The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  Toby shrugged apologetically and said, "I just hope I've still got those disco pants!"

  Nick almost said, "Oh . . . the purple ones . . . ?"—since he knew just where they were, having been through everything in Toby's room, read his schoolboy diary, sniffed the gauzy lining of his outgrown swimming trunks, and even tried on the flared purple trousers (standing foolishly on the long legs). But he merely nodded, and knocked back the rest of his g-and-t.

  Gerald came down in a dark suit with characteristic pink shirt, white collar, and blue tie. He seemed to recognize, with a forgiving smile, that he had set a sartorial standard the others were unlikely to match. He kept on smiling as he crossed the room, as a sign of his decision that he would not react to Catherine's appearance. The mac worn over the micro-frock made her look almost naked. When Badger came in he was less circumspect. "My god, girl!" he said.

  "No, your god-daughter actually, Uncle Badger," said Catherine, with the forced pertness of a much younger child.

  Badger frowned and hummed. "Well, exactly," he said. "Didn't I promise to safeguard your morals, or something?" He rubbed his hands together and had a good look at her.

  "I'm not sure anyone thinks you'd be the best person for that," Catherine said, sipping her gin and sitting down sideways on a low armchair.

  "You're going easy on that stuff, aren't you, Puss?" said Gerald.

  "It's my first one, Daddy," Catherine said; but Nick could see why Gerald was anxious, she was high on her own defiance tonight. He watched Badger watching her, his grey-striped peak slicked back after his shower, something disreputable and unattached about him; in parts of Africa, according to Toby, he was known not as Badger but by one of a number of words for hyena. Certainly he circled, and was hungry for something. His lecherous teasing of his god-daughter was allowed because it was of course impossible, a clownish joke.

  Catherine stayed long enough to meet everyone and to test her claim that Barry Groom never said hello. Gerald played along and said, "Hello, Barry," and not only seized his hand but covered it confirmingly with his other hand, as if he was canvassing: at which Barry, looking round the room with a suspicious smile, said, "Gerald, I'm surprised at you"—holding him there long enough to make him uneasy—"a green front door, that's hardly sending the right signal." He got a laugh, which was warmer and more complex than he expected—there was a second or two while he grew into it, squared his shoulders. He followed Gerald across the room, nodding in a vain, critical way as he was introduced, but not saying hello. When Catherine shook his hand, he said, "Aha! Beautiful creature!" with a vaguely menacing presumption of charm. Catherine asked him where his wife was and he said she was still parking the car.

  It was good that Catherine should want to be present, to be presented, to help entertain the guests, but to the family it was also a little sinister. She put everyone on edge by having her coat on indoors, and seemed to be playing with her father's hopes that at any moment she might leave. He glanced at her distractedly from time to time, as if he would have liked to say something but had made the calculation that the oddity of the coat was preferable to the naked flesh beneath it. He introduced her to Morden Lipscomb with visible reluctance. The grey old American, with his tiny granite-like sparkle of charm, shook her hand and smiled mockingly, as if being confronted with an ancient indiscretion he meant entirely to deny. Toby and Nick were both watching her and Toby said, "God, my sis looks like, you know, one of those girls who try and lure you into striptease parlours."

  "She looks like a strippergram," Sophie said.

  Lady Partridge came in with that air of social vexation Nick had seen in her before: she wanted to appear totally at home here and she also wanted her arrival to be an event; her deafness added a querulous uncertainty as to which effect she was having. Badger got her a drink and flirted with her, and she allowed herself to be flirted with. She liked Badger, having known him since he was a boy, and nursed him through mumps once, when he was staying in the holidays—an episode that was still referred to as a touchstone of their friendship, and in a vaguely risque way, since apparently Badger's balls had been the size of grapefruit. Nick had heard them joke about it earlier in the week, and it had sounded like jokes he had with his own parents, that were ribald little reference points in a past before everything changed and became indescribable.

