The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [69]
"My sister sort of knows," said Leo. "You wrant to watch her."
"Rosemary."
"She's pretty."
Nick followed him up the short concrete path and said in his ear, "Not as pretty as you, I bet," one of his light flirty jokes that he watched swoop to earth under its own weight of adoration.
Mrs Charles and her son and daughter lived on the ground floor of a small red-brick terrace house; there were two front doors side by side in the shallow recess of the porch. Leo applied himself to the right-hand one, and it was one of those locks that require tender probings and tuggings, infinitesimal withdrawals, to get the key to turn. Nick reflected briefly on the coloured glass in the inset window and the old Palm Sunday cross pinned above the doorbell. He pictured Leo going through this routine every day; and he noted his own small effort of adjustment, his disguised shock at the sight of the street and the house—perhaps he was a twit after all. When he stepped inside he had a memory, as sharp as the cooking smell in the hall, of school afternoons of community service, going into the homes of the old and disabled, each charitable visit a lesson in life and also—to Nick at least—in the subtle snobbery of aesthetics.
He took in the tiny kitchen in a photographic glance, the wall units with sliding frosted-glass doors, the orange curtains, the church calendar with its floating Jesus, the evidence of little necessary systems, heaped papers, scary wiring, bowls stacked within bowls, and the stove with plates misted and beaded on the rack above a bubbling pan; and at the centre Leo's mother, fiftyish, petite, with hooded eyes and straightened hair and a charitable smile of her own. "You're very welcome," she said, and her voice had the warm West Indian colour that Leo kept only as a special effect or a temporary camouflage. "Thank you," said Nick. "It's very good to meet you." He was so used to living by hints and approximations that there had always been something erotic in meeting the family of a man he was in love with, as if he could get a further vicarious fix on him by checking genetic oddities, the shared curve of the nose or echoing laziness of step. In the rich air of Kensington Park Gardens he seemed to live in the constant diffused presence of Toby, among people who were living allusions to him and thus a torment as well as a kind of consolation. But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the mother of the man who called him not only a "damn good fuck" but also a "hot little cocksucker" with "a first-class degree in arse-licking." Which clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a trance of revelation and gratitude.
And then there was Rosemary, coming in from work, home early, it seemed, to help her mother out with this underexplained guest they had. She was a doctor's receptionist, and wore a blouse and skirt under her belted mac. They had an awkward introduction, edging round Leo's bike in the hall. Perhaps it was shyness, but she seemed disdainful of Nick. He looked for her prettiness, and thought she was like a silky fluffy version of Leo, without the devastating detail of an ingrowing beard. Then brother and sister both went off to change. Nick couldn't work out the plan of the house, but there were subdivided rooms at the back, and a sense of carrying closeness that made the bike entirely necessary; it waited there, shuddered and jangled faintly as Nick bumped against it, as if conscious of its own trapped velocity.
"Ah, that bicycle," said Mrs Charles, as if it was some profane innovation. "I told him . . ."
They went into the front room, in which a heavy oak dining table and chain, with bulbous Jacobean-style legs, were jammed in beside a three-piece suite that was covered in shiny ginger leather, or something like it. There was a gas fire with a beaten copper surround under a ledge crowded with