stretched and bounced. The chair was a high-backed scoop of black leather, a spaceship commander's.

'You're insatiable, you are,' said Leo.

'That's because I love you,' said Nick, singsong with the truth.

Leo took in this chance for an echoing avowal; it was a brief deep silence, as tactical as it was undiscussable. He said, 'That's what you tell all the boys'-a phrase of lustreless backchat that Nick could only bear as a form of shyness. He turned it inside out in his mind and found what he needed in it. He said quietly, 'No, only you.'

'Yeah,' said Leo, all relaxed-sounding, and gave a big fake yawn. 'Yeah, I'll probably pop down to old Pete's a bit later, see how he's getting on.'

'Right,' said Nick quickly. 'Well-give him my best!' It was a sting of worry-hidden, unexpected.

'Will do,' said Leo.

'How is old Pete?' said Nick.

'Well, he's a bit low. This illness has taken all the life out of him.'

'Oh dear,' said Nick, but felt he couldn't enquire any further, out of delicacy for his own feelings. He looked about on the desk, to focus his thoughts on where he was rather than on imagined intimacies at Pete's flat. There was a thick typescript with a printed card, 'From the Desk of Morden Lipscomb,' on 'National Security in a Nuclear Age,' which Gerald had marked with ticks and underlinings on the first two pages. 'NB: nuclear threat,' he had written.

'OK, babe,' Leo said quietly. 'Well, I'll see you soon. We'll get it together at the weekend, yeah? I've got to go-my mum wants the phone.'

'I'll ring you tomorrow…'

'Yeah, well, lovely to chat.'

And in the silence of the room afterwards, shaken, tight-lipped, Nick clutched at that cosy but cynical cockney lovely. Of course Leo was inhibited by being at home, he wanted to say more. Just think of this afternoon. It was terribly sweet that he'd rung at all. The chat was a romantic bonus, but nothing was certain when it came to words, there were nettles among the poppies. For a minute or two Nick felt their separation like a tragedy, a drama of the thickening dusk-he saw Leo at large on his bike while he stood in this awful office with its filing cabinets, its decanters, and the enlarged photograph, just back from the framers, of the hundred and one new Tory MPs.

In the kitchen he found that people had dispersed to bathe and change, and these further unstoppable rhythms made him feel like a ghost. Rachel was sitting at the table writing place cards with her italic fountain pen. She glanced up at him, and there was a slight tension in her manner as well as obvious solicitude, a desire not to offend in a moment of kindness. She said, 'All well?'

'Yes, thank you-fine…' said Nick, shaking himself into seeing that of course life was pretty wonderful, it was just that there was more to it than he expected-and less as well.

'Now should I put Badger or Derek, do you think? I think I'll put Derek, just to put him in his place.'

'Well, they are place cards,' said Nick.

'Exactly!' said Rachel, and blew on the ink. She looked up at him again briefly. 'You know, my dear, you can always bring friends here if you want to.'

'Oh, yes… thank you…'

'I mean we would absolutely hate it if you were to feel you couldn't do that. This is your home for however long you are with us.' And it was the 'we,' the general benevolence, that struck him and upset him; and then the practical acknowledgement that he wouldn't be there for ever.

'I know, you're very kind. I will, of course.'

'I don't know… Catherine says you have a… a special new friend,' and she was stern for a second, magnanimous but at a disadvantage: what should she call such a person? 'I just want you to know he'd be very welcome here.'

'Thank you,' said Nick again, and smiled through a blush at the thing being out. It was confusingly straightforward. He felt relieved and cheated. He wasn't sure he could rise to the freedom being offered-he saw himself bringing home some nice white graduate from the college instead, for a pointless tea, or convivial evening bleak with his own cowardice.

'We're such broody old things,' Rachel said, 'now that Toby's moved out. So do it just for our sake!' This was a charming exaggeration, in a woman of forty-seven, with thirteen for dinner, but it acknowledged a truth too: it didn't quite say she thought of him as a son-it didn't elevate or condescend-but it admitted a habit, a need for a young man and his friends about the house. She tapped the cards together and came across the room and Nick gave her a kiss, which she seemed to find quite right.

In fact Toby and Sophie were there that night. They came early and Nick had a gin-and-tonic with them in the