The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

  "Oh fuck," said Wani distantly. In about three seconds he was hard, and Nick too, pressing against him. Everything they did was clandestine, and therefore daring and therefore childlike, since it wasn't really daring at all. Nick didn't know how long it could go on—he didn't dream of it stopping, but it was silly and degrading at twenty-three to be sneaking sex like this, like a pickpocket as Wani said. But then again, on a hungover morning, moronic with lust, he saw a beauty in the slyness of it. There were several pound coins in the flannel depths of the pocket, and they tumbled round Nick's hand as he stroked Wani's dick.

  Wani drew the powder into two long lines. "You'd better close the door," he said.

  Nick lingeringly disengaged himself: "Yeah, we've only got a minute." He pushed the door to and came forward to take the rolled £20 note.

  "Turn the key," said Wani. "That little boy follows me everywhere."

  "Ah, who can blame him," said Nick graciously.

  Wani gave him a narrow took—he was often dissatisfied by praise. They stooped in turn and zipped up the powder, and then stood for a minute, sniffing and nodding, reading each other's faces for comparison and confirmation of the effect. Wani's features seemed to soften, there was a subtle but involuntary smile that Nick loved to see at the moment of achievement and surrender. He grinned back at him, and reached out to stroke his neck, and with his other hand rubbed playfully at Wani's oblique erection. They were on to such a good thing. He said, "This is fucking good stuff."

  "God yes," said Wani. "Ronnie always comes through."

  "I hope you haven't given me too much," Nick said; though over the next thirty seconds, holding Wani to him and kissing him lusciously, he knew that everything had become possible, and that the long demanding lunch would be a waltz and that he would play with Bertrand the tycoon and charm them all. He sighed and pulled Wani's left arm up to look at his famous watch. "We'd better go down," he said.

  "OK." Wani stepped back, and quickly undid his trousers.

  "Darling, they're waiting for us. . ." But Wani's look was so fathomlessly interesting to him, command and surrender on another deeper level, the raw needs of so aloof a man, the silly sense of privilege in their romantic secret—Nick knelt anyway, and turned him round in his hands, and pulled his pants, the loose old-fashioned drawers that Wani wore, down between his thighs.

  On the way downstairs they met little Antoine, who had been dying to look for them and was going into every room in a mime of happy exasperation. It had taken a couple of flushes to dispose of the rubber, and they had got out with thirty seconds to spare. The boy claimed them and then wanted to know what they were laughing about.

  "I was showing Uncle Nick my old photographs," Wani said.

  "They were rather funny," said Nick, pierced by the generous twist to his lie, and also, absurdly, by the missed opportunity of seeing the photos.

  "Oh," said little Antoine, perhaps with a similar regret.

  "You'd better have a quick look in here," Wani said, and pushed open the door of the room above the drawing room, which was his parents' bedroom. He swept a hand over the switches and all the lights came on, the curtains began to close automatically and "Spring" from The Four Seasons was heard as if coming from a great distance. Little Antoine clearly loved this part, and asked to be allowed to do it all again whilst Nick glanced humorously around. Everything was luxurious and he feigned dismay at his own deep footprints in the carpet. The richness of the room was its mixture of shiny pomp, glazed swagged curtains, huge mirrors, onyx and glaring gilt, with older, rougher and better things, things perhaps they'd brought from Beirut, Persian rugs and fragments of Roman statuary. On top of a small chest of drawers there was a white marble head of Wani, presumably, done at about the same age as little Antoine was now, the wider, plumper face of a child. It was charming and Nick thought if he could have anything in the house, any object, it would be that. Bertrand and Monique had separate dressing rooms—each of them, in its order and abundance, like a department of a shop. "You'd better look at this too," Wani said, showing him a large yellow painting of Buckingham Palace that hung on the landing.

  "It's a Zitt, I see," said Nick, reading the signature dashed across the right-hand corner of the sky.

  "He's rather buying into Zitt," said Wani.

  "Oh—well, it's absolutely ghastly," said Nick.

  "Is it?" said Wani. "Well, try and break it to him gently."

