Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"You see, you'll have to stay," said Badger, reaching out clumsily to hold Catherine. "How can you resist that beautiful venison?"

"Hmm," said Catherine. "It looks like something out of a field hospital." And she shot a tiny forbidding glance at Nick, who saw that it was probably the aichmophobia, the horror of sharp objects, that made the serving and carving of a haunch of venison impossible for her. The family knew about her trouble in the past, but had happily forgotten it when it seemed not to recur. It was only Nick who knew about the recent challenge of the carving knives. He said,

"I don't mind dropping out too if I'm going to spoil the seating." He enjoyed the well-oiled pomp of the dinners here, but he knew he was too much in love to do more than smile in the candlelight and dream of Leo. He would be quiet and inattentive. And already he felt a tingle in the air, the more-than-reality of the memory of being with his boyfriend.

"No, no," murmured Rachel, with an impatient twitch of the head.

"Elena, we'll risk it!" Gerald pronounced. "Si… va bene… Nick, you'll just have to be the odd man… um…" Elena went back into the dining room with that look of unhappy subjection that no one but Nick ever noticed or worried about. "We're not living in twelfth-century Calabria," said Gerald, as the phone started ringing and he plucked it from the wall and grunted, "Fedden," in his new no-nonsense style. "Yes… Hello… What?… Yes, yes he is… Yes, all right… Mm, and to you," then holding the receiver out towards Nick: "It's Leo." Nick coloured as though his thoughts of a few moments before had been audible to all of them; the kitchen had accidentally fallen silent and Gerald gave him a look which Nick felt was stern and disappointed, but perhaps was merely abstracted, the frown of a broken train of thought.

Catherine said, "If it's Leo, they'll be hours." And Rachel nodded sympathetically and said, "Yes, why don't you take it in the study." Gerald looked at him again as if to say that the brute reality of gay life, of actual phone calls between shirtlifters, was rather more than he had ever imagined being asked to deal with; but then nodded and said genially, "By all means, it's the red phone."

"Ah, hotline," said Badger, whose scandal-sensors were warming to something awkward in the air. Though as Nick went down the hall what struck him was that Rachel knew what was going on, and was protecting him. Gerald never really noticed anything about other people, they were moving parts in a social process, they agreed with him or they thwarted him, his famous hospitality disguised an odd lack of particular, personal skills-all this came clear to Nick in a liberating rush as he pushed open the study door. After which it was beautifully surreal to stand and talk in sexy murmurs beside his desk, to hear Leo's voice in the one room in the house which expressed Gerald's own taste, which was a vacuum of taste, green leather armchairs, upholstered fender, brass lamps, the stage set for his own kind of male conspiracy.

"Well, that was very jolly," said Leo, with a half-teasing, half-aspiring use of a Nick word. "Very jolly indeed."

"Did you enjoy it, darling?" said Nick.

"I didn't mind it," said Leo.

Nick glowed and grinned. "I thought it was bearable."

"I expect you can bear it," said Leo. "You don't have to ride a bike."

Nick looked around at the half-open door. "Was it too much for you?" he said wonderingly, and with a sense that recurred and recurred these weeks-of enormous freedom claimed through tiny details, of everything he said being welcome.

"You're a very bad boy," said Leo.

"Mm, so you keep saying."

"So what are you doing?"

"Well… " said Nick. It was lovely to be talking to Leo, but he wasn't quite sure why he had rung, and as it was the first time he had ever done so it made Nick uneasily expectant; until it struck him that probably Leo himself was only claiming the simple pleasure of talking to his lover, of talking, as he said he loved to fuck, for the sake of it. "I'm sitting behind Gerald's desk with a most tremendous hard-on," said Nick.

There was a pause and Leo murmured, "Now don't get me going. My old lady's here."

It was shadowy already in the room, and Nick pulled the chain that switched on the desk lamp. Gerald, like an uxorious bigamist, had photos of both Rachel and the Prime Minister in silver frames. A large desk diary was open at the "Notes" pages at the back, where Gerald had written, "Barwick: Agent (Manning)-wife Veronica NOT Janet (Parker's wife)." With his breezily asking Parker how Veronica was and Manning how Janet was, he had got some very confused looks. Nick knew Janet Parker, of course, she was a manager at Rackhams and sang in the Operatic. "So what are you doing later?" Leo wanted to know.

"Oh, we've got a big dinner party," Nick said. He noticed that he hoped to impress Leo with their life at Kensington Park Gardens and at the same time was ready to repudiate it. "It'll probably be very tedious-they only really ask me to make up the numbers."

"Oh," said Leo doubtfully.

"It'll be a lot of horrible old Tories," Nick said, in an attempt at Leo's language and point of view, and sniggered.

"Oh, is Grandma coming, then?"

"She certainly is," said Nick.

"Old bitch," said Leo; the passing insult of their doorstep meeting, unregistered at the time, had risen later like a bruise. "You ought to ask me over, to continue our fascinating conversation," he said.

The theme of Leo's coining over had cropped up several times since their first date, and hung and faded. Nick said, "Look, I'm sure I can get out of this." And really it did seem as if the logic of the evening-the numbers, the etiquette, the superstition-was only an expression of a deeper natural force, a love logic, pulling him out of the house and back into Leo's arms. "I'm sure I can get out of it," he said again. Though as he did so he felt there was also a lightness in not seeing Leo, a romance in separation, while the fabulous shock of their afternoon together sank in. Days like these had their design, their upward and downward curves: it would be unshapely to change the plan.

"No, you enjoy yourself," said Leo, wise perhaps with the same instinct. "Have a glass of wine."

"Yes, I expect I'll do that. Unless you've got a better idea… " Nick swivelled in the desk chair with a tensely mischievous smile-the red phone cord stretched and bounced. The chair was a high-backed scoop of black leather, a spaceship commander's.

"You're insatiable, you are," said Leo.

"That's because I love you," said Nick, singsong with the truth.

Leo took in this chance for an echoing avowal; it was a brief deep silence, as tactical as it was undiscussable. He said, "That's what you tell all the boys"-a phrase of lustreless backchat that Nick could only bear as a form of shyness. He turned it inside out in his mind and found what he needed in it. He said quietly, "No, only you."

"Yeah," said Leo, all relaxed-sounding, and gave a big fake yawn. "Yeah, I'll probably pop down to old Pete's a bit later, see how he's getting on."

"Right," said Nick quickly. "Well-give him my best!" It was a sting of worry-hidden, unexpected.

"Will do," said Leo.

"How is old Pete?" said Nick.

"Well, he's a bit low. This illness has taken all the life out of him."

"Oh dear," said Nick, but felt he couldn't enquire any further, out of delicacy for his own feelings. He looked about on the desk, to focus his thoughts on where he was rather than on imagined intimacies at Pete's flat. There was a thick typescript with a printed card, "From the Desk of Morden Lipscomb," on "National Security in a Nuclear Age," which Gerald had marked with ticks and underlinings on the first two pages. "NB: nuclear threat," he had written.