When it came to canvassing in Barwick, Gerald felt there was less need than ever to put oneself out. He pooh-poohed the polls. All the Northamptonshire seats were Tory strongholds, even Corby, with its closed-down steelworks. "Even the unemployed know they're better off with us," Gerald said. "Anyway, they've got a computer in the office up there now, and if they can find out how to work it they'll be able to pinpoint any dodgy waverers and bombard them with stuff." "What?" Catherine wanted to know. "Well, pictures of me!" said Gerald. Nick wondered if his cavalier tone was a way of preparing for possible defeat. In the final week there was something called Wobbly Thursday, when everyone at Central Office panicked. The polls showed Labour barging ahead. Toby remarked that his father seemed very unconcerned. "One has merely to cultivate," replied Gerald, "the quality that M. Mitterrand has attributed to the Prime Minister, and which he sees as the supreme political virtue."
"Oh yes, what's that?" said Toby.
"Indifference," said Gerald, almost inaudibly.
" Right . . . " said Toby; and then, with a certain canny persistence, "But I thought she was climbing up the wall."
"Climbing up the wall, nonsense."
"It's like the adverb game," said Catherine. "Task: Climb up the wall. Manner: Indifferently." At which Gerald went off with a pitying smile to correct his diary.
At the office Nick looked through the mail and dictated a couple of letters to Melanie. In Wani's absence he'd grown fond of dictating, and found himself able to improvise long supple sentences rich in suggestion and syntactic shock, rather as the older Henry James, pacing and declaiming to a typist, had produced his most difficult novels. Melanie, who was used to Wani's costive memos, and even to dressing up the gist of a letter in her own words, stuck out her tongue with concentration as she took down Nick's old-fashioned periods and perplexing semicolons. Today he was answering a couple of rich American queens who had a film-production company perhaps as fanciful, as nominal, as Ogee was, and who were showing interest in the Spoils of Poynton project—though with certain strong reservations about the plot. They felt that it needed an injection of sex—smooching and action as Lord Ouradi had put it. The queens themselves sounded rather like porn actors, being called Treat Rush and Brad Craft. "Dear Treat and Brad," Nick began: "It was with no small interest that we read your newest proposals comma with their comma to us comma so very open brackets indeed comma so startlingly close brackets novel vision of the open quotes sex-life close quotes of italics capital S Spoils semicolon—"
A small commotion at the door, Simon looking up, going over, Melanie setting down her pad. A crop-headed black girl, like a busty little boy, and a skinny white woman with her . . . it was usually a mistake, or they were market kids trotting round cheap Walkmans, cheap CDs. No one much, sad to say, arrived by design at the Ogee office. Melanie came back. "Oh, Nick, it's a, um, Rosemary Charles to see you. Sorry . . . " Melanie twitched with her own snobbery, part apology, part reproach—she stood in the way, box-shouldered, high-heeled, so that Nick leant back in his chair to look round her, down the length of the office, and with a view of the two words Rosemary Charles bobbing on the air, weightless signifiers, that took on, over several strange seconds, their own darkness and gravity. He stood up and went towards her, her and the other woman, who seemed to be here as a witness of his confusion. It was a momentary vertigo, a railing withdrawn. He gave them a smile that was welcoming and showed a proper unfrivolous regard for the occasion, and well . . . he was afraid he knew why they'd come, more or less. He felt something like guilt showed in his pretence that he didn't. He grasped Rosemary's hand and looked at her with allowable pleasure and curiosity—she was still coming clear to him, from four years back, when she was pretty and fluffy and her eyes were sly: and now she was beautiful, revealed, the drizzle silvering the fuzz of her crown, her jaw forward in the tense half-smile of surprise that her brother had had when he'd called for Nick one morning, unannounced, and changed his life.
"Yes, hello," she said, with a hint of hostility, perhaps just the hard note of the resolve that had brought her here. Of course she was looking for him too, down this four-year tunnel: how he used to be and how he'd changed. "This is Gemma."
"Hi," said Nick warmly. "Nick."
"I hope you don't mind," said Rosemary. "We went to your house. The woman there told us where you were."
"It's wonderful to see you!" said Nick, and saw the phrase register with them like some expected annoyance. They had something dreadful about them, with their undeclared purpose and their look of supporting each other for some much bigger challenge than Nick was ever going to offer them. "Come in, come in."
Gemma peered round the room. "Is there somewhere private where we could talk?" she said. She was Yorkshire, older, blue-eyed, hair dyed black, black T-shirt and black jeans and Doc Martens.
"Of course," said Nick. "Why don't you come upstairs."
He took them out and in again and up to the flat, with a responsible smile that threatened to warp into a smirk, as if he was proud of this kitsch apartment and its possible effect on the two women. He saw it all with fresh eyes himself. They sat down in the "Georgian-revival''-revival library.
"Look at all these books . . . " said Gemma.
On the low table all the papers were laid out, as in the reading room of a club. CHUCK HER OUT, begged the Mirror. THREE TIMES A LADY, bawled the Sun.
Rosemary said, "It's about Leo."
"Well, I thought . . ."
She looked down, she wasn't settled in the room, on the sofa's edge; then she stared at him for a second or two. She said, "Well, you know, my brother died, three weeks ago." Nick listened to the words, and heard how the West Indian colour and exactness in her tone claimed it as a private thing. It had been one of Leo's tones too: the cockney for defence, the Jamaican crackle and burn for pleasure, just sometimes, rare and beautiful like his black blush.
"Nearly four weeks now, pet," said Gemma, with her own note of bleak solidarity. "Yes, May the sixteenth." She looked at Nick as though the extra days made him more culpable, or useless.
"I'm so sorry," Nick said.
"We're trying to contact all his friends."
"Well, because, you know . . . " said Gemma.
"All his lovers," said Rosemary firmly. Nick remembered that she was, or had been, a doctor's receptionist; she was used to the facts. She unzipped her shoulder bag and delved into it. He found it screened them both, this angular attention to business—he was flinching at the frighteningly solemn thing she had just told him, and she twitched too at the power of her words, even if (as he thought he saw) they had a certain softness or drabness for her now from use, from their assertion of something that was shifting day by day from the new into the known. He said, with a sense of good manners that took him back to their long-ago meeting,
"How is your mother?"
"OK," said Rosemary. "OK . . ."
"She has her faith," said Gemma.
"She's got the church," said Nick; "and she's also got you."
"Well . . . " said Rosemary. "Yes, she has."
The first thing she passed him was a small cream-coloured envelope addressed to Leo in green capitals. He felt he knew it and he didn't know it, like a letter found in an old book. It had a postmark of August 2, 1983. She nodded, and he opened it, while they watched him; it was like learning a new game and having to be a good sport as he lost. He unfolded a little letter in his own best handwriting, and the photo slipped out into his lap. "That's how we knew where to find you," Rosemary said. He had sent it in the blank envelope to Gay Times, doubting how it could survive, how his own wish could take on form and direction, and someone there with a green biro had sent it on—he was seeing the history of his action, and seeing it as Leo himself had seen it, but distant and complete. He picked up the photo with the guarded curiosity he had for his earlier self. It was an Oxford picture, a passport-size square cut out from a larger group: the face of a boy at a party who somehow confides his secret to
the camera. He only glanced at what he'd written, on the Feddens' embossed letterhead—the small size, meant for social thank-yous, because he hadn't had much to say. The writing itself looked quaint and studied, though he remembered Leo had praised it: "Hello!" he'd begun, since of course he hadn't yet known Leo's name. The cross-stroke of the H curled back under the uprights like a dog's tail. He saw he'd mentioned Bruckner, Henry James, all his Interests—very artlessly, but it hadn't mattered, and indeed they had never been mentioned again, when the two of them were together. At the top there was Leo's annotation in pencil: Pretty. Rich? Too young? This had been struck through later by a firm red tick.
