The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  On the nine o'clock news they were talking already about a Tory landslide. Nick had another huge whisky, and felt a familiar relief begin to smooth down the bleak edges of the day. He felt he was missing the regard that was due to the bereaved, the indulgence, like a special sad prize, that was given to boys at school when the news came through. He even wondered for a while about a toot, but he knew he didn't want the irrelevant high spirits of coke. Drink showed more respect for the night, and seemed ready to mediate, for three or four hours, between the demands of grief and current affairs.

  The election unrolled at its own unsatisfactory tempo. For ages the pundits sat in the studio, waiting for results to process and pronounce on. The tedium of the four long weeks of the election reached its purest form in their attempts to summarize and predict. Various old maxims and traditions were rehearsed, with a consoling effect of pantomime. Reporters were seen, perched in a dozen town halls with nothing as yet to report. Below them, out of focus, the tellers at their long tables were racing to finish, so that another game seemed to flourish on the back of the main contest. They were going to show the Barwick declaration later on, and for five seconds Nick saw the council room in the Market Hall and the not quite familiar figures at work; then there was a film clip showing the main candidates canvassing. Gerald's style was one of crisp confidence, striding through the square with glancing "Good morning"s, like a boss coming into an office, and not listening to anything that was being said. The inexperienced Alliance woman, by contrast, got snagged in well-meaning debate with Tracey Weeks, who she was slow to realize, and on camera was reluctant to acknowledge, wasn't all there. It was sad that the Barwick electorate should be exemplified to the nation by old Tracey; Nick distanced himself from his home town with a cagey laugh, though he was very curious to see it on TV. It had a steady provincial look to it, surprised but not overwhelmed to have been noticed by the outside world. It wasn't exactly the place he knew.

  Later Nick was downstairs -when Catherine called out, "It's Polly Thing!" and he rushed back up and leant over the back of the sofa—the returning officer was already speaking. Polly Tompkins was standing for Pershore, traditionally Tory but with a strong SDP vote in '83; he couldn't be sure of getting in, and Gerald, who admired Polly, warned that his age might tell against him. Nick had read an article about young candidates—of the hundred and fifty or so under thirty the dry expectation was that half a dozen would get elected. Standing in the middle of the stage, fat and hot in a double-breasted suit, Polly could have passed for forty-five; he seemed camouflaged in his own elected future. Nick couldn't decide if he wanted him to win or not. It was a spectacle, and he looked at it with untroubled cruelty, like a boxing match. It would be good to see him smacked down. Nick supposed the candidates must know the result by now, since they'd been at the count; but perhaps not, if it was very close. Now Polly was staring out into the challenge of the lights, the invisible millions who suddenly had their eyes on him. The tiny Labour vote was announced, and he gave a heartless wince of commiseration. And now his own name was being said, "Tompkins, Paul Frederick Gervase"—("Conservative" in murmured parenthesis)—"seventeen thousand, two hundred and thirty-eight votes": the word votes shouted over a roar of triumph so quick that Polly himself seemed not to have worked it out—there was a moment's blankness in his face, and then you saw him give in to the roar and grin like a boy and raise two fists in the air—he was monstrous, Catherine said, "God . . ." in her dullest tone, but Nick felt his grin turn wistful with unexpected pleasure as the returning officer fought on against the noise, "And I therefore declare the said Paul Frederick Gervase Tompkins duly elected . . . " "Paul Tompkins," said the reporter briskly, showing in his equable tone that he hadn't known Polly as the nightmare queen of the Worcester MCR, "only twenty-eight years old . . ."as Polly shook hands crushingly with the losers, and then stepped backwards, peered round with a kind of cunning confusion, using the crowd's indulgence, his first thrill of popularity, and stretched out an arm to call a woman forward from the back of the stage. She strode up to him, nudged against him, their fingers fumbled together, and then he jerked their hands upwards in the air. "A great night for Paul Tompkins's wife, too," said the commentator: "only married last month—Morgan Stevens, one of the guiding lights at Conservative Central Office—I know she's been working tirelessly behind the scenes on this campaign . . . " Polly carried on shaking their awkwardly linked fists above their heads, his lapel dragged up against his jowls, and something he couldn't disguise in his face, something deeper than scorn, the madness of self-belief. It was already time for him to make a speech, but he milked the acclaim crudely—he looked a bit of a buffoon. He stepped forward, still loosely holding Morgan's hand, and then dodged back and kissed her, not wedding-style, but as one might kiss an aunt. He had hardly started to speak when the viewers were abruptly returned to the studio.

