The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "Toby!" the overlapping burble went up, followed by a sudden release of tension in cheers and whistles and applause—applause for Toby, not for the speaker, the heightened, unreal acclaim of a special occasion, amongst which Nick lifted his champagne glass with tears in his eyes, and kept on sipping from it to hide his emotion. But Catherine had jumped her little gilt chair back from the table and hurried out, past Tristao, who followed her for a second, to see if he could help. Then Nick and Russell stared at each other, but Toby was getting to his feet, and Nick was damned if he was chasing after her this time, he really did love Toby, more than anyone in this high magnificent room, and he was going to be with him as he spoke.

  "No," said Toby, "I'm afraid Pa got that a bit wrong. I tried to get him an interview with the Guardian, but they just weren't interested!" This wasn't quite a witticism, but it drew a loud laugh from his friends, and Gerald, who'd assumed a self-congratulating air, was forced to make a quick moue of humility. " 'Wait till he does something big,' they said." He turned to his father. "Of course I told them they wouldn't have to wait long."

  There was something artless in Toby's delivery; he was working in the family tradition of teasing, but he was too relenting and couldn't yet match Gerald's heavy archness. When he had stood up he was strikingly pale, like someone about to faint, but when he relaxed a little the colour suddenly burned in his cheeks, and his grin was a nervous acknowledgement of his blush. He said, "I'm not going to say much —" vague groans of disappointment—"but above all I want to thank my dear sweet generous Uncle Lionel for having us all here tonight. I can't imagine anything more wonderful than this party—and I have a horrible feeling that after this the rest of my life is going to be one long anticlimax." This brought cheers and applause for Lord Kessler, who was surely used to being thanked, but not to such public declarations of love. Again the family note was strong and sentimental, and a little surprising. Nick was smiling at Toby in an anxious trance of lust and encouragement. It was like watching a beautiful actor in a play, following him and wanting him.

  "I'm also really touched," Toby said, "that my old friends Josh and Caroline have come all the way from South Africa. Oh, and I understand they're also squeezing in a wedding ceremony while they're here." There was good-natured applause, though no one really knew who Josh and Caroline were. Nick found himself listening almost abstractly to Toby's voice, hearing its harmless pretensions, which were the opposite of Gerald's. Gerald was a knowing, self-confident speaker, trained at the Oxford Union, polished at innumerable board meetings, and his tone combined candour and insincerity to oddly charming effect. Toby, like many of his friends, spoke in the latest public-school accent, an inefficient blur of class denial. Now he was a bit drunk, and under pressure, and older vowels were showing through as he said that it was "awfully good of" his parents to have tolerated him. He too seemed not to know what the point of his speech was; he came over like a cross between a bridegroom and the winner of an award, with a list of people to thank. His boyish technique was to deflect attention from himself onto his friends, and in this he was also the opposite of his father. He made various jokes such as "Sam will need two pairs of trousers" and "No more creme de menthe for Mary," which clearly alluded to old disgraces, and began to bore the MPs. Nick sensed a touching nostalgia for the Oxford years, on which a door, an oak perhaps, seemed gently but firmly to have closed. He himself was not referred to; but he took this as a sign of intimacy. His gaze embraced Toby, and from behind his helpless grin and raised applauding hands he saw his dream-self run forwards to hold him and kiss his hot face.

