The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  Nick was confident that none of them knew he was sleeping with the boss, and with ten or more years of practice he could head off almost any train of talk that might end in a thought-provoking blush. Part of him longed for the scandalous acclaim, but Wani exacted total secrecy, and Nick enjoyed keeping secrets. He worked up his earlier adventures as a cover, and told Howard and Simon a different version of the Ricky incident, replacing Wani with a Frenchman he'd met at the Pond the previous summer.

  "So was he handsome, this Ricky?" said Simon.

  Handsomeness was neither here nor there with Ricky, it was his look of stupid certainty, the steady heat of him, the way you started in deep, as though the first kiss was an old kiss interrupted and picked up again at full intensity—Nick said, "Oh, magnificent. Dark eyes, round face, nice big nose—"

  "Mmm," said Simon.

  "Perhaps a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald."

  There was a moment's thought before Simon said, "That's one of your things, isn't it?"

  "What . . . ?" said Nick, with a vaguely wounded look.

  "A trifle too . . . how did it go?"

  "I can't remember what I said . . . 'a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald'?"

  Howard sat back, with the nod of someone submitting to an easy old trick, and said, "So did he have a beard?"

  "Far from it," said Nick. "No, no—he spoke, as to cheek and chin, of the joy of the matutinal steel."

  They all laughed contentedly. It was one of Nick's routines to slip these plums of periphrasis from Henry James's late works into unsuitable parts of his conversation, and the boys marvelled at them and tried feebly to remember them—really they just wanted Nick to say them, in his brisk but weighty way.

  "So what's that from, then?"

  "The baldness? It's from The Outcry, it's a novel by Henry James that no one's ever heard of." This was taken philosophically by the boys, who hadn't really heard of any novels by Henry James. Nick felt he was prostituting the Master, but then there was an element of self-mockery in these turns of phrase—it was something he was looking at in his thesis. He was at the height of a youthful affair with his writer, in love with his rhythms, his ironies, and his idiosyncrasies, and loving his most idiosyncratic moments best of all.

  "It sounds like Henry James called everyone beautiful and marvellous," said Sam, a little sourly, "from what you say."

  "Oh, beautiful, magnificent. . . wonderful. I suppose it's really more what the characters call each other, especially when they're being wicked. In the later books, you know, they do it more and more, when actually they're more and more ugly—in a moral sense."

  "Right . . . " said Simon.

  "The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other."

  "Interesting," said Howard drily.

  Nick cast a fond glance at his little audience. "There's a marvellous bit in his play The High Bid, when a man says to the butler in a country house, T mean, to whom do you beautifully belong?'"

  Simon grunted, and looked round to see if Melanie could hear. He said, "So what was his knob like, then? . . . You know, Ricky?"

  Well, it was certainly worth describing, and embellishing. Nick wondered for a moment how Henry would have got round it. If he had fingered so archly at beards and baldness, the fine paired saliences of his own appearance, what flirtings and flutterings might he not have performed to conjure up Ricky's solid eight inches? Nick said, "Oh, it was . . . of a dimension," and watched Simon work what excitement he could out of that.

  So he prattled on, mixing up sex and scholarship, and enjoying his wanderings away from the strict truth. In fact that was really the fun of it. And it seemed to fit in with the air of fantasy in the Ogee office, the distant sense of an avoided issue.

  Nick couldn't quite have defined his own role there, and he only learned what it was when he was suddenly invited to Lowndes Square for Sunday lunch. He'd been dancing at Heaven till three the night before, and was still struggling with the rubber mask, the wobbly legs, the trill and glare of a beer and brandy hangover when Bertrand Ouradi grasped his hand very hard and said, "Ah, so you're Antoine's aesthete."

  "That's me!" said Nick, returning the handshake as firmly as he could, and grinning in the hope that even an aesthete might be a good thing to be if it was sanctioned by his beloved son.

