The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [7]
"The best thing is, if you give us a ring next week," said Leo.
"I most certainly will," said Nick, pretending he thought all this was positive but feeling abruptly miserable and stiff in the face. "Look, I'm really sorry about tonight, I'll make it up to you." There was another pause in which he knew his sentence was being decided—his whole future perhaps. But then Leo said, in a throaty whisper,
"You bet you will!"—and as Nick started to giggle he hung up. So that little pause had been conspiratorial, a conspiracy of strangers. It wasn't so bad. It was beautiful even. Nick hung up too and went to look at himself in the high gilt arch of the hall mirror. With the sudden hilarity of relief he thought how nice-looking he was, small but solid, clear-skinned and curly-headed. He could see Leo falling for him. Then the colour drained from him, and he climbed the stairs.
When it had cooled Nick and Catherine went down into the garden and out through the gate into the communal gardens beyond. The communal gardens were as much a part of Nick's romance of London as the house itself: big as the central park of some old European city, but private, and densely hedged on three sides with holly and shrubbery behind high Victorian railings. There were one or two places, in the surrounding streets, where someone who wasn't a keyholder could see through to a glade among the planes and tall horse chestnuts—across which perhaps a couple would saunter or an old lady wait for her even slower dog. And sometimes in these summer evenings, with thrush and blackbird song among the leaves, Nick would glimpse a boy walking past on the outside and feel a surprising envy of him, though it was hard to know how a smile would be received, coming from the inside. There were hidden places, even on the inside, the path that curled, as if to a discreet convenience, to the gardener's hut behind a larch-lap fence; the enclosure with the sandpit and the children's slide, where genuine uniformed nannies still met and gossiped with a faint air of truancy; and at the far end the tennis courts, whose overlapping rhythms of serves and rallies and calls lent a calming reminder of other people's exertions to the August dusk.
From end to end, just behind the houses, ran the broad gravel walk, with its emphatic camber and its metal-edged gutters where a child's ball would come to rest and the first few plane leaves, dusty but still green, were already falling, since the summer had been so hot and rainless all through. Nick and Catherine strolled along there, arm in arm, like a slow old couple; Nick felt paired with Catherine in a new, almost formal way. At regular intervals there were Victorian cast-iron benches, made with no thought of comfort, and between them on the grass a few people were sitting or picnicking in the warm early twilight.
After a minute Nick said, "Feeling a bit better?" and Catherine nodded and pressed against him as they walked. The sense of responsibility came back to him, a grey weight in his chest, and he saw them from the point of view of the picnickers or an approaching jogger: not a dear old couple at all but a pair of kids, a skinny girl with a large nervous mouth and a solemn little blond boy pretending he wasn't out of his depth. Of course he must ring France, and hope that he got Rachel, since Gerald wasn't always good with these things. He wished he knew more about what had happened and why, but he was squeamish too. "You'll be all right," he said. He thought that asking her about it might only reopen the horror, and added, "I wonder what it was all about," as if referring to a mystery of long ago. She gave him a look of painful uncertainty, but didn't answer. "Can't really say?" Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly