Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

He picked up the one of Toby as a Lord of Tyre-Nick couldn't remember his name. He was the trusty minister who looked after things while Pericles went on his travels; he only came on at the beginning and the end, and spent the middle acts lounging restively around the cricket pavilion, which was used as the green room for these open-air plays. It was June, the smell of the lake and cut grass outside, creosote and linseed in the stuffy pavilion. Toby took off his heavy tunic, and blocked imaginary deliveries with a cricket bat as he waited for Sophie, who was playing Marina, to come off. Someone had photographed him then. He wore dark tights, and his own suede shoes. His naked upper body looked very white against the line round his neck where the make-up ended. His face was feminine, over-beautiful, a dancer's face, his body muscular and jutting enough to cause amusement in others. Nick had the brief but memorable role of Cerimon, the Lord of Ephesus who revives Queen Thaissa when she's washed ashore in her coffin: it was one of the intensest experiences of his life: "I hold it ever / Virtue and cunning were endowments greater / Than nobleness and riches…", his heart slamming, tears in his eyes; and then it was over, he made his dignified exit-a sense of floating and thinness, a forced adaptation to the scene outside the circle of lit stage and dark audience, who were already attending to what came afterwards. He peeled off his grey beard, twirled off his cloak, and had a jealous bottle of Guinness while Toby "unconsciously" flexed his biceps for Sophie-they were preoccupied by each other and by having still to go on. Toby wasn't a very good actor, but the role was only a bit of rhetoric, quite unpsycho-logical, and he was warmly applauded-there was something right about him. He did it as if there was no more to acting than to rowing or passing a rugger ball. He was neither modest nor vain.

Nick knew he would never see the picture again, and found it hard to put it back on the table. It gleamed in the rainy light as an emblem of why he'd come here. It wasn't clear with Toby, any more than with Leo and Wani, if fantasy could hold back time, if this sleek second-year with his sportsman's legs and marvellous arse could still excite him when he knew the fat Toby of five years on. Well, not in the mind, perhaps, but in an image, a photo: it took a certain aesthetic nerve to fly in the face of the facts. He did something silly and solemn, and left on the glass the light, blurred imprint of his lips and the tip of his nose.

Up in his room he pulled handfuls of books from his shelves and thrust them like bricks into the boxes. He hardened himself against his taste for nostalgia-the long-breathed leisure of the old days was over, matters were more urgent and unsure. The week ahead was already shadowed by the wait for his test results. The boost, the premature relief of taking charge and agreeing to learn the worst, waned steeply in the following days; already when he thought of it he felt unreachably alone. It was the third test he'd had, and that fact, and the mysterious number three, seemed by moments to shrink and to swell the chance of a positive result.

The boxes filled immediately, in proof of the ungraspable formula relating shelf-length to box-capacity. He carried one of them down, and as he dumped it in the hall he heard the sound of the back door being unlocked, feet scuffed on the mat, an umbrella shaken. Elena? Or Eileen again? Whoever it was was very unwelcome. He was annoyed by their furtiveness as well as their confidence. He went into the kitchen with a bored look.

"Oh my god!" said Penny in a breathy rush. She held the pink bundle of her umbrella in front of her chest. Then, furious to have been frightened, she said, "Mm, hello, Nick," and went to the sink with a bored look of her own. "I thought you'd gone," she said.

"I think I thought you'd gone," said Nick, quite gently. They'd both been in the wars, and he felt they might finally have found some ground to share. There was an outside chance she might give him some sympathy, which so far he hadn't had a taste of; and to him commiseration was always easy.

She settled the wet brolly, like a blown flower, and came back across the room. "In five minutes I will have. I'm getting my things." He seemed almost to be blocking her way. "You're not at the wedding," she said.

"I thought I'd give it a miss."

"Yes. Well, I don't know them, of course."

"Oh, Nat's awfully nice."

"Uh-huh."

"I don't think anyone really knows Beatriz yet. Hardly even Nat actually!"

"She's Argentinian, isn't she?"

"Yes, she's a rich widow. Her first husband broke his neck playing polo." He hesitated and said, "Apparently she's four months pregnant."

Penny made a grim snuffle. "At least I avoided that," she said, and with this tiny sarcastic self-exposure she edged past him and out of the room.

He hadn't seen her since the night at Badger's flat, and he had to admit she had an interest, a bleak unanticipated glamour. A week ago her name was known only to her family, her school and college friends, and her work contacts; now millions worldwide had heard about her sex life. He watched her march off along the passage; his mocking sense of her as a busily ambitious little person with no sense of humour rather faltered. He stood with a thin smile of remorse, and a minute later went after her into Gerald's study. She was standing reading a yard-long fax, which she clumsily folded and put down. She said, "So where are you going to go?" crisply, almost as though she were despatching him herself.

"Oh, I'm staying at Wani's. Yup." He gave a rueful smile over the ramparts of his own scandal, but no answering wave came from within hers.

"Then I'm going to start looking for a place of my own."

"You're not worried about money."

Nick shrugged. "I've done all right, actually, in the past year or so. With a little help from my friends… How about you?"

"I don't have much."

"No, I mean, where are you staying?"

"Oh, I've gone back home for a bit."

"Right… How's Norman taken all this?"

"Well, how do you imagine? Very badly indeed." She moved some papers on the desk and put them down as if inadvertently on the looped fax. "He detests Gerald, of course, and always has."

Nick shook his head slowly, as if this was beyond his grasp. "I never really believed that. Just because he's a Tory."

"Fiddlesticks. He took Rachel off him-that's what he's never forgiven him for."

"It was an incredibly long time ago," said Nick, turning towards the window to cover his surprise.

"Well, Dad's like that. When he was young he thought he was going to be very happy and very rich. And then Gerald came along."

It was clearly an arrival she could vouch for the force of. Nick laughed for a second and was vaguely touched. He said, "We all know how competitive Gerald is."

Penny searched in a drawer for a while before saying, "Mmm… " It was more than competitive, it was pathological-to steal the girlfriend and then fuck the daughter. Clearly he wasn't called Banger for nothing. He said, with a little whine of incredulity,

"You've heard about his new directorship."

"Yes… yes, I have."

"It's rather amazing, isn't it? With the share thing hanging over him…"

"Oh, they'll want him," said Penny.

"Yes," said Nick. He remembered her when she first came here, with nothing but a good degree behind her, innocent, pliant, a little complacent at the candlelit table; now her eyes looked tired and guarded from the glare of the lights. "It's rather amazing to resign in disgrace one day and be offered a job at eighty thousand a year the next."

He was afraid she resented his word "disgrace." "That's how this world works, Nick. Gerald can't lose. You've got to understand that." She sat down at the desk and looked around it. He had the sense of her clearing it of any scraps of sentiment-it was a secret raid.