  Up in his room Nick slipped out of his jacket, and sniffed at it resignedly: time for a further dowsing in "Je Promets." He went into his bathroom, and opened the little turret dormer; he splashed cold water on his cheeks. It was the toasts that had done for him—there was always one glass that tipped him over, unfairly and jokingly, into being drunk. And there were hours of the party still to come. It was a great ritual of fun, a tradition, a convention, which everyone was loving for its lavishness and truth to form. Now there was going to be a move to the dance floor, and all the couples would be allowed to make love to each other with their hips and thighs and sliding hands. Nick gazed in the mirror and saw someone teeteringly alone. The love he had felt for Toby ten minutes before migrated into a sudden hungry imagining of Leo, his transfiguring kisses, his shaving rash, and the wonderful shaved depth between the cheeks of his arse. The exactness of memory, the burning fact of what had happened, blinded him and held him for a while. When he came back, perhaps only seconds later, to the image in the mirror, he saw the flush in his cheeks and his mouth gasping in re-enacted surrender. He re-tied his tie, very perfectly, and ran a hand through his hair. There was a kind of tenderness for himself in the movement of his hand through his curls, as if it had been taught a lesson by Leo. The mirror was a chaste ellipse in a maplewood frame. The washstand was a real Louis Seize commode cut and drilled to hold a basin and a pair of tall hoarse-throated taps. Well, if you owned a Louis Seize commode, if you owned dozens of them, you could be as barbarous with them as you liked; and a commode after all was meant for ease. And after all it was marvellous to be staying in a house like this, a friend of the family, not the son of the man who wound the clocks.

  As he trotted down the stairs he saw Wani Ouradi coming up. Nick sometimes greeted Wani with a friendly grope between the legs, or a long breathless snog, and he'd once had him tied up naked in his college room for a whole night; he had sodomized him tirelessly more often than he could remember. Wani himself, glancing back to see if his girlfriend, his intended, was following, had no idea of all this, of course; indeed, they hardly knew each other.

  "Hi, Wani!" said Nick.

  "Hi!" said Wani warmly, perhaps not able to remember his name.

  "I believe I have to congratulate you . . ."

  "Oh . . . yes . . ." Wani grinned and looked down. "Thank you so much." Nick thought, as he had thought before, in the slow hours of the seminar room, that a view of the world through such long eyelashes must be one extraordinarily shadowed and filtered. They both suddenly decided to shake hands. Wani glanced back again with a murmur of exasperation so fond and well mannered that it seemed to include Nick in some harmless conspiracy. "You must meet Martine," he said. A provoking thing about him was the way his penis always showed, a little jutting bulge to the left, modest, unconscious, but unignorable, and a trigger to greedy thoughts in Nick. He checked for it now, in a woozy half-second. He was rather like a pop star of the 60s, with the penis and the dark curly hair—though the look was quite at odds with the bemused courtesy of his manner.

  "I hope it will be a long engagement," Nick heard himself saying.

  "Ah, here she is . . ."—and they looked down together at the young woman who was climbing the shallow red-carpeted stairs towards them. She was wearing a pearl-coloured blouse and a long, rather stiff black skirt, which she held raised a little with both hands, so that she seemed to curtsey to them on each step. She created a sober impression, well groomed but not fashionable. "This is Martine," Wani said. "This is Nick Guest, we were at Worcester together."

  Nick took Martine's cool hand, smiling at Wani's knowing his name, and feeling himself to be briefly the subject of humorous suspicion as an unknown friend from her fiance's past. He said, "I'm pleased to meet you, congratulations." All this congratulating was giving him a vague masochistic buzz.

  "Oh—thank you so much. Yes, Antoine has told you." She had a French accent, which in turn suggested to Nick the unknown networks of Wani's family and past, Paris perhaps, Beirut . . . the real life of the international rich from which Wani had occasionally descended on Oxford to read an essay on Dry den or translate an Anglo-Saxon riddle. Antoine was his real name, and Wani, his infantile attempt at saying it, his universal nickname.

  "You must be very happy."

  Martine smiled but said nothing, and Nick looked at her wide pale face for signs of the triumph he would have f
elt himself if he had become engaged to Wani.

  "We're just going to our room," Wani said, "and then we'll be down for the bopping."

  "Well, you will be bopping perhaps," said Martine, showing already a mind of her own, but with the same patient expression, which registered with Nick, as he went on down the stairs, as decidedly adult. It must be the face of a steady happiness, a calm possession, that he couldn't imagine, or even exactly hope for.

