Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"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.

"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."