Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

Rachel was sitting on a small sofa, apart from the others, with a wrinkled old lady dressed in black, who made Rachel in her turn seem a beautiful, rather mischievous young woman. She said, "Judy, have you met Nick Guest, Toby's great friend? This is Lady Partridge-Gerald's mother."

"Oh no!" said Nick. "I'm delighted to meet you."

"How do you do," said the old lady, with a dry jovial look. Toby's great friend -there was a phrase to savour, to analyse for its generosity, its innocence, its calculation.

Rachel shifted slightly, but there was really no space for him on the sofa. In her great spread stiffish dress of lavender silk she was like a Sargent portrait of eighty years earlier, of the time when Henry James had come to stay. Nick stood before them and smiled.

"You do smell nice," Rachel said, almost flirtingly, as a mother sometimes speaks to a child who is dressed up.

"I can't bear the smell of cigars, can you?" said Lady Partridge.

"Lionel hates it too," murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men's tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows. But since Gerald himself was smoking one, frowning and screwing up his left eye, he said nothing.

"I can't think where he picked up the habit," Lady Partridge said; and Rachel sighed and shook her head in humorous acknowledgement of their shared disappointments as wife and mother. "Do Tobias and Catherine smoke?"

"No, thank heavens, they've never taken to it," Rachel said. And again Nick said nothing. What always held him was the family's romance of itself, with its little asperities and collusions that were so much more charming and droll than those in his own family, and which now took on a further dimension in the person of Gerald's mother. Her manner was drawling but vigilant, her face thickly powdered, lips a bold red. There was something autocratic in her that made Nick want to please her. She sounded grander than Gerald by the same factor that Gerald sounded posher than Toby.

"Perhaps we could have some air," she said, barely looking at Nick. And he went to the window behind them and pushed up the sash and let in the cool damp smell of the grounds.

"There!" he said, feeling they were now friends.

"Are you staying in the house?" Lady Partridge said.

"Yes, I've got a tiny little room on the top floor."

"I didn't know there were any tiny rooms at Hawkeswood. But then I don't suppose I've ever been on the top floor." Nick half admired the way she had taken his modesty and dug it deeper for him, and almost found a slur against herself in it.

"I suppose it depends on your standard of tininess," he said, with a determined flattering smile. The faint paranoia that attaches to drunkenness had set in, and he wasn't certain if he was being rude or charming. He thought perhaps what he'd said was the opposite of what he meant. A waiter came up with a tray and offered him a brandy, and he watched with marvelling passivity as the liquor was poured. "Oh that's fine… that's fine…!" He was a nice, conspiratorial sort of waiter, but he wasn't Tristao, who had crossed a special threshold in Nick's mind and was now the object of a crush, vivid in his absence. He wondered if he could have a crush on this waiter too-it only needed a couple of sightings, the current mood of frustration, and a single half-conscious decision, and then the boy's shape would be stamped on his mind and make his pulse race whenever he appeared.

Rachel said, "Nick's also staying with us in London, where he really does have a tiny room in the roof."

"I think you said you had someone in," said Lady Partridge, again without looking at Nick. It was as if she had scented his fantasy of belonging, of secret fraternity with her beautiful grandson, and set to eradicate it with a quick territorial instinct. "Toby's certainly enormously popular," she said. "He's so handsome, don't you think?"

"Yes, I do," said Nick lightly, and blushed and looked away as if to find him.

"You'd never think he was Catherine's brother. He had all the luck."

"If looks are luck-" Nick was half-saying.

"But do tell me, who is that little person in glasses dancing with the Home Secretary?"

"Mm, I've seen him before," said Nick, and laughed out loud.

"It's the Mordant Analyst," said Rachel.

"Morton Danvers," Lady Partridge noted it.

Rachel raised her voice. "The children call him the Mordant Analyst. Peter Crowther-he's a journalist."

"Seen his things in the Mail," Lady Partridge said.

"Oh, of course…" said Nick. And it was true he did seem to be dancing with the Home Secretary, wooing him, capering in front of him, bending to him with new questions and springing back with startled enlightenment at the answers-a procedure which the Home Secretary, who was heavy footed and had no neck, couldn't help but replicate in a clumsy but courteous way.

"I don't think I'd be quite so excited," said Lady Partridge. "He talked a lot of rot at dinner on… the coloured question. I wasn't next to him, but I kept hearing it. Racism, you know"-as if the very word were as disagreeable as the thing it connoted was generally held to be.

