The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "Your mother was so beautiful," Nick said.

  "I know. And Dad."

  "They're so young."

  "Yeah, Dad's not that keen on it actually. He doesn't want the Lady seeing him in his hippy phase." To judge from the photos Gerald's hippy phase had reached its counter-cultural extreme in a pair of mutton-chop whiskers and a floral tie.

  "I can't work out how old they were."

  "Well, Dad'll be fifty next year, so he was . . . twenty-four; and Ma's a couple of years older, of course."

  "They're our age," said Nick.

  "They didn't waste any time," said Toby with a sad little smile.

  "They certainly didn't waste any time having you, dear," Nick said, making the amusing calculation. "You must have been conceived on the honeymoon."

  "I think I was," said Toby, both proud and embarrassed. "Somewhere in South Africa. Ma was a virgin when she was married, I know that, and three weeks later she was pregnant. No playing around there."

  "No, indeed," said Nick, thinking of the years his parents had taken to have him, and with an inward smile at his own freedoms.

  Toby looked at his speech again, and bit his lip. Nick watched him affectionately: unbuttoned jacket over crimson cummerbund, heavy black shoes, hair cut short so that he looked fatter-faced, like an embarrassed approximation of his father, but his father as he was now, not when he was twenty-four. On a slow impulse Nick said, "I may have just what you need. If you'd like a little, er, chemical help."

  "Have you . . . ?" said Toby, startled but interested.

  And Nick murmured to him that he'd managed to get hold of a bit of charlie.

  "God, amazing, thanks a lot!" said Toby, and then smiled round guiltily.

  They sent a waiter to the drawing room with champagne, and went on up, with a little flutter about "rehearsing." For Nick the flutter was that of sharing the secret. They went into Toby's old bedroom, and locked the door. "The place is crawling with fuzz," Toby said.

  "So what are you going to say in your speech?" said Nick, tipping out some powder on the bedside table. The room had a special mood of desertion, not the mute patience of a spare bedroom but the stillness of a place a boy has grown up in and abandoned, with everything settling into silence just as it was. There was a chest of drawers in mahogany and a gilt-framed mirror, very nice pieces, and Toby's school and team photos, a young unguarded class sense to everything; and the wardrobe of clothes Nick had once daringly dressed up in, which had lost their meaning, even to him.

  "I thought I might make a joke about the Conference," said Toby. "You know, the Next Move Forward, and Mum and Dad going on for ever, like the Lady."

  "Mm." Nick frowned over the busy credit card. "I think the thing is, darling, you should make the speech just as if the Lady wasn't there. And everything you say should be about . . . your father and your mother. It's their day, not hers, and not just Gerald's."

  "Oh," said Toby.

  "You might even make it more about Rachel."

  "Right. . . God, I wish you'd write it." Toby slouched anxiously about the room. From downstairs the doorbell was heard and the first guests arriving. "I mean, what can you say about the old girl?"

  "You could say what a lot she's had to put up with in Gerald," said Nick, with a dark sense of her not knowing the half of it. "Actually, don't say that," he added prudently; "just keep it short." He pictured Toby standing and speaking, his anxiety grinning through to a crowd that would be warmed with drink into roughness as well as affection. "Remember, everyone loves you," he said, to help him overlook the various monsters who were coming.

  Toby stooped and sniffed up his line and stood back; Nick waited and watched for the amorous dissolve, not knowing quite what colour it would take in him. "Haven't done this for yonks," Toby said, half protest, half apology. Then, "Mm, that's very nice . . ." And a minute later, in beaming surrender, "This is great stuff, Nick, I must say. Where the hell did you get it?"

  Nick snorted briskly and wiped the table with the flat of his finger. "Oh, I got it off Ouradi, actually."

  "Right," said Toby. "Yah, Ouradi always gets great stuff."

  "You used to do it with him in the old days."

  "I know, we did once or twice. I didn't know you ever did it, though." Toby pranced towards him, and it was all Nick could do not to kiss him and feel for his dick, as he would have done with Wani himself. Instead he said, "Here, why don't you take the rest of this." It was about a third of a gram.

