The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  When he went into the sitting room, there was the magazine on the table. It was a weird sort of launch, when there was never going to be a second issue. It would be good if people knew that, and prized it as itself, not as a portent or pilot of something to come. It was the only Ogee. Lying there, in a room in his house, at noon on a mild autumn day, it might have been Wani's memorial tablet, with the angel's wing sheltering the blank where his name and achievements should go.

  Next morning Nick drove up to Kensington Park Gardens to collect his things. There was intermittent drizzle and he wondered if the wedding hats were being spoiled in Yorkshire. The wide street was empty, with that accidental vacancy of a London street, a momentary lull in which the pavements, the house-fronts, the rain-striped windows have the aura of the deja vu. He let himself in at number 48, hasty in the new skills of avoiding notice: which he countered needlessly by slamming the door shut.

  Inside, in the hall: the sound . . . the impassive rumble of London shrunk to a hum, barely noticed, as if the grey light itself were subtly acoustic. Nick felt he'd chanced on the undisturbed atmosphere of the house, larger than this year's troubles, as it had been without him and would be after he'd gone. The gilt lantern burned palely in the stairwell, but in the dining room the ordinary shadows deepened in the corners and hung like smoke in the coving of the ceiling. The boulle clock ticked, with mindless vigilance. He went up the stone stairs and into the drawing room. It was really just a matter of finding his own bits and pieces, the CDs mixed in family-wise with theirs, a book that he'd lent them and watched filter slowly and unread to the bottom of the pile. He stood by the piano and thought about giving the Mozart Andante a final go; but the effect would have been maudlin as well as laughably inept. Toby's portrait looked out at him, an emblem of adolescence in its hormonal glow and expectant frown. It added an urgency to the need to move on. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, holding his possessions against his chest. A lorry passed outside, and the windows throbbed in their frames for a moment, in sympathy with its roar and the rattle of its tailgate, and then the broad quasi-silence disclosed itself again. And something else, what was it?, the smell of the place, tapestry smell, polished wood, lilies, almost churchy—he felt his senses seize and resign the thousand impressions he'd grown used to.

  And it all reached back. It spoke of Gerald and Rachel without visible interruption. He went down to the kitchen, where the tidiness and profusion, the jars, the noticeboard, the draped dishcloth, were signs of a wide, deep system. He was already an intruder, glancing up at the photos of these absent celebrities.

  He went down again, to the basement, to fetch some cardboard boxes from the trou de gloire. This lumber room under the kitchen was where the gilt ballroom chairs were stacked and interesting old tables and bleary mirrors abandoned; and where Mr Duke kept his paints, ladders, and toolboxes, along with a kettle and a calendar—it was his den, and Nick almost expected to find him there, in the subconscious of the house. He pressed down the light switch and got the shock of the wallpaper, which was purple with a pattern like black wrought iron, only partly hidden by all the junk. It always amazed him. It spoke of a time before Gerald and Rachel, and a different idea from theirs of what was great fun. Like his own parents they seemed to have avoided the '60s, with its novel possibilities and worthwhile mistakes. Perhaps in the Highgate days they'd had a joss stick and a floor cushion, but here the purple room was the junk room. Nick found some old wine boxes, and took them awkwardly upstairs. He wondered who'd lived here before the Feddens. There might well have been only three or four owners in the years since the whole speculation rose up out of the Notting Hill paddocks and slums. It was a house that encouraged the view its inhabitants had of themselves. Nick thought of Gerald's showmanship, the parties, the pathetic climax of the PM's visit. That had been just a year ago, another drizzly autumn wedding . . .

  He stopped on the second-floor landing, set down the boxes and went into Gerald and Rachel's bedroom. From the window there was the view of the gardens, in slanting rain, the large brown leaves of the planes dropping and blowing. It was a grander but closer view than the one he'd grown used to upstairs, the treetop view, with other rooftops and a spire beyond. The gardens grew smaller at this time of year: you saw the far fence and the street outside. He turned and walked softly on the pale carpet towards the bed. Who slept on which side?—Rachel here, clearly, with the novels and the earplugs. The little Gauguin landscape Lionel had given them hung opposite. On the round walnut table, with a bowl of lavender, and china boxes, stood the photographs in silver, ivory, or red-velvet frames.

