The Line of Beauty

Mrs Charles took this in. 'You hear that now, Rosemary? You and me's going out to St Paul's Cathedral any day now to look at that with our own naked eyes.' And Nick saw her, in shiny shoes and the small black hat like an air hostess's that was nesting on a chair in the corner, making her way there, with waits at a number of bus stops, and the nervous patience of a pilgrim-he saw her, as if from the air, climbing the steps and going into the stupendous church, which he felt he owned, all ironically and art-historically, more than her, a mere credulous Christian. 'Or else, of course, you and me can go… eh?' she said to Nick, somehow shyly not using his name.

'I'd love to do that,' Nick said quickly, taking the chance to be kind and likeable that had been denied him earlier on.

'We'll go together and have a good look at it,' said Mrs Charles.

'Excellent!' said Nick, and caught the hint of mockery in Leo's eyes.

Mrs Charles said, cocking her head on one side, 'You know, they always got something clever about them, these old pictures, don't they?'

'Often they do,' Nick agreed.

'And you know the clever thing about this one now… ' She gave him the tolerant but crafty look of someone who holds the answer to a trick question. To Nick the clever thing was perhaps the way that the Virgin, kneeling by the chest that holds the hoarded gifts of the Magi, and seeing the portent of the Crucifixion in her son's shadow cast on the rear wall of the room, has her face completely hidden from us, so that the painting's centre of consciousness, as Henry James might have thought of her, is effectively a blank; and that this was surely an anti- Catholic gesture. He said, 'Well, the detail is amazing-those wood shavings look almost real, everything about it's so accurate…'

'No, no…' said Mrs Charles, with amiable scorn. 'You see, the way the Lord Jesus is standing there, he's making a shadow on the wall that's just the exact same image of himself on the Cross!'

'Oh… yes,' said Nick, 'indeed… Isn't it called in fact -'

'And of course that all goes to show how the death of the Lord Jesus and his Resurrection is foretold in the Bible from ancient times.'

Nick said, 'Well, it certainly illustrates that view even if it doesn't prove it,' in a perhaps misjudged tone of equable deliberation. Leo shot him a wincing glance and created a diversion.

'Yeah, I like the way he's got him yawning,' he said; and he stretched his own arms out and up and tilted his head with a yawn that was just like the Lord Jesus except that he was holding an ice-cream-smeared dessert spoon in his left hand. It was the kind of camp you see sometimes in observant children-and Rosemary watched him with the smothered amazement and mocking anticipation of a good girl whose brother has been insolent and reckless. But she said,

'Mm, it makes me shiver when he does that.'

Leo tutted and grinned, as his own shadow, in the room's less brilliant evening light, stretched and shrugged and faltered across the wall above his chair.

When the meal finished Leo was checking his bike and they were out in the street almost at once. Nick was relieved but ashamed-he made a joke of being dragged away in the middle of a sentence, as if Leo was a lively dog on the end of a leash. But Mrs Charles seemed not to mind. 'Ah, you go on now,' she said, as if she might be quite relieved herself. Or perhaps, he thought, as he hurried along in silence beside Leo, she had sensed his own relief, and been saddened by it for a second, and then had hardened herself against him… Her tone was nearly dismissive, and perhaps she thought he was false… Well, he was condescending, in a way… These anxieties flared dully through him. He began to resent Mrs Charles for thinking he was condescending.

Leo was walking briskly, as if they'd agreed where they were going, but he said nothing. Nick couldn't tell if he was sulky, angry, ashamed, defiant… but he knew that all these emotions could rise and rush and fizzle and mutate very quickly, and that it was wiser to let him settle than to guess his mood and risk the wrong opener. Nick's consciousness of being wise was a small refuge when Leo was difficult or distant. He took in the after- sunset chill, the upswept trails of dark cloud above the rooftops, and the presence of autumn, light but penetrating, in the cold cobalt beyond. In their four weeks together these evening walks, with the ticking bicycle beside them or between them, had taken on a deepening colour of romance. He worried that the silence itself was a kind of comment, and as they reached the end of the road he pulled Leo against him with a quick chafing hug and said, 'Mmm, thank you for that, darling.'

