Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"I got to go." Tristao tugged his bow tie out of his pocket, and fiddled with the elastic and the clip. Nick waited for him to take his apron off. "Look, OK, I see you, by the main stairs, three o'clock."

"Oh… OK, great!" said Nick, and found a happy relief in both the arrangement and the delay. "Three o'clock…"

"Sharp," said Tristao, with a scowl.

He looked in at the door of Toby's bedroom. A group of his friends had come up here when the music stopped at two, and they seemed lazily to assess him. "Come in and close the door, for god's sake," said Toby, beckoning from the vast bed where he was propped up among sprawling friends. He had been given the King's Room, where Edward VII had slept-the swags of blue silk above the bedhead were gathered into a vaguely comic gilded crown. On the opposite wall hung a comfortable Renoir nude. Nick picked his way between groups sitting on the floor in front of an enormous sofa where fat Lord Shepton was lying with his tie undone and his head on the thigh of an attractive drunk girl. The curtains were parted and a window open to carry the reek of marijuana far away from the nose of the Home Secretary. Somehow they had re-created the mood of a college room late at night, girls' stockinged feet stretched out across boyfriends' knees, smoke in the air, two or three voices dominating. Nick felt the charm as well as the threat of the group. Gareth Lane was holding forth about Hitler and Goebbels, and his lecturing drone and yapping laughs at his own puns brought back something dreary from the Oxford days. He was said to be the "ablest historian of his year," but he had failed to get a first, and seemed now to be acting out some endless redemptive viva. The talk went on, but there felt to Nick's tingling drunk ears to be a residual silence in the room, on which his own movements and words were an intrusion… and yet left no trace. Several of his other pals were here, but the two months since term had distanced them more than he could explain. Some simple but strong and long-prepared change had occurred, they had taken up their real lives, and left him alone in his. He came back and perched on the edge of the bed and Toby leaned forward and passed him the joint.

"Thanks… " Nick smiled at him, and at last some old sweetness of reassurance glowed between them, what he'd been waiting for all night.

"God, darling, you smell like a tart's parlour," Toby said. Nick carried on gazing at him, paralysed for the moment by the need to hold in the smoke, a tickle in his throat, blushing with shame and pleasure. He was holding in the unprecedented "darling" and it was making him as warm and giddy as the pot. Then he let out the smoke and saw the baldly hetero claims of the rest of the remark. He said,

"And how would you know?"-wondering primly if Toby really had been to a tart's parlour. It was an image of him lurching up a narrow staircase.

Toby winked. "Having a good time?"

"Yes, fantastic." Nick looked around appreciatively, glossing over his inner vision of the night as a long stumbling journey, half chase, half flight, like one of his country-house dreams, his staircase dreams. "What's happened to Sophie, by the way?"

"She had to go back to London. Yeah. She's got an audition on Monday."

"Ah… right… " This was good news to Nick, and Toby himself, drunk, stoned, eyes glistening, seemed happy about it-he liked the adult note of responsibility in sending her home, and he liked being free of her too. He raised his voice and said,

"Oh, do shut up about fucking Goebbels!" But after a brief incredulous whirr Gareth's shock-proof mechanism rattled on.

Toby was king tonight, on his great big bed, and his friends for once were his subjects. He was acting the role with high spirits, in a childishly approximate way. Nick found it very touching and exciting. As the pot took its delayed effect, squeezing and freeing like some psychic massage, he reached back and took Toby's hand, and they lolled there like that for thirty or forty seconds of heaven. It was as if the room had been steeped in a mood of amorous hilarity as sweetly unignorable as "Je Promets." He recalled what Polly had said in the garden long before, and thought that maybe, at last, for once, Toby would actually be his.

There was a surrounding murmur of stoned gossip, heads nodding over rolling papers, the figures blurred but glowing in the lamplight. "But did the Fiihrer license the Final Solution?" Gareth asked himself; and it was clear that the arguments on this famous question were about to be passed in detailed review.

There was a giggling protest from Sam Zeman, curly-headed genius who'd gone straight into Kesslers on twenty thousand a year. "You're in a house full of Jews here, can you shut up about the fucking Final Solution, it's a party…"-and he reached for his drink with the frown and snuffle of a subtle person obliged to be brusque.

"I can go on to Stalin… " said Gareth facetiously.

After a minute's reflection Roddy Shepton said robustly, "Well, I'm not bloody Jewish."

"Tobias is," said his girlfriend, "aren't you, darling?"

"For god's sake, Claire…" said Roddy.

Claire gazed at Toby with eyes of deepening conviction. "Wasn't someone saying the Home Sectary's Jewish too…?" she said.

"Calm down, Claire!" said Roddy furiously. It was his own conviction that his large placid girlfriend, who had never been known to raise her voice, was dangerously excitable. Perhaps it was his way of implying he had tamed a sexual volcano; which in turn perhaps helped him to explain why he was going out with a strictly middle-class girl, the daughter of his father's estate manager.

Claire looked round in pursuit of her new idea. "You're Jewish, aren't you, Nat?"

"I am, darling," said Nat, "or half Jewish, anyway."

"And the other half's a bloody Welshman," said Roddy. He turned his head on her knee and squinted up at her. "God, you're drunk," he said.

This was the kind of insult that passed for wit at the Martyrs' Club, and was in fact one of the things most often said there. Toby had once taken Nick to the club's poky panelled dining room, where Christ Church toffs and Union hacks conformed deafeningly to type and boozed and plotted and howled unacceptable remarks at each other and at the harried staff. It was another world, defiantly impervious, in which it was a shock to find that Toby had a place.

"You are so fucking drunk, Shepton," Toby said. He had pulled off his socks and rolled them into a ball and he threw them very hard and accurately at the fat peer's head.

"Fucking Christ, Fedden," Roddy muttered, but left it at that.

Nick was explaining about the sea in Conrad's novels being a metaphor for both escape from the self and discovery of the self-a point which took on more and more revelatory force as he repeated it. He laughed at the beauty of it. He wasn't a strong smoker, and a second frowning toke, taken in the belief that the first one had had no effect, could leave him swimming and gabbling for hours. Nat Hanmer was sitting on the floor beside him, and his warm thigh was pressed against his own. There was something charmingly faggy about Nat tonight. He nodded and smiled into Nick's eyes as he was talking. Nick thought the pressure of the dope on his temples was as if his skull was being gently squeezed by Nat's big hands. Sam Zeman was nodding and smiling too and corrected, as if it really didn't matter, a plot detail in Victory that Nick had got wrong. Nick loved Sam because he was an economist but he'd read everything and played the viola and took a flattering interest in people less sublimely omniscient than himself.

He wanted to lie back and listen and perhaps have a long deep snog with Nat Hanmer, whose lips were not so full and soft as Leo's, but who was (Nick hadn't seen it before) almost beautiful, as well of course as being a marquess. The two of them in their shirtsleeves. Nat said he was having a go at writing a novel himself. He'd bought a computer, which he said was "a really sexy machine." In the warm explanatory light of the pot Nick saw what he meant. "I'd love to read it," he said. Across the room Gareth had switched wars and was describing the Battle of Jutland to a paralysed circle of young women. His big velvet bow tie was all donnish conceit. He was going to go on like this for forty-five years.