"Yeah, I like the way he's got him yawning," he said; and he stretched his own arms out and up and tilted his head with a yawn that was just like the Lord Jesus except that he was holding an ice-cream-smeared dessert spoon in his left hand. It was the kind of camp you see sometimes in observant children—and Rosemary watched him with the smothered amazement and mocking anticipation of a good girl whose brother has been insolent and reckless. But she said,
"Mm, it makes me shiver when he does that."
Leo tutted and grinned, as his own shadow, in the room's less brilliant evening light, stretched and shrugged and faltered across the wall above his chair.
When the meal finished Leo was checking his bike and they were out in the street almost at once. Nick was relieved but ashamed—he made a joke of being dragged away in the middle of a sentence, as if Leo was a lively dog on the end of a leash. But Mrs Charles seemed not to mind. "Ah, you go on now," she said, as if she might be quite relieved herself. Or perhaps, he thought, as he hurried along in silence beside Leo, she had sensed his own relief, and been saddened by it for a second, and then had hardened herself against him . . . Her tone was nearly dismissive, and perhaps she thought he was false . . . Well, he was condescending, in a way . . . These anxieties flared dully through him. He began to resent Mrs Charles for thinking he was condescending.
Leo was walking briskly, as if they'd agreed where they were going, but he said nothing. Nick couldn't tell if he was sulky, angry, ashamed, defiant . . . but he knew that all these emotions could rise and rush and fizzle and mutate very quickly, and that it was wiser to let him settle than to guess his mood and risk the wrong opener. Nick's consciousness of being wise was a small refuge when Leo was difficult or distant. He took in the after-sunset chill, the upswept trails of dark cloud above the rooftops, and the presence of autumn, light but penetrating, in the cold cobalt beyond. In their four weeks together these evening walks, with the ticking bicycle beside them or between them, had taken on a deepening colour of romance. He worried that the silence itself was a kind of comment, and as they reached the end of the road he pulled Leo against him with a quick chafing hug and said, "Mmm, thank you for that, darling."
Leo snorted softly. "What are you thanking me for?"
"Oh, just for taking me home. For introducing me to your family. It means a lot to me." And he found his little avowal released a sentiment he hadn't quite felt before he made it. He was very touched.
"So, now you know what they're like," said Leo, stopping and staring, with just his mother's narrowing of the gaze, across the major road beyond. The evening traffic was let slip from the lights and accelerated down the hill towards them and past them, then thinned, and then there was only a waiting emptiness again.
"They're wonderful," Nick said, meaning only to be kind—though he heard the word hang, in the silence between the lights, as if in inverted commas, and underlined too: the wonderful of gush, of connoisseurship, of Kensington Park Gardens. Leo seemed to find it absurdly unexpected, and kept blinking, but then smiled and said with a dry laugh,
"If you say so . . . darling"—the darling, longed for by Nick, taking on a dubious ironic twang.
Nick had a large wild plan of his own for the night, but for now he let Leo take charge: they were going to go back to Notting Hill and catch the seven fifteen screening ofScarface at the Gate—it had just come out and Leo had all the facts on it, including its enormous length, 170 minutes, each one of which appeared to Nick like a shadowy unit of body heat, of contact and excitement. They would be pressed together in the warm darkness for three hours. Leo said what a great actor Al Pacino was, and spoke of him almost amorously, which Nick couldn't honestly do—to him Pacino wasn't that sort of idol. There was an interview with him in the new Time Out, which Leo had probably read, since his ideas on film seemed to Nick to be drawn pretty closely from the capsule reviews in that magazine. Still, film was Leo's province, rather humourlessly patrolled against Nick's pretensions, it was one of the interests he'd originally advertised, and Nick conceded, "No, he's a genius," which was a word he could thrill them both with. They stood at the bus stop with that idea in their heads.
When the bus came Nick hopped on and sat looking out at the back at Leo, who was ages fiddling with his bike and then getting on it, dwindling away every second into the night-lit street. Then the bus pulled in at a further stop, and the bike came almost floating up, Leo rising from his forward crouch to glance in at Nick—he seemed to ride the air there for a second, and then he winked and stooped and with a click of the gears he slipped past. Nick was glad of the wink this time, he raised his hand and grinned, and then was left, in the public brightness of the bus, to be eyed by the people opposite with vague suspicion.
