The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "Miz Fed, you know is thirteen."

  "Ah . . . " said Rachel, and then gave an apologetic shrug.

  "Yes, well I don't think any of us are triskaidekaphobes here, are we?" said Gerald. They were all very up on the names of phobias, since at various times Catherine had suffered from aichmo, dromo, keno, and nyctophobia, among a number of more commonplace ones—it was a bit of a game with them, but it cut no ice with Elena, who stood there biting her lip.

  "You see, you'll have to stay," said Badger, reaching out clumsily to hold Catherine. "How can you resist that beautiful venison?"

  "Hmm," said Catherine. "It looks like something out of a field hospital." And she shot a tiny forbidding glance at Nick, who saw that it was probably the aichmophobia, the horror of sharp objects, that made the serving and carving of a haunch of venison impossible for her. The family knew about her trouble in the past, but had happily forgotten it when it seemed not to recur. It was only Nick who knew about the recent challenge of the carving knives. He said,

  "I don't mind dropping out too if I'm going to spoil the seating." He enjoyed the well-oiled pomp of the dinners here, but he knew he was too much in love to do more than smile in the candlelight and dream of Leo. He would be quiet and inattentive. And already he felt a tingle in the air, the more-than-reality of the memory of being with his boyfriend.

  "No, no," murmured Rachel, with an impatient twitch of the head.

  "Elena, we'll risk it!" Gerald pronounced. "Si . . . va bene . . . Nick, you'll just have to be the odd man . . . um . . ." Elena went back into the dining room with that look of unhappy subjection that no one but Nick ever noticed or worried about. "We're not living in twelfth-century Calabria," said Gerald, as the phone started ringing and he plucked it from the wall and grunted, "Fedden," in his new no-nonsense style. "Yes . . . Hello . . . What?. . . Yes, yes he is. . . Yes, all right. . . Mm, and to you," then holding the receiver out towards Nick: "It's Leo." Nick coloured as though his thoughts of a few moments before had been audible to all of them; the kitchen had accidentally fallen silent and Gerald gave him a look which Nick felt was stern and disappointed, but perhaps was merely abstracted, the frown of a broken train of thought.

  Catherine said, "If it's Leo, they'll be hours." And Rachel nodded sympathetically and said, "Yes, why don't you take it in the study." Gerald looked at him again as if to say that the brute reality of gay life, of actual phone calls between shirtlifters, was rather more than he had ever imagined being asked to deal with; but then nodded and said genially, "By all means, it's the red phone."

  "Ah, hotline," said Badger, whose scandal-sensors were warming to something awkward in the air. Though as Nick went down the hall what struck him was that Rachel knew what was going on, and was protecting him. Gerald never really noticed anything about other people, they were moving parts in a social process, they agreed with him or they thwarted him, his famous hospitality disguised an odd lack of particular, personal skills—all this came clear to Nick in a liberating rush as he pushed open the study door. After which it was beautifully surreal to stand and talk in sexy murmurs beside his desk, to hear Leo's voice in the one room in the house which expressed Gerald's own taste, which was a vacuum of taste, green leather armchairs, upholstered fender, brass lamps, the stage set for his own kind of male conspiracy.

  "Well, that was very jolly," said Leo, with a half-teasing, half-aspiring use of a Nick word. "Very jolly indeed."

  "Did you enjoy it, darling?" said Nick.

  "I didn't mind it," said Leo.

  Nick glowed and grinned. "I thought it was bearable."

  "I expect you can bear it," said Leo. "You don't have to ride a bike."

  Nick looked around at the half-open door. "Was it too much for you?" he said wonderingly, and with a sense that recurred and recurred these weeks—of enormous freedom claimed through tiny details, of everything he said being welcome.

  "You're a very bad boy," said Leo.

  "Mm, so you keep saying."

  "So what are you doing?"

  "Well . . . " said Nick. It was lovely to be talking to Leo, but he wasn't quite sure why he had rung, and as it was the first time he had ever done so it made Nick uneasily expectant; until it struck him that probably Leo himself was only claiming the simple pleasure of talking to his lover, of talking, as he said he loved to fuck, for the sake of it. "I'm sitting behind Gerald's desk with a most tremendous hard-on," said Nick.