"A lot of rot certainly is talked on that subject," Nick said, with generous ambiguity. The old lady looked at him ponderingly.

They turned and watched Gerald come forward to rescue the Home Secretary, with a solicitous smile on his lips and a flicker of jealousy in his eyes. He led him away, stooping confidentially over him, almost embracing him, but looking quickly round like someone who has organized a surprise: and there was a flash and a whirr and another flash.

"Ah! The Tatler," exclaimed Lady Partridge, "at long last." She patted her hair and assumed an expression of… coquetry… command… welcome… ancient wisdom… It was hard to say for sure what effect she was after.

Catherine was hurrying Nick and Pat Grayson along the bachelors' corridor towards the thump of the dance music.

"Are you all right, darling?" Nick said.

"Sorry, darling. It was that ghastly speech-one just couldn't take any more!" She was lively, but her reactions were slow and playful, and he decided she must be stoned.

"I suppose it was a bit self-centred."

She smiled, with a condescension worthy of her grandmother. "It would have been a marvellous speech for his own birthday, wouldn't it. Poor Fedden!"

Pat, who must have been the person described in the speech as a film star, said, "Ooh, I didn't think it was all that bad, considering"; though considering what, he didn't specify. Nick had seen him as the smooth eponymous rogue in Sedley on TV, and was struck by how much smaller, older and camper he was in real life. Sedley was his mother's favourite series, though it wasn't clear if she knew that Pat was a whatnot. "Ooh, I don't know about this, love…" he said as they came into the room. But Catherine pulled him into the crowd and he started rather nimbly circling round her, flicking his fingers and frowning sexily at her. She seemed to love everything that was uncool about this, but to Nick, Pat was an unwelcome future, a famous man who was a fool, a silly old queen. He slipped away across the room, and found he was being shouted and smiled at by people and roughly hugged as if he was very popular. The brandy was having its way. But for a minute he was ashamed of snubbing Pat Grayson, and pretending to be part of this hetero mob. He felt pretty good, and grinned at Tim Carswell, who came across the floor and seized him and whirled him round till they were both stumbling and Tim's damp breath was burning his cheek, and Tim shouted "Whoa!" and slowly pulled away, still slamming from side to side and then backing into the crowd with a Jaggerish raised arm. "How's the bonny blade?" said Nick, and Sophie Tipper looked at him over her shoulder with faint recognition as she danced annoyingly with Toby-Nick kissed them both on the cheek before they could stop him, and shouted "How are you?" again, beaming and heartbroken, and Toby put out a fist with a raised thumb, and shortly after that they moved away. Nick danced on, his collar was tight and he was sweating, he undid his jacket and then did it up again-ah, a window was open at the far end of the room and he jigged around in front of it for a while, turning his face to that rainy garden smell. Martine was sitting on the raised banquette that ran along the wall, and in the beam of green light that flashed on every few seconds her patient profile looked haggard and lost. "Hi-i!" Nick called, stopping and half-kneeling beside her. "Isn't Wani with you?" She looked round with a shrug: "Oh, he's somewhere…" And Nick really wanted to see him, suddenly certain of a welcome like the ones he gave him in his fantasies, and there was a twist of calculation too-he could press himself, heavy and semi-incapable, into Wani's arms. Three girls were doing disco routines in a line, turning round and touching their elbows. Nick couldn't do that. The girls danced better than the boys, as if it was really their element, where their rowdy partners were making twits of themselves. Nick didn't like it near the door, where some of the older couples had wandered in and were trotting to and fro as if quite at home with Spandau Ballet. The ultraviolet light made Nat Hanmer's dress shirt glow and the whites of his eyes were thrillingly strange. They held hands for a few moments and Nat goggled at him for the freaky effect, then he shouted, "You old poof!" and slapped his back and gave him a barging kiss on the ear before he moved off "Your eyes!" Mary Sutton gasped at Nick, and he goggled too. It was easy to trip over the raised edge of the hearthstone if you were bopping near the fireplace, and Nick fell against Graham Strong and said, "It's so great to see you!" because he'd sometimes hungered for Graham too, he hardly knew him, and he said, "We must have a dance together later," but Graham had already turned his back, and Nick fetched up with Catherine and Russell and Pat Grayson, where he was very welcome since they were an awkward threesome.