The bus threaded down at last across the Harrow Road and began its long descent of Ladbroke Grove. He pictured Leo whizzing ahead, and kept losing him in the gleams and shadows of the night traffic. Where was he now? Nick was still in the alien high reach of the road, with the canal and the council estates, and longing for the other end, his own end, the safety and aloofness of white stucco and private gardens. He wondered what Leo thought as he made the transition, which occurred at the dense middle part by the market and the station, under clangorous bridges, where people loitered and shouted . . . After that there was a stretch of uneasy gentility, before the Grove climbed, taking palpable advantage of the hill as a social metaphor, and touching into life the hint of an orchard or thicket in the very name of the street. He didn't fool himself that Leo was sensitive to these things—he was a figure of wrenching poetry to Nick, but was not himself poetic, and clearly found something daft and even creepy in Nick's aesthetic promptings and hesitations. Nick sometimes made the mistake of thinking that Leo didn't feel things strongly, and then the shock, when his love and need for him leapt out, angry at being doubted, took his breath away, and almost frightened him. He thought back over the meal, the visit, and saw that of course it had meant a lot to Leo as well, but that everything was squashed and denied by secrecy: if he had been a woman the occasion would have had a ritual meaning, and Leo's mother could have let herself dream of the altar steps at last. To Nick the bulging subject of the visit had been his love for Leo, which obsessed him just as much as Mrs Charles's love of Jesus did her; but she had given herself licence to express her fixation, had embraced a duty to do so, whilst his burned through only in blushes and secret stares. She had eclipsed him completely.
When he got to the cinema he found Leo near the head of the queue. "You made it," he said, looking round at the people behind and nodding—"Yeah, it's the first night," as if it was a bore, he was a martyr to first nights. And when they reached the window it turned out that the cinema was nearly full, and they wouldn't be able to sit together. Nick shrugged and said, "Ah well . . . " backing into the couple behind them, who were trying to overhear. "We can come at the weekend."
But Leo said, "Yeah, we'll have them—god, we're here now," and gave him a look of friendly concern.
Nick said quietly, "I just thought, if we can't sit together . . ." since the only reason for sitting through a super-violent three-hour gangster movie was to have Leo's weight and warmth against him and his hand in his open fly. They had touched each other like that, with cautious delirious slowness, in Rumblefish, under the dreamy aegis of Matt Dillon, and in Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, which had been Nick's hopeless choice of picture and a peculiar backdrop to an orgasm. Otherwise, they had only made love in parks, or public lavatories, or once in the back of Pete's shop, which Leo had kept a key to, and which felt even more furtive than these cinema handjobs. The thing about the cinema was that they seemed to share in the long common history of happy snoggers and gropers, and Nick liked that.
But now he was alone again, he felt it very keenly, accepting the "better" ticket, in the middle of the back row. The ads were already showing as he clambered along and in their patchy glare he loomed and ducked and apologized, and was a clumsy intruder in a world of
snuggling coupledom. He squeezed in and even the space of his seat seemed half absorbed by the lovers' coats and bags and angled limbs. The 170 minutes stretched out ahead like a long-ago detention, some monstrous test. They stretched out, in fact, like a film he had no wish to see, and for a moment he was gripped by a tearful bolshiness that he himself thought astonishing in a grown man. He saw that he could get up and go home and come back at the end. But then he was frightened of what Leo would say. There was so much at stake. There was a Bacardi advertisement, and the brilliance of tropical sea and white sand lit up the auditorium. He stared at the left side, near the front, to try to spot Leo, but he couldn't find him. Then he did see the squared-off silhouette of his head, and for a moment his oddly distant and attentive profile, played over by the reflected light. Of course the scene of palm trees and surf was much the same as Mrs Charles's mural. Now superbly handsome heterosexuals romped across it.
Critics had already described Scarf ace as "operatic," which perhaps was only their way of saying it was Latin, noisy and bombastic. It was set in a Miami so violent and so opulent, so glittering and soulless, that Nick found himself worrying about how people survived in it, and then about how he would survive in it. In his disaffected mood he kept wandering off from the film itself into paranoid doubts and objections. He saw that he was reacting like his mother, for whom any film on the telly with a sex scene or the word shit in it took on a nearly hostile presence, and was watched thereafter with warm mistrust. Scarface was all about cocaine, which alarmed him. He remembered tensely how Toby had taken it at Hawkeswood with Wani Ouradi. The film confirmed his worst suspicions. Nowhere in it was there a hint of the delicious pleasure that Toby had spoken of. The drug was money and power and addiction—a young blonde actress in the film snorted joyless volumes of it.
