The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

"Yes, I am," he said, with a snuffle of frankness.

  "How much money have you got?"

  His expression was sharp, but not entirely displeased. "It's hard to say exactly."

  Sally said, "You can never say exactly, can you—it goes up so fast all the time . . . these days."

  "Well, roughly," said Catherine.

  "If I died tomorrow."

  Sally looked solemn, but interested. "My dear man . . . !" she murmured.

  "Say, a hundred and fifty million."

  "Yep . . . " said Sally, nodding illusionlessly.

  Catherine was blank with concealed astonishment. "A hundred and fifty million pounds."

  "Well, not lire, young lady, I can assure you. Or Bolivian bolivianos, either."

  There was a pause while Catherine allowed them to enjoy her confusion, and Toby said something smooth about the markets, which Sir Maurice merely shrugged at, to show he couldn't be expected to talk about such things at their level.

  Catherine poked at a segmental log of cucumber in her drink and said, "I noticed you gave some money to the appeal at Podier church."

  "Oh, we give to endless churches and appeals," said Sally.

  "How much did you give?"

  "I don't recall exactly."

  "Probably quite a lot, knowing Maurice!" Sir Maurice had the super-complacent look of someone being criticized.

  "You gave five francs," said Catherine. "Which is about fifty new pence. But you could have given"—she raised her glass and swept it across the vista of hills and the far glimpse of river—"a million francs, without noticing really, and single-handedly saved the Romanesque narthex!"

  These were two terms Maurice Tipper had never had to deal with singly, much less together. "I don't know about not noticing," he said, rather leniently.

  "You simply can't give to everything," said Sally. "You know, we've got Covent Garden . . ."

  "No, OK," said Catherine, tactically, as if she'd been quite silly.

  "What's all this . . . ?" said Gerald, coming out in shorts and espadrilles, with a towel over his shoulder.

  "The young lady was giving me some criticism. Apparently I'm rather mean."

  "Not in so many words," said Catherine.

  "I'm afraid the fact is that some people just are very rich," said Sally.

  Gerald, clearly sick of his guests, and glancing tensely towards the steps to the pool, said, "My daughter tends to think we should give everything we've worked for away."

  "Not everything, obviously. But it might be nice to help when you can." She gave them a toothy smile.

  "Well, did you put something in the box?" said Sir Maurice.

  "I didn't have any money with me," said Catherine.

  Gerald went on, "My daughter lives her life under the strange delusion that she's a pauper, rather than—well, what she is. I'm afraid she's impossible to argue with because she keeps saying the same thing."

  "It's not that," said Catherine vaguely and irritably. "I just don't see why, when you've got, say, forty million you absolutely have to turn it into eighty million."

  "Oh . . . !" said Sir Maurice, as if at an absurdly juvenile mistake.

  "It sort of turns itself, actually," said Toby.

  "I mean who needs so much money? It's just like power, isn't it. Why do people want it? I mean, what's the point of having power?"

  "The point of having power," said Gerald, "is that you can make the world a better place."

  "Quite so," said Sir Maurice.

  "So do you start off wanting to do particular things, or just to have the sensation of power, to know you can do things if you want to?"

  "It's the chicken and the egg, isn't it," said Sally with conviction.

  "It's rather a good question," said Toby, seeing that Maurice was getting fed up.

  "If I had power," said Catherine, "which god forbid—"

  "Amen to that," murmured Gerald.

  "I think I should stop people having a hundred and fifty million pounds."

  "There you are, then," said Sir Maurice, "you've answered your own question." He laughed briefly. "I must say, I hadn't expected to hear this kind of talk in a place like this."

  Gerald moved off, saying, "It's art school, I'm afraid, Maurice," but not looking sure that this routine disparagement would please his guest any more than the lunch at Chez Claude.

  (iv)

  During dinner that evening the phone rang. Everyone out on the terrace looked ready for a call, and a self-denying smirk spread along the table as they listened to Liliane answering it. Nick was expecting nothing himself, but he saw the Tippers being called home by some opportune disaster. Liliane came out into the edge of the candlelight and said it was for Madame. The conversation at table continued thinly and with a vague humorous concern for the odd phrases of Rachel's that could be made out; then she must have closed the phone-room door. A few minutes later Nick saw her bedroom light go on; her half-eaten grilled trout and untouched side plate of salad took on an air of crisis. When she came back out and said, "Yes, please," with a gracious smile at Gerald's offer of more wine, she seemed both to encourage and prohibit questions. "Not bad news, I hope," said Sally Tipper. "We always get bad news when we're on holiday."

