The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "I suppose it was a bit self-centred."

  She smiled, with a condescension worthy of her grandmother. "It would have been a marvellous speech for his own birthday, wouldn't it. Poor Fedden!"

  Pat, who must have been the person described in the speech as a film star, said, "Ooh, I didn't think it was all that bad, considering"; though considering what, he didn't specify. Nick had seen him as the smooth eponymous rogue in Sedley on TV, and was struck by how much smaller, older and camper he was in real life. Sedley was his mother's favourite series, though it wasn't clear if she knew that Pat was a whatnot. "Ooh, I don't know about this, love . . ." he said as they came into the room. But Catherine pulled him into the crowd and he started rather nimbly circling round her, flicking his fingers and frowning sexily at her. She seemed to love everything that was uncool about this, but to Nick, Pat was an unwelcome future, a famous man who was a fool, a silly old queen. He slipped away across the room, and found he was being shouted and smiled at by people and roughly hugged as if he was very popular. The brandy was having its way. But for a minute he was ashamed of snubbing Pat Grayson, and pretending to be part of this hetero mob. He felt pretty good, and grinned at Tim Carswell, who came across the floor and seized him and whirled him round till they were both stumbling and Tim's damp breath was burning his cheek, and Tim shouted "Whoa!" and slowly pulled away, still slamming from side to side and then backing into the crowd with a Jaggerish raised arm. "How's the bonny blade?" said Nick, and Sophie Tipper looked at him over her shoulder with faint recognition as she danced annoyingly with Toby—Nick kissed them both on the cheek before they could stop him, and shouted "How are you?" again, beaming and heartbroken, and Toby put out a fist with a raised thumb, and shortly after that they moved away. Nick danced on, his collar was tight and he was sweating, he undid his jacket and then did it up again—ah, a window was open at the far end of the room and he jigged around in front of it for a while, turning his face to that rainy garden smell. Martine was sitting on the raised banquette that ran along the wall, and in the beam of green light that flashed on every few seconds her patient profile looked haggard and lost. "Hi-i!" Nick called, stopping and half-kneeling beside her. "Isn't Wani with you?" She looked round with a shrug: "Oh, he's somewhere . . ." And Nick really wanted to see him, suddenly certain of a welcome like the ones he gave him in his fantasies, and there was a twist of calculation too—he could press himself, heavy and semi-incapable, into Wani's arms. Three girls were doing disco routines in a line, turning round and touching their elbows. Nick couldn't do that. The girls danced better than the boys, as if it was really their element, where their rowdy partners were making twits of themselves. Nick didn't like it near the door, where some of the older couples had wandered in and were trotting to and fro as if quite at home with Spandau Ballet. The ultraviolet light made Nat Hanmer's dress shirt glow and the whites of his eyes were thrillingly strange. They held hands for a few moments and Nat goggled at him for the freaky effect, then he shouted, "You old poof!" and slapped his back and gave him a barging kiss on the ear before he moved off "Your eyes!" Mary Sutton gasped at Nick, and he goggled too. It was easy to trip over the raised edge of the hearthstone if you were bopping near the fireplace, and Nick fell against Graham Strong and said, "It's so great to see you!" because he'd sometimes hungered for Graham too, he hardly knew him, and he said, "We must have a dance together later," but Graham had already turned his back, and Nick fetched up with Catherine and Russell and Pat Grayson, where he was very welcome since they were an awkward threesome.

  He opened a door from the hall into a small drawing room where a man in shirtsleeves got up and said, "I'm sorry, sir," and came towards him unsmilingly.

  "I'm so sorry," Nick said, "I'm on the wrong side," and he went out again and pulled the door closed with a boom.