  "Ha ha!" said Bertrand, and turned away along the chequered marble floor of the hall. "Well, we need our aesthetes." He stretched out his arms in a graceful shrug, and seemed to gesture at the shiny paintings and Empire torcheres as necessary trappings of his position. He had an aesthete of his own, he seemed to say, on a small retainer. Nick followed on, wincing at the high polish on everything. He had the feeling there was only one thing in the house he would ever want to see. "I'll join you in a moment," Bertrand said, with a tiny gesture of deterrence, as Nick found himself following him into the lavatory. The dark little woman who'd opened the door led him dutifully upstairs, and he followed her instead, smiling and doomed. So Wani himself must have called him his aesthete, that was how he'd explained him to his parents . . .

  He was shown into the pink and gold confusion of a drawing room. Wani called out, "Ah, Nick . . . " like an old man remembering, and came across to shake his hand. "Now here's Martine, who's been longing to see you . . . " (Nick stopped by the sofa where she was sitting and shook her hand as well with an exaggerated bow)—"and you haven't met my mother." Nick was aware of himself advancing in the high mirror which hung over the fireplace, and at a slight tilt, so that the room seemed to climb into a luminous middle distance. He kept up a wide smile, in self-protection, and only caught his own eye for an unwise second. It was a dazzled smile, perhaps even the smile of someone about to make a sequence of witty remarks. Monique Ouradi said she had been to Mass at Westminster Cathedral, and smiled back, but seemed not quite ready yet for mere social communication. "And this is my Uncle Emile, and my cousin, little Antoine," said Wani, as two people came in unexpectedly behind him. Everything impinged on Nick, but he couldn't take it in. He shook hands with Uncle Emile, who said "Enchante" in a coughing sort of voice, and Nick said "Enchante" back. Wani rested his hand on his little cousin's head, and the boy looked up at him adoringly before also shaking hands with Nick. Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.

  Nick had decided in the taxi that he would stick to water, but when Bertrand came in saying, "Now, drinks!" he at once saw the point of a bloody Mary. Bertrand moved towards a drinks tray on a far table and at just that moment an old man in a black jacket hurried in with a salver and took control of the business. Nick gazed at them with the patient surmise of the hungover, a sense of mysterious displacement and slow revelation. Bertrand could make a mere gesture towards an action which would at once be performed by someone else—there was a signalled readiness and then a prompt, never-doubted relief! It explained everything.

  Really it was best to prop oneself at a life-like angle in the corner of the sofa and let the family talk trail back and forth . . . At the tall front windows white net curtains rippled very gently into the room. Outside on the balcony there were two pointed trees in tubs, and beyond them the planes in the square, forest-height, filled the entire view. Nick's thoughts drifted out and perched there.

  Little Antoine had a remote-controlled toy car, which Wani was encouraging him to crash into the legs of the repro Louis Quinze tables and chairs. It was a bright-red Ferrari with a whiplike antenna. Nick crouched forward to watch it haring round, and made histrionic groans when it banged into the skirting board or got stuck under the bureau. He was pretending to enjoy the game, and trying to attach himself to it, but the two boys seemed oblivious of him, Wani almost snatching the controls now and then to cause a top-speed collision. Bertrand was standing talking to Uncle Emile, and shuffled obligingly out of the way a couple of times, with a certain hardening of expression. In the tilting mirror Nick saw them all, as if from a pr
ivileged angle, like actors on a set.

  The parents were fascinating, Bertrand short and handsome as an old-fashioned film star, and Monique too, very smart and austere, with a black bob and a diamond brooch, evincing foreignness like a time-shift, into the chic of twenty years before. There was a subdued shine to Bertrand's dark suit, which was double-breasted, square-shouldered, and worn with a crimson breast-pocket handkerchief; he seemed to resolve into a pattern of squares and lozenges, with his square jaw, tougher than Wani's, and the same long hawkish nose, all parts of the pattern. Along his full upper lip he wore a thin black moustache. The light, low-cut patent slippers he had on seemed to Nick an eastern note. Wani had several pairs himself, with ridged rubber soles, "for walking on marble" as he explained. Bertrand's voice, strongly accented, casual but coercive, dominated the room.