  "God, no, I couldn't," said Toby, with the gleam of possession at once in his face.

  "Yeah, go on," said Nick. "I've had enough, but you might need some more." He held out the tiny billet-doux, which as always with Ronnie was made from a page of a girlie mag; a magnified nipple covered it like a seal. Toby took it and put it, after a moment's thought, deep in his breast pocket. "God, that's fantastic!" he said. "Yah, I think tonight'll be all right, you know, I'm just going to keep it short," and he went prattling on in the simple high spirits of a first hit of cocaine. On the way downstairs he said, "Of course, darling, tell me if you want some more—I won't use all this."

  "I'll be fine," said Nick.

  They sashayed into the drawing room, where Lady Partridge was asking a man from the Treasury about muggers, and Badger Brogan was flirting gingerly with Greta Timms, pregnant with her seventh child. Nick circled through the room, smiling and almost immune to the anxiety he noticed in others, the booming joviality, the glancing inattentiveness, the sense of a lack that was waiting to be filled by the famous arrival. He looked round for a drink. The coke trickle in his throat made him doubly thirsty. Two waiters came in with laden trays, which made him laugh: they were just the answer to a double thirst. He chose, on grounds of beauty, the dark, full-lipped one, "Thanks—oh, hello," Nick said, over his raised glass, knowing the waiter before he knew who he was—just for a second, while everything was shining and suspended, their eyes engaged, the bubbles sailing upwards in a dozen tall glasses. "I remember you," he said then, rather drily, as if he were a waiter who had memorably dropped something.

  "Oh . . . good evenin," the waiter said, pleasantly, so that Nick felt forgiven; and then, "Where do I see you before?"—so that he guessed he was in fact forgotten.

  There was a commotion at the window, and Geoffrey Titchfield said, "Ah, the Prime Minister's car has arrived," like an old flunkey, steeped in the grandeur of his masters. He moved towards the door, too exalted by his own words to share in the fuss that they had triggered. Guests glanced into each other's faces for reassurance, one or two seemed already to give up, and withdrew into corners, and among the men there was some thinly amiable jostling. Nick followed through onto the landing, with the sense that the PM was beyond discretion, she'd be piqued if there wasn't a throng, a popular demonstration. He was pressed against the banister at the first turn of the stair, smiling down like an eye-catching unnamed attendant in a history painting. The door was standing open and the damp chill from outside gave an edge to the excitement. The women shivered with happy discomfort. The night was the fractious element they had triumphed against. The Mordant Analyst scurried in, almost tripped, amid laughs and tuts. Gerald was already in the street, in humble alignment with the Special Branch boys. Rachel stood just inside, haloed by the drizzly light and the diaphanous silver sheath of her dress. The well-known voice was heard, there was a funny intent silence of a second or two, and then there she was.

  She came in at her gracious scuttle, with its hint of a long-suppressed embarrassment, of clumsiness transmuted into power. She looked ahead, into the unknown house, and everything she saw was a confirmation. The high hall mirror welcomed her, and in it the faces of the welcomers, some of whom, grand though they were, had a look beyond pride, a kind of rapture, that was bold and shy at once. She seemed pleased by the attention, and countered it cheerfully and practically, like modem royalty. She gave no sign of noticing the colour of the front door.

