shone in on him: little Nick Guest from Barwick, Don and Dot Guest's boy, fucking a stranger in a Notting Hill garden at night. Leo was right, it was so bad, and it was so much the best thing he'd ever done.
Later Nick sat for a minute on a bench by the gravel walk, while Leo took a piss on the lawn. It wasn't clear whether the tall stooping figure in wlnte shirtsleeves had seen this. Leo sat down beside Nick and there was a sense that some last, more formal part of their date was to be enacted. Nick felt abruptly heavy-hearted, and thought perhaps he had been silly to let Leo see how happy he was-he couldn't stifle his sense of achievement, and his love-starved mind and body wanted more and more of Leo. The air seemed to jostle with nothing but the presence and names of Nick and Leo, which hung in a sad sharp chemical tang of knowledge among the sleeping laurels and azaleas. The tall man walked past them, hesitated, and turned.
'You do know it's keyholders only.'
'I'm sorry?'
The mingled light from the backs of the houses revealed a flushed summer-holiday face, soft and weak- chinned, perched at an altitude under thin grey hair. 'Only this is a private garden.'
'Oh, yes-we're keyholders,' the phrase subsuming Leo, who made a little grunt, not of lust this time but of indignant confirmation. He set his hands on his knees in a proprietary attitude, his knees wide apart, sexy and insolent too.
'Ah, fine… ' The man gave a squinting half-smile. 'I didn't think I'd seen you before.' He avoided looking at Leo, who was obviously the cause of this edgy exchange-and that for Nick was another of the commonplace revelations of the evening, of being out with a black man.
'I'm often here, actually,' Nick said. He gestured away behind him towards the Feddens' garden gate. 'I live at number 48.'
'Fine… fine…'-the man walked on a couple of steps, then looked back, doubtful but eager. 'But then you must mean at the Feddens'…'
Nick said quietly, 'Yes, that's right.'
The news affected the man visibly-in the softly blotted glare, which reminded Nick for a moment of plays put on in college gardens, he seemed to melt into excited intimacy. 'Goodness… you're living there. Well, isn't it all splendid! We couldn't be more delighted. I'm Geoffrey Titchfield, by the way, number 52-though we only have the garden flat, unlike… unlike some!'
Nick nodded, and smiled noncommittally. 'I'm Nick Guest.' Some solidarity with Leo kept him from standing up, shaking hands. Of course it was Geoffrey's voice he had heard from the balcony on the night he had put Leo off, and Geoffrey's guests whose regular tireless laughter had heightened his loneliness, and now here he was in person and Nick felt he'd got one past him, he'd fucked Leo in the keyholders' garden, it was a secret victory.
'Aah… aah… ' went Geoffrey. 'It's
'I'm really just a friend of Toby's,' Nick said.
'We were saying only the other night, Gerald Fedden will be in the Cabinet by Christmas. He knows me, by the way, you must give him all the very best from both of us, from Geoffrey and Trudi.' Nick seemed to shrug in acquiescence. 'He's just the sort of Tory we need. A splendid neighbour, I should say at once, and I fancy a splendid parliamentarian.' This last word was played out with a proud, fond rise and fall and almost whimsical rubato in its full seven syllables.
'He's certainly a very nice man,' Nick said, and added briskly, to finish the conversation, 'I'm really more a friend of Toby and Catherine.'
After Geoffrey had wandered off Leo stood up and took command of his bike. Nick didn't know what to say without making matters worse, and they walked along the path together in silence. He avoided looking up at the Feddens', at his own window high up in the roof, but he had a sense of being noticed by the house, and the verdict of 'vulgar and unsafe' seemed to creep out like a mist and tarnish the triumph of the evening.
'Well,' said Leo under his breath, 'two sorts of arse-licking in ten minutes'- so that Nick laughed and hit him on the arm and immediately felt better. 'Look, I'll see you, my friend,' Leo said, as Nick opened the gate. They came out a bit shiftily on to the street, and Nick couldn't tell if the sentence really meant its opposite. So he was clear about it.
