The Line of Beauty

had a moment's glimpse of the hundred little rules and routines of the place, and a mood of truancy came over him. Besides, what happened in the booth was an eternal secret. His pencil twitched above the Labour and Alliance candidates, and then he made his cross very frowningly for the Green man. He knew the Conservative was bound to get back in.

There were doubts, though, in some quarters, and Labour was thought to have had a very good campaign. Nick himself found their press advertisements much wittier than the Tories'. 'In Britain the poor have got poorer and the rich have got… well, they've got the Conservatives' was one that even Gerald had laughed at. In general, Gerald's view was that campaigning was over-rated at the national level, and irksome, even counterproductive, in the constituencies. 'You know, the best thing I could have done on May 11, when the election was called, would have been to push off for a month's holiday somewhere,' he said to Catherine. 'Quite possibly on safari.' He got fed up with Catherine saying it was a 'TV election.' 'I don't know why you go on about it, Puss,' he said, looking in the hall mirror before a 'photo-opportunity' for the local news. 'All elections are TV elections. And a bloody good thing too. It means you don't have to go and talk to the voters yourself. In fact if you do try and talk to them they're bored to death because they've heard it all already on TV.' ('Mm, that may be why,' said Catherine.)

He was surprised that he hadn't been asked to appear in more of the major broadcasts and televised press conferences, where the Lady herself had retained a tireless dominance. His personal highlight had been a Question Time on BBC1, where he stood in for the indisposed Home Secretary at the last moment but very much took his own line. He did a lot of smarmy joshing with Robin Day, whom he knew socially, and this irritated the Labour defence spokesman, who was fighting an uphill battle on nuclear disarmament. Nick and Rachel watched it at home. Caught on the TV screen in his own drawing room Gerald looked distinctly alien, fattened and sharpened by the studio lights. He played sulkily with his fountain pen while the other panellists were speaking. His breast-pocket handkerchief billowed upwards like the flame of a torch. He came out in favour of Europe, having as he said a house in France where he spent the summer. He said he believed there were tens of thousands of jobs available if only people would get out and look for them (cries, which he relished, of 'Shame'). Lively rudeness and childish antagonism were the point of the programme, and also its limitation. Rachel laughed in fond disparagement once or twice. Gerald's special mixture of laziness and ambition seemed to crystallize under the camera into brutal bumptiousness. A questioner from the floor, who looked like Cecil, the Barwick welly-whanger, accused him of being too rich to care about ordinary people; and while Gerald boomingly deplored the statement you could see it sinking and settling in his flushed features as a kind of acclaim.

When it came to canvassing in Barwick, Gerald felt there was less need than ever to put oneself out. He pooh-poohed the polls. All the Northamptonshire seats were Tory strongholds, even Corby, with its closed-down steelworks. 'Even the unemployed know they're better off with us,' Gerald said. 'Anyway, they've got a computer in the office up there now, and if they can find out how to work it they'll be able to pinpoint any dodgy waverers and bombard them with stuff.' 'What?' Catherine wanted to know. 'Well, pictures of me!' said Gerald. Nick wondered if his cavalier tone was a way of preparing for possible defeat. In the final week there was something called Wobbly Thursday, when everyone at Central Office panicked. The polls showed Labour barging ahead. Toby remarked that his father seemed very unconcerned. 'One has merely to cultivate,' replied Gerald, 'the quality that M. Mitterrand has attributed to the Prime Minister, and which he sees as the supreme political virtue.'

'Oh yes, what's that?' said Toby.

'Indifference,' said Gerald, almost inaudibly.

' Right… ' said Toby; and then, with a certain canny persistence, 'But I thought she was climbing up the wall.'

'Climbing up the wall, nonsense.'

'It's like the adverb game,' said Catherine. 'Task: Climb up the wall. Manner: Indifferently.' At which Gerald went off with a pitying smile to correct his diary.