  He picked up the one of Toby as a Lord of Tyre—Nick couldn't remember his name. He was the trusty minister who looked after things while Pericles went on his travels; he only came on at the beginning and the end, and spent the middle acts lounging restively around the cricket pavilion, which was used as the green room for these open-air plays. It was June, the smell of the lake and cut grass outside, creosote and linseed in the stuffy pavilion. Toby took off his heavy tunic, and blocked imaginary deliveries with a cricket bat as he waited for Sophie, who was playing Marina, to come off. Someone had photographed him then. He wore dark tights, and his own suede shoes. His naked upper body looked very white against the line round his neck where the make-up ended. His face was feminine, over-beautiful, a dancer's face, his body muscular and jutting enough to cause amusement in others. Nick had the brief but memorable role of Cerimon, the Lord of Ephesus who revives Queen Thaissa when she's washed ashore in her coffin: it was one of the intensest experiences of his life: "I hold it ever / Virtue and cunning were endowments greater / Than nobleness and riches . . .", his heart slamming, tears in his eyes; and then it was over, he made his dignified exit—a sense of floating and thinness, a forced adaptation to the scene outside the circle of lit stage and dark audience, who were already attending to what came afterwards. He peeled off his grey beard, twirled off his cloak, and had a jealous bottle of Guinness while Toby "unconsciously" flexed his biceps for Sophie—they were preoccupied by each other and by having still to go on. Toby wasn't a very good actor, but the role was only a bit of rhetoric, quite unpsycho-logical, and he was warmly applauded—there was something right about him. He did it as if there was no more to acting than to rowing or passing a rugger ball. He was neither modest nor vain.

  Nick knew he would never see the picture again, and found it hard to put it back on the table. It gleamed in the rainy light as an emblem of why he'd come here. It wasn't clear with Toby, any more than with Leo and Wani, if fantasy could hold back time, if this sleek second-year with his sportsman's legs and marvellous arse could still excite him when he knew the fat Toby of five years on. Well, not in the mind, perhaps, but in an image, a photo: it took a certain aesthetic nerve to fly in the face of the facts. He did something silly and solemn, and left on the glass the light, blurred imprint of his lips and the tip of his nose.

  Up in his room he pulled handfuls of books from his shelves and thrust them like bricks into the boxes. He hardened himself against his taste for nostalgia—the long-breathed leisure of the old days was over, matters were more urgent and unsure. The week ahead was already shadowed by the wait for his test results. The boost, the premature relief of taking charge and agreeing to learn the worst, waned steeply in the following days; already when he thought of it he felt unreachably alone. It was the third test he'd had, and that fact, and the mysterious number three, seemed by moments to shrink and to swell the chance of a positive result.

  The boxes filled immediately, in proof of the ungraspable formula relating shelf-length to box-capacity. He carried one of them down, and as he dumped it in the hall he heard the sound of the back door being unlocked, feet scuffed on the mat, an umbrella shaken. Elena? Or Eileen again? Whoever it was was very unwelcome. He was annoyed by their furtiveness as well as their confidence. He went into the kitchen with a bored look.

  "Oh my god!" said Penny in a breathy rush. She held the pink bundle o
f her umbrella in front of her chest. Then, furious to have been frightened, she said, "Mm, hello, Nick," and went to the sink with a bored look of her own. "I thought you'd gone," she said.

  "I think I thought you'd gone," said Nick, quite gently. They'd both been in the wars, and he felt they might finally have found some ground to share. There was an outside chance she might give him some sympathy, which so far he hadn't had a taste of; and to him commiseration was always easy.

  She settled the wet brolly, like a blown flower, and came back across the room. "In five minutes I will have. I'm getting my things." He seemed almost to be blocking her way. "You're not at the wedding," she said.

  "I thought I'd give it a miss."

  "Yes. Well, I don't know them, of course."

  "Oh, Nat's awfully nice."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I don't think anyone really knows Beatriz yet. Hardly even Nat actually!"