  All the time Nick was thinking about Leo, so that Leo seemed to be the element, the invisible context, in which these daunting disparate people were meeting and sparring and congratulating each other. They didn't know it, which made it all the funnier and more beautiful. He mixed himself a fresh gin-and-tonic, Gerald-style, quinine lost in juniper, and drifted round not minding if he wasn't spoken to. He looked at the pictures with a new keenness, as though explaining them to Leo, his grateful pupil. The other MP and his wife, John and Greta Timms, were standing in front of the Guardi with the look of people who had come to the wrong party, who wanted more of a challenge, he in a grey suit, she in the helpless boldness of a blue maternity dress with a white bow at the neck: it was as if the PM herself were pregnant. John Timms was a junior minister in the Home Office; he must have been several years younger than Gerald, but he had precocious gravitas and unflappable self-importance. If Barry Groom never said hello, John Timms seemed at first not to blink. His gaze was fixed and almost sensual, and his speech had a hypnotic steadiness of pace and tone, irrespective of meaning: he was inspired, he seemed constantly to admit, but he wasn't in any dubious way excitable. They were talking about the Falklands War and the need to commemorate it with a monument and to celebrate it with an annual public holiday. "A Trafalgar Day for our times," said Timms, and his wife, in whom his certainty produced a more vibrant kind of urgency, said, "Why not revive Trafalgar Day itself? Trafalgar Day itself must be revived! Our children are forgetting the War Against the French . . ."John Timms gazed out into the room as though flattered by his wife's zeal and loving her for it, but not himself being ready to go so far. He hadn't been introduced to Nick (indeed the Timmses were really speaking to each other), and his gaze played on him for a moment, seemed to feel him and test him and doubt him. "You'd like to see a permanent Falklands memorial, wouldn't you," he said.

  "Mm, I wonder . . . " said Nick, not disrespectfully, and marvelled at just how unavailable his thoughts on the subject were. The doubtlessness of Timms was a wonder in itself. He imagined Leo being here beside him, and having one salient fact or objection to produce, of the kind Nick could never remember. Catherine came past, sampling each of the little power-centres in the room. "We were talking about the Falklands," said Nick.

  "I understand the Prime Minister favours an annual parade," said John Timms, "as well as a prominent memorial. It was truly her triumph."

  "And the men's," said Greta Timms, with her rich hormonal flush. "The men were staunch."

  "They were certainly staunch, my darling," said John Timms. "They were dauntless."

  "No," said Catherine, covering her ears and grinning, "it's no good, I just can't bear words with that au sound in. Do you know what I mean?"

  "Oh . . . " said Greta Timms. "I think I've always found them rather splendid words!"

  "Right, I'm off!" said Catherine, turning to the room with the big smile which perhaps all her life would seem unguarded and vulnerable. A rough chorus of "Bye"s, a chuckling "Oh, is she off?," and she was gazed at with relief, the suddenly conjured good humour that sends a child up to its early bed. "Bye, Gran!" she said, specially loudly, kissing Lady Partridge in the middle of the room. "See you in the morning, Dad." And picking up her bag she stalked out on her tall heels. Lady Partridge peeped at Morden Lipscomb to gauge his surprise; if he seemed amused by this vision of a sex-club door-girl she was ready to take some droll credit as her grandmother. But Lipscomb was looking disappointedly at Gerald.

  Lady Partridge was taken in to dinner by Lipscomb. They didn't really "take people in" at the Feddens', but the procession from the drawing room, down the stone stairs, and into t
he candlelight, awoke a memory sometimes, or an anxiety, in guests. Lipscomb, with ponderous New World formality, presented his elbow to the senior lady, and Gerald's mother, who had a hurtling look to her after two gin-and-tonics, pressed against him like an old flame. In the dining room Lipscomb peered around with guarded curiosity as people found their places. "Yes, I always think what a splendid room," Lady Partridge said, trailing away towards her chair.

  "And are these your forebears, Lady Partridge?" Lipscomb asked.

  "Yes . . . yes . . ." said Lady Partridge, in a daze of graciousness.

  "No, they are not her forebears," said Rachel, quietly but firmly. "They're my grandfather and my great-aunt."

  Nick was placed in the middle of the table, with Penny Kent on his right and Jenny Groom on his left—the dullest place of all, but he didn't mind because he had company of his own. He tucked into his crab cake as if sharing a joke. "How do you fit in?" Jenny Groom wanted to know, with the air of someone steeled to unpleasant surprises.

  "Oddly but snugly," said Nick; and since she didn't like this, "No, I'm an old friend of Toby's."