  He needed some air, but there was a clatter in the hall as people ran back indoors. Outside, from an obscured night sky, a fine rain had started falling. Nick watched it drifting and gleaming in the upcast light of a large globed lantern. Out in the circle of the drive a couple of chauffeurs were sitting in the front of a Daimler with the map-light on, waiting and chatting. And there was Wani's soft-top Mercedes, with its embarrassing number plate WHO 6. A voice brayed, "Right! Everyone on the dance floor!" And there was a ragged chorus of agreement.

  "Hoorah! Dancing!" said a drunk Sloanish girl, staring into Nick's face as though with an effort she might remember him.

  "Where is the ruddy dance floor?" said the braying boy. They had wandered back into the hall, which was being cleared with illusionless efficiency by the staff.

  Nick said, "It's in the smoking room," excited by knowing this, and by suddenly taking the lead. They all straggled after him, the Sloaney girl laughing wildly and shouting, "Yah, it's in the smoking room!" and sending him up, as the funny little man who knew the way.

  A friend of Toby's had come down from London to do the disco, and red and blue spotlights flashed on and off above the paintings of the first Baron Kessler's numerous racehorses. Most of the group started grooving around at once, a little awkwardly, but with happy, determined expressions. Nick lounged along the wall, as if he might start dancing any moment, then came back, nodding his head to the beat, and walked quickly out of the room. It was that song "Every Breath You Take" that they'd played over and over last term at Oxford. It made him abruptly sad.

  He felt restless and forgotten, peripheral to an event which, he remembered, had once been thought of as his party too. His loneliness bewildered him for a minute, in the bleak perspective of the bachelors' corridor: a sense close to panic that he didn't belong in this house with these people. Some of the guests had gone into the library and as he approached the open door he took in the scant conversational texture, over which one or two voices held forth as if by right. Gerald said words Nick couldn't catch the meaning of, and through the general laughter another voice, which he half-recognized, put in a quick correcting "Not if I know Margaret!" Nick stood at the doorway of the lamplit room and felt for a second like a drunken student, which he was, and also, more shadowy and inconsolable, a sleepless child peering in at an adult world of bare shoulders, flushed faces, and cigar smoke. Rachel caught his eye, and smiled, and he went in—Gerald, standing at the empty fireplace in the swaggering stance of someone warming himself, called out, "Ah, Nick!" but there were too many people for introductions, a large loose circle who turned momentarily to inspect him and turned back as if they'd failed to see anything at all.

  Rachel was sitting on a small sofa, apart from the others, with a wrinkled old lady dressed in black, who made Rachel in her turn seem a beautiful, rather mischievous young woman. She said, "Judy, have you met Nick Guest, Toby's great friend? This is Lady Partridge—Gerald's mother."

  "Oh no!" said Nick. "I'm delighted to meet you."

  "How do you do," said the old lady, with a dry jovial look. Toby's great friend—there was a phrase to savour, to analyse for its generosity, its innocence, its calculation.

  Rachel shifted slightly, but there was really no space for him on the sofa. In her great spread stiffish dress of lavender silk she was like a Sargent portrait of eighty years earlier, of the time when Henry James had come to stay. Nick stood before them and smiled.

  "You do smell nice," Rachel said, almost flirtingly, as a mother sometimes speaks to a child who is dressed up.

  "I can't bear the smell of cigars, can you?" said Lady Partridge.

  "Lionel hates it too," murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men's tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows. But since Gerald himself was smoking one, frowning and screwing up his left eye, he said nothing.

  "I can't think where he picked up the habit," Lady Partridge said; and Rachel sighed and shook her head in humorous acknowledgement of their shared disappointments as wife and mother. "Do Tobias and Catherine smoke?"

  "No, thank heavens, they've never taken to it," Rachel said. And again Nick said nothing. What always held him was the family's romance of itself, with its little asperities and collusions that were so much more charming and droll than those in his own family, and which now took on a further dimension in the person of Gerald's mother. Her manner was drawling but vigilant, her face thickly powdered, lips a bold red. There was something autocratic in her that made Nick want to please her. She sounded grander than Gerald by the same factor that Gerald sounded posher than Toby.

