'Oh, that was probably only Catherine.'
Leo nodded. 'Catherine. She's your sister, yeah?'
'No, I don't have a sister. She's actually the sister of my friend Toby.' Nick smiled and stared: 'It's not my house.'
'Oh…' said Leo. 'Oh.'
'God, I don't come from that sort of background. No, I just live there. It belongs to Toby's parents. I've just got a tiny little room up in the attic.' Nick was rather surprised to hear himself throwing his whole fantasy of belonging there out of the window.
Leo looked a bit disappointed. He said, 'Right… ' and shook his head slowly.
'I mean they're very good friends, they're a sort of second family to me, but I probably won't be there for long. It's just to help me out, while I'm getting started at university.'
'And I thought I'd got myself a nice little rich boy,' Leo said. And perhaps he meant it, Nick couldn't be sure, they were total strangers after all, though a minute before he'd imagined them naked together in the Feddens' emperor-size bed. Was that why his letter did the trick-the address, the Babylonian notepaper?
'Sorry,' he said, with a hint of humour. He drank some more of the sweet strong rum and Coke, so obviously not his kind of drink. The refined blue of the dusk sky was already showing its old lonely reach.
Leo laughed. 'I'm only kidding you!'
'I know,' Nick said, with a little smile, as Leo reached out and squeezed his shoulder, just by his shirt collar, and slowly let go. Nick reacted with his own quick pat at Leo's side. He was absurdly relieved. A charge passed into him through Leo's fingers, and he saw the two of them kissing passionately, in a rush of imagination that was as palpable as this awkward pavement rendezvous.
'Still, your friends must be rich,' Leo said.
Nick was careful not to deny this. 'Oh, they're rolling in money.'
'Yeah… ' Leo crooned, with a fixed smile; he might have been savouring the fact or condemning it. Nick saw further questions coming, and decided at once he wouldn't tell him about Gerald. The evening demanded enough courage as it was. A Tory MP would shadow their meeting like an unwelcome chaperon, and Leo would get on his bike and leave them to it. He could say something about Rachel's family, perhaps, if an explanation was called for. But in fact Leo emptied his glass and said, 'Same again?'
Nick hastily finished his own drink, and said, 'Thanks. Or maybe this time I'll have a shot of rum in it.'
After half an hour more Nick had slid into a kind of excited trance brought on by his new friend's presence and a feeling, as the sky darkened and the street lamps brightened from pink to gold, that it was going to work out. He felt nervous, slightly breathless, but at the same time buoyant, as if a lonely responsibility had been taken off him. A couple of places came free at the end of a picnic table with fixed benches, and they sat leaning towards each other as though playing, and then half-forgetting, some invisible game. For Nick the ease and comfort of the rum were indistinguishable parts of the intimacy which he felt deepening like the dusk.
He found himself wondering how they looked and sounded to the people around them, the couple beside them at the table. It was all getting noisier as the evening went on, with a vague sense of heterosexual threat. Nick guessed Leo's other dates would have met him in a gay pub, but he had flunked that further challenge. Now he regretted the freedom he would have had there. He wanted to stroke Leo's cheek and kiss him, with a sigh of surrender.
Nothing very personal was said. Nick found it hard to interest Leo in his own affairs, and his various modest leads about his family and his background were not picked up. There were things he'd prepared and phrased and turned into jokes that were not to be heard-or not tonight. Once or twice he took Leo with him: into a falsely cheerful dismissal of the idea that Toby, though fairly attractive, was of any real interest to him (Leo would think him a weirdo to have loved so long and pointlessly); into a sketch of Rachel's banking family, which Leo interrupted with a sour smile, as if it was all proof of some general iniquity. He had a certain caustic preoccupation with money, Nick could see; and when he told Leo that his father was an antiques dealer the two words, with the patina of old money and the flash of business, seemed to combine in a dull glare of privilege. Among his smart Oxford friends Nick managed to finesse his elbow-patched old man, with his Volvo estate full of blanket-wrapped mirrors and Windsor chairs, into a more luminous figure, a scholar and friend of the local aristocracy. Now he felt a timid need to humble him. And he was wrong, because Leo's long-time boyfriend, Pete, had been an antiques dealer, on the Portobello Road. 'Mainly French work,' Leo said. 'Ormolu. Boulle.' It was the first clear thing he had said about his private past. And then he changed the subject.