  There was a pause and Leo murmured, "Now don't get me going. My old lady's here."

  It was shadowy already in the room, and Nick pulled the chain that switched on the desk lamp. Gerald, like an uxorious bigamist, had photos of both Rachel and the Prime Minister in silver frames. A large desk diary was open at the "Notes" pages at the back, where Gerald had written, "Barwick: Agent (Manning)—wife Veronica NOT Janet (Parker's wife)." With his breezily asking Parker how Veronica was and Manning how Janet was, he had got some very confused looks. Nick knew Janet Parker, of course, she was a manager at Rackhams and sang in the Operatic. "So what are you doing later?" Leo wanted to know.

  "Oh, we've got a big dinner party," Nick said. He noticed that he hoped to impress Leo with their life at Kensington Park Gardens and at the same time was ready to repudiate it. "It'll probably be very tedious—they only really ask me to make up the numbers."

  "Oh," said Leo doubtfully.

  "It'll be a lot of horrible old Tories," Nick said, in an attempt at Leo's language and point of view, and sniggered.

  "Oh, is Grandma coming, then?"

  "She certainly is," said Nick.

  "Old bitch," said Leo; the passing insult of their doorstep meeting, unregistered at the time, had risen later like a bruise. "You ought to ask me over, to continue our fascinating conversation," he said.

  The theme of Leo's coining over had cropped up several times since their first date, and hung and faded. Nick said, "Look, I'm sure I can get out of this." And really it did seem as if the logic of the evening—the numbers, the etiquette, the superstition—was only an expression of a deeper natural force, a love logic, pulling him out of the house and back into Leo's arms. "I'm sure I can get out of it," he said again. Though as he did so he felt there was also a lightness in not seeing Leo, a romance in separation, while the fabulous shock of their afternoon together sank in. Days like these had their design, their upward and downward curves: it would be unshapely to change the plan.

  "No, you enjoy yourself," said Leo, wise perhaps with the same instinct. "Have a glass of wine."

  "Yes, I expect I'll do that. Unless you've got a better idea . . . " Nick swivelled in the desk chair with a tensely mischievous smile—the red phone cord stretched and bounced. The chair was a high-backed scoop of black leather, a spaceship commander's.

  "You're insatiable, you are," said Leo.

  "That's because I love you," said Nick, singsong with the truth.

  Leo took in this chance for an echoing avowal; it was a brief deep silence, as tactical as it was undiscussable. He said, "That's what you tell all the boys"—a phrase of lustreless backchat that Nick could only bear as a form of shyness. He turned it inside out in his mind and found what he needed in it. He said quietly, "No, only you."

  "Yeah," said Leo, all relaxed-sounding, and gave a big fake yawn. "Yeah, I'll probably pop down to old Pete's a bit later, see how he's getting on."

  "Right," said Nick quickly. "Well—give him my best!" It was a sting of worry—hidden, unexpected.

  "Will do," said Leo.

  "How is old Pete?" said Nick.

  "Well, he's a bit low. This illness has taken all the life out of him."

  "Oh dear," said Nick, but felt he couldn't enquire any further, out of delicacy for his own feelings. He looked about on the desk, to focus his thoughts on where he was rather than on imagined intimacies at Pete's flat. There was a thick typescript with a printed card, "From the Desk of Morden Lipscomb," on "National Security in a Nuclear Age," which Gerald had marked with ticks and underlinings
on the first two pages. "NB: nuclear threat," he had written.

  "OK, babe," Leo said quietly. "Well, I'll see you soon. We'll get it together at the weekend, yeah? I've got to go—my mum wants the phone."

  "I'll ring you tomorrow . . ."

  "Yeah, well, lovely to chat."

  And in the silence of the room afterwards, shaken, tight-lipped, Nick clutched at that cosy but cynical cockney lovely. Of course Leo was inhibited by being at home, he wanted to say more. Just think of this afternoon. It was terribly sweet that he'd rung at all. The chat was a romantic bonus, but nothing was certain when it came to words, there were nettles among the poppies. For a minute or two Nick felt their separation like a tragedy, a drama of the thickening dusk—he saw Leo at large on his bike while he stood in this awful office with its filing cabinets, its decanters, and the enlarged photograph, just back from the framers, of the hundred and one new Tory MPs.