At the office Nick looked through the mail and dictated a couple of letters to Melanie. In Wani's absence he'd grown fond of dictating, and found himself able to improvise long supple sentences rich in suggestion and syntactic shock, rather as the older Henry James, pacing and declaiming to a typist, had produced his most difficult novels. Melanie, who was used to Wani's costive memos, and even to dressing up the gist of a letter in her own words, stuck out her tongue with concentration as she took down Nick's old-fashioned periods and perplexing semicolons. Today he was answering a couple of rich American queens who had a film-production company perhaps as fanciful, as nominal, as Ogee was, and who were showing interest in the Spoils of Poynton project-though with certain strong reservations about the plot. They felt that it needed an injection of sex-smooching and action as Lord Ouradi had put it. The queens themselves sounded rather like porn actors, being called Treat Rush and Brad Craft. 'Dear Treat and Brad,' Nick began: 'It was with no small interest that we read your newest proposals comma with their comma to us comma so very open brackets indeed comma so startlingly close brackets novel vision of the open quotes sex-life close quotes of italics capital S Spoils semicolon-'

A small commotion at the door, Simon looking up, going over, Melanie setting down her pad. A crop-headed black girl, like a busty little boy, and a skinny white woman with her… it was usually a mistake, or they were market kids trotting round cheap Walkmans, cheap CDs. No one much, sad to say, arrived by design at the Ogee office. Melanie came back. 'Oh, Nick, it's a, um, Rosemary Charles to see you. Sorry… ' Melanie twitched with her own snobbery, part apology, part reproach-she stood in the way, box-shouldered, high-heeled, so that Nick leant back in his chair to look round her, down the length of the office, and with a view of the two words Rosemary Charles bobbing on the air, weightless signifiers, that took on, over several strange seconds, their own darkness and gravity. He stood up and went towards her, her and the other woman, who seemed to be here as a witness of his confusion. It was a momentary vertigo, a railing withdrawn. He gave them a smile that was welcoming and showed a proper unfrivolous regard for the occasion, and well… he was afraid he knew why they'd come, more or less. He felt something like guilt showed in his pretence that he didn't. He grasped Rosemary's hand and looked at her with allowable pleasure and curiosity-she was still coming clear to him, from four years back, when she was pretty and fluffy and her eyes were sly: and now she was beautiful, revealed, the drizzle silvering the fuzz of her crown, her jaw forward in the tense half-smile of surprise that her brother had had when he'd called for Nick one morning, unannounced, and changed his life.

'Yes, hello,' she said, with a hint of hostility, perhaps just the hard note of the resolve that had brought her here. Of course she was looking for him too, down this four-year tunnel: how he used to be and how he'd changed. 'This is Gemma.'

'Hi,' said Nick warmly. 'Nick.'

'I hope you don't mind,' said Rosemary. 'We went to your house. The woman there told us where you were.'

'It's wonderful to see you!' said Nick, and saw the phrase register with them like some expected annoyance. They had something dreadful about them, with their undeclared purpose and their look of supporting each other for some much bigger challenge than Nick was ever going to offer them. 'Come in, come in.'

Gemma peered round the room. 'Is there somewhere private where we could talk?' she said. She was Yorkshire, older, blue-eyed, hair dyed black, black T-shirt and black jeans and Doc Martens.

'Of course,' said Nick. 'Why don't you come upstairs.'

He took them out and in again and up to the flat, with a responsible smile that threatened to warp into a smirk, as if he was proud of this kitsch apartment and its possible effect on the two women. He saw it all with fresh eyes himself. They sat down in the 'Georgian-revival''-revival library.

'Look at all these books… ' said Gemma.

On the low table all the papers were laid out, as in the reading room of a club. CHUCK HER OUT, begged the Mirror. THREE TIMES A LADY, bawled the Sun.

Rosemary said, 'It's about Leo.'

'Well, I thought…'

She looked down, she wasn't settled in the room, on the sofa's edge; then she stared at him for a second or two. She said, 'Well, you know, my brother died, three weeks ago.' Nick listened to the words, and heard how the West Indian colour and exactness in her tone claimed it as a private thing. It had been one of Leo's tones too: the cockney for defence, the Jamaican crackle and burn for pleasure, just sometimes, rare and beautiful like his black blush.