Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

There wasn't anywhere to sit down, so they stood and leaned against a brown-tiled window sill; in the opaque lower half of the window the word SPIRITS was etched in fancy Victorian capitals, their serifs spiralling out in interlacing tendrils. Leo looked at Nick frankly, since that was what he was here for, and Nick grinned and blushed, which made Leo smile too, for a moment.

Nick said, "You're growing a beard, I see."

"Yeah-sensitive skin… it's a bloodbath when I shave. Literally," said Leo, with a quick glance that showed Nick that he liked to make his point. "Then if I don't shave, I get these ingrowing hairs, fucking murder, have to pick the ends out with a pin." He stroked his stubbly jaw with a small fine hand, and Nick saw that he had those shaving-bumps he had half-noticed on other black men. "I tend to leave it for four days, say, five days, maybe, then have a good shave: try and avoid both problems that way."

"Right… " said Nick, and smiled, partly because he was learning something interesting.

"Most of them still recognize me, though," said Leo, and gave a wink.

"No, it wasn't that," said Nick, who was too shy to explain his own shyness. His glance slipped up and down between Leo's loose crotch and the neat shallow cushion of his hair, and tended to avoid his handsome face. He was taking Leo's word for it that he was handsome, but it didn't quite cover the continuing shock of what was beautiful, strange, and even ugly about him. The phrase "most of them" slowly took on meaning in his mind. "Anyway," he said, and took a quick sip of his drink, which had a reassuring burn to it. "I suppose you've had lots of replies." Sometimes when he was nervous he asked questions to which he would rather not have known the answers.

Leo made a little puff of comic exhaustion. "Yeah… yeah, I'm not answering some of them. It's a joke. They don't include a picture, or if they do they look horrible. Or they're ninety-nine years old. I even had a thing from a woman, a lesbian woman admittedly, with a view to would I father her child." Leo frowned indignantly but there was something sly and flattered in his look too. "And some of the stuff they write. It's disgusting! It's not like I'm just looking for a bonk, is it? This is something a bit different."

"Quite," said Nick-though bonk was a troublingly casual way of referring to something which preoccupied him so much.

"This dog's been round the block a few times," Leo said, and looked off down the street as if he might spot himself coming home. "Anyway, you looked nice. You've got nice writing."

"Thanks. So have you."

Leo took in the compliment with a nod. "And you can spell," he said.

Nick laughed. "Yes, I'm good at that." He'd been afraid that his own little letter sounded pedantic and virginal, but it seemed he'd got it about right. He didn't remember it calling for any great virtuosity of spelling. "I always have trouble with 'moccasin,'" he said.

"Ah, there you are… " said Leo, with a wary chuckle, before changing the subject. "It's nice where you live," he said.

"Oh… yes…" said Nick, as if he couldn't quite remember where it was.

"I went by there the other day, on the bike. I nearly rang your bell."

"Mm-you, should have. I've had the place virtually to myself." He felt sick at the thought of the missed chance.

"Yeah? I saw this girl going in…"

"Oh, that was probably only Catherine."

Leo nodded. "Catherine. She's your sister, yeah?"

"No, I don't have a sister. She's actually the sister of my friend Toby." Nick smiled and stared: "It's not my house."

"Oh…" said Leo. "Oh."

"God, I don't come from that sort of background. No, I just live there. It belongs to Toby's parents. I've just got a tiny little room up in the attic." Nick was rather surprised to hear himself throwing his whole fantasy of belonging there out of the window.

Leo looked a bit disappointed. He said, "Right… " and shook his head slowly.

"I mean they're very good friends, they're a sort of second family to me, but I probably won't be there for long. It's just to help me out, while I'm getting started at university."

"And I thought I'd got myself a nice little rich boy," Leo said. And perhaps he meant it, Nick couldn't be sure, they were total strangers after all, though a minute before he'd imagined them naked together in the Feddens' emperor-size bed. Was that why his letter did the trick-the address, the Babylonian notepaper?

"Sorry," he said, with a hint of humour. He drank some more of the sweet strong rum and Coke, so obviously not his kind of drink. The refined blue of the dusk sky was already showing its old lonely reach.

Leo laughed. "I'm only kidding you!"

"I know," Nick said, with a little smile, as Leo reached out and squeezed his shoulder, just by his shirt collar, and slowly let go. Nick reacted with his own quick pat at Leo's side. He was absurdly relieved. A charge passed into him through Leo's fingers, and he saw the two of them kissing passionately, in a rush of imagination that was as palpable as this awkward pavement rendezvous.

"Still, your friends must be rich," Leo said.

Nick was careful not to deny this. "Oh, they're rolling in money."

"Yeah… " Leo crooned, with a fixed smile; he might have been savouring the fact or condemning it. Nick saw further questions coming, and decided at once he wouldn't tell him about Gerald. The evening demanded enough courage as it was. A Tory MP would shadow their meeting like an unwelcome chaperon, and Leo would get on his bike and leave them to it. He could say something about Rachel's family, perhaps, if an explanation was called for. But in fact Leo emptied his glass and said, "Same again?"

Nick hastily finished his own drink, and said, "Thanks. Or maybe this time I'll have a shot of rum in it."

After half an hour more Nick had slid into a kind of excited trance brought on by his new friend's presence and a feeling, as the sky darkened and the street lamps brightened from pink to gold, that it was going to work out. He felt nervous, slightly breathless, but at the same time buoyant, as if a lonely responsibility had been taken off him. A couple of places came free at the end of a picnic table with fixed benches, and they sat leaning towards each other as though playing, and then half-forgetting, some invisible game. For Nick the ease and comfort of the rum were indistinguishable parts of the intimacy which he felt deepening like the dusk.

He found himself wondering how they looked and sounded to the people around them, the couple beside them at the table. It was all getting noisier as the evening went on, with a vague sense of heterosexual threat. Nick guessed Leo's other dates would have met him in a gay pub, but he had flunked that further challenge. Now he regretted the freedom he would have had there. He wanted to stroke Leo's cheek and kiss him, with a sigh of surrender.

Nothing very personal was said. Nick found it hard to interest Leo in his own affairs, and his various modest leads about his family and his background were not picked up. There were things he'd prepared and phrased and turned into jokes that were not to be heard-or not tonight. Once or twice he took Leo with him: into a falsely cheerful dismissal of the idea that Toby, though fairly attractive, was of any real interest to him (Leo would think him a weirdo to have loved so long and pointlessly); into a sketch of Rachel's banking family, which Leo interrupted with a sour smile, as if it was all proof of some general iniquity. He had a certain caustic preoccupation with money, Nick could see; and when he told Leo that his father was an antiques dealer the two words, with the patina of old money and the flash of business, seemed to combine in a dull glare of privilege. Among his smart Oxford friends Nick managed to finesse his elbow-patched old man, with his Volvo estate full of blanket-wrapped mirrors and Windsor chairs, into a more luminous figure, a scholar and friend of the local aristocracy. Now he felt a timid need to humble him. And he was wrong, because Leo's long-time boyfriend, Pete, had been an antiques dealer, on the Portobello Road. "Mainly French work," Leo said. "Ormolu. Boulle." It was the first clear thing he had said about his private past. And then he changed the subject.