The Line of Beauty

'What…?'

'Leo told us, you said we were wonderful.'

'Did I?' said Nick, who remembered it painfully. 'Well, that's not such a bad thing to be.' He paused, unsure if he'd been accused of something. He felt there was a mood of imminent blame, for everything that had happened: they had hoped to pin it on him, and had failed, and were somehow more annoyed with him as a result. 'Of course, she didn't know, did she, that Leo was gay? She was talking about getting him to the altar.'

'Well, he's been to the altar now,' said Rosemary with a harsh little laugh, as though it was her mother's fault. 'Almost, anyway.'

'It's a terrible way to find out,' said Nick.

'She doesn't accept it.'

'She doesn't accept the death…'

'She doesn't accept he was gay. It's a mortal sin, you see,' said Rosemary, and now the Jamaican stress was satirical. 'And her son was no sinner.'

'Yes, I've never understood about sin,' said Nick, in a tone they didn't catch.

'Oh, the mortal ones are the worst,' said Gemma.

'So she doesn't think AIDS is a punishment, at least.'

'No, it can be,' said Rosemary. 'But Leo got it off a toilet seat at the office, which is full of godless socialists, of course.'

'Or a sandwich,' prompted Gemma.

There was something very unseemly in their mockery. Nick tried to imagine the house surprised by guilt and blame, the helpless harshness of the bereaved… he didn't know.

Rosemary said, 'She's got him back at the house.'

'How do you mean?'

'She's got the ashes in a jar, on the mantelpiece.'

'Oh!' Nick was so disturbed by this that he said, rather drolly, 'Yes, I remember, there's a shelf, isn't there, over the gas fire, with figures of Jesus and Mary and so on -'

'There's Jesus, and the Virgin Mary, and St Antony of Padua… and Leo.'

'Well, he's in very good company!' said Nick.

'I know,' said Gemma, shaking her head and laughing grimly. 'I can't stand it, I can't go in there!'

'She says she likes to feel he's still there.'

Nick shivered but said, 'I suppose you can't begrudge her her fantasies, can you, when she's lost her son.'

'They don't really help, though,' said Rosemary.

'Well, they don't help us, pet, do they?' said Gemma, and rubbed Rosemary's back vigorously.

Rosemary's eyes were hooded for a moment, just like her mother's, with the family stubbornness. She said, 'She won't accept it about him, and she won't accept it about us.' And then almost at once she shouldered her bag to go Nick blushed at his slowness, and then was mortified that they might think he was blushing about them.

When the women had gone, he went back upstairs, but in the remorseless glare of the news, so that the flat looked even more tawdry and pretentious. He was puzzled to think he had spent so much time in it so happily and conceitedly. The pelmets and mirrors, the spotlights and blinds, seemed rich in criticism. It was what you did if you had millions but no particular taste: you made your private space like a swanky hotel; just as such hotels flattered their customers by being vulgar simulacra of lavish private homes. A year ago it had at least the glamour of newness. Now it bore signs of occupation by a rich boy who had lost the knack of looking after himself. The piping on the sofa cushions was rubbed through where Wani had sprawled incessantly in front of the video. The crimson damask was blotted with his own and other boys' fluids. He wondered if Gemma had noticed as she sat there, making her inanely upsetting remarks. He wasn't letting her in here again, in her black boots. Nick felt furious with Wani for fucking up the cushions. The Georgian desk was marked with drink stains and razor etchings that even the optimistic Don Guest would have found it hard to disguise. 'That's beyond cosmetic repair, old boy,' Don would say. Nick fingered at the little abrasions and found himself gasping and whooping with grief.

He sat on the sofa and started reading the Telegraph, as if it was known to be a good thing to do. He was sick of the election, but excited to think it was happening today. There was something primitive and festive about it. He heard Rosemary saying, 'Well, he died, you know…' or 'Well, you know, he died… ' in recurrent, almost overlapping runs and pounces-his heart thumped at the dull detonation of the phrase. He was horrified by the thought of his ashes in the house, and kept picturing them, in an unlikely rococo urn. The last photo she had shown him was terrible: a Leo with his life behind him. Nick remembered making jokes, early on, in the first unguarded liberty of a first affair, about their shared old age, Leo being sixty when Nick was fifty. And there he was already; or he'd been sixty for a week before he died. He was in bed, in a sky-blue hospital gown; his face was hard to read, since AIDS had taken it and written its message of terror and exhaustion on it; against which Leo seemed frailly to assert his own character in a doubtful half smile. His vanity had become a kind of fear, that he would frighten the people he smiled at. It was the loneliest thing Nick had ever seen.

He thought he should write a letter and sat down at the desk. He felt a need to console Leo's mother, or to put himself right with her. Some deep convolution of feelings about his own mother, as the one person who really suffered for his homosexuality, made him see Mrs Charles as a figure to be appeased as well as comforted. 'Dear Mrs Charles,' he wrote, 'I was so terribly sorry to learn about Leo's death': there, it existed, he'd hesitated, but written it, and it couldn't be unwritten. He had a feeling, an anxious refinement of tact, that he shouldn't actually mention the death. 'Your sad news,' 'recent sad events'…: 'Leo's death' was brutal. Then he worried that 'I was so terribly sorry' might sound like gush to her, like calling her wonderful. He knew his own forms of truth could look like insincerity to others. He was frightened of her, as a grieving woman, and uncertain what feelings to attribute to her. It seemed she had taken it all in her own way, perhaps even with a touch of zealous cheerfulness. He could see her being impressed by his educated form of words and best handwriting. Then he saw her looking mistrustfully at what he'd written. He felt the limits of his connoisseurship of tone. It was what he was working on, and yet… He stared out of the window, and after a minute found Henry James's phrase about the death of Poe peering back at him. What was it? The extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him. The words, which once sounded arch and even facetious, were suddenly terrible to him, capacious, wise, and hard. He understood for the first time that they'd been written by someone whose life had been walked through, time and again, by death. And then he saw himself, in six months' time perhaps, sitting down to write a similar letter to the denizens of Lowndes Square.

14

WHEN HE GOT back to Kensington Park Gardens he didn't tell Catherine about Leo straight away. To himself he seemed to gleam with his news, to be both the pale bereaved and the otherworldly messenger. He found himself lengthening his natural sighs and stares to provoke a question. But after ten minutes he accepted that she hadn't noticed. She was slumped in an armchair, with newspapers all around her, and half-empty glasses of water and mugs of tea on the table beside her. He looked down on her from behind, and she seemed as small and passive as a sick child. She looked up and said, with an effort at brightness, 'Oh, Nick, it's Election Special after the news,' as though it had taken great effort to find this out, as though it was itself a piece of good news.

'OK, darling,' said Nick. 'Great, we'll watch that.' He gazed round the room, feeling for the precedence, the protocol of their relative afflictions. 'Um… yes… OK!' It didn't seem right to land her with the news of a death. He felt that like all news it had its own momentum, and it would somehow go stale and unsayable if it was left too long.

He went up to his room with a slight mental stoop from the burden of Catherine's condition. It was hard work living with someone so helpless and negative, and much worse if you'd known them critical and funny. Well, sometimes, perhaps, it made your own problems look light; at others it amplified them, by a troubling sympathetic gloom. He had borrowed a book of Rachel's by Dr Edelman, who was treating Catherine, A Path Through the Mountains: Clinical Responses to Manic Depression. He