Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"I expect you'd like to be left alone," he said. He came and stood in front of her so as to glance at the fax, which he saw was in Gerald's impossible handwriting: it ended with that breezy ideogram that might have been "Love" or "Yours" or "Hello" and a big "G" and a line of crosses. Then he found Penny was looking at him tensely, with a look that acknowledged the writing and the kisses, and with hurried blinks as she decided.

"I'm not giving him up, Nick."

"Oh…" said Nick.

"I'm not."

"I see."

"I don't care what Dad says, or Madam, or the Editor of the Sun."

Nick stared respectfully, but said, "I thought he'd virtually been given up for you."

"What…? Oh, I see-well, publicly, yes. That's what we want people to think."

"You say ' we. '"

"We're very much in love."

Nick looked at the floor, perhaps impatiently. It seemed everything was going to go stubbornly on: first it was Rachel who wouldn't leave Gerald, and now Penny wouldn't either. He must have something extraordinary, Gerald, something Nick had been incapable of understanding. He saw the story reaching on through an obscure futurity; innumerable articles by the Mordant Analyst. He said, "But how can you bear the secrecy?" with a real curiosity as to how someone else would answer this question.

"Perhaps it won't be a secret."

"Hmm… " Nick's raised eyebrow and dry chuckle made her blush but not apparently change her mind.

"Anyway, I don't care," she said.

"Well…"

"Catherine's always mocked and jeered at Gerald," said Penny, as if not quite able to bear the line of talk she'd started.

Nick said hesitantly, "I think it's pretty mutual." Penny's world seemed only to make sense to her as a forcefield of detestations.

"I know she's always hated me," she said, with a grim laugh that didn't quite spare Nick either; she didn't come out with it, but she seemed to know what he'd thought and said about her over the years.

"You know that's not true," said Nick, in a mutter at the pointlessness of saying it. "I think it's herself that she hates most at the moment."

Penny tucked her chin in, and gave him a very old-fashioned look. "She was revelling in the whole thing, I would say."

"That's not revelling, Penny. At first it seems thrilling, but then it becomes a kind of torment to her, being manic." He realized that Penny's main source of views on Catherine would be Gerald; just as his own, besides a friend's intuition, was the strenuous prose of Dr E. J. Edelman.

"Well, it's nothing to the torment she's caused," said Penny unrepentantly.

Nick shook his head at her in astonishment, and thought he might as well leave her to it. She was too excited to look at him as she said, "I assume it was you that told her, was it?"

"Absolutely not!" said Nick.

"Well, that's certainly what Gerald thinks."

Nick said, "You see it's typical of Gerald to think she couldn't work it out for herself. Actually she's the cleverest one of us all."

"I could tell you suspected something when you were with us in France," Penny said.

"I was very worried about Rachel," Nick said. "She's an old friend."

"Well, I wonder if she feels the same about you." Penny gave him a short sharp smile, and then sat forward, with her elbows on the desk. "And now, if you'll excuse me," she said, "I have things to do," and found a chance after all, in the dullest of formulas, for a further dismissal.

Nick pulled the blue front door shut, double-locked the Yale locks and the Chubb lock, and stood fiddling the keys off his ring. He held open the letterbox and flung them through and heard them tinkle on the marble floor. Then he peered through the letterbox himself and saw them lying there inaccessibly. There was also the back-door key, so in fact he still could get in, but he soon threw that in too. The one he was most reluctant about was the sleek bronze Yale for the communal gardens; it had a look of secrets to it. He could probably keep it, no one would remember; it would be nice to be still in fact, if not by rights, a keyholder. His eyes moved in lazy twitches of indecision. He hardly saw himself coming back, haunting the place, gazing up at the Feddens' windows for glints of the life they were leading without him. Painful and pointless. He pushed up the flap and put his hand through with the key in it, held it for a second before letting it drop onto the mat.

The little car was jammed full of boxes and curled heaps of clothes on hangers. It sat low on its springs, under all these possessions heavy as passengers. Nick stood by it, still thinking, and then drifted unexpectedly down the street. The pavement was dry now in patches, but the sky was threatening and fast-moving. The tall white house-fronts had a muted gleam. It came over him that the test result would be positive. The words that were said every day to others would be said to him, in that quiet consulting room whose desk and carpet and square modern armchair would share indissolubly in the moment. There was a large tranquil photograph in a frame, and a view of the hospital chimney from the window. He was young, without much training in stoicism. What would he do once he left the room? He dawdled on, rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked cars, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed. It was like a drug sensation, but without the awareness of play. The motorcyclist who lived over the road clumped out in his leathers and attended to his bike. Nick gazed at him and then looked away in a regret that held him and glazed him and kept him apart. There was nothing this man could do to help him. None of his friends could save him. The time came, and they learned the news in the room they were in, at a certain moment in their planned and continuing day. They woke the next morning, and after a while it came back to them. Nick searched their faces as they explored their feelings. He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out. It was the morning's vision of the empty street, but projected far forward, into afternoons like this one decades hence, in the absent hum of their own business. The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn't just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of three previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, and The Spell. He lives in London.

The text of this book is set in Bembo. This type was first used in 1495 by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius for Cardinal Bembo's De Aetna, and was cut for Manutius by Francesco Griffo. It was one of the types used by Claude Garamond (1480-1561) as a model for his Romain de L'Universite, and so it was the forerunner of what became standard European type for the following two centuries. Its modern form follows the original types and was designed for Monotype in 1929.