  They went down into the dining room, with little Antoine going in before them, lolling his head from side to side and saying "eb-solutely gharstly" over and over to himself. Wani caught him from behind and gave him an enjoyable strangle.

  Nick was placed on Monique's right, beside little Antoine, with Uncle Emile opposite. Uncle Emile had the air of a less successful brother, baggy and gloomy rather than gleamingly triangular. But it turned out that in fact he was Monique's brother-in-law, on a visit of indefinite duration from Lyon, where he ran an ailing scrap-metal business. Nick took in this story and smiled along the table as if they were being told a simmeringly good joke; it was only Wani's tiny frown that made him suspect he might be looking too exhilarated by his tour of the house. It was the magic opposite, all this, of the jolted witless hangover state of half an hour earlier. All their secrets seemed to fuse and glow. Though for Wani himself, severely self-controlled, it seemed hardly worth having taken the drug. The little old couple were bringing in elaborately fanned slices of melon and orange. It was clear that citrus fruits were treated with special acclaim in the house; here as in the drawing room there was a daringly stacked obelisk of oranges and lemons on a side table. The effect was both humble and proprietorial. Another Zitt, of the Stock Exchange and the Mansion House, done in mauve, hung between the windows.

  "I see you're admiring my husband's new Zitt," said Monique, with a hint of mischief, as if she would value a second opinion.

  "Ah yes . . . !"

  "He's really an Impressionist painter, you know."

  "Mm, and almost, somehow, an Expressionist one, too," said Nick.

  "He's extremely contemporary," said Monique.

  "He's a bold colourist," said Nick. "Very bold . . ."

  "So, Nick," said Bertrand, spreading his napkin, and steadying his swivelling array of knives on the glassy polish of the table top: "how is our friend Gerald Fedden?" The "our" might have referred to just the two of them, or to a friendship with the family, or to a vaguer sense that Gerald was on their side.

  "Oh, he's absolutely fine," said Nick. "He's in great form. Wildly busy—as always . . . !" Bertrand's look was humorous but persistent, as if to show that they could be candid with each other; having ignored him for the first half-hour he was turning the beam of his confidence on him, with the instinct of a man who gets his way.

  "You live in his house, no?"

  "Yes, I do. I went to stay for a few weeks and I've ended up staying for nearly three years!"

  Bertrand nodded and shrugged, as if this was quite a normal arrangement.

  Uncle Emile himself, perhaps, might turn out to be just such a visitor. "I know where it is. We're invited to the concert, whatever it is, next week, which we'll be charmed to come to."

  "Oh, good," said Nick. "I think it should be quite fun. The pianist is a young star from Czechoslovakia."

  Bertrand frowned. "I know they say he's a bloody good man."

  "No, actually . . . oh, Gerald, you mean—yes, absolutely!"

  "He's going to go to the very top of the ladder. Or almost to the top. What's your opinion of that?"

  "Oh—oh, I don't know," said Nick. "I don't know anything about politics."

  Bertrand twitched. "I know you're the bloody aesthete . . ."

  Nick was often pressed for insider views on Gerald's character and prospects, and as a rule he was wafflingly loyal. Now he said, "I do know he's madly in love with the Prime Minister. But it's not quite clear if the passion is returned. She may be playing hard to get." Little Antoine did the furtive double-take of a chil
d who is not supposed to have heard something, and Bertrand's frown deepened over his melon. It occurred to Nick that he was in a household with a very serious view of sexual propriety. But it was Monique who said,

  "Ah, they're all in love with her. She has blue eyes, and she hypnotizes them." Her own dark gaze went feelingly down the table to her husband, and then to her son.

  "It's only a sort of courtly love, isn't it," said Nick.

  "Yah . . . " said Wani with a nod and a short laugh.

  "You've met the lady, I imagine," Bertrand said.

  "I never have," said Nick, humbly but cheerfully.

  Bertrand made a pinched plump expression with his lips and stared into an imaginary distance for a moment before saying, "You know, of course, she's a good friend of mine."

  "Oh, yes, Wani told me you knew her."

  "Of course, she is a great figure of the age. But she is a very kind woman too." He had the mawkish look of a brute who praises the kindness of another brute. "She has always been very kind to me, hasn't she, my love?

