Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

But then, alone again in the street with Leo, neither of them saying anything, he had a sense of what an affair might actually be like, and the endless miraculous permission was only a part of it. His limbs were oddly stiff, his hands tingling as if he'd just come in from snowballing to stand by a blazing fire. He felt the moment echoing other occasions when he had just missed success through a failure of nerve, or a stupidly happy anticipation. All Leo's effusiveness with Pete and then with Sophie had ebbed away, and left just the two of them, in this horrible noise and crush. Nick glanced at him with a tight smile; at which Leo stretched his neck with a moody, uninvolved air. "Well," said Nick finally, "where do you want to go?"

"I don't know, boyfriend," Leo said.

Nick laughed ruefully, and something kept him back from a further He. "A caff?" he said. "Indian? A sandwich?"-which was the most he could imagine managing.

"Well, I need something," said Leo, in his tone of flat goading irony, looking at him sharply. "And it isn't a sandwich."

Nick didn't take a risk on what this might mean. "Ah… " he said. Leo turned his head and scowled at a stall of cloudy green and brown glassware, which was taking its place in their crisis, and seemed to gleam with hints of a settled domestic life. Leo said,

"At least with old Pete we had his place, but where are me and you ever going to go?"

Could this be his only objection, the only obstacle…? "I know, we're homeless," Nick said.

"Homeless love," said Leo, shrugging and then cautiously nodding, as if weighing up a title for a song.

NICK CHOSE A moment before dinner to pay the rent. It was always awkward. "Oh… my dear… " said Rachel, as if the two ten-pound notes were a form of mild extravagance, like a box of chocolates, or like flowers brought by a dinner guest, which were also a bit of a nuisance. She looked for somewhere to put down her bowl of steeping apricots. "If you're sure… "

Nick shrugged and snuffled. "Heavens," he said. He had just spent five pounds on a taxi, he was doing all sorts of incautious things, and would have loved not to pay.

"Well, thank you!" Rachel took the money, and stood folding it appreciatively, not sure where to put it. Then Gerald and Badger Brogan came in from tennis-there was the flat chime of their feet on the iron stair from the garden, and then they were in the kitchen like two big hot boys. Just for a second Gerald noted the transaction that was taking place. The next second he said, "Thrashed him!" and threw down his racquet on the bench.

"God, Fedden, you're a liar," said Badger. "It was 6-4, Rache, in the third set."

Gerald shook his head in the savour of triumph. "I let him have it hot."

"I'm sure you were very well matched," said Rachel prudently.

This wasn't quite acceptable to either player. "I chose not to question some frankly fantastic line calls," said Badger. He roamed round by the table, picking up a spoon and putting it down, and then a garlic press, without noticing. Nick smiled as if amused by the drama of their game, though in fact he felt challenged by Badger's free and easy way here, by the mood of competition he stirred up in Gerald, and perhaps by its counterpart, his longer and deeper claim on Gerald's affection. "Hello, Nick!" said Badger, in his probing, sarcastic tone.

"Hello, Badger," said Nick, still self-conscious at teasing a virtual stranger about the yellow-grey stripe in his dark hair, at having to enrol in the family cult of Badger as a character, but finding it easier after all than the sober, the critical, the almost hostile-sounding "Derek."

Badger in turn was clearly puzzled by Nick's presence in his old friend's house and made facetious attempts at understanding him. It was a part of his general mischief-he lurched about all day, asked leading questions, rubbed up old scandals and scratched beadily for new ones. He said, "So what have you been up to today, Nick?"

"Oh, just the usual," said Nick. "You know, morning in the library, waiting for books to come up from the stacks; bibliography class in the afternoon, 'How to describe textual variants.' " He made himself as dull as he could for Badger, like a brown old binding, though to his own eye "textual variants" glinted with hints at what he'd actually done, which was to cut the class and have two hours of sex with Leo on Hampstead Heath. That would have been more scandal than Badger could manage. On the first night of his stay he had described an Oxford friend of theirs as the most ghastly shirtlifter.

"LBW, Badge?" said Gerald.

"Thanks, Banger," said Badger, using an interesting old nickname that Nick couldn't see himself making free with, and which Gerald was wise enough not to object to. The two men stood there, in their tennis whites, drinking their tall glasses of lemon barley water, gasping and grinning between swigs. Gerald's legs were still brown, and his confusingly firm buttocks were set off by his tight Fred Perry shorts. Badger was leaner and seedier, and his Aertex shirt was sweatier and pulled askew by being used to mop his face. He was wearing scruffy old plimsolls, whereas Gerald seemed to bounce or levitate slightly in the new thick-soled "trainers."

Elena hurried in from the pantry with the joint, or limb, of venison, plastered up in a blood-stained paste of flour and water. The whole business of the deer, culled at Hawkeswood each September and sent to hang for a fortnight in the Feddens' utility room, was an ordeal for Elena, and an easy triumph for Gerald, who always fixed a series of dinner parties to advertise it and eat it. Elena set the heavy dish on the table just as Catherine came down from her room, with her hands held up like blinkers to avoid the sight. "Mm-look at that, Cat!" said Badger.

"Fortunately I won't even have to look at you eating it," said Catherine; though she did quickly peer at it with a kind of relish of revulsion.

"Are you going out, then, old Puss?" said Gerald, his eagerness damped at once by a wounded frown.

"You'll have a drink with us, darling?" said Rachel.

"I might do if there's time," said Catherine. "Is it all MPs?"

"No," said Gerald. "Your grandmother's not an MP."

"Thank Christ, actually," said Catherine.

"And nor is Morden Lipscomb an MP."

"There are two MPs coming," said Rachel, and it wasn't clear if she thought this rather few or quite enough.

"Yup, Timms and Groom!" said Gerald, as if they were the joiliest company imaginable.

"The man who never says 'hello'!"

"You're too absurd," said Gerald. "I'm sure I have heard him say it…"

"If Morden Lipscomb's coming I'm going to keep my coat on, he makes my blood run cold."

"Morden's an important man," said Gerald. "He has the ear of the President."

"Will Nick be making up numbers, I suppose," said Catherine.

Nick fluttered his eyelashes and Gerald said, "Nick doesn't make up numbers, child, he's part of the… part of the household."

Catherine looked at Nick, slightly mockingly, across the space that separates good and bad children. She said, "He's the perfect little courtier, isn't he?"

"Oh, Elena," said Rachel, "Catherine's not dining, we'll be one fewer for dinner-yes, one less." Elena went into the dining room to adjust the placings, and came back a moment later with an objection.

"Miz Fed, you know is thirteen."

"Ah… " said Rachel, and then gave an apologetic shrug.

"Yes, well I don't think any of us are triskaidekaphobes here, are we?" said Gerald. They were all very up on the names of phobias, since at various times Catherine had suffered from aichmo, dromo, keno, and nyctophobia, among a number of more commonplace ones-it was a bit of a game with them, but it cut no ice with Elena, who stood there biting her lip.