The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [78]
He went up two at a time, in too much of a hurry, and when he looked back on the turn he saw Leo dawdling by the same factor that he was rushing; he went into the drawing room and pressed switches that brought on lamps on side tables and over pictures—so that when Leo sauntered in he saw the room as Nick had first seen it two years before, all shadows and reflections and the gleam of gilt. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, longing for it to be a triumph, but taking his cue from the suppressed curiosity in Leo's face.
"I'm not used to this," Leo said.
"Oh . . ."
"I don't drink whisky."
"Ah, no, well —"
"Who knows what it'll do to me? I might get dangerous."
Nick grinned tightly and said, "Is that a threat or a promise?" He reached out and touched Leo's hip—his hand lay there for a second or two. Normally, together, alone, they would have been snogging, holding each other very tightly; though sometimes, it was true, Leo laughed at Nick's urgency and said, "Don't panic, babe! I'm not going anywhere! You've got me!" Leo rested his glass on the mantelpiece, and eyed Guardi's Capriccio with S. Giorgio Maggiore, which certainly seemed a rather pointless picture after The Shadow of Death. It was hard to imagine Rachel haranguing her guests about the clever something in it. Underneath it the invitations were propped, overlapping, making almost one long curlicued social sentence, Mr and Mrs Geoffrey—& Countess of Hexham—Lady Carbury "At Home" for—Michael and Jean—The Secretary of State . . . and those others, amazingly thick, with chamfered edges, The Lord Chamberlain is Commanded by Her Majesty to Request . . . which tended to stay there long after the events they referred to, and which gave Nick as well a lingering pompous thrill. Though he saw now, very quickly, that such a pleasure required willing complicity in Gerald's habit of showing off to himself. He turned away, pretending the invitations weren't there, and Leo said, with a derisive tut,
"God, the snobs."
Nick laughed. "They're not really snobs," he said. "Well, he is perhaps a bit. They're . . ."It was hard to explain, hard to know, in the dense compact of the marriage, who sanctioned what. They were each other's alibi. And Nick saw that Leo was using the word in a looser way, to mean rich people, who lived in nice places, to mean nobs. It struck him that he might be about to take the whole treat of coming to Kensington Park Gardens and making love in a bed as an elaborate but crushing rebuff. He watched him sip some more, deliberately, and then wander towards the front windows. He tried to act on his advice of fifteen minutes earlier, tried to trust his Uncle Leo. The room was devised and laid out for entertaining, on a generous scale, and for a second, as if a thick door had opened, he heard the roar of accumulated talk and laughter, the consensual social roar, instead of the clock's ticking and the fizz of silence.
"That's a nice bit of oyster," Leo said, pointing at a walnut commode. "And that's Sevres, if I'm not wrong, with that blue."
"Yes, I think it is," Nick said, feeling that this nod at a common interest also brought old Pete rather critically into the room. Old Pete would have had some smart gay backchat to deal with an awkward moment like this.
"No, they've got some nice pieces," Leo said, flatly, and a little ponderously, and so perhaps shyly. He turned round, nodding. "You've done well."
"Darling, none of it's mine . . ."
"I know, I know." Leo sat down at the piano, and after a moment's thought stood his glass on a book on the lid. "What's this, then. . . Mozart, all right, that's not too bad," checking the cover of the music on the stand, but letting it fall back to the eternally