  "Perhaps we could have some air," she said, barely looking at Nick. And he went to the window behind them and pushed up the sash and let in the cool damp smell of the grounds.

  "There!" he said, feeling they were now friends.

  "Are you staying in the house?" Lady Partridge said.

  "Yes, I've got a tiny little room on the top floor."

  "I didn't know there were any tiny rooms at Hawkeswood. But then I don't suppose I've ever been on the top floor." Nick half admired the way she had taken his modesty and dug it deeper for him, and almost found a slur against herself in it.

  "I suppose it depends on your standard of tininess," he said, with a determined flattering smile. The faint paranoia that attaches to drunkenness had set in, and he wasn't certain if he was being rude or charming. He thought perhaps what he'd said was the opposite of what he meant. A waiter came up with a tray and offered him a brandy, and he watched with marvelling passivity as the liquor was poured. "Oh that's fine . . . that's fine . . . !" He was a nice, conspiratorial sort of waiter, but he wasn't Tristao, who had crossed a special threshold in Nick's mind and was now the object of a crush, vivid in his absence. He wondered if he could have a crush on this waiter too—it only needed a couple of sightings, the current mood of frustration, and a single half-conscious decision, and then the boy's shape would be stamped on his mind and make his pulse race whenever he appeared.

  Rachel said, "Nick's also staying with us in London, where he really does have a tiny room in the roof."

  "I think you said you had someone in," said Lady Partridge, again without looking at Nick. It was as if she had scented his fantasy of belonging, of secret fraternity with her beautiful grandson, and set to eradicate it with a quick territorial instinct. "Toby's certainly enormously popular," she said. "He's so handsome, don't you think?"

  "Yes, I do," said Nick lightly, and blushed and looked away as if to find him.

  "You'd never think he was Catherine's brother. He had all the luck."

  "If looks are luck—" Nick was half-saying.

  "But do tell me, who is that little person in glasses dancing with the Home Secretary?"

  "Mm, I've seen him before," said Nick, and laughed out loud.

  "It's the Mordant Analyst," said Rachel.

  "Morton Danvers," Lady Partridge noted it.

  Rachel raised her voice. "The children call him the Mordant Analyst. Peter Crowther—he's a journalist."

  "Seen his things in the Mail," Lady Partridge said.

  "Oh, of course . . ." said Nick. And it was true he did seem to be dancing with the Home Secretary, wooing him, capering in front of him, bending to him with new questions and springing back with startled enlightenment at the answers—a procedure which the Home Secretary, who was heavy footed and had no neck, couldn't help but replicate in a clumsy but courteous way.

  "I don't think I'd b
e quite so excited," said Lady Partridge. "He talked a lot of rot at dinner on . . . the coloured question. I wasn't next to him, but I kept hearing it. Racism, you know"—as if the very word were as disagreeable as the thing it connoted was generally held to be.

  "A lot of rot certainly is talked on that subject," Nick said, with generous ambiguity. The old lady looked at him ponderingly.

  They turned and watched Gerald come forward to rescue the Home Secretary, with a solicitous smile on his lips and a flicker of jealousy in his eyes. He led him away, stooping confidentially over him, almost embracing him, but looking quickly round like someone who has organized a surprise: and there was a flash and a whirr and another flash.

  "Ah! The Tatler," exclaimed Lady Partridge, "at long last." She patted her hair and assumed an expression of. . . coquetry . . . command . . . welcome . . . ancient wisdom . . . It was hard to say for sure what effect she was after.

  Catherine was hurrying Nick and Pat Grayson along the bachelors' corridor towards the thump of the dance music.

  "Are you all right, darling?" Nick said.

  "Sorry, darling. It was that ghastly speech—one just couldn't take any more!" She was lively, but her reactions were slow and playful, and he decided she must be stoned.