  "Oh, Gerald's son, you mean . . . And I hear he's working for the Guardianl" The scandal of Toby's having a traineeship at the Guardian seemed to Nick to eclipse his own dissidence, to be enough scandal for one household.

  "Well, you can ask him. He's sitting just over there," said Nick, loud enough to intrude on Toby as he listened to Greta Timms extolling the virtues of the Family: Toby gave a half-secret smile of acknowledgement but said, "Yes, I see," to Greta to show she still had his attention.

  "Oh, of course. He's got his father's looks," said Jenny with a frown. "So what do you do?"

  "I'm doing a doctorate at UCL—on . . . on Henry James," said Nick, seeing the style question might lose her completely.

  "Oh . . ." said Jenny warily, getting a hook on it. "Yes. I've never got round to Henry James."

  "Well . . ." said Nick, not caring if she had or not.

  "Or hang on, did I read one? Dr Johnson or something."

  "No . . . I don't think so . . ."

  "No, not Dr Johnson, obviously . . . !"

  "I mean there's the Boswell."

  "It was set in Africa . . . I know: Mr Johnson."

  "Oh, Mister Johnson is a novel by Joyce Cary."

  "Exactly, I knew I'd read something by him."

  When the venison came in Gerald yapped, "Don't touch the plates! Don't touch the plates!" so that it sounded as though something had gone wrong. "They have to be white hot for the venison." The fact was that the fat congealed revoltingly if the plates were less than scorching. "Yes, my brother-in-law has a deer park," he explained to Morden Lipscomb. "A rare enough amenity these days." The guests looked humbly at their helpings. "No," Gerald went on, in his bristling way of answering questions he wished someone had asked, "this is buck venison . . . comes into season before the doe, and very much superior." He went round with the burgundy himself. "I think you'll like this," he said to Barry Groom, and Barry sniffed at it testily, as if he knew he was thought to have more money than taste.

  Nick shared a brief smile down the table with Rachel. It seemed subtly to mock not only Barry but Gerald himself. Nick took his first sip of the burgundy with a frisson at their shared understanding, like the liberty allowed to a child by a confident mother—the pretended conspiracy against the father. He wondered if Gerald and Rachel ever rowed. If anything happened, then it was in the white secrecy of the bedroom, which, with its little vestibule, was removed from hearing behind two heavy doors; it became somehow sexual.

  When he thought of Leo after not thinking of him for a minute or two he heard a big orchestral sound in his head. He saw Leo lying on his coat under a bush, his shirt and jersey pushed up under his armpits, his jeans and pants round his knees, small dead leaves sticking to his thighs—and he heard the astonishing chord. It was high and low at once, an abysmal pizzicato, a pounce of the darkest brass, and above it a hair-raising sheen of strings. It seemed to knock him down and fling him up all in one unresisted gesture. He couldn't repeat it immediately, but after a while he would see Leo rising to kiss him, and the love-chord would shiver his skin again. It startled him while Penny was describing the enormous interest of working for Gerald, and he jumped, and smiled at his invisible friend, so that Penny worried that she'd been funny. He wondered if it came from something he knew, or if he'd written it himself. It certainly wasn't the Tristan chord, with its germ of catastrophe. The horrible thought came to him that if it existed, it had probably been written by Richard Strauss, to illustrate some axe-murder or beheading, some vulgar atrocity. Whereas to Nick, though it was frightening, it was also indescribably happy.

  "So how are you getting on at UCL?" said Penny kindly, as if it must be a sorry comedown after Oxford. Nick and Penny had never met as students, the word Oxford meant different things to them, but Penny relied on it as a thing they had in common.

  "Oh, fine . . . !" said Nick; and went on obligingly, "It's not at all like Oxford, you know. The place itself is fairly grim. I've just found out that the English department used to be a mattress factory."

  "Really!" said Penny.

  "It is a bit depressing. I suppose it's no wonder half the staff are alcoholics." Penny laughed, oddly titillated, and Nick felt rather treacherous. In fact he revered Professor Ettrick, who had taken to him with immediate subtle confidence, and seen possibilities in his thesis topic that he himself hadn't dreamt of. But nothing much was being done, and through most of Nick's library days his eyes wandered just beyond the page in a deep monotonous reverie about Leo: the great unfolding sentences of Meredith or James would slow and fade into subliminal parentheses, half-hour subordinate clauses of remembered sex. And he felt guilty, because he wanted to deserve the professor's trust and be as clever and committed as he was meant to be. Penny said, "Was it Henry James you're working on?"

