The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  Nick worked on him easily and steadily, his own dick still buttoned away in a hard diagonal, something else waiting to happen, and the squeak of the telltale floorboard coming in rapid runs, like a manic mouse, and then with impressive intermittence; Nick almost went with it, but it was a distraction too, like the voices on the stair, a kind of brake or warning. They must have moved the bed, or they were fucking on the floor perhaps. He pictured them, Catherine vaguely and anxiously, Jasper much more vividly.

  Wani's hands stroked and clutched at Nick's hair, tugged on it unpleasantly hard. "They're really going at it," he murmured. "The little sluts . . . " Nick glanced up and saw him smiling, in his erotic trance, not at him directly but at the two of them in the mirror; and also (Nick knew) staring through the mirror, and the wardrobe itself, into the room beyond, which he had never seen and which was just as readily the motel bedroom of some seedy flick. "They're really going at it—the little sluts"—Nick heard how he loved saying it again, whispering it, and grunted as Wani's little thrusts against his face fell into the accelerating rhythm of the kids next door. He felt awkward, pulled in to service a fantasy he couldn't quite share—he tried again, he'd jerked off a few times about Jasper already, but Catherine was his sister, and on lithium, and, well . . . a girl. He heard her voice now, quick staccato wails . . . and Wani's breathing, slipping away from him just at the moment he had him. And then another idea came to him, a second resort, a silent, comical revenge on Wani while he brought him off—it was Ronnie he'd invited in, to solace him for his woman trouble, to give him ten minutes of real care, man to man. It took a little adjustment, of course, a little further twist on make-believe, since the Ronnie he'd imagined was twice the size of Wani—at least. But as Wani pulled out and Nick squeezed his eyes tight shut, it could almost have been Ronnie in front of him, instead of the man he loved.

  Downstairs, a little later, in the drawing room, the coda of the party was unwinding, and Gerald opening new bottles of champagne as though he made no distinction between the boring drunks who "sat," and the knowing few of the inner circle, gathered round the empty marble fireplace. The Timmses were there, and Barry Groom, with their different fanatical ways of talking, their shades of zeal and exasperation—all alien to Nick more than ever in the lull after drugs and sex. He saw that Polly Tompkins was sitting with them, as if among equals, and already impatient for something superior. Gerald, it was clear, hadn't yet got round to the new paper on Third World debt. "Have a look at it," said Polly, and nodded at him like a genial don. The strange thing was that it was also Gerald's nod, just as his white collar was Gerald's collar. The mimicry was artful, slightly amorous, and since the love was hopeless, slightly mocking too. Really everything nice about Polly was a calculation.

  Morgan, the woman Polly had brought, came to join Gerald's group, where they were going back over the scandal of Oxford refusing the PM an honorary degree. John Timms, with his intense belief in form, regarded the incident as an outrage, but Barry Groom, who hadn't bothered with Oxford, said, "Fuck 'em's what I say," in a sharp frank tone that made Morgan blush and then weigh in like a man herself. The only touching thing about her was her evident uncertainty as to when or why anything was funny. "They seem to think the lady's not for learning," Gerald said. She looked bewilderedfy at their laughing faces.

  From the balcony, in the late July evening, the gardens receded in depth beyond depth of green, like some mysterious Hodgkin, to a point where a faintly luminous couple reclined on the grass. The astonishing greenness of London in summer. The great pale height of the after-dusk sky, birds cheeping and falling silent, an invincible solitude stretching out from the past like the slowly darkening east. The darkness climbed the sky, and the colours surrendered, the green became a dozen greys and blacks, the distant couple faded and disappeared.

  "Hallo there . . . !"

  "Oh hi, Jasper."

  "How are you, then, darling?"—almost tweaking him in the ribs.

  "Very well. How are you?"

  "Ooh, not bad. A bit tired . . ."

  "Hmm. What have you been up to?"

  Young Jasper, no younger probably than Nick, but with his chancy just-out-of-school look, quick and lazy at the same time, his flirtiness, his assumption he knew you, as if by bedding, or flooring, Catherine he gained equal rights, an instant history, with her intimate old friend . . . Jasper couldn't have known they'd been overheard upstairs, but his little smirk coming and going invited you to guess he'd been up to something. He had the pink of sex about him still. He leant by Nick on the balustrade, and he was clearly fairly drunk.