'I want to see you,' he said, and the five light words seemed to open and deepen the night, with the prickling of his eyes, the starred lights of the cars rushing past them and down the long hill northwards, towards other boroughs, and neighbourhoods known only from their mild skyward glare.
Leo stooped to fit on his lamps, front and back. Then he leant the bike against the fence. 'Come here,' he said, in that part-time cockney voice that shielded little admissions and surrenders. 'Give us a hug.'
He stepped up to him and held him tight, but with none of the certainty of minutes before, beside the compost heap. He pressed his forehead against Leo's, who was so much the right size for him, such a good match, and gave him a quick firm kiss with pursed lips-there was a jeer and a horn-blast from a passing car. 'Wankers,' murmured Leo, though to Nick it felt like a shout of congratulations.
Leo sat on the bike, one foot straight down like a dancer's to the pavement, the other in the raised stirrup. A kind of envy that Nick had felt all evening for the bike and its untouchable place in Leo's heart fused with a new resentment of it and of the ease with which it would take him away. 'Look, I've got a couple more to see, yeah?' At which Nick nodded dumbly. 'But I'm not letting you go.' He settled back on the saddle, the bike wobbled and then he rode round in ratcheting circles, so that Nick was always facing the wrong way. 'Besides,' said Leo, 'you're a damn good fuck.' He winked and smiled and then darted out across the road and down the hill without looking back.
3
NICK'S BIRTHDAY WAS eight days after Toby's, and for a moment there had been an idea that the party for Toby's twenty-first should be a joint celebration. 'Makes obvious sense,' Gerald had said; and Rachel had called it 'a fascinating idea.' Since the party was to be held at Hawkeswood, which was the country house of Rachel's brother, Lord Kessler, the plan almost frightened Nick with its social grandeur, with what it would confer on him and demand from him. Thereafter, though, it had never been mentioned again. Nick felt he couldn't allude to it himself, and after a while he allowed his mother to make arrangements for his own family party at Barwick a week later: he looked forward to that with queasy resignation.
Toby's party was on the last Sunday in August, when the Notting Hill Carnival would be pounding to its climax, and when many local residents shuttered and locked their houses and left for their second homes with their fingers crossed: since the race riots of two summers earlier the carnival had been a site of heightened hopes and fears. Nick had lain in bed the night before and heard the long-legged beat of reggae from down the hill, mixed in, like the pulse of pleasure, with the sighing of the garden trees. It was his second night without Leo. He lay wide-eyed, dwelling on him in a state beyond mere thought, a kind of dazzled grief, in which everything they'd done together was vivid to him, and the strain of loss was as keen as the thrill of success.
Next morning at eleven they gathered in the hall. Nick, seeing Gerald was wearing a tie, ran up and put one on too. Rachel wore a white linen dress, and her dark hair, with its candid streaks of grey, had the acknowledged splendour of a new cut and a new shape. She smiled her readiness at them, and Nick felt their fondness and efficiency as a family unit. He and Elena stowed the overnight luggage in the Range Rover, and then Gerald drove them out, past blocked-off streets, through gathering crowds. Everywhere there were groups of policemen, to whom he nodded and raised his hand authoritatively from the wheel. Nick, sitting in the back with Elena, felt foolish and conceited at once. He dreaded seeing Leo, on his bike, and dreaded being seen by Leo. He imagined him cruising the carnival, and yearned to belong there in the way that Leo did. He saw him dancing happily with strangers in the street, or biding his turn in the dense mutating crowds at the underground urinals. His longing jumped out in a little groan, which became a throat-clearing and an exclamation: 'Oh I say, look at that amazing float.'
In a side street a team of young black men with high yellow wings and tails like birds of paradise were preparing for the parade. 'It's marvellous what they do,' said Rachel.
'Not very nice music,' said Elena, with a cheerful shiver. Nick didn't reply-and found himself in fact at one of
