The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "You can have one if you like," said Rosemary.

  "No," said Nick; "thank you."

  He sat, rather hard-faced, over his coffee.

  After a bit Gemma said, "This is proper coffee, isn't it."

  "Oh . . . !" said Nick, "do you like it. It's Kenyan Rich, medium roast . . . It comes from Myers' in Kensington Church Street. They import their own. One pays more, but I think it's worth it."

  "Mm, it's lovely and rich," said Gemma.

  "I'd rather not look at the other letters now," Nick said.

  Rosemary nodded. "OK," she said, as if skimming forward for another appointment, a cancellation. "I can leave them with you . . . ?"

  "No, please don't," said Nick. He felt he was being pressed very hard very fast, as in some experiment on his emotions.

  Gemma went to the lavatory—she murmured the directions to herself as she tried the door, and then slipped in as if she'd met a friend. There was silence for a while between Nick and Rosemary. The extremity of events excused anything, of course, but her hardness towards him was another shock to get used to: it added puzzlingly to the misery of the day. She was his lover's sister, and he thought of her naturally as a friend, and with spontaneous fondness and fresh sympathy on top of mere politeness. But it seemed it didn't work the other way round. He smiled tentatively. There was such a physical likeness now that he might have been asking Leo himself to be nice to him, after some row. But she'd decided against the note of tenderness, even towards Leo himself.

  "So you hadn't seen him for a year or two?" she said.

  "That's right . . ."

  She looked up at him warily, as though starting to concede his own, homosexual claim on her brother and wondering where such a shift might lead her. "Did you miss him?" she said.

  "Yes . . . I did. I certainly did."

  "Do you remember the last time you saw him?"

  "Well, yes," said Nick, and stared at the floor. The questions were sentimental, but the manner was detached, almost bored. "It was all very difficult."

  She said, "He hadn't made a will."

  "Oh, well . . . he was so young!" said Nick, frowning because he found himself on the edge of tears again, at the thought that she was going to offer him something of Leo's—of course she was cold because she found it all so difficult herself.

  "We had him cremated," Rosemary said. "I think it's what he would have wanted, though we didn't ask him. We didn't like to."

  "Hm," said Nick, and found he was crying anyway.

  When Gemma came back she said, "You must see the toilet." Rosemary gave a loyal but repressive smile. "Or is that trick photography?"

  "Oh . . . !" said Nick. "No . . . no, it's real, I'm afraid." He was glad of the absurd change of subject.

  "There's a picture of him dancing with Maggie!"

  It was one of the photos from the Silver Wedding, Nick red-faced and staring, the Prime Minister with a look of caution he hadn't been aware of at the time. He wasn't sure Gemma would get the special self-irony of the lavatory gallery. It was something he'd learnt from his public-school friends. "Do you know her, then?" she said.

  "No, no," said Nick, "I just got drunk at a party . . ." as if it could happen to anyone.

  "Go on, I bet you voted for her, didn't you?" Gemma wanted to know.

  "I did not," said Nick, quite sternly. Rosemary showed no interest in this, and he said, "I remember I promised to tell your mother if I ever met her."

  "Oh . . . ?"

  He smiled apprehensively. "I mean, how has she coped with all this?"

  "You remember what she's like," said Rosemary.

  "I'll write to her," said Nick. "Or I could drive over and see her." He pictured her at home with her pamphlets and her hat on the chair. He had a sense of his charm not having worked on her years ago and was ready to do something now to make good. "I'm sure she's been wonderful."

  Rosemary gave him a pinched look, and as she stood up and collected her things she seemed to decide to say, "That's what you said before, wasn't it? When you came to see us?"

  "What . . . ?"

  "Leo told us, you said we were wonderful."

  "Did I?" said Nick, who remembered it painfully. "Well, that's not such a bad thing to be." He paused, unsure if he'd been accused of something. He felt there was a mood of imminent blame, for everything that had happened: they had hoped to pin it on him, and had failed, and were somehow more annoyed with him as a result. "Of course, she didn't know, did she, that Leo was gay? She was talking about getting him to the altar."

