The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [68]
Catherine moved away and started up the stairs, and Rachel tried to put an arm round her, but she shook it off. Nick took Brentford to the door. "Are you sure we can't pay you?" he said, though he doubted he had the price of a fare from Stoke Newington himself. He wanted Brentford to know he wasn't guilty of the thing the whole house stood accused of.
"He's a bad man," said Brentford, on the doorstep.
"Oh . . . " said Nick, "yes . . . " He wasn't certain which man was being referred to, and Brentford's shake of the head and flap of the arm seemed to write them all off.
Nick stood on the pavement for a while after the Sierra had gone, and heard the laughter of the women from an open window above. It was good to be out of the house, in the night air. He was trembling a little from having shouted at someone he hated. He thought of Leo, and smiled, and hugged his hands under his armpits. He wondered what Leo was doing, the afternoon flared up again and warmed him with amazement; then the thought of Pete came over it like the chill of a cloud. He went in and slowed as he passed by the half-open door of the dining room: " . . . the beggar stank of pot!" Gerald was saying, to odd humourless laughter. Now perhaps he could really go upstairs, and taste the freedom of being the odd man. He didn't have a place in either of the two parties. It was bad form to go away, it admitted a prior desire to do so; but he couldn't go back and sit with Barry Groom. He thought Gerald might be angry with him too, but he would surely be glad of his taking an interest in Catherine. It couldn't be called a shirking of responsibility. Nick started to climb the stone stairs, and had hummed several bright anticipatory bars from Schumann's Fourth Symphony before he stopped himself.
6
"GOD YOU'RE A twit," said Leo. He looked fretfully at different parts of Nick, unable to place his dissatisfaction exactly. In the end he licked his thumb and rubbed his cheek, as if Nick was a child. This word twit, a tiny sting, had come up before, and signalled some complex of minor reproaches, class envy, or pity, the obvious frustrations of having a boy like Nick to teach. As always Nick searched for something else in it too, which was Leo's tutting indulgence of his pupil; he still longed for flawless tenderness, but he forgave Leo, who for once was nervous himself. They were on the Willesden pavement, ten yards from his front gate. "You're so fucking preppy," said Leo.
"I don't know what that means."
Leo shook his head. "What am I going to do with you?"
They had met after work, across the road from the Council offices, and Leo was wearing a dark grey suit with square shoulders and a white shirt and a wide but sober tie. It was the first time Nick had seen this beautiful everyday metamorphosis, and he couldn't help smiling. He was in love to the point of idolatry, but the smiles, the appreciative glances, seemed to strike Leo like a kind of sarcasm. "You look so handsome," Nick said.
"Yeah, and so do you," said Leo. "Right, we're going in. Now what did I tell you, don't take the name of the Lord in vain. Don't say, 'Oh my god!' Don't even say, 'Good Lord!' " (Leo fluted these phrases in the way that was his puzzling imitation of Nick.) "Don't say, 'Jesus fucking bollocks.' "
"I'll try not."
Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments