Next day Nick wandered for lost half-hours through what he'd done, taking the tube of gel, that was folded back neatly, three-quarters empty, and peering at it in the gloom with relief and embarrassment; turning Leo round in his arms and unbuttoning his jeans as if they were his own, and prising his broad blunt hard-on from his pants as he eased them down, and pushing him forward to hold on to the bench as he knelt behind him and paid the kind of homage with his tongue and lips that he'd dreamed of paying for years to a whole night-catalogue of other men. He loved the scandalous idea of what he was doing more perhaps than the actual sensations and the dull very private smell. He twisted his own pants down to his knees, and smiled at the liberated bounce of his dick in the cool night air, and kissed his smile into Leo's sphincter. Then when he fucked Leo, which was what he did next, a sensation as interesting as it was delicious, he couldn't help laughing quietly. "I'm glad you think it's funny," Leo muttered. "No, it's not that," said Nick; but there was something hilarious in the shivers of pleasure that ran up his back and squeezed his neck, and ran down his arms to his fingers—he felt he'd been switched on for the first time, gently gripping Leo's hips, and then reaching round him to help unbutton his shirt and get it off and hold his naked body against him. It was all so easy. He'd worried a lot the night before that there might be some awful knack to it—
"Mind that shirt," Leo said: "it's my sister's."
That made Nick love him much more, he couldn't say why. "Your arse is so smooth," he whispered, while his hands stroked hungrily through the short rough hair on his chest and belly.
"Yeah . . . shave it . . ." said Leo, between grunted breaths as Nick got quicker and bolder, "get arse-knit. . . fucking murder . . . on the bike . . . " Nick kissed the back of his neck. Poor Leo! With his arse-knit and his ingrowing beard he was a martyr to his hair. "Yeah, like that," he said, with a sweet tone of revelation. He was leaning forward on one arm now, and masturbating in a pounding hurry. Nick was more and more seriously absorbed, but then just before he came he had a brief vision of himself, as if the trees and bushes had rolled away and all the lights of London 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 such good news. We're on the local association, and we couldn't be more thrilled. Good old Gerald."
"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 those unforeseen moments of inner transition, when an old prejudice dissolves into a new desire. The music shocked him with its clear repetitive statement of what he wanted. Then one vast sound system warred happily with the next, so that there were different things he wanted, beautiful jarring futures for him—all this in forty or fifty seconds as the car slipped out and away into the ordinary activity of the weekend streets.
Still, if he couldn't be with Leo it was best to be somewhere quite different. Gerald drove them out along the A40, at a somehow preferentially high speed, as if led by an invisible police escort. Soon, however, they came into massive roadworks, and a long unimpressionable tailback, as you did everywhere these days. Here they were taking out the last old roundabouts and traffic lights and forcing an unimpeded freeway across the scruffy flat semi-country. Nick gazed out politely at the desert of digging and concrete, and beyond it a field where local boys were roaring round and round on dirt-bikes in breakneck contempt for the idea of actually going anywhere. They didn't care about the carnival, they'd never heard of Hawkeswood, and they'd chosen to spend the day in this field rather than anything else. Beside them perhaps a mile of solid traffic stood stationary on the motorway of the future.
As always, Nick felt a need to make things all right. He said, "I wonder where we are. Is this Middlesex, I suppose?"
"I suppose it's Middlesex," Gerald said. He hated to be thwarted and was already impatient.
"Not very nice," said Elena.
"No . . . " said Nick, hesitantly, humorously, as if considering a defence of it, to pass the time. He knew Elena was anxious about the party, and about her role for the evening. She had asked a couple of questions already about Fales, who was Lionel Kessler's new butler, with whom she was about to find herself pressed into some unspecified relation.
"If Lionel's giving us lunch," said Gerald, "we'd better stop somewhere and ring ahead. We'll be late."
"Oh, Lionel won't mind," said Rachel, "we're just taking pot luck."
"Hmm," said Gerald. "One doesn't as a rule find the words Lionel and pot luck used in the same sentence." The tone was mocking, but suggested a certain anxiety of his own about his brother-in-law, and a sense of obligation. Rachel settled back contentedly.