  "Is Catherine OK?"

  "Yeah . . . She's a bit knackered, she's turned in. This isn't really her sort of scene."

  Nick stared at the compound presumption of this remark and said, "Things going OK between you two?"

  "Ooh yes," said Jasper, with a momentary pout, a wincing frown, to say how very hot it was. "No, she's a lovely lady."

  Nick couldn't rise to this. After a moment he said, as nicely as he could, "You are looking after her, aren't you, Jasper?"

  "Hark at Uncle Nick," said Jasper, piqued and somehow furtive.

  "I mean, she seems quite steady at the moment, but it would just be disastrous if she came off this medication again."

  "I think she's got it all sorted out," said Jasper, after a pause, adjusting his tone, his whole accent. He stood back and pushed his right hand through his glossy chestnut forelock, which immediately fell forward again; then the hand went into his jacket pocket, with just the thumb hooked out: subtly annoying gestures meant perhaps to convey commitment and dash to the doubtful house-buyer. "She thinks the world of you, Nick," he said.

  Polly Tompkins had come out onto the balcony, perhaps jealous at seeing Nick with the boy he had squashed unavailingly earlier. Nick introduced them in a thinly amused tone which made no great claims for either of them. "I thought you were avoiding me," he said.

  Jasper was waiting casually to see what the terms were, and if this big fat double-breasted man, who could have been anything between twenty-five and fifty, was part of the gay conspiracy or the straight one. Polly said, "You're such a social butterfly, I haven't been able to reach you with my net," and looked at Jasper as if to say he could find a use for him, if Nick couldn't.

  Nick said, "Well, I was a social caterpillar for years."

  Polly smiled and took out a packet of fags. "You seem to be very close with our friend Mr Ouradi. What were you talking to him about, I wonder?"

  "Oh, you know . . . cinema . . . Beethoven . . . Henry James."

  "Mmm . . . " Polly looked at the Silk Cut—a quitter's ten—but didn't open them. "Or Lord Ouradi, as I suppose we shall soon be saying."

  Nick struggled to look unsurprised as he ran through all the reasons that Polly might be pulling his leg. He said, "I wouldn't be surprised—there's a sort of reverse social gravity these days, isn't there. People just plummet upstairs."

  "I think Bertrand's rather more deserving than that," said Polly, successfully resisting and pocketing the cigarettes.

  "Anyway, he's not British, is he?" Nick said airily, and rather proud of this objection. It was Polly, after all, who'd once called him a Levantine grocer.

  "That's hardly an insuperable problem," said Polly with a quick pitying smile. "Well, we must be going. I just wanted to say goodbye. Morgan has an early start tomorrow. She has to fly up to Edinburgh."

  "Well, my dear," said Nick, "one never sees you these days. I've given up keeping your place warm for you at the Shaftesbury"—a kindness, a bit of a sentimental gesture at the sort of friendship they had never actually had.

  And Polly did a small but extraordinary thing: he looked at Nick and said, "Not that I remotely concur with what you've just said—about the peerage." He didn't flush or frown or grimace, but his long fat face seemed to harden in a fixative of threat and denial.

  He went in, and Jasper followed him, turning to give Nick a curt little nod, in his own unconsciou
s impression of Polly, so that the mannerism seemed to spread, a note of contempt that was a sign of allegiance.

  10

  THE SERVICE STAIRS were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread. It was glory at last, an escalation of delight, from which small doors, flush with the panelling, moved by levers below the prince-bishops' high-heeled and rosetted shoes, gave access, at every turn, to the back stairs, and their treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang, crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable anticlimax of home.

  On his back, in the curtained light, the inveterate habits of home took hold of him without a word . . . Wani, of course . . . yes, Wani . . . in the car . . . and that time with Ricky, the outrage of it . . . though home, historically, was a shrine of Toby-longing, almost extinct now, worked up only in moods of vicious nostalgia . . . still, it seemed possible . . . Toby of three years ago . . . at Hawkeswood . . . morning after the great party . . . calling him into the King's Room, sweaty with hangover under one roiled sheet . . . "Fuck, what a night . . . !" and then he darted to the bathroom . . . only time he saw him naked . . . great innocent rower's arse . . . did that happen . . . did what happened next happen . . . and Wani that night . . .

  met him on the stairs. . . who would have dreamt. . . dark green velvet. . . oh god, Wani in the flat . . . tied to the posts of the ogee bed . . .

