The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [178]
"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