Leo shifted slightly on his heels. "Can you see?" he said.
Nick was grinning and sighing at the same time. "Yes, I can see," he said, in a murmur that shrank the conversation away from Pete into heady subterfuge.
"And what do you think?" asked Leo brightly.
"Oh . . . it's beautiful," Nick whispered. He checked the open door to the back room before he stooped and slid his hand in and verified that this time there was no blue horizontal, there was only smooth, shaved, curving Leo. A second or two, and then Nick straightened up and put his hands gently round Leo's neck—who tipped back against his legs for support, and rolled his shoulder a couple of times against Nick's hard-on.
"Mm, you do like it," he said.
"I love it," said Nick.
When Pete came back in they were loafing round the room with their hands in their pockets. "You won't believe this," he said. "I think I've sold the bed."
"Oh yes?" said Leo. "Nick was just saying what a nice piece it was. But he says it'll take quite a bit of work, don't you, Nick?"
Their final few minutes in the shop had an atmosphere of ridiculous oddity. It was hard to take in what the other two were saying—Nick felt radiantly selfish and inattentive, and left it to Leo to wind things up. The furniture and objects took on a richer lustre and at the same time seemed madly irrelevant. It must have been obvious to Pete that something was up, that the air was gleaming and trembling; and it wouldn't have been beyond him to make some tart comment about it. But he didn't. It struck Nick that perhaps Pete was really over Leo, realistic and resigned, and he noticed he regretted this slightly, because he wanted Pete to be jealous.
"Well, we must get our lunch," Leo said. "I'm hungry, aren't you, Nick?"
"Starving," said Nick, in a kind of happy shout.
They all laughed and shook hands, and when Pete had hugged Leo he pushed him away with a quick pat.
So there they were, out in the street, being nudged and flooded round by the crowds, and heedlessly obstructive in their own slow walk, which unfurled down the hill to the faint silky ticking of Leo's bicycle wheels. It was all new to Nick, this being with another man, carried along on the smooth swelling current of mutual feeling—with its eddies sometimes into shop doorways or under the awnings of the bric-a-brac stalls. There was no more talk of lunch, which was a good sign. In fact they didn't say anything much, but now and then they shared glances which flowered into wonderful smirks. Lust prickled Nick's thighs and squeezed his stomach and throat, and made him almost groan between his smiles, as if it just wasn't fair to be promised so much. He fell behind a step or two and walked along shaking his head. He wanted to be Leo's jeans, in their casual rhythmical caress of his strolling legs, their momentary grip and letting go. His hands flickered against Leo time and again, to draw attention to things, a chair, a plate, a passing punk's head of blue spikes. He must have come first, out of all the men Leo had auditioned. He kept touching Leo on the bottom, in the simple pleasure of permission. Leo didn't reciprocate exactly, he had his own canny eye for the street, he even raised a sly eyebrow at the sexy shock of other boys going past, but it didn't matter because they were a kind of superfluity, the glancing overspill of his brimming desire for Nick. As they dawdled through the crowd Nick saw himself rushing ahead through neglected years of his moral education. This was what it was like!
Under the fringed canopy of a stall he saw the down-turned profile of Sophie Tipper, studying a lot of old rings and bracelets pinned on a ramp of black velvet. His first thought was to ignore her or avoid her. He felt his old envy of her. But then Toby rolled into view behind her, leaning forward with a little pursed smile of vacant interest—very like a husband. He rested his chin on her shoulder for a moment, and she murmured something to him, so that Nick had the uncomfortable feeling of peering at their own heedless self-content. They made a necessarily beautiful couple, somehow luminous against the dark jumble of the market, like models in a subtle but artificial glare. Nick turned away and looked for something he could buy for Leo; he longed to do that. He saw all the reasons the impending social encounter might not be a success. "Hey, Guest!" said Toby, loping round the stall, grabbing him and giving him a firm kiss on the cheek.
"Hi—Toby . . . " Their kissing was a new thing, since the party, somehow made possible and indemnified by the presence of Sophie. And it seemed almost a relief to Toby, as if it erased some old low-level embarrassment about their not kissing. To Nick himself it was lovely, all the warmth of Toby for a moment against him, but unignorably sad too, since it was clearly the limit of concessions, granted in the certainty that nothing more intimate would ever follow.