  Upstairs, calm was re-established, but of a specia
l kind, the engaged calm of progress once the overture has finished and the curtain has gone up. People recollected themselves. There was a sort of unplanned receiving line when the Lady came into the room (her husband, behind her, slipped modestly towards a drink and an old friend). Barry Groom, bouncing back from a low point with a call girl in the spring, dropped his head with horrible humility as the PM took his hand; it was later claimed that he had even said hello. Wani she greeted humorously, as someone she had seen recently elsewhere—he won the glow of recognition but surrendered the claim to need to speak to her so soon again; though he held on to her hand and it wasn't clear for a moment if he was going to kiss her. Gerald steered her jealously on, murmuring names. Nick watched with primitive interest as she approached; again she was beyond manners, however courtly and jewelled. Her hair was so perfect that he started to picture it wet and hanging over her face. She was wearing a long black skirt and a wide-shouldered white-and-gold jacket, amazingly embroidered, like a Ruritanian uniform, and cut low at the front to display a magnificent pearl necklace. Nick peered at the necklace, and the large square bosom, and the motherly fatness of the neck. "Isn't she beautiful," said Trudi Titchfield, in unselfconscious reverie. Nick was briskly presented, elided almost, in the rhythm of the long social sentence, but with a surprising detail, or fib, "Nick Guest . . . a great friend of our children . . . a young don," so that he saw himself enhanced and also compromised, since dons were not the PM's favourite people. He nodded and smiled and felt her blue eyes briefly but unconfidently focus on him before she seized the initiative and called out, "John, hullo . . . !" to John Timms, who was suddenly right next to him. "Prime Minister . . ." said John Timms, not shaking her hand but clasping her somehow with the fervour and humour of his tone. At the end of the row were the children themselves, a goggling unmatched pair, Toby still marvellously cheerful and Catherine, who could have sulked or asked an awkward question, shaking hands with a bright "Hello!" and gazing at the PM like a child at a conjuror. "Oh, and this is my boyfriend," she said, producing Jasper but forgetting to name him. "Hello," said the Prime Minister, in a tone just dry enough to suggest that by now she deserved a drink: which Tristao, with his doe eyes and nerveless smile, was at hand to provide.

  Nick trotted downstairs from a quick refresher and caught Wani coming out of Gerald and Rachel's bedroom. "God, careful, darling," he said.

  "I was just using the lav," said Wani.

  "Mm," said Nick. He was too drunk and high himself to take the danger at all seriously. "Do use my lav if you need to."

  "The stairs," said Wani.

  Nick loved the way the coke took off the blur of champagne, claret, Sautemes, and more champagne. It totted up the points and carried them over as credit in a new account of pleasure. It brought clarity, like a cure—almost, at first, like sobriety. He put an arm round Wani's shoulders, and asked him if he was having a good time. "We see so little of each other," he said. They started to go downstairs and something caught Nick's eye at the third or fourth step, someone else moving in the great white bedroom that Wani had come out of. His instinct as guardian of the house, preventer of trouble, quickened. Jasper came out, businesslike, as if he had the keys and was showing the place to a buyer. He gave Nick a nod and a wink. "Just going up to Cat's room," he said.

  "So," said Nick, as he and Wani went on down, with a pensive hesitation each step or two, as though they might stop completely in the charm of a shared thought, "you've been running the house tart up the hill . . . "

  "It's got to be climbed, old chap, it's got to be climbed."

  "Yeah," said Nick, with a sniff and a sour turning down of the mouth. He looked for guilt in Wani's oddly rosy face; he glimpsed, like shuffled cards, the two of them together in the bathroom, Wani's love of corruption, all the licence that went with the latest line. "So it's not our secret any more," he said. Wani gave him a look that was scornful but not aggressive. Nick might be in the clear, clever phase, but Wani was much further on, in the phase where high spirits reel and stall and blink at a barely recognized room or friend. Nick let him go, and the high heartbeat of the coke became a short sprint of panic. He smiled defensively, and the smile seemed to search and find a happier subject, in the opening bloom of the drug. It was hard to know what mattered. There was certainly no point in thinking about it now. Out in the marquee the music had started, and everything had the air of an escapade.

  He found Catherine in a corner of the drawing room being chatted up by toothy old Jonty Stafford, the retired ambassador, who stooped over her like a convivial Jabberwock. "No, I think you'd like Dubrovnik," he was saying, with a suggestive hooding of the eyes. "The Hotel Diocletian, enormous charm."

  "Oh," said Catherine.

  "They always gave us the bridal suite, you know . . . which has the most enormous bed. You could have had an orgy in there."

  "Not on your wedding night, presumably."

  "Hello, Sir Jonty."

  "Ah, now here's your handsome young beau, now I'm for it, now I'm done for!" said SirJonty, and lurched off after another passing female bottom, which happened to be that of the PM. He looked back for a moment with a shake of the head: "Marvellous, you know . . . the Prime Minister . . . "

  "I think you've just been propositioned by a very drunk old man," said Nick.