  Rachel sighed and hesitated, and held Catherine's gaze, which was alert and apprehensive. "Awfully sad, darling," she said. "It's godfather Pat. I'm afraid he died this morning."

  Catherine, with her knife and fork held unthinkingly in the air, forgot to chew as she stared at her mother and tears slipped down her cheeks.

  "Oh, I'mso sorry," said Nick, movedby her instant distress more than by the news itself, and feeling the AIDS question rear up, sudden and undeflectable, and somehow his responsibility, as the only recognized gay man present. Still, there was a communal effort by the rest of the family to veil the matter.

  "Awfully sad," said Gerald, and explained, "Pat Grayson, you know, the TV actor . . . ? Old, old friend of Rachel's . . . " Nick saw something distancing already in this and remembered how Gerald had called Pat a "film star" at Hawkeswood three years earlier, when he was successful and well. "Who was it, darling, on the phone?"

  "Oh, it was Terry," said Rachel, so tactfully and privately she was almost inaudible.

  "We see so little TV," said Sally Tipper. "We don't have the time! What with Maurice's work, and all our travelling . . . And really I don't think I miss it. What was he in, your friend?"

  Toby, clearly moved, said, "He starred in Sedley. He was bloody funny, actually."

  "Oh, sitcoms," said Sally Tipper, with a twitch.

  "Would you say, Nick?" said Gerald. "Not a sitcom exactly . . ."

  "It was sort of a comedy thriller," said Nick, who wanted them to like Pat before they found out the truth. "Sedley was the charming rogue who always got away with it."

  "Mm, quite a lady-killer," said Gerald.

  Wani said, "I thought he was so charming when I met him . . . at Lionel's house, it must have been . . . frightfully funny!"

  "I know . . . " said Rachel distractedly, stroking Catherine's hand across the table, enabling and containing the little episode of grief. She had probably been crying herself in her room, and now drew a certain resolve from having her daughter to look after.

  Gerald, with his frowning moping manner of comprehending the feelings of others while being quite untouched and even lightly repelled by them, made little sighs and rumbles from the head of the table. "Poor old Puss," he said. "Uncle Pat was her godfather. Not her real uncle, obviously . . . !"

  "Madly left-wing," said Lady Partridge, but with a chuckle of posthumous indulgence, as though that had been something else rather roguish about him. "She had two—a true-blue one and a red-hot socialist. Godfathers."

  "Well, he might have been a red-hot socialist when Mum first met him," said Toby. "But you should have heard him on the Lady."

  "What . . . ?" said Gerald.

  "Loved the Lady!"

  "Of course he did," said Gerald warmly, not wanting t
o risk the old jokes about Rachel's left-wing pals in front of the Tippers. "Her godmother, of course, is Sharon, um, Flintshire . . . you know, yup, the Duchess."

  "You and Pat were old friends," said Wani, with his instinct for social connections. "You were at Oxford together."

  "He was Benedick to my Beatrice," said Rachel, with a beautiful smile which seemed conscious of the spotlight of sympathy, "and indeed Hector Hushabye to my Hesione!"

  "Mm, jolly good!" said Gerald, outshone and subtly embarrassed.

  This was enough to rouse Maurice Tipper, who said, in the airy unsurprisable way of a suspicious person, "So how did he die?"

  Gerald made a sort of panting noise, and Rachel said quietly, "It was pneumonia, I'm afraid. But he hadn't been well, poor old Pat."

  "Oh," said Maurice Tipper.

  Rachel peered into the distance beneath the glazed earthenware salad bowl. "He picked up some extraordinary bug in the Far East last year. No one knew what it was. It's thought to be some incredibly rare thing. It's just frightfully bad luck."