"Hello, Nick!" said Sophie, coming round and kissing him on both cheeks with beaming goodwill, which he put down to her being such an up-and-coming actress. He wanted to introduce Leo, but he thought something wrong might be said, based on his excited gabble at Hawkeswood, when he was stoned. It was one of those inevitable but still surprising moments when mere wishful thinking was held to account by the truth. He said,
"You're going to be late for lunch," and thought he sounded rather rude.
"I know," said Toby. "Gran wants one of her sessions with Sophie. So we're keeping it as short as possible."
"Well, I love your grandmother," Sophie said, with mock petulance.
"No, she's a marvellous old girl," said Toby; and it reminded Nick of second-hand things he used to say at Oxford, sagacious remarks about his parents' famous friends. He smiled vaguely at Leo. If Sophie hadn't been there, Nick thought, then he could have shown Toby off to Leo as a glamorous accessory to his own past, perhaps something more . . . But like this Toby was hopelessly claimed and placed.
Nick said, "Sophie Tipper, Toby Fedden: Leo Charles," and Leo said "Leo" both times as he shook hands.
"Right," said Toby, "fantastic . . . We know all about you," and he gave an encouraging grin.
"Oh, do you," said Leo, drily doubtful at the return of his own phrase.
"Leo's Nick's new boyfriend," Toby said to Sophie. "Yah, it's really great."
Nick only took a quick agonized peep at Leo, whose expression was scarily blank, as if to dramatize his unrelinquished power of choice. The welling confidence of a few minutes before looked a foolish thing. Nick said, "Well, we don't want to jump the gun."
"But that's wonderful," said Sophie, as though Nick's welfare, his unhappy heart, had long been her concern. He saw her reaching wide to bless the double triumph of boyfriend and black.
"He's been keeping you very much to himself," said Toby. "But now we've caught you at it. So to speak!" And he blushed.
"We're just going for a little toddle," said Leo.
"That's marvellous." Toby seemed as thrilled as Sophie by what they imagined was happening, and Nick had a sad clear sighting of his deeper, perhaps even unconscious reason: that an obscure pressure, a sense of unvoiced expectations, might be lifted from him by the transference of Nick's adoration to another man. As Gerald might have said of something quite different, it was hugely to be encouraged. And maybe Sophie sensed that too. They'd probably even talked about it, before sleep, as a vague problem—just for a moment, before it shrank into irrelevance like shoes kicked off at the end of the bed. . ."So you're not joining us for lunch?" Toby went on.
"Not invited," said Leo, but with a cheerful shake of the head. Nick raced away from the mere idea of it, as a nexus of every snobbery and worry, scene of tortured intercessions between different departments of his own life: Leo—Gerald—Toby—Sophie—Lady Partridge . . .
"Well, another time," said Toby. "We must be going, Pips. But let's all meet up soon?"
"I knew we wouldn't find my ring," said Sophie, with the crossness that hides a sweetness that hides a toughness.
"We'll come back after lunch. The girl's got to have a ring," Toby explained, which Nick didn't like the sound of.
Leo had kept up an attitude of steady ironic contemplation of the young couple, but then he said, "I know I've seen
you," and looked faintly embarrassed by his own gambit. Sophie's face was a lesson in hesitant delight.
"Oh . . ."
"I may be completely wrong," said Leo. "Weren't you in English Rose?"
Disappointed, she seemed to struggle to remember. "Oh, no . . . Clever you, but no, I wasn't in that one."
"That was Betsy Tilden," said Nick.
"Right, oh yeah, Betsy . . . No, I know I've seen you . . ."
Nick wanted to say that she'd only been in two things, an episode of Bergerac and a student-made film of The White Devil, bankrolled by her father, which had had a single late-night screening at the Gate.
"I was in a film that was called The White Devil," said Sophie, as though speaking to a child.
"That was it!" said Leo. "Yes! That was a fantastic film. I love that film."
"I'm so glad," said Sophie. "You are kind!"
Leo was smiling and staring, as if the scenes were spooling through his head again, miraculously matched by the woman in front of him. "Yeah, when he poisons him, and . . . Did you see this film, Nick, White Devil . . . ?"