  "Well, he's been to the altar now," said Rosemary with a harsh little laugh, as though it was her mother's fault. "Almost, anyway."

  "It's a terrible way to find out," said Nick.

  "She doesn't accept it."

  "She doesn't accept the death . . ."

  "She doesn't accept he was gay. It's a mortal sin, you see," said Rosemary, and now the Jamaican stress was satirical. "And her son was no sinner."

  "Yes, I've never understood about sin," said Nick, in a tone they didn't catch.

  "Oh, the mortal ones are the worst," said Gemma.

  "So she doesn't think AIDS is a punishment, at least."

  "No, it can be," said Rosemary. "But Leo got it off a toilet seat at the office, which is full of godless socialists, of course."

  "Or a sandwich," prompted Gemma.

  There was something very unseemly in their mockery. Nick tried to imagine the house surprised by guilt and blame, the helpless harshness of the bereaved . . . he didn't know.

  Rosemary said, "She's got him back at the house."

  "How do you mean?"

  "She's got the ashes in a jar, on the mantelpiece."

  "Oh!" Nick was so disturbed by this that he said, rather drolly, "Yes, I remember, there's a shelf, isn't there, over the gas fire, with figures of Jesus and Mary and so on —"

  "There's Jesus, and the Virgin Mary, and St Antony of Padua . . . and Leo."

  "Well, he's in very good company!" said Nick.

  "I know," said Gemma, shaking her head and laughing grimly. "I can't stand it, I can't go in there!"

  "She says she likes to feel he's still there."

  Nick shivered but said, "I suppose you can't begrudge her her fantasies, can you, when she's lost her son."

  "They don't really help, though," said Rosemary.

  "Well, they don't help us, pet, do they?" said Gemma, and rubbed Rosemary's back vigorously.

  Rosemary's eyes were hooded for a moment, just like her mother's, with the family stubbornness. She said, "She won't accept it about him, and she won't accept it about us." And then almost at once she shouldered her bag to go Nick blushed at his slowness, and then was mortified that they might think he was blushing about them.

  When the women had gone, he went back upstairs, but in the remorseless glare of the news, so that the flat looked even more tawdry and pretentious. He was puzzled to think he had spent so much time in it so happily and conceitedly. The pelmets and mirrors, the spotlights and blinds, seemed rich in criticism. It was what you did if you had millions but no particular taste: you made your private space like a swanky hotel; just as such hotels flattered their customers by being vulgar simulacra of lavish private homes. A year ago it had at least the glamour of newness. Now it bore signs of occupation by a rich boy who had lost the knack of looking after himself. The piping on the sofa cushions was rubbed through where Wani had sprawled incessantly in front of the video. The crimson damask was blotted with his own and other boys' fluids. He wondered if Gemma had noticed as she sat there, making her inanely upsetting remarks. He wasn't letting her in here again, in her black boots. Nick felt furious with Wani for fucking up the cushions. The Georgian desk was marked with drink stains and razor etchings that even the optimistic Don Guest would have found it hard to disguise. "That's beyond cosmetic repair, old boy," Don would say. Nick fingered at the little abrasions and found himself gasping and whooping with grief.

  He sat on the sofa and st
arted reading the Telegraph, as if it was known to be a good thing to do. He was sick of the election, but excited to think it was happening today. There was something primitive and festive about it. He heard Rosemary saying, "Well, he died, you know . . ." or "Well, you know, he died . . . " in recurrent, almost overlapping runs and pounces—his heart thumped at the dull detonation of the phrase. He was horrified by the thought of his ashes in the house, and kept picturing them, in an unlikely rococo urn. The last photo she had shown him was terrible: a Leo with his life behind him. Nick remembered making jokes, early on, in the first unguarded liberty of a first affair, about their shared old age, Leo being sixty when Nick was fifty. And there he was already; or he'd been sixty for a week before he died. He was in bed, in a sky-blue hospital gown; his face was hard to read, since AIDS had taken it and written its message of terror and exhaustion on it; against which Leo seemed frailly to assert his own character in a doubtful half smile. His vanity had become a kind of fear, that he would frighten the people he smiled at. It was the loneliest thing Nick had ever seen.