"Everything will be fine," she said. And in fact the traffic did then make a move, and an optimistic attitude, which was the only sort Gerald could bear, was cautiously indulged. Nick thought about the old-fashioned name Lionel. Of course it was related to Leo; but Lionel was a little heraldic lion, whereas Leo was a big live beast.
Five minutes later they were at a standstill.
"This fucking traffic," said Gerald; at which Elena looked a bit flustered.
"As well as everything else," Nick said, with determined brightness, "I can't wait to see the house."
"Well, you're going to have to," said Gerald.
"Ah, the house," said Rachel, with a sighing laugh.
Nick said, "Or perhaps you don't like it. It must be different for you, having grown up there." He felt he was rather fawning on her.
"I don't know," Rachel admitted. "I hardly know if I like it or not."
"You'd have to say, I think," said Gerald, "that it's the contents that make Hawkeswood. The house itself is something of a Victorian monstrosity."
"Mmm . . ." In Rachel's conversation a murmured "mmm" or drily drawn-out "I know . . ." could carry a note of surprising scepticism. Nick loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement; he longed to master it himself. It was so different from the bounding effort of Gerald's conversation that he sometimes wondered if Gerald himself understood her. He said,
"I think I'll like the house as well as the contents."
Rachel looked grateful, but remained vague about the whole thing, and Nick felt slightly snubbed. Perhaps it was impossible to describe a place one had known all one's life. She didn't disparage Nick's interest, but she showed she couldn't quite be expected to be interested herself. It had been her fortune not to describe but to enjoy. She said, "You know of course there's modern art, as well as the Rembrandts," with a brief smile at having retrieved a notable detail.
Hawkeswood had been built in the 1880s for the first Baron Kessler. It stood on an artificially flattened hilltop among the Buckinghamshire beech woods, which had since grown up to hide all but its topmost spirelets from outside view. The approach, after trailing through the long linked villages, entering past a lodge and a cattle grid and climbing the half-mile of drive among grazing deer, was a complex climax for Nick; as the flashing windows of the house came into view he found himself smiling widely while his eyes darted critically, admiringly—he didn't know what—over the steep slate roofs and stone walls the colour of French mustard. He had read the high-minded but humorous entry in Pevsner, which described a seventeenth-century chateau re-imagined in terms of luxurious modernity, with plate-glass windows, under-floor central heating, numerous bathrooms, and running hot water; but it had left him unprepared for the sheer staring presence of the place. Gerald pulled up in front of the porte cochere and they got out and went in, Nick coming last and looking at everything, while Fales, a real butler in striped morning trousers, materialized to meet them. There they were, already, in the central hall, the great feature of the house, two storeys high, with an arcaded gallery on the upper level, and a giant chimneypiece made from bits of a baroque tomb. Nick felt he'd stepped into the strange and seductive fusion of an art museum and a lu
xury hotel.
Pot luck turned out to be an exquisite light lunch served at a round table in a room lined with rococo boiseries that had been removed wholesale from some grand Parisian town house, and painted pale blue. On the ceiling, in a flowered ellipse, two naked females held a wreath of roses. Nick saw at once that the landscape over the fireplace was a Cezanne. It gave him a hilarious sense of his own social displacement. It was one of those moments that only the rich could create, and which came for Nick all wrapped up in its own description, so that he was already recounting it to some impressionable other person—a person, that is, as impressionable as himself. He didn't know whether he should refer to it, but Lord Kessler said as he sat down, "You see I've moved that Cezanne."
Rachel peered at it briefly and said, "Oh yes." Her whole manner was comfortable, almost sleepy; she made a charming shrug of welcome, of dissolved formality, gesturing Nick to his place. Gerald looked at the painting more critically, with a sharp way he had of scanning any document which might come in useful later on.
Nick thought he could say, "It's very beautiful." And Lord Kessler said, "Yes, isn't it a nice one."
Kessler was perhaps sixty, shorter and stouter than Rachel, bald, with an alert, not quite symmetrical face. He had on a dark grey three-piece suit which made no concession to fashion or even to the season; he looked warm in it, but seemed to say that this was simply what one wore. He ate his salmon and drank his rather sweet hock with an indefinable air of relished routine, an admission of lifelong lunching in boardrooms and country houses and festival restaurants all over Europe. He said, "So Tobias and Catherine are coming down when?"
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