  In the kitchen he found that people had dispersed to bathe and change, and these further unstoppable rhythms made him feel like a ghost. Rachel was sitting at the table writing place cards with her italic fountain pen. She glanced up at him, and there was a slight tension in her manner as well as obvious solicitude, a desire not to offend in a moment of kindness. She said, "All well?"

  "Yes, thank you—fine . . ." said Nick, shaking himself into seeing that of course life was pretty wonderful, it was just that there was more to it than he expected—and less as well.

  "Now should I put Badger or Derek, do you think? I think I'll put Derek, just to put him in his place."

  "Well, they are place cards," said Nick.

  "Exactly!" said Rachel, and blew on the ink. She looked up at him again briefly. "You know, my dear, you can always bring friends here if you want to."

  "Oh, yes . . . thank you . . ."

  "I mean we would absolutely hate it if you were to feel you couldn't do that. This is your home for however long you are with us." And it was the "we," the general benevolence, that struck him and upset him; and then the practical acknowledgement that he wouldn't be there for ever.

  "I know, you're very kind. I will, of course."

  "I don't know . . . Catherine says you have a . . . a special new friend," and she was stern for a second, magnanimous but at a disadvantage: what should she call such a person? "I just want you to know he'd be very welcome here."

  "Thank you," said Nick again, and smiled through a blush at the thing being out. It was confusingly straightforward. He felt relieved and cheated. He wasn't sure he could rise to the freedom being offered—he saw himself bringing home some nice white graduate from the college instead, for a pointless tea, or convivial evening bleak with his own cowardice.

  "We're such broody old things," Rachel said, "now that Toby's moved out. So do it just for our sake!" This was a charming exaggeration, in a woman of forty-seven, with thirteen for dinner, but it acknowledged a truth too: it didn't quite say she thought of him as a son—it didn't elevate or condescend—but it admitted a habit, a need for a young man and his friends about the house. She tapped the cards together and came across the room and Nick gave her a kiss, which she seemed to find quite right.

  In fact Toby and Sophie were there that night. They came early and Nick had a gin-and-tonic with them in the drawing room. They seemed to bring along their own complacent atmosphere, the mood of their life together in the Chelsea flat, and of some larger future when they might curl up a leg on the sofa or stand with an elbow on the mantelpiece in a room as enormous as this. Toby played the lightly chivvied "husband" very sweetly, and Sophie claimed him in the childish ways of someone experimenting with her power, with little exasperations and innuendos. She did a performance about how Toby ground his teeth in his sleep. Nick tittered warily at this glimpse of the bedroom, but found her lack of subtlety oddly reassuring. She'd got Toby, snoring and twitching, but the romantic reach of Nick's feelings for him, the web of sacrifice and nonsense and scented Oxford nights, survived untouched. Toby was very sweet to Nick too. He left his position by the fireplace and came and sprawled on the rug by his chair, so that Nick could have reached out and stroked the back of his neck. For a moment Sophie looked disconcerted, but then she took possession of that situation as well. "Ah—you two should see more of each other," she said. "It's good to see you together." A minute later, looking vaguely self-conscious, Toby got up and pretended to search for a book.

  "And what about your lovely friend . . . ?" Sophie wanted to know.

  "Oh . . . Leo, do you mean?"

  "Leo," said Sophie.

  "Oh, he's—lovely!" Here was the subject again—Nick just hadn't got used to it yet, to the idea of anything so secret, so steeped in his own fears and fantasies, being cheerfully enquired after by other people. Toby too looked round from the bookcase with his encouraging grin.

  "Such a . . . lovely man," said Sophie, whose conversation tended not to develop, but to settle, snugly or naggingly, in one place.

  Nick was glad of the praise, and mistrusted it at the same time. "Well, he loved meeting you," he said.

  "Aah . . ." Sophie purred, as if to say that people usually did enjoy that. "He's a great fan of your work, Pips," said Toby.

  "I know," said Sophie, and sat looking down modestly. Her dark-blonde hair, worn long at Oxford, had been cut and backcombed, Diana-style, and quivered when she shook her head. She was wearing a red strapless number that didn't really suit her.