  And of course I intend to return the compliment."

  "Aha . . ."

  "I mean in a practical way, in a financial way. I saw her the other day, and . . . " he waved his left hand impatiently to show he wouldn't be going into what had been said; but then went on, with weird candour, "I will make a significant donation to the party funds, and . . . who knows what then." He stabbed and swallowed a slice of orange. "I believe you have to pay back, my friend, if you have been given help"—and he stabbed the air with his empty fork.

  "Oh, quite," said Nick. "No, I'm sure you do." He felt he had inadvertently become the focus of some keen resentment of Bertrand's.

  "You won't hear any complaints about the lady in this house."

  "Well, nor in mine, I assure you!"

  Nick glanced around at the submissive faces of the others, and thought that actually, at Kensington Park Gardens, the worship of "the lady," the state of mesmerized conjecture into which she threw Gerald, was offset at least by Catherine's monologues about homeless people and Rachel's wry allusions to "the other woman" in her husband's life.

  "So he's on the up-and-up, our friend Gerald," Bertrand said more equably. "What's his role actually?"

  "He's a minister in the Home Office," Nick said.

  "That's good. He did that bloody quickly."

  "Well, he's ambitious. And he has the . . . the lady's eye."

  "I'll have a chat with him when I come to the house. I've met him, of course, but you can introduce us again."

  "I'd be happy to," said Nick; "by all means." The black-jacketed man removed the plates, and just then Nick felt the steady power of the coke begin to fade, it was something else taken away, the elation grew patchy and dubious. In four or five minutes it would yield to a flatness bleaker than the one it had replaced. However, the wine was served soon after, so there was an amusing sense of relief and dependency. Bertrand himself, Nick noted, drank only Malvern water.

  Nick tried for a while to talk to Emile about scrap metal, which tested his Cornelian French to the limits; but Bertrand, who had been looking on with an insincere smile and a palpable sense of neglect, broke in, "Nick, Nick, I don't know what you two young men are getting up to, I don't like to ask too many questions . . ."

  "Oh . . ."

  "But I hope it's soon going to start bringing in some money."

  "It will, Papa," said Wani quickly, while Nick blushed in horror at the chasm he'd just hopped over, and said, "I'm the aesthete, remember! I don't know about the money side of things." He tried to smile out through his blush, but he saw that Bertrand's little challenges were designed to show him up in a very passive light.

  Bertrand said,

  "You're the writing man—" which again was something allowed for, an item in a budget, but under scrutiny and probably dispensable.

  Nick felt writing men were important, and though he had nothing to show for it as yet he said again, "That's me." He realized belatedly, and rather sickeningly, that he would have to improvise, to answer to Wani's advantage, to give body to what his father must have thought were merely fantasies.

  "You know I want to start this magazine, Papa," Wani said.

  "Ah—well," Bertrand said, with a puff. "Yes, a magazine can be good. But there is a whole world of difference, my son, running a magazine than having your bloody face in a magazine!"

  "It wouldn't be like that," Wani said, somehow both crossly and courteously.

  "All right, but then probably it won't sell."

  "It's going to be an art magazine—very high quality photography—very high quality printing and paper—all extraordinary exotic things, buildings, weird Indian sculptures." He searched mentally through the list Nick had made for him. "Miniatures. Everything." Nick felt that even with his hangover he could have made this speech better himself, but there was something touching and revealing in how Wani made his pitch.

  "And who do you suppose is going to want to buy that?"

  Wani shrugged and spread his hands. "It will be beautiful."

  Nick put in the forgotten line. "People will want to collect the magazine, just as they would want to collect the things that are pictured in it."

  Bertrand took a moment or two to see whether this was nonsense or not. Then he said, "All this bloody top-quality stuff sounds like a lot of money. So you have to charge ten pounds, fifteen pounds for your magazine." He took an irritable swig from his glass of water.

  Wani said, "Top-quality advertising. You know, Gucci, Cartier . . .Mercedes," reaching for names far more lustrous than Watteau or Borromini. "Luxury goods are what people want these days. That's where the money is."

  "So you've got a name for the bloody thing."