  It must be Mrs Creeley with his mother in the drive. They were talking about the car, Nick's little Mazda, "a nice little runaround" his father had called it, to minimize their evident anxiety as to how he had come by such a thing. NG 2485: Mrs Creeley was thrilled by the number plate, Mrs Guest perhaps not so sure. ("You must be doing very well, dear," she had said, in just the tone she would use to say "You don't look very well, dear.") Wood pigeons in the trees, in the thick spruces at the front, making their broody calls, reproachful, condoning—who knew? The two women moved away, in the slow trawl of gossip, over the gravel: talk about the sale of the field, syllables only, on the faint breeze through the open top window, overlaid by the pigeons, the talk beaded and chiming, rhythmic and nonsensical, the breeze lifting and dropping the curtain in one lazy breath, hushing the voices. The lie-in: time-honoured concession of school holidays, the rare weekend visits. His father would have gone to the shop—he might have woken to the familiar drag of garage door, thump of car door, and then wandered sideways again into staircase dreams. Mrs Creeley went, he didn't hear his mother come inside, she had probably got up in gardening trousers, an old blouse that didn't matter. They had Gerald descending tonight, and the house, inside and out, would be ready for an inspection . . . A little later came the leisurely clop of a horse, sounds as abstract and calming as other people's exertions on the tennis courts at home—at his other home. He wasn't sure, but he thought it was right that no horse had equal tone or resonance in all four hooves, as it distanced it made an odd sauntering impression, a syncopation, until lastly only one hoof continued faintly to be heard.

  Out on the edge of town was where they were, where they'd carefully and long-sightedly chosen to be, on Cherry Tree Lane, decent post-war houses with plenty of garden, and only a view of fields at the back, and horses leaning in from time to time to chomp at the delphiniums and the weeping willow. And now the dreaded thing had happened, Sidney Hayes had bought next door, and thus at last got access from the lane to the field where he kept his horses, and got planning permission too, exceedingly quickly, five houses to the acre. Everyone had objected to the plans, and Nick had even been made embarrassingly to bring it up with Gerald, as their MP, who said of course he'd put a stop it, but quickly lost interest since no conditions had been breached, in fact rather the reverse, there was a property boom, home ownership was within the grasp of all, and even with the new development on top of them the value of "Linnells" was destined to soar. All this cast a muddling running shadow over Don and Dot Guest's lives. They were more comfortable than they'd ever been, business was better, and yet across their treasured view a long-held worry was about to materialize in bricks and slates.

  Despite its long mute presence in his life Nick found it hard to care for the house, its pinkish walls and metal-framed windows; it lacked poetry. At Linnells, as Gerald had said of Hawkeswood, the contents were the thing: a ruck of furniture, crowded families of Staffordshire and Chelsea figures, three clocks ticking competitively in one room, where the real family sat, supervised and even a little oppressed by their own possessions. Which changed, unpredictably, when something came into the shop that Don wanted to live with, or when a buyer was suddenly found for something in the house. So the market squeezed on them, acceptably, amusingly, and they would let a chest or a grandfather clock go, which in Nick's young life had the status of an heirloom already. For years he had had a nice wide walnut bed, a snug double of imagined couplings—the whorls and fans in the grain of the walnut were the underwater blooms of adolescent thought, pale pond-life of a hundred lie-ins. But one Christmas, in fact the one after he had come out, he arrived home to find it had been sold from under him, and replaced by something plain, modem, single and inhibitingly squeaky. In the past year or so, as business boomed, Don had started asking "London prices," which had always been family code for extortion. Meanwhile London prices themselves had climbed, so Guest's was still cheaper and worth a day trip from town. Yesterday, after the big uneasy surprise of the car, Nick had had his own surprise, the missing bureau. "You'll never guess what I got for it," his father said—with a look of unaccustomed and still embarrassed greed.