  He could hear the music in the distance, and the burble and laughter from the library, and a high ringing in his own ears. Up above, the hundred lilies of the electrolier glowed and twitched—there was a hesitant animation to things, all beating to his own pulse. He went sidling and parading through a suite of lit rooms, abandoned, amusing, a bolster or pulled-back curtain like a glimpse of a person in hiding. Stopped and stooped now and then to appreciate a throbbing little bronze or table that revolved as you looked away from it. Leant caressingly, a little heavily, on the escritoire of the dear old Marquise de Pompadour, which creaked—he was a lover of that sort of thing, if anyone was watching . . . He went into the dining room where they'd had lunch, found the light switches and looked very closely at the landscape by Cezanne, which pulsed as well, with secret geometries. Why did he talk to himself about it? The imaginary friend was at his shoulder, the only child's devoted companion, needing his guidance. The composition, he said . . . the different greens . . . He had a keen idea, which he was cloaking and avoiding, and then licensing step by step as he opened a side door into a brown passageway, that turned a corner, and had other doors off it, and then came in a quickening cool draught to an open back door with the service yard beyond, glittering in drizzle. The glare was bright and unsentimental here. No enriching glow of candles or picture lights. Men in jeans were stacking and crashing things, and carried on shouting to each other as they passed Nick, so that he felt like a ghost whose "Thanks!" and "Sorry!" were inaudible. Tristao was washing glasses in a pantry and he walked in behind him with his heart suddenly thumping, smiling as if they were more than friends, and aware none the less that Tristao was working, it was one in the morning, and he himself was just a bow-tied drunk, a walking wrong note of hope and need.

  "Hi there!"

  Tristao looked round and sighed, then turned back to his work. "You come to help?" The glasses came in on metal trays, half full, lipstick-smeared, fag ends in claret, jagged edges on stems.

  "Urn . . . I'm sure I'd break everything," Nick said, and gazed at him from behind with wonder and a sense of luck and again the suspicion of a rebuff.

  "Oof. . . ! I'm tired," Tristao said, and came across the room so that Nick felt in the way. "I been up on my feet nine hours now."

  "You must be," said Nick, leaning towards him with a friendly stroke or pat, which fell short and was ignored. He wondered if he might be going to fall over. "So . . . When do you finish?"

  "Oh, we go on till you go off, baby." He dried his hands on a tea towel, and lit himself a cigarette, half offering one to Nick as an afterthought. Nick hated tobacco, but he accepted at once. The first sharp drag made his head fizz. "You enjoying the party, anyway?" Tristao said.

  "Yeah . . ." said Nick, and gave a shrug and a large ironical.laugh. He wanted to impress Tristao as a Hawkeswood guest, and to mock at the guests as well. He wanted to suggest that he was having a perfectly good time, that the staff, certainly, could not have done more, but that he could take it or leave it; and besides (here he half closed his eyes, suavely and daringly) he had a better idea about how to have fun. Tristao perhaps didn't get all that at once. He looked at Nick moodily, as at a kind of problem. And Nick looked back at him, with a simmering drunk smile, as if he knew what he was doing.

  Tristao had lost his bow tie, and the top two buttons of his shirt were open over a white singlet. His sleeves were rolled up, there were streaked black hairs on his forearms, but from his heart to his knees he wore a white apron tied round tight, which made a secret of what had been such a heavy hint before. The pantry was lit by a single fluorescent tube, so that his tired sallow face was shown without flattery. He looked quite different from what Nick had remembered, and it took a little effort of lustful will to find him attractive—there seemed almost to be an excuse for giving up on him and going back to the party. "A lot of people here, yeah?" said Tristao. He glanced sourly at the trays of glasses and debris, and blew out smoke in that same critical sibilant way that Polly had, like a sign of some shared expertise. And then Nick found himself bitterly jealous at the idea of Polly getting Tristao, and knew that he had to stay. "Yeah, he got a lot of friends, this Mr
Toby . . . I like him. He's like a hactor, no?"—and Tristao made a gesture, long fingers spread like a fan beside his face to indicate the general eclat of Toby's features, bone structure, complexion.

  "Yes, he is," said Nick, with a chuckle and a puff of smoke. Toby's face seemed to hover for a moment in front of the waiter's, which was less beautiful in each respect. . . But wasn't the fact that he didn't admire Tristao so much a part of the lesson, what he thought of as the homosexual second-best solution? This backstairs visit was all about sex, not nonsensical longings: he wasn't going to get what he wanted elsewhere. There was a challenge in the boy's deep-set eyes and something coded in his foreignness—were Madeirans in fact susceptible to casual sex? Nick couldn't see why they shouldn't be . . .

  "So how much you had to drink?" Tristao said.

  "Oh, masses," said Nick.

  "Yeah?" said Tristao.

