Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

Up in his room Nick slipped out of his jacket, and sniffed at it resignedly: time for a further dowsing in "Je Promets." He went into his bathroom, and opened the little turret dormer; he splashed cold water on his cheeks. It was the toasts that had done for him-there was always one glass that tipped him over, unfairly and jokingly, into being drunk. And there were hours of the party still to come. It was a great ritual of fun, a tradition, a convention, which everyone was loving for its lavishness and truth to form. Now there was going to be a move to the dance floor, and all the couples would be allowed to make love to each other with their hips and thighs and sliding hands. Nick gazed in the mirror and saw someone teeteringly alone. The love he had felt for Toby ten minutes before migrated into a sudden hungry imagining of Leo, his transfiguring kisses, his shaving rash, and the wonderful shaved depth between the cheeks of his arse. The exactness of memory, the burning fact of what had happened, blinded him and held him for a while. When he came back, perhaps only seconds later, to the image in the mirror, he saw the flush in his cheeks and his mouth gasping in re-enacted surrender. He re-tied his tie, very perfectly, and ran a hand through his hair. There was a kind of tenderness for himself in the movement of his hand through his curls, as if it had been taught a lesson by Leo. The mirror was a chaste ellipse in a maplewood frame. The washstand was a real Louis Seize commode cut and drilled to hold a basin and a pair of tall hoarse-throated taps. Well, if you owned a Louis Seize commode, if you owned dozens of them, you could be as barbarous with them as you liked; and a commode after all was meant for ease. And after all it was marvellous to be staying in a house like this, a friend of the family, not the son of the man who wound the clocks.

As he trotted down the stairs he saw Wani Ouradi coming up. Nick sometimes greeted Wani with a friendly grope between the legs, or a long breathless snog, and he'd once had him tied up naked in his college room for a whole night; he had sodomized him tirelessly more often than he could remember. Wani himself, glancing back to see if his girlfriend, his intended, was following, had no idea of all this, of course; indeed, they hardly knew each other.

"Hi, Wani!" said Nick.

"Hi!" said Wani warmly, perhaps not able to remember his name.

"I believe I have to congratulate you…"

"Oh… yes…" Wani grinned and looked down. "Thank you so much." Nick thought, as he had thought before, in the slow hours of the seminar room, that a view of the world through such long eyelashes must be one extraordinarily shadowed and filtered. They both suddenly decided to shake hands. Wani glanced back again with a murmur of exasperation so fond and well mannered that it seemed to include Nick in some harmless conspiracy. "You must meet Martine," he said. A provoking thing about him was the way his penis always showed, a little jutting bulge to the left, modest, unconscious, but unignorable, and a trigger to greedy thoughts in Nick. He checked for it now, in a woozy half-second. He was rather like a pop star of the 60s, with the penis and the dark curly hair-though the look was quite at odds with the bemused courtesy of his manner.

"I hope it will be a long engagement," Nick heard himself saying.

"Ah, here she is…"-and they looked down together at the young woman who was climbing the shallow red-carpeted stairs towards them. She was wearing a pearl-coloured blouse and a long, rather stiff black skirt, which she held raised a little with both hands, so that she seemed to curtsey to them on each step. She created a sober impression, well groomed but not fashionable. "This is Martine," Wani said. "This is Nick Guest, we were at Worcester together."

Nick took Martine's cool hand, smiling at Wani's knowing his name, and feeling himself to be briefly the subject of humorous suspicion as an unknown friend from her fiance's past. He said, "I'm pleased to meet you, congratulations." All this congratulating was giving him a vague masochistic buzz.

"Oh-thank you so much. Yes, Antoine has told you." She had a French accent, which in turn suggested to Nick the unknown networks of Wani's family and past, Paris perhaps, Beirut… the real life of the international rich from which Wani had occasionally descended on Oxford to read an essay on Dry den or translate an Anglo-Saxon riddle. Antoine was his real name, and Wani, his infantile attempt at saying it, his universal nickname.

"You must be very happy."

Martine smiled but said nothing, and Nick looked at her wide pale face for signs of the triumph he would have felt himself if he had become engaged to Wani.

"We're just going to our room," Wani said, "and then we'll be down for the bopping."

"Well, you will be bopping perhaps," said Martine, showing already a mind of her own, but with the same patient expression, which registered with Nick, as he went on down the stairs, as decidedly adult. It must be the face of a steady happiness, a calm possession, that he couldn't imagine, or even exactly hope for.

He needed some air, but there was a clatter in the hall as people ran back indoors. Outside, from an obscured night sky, a fine rain had started falling. Nick watched it drifting and gleaming in the upcast light of a large globed lantern. Out in the circle of the drive a couple of chauffeurs were sitting in the front of a Daimler with the map-light on, waiting and chatting. And there was Wani's soft-top Mercedes, with its embarrassing number plate WHO 6. A voice brayed, "Right! Everyone on the dance floor!" And there was a ragged chorus of agreement.

"Hoorah! Dancing!" said a drunk Sloanish girl, staring into Nick's face as though with an effort she might remember him.

"Where is the ruddy dance floor?" said the braying boy. They had wandered back into the hall, which was being cleared with illusionless efficiency by the staff.

Nick said, "It's in the smoking room," excited by knowing this, and by suddenly taking the lead. They all straggled after him, the Sloaney girl laughing wildly and shouting, "Yah, it's in the smoking room!" and sending him up, as the funny little man who knew the way.

A friend of Toby's had come down from London to do the disco, and red and blue spotlights flashed on and off above the paintings of the first Baron Kessler's numerous racehorses. Most of the group started grooving around at once, a little awkwardly, but with happy, determined expressions. Nick lounged along the wall, as if he might start dancing any moment, then came back, nodding his head to the beat, and walked quickly out of the room. It was that song "Every Breath You Take" that they'd played over and over last term at Oxford. It made him abruptly sad.

He felt restless and forgotten, peripheral to an event which, he remembered, had once been thought of as his party too. His loneliness bewildered him for a minute, in the bleak perspective of the bachelors' corridor: a sense close to panic that he didn't belong in this house with these people. Some of the guests had gone into the library and as he approached the open door he took in the scant conversational texture, over which one or two voices held forth as if by right. Gerald said words Nick couldn't catch the meaning of, and through the general laughter another voice, which he half-recognized, put in a quick correcting "Not if I know Margaret!" Nick stood at the doorway of the lamplit room and felt for a second like a drunken student, which he was, and also, more shadowy and inconsolable, a sleepless child peering in at an adult world of bare shoulders, flushed faces, and cigar smoke. Rachel caught his eye, and smiled, and he went in-Gerald, standing at the empty fireplace in the swaggering stance of someone warming himself, called out, "Ah, Nick!" but there were too many people for introductions, a large loose circle who turned momentarily to inspect him and turned back as if they'd failed to see anything at all.