The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [180]
"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