  "Er . . . yes," said Nick.

  She seemed to settle comfortably on that, but only said, "My father's got tons of Henry James. I think he calls him the Master."

  "Some of us do," said Nick. He blinked with the exalted humility of a devotee and sawed off a square of brown meat.

  "Art makes life: wasn't that his motto? My father often quotes that."

  "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process," said Nick.

  "Something like that," said Penny. She smiled contentedly into the candlelight. "What would Henry James have made of us, I wonder?" she went on.

  " Well . . . " Nick chewed it over. He thought she was rather like a high-minded aunt, proposing questions with virginal firmness and ignorance. He wondered condescendingly what her sexual prospects were. A certain kind of man might like to raise the colour in that plump white neck. He said, "He'd have been very kind to us, he'd have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he'd have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn't have realized until just before the end that he'd seen right through us."

  "Because he did write about high society, didn't he?" said Penny, clearly thinking that was where she was, and also perhaps that it was proof against being seen through.

  "Quite a lot," said Nick; and remembering his chat with Lord Kessler in the summer and really giving a long-pondered answer to him, "People say he didn't understand about money, but he certainly knew all about the effects of money, and the ways having money made people think." He looked fondly across at Toby, who out of sheer niceness tried now and then not to think like a rich person, but could never really get the hang of it. "He hated vulgarity," he added. "But he also said that to call something vulgar was to fail to give a proper account of it."

  Penny seemed to be puzzling this over, but in fact she was listening to what Badger was suggesting in her other ear: her sudden blush and giggle showed Nick that this was one of Badger's little sexual challenges to him—
it was almost a way of calling him a fag.

  Toby was listening to Greta Timms, but leaning past her to keep an eye on Sophie, who was being drily examined by Morden Lipscomb. "No," said Sophie reluctantly, "I've only been in one sort of major film."

  "And what of the stage?" said Lipscomb, with an odd mixture of persistence and indifference.

  "Well, I am about to be in something. It's . . . I'm afraid it's going to be rather a trendy production . . . it's Lady Windermere's Fan."

  Jenny Groom started asking something about Catherine, was she as mad as they said, and Nick's hesitations as he answered only half allowed him to hear the truth that Lipscomb dragged out of Sophie, that she wasn't playing Lady Windermere herself, but "Oh, just a minor part. . . No! Not too much to learn . . . Oh no, not her, that's a wonderful part . . . Anyway it will probably all be ruined by the director . . . " and that in fact she'd been cast as Lady Agatha, a role which famously contained nothing but the two words "Yes, mamma." Nick thought this was very funny, and then felt almost sorry for her.

  Rachel said, "My dear, what fun, we shall all come to your first night," apparently sincerely, so that a further alliance, of efficient, almost impersonal solidarity, was seen to be in place between the mother and her possible daughter-in-law.

  Lady Partridge, jealous of Lipscomb's attention, went off on the unobvious tangent of her hip replacement. "Oh, I had it at the Dorset . . . Well, yes, I always go there, I find them marvellous . . . charming girls . . . The nurses, yes . . . One or two of the doctors are coloured, but there's absolutely no need to have anything to do with them . . . Not that I'm much of a one for hospital!" she reassured him. "My late husband was there a good deal."

  "Ah . . . " said Lipscomb, measuring the distance to a condolence.

  She lifted her glass, with a worldly sigh. "Well, I've outlived two husbands, and that's probably enough," she said, as if still leaving a tiny loophole for further proposals. She looked at Lipscomb, perhaps wondering if he had said something, and went on, "Actually they were both called Jack! They couldn't have been more different, as it happens . . . chalk and cheese . . . I don't think they'd have got on for a moment—had they ever met!" Nick thought she might almost have been on the phone, hearing answers and questions from far away. "Jack Fedden, of course, Gerald's father, a funny sort of man, in a way . . . He was in the law, very much a law man . . . very, very handsome . . . and Jack Partridge, Sir Jack, of course . . . No, not a law man . . . Not at all. . . He was a practical man, a builder, he built some of the new motorways, as you may know . . . Yes, some of the Ms. . . the M, um . . . He did marvellous work . . ."