The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [53]
"I was in a film that was called The White Devil," said Sophie, as though speaking to a child.
"That was it!" said Leo. "Yes! That was a fantastic film. I love that film."
"I'm so glad," said Sophie. "You are kind!"
Leo was smiling and staring, as if the scenes were spooling through his head again, miraculously matched by the woman in front of him. "Yeah, when he poisons him, and . . . Did you see this film, Nick, White Devil . . . ?"
"Stupidly, I missed it," Nick said; though he had a clear recollection of undergraduates acting at being film-makers, bouncing round in jeeps and wearing dark glasses at night; the Flamineo, Jamie Stallard, a drawling Martyrs' Club twit, was one of his favourite betes noires.
"I've got to tell you, that guy—Jamie, is it?—ooh-ooh . . ."
"I know," said Sophie. "I thought you'd like him."
"You're not wrong, girl," laughed Leo, so lit up with sassy excitement that Nick thought he might be teasing Sophie. "But he's not, though—you'd better tell me—he's not . . . is he . . . ?"
"Oh . . . ! I'm afraid he isn't, no. A lot of people ask that," Sophie admitted.
Leo took it philosophically. "Well, when it comes on again I'm definitely taking him," he said, tutting as if they both thought cultivated, first-class Nick, still heavy-headed with exam knowledge, steeped to the chaps in revenge tragedy, was a bit of a slob.
"All right," said Nick, seeing it at least as a couple of hours in the warm dark together, rather than behind a bush. "And I can tell you all about Jamie Stallard," he added.
But Leo's real interest was in Sophie. "So what are you doing next?" he said. Nick raised his eyebrows apologetically to Toby, who shook his head kindly, as if to say that going out with a promising actress he was bound to find himself in an attendant role. Sophie herself looked slightly overexcited, partly at the praise but partly because she wasn't used to talking to anyone like Leo, and it seemed to be going really well. "I'll let you know," she was saying. "I can get your number off Nick!"
Nick wished he could match Toby's confidence. He felt snubbed by Leo's attentions to Sophie, but perhaps it was only because he felt foolish, childish at having put it about that they were boyfriends. Toby said, "Really, we must go, Pips," and there was something so silly about this nickname that it helped Nick not to care.
But then, alone again in the street with Leo, neither of them saying anything, he had a sense of what an affair might actually be like, and the endless miraculous permission was only a part of it. His limbs were oddly stiff, his hands tingling as if he'd just come in from snowballing to stand by a blazing fire. He felt the moment echoing other occasions when he had just missed success through a failure of nerve, or a stupidly happy anticipation. All Leo's effusiveness with Pete and then with Sophie had ebbed away, and left just the two of them, in this horrible noise and crush. Nick glanced at him with a tight smile; at which Leo stretched his neck with a moody, uninvolved air. "Well," said Nick finally, "where do you want to go?"
"I don't know, boyfriend," Leo said.
Nick laughed ruefully, and something kept him back from a further He. "A caff?" he said. "Indian? A sandwich?"—which was the most he could imagine managing.
"Well, I need something," said Leo, in his tone of flat goading irony, looking at him sharply. "And it isn't a sandwich."
Nick didn't take a risk on what this might mean. "Ah . . . " he said. Leo turned his head and scowled at a stall of cloudy green and brown glassware, which was taking its place in their crisis, and seemed to gleam with hints of a settled domestic life. Leo said,
"At least with old Pete we had his place, but where are me and you ever going to go?"
Could this be his only objection, the only obstacle . . .? "I know, we're homeless," Nick said.
"Homeless love," said Leo, shrugging and then cautiously