The Line of Beauty

'Nearly four weeks now, pet,' said Gemma, with her own note of bleak solidarity. 'Yes, May the sixteenth.' She looked at Nick as though the extra days made him more culpable, or useless.

'I'm so sorry,' Nick said.

'We're trying to contact all his friends.'

'Well, because, you know… ' said Gemma.

'All his lovers,' said Rosemary firmly. Nick remembered that she was, or had been, a doctor's receptionist; she was used to the facts. She unzipped her shoulder bag and delved into it. He found it screened them both, this angular attention to business-he was flinching at the frighteningly solemn thing she had just told him, and she twitched too at the power of her words, even if (as he thought he saw) they had a certain softness or drabness for her now from use, from their assertion of something that was shifting day by day from the new into the known. He said, with a sense of good manners that took him back to their long-ago meeting,

'How is your mother?'

'OK,' said Rosemary. 'OK…'

'She has her faith,' said Gemma.

'She's got the church,' said Nick; 'and she's also got you.'

'Well… ' said Rosemary. 'Yes, she has.'

The first thing she passed him was a small cream-coloured envelope addressed to Leo in green capitals. He felt he knew it and he didn't know it, like a letter found in an old book. It had a postmark of August 2, 1983. She nodded, and he opened it, while they watched him; it was like learning a new game and having to be a good sport as he lost. He unfolded a little letter in his own best handwriting, and the photo slipped out into his lap. 'That's how we knew where to find you,' Rosemary said. He had sent it in the blank envelope to Gay Times, doubting how it could survive, how his own wish could take on form and direction, and someone there with a green biro had sent it on-he was seeing the history of his action, and seeing it as Leo himself had seen it, but distant and complete. He picked up the photo with the guarded curiosity he had for his earlier self. It was an Oxford picture, a passport-size square cut out from a larger group: the face of a boy at a party who somehow confides his secret to the camera. He only glanced at what he'd written, on the Feddens' embossed letterhead-the small size, meant for social thank-yous, because he hadn't had much to say. The writing itself looked quaint and studied, though he remembered Leo had praised it: 'Hello!' he'd begun, since of course he hadn't yet known Leo's name. The cross-stroke of the H curled back under the uprights like a dog's tail. He saw he'd mentioned Bruckner, Henry James, all his Interests-very artlessly, but it hadn't mattered, and indeed they had never been mentioned again, when the two of them were together. At the top there was Leo's annotation in pencil: Pretty. Rich? Too young? This had been struck through later by a firm red tick.

Nick folded it away and peeped at the two women. It was Gemma's presence, the stranger in the room, that brought it home to him; for a minute she seemed like the fact of the death itself. She didn't know him, but she knew about the letter, the affair, the tender young Nick of four years ago, and his shyness and resentment went for nothing in the new moral atmosphere, like that of a hospital, where everything was found out and fears were justified as diagnoses. He said, 'I wish I'd seen him again.'

'He didn't want people seeing him,' said Rosemary. 'Not later on.'

'Right… ' said Nick.

'You know how vain he was!'-it was a little test for her grief, an indulgent gibe with a twist of true vexation, at Leo's troublesomeness, alive or dead.

'Yes,' said Nick, picturing him wearing her shirt. And wondering if the man's shirt she had on now was one of his.

'He always had to look his best.'

'He always looked beautiful,' said Nick, and the exaggeration released his feelings suddenly. He tried to smile but felt the corners of his mouth pulled downwards. He mastered himself with a rough sigh and said, 'Of course I hadn't seen him for a couple of yean.'

'OK… ' said Rosemary thoughtfully. 'You know we never knew who he was seeing.'

'No,' said Gemma.

'You and old Pete were the only ones who got asked to the house. Until Bradley, of course.'

'I don't know about Bradley,' said Nick.

'My brother shared a flat with him,' said Rosemary. 'You knew he moved out.'

'Well, I knew he wanted to. That was about the time he… I'm not sure what happened. We stopped seeing each other.' He couldn't say the usual accusing phrase he dumped me, it was petty and nearly meaningless in the face of his death. 'I think I thought he was seeing someone else.' Though this itself wasn't the whole truth: it was the painful story he'd told himself at the time, to screen a glimpse he'd had of a much worse story, that Leo was ill.

But Bradley had been there. He sounded like a square-shouldered practical man, not a twit like Nick.

'Bradley's not well, is he?' said Gemma.

'You knew old Pete died… ' said Rosemary.

'Yes, I did,' said Nick, and cleared his throat.

'Anyway, you're all right, pet,' said Gemma.

'Yes, I'm all right,' said Nick. 'I'm fine.' They looked at him like police officers awaiting a confession or change of heart. 'I was lucky. And then I was… careful.' He put the letter on the table, and stood up. 'Would you like some coffee? Can I get you anything?' Gemma and Rosemary pondered this and for a moment seemed reluctant to accept.

In the kitchen he gazed out of the window as the kettle boiled. The rain fell thin and silvery against the dark bushes of the garden and the brick backs of the houses in the next street. He gazed at the familiar but unknown windows. In a bright drawing room a maid was hoovering. At the edge of hearing an ambulance wailed. Then the kettle throbbed and clicked off.

He took the coffee tray through. 'This is so sad,' he said. He had always thought of this as a slight word, but its effect now was larger than mere tactful understatement. It seemed to surround the awful fact with a shadowing of foreknowledge and thus of acceptance.

Rosemary raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. There was something stubborn about her, and Nick thought perhaps it was only a brave hard form of shyness, unlike his own shyness, which ran off into flattery and evasion. She said, 'So you met Leo through a lonely hearts?'

'Yes, that's right,' said Nick, since she obviously knew this. He had never been sure if it was a shameful or a witty way to meet someone. He didn't know what the women would think either (Gemma gave him a sighing smile). 'It was such a wonderful piece of luck he chose me,' he said.

'Paght… ' said Rosemary, with a look of sisterly sarcasm; which maybe wasn't that, but a hint that he shouldn't keep boasting about his luck.

'I mean he had hundreds of replies.'

'Well, he had a lot.' She reached into her bag again, and brought out a bundle of letters, pinched in a thick rubber band.

'Oh,' said Nick.

She pulled off the rubber band and rolled it back over her hand. For a moment he was at the doctor's-or the doctor was visiting him, with the bundled case notes of all her calls. Both brother and sister were orderly and discreet. 'I thought some of them might mean something to you.'

'Oh, I don't know.'

'So that we can tell them.'

'What did he do?' said Gemma. 'He went out and tried them all?'

Rosemary sorted the letters into two piles. 'I don't want to go chasing people up if they're dead,' she said.

'That's the thing!' said Gemma.

'I don't expect I'll know anyone,' said Nick. 'It's very unlikely…' It was all too bleakly businesslike for him-he'd only just heard the news.

The funny thing was that all the envelopes were addressed in the same hand, in green or sometimes purple capitals. It was like one crazed adorer laying siege to Leo. The name came up at him relentlessly off the sheaf of