  "Well, not as much as some people," said Nick. He smoked, and held his cigarette by his lapel, and felt that his smoking was unpractised and revealing. Of course the wonderful thing about his date with Leo had been that it was a date—they both knew what they were there for. Whereas the Tristao thing might well be all in his own head. He wasn't sure if the thinness of their conversation showed how futile it was, or if it was a sign of its authenticity. He suspected chat-ups should be more colourful and provocative. He said, "So you're from Madeira, I gather," with the flicker of an eyebrow.

  Tristao narrowed his eyes and gave his first little smile. "How you know that?" he said. Nick took the moment to hold his gaze. "Oh, I know, the big guy tell you."

  "Huge," said Nick—"well, round the middle anyway!"

  Tristao looked inside his packet of cigarettes, where he'd stowed Polly's card. "That him?" he said. Nick glanced dismissively at the card but felt he'd been taught a lesson by it. Dr Paul Tompkins, 23 Lovelock Mansions . . . so established already, like a consulting room, with the boys coming through. He turned the card over, where Polly had scribbled Sep 4, 8pm sharp! "Why he say sharp?" said Tristao.

  "Oh, he's a very busy man," said Nick, and feeling it was the moment he made a sudden movement forwards, two steps, his arms out, and a smirk of ineffable irony about Polly on his lips.

  "Sorry, mate —": a red-faced man looked in at the door, then tucked in his chin and gave a confident dry laugh. "Wondered what was going on there for a moment!" Nick reddened and Tristao had the proper provoking presence of mind to snort quietly and say, "Bob, how's things?"

  Bob gave him some instructions about the different rooms, "his lordship" was referred to a couple of times, with servants' irony as well as pitying respect, and Nick swayed from side to side with a tolerant smile, to convey to the men that he knew Lord Kessler personally, they'd had lunch together and he'd shown him the Moroni. When Bob had gone, Tristao said, "What am I going to do with you?" without much warmth or sense of teasing.

  "I don't know," said Nick, chirpily, half numbed by drink to the looming new failure.

  "I got to go." Tristao tugged his bow tie out of his pocket, and fiddled with the elastic and the clip. Nick waited for him to take his apron off. "Look, OK, I see you, by the main stairs, three o'clock."

  "Oh . . . OK, great!" said Nick, and found a happy relief in both the arrangement and the delay. "Three o'clock . . ."

  "Sharp," said Tristao, with a scowl.

  He looked in at the door of Toby's bedroom. A group of his friends had come up here when the music stopped at two, and they seemed lazily to assess him. "Come in and close the door, for god's sake," said Toby, beckoning from the vast bed where he was propped up among sprawling friends. He had been given the King's Room, where Edward VII had slept—the swags of blue silk above the bedhead were gathered into a vaguely comic gilded crown. On the opposite wall hung a comfortable Renoir nude. Nick picked his way between groups sitting on the floor in front of an enormous sofa where fat Lord Shepton was lying with his tie undone and his head on the thigh of an attractive drunk girl. The curtains were parted and a window open to carry the reek of marijuana far away from the nose of the Home Secretary. Somehow they had re-created the mood of a college room late at night, girls' stockinged feet stretched out across boyfriends' knees, smoke in the air, two or three voices dominating. Nick felt the charm as well as the threat of the group. Gareth Lane was holding forth about Hitler and Goebbels, and his lecturing drone and yapping laughs at his own puns brought back something dreary from the Oxford days. He was said to be the "ablest historian of his year," but he had failed to get a first, and seemed now to be acting out some endless redemptive viva. The talk went on, but there felt to Nick's tingling drunk ears to be a residual silence in the room, on which his own movements and words were an intrusion . . . and yet left no trace. Several of his other pals were here, but the two months since term had distanced them more than he could explain. Some simple but strong and long-prepared change had occurred, they had taken up their real lives, and left him alone in his. He came back and perched on the edge of the bed and Toby leaned forward and passed him the joint.

  "Thanks . . . " Nick smiled at him, and at last some old sweetness of reassurance glowed between them, what he'd been waiting for all night.

  "God, darling, you smell like a tart's parlour," Toby said. Nick carried on gazing at him, paralysed for the moment by the need to hold in the smoke, a tickle in his throat, blushing with shame and pleasure. He was holding in the unprecedented "darling" and it was making him as warm and giddy as the pot. Then he let out the smoke and saw the baldly hetero claims of the rest of the remark. He said,

  "And how would you know?"—wondering primly if Toby really had been to a tart's parlour. It was an image of him lurching up a narrow staircase.

