Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

For a moment Nick couldn't think what he meant. "Oh, Martine, do you mean?"

"The fiancee."

"Oh… yes, but she wasn't actually his girlfriend."

"No, no, they were going to get married."

"They might have got married, but it was just a front, Gerald. She was only a paid companion."

Gerald pondered this and then flicked up his eyebrows in sour resignation. The facts of gay life had always been taboo with him: he and Nick had never shared a frank word or knowing joke about them, and this was an odd place to start. With a nervous laugh Nick went on, "I'll miss him, of course."

Gerald busied himself with some papers, shuffled them into a box-folder and snapped down the spring. He glanced, as if for approval, at the two framed photos, of Rachel and the Prime Minister, and said, "Remind me how you came to be here."

Nick wasn't sure if courtesy really required him to do so. He shrugged, "Well, as you know, I came here as a friend of Toby's."

"Aha," said Gerald, with a nod, but still not looking at him. He sat down at the desk, in the spaceship black chair. He made an exaggerated moue of puzzlement. "But were you a friend of Toby's?"

"Of course I was," said Nick.

"A funny sort of friendship, wasn't it…?" He glanced up casually.

"I don't think so."

"I don't think he knew anything about you."

"Well, I'm just me, Gerald! I'm not some alien invader. We'd been in the same college for three years."

Gerald didn't concede this point, but swivelled and stared out of the window again. "You've always been comfortable here, haven't you?"

Nick gasped with disappointment at the question. "Of course…"

"I mean, we've always been very kind to you, actually, I think, haven't we? Made you a part of our life-in the widest sense. You've made the acquaintance of many remarkable people through being a friend of ours. Going up indeed to the very highest levels."

"Yes, certainly." Nick took a deep breath. "That's partly why I'm so dreadfully sorry about everything that's happened," and he pushed on, earnestly but slyly, "you know, with Catherine's latest episode."

Gerald looked very affronted by this-he didn't want some defusing apology from Nick, and especially one that turned out not to be an apology but a commiseration about his daughter. He said, as though parenthetically, "I'm afraid you've never understood my daughter."

Nick flattered Gerald by taking this as a subtle point. "I suppose it's difficult for anyone who hasn't suffered from it to understand her kind of illness, isn't it, not only moment by moment, but in its long-term patterns. I know it doesn't mean she loves you and Rachel any the less that she's done all this… damage. When she's manic she lives in a world of total possibility. Though actually you could say that all she's done is tell the truth." He thought he'd perhaps got through to Gerald-who frowned ahead and said nothing; but then, rather as he did in TV interviews, carried on with his own line, as if no answer or objection had been made.

"I mean, didn't it strike you as rather odd, a bit queer, attaching yourself to a family like this?"

Nick thought it was unusual-that was the beauty of it, or had been, but he said, "I'm only the lodger. It was Toby who suggested I live with you." He took a risk and added, "You could just as well say that the family attached itself to me."

Gerald said, "I've been giving it some thought. It's the sort of thing you read about, it's an old homo trick. You can't have a real family, so you attach yourself to someone else's. And I suppose after a while you just couldn't bear it, you must have been very envious I think of everything we have, and coming from your background too perhaps… and you've wreaked some pretty awful revenge on us as a result. And actually, you know…"he raised his hands, "all we asked for was loyalty."

The strange, the marvellous thing was that at no point did Gerald say what he considered Nick actually to have done. It seemed as natural as day to him to dress up the pet lamb as the scapegoat. There was no point in fighting, but Nick said, as if eerily detached from the very young man who was gripping the chair back, tearful with surprise, "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, Gerald. But I must say it's a bit steep to talk to me about loyalty, of all things." It struck him he'd never spoken a word of criticism to Gerald before. It clearly struck Gerald too, from his incredulous recoil, and the grappling way he turned Nick's words on him.

"No, actually, you haven't the faintest fucking idea what you're talking about!" He stood up convulsively, and then sat down again, with a sort of sneer. "Do you honestly imagine that your affairs can be talked about in the same terms as mine? I mean-I ask you again, who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?" The slight rephrasing, the sharpening of his position, loosed a flood of anger, which moving visibly through his face seemed almost to bewilder him, like a physical seizure.

Trembling with the contagion of madness Nick said the thing he'd come to say, but in a tone of cheap sarcasm he'd never intended to use: "Well, you'll be devastated to hear that I'm moving out of the house today. I just dropped in to tell you."

And Gerald, furiously pretending not to have heard, said, "I want you out of the house today."

THE DUCHESS INSISTED that Gerald and Rachel go to the wedding. Gerald had made a noisily abject phone call: "Really, Sharon, I could never forgive myself if I caused you a moment's embarrassment on so joyous a day," and before Sharon, in her robust way, had finished saying that he shouldn't talk nonsense, he had rapidly said, "Oh good, oh good," in a tone which suggested he hadn't really meant it in the first place. It was a tiny protocol of self-abasement that he had found himself reluctantly obliged to follow. "I just thought I should ask," he said, as if the offer and not its cause might be the social false note. He didn't really believe he could be an embarrassment to anyone. They drove off to Yorkshire on the Friday morning.

Wani had had an exquisite new morning suit and dinner suit made, with narrow trousers and a smaller chest disguised by flyaway lapels. They looked like the formal dress of a little prince, which might only be worn once before he grew out of it. Nick saw them laid out on the ogee bed, with the new Oxfords and evening slippers aligned on the floor beneath. It was as if two people even more insubstantial than Wani were lying back side by side on the covers. He helped Wani pack, and peeked out of habit in his leather stud-box, where there was a flesh-pink paper packet an inch long. He took it out and hid it, with a sense of a new code of honour overriding an old one.

He found Wani lying on the sofa, in front of some heavy-duty video: but his eyes were closed, his mouth open and askew. Nick took a second or two to burn off his horror in the slower flame of his pity. Twice now he had come across Wani dozing and leaned over him not, as he used to, for the private marvel of the view, but to check that he was alive. He sat by him with a sigh and felt the strange tenderness towards himself that came with looking after someone else, the sense of his own prudence and mortality. He thought it might be like parenthood, the capable concealment of one's worries. He hadn't told Wani, but he was having another HIV test in the afternoon: it was another solemn thing, and even more frightening than it need have been for not being talked about. From the corner of his eye, the video seemed to pullulate, like some primitive life form, with abstract determination. It was an orgy, unattributable organs and orifices at work in a spectrum of orange, pink, and purple. He looked more closely for a moment, with a mixture of scorn and regret. It was what they were already calling a "classic," from the days before the antiseptic sheen of rubbers was added to the porn palette-Wani had hated that development, he was an aesthete at least in that. Turned down low, the actors grunted their binary code- yeah… oh yeah, oh yeah… yeah … oh. .. yeah, yeah… oh yeah. ..