Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Your splendid Mr Fedden," said Leo, in his deadpan way, almost as if he knew that splendid was one of Gerald's top words. "Well, I could tell there was something you didn't want me to know, and that always gets me-I'm like that. And then your friend Geoffrey in the garden was going on something about parliament-I thought, I'll look into all this at work. Electoral roll, Who's Who, we know all about you…"

"I see," said Nick, flattered but taken aback by this first glimpse of the professional Leo. Of course he'd done similar researches himself when he'd fallen for Toby. There had been a proxy thrill to it, Gerald's date of birth, pastimes, and various directorships standing in somehow for the intimate details, the kisses and more he had wanted from his son. He thought it probably wasn't like that for Leo.

"He's quite nice-looking for a Tory," Leo said.

"Yes, everyone seems to fancy him except me," said Nick.

Leo gave him a shrewd little smile. "I don't say I fancy him exactly," he said. "He's like someone on the telly."

"Well, soon I'm sure he will be someone on the telly. Actually of course there are monsters on both sides-looks-wise."

"True enough."

Nick hesitated. "There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism, though, isn't there."

"Yeah?"

"That blue's an impossible colour."

Leo nodded thoughtfully. "I wouldn't say that was their main problem," he said.

The weekend crowds were pressing steadily along the lane from the station and down the steep hill into the market. Pete's establishment was in the curving row of shops on the left: PETER MAWSON in gold on black, like an old jeweller's, the windows covered in mesh though today the shop was open. Leo shouldered the door and the wired doormat, as he stood there manoeuvring the bike in, kept sounding a warning chime. Nick had peered into the shop before, on one of the dead weekdays, when it was all locked up, and the mail lay unattended across the floor. There was a pair of marble-topped Empire tables in the windows flanking the door, and beyond that a space that looked more like a half-empty warehouse than a shop.

Pete could be heard on the phone in a back room. Leo propped up his bike in a familiar way and wandered through, and Nick was left alone, blinking longingly at that last image of him, the slight bounce or dance in his step. He heard Pete ringing off, a murmur of kissing and hugging. "Ooh, you know… " said Pete. "No, I'm a bit better."

"I've brought my nice new friend Nick round to see you," said Leo, in a silly cheerful voice which made Nick realize this might be an awkward half-hour for all of them. He was very sensitive to anything that might be said. As so often he felt he had the wrong kind of irony, the wrong knowledge, for gay life. He was still faintly shocked, among other emotions of interest and excitement, at the idea of a male couple. He and Leo had come together, in their odd transitory way, but the truth was they weren't yet a couple themselves.

"So what's all this?" Pete asked, following Leo back into the room.

"This is Pete, this is Nick," said Leo, with a large smile and a mime of urging them together. The effort to charm and reassure was a side of him that Nick hadn't seen before; it seemed to make all sorts of other things possible, in the longer view. "Pete's my best old friend," he said, in his cockney voice of concessions. "Aren't you, darlin'?" They shook hands, and Pete winced, as at the grip of something not quite welcome, and said,

"I see you've been hanging around the school gates again, you terrible old man."

Leo raised an eyebrow and said, "Well, I won't remind you how old I was when you snatched me from my pram."

Nick laughed eagerly, though it was a kind of camp slapstick he didn't naturally find funny, and it was surprisingly painful to be given a glimpse of their past together. He found himself picturing and half believing the story of Leo in his pram. Being small and fresh-faced was usually an advantage, but he was anxious not to be thought a child. "Actually, I'm twenty-one," he said, in a mock-gruff tone.

"Hark at him!" Pete said.

"Nick lives just round the corner," said Leo. "Kensington Park Gardens."

"Oh. Very nice."

"Well, I'm just staying there for a while, with an old college friend."

Leo tactfully didn't elaborate; he said, "He knows about furniture. His old man's in the trade."

Pete made a shrugging gesture that took in the sparse contents of the shop. "Feel free… " he said; so Nick had politely to do that, while the old lovers fell back into quiet scoffing chatter, which he deliberately blocked out with tunes in his head, not wanting to learn anything, good or bad. He examined some knocked-about Louis Seize chairs, a marble head of a boy, a suspiciously brilliant ormolu-mounted cabinet, and the pair of tables in the window, which made him think of the ones turned into washstands at Hawkeswood. One wall was covered with a huge dreary tapestry showing a bacchanalian scene, with figures dancing and embracing under red and brown trees; it was too high for the space, and on its loosely rolled bottom edge a satyr with a grin seemed to slide forwards like a limbo dancer on to the floor.

The only real object of interest, the thing to acknowledge and be equal to, was Pete himself. He was perhaps in his mid-forties, with a bald patch in his sandy hair and a bit of grey in his thin beard. He was lean, an inch or two taller than Nick and Leo, but already slightly stooped. He wore tight old jeans and a denim shirt, and something else, which was an attitude, a wearily aggressive challenge-he seemed to come forward from an era of sexual defiance and fighting alliances and to cast a dismissive eye over a little chit like Nick, who had never fought for anything. Or so Nick explained his own sense of discomfort, the recurrent vague snobbery and timidity with which he peered into the world of actually existing gayness. Nick had pictured Pete as the fruity kind of antique-dealer, or even as a sexless figure like his own father, with a bow tie and a trim white beard. That Pete should be as he was threw such a novel light over Leo. He glanced at Leo now, with his sublime little bottom perched on the corner of Pete's desk, and saw him totally at home with a far from attractive middle-aged man-he had been his lover and done a hundred things with him that Nick still only dreamed of, time and time again. Nick didn't know how it had ended, or when; they seemed to share the steadiness of something both long established and over, and he envied them, although it wasn't quite what he wanted himself. It was part of Leo's game, or maybe just his style, to have told Nick almost nothing; but if Pete was Leo's kind of man it looked suddenly unlikely that Nick would be chosen to replace him.

"Have a look at that, Nick," Pete called out, as if amiably trying to keep him occupied. "You know what that is."

"That's a nice little piece," said Leo.

"It's a very nice little piece," said Pete. "Louis Quinze."

Nick ran his eye over the slightly cockled boulle inlay. "Well, it's an encoignure," he said, and with a chance at charm: "n'est-ce pas?"

"It's what we call a corner cupboard," Pete said. "Where did you get this one, babe?"

"Ooh… I just found him on the street," said Leo, gazing quite sweetly at Nick and then giving him a wink. "He looked a bit lost."

"Hardly a mark on him," said Pete.

"Not yet," said Leo.

"So where's your father's shop, Nick?" said Pete.

"Oh, it's in Barwick-in Northamptonshire?"

"Don't they pronounce that Barrick?"

"Only frightfully grand people."

Pete lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, and then coughed and looked almost sick. "Ah, that's better," he said. "Yes, Bar-wick. I know Barwick. It's what you'd call a funny old place, isn't it."