Leo was certainly quite an egotist-Catherine's graphological analysis had been spot on. But he didn't expound his inner feelings. He did something Nick couldn't imagine doing himself, which was to make statements about the sort of person he was. 'I'm the sort of guy who needs a lot of sex,' he said, and, 'I'm like that, I always say what I think.' Nick wondered for a moment if he'd inadvertently contradicted him. 'I don't bear grudges,' Leo said sternly: 'I'm not that kind of person.' 'I'm sure you're not,' Nick said, with a quick discountenancing shudder. And perhaps this was a useful skill, or tactic, in the blind-date world, even if Nick's modesty and natural fastidiousness kept him from replying in the same style ('I'm the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth,' 'I'm crazy about sex but I haven't had it yet'). It added to the excitement of the evening. He wasn't here to share quickly matched intuitions with an Oxford friend. He loved the hard self-confidence of his date; and at the same time, in his silent, superior way, he thought he heard how each little brag was the outward denial of an inner doubt.
With the third drink Nick grew warm and half-aroused and he looked undisguisedly at Leo's lips and neck and imagined unbuttoning the shiny blue short-sleeved shirt that cut so tightly under his arms. Leo hooded his eyes for a second, a signal, secret and ironic, and Nick wondered if it meant he could see he was drunk. He wasn't sure if he should somehow signal back-he grinned and took another quick sip. He had the feeling that Leo had drunk Coke since he was a child, and that it was one of the nearly unnoticed facts of life to him, beyond choice or criticism. Whereas in his family it was one of a thousand things that were frowned on-there had never been a can or bottle of it in the house. Leo couldn't possibly have imagined it, but the glass of Coke in Nick's hand was a secret sign of submission, and afterwards the biting sweetness of the drink, like flavouring in a medicine, seemed fused with the other experiments of the night in a complex impression of darkness and freedom. Leo yawned and Nick glanced into his mouth, its bright white teeth uncorrupted by all the saccharine and implying, Nick humbly imagined, an almost racial disdain for his own stoppings and slants. He put his hand on Leo's forearm for a moment, and then wished he hadn't-it made Leo look at his watch.
'Time's getting on,' he said. 'I can't be late getting back.'
Nick looked down and mumbled, 'Do you have to get back?' He tried to smile but he knew his face was stiff with sudden anxiety. He moved his wet glass in circles on the rough-sawn table top. When he glanced up again he found Leo was gazing at him sceptically, one eyebrow arched.
'I meant back to your place, of course,' he said.
Nick grinned and reddened at the beautiful reversal, like a teased child abruptly reprieved, rewarded. But then he had to say, 'I don't think we can…'
Leo looked at him levelly. 'Not enough room?'
Nick winced and waited-the truth was he didn't dare, he just couldn't do that to Rachel and Gerald, it was vulgar and unsafe, the consequences unspooled ahead of him, their happy routines of chortling agreement would wither for ever. 'I don't think we can. I don't mind going up to your place.'
Leo shrugged. 'It's not practical,' he said.
'I can jump on the bus,' said Nick, who had studied the London
'Nah-' Leo looked away with a reluctant smile and Nick saw that he was embarrassed. 'My old lady's at home.' This first hint of shyness and shame, and the irony that tried to cover it, cockneyfied and West Indian too, made Nick want to jump on him and kiss him. 'She's dead religious,' Leo said, with a short defeated chuckle.
'I know what you mean,' said Nick. So there they were, two men on a summer night, with nowhere to call their own. There was a kind of romance to that. 'I've got an idea,' he said tentatively. 'If you don't mind, um, being outside.'
'I don't care,' said Leo, and looked lazily over his shoulder. 'I'm not dropping my pants in the street.'
'No, no…'
'I'm not that sort of slut.'
Nick laughed anxiously. He wasn't sure what people meant when they said they'd had sex 'in the street'-even