The couple on Nick's left were slumped in a slowly evolving embrace. He was aware of a hand on a thigh left bare by a very short skirt—and when it moved, his glance twitched guiltily away. He had an unusual sense of the cinema as a room—a long narrow space with the dusty plaster mouldings of an old theatre. Instead of the proper oblivion of the filmgoer he felt a kind of foreboding. When the picture brightened his eyes yearned down across the shadowy ranks of heads, but Leo was little and so was he, and he never had that one clear view of him again. Because the film was Leo's choice, he imagined him enjoying it, taking it on, adjusting himself, as it went along, to its new standards of hardness. A film that was shocking quickly lowered the threshold, it made people unshockable. Nick felt that if he'd been sitting with Leo he might have tittered and groaned at the shootings and blood like everyone else. But now they were apart, as they might have been on occasion in this very cinema before they even knew of each other's existence, sitting separately in the near dark. It was irrational, perhaps, but the glaring unreality of the film seemed to throw a suspicion of unreality over everything else, and his affair with Leo, which was so odd, so new, so unrecognized, felt open to crude but penetrating doubt. He wondered if he would have noticed Leo a year ago, in the shuffling semi-patience of the exit line, or carried his image home to lie awake with. Well, probably not, since one of Leo's affectations was to sit through to the very last credits, the lenses, the insurers, the thanks to the mayor and police department of . . . oh, somewhere obscurely a solution and a puzzle at the same time.
And it wasn't in fact until all that was over that Leo came into the foyer, blinking and nodding and then genially puzzled at the troubled look on Nick's face. "All right, babe," he said quietly, and gripped his upper arm to steer him out. "That's what I call snorting coke," he went on, referring to a scene in the film's final hour where Pacino had torn open a huge plastic bag of cocaine on his desk and plunged his nose into it, the slave at last to his own instrument of power. It had struck Nick as completely ridiculous. "Did you like that, then?"
Nick hummed and cleared his throat like an anxious bringer of bad news. "Not much," he said, and gave Leo a thin smile.
"It was quite a laugh," said Leo. "The ending was outrageous."
"Yes . . . yes it was," Nick agreed, hesitantly but firmly, recalling the comprehensive final bloodbath. As so often he had the feeling that an artistic disagreement, almost immaterial to the other person, was going to be the vehicle of something that mattered to him more than he could say.
But Leo said, "Nah, sorry about that, babe, it was pretty crappy. And we never got our kiss and cuddle."
"I know," said Nick with an archness that covered and somehow dissolved three hours of regrets—in his relief he couldn't see where he was going and grabbed and rattled one of the cinema's already locked glass doors.
Leo went out and into the blocked-offside street where he'd left his bike, and when Nick followed he found him putting his arms round his neck and kissing him, chastely but tenderly, on the forehead; then he kept looking at him, lightly frowning and smiling at the same time, with humorous reproach.
"Nicholas Guest."
"Mm . . ."—Nick colouring but holding Leo's gaze submissively.
"You worry too much. You know that?"
"I know . . ."
"Yeah? You do trust your Uncle Leo, don't you?"
"Of course I trust you," Nick burst out quietly, as if he'd been asked a simpler question.
"Well, don't worry so much, then. Will you do that for me?" And again he was all cockney softness.
"Yes," said Nick, glancing a little worriedly none the less to left and right, since Leo was holding him against the wall like a mugger as much as a lover—he worried what people would think. In the wake of his relief this short exchange raised a vague dissatisfaction.
"Don't ever forget it."
"I won't," Nick murmured, and Leo stood back. He wasn't sure what it was that he mustn't forget, he had a restless ear for syntax, but he smiled at the general drift of the little catechism of reassurance. It was lovely that Leo saw at once what was wrong, even if his avuncular tone didn't put it completely right. Nick found he was confident enough, despite his racing heartbeat, to mention his plan.
"You're sure they're not here, yeah?"
