The Line of Beauty

in vain. Don't say, 'Oh my god!' Don't even say, 'Good Lord!' ' (Leo fluted these 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 wrant 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 the 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 and the house-perhaps he was a twit after all. When he stepped inside he had a memory, as sharp as the cooking smell in the 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 subtle snobbery of aesthetics.

He took in the tiny kitchen in a photographic glance, the wall units with sliding frosted-glass doors, the orange curtains, the church calendar with its floating Jesus, the evidence of little necessary systems, heaped papers, scary wiring, bowls stacked within bowls, and the stove with plates 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 her 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 meet you.' He was so used to living by hints and approximations that there had always been something erotic in meeting the 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 diffused presence of Toby, among people who were living allusions to him and thus a torment as well as a kind of consolation. But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the mother of the man who called him not only a 'damn good fuck' but also a 'hot little 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 with this underexplained 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 the 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 the front room, in which a heavy oak dining table and chain, with bulbous Jacobean-style legs, were jammed in beside a three-piece suite that was covered in shiny ginger leather, 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 the 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 her?'

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 correctly.' 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.'