Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Yah, well," said Toby, with a big sigh that seemed to weigh a burden and hint at a threat. Unexpected intimacies were blowing up all around him. He leant on the table and looked at a paper to hide his discomfort. "First it's Dad and Penny, with this fraud thing going on too, then there's you and Ouradi, with the plague thing…"

"Well, you knew Wani had AIDS."

"Mm, yah… " said Toby uncertainly. He squared up the newspapers in a pile, with distracted firmness. They were the astonishing evidence of his situation. "And my bloody old sis going clean off the rails."

"She has rather landed us in it."

"It's as if she hates Dad."

"It's difficult…"

"And hates you too. I mean, how did she get like this?"

It was the long-ago talk by the lake, the solemn explanation… "I don't think she hates us," said Nick. "Since she crawled out from under the lithium she's just been in a mood to tell the truth. Actually, she always has been, when you think about it. I'm certain she'd never actually want to hurt us. She's been got at by people who do hate Gerald, perhaps; that's the thing."

"Anyway, it's a fuck-up," said Toby, quickly resisting the role-reversal. And Nick caught that startling thing, the stared-out threat of tears, the miserable twitch of the mouth.

"It's a fuck-up," Nick agreed. He winced at his own readiness to explain Toby's story to him. Poor Toby had been tricked, or not trusted, which seemed a form of trickery, by everyone around him: it was awful, and Nick found a smile creeping out of the corners of his mouth in bizarre amusement.

"I must say the Independent has by far the best-quality photographs," Toby said. "They've achieved consistently high standards."

"Yes, the Telegraph's are very murky in comparison."

"The Mail's somewhat better, though." Toby snapped back the pages. The Mordant Analyst had been given a double spread to explore the whole situation, drawing on his inside knowledge of "the Fedden set." The picture of Toby clasping Sophie on the dance floor at Hawkeswood was one of Russell's. Toby looked away at the floor and still didn't meet Nick's eye when he said, "I don't know quite where this leaves us."

"No," said Nick. "Everything's rather in the air, isn't it."

"I mean, I don't see how you can stay here." Then he did look at Nick for several seconds, and the lovely brown gaze, which had always softened or faltered, didn't do so.

"No, no, of course," said Nick, with a scowl as if Toby was insulting him to suggest he thought he could.

Toby pursed his lips, stood up straight and buttoned his jacket. There was a sense that, though it could have been done better, he'd performed a bit of business, and his uneasy satisfaction carried him quickly to the door. "I'm going to have a word with Ma," he said. "Sorry."

Nick sat for a while, feeling that Toby's anger was the worst part of it, the one utterly unprecedented thing; and looking over the papers in which his own image appeared. He was letting himself in at the front door of this house, and also, four years younger, in a bow tie and his Uncle Archie's dinner jacket, looking very drunk. It was fascinating, if you thought about it, that they hadn't got hold of the picture of him and the PM. Still, they had all the rest, sex, money, power: it was everything they wanted. And it was everything Gerald wanted too. There was a strange concurrence about that.

Nick felt his life horribly and needlessly broken open, but with a tiny hard part of himself he observed what was happening with detachment as well as contempt. He cringed with dismay at the shame he had brought on his parents, but he felt he himself had learned nothing new. His long talk on the phone with his father, and then with his mother, had been all the harder for his lack of surprise; to them it was "a bit of a bombshell," it called for close explanation, almost for some countering offensive. He had found himself sounding flippant, and wounded them more, since of course, when it came to it, all their deep instincts were for him, for his safety, and protection. They took it utterly seriously, but rattled him with their clear admissions that they'd expected trouble of some kind, they'd known something wasn't quite right. Nick resisted that, he wasn't shocked, and couldn't capture at all the shock that was fuelling the press. He'd known about Penny, and he'd known about himself and Wani. The real horror was the press itself. "Greed drives out Prudence," wrote Peter Crowther, as if nobody'd ever thought of that before. He saw the romance of his years with the Feddens, deep, evolving, and profoundly private, framed and explained to the world by this treacherous hack.

The doorbell rang, and since no one answered it Nick went out and peered through the new spyhole: in which the furious, conceited features of Barry Groom loomed and then fled sideways as he rang the bell again. Nick opened the door; and glanced out past the MP at the now almost deserted street. "Hello, Barry, come in… Yes, they've virtually all gone now."

"No thanks to you," said Barry, stepping past him and frowning his eyebrows and mouth into two thin parallel lines. "I've come to see Gerald."

"Yes, of course." It wasn't clear if Barry was treating him as a servant or an obstacle. "Come this way," he said, and went on gracefully, as he turned back down the hall, "I'm so sorry about all this ghastly business." There was a strange smooth relish in saying that. For a second Barry seemed to take it as his due, then his face soured again. He said,

"Shut up, you stupid little pansy!" It was a quaint sentence, and somehow the more expressive for that.

"Oh…!"-Nick darted a look in the big hall mirror, as though for witnesses. "That's hardly-"

"Shut up, you little cuntl" said Barry, with a biting clench of the jaw, and pushed past him and down the passage towards Gerald's study.

"Oh, fuck off," said Nick, in fact he only mouthed the words, because he thought Barry might turn back and punch him in the face. Gerald opened his door and looked out like a headmaster.

"Ah, Barry, good of you to come," he said, and gave Nick a momentary stare of reproach.

"You ignorant, humourless, greedy, ugly cunt… " Nick went on to himself, in the shocked hilarity of having been insulted. He wandered in the hall, blinking in astonishment at the black-and-white marble squares of the floor. He couldn't quite tell, when he went into the kitchen, if Elena had heard this outburst. She always protested, dimly but sincerely, at Gerald's unguarded fucks -she was serious about all that.

"Hello, Elena!" said Nick.

"So, Mr Barry Groom come," said Elena. She was a little woman but she occupied the kitchen from wall to wall. She patrolled it. "He want coffee?"

"Come to think of it, he never said. But I rather think not."

"He don't want?"

"No… " He looked at Elena with cautious tenderness, uncertain what credit remained from his years of diligent niceness to her. "By the way, I won't be here for dinner tonight." Elena raised her eyebrows and pinched her lips. The new revelations about Nick and Wani must be amazing to her. It wasn't clear if she'd even taken in that Nick was gay. He said, "It's all a bit of a mess, isn't it? Un pasticcio … un imbroglio"

"Pasticcio, si," she said, with a hard laugh. They'd had a certain amount of fun over the years with each other's Italian. She went into the pantry, and spoke to him without turning round, so that he had to follow her.

"I'm sorry?"

"How long you been here now?" She peered up at the shelved tins.

"In Kensington Park Gardens?-Oh, four years last summer, four and… a quarter years."

"Four years. A good time."

"Yes, it has been a good time"-he grunted at the little blur of idiom. She was reaching up, and Nick, not that much taller, stretched past her. "The borlotti?" He put the can into her hands, so that she had at least to nod in thanks; then he followed her out again, as if hoping for another task. She jammed the beans under the tin opener and cranked round the handle, something Nick felt he'd seen her do scores, hundreds of times, with her tomato puree and her fagioli and all the things she preferred canned to fresh. And suddenly it was obvious to him. He said, "Elena, I've decided it's time to hand in my resignation."