"Stupidly, I missed it," Nick said; though he had a clear recollection of undergraduates acting at being film-makers, bouncing round in jeeps and wearing dark glasses at night; the Flamineo, Jamie Stallard, a drawling Martyrs' Club twit, was one of his favourite betes noires.
"I've got to tell you, that guy—Jamie, is it?—ooh-ooh . . ."
"I know," said Sophie. "I thought you'd like him."
"You're not wrong, girl," laughed Leo, so lit up with sassy excitement that Nick thought he might be teasing Sophie. "But he's not, though—you'd better tell me—he's not . . . is he . . . ?"
"Oh . . . ! I'm afraid he isn't, no. A lot of people ask that," Sophie admitted.
Leo took it philosophically. "Well, when it comes on again I'm definitely taking him," he said, tutting as if they both thought cultivated, first-class Nick, still heavy-headed with exam knowledge, steeped to the chaps in revenge tragedy, was a bit of a slob.
"All right," said Nick, seeing it at least as a couple of hours in the warm dark together, rather than behind a bush. "And I can tell you all about Jamie Stallard," he added.
But Leo's real interest was in Sophie. "So what are you doing next?" he said. Nick raised his eyebrows apologetically to Toby, who shook his head kindly, as if to say that going out with a promising actress he was bound to find himself in an attendant role. Sophie herself looked slightly overexcited, partly at the praise but partly because she wasn't used to talking to anyone like Leo, and it seemed to be going really well. "I'll let you know," she was saying. "I can get your number off Nick!"
Nick wished he could match Toby's confidence. He felt snubbed by Leo's attentions to Sophie, but perhaps it was only because he felt foolish, childish at having put it about that they were boyfriends. Toby said, "Really, we must go, Pips," and there was something so silly about this nickname that it helped Nick not to care.
But then, alone again in the street with Leo, neither of them saying anything, he had a sense of what an affair might actually be like, and the endless miraculous permission was only a part of it. His limbs were oddly stiff, his hands tingling as if he'd just come in from snowballing to stand by a blazing fire. He felt the moment echoing other occasions when he had just missed success through a failure of nerve, or a stupidly happy anticipation. All Leo's effusiveness with Pete and then with Sophie had ebbed away, and left just the two of them, in this horrible noise and crush. Nick glanced at him with a tight smile; at which Leo stretched his neck with a moody, uninvolved air. "Well," said Nick finally, "where do you want to go?"
"I don't know, boyfriend," Leo said.
Nick laughed ruefully, and something kept him back from a further He. "A caff?" he said. "Indian? A sandwich?"—which was the most he could imagine managing.
"Well, I need something," said Leo, in his tone of flat goading irony, looking at him sharply. "And it isn't a sandwich."
Nick didn't take a risk on what this might mean. "Ah . . . " he said. Leo turned his head and scowled at a stall of cloudy green and brown glassware, which was taking its place in their crisis, and seemed to gleam with hints of a settled domestic life. Leo said,
"At least with old Pete we had his place, but where are me and you ever going to go?"
Could this be his only objection, the only obstacle . . .? "I know, we're homeless," Nick said.
"Homeless love," said Leo, shrugging and then cautiously nodding, as if weighing up a title for a song.
5
NICK CHOSE A moment before dinner to pay the rent. It was always awkward. "Oh . . . my dear . . . " said Rachel, as if the two ten-pound notes were a form of mild extravagance, like a box of chocolates, or like flowers brought by a dinner guest, which were also a bit of a nuisance. She looked for somewhere to put down her bowl of steeping apricots. "If you're sure . . . "
Nick shrugged and snuffled. "Heavens," he said. He had just spent five pounds on a taxi, he was doing all sorts of incautious things, and would have loved not to pay.
"Well, thank you!" Rachel took the money, and stood folding it appreciatively, not sure where to put it. Then Gerald and Badger Brogan came in from tennis—there was the flat chime of their feet on the iron stair from the garden, and then they were in the kitchen like two big hot boys. Just for a second Gerald noted the transaction that was taking place. The next second he said, "Thrashed him!" and threw down his racquet on the bench.
"God, Fedden, you're a liar," said Badger. "It was 6-4, Rache, in the third set."