  "She's Argentinian, isn't she?"

  "Yes, she's a rich widow. Her first husband broke his neck playing polo." He hesitated and said, "Apparently she's four months pregnant."

  Penny made a grim snuffle. "At least I avoided that," she said, and with this tiny sarcastic self-exposure she edged past him and out of the room.

  He hadn't seen her since the night at Badger's flat, and he had to admit she had an interest, a bleak unanticipated glamour. A week ago her name was known only to her family, her school and college friends, and her work contacts; now millions worldwide had heard about her sex life. He watched her march off along the passage; his mocking sense of her as a busily ambitious little person with no sense of humour rather faltered. He stood with a thin smile of remorse, and a minute later went after her into Gerald's study. She was standing reading a yard-long fax, which she clumsily folded and put down. She said, "So where are you going to go?" crisply, almost as though she were despatching him herself.

  "Oh, I'm staying at Wani's. Yup." He gave a rueful smile over the ramparts of his own scandal, but no answering wave came from within hers.

  "Then I'm going to start looking for a place of my own."

  "You're not worried about money."

  Nick shrugged. "I've done all right, actually, in the past year or so. With a little help from my friends . . . How about you?"

  "I don't have much."

  "No, I mean, where are you staying?"

  "Oh, I've gone back home for a bit."

  "Right . . . How's Norman taken all this?"

  "Well, how do you imagine? Very badly indeed." She moved some papers on the desk and put them down as if inadvertently on the looped fax. "He detests Gerald, of course, and always has."

  Nick shook his head slowly, as if this was beyond his grasp. "I never really believed that. Just because he's a Tory."

  "Fiddlesticks. He took Rachel off him—that's what he's never forgiven him for."

  "It was an incredibly long time ago," said Nick, turning towards the window to cover his surprise.

  "Well, Dad's like that. When he was young he thought he was going to be very happy and very rich. And then Gerald came along."

  It was clearly an arrival she could vouch for the force of. Nick laughed for a second and was vaguely touched. He said, "We all know how competitive Gerald is."

  Penny searched in a drawer for a while before saying, "Mmm . . . " It was more than competitive, it was pathological—to steal the girlfriend and then fuck the daughter. Clearly he wasn't called Banger for nothing. He said, with a little whine of incredulity,

  "You've heard about his new directorship."

  "Yes . . . yes, I have."

  "It's rather amazing, isn't it? With the share thing hanging over him . . ."

  "Oh, they'll want him," said Penny.

  "Yes," said Nick. He remembered her when she first came here, with nothing but a good degree behind her, innocent, pliant, a little complacent at the candlelit table; now her eyes looked tired and guarded from the glare of the lights. "It's rather amazing to resign in disgrace one day and be offered a job at eighty thousand a year the next."

  He was afraid she resented his word "disgrace." "That's how this world works, Nick. Gerald can't lose. You've got to understand that." She sat down at the desk and looked around it. He had the sense of her clearing it of any scraps of sentiment—it was a secret raid.

  "I expect you'd like to be left alone," he said. He came and stood in front of her so as to glance at the fax, which he saw was in Gerald's impossible handwriting: it ended with that breezy ideogram that might have been "Love" or "Yours" or "Hello" and a big "G" and a line of crosses. Then he found Penny was looking at him tensely, with a look that acknowledged the writing and the kisses, and with hurried blinks as she decided.

  "I'm not giving him up, Nick."

  "Oh . . ." said Nick.

  "I'm not."

  "I see."

  "I don't care what Dad says, or Madam, or the Editor of the Sun."

  Nick stared respectfully, but said, "I thought he'd virtually been given up for you."

  "What. . . ? Oh, I see—well, publicly, yes. That's what we want people to think."

  "You say ' we . '"

  "We're very much in love."

  Nick looked at the floor, perhaps impatiently. It seemed everything was going to go stubbornly on: first it was Rachel who wouldn't leave Gerald, and now Penny wouldn't either. He must have something extraordinary, Gerald, something Nick had been incapable of understanding. He saw the story reaching on through an obscure futurity; innumerable articles by the Mordant Analyst. He said, "But how can you bear the secrecy?" with a real curiosity as to how someone else would answer this question.