  Nick came downstairs and glanced out coyly at the car. He liked to give himself that little prepared surprise, it was new enough for the thrill of its first arrival to flare up beautifully again each morning. Like a child's new present it lit up a dull day, and made it worth getting up and going out, just to sit in the simmer of London traffic and feel the throb of possession. If it had shocked his parents, then it had shocked him too, the colour, the grin of it, the number plate, all things he wouldn't have chosen for himself. But the burden of choice and discretion had been taken off him, it was what Wani wanted him to have, and he let himself go. The car was his lower nature, wrapped in a gift ribbon, and he came to a quick accommodation with it, and found it not so bad or so low after all. A first car was a big day for a boy, and he wished his parents could just have clapped their hands at the fun of it; but that wasn't their way. He explained, as he smiled anxiously, that it was all to do with work, it was a tax write-off, it was nonsense he didn't understand himself. He tried to entertain them with the mechanism of the roof, and opened the bonnet for his father to look at the cylinders and things, which he did with a nod and a hum; clocks, not engines, were his oily interest. Nick wondered why they couldn't share in his excitement; but had to admit, after ten minutes, that he'd somehow known they wouldn't—the hilarity of his arrival had been a self-delusion. He thought of an obscure childhood incident when he'd stolen ten shillings from his mother to buy her a present of a little china hen; he'd denied it through such storms of tears that he wasn't sure now if he'd stolen the money or not; he'd almost convinced himself of his innocence. The episode still darkened his mind as a failed, an obscurely guilty, attempt to please. It was the same with the car, they couldn't see where it came from, and they were right in a way, since they knew him so well: there was something very important he wasn't telling them. In Rachel's terms the Mazda was certainly vulgar and potentially unsafe; but f
or Don and Dot its shiny red snout in the drive was more than that, it was the shock of who Nick was, and the disappointment.

  Gerald was in Barwick on various duties, first the Summer Fete, which he was opening at two o'clock, and later a dinner at the Crown to mark the retirement of the agent; in between he was due to look in at Cherry Tree Lane for a drink. It was the last weekend before their departure to France, and his usual bad temper about anything to do with Barwick was only soothed by the prospect of making speeches at at least two of these events. Rachel had stayed at home, and Penny had come up with Gerald to write down people's names on bits of paper and prevent those muddles which had caused some bad feeling in the past.

  The Barwick Fete, which Nick hadn't been to since his schooldays, was held in Abbots' Field, a park near the middle of town. On a normal Saturday afternoon the field had two dim attractions, a fragment of the once great Augustinian abbey, and a Gents where the maniacal rejoinders and obliterations of the graffiti had come to interest Nick in his adolescence even more than the Curvilinear tracery of the monks' choir. He had never made contact in the Gents, never acted on the graffiti, but whenever he passed it on a walk with his mother and heard the busy unattended flush of the urinal, his look became tense and tactful, he felt the kinship of an unknown crowd. Today the field was ringed with stalls, there was a skittle alley hedged with straw bales, a traction engine let out shrill whistles, and the silver prize band warred euphoniously with a jangling old carousel. Nick wandered round feeling both distinguished and invisible. He stopped to talk to friends of his parents, who were genial but just perceptibly short with him, because of what they knew or guessed about him. The friendliness, a note of bright supportive pity, was really directed to his parents, not to him. It made him wonder for a moment how he was talked about; it must be hard for his mother to boast about him. Being sort of the art adviser on a non-existent magazine was as obscure and unsatisfactory as being gay. He scented a false respect, which perhaps was just good manners; a reluctance to be drawn into truth-telling talk. He saw Mr Leverton, his old English master, who had done The Turn of the Screw with him and sent him off to Oxford, and they had a chat about Nick's doctorate. Nick called him Stanley now, with a residual sense of transgression. He felt a kind of longing behind Mr Leverton's black-framed glasses for the larger field of speculation Nick was moving in, and for other things too. The old tone of crisp enthusiasm quavered with a new anxiety about keeping up. He said, "Come back and see us! Come and talk to the A-level lot. We've had a very jolly Hopkins group this year." Later Nick said hello to Miss Avison, who much earlier in his life had taught him ballroom dancing; his mother had said it would be something he'd always be grateful for. She remembered all the children she'd taught, and with no acknowledgement that they'd grown and changed and hadn't danced a waltz or a two-step for twenty years. Nick felt for a moment he was still a treasured and blissfully obedient little boy.