  Nick felt a kind of relief that this sinister fiction was being maintained, and looked at ignorant little Jasper, who was nodding at it and not quite meeting his girlfriend's eye. Then he saw him wince in anticipation.

  "Mum, for Christ's sake!" said Catherine. "He had AIDS!"—with a phlegmy catch in her voice, which her anger fought with. "He was gay . . . he liked anonymous sex . . . he liked . . ."

  "Darling, you don't know that . . . " said Rachel. It wasn't clear how much of the story she hoped to throw doubt over.

  "Of course he did," said Catherine, whose view of gay sex was both tragic and cartoonlike. She grinned incredulously down the table. Nick felt himself included in her scorn.

  "Anyway . . . !" said Gerald, with a smile and a deep breath, as if the nasty moment had passed, lifting and tilting the bottle enquiringly towards his mother.

  "Oh, it's pathetic!" shouted Catherine, with the rush and stare of someone hurtled along by a strong new mix of emotions. "I mean surely the least we can do is tell the truth about him?"—and she smacked the table hard, but still somehow childishly and comically; there were one or two nervous smiles. She jumped her chair back over the flags and hurried indoors.

  "Um . . . should I . . . ?" said Jasper, and sniggered.

  "No, no, I'll go," said Rachel. "In a minute or two."

  "Experience suggests to wait a bit," said Gerald, as if explaining some other local custom to his guests.

  "An emotional young lady," said Maurice Tipper with a grin of displeasure.

  "She's a very emotional young lady," said Jasper, in a cowardly mixture of boasting and mockery.

  "She's quite unbalanced," Lady Partridge agreed confidentially.

  Gerald hesitated, peering over his raised wine glass, but took his daughter's part. "I think I'd say she's just very softhearted," he said; which it seemed to Nick was just what she wasn't.

  Rachel said, with a hint of frost, "Does Sophie ever get upset?"

  Sir Maurice seemed to think the question impertinent. His wife said, "If she does, she doesn't let it show. Unless she's on stage, of course. Then she's all passion." Nick thought of her performance in Lady Windermere's Fan, where all she had had to say was "Yes, mamma."

  After dinner the four boys were in the drawing room, though Jasper fidgeted and soon went upstairs to skulk around Catherine's door. Wani was reading Sir Maurice's Financial Times, and Toby was sitting in the puzzlement of bereavement, tilting a glass of cognac from side to side, and trying occasional rephrasings of the same idea to Nick: "God it's awful, poor old Pat, I can't believe it."

  Nick lowered the book he had just started, smiled to suggest the book itself was a bore. "I know," he said. "Isn't it awful. I'm so sorry." He thought of the two of them down by the pool after lunch, and the lustful tenderness he felt for Toby seemed to glow and fill the room. He was excited by Toby's grief, and the boyish need he seemed to feel for Nick's comfort, and for something wise Nick might say. Nick himself was impressed by Pat's death, and had a distantly acknowledged feeling of guilt, that he'd done nothing for Pat—though Pat, in another sense, had done nothing for him; Nick hadn't liked his brand of cagey camp, and had been snotty and even priggish with him: so that, more shamefully still, he felt subtly disembarrassed by the death, since it erased the memory of his own bad grace. "I wonder how Terry's coping," he said, to focus Toby's thoughts.

  "Yah, poor guy. God it's awful, this bloody plague."

  "I know."

  "You'd bloody well better not get the fucking thing," said Toby.

  "I'll be all right," said Nick. "I've been taking very good care since—well, since we knew about it." He glanced across at Wani, who was screened above the knees by the raised pink broadsheet with its headlines about record share prices, record house prices. From time to time he smacked the page flat. "You don't have to worry about me," Nick said.

  Toby looked a bit shame-faced. "I didn't know Pat, you know, slept around."

  "Well . . . " said Nick. He knew very well, because Catherine was indiscreet, that Pat had liked very rough sex. "Don't believe everything Catherine says. She lives in a world of her own hyperbole."

