The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [74]
Leo was walking briskly, as if they'd agreed where they were going, but he said nothing. Nick couldn't tell if he was sulky, angry, ashamed, defiant . . . but he knew that all these emotions could rise and rush and fizzle and mutate very quickly, and that it was wiser to let him settle than to guess his mood and risk the wrong opener. Nick's consciousness of being wise was a small refuge when Leo was difficult or distant. He took in the after-sunset chill, the upswept trails of dark cloud above the rooftops, and the presence of autumn, light but penetrating, in the cold cobalt beyond. In their four weeks together these evening walks, with the ticking bicycle beside them or between them, had taken on a deepening colour of romance. He worried that the silence itself was a kind of comment, and as they reached the end of the road he pulled Leo against him with a quick chafing hug and said, "Mmm, thank you for that, darling."
Leo snorted softly. "What are you thanking me for?"
"Oh, just for taking me home. For introducing me to your family. It means a lot to me." And he found his little avowal released a sentiment he hadn't quite felt before he made it. He was very touched.
"So, now you know what they're like," said Leo, stopping and staring, with just his mother's narrowing of the gaze, across the major road beyond. The evening traffic was let slip from the lights and accelerated down the hill towards them and past them, then thinned, and then there was only a waiting emptiness again.
"They're wonderful," Nick said, meaning only to be kind—though he heard the word hang, in the silence between the lights, as if in inverted commas, and underlined too: the wonderful of gush, of connoisseurship, of Kensington Park Gardens. Leo seemed to find it absurdly unexpected, and kept blinking, but then smiled and said with a dry laugh,
"If you say so . . . darling"—the darling, longed for by Nick, taking on a dubious ironic twang.
Nick had a large wild plan of his own for the night, but for now he let Leo take charge: they were going to go back to Notting Hill and catch the seven fifteen screening ofScarface at the Gate—it had just come out and Leo had all the facts on it, including its enormous length, 170 minutes, each one of which appeared to Nick like a shadowy unit of body heat, of contact and excitement. They would be pressed together in the warm darkness for three hours. Leo said what a great actor Al Pacino was, and spoke of him almost amorously, which Nick couldn't honestly do—to him Pacino wasn't that sort of idol. There was an interview with him in the new Time Out, which Leo had probably read, since his ideas on film seemed to Nick to be drawn pretty closely from the capsule reviews in that magazine. Still, film was Leo's province, rather humourlessly patrolled against Nick's pretensions, it was one of the interests he'd originally advertised, and Nick conceded, "No, he's a genius," which was a word he could thrill them both with. They stood at the bus stop with that idea in their heads.
When the bus came Nick hopped on and sat looking out at the back at Leo, who was ages fiddling with his bike and then getting on it, dwindling away every second into the night-lit street. Then the bus pulled in at a further stop, and the bike came almost floating up, Leo rising from his forward crouch to glance in at Nick—he seemed to ride the air there for a second, and then he winked and stooped and with a click of the gears he slipped past. Nick was glad of the wink this time, he raised his hand and grinned, and then was left, in the public brightness of the bus, to be eyed by the people opposite with vague suspicion.
The bus threaded down at last across the Harrow Road and began its long descent of Ladbroke Grove. He pictured Leo whizzing ahead, and kept losing him in the gleams and shadows of the night traffic. Where was he now?