Nick folded it away and peeped at the two women. It was Gemma's presence, the stranger in the room, that brought it home to him; for a minute she seemed like the fact of the death itself. She didn't know him, but she knew about the letter, the affair, the tender young Nick of four years ago, and his shyness and resentment went for nothing in the new moral atmosphere, like that of a hospital, where everything was found out and fears were justified as diagnoses. He said, "I wish I'd seen him again."
"He didn't want people seeing him," said Rosemary. "Not later on."
"Right . . . " said Nick.
"You know how vain he was!"—it was a little test for her grief, an indulgent gibe with a twist of true vexation, at Leo's troublesomeness, alive or dead.
"Yes," said Nick, picturing him wearing her shirt. And wondering if the man's shirt she had on now was one of his.
"He always had to look his best."
"He always looked beautiful," said Nick, and the exaggeration released his feelings suddenly. He tried to smile but felt the corners of his mouth pulled downwards. He mastered himself with a rough sigh and said, "Of course I hadn't seen him for a couple of yean."
"OK . . . " said Rosemary thoughtfully. "You know we never knew who he was seeing."
"No," said Gemma.
"You and old Pete were the only ones who got asked to the house. Until Bradley, of course."
"I don't know about Bradley," said Nick.
"My brother shared a flat with him," said Rosemary. "You knew he moved out."
"Well, I knew he wanted to. That was about the time he . . . I'm not sure what happened. We stopped seeing each other." He couldn't say the usual accusing phrase he dumped me, it was petty and nearly meaningless in the face of his death. "I think I thought he was seeing someone else." Though this itself wasn't the whole truth: it was the painful story he'd told himself at the time, to screen a glimpse he'd had of a much worse story, that Leo was ill.
But Bradley had been there. He sounded like a square-shouldered practical man, not a twit like Nick.
"Bradley's not well, is he?" said Gemma.
"You knew old Pete died . . . " said Rosemary.
"Yes, I did," said Nick, and cleared his throat.
"Anyway, you're all right, pet," said Gemma.
"Yes, I'm all right," said Nick. "I'm fine." They looked at him like police officers awaiting a confession or change of heart. "I was lucky. And then I was. . . careful." He put the letter on the table, and stood up. "Would you like some coffee? Can I get you anything?" Gemma and Rosemary pondered this and for a moment seemed reluctant to accept.
In the kitchen he gazed out of the window as the kettle boiled. The rain fell thin and silvery against the dark bushes of the garden and the brick backs of the houses in the next street. He gazed at the familiar but unknown windows. In a bright drawing room a maid was hoovering. At the edge of hearing an ambulance wailed. Then the kettle throbbed and clicked off.
He took the coffee tray through. "This is so sad," he said. He had always thought of this as a slight word, but its effect now was larger than mere tactful understatement. It seemed to surround the awful fact with a shadowing of foreknowledge and thus of acceptance.
Rosemary raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. There was something stubborn about her, and Nick thought perhaps it was only a brave hard form of shyness, unlike his own shyness, which ran off into flattery and evasion. She said, "So you met Leo through a lonely hearts?"
"Yes, that's right," said Nick, since she obviously knew this. He had never been sure if it was a shameful or a witty way to meet someone. He didn't know what the women would think either (Gemma gave him a sighing smile). "It was such a wonderful piece of luck he chose me," he said.
"Paght . . . " said Rosemary, with a look of sisterly sarcasm; which maybe wasn't that, but a hint that he shouldn't keep boasting about his luck.
"I mean he had hundreds of replies."
"Well, he had a lot." She reached into her bag again, and brought out a bundle of letters, pinched in a thick rubber band.
"Oh," said Nick.
She pulled off the rubber band and rolled it back over her hand. For a moment he was at the doctor's—or the doctor was visiting him, with the bundled case notes of all her calls. Both brother and sister were orderly and discreet. "I thought some of them might mean something to you."
"Oh, I don't know."
"So that we can tell them."
"What did he do?" said Gemma. "He went out and tried them all?"