  "Yah, but she was pretty close to Pat, Nick—he took her out to dinner quite often. She stayed at Haslemere three or four times. If she says he liked anonymous sex—"

  Nick saw that the Tippers had come in. They'd been up to their room and now they'd come down, tight-lipped and close together, as though they felt obliged to put in another half-hour. Maurice had clearly been very displeased by the scene at dinner, and a suspicion of deviancy seemed to hang for him now over the whole party. The boys all stood up, and Nick set his book, face down, on the arm of his chair. Sally Tipper peered at it, to deflect her discomfort on to a neutral object, and said, "Ah, that's Maurice's book, I see."

  "Um . . . oh," said Nick, sure of himself but confused as to her reasoning; it was a study of the poetry of John Berryman. "I don't think . . ."

  "Do you see that, darling?"

  Maurice brought his gleaming lenses to bear on it. "What? Oh yes," he said. He went towards Wani, who was quickly refolding the FT.

  "You're very welcome to read it," Nick said, with a frank little laugh, "but it's actually mine—it was sent on to me this morning. I'm reviewing it for the THES."

  "Oh I see, no, no," said Sally, with a coldly tactful smile. "No, Maurice owns Pegasus—I just noticed they publish it."

  "I didn't know that."

  "I've bought it," said Sir Maurice. "I've bought the whole group. It's in the paper." And he sat down and glared at the vase of thistles and dried honesty in the grate.

  "I'm just going up to see if my sis is OK," said Toby, as though all this had decided him.

  Nick didn't feel he could go out after him. He sat down again, opposite Sally, but not quite in relation with her, like guests in a hotel lounge. He said, "I'm afraid this news has rather spoilt the evening."

  "Yes," said Sally, "it's most unfortunate."

  "Awful losing an old friend," said Nick.

  "Mm," said Sally, with a twitch, as if to say her meaning had been twisted. "So you knew him too, did you, the man?"

  "Pat—yes, a bit," said Nick. "He was a great charmer." He smiled and the word seemed to linger and insist, like a piece of code.

  Sally said, "As I say, we never saw him." She took up a copy of Country Life, and sat staring at the estate agents' advertisements. Her expression was tough, as if she was arguing the prices down; but also self-conscious, so that it seemed just possible she wanted to talk about what had happened. She looked up, and said with a great twitch, "I mean, they must have seen it coming."

  "Oh . . ." said Nick, "I see. I don't know. Perhaps. One always hopes that it won't be the case. And even if you know it's going to happen, it doesn't make it any less awful when it does." It had become unclear to him whether she knew that he was gay; he'd always assumed it was the cause for her coldness, her way of not paying attention to h
im, but now he'd started to suspect she was blind to it. He felt the large subject massing, with its logic and momentum. There would be the social strain of coming out to such people in such a place, and the wider matter of AIDS concerning them all, more or less. He said, "I think I heard you say your mother had a long final illness."

  "That was utterly different," Sir Maurice put in curtly.

  "It was a blessed relief," said Sally, "when she finally went."

  "She hadn't brought it on herself," said Sir Maurice.

  "No, that's true," Sally sighed. "I mean, they're going to have to learn, aren't they, the . . . homosexuals."

  "It's a hard way to have to learn," said Nick, "but yes, we are learning to be safe."

  Sally Tipper stared at him. "Right . . . " she said.

  Sir Maurice seemed not to notice this, but in her there was a little spectacle of ingestion. Nick tried to put it in her language, but couldn't think what the term would be. "You know, there are very simple things that need to be done. For instance, people have got to use protection . . . you know, when they're . . . when they're humping."

  "I see," said Sally, with another shake of the head. He wasn't sure she followed. Were such cheerful genteelisms any use? She had an air of being ready to take things on, and simultaneously an air of puzzled and frightened offence. "That's what he'd been doing, had he, I suppose, your friend the actor? Humping?"

  "Almost undoubtedly," said Nick. Sir Maurice made a rough, dyspeptic sound, as if chewing a mint. "But as we all know," Nick went on flatteringly, and with a sort of weary zeal now the moment had come, "there are other things one can do. I mean there's oral sex, which may be dangerous, but is certainly less so."

  Sally received this stoically. "Kissing, you mean."

  Sir Maurice looked at him sharply and said, "I'm afraid what you're saying fills me with a physical revulsion," and seemed to be laughing in his distaste. "I just don't see why anyone's remotely surprised. The whole thing had got completely out of hand. They had it coming to them."