  He thought he should write a letter and sat down at the desk. He felt a need to console Leo's mother, or to put himself right with her. Some deep convolution of feelings about his own mother, as the one person who really suffered for his homosexuality, made him see Mrs Charles as a figure to be appeased as well as comforted. "Dear Mrs Charles," he wrote, "I was so terribly sorry to learn about Leo's death": there, it existed, he'd hesitated, but written it, and it couldn't be unwritten. He had a feeling, an anxious refinement of tact, that he shouldn't actually mention the death. "Your sad news," "recent sad events" . . .: "Leo's death" was brutal. Then he worried that "I was so terribly sorry" might sound like gush to her, like calling her wonderful. He knew his own forms of truth could look like insincerity to others. He was frightened of her, as a grieving woman, and uncertain what feelings to attribute to her. It seemed she had taken it all in her own way, perhaps even with a touch of zealous cheerfulness. He could see her being impressed by his educated form of words and best handwriting. Then he saw her looking mistrustfully at what he'd written. He felt the limits of his connoisseurship of tone. It was what he was working on, and yet . . . He stared out of the window, and after a minute found Henry James's phrase about the death of Poe peering back at him. What was it? The extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him. The words, which once sounded arch and even facetious, were suddenly terrible to him, capacious, wise, and hard. He understood for the first time that they'd been written by someone whose life had been walked through, time and again, by death. And then he saw himself, in six months' time perhaps, sitting down to write a similar letter to the denizens of Lowndes Square.

  14

  WHEN HE GOT back to Kensington Park Gardens he didn't tell Catherine about Leo straight away. To himself he seemed to gleam with his news, to be both the pale bereaved and the otherworldly messenger. He found himself lengthening his natural sighs and stares to provoke a question. But after ten minutes he accepted that she hadn't noticed. She was slumped in an armchair, with newspapers all around her, and half-empty glasses of water and mugs of tea on the table beside her. He looked down on her from behind, and she seemed as small and passive as a sick child. She looked up and said, with an effort at brightness, "Oh, Nick, it's Election Special after the news," as though it had taken great effort to find this out, as though it was itself a piece of good news.

  "OK, darling," said Nick. "Great, we'll watch that." He gazed round the room, feeling for the precedence, the protocol of their relative afflictions. "Um . . . yes . . . OK!" It didn't seem right to land her with the news of a death. He felt that like all news it had its own momentum, and it would somehow go stale and unsayable if it was left too long.

  He went up to his room with a slight mental stoop from the burden of Catherine's condition. It was hard work living with someone so helpless and negative, and much worse if you'd known them critical and funny. Well, sometimes, perhaps, it made your own problems look light; at others it amplified them, by a troubling sympathetic gloom. He had borrowed a book of Rachel's by Dr Edelman, who was treating Catherine, A Path Through the Mountains: Clinical Responses to Manic Depression. He had groaned over Dr Edelman's style, and corrected his grammar to protect himself from a superstitious fear that the book awoke in him: of finding the symptoms in himself, now he knew what they were. They certainly seemed to be present in all the more volatile, the more irascible or oddly lethargic people he knew.

  The book had helpful facts in it, but it left Nick with an imaginative uncertainty, as to where Catherine was when he looked at her and spoke to her: not in the black and shiny place of her old depressions, but in some other unfeatured place, policed by Dr Edelman's heavy new dosage of lithium. She lacked the energy and motivation to describe it herself. She said she couldn't concentrate on a book, or even an article. Sometimes she acted in her quick pert way, but it was a reflex: she observed it herself with bewilderment and a kind of longing. Mostly she sat and waited, but without any colour of expectation. Nick found himself talking with awful brightness of purpose, as if to someone old and deaf; and it was more awful because she didn't find it condescending.