  "Is Morgan really a woman?" said Catherine.

  "Very fair question," said Nick; "but I think so."

  "She's got a man's name."

  "Well, there was Morgan Le Fay, wasn't there, the famous witch."

  "Was there?"

  "Anyway, she's married to a man called Polly, so it's probably all right."

  Now the results were coming in too fast to be sure of individual notice. The talk of a landslide took shape in vertiginous diagrams. "I thought it was a landslide last time," said Catherine. "We had that book about it."

  "Yes, it was," said Nick.

  She stared at the screen, where the famous swingometer was virtually at rest. "But nothing's changing," she said. "I mean there's two more Labour seats. That's not a landslide."

  "Oh, I see," said Nick.

  "I mean a landslide's a disaster, it changes everything."

  "So you thought . . . " Nick thought he saw that Catherine, in her inattentive but literal way, had convinced herself it was a Labour landslide. "It's a dead metaphor, darling. It just means a crushing victory."

  "Oh god," said Catherine, almost tearfully.

  "I mean, the land did slide once, as we all know. And it looks very much as though it's going to stay slidden."

  Barwick came up half an hour later. There was a buzz in the studio, as if they knew something was about to happen. Nick and Catherine sat forward on the sofa. "Welcome to Barwick," said the bearded young reporter: "where we're in the splendid Market Hall built by Sir Christopher Wren." ("No, you are not," said Nick.) "We're expecting the declaration in the next minute. Barwick of course held by Gerald Fedden since the last election—a minister in the Home Office—something of a maverick, but could be looking at a Cabinet post in the next government—he had a majority of over eight thousand in '83, but we're expecting to see a big increase in the Alliance vote here—Muriel Day, a very popular figure locally . . . " The camera found the two rivals, each in discussion with their people, Gerald chaffing as if nothing was going on, Muriel Day already rehearsing the smile of a good loser. The Labour man, perhaps under a delusion about the outcome, was running over a three-page speech.

  Nick flopped back in the sofa with a laugh, to break the mood. Staring at the screen he felt awkwardly responsible, as if the place he'd come from, the very room that he'd measured and drawn as a schoolboy, was about to deliver its verdict on the room he was sitting in now. It was embarrassing, but there was nothing he could do. He watched the event quickly clarify, the intent activity was finished, the people redeployed themselves, officials were briefly in conference, and out of the toil of the day, metal boxes and rented tables, pure process without poetry, a kind of theatre emerged, so thick with precedent that it looked instinctual.

  Old Arthur State was saying, extremely slowly, "I, Arthur Henry State, being the returning officer for the parliamentary constituency of Barwick in the county of Northamptonshire . . . " and surely expanding his text with various quaint heraldic clauses, while Catherine eyed her father on the podium behind him. Nick glanced at her in profile. She had a look of exhaustion, as at an object co
nstantly but inexplicably in her way; but a twitch of excitement too: she was powerless, but tonight there were other powers stirring. Something might happen. The Labour man was called Brown and so came first—he'd got eight thousand, three hundred and twenty-one votes ("that's more than three thousand up on last time"), and was cheered defiantly. Next was Muriel Day, and her vote too was well up on that of her predecessor, two and a half thousand up, at eleven thousand, five hundred and seven. She took the applause with a grateful but distracted smile, almost hushing her supporters to let them hear the rest—since Arthur always waited for total silence, and went back to the start of any sentence that was interrupted. It was a serious figure, and Gerald had a look Nick knew well, the condescending simper that covered a process of mental arithmetic. The suspense was made worse by the unignorable but somehow forgotten figure of Ethelred Egg ("Monster Raving Loony Party"), who'd only polled thirty-one votes but seemed to have a hall-full of supporters. He plucked off and waved his green top hat and capered about in his clown's suit. You couldn't help seeing some slight kinship between him and Gerald, whose white collar and pink tie were half hidden by a vast blue rosette with long tabs or streamers below and the breast-pocket handkerchief struggling above. "Oh lose, lose . . ." muttered Catherine. "Fedden," said Arthur State, "Gerald John" ("Conservative . . ."), and because there was a klaxon squawk he repeated it, the strange momentary levelling and exposure of the cited second name, "eleven thousand, eight hundred and ninety-three"—so that Gerald grinned and coloured for a second, and perhaps thought he'd lost after all. The cheer that followed was a funny sound, because it had a loud "Woo-oo" mixed in with it, at the luck of a man who had just got away with something.