  "Perhaps it won't be a secret."

  "Hmm . . . " Nick's raised eyebrow and dry chuckle made her blush but not apparently change her mind.

  "Anyway, I don't care," she said.

  "Well . . ."

  "Catherine's always mocked and jeered at Gerald," said Penny, as if not quite able to bear the line of talk she'd started.

  Nick said hesitantly, "I think it's pretty mutual." Penny's world seemed only to make sense to her as a forcefield of detestations.

  "I know she's always hated me," she said, with a grim laugh that didn't quite spare Nick either; she didn't come out with it, but she seemed to know what he'd thought and said about her over the years.

  "You know that's not true," said Nick, in a mutter at the pointlessness of saying it. "I think it's herself that she hates most at the moment."

  Penny tucked her chin in, and gave him a very old-fashioned look. "She was revelling in the whole thing, I would say."

  "That's not revelling, Penny. At first it seems thrilling, but then it becomes a kind of torment to her, being manic." He realized that Penny's main source of views on Catherine would be Gerald; just as his own, besides a friend's intuition, was the strenuous prose of Dr E. J. Edelman.

  "Well, it's nothing to the torment she's caused," said Penny unrepentantly.

  Nick shook his head at her in astonishment, and thought he might as well leave her to it. She was too excited to look at him as she said, "I assume it was you that told her, was it?"

  "Absolutely not!" said Nick.

  "Well, that's certainly what Gerald thinks."

  Nick said, "You see it's typical of Gerald to think she couldn't work it out for herself. Actually she's the cleverest one of us all."

  "I could tell you suspected something when you were with us in France," Penny said.

  "I was very worried about Rachel," Nick said. "She's an old friend."

  "Well, I wonder if she feels the same about you." Penny gave him a short sharp smile, and then sat forward, with her elbows on the desk. "And now, if you'll excuse me," she said, "I have things to do," and found a chance after all, in the dullest of formulas, for a further dismissal.

  Nick pulled the blue front door shut, double-locked the Yale locks and the Chubb lock, and stood fiddling the keys off his ring. He held open the letterbox and flung them through and heard them tinkle on the ma
rble floor. Then he peered through the letterbox himself and saw them lying there inaccessibly. There was also the back-door key, so in fact he still could get in, but he soon threw that in too. The one he was most reluctant about was the sleek bronze Yale for the communal gardens; it had a look of secrets to it. He could probably keep it, no one would remember; it would be nice to be still in fact, if not by rights, a keyholder. His eyes moved in lazy twitches of indecision. He hardly saw himself coming back, haunting the place, gazing up at the Feddens' windows for glints of the life they were leading without him. Painful and pointless. He pushed up the flap and put his hand through with the key in it, held it for a second before letting it drop onto the mat.

  The little car was jammed full of boxes and curled heaps of clothes on hangers. It sat low on its springs, under all these possessions heavy as passengers. Nick stood by it, still thinking, and then drifted unexpectedly down the street. The pavement was dry now in patches, but the sky was threatening and fast-moving. The tall white house-fronts had a muted gleam. It came over him that the test result would be positive. The words that were said every day to others would be said to him, in that quiet consulting room whose desk and carpet and square modern armchair would share indissolubly in the moment. There was a large tranquil photograph in a frame, and a view of the hospital chimney from the window. He was young, without much training in stoicism. What would he do once he left the room? He dawdled on, rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked cars, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed. It was like a drug sensation, but without the awareness of play. The motorcyclist who lived over the road clumped out in his leathers and attended to his bike. Nick gazed at him and then looked away in a regret that held him and glazed him and kept him apart. There was nothing this man could do to help him. None of his friends could save him. The time came, and they learned the news in the room they were in, at a certain moment in their planned and continuing day. They woke the next morning, and after a while it came back to them. Nick searched their faces as they explored their feelings. He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out. It was the morning's vision of the empty street, but projected far forward, into afternoons like this one decades hence, in the absent hum of their own business. The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn't just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.