Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"Well, I wouldn't want her at my twenty-first," he said.

"I don't think Toby really wanted her," Nick put in apologetically. The touching thing was that Catherine had clearly taken her father's fantasy as the truth, and then used it to lure Russell. The dream of the leader's presence seeped through to an unexpected depth.

"Well, Toby would have been perfectly happy with a party at home," she said. She wasn't quite sure whose side she was on, when it came to a difference between her father and her brother; Nick saw that she wanted to impress Russell with the right kind of disaffection. "But then Gerald has to get hold of it and invite the ministers for everything. It's not a party, darling, it's a party conference!"

"Well… " Russell chuckled and dangled his long arms and clapped his hands together loosely a few times, as if ready to take them on.

"We've got an enormous house of our own," Catherine said. "Not that Uncle Lionel's isn't fantastic, of course." They turned and frowned at it across the smooth lawn and the formal scrolls of the parterre. The steep slate roofs were topped with bronze finials so tall and fanciful they looked like drops of liquid sliding down a thread. "I just don't think Uncle Lionel will be all that pleased when Toby's rowing friends start throwing up on the whatsits."

"The whatnots," Nick made a friendly correction.

Russell blinked at him. "He's a fruit, is he, Uncle Lionel?" he said.

"No, no," Catherine said, faltering for a moment at the expression. "Nothing like that."

Nick's dinner jacket had belonged to his great-uncle Archie; it was double-breasted and wide on the shoulder in a way that was once again fashionable. It had glazed, pointed lapels which reached almost to the armpits, and shiny silk-covered buttons. As he crossed the drawing room he acknowledged himself with a flattered smile in a mirror. He was wearing a wing collar, and something dandyish in him, some memory of the licence and discipline of being in a play, lifted his mood. The only trouble with the jacket, on a long summer night of eating and bopping, was that when it warmed up it gave off, more and more unignorably, a sharp stale smell, the re-awoken ghost of numberless long-ago dinner-dances in Lincolnshire hotels. Nick had dabbed himself all over with "Je Promets" in the hope of delaying and complicating the effect.

Drinks were being served on the long terrace, and when he came out through the French windows there were two or three small groups already laughing and glowing. You could tell that everyone had been on holiday, and like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light. Gerald was talking to a somehow familiar man and his blonde-helmeted wife; Nick knew from his smiles and guffaws that he was being recklessly agreeable. None of his particular friends was here yet, and Toby was still upstairs with Sophie, interminably getting dressed. He took a flute of champagne from a dark-eyed young waiter, and strolled off into the knee-high maze of the parterre. He wondered what the waiter thought of him, and if he was watching him in his solitary meandering over trimmed grass and pea gravel. He had worked as a waiter himself, two Christmases ago, and stood about with a tray in a similar way at two neighbouring hunt balls. It was not impossible that he would do so again. He felt he might look like a person with no friends, and that the waiter might know that he didn't really belong to this looking-glass world. Could he even tell, any more than Lord Kessler could, that he was gay? He felt there had been a flashing hint, in their moment of contact, of some more luxurious understanding, of a longer gaze, full of humour and curiosity, that they might have shared… He thought at the second contact, the refill, he would make it all right. The curlicue of the path brought him round to a view of the house again, but the waiter had moved off, and instead he saw Paul Tompkins ambling towards him.

"My dear!"

At Oxford Tompkins was widely known as Polly, but Nick said, "Hello, Paul," because the nickname seemed suddenly too intimate or too critical. "How are you?" He realized that in the romantic retrospect of his undergraduate life Paul was a figure he had painted out.

"I'm extremely well," Paul said meaningly. He was large and round in the middle and seemed to taper away, in his tight evening suit, towards narrow feet and a tall, jowly head. He had been a noise, a recurrent clatter of bitchery and ambition, a kind of monster of the Union and the MCR, throughout Nick's years in college. He had come out just below the top in the Civil Service exams, and had recently started in some promising capacity in Whitehall. He looked pop-eyed already from the tussle between pompous discretion and a natural love of scandal. He raised his glass. "My compliments to wicked old Lionel Kessler. The waiters here are sheer heaven."

"I know…"

"That one with the champagne is from Madeira, which is rather funny."

"Oh, really… "

"Well, better than the other way round. Now, however, he lives in Fulham: really awfully close to me."

"You mean that one there."

"Tristao." Paul gave Nick a look of concentrated mischief. "Ask me more after our date next week, my dear."

"Ah." Nick's face was tight with regret for a second, the pinch of his own incompetence. It was a mystery to him that fat old Polly, who was rutted with acne scars and completely lacking in ordinary kindness, had such a conspicuous success with men. In college he had brought off a number of almost impossible seductions, from kitchen boys to the solemnly hetero Captain of Boats. Nothing that lasted, but startling triumphs of will, opportunism and technique, even so. Nick was slightly frightened of him. He walked on a pace or two, round the plinth of a large urn, and looked across the roses at the assembling guests. A famous TV interviewer was exerting his charm over a group of flattered girls. Nick said, "It's rather a distinguished crowd."

"Mmm." Paul's murmur had a note of scepticism in it as well as a suggestion that here too there were opportunities. He got out, and lit, a cigarette. "That depends very much on your idea of distinction. But aren't the wives marvellous, since the last election? It's as if any doubts they had the first time round have now been completely discounted. The men did something naughty, and got away with it, and not only did they get away with it but they've been asked to do it again, with a huge majority. That's so much the mood in Whitehall-the economy's in ruins, no one's got a job, and they just don't care, it's bliss. And the wives, you see, all look like… her-they've all got the blue bows, and the hair."

"Well, Rachel hasn't," said Nick, who rather doubted that Paul could sum up the mood in Whitehall when he'd only been there five minutes.

"No, dear, but Rachel's got a lot more class. Jewish class, but still class. And her husband's not called Norman."

Nick had some further objections to what Paul was saying, but didn't want to seem humourless. "No, or Ken," he said.

Paul inhaled tolerantly and blew the smoke out in a long sibilant jet. "I must say Gerald is looking quite delicious this evening."

"Gerald Fedden…?"

"Absolutely…"

"You're pulling my leg."

"Now I've shocked you," Paul said unapologetically.

"Not at all," said Nick, to whom life was a series of shocks, more or less well mastered. "No, I can see he's…"

"Of course now you're living in his house you've probably grown accustomed to his sheer splendour."

Nick laughed and together they watched the MP as he wound up a story (which was all chortling patter with booming emphases) and the blue-dressed women around him rippled and staggered about slightly on the fine gravel. "I wouldn't deny that he's very charming," Nick said.