The Line of Beauty

'He's forty-four,' said Leo.

'He was a great help to my son. He helped him with getting through college, and with the job on the council. And he didn't stand to get nothing from it-leastways not in this world. I always say to Leo he's his fairy godfather.'

'Something like that,' said Leo, with the sourness of a child subjected to the astounding iterations of a parent's treasured phrases-treasured often because they put a bright gloss on some anxious denial. The clumsy unconscious joke in this one must have made it specially wearing.

'A proper decent father Leo didn't have,' said Mrs Charles candidly, and again with an almost cunning air of satisfaction that they had been so tested. 'But the Lord looks after his own. And now, don't you reckon he's a good boy?'

'Yes, he's… splendid!' said Nick.

'What's for tea?' said Leo.

'I'm hoping your sister is bringing it off now,' said Mrs Charles. 'We're giving our guest our special spicy chops and rice. In this country,' she observed to Nick, 'you don't fry the chops so much, you're always grilling them, isn't that right?'

'Um… I don't know. I think we do both.' He thought of his own mother, as an embodiment of any such supposed tradition; but went on charmingly, 'But if you fry them rather than grilling them, then that's also what we do in this country!'

'Ha… ' said Mrs Charles, 'well that's certainly one way of looking at the matter.'

At table the movement of Nick's left arm was limited by the leaning tower of 'Welcoming Jesus In Today.' He came down on his food in a hesitant but predatory fashion. The meal was a bold combination of bland and garishly spicy, and he wondered if Rosemary had mockingly overdone the chillies to make fun of his good manners. He was full of round-eyed appreciation, which was also a cover for the surprise of having his evening meal at five forty- five; some absurd social reflex, the useful shock of class difference, a childish worry perhaps at a changed routine, all combined in a mood of interesting alienation. At Kensington Park Gardens they ate three hours later, and dinner was sauntered towards through a sequence of other diversions, chats and decantings, gardening and tennis, gramophone records, whisky and gin. In the Charles household there was no room for diversions, no garden to speak of, and no alcohol. The meal came on straight after work, a wide-ranging grace was declaimed, and then it was eaten and done with, and the whole long evening lay ahead. There were things Nick guessed about them, from the habits of his own family, which lay somewhere between the two; but there were others he would have to wait for and learn. He had never been in a black household before. He saw that first love had come with a bundle of other firsts, which he took hold of like a wonderful but worrying bouquet.

After a longish silence Leo said, 'So how's it going at college?' as if they hardly knew each other.

'Oh, it's all right,' said Nick, disconcerted but then touched by Leo's stiffness. Whenever Leo was cold or rough to him he felt it like a child-then he turned it round and found some thwarted love in it. He was in awe of Leo, but he saw through him too, and each time he followed this little process of indulgence he felt more in love. 'It hasn't been very exciting so far. I suppose it's just different from what I've been used to.' He always came away from the sunless back court where the English department was with two or three newly shaped anecdotes, which gave his days there a retrospective sparkle; but he found it hard to interest Leo in them and they often went to waste. Or they were stored up, with a shadowy sense of resentment.

'He was at Oxford University before,' said Leo.

'And now where is he?' Mrs Charles wondered.

'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.'