"Yes, I'm positive. Well, Catherine might be in."
"Catherine, right, that's your sister, yeah?" And then Leo winked.
The heavy, sharp-edged key to the mortise locks had already cut a gash in Nick's trouser pocket, and the whole bunch was tangled in the torn threads and hanging against the top of his thigh. As he tugged at it a few of the new pound coins dropped ticklingly down his leg and rolled across the tiled floor of the porch. Leo jumped on them. "That's right, throw it away," he said.
A light always burned in the hall, and gave it tonight a somehow eerie vigilance. Nick locked the door behind them, and put the keys back in his pocket, and this time, after two steps, they had shaken their way down his leg and out on to the chequered marble. Leo, peeking in the hall mirror, raised an eyebrow but said nothing. On the console table were spare car keys, opera glasses, one of Gerald's grey fedoras, a letter "By Hand" addressed to the Rt Hon Mr and the Hon Mrs Gerald Fedden—and together, as a careless still life, reflected in the mirror, they seemed to Nick both wonderful and embarrassing. He stood still for a moment and listened. The light, from a brass lantern hanging in the well of the stair, threw steep shadows down inside the threshold of the dining room, revealing only the black satin bodice of a nineteenth-century Kessler. The Hon and the Rt Hon were both in Barwick for the night on constituency business, and whilst he confirmed this to himself he was also rewording the sentence in which he would explain Leo to them if, after all, they came chattering in. He had a sense of their possessing the house and everything in it, calmly but defiantly, and of its stone staircase and climbing cornices reaching rather pitilessly up into the shadows. He gave Leo a passing kiss on the cheek, and drew him into the kitchen, where the under-unit lighting stammered and blinked into life. "Do you want a whisky?"
And for once Leo said, "I don't mind if I do! Yeah, that would be nice. Thanks very much, Nick." He strol
led round the room as if not really noticing it, and stood scanning the wall of photographs. One of the Tatler pictures from Toby's twenty-first had now been bought, blown up and framed: a wildly smiling family group in which the Home Secretary seemed to show some awareness of being an intruder. Just above them the student Gerald, in tails, was shaking hands with Harold Macmillan at the Oxford Union. Again Leo made no comment, but when Nick handed him the cold tumbler he saw in his eyes and in his very faint smile that he was noting and storing. Perhaps he was calculating the degree of affront represented by all this Toryness and money. Nick felt his own kudos as family friend, as keyholder, was a very uncertain quantity. "Let's go upstairs," he said.
He went up two at a time, in too much of a hurry, and when he looked back on the turn he saw Leo dawdling by the same factor that he was rushing; he went into the drawing room and pressed switches that brought on lamps on side tables and over pictures—so that when Leo sauntered in he saw the room as Nick had first seen it two years before, all shadows and reflections and the gleam of gilt. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, longing for it to be a triumph, but taking his cue from the suppressed curiosity in Leo's face.
"I'm not used to this," Leo said.
"Oh . . ."
"I don't drink whisky."
"Ah, no, well —"
"Who knows what it'll do to me? I might get dangerous."
Nick grinned tightly and said, "Is that a threat or a promise?" He reached out and touched Leo's hip—his hand lay there for a second or two. Normally, together, alone, they would have been snogging, holding each other very tightly; though sometimes, it was true, Leo laughed at Nick's urgency and said, "Don't panic, babe! I'm not going anywhere! You've got me!" Leo rested his glass on the mantelpiece, and eyed Guardi's Capriccio with S. Giorgio Maggiore, which certainly seemed a rather pointless picture after The Shadow of Death. It was hard to imagine Rachel haranguing her guests about the clever something in it. Underneath it the invitations were propped, overlapping, making almost one long curlicued social sentence, Mr and Mrs Geoffrey—& Countess of Hexham—Lady Carbury "At Home" for—Michael and Jean—The Secretary of State . . . and those others, amazingly thick, with chamfered edges, The Lord Chamberlain is Commanded by Her Majesty to Request . . . which tended to stay there long after the events they referred to, and which gave Nick as well a lingering pompous thrill. Though he saw now, very quickly, that such a pleasure required willing complicity in Gerald's habit of showing off to himself. He turned away, pretending the invitations weren't there, and Leo said, with a derisive tut,
The Line of Beauty Page 17