  Toby winked. "Having a good time?"

  "Yes, fantastic." Nick looked around appreciatively, glossing over his inner vision of the night as a long stumbling journey, half chase, half flight, like one of his country-house dreams, his staircase dreams. "What's happened to Sophie, by the way?"

  "She had to go back to London. Yeah. She's got an audition on Monday."

  "Ah . . . right . . . " This was good news to Nick, and Toby himself, drunk, stoned, eyes glistening, seemed happy about it—he liked the adult note of responsibility in sending her home, and he liked being free of her too. He raised his voice and said,

  "Oh, do shut up about fucking Goebbels!" But after a brief incredulous whirr Gareth's shock-proof mechanism rattled on.

  Toby was king tonight, on his great big bed, and his friends for once were his subjects. He was acting the role with high spirits, in a childishly approximate way. Nick found it very touching and exciting. As the pot took its delayed effect, squeezing and freeing like some psychic massage, he reached back and took Toby's hand, and they lolled there like that for thirty or forty seconds of heaven. It was as if the room had been steeped in a mood of amorous hilarity as sweetly unignorable as "Je Promets." He recalled what Polly had said in the garden long before, and thought that maybe, at last, for once, Toby would actually be his.

  There was a surrounding murmur of stoned gossip, heads nodding over rolling papers, the figures blurred but glowing in the lamplight. "But did the Fiihrer license the Final Solution?" Gareth asked himself; and it was clear that the arguments on this famous question were about to be passed in detailed review.

  There was a giggling protest from Sam Zeman, curly-headed genius who'd gone straight into Kesslers on twenty thousand a year. "You're in a house full of Jews here, can you shut up about the fucking Final Solution, it's a party . . ."—and he reached for his drink with the frown and snuffle of a subtle person obliged to be brusque.

  "I can go on to Stalin . . . " said Gareth facetiously.

  After a minute's reflection Roddy Shepton said robustly, "Well, I'm not bloody Jewish."

  "Tobias is," said his girlfriend, "aren't you, darling?"

  "For god's sake, Claire . . ." said Roddy.

  Claire gazed at Toby with eyes of deepening conviction. "Wasn't someone sayi
ng the Home Sectary's Jewish too . . . ?" she said.

  "Calm down, Claire!" said Roddy furiously. It was his own conviction that his large placid girlfriend, who had never been known to raise her voice, was dangerously excitable. Perhaps it was his way of implying he had tamed a sexual volcano; which in turn perhaps helped him to explain why he was going out with a strictly middle-class girl, the daughter of his father's estate manager.

  Claire looked round in pursuit of her new idea. "You're Jewish, aren't you, Nat?"

  "I am, darling," said Nat, "or half Jewish, anyway."

  "And the other half's a bloody Welshman," said Roddy. He turned his head on her knee and squinted up at her. "God, you're drunk," he said.

  This was the kind of insult that passed for wit at the Martyrs' Club, and was in fact one of the things most often said there. Toby had once taken Nick to the club's poky panelled dining room, where Christ Church toffs and Union hacks conformed deafeningly to type and boozed and plotted and howled unacceptable remarks at each other and at the harried staff. It was another world, defiantly impervious, in which it was a shock to find that Toby had a place.

  "You are so fucking drunk, Shepton," Toby said. He had pulled off his socks and rolled them into a ball and he threw them very hard and accurately at the fat peer's head.

  "Fucking Christ, Fedden," Roddy muttered, but left it at that.

  Nick was explaining about the sea in Conrad's novels being a metaphor for both escape from the self and discovery of the self—a point which took on more and more revelatory force as he repeated it. He laughed at the beauty of it. He wasn't a strong smoker, and a second frowning toke, taken in the belief that the first one had had no effect, could leave him swimming and gabbling for hours. Nat Hanmer was sitting on the floor beside him, and his warm thigh was pressed against his own. There was something charmingly faggy about Nat tonight. He nodded and smiled into Nick's eyes as he was talking. Nick thought the pressure of the dope on his temples was as if his skull was being gently squeezed by Nat's big hands. Sam Zeman was nodding and smiling too and corrected, as if it really didn't matter, a plot detail in Victory that Nick had got wrong. Nick loved Sam because he was an economist but he'd read everything and played the viola and took a flattering interest in people less sublimely omniscient than himself.