  "Well, it's nice to be noticed by someone," said Catherine, dropping onto a sofa. "Sit here. Do you know where Jaz is?"

  "Haven't seen him," said Nick.

  The photographer was at large, and his flash gleamed in the mirrors. He slipped and lingered among the guests, approached with a smile, like a vaguely remembered bore, in his bow tie and dinner jacket, and then poufl—he'd got them. Later he came back, he came around, because most shots catch a bleary blink or a turned shoulder, and got them again. Now they bunched and faced him, or they pretended they hadn't seen him and acted themselves with careless magnificence. Nick dropped onto the sofa beside Catherine, lounged with one leg curled under him and a grin on his face at his own elegance. He felt he could act himself all night. He felt fabulous, he loved these nights, and whilst it would have been good to top the thing off with sex it seemed hardly to matter if he didn't. It made the absolute best of not having sex.

  "Mm, you smell nice," said Catherine.

  "Oh, it's just the old 'Je Promets,' " said Nick, and shook his cufflinks at her. "Have you had your twelve seconds with the PM yet?"

  "I was just about to, but Gerald put a stop to it."

  "I heard a bit of her talk at dinner. She does that Great Person thing of being very homely and self-indulgent."

  "Greedy," said Catherine.

  "They all love it, they breathe sighs of relief, they'd talk about marge versus butter all night, and then suddenly she's on them with the Common Agricultural Policy."

  "You've not given her your own thoughts on it."

  "Not yet. . ." said Nick. "She's quite closely managed, isn't she? She's in charge, but she goes where she's told."

  "Well, she's not in charge here," said Catherine, beckoning boldly to Tristao. "What do you want to drink?"

  "What do I want?'.' said Nick, matching Tristao's formal smile with a sly one, and running his eyes up the waiter's body. "What would I like best?"

  "Champagne, sir? Or something stronger?"

  "Champagne for now," Nick drawled, "and something stronger later." The view of pleasure deepened in front of him, the lovely teamwork of drugs and drink, the sense of risk nonsensically heightening the sense of security, the new conviction he could do what he wanted with Tristao, after all these years. Tristao himself merely nodded, but as he stooped to reach an empty glass he leant quickly and heavily on Nick's knee. Nick watched him going away through the crowded room and for several long seconds it was all one perspective, here and Hawkeswood, the gilt, the mirrors, room after room, the glimpsed coat-tails of a fugitive idea: which then came to you, by itself, and it was what you wanted. The pursuit was nothing but a restless way of waiting. All shall have pri
zes: Gerald was right. When Tristao came back and bowed the drinks on their tray towards them, Nick plucked up his glass in a toast that was both general and secret. "To us," he said.

  "To us," said Catherine. "Do stop flirting with that waiter."

  A minute later she said, "Fedden seems pretty lively tonight. Most unlike himself, I must say." They looked across to where Toby was sprawled on the PM's sofa and telling some unimaginable joke. Just beside the PM the wide dented seat cushion was a reception zone on which supplicants perched for an audience of a minute or two before being amicably dislodged—though Toby, trading perhaps on the triumph of his speech after dinner, had been there rather longer.

  "I wouldn't be surprised," said Nick, "if Wani hadn't given him a bit of laughing powder to get him through."

  "Oh, god," said Catherine disparagingly, before smiling at the idea of it. "You know what he's like, he'll offer her a poke or whatever it's called."

  "She's had a lot to drink, hasn't she. But it doesn't seem to have any effect."

  "It's so funny watching the men with her. They come up with their wives but you can see they're an embarrassment—look at that one now, yes, shakes hands, 'Yes, Prime Minister, yes, yes,' can't quite get round to introducing his wife . . . obviously longing for her to get lost so he can have a hot date with the Lady himself—now she's got to sit on the sofa, he's furious . . . but yes! she's got him—he's squatting down . . . he's kneeling on the carpet . . ."

  "Maybe she'll make him kiss her, um . . ."

  "Oh, surely not . . ."

  "Her ring, darling!"

  "Oh, maybe. It's a very big one."

  "Well, she's quite queenly, isn't she, in that outfit."

  "Queenly? . . . Darling, she looks like a country and western singer."