Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Yes, of course," Nick murmured, while his face grew fixed at the rebuke. Rachel was waiting, as if taking the pulse of her feelings; he peeped at her, saw her blink again and draw breath but then only give out a sharp resentful sigh. Nick said, "I left her with Gerald… the other night. That should have been safe enough."

"Ah, safe," she said, "yes. She should never have been there in the first place."

"I promise you, I didn't know where she was taking me…"

"She wasn't taking you anywhere. You were taking her, if you remember, in your horrible little car."

"Oh…!"

"I'm sorry," she said, and Nick wasn't sure if she was instantly retracting or grimly confirming her remark. His impulse was to forgive her, he frowned tenderly, the reflex of a boy who couldn't bear to be in the wrong. "You know the state she was in. Who knows what's happening to her now, if she hasn't got her librium with her."

"Mm… her lithium…"

"There's just rather a question of responsibility, you know? I mean, we'd always supposed you understood your responsibilities to her-and to us, of course."

"Oh, well, yes…!" He flashed a smile at the sting of this.

"We'd imagined you'd tell us if, for instance, anything went seriously wrong." Her steady tone, her emphasizing twitches, were new to Nick; they seemed to signal a change in their relations that wouldn't easily be reversed. He was used to her easy assents, her oddly contented demurrals… "We didn't know until last night, for instance, about this very serious episode four years ago."

"What do you mean?" said Nick, shaking his head. The "we" was fairly unnerving, the apparent solidarity with Gerald.

"I think you know very well what I mean." She peered at him, with an effect of complex distaste; which extended in a reluctance to put it in words. "We had no idea she'd tried to… harm herself while we were away."

"I don't know what you've been told. She didn't harm herself, anyway. She asked me to stay with her-which I did-and she was fine, you know, she'd just had one of her bad moments."

"You didn't tell us about it," said Rachel, pale with anger.

"Please, Rachel! She didn't want to upset you, she didn't want to spoil your holiday." The half-forgotten alibis came back, and the squeezing sensation of being out of his depth. "I stayed with her, I talked her through it." It was a bleat of a boast.

"Yes, she said you were wonderful," said Rachel. "Apparently, she quite raved about you to Gerald the other night." Nick looked at the floor, and at the rhythm of the black-and-gilt S-shaped balusters. Then beyond them, and below, he heard the scratch of the front door being unlocked, a voice from the street saying, "Over here, love!" and the jump of the knocker as the door slammed shut again.

Rachel stood where she was, in her own house and her indignation, and Nick edged away from her, still reluctantly holding the thread of her accusation, and went down a few steps to look over the banister. But it wasn't Catherine. It was Eileen, Gerald's "old" secretary. She gazed up into the stairwell. She was wearing a dark overcoat and holding a black handbag. She looked like someone who'd come for a smart party on the wrong night. Nick thought she must have wanted to look good for the press. "Hello, Eileen," he said.

"I thought I'd better come in and see to things."

"Good idea," said Nick.

"I've said I'll keep an eye on things."

"Well, that's marvellous." Nick smiled with the real but finite politeness of someone who's been interrupted; he put a clinching warmth into it. The joke in the family had always been that Eileen had a crush on Gerald, who kept up an unseemly mockery of her efficiency and forethought. She was part of Nick's earliest idea of the house, in that first magic summer of possession which Rachel was now turning over like a stone. She'd been keeping an eye on things then. She came forward and put her hand on the tight bottom curl of the stair rail.

"I've brought the Standard," she said. She'd been gripping it in her other hand, almost behind her, shielding them from it. "I don't know that you'll like it very much." She came up a few steps and Nick came down, with a vague sense of receiving a summons, and took it from her. He felt he should be specially diligent, and take the brunt of it on Rachel's behalf. He stood capably, with one foot on the stair above, and shook the paper flat. He saw the picture of himself, and thought, I'll come back to that in a second, and looked at the headline, which didn't make sense, and looked at the picture again and the one beside it of Wani. There was hardly any room for the article itself. The words and the pictures crowded out any sense of what they might mean. He felt oddly sorry for Bertrand: "Peer's Playboy Son Has AIDS". That was the subheading. "Gay Sex Link to Minister's House." Hard to get all that in. Didn't flow very well. Nick had a strange subliminal sensation that the banister wasn't there, and that the hall floor had hurtled up to meet him, like fainting but remaining fully conscious. He could tell it was very bad news. Then he realized where it had come from, and started to read the article, with a feeling like a thump in the sternum.

"Bloody hell, Nick…!" said Toby next morning.

Nick chewed his cheek. "I know…"

"I had absolutely no idea about this. None of us did." He pushed his copy of Today away from him, across the dining-room table, and fell back in his chair.

"Well, the Cat did, obviously. She twigged when we were all in France last year." He used the family nickname with a sense that his licence to do so had probably expired.

Toby gave him a wounded look which seemed to search and find him back at the manoir, under the awning, or by the pool, where they'd got drunk alone together that long hot afternoon. "You could have told me, you know, you could have trusted me." Toby had told his own secrets that day, his problems with intimacy-he'd entered into Nick's realm of examined feelings, it had been a triumph of intimacy in itself for him. "I mean, two of my best mates, you know? I feel such a blasted idiot."

"I was always longing to tell you, darling." Again Toby's face seemed to close against the endearment. "But Wani just wouldn't hear of it." He looked shyly at his old friend. "I know people take it very personally when they find they've been kept out of a secret. But really secrets are sort of impersonal. They're simply things that can't be told, irrespective of who they can't be told to."

"Hm. And now this." Toby pulled out the Sun from the slew of newsprint on the table. " 'Gay Sex Romp at MP's Holiday Home.'" He threw it away from him, with a look of disdain and a hint of a challenge.

"It's really rather sweet their idea of what constitutes a romp," Nick said, to try and put it in proportion.

"Sweet …?" said Toby, incredulously, but with a flinch of regret as well, that he should be speaking like this to someone he'd always simply trusted. He stood up, and walked awkwardly along to the far end of the table. The mood of an extended morning-after still reigned in the room, with sunshine seeping in over the top of the shutters, and the gilt wall lamps casting a crimson glow. He stood with his back to the Lenbach portrait of-what was he?-his great-grandfather: a stout bourgeois figure in a tightly buttoned black coat. Nick, with his eye for the family line, saw Toby growing into a likeness. Toby himself had on a dark suit, blue shirt, and red tie. He was going to a meeting, and this little chat was a bit like a meeting too. He seemed to share with his ancestor a respect for the obvious importance of business, as well as a dignified failure to anticipate the scandals of this week.

"God, I'm sorry, Toby," said Nick.