Rosemary sorted the letters into two piles. "I don't want to go chasing people up if they're dead," she said.
"That's the thing!" said Gemma.
"I don't expect I'll know anyone," said Nick. "It's very unlikely . . ." It was all too bleakly businesslike for him—he'd only just heard the news.
The funny thing was that all the envelopes were addressed in the same hand, in green or sometimes purple capitals. It was like one crazed adorer laying siege to Leo. The name came up at him relentlessly off the sheaf of letters. "It must have looked odd, these arriving all the time," he said. A lot of them had the special-issue army stamps of that summer.
"He told us it was all to do with some cycling thing, a cycling club," said Rosemary.
"His bike was his first love," said Nick, unsure if this was merely a quip or the painful truth. "It was clever of him."
"These ones I think he didn't see. They've got a cross on."
"There's even a woman wrote to him," said Gemma.
So Nick started going through the letters, knowing it was pointless, but trapped by the need to honour or humour Rosemary. He saw her as a stickler for procedure, however unwelcome. He didn't need to read them in detail, but the first two or three were eerily interesting—as the private efforts of his unknown rivals. He concealed his interest behind a dull pout of consideration, and slow shakes of the head. The terms of the ad were still clear to him, and the broad-minded age-range, "18 to 40." "Hi there!" wrote Sandy from Enfield, "I'm early 40s, but saw that little old ad of yours and thought I'd write in anyway! I'm in the crazy world of stationery!" A snap of a solidly built man of fifty was attached to the page with a pink paper clip. Leo had written, House/Car. Age? And then, presumably after he'd seen him, Too inexperienced. Glenn, "late 20s," from Barons Court, was a travel agent, and sent a Polaroid of himself in swimming trunks in his flat. He said, "I love to party! And sexpecially in bed! (Or on the floor! Or halfway up a ladder!! Whoops—!)" Too much? wondered Leo, before making the discovery: Invisible dick. "Dear Friend," wrote serious-looking black Ambrose from Forest Hill, "I like the sound of you. I think we have some love to share." The exclamation marks, which gave the other letters their air of inane self-consciousness, were resisted by Ambrose until his final "Peace!" Nick liked the look of him, but Leo had written, Bottom. Boring. Nick made a stealthy attempt to remember the address.
When he'd read a letter he passed it back to Rosemary, who put it face down on the table, by the coffee pot. The sense of a game ebbed very quickly with his lack of success. The fact was these were all men who'd wanted his boyfriend, who'd applied for what Nick had gone on to get. Some of them were pushy and explicit, but there was always the vulnerable note of courtship: they were asking an unknown man to like them, or want them, or find them equal to their self-descriptions. He recognized one of the men from his photo
and murmured, "Ah . . . !" but then let it go with a shrug and a throat-clearing. It was a Spanish guy who'd turned up everywhere, who'd been a nice dark thread in the pattern of Nick's early gym days and bar nights, almost an emblem of the scene for him, its routine and compulsion, and he knew he must be dead—he'd seen him a year ago at the Ponds, defying his own fear and others' fear of him. Javier, he was called. He was thirty-four. He worked for a building society, and lived in West Hampstead. The mere facts in his letter of seduction had the air of an obituary.
Nick stopped and drank some coffee. "Was he ill for a long time?" he asked.
"He had pneumonia last November, he nearly died; but he came through it. Then things got, well, a lot worse in the spring. He was in hospital for about ten days at the end."
"He went blind, didn't he," said Gemma, in the way people clumsily handle and offer facts which they can neither accept nor forget.
"Poor Leo," said Nick. Relief at not having witnessed this was mixed with regret at not having been called on to do so.
"Did you bring the photos?" said Gemma.
"If you want to see . . ." said Rosemary, after a pause.
"I don't know," said Nick, embarrassed. It was a challenge; and then he felt powerless in the flow of the moment, as he had on his first date with Leo, he met it as something that was going to happen, and took the Kodak wallet. He looked at a couple of the pictures and then handed them back.
The Line of Beauty Page 39