  Nick topped up his drink and went out onto the balcony. He rallied to the surprising chill out there. Gerald's close shave at the ballot box was a drama and an embarrassment, and it was going to be hard to know what to say when he got home. Congratulations might sound sarcastic or unduly blithe, even to Gerald. Anyway, he was in, and everything could go on as planned. His gleaming grin floated against the dark trees for a while, and then faded, as perishable as all news. Slowly the trees themselves took on shape and detail in the light from the houses and from the softly reflecting night clouds. Nick loved the gardens; when he strolled between the house and the gardens through the private gate he seemed to glance up at his own good luck, in the towering planes on one side and the white-stuccoed cliff on the other. It would be good to be out there now; but it was too dripping and cold. There were wonderful expanses of summer ahead, no need to panic.

  He remembered taking Leo there, in a jitter of nerves and shadows, the night they'd finally met; and quite a few other men too, the summer before last, on the sand path behind the workmen's hut—it had been his trick, done confidently, dwindling a little in charm and danger. Something basic and unsocial about it, no giving them a drink or a shower: it was good. And perhaps it had been a secret tribute to Leo, a memory honoured and scuffed over in each careless encounter. Leo never knew how much Nick had imagined him, before he'd met him; or how the first kiss, the first feel of his body, had staggered a boy who till then had lived all in his mind. Leo wasn't imaginative: that was part of the point and the beauty of him. But he had a kind of genius, as far as Nick was concerned. That big red tick on his letter had bounced him into life.

  He swilled round the whisky in his glass and shivered. There was a mood of homage and forgiveness: how could you begrudge the dead? And there was something else, a need to be forgiven himself, though he frowned the thought away. When Rosemary had asked him about the last time he'd seen her brother, he had blinked at her through the bleak little image of a parting on Oxford Street. The dense blind crowd, which could hide all kinds of intimacy in its rush, had this time made things impossible. Leo pushed away on his bike, crept through the red light and round the corner, without looking back. In fact the crowd almost hid the thing that Nick was remembering—the latest of several unhappy goodbyes not marked in any way as the last of all. In the following weeks he'd had to rescue that routine sequence of actions, and clarify it in the light of what it had turned out to be. At the time it was just an impatient escape into the traffic.

  But then, far more recently, three or four months ago, on a wet late February night, something else had happened, which he hadn't quite thought of this morning. Wani must already have been in Paris, and Nick had gone into the Shaftesbury on a sudden urge to pick up, the glow in his chest and the ache in his thighs. He went in through the little back bar, with its gas fire and non-combatant atmosphere, where you got served quicker. He noticed a couple of friends in his first half-sociable push through the crowd, and took in, while he waited to be served, the little black guy in a woolly hat, with his back to him, talking to a middle-aged white man. He saw how his beltless jeans stood away from his waist to give a glimpse of blue underwear, and had a moment's sharp unexpected recall of Leo, the double curve of his lower back and muscular bottom. There was sadness in the likeness, but the image lay quiet; it had more of the warmth of a blessing than the chill of a loss. Nick was pleased at that. The pub was all potential—he gazed busily over the counter into the main bar, which was jostling with sexy self-regard. This little guy was much too skinny, really, to excite him, and too odd: he had a beard that was so bushy you could see it from behind, the black touched with grey beside the ears. Still, Nick looked at the chap he was talking to, caught his eye for a second, with a tiny smile of collusion. Then instead of ordering the usual practical pint, he asked for a rum and Coke.