Leo snorted softly. 'What are you thanking me for?'

'Oh, just for taking me home. For introducing me to your family. It means a lot to me.' And he found his little avowal released a sentiment he hadn't quite felt before he made it. He was very touched.

'So, now you know what they're like,' said Leo, stopping and staring, with just his mother's narrowing of the gaze, across the major road beyond. The evening traffic was let slip from the lights and accelerated down the hill towards them and past them, then thinned, and then there was only a waiting emptiness again.

'They're wonderful,' Nick said, meaning only to be kind-though he heard the word hang, in the silence between the lights, as if in inverted commas, and underlined too: the wonderful of gush, of connoisseurship, of Kensington Park Gardens. Leo seemed to find it absurdly unexpected, and kept blinking, but then smiled and said with a dry laugh,

'If you say so… darling'-the darling, longed for by Nick, taking on a dubious ironic twang.

Nick had a large wild plan of his own for the night, but for now he let Leo take charge: they were going to go back to Notting Hill and catch the seven fifteen screening ofScarface at the Gate-it had just come out and Leo had all the facts on it, including its enormous length, 170 minutes, each one of which appeared to Nick like a shadowy unit of body heat, of contact and excitement. They would be pressed together in the warm darkness for three hours. Leo said what a great actor Al Pacino was, and spoke of him almost amorously, which Nick couldn't honestly do-to him Pacino wasn't that sort of idol. There was an interview with him in the new Time Out, which Leo had probably read, since his ideas on film seemed to Nick to be drawn pretty closely from the capsule reviews in that magazine. Still, film was Leo's province, rather humourlessly patrolled against Nick's pretensions, it was one of the interests he'd originally advertised, and Nick conceded, 'No, he's a genius,' which was a word he could thrill them both with. They stood at the bus stop with that idea in their heads.

When the bus came Nick hopped on and sat looking out at the back at Leo, who was ages fiddling with his bike and then getting on it, dwindling away every second into the night-lit street. Then the bus pulled in at a further stop, and the bike came almost floating up, Leo rising from his forward crouch to glance in at Nick-he seemed to ride the air there for a second, and then he winked and stooped and with a click of the gears he slipped past. Nick was glad of the wink this time, he raised his hand and grinned, and then was left, in the public brightness of the bus, to be eyed by the people opposite with vague suspicion.

The bus threaded down at last across the Harrow Road and began its long descent of Ladbroke Grove. He pictured Leo whizzing ahead, and kept losing him in the gleams and shadows of the night traffic. Where was he now? Nick was still in the alien high reach of the road, with the canal and the council estates, and longing for the other end, his own end, the safety and aloofness of white stucco and private gardens. He wondered what Leo thought as he made the transition, which occurred at the dense middle part by the market and the station, under clangorous bridges, where people loitered and shouted… After that there was a stretch of uneasy gentility, before the Grove climbed, taking palpable advantage of the hill as a social metaphor, and touching into life the hint of an orchard or thicket in the very name of the street. He didn't fool himself that Leo was sensitive to these things-he was a figure of wrenching poetry to Nick, but was not himself poetic, and clearly found something daft and even creepy in Nick's aesthetic promptings and hesitations. Nick sometimes made the mistake of thinking that Leo didn't feel things strongly, and then the shock, when his love and need for him leapt out, angry at being doubted, took his breath away, and almost frightened him. He thought back over the meal, the visit, and saw that of course it had meant a lot to Leo as well, but that everything was squashed and denied by secrecy: if he had been a woman the occasion would have had a ritual meaning, and Leo's mother could have let herself dream of the altar steps at last. To Nick the bulging subject of the visit had been his love for Leo, which obsessed him just as much as Mrs Charles's love of Jesus did her; but she had given herself licence to express her fixation, had embraced a duty to do so, whilst his burned through only in blushes and secret stares. She had eclipsed him completely.

When he got to the cinema he found Leo near the head of the queue. 'You made it,' he said, looking round at the people behind and nodding-'Yeah, it's the first night,' as if it was a bore, he was a martyr to first nights. And when they reached the window it turned out that the cinema was nearly full, and they wouldn't be able to sit