The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [79]
"It's a funny old piano," said Nick. He felt that if Leo played the piano, especially if he played it badly, it would waken the unconscious demons of the house and bring them in yawning and protesting.
"Ah, that's all right," Leo murmured courteously; and he started to play, with a distracted frown at the page. It was the great second movement of K533, spare, probing, Bach-like, that Nick had discovered, and tried to play, on the night when he'd lost his chance of meeting Leo—till Catherine had complained, and he'd apologized and doodled off into Waldorf music. To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, "vulgar and unsafe"—that was the worst thing. And the music seemed to know this, to know the irresistible curve of hope, and its hollow inversion. Leo played it pretty steadily, and Nick stood behind him, willing it along, nudging it through those quickly corrected wrong notes and tense hesitations that are a torture of sight-reading and yet heighten the rewards when everything runs clear and good. When Leo suddenly went steeply wrong he gave a disparaging shout, struck a few random chords, then reached for his glass. "Must be too pissed to play," he said, not necessarily joking.
Nick sniggered. "You're good. I can't play that. I didn't know you could play." He felt very touched, and chastened, as if by a glimpse of his own unquestioned assumptions. It opened a new perspective, the sight of Leo in his jeans and sweatshirt and baseball boots raising Mozart out of the sonorous old Bosendorfer. And it seemed to have loosened him up, he was like a shy guest who makes a brilliant joke, its lustre heightened by delay and distillation, and who suddenly finds he's enjoying himself. Nick grabbed him from behind and squashed a kiss onto his cheek.
Leo chuckled and said, "All right, babe . . ."
Nick said, "I love you," shaking him in a tight hug, and grunting at the hard muscular heat of him. Leo reached up with his free right hand and gripped his arm. After a while he said,
"That's a terrible picture."
It was Norman Kent's portrait of Toby, aged sixteen, and it was the image—beyond the intimidating bronze bust of Liszt—on which the eyes of the doodling pianist tended to dwell. While Leo had been playing, it had lent its sickly colour to Nick's thoughts.
"I know . . . Poor Toby."
"Cos he's quite tasty, in my opinion."
"Oh yes."
"You never told me if you had him, when you were all up at Oxford University."
Nick had still not quite let on to Leo that before their tangle in the bushes he had never exactly "had" anyone. He said, "No, no, he's completely straight."
"Yeah?" said Leo, sceptically. "You must have had a go."
"Not really," Nick said. He stood back, with his hands still on Leo's shoulders, and smiled wanly at the pink-faced blazered boy. The old regret could always come alive again, and for a moment even Leo, warm under his hands, seemed cheap and provisional compared to the unattainable bloom of Toby.
"I just thought the way he kissed you and looked at you was a bit poofy."
"Don't!" Nick murmured, and then laughed, pulling Leo to get him up, and get the real kisses from him, the ones that Toby would never give him.
But Leo held out a moment longer. "So they're easy about having a bender in the house, are they, their lordships?"
"Of course," said Nick. "They're absolutely fine with it." And in his mind he heard Catherine saying, "As long as it's never mentioned." He went on, with a degree of exaggeration, "They've got lots of gay friends. In fact they asked me to bring you here, darling."
"Oh," said Leo, with a subtlety of register worthy of Rachel herself.
Nick lay naked on top of the duvet, in quick-pulsed amazement. Leo had rung his mother, told her he was staying over: it was a risk, a yielding, and therefore a commitment. Nick listened to the hiss of the shower in the bathroom across the landing. Then, since he could see himself in the wardrobe