Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

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 It was a momentary vertigo, a railing withdrawn.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.