Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"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 started 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.