  "Yah, we're calling it Ogee, like the company," Wani said, very straightforwardly.

  Bertrand pursed his plump lips. "I don't get it, what is it . . . ? 'Oh Gee!,' " is that it?" he said, bad-tempered but pleased to have made a joke. "You'll have to tell me again because no one's ever heard of this bloody 'ogee.' "

  "I thought he was saying 'Orgy,'" said Martine.

  "Orgy?!" said Bertrand.

  Wani looked across the table, and since this unheard-of name had originally been his idea Nick said, "You know, it's a double curve, such as you see in a window or a dome." He made the shape of half an hourglass with his hands raised in the air, just as Monique, in one of her occasional collusive gestures, did the same and smiled at him as if salaaming.

  "It goes first one way, and then the other," she said.

  "Exactly. It originates in . . . well, in the Middle East, in fact, and then you see it in English architecture from about the fourteenth century onwards. It's like Hogarth's line of beauty," Nick said, with a mounting sense of fatuity, "except that there are two of them, of course . . . I suppose the line of beauty's a sort of animating principle, isn't it . . ." He looked around and swooped his hand suggestively in the air. It wasn't perhaps the animating principle here.

  Bertrand set down his knife and fork, and gave a puncturing smile. He seemed to savour his irony in advance, as well as the uncertainty, the polite smiles of anticipation, on the faces of the others. He said, "You know, um . . . Nick, I came to this country, twenty years ago nearly, 1967, not a bloody good time in Lebanon incidentally, just to see what the chances were in your famous swinging London. So I look around, you know the big thing then is the supermarkets are starting up, you know, self-service, help-yourself—you're used to it, you probably go to one every bloody other day: but then . . . !"

  Nick simpered obediently at the notion of how accustomed he was. He wasn't sure if the Ogee talk was over, or being treated to some large cautionary digression. He said coolly, "No, I can see what a . . . what a revolution there's been."

  Like other egotists Bertrand cast only a momentary, doubting glance at the possibility of irony aimed at himself, and stamped on it anyway. "Of course it is! It's a bloody revolution." He turned to gesture the old man to pour more win
e for the others, and watched with an air of practised forbearance as the burgundy purled into the cut-glass goblets. "You know, I had a fruit shop, up in Finchley, to start off with." He waved his other arm fondly at that distant place and time. "Bought it up, flew in the fresh citrus, which was our own product by the way, we grew all that, we didn't have to buy it off bloody nobody. Lebanon, a great place for growing fruit. You know, all that's come out of Lebanon in the last twenty years? Fruit and brains, fruit and talent. No one with any brains or any talent wants to stay in the bloody place."

  "Mm, the civil war, you mean." He'd meant to mug up a bit on the past twenty years of Lebanese history, but Wani grew pained and evasive when he mentioned it, and now here it came. He didn't want to concur in his host's harsh judgement on his own country, it was itself a bit of a minefield.

  Monique said, "Our house was knocked down, you know, by a bomb," as though not expecting to be heard.

  "Oh, how terrible," said Nick gratefully, since it was another voice in the room.

  "Yes," she said, "it was very terrible."

  "As Antoine's mother says," said Bertrand, "our family house was virtually destroyed."

  "Was it an old house?" Nick asked her.

  "Yes, it was quite old. Not as old as this, of course"—and she gave a little shiver, as if Lowndes Square dated from the Middle Ages. "We have photographs, many . . ."

  "Oh, I'd love to see them," said Nick, "I'm so interested in that kind of thing."

  "Anyway," said Bertrand, "1969 I open the first Mira Mart, up in Finchley, up in Finchley, it's still there today, you can go and see it any time. You know what the secret of it is?"

  "Um . . ."

  "That's what I saw, that's what you got in London, back then—twenty years ago. You got the supermarkets and you got the old local shops, the corner shops going back hundreds of years. So what do I do, I put the two bloody things together, supermarket and corner shop, and I make the mini-mart—all the range of stuff you get in Tesco or whatever the bloody place, but still with the local feeling, comer-shop feeling." He held up his glass and drank as if to his own ingenuity. "And you know the other thing, of course?"