The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [48]
"He's quite nice-looking for a Tory," Leo said.
"Yes, everyone seems to fancy him except me," said Nick.
Leo gave him a shrewd little smile. "I don't say I fancy him exactly," he said. "He's like someone on the telly."
"Well, soon I'm sure he will be someone on the telly. Actually of course there are monsters on both sides—looks-wise."
"True enough."
Nick hesitated. "There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism, though, isn't there."
"Yeah?"
"That blue's an impossible colour."
Leo nodded thoughtfully. "I wouldn't say that was their main problem," he said.
The weekend crowds were pressing steadily along the lane from the station and down the steep hill into the market. Pete's establishment was in the curving row of shops on the left: PETER MAWSON in gold on black, like an old jeweller's, the windows covered in mesh though today the shop was open. Leo shouldered the door and the wired doormat, as he stood there manoeuvring the bike in, kept sounding a warning chime. Nick had peered into the shop before, on one of the dead weekdays, when it was all locked up, and the mail lay unattended across the floor. There was a pair of marble-topped Empire tables in the windows flanking the door, and beyond that a space that looked more like a half-empty warehouse than a shop.
Pete could be heard on the phone in a back room. Leo propped up his bike in a familiar way and wandered through, and Nick was left alone, blinking longingly at that last image of him, the slight bounce or dance in his step. He heard Pete ringing off, a murmur of kissing and hugging. "Ooh, you know . . . " said Pete. "No, I'm a bit better."
"I've brought my nice new friend Nick round to see you," said Leo, in a silly cheerful voice which made Nick realize this might be an awkward half-hour for all of them. He was very sensitive to anything that might be said. As so often he felt he had the wrong kind of irony, the wrong knowledge, for gay life. He was still faintly shocked, among other emotions of interest and excitement, at the idea of a male couple. He and Leo had come together, in their odd transitory way, but the truth was they weren't yet a couple themselves.
"So what's all this?" Pete asked, following Leo back into the room.
"This is Pete, this is Nick," said Leo, with a large smile and a mime of urging them together. The effort to charm and reassure was a side of him that Nick hadn't seen before; it seemed to make all sorts of other things possible, in the longer view. "Pete's my best old friend," he said, in his cockney voice of concessions. "Aren't you, darlin'?" They shook hands, and Pete winced, as at the grip of something not quite welcome, and said,
"I see you've been hanging around the school gates again, you terrible old man."
Leo raised an eyebrow and said, "Well, I won't remind you how old I was when you snatched me from my pram."
Nick laughed eagerly, though it was a kind of camp slapstick he didn't naturally find funny, and it was surprisingly painful to be given a glimpse of their past together. He found himself picturing and half believing the story of Leo in his pram. Being small and fresh-faced was usually an advantage, but he was anxious not to be thought a child. "Actually, I'm twenty-one," he said, in a mock-gruff tone.
"Hark at him!" Pete said.
"Nick lives just round the corner," said Leo. "Kensington Park Gardens."
"Oh. Very nice."
"Well, I'm just staying there for a while, with an old college friend."
Leo tactfully didn't elaborate; he said, "He knows about furniture. His old man's in the trade."
Pete made a shrugging gesture that took in the sparse contents of the shop. "Feel free . . . " he said; so Nick had politely to do that, while the old lovers fell back into quiet scoffing chatter, which he deliberately blocked out with tunes in his head, not wanting to learn anything, good or bad. He examined some knocked-about Louis Seize chairs,