Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

His own article, deferentially far back, behind Anthony Burgess on brothels and Marco Cassani on the Gothic revival in Italy, was about the Line of Beauty, illustrated with sumptuous photos of brooches, mirrors, lakes, the legs of rococo saints and sofas. He read it with a beating heart, going back once or twice to ride the slide of an elegant sentence again. Beside him as he read were other admirers… Professor Ettrick, his trust in a little-seen student restored… Anthony Burgess, in Monaco, brought to a marvelling halt as he skimmed his contributor's copy… Lionel Kessler, relaxing perhaps on a Louis Quinze day bed, garlanded all round with lines of beauty, seeing welcome proof that his clever maligned young friend was a mensch. Nick went on, with a confident smile, through the latter pages, the glowing short features on mah-jong sets and toy soldiers of the Raj. The inside back cover, to his satisfaction, was an ad for "Je Promets." And after that the answering angel with its lifted wing. Nick took the highest view of it all, his initial timidity was flooded out by its opposite, a conviction that they'd produced a masterpiece.

Strange teetering mood of culmination. Five minutes later he wished he had it to read through fresh again; but that could never happen. He took a copy upstairs to the flat, and opened it at random several times-to find that its splendour had a glint to it, a glassy malignity. No, it was very good. It was lustrous. The lustre was perfected and intense-it was the shine of marble and varnish. It was the gleam of something that was over.

How he wished Wani could have been here to see it-he'd missed it by five minutes. He could have taken it with him to Yorkshire, given copies to the guests, to Toby, to Sophie, to the Duchess, to Brad and Treat. Nick pictured Roddy Shepton, huge in tails and top hat, casting a wary eye over it as he waited for a drink. He pictured Wani himself, shuffling through the rooms in chilly defiance to show them the one beautiful thing he had managed to make out of his millions-it would confirm or confound their slight expectations that he was or wasn't going to do something. The reflex acclaim for anything published by a child of the fellow-rich would be loud, but tempered by disgust at his illness and remembered unease about his origins. Copies would be left behind in bedrooms and lavatories. Nick sighed over their fate and then thought how silly he was, since Wani hadn't taken the magazine with him; and really there were worse things to imagine. He was afraid, for instance, that he hadn't been careful enough in checking Wani's bags-he could easily have had other wraps of coke in his pockets or in his rolled socks. The crisis in May had forcibly broken his habit, but the reprieve, the return to London and its suddenly finite pleasures, must have pulsed with temptation. Nat himself was clean now, but his friends included half a dozen steady users, who could easily and carelessly offer Wani a line. And his heart was very weak. It would be a kind of suicide. Nick stood at the kitchen window, hardly seeing the house-backs opposite as he lived through the phone call, from Sharon perhaps, or from Gerald himself, tersely dutiful: a massive heart attack. There was nothing they could do.

When he went into the sitting room, there was the magazine on the table. It was a weird sort of launch, when there was never going to be a second issue. It would be good if people knew that, and prized it as itself, not as a portent or pilot of something to come. It was the only Ogee. Lying there, in a room in his house, at noon on a mild autumn day, it might have been Wani's memorial tablet, with the angel's wing sheltering the blank where his name and achievements should go.

Next morning Nick drove up to Kensington Park Gardens to collect his things. There was intermittent drizzle and he wondered if the wedding hats were being spoiled in Yorkshire. The wide street was empty, with that accidental vacancy of a London street, a momentary lull in which the pavements, the house-fronts, the rain-striped windows have the aura of the deja vu. He let himself in at number 48, hasty in the new skills of avoiding notice: which he countered needlessly by slamming the door shut.

Inside, in the hall: the sound… the impassive rumble of London shrunk to a hum, barely noticed, as if the grey light itself were subtly acoustic. Nick felt he'd chanced on the undisturbed atmosphere of the house, larger than this year's troubles, as it had been without him and would be after he'd gone. The gilt lantern burned palely in the stairwell, but in the dining room the ordinary shadows deepened in the corners and hung like smoke in the coving of the ceiling. The boulle clock ticked, with mindless vigilance. He went up the stone stairs and into the drawing room. It was really just a matter of finding his own bits and pieces, the CDs mixed in family-wise with theirs, a book that he'd lent them and watched filter slowly and unread to the bottom of the pile. He stood by the piano and thought about giving the Mozart Andante a final go; but the effect would have been maudlin as well as laughably inept. Toby's portrait looked out at him, an emblem of adolescence in its hormonal glow and expectant frown. It added an urgency to the need to move on. Nick stood in front of the fireplace, holding his possessions against his chest. A lorry passed outside, and the windows throbbed in their frames for a moment, in sympathy with its roar and the rattle of its tailgate, and then the broad quasi-silence disclosed itself again. And something else, what was it?, the smell of the place, tapestry smell, polished wood, lilies, almost churchy-he felt his senses seize and resign the thousand impressions he'd grown used to.

And it all reached back. It spoke of Gerald and Rachel without visible interruption. He went down to the kitchen, where the tidiness and profusion, the jars, the noticeboard, the draped dishcloth, were signs of a wide, deep system. He was already an intruder, glancing up at the photos of these absent celebrities.

He went down again, to the basement, to fetch some cardboard boxes from the trou de gloire. This lumber room under the kitchen was where the gilt ballroom chairs were stacked and interesting old tables and bleary mirrors abandoned; and where Mr Duke kept his paints, ladders, and toolboxes, along with a kettle and a calendar-it was his den, and Nick almost expected to find him there, in the subconscious of the house. He pressed down the light switch and got the shock of the wallpaper, which was purple with a pattern like black wrought iron, only partly hidden by all the junk. It always amazed him. It spoke of a time before Gerald and Rachel, and a different idea from theirs of what was great fun. Like his own parents they seemed to have avoided the '60s, with its novel possibilities and worthwhile mistakes. Perhaps in the Highgate days they'd had a joss stick and a floor cushion, but here the purple room was the junk room. Nick found some old wine boxes, and took them awkwardly upstairs. He wondered who'd lived here before the Feddens. There might well have been only three or four owners in the years since the whole speculation rose up out of the Notting Hill paddocks and slums. It was a house that encouraged the view its inhabitants had of themselves. Nick thought of Gerald's showmanship, the parties, the pathetic climax of the PM's visit. That had been just a year ago, another drizzly autumn wedding…

He stopped on the second-floor landing, set down the boxes and went into Gerald and Rachel's bedroom. From the window there was the view of the gardens, in slanting rain, the large brown leaves of the planes dropping and blowing. It was a grander but closer view than the one he'd grown used to upstairs, the treetop view, with other rooftops and a spire beyond. The gardens grew smaller at this time of year: you saw the far fence and the street outside. He turned and walked softly on the pale carpet towards the bed. Who slept on which side?-Rachel here, clearly, with the novels and the earplugs. The little Gauguin landscape Lionel had given them hung opposite. On the round walnut table, with a bowl of lavender, and china boxes, stood the photographs in silver, ivory, or red-velvet frames.