  Martine was sitting at the other end of Nick's sofa, in what felt like her "place," adjacent to Wani's mother. They were speaking quietly in French, in a kind of listless female conspiracy, while the men boomed and frowned and crashed cars. Nick smiled at them undemandingly. Martine in her long engagement must have become a fixture, a passive poor relation, who was waiting and waiting to turn into a millionairess. She seemed shy of speaking to Nick, for reasons he could only guess at. Wani's claim that she was longing to see him had been wishful social prompting—he had a habit of languidly implanting his wishes. But Martine, in her mild unexpectant way, had always seemed to have her own mind. So it was a minute or two before she slid a dish of olives towards him on the low glass table and said, "And how are you getting on?"

  "Oh, fine!" said Nick, blinking and smirking. "I'm feeling a bit delicate, actually"—and he waggled his glass. "This is helping. It's a miracle how it does." He thought what extraordinary things one said.

  She was too delicate herself to take on the subject of his hangover. "Work is all fine?" she said.

  "Oh—yes . . . thank you. Well—I'm trying to finish my thesis this summer, and of course I'm very behind," he said, as if she must be familiar with his weaknesses, they seemed to grin out of him as he sat there. "I'm so terribly lazy and disorganized."

  "I hope not," she said, as if he could only be joking. "And what is it concerning, this thesis?"

  "Oh . . . it's concerning—Henry James . . . " He'd developed a reluctance that was Jamesian in itself to say exactly what its subject was. There was a lot to do with hidden sexuality, which struck him as better avoided.

  "But Antoine says you are working with him too, at the Ogee?"

  "Oh, I don't really do very much."

  "You are not writing a film? That is what he says."

  "Well, I'd like to. In a way, yes . . . We have a few ideas." He smiled politely beyond her to take Wani's mother as well into the conversation. Since it was all he had, he said, "Actually, I've always rather wanted to make a film of The Spoils of Poynton . . . " Monique settled back with an appreciative nod at this, and Nick felt encouraged to go on, "I think it could be rather marvellous, don't you. You know Ezra Pound said it was just a novel about furniture, rneaning to dismiss it of course, but that was really what made me like the sound of it!"

  Monique sipped at her gin-and-tonic and looked at him with vague concern, and then, as if searching for the point, glanced about at the tables and chairs. Of course she had no idea what he was talking about.

  Martine said, "So you want to make zfxlm about furniture?"

  Monique said, raising her voice as the Ferrari tore past her ankles, "We saw the latest film, which was so nice, of The Room with the View."

  "Ah yes," said Nick.

  "Mainly it took place in Italy, which we love so much, it was delightful."

  Martine slightly surprised him by saying, "I think it's so boring now, everything takes place in the past."

  "Oh . . . I see. You mean, all these costume dramas . . ."

  "Costume dramas. All of this period stuff. Don't the English actors get fed up with it—they are all the time in evening dress."

  "It's true," said Nick. "Though actually everyone is in evening dress all the time these days, aren't they." He was thinking really of Wani, who owned three dinner jackets and had gone to the Duchess's charity ball in white tie and tails. He saw he was under attack, since the Poynton project would naturally involve a lot of dressing up.

  Monique Ouradi said, "I'm sure my son will make a beautiful film, with your help"—so that Nick felt she was encouraging him in some larger sense, in the inscrutable way that mothers sometimes do.

  "Yes, perhaps you don't know him all that well," Martine agreed. "You will need to push and shove him."

  "I'll remember that," said Nick with a laugh, and amazing arousing images of Wani in bed glowed in front of him, so that Martine was like a person in the beam of a slide projector, half exposed, half coloured over, and a little ridiculous.