Gerald shook his head in the savour of triumph. "I let him have it hot."
"I'm sure you were very well matched," said Rachel prudently.
This wasn't quite acceptable to either player. "I chose not to question some frankly fantastic line calls," said Badger. He roamed round by the table, picking up a spoon and putting it down, and then a garlic press, without noticing. Nick smiled as if amused by the drama of their game, though in fact he felt challenged by Badger's free and easy way here, by the mood of competition he stirred up in Gerald, and perhaps by its counterpart, his longer and deeper claim on Gerald's affection. "Hello, Nick!" said Badger, in his probing, sarcastic tone.
"Hello, Badger," said Nick, still self-conscious at teasing a virtual stranger about the yellow-grey stripe in his dark hair, at having to enrol in the family cult of Badger as a character, but finding it easier after all than the sober, the critical, the almost hostile-sounding "Derek."
Badger in turn was clearly puzzled by Nick's presence in his old friend's house and made facetious attempts at understanding him. It was a part of his general mischief—he lurched about all day, asked leading questions, rubbed up old scandals and scratched beadily for new ones. He said, "So what have you been up to today, Nick?"
"Oh, just the usual," said Nick. "You know, morning in the library, waiting for books to come up from the stacks; bibliography class in the afternoon, 'How to describe textual variants.' " He made himself as dull as he could for Badger, like a brown old binding, though to his own eye "textual variants" glinted with hints at what he'd actually done, which was to cut the class and have two hours of sex with Leo on Hampstead Heath. That would have been more scandal than Badger could manage. On the first night of his stay he had described an Oxford friend of theirs as the most ghastly shirtlifter.
"LBW, Badge?" said Gerald.
"Thanks, Banger," said Badger, using an interesting old nickname that Nick couldn't see himself making free with, and which Gerald was wise enough not to object to. The two men stood there, in their tennis whites, drinking their tall glasses of lemon barley water, gasping and grinning between swigs. Gerald's legs were still brown, and his confusingly firm buttocks were set off by his tight Fred Perry shorts. Badger was leaner and seedier, and his Aertex shirt was sweatier and pulled askew by being used to mop his face. He was wearing scruffy old plimsolls, whereas Gerald seemed to bounce or levitate slightly in the new thick-soled "trainers."
; Elena hurried in from the pantry with the joint, or limb, of venison, plastered up in a blood-stained paste of flour and water. The whole business of the deer, culled at Hawkeswood each September and sent to hang for a fortnight in the Feddens' utility room, was an ordeal for Elena, and an easy triumph for Gerald, who always fixed a series of dinner parties to advertise it and eat it. Elena set the heavy dish on the table just as Catherine came down from her room, with her hands held up like blinkers to avoid the sight. "Mm—look at that, Cat!" said Badger.
"Fortunately I won't even have to look at you eating it," said Catherine; though she did quickly peer at it with a kind of relish of revulsion.
"Are you going out, then, old Puss?" said Gerald, his eagerness damped at once by a wounded frown.
"You'll have a drink with us, darling?" said Rachel.
"I might do if there's time," said Catherine. "Is it all MPs?"
"No," said Gerald. "Your grandmother's not an MP."
"Thank Christ, actually," said Catherine.
"And nor is Morden Lipscomb an MP."
"There are two MPs coming," said Rachel, and it wasn't clear if she thought this rather few or quite enough.
"Yup, Timms and Groom!" said Gerald, as if they were the joiliest company imaginable.
"The man who never says 'hello'!"
"You're too absurd," said Gerald. "I'm sure I have heard him say it . . ."
"If Morden Lipscomb's coming I'm going to keep my coat on, he makes my blood run cold."
"Morden's an important man," said Gerald. "He has the ear of the President."
"Will Nick be making up numbers, I suppose," said Catherine.
Nick fluttered his eyelashes and Gerald said, "Nick doesn't make up numbers, child, he's part of the . . . part of the household."
Catherine looked at Nick, slightly mockingly, across the space that separates good and bad children. She said, "He's the perfect little courtier, isn't he?"
"Oh, Elena," said Rachel, "Catherine's not dining, we'll be one fewer for dinner—yes, one less." Elena went into the dining room to adjust the placings, and came back a moment later with an objection.
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