• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1057 0

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.

He thought he should write a letter and sat down at the desk. He felt a need to console Leo's mother, or to put himself right with her. Some deep convolution of feelings about his own mother, as the one person who really suffered for his homosexuality, made him see Mrs Charles as a figure to be appeased as well as comforted. "Dear Mrs Charles," he wrote, "I was so terribly sorry to learn about Leo's death": there, it existed, he'd hesitated, but written it, and it couldn't be unwritten. He had a feeling, an anxious refinement of tact, that he shouldn't actually mention the death. "Your sad news," "recent sad events" . . .: "Leo's death" was brutal. Then he worried that "I was so terribly sorry" might sound like gush to her, like calling her wonderful. He knew his own forms of truth could look like insincerity to others. He was frightened of her, as a grieving woman, and uncertain what feelings to attribute to her. It seemed she had taken it all in her own way, perhaps even with a touch of zealous cheerfulness. He could see her being impressed by his educated form of words and best handwriting. Then he saw her looking mistrustfully at what he'd written. He felt the limits of his connoisseurship of tone. It was what he was working on, and yet . . . He stared out of the window, and after a minute found Henry James's phrase about the death of Poe peering back at him. What was it? The extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him. The words, which once sounded arch and even facetious, were suddenly terrible to him, capacious, wise, and hard. He understood for the first time that they'd been written by someone whose life had been walked through, time and again, by death. And then he saw himself, in six months' time perhaps,