  There were various phone calls that evening. Nick's mother rang and talked excitedly about the election, which she seized on as a chance to share in Nick's London life. He was cool and humourless with her, and saw himself, as so often, almost blaming her for not knowing the important thing he was incapable of telling her. She had never heard of Leo, and he thought if he did try to tell her they would work each other up into a state of mutual resentment at the fact. She gave an account of Gerald's performance on the local radio, as if Nick needed to hear praise of him. "He said we don't want these, you know, lesbian workshops," she said, not unaware of her own bravery in using the word. Then Gerald himself was on the other line, and she rang off as if she'd been caught. "All well?" said Gerald airily, obviously wanting to talk about himself. It was the long evening's wait for the results, when his confidence was the most stretched, and he was fishing for sympathy, almost as though he'd lost. "How did your speech go?" said Nick. "Went down like dinner," Gerald said. "Which is more than I can say for dinner itself—what? God these provincial hotels." Nick felt a punitive urge to make Gerald listen to his problem, since he'd met Leo and had even been gingerly in favour of him; but he knew he wouldn't get his attention, it was the wrong moment, the wrong week, and actually the wrong death.

  Elena had prepared some cannelloni, which Nick and Catherine ate in the kitchen, under the family gallery of photographs and cartoons; this had now spread over the pantry door and down the other side, where Marc's caricature of Gerald had pride of place. Gerald had still not received the accolade of a Spitting Image puppet in his likeness, but it was one of his main hopes for the new Parliament. Catherine stared at her food as she worked through it, like someone performing a meaningless task as a punishment, and Nick found himself contrasting her to her eager six-year-old self, with only half her big teeth, and a grin of excitement so intense it was almost painful; and to a feature from Harper's ten years later, where rich people's children modelled evening clothes, and white gloves covered the first scars on her arms. Really, though, it was Gerald's wall, and his wife and children appeared as decorative adjuncts to the hero's life, unfolding in a sequence of handshakes with the famous. The Gorbachev was the latest trophy, not a handshake, but a moment of conversation, the Soviet leader's smile just hinting at the tedium of hearing English puns explained by an interpreter. Nick said, "Can you remember when that picture of you was taken?" and Catherine said, "No, I can't. I can only remember the picture." She glanced up over her shoulder with an apologetic cringe. It was as if all the pictures might come bashing down about her ears.

  He said, "Mum says there's a cartoon of Gerald in the Northants Standard; she's sending it down for possible inclusion."

  "Oh . . ." said Catherine. She looked at him steadily. "I don't know about cartoons."

&nb
sp; "You love satire, darling, especially if it's of Gerald."

  "I know. Just imagine if people did look like that, though. Hydrocephalous is the word. Monstrous teeth of Gerald . . . " and her hand shook. She seemed startled to recall these words.

  Afterwards they went up to the drawing room, and Nick, suddenly shaky too, poured himself a large Scotch. They sat side by side on the sofa, in the heavy but unselfconscious silence she generated. He remembered the one time Leo had come to this room, and surprised him, moved him, and slightly rattled him by playing Mozart on the piano. They'd both had a glass of whisky then, the only time he'd known Leo to drink. He caught the beautiful rawness of those days again, the life of instinct opening in front of him, the pleasure of the streets and London itself unfolding in the autumn chill; everything tingling with newness and risk, glitter of frost and glow of body heat, the shock of finding and holding what he wanted among millions of strangers. His sense of the scandalous originality of making love to a man had faded week by week into the commonplace triumph of a love affair. He saw Leo crossing this room, the scene brilliant and dwindling, as if watched in a convex mirror. It was the night he had stepped warily, with many ironic looks, into Nick's deeper fantasy of possession: his lover in his house, Nick owning them both by right of taste and longing.

  Now the rain had stopped, and the sky brightened a little just as the dusk was falling. Pale neutral light stretched in through the front windows, seemed to search and fail and then probe again. Nick formulated the thing, "I had some terribly sad news today, I heard that Leo's died, you remember . . ."; but it stayed shut in his head, like a difficult confession.

  He listened to the birdsong from the gardens, with a more analytical ear than usual for the notes of warning and protest and ruffled submission. The long neutral light grew more tender and burning as it touched the gilt handles of the fire irons and the white-marble vines beneath the mantelpiece. Then it reached the turned legs of an old wooden chair and made them glow with new and unsuspected presence, like little people, skittle-people, with bellies and collars and Punchinello hats, shining fiercely and stoically with their one truth, that they would last for centuries longer than the young live people who were looking at them.