• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1049 0

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.

"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