  He moved away with it, spoke to someone he knew, glancing off to check his own looks in one of the pub's many mirrors, and saw the black man in profile, turning briefly, unconsciously, to full face, and turning back again to answer his friend. Even then, the nostalgic idea that he was like Leo held off for a second or two the recognition that he was Leo. The greying beard hid the gauntness of his features, and the hat was rolled down to his eyebrows. Even after that Nick shunned the possibility, looked away, in case the man should meet his eye in the mirror with an answering slide into shock, and then glanced back, already hardened in the fiction that he hadn't recognized him. He pressed through into the other room. There was a party of French boys, there was a man he'd fancied at the Y, the whole bar was a fierce collective roar, and he edged and smiled politely through it like a sober late arrival at a wild party. His heart was thumping, and the expectant glow in his chest had become some neighbouring sensation, a clench of guilt and regret. It was simply an instinct, a reflex, that had made him turn away. A minute later he saw it could just as easily have thrown him towards Leo; but he was a coward. He was frightened of him—afraid of being rebuffed and full of grim doubts about what was happening to him. Perhaps he should go back in and check that it really was him—he was suddenly happy at the thought that it couldn't have been. He shouldered back through the crowd, sensing their vague annoyance at moving for him again; but stopped and got talking to the man from the Y, boldly but inattentively. He knew he had a bluebird tattooed on his left buttock, and he'd seen him with a sensible erection in the showers, but these cute memories seemed steadily more meaningless. He knocked back his drink in distracted gulps. Then he went downstairs to the Gents, and found, when he peeped sideways along the reeking trough, that the man had followed him; so they stood there for a bit, in a tense delay whilst other people came and went, until the man nodded towards the empty lock-up. Nick said it was too risky, felt almost annoyed that this was happening, yet curiously timid and grateful too. The man said he lived in Soho, they could go there, five minutes' walk, and Nick said OK. It was a kind of shield. Actually it was a brilliant quick success, a fantasy granted, but Nick couldn't feel it. "We'll go out the side way," said the man, who also gave his name, Joe. "Oh, OK," said Nick. They went through the back bar, Nick with his hand on Joe's broad shoulder, sticking cheerfully close to him and turning a blank gaze across the room to find the little woolly-hatted figure, utterly unknown to Joe, who ha
d once been his lover.

  15

  "OH MY!" said Treat. "Pansy salad!" "It's really rather good," said Nick.

  Treat watched him, over his cocktail glass, to see if he was joking. "Is it all pansies?"

  "What's that?" said Brad.

  "It's mostly rather butch lettuce," said Nick. "They just put one or two pansies on top."

  "Butch lettuce . . . !" said Treat, full of flirty reproach.

  "They're token pansies," said Nick.

  "I'm going to have to try it," said Treat.

  "You should certainly have it once," said Nick.

  "What's that?" said Brad.

  "Treat wants to try the pansy salad," said Nick.

  "Oh . . . oh, I see, 'pansy salad': oh my!"

  "I just said that," said Treat.

  Nick smiled round the restaurant, relieved to see two famous writers at one table, and a famous actress at another. Brad Craft and Treat Rush, till now mere muscular spondees of American suggestion, had turned out to be a socially hungry pair. Brad was indeed big and muscular, handsome and pleasant, if rather slow on the uptake. Treat was the talker, about Nick's height, with a shiny blond fringe that he kept in line with a pointed little finger. They had come over for Nat Hanmer's wedding, and were spending the whole of October in England ("Anything to escape the New England fall!" said Treat). Today there was the film to talk about, but they were clearly working, with one eye always on the square beyond, at a thorough penetration of London, and were full of slapdash questions about people and titles. The point seemed to be to ask questions; they didn't bother much with the answers. They held out the threat of being easily bored. Nick hoped Gusto would amuse them. He saw Treat watching the kitchen through the blue glass wall, which turned the chef and his sweating minions into a faintly erotic cabaret of hard work.