The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [77]
"I know," said Nick with an archness that covered and somehow dissolved three hours of regrets—in his relief he couldn't see where he was going and grabbed and rattled one of the cinema's already locked glass doors.
Leo went out and into the blocked-offside street where he'd left his bike, and when Nick followed he found him putting his arms round his neck and kissing him, chastely but tenderly, on the forehead; then he kept looking at him, lightly frowning and smiling at the same time, with humorous reproach.
"Nicholas Guest."
"Mm . . ."—Nick colouring but holding Leo's gaze submissively.
"You worry too much. You know that?"
"I know . . ."
"Yeah? You do trust your Uncle Leo, don't you?"
"Of course I trust you," Nick burst out quietly, as if he'd been asked a simpler question.
"Well, don't worry so much, then. Will you do that for me?" And again he was all cockney softness.
"Yes," said Nick, glancing a little worriedly none the less to left and right, since Leo was holding him against the wall like a mugger as much as a lover—he worried what people would think. In the wake of his relief this short exchange raised a vague dissatisfaction.
"Don't ever forget it."
"I won't," Nick murmured, and Leo stood back. He wasn't sure what it was that he mustn't forget, he had a restless ear for syntax, but he smiled at the general drift of the little catechism of reassurance. It was lovely that Leo saw at once what was wrong, even if his avuncular tone didn't put it completely right. Nick found he was confident enough, despite his racing heartbeat, to mention his plan.
"You're sure they're not here, yeah?"
"Yes, I'm positive. Well, Catherine might be in."
"Catherine, right, that's your sister, yeah?" And then Leo winked.
The heavy, sharp-edged key to the mortise locks had already cut a gash in Nick's trouser pocket, and the whole bunch was tangled in the torn threads and hanging against the top of his thigh. As he tugged at it a few of the new pound coins dropped ticklingly down his leg and rolled across the tiled floor of the porch. Leo jumped on them. "That's right, throw it away," he said.
A light always burned in the hall, and gave it tonight a somehow eerie vigilance. Nick locked the door behind them, and put the keys back in his pocket, and this time, after two steps, they had shaken their way down his leg and out on to the chequered marble. Leo, peeking in the hall mirror, raised an eyebrow but said nothing. On the console table were spare car keys, opera glasses, one of Gerald's grey fedoras, a letter "By Hand" addressed to the Rt Hon Mr and the Hon Mrs Gerald Fedden—and together, as a careless still life, reflected in the mirror, they seemed to Nick both wonderful and embarrassing. He stood still for a moment and listened. The light, from a brass lantern hanging in the well of the stair, threw steep shadows down inside the threshold of the dining room, revealing only the black satin bodice of a nineteenth-century Kessler. The Hon and the Rt Hon were both in Barwick for the night on constituency business, and whilst he confirmed this to himself he was also rewording the sentence in which he would explain Leo to them if, after all, they came chattering in. He had a sense of their possessing the house and everything in it, calmly but defiantly, and of its stone staircase and climbing cornices reaching rather pitilessly up into the shadows. He gave Leo a passing kiss on the cheek, and drew him into the kitchen, where the under-unit lighting stammered and blinked into life. "Do you want a whisky?"
And for once Leo said, "I don't mind if I do! Yeah, that would be nice. Thanks very much, Nick." He strolled round the room as if not really noticing it, and stood scanning the wall of photographs. One of the Tatler pictures from Toby's twenty-first had now been bought, blown up and framed: a wildly smiling family group in which the Home Secretary seemed to show some awareness of being an intruder. Just above them the student Gerald, in tails, was shaking hands with Harold Macmillan at the Oxford Union.