The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [49]
The only real object of interest, the thing to acknowledge and be equal to, was Pete himself. He was perhaps in his mid-forties, with a bald patch in his sandy hair and a bit of grey in his thin beard. He was lean, an inch or two taller than Nick and Leo, but already slightly stooped. He wore tight old jeans and a denim shirt, and something else, which was an attitude, a wearily aggressive challenge—he seemed to come forward from an era of sexual defiance and fighting alliances and to cast a dismissive eye over a little chit like Nick, who had never fought for anything. Or so Nick explained his own sense of discomfort, the recurrent vague snobbery and timidity with which he peered into the world of actually existing gayness. Nick had pictured Pete as the fruity kind of antique-dealer, or even as a sexless figure like his own father, with a bow tie and a trim white beard. That Pete should be as he was threw such a novel light over Leo. He glanced at Leo now, with his sublime little bottom perched on the corner of Pete's desk, and saw him totally at home with a far from attractive middle-aged man—he had been his lover and done a hundred things with him that Nick still only dreamed of, time and time again. Nick didn't know how it had ended, or when; they seemed to share the steadiness of something both long established and over, and he envied them, although it wasn't quite what he wanted himself. It was part of Leo's game, or maybe just his style, to have told Nick almost nothing; but if Pete was Leo's kind of man it looked suddenly unlikely that Nick would be chosen to replace him.
"Have a look at that, Nick," Pete called out, as if amiably trying to keep him occupied. "You know what that is."
"That's a nice little piece," said Leo.
"It's a very nice little piece," said Pete. "Louis Quinze."
Nick ran his eye over the slightly cockled boulle inlay. "Well, it's an encoignure," he said, and with a chance at charm: "n'est-ce pas?"
"It's what we call a corner cupboard," Pete said. "Where did you get this one, babe?"
"Ooh . . . I just found him on the street," said Leo, gazing quite sweetly at Nick and then giving him a wink. "He looked a bit lost."
"Hardly a mark on him," said Pete.
"Not yet," said Leo.
"So where's your father's shop, Nick?" said Pete.
"Oh, it's in Barwick—in Northamptonshire?"
"Don't they pronounce that Barrick?"
"Only frightfully grand people."
Pete lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, and then coughed and looked almost sick. "Ah, that's better," he said. "Yes, Bar-wick. I know Barwick. It's what you'd call a funny old place, isn't it."
"It has a very fine eighteenth-century market hall," Nick said, to help him to remember it.
"I picked up a little Directoire bureau there once, bombe it was, you'll know what that means."
"That probably wasn't from us. It was probably Gaston's. My father sells mainly English things."
"Yeah? What's trade like up there these days?"
"Pretty slow, actually," Nick said.
"It's at a fucking standstill here. It's going backwards. Another four years of Madam and we'll all be on the street." Pete coughed again and flapped away Leo's attempt to take the cigarette off him. "So how long have you been in London, Nick?"
"About . . . six weeks?"
"Six weeks . . . I see. You'll still be doing the rounds, then. Or are you just shopping local? You've done the Volunteer."
Leo saw Nick hesitating, and said, "I wouldn't want him going to that old flea-box. At least not till he's sixty, like everyone else in there."
"I'm exploring a bit," said Nick.
"I don't know, where do the young things go these days?"