  "You know she's got a part in a play," said Toby.

  "Oh, shoosh . . . " said Sophie.

  "No, we've all got to go and see her. Nick—come to the first night, we'll go together."

  "Absolutely," said Nick. "What are you doing?"

  Sophie quivered and said, "Well, you might as well know," as if being hurried into announcing a different kind of engagement. "I'm doing Lady Windermere . . . "

  "Fantastic. I think you'll be very good at that." It was a surprisingly big part, but Nick could see her as the self-righteous young wife clipping rose stems in her Westminster drawing room; and delivering those awful soliloquies she has—

  "I don't know what it will be like. It's one of these very way-out directors. He's . . . he's gay, actually, too. He says it's going to be a deconstructionist reading of the play. That doesn't worry me, of course, because I've done deconstruction; but Mummy and Daddy may not like it."

  "You can't go worrying about what your parents will think," said Nick.

  "That's right," said Toby. "Anyway, your ma's very with-it. She's always going to way-out concerts and things."

  "No, she'll be fine."

  Toby chuckled. "Of course your father's most famous remark is that he wished Shakespeare had never been born."

  "I don't know that that's his most famous remark," said Sophie, with a hint of pique. In fact if Maurice Tipper had made a famous remark at all it would probably have been something about profit margins and good returns for shareholders. "He only said it after getting bitten to death by mosquitoes watching Pericles in Worcester College gardens."

  "Ah . . . " murmured Nick, whose own memory was of Toby's bashful swagger as a Lord of Tyre, when Sophie had been the Marina.

  "You're too horrid about my poor papa," said Sophie in a highly affected way, as if in her mind she was already on stage.

  Catherine came in, dressed for her night out in a tiny spangled frock, over which she was wearing an unbuttoned light-grey raincoat. She wore high-heeled black shoes and stockings with a whitish sheen to them.

  "Goodness!" said Toby.

  "Hello, darling," said Catherine confidentially to Sophie, stooping to give her a kiss. Sophie clearly found Catherine the most challenging aspect of an affair with Toby, and Catherine knew this, and treated her with the kind of clucking condescension that Sophie would otherwise have lavished on her. "Love your clever frock," she said.

  "Oh . . . thank you," said Sophie, smiling and blinking.

  "Are you going out, then, sis?" said Toby.

  Catherine headed towards
the drinks table. "I'm going out tonight," she said. "Russell's taking me to an opening in Stoke Newington."

  "And where might that be?" said Toby.

  "It's a well-known area of London," Catherine said. "It's very fashionable, isn't it, Soph?"

  "Yes, of course—darling, you've heard of it," said Sophie.

  "I was joking," said Toby; and Nick thought it was true, you never expected him to; and when he did you couldn't always be sure that he had. And then the idea of a party, not this one, but a noisy party with cans of beer and trails of pot smoke, through which he moved with his lover, as his lover, came over him like a pang and he envied Catherine. It was an image of an Oxford party, but blended with something known only from television, a house full of black people.

  Toby said, "I'm just going upstairs to see if I can find those trousers. Are you going to Nat's bash, Nick?"

  "What is it?" said Nick, with another dimmer pang at the thought of another kind of party, a posh white hetero one, at which his presence was not thought necessary.

  "Oh, he's having this Seventies party . . ." said Toby hopelessly.

  "No, I'm not invited," said Nick, with a superior smile, thinking of the loving closeness he had felt with Nat at Hawkeswood, when they were both stoned and sitting on the floor. "Is it in London?"

  "That's the thing. It's up at the blasted castle," said Toby.

  "Yes . . . It's absurdly soon, isn't it, for a Seventies party?" said Nick. "I mean, the Seventies were so ghastly, why would anyone want to go back to them?" He'd been longing for a chance to see the castle—a marcher fortress with Wyatt interiors.

  "Well, public schoolboys love reliving their puberty, don't they Soph," said Catherine, coming back with a very tall drink.

  "I know," said Sophie crossly.

  "Some of them spend their whole lives doing it," Catherine said. She stood in front of the fireplace, with a hand on her hip, and seemed already to be moving to the music of a future very remote from any such nonsense.