The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [20]
"Well," said Leo under his breath, "two sorts of arse-licking in ten minutes"— so that Nick laughed and hit him on the arm and immediately felt better. "Look, I'll see you, my friend," Leo said, as Nick opened the gate. They came out a bit shiftily on to the street, and Nick couldn't tell if the sentence really meant its opposite. So he was clear about it.
"I want to see you," he said, and the five light words seemed to open and deepen the night, with the prickling of his eyes, the starred lights of the cars rushing past them and down the long hill northwards, towards other boroughs, and neighbourhoods known only from their mild skyward glare.
Leo stooped to fit on his lamps, front and back. Then he leant the bike against the fence. "Come here," he said, in that part-time cockney voice that shielded little admissions and surrenders. "Give us a hug."
He stepped up to him and held him tight, but with none of the certainty of minutes before, beside the compost heap. He pressed his forehead against Leo's, who was so much the right size for him, such a good match, and gave him a quick firm kiss with pursed lips—there was a jeer and a horn-blast from a passing car. "Wankers," murmured Leo, though to Nick it felt like a shout of congratulations.
Leo sat on the bike, one foot straight down like a dancer's to the pavement, the other in the raised stirrup. A kind of envy that Nick had felt all evening for the bike and its untouchable place in Leo's heart fused with a new resentment of it and of the ease with which it would take him away. "Look, I've got a couple more to see, yeah?" At which Nick nodded dumbly. "But I'm not letting you go." He settled back on the saddle, the bike wobbled and then he rode round in ratcheting circles, so that Nick was always facing the wrong way. "Besides," said Leo, "you're a damn good fuck." He winked and smiled and then darted out across the road and down the hill without looking back.
3
NICK'S BIRTHDAY WAS eight days after Toby's, and for a moment there had been an idea that the party for Toby's twenty-first should be a joint celebration. "Makes obvious sense," Gerald had said; and Rachel had called it "a fascinating idea." Since the party was to be held at Hawkeswood, which was the country house of Rachel's brother, Lord Kessler, the plan almost frightened Nick with its social grandeur, with what it would confer on him and demand from him. Thereafter, though, it had never been mentioned again. Nick felt he couldn't allude to it himself, and after a while he allowed his mother to make arrangements for his own family party at Barwick a week later: he looked forward to that with queasy resignation.
Toby's party was on the last Sunday in August, when the Notting Hill Carnival would be pounding to its climax, and when many local residents shuttered and locked their houses and left for their second homes with their fingers crossed: since the race riots of two summers earlier the carnival had been a site of heightened hopes and fears. Nick had lain in bed the night before and heard the long-legged beat of reggae from down the hill, mixed in, like the pulse of pleasure, with the sighing of the garden trees. It was his second night without Leo. He lay wide-eyed, dwelling on him in a state beyond mere thought, a kind of dazzled grief, in which everything they'd done together was vivid to him, and the strain of loss was as keen as the thrill of success.
Next morning at eleven they gathered in the hall. Nick, seeing Gerald was wearing a tie, ran up and put one on too. Rachel wore a white linen dress, and her dark hair, with its candid streaks of grey, had the acknowledged splendour of a new cut and a new shape. She smiled her readiness at them, and Nick felt