  The Ferrari smacked into Bertrand's slipper once again, and little Antoine made it rev and whine as it tried to climb over it, until Bertrand bent down and picked the toy up and held it like a furious insect in the air. Antoine came round from behind the sofa, dawdling as he caught the moment of pure fury on his uncle's face and then gasping with laughter as the glare curled into a pantomime snarl. "Enough Ferrari for today," Bertrand said, and gave it back to the child with no fear of being disobeyed. Nick felt abruptly nervous at the thought of crossing Bertrand, and those same naked images of his son melted queasily away.

  Wani said, "You must be longing to see round the house."

  "Oh, yes," said Nick, getting up with a flattered smile. He felt that Wani had almost overdone the coolness and dissimulation, he'd barely spoken to him, and even now, as he lifted Nick on a wave of secret intentions, his expression gave nothing away, not even the warmth that the family might have expected between two old college friends.

  "Yes, take him round," said Bertrand. "Show him all the bloody pictures and bloody things we've got."

  "I'd love that," said Nick, seeing the hidden advantage of the aesthete persona, even in a house where the good things had the glare of reproductions. "Will I go too?" said little Antoine, who was clearly as fond of his cousin's touch and smile as Nick was; but Emile crossly made him stay.

  "We'll begin at the top," Wani announced as they left the room and started upstairs two at a time. On the second flight he said quietly, "You didn't say where you were last night."

  "Oh, I went to Heaven," said Nick, with mild apprehension at telling an innocent truth.

  "I wondered," said Wani, without looking round. "Did you fuck anyone?"

  "Of course I didn't fuck anyone. I was with Howard and Simon."

  "I suppose that follows," said Wani, and then allowed Nick a tiny smile. "What did you do, then?"

  "Well, you have been to a nightclub, darling," said Nick in a voice where sarcasm almost wished itself away. "You've been photographed in several with your fiancee. We danced and danced and drank and drank."

  "Mm. Did you take your shirt off?"

  "I think I'll leave that to your jealous imagination," Nick said.

  They went along the landing and into Wani's bedroom. Wani bustled through, with a just perceptible air of granting a concession, of counting on Nick not to look too closely at what the room contained, and went into a white bathroom beyond. Nick followed slowly. Everything in the bedroom interested him, it was dead and alive at once, group photographs, from Harrow, from Oxford, the Martyrs' Club in their pink coats, Toby and Roddy Shepton and the rest; and the books, the Arnold and the Arden Shakespeare and the cracked orange spines of the Penguin Middlemarch and Tom Jones, the familiar colours and lettering, the series and ideas of all that phase of their life, stranded and fading here as in a thousand outgrown bedrooms, never to be looked at again; and the young man's princely bed, almost a double; and the mirror, where Nick now timidly checked his own progress—he looked perfectly all right. The puzzlement of a hangover . . . the creeping hilarity of the new drink . . . He strolled on into the bathroom.

  Wani had
got his wallet out, and was crushing and chopping a generous spill of coke on the wide rim of the washbasin. "A lot of funny old stuff in there," he said.

  "I know," said Nick. "It's a little early for that, isn't it?" It was a lovely slide they were on with the coke, but sometimes Wani was a bit serious, a bit premature with it.

  "You looked as if you needed it."

  "Well, just a small line," said Nick. He looked around this room as well, with tense insouciance. He didn't really want to go down to lunch in reckless unaccountable high spirits and make a different kind of fool of himself. But a line wasn't feasibly resisted. He loved the etiquette of the thing, the chopping with a credit card, the passing of the tightly rolled note, the procedure courteous and dry, "all done with money," as Wani said—it was part of the larger beguilement, and once it had begun it squeezed him with its charm and promise. Being careful not to nudge him as he worked, he hugged Wani lightly from behind and slid a hand into his left trouser pocket.